Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/992



is as old as free-moving life itself. Only the plant — so far as we can see into Nature — is the mere theatre of technical processes. The animal, in that it moves, also has a technique of movement so that it may nourish and protect itself.

The original relation between a waking-microcosm and its macrocosm — “Nature” — consists in a touch through the senses which rises from mere sense-impressions to sense-judgment, so that already it works critically (that is, separatingly) or, what comes to the same thing, causal-analytically The stock ‘of what has been determined then is enlarged into a system, as complete as may be, of the most primary experiences — identifying marks — a spontaneous method by which one is enabled to feel at home in one’s world, in the case of many animals this has led to an amazing richness of experience that no human science has transcended. But the primary waking-being is always an active one, remote from mere theory of all sorts, and thus it is in the minor technique of everyday life, and upon things in so far as they are dead, that these experiences are involuntarily acquired. This is the difference between Cult and Myth, for at this level there is no boundary line between religion and the profane — all waking-consciousness is religion.

The decisive turn in the history of the higher life occurs when the determination of Nature (an order to be guided by it) changes into a fixation — that is, a purposed alteration of Nature. With this, technique becomes more or less sovereign and the instinctive prime-experience changes into a definitely “conscious” prime-knowing. Thought has emancipated itself from sensation It is the language of words that brings about this epochal change. The liberation of speech from speaking gives rise to a stock of signs for communication-speech which are much more than identification-marks — they are names bound up with a sense of meaning, whereby man has the secret of numina (deities, nature-forces) in his power, and number (formulæ, simple laws), whereby the inner form of the actual is abstracted from the accidental-sensuous.