LUITZEN EGBERTUS JAN BROUWER

Exactly 100 years ago, the then 23-year old Dutch math student, Bertus Brouwer, wrote the likely most radical, revolutionary and prophetic book ever published. However, the little book was disregarded and people did not breathe a word about it.
In Brouwer’s biography, Dirk van Dalen writes:

The content of the book is quite something) but when one discard the provocative passages, that which remains is a passionate argument of a mystic. However, readers…that is…if there were any…got, in the first place, afflicted by the offensive passages in the book. Life , Art and Mysticism has always been a puzzling, not to mention awkward, piece of work to the Brouwer scholars .Over the years, people kept quiet about this little book. They were too afraid that this piece of work would cause not so much Brouwer, as all of his work, to fall in discredit.

In his Introduction to Life, Art and Mysticism Walter P. Van Stigt writes:

Heyting was one of Brouwer`s most loyal students; he kept the cause of intuitionism alive when Brouwer withdrew into "silence," albeit with a change of emphasis. When in a discussion in 1968 on the Brouwer bibliography I first mentioned Life, Art and Mysticism, Heyting seemed rather embarrassed and dismissed "that booklet" as "quite irrelevant....a youthful aberration...better forgotten." He admitted he had not read it but knew of its outrageous content.

Brouwer knew very well what he wrote and was thoroughly aware of the prophetic meaning of his little book. Already in 1903, he writes to his friend and alter ego Carel Adama van Scheltema:

[….] we are the prophets, who, as messengers between God and mankind, lead the development, the works, and growth into becoming prosperous and inspire these with dewdrops, that flow from our fingers.

Especially the merciless criticism and social pessimism aggravated or agitated the readers. Professor Korteweg (his tutor) wrote Brouwer, who had sent him a copy:

Dear Brouwer,

You are certainly not mistaken in assuming that I take an interest in you and therefore appreciate your sending me a copy of your booklet. Whether I shall read it?
Well, I paged through it, but it is not the kind of reading that appeals to me nor that is good for me. True, close to us there are unfathomable abysses, but I don’t like walking close to the edge. It makes me dizzy and less capable for the task in front of me. Whether it is good for you I very much doubt. I’d rather see you walk other paths, although even there I find it difficult to follow you, especially where you dig so deep down to fundamentals.

Friendly greetings,
Yours,
D. J. Korteweg "

It is a rebellious and revolutionary writing, that has been suppressed and disposed of as a sin of one’s youth by an angry young man.

In his biography, van Dalen cites Brouwer:

"For a few more years to come I will have to be obscure, then my grip will be felt. Specially because I feel the futility of all earthly matter, no side issue or fear will interfere with my stride." He wrote this when he was 23 and his biographer writes: "whomever writes such things at the age of 23 must be either a megalomaniacal dreamer or a self-assured chosen one.

In Life, Art and Mysticism, Brouwer destructively criticizes, like an Old-Testamentary prophet, the human struggles that completely preoccupies people and senselessly wears them out in life, because man, as he states, has lost himself. It is one urging exhortation to his fellow men to, for their own good, rid themselves of all lumber. Unfortunately there are a number of shortcomings and inconsistencies in his booklet, but these have been corrected in the comments.

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Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic
Volume 37, Number 3, Summer 1996
URL: http://projecteuclid.org/Dienst/UI/1.0/Summarize/euclid.ndjfl/1039886518
Without comment but with an comprehensive introduction by Walter P. van Stigt. He writes:

Life, Art, and Mysticism

LUITZEN EGBERTUS JAN BROUWER

Translation by

WALTER P. VAN STIGT

CONTENTS

I The Sad World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
II Turning into Oneself  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
III Man’s Downfall Caused by the Intellect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . 19
IV Atonement  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
V Language  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
VI Immanent Truth  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
VII Transcendent Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
VIII The Freed Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
IX Economics  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means. Here it’s published with the prior written permission of the translator, Walter P. Van Stigt.

Holland was created and was kept in existence by the sedimentation of the great rivers. There was a natural balance of dunes and deltas, of tides and drainage. Temporary flooding of certain areas of the delta was a part of that balance. And in this land could live and thrive a strong branch of the human race.
            But people were not satisfied; in order to regulate or prevent flooding they built dykes along the rivers; they changed the course of rivers to improve drainage or to facilitate travel by water, and they cut down forests. No wonder the subtle balance of Holland became disturbed; the Zuyder Zee was eaten away and the dunes slowly but relentlessly destroyed. No wonder that nowadays even stronger measures and ever more work are needed to save the country from total destruction. What is more surprising: this self-imposed burden is not only accepted as inevitable but has been elevated to a task laid on our shoulders by God or inescapable Fate.
Originally man lived in isolation. Supported by nature, every individual sought to maintain his equilibrium between sinful temptations. That filled the whole of his life; there was no involvement with others, nor was there any worry about the future.
As a result hard work did not exist, nor did sorrow, hatred, fear, or lust. But man was not content; he started to assert control over his fellow men and to search for certainty about the future. And so the balance was lost: labor forced onto the oppressed became ever more distressing and the conspiracy of those in power ever more wicked. We have now reached the point where everyone has power but at the same time suffers oppression; the old instinct of separation and isolation now only lives on as pale envy and jealousy.
            Animals and human beings originally did not interfere with one another. This happy state ended when these discontented humans started to sponge on the animals which they found useful and tried to exterminate the others. The order of nature was torn apart and turned into misery: the burden and toil of looking after domestic animals, all sorts of disease caused by parasitic eating practices, a long and hard battle against the wild animals that had not been exterminated, and an even harder battle against vermin in man’s own home and the bacteria infesting his body. Science takes pride in this battle and even expresses its resignation in God’s will, while it is all the result of rebellion against his will!
            It is part of the balance of the eternal and omnipresent life that everyone is called away from this earthly existence when one’s time has come. Until then man suffers in mind and body as befits his evil mood of thrift, his lust for power, his vanity, and fear. In his resentment he starts tampering with his body through medicines and diets and with his mind through hypnosis and make-belief; he disturbs the melting pot of his lusts and destroys the balance of psychical responsibility and physical well-being.
There is a bodily and moral degeneration, such that in the end man can no longer be held responsible for his crimes, for what he has done during his time on this earth.
Science has recently claimed credit for extending the span of human life, which certainly is much too short. But what is that worth? It is equally sad to leave this life after one’s time as before one’s time; and as to death, “Nature never destroys anything without putting something better in its place.”
                Meanwhile, truth is still around and about. There is for example Grimm’s fairy-tale “The Fisherman and His Wife”, and such sayings as “Honesty is the best policy,” “Better is the enemy of good,” and “Truth will be out.” Educators teach little children “always to tell the truth”; they drum it into them that little lies never pay, that one thing leads to another and that in the end one becomes entangled and gets caught.
And of course, there are all these novels, illustrating how in the end the chickens will come home to roost. One truth therefore definitely comes through:

If reason presents certain actions as likely to improve your condition but your conscience does not approve, then leave them undone. Reason never grasps the world in its entirety and the means it dictates to achieving its limited aim will ultimately and in some inscrutable way only cause damage.

