The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Mystery of the Soul and the Mystery of the World. Research and Perception in German Intellectual Life

[ 1 ] Dear attendees! As I took the liberty of saying in my previous lecture, my aim today will be to elaborate further on the questions touched upon at that time concerning the human soul and its connection with the mysteries of the world; but I will endeavor to ensure that today's lecture can also be understood on its own terms, so to speak.

[ 2 ] However, ladies and gentlemen, I must apologize to you today, because what I intend to present is a summary of results rather than individual developments, the results of a long journey of spiritual research; and I will have to refer to the individual stages of this path of research and to these results, which are recorded in my various writings. Nevertheless, please forgive me for this personal starting point today, even though the very first seeds of this path of research, as it appears to me, were sown by me many years ago, throughout these decades my endeavor has been, on the one hand, through what I have often referred to here as spiritual research, to return again and again to the corresponding questions and mysteries, to penetrate them from all sides, as can be done through spiritual research . So when I speak of results, these have been found through the spiritual research approach that has often been discussed here over the years.

[ 3 ] On the other hand, however, my endeavour throughout these decades has been to namely to draw the various threads, the threads of thought, the threads of imagination, in accordance with current scientific research, in accordance with what I have often mentioned here out of honest conviction, the admirable results of modern scientific research. And it is precisely in relation to this that I will allow myself to make a few remarks today, for it is precisely in relation to this that something peculiar has occurred to me. On the one hand, nothing seemed more self-evident to me than that the results of the spiritual research I am referring to in relation to questions of the human soul and the world are everywhere substantiated and confirmed by what are now scientific achievements. Everywhere, not only in contemporary natural science, but in a wide variety of fields, there is not only no contradiction — which would not even mean much — but everywhere confirmation, evidence of Spiritual Science research through what is available to us today in natural science.

[ 4 ] And yet, again, everywhere, dear attendees, on the part of those who believe they stand firmly on the ground of this newer natural science, there is contradiction upon contradiction, rejection upon rejection, in which Spiritual Science research, as I mean it here, is presented as a sum of fantasies, of arbitrarily constructed flights of fancy or figments of the imagination. Now, for those who are completely familiar with the subject, what I have said is is not surprising, but what I have just indicated must first be surprising to our contemporaries today.

[ 5 ] To me, dear attendees, it often seems that the best evidence comes from the very areas where natural science most strongly resists what is to be presented here in Spiritual Science. I would like to start with this thought today, just by way of introduction. In the field that seeks to determine the relationships between the soul life and the physical organization of the human being and physical experience, natural science has, as I have already indicated, The way in which these results are conceived and used for knowledge is precisely what is characteristic and peculiar, and should lead us to a different path of research than the one that is so common today.

[ 6 ] Starting from this point, I will have to present things today which, although they are based precisely on current scientific research, seem to contradict everything that is claimed by a certain, apparently scientifically minded side; and here too I will have to apologize, because these facts will make a large number of thoughts appear paradoxical and highly strange. But I want to start from the premise that we already have an excellent body of literature that originates precisely from scientific thinkers and deals with relating human soul life to human physical life. I could cite dozens and dozens of works from this literature, but I want to pick out one that is truly solid, significant, but also characteristic: I want to pick out the physiological psychology, the scientific theory of the soul by Theodor Ziehen, which is also excellent from his point of view.

[ 7 ] In order to say what I want to say here, I must assume that, based on experience, we must create a mental image of our ebb and flow of soul life, as we set it in motion every day between waking up and falling asleep, and how we spend our days. But our ordinary science also establishes that this whole ebb and flow of soul life, purely from experience, breaks down into the life of imagination, which is connected with the life of perception, into the life of feeling, and into the life of will. Anyone who is capable of practicing even a little self-knowledge will not deny the significance of this division of the life of the soul into the life of mental images, feeling, and will.

[ 8 ] Now, what is peculiar is that, in the same way that a man inclined toward scientific thinking would do today, Theodor Ziehen asks himself: How does the life of the soul, this ebb and flow, relate to the life of the body? And so it has become common practice, a practice based on responsible methodology, to seek only the relationship between human soul life and sensory life and its continuation inward, to the nervous system. And in this relationship, wonderful things are achieved, and a fine example can be found in this book, but also what is characteristic of these achievements.

[ 9 ] So one asks: What actually happens in this wonderful structure of the human brain, in the sensory organs; what happens in the rest of the nervous system when mental phenomena flow out? One separates, as it were, the nervous life from the overall organization if one wants to find the relationship between the soul life and the human bodily organization. Now the peculiar thing is that Theodor Ziehen, with great acumen, beautifully finds the relationship between the life of perception and imagination and the nervous life of the human being, which he pursues, as it were. What happens in this human organism while the human being perceives, processes perceptions into mental images, while one mental image follows another, while a mental image arises, and a submerged mental image emerges as a memory? Theodor Ziehen seeks physical processes for all of this, and one would have to be quite amateurish to denounce the significance of such a researcher as materialistic, for this branch of research has a profound justification, and it shows us in a wonderful way how human physical organization is a prerequisite for ordinary imaginative life.

