The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Human Soul and Body in Natural and Spiritual Knowledge

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! If my remarks today may seem too sketchy to some of my esteemed listeners, I would ask you to bear in mind that I would like to give more of a picture of the results concerning the nature of the human soul and the human body, results which, I may say, form a kind of preliminary conclusion to a research project in Spiritual Science which I have been engaged in extensively for 36 years. Thirty-six years ago, I laid the first building block, so to speak. And today I would like to set myself the task of presenting a picture of the results.

[ 2 ] The path and the means to these results can be found in my various writings, especially in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds,” in my “An Outline of Esoteric Science,” and in other books. In these books, you will find essentially parts of these results, all of which are defensible, all of which are, in a sense, suitable for providing evidence and proof of what I would like to talk about today in a summary overview.

[ 3 ] I emphasized the length of time that these investigations in Spiritual Science, which came to a preliminary conclusion this winter, have taken, for the reason that I would like to point out that research in Spiritual Science is truly not something that is based on random ideas that happen to come to mind, something that is achieved through superficial research and careless conclusions. In particular, I would also like to emphasize that I have always endeavored to seek the relationship between what I will present today and what has been achieved through research in Spiritual Science, the relationship between this and the admirable, magnificent results of natural science.

[ 4 ] And if you will allow me this personal remark, ladies and gentlemen, I can say that over the decades I have really done everything possible to draw connections between Spiritual Science knowledge and the achievements of natural science as they have developed to this day. And it is precisely when one is able to delve into the most diverse branches of scientific research one can see how well-founded Spiritual Science research is in this regard, even if the results may still seem so daring, perhaps even paradoxical, for the present day, as the little I have to present today.

[ 5 ] Nevertheless, in view of the many opponents who still exist today against the achievements of Spiritual Science as I mean them here, considering the many opponents, one may always ask oneself: How is it that precisely from the natural sciences this well-founded scientific knowledge of the world is often presented as something fantastic, as something contrary to all science . And because such an observation can be made, I would like to take my starting point today from just one area of contemporary scientific thinking, one that is relevant to today's topic and in which I will be able to show how, on the one hand, scientific research leads directly to the form of world knowledge that is represented here; and how, on the other hand, this scientific way of thinking, one might say with every conceivable means, obstructs the paths to this spiritual research. I would like to start from a particular point in this regard.

[ 6 ] It can be said that, among the various fields of recent scientific research, the one I have already referred to in my introduction, which deals with the investigation of the relationship between human physical life and human spiritual life, has not been neglected. Beautiful, magnificent results have already been achieved in this field by scientific thinkers. But it is precisely from the most brilliant , most splendid, and most sincere products of natural science in this field, one can recognize what is actually lacking in the research path that starts from such starting points today.

[ 7 ] Let me take an outstanding work as my starting point. And if I sometimes appear too abstract or too scientific in my presentation of the current picture, I apologize; the lecture will show that I do not mean it in a bad way. I would like to start with the book in which Theodor Ziehen attempted to gain mental images of the relationship between the spiritual and the physical in humans from his scientific point of view.

[ 8 ] Now, ladies and gentlemen, when we speak of the soul in human beings, we must speak of a threefold soul life. This threefold nature of the soul life comes about simply by looking at this soul life of human beings with a reasonably open soul eye of self-knowledge. All soul phenomena can be divided into three areas of perception — which continues in thinking and mental images — that is, perception with thinking and mental images, feeling, and willing. Whatever soul phenomenon, whatever inner soul activity occurs, can be classified under one of these three categories of human soul life. In his “Physiological Psychology,” Theodor Ziehen attempts to describe the relationship between this soul life and human physical life in a way that is characteristic of contemporary scientific research and corresponds to a widespread, perhaps even dominant, way of thinking. Therefore, Theodor Ziehen's method of investigation reveals precisely the most important features that someone who wants to form mental images about these things from today's scientific perspective would arrive at.

[ 9 ] Now, of course, Ziehen investigates what initially seems to belong to the life of the soul for the natural scientist, what belongs to this life of the soul according to numerous investigations that can be ascertained — I cannot go into all the details now — but which can be ascertained. Ziehen examines the relationship of the soul life to the sense organs, to the continuations of the sense organs within the body, to the nervous system, and he first asks: How does the soul live in the sense organs? How does it continue in the human nervous system? What actually happens inside the human body when the soul is at work in human beings? Now, what is significant and noteworthy is that Ziehen comes to a rather one-sided conclusion, a conclusion that shows him that sensory life is connected with its continuation, the mental image or thinking life, with the nervous system, with the marvelous structure of the human brain, and with everything that can be described as the nervous system.

[ 10 ] In this field, scientific research has indeed already achieved great things, and what has been achieved promises even more impressive results in the very near future. But the entire path that is being taken here is one-sided. And Theodor Ziehen's research method in particular shows that this path is one-sided. For Theodor Ziehen, the way he has to think about the subject according to his research method leads him to establish a relationship only between sensory perception, sensory impressions, thinking or a mental image, and nervous life. However, the spiritual life of human beings consists not only of the life of imagination, but also of the life of feeling and will. And here it becomes apparent to Ziehen that he can indeed find something very beautiful that runs parallel to sensory impressions, the connections between thoughts in the human nervous system. This works very well for the life of imagination, but the moment this researcher wants to move on to the life of feeling, the life of feeling slips away from him; he no longer has it. And so we experience the extremely significant fact that we can really hold on to such debates as those of Theodor Ziehens in a most interesting way, in which it is really shown what is possible today and what will continue to be possible; that for everything that goes on in the life of the imagination, how one mental image connects with another and so on, as for everything, branches, ramifications, processes in the human nervous system can be demonstrated, and in the sensory system.

