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Updated: June 22, 2025
The phenomenon which led the onlooker-consciousness to form the idea of optical refraction has been known since early times. It consists in the fact, surprising at first sight, that an object, such as a coin, which lies at the bottom of a vessel hidden from an observer by the rim, becomes visible when the vessel is filled with water.
When studying man's nature with the idea of understanding the genesis of his onlooker-consciousness, it will be remembered, we had to examine the ordering of his consciousness into waking, dreaming and sleeping in the different members of his organism.
This kind of explanation is quite in line with the peculiarity of the onlooker-consciousness, noted earlier, to attribute an optical illusion to the eye's way of working, while charging the mind with the task of clearing up the illusion. In reality it is just the reverse.
Once scientific observation and thought are freed from the limitations of the onlooker-consciousness, both gravity and electricity appear in a new perspective, though the change is different for each of them.
For since the onlooker-consciousness is quite unable to conceive the existence of numerical relationships in the physical world except as sums of computable units in space, it was natural for this type of consciousness to reduce all empirically established numerical relationships to correspending relationships among quantities of the smallest possible material or matter-like units.
In yet another way the same forces function as movers and stirrers of the macro-telluric processes of the earth, and beyond this of the happenings in the body of our planetary system, including the movements of the various planets. This is an aspect which was by no means unfamiliar to ancient man. It was naturally lost when the onlooker-consciousness awoke.
What else could be concluded from the apparent unchangeability of weight throughout all the chemical happenings in nature than that the ponderable world-content was of eternal duration? We see here how much modern chemistry and its concept of the chemical element has been ruled right from the start by the one-sided gravity concept of the onlooker-consciousness.
Moreover, it was only natural that in his search for a world of a higher order than the physical he should, as a man of his time, first turn his attention to spiritistic occurrences, for spiritism, as it had come over to Europe from America in the middle of the nineteenth century, was nothing but an attempt by the onlooker-consciousness to learn something in its own way about the supersensible world.
This accounts for the fact that the unipolar concept of gravity had eventually to be supplemented by some kind of bipolar concept. Now, the only sphere of nature-phenomena with a bipolar character accessible to the onlooker-consciousness 'was that of electricity.
The italics are Reid's. 3 Presumably Kant and his school. Schopenhauer was definitely of this opinion. Seeing as 'Deed' II The observation of our own visual process, which we began in the last chapter, will serve now to free us from a series of illusory concepts which have been connected by the onlooker-consciousness with the phenomena brought about by light.
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