[ 10 ] But now Theodor Ziehen asks himself: Yes, he says, people also talk about emotional life. Precisely because he is a Christian researcher, because he relies on strict methods, he cannot accommodate this emotional life in the processes he describes in the nervous-physical organization. Emotional life cannot find a counterpart in nervous life, a physical counterpart, in the same way as imaginative life. So what does Theodor Ziehen do? Theodor Ziehen effectively excludes emotional life as an independent element from human soul life. Well, even though a person with a healthy soul life must say to themselves: Just as important as imaginative life is is what floods through the soul as emotional experiences, and this life is independent in emotional experiences. Nevertheless, Theodor Ziehen feels compelled — because he cannot find a counterpart for emotional life in nervous life in the same way as [that] for imaginative life — to say: Feelings are actually not independent in human soul life. What we call feelings are actually only a certain emphasis of the life of mental images. One mental image is emphasized in one way, another in another; one is attached to the sympathetic, the other to the antipathetic, and so on.

[ 11 ] Therefore, Theodor Ziehen does not speak of feelings, but of the emotional tone of mental images. This leads him to conclude that there is no need for such a physical counterpart to emotional life, as he rightly finds for the life of mental images. Nervous processes take place in the mental images that occur in the soul; but depending on how these mental images are emphasized, these nervous processes take place in one way or another, and we have no independent emotional life, but only—in the sense of Theodor Ziehen—feelings as emphases of the life of mental images. In emotional life, we have the peculiar phenomenon that it is precisely the rigorous researcher who must half eliminate feelings, making them merely a characteristic of the life of imagination, because, according to his rigorous method, he cannot find anything that would correspond physically to the life of feeling in the same sense as the nerves correspond to the life of imagination. The matter becomes even more characteristic in Theodor Ziehen's view of the life of the will. For the life of feeling, he at least finds that feelings are emphases of the life of imagination; for the impulses of the will, he finds nothing at all, they cannot be accommodated, precisely in the face of rigorous research. The will cannot therefore be accommodated in the organization of the body according to this scientific method.

[ 12 ] People often say kindly: Well, since there is no scientific correlate for the life of the will, speculation about the will is left to metaphysicians and philosophers, while implying that these are gentlemen, personalities who are inclined to dream up all kinds of things that have nothing to do with serious natural science. Precisely when one recognizes this scientific method with full appreciation, this method itself urges one to something quite different, and it seemed necessary to me, precisely from the perspective of spiritual research, to find out what actually lies behind the fact that, in pursuing the mysteries of the human soul, the strict natural scientist must half conceal the feelings and completely conceal the will.

[ 13 ] What I am about to say is not spoken lightly, but has been discovered using Spiritual Science methods. It has been tested over decades and only this winter have I brought it to a certain preliminary conclusion. It still seems surprising today, but if I am allowed to write a detailed book about it, it will be seen that — what has been found on the one hand by natural science through the study of physics, biology, physiology, and so on, based on the most thorough scientific results — can be proven; and that natural science has no reason to oppose this, but rather that it is natural science that must turn to these things if it understands itself correctly. It became clear to me that, particularly in this field, a correct formulation of the questions, a correct formulation of the puzzle, leads an enormous way, and so I said to myself at first: Where does this obvious one-sidedness come from in someone like Theodor Ziehen? I could also cite other examples.

[ 14 ] It then became clear, dear audience, that the research of modern science cited here essentially condemns itself to one-sidedness by relating human soul life solely to one part, one member of human life, namely sensory and nervous life. But then, if one has the right mental image about such questions, it is already clear that one is led down a different path. For then one asks oneself: Shouldn't this human soul life have more than just one-sided relationships to the life of the nerves, but shouldn't it perhaps have relationships as a whole soul to the whole human physical being? Mustn't one perhaps relate the soul not only to the life of the nerves, but relate the whole soul, according to one's mental image, feelings, and will to the whole bodily life?

[ 15 ] Then it occurred to me — and these are really not just ideas, not easily conjured thoughts — after careful consideration of all the relevant scientific findings, it became clear to me that what I had discovered, not through scientific means, but through spiritual research, could be proven from all sides. The life of imagination and perception does indeed have such a relationship to the nervous life of the human being and to the sensory life as is developed by science. Much has already been accomplished in this field of the life of imagination. And if the appropriate path is pursued intelligently and without prejudice, the most significant achievements will still be made in this way; and many a mystery of the soul, which must still be obscure to natural scientists today, will be clarified so that it agrees with the results of spiritual research. So for the life of imagination, we have a very fine foundation in the current scientific direction; but so little for the life of feeling that a serious researcher must half deny the life of feeling.

[ 16 ] Now, if one proceeds in this way, one finds that this emotional life of the human being has just as direct a connection to everything we can describe in human beings as respiratory life, as respiratory rhythm, as the life of imagination has to the sense organs and the nervous system. The same paths that one takes from the life of imagination to the life of the nerves, one will have to take from the life of feeling to the rhythm of the breathing process. Everything that is the life of feeling finds its physical counterpart just as directly in the life of breathing as everything that is imaginative finds its physical counterpart in the life of the nerves. Once this truth — I do not want to say — is recognized, it will be, but when it is accepted in such a way that it is seriously pursued, it will have consequences for science that are completely unforeseeable.

