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 ] Dear attendees! In the present time, it is somewhat difficult to speak about the mysteries of life and the world, as they form the basis of this evening's reflections here, is somewhat difficult if, as is the case here, one claims to be fully scientific; scientific in the way that has become customary for humanity over the last few centuries, especially since the nineteenth century and up to the present day, through the great and tremendous advances in natural science. But precisely in the face of these admirable advances in natural science, and in the face of what the spirit of the times has made of it in recent times with regard to the exploration of spiritual life, it is extremely difficult to speak about questions such as the immortality of the soul or even questions of fate in such a way that one does not encounter resistance upon resistance with one's arguments, opposition upon opposition.

[ 2 ] If one attempts to survey the various works of literature on scientific psychology in recent times, one will find that discussion of the questions of the immortality of the soul and the question of fate has completely disappeared from these works of literature since about the 1860s, that in a certain sense it is no longer considered scientific in psychology today to discuss these questions. And yet, even in the nineteenth century, the most important scientific representatives of psychology longed to deepen their knowledge of the soul in such a way that they would not only deal with how ideas come together in our soul, how impulses of will flash through ideas and cause our actions, as is the case in psychology today, but would deepen their knowledge to such an extent that they would be able to understand how the soul is structured. mental images come together in our soul, how the impulses of the will flash through the mental images and cause our actions, but to deepen it in such a way that the scientific results of psychology can also lead to answers to all those great questions that come together in the question of the immortality of the soul. To give just one example, consider the recently deceased, highly significant nineteenth-century psychologist Franz Brentano, who published the first volume of his Seelenwissenschaft oder Psychologie (Psychology) in the spring of 1874. In this first volume, to which he promised a second volume in the fall — that is, in 1874, and the entire work was to comprise four or five volumes — in this first volume, Franz Brentano says:

Ah, it would be a very great, an irreplaceable loss for psychology if, because it wants to be scientific, it could only deal with questions such as the socialization of mental images in our soul, the emergence of pleasure and pain, the direction of attention, and so on, and if it had to renounce fulfilling the great hopes of the ancient Greek thinkers Plato and Aristotle, which consisted in handing down to mankind mental images about how parts of his being remain when man passes through the gate of death and surrenders his body to the elements of the earth.

[ 3 ] Now the peculiar thing has happened, and I mention this not because of its historical significance, but because of its fundamental importance — the peculiar thing has happened that this work by Franz Brentano, which was truly meaningful and profound, so that anyone who studies it thoroughly can see: Brentano wants everything to culminate in the last volume on the immortality of the soul, that not even the second volume of this work, which was promised for the fall, has been published, and that nothing at all has been published until these days, when Franz Brentano died.

[ 4 ] Anyone who thoroughly studies Franz Brentano's philosophical views will see that, given the way Brentano approached psychology, it was impossible for him, if he wanted to remain honest, to arrive at any view on the question of the immortality of the soul. If he wanted to remain honest, he had to stick to the promise of the work. He could not overcome the obstacles that stood in the way of the goals he had in mind at that time, in 1874. Now it was precisely he who provided the proof that something great, something truly great of modern times, had prevented achieving anything significant in the field of the spiritual and intellectual. Under the influence of this great man, and in particular under the influence of the admirable results and advances in natural science already mentioned, Brentano had already demanded with all decisiveness in 1866, when he took up his teaching post as a private lecturer in Würzburg:

[ 5 ] If there is to be a science of the soul that is truly worthy of modern humanity and its scientific demands, it must be one that proceeds in its research and methodology in exactly the same way as natural science, which has achieved so much in its own way. At that time, he uttered a sentence that was much discussed among those who deal with such matters. [Gap] The true method of research in the Spiritual Science or philosophy can be none other than that of the natural sciences.

[ 6 ] Now, one could say that such a demand was just as natural and justified in the nineteenth century as it was, on the other hand, an obstacle to arriving at any view, any mental image of the questions that are to be the subject of this evening's discussion, from the point of view of Spiritual Science on which I have been privileged to give lectures here in Bremen for many years now on a wide variety of subjects .

[ 7 ] Natural science, with its methods, has also extended its approach to the spiritual life, the soul life of human beings. What could natural science actually find in relation to this soul life of human beings? It has found something significant in its own way.

[ 8 ] Our soul life ebbs and flows; it is, in essence, what we are. It ebbs and flows in mental images, feelings, and impulses of will, which assert themselves in the most diverse ways throughout the day, from waking up to falling asleep. The natural scientist asks: How do these ebbing and flowing mental images, feelings, and impulses of will relate to what is called our nervous system, the processes of our nervous system, what is our physical organization in general? The natural scientist considers the relationship between what we know from experience as our soul life the relationship of this soul life to the transience of human nature, to that which is handed over to the elements of the earth at death, and he, the natural scientist, has indeed achieved something very significant in this field. Although it must be said, and in particular what I — if I may mention it here — research that I was just able to complete this winter show that natural science is still very one-sided. But what has already been achieved in terms of researching the relationship between the spiritual spiritual and the brain and nervous system is such a significant beginning that it promises so much for the near future that one really has to say: it is not just in terms of the results alone, but in terms of the conscientiousness and honesty of the research, which has become something tremendously exemplary for all science in the field of natural science, that one must not sin if Spiritual Science wants to claim scientificity, must not sin against.

[ 9 ] Now, however, this natural science research — I will not go into details here — has only investigated the relationship between the life of the soul and the transience of the body. And it has led to a much more intense recognition than was previously the case of the dependence of what we call our mental images, feelings, and will on the transience of the body. As a result, the demands placed on Spiritual Science have also become greater than they were in any past age. In any past age, it was not possible to point to individual results of natural science with such decisiveness point to individual findings of natural science with such certainty if one wanted to claim that a mental image, as it occurs in ordinary life between birth and death, feeling, and willing are bound to physical life. Because they are bound to it, they must, in the form they have in ordinary life and in ordinary science, also dissolve with this physical life when it is surrendered to the elements of the earth. In earlier ages of research, it was not possible to speak in such a strict and decisive form about the dependence of the soul on the body. Today, the representatives of natural science psychology can do so with a certain degree of justification.

[ 10 ] This also increases the demands that can now be made on true Spiritual Science, which wants to stand alongside natural science and which, in a certain sense, must have the opposite task. If natural science investigates the relationship between the soul and the body, Spiritual Science must investigate the relationship between the soul and what is truly spiritual in human beings. For it is only from this truly spiritual element, if it exists, that we can hope to see the essence of the human being, which, unhindered from the passing of the body and that which is dependent on the physical, passes through the gate of death and is received into a world where it can unfold, even if it is not enveloped by external, physical reality.

