The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. The Cognition of the World

[ 1 ] From the preceding considerations it follows that it is impossible to prove, by examining the content of our observations, that our perceptions are representations. This proof is to be provided by showing that if the process of perception takes place in the way we imagine it according to naive realist assumptions about the psychological and physiological constitution of our individual, then we are not dealing with things in themselves, but merely with our ideas about things. If naïve realism, pursued consistently, leads to results that are the exact opposite of its presuppositions, then these presuppositions must be labeled as unsuitable for establishing a worldview and must be dropped. In any case, it is inadmissible to reject the premises and accept the conclusions, as the critical idealist does, who bases his assertion that the world is my conception on the above line of reasoning. (Eduard von Hartmann gives a detailed account of this line of reasoning in his essay "Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie").

[ 2 ] Another is the correctness of critical idealism, another the persuasiveness of its proofs. How it stands with the former will emerge later in the context of our remarks. But the persuasiveness of its proof is zero. If you build a house and the ground floor collapses when the second floor is built, the first floor collapses with it. Naïve realism and critical idealism behave like this ground floor to the second floor.

[ 3 ] Those who are of the opinion that the whole perceived world is only an imagined one, namely the effect of things unknown to me on my soul, for them the real question of knowledge naturally does not concern the ideas that exist only in the soul, but rather the things that lie beyond our consciousness and are independent of us. He asks: How much of the latter can we recognize immediately, since they are not immediately accessible to our observation? The person on this standpoint is not concerned with the inner connection of his conscious perceptions, but with their causes, which are no longer conscious and have an existence independent of him, while, in his view, the perceptions disappear as soon as he turns his senses away from things. From this point of view, our consciousness acts like a mirror whose images of certain things also disappear the moment its reflecting surface is not turned towards them. But he who does not see the things themselves, but only their mirror images, must inform himself indirectly by inference from the behavior of the latter as to the nature of the former. This is the standpoint of modern natural science, which uses perceptions only as a last resort in order to gain information about the processes of matter that lie behind them and are the only true ones. If the philosopher, as a critical idealist, accepts a being at all, then his striving for knowledge, with the indirect use of perceptions, is directed solely towards this being. His interest skips the subjective world of ideas and focuses on the generative power of these ideas.

[ 4 ] The critical idealist, however, can go so far as to say: I am enclosed in my world of ideas and cannot escape from it. If I think a thing behind my imagination, then this thought is nothing more than my imagination. Such an idealist will then either deny the thing itself altogether or at least declare that it has no meaning for us humans, that is, that it is as good as non-existent, because we cannot know anything about it.

[ 5 ] To a critical idealist of this kind, the whole world appears as a dream against which any urge for knowledge would simply be meaningless. For him, there can only be two kinds of people: The biased, who consider their own dreams to be real things, and the wise, who see through the futility of this dream world and who must gradually lose all desire to concern themselves with it. From this point of view, one's own personality can also become a mere dream image. Just as our own dream image appears among the images of our sleep dream, so in waking consciousness the idea of our own ego is added to the idea of the outside world. In consciousness we have then not given our real ego, but only our ego image. Whoever denies that things exist, or at least that we can know anything about them, must also deny the existence or realization of his own personality. The critical idealist then comes to the assertion: "All reality is transformed into a wonderful dream, without a life that is dreamed of, and without a spirit that dreams; into a dream that is connected in a dream of itself" (cf. Fichte, The Destiny of Man).

[ 6 ] It makes no difference whether the person who believes to recognize immediate life as a dream no longer suspects anything behind this dream, or whether he relates his ideas to real things: life itself must lose all scientific interest for him. But while for those who believe that the universe accessible to us is exhausted by dreams, all science is an absurdity, for the other, who believes himself authorized to deduce things from ideas, science will consist in the investigation of these "things in themselves". The former world view can be referred to as absolute illusionism, the second is called transcendental realism by its most consistent representative, Eduard von Hartmann. ^{1Transcendental, in the sense of this worldview, is the name given to a knowledge that consciously believes that nothing can be said directly about things in themselves, but which draws indirect conclusions from the known subjective to the unknown that lies beyond the subjective (transcendental). According to this view, the thing in itself is beyond the realm of the world immediately recognizable to us, i.e. transcendent. - However, our world can be related transcendentally to the transcendent. Hartmann's view is called realism because it goes beyond the subjective, the ideal, to the transcendental, the real.}

[ 7 ] These two views have in common with naïve realism that they seek to gain a foothold in the world through an investigation of perceptions. However, they cannot find a fixed point anywhere within this area.

