Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path

36 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path

are people who believe that once we know what matter is
we will also know how matter thinks—it must still be stat-
ed that one can talk about thinking without immediately
running into brain physiology. Most people today find it
hard to grasp the concept of thinking in its purity. Whoev-
er immediately counters the view of thinking developed
here with the statement of Cabanis that “the brain secretes
thoughts as the liver does gall or the salivary ducts saliva”
simply does not know what I am talking about.^2 Such a
person wants to find thinking through a mere process of
observation—wants to proceed with thinking in the same
way as we proceed with other objects of the world content.
But thinking cannot be found in this way, because precise-
ly as an object of world content thinking eludes normal
observation, as I have shown. Those who cannot over-
come materialism lack the capacity to induce in them-
selves the exceptional state that brings into consciousness
what remains unconscious during all other spiritual activ-
ity. Just as one cannot discuss color with the blind, so one
cannot discuss thinking with those who lack the good will
to place themselves in this position. But at least they
should not imagine that we take physiological processes to
be thinking. They cannot explain thinking because they
simply do not see it.

2. Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808). A French physician
   and philosopher, Professor of Hygiene (1794) and legal medicine
   and history of medicine (1799) at the Medical School of Paris, who
   evolved radically mechanistic and materialistic theory of biology.
   The phrase is from “Rapports du physique et du moral de l‘homme”
   (1799, published 1802).