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The idea of the intellectual soul is borrowed
from Anthroposophy. Although Barfield
admits that "there is really, by the very nature of the subject, an almost
insuperable difficulty about describing or 'explaining' the intellectual
soul, as seen from within, that is to say, from the Ego itself" (RCA
126), he succeeds admirably in helping us to understand its stance before
the world.
"We in the West," he explains in Romanticism
Comes of Age, "are so placed [in the Intellectual Soul] that
as our self-consciousness
increases, we feel: over there is the material world, all that I experience
as sense-perception and ordinary thought, and over here is the "I," a mysterious
entity, perhaps non-entity) about which I can never know anything, and
between the two there is no connection. (132)
While the Consciousness
Soul "only says 'I know,' when it can add: 'because I have experienced,'"
the intellectual soul knows things, or thinks it does, with certainty without
the need of "suffering" them. Its knowledge is abstract.
See in particular "Of the Intellectual Soul"
(RCA 126-142). |
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