CHAPTER II – Where Do We Stand To-day?
In between the two polarically opposite systems there is a third, again of clearly distinct character, which functions as a mediator between the two. Here all processes are of a strictly rhythmic nature, as is shown by the process of breathing and the pulsation of the blood. This system, too, provides the foundation for a certain type of psychological process, namely feeling. That feeling is an activity of the soul distinct from both thinking and willing, and that it has its direct counterpart in the rhythmic processes of the body, can be most easily tested through observing oneself when listening to music.
As one might expect from its median position, the feeling sphere of the soul is characterized by a degree of consciousness half-way between waking and sleeping. Of our feelings we are not more conscious than of our dreams; we are as little detached from them as from our dream experiences while these last; what remains in our memory of past feelings is usually not more than what we remember of past dreams.
This picture of the threefold psycho-physical structure of man will now enable us to understand the evolution of consciousness both in individual life and in the life of mankind. To furnish the foundation of waking consciousness, parts of the body must become divorced from life. This process, however, is one which, if we take the word in its widest sense, we may call, ageing. All organic bodies, and equally that of man, are originally traversed throughout by life. Only gradually certain parts of such an organism become precipitated, as it were, from the general organic structure, and they do so increasingly towards the end of that organism’s life-span.
In the human body this separation sets in gently during the later stages of embryonic development and brings about the first degree of independence of bones and nerves from the rest of the organism. The retreat of life continues after birth, reaching a certain climax in the nervous system at about the twenty-first year. In the body of a small child there is still comparatively little contrast between living and non-living organs. There is equally little contrast between sleeping and waking condition in its soul. And the nature of the soul at this stage is volition throughout. Never, in fact, does man’s soul so intensively will as in the time when it is occupied in bringing the body into an upright position, and never again does it exert its strength with the same unconsciousness of the goal to which it strives.
What, then, is the soul’s characteristic relationship to the world around at this stage? The following observations will enable us to answer this question.
It is well known that small children often angrily strike an object against which they have stumbled. This has been interpreted as ‘animism’, by which it is meant that the child, by analogy with his experience of himself as a soul-filled body, imagines the things in his surroundings to be similarly ensouled. Anyone who really observes the child’s mode of experience (of which we as adults, indeed, keep something in our will-life) is led to a quite different interpretation of such a phenomenon. For he realizes that the child neither experiences himself as soul-entity distinct from his body, nor faces the content of the world in so detached a manner as to be in need of using his imagination to read into it any soul-entities distinct from his own.
In this early period of his life the human being still feels the world as part of himself, and himself as part of the world. Consequently, his relation to the objects around him and to his own body is one and the same. To the example of the child beating the external object he has stumbled against, there belongs the complementary picture of the child who beats himself because he has done something which makes him angry with himself.
In sharp contrast to this state of oneness of the child’s soul, in regard both to its own body and to the surrounding world, there stands the separatedness of the adult’s intellectual consciousness, severed from both body and world. What happens to this part of the soul during its transition from one condition to the other may be aptly described by using a comparison from another sphere of natural phenomena. (Later descriptions in this book will show that a comparison such as the one used here is more than a mere external analogy.)
Let us think of water in which salt has been dissolved. In this state the salt is one with its solvent; there is no visible distinction between them. The situation changes when part of the salt crystallizes. By this process the part of the salt substance concerned loses its connexion with the liquid and contracts into individually outlined and spatially defined pieces of solid matter. It thereby becomes optically distinguishable from its environment.