The question as to how it is possible that I can see, hear, smell, taste, feel, think, take nourishment, and so forth, here rolls back into beginninglessness, into a double question--that concerning the succession of Kamma, representing endlessness in time; and that concerning the material, representing the corresponding endlessness in space. I learn to see, hear, think, and so forth, as the flame learns to burn. Had I to learn this in the vulgar sense of the word, never in life could I compass it. As pure process of alimentation I _have_ not all these powers; I _am_ this potency itself. I do not _have_ functions; I _am_ functioning itself, as a genuine, self-acting process which burns in virtue of a genuine energy that never can _be demonstrated_, that only _demonstrates itself_ in consciousness. When _science_ teaches that I am descended wholly and entirely from my parents, it teaches that the _I_-process is not kindled at all, but propels itself hither from parents, grandparents, and so forth--does not burn, but rolls--so making necessary the question as to the first beginning of this motion; for everything set in motion, urged onward--in short, every reaction--must have a first moment of beginning. In contradistinction to science, _faith_ teaches that the parents provide the material, while God sets all alight by endowing me with an immortal soul--an idea, indeed, demanding faith. _The Buddha_ teaches: The parents provide the material, the groundwork, and the _I_-energy of some disintegrating _I_-process corresponding uniquely to these potentialities, sets all alight. Here I take rise in my parents as the fountain takes its rise in the hill. That the fountain does so, is beyond all cavil, is patent to any eye; yet it is but as an alien guest. Thus of the three, the Buddha is the only one to abide by actuality, the only one with whom the entire miracle of propagation takes its place among mundane events, conforming likewise to the laws of mundane occurrences. For faith, the miracle of propagation lies outside the jurisdiction of these latter; for science, it is true it remains within their jurisdiction, but only as a barren possibility. It is here where the true thinker must clutch and claw his way in, that I would confront him, as the highwayman the traveller, with a “Sta viator!” For the simple fact that I am here, a single moment of the “_I_,” yields the entire cosmogony of the Buddha. Every _I_-moment is possible, is thinkable, only as the point of intersection of the lines of Kamma and of the material, hence as the form of a world that _has_ not law but itself _is_ law. I am here, means, I am here as self-conscious. I am here as self-conscious, means, I am determined as one and single. I am determined as one and single, means, The twofold material of generation must be made one through some energy. That, however, means, I am without beginning. Of what service is this idea as a working hypothesis?