98 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
The forces acting within my skin are the same as those
existing outside it. Therefore, I really am the things: to be
sure, not “I” as a perceived subject, but “I” as a part of the
universal world process. The percept of the tree lies with
my I in the same whole. The universal world process calls
forth equally the percept of the treethere, and the percept
of my Ihere. Were I a world-creator, not a world-knower,
then object and subject (percept and I) would arise in one
act. For they determine each other mutually. As world-
knower, I can find the common element of the two, as two
sides of being that belong together, only through think-
ing, which relates them to each other through concepts.
The so-called physiological proofs of the subjectivity
of percepts will be the hardest of all to drive from the
field. If I exert pressure on my skin, I perceive it as a sen-
sation of pressure. The same pressure may be experi-
enced by me through the eye as light, and through the ear
as sound. I perceive an electric shock through the eye as
light, through the ear as sound, through the nerves of the
skin as impact, and through the nose as an odor of phos-
phorus. What follows from this? Only that I perceive an
electric shock (or pressure) and then a quality of light, or
a sound, or a certain smell, and so forth. If there were no
eye, there would be no percept of light accompanying the
percept of mechanical change in the environment; with-
out an ear, no percept of sound, etc. What right have we
to say that, without organs of perception, the whole pro-
cess would not exist? Those who conclude—from the fact
that an electrical process in the eye evokes light—that
what we sense as light is, outside our organism, only a
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