[ 11 ] Now, the first thing that arises is the need to ask the question about the immortality of the soul in the right way. In true science, ladies and gentlemen, it is very often a matter of asking the questions in the right way. If the question is wrong, sometimes everything in the answer will also be wrong. So what is it perhaps we need to ask correctly what the soul actually demands when it asks for this immortality? Can this soul demand to know whether anything, no matter what, of our human nature passes through the gate of death? Can this soul, for example, demand to know that an unconscious, as Eduard von Hartmann believes, who was, incidentally, a great and important man, that an unconscious passes through the gate of death? The soul of man should, in principle, be indifferent to this fundamental question of whether an unconscious passes through the gate of . When the soul asks the question of immortality, it must be concerned with learning something about how consciousness passes through the gate of death; whether that which passes through death from the human being can develop consciousness after death. Thus, the question of the immortality of the soul is, in particular, a question of consciousness.

[ 12 ] Therefore, in the last chapter of my last book, “The Riddle of Man,” building on what has been achieved in the course of spiritual life for the study of the soul, I have attempted to emphasize sharply the question of the supersensible, namely the question of the immortality of the soul as a question of consciousness. And I pointed out that what Goethe once described in a meaningful way in a short essay, as if he had a premonition, one might say, of an enormous field of knowledge in the times to come, what he called “Anschauende Urteilskraft” (Perceptive Judgment). Like so much else that claims to be true Spiritual Science, this little essay by Goethe has also become less well known. Anyone who, like me, has spent more than three decades intensively engaged with the questions of Goethe's research can safely say that this short essay contains one of Goethe's most significant and compelling ideas.

[ 13 ] Goethe asked himself at the time: What is Kantianism actually about? I myself have seen — if I may make this personal remark — the copy of Kant's Critique of Judgment [and] Critique of Pure Reason that Goethe read. I saw it with the pencil marks in the margins that Goethe had made. I was able to form a mental image of which passages particularly caught Goethe's attention, and from this I was able to form an idea of why Goethe took offense at the basic concept of Kantianism. As is well known, Kant — let us briefly mention this philosophical consideration, we do not want to return to purely philosophical matters later — Kant wanted to establish certain limits of human knowledge. But at the same time, by claiming that human knowledge reaches limits that cannot be overcome, he also claimed that the consciousness of freedom lies within humans as a kind of practical requirement; so that humans cannot know anything about freedom and immortality, but must accept them as practical requirements.

[ 14 ] Goethe opposed precisely this aspect of Kantianism. Kant called a person who wanted to try to really seek the creative image, the spiritual essence, the supersensible in the world of appearances, Kant called such a person “addicted to the adventure of reason.” Goethe objected: “If one really wanted to arrive at the demand for freedom and immortality in the moral and practical realm, why should the human soul not be capable of penetrating the supernatural and spiritual in its perception and, as he said, courageously enduring the adventure of reason that the old man from Königsberg wants to forbid?”

[ 15 ] And Goethe wrote — he did not yet have Spiritual Science as it is meant here, but he sensed the path to this Spiritual Science before his soul — he attributed to human beings the ability to have “intuitive judgment” and, through this intuitive judgment, to truly penetrate the world of spiritual beings and processes. Developing what Goethe sensed at that time, we arrive at what is referred to here today as Spiritual Science; we arrive at what must be called “contemplative consciousness.”

[ 16 ] Contemplative consciousness, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to begin by explaining it in this way. In our everyday lives, we already live not in just one, but in two clearly distinct states of consciousness. We live in a dull, state of consciousness that extends into the unconscious, from which, however, what we call the dream world emerges chaotically. Actually, we are dealing with the state of sleep, and the dream world rises from the very dull life of sleep, of which we are only vaguely aware; that is why most people believe that we are not conscious at all. From this dull life, dreams emerge, flooding up and down in images. So this state of consciousness exists. From this state of consciousness, we wake up into the state of waking daytime consciousness, which we experience from waking up to falling asleep. Now the spiritual researcher shows that just as it is possible to to wake up from sleep or dream consciousness to ordinary everyday consciousness, which is also the consciousness of ordinary science, it is also possible to wake up from this daytime consciousness to seeing consciousness, so that, just as sleep or dream consciousness relates to waking daytime consciousness, waking daytime consciousness relates to seeing consciousness. And in this seeing consciousness, we have before us a completely different world than in ordinary, waking daytime consciousness. Just as when we dream, we have ascending and descending images before us, and regard these images as realities while we dream, but when we wake up we know that these images rise and fall from what our organism has received from the experiences of outer life, that is, what rises and falls from the organism itself, but we know that we are dealing with the fabric of a world of images, just as we know when we wake up from sleep or dream consciousness that we connect our entire human life with a sensory-physical external world.

[ 17 ] And now we do not remain with the images, as in a dream, but we transfer the images, as it were, to the surface of the things of the outer world. We connect what in dreams are merely surging images, with which we remain in the dream, with what we really connect with in the outer world. Thus, the spiritual researcher shows that we can also rise above what we have in everyday consciousness as the mental images, the impulses of feeling and will that we connect with external physical things, so that we now feel connected not only with external physical things, but also with a world that lies behind these physical-sensory things, just as the physical-sensory things that surround us, lie behind the dream world. We know nothing of them in dream consciousness, yet this physical-sensory world lies behind it. When we are in waking daytime consciousness, we know nothing of the spiritual world, but it lies behind us just as the physical-sensory world lies behind the dream world.

[ 18 ] It will now be my task to show how this awakening takes place, how human beings move from ordinary waking consciousness to a seeing consciousness through which they are transported into the spiritual world. I may perhaps answer the question by that I am referring to something that might seem like a personal remark, but which in reality is quite objectively related to what I have to deal with. Those of you who have been here often know how little I am inclined to insert personal remarks. But in this case, it is really a matter of the personal-impersonal. And so I may say: When, about 36 years ago, I laid the first building blocks for what is meant here as Spiritual Science, of which I have a chapter to present, an interesting treatise by the famous great aesthetician and philosophical researcher Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who is called “V-Vischer.” Vischer wrote very beautifully and profoundly at that time about a treatise by the current Leipzig University professor Volkelt, who wrote about “Die Traum-Phantasie” (The Dream Fantasy). We will not go into details here; I would just like to mention one sentence. As I said, when I was gathering the first building blocks of what I am about to present, it struck me like a bolt of lightning what Friedrich Theodor Vischer said in a treatise at that time, but especially one sentence: “The unified soul of man cannot be in the body, but it cannot exist anywhere else but in the body.”

[ 19 ] Think, ladies and gentlemen, what a strange statement this is, coming from a profound man who truly explores the nature of the soul from the seriousness of human nature! What a peculiar statement! Although it is not a complete contradiction, it is almost a complete contradiction. At that time, however, this coincided with other researchers, such as the then famous du Bois-Reymond, who spoke of the mysteries of research that cannot be overcome. Du Bois-Reymond said at a famous gathering in the 1870s: “No human mind can overcome the mysteries of matter and consciousness.” And then he stated in a paper “Seven World Mysteries” that one must stop at.

