Sixth Lecture

Then we live in intuition when we are at one with spiritual reality, which means nothing other than this: at one pole of the human being as he stands today in this world period, there is objective knowledge; at the other pole, there is intuitive knowledge. Between the two stand imagination and inspiration. But if one wants to describe the human being in ordinary life, then one must, if one conceives of him as an actor, as a moral agent, find moral intuition for this one isolated area of moral motives, already for the sake of a philosophy of freedom. If one then develops the same thing for the entire cosmos, what one develops through such a philosophy of freedom as the basis of human action, one realizes intuition over the entire cosmos, whereas otherwise one finds it only in the limited realm of human action. But while one simply adds moral intuition to the objective knowledge of everyday life through the ordinary natural dispositions of human beings here in the physical world, if one is a moral person, one must, if one wants to arrive at real knowledge of the world and, I would say, arrive at cosmic intuition, which corresponds in the cosmos to moral intuition for the inner life of human beings, then one must pass through the two stages of imagination and inspiration. In other words, if one describes human beings, one can do so through a philosophy of freedom. There one is only compelled to arrive at the limited realm of intuitive experience for human action. If one seeks a cosmic view corresponding to this philosophy of freedom, then one must expand what one has done there in a limited realm by developing the stages of knowledge: objective cognition, imagination, inspiration, intuition.