[ 17 ] Now, when I last spoke here, I emphasized that the spiritual researcher in particular must not only consider honestly what speaks in favor of his assertions and then assert them in the usual way, but that the spiritual researcher cannot do otherwise than to develop what what I have called flexibility of thinking, than to always make clear to themselves all possible objections and really bring them before their soul. The spiritual researcher is of the opinion that only those who can think positively understand the significance of a thought. No one understands materialism who can only refute it, but only those who can also defend it, who know its limits, who know what materialistic thinking is all about. So, although I could list hundreds of objections that might spring to mind from scientific knowledge when thinking lightly, I would like to mention one characteristic one.

[ 18 ] One might immediately object: You are talking pure amateurism, even reckless amateurism, because just consider the understanding of music, the listening to music. You know that when a person listens to a structure of sounds, it affects the ear, and from there the imagination, and since music is primarily an emotional experience, you can see that musical understanding and musical feeling are directly linked to the imagination. At first glance, this seems to be an irrefutable objection. What can one say in response? But I am not referring to a superficial consideration of the breathing process alone; when I speak of this process, I am referring to breathing in all its subtle ramifications. During breathing, the rhythm continues continuously — one could describe this in detail — continuing up into the brain. The breathing rhythm affects the sensory organs, branching out in the human organism as finely as the nervous system. Breathing goes everywhere. And now create a mental image of something musical affecting the ear, continuing into the nervous system. This alone creates a musical emotional life, in which the breathing rhythm rises from below, encounters the mental image, and only in the way in which the breathing rhythm takes in what is received by the ear into its breathing rhythm does musical imagination arise. This itself lives entirely in the breathing rhythm, in the finely branched breathing rhythm.

[ 19 ] And so one can find hundreds and hundreds of refutations from natural science for what I have said, if one proceeds superficially. If one proceeds thoroughly, Spiritual Science has nothing to fear from thorough criticism. Yes, now the question could arise: Yes, but what role does the nervous system actually play when it comes to emotional life? The nervous system plays no different role in relation to breathing than it does in relation to the sensory organ in perception. Whether I perceive a sound or a color, the nerve plays the same role that it plays when it branches inward and perceives [feelings]. The difference between perception and becoming aware of perception in breathing is that in one case, with the sensory organ, the nerve is directed outward, and in the other case, in breathing, is directed inward.

[ 20 ] The nerve does not have the task of somehow affecting feeling more than it does external sound or color. It is as little concerned with feeling as it is with external sound or color. It makes it conscious life. As a nerve of perception, it also extends into the realm of breathing. The life of feeling plays directly into the life of breathing, without the mediation of the nervous life, just as color and sound directly affect the nervous system through the sense organs. Now, when one studies the human body, one essentially finds three parts of this human body, three systems, so to speak.

[ 21 ] One is the sensory perception system — natural science has created a good basis for this —; the second is the respiratory life — this is the physical counterpart of the emotional life —; a third member of the human organism, and in such a way that when we have the three members together, when we have the whole human being physically before us — is the metabolic life. And I ask you to consider this again in all its ramifications, like the nervous life and the respiratory life. I expressly note — so that no one thinks that it is easy to construct hasty refutations based on scientific findings, come up with all kinds of such refutations — I note that the matter becomes very complicated when viewed realistically. I must simply explain it here.

[ 22 ] The matter is very complicated because these three systems are intertwined, rather than existing side by side. The nerve is constantly nourished and is subject to metabolism; the respiratory and sensory processes also affect it. What respiration mediates is also subject to metabolism. Only metabolism can be considered, in a sense, as a third link in its own right. And then, then one comes to say to oneself that what Theodor Ziehen had to eliminate completely in order to cope with his strict method, what he good-naturedly leaves to the philosophers, the life of the will, is as directly related to metabolism as the life of sensory perception is to the sensory organs and nerves, as the life of feeling is to the respiratory system. Directly, directly, immediately, the will intervenes in the metabolism—that is the result of spiritual research. Of course, when attention is developed, it also intervenes in the metabolism of the nervous system. But when the will is involved, what concerns the will is not dependent on the nerves, through which the nerves are organs of perception, but on metabolism.

[ 23 ] This naturally complicates matters. But the important, essential thing is that there is just as direct a relationship between the will and the metabolism as there is between perception and the nervous system and between feeling and the respiratory system. Now, if one wants to investigate this matter thoroughly, one comes to a conclusion that will certainly cause a great deal of offense today. But you can believe me, I have examined everything from all sides, strictly from a scientific point of view, and although I have been lecturing on this subject in private lectures for many years, I have saved it up until its preliminary conclusion this winter and am only now beginning to communicate this result to the public.

[ 24 ] For it turned out, strangely enough, that scientists have so far distinguished between two types of nerves. They refer to one type as sensory nerves, which run from the outside to the inside, and the other as motor nerves, which originate in the brain and spinal cord and carry the currents to the outside, as it were. The sensory organ is first impressed, then this continues in the nerves, leading perception to a volition. Then, from somewhere, the soul—if one accepts it—is switched into the two types of nerves, and [it] is transferred from somewhere to the motor nerve through a process. This directs it to the periphery of the body, and one moves the hand, the foot, and so on. This is the two-part structure of the human nervous system. It will have to be completely abandoned by the natural sciences of the future. One does not speak of such a result lightly. The two-part division will have to be completely abandoned by the science of the future. Whether the nerves are called sensory or motor nerves is of no importance to me; what matters to me is that there is only one type of nerve and that, in principle, what what we call sensory nerves and what we call motor nerves have exactly the same function. I know that it is easy to raise objections based on physiology; one need only think of the symptoms in patients with tabes dorsalis, or the experiments involving the severing of nerves.

