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 ] My dear friends! It is difficult at present to speak about the significant questions that have such a profound impact on human life and which are to be the subject of today's consideration, if such speech is to be based on solid scientific ground. For considerations about the immortality of the soul, reflections on questions of human destiny have actually disappeared completely from writings and books on scientific psychology in recent decades, one might say since the 1960s. And one can see from the reflections on psychology that are currently being pursued from a scientific perspective how such questions are taken today as if they were completely beyond the scope of scientific consideration. That this is not the case is precisely the subject of this evening's reflection.

[ 2 ] For years now, I have been allowed to speak here in Hanover on subjects related to Spiritual Science research. And those who have heard the lectures here more often will know that I do not like to stray from objective observation and get personal. Tonight, however, I ask you to allow me to start with a personal remark, which is only seemingly personal, which, I believe, is objectively related to the whole structure of the discussions we want to have here today.

[ 3 ] When, 35 to 36 years ago, I gathered the first building blocks for the scientific psychology of the soul referred to here, it was the time when the speech given by the famous naturalist du Bois-Reymond at a naturalists' conference in the 1870s, which was later published in print, caused a tremendous stir. In this speech—today we live in fast-paced times, caused a sensation at the time, but today hardly anyone cares about these things — in this speech, du Bois-Reymond argued that, no matter how far research may progress, no matter how promising and profound the natural science of recent times may be, there are two questions, two enigmas of existence that natural science and all scientific observation will never be able to resolve. And du Bois-Reymond identified these two enigmas as the questions of the nature of substance, of matter. “Never,” he said, “will we be able to know what is out there in space, what we call matter or substance.” And likewise, he said, we will never be able to know how, from that which moves within the human organism, from that which performs material processes within it, the simplest sensation, the simplest fact of consciousness, arises. For us tonight, it is only important that the great natural scientist of that time found his thinking compelled to say in two places: One cannot continue with research, with science. Then du Bois Reymond followed up with another discussion in which he listed seven such questions in his work “The Seven World Riddles.”

[ 4 ] Now, one could multiply the number of such riddle questions, which the human mind and human research are struggling with, so to speak, . My concern today is not to discuss such riddles, but rather to point out that when we struggle for knowledge, for the meaning of the riddles that life itself presents us with, we are indeed confronted with such fundamental questions of existence. And, as I said, at that time, when I was trying to lay the first building blocks for the worldview I want to talk about today, this fell into my field of vision in a particularly striking way, because it seemed to me that such enigmatic questions had to be approached from a completely different angle.

[ 5 ] At that time, I wrote a treatise on the erroneous path that du Bois-Reymond had taken with regard to such enigmatic questions. Of course, what was well-intentioned at the time was rejected by all sides.

[ 6 ] Only a few contemporary philosophers were receptive to what I had to say. And I was met with extraordinary kindness by the great aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who himself attempted to penetrate the enigmatic questions of existence in a profound way, according to the possibilities of the time, and who is known as “V-Vischer.”

[ 7 ] The way people behave in our time when they encounter such enigmatic questions is to say: Well, we have reached the limits of human knowledge; human knowledge cannot go beyond that. We must stop there. We must simply acknowledge that science must declare its field of vision to be complete."

[ 8 ] With such a way of thinking, ladies and gentlemen, one will never be able to say anything meaningful, anything that satisfies the human soul, about the great, the greatest riddles of existence, scientifically. One must approach such questions in a completely different way, in a completely different manner than is currently done in most circles; one must not grasp them theoretically in a one-sided, philosophically abstract way, but rather in a lively inner struggle.

[ 9 ] I have now attempted to pose the questions that are to be the subject of our present considerations, namely the question of immortality and the question of destiny, in my latest book, The Riddle of Man, in the way they must actually be posed if one wants to approach them in a fruitful way.

[ 10 ] Must we not say to ourselves: even if someone were to prove conclusively that when a person passes through the gate of death, when they surrender their body to the earthly elements, something remains of their human soul, something lives on, that they would then have satisfied what [they] actually has to ask out of human curiosity? No. If one answers the question as Eduard von Hartmann does, that when a person passes through the gate of death, what remains of the soul is that which lies behind consciousness as the unconscious, then one would have the prospect of living after death without consciousness, like some unconscious entity. But that is not even the question. Humans are not concerned with such an unconscious entity when they address the question of immortality in the true sense. That is why I have tried above all to pose the question — I have presented this briefly and concisely in the book mentioned above, and also earlier in my “Riddle of Philosophy” — I have tried to make this question a question of consciousness. In doing so, however, I have not started from any fantastic, adventurous mental images, but from that significant foundation which is so forcefully present in modern intellectual life. I started from what can be called Goethe's worldview, the worldview that I have been trying to explore and penetrate for more than thirty years.

[ 11 ] Goethe opposed such boundary questions as those to which I have drawn attention, based on Kant's philosophy. Goethe did not view Kant's philosophy with its boundary questions in the same way as others, but allowed it to affect his entire soul. And then it became particularly clear to his mind's eye that Kant says that certain limits of knowledge cannot be transcended in contemplation. One can establish certain “practical postulates,” as Kant calls them, about freedom and immortality. One can say: that human beings could not be moral unless they assumed that these two things existed, but that one could not know anything about these questions in the sense of what is called knowledge. And Kant calls the endeavor to explore these questions in the same way as one explores the sphere of natural, sensory existence an “adventure of reason.” Goethe, above all, opposed this out of the very essence of his nature, and in his beautiful essay “On Perceptual Judgment,” which can be found in his scientific writings, he says the following: If one approaches the concepts of freedom and immortality with practical moral postulates, why should it not be possible for the human spirit to truly rise to a higher realm where man lives and courageously endure the adventure of reason?

[ 12 ] And Goethe used the expression “intuitive judgment” for that spiritual activity, which he did not yet have in the sense of today's Spiritual Science, but which he had in its first elements, as he called this life that leads into the spiritual regions.

[ 13 ] And in this sense, continuing to develop what he described as intuitive judgment, I spoke of “contemplative consciousness,” so that the question of immortality now takes the form that, although with the consciousness we use in outer life and the consciousness which prevails in ordinary science, the question of immortality and the question of fate cannot be solved; but that human beings are capable of bringing to mind another consciousness, a consciousness that they do not have in ordinary life here between birth or conception and death, but which they can bring to mind in such a way that they can know about it. It survives birth and death, it truly leads him into those depths of his being where this being reveals itself as immortal.

[ 14 ] Now I would first like to use a comparison — it is not meant to be an explanation, but a comparison — to explain what I actually mean by this. And I would like to start from the premise that we have, so to speak, a primitive, chaotic consciousness in human life in dream consciousness, and that when we wake up from the dream, we wake up into the ordinary sensory world, so that we can distinguish the dream consciousness, which has a world of images that fluctuate up and down and are taken for reality during the dream. When one awakens from this consciousness, one connects one's entire human being with the physical world, its objects, its processes, and then one knows through immediate life that one is now standing in reality. And when one looks back, , you call the world you experienced in the dream not a reality, but that from which you have awakened.

