Page "Rudolf Steiner" Paragraph 58

Steiner postulates that the world is essentially an indivisible unity, but that our consciousness divides it into the sense-perceptible appearance, on the one hand, and the formal nature accessible to our thinking, on the other.

He sees in thinking itself an element that can be strengthened and deepened sufficiently to penetrate all that our senses do not reveal to us.

Steiner thus explicitly denies all justification to a division between faith and knowledge ; otherwise expressed, between the spiritual and natural worlds.

Their apparent duality is conditioned by the structure of our consciousness, which separates perception and thinking, but these two faculties give us two complementary views of the same world ; neither has primacy and the two together are necessary and sufficient to arrive at a complete understanding of the world.

In thinking about perception ( the path of natural science ) and perceiving the process of thinking ( the path of spiritual training ), it is possible to discover a hidden inner unity between the two poles of our experience.