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202 people regarding the mutual claims of Nature and spirit and on the necessity of their working together.

It is simply that while the simultaneity and equivalue of both worlds is for them an intellectual concept, for him these considerations constitute Life and Reality.

This is not clear. Let us try to elucidate the matter.

Myshkin is different from others because, as an Idiot and an epileptic who is at the same time an exceptionally clever man, he has much closer and less obscure relationships with the Unconscious. He has had rare instants of intuitive perception, occasional seconds of transcendent exaltation. For a lightning moment he has felt the all-being, the all-feeling, the all-suffering, the all-understanding. He has known all that is in the world. There lies the kernel of his magical being. He has not studied, and is not endowed with, mystical wisdom, he has not even aspired to it. He has simply experienced the thing itself. He has not merely had occasional significant thoughts and ideas. He has literally, once and more than once, stood on the magic borderland where everything is affirmed, where not only the remotest thought is true, but also the contrary of such thought.

That is the fearful part of it, that is the part of him rightly feared by others. He does not stand quite alone, not all the world is against him. There are a few people, very doubtful, risky, dangerous people who stand in close relationship to him. Rogozhin, Nastasya. He is understood by criminals and by hystericals; he, the innocent, the gentle child. But this child is not so soft as he seems. His innocence is not so harmless and men are rightly in awe of him.

The Idiot is, as I said, from time to time near that borderland where every thought and its opposite are equally true. That is, he has an intuitive perception that no thought, no law, no mould, no form exist which are true and right except as regarded from one pole—and every pole has its opposite. The situation of a pole, the taking up, that is to say, of a position from which to view and order the world, is the first stage in the foundation of every cultural form, of every society and morality. Whosoever considers Spirit and Nature, Spirit and Freedom, Good and Evil as interchangeable, if only for a moment, is the deadliest foe of every order of civilization. For there begins the contrary of Order; there begins Chaos.

A line of thought which turns back to the Unconscious, to Chaos,