[ 15 ] Now, just as one can awaken from dream or sleep consciousness into ordinary daytime consciousness, which also underlies ordinary science, so it is also possible to awaken from ordinary daytime consciousness into that consciousness which can be called “seeing consciousness.” And human beings can form mental images of a consciousness that does not permeate the life we live from morning to night, but which underlies this consciousness and outlasts the life of the transitory body.

[ 16 ] I will now attempt to illustrate how human beings can speak of such a seeing consciousness as a reality in a scientifically grounded way. This seeing consciousness is not present in ordinary life, as I said. This seeing consciousness is just as little present in ordinary life as it is present in sleep or in dreams, a consciousness of the objects of the world around us. The question now is whether there are perhaps indications in ordinary consciousness of such a contemplative consciousness that could lie hidden in our ordinary consciousness. Such indications do indeed exist. They are found precisely in those areas of our contemporary thinking where the most conscientious , most honestly, and most earnestly sought after science. And you can see that by this I mean nothing other than the foundation of natural science. Spiritual Science, as it is meant here — this must be said again and again — is not in the least opposed to the admirable progress of natural science in recent centuries, and especially in the last century. Spiritual Science fully recognizes what natural science has achieved in its results, what it has accomplished in disciplining human research and human thinking, so that natural science in particular science can be exemplary in all fields in terms of scientific conscientiousness. However, when it comes to the human soul, natural science seeks something completely different from what Spiritual Science or anthroposophy must seek, as we shall see today. What natural science seeks is, on the one hand, the opposite, but it must still be exemplary in the way natural science seeks. And it has already achieved beautiful results in these areas today, which promise to draw even larger, wider circles in the near future, although, as I have just discovered this winter in a certain research conclusion, they are imperfectly one-sided; that does not matter.

[ 17 ] Now I would like to start from a specific phenomenon; I would like to start from writings that are based on conscientious scientific thinking, albeit one-sided, in the most beautiful sense of the word. I would like to start from a book by Theodor Ziehen, “Physiological Psychology”; in other words, one could say “natural scientific psychology.” What does such a researcher want in his scientific field? He says: We experience human soul life; in a sense, we ourselves are this human soul life. This human soul life ebbs and flows within us between birth and death, from falling asleep to waking up. In thinking, creating mental images, feeling, and willing, it surges and ebbs. We have this as an inner experience. We perceive within ourselves how mental images surge and ebb, connecting with impulses of feeling and will.

[ 18 ] The natural scientist now asks: How does that which surges up and down relate to our physical organization? The natural scientist investigates in his conscientious manner — despite some criticism that can be raised, it must be said — he investigates what surges up and down in the human physical organization. Now it is downright interesting how such a conscientious researcher as Theodor Ziehen arrives at his results in this field. He comes to the honest conclusion that the relationship between human mental images and human nervous life, that is, the physical organization insofar as it is localized in the nerves. He then arrives at a remarkable result that is very noteworthy. He finds that, as mental images unfold, they have parallel processes in what happens in the marvelous structure of the human brain and its continuation in the nervous system. For the life that we call our emotional life, and especially for the life we call our emotional life, he finds nothing of the sort. There he comes to a standstill. Very strange, he does not regard feelings at all as something existing in themselves, even though our experience shows that our feelings are just as alive as our mental images. He describes these feelings only as the emotional tone of mental images, as a nuance of color in mental images. He cannot find his way. He does not find it possible to to descend from feelings into the physical organization in the same clear way as he finds for mental images; even less so for the impulses of the will. So he says: The natural scientist cannot deal with the impulses of the will at all; we leave that to the philosophers, whereupon the natural scientist usually makes the benevolent remark that this must be left to the rich imagination of the philosophers.

[ 19 ] What do we have here? We have something very significant, something tremendously decisive, something that, when viewed correctly, leads directly to the path that spiritual research must take for the questions we are discussing today.

[ 20 ] Anyone who observes the life of the soul with any degree of clarity will find that we relate to our mental images in a completely different way than we do to our feelings or even our impulses of will. Let us take the latter as an example. The same applies to feelings. When we want something, we have a mental image: we want to grasp or do this or that; then the action follows. But what goes on down there in the organism, what is lived out in the organism when the mental image " I want this and that" is translated into a bodily movement, an action, we know as little about it in our ordinary, everyday consciousness as we know during sleep what is going on in our organism or what is going on in our environment. And if we stand strictly on the ground of modern natural science, we can utter a strange sentence, the sentence: “When we really consider our will, our volition, we see that while we are awake during the day, we are asleep with regard to our volition. We do not only sleep at night, we also sleep through those processes within us that we call volition.”

[ 21 ] And it is interesting, if we continue this observation, that the feelings and emotions that underlie our soul life actually proceed in the same way in our soul life as the things we have in our dream consciousness do in other areas. The darkness of sleep consciousness spreads over our will. The dream consciousness, the real waking consciousness, the full waking consciousness, we have spread only over our mental images. And because Theodor Ziehen wants to proceed only from full waking consciousness, he does not come to regard feelings as something special, or even to regard the impulses of the will as something special.

[ 22 ] So we can say: Through natural science itself, in its honest method, we see a sleep consciousness protruding into ordinary daily consciousness. We are only partially awake; we are actually asleep with regard to emotional and volitional impulses. And the question can really arise from a deep reality: Can we wake up to these things in the same way that we wake up to external sensory things when we wake up from sleep consciousness in the morning, and no longer have to deal with our own organism only with dream images, but with things from our surroundings with which we connect our entire human life? Can such an awakening take place? That such an awakening can take place is the task of spiritual research to demonstrate, that a seeing consciousness can develop out of the ordinary so-called waking daytime consciousness.

[ 23 ] Such questions, as you can see from the subject itself and from the nature of the observation, develop slowly and gradually. And it was again most remarkable to me — again, it was 36 years ago — when I came across a very significant treatise by Friedrich Theodor Vischer; a treatise on Volkelt's book on “Die Traumphantasie” (The Dream Fantasy) , in which there is a remarkable remark, a remark that at that time could perhaps only strike like lightning into the consciousness of those who were just beginning to lay the first building blocks of Spiritual Science. Vischer said at that time in this extraordinarily significant treatise: “Those who do not want to concern themselves with the mysteries of dreams will never understand human passion.” Bear in mind that Vischer was far removed from standing on the ground of today's Spiritual Science and reckoning with its methods. But he had sensed that there is a connection between what surges up and down in dreams as images and what we experience in our passions, in our feelings. Science has simply not been inclined to engage with such things in recent decades. That is why the enigmatic question that arose everywhere in the last third of the nineteenth century, especially at its beginning, and through which many thinkers came close to grasping what is to be explained here today, has been rejected, and why today, one might say, it is difficult to truly assert oneself against a world of opposition.

