The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Immortality of the Soul, Forces of Destiny, and the Human Life Course. Findings of Spiritual Science and their Consideration in Relation to our Fateful Times

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Anyone who wishes to speak about the mysteries of human life in the present day, which will be the subject of this evening's discussion, must be aware that they are essentially speaking against countless prejudices, not only of the wider public consciousness, but also of contemporary science. Although I would like to emphasize from the outset that what is to be presented this evening is intended to be entirely in the spirit of true, genuine science, concerning the mysteries of the immortality of the soul and human destiny in their connection with the human life course. The best way to gauge the vagueness of opinions when discussing such views is to consider that Eduard von Hartmann, the well-known philosopher of the unconscious, in a comprehensive work on modern psychology, the psychology of the second half of the twentieth century, expressly mentions that, since the last third of the nineteenth century, questions about the immortality of the soul and human freedom have disappeared from considerations of the life of the soul.

[ 2 ] In a characteristic way, Franz Brentano, who I believe to be one of the greatest psychologists of modern times and who recently died in Zurich at an advanced age, expressed this view when, in 1874, he wrote the first volume of his Psychology or Soul Science with complete clarity from the perspective of the consciousness of his time and in line with the overall direction and current of science at that time. that modern psychology, insofar as it claims to be scientific, is now concerned almost exclusively with observing how individual mental images are linked together in human consciousness, how feelings are combined with mental images, how pleasure and displeasure balance each other out, how impulses of the will assert themselves in the soul, how attention permeates the life of the soul, and so on. These are all questions that must certainly be of great interest within the narrower framework of scientific inquiry, but which cannot satisfy the great longings that must be asserted in humanity at large about spiritual life. And that is why Brentano says in his book: "No matter how much modern psychology shows how attention works, how feelings fluctuate, this can in no way compensate for the loss of Plato's great hopes Aristotle's great hopes for the survival of the better part of our self when our mortal body is dissolved into the elements of the earth. And if modern science were unable to achieve this, the loss would be even greater."

[ 3 ] Now something very remarkable has happened, which I believe is not only of personal importance, but also of fundamental importance for our time. I said: In 1874, the first volume of Brentano's Seelenkunde (Psychology) was published; it was in the spring of that year. In the preface, he promised the second volume for the fall, and two or three more were to follow; the entire work was planned to comprise four to five volumes. To date, nothing has been published except the first, introductory volume in January 1874; nothing more has followed.

[ 4 ] I believe, to the following conclusion. With every fever of his scientific life, Brentano strove to lead psychology to where it can find answers to the questions to be raised here today. Brentano wanted to find these answers in the spirit of modern science. He was unable to do so. I have endeavored to study all of Franz Brentano's published writings in detail. I am very familiar with his life's work, and I have come to the conclusion that he repeatedly attempted to lead psychology to these two riddles, but that he was always unable to cross a certain boundary, and that, as a truly honest man, he therefore never continued or completed his work. And when Brentano's estate, which is said to be very large, is published, it will show that my view is entirely justified.

[ 5 ] If I now want to state the reason, I will actually have to do so with all my remarks today. I will have to show that there is a possibility of truly knowing the human soul life, but that in order to do so, one will have to penetrate into what what is to be characterized this evening, and what I have been able to discuss here almost every winter as anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science. But Brentano, out of a certain scientific prejudice, did not want to, and could not, follow this path. Therefore, he had to come to a standstill at his limit.

[ 6 ] Those of you in the esteemed audience who have heard my lectures over the years when I was also allowed to speak in Leipzig will remember that I have avoided as much as possible, in the course of these lectures, to stray from objective observation and to touch on personal matters. Today, however, I would like to make a few remarks that may appear personal, because I believe that they are objectively related to the subject matter.

[ 7 ] It is now, my dear audience, 35 to 36 years since I first attempted to sow the seeds of what forms the basis of these lectures and also of today's reflections. At that time, when I wrote down my first thoughts on this worldview, I came across a treatise by the great and important aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer — known as “V-Vischer” — which dealt with the extraordinarily interesting work of the now Leipzig philosopher Volkelt. In this treatise by Vischer there is a remarkable sentence that I had to pause at, that I had to engage with, I would say, with all my striving. I had already begun, basically, and that is why I had to pause at this particular sentence. I will quote the sentence for you. It is a remarkable sentence that Vischer wrote: “The unity of spiritual life certainly cannot be located in the body, although it cannot actually occur anywhere else but in the body.”

[ 8 ] Well, ladies and gentlemen, what does that actually mean? It is a completely paradoxical sentence. Someone says: That which is the unified soul cannot be in the body, but it cannot be outside the human body either. A complete contradiction! And yet, what a contradiction, a contradiction to which a certain human thinking must come not through arbitrariness, but through unconditional inner necessity. And one could not merely list such a contradiction, but, if there were time, one could name hundreds of such contradictions to which ordinary thinking and also ordinary scientific thinking must come. When ordinary thinking or ordinary scientific thinking comes to such a contradiction, what does it do? Well, it stops at the boundary of human cognitive ability. They say: Man has a certain capacity for knowledge, which leads him to boundaries that he cannot transcend.

[ 9 ] You see, even then I had to say — as I said, from the first seeds that came to me for what I call here Spiritual Science or anthroposophy — I had to say to myself: A different approach than the usual one to these so-called borderline questions is what matters if one wants to establish a true Spiritual Science of the soul and spirit. And at that time I wrote the thoughts I had in connection with this sentence of Vischer's to Vischer, who replied in an extremely accommodating manner that, in fact, precisely in the way I also connected the concept of time in the essay I had sent him, a path opens up to the knowledge of spiritual life. I believe that people like Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who were still rooted in the traditions of the first half of the nineteenth century, could indeed have found a connection to Spiritual Science from their science and philosophy, which today, it seems, so difficult to find in other sciences, which means that one actually only encounters opposition and adversity from other sciences and ordinary consciousness with Spiritual Science. But Vischer died very soon after that, and it remained at this one-time exchange of letters. And so, with his help, that which underlies the lectures of past years and today's reflections has come about.

