The plantlike-cosmic, Being heavy with Destiny, blood, sex, possess an immemorial mastery and keep it. They _are_ life. The other only serves life. But this other wills, not to serve, but to rule; moreover, it believes that it does rule, for one of the most determined claims put forward by the human spirit is its claim to possess power over the body, over “nature.” But the question is: Is not this very belief a service to life? Why does our thought think just so? Perhaps because the cosmic, the “it,” wills that it shall? Thought shows off its power when it calls the body a notion, when it establishes the pitifulness of the body and commands the voices of the blood to be silent. But in truth the blood rules, in that silently it commands the activity of thought to begin and to cease. There, too, is a distinction between speech and life--Being can do without consciousness and the life of understanding, but not vice versa. Thought rules, after all, in spite of all, only in the “realm of thought.” III It only amounts to a verbal difference whether we say that thought is a creation of man, or higher mankind a creation of thought. But thought itself persistently credits itself with much too high a rank in the ensemble of life, and through its ignorance of, or indifference to, the fact that there are other modes of ascertainment besides itself, forfeits its opportunity of surveying the whole without prejudice. In truth, all professors of thought--and in every Culture they have been almost the only authorized spokesmen--have taken it as self-evident that cold abstract thought is _the_ way of approach to “last things.” Moreover, they have assumed, also as self-evident, that the “truth” which they reach on this line of advance is the same as the truth which they have set before themselves as an aim, and not, as it really is, a sort of imaginary picture which takes the place of the unknowable secrets. For, although man is a thinking being, it is very far from the fact that his being consists in thinking. This is a difference that the born subtilizer fails to grasp. The aim of thought is called “truth,” and truths are “established”--i.e., brought out of the living impalpability of the light-world into the form of concepts and assigned permanently to places in a system, which means a kind of intellectual space. Truths are absolute and eternal--i.e., they have nothing more to do with life.