228 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
Those who judge human beings according to generic
characteristics stop before the boundary beyond which
people begin to be beings whose activity is based on free
self-determination. What lies short of that boundary can,
of course, be an object of scientific investigation. Racial,
tribal, national, and sexual characteristics form the con-
tent of specific sciences. Only persons who want to live
merely as examples of a genus can fit themselves into a
generic picture derived from such scientific investigation.
But all these sciences together cannot penetrate to the spe-
cific content of single individuals. Where the region of
freedom (in thinking and action) begins, determination of
individuals by the laws of the genus comes to an end. The
conceptual content that, in order to have full reality, hu-
man beings must connect with a percept through thinking
(cf. pp.81 –82) cannot be fixed once and for all, and be-
queathed in finished form to humanity. Individuals must
gain their concepts through their own individual intui-
tions. How an individual should think cannot be derived
from some generic concept. Each individual must set the
standard all alone. Nor is it possible to tell, from general
human traits, which concrete goals an individual chooses
to seek. Anyone who wishes to understand a particular in-
dividual must penetrate to that individual’s particular be-
ing, not remain at the level of typical characteristics. In
this sense, every single human being is a separate prob-
lem. All science concerned with abstract thoughts and ge-
neric concepts is only a preparation for the kind of
cognition imparted to us when a human individuality
communicates to us its way of viewing the world. And all
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