cancels again, as soon as made, such a truth as e.g. the Here is a tree, or the Now is noon, and expresses the very opposite: the Here is a not tree but a house. And similarly it straightway cancels again the assertion which here annuls the first, and which is also just such an assertion of a sensuous This. And in all sense-certainty what we find by experience is in truth merely, as we have seen, that "This" is a universal, the very opposite of what that assertion maintained to be universal experience.
We may be permitted here, in this appeal to universal experience, to anticipate[1] with a reference to the practical sphere. In this connection we may answer those who thus insist on the truth and certainty of the reality of objects of sense, by saying that they had better be sent back to the most elementary school of wisdom, the ancient Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus; they have not yet learnt the inner secret of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. For those who are initiated into these mysteries not only come to doubt the being of things of sense, but get into a state of despair about them altogether; and they themselves partly bring about the nothingness of those things, partly they see those things accomplish their own nothingness. Even animals are not shut off from this wisdom; but show they are deeply initiated into it. For they do not stand stock still before things of sense as if these were things per se, with being in themselves: they despair of this reality altogether, and in complete assurance of the nothingness of things they fall-to without more ado and eat them up. And all nature proclaims, as animals do, these open secrets, these
- ↑ Cf. Analysis of Desire, p. 166 ff.
