2. Philosophy

One will then find that in the problem one sets oneself in this way, something comes to light that I want to make clear through a comparison, because I have to be brief – it could, of course, be encompassed with the adequate concept in an explanation lasting hours: I can also look through a pair of glasses and still see the world around me as the naive consciousness perceives it, with its color tinglings, with all its sensory qualities. I must only look through colorless transparent glasses; I must not look through glasses that change the outer world itself for me. And I must now find my way into the difference between glasses that change the outer tinting and glasses that are colorless and transparent and avoid any outer tinting. From this comparison – as I said, long-winded considerations could be used instead of the comparison – I will find: if I take the structure of the so-called normal eye, I have given it a structure that proves to be transparent, that can be compared to the transparent-colorless glass. I find nothing in the normal eye that indicates that the external world is qualitatively changed in any way. But I must not conduct this investigation with the ordinary concepts that I have in everyday consciousness, but with the imaginative consciousness that can truly penetrate the structures of the eye.