INDIVIDUALITY AND WORLD 635 



personality. This is the world of the social struggle and the struggle with 

 nature. 



Poetry and art have been, and continue to be, largely expressions of our 

 egocentric attitude towards the world ; they represent us and our experiences, 

 our feelings and emotions. They attach meaning to our world, or they intensify 

 and extend the meaning and significance of our world and of our life and 

 they may picture a world and life from which fear and disharmony are more 

 and more eliminated. They tend to convert an inanimate, cold, non-feeling 

 world into an animate world, in which feeling and human meaning is 

 extended and intensified, so that we can find ourselves and beings like us 

 everywhere. But gradually the character of this egocentric world has under- 

 gone changes. The surrounding world, the universe, begins to center around 

 us in a different sense. In the interactions between the outer world and our- 

 selves we find identities and differences ; we abstract from the differences and 

 combine new similarities. In this way there is gradually created a second 

 world, that of simple and complex sensations and a logical world of things 

 and interactions in which we and beings like ourselves live. It no longer 

 centers around ourselves and in it we are merely a small part of a strange 

 universe ; but more and more it becomes to us the real world ; it is the world 

 revealed by scientific analysis and synthesis. We adapt ourselves also to this 

 world ; we make it our own by understanding it and we attempt to make it 

 respond to our needs, wishes, hopes and fears. There still radiate from 

 ourselves thoughts and emotions out to the universe; the universe is still 

 bound up with us and we with it in one thought structure. 



In the course of time there begins to be added to this analysis of the 

 outer world, an analysis of our inner world, of the world of myth which 

 we have created, of social and natural struggles and the emotions they elicit. 

 We form concepts not only of the environment and of other human beings, 

 but also or our own organism or parts of it and its relations with the outer 

 world, and we realize the vast differences between the egocentric and the 

 non-egocentric conceptions of the universe. These two developments, that of 

 the egocentric world, eventuating in the formation of pictures of ourselves 

 around which everything else centers, and that of the objective world, of 

 which we are merely a very small and relatively unimportant part, have 

 proceeded side by side throughout human history. It is the varying relative 

 importance of these two world conceptions which have determined largely 

 the nature of our civilization, and the life we live is a compromise between 

 these two antagonistic attitudes. 



Yet physiologically each of us remains bound up with his organism, and 

 the needs and functions of the latter continue to make ourselves the center 

 of our own small universe; we therefore still make use of poetry and art to, 

 change the concept of the world around us and of human beings and human 

 relations in accordance with our needs and wishes. It is the analytic, 

 scientific world which restricts such egocentric thinking and influences and 

 changes the values we attach to things and the laws we make. Science creates 