[ 11 ] But what about the life of feeling? Ziehen himself raises this question: What about the life of feeling? Yes, he comes to the point of really letting this life of feeling slip away, by not seeing this life of feeling as anything independent, as anything that would correspond to how we really have our emotional life in our soul. We truly have it as independent within us as the life of imagination. And the life of imagination truly plays no more independent role than the emotional life. But Theodor Ziehen comes to — one can say this, because it is really so — to deny feelings altogether; to deny feelings as such, as independent spiritual experiences. For he finds nothing in the human body that corresponds to feelings in the same way that the ramifications and connections of the nerves correspond to the life of imagination, to the life of thought. He finds nothing. And so he says: Feelings are not independent at all, they are only a certain emphasis of mental images. And he does not speak of feelings, but of “emotional tones” of mental images. So we only have mental images; one is melancholic, the other cheerful, and so on.

[ 12 ] And because one cannot find anything in the body for what what pain and joy stimulate in the soul, he can find nothing in the body, for this reason he erases it completely and says: The mental images have their emphasis, and that is the emotional tone of the mental image. This only shows what is characteristic of this approach to research, that today's scientific way of thinking, when it asks about the relationship between soul and body, focuses solely on seeking the relationships between the soul and the nervous system; this is considered a dogma. When one speaks of the soul on the one hand, this corresponds to the nervous system. But in the nervous system, Ziehen finds nothing that could indicate feelings in this system, so his feelings flutter away.

[ 13 ] And his will, his volition, flutters away even more. He finds nothing for it in the nervous system. Therefore, he denies the will as a mental phenomenon altogether. He says to himself: I want to go. First, I have the mental image: I want to go. This is a mental image that has its complete counterpart in the nervous system. Then I have nothing more than an observation that I actually go afterwards. That is the second mental image. But the will is not in between, the will falls out completely.

[ 14 ] So, the life of the will is also completely denied.

[ 15 ] This literary phenomenon, “Physiological Psychology” by Theodor Ziehen, is significant for the reason because it is so honest and sincere, because this researcher draws on nothing other than what he can establish scientifically. And because he finds nothing for feeling and will, he says: To consider feeling and will to be independent is pure fantasy. Feeling is only an emphasis of the life of the imagination. And to talk about will, well, that is left to the philosophers, and they are so accustomed to fantasizing all kinds of things into reality — he says good-naturedly.

[ 16 ] Ladies and gentlemen, my scientific research has shown me that the main flaw in this long-standing research is that it seeks the life of the soul in its relationship to the nervous system in a one-sided manner, and that it does not even raise the question, does not get around to raising it: Since the human being is a whole as a body, should we not perhaps seek a relationship between the whole of the soul and the whole of the human body, and not just between the soul and one part of the human body, the nervous system? And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the basis of Spiritual Science research in this field, that this Spiritual Science research now seeks the relationships of the whole soul life to the whole human body life.

[ 17 ] Of course, I can only cite the results at first. For if I am allowed to write a fairly detailed book about what I have to say today, you will find in it the details that show just how well what has been found purely through Spiritual Science can also be proven scientifically. The first of these is absolutely correct and can even be regarded as a proven scientific result: the part of human soul life that affects the senses and their continuation, the nerves, the part that we can call the life of imagination, has its counterpart in the nervous system of the human body. And research will increasingly lead to the recognition that there is no greater miracle in the realm of what can be found in human physical life on earth than the miraculous structure of the human brain, which is a faithful image, a faithful plastic image, and at the same time a faithful image of movement of what can be called spiritual imagination, soul imagination.

[ 18 ] We find, in a sense — what has not yet been found today will be found in the future — we find counterparts for everything that turns out to be a relationship between mental images in the branches, in the arrangements, in the structure of the individual nerve organs of the human brain. Research is on the way to showing that there is a wonderful reflection of the life of ideas in the human brain. But Spiritual Science must add to this what it gains from its findings.

[ 19 ] And here it is a matter of the fact that, on the one hand, the relationship just described exists between the soul and the nervous system, but on the other hand, Spiritual Science can find a relationship between the life of imagination and something spiritual. So that there is not only a relationship between mental images and the nervous system on the one hand, but also a relationship between mental images and what is spiritual on the other. But this spiritual realm can only be explored by means of heightened consciousness, awakened consciousness, contemplative consciousness, which I spoke about here recently. This contemplative consciousness, which arises when a person strengthens their thinking, comes to view the spiritual realm to look at spiritually, just as the sensory eyes look at the brain when they are able to determine the brain's relationship to the life of imagination. And I must emphasize the depth of soul work that is necessary in order to gain full clarity about the relationship between the life of imagination and the spirit.

[ 20 ] The day before yesterday, I drew attention to a remarkable statement by the great thinker who lived and died here a long time ago, the so-called “V-Vischer.” He says:

The unity of soul life certainly cannot be located in the body, although it cannot actually occur anywhere else but in the body.

[ 21 ] This is a complete contradiction.

[ 22 ] What does a person do today who departs from the usual scientific approach or the worldview that is common today, what does he do when he encounters such things? He says: Well, these are the limits of knowledge; one must stop there; human beings cannot go beyond these limits of knowledge with their cognitive abilities.

