The cognitive sense by which we perceive the thought or concept living in another person directly, above and beyond the spoken word.
The sense of thought is the faculty Rudolf Steiner names as the perceiver of another being's concepts. Where the sense of word registers spoken language, the thought-sense reaches through the word to the meaning that the speaker is forming. Steiner counts it among the twelve senses, grouping it with the world-facing upper senses that let one human inwardly meet the mental life of another.
In Steiner's Own Words
Similarly, the sense of thought has nothing to do with the formation of our own thoughts. Something entirely different is involved when we ourselves are thinking; this thinking is not an activity of our sense of thought. That still remains to be discussed. Our sense of thought is what gives us the ability to understand and perceive the thoughts of others. Thus this sense of thought does not, primarily, have anything to do with the formation of our own thoughts.
What it Means Today
The strongest modern parallel to the thought-sense is found in the phenomenology of understanding, the philosophical study of how one consciousness grasps another. When Edmund Husserl analysed empathy in his 1928 lectures, and when Edith Stein devoted her 1916 doctoral dissertation under Husserl at Freiburg to On the Problem of Empathy, both argued that we apprehend another person's experience as a given, not as a guess assembled from gestures. Steiner says the same in a different register: when we meet a speaker, we do not infer the thought behind the words, we perceive it through a dedicated sense.
This is where Steiner's account stays sharp against the materialist reading he criticised in the same lecture cycle. He rejects the view, then advancing through thinkers like Ernst Mach, that recognising another mind is a subconscious deduction from physical signs. The thought-sense, like the sense of the I beside it, is a direct organ of social perception. Phenomenologists working in the Husserl lineage, through Maurice Merleau-Ponty and into present-day enactive cognitive science, reach a parallel conclusion: comprehension of another's meaning is perceptual and immediate. What Steiner frames as a distinct concept-sense, this tradition frames as the directness of intersubjective understanding. Both refuse to reduce the meeting of two minds to inference from behaviour. The practical consequence is a discipline of attention: to read the concept a person is forming, not merely the words they utter.
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