Human History
GA 61
I. The Relation of the Human Being to the Supersensible Worlds
19 October 1911, Berlin
In the next months as already in the past winters, I would like to hold talks about objects and interests of spiritual science, the science of the supersensible worlds.
If one speaks of a science of the supersensible worlds today, one still meets many a prejudice and opposition. This is comprehensible. Since someone who knows the cultural development of the last years or decades has to admit without further ado that the cultural development was reluctant generally to accept researches about the supersensible world in any sense. If one even demanded as it happened in the past winter talks and will also further happen that these talks have a scientific character in all their appearance and make a claim to place themselves beside other scientific considerations, then these prejudices are even bigger. Indeed, one has to admit that recently within our cultural life the need has grown up to turn the sight to the supersensible worlds to receive sense and understanding of the whole human life from this knowledge of the supersensible world to gain power in our so complex life for the demands of the outer world. A growing longing for knowledge of the supersensible worlds exists.
However, on the other side one cannot deny that the present human being demands scientific justification of spiritual science in certain respect. One has to admit now that today many circles completely deny any scientific nature to a consideration of the supersensible worlds from the point of view of the present science. One denies this while one takes two quite different points of view that find, but many representatives just in our time with those who have the longing to grow out from the old traditions that are there to satisfy the supersensible needs.
What the outer science can supply today what in particular the so admirable natural sciences can deliver is enough to give the human being an satisfying view of the world someday which must satisfy any longing for a world view. Only that worldview could satisfy, one says, which simply summarises the scientific or other as scientifically approved results to get an idea about the solution of the world riddles from its totality. Others say against it, indeed, we can form a worldview on basis of modern sciences; but this view is not enough for the indelible need for knowledge of the human soul. Everything that we can know about the world with only outer science proves to us almost that this outer science is not suitable to answer the big questions of existence anyhow. Everywhere a precise knowledge of the outer science points to the undergrounds of that what this science supplies.—Within these circles there are those people again who admit, indeed, that everywhere in the world are references to something supersensible, and that the outer science is never enough to receive a satisfying idea of the solution of the world riddles that still say that the human cognitive faculties and knowledge are limited. He would exceed the limits of his efficiency and knowledge in scientific respect if he wanted to penetrate into this supersensible world.
Thus, we realise that just from that spiritual life with which spiritual science wants to be in harmony prejudices and opposition arise against it. Hence, it is necessary at the beginning of this course of talks to discuss programmatically whether the human being can get a relation to the supersensible worlds. More careful spirits have always admitted—also in the recent heyday of natural sciences—that the human being must have such a relation to the supersensible worlds, and that he is just unable maybe to penetrate with his cognitive forces into these supersensible worlds.
If one can often hear about such discussions, as they should be done here in this talks, that this is basically an unauthorised fantasy on the supersensible worlds, and if one has to find such a thing comprehensible, one can point on the other side to point also to the fact that at least more careful thinkers and researchers have always admitted that it is no arbitrariness of the human soul to conclude from that what the outer science can give that everything points in our surroundings to supersensible worlds at last.
Let me point to an older and to a recent fact out of a range of many facts and initiate that what I want to bring to mind then in the other talks by the spiritual-scientific research itself. Let me initiate with the fact that the science of the last decades did not induce those who know it really to deny the supersensible worlds. On the other hand, one can also already say for the expert of the scientific point of view that our outer science is so far that it feels already constrained to admit a certain knowledge of supersensible worlds at least in a limited measure. This strict science also disproves most seriously, what many popular worldviews present as a materialistic or monistic worldview.
I would like to point to an older fact at first: to a researcher who stood within the glamorous activity of modern natural sciences who performed a lot in a narrowly defined specialty, but kept open his look to everything that outer science cannot offer. This researcher once said the following unforgettable words: the view is admirable which natural sciences can give in their theories of that what underlies the material effects and the natural forces as diverse nuclear effects. However, this researcher was of the opinion that it would be a fatal illusion to believe that something is included in the scientific views and theories that would exclude a metaphysical need, that is a need for a knowledge of the supersensible world or at least of the assumption of a supersensible world. It would be a fatal mistake if one believed that everything that natural sciences can give is only something that corresponds to the outer view. One would always have to found it on something exceeding this view.
