Part I.6: The Metamorphosis of World Phenomena

But this highest perception liberates man's spirit also from all one-sided feeling of dependency. He feels himself, through having this view, to be sovereign in the realm of the moral world order. He knows that the driving power which brings forth everything works in his inner life as within his own will, and that the highest decisions about morality lie within himself. For these highest decisions flow out of the world of moral ideas, in whose production the soul of man is present. Even though a person may feel himself restricted in part, may also be dependent upon a thousand things, on the whole he sets himself his moral goal and his moral direction. What is at work in all other things comes to manifestation in the human being as idea; what is at work in him is the idea which he himself brings forth. In every single human individuality a process occurs that plays itself out in the whole of nature: the creation of something actual out of the idea. And the human being himself is the creator. For upon the foundation of his personality there lives the idea which gives a content to itself. Going beyond Goethe one must broaden his principle that nature is “great enough in the wealth of its creation to make, after thousandfold plants, one in which all the others are contained, and to make, after thousandfold animals, one being that contains them all: man.” Nature is so great in its creation that it repeats in every human individual the process by which it brings forth freely out of the idea all creatures, repeats it through the fact that moral actions spring from the ideal foundation of the personality. Whatever a person also feels to be an objective reason for his action is only a transcribing and at the same time a mistaking of his own being. The human being realizes himself in his moral actions. Max Stirner has expressed this knowledge in lapidary words in his book, The Single Individual and What Is His Own. “It lies in my power to be my own person, and this is so when I know myself as a single individual. Within the single individual even someone who is his own person returns to the creative nothingness out of which he is born. Every higher being over me, be it God or man, weakens the feeling of my singleness and pales only before the sun of this consciousness. If I base my affairs upon myself, the single individual, then they rest upon their own transitory mortal creator, who devours himself, and I can say that I have based my affairs upon nothing.” But at the same time one can tell this Stirnerian spirit what Faust told Mephistopheles: “In your nothingness I hope to find my all,” for there dwells in my inner life in an individual form the working power by which nature creates the universe. As long as a person has not beheld this working power within himself, he will appear with respect to it the way Faust did with respect to the earth spirit. This working power will always call out to him the words, “You resemble the spirit that you can grasp, not me!” Only the beholding of one's deepest inner life conjures up this spirit, who says of itself: