I And Thou

then by visual " touch " of another being) the inborn
Thou is very soon brought to its full powers, so that the
instinct ever more clearly turns out to mean mutual
relation, " tenderness ". But the instinct to " creation ",
which is established later (that is, the instinct to set
up things in a synthetic, or, if that is impossible, in an
analytic way—through pulling to pieces or tearing up),
is also determined by this inborn Thou, so that a " per-
sonification " of what is made, and a " conversation ",
take place. The development of the soul in the child is
inextricably bound up with that of the longing for the
Thou9 with the satisfaction and the disappointment of
this longing, with the game of his experiments and the
tragic seriousness of his perplexity. Genuine under-
standing of this phenomenon, which is injured by every
attempt to lead it back into more confined spheres, can
only be promoted if, during its observation and dis-
cussion, its cosmic and metacosmic origin is kept in
mind. For it reaches out from the undivided primal
world which precedes form, out of which the bodily
individual who is born into the world, but not yet the
personal, actualised being, has fully emerged. For only
gradually, by entering into relations, is the latter to
develop out of this primal world.

Through the Thou a man becomes I. That which
confronts Trim comes and disappears, relational events
condense, then are scattered, and in the change con-
sciousness of the unchanging partner, of the Z, grows
clear, and each time stronger. To be sure, it is still
seen caught in the web of the relation with the
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