The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Theosophical Doctrine of the Soul I: Body and Soul

[ 1 ] In order to be able to convey heavenly wisdom to people, self-knowledge is required. Plato held his great teacher Socrates in such high esteem precisely because Socrates, through self-knowledge, was able to attain the highest level of knowledge—knowledge of God—because he valued the knowledge of his own soul more than all knowledge of external nature, more than anything that relates to anything beyond our world. Socrates became one of the martyrs of knowledge and truth precisely because he was misunderstood in this knowledge of his own soul. He was accused of denying the gods, whereas he had merely sought them by a different path than others, the path through his own soul; accused for the sake of this knowledge of the soul, which has as its goal not merely the knowledge of one’s own human soul, but also the treasure that this human soul holds in terms of knowledge, namely, the knowledge of the divine foundation of the world.

[ 2 ] These three lectures will deal with this knowledge of the soul. The number of lectures has not been set arbitrarily, nor is it a matter of chance; rather, it has been carefully determined based on the soul’s developmental process. For in the times when knowledge of the soul and wisdom of the soul were placed at the center of all human thought and striving—in the times of ancient Indian Vedanta wisdom, which preceded Buddhism; and again during the time of Buddhism, when it was in its prime; and again during the time when Greek philosophy was in its prime— and again during the early and later golden age of Christian development, the human being was divided into three parts: body, soul, and spirit. If one wishes to consider the soul in the proper sense, one must relate it to the other two aspects of the human being—the body on the one hand and the spirit on the other. Therefore, this first introductory lecture must deal with the relationship of the soul to the body. The second lecture will deal with the actual inner nature of the human soul, and the third lecture with the view that the human soul can gain of the divine-spiritual foundation of worldly existence.

[ 3 ] By a strange twist of history, this threefold division of the human being has been lost to Western scholarship, for wherever you look for the science of the soul today, everywhere you will find that the science of the soul, or psychology, is simply set in opposition to the natural sciences or the study of the body, and everywhere you will hear that the underlying assumption is that the human being should be viewed from two perspectives: the perspective that sheds light on physicality and the perspective that sheds light on the soul. Put simply, this means that the human being consists of body and soul. This statement, upon which essentially all of the psychology you know is based and to which many errors in psychology can be traced, has a curious history. Right up until the early days of Christianity, whenever people reflected on human beings and sought to explain their nature, they distinguished the human being into three parts: body, soul, and spirit. Go to the early Christian church fathers, go to the Gnostics, and you will find this division everywhere. Right up into the 2nd and 3rd centuries, you encounter this tripartite division of the human being, which was also recognized by Christian scholarship and dogmatics. Later on, this teaching was considered dangerous within Christianity. It was believed that by rising beyond the soul to the spirit, man would become too arrogant, that he would presume too much in seeking to elucidate the nature of things, a matter that only revelation was meant to clarify. Therefore, various councils deliberated and decided that the following should be taught as dogma for the future: man consists of body and soul. Distinguished theologians, such as John Scotus Erigena and Thomas Aquinas, held fast to the tripartite division in certain respects. But Christian scholarship, which was primarily responsible for the study of the soul during the Middle Ages, increasingly lost awareness of this tripartite division. And with the flourishing of science in the 15th and 16th centuries, there was no longer any awareness of the old classification. Even Descartes distinguished only between the soul—which he calls the mind—and the body. And so it remained. Those who speak today of psychology or the science of the soul do not realize that they are speaking under the influence of a Christian dogma. It is believed—and one can read this in the textbooks—that human beings consist only of body and soul. But in doing so, one has merely perpetuated a centuries-old prejudice, and this is still the foundation upon which we stand today. This will also become clear to us in the course of these lectures.