[ 25 ] I wish I had time to show you that all these experiments, all the symptoms, especially in patients with tabes, prove exactly what I have just stated here: the uniformity of nerves, and refute, if one proceeds with sufficient precision, what is today known as the theory of the duality of nerves. But there is no time for that. However, I would like to point out one thing. It is so easy to point out: Yes, don't you sense how the motor nerve gradually creeps in?

[ 26 ] Someone learns to play the piano, learns the subtle movements that the fingers perform, or in any other skill or activity, he learns that — one has the impression — because at first he cannot conduct the current, the impulse, through the motor nerve, but when he performs the movement over and over again, then he can conduct it. The nerve pathway creeps in. But that is not how it really is. What is activated as will in the moving fingers intervenes directly in the metabolism, and everything that is nerve has only the task of perceiving the fine movement internally, just as the nerve perceives sound from the senses.

[ 27 ] The motor nerve also serves no other purpose than to ensure that the movement is not performed unconsciously, that we perceive it internally with the nervous system. Everywhere, the nerve is endowed with the same function, only it differs from others in that it goes to the sensory organ and perceives the impression from outside, and in other cases it perceives the directly caused metabolism internally. The motor nerve is quite similar to the sensory nerve. I believe that perhaps the first people to show an inclination toward these finer results, which have been obtained with the help of Spiritual Science, will be those who are artistic. I believe that supporters of these ideas are much more likely to be found among knowledgeable piano players than among physiologists, for example. They will soon realize that skill is based on learning more and more to follow the movements in their subtleties, that one can learn to follow one's own finger movements down to the finest details, that one can perceive the subtle, immediately executed movements down to their nuances; and when one becomes knowledgeable, one will learn to observe how a child's babbling turns into speech, how this is a process based on learning to control one's metabolism through willpower and then perceiving it subtly by becoming aware of it [gap].

[ 28 ] You have briefly indicated the relationship of the whole soul life to the whole human body life; for there are no other processes. All movement processes are based on metabolic processes. There are no others than metabolic, respiratory, perceptual, and nervous processes. You have related willing, feeling, thinking, mental images, and perceiving to the threefold human being, the nervous, respiratory, and metabolic human being. Even today, where rigorous research is conducted, it would and will always be interesting to prove in detail what has just been explained.

[ 29 ] I have not discovered all this on my own, for example by drawing conclusions about the soul processes from the phenomena of the various bodily processes, but rather through the path of spiritual research that I have often indicated here. For just as on the one hand we find the human physical life to be threefold, so on the other hand, when we come to contemplative consciousness, we find the relationship of the soul life to the spiritual human being. Just as on the one hand the body, the threefold body of perception, respiration, and metabolism, is the counterpart to the soul life, so, on the other side, the spirit is the counterpart to the human soul. The only thing is that one has to seek the path from the life of imagination to the spirit just as one seeks the path from the life of imagination to the body, arriving at the nervous system.

[ 30 ] This path from the life of mental images to the spirit can only be found if one trains what is otherwise human imagination and thinking, for example, using the methods described in my book "How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? " so that one really brings thinking, which is initially only applicable to the outer sense life, to the point where it can truly detach itself from the body and become independent within the movement of thinking itself. The opposite path must be taken, which is to be taken in all narrowing of consciousness.

[ 31 ] On the one hand, there is the morbidly hypnotic life; the opposite brings spiritual research to development in everything, even in what is often called mystical experience. The fact is that while in ordinary, healthy life, the human being has independence in his thinking, feeling, and willing in relation to the life of the body, in everything that is hypnosis, illusion, hallucination, which is unhealthy mysticism that can sometimes express itself in wonderfully poetic images, the soul is pushed down. Every vision consists in the fact that the life of imagination is stripped of its independence — instead of living within itself — and is pushed deeper down, so that the body is too strongly engaged. Spiritual Science has nothing to do with all this, but must overcome precisely this whole visionary life, including the false mystical life. . And anyone who can prove to me in my books, where I speak of soul or world riddles, a single result that was gained solely through mysticism bound to the physical — which, however, is interpreted as such by friends and opponents because people like it so much: they want to see visions — anyone who can prove this to me, let them do so. They will find none.

[ 32 ] Everything that has truly been found in Spiritual Science is sought by making thinking, which is free from physical life, even freer, even more intensified in its uniqueness. This, however, involves more than is often heard, [in order] to arrive at some complicated vision. It includes, for example, taking healthy thinking as the starting point and then searching within this thinking for what arises only in thinking itself; I would say, even freer, more independent than thinking already is; so that the questions are asked correctly, and then the answers developed in thinking are given from what is always around us, the answers are given from the spiritual world. Thinking, properly trained, freed from its physical life. Thinking is made free so that we penetrate into what is behind the sensory world.

[ 33 ] I have taken the liberty of calling this thinking: imaginative mental image, not because it is based on imagination, but because it is based on a more energetic form of mental image that brings it to life in its freedom. But the image is not brought about by squeezing thinking and the sensory organs into the brain, as visionaries may believe, but precisely by separating thinking from physical life. This achieves the independence of thinking from physical life. Therefore, everything that is called imagination has absolutely no connection with physical life. The body goes along with its experience.