[ 23 ] The spiritual researcher also stops at such apparent limits, strictly forbidding himself to put forward any fantastical hypotheses about what might lie beyond these limits. He takes a hard look when such a contradiction arises, and then he seeks to make such a contradiction present in his consciousness with his soul, to wrestle with it, to work with it; for he realizes, the spiritual researcher: You are standing here at a point where thinking, which is bound to the brain, ceases, where you cannot proceed further with thinking that is bound to the brain. And he now endeavors to try whether the path continues. And so it is a great, lengthy task for the spiritual researcher to find the numerous paradoxes, the apparent contradictions that arise, such as this contradiction that Vischer cites.

[ 24 ] It is precisely the hundreds and hundreds of points to which human thinking can come, where it seemingly reaches a limit, that the spiritual researcher seeks out. And he now tries to see if something can be done with his soul precisely by processing these limits. And there he finds that as soon as he frees himself from those rigid forms of thinking that exist in ordinary life and in ordinary science, it works; only he experiences through inner experience that he then becomes completely free with his thinking from the organ of the brain, from the organs of the nervous system; that he then gradually enters with his thinking into an independent soul life — only a comparative soul life, however — into something that human beings can work out for themselves, and in which he sees: With your brain and your nervous life, you can reach a certain limit, where there is a contradiction; there you must now continue working freely, without the tools of physicality. That such further work can only be based on the healthiest soul work and not on any kind of pathological soul work, I have often emphasized in my lectures and in my books, and only malice and a desire to slander can see anything unhealthy in this striving for freedom of thought, which is to be achieved while fully maintaining consciousness, and which now moves in a free element, free from physical life, in this liberation of thought from the physical organization.

[ 25 ] And then something very strange becomes apparent. It becomes apparent that while we develop mental images, spiritual facts live unconsciously within us. A color, another sensory impression, a sound comes to our consciousness; a sound; the mental images associated with this color, this sound, come to our consciousness; but what does not come to consciousness in ordinary life lives supersensibly in what takes place sensually within it. And when one frees one's thinking from physical life in this way, one arrives at a conscious overview of what I have taken the liberty of calling imagination in my books. One arrives at imaginative knowledge, at a knowledge that is independent of sensory and nervous life; at a knowledge that is not fantasy, but contains something thoroughly objective, that expresses something just as objective as color and sound originate from something objective. Only, ordinary life is such that through the activity of life, precisely that which is spiritual, which can then become visible to the imagination, disappears, that the physical asserts itself in such a way that the spiritual, the imaginative, is suppressed. When we receive sensory impressions and process them through the nervous system, impressions from the outside world that are still present behind the sensory impression also enter us, impressions that can only be grasped through imagination, but which disappear as the sensory process takes place among the other processes.

[ 26 ] Here we come to an area where, once again, a remarkable encounter with modern natural science emerges. Natural science has long been researching what, in contrast to the coarser materiality of the ether, that which is called ether. Natural science presupposes ether in contrast to what is present as air, water, and coarser materiality. If one wanted to discuss everything that natural science has said about ether, what views it has arrived at, one would have to talk for many days.

[ 27 ] But conscientious researchers of recent times have come to a remarkable conclusion. And I would like to quote this view of the ether almost verbatim in the words of a recent physics researcher. Planck, the physicist, once said: If we want to gain any mental image of the ether at all, we must adhere to what we know scientifically, namely that this ether has no material properties.

[ 28 ] Now consider that in our present age of materialism, physicists have come to the conclusion, precisely because of what material phenomena represent, that if one wants to have a favorable mental image of the ether, one must imagine it as immaterial, spiritual.

[ 29 ] Spiritual Science now imagines it spiritually, that is, it says: You can never attribute properties to the ether that are experienced by the senses, but you can only do so through imaginative cognition. For the ether is home to forces that are not present in the outer, visible nature, but only become visible through imaginative cognition.

[ 30 ] In this sense, what happens is that it is not only the outer material world that makes an impression on us, but that it is mainly the etheric that makes an impression on the senses. What flows into the eyes and ears is what takes place in the etheric, and only in the senses does the etheric process evoke a material process, and then again in the nervous process. If we were to directly absorb what comes in from the ether, we would have imagination, a recognition of images, a vision that describes things that are not found in sensory life. And as imagination passes through the senses, it is directed downwards towards the physical, and [the nervous system] is the organ that transmutes the imaginative-etheric into the material.

[ 31 ] In this area, therefore, the spiritual researcher must agree with the materialistic thinking of natural science, which develops in the human body; for what we have as thinking is activity of the nervous system, that is bound to the nervous system. But this thinking and mental image appears to be so because the incoming imagination is first weakened. In reality, we as human beings live in a relationship not only to what the nerves do, but to what the spirit does by sending us its imaginations. And the imaginative world belongs to us as flesh and blood belong to us. The spirit lives within us, but during life between birth or conception and death, it is weakened to the life of the body.

[ 32 ] But now we come to the question: What is it that takes place as an etheric process, entering through one sense or another and constituting our external world of observation and experience? What is it at the same time? It is also the formative forces. These turn out to be the formative forces of the human organism as a whole. This has to do not only with the individual sensation of sight, the sensation of sound, but also with the living activity that accompanies us as physical human beings from physical birth to physical death, which carries over our physical, bodily organization from day to day, from year to year, as we grow. We live in a supersensible body just as we live in a physical-sensory body. And whether you call what is accessible to imaginative knowledge the image-forming body, as I recently did in my essay in the magazine Das Reich , or whether you call it the etheric body, as people have become accustomed to saying, even though it is nonsense — it is not names and words that matter, but the thing itself — what lives in the human being, what can be called the formative body, what makes us a whole between birth and death, what carries over the growth from day to day, from year to year in life; which is a body of forces, an etheric body, that lives in us just like the physical-sensory body.

