112 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
For naive consciousness, the self-sufficient existence
of what can be experienced through ideas is not consid-
ered to be real in the same way as what can be experi-
enced through the senses. Until conviction of its reality
is supplied by sense-perception, an object grasped in
“idea alone” is a mere chimera. In brief, the naive person
demands, in addition to the conceptual evidence of
thinking, the real evidence of the senses. The basis for
the development of primitive forms of belief in revela-
tion lies in this naive human need. To naive conscious-
ness, the god given through thinking always remains
merely a “thought” god. Naive consciousness demands
revelation through means accessible to sensory percep-
tion. God must appear bodily, and the testimony of
thinking counts little. Rather, divinity must be confirm-
able by the senses through such things as the transforma-
tion of water into wine.
The naive person imagines that cognition is itself a pro-
cess analogous to sensory processes. Things make anim-
pression on the soul, or they emit images that penetrate
through the senses, and so forth.
What naive human beings can perceive with their sens-
es is considered real, and what cannot be perceived in this
way (god, the soul, cognition, etc.) is imagined to be anal-
ogous to what isperceived.
If naive realism wants to establish a science, it can do
so only through the exactdescription of perceptual con-
tents. For naive realism, concepts are only means to this
end. They exist to provide conceptual counter-images of
the percepts. They have no significance for the things
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