The physical world is to a great extent an expression of life. This life is concentrated in the empty space around the shining star systems that we see in the clear night sky. All these shining stars or stellar systems have emerged from the darkness of empty space. They are, so to speak, a product of this empty space, just as we see them disappear again into the darkness and become invisible, leaving behind them only empty space.
      We have before us therefore a gigantic empty space in which worlds appear and disappear. Since something cannot come from nothing, just as something cannot either become nothing, what we experience here is fictitious. We see that shining clouds arise, so to speak, from nothing. These clouds in turn condense into suns and galaxies, culminate in a state of light and heat in order thereafter once again, over vast periods of time, to meet their destruction, to disintegrate into the darkness, to become nothing in the universe.
      Since something, as previously mentioned, cannot become nothing, this emergence of the heavenly bodies in space cannot possibly be the beginning of substance or matter. These substances must have already fully existed before they became the gaseous clouds and the suns and planets that we see before our eyes out in space.
      Since something cannot become nothing, the disintegration and disappearance of the heavenly bodies in space cannot be the destruction of the substances or the absolute end of matter, which we also see with our physical eyes. This establishes as fact that substances can exist in a state where they are inaccessible to our physical senses. And where matter or substances are not accessible to our physical senses, we can of course sense nothing. But where we can sense nothing and can therefore experience no details whatsoever, we can experience existence only as empty space.