This is the condition of soul of which Traherne says in the same poem that through it a man is still a recipient of the 'true Ideas of all things'. In this condition the object of sight is not the corporeal world which reflects the light, but light itself, engaged in the weaving of the archetypal images. In a later passage of the same poem Traherne expresses this by saying: 'Tis not the Object, but the Light That maketh Hev'n. ...' And more clearly still in the following part of his poem An Infant Eye: 'A simple Light from all Contagion free, A Beam that's purely Spiritual, an Ey That's altogether Virgin, Things doth see Ev'n like unto the Deity; That is, it shineth in an hevenly Sense, And round about (Unmov'd) its Light dispense. 'The visiv Rays are Beams of Light indeed, Refined, subtil, piercing, quick and pure; And as they do the sprightly winds exceed, Are worthy longer to endure; They far out-shoot the Reach of Grosser Air, With which such Excellence may not compare. But being once debas'd, they soon becom Less activ than they were before.' How at this stage the soul experiences the act of perception in itself is shown in the following passage from the poem Wonder: 'A Nativ Health and Innocence Within my Bones did grow And while my God did all his Glories show I felt a vigour in my Sense That was all SPIRIT: I within did flow With seas of Life like Wine.' Utterances of this kind illustrate the fact that perception of the ur-images of the world consists in a reading with the eye-of-the-spirit, which has been rendered so strong that for its action no support from the physical eye is any longer required. This faculty of spiritual Imagination (which Rudolf Steiner was able to exercise in advance of other human beings) is acquired on a path of training which is the direct continuation of the Goethean path.1 It remains to show that acceptance of information obtained through spiritual Imagination, without ourselves being as yet in actual command of it, is not in contradiction with the principles of 'reading'. Let us, to this end, think of reading in the ordinary sense of this word, calling to mind that for the acquisition of this faculty we depend on someone who can teach it because he already has it. Exactly the same holds good for the reading with which we are here concerned. Here, too, a teacher already possessing this faculty is required. Thus Goethe became for us a teacher of reading, and it would be a mistake to imagine that he, for his part, needed no teacher. In his case this function was fulfilled partly by what he learned through his studies of the earlier fruits of man's spiritual activity, that is, from an epoch when vestiges at least of the original, instinctive faculty of spiritual Imagination were still extant. A similar function on our own path of study was performed by our occupation with the old doctrine of the four elements and the basic concepts of alchemy.