The Sources of Artistic Imagination and Supersensible Knowledge II

The painting and what is expressed in it is experienced inwardly where nerve and blood waves meet. The artistic process is conscious, but the impulses are unconscious. The visionary consciously immerses himself in what underlies the artistic imagination as an impulse, as an inner experience, which is not characterized in such an abstract way as it is done today, but so concretely that one can find every single phase in the configuration of one's own body. The ancients sensed correctly that, with regard to architecture, every form and every measure is present in one's own self-insertion into the external world. Ancient architecture originates from a different sensing of these proportions than Gothic architecture, but both originate from a sensing of one's own equilibrium with the conditions of the macrocosm. In this way, one recognizes how man, in his own construction, is an image of the macrocosm. That is why the body has been called the temple of the soul. There is much truth in such expressions. Thus we can say that basically the sources from which the artist draws, who is to be taken seriously and has a relationship to reality, are the same sources from which the seer draws, to whom only that which is to remain an impulse in its effect now appears in consciousness, while when the impulse remains in the subconscious, he brings up what is brought to view by the artist.