The choice of a symbol is strongly influenced by what strongly impresses the mind, what moves the soul, whether joyful or painful, what is of vital interest, in short, whatever touches us nearly, whether consciously or unconsciously. This influence is shown even in the commonplace instances, where the professional or the amateur is betrayed by the manner of apperceiving one and the same object. Thus the landscape painter sees in a lake a fine subject, the angler an opportunity to fish, the business man a chance to establish a sanitarium or a steamboat line, the yachtsman a place for his pleasure trips, the heat tormented person a chance for a bath, and the suicide, death. In the symbolic conception of an object, moreover (which is much more dependent on the unconscious or uncontrolled stimulation of the phantasy that shapes the symbol), the choice from among the many possibilities can surely not fall upon such images as are unsympathetic or uninteresting to the mind. Even if we consciously make comparisons we think of an example mostly from a favorite and familiar sphere; when something “occurs” to us there is already evidenced some part of an unconscious complex. This will become elaborated in the degree that the phantasy is given free play. The raw product then, of the symbol-choosing phantasy of the individual (“raw,” i.e., not covered for publicity with a premeditated varnish) bears traces of the things that closely concern the person in question. (“Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh”—even without premeditation.) If we now start from a spiritual product which is expressed in symbols (mythologically apperceived), and whose author we must take to be not an individual man but many generations or simply mankind, then this product will, in the peculiarities of the selection of the symbol, conceivably signify not individual propensities but rather those things that affect identically the generality of mankind. In alchemy, which as a mythologically apperceiving science is completely penetrated by symbols, we regard as remarkable in the selection of symbols, the juxtaposition of such images as reflect what we have, through psychoanalysis, become acquainted with, as the “titanic” impulses (Œdipus complex). No wonder! These very impulses are the ones that we know from psychoanalytic investigations as those which stand above all individual idiosyncracies. And if we had not known it, the very circumstances of alchemy would have taught us.