Moral Impulses and the Lack Thereof
"What then did the Philosophy of Freedom set out to do? The necessary task to be accomplished was to show that if man is unable to find moral impulses, when he stands outside of nature, because through his senses he can reach only natural laws, then he must go out of himself. He can no longer remain within the confines of his body. I had to describe this first going out, when man leaves behind his bodily nature. This first going out is accomplished in pure thinking in the way it is described in the Philosophy of Freedom. Here man does not project himself into the environment by means of instinctive clairvoyance; he goes out of his body altogether. He transfers his consciousness into the external world (green lines). And what does he attain there? He attains moral intuition because he has reached the very first delicate degree of clairvoyance—or you may wish to use the subjective term I used then: moral imagination. Here man goes out of himself to find within the technical the spiritual—the spiritual is, after all, within it—where it is first to be found: in the sphere of morality."
Rudolf Steiner, The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution, 5. The Human Soul in Relation Sun and Moon GA 212, 7 May 1922, Dornach.