[ 20 ] Yes, at the time it seemed quite right to me that these researchers had reached certain points beyond which they did not want to go, so to speak, with ordinary thinking. But the whole way in which the researchers simply stood outside of scientific consciousness in relation to the fact that they had reached such points, this whole way of doing things, would make it completely impossible for me to go along with them.

[ 21 ] At that time, I wrote a lengthy treatise on du Bois-Reymond's “world riddle,” which was, of course, rejected by all journals.

[ 22 ] I also wrote a shorter treatise, which I sent to Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who actually responded to the matter with tremendous love and admitted that this way of thinking — and this approach was nothing other than what led to what I now call Spiritual Science — that this approach contained something that would enable us to go beyond what is commonly referred to in science and everyday thinking as the “limits of knowledge.”

[ 23 ] Vischer died very soon afterwards. And so the one who really wanted to continue cultivating Spiritual Science in the sense mentioned here remained completely alone. And one can say that even today it still encounters opposition upon opposition, often of a very strange kind.

[ 24 ] What must be assumed — if this Spiritual Science is not to degenerate into wild fantasy, into all the perverse mystical stuff that is so often confused with Spiritual Science today — is that it must start precisely from such borderline questions. There are not seven world riddles, as Bois-Reymond believes, there are, one might say, hundreds. If one takes seriously what the human soul can pursue on the path of knowledge, one comes to such boundaries. And it is precisely the striving for such boundaries, the conscious leading of thought to such boundaries, that is what matters if one wants to make progress in Spiritual Science.

[ 25 ] Ordinary thinking, including ordinary science, says: Well, these are the limits of human knowledge, and we must be content with that; human beings cannot go any further with their cognitive abilities. Spiritual Science cannot be satisfied with such theorizing, such, one might say, logical stagnation at what appears to be the limits of knowledge. One does not theorize here, but approaches such limits with the whole life of the soul. And it is precisely when one struggles with these limits of cognitive ability — if I may use this expression — when one struggles with all one's vitality at these limits, that one transcends them in a very peculiar way, which I would like to clarify by means of a comparison.

[ 26 ] People notice, especially when they become spiritual researchers in the manner described here, that by tormenting their thinking in this way at such boundaries, it does not lose vitality, but gains it. They notice that at this moment, thinking becomes something like an inner sense of touch. When we first use our sense of touch , our sense of feeling, our capacity for feeling, say in a dark room, by simply bumping into the walls with the organs of our sense of touch, then the sense of touch remains something that basically only conveys our own being, our own experience. But if we continue with the sense of touch, if we feel surfaces, feel shapes, then the sense of touch develops further. Then the sense of touch gives us not only the feeling that we have been bumped, but also the shapes of the external physical objects.

[ 27 ] The same is true when we develop thinking in the liveliness I have referred to at the points I have mentioned, where ordinary thinking reaches what are called limits. For this living thinking, it is as if it were reaching limits with a spiritual feeling in spiritual darkness. And just as the sense of feeling must work its way out of the indeterminate experience of only itself, so thinking works its way out of such limits by becoming aware of the spiritual that lies behind it — just as in touching, the external physical things lie behind the sense of touch — by becoming aware of the spiritual. It is precisely beyond these limits that the spiritual world opens up, just as the real physical world opens up to the sense of touch when the sense of touch enters into a relationship with what is then also the physical boundary.

[ 28 ] Goethe once said very beautifully: “The eyes and ears of human beings, what are they but highly developed organs of touch!” From indeterminate organs, what we now know as the complex eyes and ears gradually differentiated themselves. And modern science stands firmly on this ground, which Goethe, like so many other things. In the spiritual realm, we can say that the first stage of visual consciousness dawns on us when we progress from touching the so-called limits of knowledge to formation, and then come to develop what, to use Goethe's words, “spiritual eyes and spiritual ears,” where spiritual organs develop that are now just as purely spiritual and have nothing to do with physical organs. Just as the eyes and ears are more highly developed organs compared to the sense of touch, so everything that we further develop in our visual consciousness, and which we will discuss in a moment, is an effect of what thinking, which comes to life, can do with what initially presents itself as the limits of knowledge. This thinking and mental image must transition from the state in which it initially exists in ordinary life to a completely different state of inner vitality. It must become something completely different.

[ 29 ] It is still extremely difficult to talk about these things today, simply because Spiritual Science is only at the beginning of its development. However, the words of our language are chosen for what is there. So it is difficult to find fully valid words in language for what is to be expressed in Spiritual Science. Therefore, allow me to use words that sometimes only approximately express what is meant. Nevertheless, what is meant must be made clear.

[ 30 ] Now I would like to say that thinking that emerges from the state of ordinary life must become more flexible, more mobile. Goethe has already made a great start in this regard. One only needs to read, with true inner understanding, what what Goethe wrote so beautifully about the metamorphosis of plants, where he first develops concepts, albeit still elementary ones, but concepts that are of a completely different kind than those concepts that one otherwise has in life and in science. He develops a concept that is actually a very flexible concept, the concept of the leaf, which is at the same time the concept of the flower, of the plant organism; a concept that itself lives inwardly, that is not static, that has not become rigid. This inner flexibility, this inner life of the concept must be achieved. Goethe then arrived at the concept of the “primordial plant.” What is the primordial plant? It is all plants; not this plant, not that plant. Goethe was particularly pleased and delighted when he came up with this concept. And he said: “If one possesses this concept, one can use it to form the images of all plants, with the possibility of life.” Thus he had a concept that, as it were, wound its way through all plants.

[ 31 ] You can see what is important! This is a beginning, but a correct beginning. It is important to gain a completely different position on the concept than the position one has in ordinary life on concepts and mental images. In ordinary life, people swear by concepts and mental images. They want them to express what processes and objects exist out there in life. The most ordinary things illustrate how people want sharply defined concepts and want to swear by them. Someone imagines, and rightly so, from the concept: it is good to exercise for certain illnesses; he swears by this concept. He meets a person who complains about his condition. What he hears as a complaint roughly corresponds to what he has formed the concept for: one must exercise. And he says to the one who complains: Yes, you must exercise a lot. He gets the answer: Yes, but you're forgetting that I'm a mail carrier. You see, this is just one example, a vulgar example, but one that makes you notice the issue a little. There are plenty of examples of this in science. It is people's infatuation with their clearly defined concepts and mental images.

[ 32 ] For Spiritual Science, the mental image becomes something completely different. It must become like a photograph that captures a tree or a house from different angles. If a tree is photographed from four different angles, each picture may be different from the others, but the tree is accurately reproduced in all four pictures. However, in order to form a mental image of the tree, one must have all four pictures.

