With this we are brought face to face with man. In man’s waking-consciousness nothing disturbs the now pure lordship of the eye. The sounds of the night, the wind, the panting of beasts, the odour of flowers, all stimulate in him _a “whither” and a “whence” in the world of light_. Of the world of scent, in which even our closest comrade the dog still co-ordinates his visual impressions, we have no conception whatever. We know nothing of the world of the butterfly, whose crystalline eye projects no synthetic picture, or of those animals which, while certainly not destitute of senses, are blind. _The only space that remains to us is visual space_, and in it places have been found for the relics of other sense-worlds (such as sounds, scents, heat and cold) as _properties and effects of light-things_--it is a seen fire that warmth comes from, it is a seen rose in illumined space that gives off the scent and we speak of a certain tone as violin-tone. As to the stars, our conscious relations with them are limited to seeing them--over our heads they shine, describing their visible path.[4] But of these sense-worlds there is no doubt that animals and even primitive men still have sensations that are wholly different from ours; some of these sensations we are able to figure to ourselves indirectly by the aid of scientific hypotheses, but the rest now escape us altogether.

This impoverishment of the sensual implies, however, an immeasurable deepening. Human waking-consciousness is no longer a mere tension between body and environment. It is now life _in_ a self-contained light-world. The body moves _in_ the space that is seen. The depth-experience[5] is a mighty out-thrust _into the visible distance_ from a light-centre[6]--the point which we call “I.” “I” is a light-concept. From this point onward the life of an “I” becomes essentially a life in the sun, and night is akin to death. And out of it, too, there arises a new feeling of fear which absorbs all others within itself--_fear before the invisible_, fear of that which one hears or feels, suspects, or observes in its effects without seeing. Animals indeed experience fear in other forms, but man finds these forms puzzling, and even uneasiness in the presence of stillness to which primitive men and children are subject (and which they seek to dispel by noise and loud talking) is disappearing in the higher types of mankind. It is fear of the invisible that is the essence and hall-mark of human religiousness. Gods are surmised, imagined, envisaged light-actualities, and the idea of an “invisible” god is the highest expression of human transcendence. Where the bounds of the light-world are, there lies the beyond, and salvation is emancipation from the spell of the light-world and its facts.

In precisely this resides the ineffable charm and the very real power of emancipation that music possesses for us men. For music is the only art whose means lie outside the light-world that has so long become coextensive with our total world, and music alone, therefore, can take us right out of this world, break up the steely tyranny of light, and let us fondly imagine that we are on the verge of reaching the soul’s final secret--an illusion due to the fact that our waking consciousness is now so dominated by one sense only, so thoroughly adapted to the eye-world, that it is incapable of forming, out of the impressions it receives, a world of the ear.[7]

Man’s thought, then, is visual thought, our concepts are derived from vision, and the whole fabric of our logic is a light-world in the imagination.

This narrowing and consequent deepening, which has led to all our sense-impressions being adapted to and ordered with those of sight, has led also to the replacement of the innumerable methods of thought-communication known to animals by the one single medium of language, which is a bridge _in the light-world_ between two persons present to one another’s bodily or imaginative eyes. The other modes of speaking of which vestiges remain at all have long been absorbed into language in the form of mimicry, gesture, or emphasis. The difference between purely human speech and general animal utterance is that words and word-linkages constitute a domain of inward light-ideas, which has been built up under the sovereignty of the eyes. Every word-meaning has a light-value, even in the case of words like “melody,” “taste,” “cold,” or of perfectly abstract designations.

Even among the higher animals, the habit of reciprocal understanding by means of a sense-link has brought about a marked difference between _mere_ sensation and _understanding_ sensation. If we distinguish in this wise _sense-impressions_ and _sense-judgments_ (e.g., scent-judgment, taste-judgment, or aural-judgment), we find that very often, even in ants and bees, let alone birds of prey, horses, and dogs, the centre of gravity has palpably shifted towards the judgment side of waking-being. But it is only under the influence of language that there is set up within the waking-consciousness a definite _opposition_ between sensation and understanding, a tension that in animals is quite unthinkable and even in man can hardly have been at first anything more than a rarely actualized possibility. The development of language, then, brought along with it a determination of fundamental significance--_the emancipation of understanding from sensation_.

