6. Spiritual Scientific Findings on the Ideas of Freedom and Social-moral Life

Everything that lives in our feelings, we dream while awake. What lives in our will is no more conscious to us in our waking daily life than the dull, barely perceptible consciousness during sleep. This is precisely why people in the field of philosophy have always argued about whether the will can be free or not, because even if they are enlightened philosophers, with their ordinary consciousness they cannot look into the workings of the soul when it expresses itself in the will, just as little as they can see into what the soul experiences during the deepest dreamless sleep. For the life of the will in its actual mystery is not only dreamt away, it is slept away in ordinary consciousness. We know nothing more about any action we perform, about anything we put into life, than what extends from sensory perception to imagination. You can convince yourself that psycho-physiologists who think thoroughly in scientific terms have already come to this conclusion when you study Theodor Ziehen's very important book on psychology: that one must stop at the disposition of the will, at the impulse of the will, at the imagination; that one cannot go any further. Only then does the completed action occur, which re-enters the imagination. What lies between the completed action and the imagination is just as immersed in the dullness of consciousness in waking daily life as what a person experiences between falling asleep and waking up is immersed in darkness when no dreams pass through their sleep.