12

PARTLY OUR CREATION: What a strange moment it is in one's life when one realizes that, ultimately, there is no such thing as a 'bumblebee', indeed, that there has never been such a thing except in relation to human cognition and imagination. The world we have created generally suffices us. We believe quite firmly in the existence of 'bumblebees', a type of winged insect we can easily differentiate from other such insects but which, in the world beneath man, is no closer to being a 'bumblebee' than anything else. As a named creature, it is both a truth and an illusion. As an unnamed one, a truth through and through. But we are of course unable to live without illusions; we must give names to things in order to be able to differentiate between them and, in doing so, fall into the trap of actually believing these named things to be ultimate realities - something they in no sense are or ever can be.

And so one day we realize that, together with any number of other insects, birds, animals, fish, etc., the 'bumblebee' is partly a figment of our imagination, a nameless creature which in our world acquires a fixed position but which in its own world - and doubtless in the worlds of numerous other nameless creatures - must forever remain a truthful thing-in-itself, unknowable and unnamed.

With man, however, such illusions (and I use the term in the special, if unusual sense, to which it here applies) are of the greatest significance. We need our illusions for the sake of our truths, so let us not endeavour to undermine them. For what I have just told you is, after all, a truth acquired at the expense of an illusion.