Man visible and invisible Author:Charles Webster Leadbeater Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: able to see only solid matter, would be utterly unconscious of the ocean stretched before him, but would see instead the vast cavity of the ocean-bed, with all i... more »ts various inequalities, and the fishes and other inhabitants of the deep would appear to him as floating in the air above this enormous valley. If there were clouds in the sky they would be entirely invisible to him, since they are composed of matter in the liquid state; for him the sun would be always shining in the day-time, and he would be unable to comprehend why, on what to us is a cloudy day, its heat should be so much diminished; if a glass of water were offered to him, it would appear to him to be empty. Contrast with this the appearance which would be presented before the eyes of the man who saw only matter in the liquid condition. He would indeed be conscious of the ocean, but for him the shore and the cliffs would not exist; he would perceive the clouds very clearly, but would see almost nothing of the landscape over which they were moving. In the case of the glass of water he would be entirely unable to see the vessel, and would therefore be quite unable to understand why the water should so mysteriously preserve the special shape given to it by the invisible glass. Imagine these two persons standing side by side, each describingthe landscape as he saw it, and each feeling perfectly certain that there could be no other kind of sight but his in the universe, and that anyone claiming to see anything more or anything different must necessarily be either a dreamer or a deceiver! We can smile over the incredulity of these hypothetical observers; but it is exceedingly difficult for the average man to realise that, in proportion to the whole that is to be seen, his power of vision is very much more imperfect th...« less