[ 24 ] Now I would like to show how this contemplative consciousness actually develops in human beings; how human beings awaken from ordinary daytime consciousness into this contemplative consciousness, just as they awaken from dream consciousness into ordinary daytime consciousness. Building on this comparison, we can already say the following: When we dream, that is, when we are in sleep consciousness, the dream images surge up and down. We know only of these dream images. That is our whole world when we dream. We know nothing of our own organism, but also nothing of the external sensory world. That immediately enters our field of vision when we wake up. But only part of our own human being enters our field of vision when we wake up. We must realize that we grow into the outer world when we wake up, but only a little into our own human being, so little that one can really say: we dream our feelings, our emotions; we sleep through what is actually going on in our impulses of will.

[ 25 ] The awakening to seeing consciousness must go out if it is not to lead into fantasy, into false, confused mysticism — with which true Spiritual Science is very easily confused. but we can console ourselves with the fact that it even happened to Vischer when he wrote that treatise in which the beautiful sentence I just mentioned is found, that ill-willed people came and said: "Now even this serious, genuine, sober researcher is going over to the camp of the spiritualists ." Of course, this researcher has no more gone over to the camp of the spiritualists or confused occultists than what is meant here today has anything to do with the confusion of any mystical direction or the like —, must be assumed in this awakening to the seeing consciousness of thinking. But this thinking, as we have it in ordinary, waking daytime consciousness, must be completely transformed.

[ 26 ] Where must this transformation begin? It must begin with the recognition that human knowledge does not stop at the boundary questions that are being discussed, as is so often done today, by saying: Human knowledge stops here, it goes no further. Those who remain at these boundaries are like someone who, with their eyes and ears closed, feels their way along walls with their sense of touch; they perceive the walls, but in a sense they only perceive what is going on inside themselves when they bump into the walls. Only the sense of touch is effective. But if we want to have a real awareness of the sensory external world, this sense of touch must develop and be trained so that it not only perceives the impacts exerted on the person themselves, but also forms mental images of what is outside itself by feeling shapes and tracing boundaries. However, it must then perfect itself, and over the course of years, years of human development, it has perfected itself into sensory seeing and hearing. For natural science shows us that this is true, [what] Goethe said in a beautiful saying: Our eyes and ears also developed from subordinate organs that were similar to tactile organs, and evolved from the tactile senses to the seeing and hearing senses.

[ 27 ] Thus, in a lively inner struggle, the spiritual researcher must come to realize that he must not merely stop at such boundaries with his thinking, but must now feel himself at these boundaries as at spiritual boundaries, purely in spiritual thinking activity, but in lively, not dead thinking activity, just as the sense of touch feels itself at physical boundaries. You see, there is a complete analogy between the way our senses were formed and what the spiritual researcher strives for in seeking to ascend from ordinary consciousness to contemplative consciousness. The spiritual researcher regards ordinary thinking, which human beings develop for ordinary waking consciousness, as a starting point, just as he regards the touching of objects as a starting point. But he does not stop at this starting point. Rather, just as touching must be trained, as in the case of a child, the spiritual researcher touches, as it were, the hundreds and hundreds of borderline questions that human cognition encounters. And by not philosophizing one-sidedly, but by working through these meaningful questions with one's whole soul, so to speak, in order to deal with them in living experience, one develops contemplative thinking out of ordinary thinking. This contemplative thinking is always within us, but it does not come to the fore in ordinary thinking.

[ 28 ] Ordinary thinking is bound to the human brain, the human nervous system. And because the thoughts that follow our sensory observations must use the tools of the brain and the human nervous system, they become, in a sense, paralyzed; one could even say deadened. And in ordinary, everyday consciousness, we have to deal with—this is a result of spiritual research—in ordinary consciousness, we have to deal with mental images that have been dulled and killed by living thinking. We must have these mental images in ordinary everyday life. If thinking came to us in consciousness as it actually lives within us and as it is discovered through contemplative consciousness, then we would never be able to distinguish ourselves from the outer senses. It is significant that, as external things in the physical world make an impression on us, they become numb to dead thoughts; for through this we learn to distinguish ourselves as a self from the outside world. And once we have learned this, we can ascend to seeing consciousness, where we grasp ourselves in living thinking.

[ 29 ] This living thinking, in turn, has its starting point, albeit only a starting point, in what we have in Goethe's worldview. And I am convinced that only by continuing to work from this healthy foundation can we arrive at a scientific understanding of seeing consciousness, indeed, at a mastery of seeing consciousness.

[ 30 ] Today, one can read these first beginnings, which have been made into seeing consciousness, even though they are beginnings, in Goethe's beautiful treatise on the metamorphosis of plants, on the metamorphosis of animals, in his other, so little appreciated scientific treatises, which arose from such diligence, not merely from genius, as his observations on wind and weather, or his biological studies. Consider all this, and you will find truly living thinking as opposed to dead, abstract thinking. This is what living thinking consists of. You will find more details on what I have now outlined in principle in my books “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds,” in my “Occult Science,” or in “Theosophy” at the end, methodically indicated. There you will find what one must acquire. I will briefly touch on the things that are explained in detail in these books.

[ 31 ] The most important thing one must acquire if one wants to penetrate the world through inner spiritual research is that one must take a completely different position toward thinking than the position one has in ordinary thinking. Gideon Spicker — who wrote the beautiful book about “Lessing's Worldview” and who has written a second beautiful book, “From [Monastery] to Teaching” — Spicker has expressed very beautifully what a person actually experiences when he truly considers thinking as he does in ordinary waking consciousness. He says: “Every philosophy without exception must start from the premise that it asserts the necessity of thinking.” No philosophy can go beyond this starting point. So Spicker, too, stands entirely on the standpoint of ordinary waking consciousness. And he then says: “because every [attempt to prove its correctness] already presupposes the necessity of thinking; but behind this lurks” — and it is significant that he says this, because he was a wrestler in knowledge, not an ordinary philosopher — he says: “Behind thinking lurks what is a terrible abyss, a darkness illuminated by no ray of light.” We do not know what lurks behind this thinking. It could be either “a gracious God or a malicious demon.”

[ 32 ] It is very significant that this confession was made by a thinker in the last third of the nineteenth century. But this thinking must be brought to life, then the words of the profound philosopher Spicker will simply become meaningless.

[ 33 ] As I said, Goethe actually laid the first building blocks for this enlivening of thought with his theory of metamorphosis. He brought thought to life. He grasped it as it must relate to reality. Much of what we have in our habitual ways of thinking in ordinary consciousness must disappear. Ah, these habits of thinking in ordinary consciousness! We believe that we have a concept when we have thought something up, that we have a concept, a mental image of the thing that exhausts the thing. In ordinary external sensory life, we do not believe this.

