Newton found the support that holds the earth to the sun and the moon to the earth, but there was no visible cable, no mighty grooves in which the poles of the earth’s axis spin. There was nothing to see, and yet his mind discovered an invisible link that fastens every particle of matter in the universe to every other particle, however remote. One fact after another has forced the scientist to-day to draw upon an invisible world of ether for his explanations of a vast number of the things that appear. Gravitation, electrical phenomena, light and color vision, and, perhaps, the very origin of matter, are due, his mind sees, to the presence of this extraordinary world within, or behind, the world we see.
One of the greatest advances that has ever been made in the progress of medicine was made through the discovery of invisible microbes as the cause of contagious and infectious diseases. The ancients had also believed the cause of many diseases to be the presence of invisible agents, which they called “demons,” but they could hit upon no way of finding the “demons” or of banishing them. The scientific physician “sees” the invisible microbe and he “sees” what will put this enemy hors de combat.
The study of philosophy is chiefly the cultivation of the power to see the invisible. Pythagoras is said to have required a period of a year of silence as an initiation into the business of philosophy—because there was nothing to talk about until the beginner had learned how to see the invisible! The great realities to which the philosopher is dedicated are not things to be found, even with microscopes or telescopes. Nobody is qualified to enter the philosophical race at all—even for the hundred-yard dash—unless in the temporal he can see the eternal, and in the visible the invisible, and in the material the spiritual. There can be no artistic creation until some one comes who has “the faculty divine” to see
“The gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land.”
Such artistic creations must not be unreal. On the contrary, they must be more real than the scenes we photograph or the factual events we describe. They must present to us something that is in all respects as it ought to be. The artist, the poet, the musician succeed in making some object, or some character, or some series of events or sounds raise us above our usual restraints of space and time and imperfection and for a moment give us a glimpse of something eternal.
But we see the invisible in our common daily life much more than we realize. The simple cobbler of shoes stitches and pegs at his little shoe, and makes it as honestly as he can, for some child whom he has never seen and perhaps never will see. The merchant expands his business because he forecasts the expanding need for his articles in China, Africa, or South America. The statesman at every move is dealing as much with the country of his inner vision as with the country his eyes see. So, too, is the parent as he plans for the discipline and education of his child. No one can be a good person—however simple, or however great—without leaving the things that are behind, i.e. the things that are actual, and going on to realize what is not yet apprehended, what exists only in forecast and vision. Religion, then, is not alone in demanding the supreme faculty of seeing the invisible. We live on all life-levels by faith, by assent to realities which are not there for our eyes. Religion only demands of us that we see the whole Reality which this visible fragment of nature implies, that we see the larger spirit which our own human spirits call for, that we see the eternal significance revealed in the life of Christ and in the conquests of His spirit through the ages.