Tertium Organum

part. His relation to himself and to the world is called knowledge. The 
broadening and deepening of the relation to oneself and the world is a 
broadening of knowledge.
All the mental faculties of man, all the elements of his inner life ­
sensations, representations, concepts, ideas, judgments, conclusions, feelings, 
emotions, even creation - all these are the 
instruments of knowledge
which we 
possess. 
Feelings - from the simple emotions to the highest, such as aesthetic, 
religious and moral emotions - and creation, from the creation of a savage 
fashioning himself a stone hatchet, to the creation of Beethoven, are 
means of 
knowledge. 
Only to our narrow 
HUMAN 
view do they seem to serve other 
purposes - the protection of life, the creation of something, or enjoyment. In 
actual fact all this 
serves 
knowledge. 
Evolutionists, the followers of Darwin, will say that the struggle for 
existence and the selection of the fittest have created the 
mind
and 
feeling of 
the modern man - that mind and feeling 
serve life, 
protect the life of separate
individuals or of the species and that, 
apart from this,
in themselves, they
have no meaning. To this one can oppose the same argument as was used 
against the idea of the 
mechanicalness
of the universe. Namely, if 
intelligence exists, then nothing exists except intelligence. The struggle for 
existence, and the survival of the fittest, if they in truth play such a role in the 
creation of life, are also not accidents, but products of an intelligence 
WHICH 
WE DO NOT KNOW
. And, like everything else, they serve 
KNOWLEDGE
. 
But we do not realize, do not see the presence of intelligence in the 
phenomena and laws of nature. This happens because we always study not 
the whole but a part, and we do not see the whole we wish to study. But 
studying the little finger of a man we cannot see the intelligence of the man. 
The same refers to nature. We always study the little finger of nature. If we 
realize this and understand that 
EVERY 
LIFE IS THE MANIFESTATION OF A PART OF SOME WHOLE, Only then a 
possibility opens of knowing that whole. 
In order to know the intelligence of a given whole, one should 
* Al-Ghazzali, 'The Alchemy of Happiness'. 

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understand the character of that whole, and its functions. Thus the function of 
man is knowledge and self-knowledge. But without understanding 'man' as a 
whole, it is impossible to understand his function. 
In order to understand what is our mind, the function of which is 
knowledge, it is necessary to make clear our relation to life. 
In Chapter 10 an attempt was made (based on an analogy with the world of 
imaginary two-dimensional beings), to define 
life
as motion in a sphere
higher in comparison with a given sphere. From this point of view every 
separate 
life
is, as it were, the manifestation in our sphere of a part of one of 
the intelligences of another sphere. These intelligences seem to look in on us 
by means of lives which we see. When a man dies, 
one eye of the universe 
closes,
says Fechner. Every separate human life is a moment of the life of the 
great being
which lives 
in us. 
Every separate life of a tree is a moment of the 
life of the 
being
of the species or the variety. The intelligences of these 
higher 
beings do not exist independently of the lower lives. They are two 
sides of one and the same thing. Each 
single
human mind, in some other 
section of the world may produce the illusion of many lives. 
It is very difficult to illustrate this by an example. But if we take Hinton's 
spiral, passing through a plane, and a point running in circles on the plane 
(Chapter 6, pp. 52-3) and suppose that the spiral is the mind, then the moving
point of intersection of the spiral with the plane would represent