[ 8 ] A main question for the proponent of transcendental realism would have to be: how does the ego bring about the world of ideas from within itself? A serious striving for knowledge can warm up to a world of ideas given to us, which disappears as soon as we close our senses to the outside world, insofar as it is the means of indirectly exploring the world of the self that exists in itself. If the things of our experience were images, then our everyday life would resemble a dream and the realization of the true facts would resemble awakening. We are also interested in our dream images as long as we are dreaming and therefore do not see through the nature of dreams. At the moment of awakening we no longer ask about the inner context of our dream images, but about the physical, physiological and psychological processes on which they are based. Nor can the philosopher, who considers the world to be his imagination, be interested in the inner connection of the details in it. If he accepts an existing ego at all, then he will not ask how one of his ideas is connected with another, but what is going on in the soul that is independent of him, while his consciousness contains a certain imaginative process. If I dream that I am drinking wine, which causes a burning sensation in my larynx and then wake up with a cough (see Weygandt, Entstehung der Träume, 1893), the dream action ceases to be of interest to me at the moment of awakening. My attention is now directed only to the physiological and psychological processes by which the coughing stimulus is symbolically expressed in the dream image. In a similar way the philosopher, as soon as he is convinced of the imaginary character of the given world, must immediately jump from it to the real soul behind it. The situation is worse, however, when illusionism completely denies the ego behind the ideas, or at least considers it unrecognizable. To such a view the observation can very easily lead that, in contrast to dreaming, there is the state of waking, in which we have the opportunity to see through dreams and relate them to real conditions, but that we have no state in a similar relationship to the waking life of consciousness. He who professes this view lacks the insight that there is something which in fact relates to mere perception as experience in the waking state relates to dreaming. This something is thinking.

[ 9 ] The naive person cannot be credited with the lack of insight that is being referred to here. He surrenders to life and considers things to be real as they present themselves to him in experience. The first step, however, which is taken beyond this standpoint, can only consist in the question: how does thinking relate to perception? It makes no difference whether perception continues to exist in the form given to me before and after my imagination or not: if I want to say anything about it, it can only be done with the help of thinking. If I say: the world is my imagination, then I have expressed the result of a thinking process, and if my thinking is not applicable to the world, then this result is an error. Thinking interposes itself between perception and any kind of statement about it.

[ 10 ] We have already indicated the reason why thinking is usually overlooked when considering things (see page 42f.). It lies in the fact that we only focus our attention on the object we are thinking about, but not on thinking at the same time. The naive consciousness therefore treats thinking as something that has nothing to do with things, but stands quite apart from them and makes its observations about the world. The picture that the thinker draws of the phenomena of the world is not regarded as something that belongs to things, but as something that exists only in the mind of man; the world is also finished without this picture. The world is finished in all its substances and powers; and man creates an image of this finished world. Those who think in this way need only ask: by what right do you declare the world to be finished without thinking? Does not the world bring forth thought in the mind of man with the same necessity as the blossom on the plant? Plant a seed in the ground. It sprouts roots and stems. It unfolds into leaves and flowers. Place the plant opposite yourself. It is associated in your soul with a certain concept. Why does this concept belong less to the whole plant than the leaf and flower? You say: the leaves and flowers are there without a perceiving subject; the concept only appears when the human being confronts the plant. Quite so. But flowers and leaves also only develop on the plant when there is soil in which the germ can be placed, when there is light and air in which leaves and flowers can unfold. This is precisely how the concept of the plant arises when a thinking consciousness approaches the plant.

[ 11 ] It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through mere perception as a totality, as a whole, and that which arises through thinking contemplation as such an addition that has nothing to do with the thing itself. When I receive a rosebud today, the image that presents itself to my perception is only initially a closed one. If I put the bud in water, tomorrow I will receive a completely different image of my object. If I do not turn my eye away from the rosebud, I will see today's state continuously changing into tomorrow's through countless intermediate stages. The image that presents itself to me at a particular moment is only a random section of the object that is in a constant state of becoming. If I do not place the bud in water, it will not bring to development a whole series of states which it had the potential to develop. Likewise, tomorrow I may be prevented from further observing the blossom and thus have an incomplete picture.

[ 12 ] It is a completely unobjective opinion, attached to coincidences, which declares of the picture that presents itself at a certain time: that is the thing.