[ 10 ] The first thing that matters is to realize that our present age, according to its habits of thinking, according to what it necessarily must want, needs a scientifically ordered, scientifically intended answer to our question, which has been asked over the course of centuries and millennia. And here I would like to emphasize what I have said many times before: the Spiritual Science referred to here is in no way opposed to what scientific thinking is in our time; on the contrary. It is precisely this Spiritual Science that has every reason to fully recognize the great significance and achievements of the scientific worldview; and everywhere its endeavor must be to to take strict and disciplined thinking as their model. And so it will also be useful, in order to illustrate what is desired today, to show how Spiritual Science has to accomplish something similar in a different direction to what natural science has accomplished in one direction with regard to the life of the soul.

[ 11 ] This human soul life is, after all, ourselves. We experience it by experiencing ourselves. Our thinking, our mental images, our feeling, our willing, they ebb and flow, and what ebbs and flows between birth and death is what we call our soul life, what we can basically call “ourselves” insofar as we live in a physical body.

[ 12 ] What does natural science do? It sets itself the task of investigating what relationship, what connections exist between what surges up and down as a mental image, feeling, and will in our soul life, and what constitutes the human physical organization. And just as natural science has achieved tremendous successes in other fields, so too in this field, although this winter in particular has revealed to me a certain one-sidedness among scientific thinkers in this field as well. But natural science has attempted to show what actually goes on in the human organism, in the physical organism, namely in the nervous system, what happens there while mental images, feelings, and desires ebb and flow. And that is the real task of natural science. If we can say that natural science has already achieved great things today, then these achievements are something that guarantees that, perhaps in the near future, great and powerful things will be achieved, particularly with regard to the study of the human soul and the physical organism.

[ 13 ] So we can say since it is obvious that natural science has set itself the task of determining the relationship between the human soul life and that which is transitory in human beings, that which, when they pass through the gate of death, is surrendered to the elements of the earth. The other path, the opposite path, one could say, if it is not misunderstood, is now to be taken by Spiritual Science. It, too, has to relate this human soul life, but now not to physical life, but to spiritual life. And the first question is: Is it possible, just as rigorously as natural science finds the relationships between the life of the soul and what is transitory in human beings, to establish relationships between what is experienced as the life of the soul and what is spiritual, and what we will see is the immortal part of the human being?

[ 14 ] But when we raise this question not in a general way — as dilettantes do — but in the way we are accustomed to raising questions in modern science, we immediately encounter strange prejudices. And I could now cite a large number of modern soul researchers who demonstrate how these prejudices prevail, prejudices that are downright capable of blocking the path that leads from the soul to the imperishable just as well as it leads to the perishable. I would like to cite just one example, because it is characteristic.

[ 15 ] Even though many people today are not followers of Eduard von Hartmann, and I am not either, one must nevertheless admit that Eduard von Hartmann was a profound philosopher who made comprehensive observations about life and science in a wide variety of directions; and so what he wrote in his short treatise on psychology can be cited as representative, so to speak, and can only be understood as the assertion of the impossibility of somehow arriving at observations of spiritual life. Eduard von Hartmann summarizes what many people say today in characteristic sentences. He says things that cannot be contradicted—which is very important — things that should actually be completely obvious to everyone. For example: when tender feelings arise in the soul, if one wants to observe them, which is what should happen in natural science, they are driven out of the soul in that moment. Just look at your feelings and try to observe them; they are not there; observation drives them away. Furthermore: Every person who knows what historians can achieve [gap] physical pain is basically also a mental experience; physical pain becomes spiritual when a person thinks about it, wants to observe it. So observation distorts what it wants to observe.

[ 16 ] He gives a very nice example that is characteristic and that everyone is familiar with: Imagine that someone wants to recite a text that they know well from memory, and while reciting, they observe themselves. Everyone knows that if they recite a poem and try to observe themselves at the same time, they will inevitably get stuck. In other words, if you want to observe something that the soul lets flow, the observation drives away what you want to observe; you cannot observe it. What conclusion does the modern soul researcher draw from this obvious impossibility of observing the soul phenomenon as he wants to? He concludes: So you cannot observe the soul phenomena.

[ 17 ] Now, let us imagine that natural scientists would say the same thing. Yes, our mental images, our feelings, and our wills take place within us; they cannot be observed. Therefore, one cannot observe their relationship to the physical, to the transitory. But natural scientists do not say this. Rather, they are aware that there are no obstacles to determining the relationship between the soul and the body, even though they cannot be observed in the way Eduard von Hartmann discusses. So the objection probably does not apply to actual spiritual research, to the determination of the relationship between soul experience and that which reigns in human beings as spirit, just as the physical reigns in them. And one can only come to terms with such things if one really understands them. If one can really take the standpoint that asks: What is the scope of such thoughts? Then the prejudice that has prevented modern soul research from even approaching the essence of the human soul cannot prevent us from seeking real spiritual research. But when we approach questions such as those concerning the immortality of the soul and human destiny, it is important above all to know how to ask such questions correctly. Such questions are not always asked correctly. And if one is not able to ask the questions correctly, then one deprives oneself of the possibility of finding answers from the outset. In my last book, The Riddle of Man, I attempted in a brief outline in the last chapter to characterize in the most delicate way possible the very question that must arise here.

[ 18 ] Wouldn't it be something if we could prove that when a person passes through the gate of death, something of their soul life remains, something that is not subject to dissolution into the elements of the earth? Certainly, the proof could be provided; some have apparently attempted to do so. but it does not really help those who are concerned with such questions in relation to the human soul life itself; it really does not help them at all. The question cannot be: Does anything remain of the human soul after death? Rather, the question must be, above all: Does consciousness, complete consciousness, remain inherent in the human soul after death? For if, as Eduard von Hartmann believes, the human soul is based on something unconscious, and this remains after death, then, although such an objection may seem petty, it would be right to ask: Yes, what does the human soul gain from continuing to exist unconsciously for so long after death? The question is whether it can be found that the human soul consciously survives death and belongs to a spiritual world with consciousness, even when the physical body no longer exists.