[ 4 ] Above all, it is now our task to show what relationship the impartial observer of the soul must assume between soul and body; for it seems to be a conclusion of modern natural science that one should no longer speak of the soul at all in the way one spoke of it thousands of years before our time. Natural science, which left its mark on the 19th century and its intellectual development, has repeatedly declared that a science of the soul in the old sense of the word—such as Goethe’s and, to some extent, Aristotle’s—is incompatible with its views and therefore untenable. You can consult textbooks on psychology, or take Haeckel’s *The Riddles of the Universe*; you will find everywhere that dogmatic prejudices persist and that the view prevails that the old ways of approaching the soul have been overcome. No one—and I say this for the natural scientists and the admirers of Ernst Haeckel—can revere Haeckel more than I do, as a great figure, as a monumental scientific figure. But great people also have great faults, and so it is fitting to examine a prejudice of our time with complete impartiality.

[ 5 ] What does this perspective tell us? It tells us: Look, what you have called the soul has, after all, vanished from our grasp. We natural scientists have shown you that all sensory perceptions, everything that develops as an imaginative life, all thinking, all willing, all feeling—that all of this is bound to very specific organs of our brain and our nervous system. Nineteenth-century natural science has shown, so they say, that certain parts of our cerebral cortex, if they are not completely intact, make it impossible for us to perform certain mental functions. From this, one draws the conclusion that these mental functions are localized in these individual parts of our brain, that they, as they say, depend on these parts of our brain. This has been expressed quite drastically by saying: A certain point in the brain is the center for language, another part for this mental activity, another part for yet another, so that one can chip away at the soul piece by piece. — It has been shown that the disease of very specific parts of the brain is accompanied by the loss of specific mental faculties. What people have imagined the soul to be for millennia, no natural scientist can find; it is a concept with which the natural scientist cannot make sense of. We find the body and its functions, but nowhere a soul. The great moral teacher of Darwinism, Bartholomäus Carneri, who wrote an ethics of Darwinism, clearly expressed his conviction, as it can perhaps never be expressed more clearly from these circles of natural scientists. He says: Let us take a clock, for example. The hands move forward; the clockwork is in motion. All of this happens through the mechanism before us. Just as what the clock accomplishes is an expression of the clock mechanism, so what a human being feels, thinks, and wills is an expression of the entire nervous mechanism before us. Just as one cannot assume that there is a little soul-being inside the clock that moves the wheels and advances the hands, so too can we not assume that there is a soul outside the organism that brings about thinking, feeling, and willing. — This is the confession of a natural scientist in a spiritual sense; this is what natural scientists have made the foundation of a new faith, of such a purely naturalistic religion. The natural scientist believes that the results of science compel him to this confession, and he believes that he may regard anyone who, under the influence of science, does not arrive at these conclusions as having a childish mind. Bartholomäus Carneri has shown this without embellishment. As long as people were children, they spoke like Aristotle; but now that they have become adults and understand science, they must abandon childish views. The view of natural scientists, which sees nothing in human beings but a mechanism, corresponds to the parable of the clock. This view is expressed in radical terms. It is regarded as the only one worthy of the present age. And it is presented in such a way that the scientific discoveries of the age compel us to arrive at these convictions.

[ 6 ] But now we must ask ourselves: Is it really, above all, the natural sciences—the detailed study of our nervous system, the detailed study of our organs and their functions—that have compelled us to adopt this view? No, because in the 18th century, everything that is today cited as scientifically sound and authoritative was still in its infancy. There was nothing of modern psychology, nothing of the discoveries of the great Johannes Müller and his school, nothing of the discoveries made by natural scientists in the 19th century. And back then, in the 18th century, these views were expressed in the most radical way during the French Enlightenment, which could not rely on the natural sciences; it was then that the words “Man is a machine” were first uttered. — A book by Holbach dates from this period, titled *Système de la nature*, of which Goethe said that he had felt repelled by its superficiality and lack of substance. This serves as proof that this view existed before modern natural science. One may say that, on the contrary, the materialism of the 18th century overshadowed the minds of the 19th century and that the materialist creed set the tone for the way of thinking that was only later introduced into natural science. So much for historical truth. For if this were not the case, one would have to call the view held by modern natural science—namely, that one cannot speak of the soul in the old sense because the soul can be removed in the same way that it has been shown that the brain can be removed—childish.

