The Rudolf Steiner Archive

17. Is Theosophy Unscientific?

[ 1 ] Eight days ago, I tried to show you what modern people can find in Theosophy today. Before I continue this series of lectures, we must discuss the specific question of Theosophy and its relationship to the great cultural tasks of the present, to the significant spiritual currents of our time. And so today I would like to address the very important question of whether Theosophy is unscientific.

[ 2 ] This is, after all, the accusation that strikes the Theosophical Movement hardest at a time when science holds the greatest conceivable authority—perhaps even the only real authority. In such a time, however, this misunderstanding carries great weight. And so it must be particularly distressing to theosophists when science—namely those who seek to create a worldview and way of life based on scientific principles—repeatedly levels the accusation that theosophy is unscientific. That today the majority of people are seeking precisely this authority of science can be gauged from a phenomenon of recent years, which must be symptomatic of the interests of our time. However, the question I now wish only to touch upon will be discussed in detail in the lecture on science. Nevertheless, I would like to point out the great sensation caused by Haeckel’s *The Riddle of the Universe* to show that the very teachings of this book reveal to those who recognize its value as I do where the interest lies. This book aims to construct an entire worldview on the basis of natural science. Over ten thousand copies have been sold; then a cheap popular edition was published for one mark, and over one hundred thousand copies of this edition have been sold in the few years since its publication. The book has been translated into almost all major cultural languages. But this seems to me less significant than what I am about to say. Haeckel has received more than five thousand letters addressing questions of natural science. The letters all contain nearly the same questions, and so we see that an important, central need has been met. A supplement to the book *The Riddles of the Universe* is the book *The Wonders of Life*. In the introduction to it, Haeckel tells us what I have just said. In this book, you can also read the accusation leveled against theosophy—the accusation of unscientificness. The question is therefore a burning one.

[ 3 ] We must therefore clarify for ourselves what the overall position of our theosophical spiritual movement is with regard to science in general. Anyone who looks only at the last few centuries cannot possibly gain a clear understanding of this. One must go much further back; one must return to the origins of human knowledge, to a time far before our current calendar, to the dawn of human knowledge—or at least what we today call human knowledge.

[ 4 ] To fully understand just how vast the contrast is between how scientific problems are viewed today and how they were viewed at that dawn of human knowledge, we must realize that modern science itself admits it is completely incapable of answering the great questions of existence. In the preface to *The Wonders of Life*, you will find repeated references to what Haeckel has often said: that he represents the standpoint of science in opposition to medieval superstition and revelation. There is no middle ground between truth and superstition; only an either-or is possible. In doing so, he claims that what he has attained on the basis of his scientific studies is the only truth, and that everything produced by other millennia is error, superstition, and unscientific, simply because the researchers of earlier centuries knew nothing of the great discoveries of the 19th century.

[ 5 ] Yet modern science admits that it is unable to answer certain very specific questions. Certainly, as I already indicated in my previous lecture, this natural science attempts to take us back to times long past; it seeks out prehistoric animals and plants and leads us back to the point in time when life on Earth likely first emerged. But the questions—these important central questions—posed by de Bois-Reymond, and which Haeckel attempted to answer in his book *The Riddles of the Universe*—the questions regarding the origin of life—find no answer in modern science. Admittedly, the natural scientist today attempts to provide an answer to these questions; Haeckel, in particular, attempts to do so. He shows how the Earth emerged from a molten state, gradually cooled, became more solid, how water was then able to form and accumulate, and how the conditions were finally in place for living beings to arise. He attempts to show how one might imagine that life sprang forth from the non-living. This is what he sought to set against all older convictions: that the living once sprang from the non-living, and that everything that depends on life—including human beings—is nothing other than a product of inorganic matter, that it is based on nothing other than what we have in physics and chemistry. But Haeckel tries in vain to show that human beings are nothing other than the result of the marvelous dynamics and mechanics of the human organism. For here comes the big question. Here the natural scientist reaches the point in time when the conditions on our Earth are said to have existed for the first living being to emerge from inanimate matter. And here the researchers, even Haeckel himself, make a concession: We have absolutely no conception of the state in which our Earth was back then, when the first life first appeared on it. We do not know what the external natural conditions were like at that time, and therefore we cannot possibly say how the inanimate transformed into the living at that time.

