182 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
well-being—then a concrete mental picture of the action
(the relation of the concept to a perceptual content) must
first be found in each individual case. This translation of
concept into mental picture is always necessary for afree
spirit, who is driven neither by a model nor by fear of
punishment.
Imagination is the chief means by which human beings
produce concrete mental pictures from the sum of their
ideas. Free spirits needmoral imagination to realize their
ideas and make them effective. Moral imagination is the
source of a free spirit’s actions. Therefore, only people
who have moral imagination are really morally produc-
tive. Simple moral preachers—that is, people who spin
out codes of ethics without being able to condense them
into concrete mental pictures—are morally unproductive.
They are like critics who can rationally discuss what
works of art should be like, but cannot themselves pro-
duce anything at all.
To turn a mental picture into a reality, moral imagina-
tion must set to work in a specific field of percepts. Hu-
man action does not create percepts, it recasts already-
existing percepts and gives them a new form. To be able
to transform a specific perceptual object or group of ob-
jects in accordance with a moral mental picture, one
must have understood the laws of the perceptual picture
to which one wants to give new form or new direction—
that is, one must have understood how it has worked until
now. Further, one must find the method by which those
laws can be transformed. This part of moral efficacy de-
pends on knowledge of the phenomenal world with which
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