A mother will realize better than a philosopher. She knows the rupture which has finally separated her child into its own single, free existence. She knows the strange, sensitive rose of the navel: how it quivers conscious; all its pain, its want for the old connection; all its joy and chuckling exultation in sheer organic singleness and individual liberty. The powerful, active psychic center in a new child is the great solar plexus of the sympathetic system. From this center the child is drawn to the mother again, crying, to heal the new wound, to re-establish the old oneness. This center directs the little mouth which, blind and anticipatory, seeks the breast. How could it find the breast, blind and mindless little mouth? But it needs no eyes nor mind. From the great first-mind of the abdomen it moves direct, with an anterior knowledge almost like magnetic propulsion, as if the little mouth were drawn or propelled to the maternal breast by vital magnetism, whose center of directive control lies in the solar plexus. In a measure, this taking of the breast re-instates the old connection with the parent body. It is a strange sinking back to the old unison, the old organic continuum—a recovery of the pre-natal state. But at the same time it is a deep, avid gratification in drinking in the sustenance of a new individuality. It is a deep gratification in the exertion of a new, voluntary power. The child acts now separately from its own individual center and exerts still a control over the adjacent universe, the parent body. So the warm life-stream passes again from the parent into the aching abdomen of the severed child. Life cannot progress without these ruptures, severances, cataclysms; pain is a living reality, not merely a deathly. Why haven’t we the courage for life-pains? If we could depart from our old tenets of the mind, if we could fathom our own _unconscious_ sapience, we should find we have courage and to spare. We are too mentally domesticated. The great magnetic or dynamic center of first-consciousness acts powerfully at the solar plexus. Here the child knows beyond all knowledge. It does not see with the eyes, it cannot perceive, much less conceive. Nothing can it apprehend; the eyes are a strange plasmic, nascent darkness. Yet from the belly it knows, with a directness of knowledge that frightens us and may even seem abhorrent. The mother, also, from the bowels knows her child—as she can never, never know it from the head. There is no thought nor speech, only direct, ventral gurglings and cooings. From the passional nerve-center of the solar plexus in the mother passes direct, unspeakable effluence and intercommunication, sheer effluent contact with the palpitating nerve-center in the belly of the child. Knowledge, unspeakable knowledge interchanged, which must be diluted by eternities of materialization before they can come to expression.