[ 34 ] This is the difference, already mentioned here several times, between the visionary and the spiritual researcher who has truly freed his thinking: the latter is always able to have, alongside what is given to him in mental images, the ordinary, healthy sensory life, and the two run parallel to each other. It is pathological when one replaces the other, when one cannot be a completely reasonable person, perform one's daily tasks, raise one's children properly, and so on, and at the same time develop what has nothing to do with physical life, the penetration of the spiritual-soul within us into the spiritual-soul around us. Then I would like to know if anyone will tell me that someone who is merely a visionary, or even someone who has a pathological mental image, also has a healthy side. Then it would not be pathological if he knew that the other mental image was pathological. But people think about these things far too superficially, judging them from the outside.

[ 35 ] Then, when we penetrate through genuine, true research in deepened thinking into what is spiritual around us, then we have a first element of the spiritual world, then we have what physics today only dreams of, we have etheric life. And just as we know through our sensory life that the substances that are outside in physical life live in our flesh and blood, so we know through a mental image that the supersensible-etheric, as formative forces, permeates everything and lives in us as formative forces, permeating our organism as a second supersensible organism, which we carry within us and which can be scientifically researched just like the physical one. Just as this physical body is a part of the physical world, so our own etheric organism is a part of the surrounding etheric world, which is supersensible, and supersensible laws play into our etheric body just as physical laws play into the physical body.

[ 36 ] What is the task of this formative body? Its task is to carry over what is momentary, from moment to moment, from hour to hour; it has the task of sustaining life in time between the birth and death of the human being. Without this image-forming body, we would never have a coherent human life. We change and exchange our substances, and the image-forming body carries the new substances in the same way, metamorphosing them into future life. This formative body is a strictly scientific result, just like the physical organism. This formative body now stands in the same relationship to the life of imagination from the spirit as the nerve body stands from the body. Just as the nerve-sense life is the physical counterpart of the life of imagination, so the spiritual counterpart is the formative body. Just as the nervous system is a marvel of construction, so too is that which can be recognized as the formative body a marvel of construction in the spirit, whose task lies not in the individual moments of human experience, but in the passage of time between birth or conception and death.

[ 37 ] This does not yet bring us to what goes beyond birth and death, for there the knowledge, the inner enlivening of consciousness, must rise to another level of knowledge. Do not be offended by the expression — it was carefully chosen many years ago, and today you will understand why I have renewed it — we rise to “inspired knowledge.” One ascends to it by further developing, as it were, that which leads to imaginative knowledge. It is necessary to bring something completely different into one's already liberated thinking and imagination. One must acquire something completely new. I have already spoken about this in the previous issue of “Reich.”

[ 38 ] I can only make this clear by means of a comparison. In ordinary life, we think logically. We are satisfied with that. However, in order to become a spiritual researcher, one must not only learn to think about other things, but also to think differently. People find this extremely difficult, because today we think abstractly. People think they already have something with narrow concepts when they realize: this mental image is correct. A mental image can be very correct, but it depends on the reality value of the mental image. Today, people have a certain lust for only looking at the logical, scientific correctness of mental images, but that does not exhaust the reality value of the mental image. You only arrive at it when you know that our mental images, as we have them, are initially only instruments for reality, not something we must hold on to absolutely. I would like to use a trivial example, just to illustrate. It is certainly a very nice mental image to say that a good night's sleep is very healthy. One can fall very much in love with this mental image. Healthy sleep is very healthy. Someone who cherishes this mental image comes to visit someone else. He is introduced to a lady, about whom he is told: oh, this lady is lacking this or that. She herself complains. He sticks to the mental image he knows to be right, which he is fanatically committed to, and says: “Oh, madam, you just need to get plenty of sleep, because healthy sleep is good for your condition.” Then he shows her to the door. Yes, what do you say to that, she sleeps all day long! Or someone may be fanatical about the mental image that walking is very healthy. Such a person advises someone who describes all kinds of conditions to him: “Yes, you must get some exercise.” But the other person replies: “Yes, you forget that I am a mail carrier.”

[ 39 ] Our mental images are not there for us to recognize them dogmatically as absolutely correct in a limited way. They are instruments that guide us through reality. This must be developed as an inner attitude if one wants to ascend to further stages of spiritual research. It seems to everyone to be a very nice thing when two people agree in their mental images. But Franz I once said: “I don't know what he actually has against me. We are in complete agreement in our desires and mental images.” Both of them wanted to conquer Milan. This is also expressed in radical terms. And when it occurs in a more subtle form, one simply does not notice it, but holds fast to the belief that when two people think alike, this must be proof that their thoughts can also become reality. In short, this is something significant that needs to be thoroughly researched if one wants to become a spiritual researcher. I have characterized it trivially; it could also be characterized in a scholarly way. But one must come to the point of beginning to think in a certain way for one's mental images and thinking, which I can clarify with the following comparison.

[ 40 ] When we are in the outer world, we are not satisfied if we only play logically back and forth with our actions and impulses. We perform actions because our duty imposes them on us; we refrain from others or direct them in a different direction. Logic would be of no use in the sensory world; there we have to reckon with reality. There we have to allow or deny ourselves an action based on the context of a whole. This must also be transferred to the life of thought if one wants to progress beyond imaginative consciousness. One must come to not only consider certain thoughts to be right and others to be wrong, but also be able to experience a thought as permissible and another as unacceptable in relation to certain realities.

