The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. Theosophy and Darwin

[ 1 ] In the present day, we find two major cultural trends. One, which has already passed its peak, is evident in Darwin; in Tolstoy, we see another cultural trend that is just beginning.

[ 2 ] Many of our contemporaries who concern themselves with issues related to the name Darwin are likely of the opinion that what is called Darwinism represents something like a definitive truth; that, in contrast, everything people previously believed has been overcome; and that, along with these finally discovered truths, there is something that must hold true for the distant future. Many people cannot conceive that human opinions are something entirely subject to change. They have no conception that the most important concept we find in Darwinism—the concept of evolution—is no less applicable to spiritual life than to natural life, and that, above all, human opinions and human knowledge themselves are subject to evolution. Only when you seek to survey a longer period of the development of the human spirit will it become clear to you that the truths, insights, and views of a particular epoch have developed out of earlier perspectives, have become different, and that in the future they will become different again.

[ 3 ] Theosophy would hardly be fulfilling its purpose if it did not apply this very concept of evolution to the great phenomena of life, especially spiritual life. So let us today view what is associated with the name Darwin not from the narrow horizon of a modern person, but from a higher perspective. We will, however, have to go back quite a long way in time, for no one can comprehend those phenomena if they are viewed in isolation, if they are not considered in connection with other, similar phenomena. Theosophy enables us to place these phenomena within their proper, broader contexts. Theosophy considers the development of the human spirit, the development of this spirit in the various forms of existence, as we have come to know them in the recent lectures. This human spirit, this human being, as he is today and as he has been for millennia, is not something finished, something complete. In millennia and in even more distant times, he will no longer be what he is today. To understand how he positions himself in the world today and how he initially views his task in the world, we must highlight the characteristic traits we find in modern man. But to do so, we must broaden our perspective somewhat by not overestimating certain concepts and ideas we hold.

[ 4 ] There is one concept in particular that people today overestimate all too much: the concept of conscious human activity, as we understand consciousness today. Whenever people consider art, technology, and the like—things that originate from them—they have, in a certain sense, the concept of conscious creation and conscious thinking in the background. They do not even notice that there are artistic and technical activities in the world around them that are at least as significant as human ones, but differ from human ones in that humans carry out what they bring about in a conscious manner; for humans are active in the world through thought. Everything that a human being undertakes is ultimately a realized human thought. As a thought, the house first lives in the mind of the architect, and when it is finished, it is a thought made material. But we find such thoughts made material elsewhere in the world as well. Just consider once, without preconceptions—not through the lens of the current worldview—the movement of the stars in their regularity, and you will find that the structure of the universe is based on a universal thought, just as the construction of a house is. How could a human being, as an astronomer, force this structure of the universe into mathematical and other laws? How could he discover the laws of the universe’s structure if these laws, which he grasps in thought, were not first contained within this structure itself? Or, to take another example, consider the structures built by a well-known animal, the beaver. They are so artful, of such mathematical regularity, that the engineer who studies these things must say to himself: If he were given the task of building the most practical structure under the given conditions, he could not, in accordance with the river’s gradient and the requirements of the beaver’s way of life, construct anything more practical, anything more perfect. In this way, you can observe all of nature, if only you observe it with an open mind, and you will see everywhere that what humans consciously accomplish in thought and translate into reality is all around us, and that what is all around us is permeated by thought.

[ 5 ] We are accustomed to calling what an animal does an instinctive activity. We would therefore also call the elaborate constructions of beavers, ants, and bees instinctive activities. But this leads us to understand that human activity differs from the activity taking place around us only in that humans are aware of the laws governing their activity; they possess knowledge of them. And it is precisely this that we refer to as an instinctive activity—one present in a being that has no awareness of the laws according to which it operates. If you consider in this way two beings that are far apart in their development—such as humans in their conscious activity and, for example, the beaver or the ant—you will notice the great difference between human conscious intellectual activity and the unconscious, instinctive activity of a relatively imperfect animal. Between these two activities there are countless degrees. Among these degrees, we can also describe those that humanity has undergone in a period that, while long, is nevertheless brief in comparison to the vast span of world history. In the course of these lectures, we will be led to an earlier, much earlier stage of human cultural activity—today I can only hint at this—we will be led to the human ancestors of a time long past, to the so-called Atlanteans, whose culture has long since perished and whose descendants are the cultural creators of our present human race. If we now trace the spiritual activity, the entire manner in which human beings engage with their environment, among these Atlanteans, who were our predecessors many millennia ago, and see the means by which the theosophical worldview comes to know the spiritual activity of these ancestors, then it would become clear to us that, while their mental activity is not as far removed from our present-day intellectual activity as that of animals, our Atlantean ancestors were nevertheless of a fundamentally different nature than our contemporaries today. These Atlantean ancestors were by no means incapable of erecting great structures, nor of bringing nature under their control; but their activity was more instinctive than the fully conscious activity of present-day humanity. It was not as instinctive as that of animals, but more instinctive than that of today’s intellectual humanity.

