Unknowable

“ That mysterious Unknown or Unknowable is no cruel darkness, but simply an impenetrable distance into which we are impotent to glance, but which excludes no legitimate speculation and forbids no reasonable hope. ”

“ By continually seeking to know and being continually thrown back with a deepened conviction of the impossibility of knowing, we may keep alive the consciousness that it is alike our highest wisdom and our highest duty to regard that through which all things exist as the Unknowable. ”

“ The unknowable, if it is something more than the merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up. ”

“ We pretend to know the Unknown if we declare Him to be the Unknowable. Unknowable to us at present, yes! Unknowable for ever, in other possible stages of existence? We have reached a region into which we cannot penetrate; here all human faculties fail us ”

“ But, we may ask, must thought inevitably lead to such an absurd conclusion? If we examine the Unknowable closely, we shall find that it is simply something which we think or at least vaguely feel to be actual, but which we affirm that we cannot know. ”

“ The unknowable as manifested to us within the limits of consciousness in the shape of feeling, being no less inscrutable than the unknowable as manifested beyond the limits of consciousness in other shapes, we approach no nearer to understanding the last by rendering it into the first. ”

“ In such sermons as those on the "Intermediate State," the "Invisible World," the "Greatness and Littleness of Human Life," the "Individuality of the Soul," the "Mysteriousness of our Present Being," we may see exemplified the enormous irruption into the world of modern thought of the unknown and the unknowable, as much as in the writers who, with far different objects, set against it the clearness and certainty of what we do know. ”

“ Suppose, for instance, the continuity of our inward power of receiving sense-impressions, of knowing, and reasoning; (our personal Identity) is a groundless belief;—Suppose too that our sense-impressions are reflections from self-created shadows and not from objective realities;—where can any knowledge be truly subsistent save in that place of exile now generally termed "the Unknowable"? ”

“ Ignorance, superstition, singular illusions, symbolisms, these with many others are causes of that unconscious element, often found in customs, which now constitutes for us the unknown and the unknowable. ”

“ O World Invisible, we view thee, O World intangible, we touch thee, O World unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee! ”

“ We arrive at what we do not know, 291 and we pronounce that unknown to be unknowable; that is, we regard it as something different in nature from what we do know. So far as I can see, the attitude of ordinary thought in regard to this matter might be fairly represented by saying, that it always begins by considering objects as capable of being known in their reality, or as they are, and that experience always proves the attempt to know them as they are to be a failure. ”

“ that all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastical commentary on an known text, one perhaps not unknowable, yet felt? ”

“ The possibility of such problems, to which belong the metaphysical problems in general, viz., to be able to know the unknowable, shows us of what peculiar kind that mind must have been which created such things which to us are the height of absurdity. ”

“ Not knowing that these imperceptible and unknowable phenomena are the productions of their own minds, men from their habitual delusions invest them with an existence outside of mind, as perceptible mental phenomena, as things visible, audible, etc. ”

“ The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual Agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as "unknowable." [82] What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing; and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. ”

“ Surely, that is mystery enough. You may say, if you like, that this feeling of mystery is because of our ignorance; nevertheless, it is there."
"Yes," she replied. "But the trouble is that, in so far as we have discovered mysteries, they turn out to be of the most prosy and commonplace nature. Things that were once unknown, and appealed to the world as romantic, now that they are known are just as prosy and uninteresting as the commonplace. Directly a thing is known it becomes humdrum. I went to a lecture one night given by a scientist—an astronomer, in fact. ”

“ And so I entered this world: a being, sliding obscurely in among human beings. But whence, or whither? Those questions belong among the gigantic, terrible ones, insoluble, silent,—the unanswering primeval sphinxes of the mind. We can sit and stare at such questions, and wonder; but staring and wondering are not thought. ”

“ Thought clouds our life’s day-sense with strangeness, yet
Never from strangeness more than that it’s strange
Doth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get
But the words’ sense from words—knowledge, truth, change.
We know the world is false, not what is true. ”

“ He, it seems, was able to tap that vast, hidden and unsung reservoir of knowledge which is the epitome of all that the human mind has grasped and which, though flowing through the subconscious mind of all, is available in its entirety to but few—and then in all too brief flashes. ”

“ How do you know that you really exist? Here you are at the end of doubt, and here a still, small voice cries to you, 'I, I am, for I think, I doubt my being; I, the thought, the doubt within me, I exist, even if all around me disappear in illusion and shadow.' Begin with doubt and you can stop at no arbitrary resting-place. ”

“ She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast. ”

“ Is it really knowing a thing, he asks, to class it with something else with which one is already familiar and so find it less strange?—this when both alike may be unknown, the things we are most familiar with being sometimes the least known, inasmuch as they excite no curiosity and we fancy we know them already. ”

“ Such persons, therefore, find every where a due sense of their claims already established, except among those who are ignorant of the world by virtue of their own obscurity; "Not to know them, argues one's self unknown." ”

“ And now, if for a paragraph or two I may be even offensively abstruse, the conditions of our positive experience, of our actual knowledge, are such, and are commonly recognized to be such, that there must always be an unknown. ”

“ Poor people! the sterility of their imagination is a eulogy on their credulity! I own that, if I had felt the want of persuading my readers I had penetrated into the walled city, I should have adopted a completely different course. My experience of things human taught me, a very long time ago, that the Unknown usually conceals a deception, and I should simply have expressed my surprise at having seen nothing surprising! ”