[ 7 ] For what, exactly, does this view gain? No researcher in the field of the life of the soul—whether in the sense of Aristotle, in the sense of the ancient Greeks, or—let us say, despite all the objections that will come from some quarters—no researcher in the life of the soul who seeks to understand the soul in the sense of the Christian Middle Ages—can take offense at the truths of modern natural science. Any reasonable researcher of the soul will agree with what modern science says about the nervous system and the brain as the mediators of our mental functions. He is not surprised that, if a certain part of the brain becomes diseased, one can no longer speak. The ancient researcher is no more astonished by this than he is by the fact that he can no longer think if he is killed. Modern science does nothing more than specify in detail what people have already generally understood. And just as, because a person knows that without certain parts of the brain they cannot speak or form ideas, so too it should be proof that they have no soul if they can be killed. The Vedantists, Plato, and others are also clear that human soul activity ceases when a large boulder falls on a person’s head and crushes it. The ancient doctrine of the soul taught nothing else. We can be clear about that. We can accept the whole of natural science and yet understand the doctrine of the soul differently. In earlier centuries, it was clear that the path taken by natural science does not lead to knowledge of the soul and therefore cannot be taken to refute it. If those who strive to refute the ancient science of the soul from the standpoint of natural science were well-versed in the thought processes of earlier times—when people were not yet so preoccupied with external life, when they were not yet accustomed to indeed the life of the soul in general, would the naturalistic believers engage with the thought processes of ancient sages, then it is precisely through these thought processes that they would be able to see what a quixotic endeavor it is to fight against the doctrine of the soul in this scientific sense.

[ 8 ] This entire struggle is already depicted in a dialogue found in Buddhist literature—a dialogue that does not belong to the Buddha’s own discourses and was first recorded in the early years before the birth of Christ. But anyone who examines the dialogue will see that it deals with the oldest authentic views of Buddhism, which are expressed in the conversation between King Milinda—endowed with Greek wisdom and dialectic—and the Buddhist sage Nagasena. This king steps before the Indian sage and asks: Tell me, as whom are you known? — To this, the wise Nagasena replies: “They call me Nagasena. But that is only a name. There is no subject, no personality behind it.” “What?” said King Milinda, who embodied Greek dialectic and the full capacity and power of Greek thought, “Listen, all of you who have come here: the sage claims that there is nothing behind the name Nagasena.” What, then, is this that stands before me? Are your hands, your legs, Nagasena? No. Are your sensations, feelings, and ideas Nagasena? No, none of that is Nagasena. Well, then, the connection of all these things is Nagasena. But since he now claims that all of that is not Nagasena, that there is only a name that holds everything together, who then is he, and what, then, is Nagasena? Is that which lives behind the brain, behind the organs, behind the physical body, behind the feelings and ideas, a nothing? Is a nothing the one who bestows benefits upon others? Is the one who does good and evil a nothing? Is the one who strives for holiness a nothing? Is there nothing behind all this but the mere name? — Then Nagasena replied with another parable: How did you come here, great king, on foot or by chariot? — The king replied: By chariot. — Well then, explain the chariot to me. Is the drawbar your chariot? Are the wheels your chariot? Is the body of the chariot your chariot? — No, replied the king. — What, then, is your chariot? It is a name that refers only to the connection of the various parts.

[ 9 ] What did the sage Nagasena, who was well-versed in Buddhist teachings, mean by his answer? — O King, you who have attained great and formidable skill in Greece and in Greek philosophy, you must understand that when you consider the parts of a chariot in their context, you arrive at nothing more than a name, just as when you hold the parts of a human being together.

