I. Inner Experience of Language I

When you consider the matter further you will see that in the transformations into vivid imagery but now is the first to go. Then everything passes into verb form, or at least passes into something that compels one to develop picture conceptions. You see when one cultivates such a style today that picture conceptions underlie it, then as a rule one gets the response that people do not understand this, it is very hard to understand. But he who faces our times honestly will consciously strive to put things in such a form as can be conceived entirely in pictures. In the pamphlet which was published on the social question—where one is forded into abstractions because at present wherever the social question is discussed we get for the most part mere abstractions—in that pamphlet itself I strove as far as possible for a style in which the matter could be presented in picture form. It is especially in the present-day discussions over the social question that the capacity for being abstract is driven to its furthest extent. People have gradually become accustomed to accepting the words as a sort of verbal currency with which they no longer think in any concrete pictures at all. Today, to read a social pamphlet or book you find you must have been for years accustomed to what is meant in order to come to terms with the book at all. The whole meaning of such discussions depends upon the conventional use of words. Who today in speaking of “possessing” deals that the word has a certain connection with “to be possessed”? Yet the genius of speech as I have often remarked is very much more significant than what the single individual can think and speak; it creates innumerable connections that only need to be discovered by the individual for a return into a certain spiritual life. It is just when we tried to find the verb behind every noun and make it a practice not always to speak of light and sound, but to speak of what illumines, of what sounds, and then find ourselves obliged to penetrate more and more into the reality of things in contrast to the non-realities, that then we arrive at a path that can lead to healing.