PART III
THE WISDOM OF THE SPIRIT (Pneumatosophy)
LECTURE III
Imagination — ‘Imagination’;* Inspiration —
Self-fulfillment; Intuition — Conscience.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Dr. Steiner could employ the
non-German word Imagination in the sense familiar to students
of anthroposophy, without much danger of confusion, because it is
practically never used in German to mean ‘imagination’ in
the common sense (that is Phantasie). In this lecture the two
terms are offset, one against the other, and in translation a
difficulty arises in our having but the one word in English: there is
no synonym for ‘imagination’. The best solution available
seems to be as follows: whenever ‘imagination’ is used in
the ordinary sense (Phantasie) it will appear in inverted
commas, but without these it has the technical meaning. If the reader
will bear this purely arbitrary device in mind he should not be
startled when he runs across something like “imagination leads
to ‘imagination’.”
ESTERDAY we found that in a certain way there is, after all, something
like proof of the existence of the spirit that will satisfy our personal
consciousness, provided the latter is rightly understood. We
maintained that error and the possibility of correcting it are
evidence of the existence of the spirit, in so far as our personal
consciousness is concerned, and in order to understand this we cited
an attribute of the spirit that appears self-evident. That is, its
supersensibility, as we call it, for we based our statement on the
fact that the root of error must be sought in the super-sensible
realm. I said that it would naturally be impossible to present all
the arguments necessary to prove such a matter in full detail, but
that it might be extremely interesting to show how the possibility of
error appears only in that realm to which man raises himself by
casting off the coercion of the outer physical world through all that
he can learn through perception alone.
One fact suffices to indicate the method by which it
could be shown that at bottom it is only through his own nature and
being that man is exposed to the temptation to fall into error
through a connection with the outer world. It has been repeatedly
pointed out that modern science really gathers from all sides certain
proofs of the conclusions arrived at by spiritual science, but the
proponents of external science fail to interpret them with sufficient
open-mindedness.
We will cite one of these facts, established by the
naturalist, Huber, through the observation of caterpillars spinning a
cocoon. There is a caterpillar that builds its web in successive
phases or stages, so that one can describe the process as spinning in
the first stage, second stage, and so forth, up to seven. Now, Huber
took a caterpillar working on the third stage and set it on another
web of which six stages were finished, and a strange thing happened.
At first the caterpillar felt shocked, as one might interpret its
behavior, but then it continued to spin, not the seventh stage, but
the fourth, fifth, etc. It obeyed a sure inner life, following only
its own dictates. When Huber took one of the caterpillars away from
its own cocoon and put it in another that had also arrived at the
third stage, it continued the work in the regular way. It was not
reacting to an outer impression at all. It did not say to itself,
“Now I must spin the fourth stage.” It was following an
inner urge, and this it did even when the outer impression emanated
from another stage.
This is an extremely important fact, because it shows
that in animal beings outer impressions can in no way effect what in
man we call right or wrong — the category “subject to
error.” The human being can be confused by something external,
because the nature of his organization is such as to cause him to
obey not only his inner life of impulses, but the impulses entering
from without as well. In this sense only man confronts an outer
world. Fundamentally, this accounts for all possible illusions in
respect to the concept of the spirit; at least, there is a
connection.
Now, in order to find the right transition from science
to our anthroposophical doctrine of the spirit, let us call to mind
again what a keen teacher of the present, Brentano, brought forward
to characterize the soul and its capacity as such, and to facilitate
the right transition to the spirit realm I will indicate by diagrams
on the blackboard what is in question.
Brentano classifies our psychic faculties as
visualizations, reasoning and what we can call emotions — the
phenomena of love and hate. Well, if we imagine the whole extent of
our soul life as organized in this way, we should have to observe
that visualizations and emotions, if closely studied, bear a
different relation to the soul and to whatever else may enter our
enquiry than do judgments. That is exactly what the soul-teachers,
the psychologists, pride themselves on. They divide visualizations
from reasoning because in reasoning they see something more than a
mere combination of visualizations. Our psychologist by no means sees
in this the essence of reasoning, where something is to be settled;
nor can all this ever have any foundation as such, because, as he
argues, when we combine visualizations it might also be a case of
establishing the possibility of combining visualizations. If, for
example, we were to combine the visualizations “tree” and
“golden” — not “tree” and “green”
— we would be forced to admit axiomatically that no tree is
golden. Now, what is really the premise of the judgment in this
context? It is that we should be able, so to speak, to form a valid
proposition out of every such judgment. From the compound
visualization, “a tree is green,” I can form the valid
proposition, “a green tree is.” Not until then have I
passed judgment. Only when I try to form the proposition do I know
whether the combination of visualizations permits of establishing
anything. “A golden tree is” — that won't do. So
when one asks whether a judgment can proceed from a combination of
visualizations, this would involve the second question: Can a valid
proposition be formed in the case?
