Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

170 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

for the illumination of world phenomena. Just as monism

declines even to think of cognitive principles other than

human ones (cf. p. 87), it also decisively rejects the thought

of ethical maxims other than those applying to human be-

ings. Human morality, like human cognition, is condi-

tioned by human nature. And just as other beings will have

a different understanding of cognition, so they will also

have a different morality. For the follower of monism, mo-

rality is a specifically human quality andfreedom is the hu-

man way of being moral.

Addenda to the new edition (1918)

1. One difficulty in evaluating what has been presented in
   the last two chapters is that readers may think they have
   encountered a contradiction. On the one hand, the discus-
   sion mentions the experience of thinking, which is felt to
   be of universal significance, equally valid for every hu-
   man consciousness. On the other hand, it is noted that the
   ideas realized in moral life, which are of the same kind as
   the ideas worked out in thinking, are expressed in an in-
   dividual way in each human consciousness. But if we feel
   compelled to remain at the level of this “contradiction”—
   if we do not recognize that a piece of the essence of hu-
   man beings is revealed precisely in the living contempla-
   tion of this actually present contrast—then we shall be
   able to see neither the idea of cognition nor that of free-
   dom in their true light. For those who think of its concepts
   as merely borrowed (abstracted) from the sense world,

[1]