Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

Appendix II 253

II

In the following, what stood as a kind of “Preface” to the
first edition is reproduced in all essentials. I place it here
as an appendix, not because it has anything immediately
to do with the book’s contents, but because it shows the
mood of thought in which I wrote the book twenty-five
years ago. Since there is a recurrent idea that I have to
suppress some of my earlier writings on account of my
later ones on spiritual science, I do not want to omit it al-
together.^1

Our age wants to draw forthTruth only from the depths
of the human being. Of Schiller’s two well known paths,
our present age prefers the second:

We both seek truth; you in outer life, I within

In the heart, and thus each is sure to find it.

If the eye is healthy, it meets the Creator without;

If the heart is healthy, it surely mirrors the world

within.^2

1. Only the very first introductory sentences of this preface (in the
   first edition) have been completely omitted; today, they seem to me
   quite inessential. But what is said in the rest of it seems to me neces-
   sary to say even today in spite of—indeed, because of—the natural
   scientific thinking of our contemporaries. (Author’s note)


2. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) Great Ger-
   man dramatist, aesthetic philosopher, and critic.

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