Perhaps getting hung up on particular concepts in PoF is like trying to learn to play a piece of complicated music.  One person finds it hard to play the sharps, another has to work for years to get some of the more difficult chords and so on. 

We will have questions about Steiner's approach, the book is intended to raise questions.

I found the following fascinating comment in one person's review of the book "Anthroposophy - a Fragment" by Steiner:

Sometimes the important things about reading a certain book are the insights that happen to me spontaneously that are obviously or maybe not so obviously connected with the book. That happened with this book by Rudolf Steiner. It was a book he started, but never completed. So difficult was his task of converting his insights into words, not only did he never finish it (thus the subtitle), but he actually re-wrote some pages several times. The unfinished manuscript was finally published in English only recently together with his multiple renditions of certain pages. The subject of the book is the twelve senses of the human body. Yes, twelve senses, and his way of talking about them makes reading of this book rather like walking across a tightrope - one focuses so much on balancing concepts just to get across the wire that it is difficult to remember what happened during the trip. One can always go back across the wire, but once again one finds that a similar thing happens: one arrives at the other side, breathlessly, with only a little more to remember. For this reason and others, I'd like to start off this review by discussing an insight that came to me one day while I was pondering, as I usually do, the latest book I had been reading in the shower. I call these episodes "board meetings" - as they provide me with uninterrupted time that I can think and plan.

The full review is here: http://www.doyletics.com/arj/aafrvw.htm

Now I find that a fascinating image.. we are balancing concepts and crossing a tightrope.  My experience of PoF is actually very similar to that, but I think that PoF is perhaps more like a narrow footbridge than a tightrope and it's within the power of every one of us to cross it balancing our concepts appropriately.  There are repeated points in the book where Steiner leaves it open for us to cross this footbridge.

Here is another suggested analogy.  A bit rough but I would like people's thoughts on it, is it helpful or not?

We have a sense that what Steiner refers to as percept and concept belong together.  Bear with me for a while as I try to concoct the analogy.  We can sing the octave.. Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do.. Do Ti La So Fa Mi Re Do.  I experience moving from one note to another.  I can conceive of each note as a separate object but I know that that's not really absolutely the case, it's just as true that the whole movement through the notes is a reality, in fact in some sense much more real.  And then again I have experience of harmonics, of notes that are not "actually" there in a primary sense... and so on.

I would like to suggest that the concepts "percept" and "concept" in PoF relate to one another somewhat as the two "Do" notes in the Octave.  We can move from one to the other through singing the scale backwards and forwards.  But perhaps then we notice that there are eight "separate" notes in the octave and the eighth "feels" like the first.  Percept and concept are similar but different.  That raises a further question.

Now people have been questioning the idea that there is an experience of a pure "percept".  In a sense, I would agree with that assertion, it is a kind of a limit, like one end of the octave.  In the same way, can anyone truly say that they have experienced a pure "concept"?  It's kind of a limit I think, Steiner doesn't want us to "think beyond" or "experience beyond" these two limits but to find that everything is in a sense contained in the movements between them.

In the same sense music could be said to be in a sense all about the movements between the first "Do" and the last "Do".  But only in a sense...

So if you've persevered with my analogy this far, what are the intervening notes?  Perhaps - again tentatively - I could suggest they are levels of being.  For example, I note that my experience of the world is permeated with the results of my own thinking, with individual feelings, memories and so on.

Perhaps I could consider each of these levels of being as something like one of the intervals in the musical scale?  The octave being knowing, the third and fourth being some kind of feeling, the fifth being some kind of conceptual level of being and so on? 

Then what is the music, the movement between notes, the harmony, the rhythm, the melody?  The music is thinking's true being, which is spirit.

These thoughts were sparked in part after reading through the Steiner lectures "The Inner Nature of Music and the Experience of Tone" which I can thoroughly recommend - it is available online here: http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/InNatMusic/InNaMu_index.html and is full of interesting insights into the relation between the evolution of the human being and the evolution of music, some aspects of which I'm sure you will have heard before.