Now let me ask you this. If you were to traverse the
entire extent of the soul life, searching everywhere in the soul,
could you anywhere discover the possibility of simply forming a valid
proposition out of a combination of visualizations? What can impel
you to form the proposition, “a green tree is,” out of
the compound visualization, “the tree is green?” What is
it that induces you to do this? Only something that is primarily not
within your soul, because in the whole realm of the soul you can find
nothing of the sort. When you want to make the transition from the
compound conception to the proposition, to the thesis that settles
something, you must emerge from the soul life and seek something
which, as your inner feeling tells you, is not of the nature of the
soul but with which the soul makes contact. That means that there is
no way of accomplishing the transition except through perception.
When a combination of conceptions is joined by what we can call
perception, then and only then is it possible to speak of forming a
judgment within the present meaning.
This shows further that in the first instance we know
nothing more of all that we visualize than simply that it lives in
the soul, and that something more is needed if we are to pass from
conception to reasoning. That emotions exist only in the soul
everybody will doubtless believe even more readily than that this is
the case with visualizations, for if they had their being anywhere
but within the soul they could not bear so individual a character as
they do in different people. We need waste no time explaining that
emotions live primarily in the soul.
We must enquire next if it is in any way possible to
maintain that visualizations and emotions live only in the soul.
Although we know that without the aid of outer perception we cannot
directly arrive at a verdict, because visualizations and emotions are
inner processes of the soul, we must still ask whether anything
justifies our speaking of visualizations and emotions as though they
existed only within the soul. Well, in respect to visualizations we
could first point out that when living in them we by no means feel as
though we mastered them completely in our soul, as though they were
not coercive or the like. We learned yesterday that error is of a
spiritual, super-sensible nature and can enter the realm of our
visualizations, but that the latter in turn can overcome error;
otherwise, it would never be possible to get beyond error. Bearing
this in mind we must recognize the fact that we have in our soul a
kind of battlefield of a conflict between error and — well,
something else. All error is of a spiritual nature, and we must have
something adequate to oppose it, otherwise we could never rise above
it. There is, indeed, a means of overcoming error, as everyone knows.
Since error is spiritual, we cannot overcome it through mere
perception from the sense world. In the lectures on Anthroposophy I
pointed out that the senses as such do not err. Goethe once
emphasized that. It is not the senses that err but what goes on in
the soul; therefore, error can only be corrected within the soul, and
primarily through visualization. It is by means of visualizations,
then, that we get past error.
We found yesterday that in a certain way error is a sort
of abortive species of something else, of something we could
designate as precisely the element in us that raises us to higher
regions of the soul life. The chief characteristic of error is its
non-agreement with the world of perception, and we came to realize
that on the path to the higher world we must devote ourselves in
meditation, concentration, and so forth, to conceptions that also
fail to agree with our perception. The rose cross itself, for
example, is a conception that shares with error its lack of agreement
with outer perception. We said, however, that when error is employed
on the path of spiritual life it would have a destructive effect in
us, and experience shows this to be the case.
How, then, can we achieve conceptions that, though at
variance with the outer world of perception, nevertheless awaken
higher soul forces in a healthy, normal way? How can we proceed from
what is merely false to allegorical conceptions such as we have
described? We can do this by not letting ourselves be guided by the
outer sense world, the world of perception, in compounding such
visualizations, nor, on the other hand, by forces that lead us into
error. We must avoid both of these and appeal to forces in the soul,
which, however, we must first awaken. The day before yesterday we
characterized them as inner stirrings growing only out of the soil of
morality and beauty. We must break, as it were, with impulses and
passions such as are imprinted in us by a world that after all must
be termed external; we must work within ourselves in order to be able
to call up, quite experimentally, forces in our soul that at the
outset we lack entirely. By doing this we learn to form allegorical
conceptions that in a sense have a certain objective validity, though
one not applicable to the outer world of perception.
