Tertium Organum

parts; in another meaning it is an insignificant part of a vast whole. Our mind
cannot bind all that into one;
therefore the 
essence of the thing 
withdraws from us as we strive to know it, 
fleeing before us like a shadow. 
Light on the Path
says: 'You will enter the
light, but you will never touch the flame.' 
This means that 
every knowledge
is conditional. We can never embrace 
all 
the meanings
of any one thing, because in order to do that we must embrace
the whole world
with all the variety of 
its own 
meanings. 
The chief difference between the phenomenal and the noumenal aspects of 
the world consists in the fact that the former is 
always limited,
always finite,
embracing those properties of a given thing which we can generally know as 
phenomena; 
the latter, the noumenal aspect, is always unlimited, 
always
infinite.
And we can never know the end of the hidden functions and the 
hidden meaning of any given thing. Properly speaking, they do not end at all. 
They can change endlessly, i.e. appear different and for ever new from new 
points of view, but they cannot disappear any more than they can end or stop. 
All that is highest
in the understanding, to which we may come, of the
essence, the meaning, the 
soul
of a given phenomenon, from another, a still
higher point of view, in a still wider generalization, will 
again
have a 
different meaning. 
And there is no end to it! 
This is the majesty and the terror
of infinity!
Moreover, we must remember that the world as we know it does not represent
anything stable. It must change with the slightest change in the forms of our 
perception. Phenomena which appear to us totally unrelated may be seen by
another, wider consciousness as pans of one whole. Phenomena which appear
to us completely identical may look totally different. Phenomena which 
appear to us as something whole and indivisible may in reality be very
complex, including in themselves very varied elements which have nothing in
common with one another. And everything together may form one whole, but 
in a category quite incomprehensible to us. Therefore, side by side with our 
view of things, another view is possible - a view as it were from another 
world, from 
'over there',
'from that which lies on the other side'.
But 'over there' signifies not another place, but another method of 

---

perception, a new understanding. And we shall begin to look 
not from here 
but from 
over there
if we regard a phenomenon not as something isolated, but 
in conjunction with all the chains intersecting in it. 

---

CHAPTER 14
The voices of stones. The wall of a church and the wall of a prison. The mast of a ship 
and a gallows. The shadow of a hangman and the shadow of a saint. The soul of a 
hangman and the soul of a saint. The different combinations of phenomena known to 
us in higher space. The connectedness of phenomena which seem to us separate, and 
the difference between phenomena which appear to be similar. How should we 
approach the noumenal world? The understanding of things outside the categories of 
time and space. The reality of a great many 'figures of speech'. The occult 
understanding of energy. The letter of a Hindu occultist. Art as the cognition of the 
noumenal world. What we see and what we do not see. Plato's dialogue about the 
cave. 
It seems to us that we see something and understand something. But in actual 
fact we have but a very dim sense of all that is happening around us, just as a 
snail has a dim sense of the sunlight, the rain, the darkness. 
At times we dimly feel in things the difference resulting from their 
functions, i.e. their 
REAL 
difference. 
Once I was crossing the Neva in a boat with my friend A. with whom, 
before this and later, I had many conversations on the subjects touched on in 
this book. We had been talking, but approaching the fortress we both fell 
silent, looking at the walls and probably thinking more or less, the same 
thoughts. There are factory chimneys too!' said A. And indeed from behind 
the fortress there rose brick chimneys with smoke-blackened tops.
And suddenly, as he said it, I had an