If in this life we always had a mirror in front of us in which we could see things at a glance, grasp everything in one image, acting and knowing would not cause us any problem. But since in our viewing we must turn from one thing to another, we cannot concentrate on one without obstructing the other. (Meister Eckhart)

Truth may be around, but life of each human being and of people as a whole is nothing but a long string of sins against truth. Aspirations are frustrated all the time and new ones take their place; all these castles in the air collapse and new ones are built in their place.
            Life of the individual is an illusion, an anxious and laborious pursuit of ends— disillusionment. At the time of death, which he has awaited unprepared and in complete ignorance, he is either startled by the realization that he has wasted his life or his reason is dulled by the comforting thought that without illusions life would have been nothing at all, or that on balance at least he will take with him into his grave a large measure of experience.
            Oh yes, these “wise” old people, who kid themselves that experience, old age, a long life of sin which has left its mark on their faces, rigid and long deprived of all naiveté, and which stares out of their lifeless eyes, that all this and this alone leads to wisdom! And then, when things come to a head, they challenge the younger generation to tell them what human life is all about.
            Life of mankind as a whole is an arrogant tearing up and devouring of its nest on this pure earth, messing up its mothering growth, gnawing and mutilating her and making her rich creative power sterile, until all life has been swallowed up and the human cancer has withered on the barren planet. The sickness of mind which has caused this, and which has turned men into madmen, they call “understanding the world.”

On "Gods Will"
To ascribe an attribute to the Ineffable, Perfect, Absolute is just a projection. To desire something is a sign of being discontent. Spinoza said: "God and nature are one" and the perfect order, maintained by it’s eternal and unalterable laws, desires nothing. All that is, is. Man, who has strayed from the straight and simple path, disrupts the perfect order (Brouwer writes: `tears the creation from its context `). The immutable laws of nature only strife to repair the disrupted order. Thus, all distress has been and still is a direct result of non-compliance with natures laws, a result of the disruption of the original balance, caused by disturbed people. Brouwer states: `All emanates from the rebellion against Gods Will.

Comment
Initially people did not have a fixed habitat, but roamed freely, not bothered by fictive borders, on earth. Thus people weren’t a strong branch of the human race, thriving and living in this land, as Brouwer states, but people were going with the flow of life....they "followed" the seasons, just like birds of passage, feeding on the rich resources of nature. People lived in sync with nature, not against it. They weren’t dependent on each other, so did not need each other. They had nothing to loose, so did not know fears. Not driven by self interest, no fear for others, they loved each other unselfishly. Brouwer does write that the dissatisfied man turned onto a fatal path but he does not elaborate on the reasons for dissatisfaction. Nor does he explain why pernicious temptations existed nor what they were. Dissatisfaction, temptation and power over one another are not causes but effects of leaving the natural state and once started there is no end, despite the fact that all discomfort, pain, suffering and distress, only points back to original paradisaicle condition.
Also, like Brouwer claims, is discord not an instinct but an effect of leaving one’s original disposition or nature, similar with the occurrence of diseases. He rightly states that this moral sense has been overshadowed by all man-made theories. "All evil comes from beyond ourselves". Everyone is ill, everyone has dirty hands, everyone has strayed from the straight and simple path.
Everyone is blind and deaf, and doesn’t see and hear what he sees and hears. Everyone is therefore literally feeble-minded and with his hedonic aspiration for pleasures, one creates his own purgatory. Physicians and therapists do not unbalance this purgatory like Brouwer states, but physicians alleviate the symptoms and therapists teach people how best to survive in this purgatory.

        Having contemplated the sadness of this world, look into yourself. Within you there is a consciousness, a consciousness which continually changes its content. Are you master of these changes? You will probably say no, for you find yourself placed in a world which you have not created yourself, and you are bewildered by the unforeseen change and adversity you meet there.
But isn’t the content of your consciousness in part determined by your own moods and aren’t these within your power? Or is the motto “Control your passions” only an empty phrase? No doubt you sometimes have this religious sensation, when you feel as if you have withdrawn from your passions, from fear and desire, from time and space, and from the whole of this perceptional world. And finally, you do know that very meaningful phrase turning-into-oneself. You therefore seem to be capable of some kind of attention which centers round yourself and which to some extent is within your power. What this self is, you cannot further say, nor can you reason about it, for you know full well that all speaking and reasoning is an attention at a great distance from the self; that you cannot get closer to the self by means of words or reasoning, but only by this turning-into-yourself as it is given to you.
This turning-into-oneself requires an effort; it seems that some inertia must be overcome, that your attention is strongly inclined to linger where it is, and that the resistance felt in the move toward the self is much greater than in the move away from it.
If, however, you is given overcoming all inertia and you proceed, you will find that passions will be silenced, you will feel dead to the old world of perception, of time and space, and all other forms of plurality; and your eyes, no longer blindfolded, will be opened to a scene of joyful quiescence.

Comment:
Brouwer reverses the argument when he states that the content of consciousness is determined by one’s mood. The content of your consciousness are your thoughts and without thought there is no emotion, just like jealousy, annoyance and anxiety are unknown to little children and animals. So first, your thoughts determine your emotions and then through a disastrous spiral, your emotions bring on your thought....etc. To look at yourself is extremely painful because doing so, you will have to question the way you are living your life, and if any doubt about this way arises, it will mean, that you will have to re-evaluate your past, and expose all your certainties as pseudo-certainties.
It is also not about controlling your passions, as this will only make you ill. The essence is to understand how all passions are evoked by everything you desire. One, who does not desire knows no passions anymore, because ‘the wish is the father to the thought’ and without thought, no passions. In the scarce moment, that you are completely contented, there are no more thoughts, is your head empty and you feel, as Brouwer rightly says." set free from the old way of perception, free from time and space and all other things. Then your no longer blindfolded eyes open in gratifying silence."