[ 6 ] The history of ancient Babylon and Assyria tells us of artfully constructed buildings, and today’s architects, who study these things, assure us that the manner in which the works of that time were created was so extraordinary that the conscious activity of today’s architect has not yet reached the point where it can accomplish what people were capable of doing back then at relatively unconscious levels. You need not take offense at the word “instinctively.” After all, there is only a slight difference between the human spirit of today and that of the past. If we were to trace back the activities that—to put it in somewhat popular terms — people have more in their grasp, more in their feeling and intuition, which we perform more mechanically and not by consciously setting out to do them, if we were to trace these activities back, we would arrive at our Atlantean ancestors, who acted instinctively to a much greater degree than was the case in the times we can trace historically. Thus we can say that historically we can trace human intellectual activity back to a time when intellectual activity was not yet present to the extent it is today—indeed, at the beginning of the Atlantean era, it was not present at all—and that, on the other hand, we must also admit that in the future humanity will develop entirely different mental faculties than those of today’s intellect. Thus, our present-day intellect, which is the most distinctive and characteristic feature of modern humanity, is not something that is eternal or even unchanging, but rather something that is in the process of development. It has come into being and ‘will develop into other, higher forms.’

[ 7 ] What, then, is the nature of this reason’s activity? We have already touched upon this as well. It consists in the fact that human beings increasingly overcome the purely instinctive aspect of their activity and clearly understand the laws they apply in their external lives, as well as the laws that have come to fruition in nature. But if this intellect itself is in the process of development, then it has evidently gone through various stages of development; it has progressed from relatively imperfect stages to a higher stage in the present, and in the future it will ascend to still others.

[ 8 ] If we look back at our Atlantean ancestors, we see the intellect emerging first in its dawn, then developing to a peak, only to be superseded in the future by a higher spiritual activity. This intellect cannot develop all at once. It must, so to speak, accomplish its task step by step. It must proceed from stage to stage if it is to know the laws that are in our nature and that it itself brings to fruition. This can only happen in successive stages. What is the purpose of this intellect? It is to comprehend the things around it, to know them. It is meant to recreate them within itself, to conceptually recreate that which exists outside in reality. It must acquire this knowledge little by little. However, this knowledge must correspond to external things. External things, however, are manifold. The things we can observe in the world are mind, soul, and external physical reality.

[ 9 ] The mind was not present in the soul from the very beginning of its development to comprehend this external nature in all its diversity. Bit by bit, human beings have had to master the various aspects of reality: the spiritual, the psychological, and the physical. And in a very interesting way, we can observe how he conquers them. Human beings are not capable of comprehending things out in the world until they have first appropriated them in the solitude of their reflection. Humanity would never be able to comprehend an ellipse as a stellar orbit if it had not first appropriated the laws of the ellipse and its forms in solitude. Once the concept has been found within, it is also seen realized in the external world. Only when humanity has created the knowledge within itself can it find it materialized in the external world. Now we must be clear that this has occurred at the most diverse stages of intellectual development throughout our human racial evolution. The human intellect first had to form a concept of the image it can see in the external world in order to then understand what is seen in the external world. As a rule, human beings first recognize what lives within themselves. That is the spirit, the soul. Only gradually does he arrive at concepts of what is around him. You can observe this in every child. The child does not first have a concept of inanimate nature, but of the soul. He strikes the table against which he has bumped himself, because he regards it as being of the same nature as himself. So it is also in cultural development. In the development of culture, we can observe an epoch that researchers have called animism. In all of nature, people saw animated beings; in every stone, in every rock, in every spring, they saw something living, because they themselves were alive and could form the concept of the living from within themselves. In the same way, earlier human races first developed the concept of the spirit, then that of the soul-life, and only finally did they acquire the concept of the external, mechanical, and lifeless.