[ 41 ] An inner moralization, an over-moralization of the life of thought and imagination must occur. When this occurs, one gains the possibility of inspired knowledge, that knowledge which is also capable of transmitting the second spiritual member of the human being, which now stands to the life of feeling as the life of breathing stands to the life of feeling in the physical body. And because this parallelism exists, I have called that which corresponds to the life of feeling from the spirit its counterpart there, which is given through inspired knowledge, which shows us that we have a second member in the spirit, just as we have the respiratory life in relation to the physical brain and nerve life, and just as the respiratory life connects us with the environment the air that I have within me is /gap] outside and inside. From the respiratory system, the threads lead everywhere into the environment. That is how I belong to the world. In the same way, I belong to the spiritual world in the part of the spirit organism that is recognized through inspired knowledge, namely in the part that we carry within us, that we have lived through between the last death and the moment when we sank the spiritual into the physical, which we have inherited from our ancestors. The second link in the spiritual organism leads us into the world we live through between death and a new birth.

[ 42 ] We can attain a third level of knowledge if we develop this knowledge further. And I have already hinted at an important event through which knowledge can be structured even more freely and highly. This is when we feel the fateful nature of knowledge itself, when we are so involved in knowledge that we feel the attainment of knowledge as a destiny, when we understand how to say to ourselves: You have been affected by difficult and joyful things, and you do not become dull; you feel like one [gap]. But in contrast to everything that can approach me externally, I have recognized one thing: the awareness that I can grasp the spirit inwardly through imagined, inspired knowledge. For me, this has become as much a case of destiny as any other. Here I have experienced destiny. If one experiences fate in this way and experiences other processes of knowledge with the same inwardness, then one moves on to what can be called intuitive knowledge, where it is really the case that we consciously immerse ourselves in the object of knowledge itself. And when this insight is gained, when we have, so to speak, been inwardly present at destiny itself, then we realize that a third link in the human spirit organism comes into play in our lives, which stands to the life of the will as the metabolic organism stands to the life of the will from the physical side; for then we realize that what comes to us externally as a stroke of destiny has an effect from previous earthly lives, and what we now perceive as a stroke of fate will have an effect in later earthly lives. We learn to recognize what influences our will life. But these things can be shown very well through periods in their parallelism to physical life and soul life.

[ 43 ] We live, but we do not observe life in its intimate details. We are fifteen years old; something lives within us that we do not even know, but which we follow. It lives within us more subtly than an instinct. We do this or that, believing we are doing it because this or that compels us to do so; but in everything there lives something that gives us direction from our own being. If you have a talent for self-observation, you will realize: you have something within you that is a longing, an urge—you have to perceive it as something subtle—to move you in that direction. You would notice that you are on a journey; you did not notice that there was an urge for something undefined; but the journey ends with you making an acquaintance. This acquaintance meets something undefined within us. A spiritual process takes place that has its physical counterpart. Forgive me, but precisely because because the spiritual scientist stands in the real world, some things may appear very materialistic in comparison. One has an urge that drives like thirst and hunger — satiation helps — one has an urge, what is it? It is the soul member that corresponds to what hunger is in the metabolic organism. From previous earthly lives, that which drives us overflows, and satisfaction is achieved through an event. There you have the third member, which belongs to our destiny [gap] like metabolism in the body belongs to the life of the will, even if it is in the ordinary position of hunger and thirst. Just as it underlies what we do directly from our physical life and experience spiritually as will, so fate within us — which resonates from previous earthly lives for intuitive knowledge — creates that spiritual hunger and thirst that lives in fate only unnoticed by coarse observation.

[ 44 ] You can see how, by proceeding step by step, Spiritual Science is just as methodical as the external natural sciences; only today it is still unfamiliar to people. But there is much that is unfamiliar to people today. It was also unfamiliar to Copernicus' contemporaries to believe that the sun stood still and the earth revolved around it. People have become accustomed to this and will also become accustomed to Spiritual Science. I know that it can still be refuted today. Tycho Brahe also refuted Copernicanism, but it was more useful that Kepler expanded on Copernicanism. I know that what I can say today is very imperfect, and I know that all kinds of objections can be raised, but I think it is more useful if others come along who will modify the matter in such a way that it becomes more sustainable. The further development of science seems more useful to me. Those who think this way are perhaps correctly positioned within the intellectual life of humanity, for they appreciate both the validity of criticism and that of expansion. But then, when one learns to research correctly, one will realize that everything we carry within us as a body is the absolutely indispensable tool between birth and death, that it is a complication to seek all kinds of mysticism for life between birth and death, but that we ascend to spiritual life and find the threefold spirit, the spirit to be imagined, the spirit to be recognized through inspiration, and thus penetrate into the eternal, into the eternal that passes through birth and death, into the immortality of the human being, which cannot be found through speculation, but by seeking out that which thinks as spirit within us. But then one also discovers that we are related to a spiritual world, just as we are related to the physical world through the physical organism, and that what we surrender to the physical elements as our physical body is only subject to physical laws when the threefold spirit is outside here. Then we feel that we can say: our body holds together as long as it is held together by the spirit. With death, the body is surrendered to the earthly elements and the spirit goes its way into the spiritual world. In connection with these mysteries, the mysteries of the world also gain ground.