[ 34 ] One photographs a tree from different sides, and one knows that when the tree is photographed from four sides, the four images are completely different; they refer to the true reality of the tree. They look different; you cannot conjure up the whole tree in the picture. But you will be mistaken if you try to deduce the whole reality of the tree from a photograph. The spiritual researcher must take this to heart with regard to thought. He must realize that thoughts and mental images can only ever approach one side of reality; that, basically, one can never conjure up reality in one's mental image. In other words, they must develop a sense of reality, not merely a sense of thought; not a sense of mental images, not a sense of thought, not a sense of ideas, but a sense of reality. They must strive to think deeply about any subject, thereby making their thinking agile and flexible. This setting of thinking in motion, this making of thinking flexible, is the first step that must be taken. It often runs counter to the path that thinking has taken today. Yes, today people are so fond of swearing by concepts, by one-sided mental images.

[ 35 ] If I want to be trivial, I can say something like this: Someone dogmatically forms a mental image of exercise being good for certain illnesses. That may be true, as true as a photograph of a tree. But it cannot be the whole reality. It may happen that you hear someone complain that they are ill, and you advise them that they need to exercise. This advice may be entirely correct. But the man replies: Excuse me, but you may not know that I am a postman. You see, a mental image can be very correct from one point of view. But what matters is not this one-sided correctness, but rather that one can use the mental image to correctly assess reality.

[ 36 ] Then it strikes the mind of those who are seriously struggling as very strange when they hear from Goethe that one day he came up with the idea of a mental image of a plant, which he calls the “primordial plant,” through which he is able to change this mental image so that, just as the plant grows outside, so does the mental image. Thinking is set in motion. And Goethe says that with such a mental image, one can invent many plants. One gets many images that can then really be plants, that have the possibilities of plants. Here, thinking must move up into the pictorial. That is why I have this first stage, where thinking is first a groping at the limits of human knowledge, where this thinking becomes mobile, like the sense of touch, where thinking moves in spiritual reality and feels and recognizes this spiritual reality—only one must not take the words materialistically—I have called this first stage “imaginative cognition.” This does not mean that one has something imaginary before one's eyes; rather, because thinking becomes meaningful, rising from abstract thinking, which only reflects the external sensory world, to a life with a mental image, with reality itself. In such thinking, which is to become alive, it is important to have the will not only to form an opinion, but also to always form the opposing opinion; not only what one can say for a cause, but also what one can say against it. For those who want to become true spiritual researchers, must not allow only one mental image to arise; mental images must come to them from all sides, so that they know that they are circling around reality with their mental images, and reality remains in its place, just as a tree remains in its place when one walks around it.

[ 37 ] Therefore, and here I may perhaps make another personal remark, the spiritual researcher will develop the habit that I have always practiced, both in my books and elsewhere, when the opportunity arises, in public and other lectures — those who have often heard my lectures will know that this is the case — not only to say what is in favor of, but also to say what is against a matter that one has to assert and defend. This has, however, led to the strange result that now, when there is so much hostility toward what I represent here, people can copy the objections to what I say from my own books and writings. This is now being copied in many places; what is omitted is what is " for" is to be said. There is an easy method of refuting the spiritual researcher; one need only copy him.

[ 38 ] The spiritual researcher seeks not merely thoughts, but reality. That is why it is so difficult to be understood when one pursues Spiritual Science as it is meant here.

[ 39 ] You see, it happened to me myself that at about the same time I was accused of being in an “isolated and bitter [opposition] to modern natural science.” This was written around the turn of the nineteenth century. And around the same time, it was written that I had succeeded admirably in integrating the scientific knowledge of the nineteenth century into my book, The Riddle of the Universe, in such a way that it fit perfectly into philosophical development. You see, one of the writers understood more about natural science, and the one who wrote the former imagined that he understood more about philosophy. This is something that must be taken into account in relation to spiritual research, because it can very easily happen to those who do not understand it, since spiritual researchers really have to examine things from a wide variety of angles. Materialism is not wrong for spiritual research because it is materialism — for one must view matter materialistically — but because those who are materialists in the true sense of the word believe that by viewing matter, they are viewing the whole world. Spiritual research — please note this — is not carried out by those who constantly talk about “spirit, spirit, spirit,” just as those who only ever say “Lord, Lord, Lord” are not really Christians — but a true spiritual researcher is someone who, whether they are looking at matter or spirit, takes spirit as their starting point.

[ 40 ] Now, what does one arrive at when one has first made thinking flexible and alive in this way?

[ 41 ] Well, first of all, my dear audience, we arrive at a real explanation of what can be called the world of formative forces, the world of imaginations, but real imaginations, not imagined ones; or, if you want to use a physical expression, the world of ether. I would like to say: just as the air does not need to be conscious to someone who has never heard of science, the air is there, and just as he could say, here is a table, a chair, but he knows nothing of the air until he learns that the air is all around him; so when one struggles up to the first stage of contemplative consciousness, to imaginative thinking, one becomes aware one learns to know that one has a supersensible world around oneself, just as one learns through ordinary science that one has the material world around oneself.

[ 42 ] Now physics also has to form mental images of the ether. I would have to speak at length if I wanted to list the various hypothetical mental images that physics has attempted. There are an enormous number of hypotheses about it, but one of them is interesting. Physics today comes to the ether, it must presuppose the ether; it speaks of the ether. It has constructed many hypotheses about the ether. But here is a point where what must be said again and again is already proving to be true today: Spiritual Science and natural science work like workers who drill into a mountain from two sides in order to meet in the middle and make a tunnel through the mountain. And it will become more and more apparent that Spiritual Science and natural science, by working with disciplined methods, will also meet in the middle. And here is a point where, in the initial stage, so to speak, the most materialistic of the sciences, physics, meets the Spiritual Science. The Spiritual Science cannot speak of the ether in hypotheses as if it were only a finer form of matter. Rather, for the Spiritual Science, the ether is something supersensible, something that no longer has material properties, no longer has anything material about it. This is where the spiritual, the supersensible, begins. The The eminent physicist Planck has spoken very strangely about the ether, saying: “People have always talked about the ether in the same way that many people talk about perpetual motion. They have come up with all kinds of ideas. But just as Helmholtz was the first to see perpetual motion in the right light, so too will we first have to find the right way of looking at the ether. And the right way,” — says Planck — “will only be found when we form a mental image of the ether that excludes all material properties from the ether. Whatever other mental images we may gain, we must in any case form the mental image that the ether has no material properties. We must not attribute material properties to this ether, which lives in natural phenomena.”

