The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. The Eternal and the Transient in Human Beings

[ 1 ] The subject to be discussed here is undoubtedly one that is of interest to all people. Who could say that they are not deeply interested in the question of immortality? We need only realize that the thought of death fills people with dread. And even the few who are weary of life, who seek in death a respite from life, cannot entirely overcome this dread.

[ 2 ] People have tried to answer this question in all sorts of ways. But remember that no one can speak impartially about something in which they have a vested interest. Will they then be able to speak impartially about this question, which is of the deepest interest to their entire life? And there is something else you must consider: how much of culture depends on this. The development of our entire culture depends on how this question is answered. The stance of someone who believes in an eternal aspect of humanity will be entirely different regarding all cultural issues.

[ 3 ] It is said that it is unjust that humans were given this hope for the afterlife. The poor are thus consoled with the promise of the afterlife and thereby prevented from creating a better life for themselves here. Others say, however, that existence is bearable only in this way. When human desires play such a strong role in a matter, every possible reason is sought to justify it. It would have made little difference to man to prove that two plus two does not equal four, if his happiness had depended on that proof. And because man could not refrain from letting his desires have a say in this question of immortality, it had to be raised again and again. For man’s subjective sense of happiness is drawn into this question.

[ 4 ] It is precisely this fact, however, that has made it so suspect to modern science. And rightly so. It is precisely the most eminent figures in this field who have spoken out against human immortality. Ludwig Feuerbach says: “People first believed in immortality and then proved it.” By this he implies that humans have sought to find evidence for it because they desire it. David Friedrich Strauss and, more recently, Ernst Haeckel in his The Riddles of the Universe express similar views. If I were now required to say something here that goes against modern natural science, I would be unable to speak on this question. But it is precisely my reverence for Haeckel’s great achievements in his field and for Haeckel as one of the most monumental minds of our time that leads me, in his spirit, to take a stand against his conclusions. My task today is something entirely different from combating the natural sciences.

[ 5 ] Theosophy does not oppose the natural sciences, but rather aligns itself with them. But it does not stop there. It does not believe that we have only now, in the 19th century, made such magnificent progress; that while ignorance and superstition reigned supreme in all the centuries before, the truth has only now been brought to light through the science of our time. If the truth stood on such shaky ground, one could have little confidence in it. But we know that truth formed the very core of the wisdom teachings of the Buddha, the Jewish priests, and so on. To seek this core in all the various theories is the task of theosophy. But it does not stop at 19th-century science either. And because this is so, we may undoubtedly also approach the question from the standpoint of science. Thus, it can form the foundation from which we proceed when we seek the eternal in the human being.

[ 6 ] Feuerbach is undoubtedly correct in his previously quoted statement when he opposes the scientific method of the last fourteen centuries or so. However, he is wrong regarding the wisdom of even earlier times. For the manner in which the ancient schools of wisdom led to the knowledge of truth was fundamentally different. It was only in the later centuries of Christianity that faith was first demanded, for which the scholars then provided the evidence. This was not the case in the mysteries of antiquity. That wisdom, which was not readily disseminated, which remained the possession of the few, which was handed down to the initiate in sacred temple sites through the teachings of the priests, had a different way of leading its students to the truth. This knowledge was kept secret from the uninitiated masses; it would have been considered profaned had it been imparted to all without distinction. Only those were deemed worthy who, through long practice, had elevated their spiritual lives to understand the truth in a higher sense.

[ 7 ] Jewish tradition recounts that when a rabbi once spoke of the secret teachings, his listeners reproached him: “O old man, you should have remained silent! What have you done! You are confusing the people.” — A great danger was seen in the betrayal of the mysteries, should they be desecrated and distorted and become common knowledge. They were approached only with sacred reverence. The trials the disciples of the mysteries had to undergo were severe. Our time can scarcely imagine the arduous trials imposed upon the student. Among the Pythagoreans, we find that the students call themselves listeners. For years they are merely silent listeners, and it is entirely in the spirit of that time that this silence extended to as long as five years. They are silent during this time. Silence, in this case, means: abstaining from any debate, any criticism. Today, when the principle applies: “Test everything and keep the best”—where everyone believes they can judge everything, where, with the help of journalism, everyone quickly forms an opinion even about what they do not understand at all—one has no idea of what was demanded of a student back then. Every judgment was to remain silent; one first had to make oneself capable of taking everything in. If one passes judgment without this prerequisite, if one begins to criticize, one rebels against any further instruction. The one who understands something of this knows that he needs to spend years simply learning and allowing it to sink in over a long period of time. Today, people do not want to believe this. But only the one who has already grasped things inwardly will arrive at a true judgment of his own.

