Second Lecture

For ordinary consciousness, it is indeed the case that from the moment a person wakes up in the morning until they fall asleep in the evening, they actually always live in soul contents that perception has already mixed with thinking. Only a truly thorough analysis can separate what is passive perception from what has been brought in by thinking. Then one comes to understand what our image of perception actually looks like. This image of perception can only be traced by, let's say, refraining from summary thinking for just five minutes and simply registering what one perceives in sequence. Thinkers such as Richard Wahle and Johannes Volkelt have done this, registering how, say, a postman comes in, delivers a letter, what happens to this letter, how one image of perception after another is chaotically strung together in contrast to the ordering of thought. But this gives one a real insight into the constantly ongoing, only minimally conscious activity in the human soul, which consists of constantly mixing perception with thinking, that is, passively observed things with things actively produced internally.