[ 43 ] So you see: Physics is already in the process of recognizing the ether as something supernatural. When other things are claimed today in popular worldview writings and so on, it must be said that such claims, which are peddled in popular writings and lectures on worldview, are mostly based on scientific groundwork laid decades ago. Those who have kept up with science know how close even physics is today to what Spiritual Science has to say.

[ 44 ] But then, when the seeing consciousness has risen to seeing thinking, to imaginative cognition, we do not have the blurred pantheistic ether around us, but we have around us in this ether world or world of formative forces, as I called it in my essay in the journal “Das Reich,” a new world; a world of new beings, of supersensible beings and supersensible processes. And we belong to this world; just as we belong to the outer physical world with our bones and muscles, with our blood, so we belong to this etheric world that surrounds us. We carry the etheric body within us, just as we carry the physical body consisting of flesh and bones and blood. We are not only this physical body; we are the body that can be called the etheric body, which consists precisely of the supersensible ether, which is born out of the supersensible ether, just as our sensory body is born out of the sensory.

[ 45 ] For in this etheric body we have that in which our thinking actually takes place. For we are not what we appear to be in our ordinary daily consciousness. There, the living mental image in our etheric body weakens into abstract thoughts. But in reality, our etheric body is home to living thoughts, imaginations, and visual thoughts. And it is only because we are instructed in our ordinary consciousness to use our physical body as a tool that our visual thoughts weaken and become paralyzed, turning into abstract thoughts, into dead thoughts. We carry this etheric body within us, just as it is, from birth or conception until death. While we constantly exchange the substances we take in with our food, the substances we receive through heredity, the etheric body remains the same between birth and death and passes through the gate of death. We have grasped the first supersensible element in the human being, that which guides him from moment to moment, from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, from decade to decade. The etheric body is the first supersensible thing with which we have not yet ascended into a higher spiritual world; but it is a higher world than in the supersensible etheric body —, [which] protrudes into this world itself as something supersensible.

[ 46 ] But then this thinking can be developed further, my dear audience, only we must be clear that this thinking must really grasp us if we want to become spiritual researchers, that this thinking must truly be a new element within us, that it must not merely be ordinary thinking — which can only reach the limits described above, when ordinary thinking is able to say something about the supersensible world in a philosophical way — but that this thinking must go further, in such a way that it really penetrates reality in the way described. This must become a habit for the spiritual researcher.

[ 47 ] Perhaps I may say: the same remarks I have made here from the beginning until now, I developed the day before yesterday in Leipzig. What I presented the day before yesterday and what I have presented today is the same. However, anyone who had taken notes might find that a thought has not been expressed here in the same way as the day before yesterday. In this respect, too, the spiritual researcher seeks to illuminate what he wants to present from a wide variety of angles. It becomes a habit for him, something self-evident, whereas today's habits of thinking tend to to take a certain concept, put it into words, and then always reel it off. What matters is this living consciousness, that one can constantly approach reality in one way or another, like a camera. One looks at reality and tries to point to it by characterizing it from all sides, which must actually remain unspoken. One points it out.

[ 48 ] But the following can also be said: as thinking becomes flexible, as I have characterized it, it develops in humans in the opposite direction to certain things that are unfortunately popular today, which form the subject of physical research, with which spiritual research is also very easily conflated. Through these other things, through hallucinations, through illusions, through suggestions, hypnosis, consciousness is actually diminished. Through everything that is Spiritual Science method, consciousness is made critical, expanded. Only foolish simplicity can confuse what I have just described as the path of spiritual research which makes itself independent of the human body, which steps out of the body, frees itself from the body, moves in spirit with the spirit, with what makes people uncritical, what misleads people. Spiritual Science leads people precisely to criticism. Today, opposites are confused with opposites, apparently for a reason that is very transparent but not beautiful. These things must be taken very seriously.

[ 49 ] Take what I have called “inspired knowledge” and do not be misled by any traditional opinions about the term inspiration. The research I have done this winter shows me how right I was to call this second stage of contemplative consciousness “inspired knowledge.”

[ 50 ] When we face the outside world, we cannot be satisfied with mere logic. When we think only in ordinary consciousness, we think logically. Then, for today's habits of thinking, we are already very satisfied if we can think logically. Well, yes, but then it is easy for us to have a false thought. As they say, thoughts are duty-free. Why? Because a false thought can coexist in our thinking with the right thought. What can be illuminated from different sides can coexist in reality. In a moral reality, a bad action cannot coexist with a good action. There, it is not just a matter of mental images, but there is a compulsion to perform the dutiful action and to refrain from the inappropriate one. We face the world differently when we stand inside reality. This standing inside reality must now be transferred to thinking. The mental images that arise as thoughts must become so real to us that we have a vivid feeling toward one complex of mental images: you may surrender to this, it will lead you in a certain direction; while with the other we have the feeling: you must suppress this or let it run alongside. Reality must enter into the living process of thought and imagination; moralizing must permeate the whole life of imagination.

[ 51 ] But that really leads the soul out of the body. It leads the human soul out of the body in such a way that we now know: even in mysticism, often in the most beautiful mysticism, one actually goes deeper into the body. Afterwards, the utterances of this beautiful mysticism can be very poetic, but they are only beautiful because they go even deeper into the body. I am thinking, for example, of the beautiful mystical effusions of Mechthild of Magdeburg. Who would not admire them? But anyone who knows these things knows that they arose because the bearer of this mysticism went even deeper into the body, slept even more, so to speak, than happens in ordinary waking consciousness, that she slept more in feeling and will than is otherwise the case in ordinary waking consciousness.

[ 52 ] Now, once one has awakened to the mental image itself — not only dreaming about feelings and sleeping in the will, but having the mental image only as a mirror image — one awakens to the living mental image, and through this one receives the etheric body that accompanies us from birth or conception until death. But by continuing further, by moralizing thinking inwardly, by making thoughts themselves into living powers that have something to say to each other, that repel each other inwardly as thoughts with sympathy or antipathy, by becoming free from all physical complicity, one ascends to inspired knowledge. And now, having become completely free from the body, one becomes free from everything that accompanies the human life course until death. One rises to what we can call the actual supersensible nature of human beings.

[ 53 ] Spiritual Science does not approach the human supersensible by engaging in philosophical considerations as to whether this human being is immortal or not, but by leading us to the supersensible itself. As the contemplative consciousness rises to inspired knowledge, it becomes apparent that in every human being — as they live through their life between birth and death through the events of waking consciousness — what is below is concealed, but it passes through births and deaths.

[ 54 ] Just as we do not need to know that the red rose is red when we see it — we see it — so in contemplative consciousness we are led to the human soul, whose immortality does not need to be “proved”; rather, this supersensible soul shows in its own being that which connects with what comes from parents and ancestors through heredity, what lives in a spiritual world before birth, what comes out of the spiritual world, just as the hereditary substance came from parents and ancestors. One sees how the human soul comes from the spiritual world, how it re-enters the spiritual world.