The naturalist concerned pronounced this in a time, when the less strict thinkers, so the daredevils of modern natural sciences celebrated those thoughts which wanted to exclude any idea of the human being of a supersensible world.—I do not tell the saying of a naturalist which was possibly sickened by any mysticism, which would have been burdened philosophically, or which would have been done possibly in a mystic meeting. The statement that I have just mentioned was done in 1867 in the dawn of the materialistic natural science of the last century in the Vienna Academy of Sciences by the famous clinician and pioneer of medical science Karl von Rokitansky (1804–1878). Someone admits that who knows the entire being and the essence of natural sciences.
I would like to mention another fact. Who could believe that today a science owes its greatness more to outer experimental researches of those thinkers who founded it upon these outer researches and experiments than physics? On one side, what could one bring in more than the physical achievements of our time as typical for the scientific thinking of the present? On the other side, one brings the achievements forward repeatedly if one wants to refute the possibility that the human being might have to deal with matters of the supersensible world.
However, if now a physicist came and said, you have to say goodbye to the physical thinking of the present, or at least many facts and research results are there that you have to say goodbye to an idea with which so many hopes were connected just for the purely scientific approach?—For example, to the materially imagined ether which one regarded, so to speak, as a kind of magic cure for all outer natural phenomena long time. Since phenomena like light, heat, electricity and so on should be explained only by the fact that one assumed the so-called ether as the subtlest material hypothetically behind that what our senses perceive. While one imagined this ether materially, one did not hesitate to attribute to it also that in some processes of that material ether, which fulfils us, the spiritual, the supersensible experiences of the human being would have their origin. For everything that one attributes, otherwise, to a spiritual, supersensible world this material ether became a kind of magician and explainer. What happens, if now a physicist came and said that certain things within the physical research make us assume such a connection of the natural forces, which allows us imagining that without the requirement of a material ether the rays of light would pass through the space? What happens, if this physicist said, one must already suppose from certain facts today that the light waves travel through the space without a material medium?
If this physicist said also, indeed, this violates any kind of mechanical explanation of nature, but if the physical facts require this, just the mechanical view of nature is hopelessly lost. If then he still went on and said, what has to replace the ether? Then something would have to replace it to which above all one has to attribute no material quality. Now something strange has to replace this ether.—I must stress repeatedly: for the purposes of modern physics, something strange has to replace the ether, namely purely mathematical equations. These are thoughts, structures of thought. What continues as structures of thought, this should continue not through matter, but—as one says academically—through the vacuum, through the empty space. This one considers as necessary with respect to the light that is not bound to any material substance.
If some time ago anybody had said this, one would have probably assumed that this man is a tricky representative of a spiritual worldview, because only such can state that the light flows without material medium through the space. But no mystic said this, one did not say this in a meeting where one can dish up all possible things to the people, but the physicist of the Berlin University said this, Max Planck (1858–1947), in September, 1910 on the 82-nd Conference of German Naturalists in Königsberg (now: Kaliningrad). This fact is still much more important than the just mentioned one, namely because we only have not heard here what we have heard from the clinician Karl von Rokitansky: the fact that nature herself points everywhere to a supersensible world,—but that in the thoughts of the physicist which he really writes with mathematical signs on the paper something is included that is not bound to any material medium. That is we have not only admitted that pure thoughts, spiritual effects, are somewhere in the unknown, but that physics must recognise this in its real knowledge what is not only material what carries something supersensible through space.
With it, we see science at that gate where it must not be content to say only, there may be a supersensible world, but the human knowledge cannot penetrate into it.—But now it concedes that the thoughts which science makes not only refer to the outside world which consists only in the materials and is impregnated by matter, but that the knowledge which one has refers to something spiritual, to something supersensible! With it, the evidence is supplied from the conditions of our time for someone who knows the development of science really that today it is out-of-date to say that supersensible knowledge cannot claim any validity within science. Then perhaps one may consider it not so fantastic if the spiritual scientist says that with such concessions only science just gains a path which must lead on and on, because the things develop for the moment from their beginnings to the recognition of the reality of that which the human being can survey with his cognitive forces regarding a supersensible world.
If the human being wants to penetrate into the supersensible world, he turns to the contemplation of thoughts of the world at first. We do not apply the word philosophy; the essentials are a contemplation of thoughts. Since this becomes soon clear to a human being that he cannot come to the depths of the things by the mere outer view—it may be scientific ever so much.