More and more often there appears, in lieu of the simple comprehension of the gross intake, a comprehension of the significances of the component sense-impressions, which have hardly been noticed as such before.[8] Finally these impressions themselves are discarded and replaced by the felt connotations of familiar word-sounds. The word, originally the name of a visual thing, changes imperceptibly into the label of a mental thing, the “concept.” We are far from being able to fix exact meanings to such names--that we can do only with wholly new names. We never use a word twice with identical connotation, and no one ever understands exactly as another does. But mutual comprehension is possible, in spite of this, because of the common world-outlook that has been induced in both, with and by the use of a common language; in an ambiance common to the lives and activities of both, mere word-sounds suffice to evoke cognate ideas. It is this mode of comprehending by means of sounds at once derived and detached (abstract) from actual seeing which, however rarely we can find it definitely evidenced at the primitive level, does in fact sharply separate the generic-animal kind of waking-consciousness from the purely human kind which supervenes. Just so, at an earlier stage, the appearance of waking-consciousness as such fixed a frontier between the general plantlike and the specifically animal existence.

_Understanding detached from sensation is called thought._ Thought has introduced a permanent disunity into the human waking-consciousness. From early times it has rated understanding and sensibility as “higher” and “lower” soul-power. It has created the fateful opposition between the light-world of the eye, described as a figment and an illusion, and the world-imagined (“_vorgestellte_,” “set before” oneself), in which the concepts, with their faint but ineffaceable tinge of light-coloration, live and do business. And henceforth for man, so long as he “thinks,” this is the true world, the world-in-itself. At the outset the ego was waking-being as such (in so far, that is, as, having sight, it felt itself as the centre of a light-world); now it becomes “spirit”--namely, pure understanding, which “cognizes” itself as such and very soon comes to regard not only the world _around_ itself, but even the remaining component of life, its own body, as qualitatively _below itself_. This is evidenced not only in the upright carriage of man, but in the thoroughly intellectualized formation of his head, in which the eyes, the brow, and the temples become more and more the vehicles of expression.[9]

Clearly, then, thought, when it became independent, discovered a new mode of activity for itself. To the practical thought which is directed upon the constitution of the light-things in the world-around, with reference to this or that practical end, there is added the theoretical, penetrating, subtilizing thought which sets itself to establish the constitution of these things “in themselves,” the _natura rerum_. From that which is seen, the light is abstracted, the depth-experience of the eye intensifies itself in a grand and unmistakable course of development into a depth-experience within the tinted realm of word-connotations. Man begins to believe that it is not impossible for his inner eye to see right through into the things that actually are. Concept follows upon concept, and at last there is a mighty thought-architecture made up of buildings that stand out with full clarity under the inner light.

The development of theoretical thought within the human waking-consciousness gives rise to a kind of activity that makes inevitable a fresh conflict--that between Being (existence) and Waking-Being (waking-consciousness). The animal microcosm, in which existence and consciousness are joined in a self-evident unity of living, knows of consciousness _only as the servant_ of existence. The animal “lives” simply and does not reflect upon life. Owing, however, to the unconditional monarchy of the eye, life is presented as the life of a visible entity in the light; understanding, then, when it becomes interlocked with speech, promptly forms a _concept_ of thought and with it a _counter-concept_[10] of life, and in the end it distinguishes life as it is from that which might be. Instead of straight, uncomplicated living, we have the antithesis represented in the phrase “thought and action.” That which is not possible at all in the beasts becomes in every man not merely a possibility, but a fact and in the end an alternative. The entire history of mature humanity with all its phenomena has been formed by it, and the higher the form that a Culture takes, the more fully this opposition dominates the significant moments of its conscious being.

The plantlike-cosmic, Being heavy with Destiny, blood, sex, possess an immemorial mastery and keep it. They _are_ life. The other only serves life. But this other wills, not to serve, but to rule; moreover, it believes that it does rule, for one of the most determined claims put forward by the human spirit is its claim to possess power over the body, over “nature.” But the question is: Is not this very belief a service to life? Why does our thought think just so? Perhaps because the cosmic, the “it,” wills that it shall? Thought shows off its power when it calls the body a notion, when it establishes the pitifulness of the body and commands the voices of the blood to be silent. But in truth the blood rules, in that silently it commands the activity of thought to begin and to cease. There, too, is a distinction between speech and life--Being can do without consciousness and the life of understanding, but not vice versa. Thought rules, after all, in spite of all, only in the “realm of thought.”