ture – but it is still like in a cloud and that is why he is not able to express exactly what it is he wants” (Zoch 1847, 411). Under the notion of spiritual vision, he could not imagine anything other than arbitrary subjective visions. Kellner-Hostinský made a fervent stand for Hurban. Explaining that genuine intuition or inspiration is something other than fantasy, somnambulism, soothsaying or visions conditioned by the stomach (bodily organs). The history of Slovak philosophy in fact begins with this controversy about the “eye of the heart”. Štúr, Hurban and others assumed the real existence of a spiritual world from which the human soul draws knowledge and content by means of a real process of inspiration. This was implicit and self-evident in the romantic worldview, whereas the Enlightenment and modern Western views (on behalf of whom Zoch is also speaking) regarded such communication with the world of spiritual beings as fictitious and non-existent. For them, it is a flagrant contravention of correct thinking to mix religion and poetic inspiration with science because feelings do not contain any objectiveness. But the Štúr group believed that truth is revealed to man in poetic or prophetic inspiration; that one can gaze at the principles and ideas according to which the world has been formed and thus observe the objective world from within through one’s spiritual eye. Therefore, references to fairy tales, legends and myths, for instance, counted as a valid argument when looking for truth since the genius of a nation is manifested as a real being in them. “The Kellner-Hostinský method consists in the parallelization of semantic associations between natural phenomena and the world of man” (Čepan 1989, 98). That is to say, he presumes the same as Comenius, and not Kant’s thesis about unknowable things-inthemselves by which the definitive subjectobject split occurred in the West and in which all metaphysics has been buried. For instance, one can know a rose-in-itself very well because the metaphysical power standing beyond the phenomenon of the rose, the idea of the rose, is a being that we can know intimately and see inwardly as the power of love. The spiritual rose reveals itself and also pervades our own soul. The same powers that shape external nature are also moving and working inside the human soul. That is why nature can speak to us in the figurative language of symbols innate to man. Images in dreams have the same meaning. Unfortunately, as a consequence of the fall of man, the forces of our inner world are in chaotic disarray and distorted by personal bias. Only an artist with moral aspirations, forging and ennobling his own inner being in the hearth of ardent love and sacrifice will purify his imagination and transform it into an organ able to correctly perceive the inspirations of a higher power. His inner images gradually become equal to the archetypes: “The enthused artist simply follows his inner inspirations and at the moment an idea conceived through fervent love is brought forth... into outward reality – all else must vanish in the soul of the artist, and where he submits to a higher power, his imagination becomes equal to the archetype” (Hostinský, manuscript M45D8). The innermost esSpirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 53 (17)
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