“Let us take some other word, for example, the term ‘WORLD.’ Each man understands it in his own way, and each man in an entirely different way. Everyone when he hears or pronounces the word ‘WORLD’ has associations entirely foreign and incomprehensible to another. Every ‘conception of the WORLD,’ every habitual form of thinking, carries with it its own associations, its own ideas. Fragments: Four

“In a man with a religious conception of the WORLD, a Christian, the word ‘WORLD’ will call up a whole series of religious ideas, will necessarily become connected with the idea of God, with the idea of the creation of the WORLD or the end of the WORLD, or of the ‘sinful’ WORLD, and so on. Fragments: Four

“In relation to the term ‘WORLD’ it is necessary to understand from the very outset that there are many WORLDs, and that we live not in one WORLD, but in several WORLDs. This is not readily understood because in ordinary language the term ‘WORLD’ is generally used in the singular. And if the plural ‘WORLDs’ is used it is merely to emphasize, as it were, the same idea, or to express the idea of various WORLDs existing parallel to one another. Our language does not have the idea of WORLDs contained one within another. And yet the idea that we live in different WORLDs precisely implies WORLDs contained one within another to which we stand in different relations. Fragments: Four

“If we desire an answer to the question what is the WORLD or WORLDs in which we live, we must first of all ask ourselves what it is that we may call ‘WORLD’ in the most intimate and immediate relation to us., “To this we may answer that we often give the name of ‘WORLD’ to the WORLD of people, to humanity, in which we live, of which we form part. But humanity forms an inseparable part of organic life on earth, therefore it would be right to say that the WORLD nearest to us is organic life on earth, the WORLD of plants, animals, and men. Fragments: Four

“But organic life is also in the WORLD. What then is ‘WORLD’ for organic life? “To this we can answer that for organic life our planet the earth is ‘WORLD.’ “But the earth is also in the WORLD. What then is ‘WORLD’ for the earth? ” ‘World’ for the earth is the planetary WORLD of the solar system, of which it forms a part. Fragments: Four

“What is ‘WORLD’ for all the planets taken together? The sun, or the sphere of the sun’s influence, or the solar system, of which the planets form a part. Fragments: Four

“For the sun, in its turn, ‘WORLD’ is our WORLD of stars, or the Milky Way, an accumulation of a vast number of solar systems. Fragments: Four

“Furthermore, from an astronomical point of view, it is quite possible to presume a multitude of WORLDs existing at enormous distances from one another in the space of ‘all WORLDs.’ These WORLDs taken together will be ‘WORLD’ for the Milky Way. Fragments: Four

“Further, passing to philosophical conclusions, we may say that ‘all WORLDs’ must form some, for us, incomprehensible and unknown Whole or One (as an apple is one). This Whole, or One, or All, which may be called the ‘Absolute,’ or the ‘Independent’ because, including everything within itself, it is not dependent upon anything, is ‘WORLD’ for ‘all WORLDs.’ Logically it is quite possible to think of a state of things where All forms one single Whole. Such a whole will certainly be the Absolute, which means the Independent, because it, that is, the All, is infinite and indivisible. Fragments: Four

“The chain of WORLDs, the links of which are the Absolute, all WORLDs, all suns, our sun, the planets, the earth, and the moon, forms the ‘ray of creation’ in which we find ourselves. The ray of creation is for us the ‘WORLD’ in the widest sense of the term. Of course, the ray of creation does not include the ‘WORLD’ in the full sense of the term, since the Absolute gives birth to a number, perhaps to an infinite number, of different WORLDs, each of which begins a new and separate ray of creation. Furthermore, each of these WORLDs contains a number of WORLDs representing a further breaking up of the ray and again of these WORLDs we select only one — our Milky Way; the Milky Way consists of a number of suns, but of this number we select one sun which is nearest to us, upon which we immediately depend, and in which we live and move and have our being. Each of the other suns means a new breaking up of the ray, but we cannot study these rays in the same way as our ray, that is, the ray in which we are situated. Further, within the solar system the planetary WORLD is nearer to us than the sun itself, and within the planetary WORLD the nearest of all to us is the earth, the planet on which we live. We have no need to study other planets in the same way as we study the earth, it is sufficient for us to take them all together, that is to say, on a considerably smaller scale than we take the earth. Fragments: Four

“But the concept ‘materiality’ is as relative as everything else. It we recall how the concept ‘man’ and all that refers to him — good, evil, truth, falsehood, and so on — is divided into different categories (‘man number one,’ ‘man number two,’ and so on, it will be easy for us to understand that the concept ‘WORLD,’ and everything that refers to the WORLD, is also divided into different categories. The ray of creation establishes seven planes in the WORLD, seven WORLDs one within another. Everything that refers to the WORLD is also divided into seven categories, one category within another. The materiality of the Absolute is a materiality of an order different from that of ‘all WORLDs.’ The materiality of ‘all WORLDs’ is of an order different from the materiality of ‘all suns.’ The materiality of ‘all suns’ is of an order different from the materiality of our sun. The materiality of our sun is of an order different from the materiality of ‘all planets.’ The materiality of ‘all planets’ is of an order different from the materiality of the earth, and the materiality of the earth is of an order different from the materiality of the moon. This idea is at first difficult to grasp. People are accustomed to think that matter is everywhere the same. The whole of physics, of astrophysics, of chemistry, such methods as spectroanalysis, and so on, are based upon this assumption. And it is true that matter is the same, but materiality is different. And different degrees of materiality depend directly upon the qualities and properties of the energy manifested at a given point. Fragments: Five