[ 10 ] If we look back to the period of history we can trace—to the time of ancient India with its Vedas and Vedanta philosophy—and study these ancient worldviews, we find that people had a concept of the spiritual in the broadest sense. The concept of the spirit lives on in these ancient, wonderful texts. But what the ancient peoples could not do was to comprehend the individual spirit, the unique spirit. They had a grand conception of the all-encompassing world spirit and its various manifestations in the world, but to look into the individual human soul in order to grasp the spirit of the human soul—that was not yet possible in those early times. They had no concept of psychology as we understand it, of what is today called the science of the spirit—though this will only become a true science of the spirit in the future. They conceived of the spirit, but did not understand the individual spirit. If we trace the beginnings of spiritual development back to the dawn of Greek civilization, we find that even those who called themselves philosophers in that era applied the concept of the soul to the entire world. For them, everything is animated. But when it comes to understanding the individual soul, their comprehension fails.

[ 11 ] First, then, human beings form the general concept of the spirit and the general concept of the soul. But it is only later that they approach these concepts with their spirit in order to grasp them in the individual being. Throughout the Middle Ages, we can observe that human beings have not yet penetrated the individual spirit. I would like to mention only Giordano Bruno here. Anyone who studies the philosophy of this leading thinker will find that he has an all-encompassing concept of a cosmic life, a concept of life in its highest sense. The whole world is life to him; in every stone, in every star, he sees life. Every single part of the universe is for him a limb, an organ of the universe. He looks up to the stars as to living beings. And he consistently regards the individual human being in this sense as well. In the living human being, he sees only a stage in the sequence of general spiritual human life. He calls the human being who stands physically before us a spirit spread out in space, life spread out in space. And he understands death as nothing other than the contraction of life into a single point. Expansion and contraction are, for him, the manifestations of life and death. Life is eternal. The life that appears to us in the physical realm is life expanded in space; the life that does not appear in the physical realm is contracted life. Thus, life continually alternates through expansion and contraction. Apart from these two characteristics, through which Giordano Bruno demonstrates the comprehensive concept he has of life, I might perhaps also mention the concept of heaven—a concept that science is still far from having attained, but which one would have to study, into which one would have to immerse oneself, in order to return once more to the comprehensive concept of heaven. But what was not yet possible even for Giordano Bruno is to comprehend the individual living being, the unique being. The ability to comprehend these individual living beings, however, is developing precisely at this time. It is only now that we are beginning to clarify the processes in the human body for the mind; it is only now that we are beginning to understand how blood flows through the body, how the body’s functions take place. What we call physiology today was only just beginning to take tangible shape back then. If you look at the natural scientists of that time, such as Paracelsus, you will see that they lack a certain concept; human cultural development had not yet brought forth the concept that dominates our worldview today: the concept of mechanism. The concept of mechanism is the one that was grasped last. What a machine is, humanity grasped last. It was only after Giordano Bruno and Paracelsus that scientific thinking began to develop the concept of the machine, the concept of the mechanical.

[ 12 ] We have thus seen how, over the course of time, the development of human reason has successively grasped the concepts of spirit, soul, life, and mechanism. Now, in our racial evolution, the reverse is taking place. After human evolution had grasped these concepts, it applied them to external things themselves, and the first epoch in this regard is the application of the concept of the machine to the surrounding reality. People not only want to understand the machine, but they also apply the concept of the machine to the individual being. The application of the concept of machine activity is the hallmark of the epoch from which only a few centuries have passed. The 17th century belongs to this epoch. If we go back to that time, we find the philosopher Descartes. He applies the concept of mechanism to the animal world. He does not distinguish between animals and inanimate objects, but regards the entire animal and plant world as beings that are like automata, as beings completely absorbed in pure mechanical activity. This stems from nothing other than the fact that humanity had advanced far enough to grasp the concept of the mechanical, but had not yet understood how to apply the concept of the soul and the spirit to the individual being; rather, it understood only how to apply the concept of the mechanical to nature. Thus, humanity saw, as it were, right through the plant, the animal, and the human soul. There they could grasp nothing; it was not possible for them to see anything higher in plants, animals, and human beings. And in its outward form, every being is indeed mechanical. Every being on the physical plane is mechanical. This lowest level is grasped first by the intellect. It grasps the physical body of the various things in the world, and it conceives of it, as is natural, initially as purely physical, mechanical activity. That was the epoch of the mechanical understanding of the world and, at the same time, the epoch of the failure to recognize anything higher in the world. This epoch extends into our own time. We see how people today strive to apply the concept of the mechanical to the external world; we see how Descartes conceives of plants, animals, and humans mechanically, for the human physical body, too, is mechanical. Hence also the assertion that the human being is merely a machine.