[ 13 ] Nor is it permissible to declare the sum of perceptual features to be the thing. It would be quite possible for a mind to perceive the concept simultaneously and inseparably from perception. Such a mind would not even think of regarding the concept as something that does not belong to the thing. It would have to attribute to it an existence inseparably connected with the thing.

[ 14 ] I will make myself clearer with an example. If I throw a stone horizontally through the air, I see it in different places one after the other. I connect these places to form a line. In mathematics, I learn about different line shapes, including the parabola. I know the parabola as a line that is formed when a point moves in a certain lawful way. When I examine the conditions under which the thrown stone moves, I find that the line of its movement is identical to the one I know as a parabola. The fact that the stone moves in a parabola is a consequence of the given conditions and necessarily follows from them. The shape of the parabola belongs to the whole phenomenon, like everything else that comes into consideration. The mind described above, which would not have to take the detour of thinking, would not only be given a sum of facial sensations in different places, but also the parabolic form of the cube line, which we only add to the appearance by thinking,

without being separated from the appearance.

[ 15 ] It is not because of the objects that they are initially given to us without the corresponding concepts, but because of our mental organization. Our total being functions in such a way that for each object of reality the elements that are relevant to the object flow into it from two sides: from the side of perception and thought.

[ 16 ] It has nothing to do with the nature of things how I am organized to grasp them. The intersection between perceiving and thinking is only present at the moment when I, the observer, come face to face with things, but which elements belong to the thing and which do not cannot depend on how I come to know these elements.

[ 17 ] Man is a limited being. First of all, he is a being among other beings. His existence belongs to space and time. As a result, only a limited part of the entire universe can ever be given to him. However, this limited part is connected to others all around it in terms of both time and space. If our existence were linked to things in such a way that every world event was also our event, then there would be no difference between us and things. But then there would also be no individual things for us. All events would merge continuously into one another. The cosmos would be a unity and a self-contained whole. The stream of events would have no interruption anywhere. Because of our limitations, what in truth is not a single entity appears to us as a single entity. Nowhere, for example, is the individual quality of red present in isolation. It is surrounded on all sides by other qualities to which it belongs and without which it could not exist. For us, however, it is a necessity to single out certain sections of the world and view them in isolation. Our eye can only grasp individual colors one after the other from a multi-membered color whole, our mind only individual concepts from a coherent conceptual system. This separation is a subjective act, conditioned by the fact that we are not identical with the world process, but one being among other beings.

[ 18 ] It is now all a matter of determining the position of the being that we ourselves are in relation to the other beings. This determination must be distinguished from the mere awareness of ourselves. The latter is based on perception like the awareness of any other thing. Self-perception shows me a sum of qualities which I combine into the whole of my personality, just as I combine the qualities: yellow, shiny metal, hard etc. into the unit "gold". Self-perception does not lead me out of the realm of what belongs to me. This self-perception is to be distinguished from the thinking self-determination. Just as I integrate an individual perception of the outside world into the context of the world through thinking, I integrate the perceptions I make of myself into the world process through thinking. My self-perception includes me within certain boundaries; my thinking has nothing to do with these boundaries. In this sense I am a double being. I am enclosed in the area that I perceive as that of my personality, but I am the bearer of an activity that determines my limited existence from a higher sphere. Our thinking is not individual like our feelings and sensations. It is universal. It acquires an individual character in every single person only because it is related to his individual feelings and sensations. Individual people differ from one another through these particular colorations of universal thinking. A triangle has only one concept. It makes no difference to the content of this concept whether the human consciousness carrier A or B grasps it. However, it will be grasped by each of the two carriers of consciousness in an individual way.

[ 19 ] This thought is opposed by a human prejudice that is difficult to overcome. The bias does not reach the realization that the concept of the triangle grasped by my head is the same as that grasped by the head of the person next to me. The naive person believes himself to be the creator of his concepts. He therefore believes that each person has his own concepts. It is a basic requirement of philosophical thought to overcome this prejudice. The one unified concept of the triangle does not become a multiplicity by the fact that it is thought by many. For the thinking of the many is itself a unity.

[ 20 ] In thinking we have given the element that unites our particular individuality with the cosmos into a whole. By feeling and sensing (also perceiving), we are individuals; by thinking, we are the all-one being that permeates everything. This is the deeper reason for our dual nature: we see in ourselves an absolute force coming into existence, a force that is universal, but we do not come to know it as it emanates from the center of the world, but at a point on the periphery. If the former were the case, then we would know the whole riddle of the world the moment we become conscious of it. But since we stand in a point of the periphery and find our own existence enclosed within certain boundaries, we must get to know the area outside of our own being with the help of the thinking that projects into us from the general being of the world.

