Number is the most accessible primitive manifestation of this transcendental spontaneous principle of movement in the psyche
Consequently, it is not only the parallelism of concepts (to which Bohr and Pauli have both drawn attention) which nowadays draws physics and psychology together, but more significantly the psychic dynamics of the concept of number as an archetypal actuality appearing in its “transgressive” aspect in the realm of matter.
It preconsciously orders both psychic thought processes and the manifestations of material reality.
As the active ordering factor, it represents the essence of what we generally term “mind.”
Indeed [says Jung], this ordering capacity or quality of the mind also inheres in the other realms; physics can create order in the psychic, and the psyche in the realm of matter, but in principle both are subject to the mind or spirit, in other words-number.
In “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales” Jung describes the nature of the spirit, when it becomes observable in a psychic manifestation, as that unknown element embodying a spontaneous principle of movement in the unconscious psyche which engenders, autonomously manipulates, and orders inner images.
Number is, as it were, the most accessible primitive manifestation of this transcendental spontaneous principle of movement in the psyche
The question then becomes:
In what form is the “spirit,” or mind, i.e., the dynamic ordering factor of the unconscious, bound up with matter and psyche?
Probably it operates (precisely in the form of number) in the background of these two regions, but it does not have a causal effect on them (otherwise the spirit would have to be partly material and partly psychological, or we would have to fall back on the old conception of a subtle body).
Most likely number expresses an essential quality of phenomenon, and phenomenon represents an essential quality of the spirit, and it is precisely these facts that let us guess the existence of a unitary reality (umus mundus).
In the last analysis, the mystery of the unus mundus resides in the nature of number.
The means by which we experience the hieroglyphs of the Unus Mundus is always a numerical value; a pile of stones, for instance, simply lies there and an observer is present who perceives them.
This in itself is our most direct experience of the unus mundus.
I shall try in the following chapters to clarify these abstract formulations of Jung’s.
The diagram on p. 55 may be useful in clarifying epistemologically the processes of cognition I have been describing.
By consciously turning away from physical reality (matter) the psychologist observes the so-called psychic reality (shaded area A).
The physicist, on the other hand, observes the psychic images of physical reality or relations among physical data ( crosshatched area B) through the elimination of the psychic, experienced by him as a “personal subjective element.”
But for the psychologist, another unknown lurks behind observable psychic reality, since he cannot define psychic reality while he himself is enveloped by it.
Behind that which the physicist calls matter there probably also lies a “reality,” unrecognizable in itself (the two hatched outer rings).
It is probable, as Jung points out, that the unknowns in both fields ultimately partake of the same reality. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Number and Time, Page 53-54
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