When all images have been removed from the soul, and she beholds the Only One, then the naked essence of the soul finds the naked formless Essence of Divine Unity, the presence of the Superior Being waiting in the self. (Meister Eckhart)

If only for one moment you abandon yourself there where no creatures live you will hear God speak.

It is within you. If only you can be silent for one hour and forget all your desires and feelings, you will hear the unspeakable words of God.

When you keep still and let go of the feelings and desires of your self, then eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking will be revealed and God will hear and see in you. Your own hearing, willing, and seeing is a hindrance, stopping you from seeing and hearing God.

When you are silent you are like God before He formed nature and creatures, including yours; you will then hear and see with what God saw and heard in you before your own willing, seeing, and hearing had begun. (Jakob Boehme)

Elucidation:
Then, you understand that everything you have done in your past, you’ve done in all ignorance because you didn’t know what you were doing. You have done what others wanted of you, because you had learned, you had to do that. Therefore you don’t feel guilty about that, at the very most you feel ashamed because you did not see what was so obvious. Then, your past no longer determines your future.

Elucidation:
Then the scales are fallen from your eyes and you behold the undivided reality, like you have never dared to see. Then you feel yourself in the centre of the world and you feel yourself `one` with one and all. Then there are no longer separated things but you see how one and all is connected. Then you understand how you have been standing in your own light, and have had the illusion that you had a free will and could make choices, while your thoughts, and therefore your will has let you do the things, you have done. Then, finally you walk the straight and simple path, you go with the flow of life and have no desire to deviate from it because you realize that doing so, will only cause misery, pain and illness. Then, you are in the world but are no longer of the world.
You understand then that you yourself are the only one responsible for your happiness and your misery. You may want something again, but immediately you realize how ridiculous that is. Also, then you understand you have to play along with the game in society, knowing, that it`s a bizarre game. You can deviate from the path, but you know it is reversible, you can go back again.

Comment:
It`s not the hand of vengeance but the hand of compassion, what shows people, for their own good, the way back to themselves.

You will also find that over and above physical causality you can see a clear direction in your own life’s course, determined by the self and parallel with the direction of the self;

how this so-called chance is in fact ruled by a firm, wise, and wonderful hand; how through your greater wisdom you will live your life in this sad world in lasting joyfulness, knowing that “There is no evil, and no danger, nothing can happen to me, I am a child, loved of God, and born to happiness.”

Elucidation:
Coincidence only exists for the person who is not able to survey the whole because of his tunnelled vision or senses and therefore cannot see how one and all is connected. He, who doesn’t understand himself, others or the world, who, disturbed because of his opinions and his self-constructed world picture, in other words through his disturbed self-image, only sees a fragmented world, where in his point of view things just happen. All of the misery, that happens to the strayed one, points only in one direction, back...back...back...until he eventually finds back his original balance and then realizes: "There is no evil and no danger, nothing can happen to me."

On releasing of the Self:
Releasing of the Self, means to be no longer what you are, namely human, no more and no less. Only little children are themselves, but are not allowed to stay like that, because they are taught by people that don’t know any longer what they are, to become something. And when they have become something, they think that they are what they think and do. They identify themselves with their character, the aggregate of opinions and convictions, that lets them do what they do and react like they react. That’s the way I am, they say then. They have then lost or released themselves, or their Self, like Brouwer says, and have learned to listen to others, superiors, experts and other know-it-betters and no longer listen to their Self.

On irreversible roads:
When you start then there is no way out. Then you fill one hole with another, pile one lie on another, life becomes more and more complicated, for every problem you search for solutions, each one of which calls for new problems in an increasingly expanding spiral, ever farther from home, ever more misery, ever more possessions, more and more laborious it becomes to justify everything, to soothe your conscience and you become more and more dissatisfied. That road seems non-reversible, because you have the feeling that you cannot go back anymore and that is why you go on and you have to go on if you cherish the illusion that you can not go back anymore. This mass-psychosis is called progress and like a flock of lemmings, all of mankind is headed for a fall and they lilt that they are engaged so nicely and that they are so happy. One massive mass-deception.

           You will then see how fear and an obsession with saving, born from the illusion of time, and how desire and lust for power, born from the illusion of space, made you attach intrinsic importance to what should only be a fleeting emanation of the self without any reality of its own. And you will see how the false trails of desire and fear led the wanderer to labor, sweat, and toil, to ever new, irreversible changes and to ever greater misery.
With a smile you will look back on the reality of the sad world, a past illusion, and within it your own fear and desire, your labor and pain. But your happiness is no longer disturbed, that too is a phantasy without reality, a phantasy of sadness and remembrance.

Elucidation:
If there is a way there, there is also a way back or like Heraclitus stated saliently: "The way up and the way down are one and the same." But to turn around means that you have to acknowledge, even if it’s only to yourself, that you have been mistaken. That you let yourself be mislead by your own concoctions and those of others and that is painful. Not until then you are able to follow the trail back, the road to self-knowledge, until you eventually get to your Self, yourself, again and come to realize that you are human being and nothing else.

Chapter Three: Man’s Downfall, Caused by the Intellect

Without pain you now see mankind wandering, cast down by fear and desire, by avarice and lust for power, by time and space, without wings and incapable of lifting itself in self-reflection, chained to the intellect, the spawn of time and space and fossilized in the form of the human head, the symbol of man’s fall. Primitive tribes consider headhunting to be a process of cleansing, and take the greatest pleasure in practicing it on the most developed people. This is based on the deep philosophical insight that in nature greater differentiation goes hand in hand with graver damnation; this insight resides in their hearts, not in their heads.