We start by forming the conception of man as he presents
himself to us in the present time, a being of whom, in a certain
sense, he himself can by no means approve, with whom he cannot be
satisfied, and of whom he must say that such as he is now, he must be
conquered. Then, by the side of this conception we place the other:
that he feels he must strive to realize his own higher nature, a
nature that would give him complete mastery over all that in his
present form he disapproves of. That this second conception cannot be
classed as perception is shown by the fact that it does not refer to
the present or the past, but to man's future. Then, from such
stirrings, we combine conceptions that ordinarily, under the guidance
of the world of perceptions, would not coincide. We bring together
the black cross, symbol of what must be caused to die, and the red
roses, symbol of the life that must arise from it. In inner
meditation we visualize the rose cross, a visualization that can only
be called unreal, yet did not come into being like an external error
but was born of the noblest impulses of our soul.
We have, then, brought forth out of the noblest impulses
of our soul a visualization corresponding to no outer perception and
if we apply this visualization — that is, if we give ourselves
up to it in conscientious inner devotion and let it work upon us —
we find that our soul expands in a healthy way and attains to heights
not reached before. Thus, experience shows the soul to be capable of
development. By means of a visualization that is outwardly an error
we have performed something that manifests itself as intrinsically
right.
The next question is whether or not we can endow all
that crowds into us through outer perception with power over such a
visualization that has nothing in common with this outer perception.
Can we lend it the power to exercise any force that will make of the
visualization something different in our soul from what it makes of
error? We must remember that the quality in us that has converted
this allegorical visualization into something different from anything
that could arise out of error is the opposite of what functions
forcefully in error. We said that in error we felt the Luciferic
forces; now we can say that in the transformation of an allegorical
visualization in the soul, in the wholesome guiding of the
allegorical visualization to a higher aspect of the soul, the lofty
stirrings we feel are the opposite of Luciferic. They are of the
nature of the divine-spiritual.
The deeper you penetrate into this interrelationship,
the more directly you will feel the inner influence of the
super-sensible through this experience of transforming an allegorical
visualization. Then, when we see that the super-sensible effects
something in us, achieves something, operates in us, then what had
previously been mere visualization in the soul, abiding within the
soul element, becomes something quite different, something that we
must now term a conclusion such as the soul, as primarily
constituted, cannot bring about through outer perception. Nor can a
visualization perform in the soul what has been described. Just as
visualization, when coming in contact with the ordinary outer world,
leads to reasoning, so the inner life of a visualization, not lacking
direction but amenable to guidance as set forth, leads out beyond the
visualization itself and transforms it. It becomes something that may
not be a verdict but is at least a visualization fraught with
significance and pointing out beyond the soul. This is what in the
true sense of the term we call imagination. Summing up: When
visualization comes in contact with the outer world through
perception, it points to reasoning, but through the inner process we
have described it points to what we call inner imagination in the
true sense.
Just as perception is not mere visualization, so
imagination is not visualization either. By means of perception, the
life of visualization comes in contact with a primarily unfamiliar
outer world. By means of the process described, visualization adapts
itself to what we may call the imaginative world. Just as there is a
real transition from the mere conceptual complex, “a tree is
green,” to the verdict, “a green tree is,” so there
is an analogous transition from the mere life of conceptions to what
is comprised in imagination, in a conception filled with other than
the yield of a spatial outer world. There we have the process that in
our imaginative life enriches our conceptions.
There is, however, something that intervenes between
imagination and visualizations. Imagination has a way of announcing
itself quite realistically the moment it appears. When our soul
really attains to imagination, it senses in its life of
visualizations something akin to what it feels in its life of
perceptions. In the latter the soul feels — well, its direct
contact with the outer world, with corporeality; in imagination it
feels an indirect contact with a world that at first also appears to
it as an outer world, but this is the outer world of the spirit. When
this spirit begins to live in the visualizations — those that
really attain to imagination — it is just as coercive as outer
corporeality. Just as little as we can imagine a tree as golden when
we are in contact with the outer world — just as the outer
world forces us to visualize in a certain way — so we feel the
compulsion emanating from the spirit when visualization rises to
imagination. In that case, however, we are at the same time aware
that this life of visualizations expresses itself independently of
all the ways and means by which visualizations are ordinarily given a
content. In ordinary life this takes place by reason of our having
perceptions through our eyes, ears, etc., and of our nourishing the
life of visualizations with these perceptions, so that it is filled
from the content of our perceptions. In imagination we suffer our
visualizations to be filled by the spirit. Nothing must intervene
that might become the content of our soul by way of the bodily
organs, nothing that enters us through our eyes or ears. We are
directly conscious of being free of all that pertains to outer
corporeality. We are as directly free of all that as we are —
to use a material comparison — of the processes of the outer
body during sleep. For this reason, as far as the total organism is
concerned all conditions are the same during imagination as during
sleep, except that imaginative consciousness takes the place of the
unconsciousness of sleep. What is otherwise wholly empty, what has
separated from the body, is filled with what we may call imaginative
conceptions. So the only difference between a man in sleep and one in
imagination is that the parts that in sleep are outside the physical
body are devoid of all conceptions in ordinary sleep, whereas in
imagination they are filled with imaginative conceptions.