[ 33 ] This is what happens when the observing consciousness rises from ordinary thinking to developed thinking. What matters is that one has the full reality of a thing, not a single concept; but that one approaches reality as multifaceted as possible from all possible points of view, and that one approaches reality with full consciousness: You cannot comprehend reality with any mental image anyway; you always remain outside of reality with your mental images. Those who claim to have complete, clearly defined concepts of the spiritual world never come close to the spiritual world at all. Today, people not only want to have clearly defined concepts for the spiritual world, but they even want to have something that is very similar to external things. But the first step into intuitive consciousness is to free oneself from being bound by mental images, to progress toward a life of mental images that is as versatile as possible. Starting from this point, we can return once more to our characterization of seeing consciousness.

[ 34 ] In dream life, which is actually sleep life, except that dreams arise from sleep life, images surge up and down in dream life. We take these images themselves as reality; we live in these images. Now we wake up. We no longer take the images as reality. We only take the mental images as reality insofar as they tell us something about external things and objects. To that extent, we regard them as reality. In our external waking consciousness, we take our mental images as true images of things. In our seeing consciousness, we no longer take them as images either, but as something that sets us on the path to see in the spirit; which enables us to depict the spiritual from different sides. That is why I have for years called the first stage of contemplative consciousness the stage of “imaginative knowledge” ; not because one imagines something, but because one ascends to images. From ordinary abstract thinking, which is justified for ordinary life, one ascends to living thinking, which knows: It knows only to walk around spiritual reality in order to characterize spiritual reality. But image consciousness, spiritual image consciousness, is what must be developed as the first stage.

[ 35 ] One could also characterize these three stages of consciousness in the following way: In sleep or dream consciousness, we live in images. We live entirely in the images of dreams. This is also the case in sleep, where we live in something similar to images, only so dimly that we believe it is completely unconscious. But what do you know nothing about in ordinary dreams? About the body. By connecting with the external sensory perceptions at the same time, you become aware of the physical body. You cannot have this awareness of the physical body in sleep consciousness, even though everything from this body also rises up in sleep consciousness. What human beings carry within themselves as their spiritual being relates to ordinary consciousness in the same way that the physical body relates to dream consciousness. They cannot know the physical body in dream consciousness. Now, in waking daytime consciousness, they get to know the body. In clairvoyant consciousness, however, they learn not only about the physical body, but also about what they carry within themselves as spiritual beings. They ascend to clairvoyant consciousness and now learn to know themselves as spiritual beings, just as they learn to know themselves as physical beings in waking consciousness.

[ 36 ] I would like to characterize somewhat negatively what I have described as the first stage of contemplative consciousness, and what I have been calling for years: the stage of imaginative knowledge, namely for the reason that so often the opposition to this contemplative consciousness is so easily confused with what is the complete opposite. It is so easy to say: Well, the spiritual researcher also speaks of all kinds of images that he comes to, he speaks of a special consciousness. There we have it! It is just as if someone imagines that hallucinations, illusions, or suggestions are realities.

[ 37 ] Now, if you accept what I have given as the characteristics of what is called seeing consciousness here, you will see that this seeing consciousness is the exact opposite of everything I have just mentioned. Take suggestion, for example; it consists of a narrowing of consciousness; it consists of you being deprived of the opportunity to enlighten yourself about what you have before you. Whereas the spiritual researcher demands that consciousness be expanded; that everything be brought in that can illuminate what he has before him from the most diverse angles. If someone is under suggestion and is handed a potato with the statement that it is a pear, he will bite into it and find that it is a pear. What has happened? What has happened is that their consciousness has been narrowed, that they no longer have the capacity for criticism. The mental image that makes it clear to them that it is not a pear has been taken away from them. They no longer have the possibility of developing their consciousness.

[ 38 ] The opposite is true in spiritual research. There, consciousness is expanded; there, one can apply all criticism. There, one looks at the thing or process in the right way, not only from the side that one sees in ordinary consciousness, but from all sides. Or take hallucination or illusion, what do they consist of? They consist of the fact that the human being is less free from the organism than in waking daytime consciousness. When you see and hear in waking daytime consciousness, and summarize what you see and hear with your mind, you are in a certain sense independent of the rest of the organism. It serves you to summarize the experiences of the senses into the experience of the I. But you are independent; you are more independent than when you are subject to an illusion or hallucination. Then the senses do not function properly; then what lies in the body functions; you make yourself more dependent on the physical than in ordinary sensory consciousness. And so it is with everything dreamlike, and so it is with what often appears to be a caricature of real mysticism. Spiritual Science must point out precisely these things, because a spiteful opposition often maliciously confuses them with these things. Even if one takes the extraordinarily beautiful products of what is called mysticism — yes, I say this without reservation — if one takes the beautiful mystical works of Mechthild of Magdeburg, even this mysticism consists in such a mystic freeing herself from what is external understanding, but in return going back to a deeper experience of the body. She renders what she experiences in the body poetically, vividly, beautifully, magnificently, but she makes herself more dependent on the body.

[ 39 ] Contemplative consciousness develops the human being in the opposite direction; it is that which does not make the human being dependent on the body. While the dreamer is dependent on the body and sensory consciousness is dependent on the senses, contemplative consciousness is such that only the spiritual entity and nothing physical is involved. Therefore, the development of contemplative consciousness is precisely what most effectively dispels all suggestibility, all hypnotism, all illusory capacity, everything illusory, and so on, and it takes a great deal of malice for those who see through these things to nevertheless confuse true Spiritual Science with this illusory and false mysticism.

[ 40 ] But then, when a person has reached this stage of imaginative knowledge, they experience something around them — I would like to use a comparison: let us assume that there are people who have to learn that there is a table; then they learn that there is air; there are not many such people today, but there have been such people, who know nothing about air and only see: there is nothing there — when a person has reached this stage, they learn, through imaginative consciousness, that there is something spiritual in our environment, and that we, as spiritual human beings, are just as much a part of this supersensible world as we are, with our blood and muscles, a part of the physical-sensible world that surrounds us.

[ 41 ] Now, here we have a curious point, my dear audience, where one can say: Spiritual Science today already coexists wonderfully with real science. What is often presented in popular lectures on worldviews under the name of monism is often a natural science of twenty or thirty years ago; it is often pure scientific dilettantism. Anyone who really stands on the ground of contemporary natural science can compare the work of Spiritual Science and the work of natural science with it! When workers who want to dig a tunnel dig into a mountain from two directions, if the arrangements are correct, the workers will meet in the middle. This is how Spiritual Science and natural science work together. And we can already point to many areas today where Spiritual Science and natural science really do converge. And here is one point: the first point of imaginative cognition.

