Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/657/en

It demands an inner effort to sort out from the sum of feelings those that distort the phenomenon through exuberant sympathy or negating antipathy. It is self-consciousness that makes the choice here — that separates the essential from the inessential within the concept-determining image-content. The more the cognizing soul turns to the phenomenon in reverence, faithfulness, and love, the more self-consciousness binds thought and image into a unity. A judgment takes shape in which the spirit resonates — the spirit that lies hidden and holds sway in perception: for instance, the living context, living itself forth in metamorphosis, of egg — caterpillar — cocoon — butterfly. What hides itself in sense-appearance as a spiritually working principle reveals itself to thinking consciousness through a science that has made spirit itself the object of perception. The results of this spiritual research lie before us in idea-forms. When one studies these, the spiritually felt element of the sensory thought-images brightens into spirit-thoughts — into ideas that lend the soul-activity of willing a moral force of working. Now thinking and feeling can plunge into willing and become one with it. Now at last, in such stellar moments, truly free initiative can arise. In a group of collaborating human beings the fire of enthusiasm kindles and gathers them, in the confluence of free individual willing, into a community of initiative (Figure 10, p. 172).