Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

68 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

it disappears with my mental picturing; that it is only a
modification of my own soul states. Do I still have the
right to take it as a starting point for my reflections? Can
I say that it has an effect on my soul? From now on, I
must treat the table itself—which I used to believe af-
fected me, and produced a mental picture of itself within
me—as a mental picture. But then to be consistent my
sense organs and the processes in them must also be only
subjective. I have no right to speak of a real eye, only of
my mental picture of the eye. It is the same with nerve
conduction and brain processes, and no less so with the
process, in the soul itself, by whichthings are supposed-
ly built up out of the chaos of the various sensations. If I
run through the elements of the act of cognition once
again, assuming the correctness of that first circuit of
thoughts, then the cognitive act reveals itself as a tissue
of mental pictures that, as such, can have no effect on one
another. I cannot say: my mental picture of the object has
an effect on my mental picture of the eye, and from this
interaction there proceeds the mental picture of the color.
Nor do I need to do so. For as soon as it is clear to me that
even my sense organs and their activities, the processes
of my nerves and soul, can be given only through percep-
tion, then the above train of thought reveals itself in its
perfect impossibility. So much is correct then: I can have
no percept without the corresponding sense organ. But
neither can I have a sense organ without perception. I can
pass from my percept of the table to the eye that sees it,
or to the nerves in the skin that touch it; but what takes
place within these I can learn, once again, only through