from what they do in the actual sense-world; and he recognizes that
behind them lie causes which are not physical, but psycho-spiritual ones.

Should he receive an impression of heat he will not, for instance,
attribute this to a piece of hot iron, but will regard it as the emanation
of some soul-process, which he has hitherto experienced only with his
soul's inner life. He knows that behind imaginative experiences exist
psycho-spiritual things and processes just as behind physical perceptions
we have physical entities and material facts.

And yet this similarity, apparent between the world of imagination and the
physical world, is modified by one important difference. There is
something present in the physical world which, when met in the imaginative
world, bears quite another appearance. In the former we are aware of a
perpetual ebb and flow, an alternation between birth and death. But in the
imaginative world there appears, in place of this phenomenon, a continual
metamorphosis of the one into the other. In the physical world we see, for
instance, how a plant fades away, but in the imaginative world there
emerges, in proportion as the plant fades, another form, not physically
discernible, into which the withering plant is gradually transformed. When
once the plant has faded away completely, this form will have become fully
developed in its place. Birth and death are conceptions which lose their
value in the imaginative world, making way for a comprehension of the
transmutation of the one into the other.

This being the case, those truths concerning which we have already made
certain communications in an earlier chapter of this book (see Chapter II,
"The Nature of Man") become accessible to the imaginative perception.
Physical sense-perception is able to perceive only what takes place in the
physical body, processes which are enacted within the "domain of birth and
death." The other principles of man's being, namely, the etheric or vital
body, the sentient body, and the ego, are subject to the law of
transmutation, and the perception of them is unlocked by imaginative
cognition. Any one who has advanced this far will observe that that which
lives on under other conditions of being after death, detaches itself from
the physical body.

But development does not come to a standstill within the imaginative
world. Anyone who would like to remain stationary in it, would, it is
true, be able to note the entities in process