Hence there is no more important knowledge than self-knowledge; and there is equally no knowledge which leads so completely out beyond itself. When the “self” knows itself aright, it is already no longer a “self.” In his own language, the writer of the book in question expresses this as follows: “For God’s ‘own-ness’ is void of this and that, void of self-ness and I-ness; but the nature and own-ness of the creature is that it seeketh and willeth itself and its own and ‘this’ and ‘that’; and in all that it does or leaves undone, it seeketh to receive its own benefit and profit.” “When, now, the creature or the man loseth his own-ness and his self-ness and himself, and goeth out from himself, then God entereth in with His Own-ness, that is with his Self-hood.”[8] Man soars upwards, from a view of his “Ego” which makes the latter appear to him as his very being, to a view such that it shows him his Ego as a mere organ, in which the All-Being works upon itself. In the concept-sphere of our text, this means: “If man can attain thereto that he belongeth unto God just as a man’s hand belongeth to him, then let him content himself and seek no further.”[9] That is not intended to mean that when man has reached a certain stage of his evolution he shall stand still there, but that, when he has got as far as is indicated in the above words, he should not set on foot further investigations into the meaning of the hand, but rather make use of the hand, in order that it may render service to the body to which it belongs. [8] Chap. xxiv, _Book of the Man from Frankfurt_. [9] _Ibid._, Chap. liv. * * * * * HEINRICH SUSO and JOHANNES RUYSBROEK possessed a type of mind which may be characterised as genius for feeling. Their feelings are drawn by something like instinct in the same direction in which Eckhart’s and Tauler’s feelings were guided by their higher thought-life. Suso’s heart turns devoutly towards that Root-Being which embraces the individual man just as much as the whole remaining world, and in whom forgetting himself, he yearns to lose himself as a drop of water in the mighty ocean. He speaks of this his yearning towards the All-Being, not as of something that he desires to embrace in thought; he speaks of it as a natural impulse, that makes his soul drunken with desire for the annihilation of its separated existence and its re-awakening to life in the all-efficiency of the endless life. “Turn thine eyes to this being in its pure naked simplicity, so that thou mayest let fall this and that manifold being. Take being in itself alone, that is unmoved with not-being; for all not-being denies all being. A thing that is yet to become, or that has been, is not now in actual presence.”