by C. G. Jung
When all the essays had been read, the teacher paused. Then he said, “Now I have one more composition—Jung’s. It is by far the best, and I ought to have given it first place. But unfortunately it is a fraud. Where did you copy it from? Confess the truth!”
I shot to my feet, as horrified as I was furious, and cried, “I did not copy it! I went to a lot of trouble to write a good composition.” But the teacher shouted at me, “You’re lying! You could never write a composition like this. No one is going to believe that. Now—where did you copy it from?”
Vainly I swore to my innocence. The teacher clung to his theory. He became threatening. “I can tell you this: if I knew where you had copied it from, you would be chucked out of the school.” And he turned away. My classmates threw odd glances at me, and I realized with horror that they were thinking, “A-ha, so that’s the way it is.” My protestations fell on deaf ears.
I felt that from now on I was branded, and that all the paths which might have led me out of unusualness had been cut off. Profoundly disheartened and dishonored, I swore vengeance on the teacher, and if I had had an opportunity something straight out of the law of the jungle would have resulted. How in the world could I possibly prove that I had not copied the essay?
For days I turned this incident over in my thoughts, and again and again came to the conclusion that I was powerless, the sport of a blind and stupid fate that had marked me as a liar and a cheat. Now I realized many things I had not previously understood—for example, how it was that one of the teachers could say to my father, who had inquired about my conduct in school, “Oh, he’s just average, but he works commendably hard.” I was thought to be relatively stupid and superficial. That did not annoy me really. But what made me furious was that they should think me capable of cheating, and thus morally destroy me.
My grief and rage threatened to get out of control. And then something happened that I had already observed in myself several times before: there was a sudden inner silence, as though a soundproof door had been closed on a noisy room. It was as if a mood of cool curiosity came over me, and I asked myself, “What is really going on here? All right, you are excited. Of course the teacher is an idiot who doesn’t understand your nature—that is, doesn’t understand it any more than you do. Therefore he is as mistrustful as you are. You distrust yourself and others, and that is why you side with those who are naïve, simple, and easily seen through. One gets excited when one doesn’t understand things.”
In the light of these considerations sine ira et studio, I was struck by the analogy with that other train of ideas which had impressed itself on me so forcefully when I did not want to think the forbidden thought. Although at that time I doubtless saw no difference as yet between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, and still claimed the world of No. 2 as my own personal world, there was always, deep in the background, the feeling that something other than myself was involved. It was as though a breath of the great world of stars and endless space had touched me, or as if a spirit had invisibly entered the room—the spirit of one who had long been dead and yet was perpetually present in timelessness until far into the future. Denouements of this sort were wreathed with the halo of a numen.
At that time, of course, I could never have expressed myself in this fashion, nor am I now attributing to my state of consciousness something that was not there at the time. I am only trying to express the feelings I had then, and to shed light on that twilight world with the help of what I know now.
It was some months after the incident just described that my schoolmates hung the nickname “Father Abraham” on me. No. 1 could not understand why, and thought it silly and ridiculous. Yet somewhere in the background I felt that the name had hit the mark. All allusions to this background were painful to me, for the more I read and the more familiar I became with city life, the stronger grew my impression that what I was now getting to know as reality belonged to an order of things different from the view of the world I had grown up with in the country, among rivers and woods, among men and animals in a small village bathed in sunlight, with the winds and the clouds moving over it, and encompassed by dark night in which uncertain things happened. It was no mere locality on the map, but “God’s world,” so ordered by Him and filled with secret meaning. But apparently men did not know this, and even the animals had somehow lost the senses to perceive it. That was evident, for example, in the sorrowful, lost look of the cows, and in the resigned eyes of horses, in the devotion of dogs, who clung so desperately to human beings, and even in the self-assured step of the cats who had chosen house and barn as their residence and hunting ground. People were like the animals, and seemed as unconscious as they. They looked down upon the ground or up into the trees in order to see what could be put to use, and for what purpose; like animals they herded, paired, and fought, but did not see that they dwelt in a unified cosmos, in God’s world, in an eternity where everything is already born and everything has already died.
Because they are so closely akin to us and share our unknowingness, I loved all warm-blooded animals who have souls like ourselves and with whom, so I thought, we have an instinctive understanding. We experience joy and sorrow, love and hate, hunger and thirst, fear and trust in common—all the essential features of existence with the exception of speech, sharpened consciousness, and science. And although I admired science in the conventional way, I also saw it giving rise to alienation and aberration from God’s world, as leading to a degeneration which animals were not capable of. Animals were dear and faithful, unchanging and trustworthy. People I now distrusted more than ever.
Insects I did not regard as proper animals, and I took cold-blooded vertebrates to be a rather lowly intermediate stage on the way down to the insects. Creatures in this category were objects for observation and collection, curiosities merely, alien and extra-human; they were manifestations of impersonal life and more akin to plants than to human beings.
