The Fourfold Nature of the “I”

I would like to draw your attention to just one thing. There are people who seem to have no imagination at all in the areas where one often seeks imagination. Yes, when they sometimes take the opportunity to express themselves about imagination, they even show a pronounced hatred for all imaginative creations. But if you get at their souls, they show that they basically have a great deal of imagination: no sooner do they hear a word about their neighbor that is detrimental to him, than they invent whole stories and tell the most outrageous things about their neighbor. All lies are the product of the imagination, a transformation of the imagination into evil. And if you take this extension of the imagination into evil, you will realize that imagination is quite widespread in the human world. If you consider all the creations of fantasy that people bring about by saying this or that about their fellow human beings, or by otherwise passing this or that off as their own, you will find a considerable amount of fantasy even in those people who, in the ordinary, more noble sense, have little imagination. Human abilities sometimes go astray, and mendacity and slander are devious forms of fantasy.