50 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
concepts with more content, more saturated, and more in-
clusive. I emphasize here that it is important to note at this
point that my point of departure isthinking, notconcepts
orideas, which must first be gained by thinking. Con-
cepts and ideas already presuppose thinking. Therefore,
what I have said about the nature of thinking—that it rests
within itself and is determined by nothing—cannot sim-
ply be transferred to concepts. (I note this explicitly here,
because this is where I differ from Hegel, who posits the
concept as first and original.)
Concepts cannot be won by observation. This can al-
ready be seen from the fact that children form concepts
for the objects in their environment only slowly and grad-
ually. Concepts are added onto observation.
A popular contemporary philosopher, Herbert Spencer,
portrays the spiritual process that we perform in response
to observation as follows:
If, wandering through the fields on a Septem-
ber’s day, we hear a noise a few steps in front of us,
and see the grass in motion by the side of the ditch
whence the noise seemed to proceed, then we will
probably approach the place to find out what pro-
duced the noise and movement. At our approach,
there flutters in the ditch a partridge, and with this
our curiosity is satisfied: we have what we call an
explanation of the phenomena. Carefully exam-
ined, this explanation depends on the following:
because in life we have countless times experi-
enced that a disturbance in the peaceful state of
small bodies accompanies the movement of other
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