[ 55 ] This immortal soul lives within us, but the eternal is veiled by the fact that between birth and death we must experience through our senses, experiences in concepts that are dulled. But it lives within us before conception, it lives within us after our death. And because we have risen to a seeing consciousness that does not need the body, whereas ordinary consciousness needs the body in order to unfold, we can now create mental images of this immortal human being as not being unconscious, but [living] in seeing consciousness, which we experience here in terms of knowledge, that this true, immortal being is present in seeing consciousness.

[ 56 ] Let us now explain, in just one point, how human beings recognize this immortal being. I would have to speak for many hours if I wanted to say everything what can be gained in terms of knowledge, what human beings can experience in the spiritual realm. But with regard to the question that is hardly to be found in today's textbooks on psychology, with regard to the question of fate, let us discuss what inspired consciousness has to say.

[ 57 ] This question of fate — Schopenhauer is actually the only one among the more recent philosophers who has dared to reflect on it, but he immediately says that it should only be regarded as a hypothetical consideration, because he does not dare to say anything definite.

[ 58 ] Some people, when they have grown old in a contemplative life, speak like Goethe's friend Knebel, who expresses the following very beautifully: " No matter how confused their lives may be, when people look back in old age, it may seem to them as if there were a fixed plan underlying the entire course of their lives; as if an invisible hand had brought together the coincidences of fate. " Yes, what seems to throw people off course the most, on closer inspection, turns out to be precisely that which is connected with the whole plan of destiny. What such people, who have become contemplative in old age, is expressed by the inspired consciousness. It belongs to the contemplative consciousness. And since it has been shown that this contemplative consciousness relates to ordinary daytime consciousness as daytime consciousness relates to dream consciousness, we can ask the question: Is it not perhaps the case with this ordinary daytime consciousness in relation to the seeing consciousness as it is with dream experiences in relation to ordinary sensory experiences in daytime consciousness?

[ 59 ] We do experience our destiny. We experience destinies in that, on the one hand, they bring us feelings of joy happiness, and on the other hand bring us bitter suffering and pain. But those who see through human nature, even if only intuitively, like Friedrich Theodor Vischer, know that we are actually only dreaming in these things. "Those who do not want to concern themselves with the mysteries of dreams can never understand human passions.

" Nor can they understand feeling; feeling as it lives when fate enters our lives.

[ 60 ] Now let us first consider the fate that we create, as it were, from within. How we develop and how we can educate ourselves. One person is more inclined toward this, another toward that. Where does that come from? Can it really be compared to a kind of higher dream experience? We must ask these questions. Well, modern science has also made some discoveries in this field. And I can well imagine someone saying: Oh, now this natural science has produced such meaningful insights into the way we inherit certain physical dispositions from our ancestors and ancestors' ancestors. It shows how this is expressed in our talents and abilities. And now — as someone enthusiastic about natural science might say — along comes this spiritual researcher and says: That is completely different; it comes from the spiritual world, and not from our ancestors ; it comes from the spiritual world, where human beings lived before they clothed themselves in the substance of heredity. Now, spiritual research also fully recognizes the great achievements of natural science in this field. But it must recognize them in their one-sidedness and show that something else belongs to them. It is in complete harmony with natural science in that it expands upon its one-sidedness.

[ 61 ] Spiritual Science actually reinforces natural science; it does not combat it, it only expands it. A beautiful book has been published about Goethe. It shows how Goethe's characteristics can be found in this or that ancestor. The aim is to show how, through heredity, genius sums up the characteristics of its ancestors. This is not a scientific approach; the fact cannot be denied that this is the case. And a great deal of significant work can be done in this field through natural science. But there is nothing miraculous about what is being done here, just as it is not miraculous that someone is wet after being in water. It is only natural to carry with you what you have gone through. It is only natural to carry with you what you have absorbed by going through the line of ancestors. Natural science would have to take a closer look at this and, based on this, look at descendants, and it should show how genius traits are inherited. This will probably be left alone; yet one could make some very strange discoveries in the process.

[ 62 ] But the situation is different. Without negating what natural science has to say, inspired consciousness, which has the real immortal core of the human being as its object, just as sensory consciousness has the eyes and ears as its object, shows that what lives within us as the most essential inner roots of our abilities, our talents, our strengths and weaknesses, which only makes use of what we have been given as a body through birth, does not come from our physical ancestors, but from the forces we experienced in the spiritual world before we were clothed in a physical body through conception.

[ 63 ] The spiritual researcher who has now gained the ability to observe the spiritual in the soul through all the methods I have described knows that what underlies abilities and talents, strengths and weaknesses, can be no more directly inherited as can be inherited anything that we experience and remember. We know that this has come from outside. We cannot call what we remember inheritance, as it came from outside. Thus, the spiritual researcher learns in inspired consciousness to distinguish how that which comes as hereditary substance from parents and ancestors is permeated by the spiritual; permeated with the impulses that then live in this hereditary substance. And he arrives at a mental image that I can only discuss in terms of its results. A mental image that may seem paradoxical today may still seem paradoxical today, but which puts what natural science can say on the right track.

[ 64 ] We only have to create a mental image of ourselves as being in the spiritual world with our immortal part before we enter the physical world. We are in the spiritual world for centuries before we clothe ourselves again with a body. But according to the findings of his science, the spiritual researcher must create a mental image of the spiritual world in such a way that it is not located somewhere in a cloud cuckoo land. The spiritual world is always around us, just as spirit and soul are always within us, whether we move our hand or perform any other physical action. Everything that is physically real is permeated by spirit. Nothing happens that is not supported by spiritual beings and spiritual processes. But this is not pantheistic; it can be imagined in very concrete mental images.

[ 65 ] When we look back, we see the generations, we see our parents and grandparents. But while they develop downwards to be brought together in families in love, while this generation passes on the inherited characteristics, something is happening in the spiritual world. We ourselves are part of this. And just as my soul works in my hand, so too does that which has lived through centuries of me in the spiritual world, while my great-great-great-grandfather lives down here, work in the forces through which he finds the previous generation, through which they are inherited. In this whole process of inheritance, we are involved with the forces that we send down from the spiritual world. And when we are born at the end of the generational line from our parents, it is we ourselves who have contributed from the spiritual world to these characteristics clothing us. We are involved in this by being clothed in the characteristics of the generational line.