[ 42 ] You know that physics often speaks of ether. We can also call ether that which we first perceive as supersensible, which is in our entire environment, which also lives within ourselves. We consist not only of bones and muscles and blood, but also of ether. We carry our etheric body within us. In the penultimate issue of the magazine “Das Reich,” I called this etheric body of the human being the image-forming body, so as to avoid misunderstandings. But physics speaks of ether. I cannot now cite all the theories that physicists have been putting forward for a long time, as that would take a long time; nor is it necessary. What is interesting, however, is what physicists have come to today with regard to ether. You only need to take something like what the physicist Planck, professor at the University of Berlin, has already said. In a lecture, which has also been printed, he says: "Yes, much has been said about ether, all kinds of properties have been attributed to it; today we must admit: it cannot be attributed with any material properties."

[ 43 ] Consider, my dear audience, that physicists have now reached the point where they can say: under no circumstances can ether be regarded as anything other than something non-material. Science therefore already compels us to regard ether as something supernatural. In doing so, it arrives at the same conclusion as Spiritual Science, which has reached the first stage of intuitive consciousness, which has arrived at imaginative .

[ 44 ] It knows that we are surrounded not only by physical objects and physical processes, but also by etheric objects and etheric processes. But it actually sees something essential. This is not a vague pantheism: spirit, spirit, spirit is everywhere. That would be like a botanist walking across a meadow and saying: plants, plants, plants. The pantheist does not attribute any concrete details to the spirit. Just as the botanist would be ridiculous if he only ever talked about plants, plants, plants, so too is the person who, as a pantheist, says: Spirit, spirit is everywhere.

[ 45 ] First, the seeing consciousness introduces us to the real world of formative forces. There we learn, by ascending step by step, and by examining ourselves first with contemplative consciousness in imaginative knowledge, we truly learn about that which is our coherent human being between birth or conception and death, but which is a supersensible human being. We know today that the sensory substances we absorb are completely replaced after a few years. After about seven years, we no longer carry any of the substances that we carry with us today. But what actually works from hour to hour, from week to week, from year to year, from decade to decade between birth and death, is the living, undulating etheric body or formative force body, the supersensible within us, which initially underlies our sensory world; this is the first supersensible thing we grasp in imaginative knowledge.

[ 46 ] And only when we grasp this can we become clear about certain concepts that ordinary psychology can never clarify, such as everything that is memory. Ordinary science, which is bound only to the physical body, will never find an answer to the question of what memory is. For memory is bound to this etheric body or image-power body. It is dependent on its laws. And only the physical body forms a kind of counterbalance to this etheric body in relation to memory. How is that? Well, when we walk, we have to walk on the ground. Without ground beneath our feet, we cannot walk. Even when the ground is soft, we leave impressions in it. If someone were to come along and say: There are footprints in the ground, perhaps there are forces down there in the earth that have caused these footprints. Someone who is short-sighted enough to reject everything they cannot see in front of them might say this. But that is how someone who is a pure materialist is in relation to the workings of the soul, the memory. Certainly, one finds everything that the materialist can accept in the physical organization; but all of that is only as necessary as the ground is necessary for walking. And what is formed is formed from the spiritual-soul, first of all from the etheric, just as footprints are formed from the shapes of our feet. We cannot then deduce from what is physically in us what is there in the nervous system, but we must deduce it from the etheric body, just as footprints must be derived from the one who has walked on the ground.

[ 47 ] Once we have gained, through imaginative knowledge, the supersensible that underlies our human existence between birth or conception and death, we can then, as we proceed further, also arrive at a higher element in this human being, that which now lies beyond birth and death. But here we must go even further with regard to the development of the life of imagination. We must continue along the path through which we have acquired versatility. We must no longer take mental images as images, but only as the way to arrive at reality. This must become our inner nature.

[ 48 ] Those who are accustomed to following paths of Spiritual Science really try to characterize everything from the most diverse angles. Allow me to make a personal remark here. Those who have heard my lectures more often know that I try not only to present arguments in favor of a cause, but also to present arguments against it. For only by examining a matter from a wide variety of angles can one arrive at the correct conclusion. What is wrong with materialism is not that one has materialistic views at all, but that one accepts one's views as the only ones. Materialism is just one side of the coin. In Spiritual Science, it is not important to talk constantly about spirit, spirit, spirit, just as it is not important for Christians to always say Lord, Lord, Lord. It is not important to talk about spirit, but that spirit flows and weaves through one's way of looking at things; that one also characterizes what one characterizes as material phenomena as being imbued with spirit. Then it becomes so natural for those who try to live in the spirit to characterize things from the opposite point of view. The opposition knows this too.

[ 49 ] Now that Spiritual Science is becoming known, the number of opponents is also increasing, and they have a particularly strange habit: namely, people simply write down what I always say against the things I have to say, and they leave out what I say for the things. In this way, they can compile the most beautiful counter-writings. This is already being attempted today in a wide variety of fields. Opponents do not need to think; they can find everything in my own writings, because the spiritual researcher must at the same time also present everything that speaks against the things. Then he can ascend further, so that one can say: He has made thinking an inner living thing. But to do this, they must also take in inner vitality. I would like to clarify this in the following way.

[ 50 ] In our thinking, we are often satisfied with recognizing one mental image as right and another as wrong, one as logically correct and another as logically incorrect. We are satisfied with that. But that is not enough for life. We cannot be satisfied when we say: one action is good, another is evil. Could a person be taken seriously if he knew what was good and what was bad in social life, what was dutiful and what was wrong in social life, if he did nothing at all, if he experienced both as merely logical? No. In our external life, it is important that we do what is good and refrain from doing what is bad. But what we need in our external life, we must now develop in our thinking itself in order to advance in our knowledge, in the enlivening of our contemplative consciousness. We must be able to experience thoughts, mental images, feelings, perception. It is useful in a certain direction, we must pursue it; we do not pursue other mental images and perceptions. Of course, as long as we are engaged in spiritual research, the spiritual researcher must be strict about how he needs to use a concept, a mental image, how he needs to move with it in one direction, how another must be suppressed — he must know exactly: Now you are entering regions where you must abandon this mental image; an inner moralization must take place.

[ 51 ] You see, Professor Dewar recently gave a lecture that is typical of lectures given in this field; he spoke about what the Earth will look like after many millennia. One can develop mental images of enormous logical correctness. He said: What is water today will then have long since frozen; today's air will have become water; Earth light will always shine in a wonderful way; certain liquids that are liquid today will be solid; for example, milk will be solid and shine bluish; egg white will shine so brightly that if you paint a room with it, you can read the newspaper by its light, and so on. Yes, my dear audience, I do not even want to talk about the fact that it pains the spiritual researcher to think such mental images from the very beginning. For they cancel themselves out. How can milk that is solid so that it glows in blue light be milked? How can it come into being in the cow? Every possibility fails. The same applies to reading newspapers by the light of the egg white paint, and so on. We will not discuss this further now, but we want to talk about something else: the fact that a large part of what is called the science of earth development is based on this way of thinking today.

