Chapter XIII (part 7)

153 has really entered a cul de sac out of which there is no escape, and the official recognition of the fact that the direction it has taken is entirely the wrong one, is only a question of time. _____ We may say—not as an assumption, but as an affirmation—that the world of physical phenomena in itself represents the section, as it were, of another world, existing right here , and the events of which are proceeding right here , but invisibly to us. There is nothing more miraculous or supernatural than life. Consider the street of a great city, in all its details. An enormous diversity of facts will result. But how much is hidden underneath these facts of that which it is impossible to see at all! What desires, passions, thoughts, greed, covetousness; how much of suffering both petty and great; how much of deceit, falsity; how much of lying; how many invisible threads-sympathies, antipathies, interests—bind this street with the entire world, with all the past and with all the future. If we realize this imaginatively, then it will become clear that it is impossible to study the street by that which is visible alone. It is necessary to plunge into the depths. The complex and enormous phenomena of the street will not reveal its infinite noumenon, which is bound up both with eternity and with time, with the past and with the future, and with the entire world. Therefore we have a full right to regard the visible phenomenal world as a section of some other infinitely more complex world, manifesting itself at a given moment in the first one. And this world of noumena is infinite and incomprehensible for us, just as the three-dimensional world, in all its manifoldness of function, is incomprehensible to the two-dimensional being. The nearest approach to "truth" which is possible for a man is contained in the saying: everything has an infinite variety of meanings, and to know them all is impossible . In other words, "truth," as we understand it, i.e., the finite definition , is possible only in a finite series of phenomena. In an infinite series it will certainly become its own opposite. Hegel has given utterance to this last thought: "Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite." In this change of meaning is contained the cause of the incomprehensibility p. 154 to man of the noumenal world. The substance of a thing, i.e., the thing-in-itself , contains an infinite quantity of meanings and functions of something which it is impossible to grasp with our mind. And in addition to this it involves a change of meaning of one and the same thing. In one meaning it represents an enormous whole, including within itself a great number of things; in another meaning it is an insignificant part of a great whole. Our mind cannot bind all this into one; therefore, the substance of a thing recedes from us according to the measure of our knowledge, just as a shadow flees before us. Light on the Path says: " You will enter the light, but you will never touch the flame ." This means, that all knowledge is relative. We can never grasp all the meanings of any one thing, because in order to grasp them all, it is necessary for us to grasp the whole world , with all the variety of meanings contained in it . The principal difference between the phenomenal and noumenal aspects of the world is contained in the fact that the first one is always limited , always finite; it includes those properties of a given thing which we can generally know as phenomena : the second, or noumenal aspect, is always unlimited, always infinite . And we can never say where the hidden functions and the hidden meanings of a given thing end. Properly speaking, they end nowhere.