There the human being turns to the contemplation of thoughts and tries to get an idea of the solution of the world riddles within the thoughts. Someone who wants to draw a picture of the world out of material facts only depends also on the way to make a view of that which underlies the world. From thoughts, everything also originated what, for example, Ernst Haeckel contributes to a worldview, although he rests on the outer scientific knowledge. Whether somebody rests more or less on the outer science or whether science comes to an idealistic or spiritual worldview, in both cases one has to apply thoughts. The thought has a peculiarity if we dedicate ourselves to it. Which characteristic this thought has, this proves the fact that many people regard the research of thoughts, the philosophical reflection as unpleasant or at least as uncomfortable.
Since the Greek period, there have always been philosophers. Not only students in the sweat of their brows delve into that by necessity which the reflection about the world riddles wants to supply, but also many people who want to get clarification about life out of the whole warmth of their hearts, who maybe want to receive peace and harmony in their souls regard that as rather dry and sober and also as abstract and uncomfortable what is brought forward about the solution of the world riddles in theoretical books, in philosophy. Someone who is full of life who stands as a practitioner in life and feels attracted by that what life gives directly feels easily repelled from the sobriety and abstractness of many writings and talks that want to penetrate by work of thought into supersensible worlds.
Nevertheless, this is something that one probably gets to know with many people. However, as brilliant the philosophical systems about the world riddles appear to those who can pursue them by the preconditions of their lives, as unenjoyable such ways are for practical persons standing in life. Still those people who created such systems of thoughts from a serious thirst for knowledge felt in such a way that they said, with this work of thought a picture is given of the supersensible facts, actually, underlying the world.—Somebody who is able to admire what these thinkers have done knows how much ingenuity and dedication was applied to penetrate on this way of thinking into the world. Then he also knows which deep satisfaction one can feel about the solution of the world riddles in the philosophical systems of great thinkers. They are by no means only abstract, but the thinkers put their hearts and souls in their systems even if those seem abstract.
If it concerns such philosophical systems, one cannot deny one thing which, but someone does not feel who is a born philosopher or can experience his joy and satisfaction in abstract thoughts who is attached to such a system of thoughts with warmth, with his humanity and with the deepest need for an intrusion in the supersensible world. What such a thinker feels, I would like to bring to mind at the example of a thinker who experienced a tragic destiny then who dealt with the big questions of the conceptual solution of the world riddles in the time when he spoke about that perceptively and insistently of which the talk should be now. I mean Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). We can completely disregard what he became later.
You find that what I want to characterise here in the early years of his work where he worked out lectures at the University of Basel that one published in his posthumous works. These were lectures on the Greek thinkers under the title Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, that is, before Socrates where the great thinkers interest us like Thales, Heraclitus, and Parmenides particularly. We are interested in them because you can realise how from a lively thinking, from the Greek worldview and culture, which stood really in life and were full of immediate life, the system of ideas of Parmenides emerged. It intended to penetrate into the supersensible worlds, but ascended from the old full-juicy Greek world to the abstract thoughts of “primordial being” and “primordial non-existence.” A human being gets goose pimples who stands, otherwise, in the practical life if anybody grasps such abstract concepts like “primordial being” and “primordial non-existence” to reach the supersensible worlds. Even somebody who is used dealing philosophically with the questions of existence says to himself: it makes my blood freeze in my veins if I notice that a human being ascends to such thoughts from which all life seems squeezed like the juice from a lemon which appear too sober, dry and abstract to the other human beings. This chapter was interesting to Nietzsche because it shows how a thinker rises directly from life to an abstract world of thoughts. Nietzsche felt the thoughts of Parmenides so colorless, soulless, so completely bared of that what the heart longs for. Nevertheless, someone who deals with spiritual science understands Parmenides when he speaks of it so that it makes your blood freeze in your veins due to these dried up abstractions and if he shows that even in the most marvellous edifice of ideas something is contained that appears sober to us. There we get the feeling: how do you want to grasp the depths of this world, which faces us so lively, with the spider's web of your thoughts? However, in such a sensation is just the starting point of that what must exist in the human soul if one should attain the relation to the supersensible worlds.
Even the greatest philosopher—who spins out systems of thoughts with certain ease who can climb up to abstractions and says to himself, in these abstractions you have the truth of the things—gets only around to painting nothing but a picture with such thoughts even if they are ever so thin like cobwebs and ever so abstract. However, you must say to yourself, such a picture can never completely exhaust the wealth of that what must form the basis of the world. Somebody who puts such a worldview in thoughts as a thinker may feel satisfied in a way, but somebody who stands in the full life has a right to say to himself, such an edifice of ideas can never exhaust the full life and with it also never the depths of life.
