Tertium Organum

most 
real
attribute, whereas real attributes should be sought in the functions of a 
thing. Should we acquire the possibility of broadening and deepening our 
view of the chains of causation the links of which are our actions and our 
behaviour; should we learn to take them not only in their narrow meaning in 
relation to the life of man, to 
our own 
life, but in a wide cosmic meaning;
should we succeed in finding and establishing the connection between the 
simple phenomena of our life and the life 01 the cosmos, then, undoubtedly, 
we should find in the 'simplest' phenomena an infinity of the new and the 
unexpected. 
For instance, we should be able to learn in this way something entirely new 
about simple physical phenomena which we are accustomed to regard as 
natural and explicable, and concerning which we take it for granted that we 
know something. But, quite unexpectedly, we may find that we know 
nothing, that everything we have previously known is only a wrong deduction 
from wrong premises. Something infinitely vast and immeasurably
significant may become revealed to us in such phenomena as the expansion 
and contraction of solids, electrical phenomena, heat, light, sound, the 
movement of planets, the coming of day and of night, the succession of 
seasons, a thunderstorm, heat-lightning, and so on. In general, we may sud­
denly and most unexpectedly find explanations of the properties of 
phenomena which we used to accept as something known and containing 
nothing beyond what we see in them. 
The constancy, duration, periodicity or non-periodicity of phenomena may 
acquire for us an entirely new meaning and significance. Much that is new 
and unexpected may open up for us in the 
transition 
of one phenomenon into 
another. Birth, death, a man's life, his relationship with other men, love, 
enmity, sympathies, antipathies, desires, passions may suddenly appear in 
quite a new light. It is difficult for us to imagine at the present moment the 
nature of this 
newness
which it is possible for us to feel in old familiar things; 
and, once we begin to feel it, it will be very difficult to understand. But in 
reality it is only our incapacity to feel and understand this 
'newness' 
which 
separates us from it, for we 
live 
in it and in the midst of it. But our senses are 
too primitive, our ideas too crude for a subtle differentiation of phenomena 
which should become revealed to us in higher space. Our mind, our capacity
for association, is insufficiently flexible to grasp new correlations. 
Consequently, the first feeling brought by our acquaintance with 'that world' 
(i.e. this same world of ours, only taken without the limitations under which 
we usually view it), should be the feeling of 
wonder, 
and this wonder should 
grow, 

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becoming greater and greater as acquaintance with it becomes better. And the better we 
know a thing or a certain correlation of things, the closer, the more familiar they are to 
us, the greater will be our wonder and the more shall we discover in them of the 
new 
and the unexpected. 
Wishing to understand the 
noumenal world,
we must seek a 
hidden meaning
in 
everything. At present we are too deeply rooted in the positivist method with its 
tendency to seek in everything a 
visible 
cause and a 
visible
effect. And this weight of 
positivistic habits makes the understanding of certain ideas extremely difficult. Among 
other things it is extremely hard for us to understand the