VII. The Beginnings of Sex Duality

Altogether different from that of later times was the course taken by the rest of his mental life. Pictures lived in his soul, but not as representations of external things. When, for example, the man moved from a colder into a warmer place, there arose in his soul a definite colour-picture, but this colour-picture had nothing to do with any external object. It sprang from an inner force akin to the will. Pictures like these continually filled the soul. The whole can only be compared with the rising and falling dream-visions of man. Only at that time the pictures were not unregulated, but in conformity with laws; and for that reason we must not speak, at this stage of humanity, of a dream-consciousness, but rather of a picture-consciousness. In the main it was colour-pictures with which this consciousness was filled, but these were not the only kind. Thus man wandered through the world, experiencing its events by means of his senses of hearing and feeling, but in his inner life this world was reflected in pictures, very unlike those existing in the outer world. Pleasure and pain were bound up with these soul-pictures in a much smaller degree than is the case with man's ideas to-day, which reflect his perceptions in the world outside. Doubtless one picture caused him pleasure, another disgust; the one hatred, and the other love; but these sensations bore a much fainter character. On the other hand strong feelings were produced by something else. Man was then much more agile, much more active than later. Everything in his surroundings, as well as the pictures in his soul, stirred him to activity, to movement. Now when his activity, unhindered, had free play, he experienced a sensation of well-being; when, however, this activity was checked in any direction, he was overcome by unhappiness and discomfort. The absence or presence of opposition to his will determined the content of his life of feeling, his pleasure and his pain. And this pleasure or this pain discharged itself again in his own soul as a living world of pictures. Clear, bright, beautiful pictures lived within him when he was able to expand unhindered; gloomy and misshapen were those which appeared in his soul when his movements were hampered.