Someone who wants to go the path to the spiritual worlds has to strengthen this edifice of ideas in a particular way and he has to pursue it until its ultimate consequences. You find all other details in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?
Here it can concern only of giving the most important points of view about the way that the human being must take if he wants to attain real knowledge of the supersensible world. One must say that everybody can feel if he gets involved with mere edifices of ideas that he gets cold spiritually that he feels in such a way as if he had not approached the world, but would have gone away from the full-juicy existence as if he had really expressed the juice from existence like from a lemon.
However, one has to feel something else, namely enthusiasm for the crystalline clearness, the wonderful architecture of a system of ideas, so that one can say in a way: what is apparently so abstract is still the greatest achievements of thinking which the human being can experience, and which show how the conceptual creating prevails in the universe.—Thus, one has to bring enthusiasm into the worlds that can appear so empty because of their abstractions. Indeed, a thinker who only thinks and cannot feel enthusiasm for the thoughts weaving through the universe can never penetrate into the supersensible world.
This is only one side of that what one must feel if one wants to set up relations with the supersensible. The other side is an experience of the spiritual researchers: namely the fact that you have ascended to thoughts, but that you feel, as if you has lost the firm ground under your feet and you hover over an abyss. As long as you have pleasure in the thoughts and you feel firm in the thoughts, you cannot ascend to the supersensible world. Not before you feel something in pursuing the thoughts that has a double comparison: as if we lose the ground under our feet and have to hover in the emptiness, or as if we see the extending blue vault of heaven, and we recognise that the blue vault of heaven is no blue vault of heaven, but you yourself whose faculty of sight does not reach so far surround the universe with a blue vault of heaven. In truth, it extends into the infinite, and you have to ask, where is a firm point? Not before you feel that with an inner uncertainty with which you nail up your glance and cause the inkling of an infinite at the same time and then imagine this sensation increased, you can feel something of that which someone has to feel strongly who creates thoughts about the world connections but wants to penetrate through them into the living feeling of spiritual facts and beings. Then he feels, as if he nails up the way with his thoughts where the spiritual beings live where the spirit is working.
What I have told I have not fantastically thought up, I have also not taken it from thoughts. It is an experience of all those who have searched the way into the supersensible worlds. This can become an experience, as I have described it in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds
What I characterised that way as a sensation increases in a way and increases with that who goes the path of knowledge up to a feeling like fear, a feeling of uncertainty. One could characterise it as a state where one does not know where one is. However, this feeling must not develop completely, it must remain in the depths of the soul; and then only we can penetrate into the supersensible world. This feeling must be illuminated straight away by that what you can compare with the feeling of courage, of energy, of willpower. The human being has to become aware of something in himself during the slow, patient progress if he gets on it repeatedly: you do this not only, or you decide not only to do that for which you have an outer cause, but you put the ideal to yourself to do this or that from your own thoughts and not to lose the thought of it and the undeterred intention for it.
If we do this repeatedly in life and develop it systematically, it gives us an idea that we can receive from no outer world and no outer view, which we can get out of the depths of the soul. If we can develop this feeling when we rise to pure thinking which is free of sensuousness and not taken from the outer world, then something forms in us that you must experience that you can also experience, but as you experience a physical or chemical experiment. In the self-experiment of the soul, you experience that you become free from any view and knowledge that you can attain only with the tools of the physical body. We become free from the physical body and penetrate into that world about which we can spin, otherwise, only webs of thoughts. Then that not really exists which many people know solely about such coming-out-of-oneself, which they know from an experiment destroying the human consciousness, but it means becoming free from the sensory existence and the sensory view. The human being penetrates with his own being about which he knows that it has an independent reality compared with the physical body, into that world which is a supersensible one because he experiences it as a supersensible one. If anybody said, you can imagine this, one could give him only by logical reasons a view of what one experiences in the supersensible worlds, and what the human being is as a supersensible being. However, somebody who penetrates into the supersensible world knows that he comes on this way to a reality of supersensible kind whose reality he recognises and about which he knows that it is nothing fantastic, as he knows this about the outer sensory world.
