132 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
of naive realism. Yet, compared to the original naive re-
alism, they commit the further inconsistency of making a
specific form of perceiving (feeling or willing) into the
sole means of cognizing existence—but they can do so
only by subscribing to the general proposition that what
has been perceived is real. On that basis, however, they
would also have to ascribe an equivalent cognitive value
to external perceiving.
The philosophy of will becomes metaphysical realism
when it transfers the will into those realms of existence
where immediate experience of it is not possible in the
same way as it is in one’s own subject. It assumes the ex-
istence, outside the subject, of a hypothetical principle,
the sole criterion for whose reality issubjective experi-
ence. As metaphysical realism, the philosophy of the will
succumbs to the criticism given in the previous chapter,
which the contradictory aspect of every metaphysical re-
alism must recognize and overcome, that the will is only
a universal world process to the extent that it relates to the
rest of the world conceptually.
Addendum to the new edition (1918)
The difficulty of grasping thinking in its essence by ob-
serving it consists in this: when the soul wants to bring it
into the focus of attention, this essence has all too easily
already slipped away from the observing soul. All that is
left for the soul then is the dead abstraction, the corpse of
living thinking. If we look only at this abstraction, we
can easily feel drawn to the mysticism of feeling or the
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