[ 19 ] To answer this question, I have tried to show that human beings, with the consciousness that is the consciousness of everyday life, which is also the consciousness of ordinary science, cannot answer this question for the simple reason that the ordinary scientific view teaches that this consciousness is bound to the physical body. And since this consciousness is bound to the physical body, it must destroy itself. If, therefore, no other consciousness can be found, then it would not be possible to approach the question of immortality scientifically. That is why I showed that within ordinary consciousness and ordinary scientific consciousness there is another consciousness, which I tried to call “contemplative consciousness,” based on a concept that Goethe had formulated when he spoke of “contemplative judgment.” And I first attempted to clarify what this means by means of a comparison. It should be understood that this comparison does not prove anything, but only serves to clarify what I mean by this term.

[ 20 ] Let us compare what we have as ordinary daytime consciousness, which serves our science, with another consciousness, which should in no way be considered scientific, just for comparison, with dream consciousness. In dream consciousness, images ebb and flow; during the dream, we consider these images to be reality. When we wake up, we awaken to what we call our ordinary daytime consciousness. This daytime consciousness differs from dream consciousness in that that in dream consciousness we are only concerned with ourselves, that we are completely absorbed in ourselves. What ebbs and flows there is merely an image of what is organically within us. [Heraclitus] said something beautiful: in dreams, in sleep, man is preoccupied with himself; the moment he wakes up, he shares the space with other people.

[ 21 ] We wake up [gap] and connect our will, our entire soul, with our surroundings. In doing so, however, we strike, as it were, what surges up and down as mere images in dreams and has only reality for us; we strike it across to external reality; we hook our will, as it were, with our whole soul into external reality. Thus we awaken from dream consciousness into waking daytime consciousness.

[ 22 ] And again, it is possible, although it is not admitted due to the prejudice of the times, that human beings awaken from waking consciousness to what I have just called, in reference to a quote from Goethe, “seeing consciousness,” which relates to daytime consciousness in the same way that daytime consciousness relates to dream consciousness. This is only meant to be a comparison for now. But it will then be the case that when human beings awaken from ordinary daytime consciousness into seeing consciousness, the reality, the actuality of what they perceive there will continue to grow. While we grow into the physical-sensory world when we wake up from dream consciousness, we wake up into the spiritual world by rising, awakening from ordinary daytime consciousness into seeing consciousness.

[ 23 ] Now I will have to show in detail what is meant by this seeing consciousness. The starting point here is definitely what is prudent human thinking. I must emphasize this again and again because it is precisely at this point that the greatest misunderstandings arise. The starting point must be fully prudent human thinking. But now it becomes clear to the spiritual researcher that he must start from the point I indicated earlier. One cannot become a spiritual researcher unless one has arrived, in one's inner, serious soul life, in one's experienced soul life, with every fiber of one's thirst for knowledge, at those points which I have indicated in a single case through what Friedrich Theodor Vischer expressed: The human soul cannot be in the body, but neither can it exist outside the body.

[ 24 ] Yes, where should it be then? One comes to numerous such points, one encounters, as it were, walls with the soul life of waking consciousness. And as I said, ordinary consciousness stops there, sets limits to knowledge. The spiritual researcher must behave differently at this point. At this point, the spiritual researcher gets a feeling — in a spiritual sense, that is; everything that comes to spiritual research is inner soul life — he feels at such a point roughly as when a person bumps into walls and surroundings with his sense of touch, without being able to see or hear. Gradually, the human being learns — as growing up in childhood testifies — to organize and shape this touching of the resistances of the environment; he learns to recognize objects in their forms by touching them. In a very similar way, thinking can be enlivened if one does not remain discouraged and, so to speak, inwardly cowardly at this important point, but feels and experiences what one can feel and experience: here you encounter spiritual obstacles like spiritual walls. It takes a variety of inner processes to get this feeling of mental collision right, the feeling of having a mental sense of touch that grows out of thinking.

[ 25 ] I have described what one has to do, which I can only briefly hint at here, in my books “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds,” in the second part of my “Occult Science,” and in the last chapter of my latest book, "The Riddle of Man ." There I try to show how living thinking arises from the thinking that people have in ordinary life; a kind of thinking that encounters these boundaries as a spiritual groping. And by feeling this spiritual groping, one has already attained what can be called the first stage of visionary consciousness.

[ 26 ] Now there are some fundamental things to say about how human beings should behave, how they can initially develop this contemplation in their thinking. Much must take place in human thinking in order to accomplish this contemplative thinking. Above all, we must realize that many habits of thinking that are natural to us in ordinary life, and which also belong in ordinary life, must now cease, but only during spiritual research. If someone is studying chemistry, they do not need to cease. But if someone wants to become a spiritual researcher, they must acquire habits of thinking that are primarily aimed at viewing a subject from as many sides as possible. In ordinary life, we tend to approach a subject and form a concept of it. In ordinary life, we do not know that a concept can only be a kind of path into life. Here, the spiritual researcher must exercise self-education. They must be able to form completely different concepts. Just as one photographs a tree from different angles, and the photos all show the same tree, despite their differences, but only by looking at the photos together does one get a mental image of the reality of the tree; Anyone who says that it is a different tree in one photograph than in the other is saying something foolish. It is easy to see the foolishness in this. The fact that it is the same with thinking, that when one looks at things from different sides, they only reveal themselves, must be the basis for the spiritual researcher. Therefore, the spiritual researcher must come to regard the mental image as an instrument for reality.

[ 27 ] Particularly under the influence of the present age, people are averse to turning to such mental images that lead to seeing consciousness. People today would prefer to swear by mental images. There are people who say they have discovered that exercise is good for certain illnesses. They now hold on to this idea as an absolute concept. Someone comes to them complaining about the very illness for which they believe exercise is good. Yes, they say, you must exercise. The sick person replies: Don't forget that I am a mail carrier. Such things can be experienced everywhere today, and countless examples of such dogmatic adherence to concepts and mental images can be found in science.

