78 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
in the soul that exists independently from themselves,
while their consciousness contains a specific sequence of
mental pictures. If I dream that I am drinking wine that
causes burning in my throat, and then wake up with a
cough, the plot of the dream ceases to be of any interest
to me at the moment of awakening.^3 My attention is now
directed only to the physiological and psychological pro-
cesses through which the sore throat expresses itself sym-
bolically in the dream. Similarly, as soon as philosophers
are convinced that the given world has the character of a
mental picture, they should immediately pass over it to
the real soul lying behind it. Of course, the matter is
worse if illusionism completely denies an I-in-itself be-
hind the mental pictures, or at least holds it to be unknow-
able. We can be led to such a view very easily if we
observe that, in contrast to dreaming, there is a state of
waking, in which we have an opportunity to see through
dreams and relate them to real events, but that there is no
state that stands in a similar relationship to waking con-
sciousness. Those who profess this view, however, lack
the insight that there is, in fact, something that relates to
mere perception as experiences in the waking state relate
to dreaming. That something isthinking.
This lack of insight cannot be attributed to the naive ob-
server. Such people give themselves over to life and con-
sider things to be as real as they seem in experience. But
the first step to be taken beyond this naive standpoint can
only be to ask: “How does thinking relate to perception?”
- Cf. Weygandt,Entstehung der Traume, 1893. (Author’s note)
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