They can't see beyond the present; they haven't learned to visualize the future, to see beyond the material things about them into the unseen world, packed with all creative energies, where the mind starts the creative processes.
They do not realize that everything in the visible world that man has produced began in a mental vision; that the power of mind picturing, of visualizing the things we want to come into our lives, is God's priceless gift to man, to enable him to bring into visibility out of the invisible world whatever he wills.
Anyone who knows how to use this marvelous power can begin now to visualize his future; to see himself as he would like to be; to see himself mentally doing the things he would like to do; occupying the position he aspires to; and thus he will draw to himself the means necessary to build, step by step, in the material world the future as he sees it in his vision.
By its aid we can bring ourselves out of a poverty-stricken, discordant environment into harmonious conditions, a harmonious environment, with the refinements and, if we will, the luxuries of life; or we may pervert it, and hold ourselves in degrading lack and poverty, limited, held back from self-development, the un-foldment of our possibilities, and all the joys of living.
Whatever we visualize intensely and persistently we create, vitalize into form, build into the life, bring into the actual.
In other words, the vital substance from which man fashions circumstances, destiny, is in the unseen world where all potencies and power dwell. The very foundations of the universe and the things which are doing most for the world to-day are the unseen forces, eternal principles.
The forces which transport us over the globe and bring its uttermost parts into instant communion; the power of the principles of chemistry, of gravitation, of cohesion, of adhesion, — all the mighty agencies operating in the universe and producing its phenomena, — we cannot see, hear, or touch, we cannot appreciate them with our senses only as we feel their effects; they are things we know little about, yet we know they are great realities.
Who knows or who has seen what is back of these great principles, these potencies which we know exist?
Gravitation, which is holding the heavenly bodies in their orbits, which keeps the world so marvelously balanced in space, revolving at terrific speed around the sun, none of them varying in their revolutions in their orbits the fraction of a second in a thousand years, is an invisible force.
Because we can't see or taste, or smell, or handle it, shall we say it is not a reality? That it does not exist?
We can see and feel the effects of electricity, but who knows what this invisible force is? The Edisons, the Bells, the Marconis have, through experiments, found out certain things, certain laws governing it, through the operation of which we get heat, energy, and light.
They have put it to work for us in a multitude of ways. It carries our messages under oceans and across continents. It has already done away with a large part of the drudgery of the world, and is destined to serve mankind in ways perhaps not yet dreamed of by even the wisest scientists and inventors.
This mighty force which he has used in his thousands of inventions, Edison confesses he knows nothing about. He stands in awe of this mysterious power which has come out of the cosmic intelligence in response to his efforts.
He regards himself merely as a channel through which some of its secrets have been passed along to man, to make life less toilsome, more comfortable, and more beautiful.
It is nonsense for skeptics and materialists to say that they take no stock in anything that they cannot test with their senses, when we know that the real force in the very things we live on, the elements that nourish and keep alive even the material part of us, are all invisible.
We cannot see the life-building, life-sustaining gases in the air we breathe; we cannot see the air, yet we take it into our body eighteen or twenty times a minute and get the silent, unseen power resident in it.
The blood absorbs and sends it to the billions of cells in our bodies. None of its mysterious potency can we see or handle, yet we know we could not live a minute without it.
No one has ever seen the force in the food we eat, but we know it is there, that we get strength from it, and that after a time the apparently dead, inert matter comes to life in the body; that it acts, dreams, has experiences, works, creates.
Notwithstanding all its marvelous discoveries, science has not been able to uncover the secrets of the unseen forces everywhere at work in the universe.
Who can see or explain the mystery of the unfolding bud, the expanding flower, the generating of the wonderful fragrance and marvelous beauty of the rose? Yet we know that there is reality back of them, an intelligence which plans and shapes them, brings them to their glorious maturity.
We know that all these things come from the same Omnipotent Source, that they are the creations of Divine Mind.
Scientists are demonstrating that there is but one substance, one eternal force or essence, in the universe, and that all we see is a varying expression of it.
To the senses this universal substance, which is the great reality back of all we see, is non-existent. We can neither see, nor touch, nor taste, nor smell it.
Yet all the time science is piling up proof after proof that everything about us is merely a modification, a change of form, change of vibration of this universal substance, just as electricity is a manifestation of force in various forms.
We think we live in a material world, but in reality we live in a mental world, a world of externalized thought, a world controlled and guided by invisible forces.
We contact with material things only at a few points in our lives. The corporal part of us is fed, warmed and clothed by material things, but we live, move, and have our being in the unseen.
When we come to the reality of ourselves, the soul, the spirit of man, which is one with God, we live altogether in an invisible world. The real self is the unseen self.
The man whose reflection we see in the mirror is but the shadow of the reality. The material body of flesh and blood that we see, and can touch with our hands, is not the real man. That is behind what we see and touch.
It is back of the cell, back of the atoms, back of the electrons which make up the body.
The new philosophy is going back of appearance and showing us the real man, the invisible man. It is revealing his hidden potencies and possibilities, and pointing the way to their development and use.
It shows us that, the impotent, sickly, ailing man, the weakling, the discouraged, disconsolate, complaining being, the failure, the man full of discord, disease, inharmony, is not the man God made; that this is the unreal creature man himself has made.
This is the being that wrong thinking, wrong living, and unfortunate motives have made, the being who is the victim of his passions, of his moods, of his ignorance of realities, the great eternal verities of life.
We all learned as children that man is made in God's image and likeness, but the new philosophy urges us to act on this truth; to look beyond the appearance to the reality, to see with the inner eye the real man, the invisible man, who is one with his Creator.
He is strong, vigorous, robust, with Godlike powers and qualities. He matches God's ideal of manhood. There is no suggestion of failure, of weakness, of instability, of sickness about him. He is perfect, immortal, unchangeable as truth itself, because the real man is the truth of being, changeless reality.
No matter what his conditions or circumstances, the God stuff, the God principle, the divinity in him is still intact, still perfect, still contains all of his possibilities, is still stamped with nobility, with success, with health, with prosperity, with harmony, with the image of his Creator — for God's image and likeness is perfect, immortal.
If we could only realize this, and measure life with its infinite possibilities from the standpoint of the changeless reality of man, instead of