[ 28 ] In spiritual research, one must never cling to a concept. Mental images may only be held as tools for arriving at reality. Therefore, the spiritual researcher must be willing not only to think about things and processes in a way that, in a certain sense, explains the thing and the process as he believes it must be, but also to allow all objections to come to him; he must be willing to be critical of his own opinion in the most comprehensive way possible. He must strive for versatility of thought in such a way that he has an inner experience of how much what can be said for a thing and how much what can be said against a thing are worth in relation to each other. And so, starting from such subtle and intimate premises, he must arrive at a revitalization of thought.

[ 29 ] A good start was made when Goethe attempted to capture animal and plant forms in his theory of metamorphosis using living concepts, because concepts do indeed come to life when they are used in this way. Take, for example, the fact that science usually attempts to precisely define a monkey or a human being through concepts. The theory of evolution seeks to establish the relationship between monkeys and humans. We cannot arrive at the concept of the human being from the concepts that our sensory perception of monkeys gives us. Only when we can grasp something living in the monkey does the concept come alive, transforming itself, as in Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. Then the concept comes alive. Then thinking becomes something it was not before; it becomes a spiritual act.

[ 30 ] Let me briefly mention that for the spiritual researcher — and here I want to use the usual terms again, because it is a matter of objectivity — for those for whom the path of spiritual research is natural, it is also quite natural that when they have to express an opinion on any matter, they have to present the results, they feel compelled to always state the objections as well. This has led to a curious result in recent times. Those who are familiar with my books and lectures, even in smaller circles, know that I always strive, in keeping with what I have just said, not only to state what I have established, but also, in order to present the matter in its entirety, to record and express the opposing opinion in detail, whenever the opportunity arises. Now that a vicious battle is being waged against Spiritual Science, it is becoming apparent that this is very convenient for its opponents. All one has to do is copy what is found in my books and lectures, along with the objections that I myself always raise for the reasons mentioned, and one can find the most beautiful refutations of Spiritual Science. This is done very frequently today, sometimes in the most vicious way, by simply omitting what needs to be said about the issues.

[ 31 ] What this is all about is moving from ordinary thinking to living thinking. Then you also come to recognize the nature of ordinary thinking; to recognize what ordinary thinking is. This ordinary thinking has basically come about because the body organization turning what is always present in us, what is living thinking, into something like a discarded, even killed inner product. Ordinary mental images are not, for human waking consciousness, what actually prevails in human beings, but more or less a paralyzed product of what prevails there, And we only go back from a numb, dead thinking to the living thinking, which I have taken the liberty of calling imaginative thinking in my writings, imaginative cognition, because it does not, so to speak, work in abstract contours like ordinary thinking, but works in such a way that everything proceeds in images in this contemplative thinking.

[ 32 ] And now let me characterize what I have described as the first stage of contemplative consciousness from the negative side.

[ 33 ] Today, many people are familiar with altered states of consciousness, such as hallucinations and illusions; but in recent times, scientific study has focused in particular on what what is produced by suggestion. If one is to say how what I mean here relates to all these abnormal states of mind, one must say: it is the very opposite of what has been characterized here as Spiritual Science. Whereas suggestion consists precisely in a personal influence is exerted by one person on another, so that the other person's critical faculties are clouded, opposing mental images are erased, and their consciousness is narrowed. And so it is with other states; in all these cases, consciousness is narrowed, and a lower degree of consciousness is reached than in ordinary sensory perception. The opposite opposite occurs in the case referred to here. Consciousness is not narrowed, critical faculties are not dampened, but rather all personal influence is excluded.

[ 34 ] Secondly, those who are concerned with ascending to spiritual vision are advised, as indicated in the aforementioned writings, that they should not restrict their critical faculties or narrow their consciousness, but rather expand them; that they should feel absorbed by all the objections that can be made [in] themselves, so that their consciousness is driven into the vastness. And it takes a great deal of malice to repeatedly confuse the methodological basis of Spiritual Science with its opposite. For everything that Spiritual Science strives for as a method is precisely suited to strictly exclude all those things that lead to an abnormal state of consciousness. For this consciousness only leads to mystical ravings and fantasies, but never to an entry into the spiritual world.

[ 35 ] I would just like to mention that anyone who now attempts to enter the spiritual world in this way through contemplative consciousness must be clear that their ordinary daytime consciousness is in order, that contemplative consciousness can truly be built upon it.

[ 36 ] Just think that one can only develop a proper everyday consciousness if one has slept well, if one is not disturbed by dreams during sleep, such as those who experience pathological conditions in their sleep. Similarly, those who tend toward fantasy, mystical enthusiasm, and confusion in their everyday consciousness confusion in their daytime consciousness cannot develop a proper, clear consciousness. Anyone who wants to advance in spiritual research must realize that they must start from an orderly, ordinary consciousness; that they must stand in ordinary consciousness as a level-headed, clear-minded person who is not prone to any confusion, or else they must exercise strict self-discipline so that the confusion ceases. People who believe that they can enter some spiritual world through semi-conscious states do not enter the spiritual world, but rather leave the physical world and descend into their own physicality. And even where mysticism is already loved, so-called mystical states are very often confused with the state of true spiritual vision. These states are nothing more than a more refined experience of one's own bodily states; only one is not aware of this.

[ 37 ] Where does one arrive at first when one applies the seeing consciousness in the right way? One arrives at experiencing what someone experiences who awakens from a completely naive consciousness to an expanded consciousness. There may be people who say: Here is a table and a chair, but not here." Then people learn that there is air. Just as one can learn that there is air, so one learns through spiritual research, as thinking advances from a dead state to a living state, to a real spiritual feeling, that there is spirit around us, that spirit underlies everything physical and sensory. And the first thing one experiences there is what I called in the penultimate issue of the magazine “Das Reich” the image forces in our environment, which can also be described as the essence of the etheric world around us. This etheric world must then be understood as the lowest supersensible world.