[ 10 ] Take this ancient teaching, which can be traced back to the earliest days of the Buddhist worldview, and ask yourself: what does it say? Nothing other than that the path of attaining knowledge of the soul through the observation of the external organs—whether viewed in a coarse or subtle manner—and through the observation of the interplay of mental images, which the great anatomist Mechnikov estimated at one billion, is a wrong path. In the spirit of this correct statement by the sage Nagasena, we cannot find the soul in this way. This is a false path. Never, in the times when people knew the way to find and study the soul, did anyone attempt to approach the soul in this manner. It was a historical necessity that the subtle, intimate paths along which the ancient sages of the Christian Middle Ages still sought the soul receded somewhat as our natural science began to shift its focus more toward the external world. For what, then, are the methods, perspectives, and points of view that natural science has developed in a particularly distinctive way? You can find in the posthumous works of one of the most brilliant natural scientists of our immediate present—who made great discoveries in the field of electrical theory—that modern natural science has inscribed on its banner: simplicity and practicality. And you will find that a psychologist who also works in the spirit of natural science adds clarity to these two requirements of simplicity and practicality. And one can say that through these three—simplicity, practicality, and clarity—natural science has worked nothing short of miracles.

[ 11 ] But this does not apply to the soul. Clarity in observing external features, practicality in relation to external appearance—that is why natural science came to seek, calculate, and investigate the connections between parts. But that was precisely what, in the sense of the saying of the sage Nagasena, can never lead to the soul. Because natural science has now taken this path, it is only too understandable that it has strayed from the paths of the soul. Today, there is not even an awareness of what soul researchers have strived for over the centuries. It is nothing short of astonishing what is said in this regard and what a sum of ignorance is revealed when, in seemingly authoritative circles today, people speak of Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul, or of the doctrine of the soul held by the early Christian researchers, or of the medieval doctrine of the soul. And yet, if one wishes to understand the nature of the soul scientifically, there is no other approach than that of careful inner work to assimilate Aristotle’s concepts—the very concepts that led the early Christians and the great Christian Church Fathers to an understanding of the soul. There is no other method. It is just as important for this field as the method of natural science is for the external sciences. But these methods of the science of the soul have largely been lost to us. Truly inner observations are not regarded as a scientific field at all.

[ 12 ] The Theosophical Movement has set itself the task of re-exploring the paths of the soul. Access to the soul can be found in a wide variety of ways. In other lectures, I have attempted to convey an understanding of the soul through purely spiritual-scientific means and purely Theosophical methods. Here, however, we shall first speak in the sense in which the great Aristotle established this science of the soul at the conclusion of the great Greek philosophical epoch. For unlike with Aristotle, the wisdom of the soul had been cultivated in earlier times. We will understand how the wisdom of the soul was cultivated in ancient Egyptian wisdom, and in the ancient Vedic wisdom. But that is for later. Today, let me speak of Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul, who, centuries before the birth of Christ, as a scholar and scientist, brought to completion that which had been discovered through entirely different paths. We can say that in Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul we have something that the greatest minds in the field of soul studies were able to offer. And because Aristotle conveys the best, we must speak of Aristotle above all else. And yet this giant of his time—his writings are a treasure trove of ancient knowledge, and anyone who delves into Aristotle knows what had been accomplished before his time—this giant was no clairvoyant like Plato; he was a scientist. Anyone who wishes to approach the soul through scientific means must do so by Aristotle’s path. Aristotle is a figure who, in every respect—when one takes the times into account—meets the demands of scientific thinking. Except, as we shall see, on a single point. And this single point, on which we shall find Aristotle unsatisfactory for the doctrine of the soul, has become the great downfall of all scientific doctrines of the soul in the West.

