The perception of cosmic beat we call “feel (_Fühlen_),” that of microcosmic tensions “feeling (_Empfinden_).” The ambiguity of the word “_Sinnlichkeit_” has obscured this clear difference between the general and plantlike side and the specifically animal side of life. If we say for the one race- or sex-life, and for the other sense-life, a deep connexion reveals itself between them. The former ever bears the mark of periodicity, beat, even to the extent of harmony with the great cycles of the stars, of relation between female nature and the moon, of this life generally to night, spring, warmth. The latter consists in tensions, polarities of light and object illuminated, of cognition and that which is cognized, of wound and the weapon that has caused it. Each of these sides of life has, in the more highly developed genera, taken shape in special organs, and the higher the development, the clearer the emphasis on each side. We possess _two cyclic organs of the cosmic existence_, the blood system and the sex-organ, _and two differentiating organs of microcosmic mobility_, senses and nerves. We have to assume that in its origin the _whole_ body has been both a cyclic and a tactual organ. The blood is for us the symbol of the living. Its course proceeds without pause, from generation to death, from the mother body in and out of the body of the child, in the waking state and in sleep, never-ending. The blood of the ancestors flows through the chain of the generations and binds them in a great linkage of destiny, beat, and time. Originally this was accomplished only by a process of division, redivision, and ever new division of the cycles, until finally a specific organ of sexual generation appeared and made _one moment_ into a symbol of duration. And how thereafter creatures begat and conceived, how the plantlike in them drove them to reproduce themselves for the maintenance beyond themselves of the eternal cycle, how the _one_ great pulse-beat operates through all the detached souls, filling, driving, checking, and often destroying--that is the deepest of all life’s secrets, the secret that all religious mysteries and all great poems seek to penetrate, the secret whose tragedy stirred Goethe in his “_Selige Sehnsucht_” and “_Wahlverwandtschaften_,” where the child has to die because, brought into existence out of discordant cycles of the blood, it is the fruit of a cosmic sin.