[ 38 ] This touches on a point, my dear friends, where we can actually show how Spiritual Science, as we understand it here, and natural science actually work against each other from two sides. This is already the case today. As you know, tunnels are often dug by drilling into a mountain from two sides. If everything is properly organized, the drillers meet in the middle. This is how natural science and Spiritual Science work their way into living reality; if they are correctly oriented, they will meet. However, what is often presented today as a scientific worldview — which is now called a modern monistic worldview — is largely based on dilettantism. Anyone familiar with scientific developments knows how close scientific research and Spiritual Science already are to each other on certain points. This can be demonstrated in particular by the concept of ether. There is already a physicist today, Planck, who has expressed a very beautiful idea, a result of his physical research. Please note that that it is a physicist who says the following: “According to the latest research on the [gap], one must not attribute material properties to the ether.”

[ 39 ] Consider that a physicist today is characterizing the ether as a supersensible entity; characterizing the ether in such a way that one must not attribute material properties to it. These supersensible etheric beings or formative forces are what we are dealing with first. That is what we discover first. Today I want to characterize it in relation to its application to human beings. In humans, we are dealing with the physical body that we receive at birth and that we surrender to the elements of the earth at death. But as we ascend to contemplative consciousness, we become aware of the etheric world and our place within this supersensible world, just as we become aware of the air, which is initially incomprehensible to us. we become aware of the etheric world and our standing within this supersensible world. While the substances that make up our physical body are constantly changing, our image-forming body remains available to us between birth and death as a lasting supersensible, as a lasting spiritual entity. And we look into this lasting spiritual entity — which carries us from moment to moment, from day to day, from week to week, from year to year — into this supersensible world, by having truly treated our thinking in this way and made it into something other than ordinary thinking. We first look into the supersensible that underlies our transience; we have just reached the first stage of contemplative consciousness.

[ 40 ] Now, however, spiritual research must be taken as seriously as science is taken in other areas. This means starting with small details that are not usually given much consideration. The spiritual researcher begins by observing memory and forgetting. By focusing on the image-forming body, they gain a mental image of what underlies sounds in the etheric realm that penetrates into it; this penetrates into the physical body and causes changes there. The opposite is true of forgetting; here the vitality of the physical body asserts itself; it triumphs over the activity of the spirit. This is then observed. One really sees this as an immediate presence. Then one rises, arrives at new mental images about what is in human beings, according to today's scientific concepts, about inherited characteristics. These inherited characteristics stand on one side; they initially mean something in us that comes to us from outside through the physical body. We see something else penetrating the physical body from the spiritual realm, in what we have to bring to bear as self-discipline or education from outside against the inherited characteristics. And we see the interaction of the inherited characteristics with what works into the soul.

[ 41 ] Then we come to the next insight, the insight that I have taken the liberty of calling inspired insight in my books and lectures. It will become apparent that this expression corresponds in a very eminent way to what is actually meant. I ask you to understand only what I myself refer to here as inspired insight, and not to confuse it with the traditional meaning of the expression.

[ 42 ] However, what the soul has experienced up to the point of the living thinking described must then be taken further. Entering into reality from mere logical thinking, from mere ideal thinking, immersing oneself in reality, this must be taken further. Thinking must be made even more alive. This can only be achieved by undergoing a process in one's inner soul life that truly means a kind of grasping of realities within the human being, as opposed to mere logical essences. One must transfer the reality that otherwise prevails in the outer world to one's own inner soul life. Let us take moral living as an example. If we are involved in moral living within the social order of human beings, we cannot be satisfied with being logical. Something is good, something is evil. Logical knowledge is not enough; we are only complete human beings when we truly manage to do good and refrain from evil; when we carry out an action that we recognize as our duty, and suppress another that we do not recognize as our duty. In ordinary thinking, people are satisfied with presenting one thought as logical and another as illogical, but the whole thought is considered duty-free. This must cease in the field of spiritual research. Here, the spiritual researcher must succeed in making certain mental images so vivid that other mental images are extinguished in direct experience; one must confront other mental images in such a way that they extinguish their own reality. One must arrive at a completely different way of approaching reality than in ordinary life.

[ 43 ] An example from ordinary science can be cited here. There, one allows oneself many things; I do not wish to object to that; there are examples that are extraordinarily ingenious, transparent, and instructive. I would like to refer to a lecture given by Professor [Dewar] in which he speaks of a certain final state of the Earth that can be found biologically and physically. He calculates a final state of the Earth that will occur in thousands of years, when the Earth will have cooled down. He paints this final state in such a way that he wants to show his listeners that the Earth will one day reach this cooling point, where then what is liquid water will have become earth; where the air will be present as seas and streams; how certain wires, which today carry only gram weights, will subsequently be so strong that they will carry heavy loads. The walls will be coated with egg white, which will be luminous. People will be able to read newspapers by the light shining from the walls. There will be milk that is solid; it will glow in blue light. In short, he paints a picture of the final state of the earth in a scientific manner.

[ 44 ] The spiritual researcher in the field of spiritual research cannot go along with such mental images, because they behave in the following way with regard to the method — but I do not want to be misunderstood as if I had anything against natural science and its way of thinking — according to which such things are conceived. It is the same as if I were to say: Man has a stomach or bones; I observe the stomach or bones every eight days, I observe how things are constantly changing. I observe this over years, how things change, and now I calculate what this change in the stomach or bones would be like after two hundred years. Then I can see what a human being would look like after two hundred years. But, wouldn't you agree, the human being would have died long ago. In the same way, according to the very ingenious rules of geology, I could calculate what the earth was like in the past by observing how it has changed. That can be very ingenious indeed. But it would be like examining the organs of a child and then calculating what they were like 120 years ago. My method would be quite correct. The methods are often very ingenious. Everything that is put forward is correct, but it is not thinking that is grounded in reality.

