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Anthroposophy's Contribution to the Most Urgent Needs of Our Time
GA 78

5 September 1921, Stuttgart

Translated by F. Hough

Seventh Lecture

Anthroposophy's Contribution to the Most Urgent Needs of Our Time

The most significant question in the spiritual life of our time, which casts its shadow over the whole of our culture, is of such a nature that it already affects every man's feeling life to some extent. Yet its answer can only be found on the path leading from ordinary objective knowledge to super-sensible cognition by means of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Each soul must ask himself this significant question, when, in genuine concern for the being of man, he contrasts, with a complete lack of bias, the conception of the moral, ethical life that is possible today, with the interpretation of life that stems with good reason from a natural scientific world conception. What is more, in our day the question of morality is of the greatest urgency because we live in that period of time when what is ethical is at the same time social, and today every man experience the urgency of the social question.

Let us consider what the soul learns about existence in conformity with today's thinking as it is shaped by natural science. In the attempt to reach a true natural science, man is led to consider the objects of the world in their necessity, in their causal connections. This results in a world outlook which must necessarily extend these causal connections to comprise everything that is within the world order, including man. Today, in so far as we wish to understand man by means of natural science, we take it as a foregone conclusion that we apply that same cognition that we are accustomed to use when considering natural appearances outside man, and we then attempt to extend in more or less audacious hypotheses, what natural science has learnt from what is lying nearest to us, that we are able to observe, to cover world facts and world beings. We construct hypotheses about the beginning and the end of the world, out of our natural scientific theories of knowledge. Then we come with this natural scientific knowledge to the point where if we are consistent we must say, ‘We may not come to a halt before human freedom.’ I have already indicated this problem.

A man who seeks a strictly uniform explanation of the world, simply out of a desire for consistency, and has to decide between assuming a freedom which is really given empirically in immediate human experience, and that all-powerful natural necessity which must be deduced from what mankind has learned through established ways of thinking and knowing, will opt for natural necessity. He will declare the experience of freedom to be an illusion, and will extend the area of natural necessity to include the most intimate experiences of the human being, so that mankind will be fully enmeshed in the web of natural necessity. And in the same way he will assess in the light of this hypothetical world conception the nature of the beginning and the end of the earth. He takes those laws and interconnections produced by physics and chemistry etc., and builds out of them such hypotheses as the nebular hypothesis, that is, the Kant-Laplace theory of the beginning of the earth. Then, out of the second principle, the teaching about mechanical heat, he constructs hypotheses about the heat death in which the earth will perish.

In this way one can extend into the most intimate details of the human being, as well as to the boundaries of the world-all, the contemporary explanation of natural appearances, as they surround us in the world in which we wander between birth and death, without disputing its fruitfulness. But then, if we reach a certain degree of self-perception, we ask ourselves, “In that case, wherein lies the dignity of man, wherein exists true human worth?” Here we come to the point where we turn our gaze to the moral world, to that which seems to be an ethical, moral impulse. We feel that it is only in carrying out a moral ideal, permeated with religious fervour, that we can achieve an existence fully worthy of mankind. We could not call ourselves fully human if we did not think that motive was active in us which we describe as ‘moral’, which streams into the social life, and seems to be inwardly vibrating in us with what we call the Divine in the world order. But for a modern man who in all honesty adopts the viewpoint from which he surveys mechanical causality, the necessary order of nature, there is no bridge leading from the natural order, which according to a certain way of knowledge must include man himself, to that other order, which is moral, and which is bound up with what man must consider to be his entire dignity, his entire worth.

In most recent times, to be sure, a certain expedient has been devised in order to bridge this chasm which has opened up between the two components of our human make-up. It has been said that we can only regard as truly scientific that which will explain the whole world in terms of natural necessity, including man, and including the beginning and the end of the world. And from this standpoint scientific validity is given to nothing that cannot be absorbed without contradiction into a thinking spun out of this natural order. But yet, a realm has been established with an entirely different kind of certainty, with the certainty of belief. Man looks within on that which shines in us as a moral light, and says to himself. “No scientific knowledge can guarantee in any way the significance of this moral sphere, but man must find within himself a certainty of belief. He must recognise out of the Subjective that in a certain way his Being is connected with that realm which is permeated with moral necessity.”

