Second Lecture

As long as we merely look out with our senses at what we can perceive outside, we have no reality before us. When we struggle to connect everything we perceive with what we bring into this existence from a completely different side, from the roots of the world, when we struggle with what initially arises in our thinking, and when we connect these two sides of reality in our own active cognitive activity, we add to our external perception what is still missing from reality; we first shape it into reality. The process of cognition is what human beings must rise to in order for reality to be contained in their world. There would be no reality in their world if they could only perceive, if they could not strive to connect what they perceive with that which perception cannot provide, that which they bring to perception from a completely different corner of the world and which is initially revealed in their thinking.