[ 45 ] One is led to such things when thinking seeks a way out of abstractions and into what is real. And then the second stage of knowledge opens up, what I call inspired thinking. This thinking then leads us to a different experience. Not only do we experience the etheric body in human beings, but we also experience that which truly survives birth and death; that which reveals itself as that which was present before conception, which came out of a spiritual world, which will enter a spiritual world when the human being has passed through death. We experience it in our contemplative consciousness. We experience something that is independent of the body. We now experience that there is a consciousness that underlies ordinary consciousness, that can free itself from the body; what was there, what was consciously there in the human being, but which has been erased from his consciousness in ordinary human soul life by his taking on the body. But this will awaken again when he passes through the gate [of death] and presents itself to the soul in mental images, so that one recognizes that the soul really existed before conception, that the soul-spiritual has connected itself with what has been given by the parents, and that he surrenders his physical body with what takes place in ordinary thinking, feeling, and willing to the elements of the earth, and with what lives in him in contemplative, inspired consciousness goes into a spiritual world.

[ 46 ] This is also where I would like to emphasize one point. After all, not everything can be covered in today's lecture. We see that the human life course is initially permeated by the etheric. But we also see that this human life course is inserted like an episode into a greater overall life. We see that human beings, with the part that inspired knowledge reaches, extend into the spiritual world and re-enter it after death. What matters is the grasping of consciousness after death.

[ 47 ] Now we can address the specific question that the relationship between this spiritual world and the ordinary human life cycle presents us with. You all know that today's natural science is rightly proud of having revealed how human beings carry within themselves qualities that are connected with their physical nature, which they have inherited from their ancestors.

[ 48 ] It may now be very easy, it may seem very obvious, that those who believe they stand firmly on the ground of natural science — spiritual researchers also stand firmly on the ground of natural science, but one can object to them, if one does not take into account what they have to say, one can object: Yes, natural science, with its rigorous, reliable methods, has worked hard to show how heredity actually works, and you want to come along and say something completely different. Yes, science has achieved a great deal.

[ 49 ] Today I would like to draw your attention to a beautiful book about Goethe, which shows how the qualities that appeared within Goethe were prepared by his ancestors, by a series of ancestors. It beautifully compiles what was present in the various ancestors and was transferred to Goethe through physical inheritance. From this, the conclusion should be drawn that someone who appears as a genius displays a sum of the various characteristics that were evident in their ancestors. Is this a scientific way of thinking? In a trivial comparison, one could say that a person carries the characteristics of their ancestors in their physical organism, that they have physically gone through the stream of these characteristics in their development; this is no more remarkable than the fact that a person who has walked through water is wet.

[ 50 ] But if one really wanted to show logically and realistically that genius traits are inherited by descendants, one would have to do it differently. One would have to take a genius and show in his descendants that the genius traits of the genius have been inherited. But that will not be done. The descendants of great, genius men would not really confirm the heritability of great qualities. Spiritual Science shows, especially with regard to inspired consciousness, that in humans, when one looks at their spiritual spiritual-soul qualities, these spiritual-soul dispositions do not originate from physical dispositions. These physical dispositions serve only as a garment. But what lies at the center of the human being is revealed to have come over from his spiritual abode as a spirit soul before he was clothed with physical matter through conception. And here Spiritual Science comes to a conclusion that seems paradoxical to many. That is: what lives within us is not only connected with the characteristics of our ancestors, but above all with what we ourselves are in the spiritual world before we were clothed in physical matter. But how? One can only create a mental image of this if one knows that just as this spiritual-soul aspect is in my body when I do this or that, because everything physical is based on the soul-spiritual, so everything that surrounds us as matter is based on the spiritual.

[ 51 ] And this spiritual-soul element that underlies everything is not somewhere in a cloud cuckoo land, but everywhere around us, always with the physical-bodily. And so a spiritual being in which we lived, say, centuries ago, in which we lived before we were born, this spiritual being is connected with its powers, with all that it is, with what is happening here. And we live in it. We ourselves send down the powers with what flows down from the spiritual world. Let's say we have an ancestor from the eighth generation before our birth; we are there in the spiritual world. In what brought a man and a woman together at that time, the spiritual forces that we ourselves send down from the spiritual world are at work. This flows from our own being into our ancestral line. And so it goes through the generations before the parents who help us into physical existence arrive. What is within us flows into what becomes our physical inheritance. We ourselves have then helped to prepare what will be innate in us in our physical heredity.

[ 52 ] Thus, the physical-bodily must be thought of in harmony with the spiritual world, and this physical-bodily must be thought of in harmony with our spiritual-soul. This is a result of Spiritual Science. The qualities that we bring forth from our innermost being, which constitute our gifts, our capacity for activity, our talents, we bring them with us from the spiritual world, and insofar as they are inherited in us, we ourselves are the cause. Here we see into the immortal from the mortal in human beings. Here we see how that which clothes itself in the transitory body is formed out of the spiritual world. Today I can only speak of this result of spiritual research, but you will find more details in my writings. You will be able to see how, step by step, these results present themselves to the spiritual researcher. You will be able to see how this is based on the fact that an awakened consciousness must be pointed out, but how this consciousness brings us what is real, just as — just as the rose proves to be red — when we have it before us, as spiritual reality, because we have it before us. Spiritual Science leads human beings — just as human beings know of themselves that the rose is red when they stand before it — to the essence, the spiritual-soul essence. And when we have it before us, it presents itself as the immortal part of the human being.

[ 53 ] And now, my dear audience, I would like to point out a third thing, with which we will then have exhausted our task, so to speak. Knowledge can ascend to a third level. I have described to you imaginative knowledge as the first stage of knowledge. The second stage is inspired knowledge, living into reality, where one [refuses to create a mental image that one will read secondly at] /gap), because they are unreal, even though they are based on logically correct foundations. From this inspired thinking, further development, further working into the contemplative consciousness, leads to the realization that one is not dealing with thinking as with groping, where one encounters limits; it becomes a sense of feeling. But just as the physical senses have developed, just as the eyes and ears have developed as higher stages of the same, so from this spiritual feeling develops that what I would like to call, using Goethe's expression, “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears.”

