Finally, however, a supreme sense develops among the rest. A something in the All, which for ever remains inaccessible to our will-to-understand, evokes for itself a bodily organ. The eye comes into existence--and in and with the eye, as its opposite pole, light. Abstract thinking about light may lead (and has led) to an ideal light representable by an ensemble picture of waves and rays, but the significance of this development in actuality was that thenceforward life was embraced and taken in _through the light-world of the eye_. This is the supreme marvel that makes everything human what it is. Only with this light-world of the eye do distances come into being as colours and brightnesses; only in this world are night and day and things and motions visible in the extension of illumined space, and the universe of infinitely remote stars circling above the earth, and that light-horizon of the individual life which stretches so far beyond the environs of the body. In the world of this light--not the light which science has deduced indirectly by the aid of mental concepts, themselves derived from visions (“theory” in the Greek sense)--it comes to pass that seeing, human herds wander upon the face of this little earth-star, and that circumstances of light--the full southern flood over Egypt and Mexico, the greyness of the north--contribute to the determination of their entire life. It is for his _eye_ that man develops the magic of his architecture, wherein the constructional elements given by touch are restated in relations generated by light. Religion, art, thought, have all arisen for light’s sake, and all differentiations reduce to the one point of whether it is the bodily eye or the mind’s eye that is addressed. And with this there emerges in all clarity yet another distinction, which is normally obscured by the use of the ambiguous word “consciousness (_Bewusstsein_).” I distinguish _being_ or “being there” (_Dasein_) from _waking-being_ or waking-consciousness (_Wachsein_).[3] Being possesses beat and direction, while waking-consciousness is tension and extension. In being a destiny rules, while waking-consciousness distinguishes causes and effects. The prime question is for the one “when and wherefore?” for the other “where and how?” A plant leads an existence that is without waking-consciousness. In sleep all creatures become plants, the tension of polarity to the world-around is extinguished, and the beat of life goes on. A plant knows only a relation to the when and the wherefore. The upthrust of the first green shoots out of the wintry earth, the swelling of the buds, the whole mighty process of blooming, scent, colour glory, and ripening--all this is desire to fulfil a destiny, constant yearning towards a “when?”