Goethe has indicated in monumental form the point of view of the highest knowledge in the words: “If I know my relation to myself and to the outer world, I call it truth. And thus every one can have his own truth, and yet it is always one and the same.” Each has his own truth: because each is an individual, separate being, beside and along with others. These other beings act upon him through his organs. From the individual standpoint at which he is placed, and according to the constitution of his power of perception, he builds up his own truth for himself in intercourse with the things around him. He acquires his relation to things. If, then, he enters into self-knowledge, if he learns to know his relation to himself, then his special separate truth is merged in the universal Truth; and this universal Truth is in all the same. The understanding of the raising of the individual, of the single self, into the Universal Self in the personality, is regarded by deeper natures as the secret which reveals itself in the inmost heart of man as the root-mystery of life. And Goethe has found an apt expression for this: “And so long as thou hast not that, this: Die and Become! Then thou art but a melancholy guest upon this dark earth.” Not a mere repetition in thought, but a real part of the world-process, is that which goes on in man’s inner life. The world would not be what it is if the factor belonging thereto in the human soul did not play its part. And if one calls the highest which is attainable by man the Divine, then one must say that this Divine is not present as something external, to be repeated pictorially in the human mind, but that this Divine is awakened in man. Angelus Silesius has found the right words for this: “I know that without me God can live no instant; if I become nothing, He must of necessity give up the ghost.” “Without me God may make no single smallest worm: if I do not sustain it with Him, then it must straightway perish.” Only he can make such an assertion who presupposes that in man something comes to light, without which external being cannot exist. If everything pertaining to the “worm” were there present without man, then one could not possibly say that it must perish if man did not sustain it. The innermost kernel of the world comes to life as spiritual content in self-knowledge. The experience of self-knowledge means for man working and weaving within the kernel of the world. He who is permeated with self-knowledge naturally carries out his own action in the light of self-knowledge. Human action is--in general--determined by motives. Robert Hamerling, the poet-philosopher, has rightly said (_Atomistik des Willens_, p. 213):