"THE OCEAN OF SEX"

It bursts forth, uncontrollable.

O wonderful ocean of Sex,

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Ocean of millions and millions of tiny seed-like human forms contained (if they be truly contained) within each person,

Mirror of the very universe,

Sacred temple and innermost shrine of each body, Ocean-river flowing ever on through the great trunk and branches of Humanity,

From which after all the individual only springs like a leaf-bud!

Ocean which we so wonderfully contain (if indeed we do not contain thee), and yet who containest us!

Sometimes when I feel and know thee within, and identify myself with thee,

Do I understand that I also am of the dateless brood of Heaven and Eternity.

Returning to that from which I started, the relation between the fundamental laws of our existence, love and death, the true mutual correlation of which remains enigmatical and incomprehensible to us, I shall merely recall Schopenhauer's words with which he ends his Counsels and Maxims.

I should point out how Beginning and End meet together, and how closely and intimately Eros is connected with Death; how Orcus, or Amenthes, as the Egyptians called him, is not only the receiver but the giver of all things... Death is the great reservoir of Life. Everything comes from Orcus—everything that is alive now and was once there. Could we but understand the great trick by which that is done, all the world would be clear.*

Transl. by T. B. Saunders, M. A. Macmillan Co., New York.

CHAPTER XVI

The phenomenal and the noumenal side of man. "Man-in-himself." How do we know the inner side of man? Can we know of the existence of consciousness in conditions of space not analogous to ours? Brain and consciousness. Unity of the world. Logical impossibility of the simultaneous existence of spirit and matter. Either all spirit or all matter. Rational and irrational actions in nature and in the life of man. Can rational actions exist alongside irrational? The world as an accidentally self-created mechanical toy. The impossibility of reason in a mechanical universe. The irreconcilability of mechanicalness with the existence of reason. Kant concerning "hosts." Spinoza on the knowledge of the invisible world. Necessity for the intellectual definition of that which can be, and that which cannot be, in the world of the hidden.

W

E know what man is only imperfectly; our conceptions regarding him are extremely fallacious and easily create new illusions. First of all, we are inclined to regard man as a certain unity, and to regard the different parts and functions of man as being bound together, and dependent upon one another. Moreover, in the physical apparatus, in man visible, we see the cause of all his properties and actions. In reality, man is a very complicated something, and complicated in various meanings of the word. Many sides of the life of a man are not bound together among themselves at all, or are bound only by the fact that they belong to one man; but the life of man goes on simultaneously on different planes, as it were, while the phenomena of one plane only at times and partially touch those of another, and may not themselves touch at all. And the relations of the same man to the various sides of himself and to other men are entirely dissimilar.

Man includes within himself all three of the above-mentioned orders of phenomena, i. e., he represents in himself the combination of physical phenomena with those of life and psychic phenomena. And the mutual relations between these three orders of phenomena are infinitely more complex than we are accustomed to think. Psychic phenomena we feel, sense and are conscious of in ourselves;

THE NOUMENON OF MAN HIS PSYCHE 177 physical phenomena and the phenomena of life we observe and make conclusions about on the basis of experience. We do not sense the psychic phenomena of others, i. e., the thoughts, feelings and desires of another man; but the fact that they exist in him we conclude from what he says, and by analogy with ourselves. We know that in ourselves certain actions, certain thoughts, and feelings proceed, and when we observe the same actions in another man, we conclude that he has thought and felt like us. Analogy with ourselves—this is our sole criterion and method of reasoning and drawing conclusions about the psychic life in other men if we cannot communicate with them, or do not wish to believe in what they tell us about themselves.

Per

Suppose that I should live among men without the possibility of communicating with them and having no way to make conclusions based upon analogy; in that case I should be surrounded by moving and acting automatons, the cause, purpose and meaning of whose actions would be perfectly incomprehensible to me. haps I would explain their actions by "molecular motion," perhaps by the "influence of the planets," perhaps by "spiritism," i. e., by the influence of "spirits," possibly by "chance" or by a haphazard combination of causes—but in any case I should not and could not see the psychic life in the depth of these men's actions.

