To this paradoxical mode of expression, however, one is only compelled so long as one identifies light with the energy itself. For the site of interference, the nodal point of the vibrations, is just as much “energy” as is the trough of the vibration. And so if one assumes light itself to be the energy, one here has a light without light. In truth, however, light is nothing but an expression of the energy in virtue of which it exists, and it is a stroke of genius on the part of modern physics--one, to be sure, which it has perpetrated unknown to itself--that in interference it has lighted on the one single possibility of making energies perceptible to sense in that one form in which alone they are capable of being made sense-perceptible--_as a pure negative_, a pure _privation_ in the sense-activity of me the observer. As all languages become alike in silence, so all energies become alike in interferences. As silence only means that there are languages, so interference only means that there are energies. With the fact “interference,” accordingly, science bears witness against herself, inasmuch as thereby she brings before our eyes the existence of actual energies in the form of the negative itself. That is why I have just called the phenomena of interference the most important step epistemologically that modern physics has yet taken. For if science would but recognize this fact for that which it really is, she would find herself obliged to remodel her whole scheme of thought from the foundation upward. The--for the beholder--purely negative character of the interference has its basis in the entry of the energy into itself. With this we stand in presence of the Buddha-thought. Here the fact “self-consciousness” becomes a pure interference phenomenon of _I_-energy. As such it is a pure entering of the _I_-energy into itself. As such, again, it is, on the one hand, a pure negative for the whole external world; on the other hand, to the individual himself, it is a something _immediately_ given, where it is simply a matter for correct interpretation, and that, here, in an immediately given, perforce can only be intuitive. In this insight into the nature of self-consciousness, the _I_, more sharply than anywhere else, defines itself as a something that only comprehends itself, while at the same time comprehending the world as being incomprehensible. In this insight the silence of the Buddha in the face of Vacchagotta’s questions explains itself. For, as long as the _terminus technicus_ “interference” is not formulated, the question is unanswerable. An interference at once is and is not. It is the immediately given for the individual himself--the not given at all for others, for beholders. The acceptance and elaboration of this thought is facilitated by the data of physiology and psychology.