[ 13 ] Aristotle was a proponent of the theory of evolution. He fully embraced the perspective of evolutionary theory. He assumed that all beings had evolved according to strict scientific necessity. He even posited that the most imperfect beings arose through spontaneous generation, through the mere coming together of inanimate natural substances, in a purely natural manner. This is a hypothesis that is a major bone of contention in science, but one that Haeckel shares with Aristotle. And Haeckel also shares Aristotle’s conviction that a straight ladder leads upward to the human being. Aristotle also includes all soul development within this evolution and is convinced that there is not a radical difference between soul and body, but only a gradual one. That is to say, Aristotle is convinced that in the development from the imperfect to the perfect, a moment arises when the stage is reached where all the inanimate has found its form, and then the possibility arises quite of its own accord that the spiritual develops upward from the inanimate. And now he distinguishes, step by step, a so-called plant soul that lives throughout the plant world, an animal soul that lives in the animal kingdom, and finally he distinguishes a higher stage of this animal soul that lives in human beings. You see, Aristotle, when properly understood, is in complete agreement with everything that modern natural science teaches. And now take Haeckel’s *The Riddles of the Universe*, the first pages where he stands on the ground of correct natural laws, and compare that with Aristotle’s natural science and theory of the soul; then you will find, once you account for the difference brought about by time, that no real difference exists.

[ 14 ] But now comes the point where Aristotle goes beyond the science of the soul, which modern natural science believes it has reached. Here Aristotle demonstrates that he is capable of observing true inner life. For anyone who follows with deep understanding what Aristotle now builds upon this theory of knowledge based on natural laws will see that all those who object to Aristotle’s view have simply not understood it in the true sense of the word. It is infinitely simple to see that we must take a step—a tremendous step—from the animal soul to the human soul. It is infinitely easy to see. Nothing prevents us from taking this step with Aristotle other than the habits of thought that have developed in the course of the modern intellectual tradition. For Aristotle is clear that something occurs within the human soul that differs fundamentally from everything found as a soul-life outside of it. Even the ancient Pythagoreans, incidentally, said that whoever truly grasps the truth that man is the only being capable of learning to count knows in what man differs from the animal. But it is not so easy to grasp what it actually means that only man can learn to count. The Greek philosopher Plato declared no one ready for his school of philosophy who had not first studied mathematics, at least the elements, the fundamentals. That is to say: Plato wanted nothing more than for those he introduced to the science of the soul to know something about the nature of mathematics, to know something about the nature of this peculiar mental activity that human beings engage in when they practice mathematics. But this is also clear to Aristotle; what matters is not so much doing mathematics as understanding that it is possible for human beings to do mathematics. This means nothing other than that human beings are capable of discovering laws—strictly self-contained laws—that no external world can provide them with. Only those who are not trained in thinking, only those who do not know how to achieve self-observation, only they fail to realize that not even the simplest mathematical theorem could ever be derived through mere observation. Nowhere in nature is there a true circle, nowhere in nature is there a true straight line, nowhere an ellipse, but in mathematics we explore these, and the world we have derived from within, we apply to the external world. This is a fact without the thorough consideration of which one can never arrive at a true understanding of the nature of the soul. That is why Theosophy demands of its students, who wish to delve deeper into it, a rigorous training of the mind; not the will-o’-the-wisp thinking of everyday life, not the will-o’-the-wisp thinking of Western philosophy, but the thinking that practices self-observation with inner thoroughness. This thinking allows one to recognize the significance of this statement. And those who, through their mathematical training, have achieved the greatest breakthroughs in the field of astronomy, recognize the significance of this and express it. Read the writings of Kepler, this great astronomer; read through what he says about this fundamental aspect of human self-observation, and you will see what this figure has to say on the matter. He knew the far-reaching significance of mathematical thinking even into the most distant reaches of the heavens. He says: It is marvelous, the correspondence we find when we have sat in a solitary study and pondered circles and ellipses, purely through our own thinking, and then look up at the sky and find their correspondence with the spheres of the heavens. — Such teachings are not about external research, but about deepening such insights. Even in the vestibule, it should become clear among those who wished to be admitted to the school of philosophy who among them could be accepted. For then it was known that—just as one who possesses his five senses can explore the external world—they could likewise explore the nature of the soul through thought. This was not possible before.

