IN a fairly brief chapter on ‘The Factors of Life,’ Steiner provides a summary of the points that he has made so far. That each individual is a “thing among things,” he says, leads us to determine the nature of the world by way of its wide proliferation of percepts. Similarly, the fact that we have access to something that allows us to perceive ourselves enables us to overcome any suspicion that we amount to nothing other than simply one percept among many:

This something which emerges is no longer a mere percept; neither is it, like percepts, simply given. It is produced by our activity. It appears, in the first instance, bound up with what each of us perceives as his Self. In its inner significance, however, it transcends the Self. It adds to the separate percepts ideal determinations, which, however, are related to one another, and which are grounded in a whole. What self-perception yields is ideally determined by this something in the same way as all other percepts, and placed as subject, or “I,” over against the objects. This something is thought, and the ideal determinations are the concepts and ideas. Thought, therefore, first manifests itself in connection with the precept of self. (p.72)

As we have seen, the Self is not purely “subjective” because such a notion only comes with thought, although Steiner believes that when we use thought to characterise ourselves in this way it allows us to lead a “purely ideal existence” in the sense that we recognise ourselves as thinking beings.

That established, we must recall how the Naïve Realist will insist that to conceptualise between percepts and ourselves is not enough in itself and therefore we must rely on the feelings that provide each of us with our own unique identity. Feelings, just like percepts, appear prior to knowledge and thus for the Naïve Realist it is only when we move beyond the mere state of existence that we begin to develop a sense of Self:

However, what for us does not appear until later, is from the first indissolubly bound up with our feelings. This is how the naïve man comes to believe that in feeling he grasps existence immediately, in knowledge only mediately. The development of the affective life, therefore, appears to him more important than anything else. Not until he has grasped the unity of the world through feeling will he believe that he has comprehended it. He attempts to make feeling rather than thought the instrument of knowledge. Now a feeling is entirely individual, something equivalent to a percept. Hence a philo-sophy of feeling makes a cosmic principle out of something which has significance only within my own personality. Anyone who holds this view attempts to infuse his own self into the whole world. (p.73)

This, for Steiner, is a form of “mysticism” that uses immediate experience to transform individual feelings into something universal. In truth, feelings enable us to distinguish ourselves from the external world and provide us with a specific identity. Of course, this does not interfere with the Self’s ability to participate in the “universal world-life” or form concepts based on our relationship to the percepts that lie outside us. Again, this is achieved by way of feeling.

For the Naïve Realist, on the other hand, it is one’s personal will that provides the main impetus and this – combined with the medium of thought – is grasped through immediate experience to the effect that one truly believes that one has encountered reality:

The mode of existence presented to him by the will within himself becomes for him the fundamental reality of the universe. His own will appears to him as a special case of the general world-process; hence the latter is conceived as a universal will. The will becomes the principle of reality just as, in Mysticism, feeling becomes the principle of knowledge. This kind of theory is called Voluntarism (Thelism). It makes something which can be experienced only individually the dominant factor of the world. (pp.73-4)

This “Voluntarism,” as Steiner calls it, is compared to mysticism in terms of Naïve Realism applying a non-scientific methodology based on the belief that concepts are insufficient when it comes to determining reality. This error arises as a result of accepting that everything which is perceived by the Self is real, meaning that “Voluntarism” is no more than a means of thinking by observation.