“ Have you ever stopped to think that these multiplied impressions might create a current of thought—a mental atmosphere—an inscrutable power of suggestion?”
“Even when one is ignorant? When one does not know the story?” ”

“ As long as you are pursuing the unknown, this movement is in operation. There is something that you can do that gives you the hope that maybe one day you will stumble into this experience of the unknown. How can the unknown ever become the known? ”

“ As for the faithful adherents of the unknown, who had long understood that we must resign ourselves to understanding nothing and he prepared for every sort of surprise there was here, all the same, even for them, a mystery of another character, a bewildering mystery, the only really strange mystery, more torturing than all the others together, because it verges upon ancestral fears and touches the most sensitive point of our destiny. ”

“ I am perfectly convinced that there is something especially exceptional in its inner construction, and that, if I took it to pieces, a secret would be revealed to me which I have long been seeking to discover, but—laugh at me if you like—this senseless thing which only gives signs of life and sound as I make it, often speaks to me in a strange way of itself. ”

“ It would, however, seem, that even in this field of mystery the extent of the inexplicable and the unknown is capable of reduction, and that the human understanding is vested in an ability of progressing towards the central point of that dark field throughout all time, mayhap all eternity, as the asymptote progresses upon its curve. ”

“ And the infinity of knowledge to be acquired runs parallel with the infinite faculty of knowing, and its development. Sometimes I feel reconciled to my extreme ignorance, by thinking, If I know nothing, the most learned know next to nothing. ”

“ Yet those who make the most pretensions in this topsy-turvy of a world regard it as a disgrace to have been obscure and ignorant, and pride themselves upon their persistence in their own kind of obscurity and ignorance! ”

“ Such has been our progress of late years in the art of revealing to the world at large the hidden springs of every action and event around us that a secret is in reality the only thing now impossible. ”

“ I have no doubt, however, that when I looked upon the heavens and the earth for the first time I must have felt the same ignorance and awe and wonder that possess my mind to-day when I try to understand the same unexplainable mysteries that have always filled me with queries, doubts, and fears. ”

“ But we have still to deal with the unknown in two more troublesome senses. It may stand for a mere possibility about which we know nothing further, and for entertaining which we can find no further ground. ”

“ In the unconscious these remain more or less permanently fixed as limited ideas, sentiments, and systems of complexes. Further, those complexes of experiences which persist not only provide the material for our memories, but tend, consciously or unconsciously, to shape the judgments, beliefs, convictions, habits, and tendencies of our mental lives. Whence they came, how they were born, we have long ceased to remember. We often arrive at conclusions which we imagine in our ignorance we have constructed at the moment unaided out of our inner consciousness. ”

“ The things I Don’t Know glow—each one separately—with a small precise lantern-brightness of its own.
Also in my wide background are things I don’t know and am unaware of it: the mass of my luminous Ignorance—it shines with an earthy phosphorescence.
When I look at the things I know I get an undetailed perspective of me like a bird’s-eye view of London.
When I look at neat formal rows of things I Don’t Know I have a clear look, as if through an uncurtained window into a bare little room, at my quietest self sitting knitting or plaiting straw. ”

“ The third cause of obscurity, inability to express the thought which one has, is at once the most common, and the most inexcusable. Here we are dealing with a tangible thing, to a great extent a matter of rule, and, at most, largely a question of study. ”

“ A new mystery confronts us here, which we shall do well to challenge; for though it reply not, its silence still will extend the field of our conscious ignorance, which is the most fertile of all that our activity knows. ”

“ Yet how was I to dream of lands, events and people whereof I have only the vaguest knowledge, or none at all, unless indeed, as some say, being a part of this world, we have hidden away somewhere in ourselves an acquaintance with everything that has ever happened in the world. ”

“ The confusion in the barbaric mind between the objective and the subjective, and between the name [Pg 169] and the person or thing, which has been illustrated in the foregoing pages, will enable us to see more clearly how the like confusion must enter into the interpretation of such occult and compound phenomena as dreams, and all their kind.
They supply the conditions for exciting and sustaining that feeling of mystery which attends man’s endeavour to get at the meaning of his surroundings. ”

“ We witnessed there all the phenomena of suggestion, second-sight, clair-audience, hypnotism, dual-consciousness, telepathy, the movement of objects without contact, and many other occurrences of such a surprising nature that in our present state of ignorance they appeared to be altogether outside the laws of Nature as we understand them; and I went away entirely convinced that certain people possess powers such as we ordinary mortals have never even dreamt of. ”

“ In it you will find much that is familiar to you, though you may never have read or heard anything of the kind; for there is a reality, beneath the unfamiliar accident, which may be recognised in a moment as native to the secret [Pg 4] life that lives behind the brain and the wise nerves with their dim ancestral knowledge. ”

“ At such times as these, coming from one knows not whence, and one feels too weak to search back to discover, there flit across the mind strange fragments, relevant, as they seem, to nothing whatever present. ”

“ I have my own theory as to just what becomes of us when we—the real, thinking we, that is—enter that somewhat uncanny realm which men have agreed to let ignorance call unconsciousness. But this is neither the time nor place to air it. ”

“ Of these problems and their connection with others in the unseen depths beyond, you are not yet in a position properly to judge, but before many years a new sense will be given you or a development of latent senses by the removal of those more gross, and a partial insight into an unsuspected unseen, into a realm to you at present unknown. ”

“ Try, we may say, to think of the utterly unreal, and see how you will have to conceive it. Can you think of sheer unreality otherwise than as that of which no mind is ever aware, of which no purpose has ever to take account as a condition of its fulfilment? ”