[ 52 ] Many calculations are made. The calculations are absolutely correct; there is nothing to object to. Geologists calculate the future and the past of the earth, and they come to different conclusions. One says that life came first; another says that non-living matter came first, and so on. These things are logically correct, but they are all actually impossible. Suppose I examine a human stomach for eight days; I can examine how it changes. Geology uses exactly the same methods when it does things like Dewar or geologists do when they calculate the Earth's history. So I calculate: the stomach changes in eight days in such and such a way; therefore, in two hundred years, it will have formed in such and such a way. Or in a child, I see how a bone changes. Now I calculate backwards: I have the shape of how the human being was in his bones two hundred years ago. It is exactly the same method that geologists use to calculate what the earth should have looked like two million years ago or two million years from now. These things are ingenious, they are logical, but they are completely unrealistic. Certainly, the stomach may look like that, but the person will be dead. That is how the earth will be when everything that is calculated using today's physical concepts has developed; but it will no longer be there as earth; it will have long since passed into a spiritual state. Certainly, one can calculate: that is how the earth used to be. But it was not the Earth of today; the Earth was in a spiritual state.

[ 53 ] When you consider these examples, you arrive at what I would call the inner reality of thinking; how thought connects with reality. And through this, thinking gradually gains the ability to grasp the spiritual in an even higher sense than through mere imaginative consciousness. It now becomes possible to grasp that which is spiritual, which not only accompanies us from birth to death, but which was connected with us before birth or conception in the spiritual world, which clothed itself in a physical body through the substance of heredity.

[ 54 ] The seeing consciousness thus connects with that in the human being which truly transcends birth and death. From this you can see that this research attaches particular importance to showing that a consciousness is possible which leads us to the soul. If it leads us to the soul — which is independent of the body — then we have grasped the soul, and we have grasped it as immortal. If someone wants to prove to us that a rose is red, we will find that ridiculous. Similarly, any so-called proof is ridiculous in the highest sense if someone wants to prove that the soul is immortal. If we find the soul in the right way through the second stage of contemplative consciousness, which I have called “inspired knowledge” for good reasons, then this soul is recognized as immortal; recognized as such, passing through births and deaths.

[ 55 ] There is much to discuss in relation to this immortal soul, which is the subject of inspired knowledge. I would like to highlight just one thing as a prime example of how the mystery of immortality is treated in Spiritual Science. This is, first of all, the question of inner destiny. Inner destiny, how does it actually unfold in relation to our human being? Well, it unfolds in such a way that, because we have this or that ability, this or that talent, we will do this or that. We are driven to do this or that. But whether we can live a life filled with happiness or pain depends on this; our inner predisposition to this or that destiny depends on it. The spiritual researcher must treat this predisposition differently than the natural scientist. It is quite true that natural science has also achieved great things in this field; and the natural scientist could easily come along and say: Spiritual researcher, you are terribly amateurish. For natural science has finally shown us how human beings acquire certain characteristics because their parents or ancestors have these characteristics. Now the spiritual researcher comes along and wants to refute these things. He does not want to refute them at all. He already recognizes what natural science has achieved, but he must expand on it; he must add something essentially different.

[ 56 ] In particular, when we consider, for example, the brilliant achievements of Mendel and others like him, we can say that Spiritual Science is by no means opposed to this research. But today, for example, the prevailing view is that a descendant inherits the characteristics of his ancestors. For example, a beautiful book has been written about Goethe and his ancestors, showing that Goethe's characteristics were, in a sense, a summation of characteristics found in all his ancestors. This has been expressed very nicely by saying: genius is the sum of the characteristics of one's ancestors. Certainly, one can achieve great things in this field. These things may be logical, but they are not really thought out. For it is not surprising that one has the characteristics of one's ancestors; that is just as little surprising as someone being wet when they have fallen into water. One simply passes through the stream of inherited characteristics. If one wanted to prove, in accordance with reality, that the characteristics one possesses are passed on to one's descendants, one would have to take a genius and show that the characteristics of genius are passed on to the descendants. But one will refrain from looking for genius characteristics in the descendants, not only in Goethe, but also in others.

[ 57 ] Here, inspired consciousness shows the following: what we experience by experiencing our own soul is just as little inherited as, for example, a memory of something we experienced in our tenth year can be inherited. If I know for sure that this has come from the outside world, I cannot say — if today, as a result of what I experienced at the age of ten, I experience this and that — I cannot say that this is inherited. Thus, inspired insight recognizes that what comes out of the spiritual world as the core of our being is clothed in the physical, which comes from our father and mother. In this way, we learn to distinguish between what is physical inheritance and what is spiritual and soul-related.

[ 58 ] Spiritual Science now shows, however, that the spiritual is everywhere, not in some cloud cuckoo land. Wherever there is the physical, there is also the spiritual, the concrete spiritual. Whether we pass through the gate of death or the gate of conception, whether we leave the spiritual world or enter it, even the spiritual world in which we live centuries before conception, also belongs to the world that exists here physically, just as my spiritual and soul life belongs to it when I move my hand. What happens in the physical world happens out of the spiritual world; but we ourselves are inside this spiritual world. We are in this spiritual world as individual souls.

[ 59 ] Now imagine that we are born of our parents. They in turn have parents, and those parents have parents. One goes back through many generations. Fathers and mothers come together, their children meet others, and over the generations a certain generation with certain characteristics follows another. while in the spiritual world we are above, and we participate in the forces that work down into the line of generations. Think of the tenth ancestor, we are in the spiritual world, but we know that there are two people, two human beings. When love develops between these two people, we are already involved, and when they have children, we are involved. We are involved in this whole stream of the line of inheritance. We carry the spiritual impulses into it. Just as I move my hand through my spiritual-soul, so my spiritual-soul worked generations ago in the way that is inherited, up to the generation that is my father and mother, who pass on their characteristics to me, who am their child, who carried themselves into it from this spiritual world. So we participate in the stream of heredity from the spiritual world. We ourselves determine from the spiritual world what will ultimately be inherited.

[ 60 ] What science says is important, but it must be supplemented spiritually. There we see how our destiny is created out of our very own element, out of our own will.

[ 61 ] Now for external destiny. We also live in external destinies, in what we call coincidences, in this or that which brings us happiness or suffering; we live within that. What about this fate? Well, Spiritual Science reveals something remarkable here. One must first understand this fate, must become capable of judging it. People who have grown old in a meaningful way, who have gone beyond ordinary thinking with a certain deeper intuitive ability, such as Goethe's friend Knebel, the astute, sharp-minded Knebel, said: When you have grown old, you come to recognize a certain connection, an ordering hand, in all the events that have accompanied our lives, that have shaped our fate. We would be very different from what we are if things had turned out differently than they did. Some things that seem to go in the opposite direction turn out to be part of a plan of fate. And Schopenhauer, the only modern philosopher who quietly ventures to approach fate, agrees with him. These people tried to approach with intuition what people call fate.