[ 21 ] Because the thinking in us reaches beyond our special being and relates to the general being of the world, the drive of cognition arises in us. Beings without thinking do not have this drive. If other things confront them, this does not give rise to questions. These other things remain external to such beings. In thinking beings, the concept confronts external things. It is that which we receive from the thing not from without but from within. The balance, the unification of the two elements, the inner and the outer, is to be provided by knowledge.

[ 22 ] Perception is therefore not something finished, completed, but one side of total reality. The other side is the concept. The act of cognition is the synthesis of perception and concept. However, perception and concept of a thing only make up the whole thing.

[ 23 ] The preceding explanations provide the proof that it is an absurdity to seek something else in common in the individual beings of the world than the ideal content that thinking presents to us. All attempts must fail that strive for a world unity other than this coherent ideal content, which we acquire through thoughtful contemplation of our perceptions. Not a human-personal God, not force or substance, nor the will without ideas (Schopenhauer's) can be regarded as a universal world unity. These entities all belong only to a limited area of our observation. We only perceive humanly limited personality in ourselves, power and substance in external things. As far as will is concerned, it can only be regarded as the expression of the activity of our limited personality. Schopenhauer wants to avoid making "abstract" thinking the bearer of world unity and instead seeks something that presents itself to him directly as something real. This philosopher believes that we can never get to grips with the world if we regard it as an external world. "In fact, the investigated meaning of the world that confronts me merely as my imagination, or the transition from it, as the mere imagination of the cognizing subject, to whatever else it may be, would never be found if the investigator himself were nothing more than the purely cognizing subject (winged angel's head without a body). But now he himself is rooted in that world, namely finds himself in it as an individual, that is, his cognition, which is the conditional carrier of the whole world as a conception, is nevertheless absolutely mediated by a body whose affections, as shown, are the starting point of the understanding's view of that world. This body is for the purely cognizing subject as such an idea like any other, an object among objects: the movements, the actions of this body are known to it in this respect no differently than the changes of all other visual objects, and would be just as strange and incomprehensible to it if the meaning of these were not unraveled for it in a completely different way.... To the subject of cognition, which appears as an individual through its identity with the body, this body is given in two quite different ways: first, as a conception in intelligible perception, as an object among objects, and subject to the laws of these; but then also at the same time in a quite different way, namely as that which is immediately known to everyone, which the word will denotes. Every true act of his will is immediately and inevitably also a movement of his body: he cannot really will the act without at the same time perceiving that it appears as a movement of the body. The act of the will and the action of the body are not two objectively recognized different states linked by the bond of causality, they are not in the relation of cause and effect; but they are one and the same, only given in two entirely different ways: once quite directly and once in the perception of the intellect." As a result of these arguments, Schopenhauer believes he is justified in finding the "objectivity" of the will in the human body. He is of the opinion that he can immediately feel a reality, the thing in itself in concreto, in the actions of the body. It must be objected to these statements that the actions of our body only come to our consciousness through self-perception and as such have nothing in advance of other perceptions. If we want to recognize their essence, we can only do so through thinking observation, that is, by integrating them into the ideal system of our concepts and ideas.

[ 24 ] The opinion that thinking is abstract, without any concrete content, is most deeply rooted in the naïve consciousness of mankind. At most, it can provide an "ideal" counter-image of world unity, not unity itself. Anyone who judges in this way has never realized what perception is without the concept. Let us only look at this world of perception: it appears as a mere juxtaposition in space and succession in time, an aggregate of incoherent details. None of the things that appear and disappear on the stage of perception has anything directly to do with the others that can be perceived. The world is a multiplicity of objects of equal value. No one plays a greater role than the other in the workings of the world. If we are to realize that this or that fact is more important than the other, we must question our thinking. Without functioning thinking, the rudimentary organ of the animal, which is of no importance for its life, appears to us to be of equal value to the most important bodily organ. The individual facts only emerge in their significance in themselves and for the other parts of the world when thinking pulls its strings from being to being. This activity of thinking is a contentful one. For I can only know why the snail is on a lower level of organization than the lion through a very specific concrete content. The mere sight, the perception gives me no content that could teach me about the perfection of the organization.

