164 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
higher power, from a divine being, whom they neverthe-
less endow with sense-perceptible qualities. They let the
conceptual content of their moral life be communicated to
them by this being, once again, in perceptible ways—
whether the god appears in a burning bush, or dwells in a
bodily/human form among humans and audibly declares
for their ears what they should and should not do.
At the highest ethical stage of development of naive re-
alism, the moral commandment (moral idea) is separated
from any entity foreign to oneself and is thought of hypo-
thetically as an absolute power within oneself. What peo-
ple first understood as the outer voice of God, they now
understand as an independent power in their inner selves,
speaking of this inner voice in a way that equates it with
conscience.
But, with this, the level of naive consciousness has al-
ready been left behind, and we have entered the region
where moral laws become independent norms. They then
no longer have a bearer, but become metaphysical entities
that exist through themselves. They are analogous to the
invisible-visible forces of metaphysical realism, which
does not seek reality by way of human participation in it
through thinking but imagines a hypothetical reality added
onto experience. Extra-human ethical norms always ap-
pear as accompaniments to this metaphysical realism.
Such metaphysical realism has to seek the origin of moral-
ity in the area of extra-human reality. There are various
possibilities here. If we assume an entity, conceived of as
having no thought of its own and operating under purely
mechanical laws, as must be the case for materialism, then
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