[ 45 ] Today, we think about the beginning and end of the Earth's development, what may have existed twenty million years ago. We find an Earth development into which, I don't know from where, the development of humanity has entered as an episode. Then we calculate what the Earth will be like after billions of years; the mental image we form, the calculation, should not be challenged. There is nothing more correct than, for example, when Professor [Dewar] introduced a lecture in London in which he asked: What will the Earth look like in billions of years, when it will have cooled down to [200] degrees Celsius below zero? Well, he gives a very beautiful — whether it is prophetic, I leave to your taste — a very beautiful picture of what the Earth will be like. The air that surrounds us has become liquid, a kind of ocean. The water we know today has become solid. Everything has changed. In front of his faithful audience, [Dewar] describes, in very beautiful or perhaps not so beautiful terms, how milk from cows will be solid, how it will be luminescent, how walls can be painted with egg white, which will be so bright that you will be able to read newspapers — absolutely correctly calculated, strictly scientific results. The rigor of this result, which one obtains when one calculates back the current state of the earth, what creatures existed twenty million years ago, can be calculated, [there] is nothing refutable, nothing at all.

[ 46 ] But anyone who is steeped in the methods of Spiritual Science knows that the calculation is correct, strictly exact, but they also know something else: that this result is obtained using the same method as if I were to observe a human stomach and could observe how the liver changes in eight days, how it changes in fourteen days, in three years, in eight years. And from this I calculated what the liver and lungs would be like after two hundred years. The calculation will be completely correct, absolutely correct; but this human body will probably no longer be alive after two hundred years; it will die before then. For the body, it seems very plausible to you; for the earth, the opposite seems plausible, namely that such a calculation can be made. One could also ask: how do the organs of a seven-year-old child change? One calculates backwards and gets the preliminary result forty years ago. In the same way, one can also calculate what the earth will be like in twenty million years and what it was like twenty million years ago, but twenty million years ago it was just as little there as earth as the child was forty years ago, and after twenty billion years the earth will be just as little there as earth; and the professor's description is accurate, only the earth dies earlier. About these things, which elude scientific observation, and it finds that life on Earth, as it is now, exhibits certain natural laws, but they are—here, Spiritual Science must go beyond Kantianism. Kant stopped at a halfway point. The laws of nature apply only from the beginning of the Earth to its end, and if we calculate beyond that, then our laws do not apply. For just as the human body, which is born out of physical preconditions, connects with a spiritual element, so it is with the Earth, which was spiritually backward from a certain point in time. It came into the world of the solar system from spiritual preconditions. What we call natural laws are merely linked to the conditions of the Earth's coexistence with the sun; and just as the spiritual organism of the human being enters the spiritual realm when we leave the body, so too does the Earth withdraw from the solar organism, except that the human being surrenders his body to the earthly realm, and the Earth surrenders its spiritual realm to the spiritual life, to which the human souls then belong. It is possible to advance to these mental images. The mysteries of the world arise when one correctly considers the mysteries of the soul in a broader context.

[ 47 ] I am firmly convinced that, with what I have just indicated, one still stands alone today, for the most part. But even if one still stands alone today, Copernicus also stood alone, and those who had objections to Copernicus continued to raise them in part until the year [1822]. The objections to Spiritual Science are of the same category. It certainly enters human culture today in an imperfect form, but I am firmly convinced that what is sought as Spiritual Science is based precisely on the right German spiritual life. I do not mean to put forward anything chauvinistic, and I do not consider it a coincidence that, long before this war, a somewhat deeper spirit believed that even physics had to respond to the whole significance of the inner nerve of German spiritual life. Eduard von Hartmann once said, with regard to physics, what seems important to me:

It is to be hoped that the errors will soon be recognized as such and that the German spirit of Anglomania will turn its back on them.

[ 48 ] Eduard von Hartmann died a decade before the war. I was delighted to find these words in his work, because the first essay I wrote as a young student dealt with the harmful influence of English materialism on German intellectual life and had the task of calling for a revival of German intellectual life. There are already minds in German development that were imbued with such impulses. How wonderful Novalis's prophetic words sound to us:

We will only become physicists when we make imaginative substances and forces the measure of natural substances and forces.

[ 49 ] Spiritual Science, as it is meant here, can only be found today. We are at its beginning; but the longing for it has always been there, especially in German intellectual life. We must build on that. That is why, even in German intellectual life, where those concerned are not researchers, we see a rebellion against what Dewar calculates to be the beginning and end of the Earth's development, presents the Kant-Laplace theory as something well-founded. Herman Grimm made a beautiful statement based on his feelings. Out of his spiritual sensibility, he turned against Goethe's interpretation, as if he had wanted to create a mental image of the beginning and end of the earth, with beautiful words that will be forgiven today and justified by future science.

And long ago [...] the great Laplace-Kant fantasy of the origin and eventual demise of the globe had taken hold. From the rotating nebula—children already learn this in school—the central gas drop forms, which then becomes the Earth, and, as a solidifying sphere, goes through all phases, including the episode of habitation by the human race, in inconceivable periods of time, to finally fall back into the sun as burnt-out slag: a long, but one that is completely comprehensible to today's audience, for the realization of which no external intervention is now required other than the effort of some outside force to maintain the sun at the same heating temperature.