On time and space:
Past and future only exist in the minds of strayed people, in all pieces of writing in which they wrote their brain-concoctions and in all creations of their god forgotten inhuman hands, with what they muddled the earth. They cherish that past, maintaining and restoring their creations with great effort and in museums they proudly and shamelessly display the arrogant and pointless excretions from their ancestors. They glorify the history and achievements of the winners, their battles and wars, their manipulations, tricks, intrigues, lies and spoofs. And from the past they extrapolate the future, blind to the history and that’s what they call progress. Past or future don’t exist, because there’s only an eternal now. Time exists also only in the minds of the strayed ones and even there it is no more than a curtailment of eternity.
Space is just as much a curtailment of infinity. Distances, measures and boundaries are just agreements to be able to play the game of power of one person over another. In the limited space, this self-created prison, people lock themselves and others up.

This highly valued intellect has enabled man and forced him to go on living in desire and fear, rather than from a salutary sense of bewilderment take refuge in self-reflection. Intellect has made him forfeit the amazing independence and directness of his rambling images by connecting them with each other rather than with the self. In this way the intellect made him persist with apparent security in the conviction of a ‘reality’, which man in his arrogance has made himself and had tied to causality, but in which in the end he must feel totally powerless.

On causality:
Like David Hume said: "causality is an observation of the observer and not a fact from the external reality". One can only speak of cause and effect in a reduced reality. Because when one and all is connected in a closed infinite network, then every movement is a movement of the whole and what the observer then interprets as being cause and effect is a detailed view, in which he doesn’t survey the whole. Causal thinking is an absurdity because every cause has its cause, until you reach the magical boundary about which in the Katha Upanishad is written: "Trace back from effect to cause, until you are forced to say: He is. If you are forced in this way, the Truth dawns." Causal thinking always looses itself in reasoning in circles, unless it diverts to hypotheses, by which the conclusions always become articles of faith.

In this life of lust and desire the intellect renders man the devilish service of linking two images of the imagination as means and end. Once in the grip of desire for one thing he is made to strive after another as a means to that end; for example, in order to change the course of rivers he builds dams; indulging his jealousy of his neighbour he sets fire to his house; to protect himself against wild animals he builds his house on stilts; to let the sun shine on his house he cuts down trees. Switching attention from end to means is accompanied by a change in bodily feelings; there is apparently a noticeable change in the bloodstream, which starts in the head. Here too one feels the close connection between head and intellect.

The act aimed at the means, however, always overshoots the mark to some extent; the means has a direction of its own, diverted at an angle however small from that of the end. It acts, therefore, not only in the direction of the end, but also in other dimensions. Man’s blinkered view prevents him from recognizing the sometimes very detrimental effects of such action, but worse, gradually the end is lost sight of and only the means remains. In this sad world where a clear view of all human activity is no longer possible, a world dominated by drill and imitation—the other offspring of fear and desire—many recognize as an end what was originally only a means. They seek what we might call an end of second order, perhaps again discover a means to this end and again out of line with that end. If this deceptive jump from end to means is repeated several times, it may happen that a direction is pursued which not only deviates into other dimensions but opposes the direction of the original end and therefore counteracts it.

Industry originally supplied its products in order to create in nature the most favorable conditions for human life. But one ignored the fact that in manufacturing these products from nature’s resources one interfered with and upset the balance of nature and the human condition, thereby causing damage greater than the advantages these products could ever bring. For example, to meet the demand for timber man has razed or ruined so many forests that in the temperate climates hardly any edible plants grow in the wild.

And worse: manufacturing these goods became an end in itself; new industries were called into existence merely to supply the tools to facilitate production, another blow to the balance of nature. Raw materials were recklessly seized from faraway lands, spawning commercial and naval enterprises, which in turn led to moral and physical misery and to oppression of one people by another.

As the self was left abandoned, the self that knows all about the past and the future, man grew more and more anxious about the future and began to crave for the power to predict its course: science came into being.

Science, which in its original form was wholly subservient to industry, has made up all kinds of general assertions in and about the world of perception. These come true as long as it pleases God; but one day they will suddenly be contradicted by facts and then our scientists will claim, “O yes, of course, we always made this or that tacit assumption.” In their incompetence they then set about complicating the issue even further and making so-called corrections and improvements.

But science does not confine itself to serving industry: again the means becomes an end in itself, and science is practised for its own sake. Bodily awareness has strayed so far away that it is all concentrated in the human head, ignoring and excluding the rest of the body. At the same time man becomes convinced of his own existence as an individual and that of a separate and independent world of perception. At this stage there are radical changes in the direction of man’s attention, and these constitute scientific thinking. For scientific thinking is nothing but a fixation of the direction of will within the confines of the head, and a scientific truth no more than an infatuation of desire living exclusively in the human head.

Elucidation:
"Heavens, deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly" (Shakespeare: "King Lear").

Trapped and entangled in causal thinking, people are under the illusion that all what they feel, all pain, turmoil and tension, has a cause, beyond themselves and don’t know anymore that everything has a meaning. In their minds they hypothesize, using all kinds of theories and convictions, scientific explanations for their symptoms, which subsequently need to be suppressed.
When man has placed himself outside of reality and his nature, he has left the universal connection and feels alone against an hostile and uncomprehended external world. Then he does not experience the connection with fellow men anymore but stands opposite to them. Lost and lonely he then hypothesizes a world view, composed of theories and beliefs, to which he desperately clings. With that, he seeks solutions to all problems that he encounters in his laborious and artificial life. This is how science and religion originate.

Every branch of science will therefore run into ever deeper trouble; when it climbs too high it is almost completely shrouded in even greater isolation, where the remembered results of that science take on an independent existence. The “foundations” of this branch of science are investigated, and that soon becomes a new branch of science. One then begins to search for the foundations of science in general and knocks up some “theory of knowledge.” As they climb higher and higher confusion grows until they are all completely deranged. Some in the end quietly give up; having thought for a long time about the elusive link between the intuiting consciousness (which develops from the perceptional world) and the perceptional world itself (which in turn only exists through and in the forms of the intuiting consciousness)—a confusion which arose from their own sin of constructing a perceptional world—they then plug the hole with the concept of the ego, which was self-created with and at the same time as their perceptional world; and they say, “Yes, of course, something must remain incomprehensible, and that something is the ego that comprehends.”
           But there are others who do not know when to stop, who keep on and on until they go mad: they grow bald, short-sighted, and fat; their stomachs stop working properly; and moaning with asthma and indigestion they fancy that equilibrium is within reach—and almost reached. So much for science, the last flower and ossification of culture.