[ 25 ] Thinking brings this content to perception from the world of concepts and ideas of man. In contrast to the content of perception, which is given to us externally, the content of thought appears internally. The form in which it first appears is what we want to call intuition. It is to thinking what observation is to perception. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge. We are strangers to an observed thing in the world as long as we do not have the corresponding intuition within us to fill in the missing piece of reality in our perception. If you do not have the ability to find the intuitions that correspond to things, the full reality remains closed to you. Just as the color-blind person only sees differences in brightness without color qualities, the intuitionless person can only observe incoherent fragments of perception.

[ 26 ] To explain, make comprehensible a thing means nothing other than to place it in the context from which it has been torn by the above-described arrangement of our organization. There is no such thing as a thing separated from the world as a whole. All separation has merely subjective validity for our organization. For us, the whole of the world is divided into: above and below, before and after, cause and effect, object and idea, substance and force, object and subject, etc. The details that confront us in observation are connected link by link through the coherent, unified world of our intuitions; and through thinking we reunite everything that we have separated through perception.

[ 27 ] The mysteriousness of an object lies in its special existence. However, this is caused by us and can, within the conceptual world, also be abolished again.

[ 28 ] Nothing is given to us directly except through thinking and perception. The question now arises: what about the meaning of perception according to our explanations? We have indeed recognized that the proof which critical idealism presents for the subjective nature of perceptions falls apart in itself; but the insight into the incorrectness of the proof does not yet establish that the matter itself is based on an error. Critical idealism does not start from the absolute nature of thought in its reasoning, but relies on the fact that naive realism, consistently pursued, cancels itself out. What is the situation once the absoluteness of thought has been recognized?

[ 29 ] Suppose that a certain perception, for example red, appears in my consciousness. On further observation, the perception proves to be connected with other perceptions, for example of a certain figure, with certain perceptions of temperature and touch. I call this connection an object of the sensory world. I can now ask myself: what else can be found in that section of space in which the above perceptions appear to me? I will find mechanical, chemical and other processes within the section of space. Now I go further and examine the processes that I find on the way from the object to my sensory organs. I can find processes of motion in an elastic medium which, in their nature, have not the slightest thing in common with the original perceptions. I obtain the same result when I examine the further mediation from the sense organs to the brain. In each of these areas I make new perceptions; but what weaves itself through all these spatially and temporally separated perceptions as a binding agent is thinking. The vibrations of the air that mediate sound are given to me as perceptions just as much as the sound itself. Only thinking links all these perceptions together and shows them in their mutual relationships. We cannot speak of there being anything other than what is directly perceived, other than that which is recognized through the ideal connections of the perceptions (to be revealed by thinking). The relationship of the objects of perception to the subject of perception that goes beyond what is merely perceived is therefore a merely ideal one, that is, one that can only be expressed through concepts. Only if I could perceive how the perceptual object affects the perceptual subject, or vice versa, if I could observe the construction of the perceptual image by the subject, would it be possible to speak as modern physiology and the critical idealism based on it do. This view confuses an ideal reference (of the object to the subject) with a process that could only be spoken of if it could be perceived. The sentence "No color without an eye that perceives color" can therefore not mean that the eye produces color, but only that there is an ideal connection between the perception of color and the perception of the eye that can be recognized by thinking. Empirical science will have to determine how the properties of the eye and those of color relate to each other; by what means the organ of vision mediates the perception of color, etc. I can trace how one perception follows another, how it is spatially related to others, and then express this in a conceptual form; but I cannot perceive how a perception emerges from the imperceptible. All efforts to search for other than mental relationships between perceptions must necessarily fail.

[ 30 ] So what is perception? Generally speaking, this question is absurd. Perception always occurs as a very specific, concrete content. This content is immediately given and exhausts itself in the given. With regard to this given, one can only ask what it is outside of perception, that is: for thinking. The question of the "what" of a perception can therefore only go to the conceptual intuition that corresponds to it. From this point of view, the question of the subjectivity of perception in the sense of critical idealism cannot be raised at all. Only that which is perceived as belonging to the subject can be described as subjective. The bond between the subjective and the objective cannot be formed by a process that is real in the naïve sense, i.e. a perceptible event, but only by thinking. What is objective for us is therefore what appears to be outside the subject of perception. My subject of perception remains perceptible to me when the table that has just been standing in front of me has disappeared from the circle of my observation. The observation of the table has brought about an equally permanent change in me. I retain the ability to create an image of the table again later. This ability to produce an image remains with me. Psychology refers to this image as a memory. However, it is that which alone can rightly be called the image of the table. It corresponds to the perceptible change in my own state through the presence of the table in my field of vision. And it does not mean the change of any "I in itself" standing behind the subject of perception, but the change of the perceptible subject itself. Imagination is thus a subjective perception in contrast to objective perception in the presence of the object in the horizon of perception. Lumping together this subjective perception with this objective perception leads to the misunderstanding of idealism: the world is my imagination.