[ 62 ] But one can only approach it completely if one looks up to a third stage of contemplative consciousness; when man's inner mental image rises from groping through imaginative knowledge, through inspired knowledge, truly rises to the spiritual eye, to the spiritual ear, just as feeling rises in natural development to the differentiated eye and ear. When this groping thinking has truly risen to the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear, then the human being comes to have a remarkable experience. This experience cannot be had only by becoming a seer in the sense I have described today, but only by engaging with literature that has been created under the influence of this seeing consciousness.

[ 63 ] You will find all these things, which I have described in principle today, in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” “Occult Science,” , “Theosophy,” in my latest book “The Riddle of Man,” and in “The Riddle of Philosophy.” If you engage with this literature — perhaps reading it as you would read other literature — but it must be read differently. When engaging with it, one must be clear that these books do not merely provide mental images like other books, but lead one to a living way of thinking. This is also the case if one simply takes the things that are said here in the right way. One does not need to be a spiritual researcher oneself, any more than one needs to be a chemist if one wants to take in the achievements of chemistry. Without being a spiritual researcher oneself, one can come to the experience that I now want to characterize.

[ 64 ] It is the experience that now leads us up to the third level of knowledge, true intuitive knowledge. This third level of knowledge is a truly inner level of experience. Then the moment comes in life when you know: You have been completely transformed inwardly; you are now part of the spiritual world with what you think and feel; you are now in the spiritual world. It is something tremendous when you have arranged your life inwardly in such a way that you experience precisely this, by living with the eternal part of your being in the spiritual world, in the immortal, eternal world. When this has happened, what is it? It is a question of destiny.

[ 65 ] My dear friends, one need not be insensitive to the joys and sorrows that fate brings. On the contrary, one becomes more sensitive to all the happiness and suffering that can often shatter human beings. One does not become insensitive, one does not need to become insensitive, one can empathize with everything human. But if one has truly grasped the insight I have just described, then, in the face of all external events of fate, what comes over one with this insight is the greatest, the very greatest experience of fate. Once one has experienced this, one has experienced a fate that one has brought about piece by piece. It is as if you have turned the wheel of fate and seen how it moves by experiencing inwardly what is otherwise only outwardly visible.

[ 66 ] And now it is as if life were a dream when one experiences it so filled with fate. A stroke of fate comes along, which is perceived as good fortune, but we only experience it by experiencing it. The other is experienced as misfortune. It is as if we were dreaming: “Oh!”, “Fire!” — and a whole picture unfolds; then we wake up, and the fire department is driving by outside. Something else caused the dream. We experience fate, but the cause lies in the spiritual world, just as the cause of the dream lies in the outer world, in the passing of the fire department. This is how life unfolds in fate. Now we perceive what is happening as the course of fate, seemingly saturated with coincidences. This human life course is determined from the spiritual world, only we do not know it in our ordinary consciousness. We know it in our intuitive consciousness. For in the spiritual world, everything is truly planned.

[ 67 ] But here we must go back not only to how our spiritual soul lives in the spiritual world, but we must go back to the repeated earthly lives. For what we experience here is connected in a mysterious way, which has become transparent to clairvoyant consciousness, with our previous earthly life. Each earthly life is again the starting point for the later earthly life. This is not something that has been handed down from an ancient Indian teaching that is simply parroted, but true Spiritual Science leads us to recognize that the whole of human life consists of repeated earthly lives and the intervening periods spent in the spiritual world. There we experience in fate itself something in which the spiritual world expresses itself. We experience what what comes out of the spiritual world, just as in a dream the outer physical world plays into the dream. We see the connection of fate precisely with how deeply we are rooted in the spiritual world.

[ 68 ] What about this fate? Yes, it often appears like this: we are sixteen years old, twenty years old; events come at us from all sides. We say we do this or that because this or that event has come our way. We often do not notice — we cannot notice it because we do not look at it with our conscious awareness — that there is an urge within us that leads us to what we must experience, what affects us. If we were to look closely, we would see how there is something in it that can only be determined when we take the first action. But what lives within us like spiritual hunger and thirst, what leads us through the world as if by fate, and brings together the events that we attract to ourselves, originates from previous earthly lives. A great prospect opens up through the research of Spiritual Science, which is thoroughly scientific in the sense that anything scientific can be, but which is still in its infancy today.

[ 69 ] I know, my dear audience, that what I have said today about the immortality of the soul, about questions of fate and the human life course, that I must still express these things imperfectly today; for we are only at the beginning of the Spiritual Science. But in this respect, I prefer to follow Kepler rather than Tycho Brahe. Spiritual Science, as I have presented it to you today, at least in a certain chapter, must enter into modern intellectual life as Kepler's worldview once did. Just think, people used to believe that the firmament above our heads was the boundary of the world that surrounds us, with the Earth at its center. Spiritual researchers today must speak of the fact that, just as the firmament is not a boundary out there, so the beginning of human life is not at birth or conception, but behind this birth lie spiritual infinities; spiritual life and also physical life of human beings. And again, spiritual infinities lie beyond death. Tycho Brahe came, he came as many critics of Spiritual Science come today, and he raised many astute objections to Copernicus. He proved that Copernicanism cannot be correct. So today, some may come and explain, quite astutely — though today less astutely than spitefully — all that is still imperfect in Spiritual Science. Kepler did not approach Copernicanism by refuting it, but by filling in the gaps that Copernicus had left.

[ 70 ] So I believe that what I have said today will be said more perfectly in a later time. But what we must regard as the present point of development for humanity seems to be demanded by Spiritual Science with all its essential power. That is why it must penetrate our spiritual life and our time — even though people will always be interested in the deepest mysteries of the soul and spirit — it must penetrate our time, when fate reigns so terribly among us. People must be particularly willing to turn their gaze to what gives this life, even though it is so full of pain and trials, gives this life a higher meaning, which draws this life, as it were, into a higher reality, just as we awaken from a dream into the world of sensory reality. And when we are carried away by even the most difficult and painful fate into spiritual reality, where immortality is revealed to us and our fate is shown in its inner order, then human life takes on meaning. It would be foolish for anyone to say: Yes, now you want to say that we ourselves are to blame for our fate, that we have to pay off the debts of a previous life; you add guilt to misfortune. That is not the case.

