Tertium Organum

The new view of humanity repudiates the idea of 
equality -
which does not exist anyway - and strives to establish the signs and 
facts of the differences between men, because humanity will soon have to 
separate those who are going forward from those who are incapable of going
forward -
the wheat from the tares,
for the tares have become too prolific and 
are stifling the growth of the wheat. 
This is the key to the understanding of our life. And this key has been
found long ago! 
The riddle has been solved long since. 
But different thinkers of different 
epochs, who found solutions, expressed them in various ways, and often, not 
knowing one another, blazed the same trail with enormous difficulties, 
without suspecting the existence of their predecessors or their contemporaries 
who were treading or who had trodden the same path. 
In the world's literature there are books, usually little known, which 
accidentally (or not accidentally) may be found standing on the same shelf, in 
the same library. Then, taken together, they will give such a full and clear 
picture of the different sides of man's existence, its purposes and ways, that 
we shall no longer have any doubts about the destiny of humanity (at least of 
a small part of it), a destiny 
other 
than the sentence of hard labour of digging
through the early globe which 'positivist philosophy', 'historical materialism', 
'socialism' and so on and so forth have in store for it. 
If we feel that we do not yet know our destiny, if we still doubt and are 
afraid to part with the hopelessness of the 'positive' view of life, we do so, 
first, because we take together, without differentiation, men of totally
different categories, with a totally different future, and second, because the 
ideas we need, through which we could understand the real correlation of 
forces, have not won a place in official knowledge, do not represent any 
recognized
department or branch of knowledge and are rarely to be found 
together in one book. It is very rare even to find books expressing these ideas, 
collected together. 
We fail to understand many things, because we specialize too easily and 
too drastically. Philosophy, religion, psychology, mathematics, natural 
sciences, sociology, history of culture, art - each has its own special literature. 
There is nothing embracing the whole in its entirety. Even the 
bridges
between separate literatures are built badly 

---

and ineffectually, and are often altogether absent. This creation of special 
literatures is the chief evil and chief obstacle to right understanding of things. 
Each 'literature' evolves its own terminology, its own language,
incomprehensible to representatives of other literatures and 
not corresponding 
to
any of the other languages. In this way each one limits itself still more 
drastically, dissociates itself from the others and renders its frontiers 
impassable. 
What we have needed for a long time is 
synthesis. 
The word 
Synthesis
was written on the banner of the modern theosophical 
movement inaugurated by H. P. Blavatsky. But it remained only a word, 
because the real result was only new specialization and a separate
theosophical
literature, tending to fence itself off still more from the general 
movement of thought. 
But there are trends of thought which strive to fight against specialization, 
not in words but in deeds. 
Books are appearing which cannot be referred to any of the accepted library
classifications, cannot be registered in any faculty. These books are the 
forerunners of a new literature, which will break down all fences built in the 
domain of thought, and will clearly show to those who wish to see it where 
they are going and where they can go. 
The names of the authors of these books are the most unexpected 
combination. I shall not undertake to give a list of authors or their books; I 
shall only point out the works of Edward Carpenter and a trend of thought
whose representative is the Canadian psychiatrist, Dr R. M. Bucke. 
Edward Carpenter, straightforwardly and without any allegories or symbols, 
formulated the thought that the existing consciousness by which modern man 
lives is only a transitory form, leading to another, a higher consciousness, 
which