At first, many people may well find reassurance if they discriminate clearly between what man can know and what he can believe, and can persuade themselves that this separation gives a certain comfort, a feeling of security in life. But if we probe deeply enough, not with a partial thinking, but with all that thought can experience if it unites itself with the full power of the human soul and spirit, then we must come to the following conclusion: if the realm of natural necessity is as man has grown accustomed to consider it in the course of the last hundred years, then in the face of this there is no possibility of preserving the realm of morality. This must be said, because the moral realm simply shows nowhere the power to be a match for the realm of natural order. We need only consider how the thought must arise with a certain inner justification out of the contemplation of heat entropy—I say expressly, must arise—that once all the remaining earth forces have changed into heat, this heat cannot change itself back into any other force, and that then the earth as such will succumb to what is called ‘the heat death.’ Thus there is no possibility for an honest thinker who must hold fast to the current way of thinking about natural causality, other than to say to himself: of this earth which has succumbed to heat death there remains a huge field of corpses, not only including all men but with them all moral ideals. They must disappear into the lifeless, if, in recognising the sole validity of natural necessity we accept that the earth is to succumb to ‘the heat death.’

For a man who faces the world without prejudice, this reflection produces an experience that even takes from him the certainty of a moral world order, and above all leaves him in a situation where he must see the world as split asunder, so that he can only say to himself: “Moral ideas rise up out of natural necessity like foam bubbles, and like foam bubbles, they vanish.” For, according to natural necessity, what is connected in the innermost being of man with human worth and dignity cannot be acknowledged as having real existence. How shall I say? Granted that one accepts a formal division between knowledge and belief, yet, even if one has already found a certainty of belief, against the necessary exactions of science, certainty of belief can give no inner guarantee for the reality of what is moral.

This not only affects man's theoretical ideas. If a man intends to live honestly, he must work with it into his deepest world experiences, and there take hold of it through events which lie deep in the subconscious, disturbing that which gives inner security, which makes it possible for a man to have a stable connection with the world, not only by means of thinking but also through experience. And a man who has a feeling for such connections could say to himself: What is called up in such an uncanny way out of the depths of human life in this twentieth century, like a devastating wave, proceeds when all is said and done out of the harmony—or one could say the disharmony—of all that the individual has experienced about himself. For our frightful catastrophic time is born finally out of the innermost condition of the human heart and soul. Such an inner division as I have described to you does not appear only on the surface of the soul-life, as a theoretic world-conception. It sinks down to the depths out of which comes the instinctive life, the life of conscience. And so this dichotomy throws up into the world-order discrepant feelings, disorder, producing a framework for what is unsocial rather than fostering what is more truly social.

Certainly, many men do not yet give full weight to what I have described today. But the consequences can already be foreseen, if we follow with only a little lack of prejudice the trend of human spiritual development in the last centuries, and especially in very recent times, and see to what moral exhaustion, to what kind of social form this division in the human soul must lead in the very near future. An answer will never be found to the burning question, ‘Why do we live in such distressing times?’ if one does not try to seek the foundation man has need of in the depths of human life itself.

Confronting what I have here described is that knowledge of the world which may be striven for through anthroposophical spiritual science, by means of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We shall see how anthroposophical spiritual science enables man to come to terms with what I have shown today to be the most urgent problem of the present and the near future, and what precisely in this way it seems to him that he will be able to know. I have shown you the path which spiritual science takes by means of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. I cannot give each exercise here in detail, but you can find this in my books which I have often mentioned here. I have drawn attention to the way in which each exercise on the path to imaginative knowledge gives the soul a conscious content in the same way as our everyday consciousness is impregnated with a content when it lives in memory. Behind what rises up in the form of memories, consciously or unconsciously invoked, lies our physical and etheric organisation. What takes place there, rises up into consciousness. What our physical organisation produces in our ordinary memory is brought about in a purely soul-spiritual way through carrying out the exercises given in my books. Through them one reaches ideas, which in a purely formal way are like memory ideas, but which refer to an outer objective content, not to an entirely personal experience. By this means we prepare ourselves through Imagination for the knowledge of a truly objective spiritual world.

