Tertium Organum

the content of the book 
will remain for him 
the 
unfathomable noumenon.
And the contents of nature are just as unfathomable for a 
positivist scientist. 
But if a man 
knows 
of the existence of the contents of the book - the 
noumenon
of 
life - if he knows that a mysterious meaning is hidden under visible phenomena, it is 
possible that, in the end, he will get to the essence of the thing. 
For this it is necessary to understand the 
idea
of the inner content, i.e. the meaning of 
the thing in itself. 

---

The scientist who finds tablets with hieroglyphs or wedge-shaped
inscriptions in an unknown language, deciphers and reads them after a great
deal of work. And in order to read them he needs only one thing: he must 
know that these signs 
represent writing. 
As long as he regards them as mere 
ornament, an external embellishment of the tablets, or an accidental design 
unconnected with any meaning, their significance and meaning will remain 
completely closed to him. But as soon as he presupposes the existence of this 
meaning, the 
possibility of
grasping it arises. 
Every cipher can be read, even without any key. 
But one must know that it 
is a cipher.
This is the first and indispensable condition. Without it nothing
can be done. 
The idea of the existence of the visible and the hidden aspects of life has been 
known to philosophy long ago. Events or 
phenomena
were admitted to 
represent only one side of the world, an 
apparent
one, devoid of real 
existence and coming into being at the moment of our contact with the real 
world; a side infinitely small as compared with the other side. The other side, 
noumena, 
were regarded as really existing in themselves, but inaccessible to 
our perception. 
But there can be no greater mistake than to regard the world as 
divided
into 
phenomena and noumena - to take phenomena and noumena as separate from 
one another, existing independently one from another and as capable of being
perceived apart from one another. This is complete philosophical illiteracy,
which manifests itself most clearly in dualistic 
spiritualistic
theories. The 
division of phenomena and noumena exists only in our perception. The 
'phenomenal world' is merely our incorrect representation of the world. 
As Karl du Prel has said, 
the world beyond is only this world strangely 
perceived.
It would be more correct to say that 
this world is only the world 
beyond strangely perceived. 
Kant's idea is quite correct that the study of the phenomenal aspect of the 
world will not bring us nearer to the understanding of 'things in themselves'. 
A 'thing in itself is a thing as it exists in itself, 
independently of us.
The 
'phenomenon of a thing' is the thing in that aspect of it which we perceive. 
The example of a book in the hands of an illiterate savage demonstrates quite 
clearly that it is sufficient to be unaware of the existence of the noumenon of 
a thing (the contents of the book in this case) for it not to manifest itself in 
phenomena. But the knowledge of its existence is sufficient to open up the 
possibility 

---

of finding it by means of the very 
same 
phenomena the study of which would 
have been utterly useless without the knowledge of the existence of the 
noumenon. 
Just as it is impossible for a savage to come nearer to understanding the 
nature of a watch by studying the phenomenal aspect of it, i.e. the number of 
wheels and the number of teeth in each wheel, so in the case of a positivist 
scientist studying the external,