Appendix I 245conscious experience.” We can see that a hypothetical
world, inaccessible to conscious experience, is here add-
ed to the world accessible to my consciousness. Other-
wise, these philosophers believe, we would be forced to
assert that all the external reality I seem to have before me
is only the world of my consciousness, and this would
lead to the—solipsistic—absurdity that other people also
exist only within my consciousness.
This question, which has been created by some recent
epistemological trends, can be clarified if we attempt to
survey the matter from the viewpoint of the spiritually
oriented observation described in this book. What, then,
do I have before me when I face another person? I look at
what is immediately apparent. It is the sensory, bodily ap-
pearance of the other person, given to me as a percept,
and perhaps also the auditory percept of what the person
is saying, and so forth. I do not merely stare at all of this;
rather, it sets my thinking activity in motion. By my
standing before the other person and thinking, the percept
proves to be, to some extent, transparent to the soul.
When I grasp the percept through thinking, I am bound to
say to myself that it is not at all what it appears to be to
the external senses. By what it is directly, the sensory
phenomenon reveals something else that it is indirectly.
Its presentation before me is, at the same time, its extin-
guishing as a mere sense phenomenon. But what it man-
ifests during that extinguishing compels me, as a thinking
being, to extinguish my own thinking for the period of its
activity and to replace it withitsthinking. I grasp thisoth-
er thinking in my own thinking as an experience, as I do