12. Philosophy and Theosophy

What characterizes the philosopher, however, and what we first encounter in Aristotle, is that he works from the pure conceptual technique and that he must necessarily reject other sources or they are inaccessible to him. [Aristotle is a philosopher in the most eminent sense, because he worked out pure thinking with the pure conceptual technique.] And because this is only the case with Aristotle, it is not without world-historical reason that it is he who founded logic, the science of the technique of thinking. Everything else was only a precursor. The way in which concepts are formed, judgments are formed, conclusions are drawn, all this was first found by Aristotle as a kind of natural history of subjective human thought, and everything we encounter in his work is closely linked to this foundation of the technique of thinking. Since we will come back to a number of things that are fundamentally important in his work for all later considerations, it is now only necessary to make this historical allusion in order to briefly characterize the starting point.