Opacity

“ Like the ethereal waves, whose inconceivable rapidity and number are said to impart the sensation of vision, the undulations of opinion are speeding on to produce the perception of truth. They are the infinitely complex and delicate movements of that universal Human Mind, whose quiescence is darkness,—whose agitation, light. ”

“ And if thou sayest that sight impedes the security and subtlety of mental meditation, by reason of which we penetrate into divine knowledge, and that this impediment drove a philosopher to deprive himself of his sight, I answer that the eye, as lord of the senses, performs its duty in being an impediment to the confusion and lies of that which is not science but discourse, by which with much noise and gesticulation argument is constantly conducted; and hearing should do the same, feeling, as it does, the offence more keenly, because it seeks after harmony which devolves on all the senses. ”

“ Fixed, mild, open, projecting eyes, in insipid countenances, are pertinacious, without firmness; dull and foolish, with pretension to wisdom; cold, though they wish to appear warm; but are only suddenly heated, without inherent warmth. Remember all men must die: the mean and hard-hearted; whose eyes have preferred to see their counterfeits of peace, rather than happy living, intelligent countenances. They also must be there at the judgment; and then, as here, you will see their small grey eye, peering about from the tottering throne of avarice. ”

“ The consideration of these two senses, sight and hearing, with their appropriate objects, light and sound, sufficiently explains and illustrates our point. For what holds good with regard to them, holds equally good with regard to all our other perceptions. The moment the objective part of any one of them is thought, we are immediately constrained by a law of our nature which we cannot transgress, to conceive as one with it the subjective part of the perception. We think objective weight only by thinking the feeling of weight. ”

“ Surely, then, when the sight is subsumed under the category of colour—as it unquestionably is whenever we think of the eye—surely all other colours must, of necessity, assume a position external to it; and what more is wanting to constitute that real objective universe of light and glory in which our hearts rejoice? ”

“ If my eye is to discern colour, it must itself be free from all colour. The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love. ”

“ Far be it, then, from Thy glory that anyone should gaze on Thy wondrous beauty with any eye save Thine own eye, or hear the melodies proclaiming Thine almighty sovereignty with any ear except Thine own ear. Too high art Thou exalted for the eye of any creature to behold Thy beauty, or for the understanding of any heart to scale the heights of Thine immeasurable knowledge. ”

“ Enough, however, has been said upon the external aspect of the human eye; we will, therefore, at once endeavour to penetrate the circle in which are contained the wonders that this little book is intended to describe. The object of these lines is not so much to describe the beauty of man's glances, nor the value of his senses, but rather to make known those illusions to which the most sagacious of all his senses is apt to fall a prey. ”

“ There are a thousand persons, at least, in this country who have a sight entirely independent of the physical eye, which overleaps the boundaries of physical vision; penetrates the barriers of external sense, tears off the mask of hypocrisy and deceit, detects the motives and mainsprings of action, and lays bare the heart of man. ”

“ Can you be deceived by the eye? You can, you have proved this; you all know that there are men who can deceive the sight of the eye, no matter how closely you observe their movements. Can you be deceived in hearing? ”

“ The point is, can we make a better one or must we be content with patching up the old one? Take an illustration. Scientists tell us that from the point of view of optics the human eye is a clumsy instrument poorly contrived for its work. ”

“ Such exercise, properly limited, promotes the growth and vigor of our faculties; but if we pervert them by directing them to illegitimate objects, we gradually become mad. God has created the light, and fitted our eyes to receive it; He has endowed us with the sense of touch, by which we may confirm and verify the impressions of sight. All physical phenomena are objects of sense, and the senses of sight and touch are the masters of all the other senses.
Can anything, then, be more atrociously perverse, more utterly idiotic, and I may even say impious, than these dark séance investigations? ”

“ Hearing and seeing lie deeper than ears and eyes, down in the purpose, the will, the desire of the heart. Unwillingness dulls, and then deafens the ears. It blurs, and then blinds the eye. An earnest, loving purpose gives peculiar keenness to the ears, and opens the eye of the eye. ”

“ Thus the distempered eye is impatient of prevailing brightness, and by attempting to observe 214 the lucid object, inadvertently betrays its own weakness; and persons of their unhappy complexion, regard all praises conferred upon another, as derogatory from their own value. ”

“ How such light will then shine out, and with wondrous thousandfold expansion spread itself, in forms and colours, depends not on it, so much as on the National Mind recipient of it. The colours and forms of your light will be those of the cut-glass it has to shine through.—Curious to think how, for every man, any the truest fact is modelled by the nature of the man! ”

“ A most important element in the power of judging of the expression of the eye and eye-brow is, that the observer shall have an intelligent mind, and kind heart; for with the prejudiced, unprincipled, or unthinking, the rules of the experienced and sensitive philosopher are indescribable hieroglyphics: to them the radiant eye of beauty and innocence, the exalted expression of imagination, and the profundity of genius are scarcely distinguishable from the pandering graces of fashion, or time-serving sycophancy, or the monotonous eye of mere fanaticism, or incurable monomanism. ”

“ I shall have the honour of convincing you this day, that my single hand is more than a match for all the sharp eyes of Overton. You will admit that a beautiful eye makes silence eloquent,--a kind eye, contradiction an assent,--and an enraged eye, beauty deformed ”

“ We must deny that the lower or natural degree bears any such fixed and permanent relation to the higher, as the eye bears to seeing or the ear to hearing. And considerably more must we deny, if we would be consistent. ”

“ But in order to give full satisfaction to some weak minds, I will subjoin two evidential arguments for this mystery to show that it is possible—arguments which derive their force from analogy. Take, therefore, the following demonstration, drawn from a physical analogy—from the eye and a mirror. For both a looking-glass and a small eye receive into themselves the whole quantity of the very greatest things, not only men, but houses, temples, trees, mountains, &c., and clearly reproduce and represent them whole. ”

