Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

76 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

that we can know anything of them, must also deny the

existence, or at least the knowledge, of their own person-

ality. Critical idealism thus arrives at the statement, “All

reality is transformed into a wonderful dream—without

there being a life that is dreamed about or a spirit that is

doing the dreaming—a dream that coheres in a dream of

itself.”^1

For those who believe they know immediate life is a

dream, it does not matter whether they suspect that noth-

ing exists behind it, or whether they refer their mental pic-

tures to real things. For them, life itself loses all scientific

interest. Science is an absurdity to those who believe that

the accessible universe is exhausted in dreams, while to

those who believe themselves equipped to reason from

mental pictures to things, it consists in the investigation

of “things-in-themselves.” We may call the first view ab-

soluteillusionism;transcendental realism is the name

given the second view by its most consistent exponent,

Eduard von Hartmann.^2

1. Cf. Fichte,Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The Vocation of
   Man), 1800. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philoso-
   pher between Kant and Hegel. Rudolf Steiner based his doctoral dis-
   sertation, published as Truth and Science [Knowledge] (1892), on
   Fichte’s theory of knowledge. See also The Riddles of Philosophy
   andThe Riddle of Man; also lecture of December 16, 1915, “The
   Spirit of Fichte in our Midst.”

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2. Knowledge, in this worldview, is calledtranscendentalbecause it
   includes the conviction that nothing can be said directly about things
   in themselves, but that one must draw indirect inferences from the
   subjective, which is known, to the unknown, which lies beyond the
   subjective (the transcendent).