12. Formal Logic I

In its thinking, our present-day intellectual culture has not yet gone beyond mere imagining, except in mathematics. For the spiritual researcher, it is sometimes grotesque to see how little people have progressed beyond mere imagining. Most people believe that the concept comes from the imagination and is only paler, less substantial than the latter. They believe, for example, that they can arrive at the concept of a horse by successively seeing large, small, brown, white and black horses appear in their perception; and now I take - so people continue - from the perception of these different horses, what is common to all horses and omit what is separate, and so I gain the concept of the horse. But one only gets an abstract idea, and one never arrives at the concept of the horse in the strict sense of the word. Nor does one arrive at a concept of the triangle by taking all kinds of triangles, taking what is common to them and omitting what separates them. One only arrives at a concept of the triangle by inwardly constructing the figure of three intersecting lines. With this inwardly constructed concept we approach the outer triangle and find it harmonizing with the inwardly constructed image.