[ 8 ] Back then, the task was not to teach someone the faith through instruction; rather, one guided them up to the essence of things. They were given the spiritual eye to see; if they wished, they could go and test it. Above all, the instruction was a purifying one; it was the purifying virtues that were demanded of the student. He first had to cast off the sympathies and antipathies of daily life, which are justified there. All personal desires had to be eradicated beforehand. No one was admitted to the instruction who had not also cast off the desire for the survival of his soul. That is why Feuerbach’s statement does not apply to this era. No, first the belief in profane immortality was eradicated in the students before they could proceed to the higher problems. Viewed in this light, it becomes understandable why modern natural science turns against the doctrine of immortality with a certain justification. But only to that extent.

[ 9 ] David Friedrich Strauss says that appearances contradict the idea of immortality. Well, appearances contradict many things that are accepted scientific truths. As long as people judged the motion of the Earth and the Sun based on appearances, they could not reach a correct conclusion about it. We only came to understand them correctly when we no longer trusted the eye alone. And perhaps appearances are not at all what we should rely on in this matter.

[ 10 ] We must ask ourselves: Is it the eternal in human beings that we see being passed down and transformed within them? Or do we find it outside? The individual flower blooms and fades, but only that which is re-expressed in every flower of the species endures. Nor do we find the eternal outside, in the history of states. That which once constituted the external forms of the state has passed away; that which presented itself as the guiding idea has remained.

[ 11 ] Let us examine how the transitory and the eternal manifest themselves in nature. You all know that seven or eight years ago, none of the substances that make up your bodies today were present in your bodies. What made up my body eight years ago has been scattered throughout the world and has entirely different tasks to fulfill. And yet I stand before you, the same person I was. If you now ask: What remains of what made an impression on the eye? — Nothing. What remains is what you do not see and yet makes a person what he is. What remains of human institutions, of states? The individuals who created them have disappeared; the state has remained. So you see that we are wrong to regard the eye as the essential, for it sees only what changes, whereas the essential is the eternal. And to understand this eternal is the task of the spiritual. What I was fulfills other tasks. Even the substances that today make up my body do not remain the same; they form different compounds and yet are what today constitutes my physical body. What holds them together is the spiritual. If we hold fast to this thought, we will recognize what constitutes the eternal in man.

[ 12 ] The eternal manifests itself to us in a different way in the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms. But even there we can observe what endures. If we crush a crystal formation—such as table salt—into powder, place it in a suitable solution, and allow it to recrystallize, the particles will spontaneously resume their characteristic form. The formative power inherent in them was the enduring element; it has, as it were, remained in a dormant state, ready to awaken to new activity when the right conditions arise. In the same way, we see countless seeds emerging from the plant, from which, when entrusted to the field, new plants spring forth. The entire formative power lay invisibly within the seed. This power was capable of awakening the plants to new life. And this extends through the animal and human worlds. Even what appears to us as the human form originates from a tiny cell. Yet this does not lead us to what we refer to as human immortality. And yet, upon closer inspection, we will find something similar here as well. Life develops from life; the invisible current flows through it. However, no one will likely be satisfied with the immortality of the species. In it, the principle of humanity passes from generation to generation. But it is only one of the ways in which the enduring is preserved. There are also other ways in which this interrelationship manifests itself. To illustrate this, let us take an example from the plant world.

[ 13 ] Hungarian wheat that has been brought to Moravia and sown there soon becomes very similar to the native variety. The law of adaptation comes into play here. It now retains the characteristics it has acquired. We see something new emerging here: the concept of development. The entire world of organisms is subject to this law. Underlying this is an idea of development, according to which imperfect living beings transform into more perfect ones. They change in their external constitution, acquire different organs, so that what is preserved develops progressively.