Concerning the existence of thought and feeling I can usually only conclude by analogy with myself. I know that certain phenomena are connected in me with my possession of thought and feeling. When I see the same phenomena in another man I conclude that he also possesses thought and feeling. But I cannot convince myself directly of the existence of psychic life in another man. Studying man from one side only I should stand in the same position in relation to him as, according to Kant, we stand with relation to the world surrounding us. We know merely the form of our knowledge of it. The world-in-itself we do not know.

Thus the psyche, with all its functions and with all its contents— I have two methods—analogy with myself, and intercourse with him by the exchange of thoughts. Without this, man is for me a phenomenon merely, a moving automaton.

The noumenon of a man is his psyche together with everything this psyche includes within itself and that with which it unites him. In "man" are opened to us both worlds, though the noumenal

world is open only slightly, because it is cognized by us through the phenomenal.

Noumenal means apprehended by the mind; and the characteristic property of the things of the noumenal world is that they cannot be comprehended by the same method by which the things of the phenomenal world are comprehended. We may speculate about the things of the noumenal world; we may discover them by a process of reasoning, and by means of analogy; we may feel them, and enter into some sort of communion with them; but we can neither see, hear, touch, weigh, measure them; nor can we photograph them or decompose them into chemical elements or number their vibrations.

Thus, the psyche, with all its functions and with all its contents— thoughts, feelings, desires, will—does not relate itself to the world of phenomena. We cannot know even a single element of the psyche objectively. Emotion as such is a thing which it is impossible to see, just as it is impossible to see the value of a coin. You can see the stamp upon a coin, but you will never see its value. It is just as impossible to photograph thought as it is to imagine "Egyptian darkness" in a vial. To think otherwise, to experiment with the photographing of thought, simply means to be unable to think logically. On a phonographic record are the tracings of the needle, elevations and depressions, but there is no sound. He who holds a phonographic record to his ear, hoping to hear something, will be sure to listen in vain.

Including within himself two worlds, the phenomenal and the noumenal, man gives us the opportunity to understand in what relation these worlds stand to one another everywhere throughout nature. It is necessary however to remember, that defining a noumenon in terms of the psyche, we take but one of its infinity of aspects.

We have already arrived at the conclusion that the noumenon of a thing consists in its function in another sphere—in its meaning which is incomprehensible in a given section of the world.* Next

*The expression "section of the world" is taken as an indicator of the unreality of the forms of each section. The world is infinite, and all forms are infinite, but to grasp them with the finite brain-consciousness, i. e., by consciousness reflected in the brain, we must imagine the infinite forms as being finite, and these are "sections of the world." The

THE PHYCHE OF MAN HIS FUNCTION 179 we came to the conclusion that the number of meanings of one and the same thing in different sections of the world must be infinitely great and infinitely various, that it must become its own opposite, return again to the beginning (from our standpoint), etc., etc., infinitely expanding, contracting again, and so forth.

It is necessary to remember that the noumenon and the phenomenon are not different things, but merely different aspects of one and and the same thing. Thus, each phenomenon is the finite expression, in the sphere of our knowledge through the organs of sense, of something infinite.

A phenomenon is the three-dimensional expression of a given

noumenon.

This three-dimensionality depends upon the three-dimensional forms of our knowledge, i. e., speaking simply, upon our brains, nerves, eyes, and finger-tips.

In "man" we have found that one side of his noumenon is his psychic life, and that therefore in the psyche lies the beginning of the solution of the riddle of the functions and meanings of man which are incomprehensible from an outside point of view. What is the psyche of man if it is not his function—incomprehensible in the three-dimensional section of the world? Truly, if we shall study and observe man by all accessible means, objectively, from without, we shall never discover his psyche and shall never define the function of his consciousness. We must first of all become aware of the existence of our own psyche, and then either begin a conversation (by signs, gestures, words) with another man, begin to exchange thoughts with him, and from his answers deduce the conclusion that he possesses the same thing that we do—or come to the conclusion about it from external indications (actions similar to ours in similar circumstances). By the direct method of objective investigation, without the help of speech, or without the help of conclusions based upon analogy, we shall not discover the psyche in another man. world is one, but the number of possible sections is infinite. Let us imagine an apple: it is one, but we may imagine an infinite number of sections in all directions and these sections will differ from one another. If instead of an apple we take a more complicated body, for instance the body of some animal: then the sections taken in different directions will be even more unlike one another.