III. Man's Faculty of Cognition in the Etheric World

And it is in this living process of attaining knowledge that the world reveals itself to man through his own being, and that his own being reveals itself in his experience of the outer world. Thus man becomes a being who finds himself again in the entire Universe, for knowing himself he learns to know the world and, knowing the world, he learns to know himself. In this inter-relationship between world and man there reveals itself what unites man with the Divine-Spiritual, that which makes his being aglow with the religious mood of all real higher knowledge. And finally, when earnest cognition blends with religious experience, then knowledge radiates religious emotion, and the transparency of knowledge is lifted to that sphere where faith becomes knowledge through its own inner power of cognition. The world is found in man and man in the world on the path of knowledge through the world.