70 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
fails to notice that it is throwing together two fields of ob-
servation between which it can find no connection.
Critical idealism can only refute naive realism if, in na-
ive-realist fashion, it accepts one’s own organism as
something that exists objectively. The moment it be-
comes aware that the percepts connected to one’s own or-
ganism and those assumed by naive realism to exist
objectively are completely equivalent, it can no longer
base itself on the former as if on a sure foundation. It is
forced to regard its own subjective organization, too, as a
mere complex of mental pictures. But thereby the possi-
bility of thinking that the content of the perceived world
is caused by our mental organization is lost. We would
have to assume that the mental picture “color” was only
a modification of the mental picture “eye.” So-called crit-
ical idealism cannot be proved without borrowing from
naive realism, while naive realism can be refuted only by
accepting its own presuppositions, unexamined, in an-
other sphere.
This much, then, is certain: investigation in the percep-
tual realm can neither prove critical idealism, nor strip the
percept of its objective character.
Still less can the proposition, “The perceived world is
mental picture,” be hailed as self-evident and in need of no
proof. Schopenhauer begins his main work,The World as
Will and Representation [Mental Picture], with the words:
The world is my mental picture. This truth
applies to every living and cognizing being, though
human beings alone can bring it into reflected
abstract consciousness. And when they actually do
[30]
[31]
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