86 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
Indeed, the sought-after significance of the
world confronting me merely as my mental picture,
or the transition from it as a mere mental picture of
the cognizing subject to what it may be beyond
this, would never be discoverable if the investigator
himself were nothing other than the purely cogniz-
ing subject (a winged cherub without a body). But
he too is rooted in that world, finds himself within
it as anindividual, that is, his cognition, which sup-
ports and determines the whole world as mental
picture, is mediated throughout by a body whose
affections are, as shown above, the intellect’s start-
ing point for contemplation of that world. For the
purely cognizing subject as such, this body is a
mental picture like any other, an object among
objects: its movements, its actions are known to
him no differently from the changes in all other
observable objects, and would be just as strange
and incomprehensible to him, if their meaning were
not deciphered for him in a completely different
way.... For the subject of cognizing, which
appears as an individual through its identity with
the body, this body is given in two quite distinct
ways: first as mental picture for the intellect’s con-
templation, as object among objects and subject to
their laws; but at the same time in a quite different
way, namely as that which is known immediately to
everyone by the word will. Every true act of his
will is instantly and unfailingly a movement of his
body as well: he cannot really will the act without