8. Three Decisions on the Path of Imaginative Perception

You see, speaking of the physical world people speak of monist philosophy, of there being only one ultimate substance or principle, frequently saying to themselves: ‘I can only understand the world if I see the whole of it as a unity.’ We have had some strange experiences particularly in this respect. When we started our spiritual movement here in Berlin with just a few members—that is quite a few years ago now—people found their way to us who then discovered that after all they could not feel they belonged to us in every fibre of their being. There was a lady, for instance, who after a few months came and told us that what spiritual science had to offer was not really the right thing for her, for it meant one had to do a great deal of thinking and thinking wiped out exactly the things that were important to her. She said she always sort of went to sleep when thinking. She also felt that really there was only thing that counted, and that was unity! It became evident that in her case the unity of the world which monists look for in all kinds of spheres—and not only the materialists among monists—had become a fixed idea: Unity, unity, unity! She wanted to look only for unity. In the intellectual life of Germany, one particular philosopher, Leibniz, was very much a monadologist. He sought not unity, but the many monads[^1] which for him were ensouled entities. He therefore knew quite clearly that as soon as one enters into the spiritual world it can be a matter only of plurality, not of unity. And so there are monists and pluralists. These views are considered philosophies. The monists fight the pluralists who are speaking in terms of plurality; they themselves only speak of unity.