5. The Beyond of the Senses and the Beyond of the Soul

It was precisely from such trains of thought, as I have cited them, and from a failure to pursue such trains of thought further, as I have followed them up, that Eduard von Hartmann reached his hypothesis of the unconscious. He says: From what takes place in the soul as thinking, feeling and willing, from what one has there as consciousness, one can actually gain no view of the real soul. But because one has only this, one must altogether renounce any view of the real soul-life and can only put forward a hypothesis. — Therefore Hartmann puts forward the hypothesis: Behind thinking, feeling and willing lies the unconscious, which can never be reached. And from this unconscious arise thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will. But what is down there in the unconscious can only be the subject of thoughts that have a greater or lesser degree of probability, but which are only hypotheses. It must be said that anyone who thinks in this way simply blocks their own access to the life of the soul, to that which is beyond the ordinary life of the soul. For Hartmann correctly recognized that everything that enters into ordinary consciousness is nothing more than a mere image. And it is precisely one of Hartmann's merits that he emphasized time and again in the most eminent sense: What falls into ordinary consciousness arises from the fact that the soul, as it were, receives its own content mirrored from the body, so that we only have mirror images in what we experience in thinking, feeling and willing. And to talk about the fact that these mirror images of consciousness contain a reality is quite similar to the assertion that the images we perceive from a mirror are reality. Hartmann emphasized this again and again. We will come back to this point today. But Hartmann, and with him countless thinkers, countless people in general in the last decades and the immediate present, they blocked their own possibility of penetrating into the soul because, I would say, they had an indescribable fear of the path that can penetrate into the soul. This fear remains in the subconscious; in ordinary consciousness it protrudes in such a way that one conjures up numerous reasons that tell one: one cannot go beyond certain limits of knowledge.