Waking-consciousness consists of sensation and understanding, and their common essence is a continuous self-adjustment in relation to the macrocosm. To that extent waking-consciousness is identical with ascertainment (_Feststellen_), whether we consider the touch of an infusorian, or human thinking of the highest order. Feeling, now, for touch with itself in this wise, the waking-consciousness first encounters the epistemological problem. What do we mean by cognition, or by the knowledge of cognition? And what is the relation between the original meanings of these terms and their later formulations in words? Waking and sleep alternate, like day and night, according to the course of the stars, and so, too, cognition alternates with dreams. How do these two differ?

Waking-consciousness, however--whether it be that of sensation or that of understanding--is synonymous with the existence of oppositions, such as that between cognition and the object cognized, or thing and property, or object and event. Wherein consists the essence of these oppositions? And so arises the second problem, that of _causality_. When we give the names “cause” and “effect” to a pair of sensuous elements, or “premiss” and “consequence” to a pair of intellectual elements, we are fixing between them a relation of power and rank--when one is there, the other must be there also. In these relations, observe, time does not figure at all. We are concerned not with facts of destiny, but with causal truths, not with a “When?” but with a law-fixed dependence. Beyond doubt this is the understanding’s most promising line of activity. Mankind perhaps owes to discoveries of this order his happiest moments; and thus he proceeds, from these oppositions in the near and present things of everyday life that strike him immediately, forward in an endless series of conclusions to the first and final causes in the structure of nature that he calls God and the meaning of the world. He assembles, orders, and reviews his system, his dogma of law-governed connexions, and he finds in it a refuge from the unforeseen. He who can demonstrate, fears no longer. But wherein consists the essence of causality? Does it lie in knowing, in the known, or in a unity of both?

The world of tensions is necessarily in itself stiff and dead--namely, “eternal truth,” something beyond all time, something that is a state. The actual world of waking-consciousness, however, is full of changes. This does not astonish an animal in the least, but it leaves the thought of the thinker powerless, for rest and movement, duration and change, become and becoming,[14] are oppositions denoting something that in its very nature “passeth all understanding” and _must_ therefore (from the point of view of the understanding) contain an absurdity. For is that a fact at all which proves to be incapable of distillation from the sense-world in the form of a truth? On the other hand, though the world is cognized as timeless, a time element nevertheless adheres to it--tensions appear as beat, and direction associates itself with extension. And so all that is problematical for the understanding consciousness somehow gathers itself together in one last and gravest problem, _the problem of motion_. And on that problem free and abstract thought breaks down, and we begin to discern that the microcosmic is after all as dependent as ever upon the cosmic, just as the individualness of a being from its first moment is constituted not by a body, but by the sheath of a body. Life can exist without thought, but thought is only one mode of life. High as may be the objectives that thought sets before itself, in actuality life makes use of thought for _its_ ends and gives it a living objective quite apart from the solution of abstract problems. For thought the solutions of problems are correct or erroneous--for life they are valuable or valueless, and if the will-to-know breaks down on the motion problem, it may well be because life’s purpose has at that point been achieved. In spite of this, and indeed because of this, the motion problem remains the centre of gravity of all higher thought. All mythology and all natural science has arisen out of man’s wonder in the presence of the mystery of motion.

The problem of motion touches, at once and immediately, the secrets of existence, which are alien to the waking-consciousness and yet inexorably press upon it. In posing motion as a problem we affirm our will to comprehend the incomprehensible, the when and wherefore, Destiny, blood, all that our intuitive processes touch in our depths. Born to see, we strive to set it before our eyes in the light, so that we may in the literal sense grasp it, assure ourselves of it as of something tangible.

For this is the decisive fact, of which the observer is unconscious--his whole effort of seeking is aimed not at life, but at the seeing of life, and not at death, but at the seeing of death. We try to grasp the cosmic as it appears in the macrocosm to the microcosm, _as the life of a body in the light-world_ between birth and death, generation and dissolution, and with that differentiation of body and soul that follows of deepest necessity from our ability to experience[15] the inward-proper as a sensuous alien.

That we do not merely live but _know_ about “living” is a consequence of our bodily existence in the light. But the beast knows only life, not death. Were we pure plantlike beings, we should die unconscious of dying, for to feel death and to die would be identical. But animals, even though they hear the death-cry, see the dead body, and scent putrefaction, behold death without comprehending it. Only when understanding has become, through language, detached from visual awareness and pure, does death appear to man as the great enigma of the light-world about him.

Then, and only then, life becomes the short span of time between birth and death, and it is in relation to death that that other great mystery of generation arises also. Only then does the diffuse animal fear of everything become the definite human fear of death. It is _this_ that makes the love of man and woman, the love of mother and child, the tree of the generations, the family, the people, and so at last world-history itself the infinitely deep facts and problems of destiny that they are. To death, as the common lot of every human being born into the light, adhere the ideas of guilt and punishment, of existence as a penance, of a new life beyond the world of this light, and of a salvation that makes an end of the death-fear. In the knowledge of death is originated that world-outlook which we possess as being men and not beasts.