[ 31 ] It will now be a matter of defining the concept of the imagination in more detail. What we have said about it so far is not the concept of it, but only points the way to where it can be found in the field of perception. The exact concept of the imagination will then also make it possible for us to gain a satisfactory insight into the relationship between imagination and object. This will then also lead us across the boundary where the relationship between the human subject and the object belonging to the world is led down from the purely conceptual field of cognition into concrete individual life. Once we know what we have to think of the world, it will be easy to adapt ourselves accordingly. We can only be fully active when we know the object belonging to the world to which we dedicate our activity.

Addition to the new edition (1918)

[ 32 ] The view that is characterized here can be seen as one to which man is initially driven, as is natural, when he begins to think about his relationship to the world. He sees himself entangled in a thought formation that dissolves for him by forming it. This thought formation is one whose mere theoretical refutation does not do everything necessary for it. One must live through it in order to find the way out of the insight into the aberration into which it leads. It must appear in an argument about man's relationship to the world not because one wants to refute others who one believes have an incorrect view of this relationship, but because one must know the confusion into which any initial reflection on such a relationship can lead. One must gain the insight into how to refute himself in relation to this first reflection. The above remarks are meant from such a point of view.

[ 33 ] Whoever wants to develop a view of man's relationship to the world becomes aware that he establishes at least part of this relationship by forming ideas about world things and world processes. This takes his gaze away from what is outside in the world and directs it to his inner world, to his imaginative life. He begins to say to himself: I cannot have a relationship to any thing or any process unless an imagination arises in me. It is then only a step from noticing this fact to the opinion: but I only experience my ideas; I only know of a world outside in so far as it is an idea within me. This opinion abandons the naive standpoint of reality that man adopts before all reflection on his relationship to the world. From this point of view, he believes that he is dealing with real things. Self-reflection pushes away from this standpoint. It does not allow man to look at a reality such as the naive consciousness thinks it has before it. It only allows him to look at his ideas; these interpose themselves between his own being and a possibly real world, as the naïve point of view believes it is allowed to assert. Man can no longer look at such a reality through the interposed world of imagination. He must assume that he is blind to this reality. This gives rise to the idea of a "thing in itself" that is inaccessible to cognition. - As long as one remains in the contemplation of the relationship that man seems to enter into with the world through his imaginary life, one will not be able to escape this thought formation. One cannot remain on the naive standpoint of reality if one does not want to artificially close oneself off to the urge for knowledge. The fact that this urge for knowledge of the relationship between man and the world exists shows that this naive standpoint must be abandoned. If the naïve point of view were something that could be recognized as truth, one could not feel this urge. - But one does not arrive at anything else that one could regard as truth if one merely abandons the naïve standpoint but - without realizing it - retains the way of thinking that it imposes. One falls into such a mistake when one says to oneself: I only experience my ideas, and while I believe that I am dealing with realities, I am only conscious of my ideas of realities; I must therefore assume that outside the circle of my consciousness there are only true realities, "things in themselves", of which I know nothing directly, which somehow come to me and influence me in such a way that my imaginary world comes to life in me. Anyone who thinks in this way is only adding another world to the one before him in his thoughts; but he would actually have to start his mental work all over again with regard to this world. For the unknown "thing in itself" is not thought of differently in its relation to man's own being than the known one of the naive standpoint of reality. - One only escapes the confusion into which one falls through critical reflection with regard to this point of view if one realizes that within what one can perceive inside oneself and outside in the world, there is something that cannot fall prey to the fate that the imagination interposes itself between the process and the person observing it. And this is thinking. Man can remain on the naive standpoint of reality in the face of thinking. If he does not do so, it is only because he has noticed that he must leave this standpoint for something else, but does not realize that the insight thus gained is not applicable to thinking. If he becomes aware of this, then he opens up access to the other insight that in thinking and through thinking that which man seems to blind himself to must be recognized, in that he must interpose the life of imagination between the world and himself. - The author of this book has been reproached by those who hold him in high esteem for the fact that in his exposition of thought he stops at a naïve realism of thought, such as exists when one considers the real world and the imaginary world to be one. But the author of these remarks believes to have proved in them that the validity of this "naive realism" for thinking necessarily results from an unbiased observation of it; and that naive realism, which does not apply to anything else, is overcome by recognizing the true essence of thinking.