This Nothing had a definite, albeit undefinable, content. For a long time, on many occasions, she had recited to herself a saying by Novalis: “What, then, can I do for my soul, which dwells within me like an unsolved riddle, granting the visible man the utmost license, because it cannot govern him in any way?” But always the flickering light of these words fell back into darkness after a lightning-swift flash of recognition, for she did not believe in a soul, as that seemed too presumptuous and also too definite a notion to apply to herself. But neither could she believe in the earthly domain. To understand this rightly, one need only to realize that this turning away from the earthly order without a belief in a supernatural order is something profoundly natural, for in every mind, the strict and simple order of logic, which mirrors the outer conditions, is accompanied by an affective order whose logic, if one may call it that, corresponds to the nature of feelings, passions, and moods. The laws governing these two bear roughly the same relationship to each other as those of a lumberyard where chunks of wood are hewn into rectangular blocks and stacked ready for transport and the laws of the forest in their dark convolutions and mysterious rustling commotion. And since the objects of our thinking are by no means independent of the state our thinking is in, these two modes of thought not only mingle in each person, but can to a certain degree confront him with two worlds, at least immediately before and after that “first occult and indescribable instant” that, according to a famous religious thinker, occurs in every sense perception before feeling and view separate and occupy the places where one is accustomed to find them: as a thing in space and a contemplation that is now locked into the observer.