“ It is this expression which causes the eye to appear to speak, to fire up suddenly, to sparkle with flashes of light, to languish or conceal itself underneath its lashes, to raise itself with inspiration, or to pierce the abyss of thought, just according to the particular sentiment governing the mind at the moment. ”

“ And must not the soul be perplexed at this intimation which the sense gives of a hard which is also soft? What, again, is the meaning of light and heavy, if that which is light is also heavy, and that which is heavy, light? ”

“ Yet colours give them not their Power of Sight;
So, though these fruits of Sense, her objects be,
Yet She discerns them by her proper light.
The workman on his stuff, his skill doth shew,
And yet the stuff gives not the man his skill ”

“ Who, besides, would believe without performing the appropriate experiments, that when one of his eyes is closed there is a great gap, the so-called 'blind spot,' not far from the middle of the field of the open eye, in which he sees nothing at all, but which he fills out with his imagination? ”

“ They can judge with astounding correctness from a shadow on one's face, a catch in one's breath, a movement of one's hands, how their words or deeds are affecting us. We cannot conceal our feelings from them. ”

“ If it be not colours, then what is it that the touch compels us to associate with the eye? We answer that it is the abstract condition of impressions as the general law on which all seeing depends, but as quite distinct from the particular visual sensations apprehended in virtue of the observance of that law. ”

“ If the reader will permit me for a moment the use of what, without such an apology, might seem pedantic, I would call it the instinct of focalizing, which prompts such random desires. Feeling is diffused over the whole surface of the body; but light is focalized in the eye ”

“ This trouble in the eye—this looking into vacancy, and yet not being vacant—this irresolute and helpless look in one so resolute, so self-sustained, is to us one of the very highest results of that art which affects the mind through the eye. ”

“ Trust that eye which gives you an idea its owner is at ease. Your admiration will increase on examination: there is beauty which accords with reason, and is not merely a creature of fancy. A well-formed forehead and open eye fears nobody, being itself power and generosity. ”

“ And, in the condition supposed, the mind becomes a prism to sophisticate and falsify the light of truth into striking and brilliant colours, instead of being a clear and perfect lens to concentrate that light in its natural whiteness and purity. ”

“ By means of light we can appreciate the beauties of hue and form, and by its power we touch as it were the inaccessible. It constitutes the most intimate connexion between ourselves and external objects—a connexion that seems even to alter our temper, disposition, and character, according to the variations of its intensity. ”

“ Every thing throws light upon every thing,—though the reflection,—which is, in many cases, so bright, as to force itself upon common eyes—may, in other cases, be so faint, as to be perceptible only to eyes of the nicest discernment. ”

“ THE ERRORS OF THE EYE. It is with our own organization that we shall commence our task of exposing the illusions that we shall meet with during our optical experiments,—in fact with that wonderful and important organ of our body that we are apt to look upon as sure and infallible, but which we shall find is deceiving us constantly, and hourly proving the fallacy of the popular saying, that “every one must believe his own eyes.” ”

“ These three precepts mean that outward show is insufficient, and therefore they bid us be true to our proper nature;—to show simplicity, to embrace plain dealing, to reduce selfishness, to moderate desire.
A variety of colours makes man's eye blind; a diversity of sounds makes man's ear deaf; a mixture of flavours makes man's palate dull. ”

“ Reason is to the mental vision exactly what the eye is to optical vision, and just as the eye borrows its visual action from external light, so reason borrows its power of clear and correct vision from traditional experience. ”

“ If I am near a window facing the street, my eye turns thither for a clue; if the appeal to vision be eliminated, the eye becomes unseeing and coöperates with the ear by excluding all that is irrelevant to the matter in hand. ”

“ The best actions are despoiled of their merit by certain motives of vanity, often concealed from our own notice.
The motives by which we are actuated are, relative to our actions, what the eye is relative to our body,—it is the motive that gives light and brilliancy to our actions. This is the sense in which we should understand our Lord when He says if our eye be simple our whole body will be luminous. ”

“ The truth is that we have learned to look at all objects with sophisticated eyes. The schools have wrought that tangle about us, and the tangles within the tangle, until to our bewildered vision nothing appears as it is, but only as hidebound theory presents it. ”

“ Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it; and in historical inquiries the most instructed thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate. ”

“ The reflexion also from glasses so usually resembled to the imagery of the mind, every man knoweth to receive error and variety both in colour, magnitude, and shape, according to the quality of the glass. But yet no use hath been made of these and many the like observations, to move men to search out and upon search to give true cautions of the native and inherent errors in the mind of man which have coloured and corrupted all his notions and impressions. ”

“ The looking-glass still more distinctly proves how deceptive is sight when unverified by touch. And the frequent cases in which we misinterpret the impressions made on our eyes, and think we see something which we do not see, further shake our faith in vision. ”

“ A great philosopher calls the eyes the windows of the soul, and, although meant as a poetical image, the saying is not far from the truth; for the optic nerve by which we see external objects, is an extension of the nerves of the brain, whose functions and actions are an unfathomable mystery. ”

“ At first I thought this habit of mind entirely universal—as it is certainly the most natural one possible; but in the course of much random talk about things in general, I have occasionally come across people whose eyes are too weak for the white brilliance of reality, who can only see life through the printed page, which is a very opaque object. ”

“ By this I understand him to mean that the soul alone can perceive the truth, but the senses, as they are different, receive and convey different impressions of the same thing; thus, the eye receives one impression of an object, the ear a totally different one. ”