[ 33 ] And ordinary mental images, ordinary thinking, is what it is because what takes place in this sphere of activity is weakened by the physical-bodily organization and becomes a weak, shadowy, often abstract image of the living-imaginative. If we penetrate into what emerges as the living-imaginative, we have before us not only the physical body, which changes its substances every seven years but we also have before us that which endures the changes between birth and death and carries the sameness of being across all the individual periods of physical experience between birth and death.

[ 34 ] And when we look at the life of imagination from a Spiritual Science perspective, we conclude that What we experience in the soul as a mental image is reflected in life, and the nervous system is the physical counterpart of the life of imagination. In the spiritual realm, the life of imagination has its [archetype] in the spiritual world, from which it is formed. And with this, one gains a view of the whole human being, not just the human being at any given moment.

[ 35 ] Now the question arises: What about the life of feeling? What about the second element of the soul? We have seen that Theodor Ziehen comes to regard feeling only as an emphasis on the life of imagination. This contradicts experience. For we know very well that the life of feeling is independent, and Spiritual Science is now continuing to explore the life of feeling. It also seeks to explore the relationships of the life of feeling to the human . And it must agree with Theodor Ziehen. There is no relationship between feeling and the nervous system. There is none.

[ 36 ] Now I must confess: It took me a long time to find the courage to say what I now want to say, based on what I have learned over the years from numerous individual results in Spiritual Science in connection with the scientific confirmations sought everywhere. It took a long time to find all this.

[ 37 ] The emotional life is just as closely connected to the respiratory system as the mental image life is to the nervous system. And just as one must search for the physical counterpart of the nervous system for the mental image, one must not look for something in the nervous system that corresponds to the emotional life, but rather in everything that is related to the respiratory life. It should be noted that I am referring to the fine breathing that extends in numerous branches to all organs, just as the nervous system extends in its branches to the various organs of the human being. We are just as filled with circulating breath as we are filled with the spreading nervous system. The nervous system has no power to relate to the life of feeling independently, but, just as the nervous system is there to perceive a sound externally, it is also there to perceive feelings internally, which, however, take place physically through the action of the respiratory system. For feelings, too, the nervous system is only the organ of perception. Feeling does not develop through the nervous system. Feelings are perceived, thought, and created as mental images through the nervous system. Despite all its findings, which point to this subtle distinction, scientific research has not yet risen to the challenge of recognizing it. Now, in saying this, I know that Emotional life relates to respiratory life as the life of imagination relates to the nervous system, I can anticipate hundreds of objections. Allow me to present one characteristic objection to you myself. For those who have the courage to express such things in serious research already raise the objections themselves. A very obvious objection would be the following:

[ 38 ] Yes, but musical perception is based on the sensory impression of the ear and on the continuation of this sensory impression of the nervous system inwardly. What lives in the musical tone is therefore contained solely in the nervous system. So what is emotional in the musical experience must be imagined as a mental image of something that takes place in the nervous system. So what do you want? The musical experience clearly shows us that you are wrong, as this becomes quite clear, [gap] and this is what brings about musical perception.

[ 39 ] The objection is, of course, entirely justified at first glance. But the matter is different, significantly different. Let us take a look at one of the hundred fine ramifications of the respiratory system. We exhale. When we exhale, not only do the lungs exhale, but the entire brain exhales with them. The entire upper part of the human body breathes along with it. And with the exhalation, there is actually a breathing away from the head toward the center of the body. A respiratory recoil is created that works its way up to the brain. As the sound image enters from outside through the ear and continues through the nervous system, it encounters the respiratory rhythm. And in the interaction of the sound image with the breathing rhythm, the musical experience arises from the respiratory system. Head breathing is musical experience. This breathing is so finely ramified that ordinary research knows nothing about it or does not think about it in the same way that it thinks about the fine ramifications of the nervous system.

[ 40 ] And so all the individual so-called refutations can be rejected if one does not remain on the surface of research but goes quite deep. Spiritual Science has only one thing to fear — if I may say so, fear being nothing more than an expression of [gap] — Spiritual Science has only something to fear from objections that come from the surface. Spiritual Science has nothing to fear from people who really go into depth, and there it will find confirmation everywhere.

[ 41 ] Now, if I wanted to try in the same way — as could very easily happen according to my research findings today — to explain the relationships between the life of feeling and the respiratory system, as natural science today attempts to explain the relationships between the life of imagination and the nervous system, I would have to go into what was my starting point more than three decades ago, and which, if taken as a starting point, really does provide a beautiful way of illustrating what the paths of Spiritual Science are. I had to start from Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. The relationships between the soul life of thinking and creating mental images and the nervous system are on a different stage of metamorphosis than the relationships between the life of feeling and the life of breathing. One might say: the life of breathing expresses less vividly the soul life that lives in it, the life of feeling.

[ 42 ] While the life of the brain is truly a faithful imprint of the thinking system, the life of breathing is on a subordinate level; it expresses itself less vividly. If I had to make a comparison, I would say: the structure of the brain and the processes that take place in it are a true picture, an image of the life of thought. If I were to compare the life of breathing with the life of feeling, the life of breathing would be to the life of feeling as pictorial writing is to what it expresses. Pictorial writing, which has already become half a sign, requires deeper knowledge if one wants to understand it. The same is true of the life of breathing.

[ 43 ] The relationship between the life of breathing and the life of feeling is not as obvious as the relationships between the life of the nerves and the life of imagination. But instinctively, people have always felt, except in our present culture, always felt the relationship that exists between the life of feeling and the life of breathing. And this will lead us at the same time to point out the kind of insight through which one comes to such a statement as I have just made have just made about the relationship between the life of feeling and the life of breathing. Behind the life of imagination, we find imaginatively a soul life that is actually only comparatively a soul life, that is actually an etheric life, only a finer spiritual life that spreads out in space.