[ 15 ] But something else was demanded as well. Mathematical thinking is not enough. It is the first stage, where we live entirely within ourselves, where the spirit of the world develops from within us. It is the most trivial, the most subordinate stage, the one that must be taken first, but which we must move beyond. This is precisely what the older soul researcher demanded: to draw the highest realms of human knowledge from the depths of the soul in the same way that mathematics draws the truths of the starry heavens from the depths of the soul. This was the requirement that Plato concealed in the statement: “Anyone who wishes to enter my school must first have completed a course in mathematics.” — It is not mathematics that is necessary, but a form of knowledge that possesses the independence of mathematical thinking. And once one realizes that human beings have within themselves a life that is independent of external natural life, that they must draw the highest truths from within themselves, then one also realizes that human beings’ highest activity extends to something that lies beyond all natural activity.

[ 16 ] Look at the animal. Its actions are purely species-specific. Every animal does what countless of its ancestors have done. The concept of the species completely governs the animal. Tomorrow it will do the same thing it did yesterday. The ant builds its marvelous structure, the beaver its own, in ten, a hundred, a thousand years just as it does today. There is development in this as well, but not history. Whoever realizes that human development is not merely development but history can, in a similar way, be clear about the method of soul observation, just as one who has realized what mathematical truths are. There are still primitive peoples. They are, admittedly, in the process of dying out, but there are still some who cannot recognize a connection between today and tomorrow. There are those who, when it gets cold in the evening, cover themselves with tree leaves. In the morning they throw these away again, and in the evening they must search for them anew. They are unable to carry yesterday’s experience over into today and tomorrow. What is necessary if we want to carry yesterday’s experience over into today and tomorrow? We cannot say that if we know today what we did yesterday, then tomorrow we will also do what we did yesterday. That is a characteristic of the animal soul. It can progress; it can become something else over time, but then that becoming-other is not a historical process. A historical process consists in the individual human being making use of what they have experienced in such a way that they can infer something not yet experienced, something of the future. I learn the meaning, the spirit of yesterday, and build upon the fact that the laws my soul derives from observation extend into that which I have not yet observed—that is, into the future. Travelers tell us that it has happened that some wanderers have kindled fires in regions where monkeys lived. They are said to have moved on, leaving the fire burning and the wood lying there. The monkeys are said to have come and warmed themselves by the fire. But they could not stoke the fire. They cannot make themselves independent of observations and experiences; they cannot draw conclusions. Man draws conclusions from his observations and experiences and thereby becomes the self-assured determiner of his future. He projects his experiences into tomorrow; he transforms development into history. Just as he transforms experience into theory, just as he extracts the truths of the spirit from nature, so he extracts the rules of the future from the past and thereby becomes the builder of the future.

[ 17 ] Anyone who thinks these two things through thoroughly—that human beings can become independent in two ways, that they can not only observe but also formulate theories, that they have not only evolution like the animal soul but also history—anyone who grasps these two things clearly will understand what I meant when I said, not only does the animal soul live within the human being, but the animal soul develops to such an extent that it can receive the so-called Nus, the world spirit. Aristotle considers it necessary for the human being to be able to create history that the world spirit sink into the animal soul. The human soul differs from the animal soul, in Aristotle’s sense, in that it has been elevated from what it had attained within animal evolution to the functions and activities through which it has come into possession of the spirit. And when the great Kepler says that the laws discovered in a solitary study are applicable to external natural phenomena, this is explained by the fact that the world spirit, the Nus, the Mahat, sinks into it and raises the human soul to a higher level. The human soul is, as it were, lifted out of animality. It is the spirit that lifts it out. The spirit lives in the soul. It develops out of the soul. It develops just as the soul gradually lifts itself out of the body.