Now, an intermediate condition can appear. It would be
induced if a man in sleep were filled with imaginative conceptions
but lacked the power to call them to consciousness. Such a condition
is possible, as you can gather from ordinary life. I will merely
remind you that in ordinary life you perceive any number of things of
which you are not aware. Walking along the street, you perceive a
whole world of things that you do not take into your consciousness.
This is shown when you dream of curious things, for there are dreams
that are indeed strange in this respect. You dream, for example, that
a man is standing by a lady and the lady says this or that. Well, the
dream remains in your consciousness, you remember it, but after
you've thought about it you have to admit that the situation actually
occurred, only you would have known nothing of it if you hadn't
dreamed of the experience. The whole event passed your consciousness
by, and not until you dreamed it did the picture enter your
consciousness. That happens often.
Thus, perceptions that have occurred can leave
consciousness untouched, and imaginations that indeed live in the
soul can also leave consciousness untouched so that they do not
appear directly. In that case they appear to consciousness in a
manner similar to that of the perceptions we have just described.
They appear to us in semi-consciousness, in dreaming. Imaginations of
that sort can shine into our waking day-consciousness and there
fluctuate and pass. An imagination of that sort does enter the
everyday human consciousness, but there it experiences changes. It
expresses itself in what is called ‘imagination,’
‘imagination’ based on world truths, the real basis of
all artistic creation, in fact, of all productive work of man.
Because this is so, Goethe, who knew well how art comes
into being, often maintained that ‘imagination’ is by no
means something that arbitrarily manipulates cosmic laws, but that it
is subject to the laws of truth. Now, these laws of truth act
absolutely out of the world of imagination, but here they integrate
the ordinary world of perceptions in a free manner, so that true
‘imagination’ is something between ordinary conception
and imagination. ‘Imagination,’ rightly understood, not
conceived of simply as something that isn't true, bears direct
witness to the progress of conceptions toward the point where they
can flow over into the super-sensible region of the imaginative world.
This is one of the points at which we are able to perceive the direct
streaming in of what we can call the spiritual world into our
ordinary world.
Now let us examine the other aspect, the emotions. It
has already been said that the psychologist under discussion keeps
within the soul, that he therefore follows up all that concerns
impulses of will only as far as these remain within the soul, and
that he stops short at the emotions. Everything that men do is
motivated by a desire, a passion, an urge, that is, that element
within the region of the soul that must be called emotion. Of course,
nothing happens through emotions alone, and as long as we remain
within the soul nothing need happen. No matter how violently we
intensify any emotion, we cannot thereby make something happen that
is independent of the soul because nothing that remains in the soul
is a true expression of will. If the soul never emerged out of
itself, but merely kept wanting to experience desires and emotions —
anything from the deepest reverence to disgust — nothing would
happen that is independent of the soul. When we recognize will in its
true form as a fact, the region of emotions points out beyond the
soul as well.
The manner in which this sphere of emotions points out
beyond the soul is singular. What does it suggest first of all? Well,
if we take the simplest expression of will — if we raise a
hand, walk about, strike the table with some instrument or do
anything else that involves the will — we see that something
takes place in the realm of reality that we can call a passing over
of our emotions by way of an inner impulse to the hand movement, to
something that is certainly no longer in our soul. Yet in a certain
way it is within us because all that happens as a result of a genuine
will impulse when we set our body in motion, and as a continuation of
this, something external as well, lies by no means outside the circle
comprising the being of man. Here, through emotions, we are led on
the other side into an externality, but into a quite different kind
of externality, into our own corporeality, which is our own
externality. We descend from our psychic to our bodily self, to our
own corporeality, but for the moment we do not know how we accomplish
this in external life. Imagine the effort it would cost if, instead
of moving your hand, you had to construct an apparatus, possibly
worked from the outside by springs or the like, that would produce
the same effect as you do in picking up this chalk! Imagine that you
would have to be able to think out all that and realize it by means
of a machine. You can't think that out and there is no such machine;
yet that apparatus exists. Something occurs in the world that is
certainly not in our consciousness, for if it were we could easily
build the apparatus. Something takes place, then, that really
pertains to us, but of which we have no immediate knowledge.
