For this is the decisive fact, of which the observer is unconscious--his whole effort of seeking is aimed not at life, but at the seeing of life, and not at death, but at the seeing of death. We try to grasp the cosmic as it appears in the macrocosm to the microcosm, _as the life of a body in the light-world_ between birth and death, generation and dissolution, and with that differentiation of body and soul that follows of deepest necessity from our ability to experience[15] the inward-proper as a sensuous alien. That we do not merely live but _know_ about “living” is a consequence of our bodily existence in the light. But the beast knows only life, not death. Were we pure plantlike beings, we should die unconscious of dying, for to feel death and to die would be identical. But animals, even though they hear the death-cry, see the dead body, and scent putrefaction, behold death without comprehending it. Only when understanding has become, through language, detached from visual awareness and pure, does death appear to man as the great enigma of the light-world about him. Then, and only then, life becomes the short span of time between birth and death, and it is in relation to death that that other great mystery of generation arises also. Only then does the diffuse animal fear of everything become the definite human fear of death. It is _this_ that makes the love of man and woman, the love of mother and child, the tree of the generations, the family, the people, and so at last world-history itself the infinitely deep facts and problems of destiny that they are. To death, as the common lot of every human being born into the light, adhere the ideas of guilt and punishment, of existence as a penance, of a new life beyond the world of this light, and of a salvation that makes an end of the death-fear. In the knowledge of death is originated that world-outlook which we possess as being men and not beasts. V