IX. The Idea of Spiritual Activity

The process presents itself differently when knowledge, when the relationship of man to the world which arises I knowledge, is regarded. In the preceding considerations the attempt was made to show that a clarifying of this relationship is possible when an unprejudiced observation is directed upon it. A right understanding of such observation comes to the insight that thinking, as a self-contained entity, can be looked upon directly. Whoever finds it necessary for the explanation of thinking as such to draw upon something else—physical brain processes, for example, or unconscious spiritual processes lying behind our perceived conscious thinking—fails to recognize what the unprejudiced observation of thinking gives him. Whoever observes thinking lives during his observation directly within a spiritual, self-sustaining weaving of being. Yes, one can say that whoever wants to grasp the being of the spiritual in the form in which it first presents itself to man, can do this within thinking which is founded upon itself.