Note 67 — Chapter IX · HOW TO LEARN TO SEE THE SPIRITUAL NUMEN IN OTHERS

In a previous chapter I remarked that the cheap estimate of others and of oneself is due to the habit of regarding human beings from the point of view of the use they can be put to, ignoring the wonderful and mysterious energies and potencies which are exhibited day by day in every human being. If the force stored in an infinitesimal particle of radium is calculated to excite admiration, how much more the forces exhibited in man, looking at him merely as the stage on which the spectacle of these forces is displayed. Consider the occurrence of such a thing as thought, the sheer miracle of mentality, the working of the constructive imagination in the artist, etc. If we sufficiently dwell on these inward facts about men, instead of merely emphasizing their external utility to one another, we shall thereby be put in tune, as it were, for the higher spiritual view of man. The difference I have said is like that between understanding the theory of electricity and merely turning on electric power in the workshop or the home. And yet the scientific contemplation of the miracles of human nature as seen from within, while it serves as a propædeutic, cannot actually bring us up to the ethical point of view. For this sort of contemplation reveals only the working of impersonal forces or powers, thought, feeling, impulse in their endless actions and reactions, similar, in so far as they are impersonal, to the forces observed in nature. The ethical point of view alone discloses a centrality, an underivative, irreducible core, a substantive being, personality.