No more fruitless perspective for the future can be imagined than the one that is being imposed on us today as scientifically necessary. A carcass that a hungry dog would detour around would be a refreshing, appetizing morsel in comparison to this last excrement of creation, as which our earth would ultimately fall back to the sun, and it is the thirst for knowledge with which our generation accepts such things and believes them to be true, a sign of a sick imagination, which scholars of future epochs will once again apply much acumen to explain as a historical phenomenon of the times.

[ 50 ] What Herman Grimm suspects will be proven true by Spiritual Science. It will reveal how what is recognized as exact research is nothing more than the product of a sick imagination. Spiritual Science, as it is meant here, is deeply rooted in German intellectual life.

[ 51 ] And finally, let me just give you a small sample of how the Spiritual Science is predisposed in German intellectual life. You see, one of those who rendered outstanding services, as it was possible at that time to deepen thinking so that the etheric, imaginative human spirit could be recognized, is the son of the great Fichte, Immanuel Hermann Fichte. He represents what we call anthroposophy, for he says:

Sensory consciousness, on the other hand, and the world of phenomena arising from its starting point, with the entire sensory life, including that of human beings, have no other meaning than to be the place where the supersensible life of the spirit takes place, introducing the otherworldly spiritual content of ideas into the sensory world through freely conscious action. [...] This thorough understanding of the human being now elevates “anthropology” to “anthroposophy” in its final result.

[ 52 ] Thus, in the 1940s, the German spirit sought anthroposophy.

[ 53 ] And Troxler likewise speaks of the supersensible body or schema

a fine, noble soul body distinct from the coarser body [...] a soul that had an image of the body itself, which they called the schema, and which was their inner, higher human being.

[ 54 ] — according to Troxler in 1827 in his writings on the mysteries of the soul and the mysteries of humanity.

[ 55 ] One is certainly in tune with the most beautiful impulses of German intellectual life when one attempts to revive this more or less forgotten tone of deeper intellectual life, but in such a way that it must actually become something completely new: from speculation to direct experience. One need not shy away from all that objections that are raised against Spiritual Science today. Objections, even those made by well-meaning people, arise from a lack of understanding, as when, a few years ago, a man who believed himself to be a serious critic thought he could strike a blow against my Spiritual Science by saying that he would provide me with a number of people whose characters I should investigate in a spiritual scientific manner. The events he demanded would rule out the methods that spiritual researchers must use. Things are judged in a very peculiar way. It is said in particular that the results of Spiritual Science are assured to be experiences. In doing so, it is maliciously concealed that it is not merely experience that is required, not merely thinking that is required of the spiritual researcher, which is sufficient for ordinary research, but that higher thinking is required. When someone speaks of hypotheses, one must reply: As a healthy person, one can [gap]. But it is not a reduction of healthy reason that is required, but an elevation of it. Thus, everywhere, what is attacked as Spiritual Science is not attacked in the way that this or that is attacked today, but Spiritual Science is often attacked in such a way that, because one cannot engage with the attacks, some people, instead of entering into real Spiritual Science, substitute what they think it is; and that is a characteristic feature that personal denigrations, doubts about the love of truth, and so on are substituted for objective struggle. Denigrations are easier to circulate than serious engagement with the research results of Spiritual Science. But do not think that by this I mean a struggle with what is unpleasant to me; on the contrary, the more refutations appear, but in the style of other refutations, the better; the more such judgments remain within the limits that decent people observe, say in the field of literature, the better.

[ 56 ] And I would like to emphasize something in conclusion. I was greatly amused when I once came across the Simplicissimus, which mentioned “Doctor [Schwätzer]” or something similar. One could point the finger at what I do as a Spiritual Science scholar, but it was written with real humor. I love these stories, just as I don't leave other things unread, provided that, even if they are mockery and scorn, they remain within the limits that are justified in literary communication — the more I understand how to respond to them, the more one should be able to respond to them, truly, whether it is someone else or me, if one can laugh. I like to laugh along, and I don't think there is anything in such things that one needs to reject. As I said, I found the matter very entertaining; but in contrast to many other things, and especially in contrast to the general attitude toward Spiritual Science, it should also be mentioned that, especially in these difficult times, it seems important to me that there could be an understanding that precisely from the deepest reasons of Central European spiritual life, feeling and sense for Spiritual Science must arise. Much of what the future will have to accomplish will perhaps take shape in the direction of a revival, through Spiritual Science, of a faded tone of German spiritual life. For this will lie precisely in the correct, full development of the meaning of Goethe's view of nature, which points elementarily to Spiritual Science, to what is inherent in it. Therefore, let me conclude with a modification of a quote from Goethe, suggesting the attitude of Spiritual Science. “Contemplation of Schiller's Skull.” Goethe saw in the shape of the skull the plastic imprint of the spirit, and in this contemplation he coined the words:

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

[ 57 ] Spiritual Science seeks the workings and weavings of the spirit in the material world; but it also seeks the spirit in its independence, in its eternity and immortality, as the human soul, the spirit in becoming, the spirit as the solver of the riddles of the soul and the world; Spiritual Science seeks to permeate the human being with the conviction and to make the word scientific truth:

What more can man gain in life
Than that spirit-nature reveal itself to him,
How it lets spirit melt into matter,
How spirit preserves itself in matter!