The earthly manifestations of “God’s world” began with the realm of plants, as a kind of direct communication from it. It was as though one were peering over the shoulder of the Creator, who, thinking Himself unobserved, was making toys and decorations. Man and the proper animals, on the other hand, were bits of God that had become independent. That was why they could move about on their own and choose their abodes. Plants were bound for good or ill to their places. They expressed not only the beauty but also the thoughts of God’s world, with no intent of their own and without deviation. Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason the woods were the place where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.
This impression was reinforced when I became acquainted with Gothic cathedrals. But there the infinity of the cosmos, the chaos of meaning and meaninglessness, of impersonal purpose and mechanical law, were wrapped in stone. This contained and at the same time was the bottomless mystery of being, the embodiment of spirit. What I dimly felt to be my kinship with stone was the divine nature in both, in the dead and the living matter.
At that time it would, as I have said, have been beyond my powers to formulate my feelings and intuitions in any graphic way, for they all occurred in No. 2 personality, while my active and comprehending ego remained passive and was absorbed into the sphere of the “old man,” who belonged to the centuries. I experienced him and his influence in a curiously unreflective manner; when he was present, No. 1 personality paled to the point of nonexistence, and when the ego that became increasingly identical with No. 1 personality dominated the scene, the old man, if remembered at all, seemed a remote and unreal dream.
Between my sixteenth and nineteenth years the fog of my dilemma slowly lifted, and my depressive states of mind improved. No. 1 personality emerged more and more distinctly. School and city life took up my time, and my increased knowledge gradually permeated or repressed the world of intuitive premonitions. I began systematically pursuing questions I had c
onsciously framed. I read a brief introduction to the history of philosophy and in this way gained a bird’s-eye view of everything that had been thought in this field. I found to my gratification that many of my intuitions had historical analogues. Above all I was attracted to the thought of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Plato, despite the long-windedness of Socratic argumentation. Their ideas were beautiful and academic, like pictures in a gallery, but somewhat remote. Only in Meister Eckhart did I feel the breath of life—not that I understood him. The Schoolmen left me cold, and the Aristotelian intellectualism of St. Thomas appeared to me more lifeless than a desert. I thought, “They all want to force something to come out by tricks of logic, something they have not been granted and do not really know about. They want to prove a belief to themselves, whereas actually it is a matter of experience.” They seemed to me like people who knew by hearsay that elephants existed, but had never seen one, and were now trying to prove by arguments that on logical grounds such animals must exist and must be constituted as in fact they are. For obvious reasons, the critical philosophy of the eighteenth century at first did not appeal to me at all. Of the nineteenth-century philosophers, Hegel put me off by his language, as arrogant as it was laborious; I regarded him with downright mistrust. He seemed to me like a man who was caged in the edifice of his own words and was pompously gesticulating in his prison.
But the great find resulting from my researches was Schopenhauer. He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil—all those things which the others hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility. Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundaments of the universe. He spoke neither of the all-good and all-wise providence of a Creator, nor of the harmony of the cosmos, but stated bluntly that a fundamental flaw underlay the sorrowful course of human history and the cruelty of nature: the blindness of the world-creating Will. This was confirmed not only by the early observations I had made of diseased and dying fishes, of mangy foxes, frozen or starved birds, of the pitiless tragedies concealed in a flowery meadow: earthworms tormented to death by ants, insects that tore each other apart piece by piece, and so on. My experiences with human beings, too, had taught me anything rather than a belief in man’s original goodness and decency. I knew myself well enough to know that I was only gradually, as it were, distinguishing myself from an animal.
Schopenhauer’s somber picture of the world had my undivided approval, but not his solution of the problem. I felt sure that by “Will” he really meant God, the Creator, and that he was saying that God was blind. Since I knew from experience that God was not offended by any blasphemy, that on the contrary He could even encourage it because He wished to evoke not only man’s bright and positive side but also his darkness and ungodliness, Schopenhauer’s view did not distress me. I considered it a verdict justified by the facts. But I was all the more disappointed by his theory that the intellect need only confront the blind Will with its image in order to cause it to reverse itself. How could the Will see this image at all, since it was blind? And why should it, even if it could see, thereby be persuaded to reverse itself, since the image would show it precisely what it willed? And what was the intellect? It was a function of the human soul, not a mirror but an infinitesimal fragment of a mirror such as a child might hold up to the sun, expecting the sun to be dazzled by it. I was puzzled that Schopenhauer should ever have been satisfied with such an inadequate answer.
Because of this I was impelled to study him more thoroughly, and I became increasingly impressed by his relation to Kant. I therefore began reading the works of this philosopher, above all his Critique of Pure Reason, which put me to some hard thinking. My efforts were rewarded, for I discovered the fundamental flaw, so I thought, in Schopenhauer’s system. He had committed the deadly sin of hypostatizing a metaphysical assertion, and of endowing a mere noumenon, a Ding an sich, with special qualities. I got this from Kant’s theory of knowledge, and it afforded me an even greater illumination, if that were possible, than Schopenhauer’s “pessimistic” view of the world.