We must ask what would have to take place to make us
aware of a movement of the hand, or of any motion of the body obeying
the will? Another reality as well, the one that is outside us, would
have to be able to enter our consciousness instead of halting before
it. We would need to have before us a process such as takes place in
our own body without penetrating consciousness — a process
equally external, yet connected with consciousness in such a way that
we would be aware of it. We should have to have something that we
experienced in the soul, yet it would have to be something like an
outer experience in this soul. So something just as ingenious as the
picking up of the chalk would have to take place in our consciousness
— just as ingenious and just as firmly based on abiding
external laws. Some external event would have to enter our
consciousness, acting in accord with prevailing laws, that would have
the following effect. We would not think, as we would in the case of
actions of the will, “I will pick up this chalk,” and
consider that as representing one side of our soul life, strictly
divided off from something we don't recognize as an external
perception but, rather, these two processes would have to coincide,
be one and the same. All the details of the hand motions would have
to occur within consciousness.
Now, that is the process that takes place in the case of
intuition. We can put it this way. When we can grasp with our
own consciousness something that comes to full expression within this
consciousness — not merely as knowledge but as an event, a
world event — we are dealing with intuition, or more precisely,
with intuition in the higher sense, such as is meant in my book,
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Within
intuition, then, we are dealing with the governing will. While that
shrewd psychologist, Brentano, finds only emotions within the soul,
not will, because the will does not exist for ordinary consciousness,
it remains for the consciousness that transcends ordinary
consciousness to find something that is a higher event. It is the
point at which the world enters and plays a part in consciousness.
That is, intuition.
Here again we have a sort of transition, only it is a
little less readily noticeable than the one leading from imagination
to ‘imagination’. This transition sets in when we acquire
such power of self-observation as to enable us not merely to will
something and follow this by the deed, with thoughts and deeds
standing dynamically side by side, so to speak, but to start
expanding our emotions themselves over the quality of our deeds. In
many cases this is even useful, yet it can happen in life that in
performing an action we are gratified or disgusted by it. I don't
believe an unprejudiced observer of life can deny the possibility of
so expanding the emotions as to include likes and dislikes for one's
own actions, but this co-experiencing of them in the emotions can be
intensified.
When this has been intensified to the point of its full
potentiality in life, this transition reveals what we can call the
human conscience. All stirrings of conscience occur at the
transition from the emotions to intuition. If we seek the location of
conscience, we find it at this transition. The soul is really open
laterally on the side of imagination and on that of intuition, but it
is closed on the side where we encounter the impact, as it were, of
outer corporeality through perception. It achieves a certain
fulfillment in the realm of imagination, and another when it enters
the realm of intuition — in the latter case through an event.
Now, since imagination and intuition must live in one
soul, how can a sort of mediation, a connection of the two, come
about in this single soul? In imagination we have primarily a
fulfilled image of the spiritual world, in intuition, an event that
impinges out of the spiritual world. An event we encounter in the
ordinary physical world is something that leaves us no peace, so to
speak. We try to understand it, then we seek the essence underlying
it. It is the same in the case of an event in the spiritual world
that is to penetrate our consciousness. Let us consider this more
closely. How does imagination first of all penetrate consciousness?
Well, we found it first on the side of the emotions, but there,
though it enters consciousness, enters the soul, it does so primarily
on the side of the emotions, not on the side of visualization. It is
the same in the case of intuition. Intuition can enter the soul life
without providing the possibility of being visualized. Imagination,
too, can occur without our being aware of it, in which case we have
‘imagination’ directly affecting the world of
visualizations. Intuition, however, is to be found on the side of the
emotions.
