12. Philosophy and Theosophy

Let me make a simple comparison. Imagine you have a seal with the name Müller on it. Now you press the seal into a sealing wax and take it away. Don't you realize that if this seal is made of, say, brass, none of the brass will pass into the sealing wax? Now if this sealing wax were cognitive in Kant's sense, it would say: “I am all lacquer, nothing comes into me from the brass, so there is no relationship that I could know about the nature of what confronts me.” But this completely forgets the fact that what matters, namely the name Müller, is objectively inside the sealing wax as an imprint, without anything having passed over from the brass. As long as one thinks materialistically and believes that, in order to establish relationships, matter must pass from one to the other, one will also say theoretically: “I am sealing wax, and the other is brass in itself; and since nothing can enter into me from the ”brass in itself", the name Müller can also be nothing other than a sign. But the thing in itself, which was inside the seal, which has imprinted itself on me so that I can read it: That remains eternally unknown to me." There you see the final formula that is used. If you take the comparison further, the result is: Man is all sealing wax (mental image), the thing itself is all petals (that which is outside the mental image). Because I, as the varnish (the imaginer), can only reach the limit of the petshaft (the thing in itself), I remain within myself, nothing of the thing in itself comes over into me. As long as materialism is extended to epistemology, we will not find out what is important. The preliminary proposition applies: we do not get beyond our mental image; but what comes over is to be called spiritual; it does not need material atoms to let it over. Nothing of a material nature enters into the subject - but nevertheless the spiritual comes over into the subject, as true as the name Müller into the sealing wax. A healthy epistemological research must be able to start from this again, then one will see how much modern materialism itself has become naturalized in the epistemological concepts without being noticed. Nothing else follows from an unbiased consideration of the situation than that Kant can only imagine a “thing-in-itself” materially, however grotesque such an assertion may seem at first glance.