[ 6 ] This is one group of researchers. They had many followers in the first third of the 19th century, just as they do today. If, for example, the great English researcher Darwin had been asked for his opinion in the early days, when it was said that life must be understood in terms of matter, he himself would have admitted that it is impossible to understand the living from the non-living. Huxley, through his study of comparative anatomy, even uttered the statement in the latter part of his life that we are, in fact, in the midst of the world’s evolution, and why should we not be able to conceive that what we see around us might not develop further, that we cannot declare the realm of beings to be complete, that we must look upward from the lower beings to the higher beings, who are, however, inaccessible to us because we lack the sensory organs for this. Such thoughts and objections have been raised by the discerning among natural scientists themselves.

[ 7 ] It is interesting that the German biologist Preyer, based on his studies—which were themselves grounded in Darwinism—came to entirely different views on life. He did not hold the view that life had developed from the non-living, but rather he concluded that at the time when the Earth gave rise to the first living being of our kind, the Earth was not a lifeless entity but a single living being, and that at that time there was absolutely nothing non-living on our Earth. The non-living developed only from the living. So you see, the Darwinist Preyer has turned the view held by other natural-philosophers into its exact opposite by regarding the Earth as a very large living being. That was, according to Preyer, millions of years ago. Our Earth was a great living being, comparable to a human or animal organism of today. Even humans today have within them both living and seemingly lifeless elements. Our skeletal system is seemingly lifeless. It has separated itself from the living as a non-living part. This is roughly how Preyer imagines that the Earth was once a great living being, and that the living Earth then expelled the lifeless, the dead, the rock, and the masses of stone, just as a human expels the skeletal framework. This is a step—an important step—that natural scientists and philosophers have taken in recent times. And this step must necessarily lead to another; it must lead to the conclusion that not only has the inanimate developed from the living, but that all the physical—the living and the inanimate—has developed from the higher, from the spiritual. Thus, if researchers follow the path they have embarked upon today and at the very beginning, they must arrive at the proposition: Not only has the inanimate developed from the animate, but the animate itself has developed from the spiritual. The spiritual came first; it first separated out the animate, and the animate in turn separated out the inanimate, the dead. But this is nothing other than the foundation of the theosophical worldview.

[ 8 ] The theosophical worldview differs from the current materialistic-scientific view in that it places the spirit first and regards everything else as dependent on the spirit. The materialist places matter first and derives everything from matter. I already hinted last time that the doctrine of the senses in the last century itself points to the reason why today’s natural scientist insists on his assertion that the living can be derived from the non-living, the spiritless. I referred to the great principle first articulated by the physiologist Johannes Müller and other prominent physiologists. Helmholtz and then Lotze formulated it as follows: The world around us would be dark and silent if we did not have eyes and ears that transform the vibrations of the air into what are for us colors and sounds. — Thus, natural science itself tells us that everything we see in the physical world around us depends on us. If we did not have eyes and ears structured in a very specific way, then we could not see and hear the world in this particular way. The physiologist can explain to us the reasons why the eye and the ear are formed in a very specific way. This stems from the fact that we participate in the physical world through our sensory organs themselves. Theosophy now shows us the basic concepts, which I will discuss in eight days. We see a thing by positioning the eye correctly in relation to the thing we wish to see. We understand a thing by having an intellect and applying it to shape the images of objects into a world picture. Through this, we are able to form a world picture. Theosophy expresses this as follows: Man is conscious of the physical world.

