Whoever attentively observes himself will find the general custom of speech very striking, for almost every day we can see for ourselves how, when falling asleep, phantasies are woven into our dreams, so that between the dreams of day and night there is not so great a difference. Thus we have two forms of thinking—directed thinking and dream or phantasy thinking. The first, working for communication with speech elements, is troublesome and exhausting; the latter, on the contrary, goes on without trouble, working spontaneously, so to speak, with reminiscences. The first creates innovations, adaptations, imitates reality and seeks to act upon it. The latter, on the contrary, turns away from reality, sets free subjective wishes, and is, in regard to adaptation, wholly unproductive.16
Let us leave aside the query as to why we possess these two different ways of thinking, and turn back to the second proposition, namely, how comes it that we have two different ways of thinking? I have intimated above that history shows us that directed thinking was not always as developed as it is at present. In this age the most beautiful expression of directed thinking is science, and the technic fostered by it. Both things are indebted for their existence simply to an energetic education in directed thinking. At the time, however, when a few forerunners of the present culture, like the poet Petrarch, first began to appreciate Nature understandingly17 there was already in existence an equivalent for our science, to wit, scholasticism.18 This took its objects from the phantasies of the past, and it gave to the mind a dialectic