What I have described of the supersensible world that way is only one direction to which we must go if we want to gain a relation to the supersensible worlds. There is something else. I have described the way through the thoughts what we call meditation spiritual-scientifically, delving into inner experiences of thoughts. This is one direction. The other direction is that by which the human being can experience something that differs from all experiences of thought. All experiences of thought are in such a way that they have something abstract and impersonal. One must feel this to bring such feelings, as I have just characterised, into the mental deepening, into meditation, and you discover that if you ascend with thinking to the spiritual being you arrive at the supersensible world. Nevertheless, the question must arise, can the human being come only on the way of thinking into reality?
In order to answer this question, I must point to another side of the relation of the human being to the supersensible worlds. As well as the human being wanders in the universe, in spatial spheres on the just characterised way he can also penetrate into his own being. But then he comes to something that leads him away also from the thought as the just characterised way has led him to the thought, because the materialistic science of thought like that of which I will at once speak leads away from the thought. Materialistic science of thought shows that the thinking is bound to the cerebral process that one finds that thinking everywhere in the world which is bound to the brain.
But when the human being returns from thinking to himself and gets clear about himself and realises how the thoughts and his whole intellectual life rise like foam bubbles from the depths of the sea of his soul life, then there is something to experience where from the thought arises. Indeed, there a deep dissatisfaction comes into being if the thoughts should be only foam bubbles on the surface of the surging sea of the soul life. Since if they were this, the world would be pointless. This is an emotional experience for that who understands the meaning of life. But now I want to characterise how one gets to something by another direction that is relieved from the abstract thought which refers us to ourselves, and which is free from thought which lacks what I have just described as the abstract and sober of rational knowledge.
The other direction gives us the mystic experience. The human being who submerges in his emotional world and strives for true self-knowledge who is able to turn the eyes away from that what surrounds us in the world comes to where the great mystics have come. If we look at these mystics, we hear from them that they experience the highest in their inside which they imagine as divine that prevails in the universe. Inside of the human being a divine spark also lives. You find this, for example, repeatedly in such mystic discussions, with Master Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and many others. This is an immediate mystic experience.
However, this mystic experience always shows something typical that the opponents always put forward. For this mystic experience has something individual. A mystic who can experience the divine spark in his soul who informs us about the world and its innermost being, and just that who experiences this strongest says: it is an inner experience of such deepness that human concepts, as one applies them, otherwise, to the things and facts, cannot transmit the experience.—The deepest mystics agree just with the fact that they can bring this experience by no means in thoughts or even in words if they feel one with that what pulsates through the world as something divine. The mystics say that you can experience it, but you cannot bring it in thoughts. Hence, one can transmit it not in the common mental pictures to others, but every human being can experience the world riddle only personally.
Usually you believe to have thoughts. However, that means again that you do not attain the divine world contents. You can read that with all mystics who described it. The soul meets inner enemies there. Then the human being can no longer say, if I feel this or that ascending, feel this or that passion, experience this or that and so on, then I am master of that.—No! Then the human being feels, as if inner enemies seized him and he cannot become master of them at first, but he must become master of them, if he wants to break down what separates him from his innermost being and with it from the inner being of the world. There one starts feeling that in our inside that comes up what is more than that what we know by thought what pours forth about our self. Then it becomes necessary to search forces with which we overcome it. There certain feelings must penetrate the mystic again. Since when the mystics only stressed: you only need to penetrate in yourself, then you experience God, then that would be again a complacent contemplation, as the complacent life in thoughts and ideas.
If one wants to come to reality, one has to experience a particular way of feeling which one can define in the following way. Some of you have certainly found it confirmed in the everyday life. We all know pains and sufferings. We start from a suffering at first that you can get to know most simply. Everybody knows how agonising physical pains and sufferings can be. But he also knows that maybe if pain increases more and more it reaches a strength where it can change over to a certain stage of bliss, even of desire. This was used where one tormented people whom one wanted to give an understanding of the sources of existence, so that the pain became so strong that it changed over to the opposite. There are such stages in which one feels something in pain that appears like a kind of desire and bliss. Someone has to feel something similar, but not identical, who immerses himself in his inside where he overcomes everything with his whole power that is hostile to him. You get an image of it if you read the mystics who describe how they exerted themselves to fight against all temptations of passion, of egoism. Besides, egoism, passion grow bigger and bigger. It is a low level of contemplation if one does not feel passion and egoism growing as our enemies.