[ 9 ] But now we must ask the question: Does a person live only within the physical world? We can begin to understand this question by imagining someone who has no ears; they would not hear the sounds made by those around them. You could produce sounds and words, but without the faculty of hearing, you would not perceive the audible manifestations of the external physical world. You must have ears to become aware of the physical world. — But does human existence consist solely of such physical manifestations? No, you all know that within the body, in which both humans and animals are enclosed, there are not only physical activities, but that in the human being there are also feelings, instincts, passions, desires, and wishes. These desires, wishes, instincts, and passions are just as real as the physical functions, the physical activities. Just as you digest and speak, you feel, wish, and desire. Digestion and speech are physical manifestations, and we can perceive them with our physical senses for our physical consciousness. Why can we not perceive the other reality that is also within us—the wishes, desires, emotions, and passions—in the same way? It is entirely in the spirit of the natural sciences to say: we cannot perceive them because we have no sensory organs for them.

[ 10 ] Yet the worldview underlying the Theosophical Movement shows us that human beings can become aware not only of the physical world, but also of a higher world. And when we look at the manifestations of this higher world, the desires, cravings, passions, and instincts are just as perceptible realities as physical perception is, just as language is the physical expression of physical activity. We then say that consciousness of the so-called astral world has awakened. Then the human being stands before us as a being of instincts, desires, and passions, just as he awakens as a physical being and can reflect light impressions for our physical eye. How these higher senses awaken, how the human being can acquire higher consciousness—we will hear about this in the lecture series on “The Basic Concepts of Theosophy.” Human beings live in this higher world, but their consciousness—insofar as they are average people of the present—has not awakened to this higher world.

[ 11 ] Then there is a third world, a world of thought, a world of higher spiritual life, which lies above the passions, desires, wishes, and instincts. This world of thought, the world of spirituality, is even less accessible to physical consciousness. Those who stand on the standpoint of modern philosophy should not deny this world of pure spirit, but rather consider that perhaps modern humans simply lack the faculties to perceive it. Humans live in this third world as well. They think in this world; they just cannot perceive it.

[ 12 ] We must therefore say: Human beings today live in three worlds. In German, we call these three worlds: the physical world, the soul world, and the spiritual world. In common theosophical terminology, they are referred to as: the physical world, the astral world, and the mental world. However, human beings are conscious only of the first, the physical world, and can therefore scientifically discern only the physical world. They can only discern the other worlds when they become just as seeing, just as perceiving, and just as conscious in them as they are today in the physical world.

[ 13 ] Thus, we have before us a threefold human being who forms a whole consisting of body, soul, and spirit, but who is conscious only of the physical aspect. For this reason, the researcher who today investigates the physical realm can look back only as far as the physical world reveals itself to his gaze. Even to the researcher’s gaze, equipped with all the tools of science, no other world presents itself than the one that presents itself to ordinary sensory life. Even if he looks back millions of years at the Earth’s development, he looks back to the point where, out of the astral dawn—which is brighter than any physical light—the physical gradually condensed. To the point where the physical emerged from the astral, and even earlier the astral from the spiritual; to the point where the spirit gradually condensed into the living and later into the inanimate—only the eye that has become seeing can penetrate there. Thus, the physical researcher’s method of inquiry ends at the point where, as it were, the physical flashes into view, where it has emerged from the soul-spiritual. Thus it is that the physiologist ascends to the periphery, to the point where the living becomes spiritual. The spiritual researcher ascends to an even earlier past, and in doing so creates a more comprehensive worldview, a worldview that extends far beyond what the physical researcher knows.

[ 14 ] We have thus shown that the theosophical worldview need not be unscientific simply because it presents a somewhat different picture of the world than that offered by physical research. It is based on different experiences—awareness on the spiritual plane. Just as you must move about by feel in a dark room and perceive by touch, and just as a completely different impression arises when the dark room is illuminated, so everything appears new to the spiritual researcher, to the one whose eyes are opened—in new activity, in a different light. This researcher has not become unscientific simply because his experience has been enriched. The logic of the theosophist is just as sound as the logic of the finest natural scientist. It is simply that this logic operates in a different realm. It is a strange ignorance to reject the science of our research before one has examined it. We think in the same way on the higher planes as the physical researcher thinks on the physical plane; this harmonizes the theosophical method of research with the physical one.

