Demian: A Novel

by Hermann Hesse

I wanted only to try to live in obedience to the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?

“We confine our personality within much too narrow bounds. We count as composing our person only that which distinguishes us as individuals, only that which we recognize as irregular. But we are made up from the entire world stock, each one of us, and just as in our body is displayed the genealogical table of development back to the fish stage and still further, so we have accumulated in our souls all the experiences through which a human soul has ever lived. All the gods and devils which have ever been, whether those of the Greeks or Chinese or Zulus, all are in us, are there as potentialities, as desires, as starting points. If all mankind died out, with the exception of a single moderately gifted child, who had not enjoyed the slightest instruction, so would this child rediscover the whole process of things; it would be able to produce gods, demons, paradises, the commandments and prohibitions, old and new testaments—everything.”

You will not consider all the two-legged creatures who walk out there in the street as human beings, simply because they walk erect and carry their young nine months in the womb? Look how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or leeches, how many are ants or bees. Well, within reach of them are the possibilities of becoming human creatures, but only when they feel this, it is only when, if even in part, they learn to make them conscious, that these potentialities become theirs.”

If nature had created you to be a bat, you ought not to want to make yourself into an ostrich. You often consider yourself as singular, you reproach yourself with going ways different from most people. You must get out of that habit. Look in the fire, look at the clouds, and as soon as you have presentiments, and the voices of your soul begin to speak, yield to them and don’t first ask what the opinion of your master or your father would be, or whether they would be pleasing to some god or other. One spoils oneself that way. In doing that one treads the common road, becomes a fossil.

Whether you and I and a few other people will one day renew the world remains to be seen. But we must renew it daily within us, otherwise we are of no account. Think over it!

We were not separated from the majority of creatures by boundaries, but rather by a different sort of vision.