130 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
This tendency—the philosophy of feeling—is often
calledmysticism. A mystical view based solely on feeling
errs in wanting toexperience what it ought toknow; it
wants to make something that is individual, feeling, into
something universal.
Feeling is a purely individual act. It is a relationship of
the outer world to our subject, insofar as that relationship
finds expression in a purely subjective experience.
There is yet another expression of the human personal-
ity. Through its thinking, the I participates in general, uni-
versal life. Through thinking, it relates percepts to itself,
and itself to percepts, in a purely conceptual way; in feel-
ing, it experiences a relationship of the object to its sub-
ject. But inwilling, the reverse is the case. In willing, too,
we have a percept before us: namely, that of the individual
relation of our self to what is objective. And whatever is
not a purely conceptual factor in our will is just as much a
mere object of perception as anything in the outer world.
Yet here, too, naive realism believes that it has before
it a far realer kind of existence than can be attained
through thinking. In contrast to thinking, which formu-
lates the event only afterward in concepts, naive realism
sees an element in the will in which we are immediately
aware of an event or cause. From this point of view, what
the I achieves through its will is a process that is experi-
enced immediately. Adherents of this philosophy believe
that, in the will, they have hold of a corner of the world
process. They believe that in willing we experience a real
event quite immediately, while we can only follow other
events from the outside. They make the form of existence
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