[ 15 ] Now we must have an explanation as to why the modern researcher makes this rigid either/or distinction and rejects everything that is not of a physical nature. It becomes clear to the theosophical researcher why this must be so: it is connected with the evolution of humanity. Because the theosophist views the evolution of humanity in a higher light and because he can, so to speak, observe the preparatory work in the spiritual realm, the theosophist is able to discern from this evolution why physical science is accorded sole authority. What we call science today has not always existed. Just as every plant and every animal has evolved, and just as the sexes and human races have evolved, so too has spiritual life evolved. And even today’s science has not always been at the same stage. It, too, is a product of evolution. Yet even in the most ancient times there was a way of human perception, even if it was not scientific in the modern sense. Therefore, one must go back to the time when the beginnings of our human life began.

[ 16 ] Everything is in a state of evolution. Millions of years ago, the human race was far more different from what it is today than one might imagine. This difference will also be discussed in the lectures on the “Basic Concepts of Theosophy.” The human race of today was preceded by another, the Atlantean human race. Plato still speaks of it. This race is a fact that cannot be denied by natural science. It conceived differently, lived differently, and developed different powers than humanity today. Anyone who wishes to learn more about this can read further about this human race in my journal “Luzifer.” Only after the demise of this human race, this “root race,” did a mode of imagination, thinking, and perception such as ours today begin to develop. And even within our present root race, we distinguish, according to theosophical understanding, seven sub-races, of which our own is the fifth.

[ 17 ] Humanity today has developed slowly, and spiritual life has developed slowly. If we go back to the spiritual life of the first subrace of our root race, we find that this spiritual life was already quite different from our spiritual life today. The thinking of these people was different. It was a kind of thinking that cannot be compared at all to our present-day combinatory intellectual knowledge. This thinking was spiritual, a kind that arose through intuition, through a sort of spiritual instinct—though even that is not the right word; it is more of a spiritualized way of thinking. This spiritualized mode of thinking harmoniously encompassed within itself, as in a seed, all the other human spiritual activities that today exist side by side. What today manifests separately as imagination, as religious piety, as moral feeling, and at the same time as scientific thinking, was one and the same back then. Just as the entire plant is contained within the seed, in a unity, so too was that which is today expressed in many spiritual activities contained within a unity. Imagination was not the kind of imagination we speak of as unreal. Imagination was fertilized by the spiritual content of the world, so that it brought forth truth. It was not what we today call artistic imagination; it was the kind that contained truth within its images. Feeling and ethical will were intimately connected with this imagination. The whole human being was a unity, a spiritual cell. We can form an external conception of this by examining what has remained to us. If you study the ancient spiritual products, such as the Vedas of the ancient Indians, you will find art, poetry, and spirit flowing as from a single source. Truth, poetry, and a sense of duty flowed back then as if from a single center within the human being, from a shared intuition. We can also study the ideas that have survived historically from the earliest Druidic era and that underlie our own—and we will find that the temple structures and stone settings of the Druids are modeled on the cosmic dimensions of the world. All of this points to an earlier stage of development.