[ 54 ] Lower animals have only the sense of touch; then the higher senses develop. Thus, from spiritual touch, the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear develop. And then one arrives at a very important point in inner experience, which, however, has something tremendously shocking for the spiritual researcher. One arrives at the point where one really knows in inner experience: the deepest thing in your being, that thing in your being of which a thinker like Vischer says: “it cannot be outside the body,” is most certainly within a spiritually infinite, immortal world; it is anchored there. In one's own path of knowledge, one has then brought about those inner conditions that lead to an inner experience that can be called an inner experience of destiny.

[ 55 ] This experience of destiny is of great significance when one knows how, through the transformation of knowledge in the way I have described, when this has occurred, then one knows that one has experienced something that cannot be compared to any other experience of destiny. Not because one has become numb to external experiences of fate; on the contrary, one becomes even less numb. What a person experiences in terms of fate — on the one hand, experiences fill them with joy, delight, strength, and zest for life, while on the other hand, these experiences can plunge them into the deepest pain — everything that fate brings, uplifting them, crushing them, all of this is something for which they do not become more dull, but rather experience even more sensitively. But nevertheless, when one has undergone the transformation of fate that I have described in one's soul, the greatest experience of fate remains that of knowing oneself to be one with the spirit; it towers above everything else. From that moment on, what can be called intuitive consciousness awakens in relation to fate. From that moment on, one knows what fate actually means. Then one knows that one has undergone an experience of fate in ordinary life that one has brought about oneself.

[ 56 ] Then what was said earlier takes on another aspect. Now one knows that the comparison with dreams, which Schopenhauer uses when speaking of the apparent intentionality of the human soul, is not without significance. With regard to human destiny, we experience that one experience brings joy, the other suffering; we experience this destiny by feeling one thing after another through emotion and so on. But as we come to contemplative consciousness, something becomes true in a much deeper sense than many who view life as seriously as Knebel, a friend of Goethe's, who once said: “For those who, in the twilight of their lives, see the human [gap], but rather see [gap] in this fate.”

[ 57 ] So Knebel says, presciently, and whether you believe him or not, accept it or reject it, he says: “You see how all these events belong together, how we could not be ourselves if anything else had come into this life.”

[ 58 ] Schopenhauer, who was more profound in this way than many other philosophers, comes to the conclusion: [gap]

[ 59 ] For the observing consciousness that has undergone the inner experience of fate, in the preparation of which one is oneself present, for this observing consciousness, external life indeed appears — to use Fichte's word — appears to be “a dream” in relation to fate. We comprehend the experience of fate by allowing the individual events to affect us, but we allow them to affect us as in a “dream.” In a dream, we hear “Oh!”, “Fire!” We wake up and see the fire department rushing to the scene. This is linked to a dramatic event in the dream. We become aware of the external cause when we wake up. Something illuminating from the outside is thrown into what we experience internally.

[ 60 ] But this is also the case when the observing consciousness looks up to what permeates our destiny from the spiritual world. There, what [gap] appears to be coordinated with what works into the physical world with the help of the spiritual world. There we find the causes of what happens in the physical world in the spiritual world. There we learn to look back in the third kind of knowledge, intuition, not only into the life between death and a new birth, but we learn to look back on repeated earthly lives. We see how we ourselves laid the foundations in earlier earthly lives for what is happening in our present life. We see the causes of later earthly lives emanating from our present earthly life. The whole of human life flows into successive states in which we are clothed in the body between birth and death, and are without a body between death and a new birth. We look at the whole of human life.

[ 61 ] What I have just said is something that Lessing already knew within German spiritual life. In his “Education of the Human Race,” we see this expressed for the first time for good reasons of thought.

[ 62 ] It is necessary that we gain insight into this. Just as dreams are ordered when we wake up, just as dreams are not explained in dreams, but only in waking consciousness is the explanation for dreams found, so too is the explanation for fate found in the contemplative consciousness that can penetrate the spiritual world.

[ 63 ] I just want to point this out because there is a spiteful opposition that comes up with foolish objections, for example, when it is said: So, in such a view of repeated earthly lives, everything that happens in life here is described as deserved from previous earthly lives.

[ 64 ] As if what befalls us as misfortune must also be felt as guilt. This is a foolish objection and can only arise from confusion with this or that mysticism or theosophy; and that is because all these concepts of guilt or merit belong only to the physical world, to ordinary waking consciousness. They lead into other concepts, where life takes on meaning in a higher sense when one ascends from ordinary consciousness to contemplative consciousness.

[ 65 ] And it would be nonsense to simply apply the concepts of guilt and atonement that apply to ordinary life to what is lived out in destiny. But the Spiritual Science shows us a higher, spiritual meaning for human beings by placing them, with the supersensible part of their being, with his destiny, which he experiences as if in a dream, by placing him in a spiritual world and giving his whole being a higher meaning. In times such as these, it is better to think: How does what is happening to me come about? How does this give meaning to my life in its entirety? One should think, although this should by no means be applied in the ordinary sense to what is happening around us: A higher meaning lies in this life. And especially when such difficult, such terrible things are experienced, as are being experienced in our present fateful time, the thought should be able to penetrate the soul that this life, in which human beings with their supersensible nature know themselves to be in the spiritual world, has a higher meaning; that what intervenes in the lives of many people as misfortune is not to be sought solely in the past, but should be regarded as the starting point for future earthly lives.

