The argumentation of this book is built up on the fact of intuitive
thinking, which may be experienced in a purely spiritual way, and which
every perception inserts into reality so that reality comes thereby to
be known. All that this book aimed at presenting was the result of a
survey from the basis of our experience of intuitive thinking. However,
the intention also was to emphasise the systematic interpretation which
this thinking, as experienced by us, demands. It demands that we shall
not deny its presence in cognition as a self-sustaining experience. It
demands that we acknowledge its capacity for experiencing reality in
co-operation with perception, and that we do not make it seek reality
in a world outside experience and accessible only to inference, in
the face of which human thinking would be only a subjective activity.
This view characterises thinking as that factor in man through which
he inserts himself spiritually into reality. (And, strictly, no one
should confuse this kind of world-view, which is based on thinking as
directly experienced, with mere Rationalism.) But, on the other hand,
the whole tenor of the preceding argumentation shows that perception
yields a determination of reality for human knowledge only when it
is taken hold of in thinking. Outside of thinking there is nothing to
characterise reality for what it is. Hence we have no right to imagine
that sense-perception is the only witness to reality. Whatever comes
to us by way of perception on our journey through life, we cannot
but expect. The only point open to question would be whether, from
the exclusive point of view of thinking as we intuitively experience
it, we have a right to expect that over and above sensuous perception
there is also spiritual perception. This expectation is justified. For,
though intuitive thinking is, on the one hand, an active process taking
place in the human mind, it is, on the other hand, also a spiritual
perception mediated by no sense-organ. It is a perception in which the
percipient is himself active, and a self-activity which is at the same
time perceived. In intuitive thinking man enters a spiritual world
also as a percipient. Whatever within this world presents itself to
him as percept in the same way in which the spiritual world of his own
thinking so presents itself, that is recognised by him as constituting
a world of spiritual perception. This world of spiritual perception we
may suppose to be standing in the same relation to thinking as does,
on the sensuous side, the world of sense-perception. Man does not
experience the world of spiritual perception as an alien something,
because he is already familiar in his intuitive thinking with an
experience of purely spiritual character. With such a world of
spiritual perception a number of the writings are concerned which
I have published since this present book appeared. The Philosophy
of Spiritual Activity lays the philosophical foundation for these
later writings. For it attempts to show that in the very experience
of thinking, rightly understood, we experience Spirit. This is the
reason why it appears to the author that no one will stop short of
entering the world of spiritual perception who has been able to adopt,
in all seriousness, the point of view of the Philosophy of Spiritual
Activity. True, logical deduction--by syllogisms--will not extract
out of the contents of this book the contents of the author's later
books. But a living understanding of what is meant in this book by
"intuitive thinking" will naturally prepare the way for living entry
into the world of spiritual perception.