114 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
perceptible ways in which human beings act—that is, an-
thropomorphically.
Modern physics traces sense impressions back to pro-
cesses in the smallest parts of the body and in an infinitely
fine substance, the ether—or something similar. For ex-
ample, what we sense as warmth is the movement of the
parts within the space occupied by the body that is the
source of warmth. Here, too, something imperceptible is
thought of by analogy to what is perceptible. The sensory
analogue of the concept “body” might be, in this sense,
the interior of an enclosed space, in which elastic spheres
move in every direction, hitting one another, bouncing off
the walls, and so forth.
Without such assumptions, the world of naive realism
disintegrates into an incoherent aggregate of percepts,
without mutual relationships and constituting no unity.
But it is clear that naive realism can arrive at its assump-
tions only through inconsistency. If it remains true to its
fundamental proposition that only the perceived is real,
then it may not assume something real where it per-
ceives nothing. From the standpoint of naive realism,
those imperceptible forces operating out of perceptible
things are actually unjustified hypotheses. Because such
a theory knows of no other realities, it equips its hypo-
thetical forces with perceptual content. It attributes a
form of existence (perceptual existence) to a realm
where sense perception—the sole means of making an
assertion about this form of existence—is lacking.
This self-contradictory worldview leads to metaphysi-
cal realism. Alongside perceptible reality, metaphysical
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