Tertium Organum

right and just
and yet which other people cannot bring 
themselves to do; dare not even think about 
through weakness, through attachment to 
life.
There may be an 
impersonal
hatred -hatred of injustice, violence, anger against 
stupidity, against dullness; 
aversion to foulness, to hypocrisy. These feelings undoubtedly lift up and purify man's 
soul and help him to 
see
things which he would not otherwise see. 
Christ driving the money-changers out of the temple or expressing 
* C. H. Hinton, 
A New Era of Thought,
London, George Allen & Unwin, 1910, pp. 
77, 78. 

---

his opinion of the Pharisees was not at all meek or mild. And there are cases 
where meekness and mildness are not a virtue at all. Emotions of love, 
sympathy, pity are very easily transformed into sentimentality, into 
weakness. And in this form they naturally serve only 
absence of knowledge, 
i.e. matter.
The difficulty of dividing emotions into categories is increased by
the fact that all emotions of the higher order, without exception, can also be 
personal, and then their effect is no different from that of the other category. 
There exists a division of emotions into 
PURE 
and 
IMPURE
. We all know this, 
we all use these words, but we understand very little what this means. Indeed, 
what does 'pure' or 'impure' mean in relation to feeling?
Ordinary morality divides emotions, 
a priori,
into pure and impure
according to external traits, just as Noah divided animals in his ark. 
Moreover, all 'carnal desires' are relegated into the category of the 
IMPURE
. In 
reality, however, 'carnal desires' are, of course, as pure as everything else in 
nature. Nevertheless there actually are pure and impure emotions. We are 
well aware that there is truth in this division. Where is it then? What does it 
mean? 
An examination of emotions from the point of view of knowledge can 
alone give a key to this problem. 
An impure emotion is exactly the same as a dirty glass, dirty water or an 
impure sound, i.e. an emotion which is 
not
pure, which contains foreign 
matter or a sediment, or echoes of other emotions; 
IMPURE
-
MIXED
. An impure emotion gives an obscured, 
not pure 
knowledge, 
just as a dirty glass gives a confused image. A pure emotion gives a clear, 
pure image of the knowledge which it is intended to transmit. 
This is the only possible solution of the problem. The main obstacle which 
prevents us from arriving at this solution is the usual moral tendency which 
has divided emotions 
a priori 
into 'moral' and 'immoral'. But if we try for a 
moment to discard the usual moral framework, we shall see that the matter is 
much more simple, that there are no emotions impure 
in their nature,
and 
that 
every emotion 
may be either pure or impure according to whether it 
contains an admixture of other emotions or not. 
There may be pure sensuality, the sensuality of the 'Song of Songs', which 
passes into the sensation of cosmic life and enables one to hear the beating
pulse of Nature. And there may be impure sensuality, mixed with other 
emotions, good or bad from the moral point of view, but equally making 
sensuality turbid. 

---

There may be pure sympathy — and there may be sympathy mixed with 
calculation to receive something for one's sympathy. There may be pure
desire to know, a thirst for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and there 
may be a pursuit of knowledge led by considerations 
of profit
and 
gain
to be 
derived from this knowledge. 
In their external manifestations pure and impure emotions may differ very
little. Two men may play chess and be quite alike in their outward behaviour, 
but one may be driven by ambition, desire of victory, and he will be full of 
different unpleasant feelings towards his opponent - apprehension, envy of a 
clever move, vexation, jealousy, animosity, or anticipation of his winnings;
but another may simply try to solve the complicated mathematical problem 
before him, without giving a thought to his opponent. 
The emotion of the first will be impure if only because too much is mixed 
with it. The emotion of the second will be pure. The meaning of this is, of 
course, perfectly obvious. 
Examples of such a division of outwardly similar emotions may be 
constantly seen in artistic, literary, scientific, social and even in spiritual and 
religious activities of men. In all domains only complete victory over the 
self-element leads man to a right knowledge of the world and himself. All 
emotions coloured by the 
SELF
-
ELEMENT 
are like concave, convex or 
distorting glasses which refract the rays incorrectly and so distort the image
of the world. 
Thus the problem of emotional knowledge consists in a corresponding 
preparation of the emotions which serve as instruments of knowledge.
'Become as little children . . .' and 'Blessed are the pure in heart. . . .' These 
words of the Gospels speak, first of all, about the purification of emotions. It 
is impossible to know rightly through impure emotions. Therefore, in the 
interests of a right knowledge of the world and oneself, the work of 
purification and elevation of emotions should go on in man. 
This last brings us to a totally new view of 
morality.
Morality, the aim of 
which consists precisely in establishing a system of right relationship to 
emotions and in assisting their purification and elevation, ceases to be in our 
eyes a tedious and self-contained exercise in virtue. Morality is a form of 
aesthetics. 
That which is not 
moral
is first of all not aesthetic, because it is not co­
ordinated, not harmonious. 
We see all the enormous significance morality can have in our life; 
we see the significance morality has 
for knowledge
because there are 
emotions through which we 
gain knowledge,
and there are emotions 

---

by which we are led astray. If morality can indeed help us to discriminate 
between them, then its value is incontestable precisely from the point of view 
of 
knowledge. 
The psychology of our ordinary conversational language knows very well 
that malice, hatred, anger 
BLIND 
a man, 
DIM 
his reason; it knows that fear 
DRIVES ONE INSANE
, and so on and so on. 
But we also know that 
every emotion
may serve knowledge and absence of 
knowledge.
Let us take an emotion, valuable and capable of a very high evolution, such 
as 
pleasure in activity. 
This emotion is a powerful moving force in culture, it 
serves the perfectioning of life and the development of all the higher 
capacities of man. But the same emotion is also the cause of an endless series 
of errors and 
faux pas 
which mankind commits and for which it has 
afterwards to pay bitterly. In the excitement of activity man easily tends to 
forget 
the aim for
the sake of which he started to act; to take the very activity
for the aim; and for the sake of preserving the activity to 
sacrifice the aim. 
This can be seen especially clearly in the activity of various religious trends. 
Having started in one direction a man, without noticing it, turns in the 
opposite direction and very often heads towards the abyss thinking that he is 
scaling the heights. 
Nothing is more contradictory, more paradoxical than a man 
absorbed in 
activity. 
We are so used to 'man' that his extraordinary perversions do not 
strike us as strange. 
Violence in the name of freedom. Violence in the name of love. Preaching
Christianity sword in hand. The stakes of the Inquisition to the glory of a 
God of Mercy. The oppression of the freedom of thought and speech on the