[ 44 ] What lies behind the life of breathing and feeling? Spiritual life. One arrives at this if one continues one's spiritual research a little further, if one does not stop at working out in lively inner soul work what one can obtain by wrestling and working with the contradiction that has been characterized. Instead, one must go a little further, and this can be done in the following way: You can develop inner soul experiences, thoughts, and concepts in your soul. Yes, because then you gain a whole new perspective, a whole new experience of the life of thought. Humanity does not take the life of thought very seriously. The life of thought is often something terribly rigid, something quite rigid for humanity. People like to form thoughts, and do not think that thoughts can only be the tools through which one finds one's way through reality. If we take a thought as absolute, so to speak, it leads us further.

[ 45 ] I would like to explain this with a few trivial examples. Someone may very well come to the conclusion that sleep is a very good remedy for their state of health. A very correct view, logically correct. The person in question has a concept, and one sticks to such concepts. They visit someone somewhere. There he meets a lady who is weak and sickly in some way; he gives her advice based on his ideas: Yes, you must get some sleep. When he leaves, he is told: The lady sleeps all day; she is only awake when she has visitors. Or someone has developed the dogmatic idea that walking, walking in the fresh air, is good for certain illnesses. He wants to use this advice to help a man who complains to him that he feels ill. The man replies: You forget that I am a postman.

[ 46 ] What I mean to say is: concepts can certainly be correct, but if a person's lived experience lacks a completely different relationship to reality than the one he has formed in his dogmatic concept, then this dogmatic concept may be correct, but it does not lead into life. We could discuss an enormous wealth of prejudices based on such things in science today. It is precisely these prejudices that the spiritual researcher must now free himself from. The spiritual researcher arrives at a certain range of thoughts. He now has these. He makes them present in his soul. He must work just as diligently inwardly as the laboratory researcher works outwardly with his instruments. Then he comes to say to himself: You must now begin to allow something into your thought life that you are not accustomed to doing otherwise. For in ordinary life, one always builds on the assumption that one can grasp any thought one wants, and that it will be possible to justify or refute it logically.

[ 47 ] But as one progresses in spiritual research, one comes to develop something in one's inner life of thought that can be compared to moral life. This does not mean a transfer, but something of this kind. In our outer moral life, in social life, there are certain actions that we tell ourselves we are allowed to do. We forbid ourselves to do others. We bring a certain structure into our actions. Our conscience commands us to do this or that action. What we have in moral life, where we do not merely have a logical justified, must be transferred — but only for the branch of spiritual research — to the inner life of thought. In a certain direction, we allow ourselves certain thoughts, but not others, and thus an inner liveliness of thought arises that can really be compared to what we develop from within ourselves as a social structural life through conscience and a sense of duty. An inner liveliness of thought arises.

[ 48 ] And when we have reached a certain stage where we know that these thoughts are valid — and their validity is guaranteed by themselves, like the morality of an action — and that others are to be rejected, when we come to this experience, then, just as the imaginative life breaks away from the life of imagination, which is bound to the nervous system, so a conscious life of knowledge breaks away from our emotional life, which I have called — please do not be offended by the expression, it corresponds quite well to the fact — a stage now develops that can be called “inspired knowledge.” . And for this inspired cognition, there is now something given out in the world, comparatively speaking, that corresponds in spirit to the life of feeling, just as the imaginatively given life of the ether corresponds to the life of thought. We wrest ourselves from the life of feeling into the inspired world. And now we have the following relationship: The life of feeling has its physical counterpart in the life of breathing, its spiritual counterpart in all that can be found through inspired knowledge as a spiritual reality, and of which we are a part spiritually, just as we are a part of the material outer world in the flesh.

[ 49 ] People felt that they could really reach a spiritual realm, instinctively in the Orient, by instinctively developing the life that physically corresponds to the life of feeling. This method of the Orient is not applicable to us; it is even harmful in many respects. But in the Orient they knew this; therefore, everywhere in the Orient, in the search for a higher spirituality than the mental image presents, you will find a certain culture of the respiratory system. See how in Indian philosophy certain breathing exercises are done in order to seek spiritual life. There one finds only a certain transformation of the inner part of spiritual life, which lives in breathing.

[ 50 ] While what I would like to call " the moralization of one's thought life," leads to a genuine search for the spiritual counterpart to the life of feeling. And in this spiritual counterpart, it becomes apparent at the same time that a world becomes perceptible in it that extends far beyond what lies between birth and death; a world that encompasses that from which we come as spirits when we are conceived or born, and into which we enter when we pass through the gate of death; that which is extinguished by physical life, but which we go through between death and a new birth, what we experience in a purely spiritual world before birth, which can only be recognized in that knowledge which can be called inspired, and which leads to the world that is the counterpart of the respiratory system. I know that these things sound paradoxical. Today, we are very far removed from this. Precisely that which lives in our inner dispositions, which shapes our inner destiny, our abilities, our powers, our entire soul constitution, insofar as it is not determined by physical hereditary characteristics but is born of the spirit, we find as the content of our spiritual individuality, as we were before we entered into our ancestral line. The spiritual world that surrounds us [gap] our eternal, spiritual life, like the ether that surrounds us, making our life continuous between birth or conception and death through the etheric body.