[ 18 ] Then we move on to the next subraces. There we see how the spiritual activities diverge, how they spread out in the beginning like the branches of a tree. We see how later, in the Chaldean-Egyptian period, the science of astronomy separates from purely practical science; how, bit by bit, it breaks away from what was a unified worldview and becomes specialized endeavors. And we can then trace a very definite law in our fifth root race: namely, that the human being of this fifth root race gradually conquers the physical world in all its realms. If we consider the spiritual human being just described from the very beginning of our age, we see how everything is still spirit for him. The ancient Vedic priest does not yet know attachment to the physical. The physical was still something unworthy to him; his gaze was directed only toward the eternal course of events; his gaze was directed toward the heavens; the earthly scarcely touched him. In our time, this Vedic view seems like an anachronism; we see how these views are no longer a match for the physical, and how the Indian people in particular suffer from the fact that their inner gaze is being darkened, pushed back by a world that can no longer understand this gaze. Humanity had to conquer the physical world with its spiritual gaze; humanity has plunged into the physical world and must work on the physical world more and more. At first, the gaze was directed toward the inner self; then, among the Chaldeans and Egyptians, it was directed toward the stars. And as we move on to the Greeks, we see how, among them, what was once united—philosophy, religion, and art—gradually appears before us as three entirely separate spiritual activities. In ancient Vedic culture, the priest is at once poet, researcher, and religious prophet; moving on to Greek culture, we see the philosopher, the artist, and the priest appear separately. And what happened, according to the laws of development in ancient Greece? The physical world was first conquered by one of the spiritual activities, by the imagination. The conquest of the physical world by means of the imagination—that is the mighty Greek art.

[ 19 ] Let us move on to the early Christian era. The groundwork for this had already been laid in the Old Testament, in antiquity, but this new realm was only conquered by the spirituality of the Christian era. It is the realm of ethical, moral life. If you look at ancient Greece, you will see that morality does not appear as something separate from the general worldview. It is only with Socrates and Plato that the moral essence begins to stand apart. Christianity conquers the moral world. Just as ancient Greek art, through the imagination, spiritually conquered the physical, so Christianity has spiritually conquered physical morality—moral life on earth. This is a second phase of development.

[ 20 ] And again, if we fast-forward a bit, we see at the turn of the 15th to the 16th century how what was once united splits apart once more. We see how the man of worldview, the philosopher, and the researcher separate. Previously, there was no separation between philosophers and researchers in the natural sciences and physics. Look back to the early Middle Ages; consider Scotus Erigena, Albertus Magnus, and all those who nurtured intellectual life in the world—you will see that everything there goes hand in hand. There was no separation between spiritual-philosophical researchers and purely physical researchers. Even in Descartes and Spinoza, you can find echoes of the connection between philosophy and science. Philosophical thinking used to go hand in hand with the natural sciences. Then, in the 15th and 16th centuries, this divergence occurs: science separates itself from philosophy; science becomes independent. A new realm of physical life is being conquered: the realm that can be conquered through physics, astronomy, and so on—in short, through the purely physical sciences of the intellect. Thus we now see what was once united—science, art, philosophy, religion, and ethics—going their separate ways.

[ 21 ] Repeated attempts were made later to reunite what had once been a single entity. We see this aspiration in Goethe as well. We see how he strives to create a spiritual science and to find a bridge between science and art. A quote from him illustrates this: “Beauty is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would have remained forever hidden from us were it not for its appearance.” Richard Wagner, too, attempted to unite the myths of the religions in a new art form that was to be more than art built on pure imagination. These endeavors recall something that has existed throughout the ages. Alongside the separate paths taken by religion, art, science, and ethics, there has always been what is called the great unity. Alongside science, art, and philosophy, there was the world of the mysteries. The entire worldview was presented to the initiate of the mysteries. There, he was not told in a scientific manner what once was and what the laws of the world are: an image of life was created there. In the drama of Dionysus, it was revealed to him how the human being, the spiritual human being, is immersed in physical matter, how the spiritual has condensed into matter in order to ‘rise again to the spiritual in the future.’ This work of art, this Dionysus drama, was performed in grand scenes in the ancient Greek Mysteries. It was shown how Dionysus is the son of Zeus and Semele, how he is saved by Pallas Athena, and how his heart is saved by Zeus. This is the performance of a great human drama; it was meant to depict nothing other than life within our Earth. It was meant to show how humanity has become immersed in the physical form, how it has saved its soul through the deepest spiritual within, and how it is to develop itself upward again toward a new divine existence. — Externally, in Greek culture, what constitutes a unity in the depths of the mystery temples appears as separate. What Socrates recounts and what Plato portrays in philosophy is nothing other than an external reflection, a fragmentation of what was found in the Mysteries. If you read Plato, you will see the philosophical elaboration of the Mystery drama; if you read the tragic fates of the heroes, you will find in these heroic dramas a faint reflection of the Mystery drama. Philosophy has developed out of the ancient arts. In our modern age, as I said, the final separation has taken place: the science of the intellect, limited to the physical world, has conquered the world; the microscope and the telescope have conquered the world. Just as Christian art conquered the inner world of feeling, so has physical science conquered outer nature. That has been the task, the great mission of the world: to conquer what was once a unity by separating it into individual parts.

