With that, the system of identification-marks develops into a theory, a picture which detaches itself from the technique of the day[1] — whether this be a day of high-level Civilized technics or a day of simplest beginnings — by way of abstraction, as a piece of waking-consciousness uncommitted to activity. One "knows" what one wants, but much must have happened for one to have that knowledge, and we must make no mistake as to its character. By numerical experience man is enabled to switch the secret on and off, but he has not discovered it. The figure of the modern sorcerer — a switchboard with levers and labels at which the workman calls mighty effects into play by the pressure of a finger without possessing the slightest notion of their essence — is only the symbol of human technique in general. The picture of the light-world around us — in so far as we have developed it critically, analytically, as theory, as picture — is nothing but a switchboard of the kind, on which particular things are so labelled that by (so to say) pressing the appropriate button particular effects follow with certainty. The secret itself remains none the less oppressive on that account.[2] But through this technique the waking-consciousness does, all the same, intervene masterfully in the fact- world. Life makes use of thought as an "open sesame," and at the peak of many a Civilization, in its great cities, there arrives finally the moment when technical critique becomes tired of being life's servant and makes itself tyrant. The Western Culture is even now experiencing an orgy of this unbridled thought, and on a tragic scale.
Man has listened-in to the march of Nature and made notes of its indices. He begins to imitate it by means and methods that utilize the laws of the cosmic pulse. He is emboldened to play the part of God, and it is easy to understand how the earliest preparers and experts of these artificial things — for it was here that art came to be, as counter-concept to nature — and how in particular the guardians of the smith's art, appeared to those around them as something uncanny and were regarded with awe or horror as the case might be. The stock of such discoveries grew and grew. Often they were made and forgotten and made again, were imitated, shunned, improved. But in the end they constituted for whole continents a store of self-evident means — fire, metal-working, instruments, arms, ploughs, boats, houses, animal-taming, and husbandry. Above all, the metals, to whose site in the earth primitive man is led by some uncannily mystical trait in him. Immemoriably old trade-routes lead to ore-deposits that are kept secret, through the life of the settled countryside and over frequented seas, and along these, later, travel cults and ornaments and
- ↑ And not vice versa. Cf. p. 268.
- ↑ The "correctness" of physical data (i.e., their applicability never disproved up to date, and therefore ranking as an interpretation) is wholly independent of their technical value. An undoubtedly wrong, and even self-contradictory, theory may be more valuable for practical purposes than a "correct" and profound one, and physical science has long been careful to avoid applying the words "right" and "wrong" in the popular sense, and to regard their syntheses as images rather than flat formulæ.
