To the few experiences I had gained on the road to the attainment of my proper ends in life was added this new one: The contemplation of such shapes, the surrendering of oneself to these irrational, twisting, odd forms of nature, engenders in us a feeling of the harmony of our inner being with the will which brought forth these shapes; we soon feel the temptation to look upon them as our own creations, as if made by our own moods; we see the boundary between ourselves and nature waver and vanish; we learn to know the state of mind by outside impressions, or by inward. In no way so simply and so easily as by this practice do we discover to what a great extent we are creators, to what a great extent our souls have part in the continual creation of the world. Or rather, it is the same indivisible godhead, which is active in us and in nature. If the outside world fell in ruins, one of us would be capable of building it up again, for mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, all that is shaped by nature lies modeled in us, comes from the soul, whose essence is eternity, of whose essence we are ignorant, but which is revealed to us for the most part as love-force and creative power. Many years later I found this observation confirmed in a book, one of Leonardo da Vinci’s, who in one passage remarks how good and deeply moving it is to look at a wall on which many people have spat. He felt the same sensation before those spots on the wet wall as Pistorius and I before the fire. At our next meeting the organist enlightened me still further on the subject. “We confine our personality within much too narrow bounds. We count as composing our person only that which distinguishes us as individuals, only that which we recognize as irregular. But we are made up from the entire world stock, each one of us, and just as in our body is displayed the genealogical table of development back to the fish stage and still further, so we have accumulated in our souls all the experiences through which a human soul has ever lived. All the gods and devils which have ever been, whether those of the Greeks or Chinese or Zulus, all are in us, are there as potentialities, as desires, as starting points. If all mankind died out, with the exception of a single moderately gifted child, who had not enjoyed the slightest instruction, so would this child rediscover the whole process of things; it would be able to produce gods, demons, paradises, the commandments and prohibitions, old and new testaments--everything.” “Well and good,” I objected; “but then what does the worth of the individual consist of? Why do we continue to strive if everything has already been achieved in us?”