You see, in the whole spiritual life of man intuition is
linked with the emotions. I will give you an example, a well-known
dream. A couple had a son who suddenly became ill and in spite of all
that could be done he died within a day. The parents were profoundly
affected. The son continually occupied their thoughts, that is, their
memory; they thought of him a great deal. One morning they found that
during the night both had had the same dream, which they recounted to
each other. (You can find this dream cited by a certain materialistic
interpreter of dreams who turns the most grotesque somersaults in
attempting to explain it.) They dreamt that the son demanded to be
exhumed, as he had been buried alive. The parents made all possible
efforts to comply with this demand, but as they lived in a country in
which exhumation was not permitted after so long a lapse of time, it
could not be done. How can we arrive at a sort of explanation of the
phenomenon presented in this dream? Well, one premise is obvious. The
parents' continuous recollection of the son, who was present in the
spiritual world as a spiritual being, created a bridge to him. Let us
suppose you admit that a bridge to the deceased was built through
memory. You cannot possibly assume that, when all the intervening
veils have been pierced, enabling the deceased to influence the two
people, and when both have the same dream in which he tells them, “I
am buried alive; go and see!” — you cannot assume that he
really said that. Instead, there simply came about a contact in the
night between parents and son. He did tell them something, or
endeavored to instill something into their souls, but since the
parents had no way of bringing to consciousness what it was that the
son had instilled into their souls, their accustomed conceptions
stood in the way of the real events. What the son manifestly wanted
was something quite different because such visualizations could only
have been gathered from the visualization substance of their
accustomed life.
The other part I will explain to you by means of another
dream, the dream a peasant woman had. This peasant woman dreamt she
was going to town, to church. She dreamt vividly of the long walk on
the road and through the fields, of arriving in the town, entering
the church, and listening to the sermon, which moved her deeply, but
it was, above all, the end of the sermon that went to her heart. The
pastor spoke there with special warmth, and with the concluding words
he spread out his arms. Suddenly his voice was transformed. It began
to resemble the crowing of a rooster. Finally it sounded actually
like a cock crowing, and the outspread arms seemed to her like wings.
At the same moment the woman woke up, and out in the barnyard the
rooster crowed. This crowing of the rooster had produced the whole
dream, but you will admit that it might have produced other dreams
just as well. Suppose, for instance, that a thief had been awakened
by it. He might have been wondering how to break a lock, and some
other astute rascal had been giving him directions that then turned
into the cock-crow. That might have been the conception. You see, it
need have no connection with what really entered the soul. The
peasant woman was floating, so to speak, in a world of devotion and,
when this was shattered, she still had the feeling of being
elsewhere, but her entire consciousness was filled by the cock-crow.
What manifested itself could therefore only express itself in
symbols.
When anyone gets practice in passing from such dreams to
reality, he finds that before he can arrive at spiritual reality he
must penetrate some form of emotion — a sorrow or joy, a
tension of this or that feeling. He must form wholly new conceptions
if he would arrive at what the spiritual world comprises, and as a
rule spiritual events are much closer to the emotions than to
conceptions. The conceptual life of dreams is not conclusive in
reporting what has happened there. There we have the spiritual event
impinging. We are present in the spiritual world throughout our
sleeping life, but our visualization is unable to characterize what
we visualize. A similar condition prevails between intuition and the
emotions. That is why mystics arrive at a vague, hazy soul experience
of the higher worlds before attaining to any concretely outlined
conceptions of them, and many mystics remain satisfied with that.
Those whose souls truly meditate in the higher worlds, however, all
describe in the same way the conditions of blissful devotion, their
frame of mind in directly experiencing the spiritual world.
If we then endeavored to proceed through intuition,
which sways the soul, we would not get very far; instead, we must
proceed more from the other side, must try to develop imagination, to
focus our attention on the imaginative world, in order not merely to
wallow in emotions but to arrive at concrete images. If we do that, a
sort of contact enters our life between intuition, which is not yet
understood but rather felt, and imagination, which still floats in
unreality and consists only of images. This contact finally enables
us to ascend to the plane we can describe by saying that we have
arrived among the beings who bring about spiritual events.
Approaching these beings is what we call inspiration, and in a
sense we have here the reverse of the processes confronting us in the
outer corporeal world.
In confronting the outer corporeal world we have, so to
speak, the thoughts we frame about objects. The objects are given,
and we think about them. Here it is the event, the “object,”
that appears in intuition primarily as emotion, so that imagination
as such would remain in suspension. Not until the two unite, until
intuition streams into imagination and visualizations are set free by
imagination so that we feel imagination as coming to us from beings,
not until then does the essence of the beings stream into us as an
event, and what the imaginations have provided flows into intuition.
We perceive in the event a content comparable to that of
visualizations. These thoughts, for the perception of which
imagination has prepared us, we then perceive by means of the event
provided by intuition.
I have described to you today how man ascends to the
spiritual world on the other side of his soul life, as it were. I
have anticipated a little in the matter of what only spiritual
science itself can give, but I had to do this in order that tomorrow
we might be able to understand each other more readily in the
principal subject — a description of the spiritual world
itself.
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