[ 71 ] It is precisely through contemplative consciousness that we are led into the spiritual world. There, what is regarded here as guilt and atonement appears in a completely different light. The objection would therefore be foolish. Instead, it would be better to understand the difficult and painful aspects, to see where so many people are suffering today, how suffering is the starting point for what we will be able to do in a subsequent earthly life. For there will be no misfortune that does not become a cause for human greatness. The experience of misfortune is difficult at the time when we experience it; when we are caught up in misfortune, we cannot see this misfortune in its true reality, just as we know nothing of true reality in a dream. But there is a way to rise above it, to broaden our short-sighted view, to bring meaning to happiness and misfortune. And perhaps, even if it must always be a matter of course for human beings to turn their gaze to the mysteries of the soul, perhaps we can expect from our time, perhaps history will one day record that our time, that the people who are now experiencing so much in such a short time, things that one might otherwise only experience over many long decades, that these people also have a deeper need in these difficult, fateful times to address questions such as those we have touched on this evening.

[ 72 ] And in conclusion, after these remarks, I would like to express my particular conviction in a few words, which is based not on a feeling, but on something I believe I have recognized.

[ 73 ] I said that more than 36 years ago, I laid the first building blocks for what I have been working on for decades to bring it into a form that can be understood today. When I was about twenty or twenty-two years old and was able to write and publish my first essay, it was in this essay that I expressed not only emotional convictions, but convictions that arose from the observation of German intellectual life; the conviction that, in particular, those powers of spirit and vision that are rooted in the deepest sources of German life are especially suited to leading humanity to that vision which opens up the spiritual world in a true and genuine way. No people should be disparaged for their characteristics; every people must contribute what is theirs to the development of humanity. But different peoples have different abilities. And when I look at the deepest sources of the German character, it seems to me even if this deepest sound, this deepest thirst for knowledge, is buried today, this thirst for knowledge of the German spirit is nevertheless like a preparation for what is called Spiritual Science here.

[ 74 ] This seems to me to lie in the deepest sources of German spiritual life. After all, the German Lessing also drew the doctrine of repeated earthly lives from sources other than the Orient, which produced it from a mystical consciousness, from sources other than the egoism of personality, of the needs of personality. Lessing regarded the development of humanity as an education of humanity through the divine plan of the Creator. And you will find in Lessing that, if you think historically under divine guidance, you must think of human life as repeated. For that which lives on from past times into the future lives on only because the human soul itself carries the past into the future. In light of Lessing's view, everything that is said about historical development, even from the most subtle point of view, falls silent.

[ 75 ] When it is said, for example: Well, if souls are only to develop in the twentieth century after Christ, how is it that those who lived in the second and third centuries were so much more imperfect? And finally, from the Christian point of view: How is it that those souls did not have the grace of Christ coming to earth before the Mystery of Golgotha, compared to those who lived after the Mystery of Golgotha? Thus, in Lessing's sense, one speaks of repeated earthly lives, and Spiritual Science says scientifically what Lessing suspected: if human beings live in repeated earthly lives, it does not matter. For the same souls pass through the different epochs and carry with them what appears again and again in the epochs. The same souls have lived again and again.

[ 76 ] What Indian consciousness has brought forth from the chaotic dream consciousness of its own life, Lessing has brought forth from his contemplations of the divine plan of education. That was Western intellectual life. And it continued in such a way that in the nineteenth century, important minds — even if they are forgotten today, they will one day be among the most famous of the nineteenth century — such as Troxler could say: Yes, we initially view human beings as we see them externally. But when we — he said “supersensible spirit” and “super-spiritual sense” instead of “seeing consciousness” — when we look at human beings with a supersensible spirit and a super-spiritual sense, we rise from mere anthropology to anthroposophy.

[ 77 ] And Fichte, the son, said: “When we consider that which is supersensible” — he only comes to this as a hypothesis — “but contemplative consciousness comes as a spiritual reality when we consider this supersensible” — says Fichte —, “then being dead is nothing other than the soul being different, now living in a different environment and gaining the conditions of its renewed consciousness from it.” “And so” — says Immanuel Hermann Fichte again, verbatim —, “anthropology rises to anthroposophy.”

[ 78 ] Troxler speaks of anthroposophy in 1827, Immanuel Hermann Fichte in 1847. Today we speak of Spiritual Science or anthroposophy because we are aware that we are working directly from the best and most authentic sources of German spiritual life; that German spiritual life which I meant when I wrote that short essay at the time, that we must work from it again.

[ 79 ] Consider that we have adopted Darwinism from the West. Goethe has already given its content in a much more significant and greater way. And when we adopt Darwinism from England, we must permeate it in a Goethean, German way with what German spirituality can develop from its own people. We must reject what has been adopted in this way, not because we despise other peoples and their gifts, but because we must work from the strong source of German folk culture itself. That is why I was pleased to find in Eduard von Hartmann, who has expressed many significant things, that "even modern physics, if it only becomes aware of the agnostic and abstract wrong turns it has taken, and if it turns away from them, then even physics will turn its back on Anglomania and the German spirit will reflect on itself. But then something will also come true that corresponds to Novalis' remark, which anticipated Spiritual Science and which says: “We will only become real physicists when we base material substance and force on imaginative substance and force.”

[ 80 ] It was something great of Novalis to speak of this even then. For it is only in the imagination that we can approach what is spiritual and ethereal, what underlies all physical things as the supersensible. I do not want to claim that the German spirit could only know itself to be strong through Spiritual Science, for example, and could do everything through Spiritual Science. What I am saying here should only be understood in the sense of saying, for example, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” There are roots of German spiritual life from which, as one of the symptoms, this genuine spiritual grasp of reality arises. From these sources of German spiritual life speaks the one who, not out of mere feeling, but out of deepest insight and out of a complete fateful connection with the German national spirit, not only feels but also recognizes what is rooted in the sources of German folklore. In this fateful time, he may say:

[ 81 ] No matter how threatening the enemies may be on all sides — we are not talking here about external threats, but about how misunderstood, slandered, and denigrated this German essence is in our time — something must be changed in response to this, reminiscent of what Johann Gottlieb Fichte said when, in a fateful time, he spoke to the Germans about their own strengths, about the source of their essence, when he did not speak in ways that were intended to disparage other peoples, but when he spoke of what should elevate the German people in their own way, when he called out to the German people: It is your responsibility to accomplish what, if it is not accomplished, the whole world would not have, not just the German people.

[ 82 ] So we can also say today: If what must never succeed were to succeed, if the enemies surrounding the German people were to harm the deepest essence of the German people out of their short-sighted views, then it would not be the German people alone who would have cause to lament, but all of humanity. For — and let me conclude with this —, summarizing from my feelings about our fateful times what has permeated this evening's discussion from this perspective: If what is hidden in the deepest sources of German culture, which has so far manifested itself most beautifully in the spiritual stream of knowledge of the German people, then not only would the German people have lost what is most dear to them, but humanity as a whole would have lost much of what is most dear to it in its entire development, and that must never be allowed to happen.