[ 18 ] But Aristotle did not say this latter point—or at least not clearly. He does say, time and again, that the soul develops step by step into the human soul in a completely natural way—but then the spirit enters this naturally developed human soul from the outside. In Aristotle’s sense, the nous is something that is placed into the human soul from the outside through a creative act. And this became the downfall of Western psychology. It is Aristotle’s downfall that he is unable to develop his correct view—that the human soul is elevated through the sinking of the nus into it—into a theory of the course of history. He is unable to grasp this development as naturally as the development of the soul is to be grasped. But Greek sages, and Indian sages before them, had already done so. They had grasped body, soul, and spirit in a natural way, up to the human spirit, in their development. With Aristotle, there is a break. The idea of creation enters into the conception. We shall see how theosophical soul doctrine overcomes this idea of creation, how it is that which, in the true sense, draws the ultimate consequences of the scientific worldview—albeit from a spiritual point of view.

[ 19 ] But only by realizing that we must return to the traditional division into body, soul, and spirit will we truly understand this natural development of the human being. However, we must not believe that access to the soul will ever be found through the seemingly irrefutable path cultivated by modern natural science—namely, by observing the individual parts of the brain. We must recognize that the objections raised by the Indian sage Nagasena also apply to today’s naturalistic theory of the soul. Above all, we must realize that deeper, inner self-observation and deeper spiritual research are necessary to gain access to the soul and spirit. A false impression is formed of those who believe that the various religious creeds and the various sages who emerged from them would have said what modern science seeks to refute. They never said that, nor did they ever attempt to do so. Anyone who follows the development of the science of the soul can see clearly that those who knew anything about the methods of the science of the soul never applied the methods of natural science, so that they would have to refute them. It is not these who can find the soul. Oh no, the researchers of the soul who still knew what the soul is never sought the soul in this way.

[ 20 ] I will mention one of them, the most reviled among the Enlightenment thinkers, yet also the least known; I will speak briefly about the 13th-century doctrine of the soul, the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas. One of the characteristic features of this doctrine of the soul is that its author says: That which the human spirit takes with it when it leaves this body, that which the human spirit takes with it into the purely spiritual world, can no longer be compared to anything that a human being experiences within his body. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas says that the task of religion in its most ideal sense is to educate human beings so that they can take with them from this body something that is not sensory, something that is not bound to the exploration, observation, and experience of external nature. As long as we live in this body, we perceive the sensory world through our eyes and hear it through our ears. We perceive all that is sensory through our sense organs. But the spirit processes this sensory material. The spirit is the truly active force. The spirit is that which is eternal. And now consider the profound insight gained through millennia of spiritual teaching, expressed in the words: The spirit that has gathered little during this life that is independent of external sensory observation, independent of the external sensory life, will not find happiness when it is disembodied. Thomas Aquinas says: What we see in our sensory environment is constantly permeated by sensory phantasms. — But the spirit, precisely the spirit I have described in the sense of mathematics, described as the Nus, which arises in a simple way, just as tomorrow arises from yesterday and today, this spirit, by freeing itself, gathers fruits for eternity. The spirit feels infinitely lonely and empty—this is Thomas Aquinas’s teaching—when it enters the realm of spirits without having reached the point where it is free from all phantasms of the sensory world. The deep meaning of the Greek myth of drinking from the River Lethe thus reveals itself to us as a thought: the spirit, in its purely spiritual existence, will develop ever higher and higher the freer and freer it becomes from all sensory phantasms. Whoever, therefore, seeks the spirit in a sensory manner cannot find it; for the spirit, once it has become free from sensuality, has nothing more to do with sensuality. Thomas Aquinas therefore most emphatically condemns the methods by which it is sought through sensory means. This Doctor of the Church is an opponent of any experiment or attempt to communicate with disembodied beings and the deceased through sensory means. The spirit must be at its purest when it is free from sensory phantasms and from attachment to the sensory realm. If it is not, then it feels infinitely lonely in the spiritual world. The spirit that relies on sensory observation, that is absorbed in sensory observations, lives in the spiritual world as in an unknown world. This isolation is its fate, its lot, because it has not learned to be free from sensory phantasms. We will only fully grasp this when we come to the second lecture. You see, the soul was sought precisely along the opposite path in the times when inner observation—the observation of what lives within the human being—was the decisive factor for the science of the soul. This is the fundamental error that persists in modern science and which has led to the very slogan of “the science of the soul without a soul” being trumpeted as the naturalistic creed of the 19th century. This science, which relies solely on external observations, believes it can refute the ancients. But this science knows nothing of the paths along which the soul has been sought. Nothing, not the slightest thing, is to be said against modern science. On the contrary, precisely as Theosophists in the spirit of this modern science, we wish to explore the realm of the soul just as it explores the realm of purely spatial nature; but we do not wish to seek the soul in external nature, but within ourselves. We wish to seek the spirit where it reveals itself, by walking the paths of the soul and arriving at knowledge of the spirit through knowledge of the soul. This is the path prescribed by millennia-old teachings, which one need only understand to grasp its truth and validity.