[ 13 ] Then come the great explorers and the great technical achievements of the mechanical world, of industry. We see how reason and the mechanical concept celebrate their greatest triumphs. It penetrates even into individual living beings and comprehends them within their physical-technical context. What was not yet possible in the 18th century—to mechanically comprehend the coexistence of animals and plants—is achieved in the 19th century. It is not evolution that is the essential point, but rather that a kinship exists between beings. Evolution is not the defining feature of Darwinism; for a theory of evolution has always existed. You can trace it back to Aristotle, indeed as far as Vedanta philosophy, and even to Goethe; everywhere you will find that the theory of evolution has been present throughout the ages. Even in the modern scientific sense, a theory of evolution—Lamarckism—already existed at the beginning of the 19th century. Lamarck’s theory certainly views the animal world as ascending from the imperfect to the perfect, all the way up to physical human beings. But at that time, Lamarckism could not yet become popular. Lamarck was not understood. It was not until the mid-19th century that the time was ripe to understand the theory of evolution in a mechanical way. By then, experience of external physical life had advanced to the point where this marvelous edifice could be constructed, which Darwin erected and through which he did nothing other than mechanically set forth what surrounds us; he expressed in mechanical terms what is around us.

[ 14 ] The next step was that humans, at least as a hypothesis, conceived of the idea of a physical kinship between material humans and other material organisms. That was the final piece, the keystone in the edifice. And we will come to understand the significance of the keystone when we discuss the philosophy of Ernst Haeckel.

[ 15 ] If we apply the concept of evolution to human beings themselves, we find that it is understandable that one stage of the spiritual human being’s development must be the conquest of spiritual thought. Darwinism has conquered this realm of the world through purely external causes, through the law of the struggle for existence. It therefore represents a necessary phase of development in human culture, and from the necessity of its emergence we will understand the necessity of its overcoming. Through this we gain the broader perspective that allows us to view Darwinism as a phase in scientific development. That Darwinism views the world and the facts as they really are—only the biased can say this. The facts are known; they have always been there; only the way of thinking is different. If you read Goethe’s essays “History of My Botanical Studies,” you will find almost word for word what Darwin describes in his own way. You will also find much in Goethe’s “Metamorphosis of Plants.” Goethe bases a far higher, much more comprehensive theory of life on the same facts—a theory from which modern science will derive something higher than Darwinism. This is Goethe’s doctrine of the interconnection of organisms. But just as every phase of development must be gone through, so too must the study of Darwinism have been gone through. The entire situation in the mid-19th century was such that it was only through it that humanity became ready to introduce mechanical ideas into the animal and plant kingdoms. This powerful idea then found expression in the mechanical struggle for existence among living beings. It has its origin in a very specific way of human life itself.

[ 16 ] In addition to his observations, Darwin attributed everything that had the greatest influence on his theory to Malthus’s doctrine. It was this theory of population and food growth that led him to establish the external struggle for existence as the principle of perfection. Malthus posits the law that humanity reproduces more rapidly than the ability to procure food grows. Food production increases slowly in arithmetic progression—that is, as 1-2-3-4 and so on—while population growth occurs in geometric progression—that is, as 1-2-4-8-16 and so on. If this is the case, then it is natural that, given the unequal growth of food supplies relative to population growth, a struggle for existence arises. This is the bleak so-called Malthusian law. While Malthus, in the first half of the 19th century, sought only to draw logical conclusions from this law—conclusions that amounted to ways of living together, a means of promoting culture, and a way of offering people a better life—Darwin said to himself: If this law prevails in human life, then it is all the more certain that the struggle for existence is everywhere. — Thus, Darwinism most clearly reveals that man proceeds from himself; what he observes in himself, he projects onto external nature. The purely mechanical law of the struggle of all against all, which became the guiding principle of life in the 19th century, confronts us once again in Darwin’s theory. I do not wish to discuss the fact that scientific research has long since made it impossible to adhere to the principle of the struggle for existence, but only to emphasize that the application of the principle is not a necessity.

