and outside, and would not be known in this world.
Persons however learned they may be, who hold such 'opinions' have
never opened the Gates of God."[1]

Behind the visible universe and in it there is an invisible universe;
behind the material universe and in it there is an immaterial universe;
behind the temporal universe and in it there is an eternal universe,
and the first business of the philosopher or naturalist, as Boehme
conceives it, is to discover the essential Nature of this invisible,
immaterial, eternal universe out of which this fragment of a visible
world has come forth.

{173}

Need have we,
Sore need, of stars that set not in mid storm,
Lights that outlast the lightnings.[2]

The visible fragment is never self-explanatory; all attempts to account
for what occurs in it drive the serious observer deeper for his answer,
and with a breathless boldness this meditative shoemaker of Goerlitz
undertakes to tell of the nature of this deeper World within the world.
As a boy he saw a vast treasury of wealth hidden in the inside of a
mountain, though he could never make anybody else see it. As a man he
believed that he saw an immeasurable wealth of reality hidden within
the world of sense, and he tried, often with poor enough success, to
make others see the inside world which he found. We must now endeavour
to grasp what it was that he saw. There is no doubt at all that this
inside world which he discovered within and behind visible Nature,
within and behind man, is really there, nor is there any doubt in my
mind that he, Jacob Boehme, got an insight into its nature and
significance which is of real worth to the modern world, but he is
seriously hampered by the poverty of his categories, by the
difficulties of his symbolism and by his literary limitations, when he
comes to the almost insuperable task of expressing what he has seen.
He is himself perfectly conscious of his limitations. He is constantly
amazed that God uses such "a mean instrument," he regrets again and
again that he is "so difficult to be understood," and he often wishes
that he could "impart his own soul" to his readers that they "might
grasp his meaning,"[3] for he never for a moment doubts that "by God's
grace he has eyes of his own."[4] He lived in an unscientific age,
before our present exact terminology was coined. He was the inheritor
of the vocabulary and symbolism of alchemy and astrology, and he was
obliged to f