158 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
world, the percept is divided from the concept by the way
we are organized; in cognition we overcome this division.
The division is no less present in our subjective nature;
we overcome it in the course of our development by
bringing our own concept to full outward manifestation.
Thus, the intellectual as well as the moral life of human
beings leads us to the dual nature of humans: perceiving
(immediate experience) and thinking. Intellectual life
overcomes the duality through cognition; moral life over-
comes it through the actual realization of the free spirit.
Every being has its inborn concept (the law of its being
and activity); but in external things the concept is insepa-
rably bound up with the percept, and only separated from
it in our spiritual organism. In human beings, the concept
and the percept areactually separate at first, to be just as
actually united by human beings themselves. It could be
objected that a particular concept corresponds to our per-
cept of a human being at every instant of a person’s life,
just as it does to every other thing; that I can create the
concept of a stereotypical human for myself, and can also
have such a human given me as percept. Were I then to
add to that the concept of the free spirit, I would have two
concepts for one and the same object.
This is one-sided thinking. As a perceptual object, I am
subject to continual transformation. As a child I was one
thing, as a youth another, as an adult still another. In fact,
at every moment the perceptual picture of myself is dif-
ferent from what it was a moment before. These changes
can take place in such a way that the same person (the ste-
reotypical human) is always expressed in them or in such
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