962. It is entirely different in the case of those beings that have come so far in their development that their instinctive ability has strongly degenerated, resulting in them having, to a marked degree, begun to sense with the aid of intelligence. In these beings there has arisen a strong hunger for answers or results. And on the strength of this new ability the individual can acquire a wealth of knowledge. But this knowledge is merely the answers in terms of weights and measures. On account of this knowledge the being thinks, in the first instance, that it has truly found the "philosophers' stone". It thinks that the solution to all of life's mysteries lies in the answers in terms of weights and measures and that everything that can be stated as lying outside these results, everything that cannot be stated in degrees of weights and measures, is unreal, mere imagination or superstition. As everything that can be stated as answers in terms of weights and measures can consist of nothing other than matter – that is to say, energy, vibration, movement, rays or waves, solid, fluid, gaseous and mental substances, in other words, dead forces – it is these dead forces that this cold, objective intellectual being is therefore "worshipping". Everything surrounding this being is in reality "dead". Macrocosmos is dead forces consisting of a game of chance. Microcosmos and mesocosmos likewise consist of dead forces. Everything is a game of chance. These chance occurrences are the result of previous chance occurrences and so on continuously without end. The materialist's overall view of the universe and everything that exists – and consequently of life – is that it consists unshakably of one thing only, namely, "death". It is true he experiences himself, along with a great many other beings in mesocosmos and microcosmos, as "alive", and of course he takes part in defining these phenomena as "living beings", but his scientific insight into or knowledge of these phenomena finds expression merely as answers in terms of weights and measures. His analyses of them are merely numerical concepts. Their content is merely an account of what they weigh, what they measure, their volume, their colour, their age, their particular characteristics, mode of behaviour and so forth. This knowledge that the materialist has therefore includes not one single idea of what it is that is actually "alive". It consists exclusively of mere statements about external combinations of kinds of movements and reactions in matter, which it is true he calls "living beings", but whose life, in the absolute sense, lies totally beyond the horizon of his day-consciousness. What is "living", or what makes the combinations of matter or the organisms and the kinds of movements and reactions emanating from them into expressions of life – in other words, the "something" whose presence in an organism makes it "alive" and whose removal from it turns it into a "corpse" – amounts in his analyses to "nothing". Any assertion that such a "something" exists is to him a symptom of pure "naivety" or one hundred per cent "superstition". His senses and ability to perceive are at a stage at which they are able to come into contact with nothing other than matter, which is the same as all forms of energy and the reactions released by them. But "who" it is that directs the energies and thereby releases the logical creative process that has transformed the Earth from its fiery state to the present, perfect setting for animal life, has not yet even arisen as a question in him. Despite the fact that his faculty of intelligence is so exceedingly well developed in analysing weights and measures that he might be a doctor or a professor, it is still so elementary or underdeveloped in the truly spiritual area or the terrain of that which is "living", that "chance" is to him completely satisfactory as the highest explanation of, or the only "scientific" solution to, the mystery of life. He therefore proclaims his denial of the existence of that which is "living" within himself, even though this denial would itself be a total impossibility without this very existence and he would thereby constitute a mere collection of chance forms of movement or combinations of energy. No being can in fact come further from reality or the truth. To proclaim in all good faith to one's surroundings that one denies the existence of one's own real "self" is the very culmination of ignorance, at the same time as it is also the culmination of untruth. This reveals the living being in the state in which it is most spiritually lacking or furthest from the Godhead and itself.