108 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
a transaction that we must each accomplish for ourselves.
Things demand no explanation. They exist and work on
one another according to laws that thinking can discover.
They exist in indivisible unity with these laws. Our I-
hood then confronts them, initially comprehending in
them only what we have described as the percept. But
within this I-hood also lies the power to find the other part
of reality. Cognitive satisfaction is attained only when the
I has united foritself both the elements of reality that are
indivisibly connected in the world—for then the I has
reached reality once again.
The preconditions for cognizing exist through andfor
the I. The I itself poses the questions of cognition. In
fact, it draws them from the element of thinking, which
is completely clear and transparent within itself. If we
ask ourselves questions that we cannot answer, their
content cannot be clear and distinct in every aspect. It is
not the world that poses questions to us; we pose them to
ourselves.
I can easily imagine that I would be quite incapable of
answering a question that I happened to find written down
somewhere if I did not know the sphere from which its
content came.
Our cognition involves questions that emerge for us be-
cause a conceptual sphere, pointing to the totality of the
world, confronts a perceptual sphere conditioned by place,
time, and subjective organization. Our task is to balance
these two spheres, both of which we know well. This has
nothing to do with a limit to cognition. At a particular
time, this or that might remain unexplained because the
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