Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/654/en

This personal path of cognition generates thought-pictures with as many facets as there are human beings willing to walk it. The imageless intellect tries to force these methodically into a general formula — one that extinguishes the image-content and with it the connection to the cognizing spirit-soul. What remains is the concept, the dead image of the concrete experience, and knowledge of this kind separates itself — like a lifeless desert — from the living reality one stands before in experience. This is a feeling that can come to the person whose very motive is to do justice to the being of the living in the running of a farm. One encounters there the contradiction that ordinary thinking, bound to the senses, cannot reach the secret of life. Yet it is precisely these dead, abstract concept-forms — shaped at the surface of the sense-world — that form the preconditions for ascending to a cognition of life. This conceptual thinking develops and sharpens self-consciousness. In this flaring self-consciousness lives the self-knowing I, the kernel of being of the human being. In the soul-activity of thinking and feeling, it binds the thought-images of the sensory world of form together with the spirit-force that springs from the essential nature of the I. This path — on which the outwardly directed knowledge of nature and the inwardly directed self-knowledge unite in the I — opens to the human being for the first time the possibility of free self-determination, and gives to the knowledge of nature its first groping steps toward the being of the living. Thinking in the logical chain of causation of abstract concepts widens into mobile image-thoughts. They seek out in intuitive beholding the relational contexts through which the individual conceptual facts become experienceable. One enters a path of self-schooling in thinking and feeling that fertilizes and enlivens the scientific path of cognition through art.