Elucidation:
All attributes we ascribe to reality with the help of language, all names, all concepts, all qualities have nothing to do with reality, just say something about the observer. "It takes one to know one". All qualities that people attribute to nature, to God, and to themselves, their total repertory of concepts are only a result of man’s dichotomy, of living in two worlds, that of common sense and that of the by knowledge clouded intellect, the world of the self and the world of the ego.
"He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow" is written in the beautiful book of Eccleciastes.
It is like someone who looks through a microscope at reality, who does not realize how the microscope transforms the original image, thinks what he sees is reality. In the same way, people look through coloured glasses, tainted by their prejudices, at reality and do not see what they see.

Elucidation:
In every culture children learn that what ought to be, what is beautiful, pleasant, and proper, what is indecent, dangerous, unhealthy and improper. This is the mass-psychosis, that incarcerates and limits life and sets boundaries. These are the social rules, laws and norms, within which people live out their imprisoned lives. This is what they call: "freedom in restraint."

It is a system which society shores up with great difficulty but without success; it flaunts all kinds of needs which each for its satisfaction requires hard work and pain, and so frustrates other needs, so that in the end all satisfaction remains illusory. Everyone’s earthly life ends in great dissatisfaction; death is the collapse and final ruin of the system. Death repudiates the whole of life, it is the violent manifestation of the self in this limited and self-created world, the unavoidable collapse of the Tower of Babel which man in his vanity had built for himself.

Elucidation:
At the moment of passing away man must let go off all that he has made his “own”, literally and figuratively. His possessions, his imaginary ties with others, his prejudices, opinions and beliefs, to put it briefly his complete self-construed world-vision which has lead his life. He then will come to the unpleasant conclusion that his whole life has been one big mistake. That he has never been, what he could have been and has never lived, how he could have lived. Therefore, it’s wise to do that releasing just now.

This manifestation of the self, however, also occurs before death, during this restricted life, in the various aspects of this system of desire and in the world of perception, which the intellect has created as the carrier of its infatutations, its independent desires and fears. Here it manifests itself in the voice of conscience, in a nostalgic memory of a paradise lost, a faint awareness of quiet happiness which was man’s original destiny, in a hankering after bliss, religious certainty, and a life of freedom and dedication. All through this sad world this faint hankering becomes a longing and a yearning for the higher, the transcendental.
        Conscience, however, when speaking in this restricted world, is silenced. When it penetrates into the enclaved categories, either man’s attention is diverted away by strongly felt stimulation and satisfaction of other needs, or it is assimilated by this attention, that is, it is recognized as a need within the closed system and capable of satisfaction in the system.
        Both are a sop to man’s conscience and are used by industry; what should have been a cause for heart-searching and penance is turned into an incentive to new endeavors and new pleasures.
        Salving man’s conscience by diverting his attention is the sole purpose of the pleasure industries and of public entertainment from card games and wine to prose and poetry. Salving man’s conscience by recognizing appetites and satisfying them within the closed system is the main purpose of both the arts and religion industries. The self lives in art, poetry, and religion, but it is betrayed by its own offspring and put in chains. Music is turned into crude sensual beat and sing-song; poetry must rely on language and rhythm, which are equally base. What should have led him away from desire, pleasure, and fear has become a source of new pleasures and does not cure his addiction to pleasure; just like the beautiful flowers of nature and the beautiful flower of womanhood: they are only admired and desired in order to be plucked and possessed. One marvels at the virgin forests, but only with a view to cultivating them.

Comment:
Brouwer is not consistent at this point. Because music and poetry did not deteriorate, but creation of music and poetry are signs of deterioration itself, means to soothe the conscience, to make the imprisoned life more pleasant. Music and poetry became the end instead of the means.

The Bible condemns the Tower of Babel and with it, all building and human creation. Yet religion glories in its wonderful temples, a crystallization of man’s creativeness and his high aspirations. Instead of banning fear, it offers a faith which appeals to the intellect, a faith which plays on man’s fears, a faith which soothes his conscience and also frightens him. Art, which should have been a liberation from the fixed form, has taken on fixed forms everywhere; its main purpose is to make man unlearn everything, but now there are special “art schools,” where art can be learned.
        Art and religion in this world are only grand morphine industries; the yearning for a better life is lulled into sleep and reduced to a state of torpidity. All who play a part in the mechanism of society and so help to maintain its evil mass production are kept quiet and happy. In book and drama they are told about reformers, revolutionaries, and recluses, about contempt for law and order, self-denial, freely chosen poverty and hunger, the free life, rejection of the world of perception, indifference to the misfortunes of life, the kingdom of God. Such people and their teachings are greatly admired, at least when presented in writing or on the stage; but when they appear in real life everyone is outraged and frightened, and they are locked up in prison or a lunatic asylum. A life full of hardship, danger, and magical forces, under constant threat of death but a life in which justice and clear conscience conquer all, such a life—which we all deserve and should endure but from which we frightened run away—is banished to the land of fiction and melodrama; there it is admired, but in everyday reality it is shunned as something gruesome.
        Real life demands that we cover up our bodies, our conversation, and social intercourse. It is not decent to show more of oneself than what belongs to the restricted life: one’s head, one’s intellect, and the actions that have a place in society; neither is it considered decent to want to see more of other people. Intimacy when discovered by a third party arouses feelings of shame.
        But self-reflection sees all these dressed-up bodies, lives, and ideas as ugly and abhorrent, as self-contradictory and as caricatures. Everyone, except the Redeemer, is a caricature.

Comment:
Brouwer does not see, just like all thinkers and philosophers before him, that the construed archetype of "The Saviour", the true human, can be found in all little children. In the eyes of all little children, without world-view, without past or future, without thought and unprejudiced, all adults are indeed caricatures.

Nakedness in the widest sense is only admired in the closed intellect; it is not turned into practice, the long, difficult, and painful road of the soul and of earthly life, full of sorrow and illness, the abandonment first of the intellect and then of all passions, one by one, when every step brings new sorrow and leads to a next step; when only slowly one feels oneself rise again, covered in scars, and when in the end one’s nakedness breaks through. On this road there is no standing still, those who start and then stop suffer an imbalance worse than those who did not set off. For example, a vegetarian who continues as a member of the established society is nonsense; such persistence shows an extra-ordinarily crude instinct, proving that one abstains from meat not out of inner conviction but from some stupid desire or in foolish imitation of others. The fruits of our civilization and power over other human races are closely related to our carnivorous habits; such a vegetarian is therefore a parasite. This halfhearted, parasitic attitude is typical of most vegetarians and of those who practice free love and anarchism. But this kind of social democracy does not arouse the public feelings of loathing that other minor religious teachings suffer.