This philosophical development extended from my seventeenth year until well into the period of my medical studies. It brought about a revolutionary alteration of my attitude to the world and to life. Whereas formerly I had been shy, timid, mistrustful, pallid, thin, and apparently unstable in health, I now began to display a tremendous appetite on all fronts. I knew what I wanted and went after it. I also became noticeably more accessible and more communicative. I discovered that poverty was no handicap and was far from being the principal reason for suffering; that the sons of the rich really did not enjoy any advantages over the poor and ill-clad boys. There were far deeper reasons for happiness and unhappiness than one’s allotment of pocket money. I made more and better friends than before. I felt firmer ground under my feet and even summoned up courage to speak openly of my ideas. But that, as I discovered all too soon, was a misunderstanding which I had cause to regret. For I met not only with embarrassment or mockery, but with hostile rejection. To my consternation and discomfiture, I found that certain people considered me a braggart, a poseur, and a humbug. The old charge of cheat was revived, even though in a somewhat milder form. Once again it had to do with a subject for composition that had aroused my interest. I had worked out my paper with particular care, taking the greatest pains to polish my style. The result was crushing. “Here is an essay by Jung,” said the teacher. “It is downright brilliant, but tossed off so carelessly that it is easy to see how little serious effort went into it. I can tell you this, Jung, you won’t get through life with that slapdash attitude. Life calls for earnestness and conscientiousness, work and effort. Look at D.’s paper. He has none of your brilliance, but he is honest, conscientious, and hard-working. That is the way to success in life.”
My feelings were not as hurt as on the first occasion, for in spite of himself the teacher had been impressed by my essay, and had at least not accused me of stealing it. I protested against his reproaches, but was dismissed with the comment: “The Ars Poetica maintains that the best poem is the one which conceals the effort of creation. But you cannot make me believe that about your essay, for it was tossed off frivolously and without any effort.” There were, I knew, a few good ideas in it, but the teacher did not even bother to discuss them.
I felt some bitterness over this incident, but the suspicions of my schoolmates were a far more serious matter, for they threatened to throw me back into my former isolation and depression. I racked my brains, trying to understand what I could have done to deserve their slanders. By cautious inquiries I discovered that they looked askance at me because I often made remarks, or dropped hints, about things which I could not possibly know. For instance, I pretended to know something about Kant and Schopenhauer, or about paleontology, which we had not even had in school as yet. These astonishing discoveries showed me that practically all the burning questions had nothing to do with everyday life, but belonged, like my ultimate secret, to “God’s world,” which it was better not to speak of.
Henceforth I took care not to mention these esoteric matters among my schoolmates, and among the adults of my acquaintance I knew no one with whom I might have talked without risk of being thought a boaster and impostor. The most painful thing of all was the frustration of my attempts to overcome the inner split in myself, my division into two worlds. Again and again events occurred which forced me out of my ordinary, everyday existence into the boundlessness of “God’s world.”
This expression, “God’s world,” may sound sentimental to some ears. For me it did not have this character at all. To “God’s world” belonged everything superhuman—dazzling light, the darkness of the abyss, the cold impassivity of infinite space and time, and the uncanny grotesqueness of the irrational world of chance. “God,” for me, was everything—and anything but “edifying.�
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The older I grew, the more frequently I was asked by my parents and others what I wanted to be. I had no clear notions on that score. My interests drew me in different directions. On the one hand I was powerfully attracted by science, with its truths based on facts; on the other hand I was fascinated by everything to do with comparative religion. In the sciences I was drawn principally to zoology, paleontology, and geology; in the humanities to Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and prehistoric archaeology. At that time, of course, I did not realize how very much this choice of the most varied subjects corresponded to the nature of my inner dichotomy. What appealed to me in science were the concrete facts and their historical background, and in comparative religion the spiritual problems, into which philosophy also entered. In science I missed the factor of meaning; and in religion, that of empiricism. Science met, to a very large extent, the needs of No. 1 personality, whereas the humane or historical studies provided beneficial instruction for No. 2.
Torn between these two poles, I was for a long time unable to settle on anything. I noticed that my uncle, the head of my mother’s family, who was pastor of St. Alban’s in Basel, was gently pushing me in the direction of theology. The unusual attentiveness with which I had followed a conversation at table, when he was discussing a point of religion with one of his sons, all of whom were theologians, had not escaped him. I wondered whether there might possibly be theologians who were in close touch with the dizzy heights of the university and therefore knew more than my father. Such conversations never gave me the impression that they were concerned with real experiences, and certainly not with experiences like mine. They dealt exclusively with doctrinal opinions on the Biblical narratives, all of which made me feel distinctly uncomfortable, because of the numerous and barely credible accounts of miracles.