Lecture V

In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have tried to show that knowledge of the super-sensible worlds is built up gradually out of Imaginative, Inspired and Intuitive experience. If we look at outer Nature, we reach first Imagination, then Inspiration, and lastly Intuition. In the moral world it is different. If in that world we reach picture-consciousness, Imaginations as such, then with Imaginations of Nature we have at the same time developed the faculty for moral intuitions. Already at the first stage we acquire what, in the other sphere, is not attained until the third stage. In the moral world, intuition follows immediately upon outer perception. In the world of Nature, however, there are two intermediate stages. So that if, in the moral world one speaks of intuitions not in mere phrases but honestly, truthfully, one simply cannot do otherwise than recognize these intuitions as being purely spiritual. But then one must work on to discover other realms of the Spirit. For qualitatively one has grasped in moral Intuition the same as the evolution of the natural world, filled with content by a book such as Occult Science.