It is thus only natural that one and the same man should have two modes of knowing. Judging by the facts of the senses, he is a thing among other things, and, in so far as he is that, he gains for himself a knowledge of these things; but at any moment he can acquire the higher experience that he is really the form in which the All-Being beholds Itself. Then man transforms himself from a thing among other things into a form of the All-Being--and, along with himself, the knowledge of things transforms itself into the expression of the very being of things. But as a matter of fact this transformation can only be accomplished through man. That which is mediated in the higher knowledge does not exist as long as this higher knowledge itself is not present. Man becomes only a real being in the creation of this higher knowledge; and only through man’s higher knowledge can things also bring their being forth into real existence. If, therefore, we demand that man shall add nothing to things through his inner knowledge, but merely give expression to whatever already exists in the things outside of himself, that would really amount to a complete abnegation of all higher knowledge. From the fact that man, in respect of his sensible life, is merely one thing among others, and that he only attains to the higher knowledge when he himself accomplishes with himself, as a being of the senses, the transformation into a higher being, it follows that he can never replace the one kind of knowledge by the other. His spiritual life consists, on the contrary, in a ceaseless oscillation between these two poles of knowledge--between knowing and seeing. If he shuts himself off from the seeing, he abandons the real nature of things: if he seeks to shut himself off from sense-perception, he would shut out from himself the things whose nature he seeks to know. It is these very same things which reveal themselves alike in the lower knowing and the higher seeing; only in the one case they reveal themselves according to their outer appearance; in the other according to their inner being. Thus it is not due to the things themselves that, at a certain stage, they appear only as external things; but their doing so is due to the fact that man must first of all raise and transform himself to the level upon which the things cease to be external and outside.