At times the man, shuddering at the alienation between the I and the world, comes to reflect that something is to be done. As when in the grave night-hour you lie, racked by waking dream—bulwarks have fallen away and the abyss is screaming—and note amid your torment: there is still life, if only I got through to it—but how, how?; so is this man in the hours of reflection, shuddering, and aimlessly considering this and that. And perhaps, away in the unloved knowledge of the depths within him, he really knows the direction of reversal, leading through sacrifice. But be spurns this knowledge; “mysticism” cannot resist the sun of electric light. He calls thought, in which be rightly bas great confidence, to his aid; it shall make good everything for him again. It is, in truth, the high art of thought to paint a reliable picture of the world that is even worthy of belief. So this man says to his thought, “You see this thing stretched out here with the cruel eyes—was it not my playfellow once? You know how it laughed at me then with these very eyes, and they had good in them then? And you see my wretched I—I will confess to you, it is empty, and whatever I do in myself, as a result of experiencing and using, does not fathom its emptiness. Will you make it up between me and it, so that it leaves off and I recover?” And thought, ready with its service and its art, paints with its well-known speed one—no, two rows of pictures, on the right wall and on the left. On the one there is (or rather, there takes place, for the world-pictures of thought are reliable cinematography) the universe. The tiny earth plunges from the whirling stars, tiny man from the teeming earth, and now history bears him further through the ages, to rebuild persistently the ant-hill of the cultures which history crushes underfoot. Beneath the row of pictures is written: “One and all” On the other wall there takes place the soul. A spinner is spinning the orbits of all stars and the life of all creation and the history of the universe; everything is woven on one thread, and is no longer called stars and creation and universe, but sensations and imaginings, or even experiences, and conditions of the soul. And beneath the row of pictures is written: “One and all.”
Thenceforth, if ever the man shudders at the alienation, and the world strikes terror in his heart, he looks up (to right or left, just as it may chance) and sees a picture. There he sees that the I is embedded in the world and that there is really no I at all—so the world can do nothing to the I, and he is put at ease; or he sees that the world is embedded in the I, and that there is really no world at all—so the world can do nothing to the I, and he is put at ease. Another time, if the man shudders at the alienation, and the I strikes terror in his heart, he looks up and sees a picture; which picture he sees does not matter, the empty I is stuffed full with the world or the stream of the world flows over it, and he is put at ease.
But a moment comes, and it is near, when the shuddering man looks up and sees both pictures in a flash together. And a deeper shudder seizes him.