[ 14 ] You can see that we have arrived at a new understanding of permanence. When a naturalist today explains a form of life, he does not give the same answer as the naturalists of the 18th century, who said: There are as many species of living beings as were once created by God. — That was an easy answer. Everything that came into being was brought to life by a miracle of creation. Nineteenth-century natural science has freed us from the concept of the miracle in its field. Natural forms owe their origin to evolution. Today we understand how animals evolved into higher forms of life, up to the level of the ape. When we view the various animal forms as a chronological sequence, we recognize that they were not created as such, but arose through evolution. But we see even more.

[ 15 ] The flowers of some plants undergo such significant changes under certain circumstances that one would no longer wish to classify them as belonging to the same species. Nature does indeed take leaps, and so, under certain circumstances, it allows one species to emerge from another. But in every species, something remains that recalls its predecessor; we understand them only in relation to one another, not in and of themselves, but through their ancestors. If one traces the temporal evolution of species, one understands what lies before us in space. We see the evolution over millions of years and know that in millions of years everything will look different again. Matter is constantly being replaced; it is constantly changing. Over thousands of years, the monkey evolved from the marsupial. But something remains that connects the monkey to the marsupial. It is the same thing that holds humanity together. It is the invisible principle that we saw as enduring within us, which was active millennia ago and continues to work among us today. The external resemblance of organisms corresponds to the principle of heredity. But we now also see how the form of living beings is not only inherited but also changes. We say: Something is inherited, something changes; there is something transitory and something that endures through the changing times.

[ 16 ] You know that, as far as physical characteristics are concerned, human beings resemble their ancestors. Physical form, facial features, temperament, and even passions can be traced back to ancestors. The way I move my hands is something I inherited from an ancestor. Thus, the law of heredity extends from the animal and plant kingdoms into the human world. Can this law now be applied in the same way to all areas of the human world? We must seek out the specific laws in each field. If Haeckel had made his magnificent discoveries in the biological realm, would he have limited himself, for example, to merely chemically examining the brains of various animals?

[ 17 ] The great laws are present everywhere, but in each realm in their own way. Apply this question to human life, the realm in which people are still, even today, the most ardent believers in miracles. When it comes to apes, everyone today knows that they evolved from less perfect forms of life. Only when it comes to the human soul do people still stand on the ground of the most flourishing belief in miracles. We see different human souls; we know that it is impossible to explain the soul through physical heredity. Who, for example, would try to explain Michelangelo’s genius through his ancestors? Anyone wishing to explain the shape of his head or his physique might well seek to draw meaningful conclusions from the portraits of his ancestors. But what in them points to Michelangelo’s genius? And this applies not only to the genius; it applies equally to all human beings, even if one chooses the genius as the clearest example to demonstrate that his characteristics are not due to physical heredity.

[ 18 ] Goethe himself felt this way when, in his famous verse, he spoke of what he owed to his parents:

From my father I inherited my stature,
And a serious approach to life,
From my dear mother, her cheerful nature
And a love of storytelling.

[ 19 ] Even his talent for storytelling is, at its core, merely an external trait. Yet he could not possibly have inherited his genius from his father or mother; otherwise, one would have to perceive it in them as well. We may owe our temperament, inclinations, and passions to our parents. But what is most essential to a human being—what makes him truly individual—we cannot find in his biological ancestors. Yet our natural science knows only the external characteristics of human beings. It seeks to investigate only these. Thus it arrives at a belief in the miracle of the human soul. It examines the structure of the human brain. But can it explain the human soul based on the physical structure of the brain and so on? Is Goethe’s soul therefore a miracle? Our aesthetics would prefer to regard this as the only correct standpoint one may take toward genius, and believes that genius would lose all its magic through explanation. But we cannot be satisfied with this explanation. Let us try to explain the nature of the soul in the same way we have studied plant and animal species; that is, to explain how the soul develops from the lower to the higher. Goethe’s soul descends from an ancestor just as his physical body does. How else could one explain the difference between, say, a Hottentot soul and Goethe’s soul? Every human soul traces back to its ancestors from whom it developed. And it will have successors who arise from it. This further development of the soul, however, does not coincide with the law of physical heredity. Every soul is the ancestor of later soul successors. We will understand that the law of heredity, which prevails in the physical realm, cannot be applied in the same way to the soul. The lower laws, however, continue to exist alongside the higher laws. The chemical and physical laws that govern the physical world determine the external organism. We, too, are woven into this life through our bodies. Standing in the midst of organic development, we are subject to the same laws as animals and plants.

