My personal soul-life, my thoughts, memories, and feelings, are in me, because I am a nature-being organised in such and such a way, with a perfectly definite sense-apparatus, with a perfectly definite nervous system. I have no right to transfer this my human soul to other things. I should only be entitled to do so if I happened to find anywhere a similarly organised nervous system. But my individual soul is not the highest spiritual element in me. This highest spiritual element must first be awakened through the inner sense; and this awakened spiritual element in me is also one and the same with the spiritual element in all things. The plant appears immediately in its own proper spirituality to this spiritual element,--I have no need to endow it with a spirituality like unto my own. All talk about the unknown “thing-in-itself” loses any kind of meaning with this conception of the world; for it is just that very “thing-in-itself” which reveals itself to the inner sense. All such talk originates simply in the fact that those who talk thus are unable to recognise in the spiritual contents of their own inner being the “things-in-themselves.” They think that they know in their own inner selves mere shadows and schemes without being,--“mere concepts and ideas” of things. But as they still have a sort of premonition of the “thing-in-itself,” they therefore believe that this “thing-in-itself” is concealing itself, and that there are limits set to man’s power of knowing. One cannot prove to such as are entangled in this belief, that they must grasp the “thing-in-itself” in their own inner being, for even if one were to put it before them, they would still never recognise or admit this “thing-in-itself.” But it is just this recognition with which we are concerned. All that Meister Eckhart says is saturated with this recognition. “Of this take a comparison: A door opens and shuts upon a hinge. If, now, I compare the outer plank of this door to the outer man, I must then compare the hinge to the inner man. Now, when the door opens and shuts, the outer plank moves to and fro, while yet the hinge remains constantly immovable and is in no way changed thereby. In like manner it is here also.” As an individual sense-being, I can investigate things in all directions--the door opens and shuts,--if I do not spiritually give birth within me to the perceptions of the senses, then do I know nothing of their nature--the hinge does not move!