[ 66 ] Just as we can point to past earthly lives, we can also point to future earthly lives and to the times we go through in the spiritual world. The misfortune, the heavy fate that overwhelms us, which flows from a fateful time itself, also gives the immortal part of the human being powers that will enable it to perform higher tasks later than if it had not been struck by misfortune. This is not a justification of misfortune, that would be foolish, but it is an indication of how even misfortune can have a real meaning. Of course, just as illnesses must now be cured, and one must not make the foolish objection: Perhaps we are experiencing something that can only be experienced through illness, so we do not want to cure it, for the objection would be foolish: " So fate, which is misfortune, must be presented as justified." But when it is there, it can only be understood in its meaning if man is able to ascend into the spiritual world through contemplative consciousness. And so I believe that these our difficult times cannot alone justify people's interest and attention in the immortal part of the human being, in the question of fate, in the intervention of immortality and fate in the course of human life. For these must be enigmatic questions that stand before the human soul as enigmatic questions throughout all ages, /large gap] question of destiny, sends light into many a soul, light in which even the scientists of the present day can believe. That is why our time may be suitable, because it needs such light, to kindle an interest in Spiritual Science, which seeks to grasp the spiritual part of the human being just as scientifically as the transitory part of the human being itself is grasped by natural science.

[ 67 ] In conclusion, I would like to say, not out of any personal feeling, not out of what what one might call a feeling based solely on emotion or on the heart, but out of what has really emerged for me from decades of standing within and wrestling with Spiritual Science, I would like to say the following: When I look through human spiritual experience, look through how it has developed up to the nineteenth century, and through this direct my gaze to the deepest, most significant sources of German spiritual life, as I said, not out of feelings, not out of chauvinism, but out of what results from a correct understanding, I would like to say: The sources of German spiritual life contain that from which, in a truly direct continuation, that which is meant here as Spiritual Science can be gained in the most spiritual way, in the most intimate way. And I can say this now because it is really not a conviction of today.

[ 68 ] Back then, 36 years ago, when I sowed the first seeds of what I then tried to develop over the following decades, and of which I wanted to present a small part today, I wrote one of my very first essays. In this essay, which I wrote as a young badger, I wrote that it was necessary for German intellectual life, after having been influenced for so long by foreign intellectual life, which is quite good in its own right and should not be disparaged in a chauvinistic manner, but because German intellectual life had allowed itself to be influenced far too strongly, it had become alienated from many of the good sources of its own uniqueness. And in the initial immaturity of that essay, I wrote, for example, about Darwinism, which must be regarded as a materialistic form of what was already present in a spiritual way in Goethe. One had a right to take up this Darwinism; but German intellectual life is called upon above all to permeate what enters our world in a materialistic form with genuine spirituality, to permeate the individual insights of the outer world with the spirituality that can be gained from the sources of German intellectual life. That this can provide real proof in the development of the world that what the German spirit has to contribute to the general development of humanity is a good part of that development.

[ 69 ] And so I was also led to what I was able to present here last year. I was led to see how, in the case of important German men, such as Troxler and Immanuel Fichte, the son of the great philosopher Fichte, the idea arises that one must ascend from the mere observation of the sensory-physical to a spiritual way of seeing, a term coined by Goethe. Troxler and Fichte both say: "That true anthropology must rise to the recognition of spiritual reality, must become anthroposophy." Not merely by the name anthroposophy appearing in other national societies, but by striving from the innermost core and nerve, the name anthroposophy appears among outstanding minds living in the first half of the nineteenth century. And nothing other than a continuation and an elevation of this German spiritual life into the spiritual world. That is what is meant here by anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science. Therefore, it was a particular satisfaction for me when I found Eduard von Hartmann saying, even in relation to physics: "It is to be hoped that as modern physics frees itself from abstract and agnostic knowledge of nature, university philosophy will turn away from it, and the German spirit of the age will come to eradicate Anglomania from itself."

[ 70 ] This does not mean that a chauvinistic front should be formed against the English, but that the German spirit should embrace its own, that the Anglomania that has been brought into physics itself must be eliminated.

[ 71 ] The present time, this fateful time, is so well suited to bringing the German spirit, which is now being attacked from all sides not only with weapons but also with words and thoughts, with hatred and hateful feelings, in such an incredible way, to bring this German spirit to reflect on its own deepest, most significant sources of experience. I am not saying this because the one-sidedness of anthroposophical world knowledge could now transform the whole world, and that the German spirit consists precisely in always striving only for the spirit. No, that is not what I mean. What I mean is something else. What I mean is this: where such things grow, as on the soil of Troxler and Immanuel Fichte, where what asserted itself as anthroposophy at that time can be found, in order to be taken up as [gap] and development, there lives in the depths of the people a deeper, more comprehensive, more powerful life; there lives such a life that one must say, not as other nations so often do, that they want to set themselves up as leaders of the whole, never, but that one can say that the German spirit knows how much it has to contribute to world development from the roots of its being, and that if it does not contribute it, [gap]. Therefore, let me say it plainly: in difficult times, Fichte concluded his “Addresses to the German Nation” by calling out to the Germans: if the Germans do not achieve what only the German essence can achieve, then something will be lost that would be a loss to the whole world and all of humanity.

[ 72 ] This can also be said today, in light of what has flowed from others in the German spirit in the subsequent period, which we look upon with humility as we seek to continue it. can also be said today. Therefore, especially in these fateful times, a consideration of Spiritual Science may well be concluded with a variation on Fichte's words, in a way that points to the deepest essence of the German people: If what what a world of enemies around us intends to do with this German essence, then not only would something be destroyed for the German essence itself that would be irretrievable for this essence, but something would be destroyed by the actions of the enemies that would be irretrievably lost for the entire development of the world, and thus also for these enemies themselves.

[ 73 ] I believe that every glance that looks into the depths of the development of modern spiritual life, but also every glance that looks at what lies at the foundation of the spiritual exploration of the world as spiritual science in the sources of the German people, every glance must teach us this:

[ 74 ] No, however threatening fate may be, however much the enemies of this German essence may condemn it in our time, this German essence has not yet been lost. It has not yet fulfilled its task in world development. What the enemies want must not come to pass. The German essence must shape that which has its roots in true spiritual knowledge, for all the development of humanity on earth. Thus, from the feelings that can come from Spiritual Science, we may also develop a feeling that must permeate us with vitality and energy in this fateful time of ours.