palpabilities

Updated: May 6, 2025

At death, or metamorphosis, these creatures, enjoying the ultimate life immortality and cognizant of all secrets but the one, act all things and pass everywhere by mere volition: indwelling, not the stars, which to us seem the sole palpabilities, and for the accommodation of which we blindly deem space created but that SPACE itself that infinity of which the truly substantive vastness swallows up the star-shadows blotting them out as non-entities from the perception of the angels.

Edgar Allan Poe - The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2

Then, as the publisher turned away to replace the P. Ts. in a safe, he added softly: "Intelligence is never likely to be so widely diffused in Ante-land that the masses would fight shy of birth. There would always be a sufficient proportion of unborn fools left who would prefer the palpabilities of bodily form to the insubstantialities of pre-natal existence.

Israel Zangwill - Without Prejudice