[ 22 ] To initiate the unity of all four—science, philosophy, ethics, and art—is the mission of a new era dawning; Theosophy seeks to prepare the way for the mission of a new humanity. That is why the first significant work, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s *The Secret Doctrine*, appeared with the subtitle: The Union of Science, Religion, and Philosophy. — This is how the theosophical worldview relates to the individual branches that dominate spiritual life today. You see why it cannot be comforted when the worldview of the scientific world confronts us with an “either-or.” You see why the theosophist, who looks at the whole, can view science with a spirit of reconciliation and can even hope for a further ascent in the scientific sphere through the continued development of science. This is the ideal of Theosophy. Because humanity is a whole within every single human being, this ideal is the great human ideal of our time. People within our root race had to reach their goal by separate paths. But only for a while, according to the great law of the world, do the paths run separately; then they must unite again. Now is the time of union.

[ 23 ] A unifying worldview can only be a tolerant worldview. That is why the great principle of tolerance stands at the forefront of the movement. It would be a misunderstanding to judge the Theosophical Movement on the basis of any single, definitive truth. We do not unite around a specific single truth, nor around a dogma, nor around what this or that person has realized or believes they have realized. Anyone in the Theosophical Movement who expresses a truth, however firmly or energetically, does not do so in the sense that others demand one must profess it. Look at the various creeds, including the scientific schools of thought—materialism, monism, dualism, and so on—and you will see one thing everywhere: the adherent of such a school believes that they alone possess the truth and dismisses everything else. It is a matter of “either-or.” The result is conflict between sects and conflict in views. Theosophy differs from this in a very fundamental way: the truth must develop within each individual human being. Whoever expresses their insight does so for no other purpose than to inspire others. Nothing more. The theosophical teacher is aware that the truth must be drawn out of every human being. In doing so, people who are completely tolerant of one another unite in brotherhood toward a common, great goal; they unite in the Theosophical Society, in the spiritual science movement. The most tolerant attitude—tolerance extending into one’s feelings and thoughts—is to be found in this movement. The Theosophist, precisely when he has advanced on his path of knowledge, is clear that the core of truth rests within every human being’s own breast, that it merely needs to be surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere in order to develop. It is the whole, the interplay, that matters. Where Theosophists unite, they create around themselves that atmosphere in which the individual human seed can flourish. In this interplay they see their true task. This is what fundamentally distinguishes the Theosophical Movement from all others. Others fight one another—but we unite. Others are monists and regard dualism as false, but we know that dualism and monism will find unity in an even higher harmony if one continues to search within oneself spiritually.

[ 24 ] This is what the great minds have declared—Goethe among them, echoing the words of the old masters—namely, that divine truth must develop within the human being himself, and that it must well up from the individual human heart. He wrote this at the beginning of one of his scientific works, as a kind of motto for our theosophical movement. This motto reads:

If the eye were not like the sun,
How could we see the light?
If God’s own power did not dwell within us,
How could the divine delight us?