OBJECT AND LIVING ORGANISM 93 



subject, that a very special degree of attention is required to 

 discover it at all. 



The order-signs and content-signs are easily brought to 

 light, because, with every experience, they are directly given 

 in our consciousness. But to throw the bond around them is 

 an activity of our own, and we perform it quite unconsciously, 

 for we are concerned only with the finished result, in which 

 form alone do we deal with it consciously. 



We can at any moment assure ourselves of the insufficiency 

 of our knowledge even in relation to our conscious actions. 

 We were surprised to find that the same command given to 

 the left hand produced a different result from what we got 

 with the right, when we wished to write the numeral 3. 

 Familiar though the numeral 3 is to us when set down on 

 paper, it is just as unfamiliar to us before it has become 

 activated in a series of movement impulses, and died away in 

 a series of impulse-signs. 



It is quite hopeless to learn anything about our mind 

 before it gets into action. And even concerning this activity 

 we learn nothing exact except through the agency of the 

 direction-signs. If the movement goes so quickly that the 

 signs cannot sound out one by one, then all we experience is 

 the finished result ; and in the case of the left hand, this 

 turns out quite differently from what we expected. 



Analogous relations arise when we run our eye over con- 

 tours, and the sequences of direction-signs determined thereby 

 impress themselves on us as a melody would. The repetition 

 of this melody takes place so quickly that we are not conscious 

 of the individual direction-signs. Before it is played, the 

 melody itself is quite unknown to us. Only the result is 

 known to us, and it appears in such a form that we realise 

 the presence of a something familiar. 



In this process, the melody of the direction-signs does the 

 shaping, but all we are conscious of is the " shape." Kant 



