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THE PARADOXES
OF
THE HIGHEST SCIENCE
IN WHICH THE MOST ADVANCED TRUTHS OF OCCULTISM ARE FOR THE FIRSTTIME REVEALED (IN ORDER TO RECONCILE THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS OFSCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY WITH THE ETERNAL RELIGION)
Éliphas Lévi
With Footnotes by A Master of the Wisdom
originally published: Calcutta, Calcutta Central Press Co., 1883.
 Adyar, Madras Theosophical publishing house.[1922]
Scanned at sacred-texts.com, July 2004. John Bruno Hare, redactor. This text is in the publicdomain. These files may be used for any non-commercial purpose, provided this notice of attributionis left intact.
 
Source:http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/levi/phs/index.htm 
 
CONTENTS
Prefacevi Forewordxi PARADOXI. Religion is magic, sanctioned by authority1 II. Liberty is obedience to the Law16 III. Love is the realisation of the impossible32 IV. Knowledge is the ignorance or negation of Evil41 V. Reason is God57 VI. The Imagination realises what it invents74 VII. The Will accomplishes everything which it does not desire88 Synthetic Recapitulation--Magic--Magism98 The Unalterable Principles135 The Great Secret159 
 
 p. vi
 
PREFACETo the 1922 Second Edition
MANY paths lead to the mountain-top, and many and diverse are the rifts in the Veil,through which glimpses may be obtained of the secret things of the Universe.The Abbé Louis Constant, better known by his
nom de plume
of ÉLIPHAS LÉVI, wasdoubtless a seer; but, though his studies were by no means confined to this, he saw onlythrough the medium of the kabala, the perfect sense of which is, now-a-days, hidden fromall
mere
kabalists, and his visions were consequently always imperfect and often muchdistorted and confused.Moreover, he was for a considerable portion of his career a Roman Catholic priest, and assuch had to keep terms, to a certain extent, with his church, and even later, when he wasunfrocked, he hesitated to shock the prejudices of the public, and never succeeded in evenwholly freeing
himself 
from the bias of his early clerical training. Consequently he notonly erred at times in good faith, not only constantly wrote ambiguously to avoid a directcollision with his ecclesiastical chiefs or current creeds, but he not unfrequently putforward Dogmas, which, taken in their obvious straightforward meanings, he certainlydid not
believe
--nay, I may say, certainly knew to be false. It is quite true that, in many of these latter cases, an undercurrent of irony may be discerned by those who know thetruth, and that in all the enlightened can sufficiently read between the lines to avoidmisconceptions. But these defects, the ineradicable bias of his early training, the verynarrow standpoint from which he regarded occultism, and the limitations to freeexpression imposed on him by his position and temperament, seriously detract
 p. vii
 from the value of all Éliphas Lévi's writings.Still, he was an eloquent and learned man, and sufficiently advanced in occultism torender all he wrote on this subject interesting and more or less valuable to earneststudents of the Mysteries; and I have, therefore, thought that fellow-searchers for theHidden Truth would be well pleased to obtain access to some important and hithertounpublished writings of this great kabalist.Hence this translation, which, although absolutely without pretensions to literary merit,yet does, I hope and believe, everywhere fully and faithfully reproduce the
obvious
 meanings of the author, leaving, in all cases, where this is so in the original, an inner meaning discernible by those who KNOW. If in many places the language appearsconstrained and awkward, this has arisen from the necessity of preserving intact theexoteric and esoteric meanings, which our author so loved to combine in hisepigrammatic sentences.
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Chaos-Zero-One

Amazing contribution. I am getting drunk on this stuff.

reply03 / 15 / 2009
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