[ 17 ] However, we must also understand that the fact that humans perceive the entire environment mechanically does not imply that this is something all-encompassing or ultimate. There is something else within beings besides mere mechanism. We have seen how mechanism, the external physical form, is only a part, only one of the elements of which the world is composed. By comprehending the external appearance, we comprehend only the very lowest part of the beings existing around us. Every phase of human cultural development also has its dark side; every phase reveals its radicalism. Anyone who had seen clearly during the heyday of Darwinism would have said to themselves: Certainly, the development of mechanical thought must take place; but this thought is not yet suited to comprehending life, the soul, and the spirit in the individual being. We must first learn to apply Bruno’s ideas of all-encompassing world life to the individual being standing before us; then we will gradually be able to comprehend the world around us with clarity all the way up to the spirit. Today we have only reached the point where we can apply the concept of the mechanical to individual beings. In the future, we must succeed in finding the concepts of life, soul, and spirit within individual beings as well. We must come to view the plant not merely through the eyes of the mechanistically thinking physiologist, but through the concepts of the scientist ascending to higher stages of life. We must ascend to the concepts of the soul and the spirit. These concepts have already been formulated in previous epochs; it is up to humanity today to learn to apply them. That would have been the idea of one who surveys the whole picture.

[ 18 ] Yet another idea, another obstacle, stood in the way. It was the tendency to be easily satisfied with the mechanical concepts of the world and to believe that, with this—that is, with the mechanical point of view—everything had been achieved, that mechanism explained everything. Such minds certainly existed. That was the era when the purely material was declared to be the universe—the time of Büchner, Vogt, and also—in terms of conceptual framework, not research—Haeckel. That is the other extreme. In between were the cautious minds, who, though unable to rise to a higher understanding of the world’s affairs, had a vague sense that they had grasped only a part, possessed only a part. These are the cautious researchers who grasped the truth; who told themselves that they stood at a stage where they could not yet explore everything, and who, in humility, revered what they could not explore as the ineffable. For those researchers who had the right intuition, the feeling should have followed that behind what they found lies something unknown, toward which they are not called upon to intervene with their mechanical thinking.

[ 19 ] Now let us ask which researchers held such views, and we find one from that era who writes: “I believe that all organic beings that have ever lived on this earth are descended from a primordial form into which the Creator breathed life.” This is a cautious researcher, a researcher who understands the external world mechanically but cannot penetrate to the comprehension of life and the spirit; he clings to the idea of a Creator and reveres Him in humility. The same researcher may also be cited in contrast to the radicals who have emerged in the wake of Darwinism. After all, attempts have also been made to explain language mechanically. In the book *The Wonders of Life*, Haeckel demands that we recognize how all language also arises from the mechanical principle. The other researcher mentioned above, however, says: “Language is that marvelous mental machine that attaches specific signs to all kinds of things and qualities and evokes trains of thought that would never have arisen from mere sensory impressions, and even if they had arisen, could not have been further developed.” This cautious researcher goes on to say: What has arisen mechanically does not rise up to the level of language; it must be left to future times to comprehend this. — Here again comes a sense of reverence toward the unfathomable. And the same researcher states it plainly: “An almighty and omniscient Creator arranges every thing and foresees every event.” — Here you have a researcher who belongs to the era of the conquest of the world by mechanical thought and who finds the correct perspective on the things and beings in the world; who, in humility, pursues what he can pursue, and points to the future epoch of development, pointing in such a way that he says: Here is a limit for me.

[ 20 ] What this researcher has expressed based on his intuition is the standpoint that the Theosophist must adopt toward the Darwinian theory of evolution. He gives us a broad overview of the evolution of our race; he shows us that Darwinism is merely a phase that will lead to the concept of life, to the application of the concepts of soul and spirit. Just as we have a mechanical science today, so in the future we will have a science of life, a science of the soul, and a science of the spirit. This is the perspective that Theosophy opens up; and it seeks nothing other than to anticipate what the future of humanity must bring. It seeks to show where we are heading, and it must be emphatically stated that this Theosophical view is in complete agreement with those cautious researchers who have found the correct perspective through their own efforts. For these words do not come from some obscure Darwinist who could not free himself from traditional prejudices—who sought to link religious prejudices with our Darwinism—but from one whose competence you will not doubt: they come from Charles Darwin himself!