Elucidation:
To become human again, to become again like little children, to free oneself of all acquired baggage is in all cultures a laborious path, because it is taboo to question the rules of that bizarre game that people play. Question like "for what?" or "why?" are forbidden and non-participation is punished mercilessly. Adjustment to the herd without criticism is the highest good, accept that there is no way out and that you just have to make the best of it. But once one starts getting doubt, whom dares to ask "what are we all doing", one who dares to see for himself and faces the fact that everything is possibly different from what it appears to be, leaves the herd and will not be able to return.

These immoral and degenerate lives, reflected in the ugliness and sickness of their bodies, these dressed-up, posturing men, these rigid masks of robots, they give the unspoilt instinct a strange feeling of terror. And here too the yearning for a better life is being suppressed. The medical industry tries to maintain a quasi-normal balance in the banished human body: the urge to fight and live in the wild is distracted by diets and medicine, in particular man’s craving for the open air is sated by overfeeding; gymnastics and sport soothe the bodily conscience with some sham satisfaction; in spas and sanatoria the vis medicatrix naturae, which should have been the archenemy of “culture,” has humbly donned the robe of lackey in the service of her enslaver and master. The medical industry was with barbers and quacks in good hands; practiced within the confines of the intellect, as a medical science, it is far less effective.

Elucidation:
The debt people pay for their unnatural life is gruesome. In an artificial world, they lead an artificial life and they have created an enormous healthcare-industry to take care of the symptoms resulting from such unnatural life. This way they can continue this artificial existence by cutting away, radiating away, or suppressing their symptoms with chemicals. Medicine is the lackey of culture.

Within the closed system of science the manifestation of the self creates needs, and within that system these needs will be satisfied. In science too there is a yearning for something higher, but a yearning which is appeased with religious doctrines of revelation, with metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of art, spiritualism, and theosophy; they all leave man in the sinful bonds of science, of belief in ‘reality’ and of logical thinking. Here too, instead of escape from earthly shackles, there is a growing insensitivity and a sham equilibrium, bought with ever greater complication of human needs, ever deteriorating living conditions, ever more backbreaking work, going ever further adrift.

Every now and then conscience breaks away from the bonds of the sad world. For example, around the age of eighteen many people discover in themselves a pure, central, not merely aesthetic admiration for dreamers, monks, and hermits. Some can do nothing but refuse to bow to what middle-of-the-road sages describe as “life”; they must express their heartfelt (i.e., felt in the heart not in the head) contempt for all the fruits of culture, for all collaborators in the social chaos, for all those involved in the building of the Tower of Babel, for all those talented tightrope dancers and magicians who are proud of what should be a source of shame, for the social do-gooders and reformers of all hues, who seem to think that God has created us in order to improve his work.
        But sadly this free conscience is short-lived: education appears on the horizon and throttles it in its web. At first they learn that there is no work to be done, that there is nothing beautiful or important; they then begin to search for what is more beautiful or more important than the human condition demands, and finally they bow down even further: they become lackeys in the palace of evil, lackeys with their crawling servility toward their master and cruelty toward outsiders, doing ignoble, degrading work, brazenly scrounging and at the same time fearing for their own dear lives.

Chapter Four: Atonement

This corrupt world, as you now recognize, only exists because of its very corruption, its deviation from the paths of rectitude. A world of righteousness now seems to you as contradictory as your own mortality. Folly and misfortune, equally balanced, they govern the world! Any struggle for a better order is just one drop more in the ocean of folly. In a world which you know to be ‘real’, strife and conflict of irreconcilable interests are essential, and so is the search for an external balance which is incompatible with external existence. Any attempt to eliminate this imbalance can only shift the imbalance to somewhere else. An external, visible world necessarily lives on the illusion of a free will; that is where it tries to find happiness, even if this free will remains firmly locked up in causality. Therefore any emanation of power, any strong manifestation of life, and any flowering and growth which are willed shall come about, but only to fade away in spite of strenuous efforts, and the growth of one time will be stemmed. All that is achieved on this earth can be summed up in the two acts of the short tragedy called Grandeur et Decadence, and in the words of the mystic:

In God’s wisdom it has been ordained
that man must part from what is dearest to him.

Knowing this, you become reconciled with the erring world and accept its disconsolateness as natural; moreover, you feel it to be your inescapable karma, to which you have reconciled yourself and which you must fulfill, to see yourself driven away from the self, placed in life where pain and labor, desire and fear are your share and where all truth is veiled.

On the "inevitable Karma" and fulfilling it:
One, who has freed himself of this society and has become an observer, sees himself placed in an insane world, surrounded by people who don’t know what they are doing. Brouwer, who saw the world this way, considered that as having reached the end, with what he had to learn to live with, a seeing person in the land of the blind, a human amidst robots.
This is, what he considers the inescapable or inevitable Karma, with what he has to deal with the rest of his life. That has been his big mistake, what determines the rest of this little book. Furthermore, he uses here, the concept of Karma in an improper way. Karma is your baggage with which you are saddled by the people who raised you, the entirety of opinions and prejudice, with which you have construed your world view and self perception and with which you have learned to hold your own in an hostile world. Everything you have learned you can unlearn and that is what’s called, to free yourself of your Karma or baggage.
One, who has ended up outside the system, who has become an observer, understands not only how but also why people live the life they live. He sees how everywhere around him, people cause their own misery themselves, sees how little children get adapted into the system, and saddled with that which he has disposed himself of with a great deal of trouble and then there is only one task left to do and that’s to end it instead of "to hear, to see and to keep silent."

You look on this life as the direction of your duty, and you live it as directed from within the self; in other words: you recognize that all these earthly bonds remain your inevitable karma until God releases you. No new desires will be able to deflect you from your path and you will not wantonly increase the burden of your karma. On the other hand you will not try to be better than you are because that too would be surrender to evil desire, neither will you wish the world to be better than it is because that would be evil lust for power. Instead you will say, “What is a God who does not become flesh in a sad world?”

