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Updated: June 10, 2025
Beyond this, Ruskin conceives of a third, still higher stage, in which man becomes capable of raising himself through 'higher contemplation' into an artistic-ethical relation to the content of the sense-world. Now, in the way Ruskin represents the second and third stages they seem to be exclusive of one another. That was as far as he could go, in his own day.
The ego must have pleasures of the senses as long as it lives in the body, even though it be for the very reason that its own nature is spiritual. For the spirit manifests in material things, and the ego is enjoying nothing less than spirit when it surrenders itself to that element in the sense-world which is irradiated by the light of the spirit.
It contains everything spiritual which is revealed through the senses, yet this spiritual treasure could not have been gathered save by life in the sense-world. This spiritual fruit of the sense-world becomes after death the ego’s own inner world.
Freedom is to be conceived, in the Kantian sense, as equally far removed from chance or caprice and from compulsion: Man chooses his own non-temporal, intelligible nature; he predestinates himself in the first creation, i.e., from eternity, and is responsible for his actions in the sense-world, which are the necessary results of that free primal act.
A still higher manifestation takes place in the spirit-land when the sound becomes the “spiritual word.” Then there streams through the ego not only the pulsing life of another spiritual being, but such a being itself communicates its own inner nature to the ego; and then, when the spiritual word streams through the ego, two beings live in one another, without that separating element which every companionship in the sense-world must carry with it.
In this way an investigator, trained in occult research, sees spiritual processes behind all the events of the physical sense-world. In his eyes all transformations of the material part of the earth-planet are manifestations of spiritual forces lying behind what is material.
Once one has been trained to accuracy by means of an obvious, physical sense process, the desire to think in conformity with facts will have become habitual, even if thought does not feel itself under the control of the physical sense-world and its laws; we then lose the tendency to let our thoughts drift about aimlessly.
Experiences, inner events, Socrates points to them, and first of all to the experience of wisdom itself. What does he desire who aspires after wisdom? He wishes to free himself from what the senses offer him in every-day perception. He seeks for the spirit in the sense-world. Is not this a fact which may be compared with dying?
At first, the soul of the occult student is feeble in all that appertains to a perception of the psycho-spiritual world; and he will therefore need all the inner energy he can summon in order, while meditating, to hold firm the symbols or other concepts which he has built up from the impulses of the sense-world.
In accordance with the tendency they had thus developed, they worked upon just that element in man which was formed through his having perceptions of the sense-world, behind which the spiritual world lies hidden.
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