If you have then the power to overcome these inner conditions of temptation, then you penetrate into the depths of the soul where the sub-sensory soul-life begins what exceeds the mere sensory life. However, you must not understand the described things in the trivial sense. There one can easily say, these are subjective experiences by which one attains no true knowledge.—But if they are understood in such a way as I have meant them here, one knows: if you descend in your inside and must call the strong forces of overcoming, you get to something that does not apply only to the one or the other human being, but that everybody can experience with the entry into the supersensible world.
If the human beings have come once by such a way to the supersensible world, they know for sure that the human being has a relation to a world that reaches beyond the senses, the usual mind, and reason. They also recognise that the human being is rooted with his whole existence in a world that does not come into being and does not pass like the sensory world, but is everlasting.
Today it mattered to describe the relation of the human being to the supersensible world. In the next talk, I speak about the topic how the human being can attain a scientific knowledge of the most important problems, of the longings and of everything that is close to us in life, of death and immortality. In the course of the talks we shall realise that such ways, such relations of the human being to the supersensible worlds, as I have described them today, are scientific in the same sense as a physical, chemical, or biological science are scientific. Since if one alludes to the impossibility of such knowledge of the supersensible, one argues:
If we examine the forces that the human being has for science, for cognition, we realise that his cognitive faculties are limited that he is unable to penetrate in a supersensible world.—However, no serious spiritual scientist who states there that the supersensible worlds are recognisable in the same sense as the sensory world will say that the usual cognitive forces—if one speaks of the inaccessibility of the supersensible world—can lead into this world. What the philosophers and naturalists understand by the cognitive forces if they say, the cognitive forces of the human being must keep away from a world that could lead only to speculative fiction,—about those forces the true spiritual researcher must also say, these forces cannot lead into the supersensible world! If you ever so strictly examine philosophically what the human being is capable of with his usual cognitive forces, even so, one will always have to answer: these cognitive forces are inappropriate to lead into the supersensible world.
If you consider the whole course of the today's discussion, you realise that I have nowhere claimed that the human being can penetrate with the usual cognitive forces into supersensible worlds. However, I have said that the human being must only go through a way from the point of view where he stands to another point of view. He has to ascend from those cognitive forces of which one rightly says that they cannot lead into a supersensible world, to other forces that are suitable to reach the supersensible world.
As little it is right to state that a blind person sees colours, it is right that a blind person if one operates him can use his eyes and can see the world of colours.
As much of Kantianism is right that the usual cognitive forces are insufficient for the knowledge of something supersensible, it is as true that the human being can get cognitive forces with which he is able to penetrate into the worlds that seem so distant. Spiritual science does not start from the use of the usual cognitive forces, but from those, which one has to attain first. This means at the same time that the human being grows into the supersensible world.
On one side, the human being can find the way into cosmic distances and depths of space and get connection with the supersensible worlds. On the other side, he can also come by that what is deeper than the usual consciousness, by his own spiritual, breaking through the usual layers of the soul life, in that which is supersensible or sub-sensory which coincides with that which he finds outside.
Since that which the human being finds in such a way is related intimately with him. If the human being finds the way by meditation to cosmic distances and distant worlds and takes such sensations and emotions along as I have described them, he meets, indeed, strange spiritual worlds, but he meets those to which he is related and in which he has his origin.
If he finds the way through himself, he enters into spiritual worlds that one cannot grasp with the usual consciousness that yet exist really as his spiritual subsoil. There he finds himself again. If he compares what he finds by immersing in his inside, and what he finds by expanding his consciousness outward, it is the same: the true spiritual being of the human being and his real origin. He opens himself to worlds which are spiritual and in which the human being has his origin as the old mystics said.
Then the human being can find deepest satisfaction from these worlds if he makes them accessible to his knowledge to satisfy the highest longings in his soul that wanted the question answered: what is the best in myself that has to exist in a sense quite different from that what is as a material world round me?—But then the human being also finds what he needs of working power, joy of life, yes, possibility of life and health of life. Since this results from such a deepening in the world if we penetrate ourselves with forces which are brought up from the deepest depths of our soul, which were brought from cosmic distances to stand firmly on the ground on which we can work and recognise a sense of existence. If I may summarise what the today's consideration should give what like a tonic has to sound through the whole series of lectures about the supersensible worlds, I would like to do this with the words:
In cosmic distances
Recognising human being,
In soul depths
Experiencing world forces,
The human being attains
Right world knowledge
By true self-knowledge.