[ 51 ] And a third element in the life of the soul is the will, the expression of the will. I said earlier, ladies and gentlemen, that Theodor Ziehen finds nothing at all for the will, and therefore denies it altogether. Spiritual research now shows something about the will that makes it necessary to first cast aside a very specific prejudice. And here I must appear particularly reckless to you, because this prejudice seems today to be one of the most secure findings of natural science. And I have thought about it for years before I dare to speak this finding publicly.

[ 52 ] Durch die eigentümliche Denkungsweise der Naturwissenschaft wird der Naturforscher heute dazu geführt, von zweierlei Nerven zu sprechen. Er nennt die eine Art sensitive Nerven. Dann, sagt er, entspringen aus dem Gehirn andere Nerven, die gehen zu den Muskeln hin, und die nennt er motorische Nerven, Bewegungsnerven. Und nun stellt er sich ganz sonderbar vor: Sinneseindrücke kommen, werden im Nervensystem wahrgenommen. Willensimpulse entstehen, die werden wiederum gleichsam geleitet durch die Bewegungsnerven zu dem Bewegungsapparat. Geisteswissenschaft zeigt nun, dass überhaupt kein Unterschied ist zwischen den sensitiven Nerven und den motorischen Nerven. Beide sind ein und dieselbe Art von Organen.

[ 53 ] Es ist schwer, wenn man einem eingewurzelten Urteil so widersprechen muss, und man überlegt sich das zuerst. Aber so ist es. Geistesforschung zeigt nämlich, dass tatsächlich es solche Nerven, durch die gewissermaßen der Wille von irgendeinem Punkte im Innern aus nach den Muskeln hinwandert, dass es solche Nerven nicht gibt. Was als solche Nerven beschrieben wird, sind ebensolche Nerven wie die anderen. Denn der Wille wirkt unmittelbar auf den Leib, nicht durch Nerven. Der Wille wirkt durch das, was wir nicht kennen, unmittelbar auf den Leib. Und wozu ist der motorische Nerv da? Um das, was im Leibe durch den Willen entsteht, wahrzunehmen. Geradeso wie der Augennerv dazu da ist [Lichtwahrnehmungen zu vermitteln], so ist, wenn ich ein Bein bewege, der Wille tätig. Alles das, was man als motorische Nerven bezeichnet, ist nur dazu da, wahrzunehmen, was geschieht. Er ist ein gleicher Nerv wie der sensible Nerv.

[ 54 ] I now know what objections can be raised. The experiments that have been carried out on patients with tabes, the various interruptions of the nerves running from the brain to the spinal cord and vice versa – anyone who investigates these things and frees themselves from the prevailing prejudices will find in all these phenomena not evidence for what natural science claims, but for what I am now saying. Precisely what I am saying is strictly scientifically proven by all the things you can find in any physiology book. This is a result of Spiritual Science.

[ 55 ] The natural scientist has a mental image of what happens when someone learns to play the piano: the motor nerves are worn down, and the person initially becomes clumsy in the use of the motor nerves; afterwards, they become more skilled, and the hand can grasp and strike the keys more quickly. This is not the case. What one acquires — and anyone who has a fine sense of perception will find this to be true in this example — what one experiences is not that the motor nerve is honed — it does not exist as such — but rather that it is a sensitive nerve that, through practice, becomes capable of immediately sensing the finest movements, so that one does not need to train the motor nerve; instead, one performs the movement, and at first one cannot follow the fine movements of the fingers with one's senses, but then one learns to do so. What is trained is the sensitivity of the sensitive nerves. Let us study from this point of view how a child's babbling relates to proper speech. Everywhere you will find that where the will is developed, the nerve has nothing else to do but make itself more receptive to the movement and action being performed.

[ 56 ] But what is the relationship between the will and the human body? This relationship exists just as it does between the other members I have mentioned, only the will is in a direct, immediate relationship to the metabolism, just as the life of imagination is related to the nervous system, the life of feeling to the respiratory system, so the will is related to the metabolic system. Every time a volitional impulse is lived out in the soul, a metabolism takes place. Even with the finest volitional impulse, with attention — for that is will — even there a fine metabolism takes place in the brain.

[ 57 ] In the human organism, these three systems are intertwined. But that is the whole human being. There is nothing else in the human body but the three systems: the life of the nerves together with the life of the senses in its entirety, the life of respiration, and the life of metabolism. There is nothing else; everything else is a subdivision. And just as the life of imagination is connected with the life of the nerves, so the life of feeling is connected with the respiratory system, and so the life of will is connected with the metabolic system.

[ 58 ] So what happens when I will? I must not look for what happens there in the nervous system. Theodor Ziehen knows this. When I move my hand, a metabolic process is triggered by my will. I have long been preoccupied with this question. I started from the processes that take place during imitation, how one can study how a will is ignited by the outside world, and so on. A metabolic process, and the nerve only perceives what change is taking place in the metabolism. So, what happens in the body is a metabolic process, and this must be perceived by the nerve. Just as you cannot perceive something that is there without looking at it, so you, as a tabes patient, cannot lift your legs because you cannot perceive what must happen. That is, you leave the movement undone.

[ 59 ] So, the life of the will is always related to the life of the metabolism. Metabolic life in all its ramifications is the counterpart to the life of the will. Here we compare the whole soul with the whole body. And just as the life of the nerves covers the imaginative life, just as the material life of breathing diminishes so that it becomes a physical process — the inspired being —, so too is there something in the life of the will that lives itself out in the metabolism.

[ 60 ] If I have compared the miraculous structure of the brain with a plastic image of the thinking system, and the life of breathing with a pictorial script, then I can only compare the life of metabolism with ordinary writing, a sign writing; if one wants to go into the inner connections in more detail, one can say: a sign writing that is, however, a metamorphosis of pictorial writing. But in the same way, everything from the lower metabolism to the highest is, in a sense, a sign writing, a sum of signs for the life of the will.

