100 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
my percepts of lions. Yet my mental picture of a lion is
certainly formed by means of perception. I can convey
the concept of a lion to those who have never seen a lion.
But without their own perceiving, I will not succeed in
conveying a vivid mental picture.
Amental picture, then, is an individualized concept.
We can now understand how mental pictures can repre-
sent the things of reality for us. The full reality of a thing
is revealed to us in the moment of observation, out of the
merging of a concept and a percept. Through a percept,
the concept receives an individualized form, a relation-
ship to that specific percept. The concept survives in us in
this individual form, with its characteristic relationship to
the percept, and forms the mental picture of the corre-
sponding thing. If we encounter a second thing and the
same concept combines itself with it, then we recognize
it as belonging to the same species as the first, for we find
not only a corresponding concept in our conceptual sys-
tem, but the individualized concept with its characteristic
relationship to this same object, and we recognize the ob-
ject once again.
Thus, a mental picture stands between a percept and
a concept. A mental picture is the specific concept that
points to the percept.
The sum of everything of which I can form mental pic-
tures I can call my “experience.” Hence, the greater the
number of individualized concepts a person has, the richer
their experience will be. A person lacking intuitive capac-
ity, on the other hand, is unsuited to acquire experience.
For such a person, once objects are out of sight they are
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