A few weeks ago I spoke about the bridge over the abyss, and afterwards there are always interesting comments. One comment said that there are actually two difficulties in the development of pure, will-permeated thinking. On the one hand, that sense perception is always also personal, therefore not pure, and on the other hand, that our surroundings present us with very many problems because we are constantly sitting in front of the screen. That is how one says it in Dutch.

I do not know whether one says that in German as well, that one is sitting in front of one’s screen, but of course that means that one has that device in one’s hand or is looking at the computer, perhaps also, in the old-fashioned way, at the television. But we are completely permeated and surrounded by all kinds of invisible entities that influence us. That is, of course, the case, and I certainly want to go further into that.

But the first point concerned sense perception and the question: yes, but is there not in the human being also pure perception, that is, a sense perception that is not more or less transformed or changed, coloured, by personal development, and so on? I would like to read a short passage in this connection. It reads:

“First we must determine what a noun and what a verb are, then what negation, affirmation, assertion, and speech are.

The sounds into which the voice is formed are signs of the representations called forth in the soul. And writing, in turn, is a sign of the sounds.

And just as not everyone has the same writing, so the sounds are not the same among all people. But that which is indicated first of all by both, the simple representations of the soul, these are the same in all human beings. And likewise the things, of which the representations are the images, are the same.

Concerning these matters, however, since they belong to another discipline, we have spoken in the books on the soul. Now just as the thoughts in the soul sometimes arise without being true or false, and sometimes in such a way that they must necessarily be one or the other, so it is also in speech. For falsehood and truth are connected with the combining and separating of representations.

Nouns and verbs by themselves resemble thoughts without combination and separation, such as, for example, the word ‘man’ or ‘white’, when nothing else is added. Here there is as yet neither error nor truth.”

This text came to my mind because it states so very clearly that the things are the same for all human beings, and likewise the representations that are the images of the things, that these are the same in all human beings.

It only becomes personally coloured when one does not remain with the pure representation, but shoots beyond it and actually interferes with it through all kinds of interpretations. This text, as you may already have guessed, comes from “the Philosopher,” as he was called in the Middle Ages, from Aristotle, and it is the first chapter of his On Interpretation. Years ago I tried several times with students to carry this text out in practice.

We then tried to determine for ourselves how we have our representations, how the thing becomes a representation, and how we go beyond it because we have all kinds of feelings with it and also thoughts. It is not without reason that Aristotle then speaks, in the following text, about the fact that a word or a thought, when it appears or is formed by itself, cannot be true or false. Truth and falsehood only come into being when one relates the thought or the word to something or relates several thoughts to one another. But in itself a thought cannot be false. And the same applies to the representations.

So, for me, what Aristotle emphasizes here—and this is, as I said, the beginning of his On Interpretation, which then leads very far—is that this philosopher, through his investigations, found that humanity is, in a certain sense, nevertheless also a unity, namely where the human being faithfully and purely represents the thing.

This actually happens more or less by itself. We cannot know at all what we perceive if it does not become a representation. And this can be practised; one can observe it; one can try to do exercises by, for example, perceiving a flowering shrub or something similar, then withdrawing from it and first trying to remember it in representation.

That is, of course, not the immediate representation. It is already a more or less transformed representation. But in this way one can come onto the track of what a representation actually is, by forming a memory-representation shortly after one has looked.

And thus we can come so far that, while we are active in sense perception, we direct, as it were, an inner eye towards the fact that immediately there is also representation. We do not form the representation consciously; the representation is an immediate consequence, or something occurring simultaneously, that is connected with sense perception. And if we examine this, then we come far enough to acknowledge that what Aristotle emphasizes here at the beginning of his On Interpretation is indeed so.

Only when we begin to interpret—and we usually do that immediately, so immediately that the more or less organic, pure representation cannot be distinguished from the interpreted representation—only when we begin to interpret, then we are really dealing with personally coloured sense perception.

Just as there is a possibility of finding within oneself a thinking that is not personal and that is also not touched by sense perception, so it is also possible to rediscover sense perception as a pure human activity, and, inseparably connected with it, the pure representation. And I find it a wonderful thought that if we can perhaps live from time to time in this realm, in pure sense perception and representation, then we are in a human realm where the universally human is active. There are no differences of opinion there, nor any struggle of judgments, or anything of that kind, for the things are as they are and they show themselves as they are. It is only because we skip over the immediate representation that we believe the representation to be personally coloured.

Therefore let this be an appeal for peace: that within ourselves, in everyday life, without spiritual development, we can find a sense perception and the pure representations connected with it that are the same for all human beings. That is what I wanted to tell today, and next time I shall turn to the difficult task that has been set before us, namely to distinguish the spiritual from electromagnetism.