[ 61 ] Now, precisely through what I said the day before yesterday — and as a further development of what I have listed today as imaginative knowledge, inspired knowledge — one can, through the further development of this inner process of knowledge, also arrive at what now corresponds to the will in the spirit.

[ 62 ] One must come to this when one develops this, when one reaches the point in one's soul's struggle that knowledge itself becomes a destiny, that what what one becomes inwardly through the insight one has gained strikes one more deeply in life than any of the happiest or saddest events in life. You have gone through sacred, supreme experiences — one might say — but that what you have gained as a kind of insight is a twist of fate that is more significant for your inner being; you are changed in a different way than by any other fate. Then one can grasp vividly that which corresponds to the will in the spirit, just as metabolism corresponds to the will in the body. Metabolism covers the spiritual, the spiritual recognized through intuition — only one must not take the term intuition in a trivial sense. In the spirit, the highest of the types of knowledge corresponds to the will, just as in the physical body, the lowest, metabolism, corresponds to it. Metabolism is the lowest in the physical human being; in this lowest, the highest is present.

[ 63 ] The third level of knowledge is therefore intuition, where you experience how there is a spiritual world in our environment that pulsates directly into our will. This became clear to me as I continued to investigate what is already contained in my Philosophy of Freedom. The intuitive impulse for the will flows to us from the spirit.

[ 64 ] Let us take a rather low impulse of the will that manifests itself in human beings, such as a rather low impulse of the will — forgive me, it is not always low for all human beings — when one is thirsty and wants to drink, when one is hungry and wants to eat; there is an immediate metabolism, even a system in the metabolism: hunger, thirst, satiety. In the spiritual realm, conscientious research reveals the following: Not all strokes of fate, but certain events in our destiny, simply take place because we have a hunger and thirst for something, not in our physical body, where we have thirst or hunger through metabolic processes, but in what I have called the spiritual realm. Imagine that you are thirsty until the age of 25, and that this thirst is directed in an indefinite direction. Just as thirst in the physical sense drives us to drink, just as it is a driving force, so you go through life from stage to stage, from experience to experience, but you are not satisfied; it drives you until, at the age of 25, you find that which relates to what drives you like satiety to hunger. Such things develop in ordinary life just like a dream, but in life they are what actually guides life.

[ 65 ] Where does this thirst come from that leads us to some kind of destiny? This thirst is placed within us from our previous earthly lives, which we look into. Just as we look into the spiritual through inspired knowledge, so we look into our previous earthly lives through intuitive knowledge. Just as a change in my metabolism causes hunger, so a spiritual thirst has arisen from previous earthly lives; this continues into this life and leads me toward my path of destiny. It is only hunger on a higher level.

[ 66 ] A wonderful mystery speaks for the depths of human life in this; a glimpse into the immortality of the soul in its connection with destiny, which can only be achieved if one recognizes what is apparently the lowest in the physical as the counterpart of the will, and the will in turn as the spiritual counterpart of that which lives in the spirit, of which we are a part, just as we are a part of the matter around us in the flesh; wherein lives precisely that which lives spiritually in us, which is naturally perceived as described in our thinking, but which first strikes our will. Schopenhauer sensed a certain, one might say very first flash of inspiration from this closeness of the will to the spiritual, which now permeates the whole world around us as a world still lying behind the world, and surrounds us, only he did not recognize the illuminated will, but the blind will to live.

[ 67 ] So we see that when we relate the whole soul to the whole human body, the connection between soul and body becomes wonderfully clear: the body consists of three systems. The well-researched but not well-understood nervous system and sensory life correspond to the life of thought. The life of respiration corresponds to the life of feeling. The life of metabolism corresponds to the life of will.

[ 68 ] Now then: the life of the will corresponds to what is recognized through intuition; the life of feeling corresponds to what is recognized through inspiration; the life of imagination corresponds to what is recognized through imagination. And what is composed of imagination, inspiration, and intuition is our spiritual organism, just as that which is composed of nerve life, respiratory life, and metabolic life is our physical organism.

[ 69 ] Ladies and gentlemen, this is the relationship that Spiritual Science must conscientiously portray between [the] human soul, which lives out its life in the nervous system, respiratory system, and metabolic system, and the human spirit, which is eternal, which goes through repeated earthly lives through births and deaths, and which lives out its life in what can become the content of imagined, inspired, and intuited knowledge.

[ 70 ] Forgive the expressions. But inspired knowledge is not exactly a bad expression; it corresponds to the respiratory life of the body. This was instinctively felt in ancient times. That is why what is being considered here was already called that in ancient times, and I have taken no offense at calling it inspiration when things can be studied precisely, just as I use the words imagination and intuition for other reasons.

[ 71 ] Now you see, my dear audience, conscientious research in the individual fields leads us into what is a wonderful connection. And it is really the case that, simply because we do not follow these paths, natural science is still hostile to these things today. I am well aware that I cannot yet say everything there is to say about these things; that I cannot yet express what I can say in a completely perfect way; but I also know very well what can be said to refute it. But this is what I think about these things:

[ 72 ] I say to myself: Copernicus assumed that it is not the sun that moves around the earth, but the earth that moves around the sun. This could be refuted; Tycho de Brahe refuted it with the science of his time, and he is quite right from his point of view. Kepler did not refute it, he developed it further. So, based on many descriptions of current research, it will be possible to refute what I am saying. But what matters is not that Copernicanism has been refuted in the manner of Tycho Brahe, but that things are developed, which I cannot yet do, but which time will be able to do. But if only I could bring about, through the way in which I try to present things and am already doing so here, that people would understand that spiritual research is not something to be taken lightly, but that it truly only arrives at its results step by step, in conscientious progress, just like other research, such as physical research, when it is conscientious. But people do not always want to follow the paths that spiritual research must take. That is why I had to say today: this or that may seem reckless, and some of what we encounter today is understandable. And from this — let me emphasize this in conclusion — from this, opposition arises quite naturally, and, so to speak, unconsciously: one must break away from many prejudices about all kinds of limits to human knowledge if one wants to agree even to some extent that what has been said today is something conscientious.

