16 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
for which the reasons are known? This leads us to ask:
what is the origin and the significance of thinking? For
without understanding the soul’s activity ofthinking, no
concept of the knowledge of anything, including an ac-
tion, is possible. When we understand what thinking
means in general, it will be easy to clarify the role that
thinking plays in human action. As Hegel rightly says,
“Thinking turns the soul, with which beasts too are gift-
ed, into spirit.”^7 Therefore thinking will also give to hu-
man action its characteristic stamp.
This is by no means to claim that all our actions flow
only from the sober deliberations of our reason. I am far
from callinghuman, in the highest sense, only those ac-
tions that proceed from abstract judgment alone. But as
soon as our actions lift themselves above the satisfaction
of purely animal desires, our motives are always perme-
ated by thoughts. Love, pity, patriotism are springs of
action that cannot be reduced to cold rational concepts.
People say that the heart, the sensibility, comes into its
own in such matters. No doubt. But heart and sensibility
do not create the motives of action. They presuppose
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831),Enzyklopädie der
philosophischen Wissenschaften(1817, second edition 1827). The
quotation is from the Preface. See also Rudolf Steiner,The Riddles of
Philosophy. For instance, “[Hegel] wanted to express clearly and
poignantly that he regardedthinkingthat is conscious of itself as the
highest human activity, as the force through which alone a human
being can gain a position with respect to ultimate questions....
Hegel is a personality who lives completely in the element of
thought.” (p. 169).
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