(γ) But when all that occupies the waking consciousness, the world outside
it and its relationship to that world is under a veil, and the soul is
thus sunk in sleep (in magnetic sleep, in catalepsy, and other diseases,
e.g. those connected with female development, or at the approach of death,
&c.), then that _immanent actuality_ of the individual remains the same
substantial total as before, but now as a purely sensitive life with an
inward vision and an inward consciousness. And because it is the adult,
formed, and developed consciousness which is degraded into this state of
sensitivity, it retains along with its content a certain nominal
self-hood, a formal vision and awareness, which however does not go so far
as the conscious judgment or discernment by which its contents, when it is
healthy and awake, exist for it as an outward objectivity. The individual
is thus a monad which is inwardly aware of its actuality—a genius which
beholds itself. The characteristic point in such knowledge is that the
very same facts (which for the healthy consciousness are an objective
practical reality, and to know which, in its sober moods, it needs the
intelligent chain of means and conditions in all their real expansion) are
now immediately known and perceived in this immanence. This perception is
a sort of _clairvoyance_; for it is a consciousness living in the
undivided substantiality of the genius, and finding itself in the very
heart of the interconnexion, and so can dispense with the series of
conditions, external one to another, which lead up to the
result,—conditions which cool reflection has in succession to traverse and
in so doing feels the limits of its own individual externality. But such
clairvoyance—just because its dim and turbid vision does not present the
facts in a rational interconnexion—is for that very reason at the mercy of
every private contingency of feeling and fancy, &c.—not to mention that
foreign _suggestions_ (see later) intrude into its vision. It is thus
impossible to make out whether what the clairvoyants really see
preponderates over what they deceive themselves in.—But it is absurd to
treat this visionary state as a sublime mental phase and as a truer state,
capable of conveying general truths(123).