[ 73 ] I have said many times, including here: I only attack those I value, and I only attack when I am forced to do so by attacks from outside. Therefore, it should not be considered disparagement when I point out to a researcher how averse people are today to looking inward. A professor in Bern gave a lecture on this subject a few years ago. The lecture is quite interesting, but it is also quite characteristic of everything that natural scientists today want to avoid because they do not have the courage to engage with it. Dr. A. Tschirch says, while discussing the methodology of modern natural science:

[ 74 ] However, I believe that we do not need to worry today about whether we will ever really penetrate to the “inner core.” We have more pressing matters to attend to.

[ 75 ] A strange statement, considering that what spiritual research has to say is connected with what is man's deepest longing, with what are the most meaningful, most decisive questions of mystery for everyday life. But Professor Tschirch, who is an excellent natural scientist, believes:

The “inner nature” that Haller probably meant, which Kant later called “the thing in itself,” is still so deep within us that it will be thousands of years before we even come close to it—assuming, of course, that a new ice age does not destroy our entire culture.

[ 76 ] Yes, when such an attitude is taken toward free research, it is no wonder that it encounters difficulties when it tries to assert itself.

[77] And in a lecture given by the equally distinguished American researcher Professor Jacques Loeb at the opening of a monist congress in Hamburg in 1911, we can read a remarkable statement. Let me conclude by quoting it here:

The question I intend to discuss is whether, based on the current state of our knowledge, there is any prospect that life, that is, the sum of life phenomena, can be explained entirely in physical and chemical terms. If, after serious consideration, we can answer this question in the affirmative, then we must also base our social and ethical way of life on purely scientific principles, and no metaphysician can claim the right to dictate to us how we should live our lives in a way that contradicts the findings of experimental biology.

[ 78 ] He thus attempts to make it clear that all of life is merely a physical chemical process. But this is asserted with a certain brutality. It must be said that the metaphysician does not want to dictate anything, but rather to explore spiritual laws, just as the natural scientist explores external laws. But according to this attitude, one would actually expect the answer to the question: Where, according to such an attitude, must morality come from? From the chemical experiment. [Gap] Such are the thoughts that stand in the way like boulders when it comes to advancing Spiritual Science today.

[ 79 ] And another researcher, who is equally important, once said the following:

Whatever the brain cell of a glowworm or the sensation of the harmonies of Tristan and Isolde may be — the substance of which they are composed is the same on the whole; it is obviously more a difference in structure than in material composition.

[ 80 ] This is science, and it will be considered scientific, genuine, exact science! Sometimes, however, one finds strange precision, strange intensity of thought, even among the greatest researchers of the present day. Perhaps I have said this here before, but it is so beautiful that it can be repeated again and again. A very important researcher, who has made great contributions in the present day, has written a book about the [universe], in which there are beautiful things that relate to the external material world. In the preface, he says the following:

When we look at our time, we find that natural science has brought us infinitely far. When we look back at ancient times, oh yes, they had such childish mental images! And now

[ 81 ] — he says, explaining whether our world is the “best of all worlds,” he says literally —,

that is difficult to decide; but that our age of scientific thinking is the age of thinking, that is immediately certain.

And we can say with Goethe, for he throws himself into his chest like Wagner:

“Forgive me! It is a great delight
To put oneself in the spirit of the times,
To see how a wise man thought before us,
And how we have finally come so far.”

[ 82 ] We can say: the thinking is so thorough that the man forgets that Goethe puts these words into Wagner's mouth, and that he is only characterizing himself, how he has come so wonderfully far. He has come so “wonderfully far” as the man of whom Goethe has his Faust say:

How all hope does not vanish from the head,
Which constantly clings to stale evidence,
Digging for treasures with greedy hands,
And is happy when it finds earthworms!

[ 83 ] It is a cute self-characterization, but it is characteristic of the thoroughness of his thinking. For himself, the man forgets to make a thorough distinction between Goethe and Wagner in Faust. If this is the structure of a great natural scientist's thinking, then it is not surprising that Spiritual Science encounters obstacles along the way that require such thinking to be transformed into thorough, conscientious energy, so that thinking can rise to imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But then the connections between the human soul, the human body, and the human spirit are revealed to him.

[ 84 ] And with a slight change, one could quote a line from Goethe's poem entitled “On Contemplating Schiller's Skull.” Goethe says:

What more can man gain in life
Than that God-Nature reveal itself to him?
How it allows the solid to melt into spirit,
How it preserves what is spiritually created.

[ 85 ] Modifying this saying of Goethe's and extending it to include the conclusions that can be drawn from the results I have presented today, one might perhaps say:

[ 86 ] Spiritual Science must attempt to seek the connection between spirit and matter in such a way that, looking confidently at this field of research, we can modify Goethe's saying in the following way, thereby expressing something like a motto for the present-day endeavors of Spiritual Science:

What more can man gain in life
Than for God-Nature to reveal herself to him,
How in spirit she lets matter melt away,
How in matter she lets spirit experience itself!