92 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
idealism, cannot be raised at all. Only what is perceived
as belonging to the subject can be characterized as subjec-
tive. The link between the subjective and the objective is
not built by any real process (in the naive sense)—that is,
by any perceptible event. It is built by thinking alone. For
this reason what seems to lie outside the perceived sub-
ject is objective for us. The percept of myself as subject
remains perceivable for me when the table now before
me has vanished from my observational field. But obser-
vation of the table has evoked in me an alteration that
also remains. I retain the capacity to create an image of
the table again later. This capacity to produce an image
remains united with me. Psychology calls this image a
memory-picture. Yet it is the only thing that can properly
be called themental picture of the table. For it corre-
sponds to the perceptible alteration in my own state
through the presence of the table in my field of sight. It
does not, in fact, signify a change in some “I-in-itself”
standing behind the perceived subject, but rather a change
in the perceptible subject itself. The mental picture is thus
a subjective percept in contrast to the objective percept of
a thing lying within the perceptual horizon. The confu-
sion of subjective percepts with objective percepts leads
in idealism to the misunderstanding that the world is my
mental picture.
We must now define the concept of mental picture
more narrowly. What we have put forward about it so far
is not its concept, but merely points the way toward find-
ing the mental picture within our perceptual field. The ex-
act concept of the mental picture will then make it
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