[ 20 ] Regardless of this, however, the law of spiritual refinement takes its course. Thus, Goethe’s soul must once have existed in another form and has evolved from that form, independent of its outward appearance, just as a seed develops into a different species, subject to the law of change. But just as the plant has an enduring element that survives the change, so too has that which was enduring in the soul entered a germinal state, like the seed in the soil, to appear in a new form when the conditions are right. This is the doctrine of reincarnation. And now we will better understand the natural scientists.

[ 21 ] How can something that did not exist before be permanent? But what is permanent? We cannot regard everything that constitutes a person’s personality—their temperament, their passions—as permanent; only that which is truly individual, which existed before their physical appearance and therefore remains even after their death. The human soul enters the body and leaves it again, only to create a new body for itself after the time of maturity and to enter it. What stems from physical causes will pass away with our personality, with death; that for which we cannot find any physical causes, we must regard as the effect of a past existence. What endures in a human being is the soul, which acts from the deepest inner self and survives all changes. A human being is a citizen of eternity because they carry something eternal within themselves. The human spirit feeds on the eternal laws of the universe, and only through this is it able to understand the eternal laws of nature. Human beings would perceive only the transitory in the world if they themselves were not enduring. That which remains of what we are today is what we incorporate into our immortal self. Plants transform under given conditions. The soul, too, has adapted; it has absorbed much within itself and refined itself. What we experience as eternal, we will carry forward into another incarnation. Only when the soul first enters a body does it resemble a blank slate, and we transfer to it what we do and take in. Just as the law of physical heredity reigns in nature, so does the law of spiritual heredity reign in the spiritual realm. And just as physical laws do not apply to the spiritual, so too do the laws of physical heredity not govern the soul’s continued existence. The ancient sages, who did not demand belief until they had grounded it in knowledge, were fully aware of this fact.

[ 22 ] The question: How does the soul in its present state relate to its former state? — a question that might naturally arise here — I would like to answer as follows. Souls are in a state of constant development. This results in differences between individual souls. A higher individuality can only develop by passing through many incarnations. In the ordinary state of consciousness, people have no memory of their soul’s earlier states, but only because this memory has not yet been acquired. The potential for it exists. Haeckel himself speaks of a kind of unconscious memory that pervades the world of organisms and without which a number of natural phenomena would be inexplicable. Therefore, this recollection is merely a matter of development. Man thinks consciously and acts accordingly, while the ape acts unconsciously. And just as he has gradually risen from the ape’s stage of consciousness to conscious thinking, so will he later, with the progressive perfection of consciousness, remember his past incarnations. Just as the Buddha says of himself: “I look back upon countless incarnations”—just as it is true that in the future every human being will have the memory of so many past incarnations once this sense of self has developed in each individual, so too is it certain that this ability is already present in some advanced individuals today. As perfection progresses, this ability will become available to more and more people.

[ 23 ] This is the concept of immortality as presented by theosophy. It is both a new and an ancient concept. This is how those who sought to teach not merely faith but knowledge once taught. We do not wish to believe and then prove, but rather to enable people to seek and find the evidence for themselves. Only those who are willing to cooperate in the development of their souls will achieve this. They will progress toward perfection from life to life, for the soul neither came into being at birth nor will it therefore vanish at death.

[ 24 ] One of the objections often raised against this view is that it renders people incapable of living. Let me address this briefly. No, theosophy does not render us incapable of living; rather, it makes us more capable, precisely because we know what is enduring and what is transitory. Of course, anyone who thinks that the body is a garment that the soul merely puts on and takes off, as is sometimes said, will indeed become incapable of living. But that is a false image that no researcher should use. The body is not a garment but a tool for the soul. A tool that the soul uses to work in the world. And the one who knows what is enduring and strengthens it within himself will wield the tool better than the one who knows only what is transitory. He will strive to strengthen the eternal within himself through unceasing activity. He will carry this activity over into another life, and he will become ever more capable. Through this image, the notion that knowledge renders a person incapable of life will vanish. We understand how to act all the more capably and enduringly when we recognize that we are working not only for this one brief life, but for all future times.

[ 25 ] Let me express the power that arises from this awareness of eternity through the words that Lessing placed at the end of his significant treatise on The Education of the Human Race: “Is not all eternity mine?”