[ 21 ] But this also makes it clear to us—and will make it ever clearer—that the deeper human being, when seeking to understand the soul, will find precisely what is missing in modern, cold science, just as Goethe found it lacking when he encountered this cold science in Holbach’s *Système de la nature*. We can indeed observe in external nature how the human being has developed in terms of outward appearance, how he has come to be, how the monad works within the finer structures, and how the middle organ system can be regarded as an expression of the soul; but all of this leads us only to an understanding of the outward. The great question of human destiny still remains. No matter how well we may have understood a human being in terms of their external form, we have not understood them insofar as they have this or that destiny in one way or another; we have not grasped what role good and evil, the perfect and the imperfect, play. External science can give us no insight into what a person experiences inwardly; only the study of the soul, based on self-observation, can provide us with a conceptual answer to this. Then come the great questions: Where do we come from, where are we going, what is our goal? — these greatest questions of all religions. These questions, which can lift a person to a sublime mood, these questions will be what lead us from the world of the soul to the Spirit, to the Spirit of God that permeates the world. That must be the subject of the next lecture: Through the Soul to the Spirit. This will show us that it is absolutely true—not merely a figurative expression—that even the perfect animal soul, which has come about through purely external development, is a human soul in the human being only insofar as it now represents something even higher, something more perfect, and that it bears within itself the potential, the seed, for something far higher still, for boundless perfection. But that this human soul, in the sense of the same statement, is to be regarded as something that does not bring forth the spirit and the soul phenomena from animality, but rather that the animal in man must develop toward the higher in order thereby to attain its destiny, its task, and also its fate. This is expressed by medieval soul doctrine in the words that only he recognizes the truth in the real sense who does not regard it as it appears to him when he hears with his outer ear or looks with his outer eye, but rather as it appears when we see it in the reflection of the highest Spirit. Thus I would like to conclude this first lecture with the words that Thomas Aquinas used in his lecture: The human soul is like the moon, which shines but receives its light from the sun. — The human soul is like water, which is neither cold nor warm in itself, but receives its warmth from fire. — The human soul is merely a higher animal soul, but it is a human soul in that it receives its light from the human spirit.

[ 22 ] In keeping with this medieval belief, Goethe says:

The human soul
Is like water:
It comes from the sky,
It rises to the sky,
And must descend again<
To the earth,
Ever changing.

[ 23 ] Only then can one understand the human soul—when one grasps it in this sense, when one grasps it in the sense that it is understood as a reflection of the highest being we can find throughout the universe, as a reflection of the world spirit that permeates the universe.