74 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
The correctness of critical idealism is one thing; the
power of its proofs to convince us is another. How things
stand with the former will emerge later in our discussion.
But the power of its proofs to convince is zero. When
someone builds a house and the ground floor collapses
during construction of the second floor, then the second
floor falls along with it. Naive realism is to critical ideal-
ism as this ground floor is to the second floor.
For anyone who believes that the whole perceived
world is only a mental picture, and in fact is the effect on
my soul of things unknown to me, the real epistemologi-
cal question of course has to do with the things that lie be-
yond our consciousness, independent of us, and not with
the mental pictures that are present only in our souls. Then
the question becomes: Since the things, which are inde-
pendent of us, are inaccessible to ourdirectobservation,
how much can we know of themindirectly? Those who
hold this point of view are concerned not with the inner
connection of their conscious percepts but only with the
non-consciouscauses of those percepts. For them, these
causes exist independently and, according to their belief,
the percepts disappear as soon as their senses are turned
away from things. From this point of view, consciousness
acts as a mirror whose images of specific things also dis-
appear the moment that its mirroring surface is not turned
toward them. But whoever does not see the things them-
selves but only their mirror images must learn to draw
conclusions about the nature of the thingsindirectly, from
the behavior of the reflections. Modern natural science
takes this position. It uses percepts only as a last resort in
[2]
[3]