Elucidation:
Apparently, Brouwer has recognized that it wasn’t the merit of himself, that he is fallen out of the world but calls it that "God has released him from it". That it wasn’t a matter of will, but that it was fallen to him. He also understood that a human can be nothing else but human, that you can not change other people and that you cannot better the world but that it’s all or nothing. To become human again, to be, is to be like "God", "I am, that I am".

The zest for natural life of divine power from which spring nature and free will makes one yearn for release from one’s own natural [i.e., worldly] will. This same zest is implanted in your will together with the imprint of nature, so that with it God be given a place therein. At the end of time it will be freed from the vanity of nature and be reborn in a crystal clear, pure nature. It will then become clear why God had locked it in time and subjected it to pain and suffering, so that through natural pain one would come to know his eternal power through forms, shape, and mortality, and so that in this time life would be revealed, although in a created form, a countermove in the game of his divine wisdom. Wisdom will be revealed through folly. Although folly will lay claim to it, it has its origin and beginning elsewhere. In this way eternal life is demonstrated through folly, so that folly contributes to the glory of God and the eternal and permanent are known through what is passing and mortal.

In order that the eternally happy may know their real selves, the pain of their earthly suffering, the possibility—though not the reality of a different existence and of downfall—must be the source of their joy, and darkness be a manifestation of light so that light be revealed in experience, which would not be possible in the One [i.e., the closed self which one had never left]. By contrariety one will learn what love and suffering are. (Jacob Boehme)

Then you will be reconciled with your world and not try to change it. You will work, eat, sleep, and travel in your world, knowing it to be your inevitable karma. It is precisely this awareness, your humility, which will help you grow in the fullness of the Lord, who will protect you from desires and fears which are not part of the task given to you.

Comment:
But it is a world, that then is populated by fellow men, who in their blindness, continue with the destruction of the creation, who make the rules and laws that you have to adhere to, who determine the boundaries within which you have to live, who build and maintain the side wings of the stage, on which you have to play their game.

Chapter Five: Language

The immediate companion of the intellect is language. From life in the intellect follows the impossibility of any form of direct communication with others—instinctively by gesture or looks, or even more spiritually through all separation of distance. People therefore start training themselves and their offspring in some crude sign language, painfully and with little success, for never has anyone been able to communicate with others, soul to soul. Language can only be the accompaniment of an already existing mutual understanding. Even when two people share the same needs and aspirations, they will be in constant danger of being led by their uncontrolled desires into different side roads and of drifting apart; they will suffer pain and anxiety in their struggle to keep together. Only in the very narrowly restricted domains of the imagination such as in the exclusively intellectual sciences—which are completely separated from the world of perception and therefore touch the least upon the essentially human—only there can mutual understanding be maintained for some time. There is little scope for misunderstanding notions such as “equal” and “triangle,” but even then two different people will never feel them in exactly the same way. Even in the case of the most restricted sciences, logic and mathematics—a sharp distinction between these two is hardly possible—no two different people will have the same conception of the fundamental concepts on which these two sciences are constructed; and yet their wills are parallel, and in both there is a small, unimportant part of the brain which forces their attention in the same way. This also happens when people together fight a common enemy, together build a house or bridge, go into business or strike a deal. Then too language will serve its purpose: that is, to keep the wills of separate people on one path.
        But ridiculous is the use of language when one tries to express subtle nuances of will which are not part of the living reality of those concerned, when for example so-called philosophers or metaphysicians discuss among themselves morality, God, consciousness, immortality, or the free will. These people do not even love each other, let alone share the same subtle movements of the soul; sometimes they even do not know each other personally. They either talk at cross-purposes or each builds his own little logical system which lacks any connection with reality. For logic is life in the human brain; it may accompany life outside the brain but it can never guide it by virtue of its own power. Indeed, if there is a harmony of will, logic may well fall by the wayside; for example, the simultaneous pronouncements “There is no evil” and “There is nothing but evil” may well express ‘unity of meaning’.
        Ridiculous too is the use of language when there is an argument and people try to come to an agreement by means of reasoning. Both parties are so much under the influence of mass suggestion of society that they feel ashamed of appearing to be “unreasonable,” that is, to admit that they search for something different from “the good” and “the right,” that mirage of human society. In this case language, which presumes a harmony of will, may well be used to accompany strife and combat. But they might just as well keep silent; they only play off their wills against each other and work on each other’s desires and fears, and the strongest man wins.
        Ridiculous also is the language of conversation. Everyone waffles, but it is considered an art to waffle without nonsense showing through the restraints of convention which hold society together; to score off others, expose their stupidity while keeping oneself covered and within the bounds, and yet daring to touch upon the most subtle topics, that is considered really great talent, demanding the greatest respect— especially in France—and entitling one to be known as spirituel! Admittedly, such mock battles are to be preferred to the quasi-serious debates on art and politics.
        Comical is the language of conversation between boys and girls. In their case there is already a harmony of will, and language is completely superfluous; indeed its only purpose is to hide this harmony of will, serving modesty and shame which dare not face it openly, to mask seriousness behind jokes. Seriousness in such conversation is only then acceptable if forced togetherness makes a dutiful exchange of a few words unavoidable; otherwise, if one allows any seriousness to creep in between the sexes, all noble modesty is lost. Once you have given away seriousness, you no longer have all to give, although often mock seriousness, a kind of playful coquetry, is the only means of defending one’s purity against uncivilized intruders. The worst and most disgusting case of such uncivilized intrusion is that of associations—one of them of students at Amsterdam University—where members male and female together “study the problem of sexuality.” The association in question calls itself Ethos, it represents the greatest obscenity that one has dared to show in public! That such is possible in our modern society just shows how deep the human sense of criticism has been buried in the intellect, far removed from all central instincts.
        In everyday life language only makes sense as a means of holding the already harmonious wills of two people together on one path. The belief in a reality, the same for all—existing outside and independent of them—made society foolishly attach great importance to “speaking the truth.” Yet “telling the truth” is often far less effective than what is known as “telling a lie.” Once someone is imprisoned in the belief in a logically coherent (i.e., conceived without pain in a certain region of the brain) complex of externalities, which he calls ‘reality’, it becomes rather difficult to follow him in his folly, and even more difficult to try to evoke in him a particular emotion or state of mind by means of words which he can only interpret in accordance with his reality. One would at least have to resort to some gross exaggeration. For example, the subtle teasing and the fun a man pokes at his wife would not mean much to an outsider; they may become a little clearer, if he is told that certain events took place, which did not actually happen but which could well have been the visible result of the relation in question. It is hard for the attention to break away from the intellect so much so that only the most extraordinary events make an impression and get through to the central human emotions. By means of language as the slave of an illusion of reality one cannot reveal truth.