[ 66 ] The mental images of natural science are not refuted, but rather placed on a healthy, truly spiritual Science of Spirituality basis. You see, the world is truly expanded from the physical into the spiritual. We are involved in this as the inheritable characteristics develop; we are interwoven with the spiritual world, which constantly permeates the physical world, which is also contained in what the previous generations have prepared, what appears in our inheritance. In this way, we ourselves have determined our inner destiny. Through inspired consciousness, we have arrived at our inner destiny. We do not have to seek the causes of our destiny in this world, where destiny befalls us, where it seems to be thrown together, but we have to seek them in the spiritual realm. Just as we do not have to seek explanations for dreams by expecting to dream what they mean, but rather by waking up, so too must we wake up in inspired consciousness. Then what we dream here in feelings and emotions becomes become reality, but a reality that begins before birth and after death in the spiritual world. [Heraclitus] already said: “In dreams, everyone has their own world; when they wake up, they share a world with others around them.” There we wake up from what we dream about our emotions, about everything that stands in the way of our inner destiny in terms of sympathy and antipathy. But we now know how reality stimulates dreams, just as spiritual reality stimulates what we encounter as our inner destiny. And again, we carry what we experience through our abilities, through the gate of death, and connect it with the spiritual forces and continue to experience it in the spiritual world.

[ 67 ] Now we come to external destiny. For our destiny is not only made up of what we bring upon ourselves through our abilities, our strengths and weaknesses, but also of events that come upon us from outside, over which our abilities have no control. And in order to address these questions of fate, to obtain the valid answer to these questions, one must ascend to the third stage of contemplative consciousness; to that stage which I have called “intuitive knowledge.”

[ 68 ] Imaginative knowledge, inspired knowledge, intuitive knowledge: These are the three stages of contemplative consciousness. I will only elaborate on this third stage in relation to the question of destiny, because a vast field of spiritual research would lie before us if I were to elaborate on everything that can be experienced in contemplative intuitive knowledge. But in speaking about the question of destiny from this point of view, I must speak about where we bring destiny into our ordinary consciousness. Usually we do not have it within us. Usually we experience it dreamily in our feelings, our sensations. But how do we wake up to understand our destiny?

[ 69 ] By advancing in knowledge from waking to watching consciousness, one day the moment comes — one does not even need to bring about what I am about to describe through inner development, truly not through inner exercises, if one simply engages with what is described in the books on Spiritual Science, even if one has not become a spiritual researcher. then what I am about to describe will come — one day you will have a shattering experience where you say to yourself, even for those who live and breathe the literature, where you say to yourself: I have experienced many things in life; I have experienced strokes of fate that have plunged me into deep suffering and pain; I have experienced fates that have uplifted me, that have brought me joy and pleasure; for one does not need to become numb through these experiences. On the contrary, one can become more receptive to earthly suffering and earthly happiness in fate.

[ 70 ] But if one has taken this insight as seriously as is meant here, if this insight has become such that one knows: through this insight one has connected oneself with the immortal part of the human being; that you live by having arrived at figurative thinking, then brought this to the mind's eye and mind's ear in life, in the spiritual world; then this itself becomes a destiny. This becomes a destiny, my dear audience, that now has a more significant impact on life than any other destiny, and which, significantly, you yourself have brought about. These things — yes, one would like to have words quite different from those available in ordinary language if one wanted to describe them adequately — these things are significant because they transform the whole human being as a human soul. One does not need to become dull; on the contrary, one can feel all other destinies all the more intensely. But the one fate that one has built up oneself from the very first building block, and which then takes shape in the realization that one has become someone else; one now lives in certain times, in what is not physical, not sensual, what is spiritual in life, what testifies to its own immortality. By preparing this destiny for yourself, you have become capable of judging the question of destiny through knowledge. Now this question of destiny begins to become the object of intuitive knowledge. Now the consciousness that I have called the contemplative consciousness expands anew. And now you know: What is it that underlies your will, what you always sleep through, what is it? How does it come into you? It comes in just as what you experience in life now comes out of you again, but which carries you yourself through birth and death.

[ 71 ] We must take one thing into account here. One can and should have noble, beautiful thoughts about various things. One can also have beautiful motives for one's actions and carry out these motives. But is quite certain that one can only truly learn to position oneself correctly in life through life itself. One can have great skill and the best will to carry something out, but one will not do it as well as if one had already done it. Only life can truly teach. And one has learned the most in life when one has to pass through the gate of death. Where does one take what one has learned?

[ 72 ] If you want to gain clarity on this question, you have to consider another aspect that is accessible to intuitive consciousness. When you look at human destiny from the outside, it appears strange. Ordinary consciousness actually oversleeps the will. We are seventeen years old; we feel something vague, it remains weaker than a dream. Life carries us on, let's say into our 25th year; stroke of fate after stroke of fate befalls us, falls upon us. Life drives us, we think. We think that this or that drives us in its path. But if we pay close attention, we find something completely different; we find a strange pull within ourselves. We learn to recognize that it is not just something that happens by chance, that drags us into the stroke of fate, but that we are actively involved. When we look back, we find that we did, albeit dimly and dreamlike, want this or that; this is what led us to the stroke of fate. And the spiritual researcher comes to find something in the soul that can be compared to the feeling of hunger. And when what we have actually been secretly seeking occurs, what we have actually been secretly seeking, which has only been hidden by the fact that we drive our body toward the stroke of fate, then it is like a satisfaction when we have achieved it, like the satisfaction of hunger; the soul sleeps, it does not notice it, but it is still there. And intuitive consciousness learns to know where it comes from. They come from life.

[ 73 ] Just as we acquire the most important things in life, we also acquire what we have slept through in life. And in this way we learn to recognize that we carry life into life, that human life on earth flows into repeated lives on earth. That which lives within us as if asleep and draws near from outer life, which we approach as if thirsty, as we approach food when hungry, which seems to come from outside, has an effect on us because we carry our previous earthly life and what we have acquired in this life over into later earthly lives. Thus the whole mortal life of the human being flows into repeated earthly lives. From life to life, the outer destiny is carried, and in the spiritual life in between, in which the impulses for all that works from within are laid down in the spiritual world. These things lead to a complete — to use Goethe's words — spiritual understanding of humanity; they lead to a real understanding of the human being.

[ 74 ] We must not, as has unfortunately happened, allow foolish simplicity to come and say: Yes, you are making what human beings experience as fate their own fault. And today, when we are living in such a fateful time, it might seem particularly cruel — and Spiritual Science has also been slandered in this regard — that human beings not only experience their misfortune, but that it is also presented as the consequences of previous lives. But that is not the case. We are not talking about guilt and atonement; those are concepts of ordinary consciousness. In clairvoyant consciousness, these concepts have no value. There we see how life passes from one earthly existence to another, and in between undergoes spiritual lives between death and a new birth; how life thereby acquires its higher meaning; how the dream of life is integrated into a higher spiritual reality, just as the outer dream is integrated into outer reality.

