[Undated]

Every emotional experience of knowledge gained is at the same time an emotional experience of ignorance unilluminated. The sense of creative success with its accompanying elation is therefore inseparable from a sense of failure to synthesize the discrete objects, the elementary particles, which are revealed by the success. Dominance of the life instincts carries with it the continued repetition of the experience. In extreme form, fear of this experience can lead to repudiation of the life instincts, and the reinforcement of the death instincts that are idealized and libidinized. The fear and intolerance of the cause or selected fact ultimately contribute to increasing attacks on the individual’s equipment for feeling and satisfying curiosity, and therefore contribute to the forces operating in producing senility. Disregarding for present purposes the fact that the non-psychotic believes that cause is a phenomenon with a corresponding realization and belongs to the domain of ontology.