Addition:
"The basic tool for the manipulation of internal link reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." (Philip K. Dick)
“Writing has been developed to make it possible to make large masses of people, administratively manipulatable. The only cultural phenomena that was coupled with this, is the coming into existence of empires and cities, in other words the integration into a political system of a considerable number of individuals and their hierarchical classification into casts and classes. That is at least the typical development one sees, from Egypt to China, since the moment onward of the advent of writing. It appears to favor the exploitation of humans before it enlightened their spirit.” (Claude Levy Strauss in "Triste Tropique" 1955)
“For that simple people of the golden age, being wholly ignorant of everything called learning, lived only by the guidance and dictates of nature; for what use of grammar, where every man spoke the same language and had no further design than to understand one another? What use of logic, where there was no bickering about the double-meaning words? What need of rhetoric, where there were no lawsuits? Or to what purpose laws, where there were no ill manners? from which without doubt good laws first came. (Erasmus in “Laus Stultitiae”, 1508 )
I am convinced that speaking is a much more deceptive deed than man usually intends – just like...by the way, almost everything people do . . . . the pure truth is namely, that it is impossible for man to come to an understanding with his equals because he is doomed to complete solitude, so he exhausts himself in fruitless attempts to get closer to his fellow human. . . when man starts to speak he does so because he thinks that he will be able to say what he thinks. Well, that’s the deceptiveness. Language does not reach that far . . . duo si idem dicunt non es idem. (José Ortega y Gasset in “Rebellion de las Masas”)

Does not in a similar way the comédie de caractère—and also naturalism—try to pass off a vision of the world as reality by exaggeration or by pure invention? And do not paintings differ from photographs of nature in the same way?
        Language can accompany man’s will to dominate the will of others or his will to keep the movements of wills together; for example, the war cry of Red Indians accompanies the will to break the will of others.
        Language by itself has no meaning; any philosophy which searched for a firm foundation based on that presumption has come to grief; lulled into sleep by the assurance of such firm foundation, one was rudely awakened by the appearance later of deficiencies and contradictions. A language which does not derive its certainty from the human will but which claims to live on in the ‘pure concept’ is an absurdity. It is indeed a great skill to be able to go on speaking without being caught in contradiction or without making silent presumptions rooted in the will—sophistical reasoning which requires the brainpower of a man like Bolland—but a kind of skill one admires in an acrobat. Mr. Bolland has shown that it is possible to speak within the confinement of reason, to remove language from the sovereignty of passion and emotion—where it originated like all other expressions of life—and that without going mad or being sick. Physiologists have shown that a frog’s heart can be kept alive even when cut off from other organisms; but the heart of that frog keeps going for a relatively short time, like the philosophy of Mr. Bolland, who maintains it is only his Sunday suit. But when reasoning touches on live issues such as love, nature, and politics then it makes pronouncements which are lifeless, that is, have no meaning for life.
        Language only lives in and through human culture, which on the one hand needs mutual understanding but on the other hand makes direct communication impossible. The use of language also consolidates that culture since it operates in the same sphere. People who use language lose their primitive desires which, however sinful, remain close to the self. Frightened by solitude, their only home, they become automata, slaves of the monster-machine of public relations. Their attention becomes shut off from all other influences and from any communication soul to soul. If these influences manage to break through the constraints of their world of intellectual perception with its man-made natural laws, they then try first to ignore them and, if that does not work, to study and categorize them, bring them within the categories of their highly acclaimed “science.” They do not seem to realize that the purest reaction to such influences is simply to keep a completely open mind, without any prejudice. Even the simplest, everyday jobs were often best done as part of a thoughtless grind of daily routine rather than from some studied conviction. Influences which do not necessarily relate to this everyday life should in any case be considered as concealed from our understanding in accordance with God’s will. Only in this way can we trust our actions and our knowledge. Tiresias and Cassandra were not members of an association for psychological research; they saw the future when this was necessary, they did not desire this insight nor did they make any particular effort to achieve it.
        Modern science, however, does not consider anything sacred. Once a particular influence is observed it must be researched and be relegated to the index of old intellectual categories; answers must be given to the questions how old, how far, how big, how strong, and how much does it cost. But he who can still free his feelings from the straitjacket of public convention and who has developed a more delicate sense of perception, nurtures and reveres it rather than dismiss it as “beside the point”; he will place his trust in dreams and premonitions without wanting to understand them. He will understand the signs given to him without using the power of his “head”; he can tell the character of his fellow men from their faces, or perhaps more easily and directly from their hands, which do not wear the mask of comedy and coquetry. He will see the most famous and learned men, their self-satisfaction written all over their faces, hailed, admired, and carried high by fools; he will see them naked and stripped of all their glory by just glancing at their hands. Even the most clever orators and philosophers, whose words may seem irrefutable, are given away by their hands.
        Such insight, however, is not given to those who have made a study of Lavater’s Physiognomy or whose intuitive perception has been impaired by intellectual considerations. Only he who humbly opens his free senses, only he will always be guided through life by timely premonitions and apparitions, not those who do scientific research into telepathy or spiritism or take part in that sort of séance or show. Theosophists and their ilk, who are so keen to find out more about life after death, will receive a nasty shock once they get there.
        People who try to force these matters into some kind of science will probably succeed because they will this interpretation. They have cast aside all meekness and innocence and they think to have found refuge in some balance: it is a sham balance which again and again will be destroyed by the discovery of new phenomena. Bodily work on this earth will become ever harder and more complex, and so will the search and reasoning of the intellect. Faith, however, will spite gravity and mass and always literally “move mountains” and walk across the sea. Retiring into the self we will playfully break all “laws of nature.”

Elucidation:
You can believe what others are saying and trust in them, but the point is that you believe yourself (your Self) and trust yourself. Trusting yourself means, to trust the dictates of your conscience, against everything you have learned. Than you can move mountains and "one, who finds himself 1 inch under the sea level will drown just as well as one, who is 500 yards under" (Plutarchus) But one, who rises above it, can "walk on the water" (Matth 14:23-33).