[ 75 ] But above all, we learn to understand the ordinary concepts, the concepts of ordinary life, in a higher sense. We learn to look at our previous earthly lives, from which we have created the causes for our present life. But we also learn how misfortune, which may befall us for the first time, can be the basis and starting point for destiny in the following earthly life. There can be no misfortune in human life that is not somehow the starting point for a richness of life, for an elevation, for an expansion of the meaning of life. It may be difficult in individual human lives to view misfortune not only with a feeling that is never completely clear to oneself; but especially in such a fateful time as today, some light should fall into the thinking and contemplating human soul, which has so much misfortune around it, if all life is given as high a meaning as our dreams are given when we wake up into physical reality .

[ 76 ] And finally, let me express a conviction. Certainly, contemplating profound questions must always be close to the human heart, to the human soul. But in our time there are still special challenges, where we have so many trials and, even if we have hopes, we still have misfortune and suffering and pain around us, so we must crave enlightenment, that leads us beyond the mere contemplation of life from the waking consciousness of the day to the integration of this life into a higher spiritual reality, in which everything that perhaps can hardly be presented as meaningful becomes meaningful. And I would like to express my conviction in conclusion that such reflections on life, such reflections on the human being, are truly connected internally with all that appears to me as the deepest most profound, the innermost source of German spiritual life.

[ 77 ] When I have a mental image of Spiritual Science arising in the world in the right way, in the way that it stands in opposition to the external natural sciences as a spiritual science, in a manner worthy of it, then I can only think that the sources that flowed in Goethe and also in others in the first half of the nineteenth century, which have been largely forgotten, should be pursued further, that the search should continue from these sources of German spiritual life.

[ 78 ] One of the first essays I wrote as a very young man deals with how an elevation into the spiritual must come precisely from the genuine roots of German spiritual life. This essay may have been youthful and immature in many ways, but I would like to draw attention to it today, because it was well-intentioned, and because I said: We may accept the materialistic form of Darwinism from abroad. But these things must be deepened spiritually through the deepest sources of German spiritual life.

[ 79 ] That can also be said in today's world. That is why it seemed so satisfying to me. Eduard von Hartmann — I am not his follower, but he is one of the most spiritual philosophers who also sought to deepen his philosophy into the spiritual realm; I was pleasantly touched when he said that he believed that even modern physics must free itself from abstract and agnostic aberrations if university philosophy turns away from them and the German zeitgeist frees itself from Anglomania.

[ 80 ] The German Zeitgeist does not need to accept foreign ideas, especially when it wants to ascend to the highest levels of spiritual life. It can build on the deepest roots of its own strength. And, I would like to point out in particular, this is indicated by the entire spirit of my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Mystery of Man), when I attempted to show how those who built on the most profound search of German spiritual life wanted to lead human anthropology, the study of the outer physical human being, to a spiritual understanding. Such is Troxler, who is unfortunately forgotten, but who will become famous again, because he gathered the first intuitive building blocks for what will emerge in the broadest sense as Spiritual Science or anthroposophy. He already speaks of the “supersensible spirit” and “spiritual senses.”

[ 81 ] “The supersensible must be grasped [gap], yet it cannot be overlooked [that this idea cannot be the fruit of speculation].”

[ 82 ] And Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, expresses that human beings can rise above themselves — he first had the inkling that Spiritual Science could only arise in our time — that human beings must rise above mere anthropology to something else. He already said in the 1840s:

[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 its own freely conscious actions. [...] This thorough understanding of the human being now elevates “anthropology” to “anthroposophy” in its final result.]

[ 83 ] Anthroposophy, ladies and gentlemen, is not something that has been conjured up arbitrarily. For those who understand German spiritual life, it is precisely that can be drawn from the deepest sources of this German spiritual life. All these sources have been forgotten in recent decades; they must be reopened. I am certainly not saying that any philosophy can prove in a one-sided way that any philosopher is of very special ability, but we can still judge by what the Bible says: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Where such fruits have ripened, as those on Troxler's and Fichte's trees, there lie other sources, other roots of the forces of the people from which they originate, which are called to something quite different. Not as something absolute, but as a symptom of the roots of the forces of the people, I would like to say this, which anthroposophically [oriented] Spiritual Science, as it is meant here, as Immanuel Fichte and Troxler sensed it. When, for example, Novalis says:

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

[ 84 ] Only German intellectual life dares to do this in such a purely spiritual way. There is no need to be chauvinistic. What I am now saying is not spoken out of feeling, but out of knowledge. But one may say this. And one may say even more. Spiritual Science is really so well suited to making people not proud or arrogant, but rather humble on the path of research, of the everlasting struggle toward the goal [gap]. People are quick to accuse Spiritual Science of being not only an opponent of natural science, but also an opponent of religion. This is truly not the case. And even if the name of Christ is not mentioned in every Spiritual Science lecture, it is still the science that shows the way to the spirit, and therefore also the path to true religion. And if one does not enter into religious waters, it could also be because one does not want to meddle in religion; because one wants to bring to the field of Spiritual Science that which leads back to religion, but one cannot be reproached for this for the simple reason that one does not want to meddle in religion. But Spiritual Science can never lead to pride and arrogance. And here, too, the German spirit found a beautiful word as early as the eighteenth century. It was found by someone who spoke many heartfelt words from genuine German spiritual life, but who also absorbed foreign influences. In the eighteenth century, Saint Martin wrote a book that was translated by Matthias Claudius. Claudius, that quintessential German, also found the right word for Spiritual Science when he said:

[For whether one is conceited and a fool about a mustache or about metaphysics and Henriade, whether one hates and envies a larger pumpkin or the invention of differential or integral calculus; in short, whether one is held back and hindered by one's five yoke oxen or by one's polyhistors on a rope, that seems to be basically the same thing and not two different things.]

[ 85 ] But I would like to say: In renewing a sentiment that lived in Johann Gottlieb Fichte when he gave his meaningful “Speeches to the German Nation” to call upon the forces that lie in the true sources of German folklore; when he gave these speeches in difficult times for Germanism, he said in conclusion: He did not speak in order to belittle another people in any way, but because he wanted to make his Germans understand that they carry within themselves something that must not disappear, because otherwise it would be lost not only to the Germans themselves, but to the world. In our fateful times today, it must be said in conclusion:

[ 86 ] No matter how threatening the enemies may be, no matter what the enemies around us may think today about this German intellectual life, of which we have presented a small excerpt here today with reference to the spirit, this excerpt also teaches us: If what many of the enemies want today were to come to pass, if this Germanness were to be damaged in the deep roots of its being, then not only would Germanness lose something, every people has its [weaknesses] , but also its special talents, and one of the special talents of the German people dawned on us today – it is significant for all of humanity. And that is why, in this fateful time, we can say, as it were, as a summary of today's reflection: We can hope that we will emerge from the trials of the present time in such a way that the roots of German culture remain undamaged; that what so many people today wish for will not come to pass. For if what the wider world today wants to see lost were to be lost, it would not only be something that would be lost to our German people, it would be something irretrievably lost to the entire development of humanity.