44 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
ciples and not immediately with the objects they want to
understand. The creator of the world had to know how to
find a vehicle for thinking, but the philosopher has to seek
a secure foundation from which to understand what al-
ready exists. What good does it do to begin with con-
sciousness and subject it to a thinking contemplation, if
before we do so we do not know whetherthinking con-
templation can offer insight into things?
We must first consider thinking completely neutrally,
without reference to a thinking subject or a thought object.
For in subject and object we already have concepts that are
formed through thinking. We cannot deny that,before any-
thing else can be understood, thinking must be understood.
Those who deny this forget that, as human beings, they are
not the first but the last link in the chain of creation. To ex-
plain the world through concepts, we cannot proceed from
the earliest elements of existence. Rather, we must proceed
from the element that is given to us as the nearest, the most
intimate. We cannot, in a single bound, set ourselves at the
beginning of the world and begin our study there. Instead,
we must proceed from the present moment and see
whether we can rise from the later to the earlier. As long
as geology spoke of imagined catastrophes to explain the
present state of the earth, it groped in the dark. Only
when it made its starting point the investigation of those
processes that are still active on earth today, and rea-
soned backward from these to the past, did it win for it-
self a secure foundation. As long as philosophy assumes
all kinds of principles—such as atoms, movement, mat-
ter, will, and the unconscious—it will hover in the air.
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