12. Philosophy and Theosophy
GA 246/1908-08-17/p044
·1908-08-17
·
English
HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Nach zum Teil bruchstückhaften Mitschriften» (From transcripts that are in part fragmentary). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 246), which also speaks of "fragmentarischen Hörernotizen und Vortragszusammenfassungen". The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
Imagine that you want to form the concept of a circle. You can do this, for example, if you go out to sea until you see nothing but water all around you; then you have formed the mental image of a circle through perception. But there is another way to arrive at the concept of a circle, namely by saying to yourself, without appealing to the senses, the following: I construct in my mind the sum of all places that are equidistant from a point. In order to form this construction, which takes place entirely within the life of thought, you do not need to appeal to anything external: This is absolutely pure thinking in the sense of Aristotle, pure actuality.
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