Then, in order to reach to Inspiration, we must not only practise in a soul-spiritual way the production of ideas which are like remembered thoughts, but we must work in such a way that the spirit-soul also practises forgetting, to some extent, as it were throwing out these imaginations from the consciousness which has been now attained. We must practise no longer having, yes, the unreal imaginations. We must deliberately distance them from our consciousness, so that, if I may so express it, this consciousness has a certain emptiness. If we reach this stage, then by means of all these practices we are able to strengthen the Ego to the point where we find ourselves within the manifestations of an objective, super-sensible world. In place of the former subjective imaginations, objective imaginations light up in our consciousness, and this lighting up of such objective Imaginations which in fact do not come from ourselves, but from spiritual objectivity, this is in reality Inspiration. We reach right to the boundary of the super-sensible, that reveals itself to us in its outer appearance through these Imaginations. Exactly in the same way as in our sense-perceptible world, if we only let the whole man be active in sense perception, we convince ourselves through the reality of this sense world, of the underlying objective outer world, so now the Imaginations we have attained give us plenary conviction of the super-sensible world whose expression they are.

Now it is a question of pursuing this way of knowledge to the next stage. This we reach in that we not only push the forgetting so far that we throw out the Imaginations, but we go yet a stage further. When a man reaches the Imaginative world, he sees first his own life in its progression. He lives consciously not only in the moment, but in the whole of his life as far back as to his birth. If he is then able to go still further back, through Inspiration, then he extends his survey to the life before birth, as far as to the perception of a super-sensible world out of which he came into the sense world through birth or conception. The spiritual field of vision extends over that world which we have lived through before birth and conception and shall live through when we have gone through the Portal of death. This prospect of the super-sensible world to which we belong is reached by means of Inspired cognition.

If we now strive even further, not only to expunge those Imaginations whose details remain within the horizon of the Imaginative world but also to wipe out the imagination of our whole life as man, that means, if we have acquired the forces to thrust out what is united with our Ego through the experiences we have had since our birth, and what is also added to it through the fact that the horizon has widened to include a spiritual world, then we have reached the stage not of weakening our Ego, but, just through forgetting ourselves, of first really and truly strengthening it. And through this we come gradually into the reality of the spiritual, the super-sensible world. We ourselves live together with the reality of the super-sensible world. We reach the point of recognising the appearance of previous earth lives as something which our Ego shows us at different stages. Then, if we have developed the capacity to forget this Ego in its present stage, that means, to thrust out its imaginative content, we reach the stage of perceiving the eternal Ego.

The matters discussed by anthroposophical spiritual science are not drawn out of some blue haze of mysticism, rather the way to reach this particular knowledge can be indicated step by step. It is in no sense an outer way. It is inward in its entire journey, but it is such that it leads to the perception of a truly objective yet super-sensible reality. And in that we raise ourselves in this way to real intuitive knowledge, we first obtain a true insight into what is in fact our own thinking, our ideation, that we employ in ordinary life, with which we mix our sense-perceptions. One reaches to full, complete reality when to a certain extent one can create an idea for oneself, an empirical idea, in the way I have attempted to describe in my book The Philosophy of Freedom. There I have tried to make known that pure thinking, that very thinking that can live in us before we have fully united the thinking with some outer perception. I have shown that this pure thinking itself can be perceived as an inner soul content. But what is in accordance with its being first lets itself be known when true intuition enters the soul through the higher way of knowledge. Then a man can certainly penetrate into his own thinking. Then he lives for the first time within his own thoughts, by means of intuition, for this intuition arises through the fact that a man lives within the super-sensible with his own being, that he plunges into the super-sensible.

And so one learns to recognise something, the experience of which is a kind of destiny of knowledge. One experiences something that is full of potency, if one lives intuitively in the Nature of knowing. One understands then how man is organised materially as man; one learns to know to what extent this material organisation is in control; but one perceives also through intuition that this control only extends so far as to serve as a support, at most a ground out of which thinking can unfold itself, but that the material process itself must be broken down where true thinking appears. To the same degree in which the material events can be reduced can that gain ground in us which now occupies the place where matter is destroyed, that is, thinking, ideation.

I know all the objections that can be brought against the proposition that I put forward here, but intuitive knowledge leads one to realise that in the place where thinking unfolds itself a nothingness of material can be seen. It leads one so far as to say, ‘In that I think, I am not, if I allow the material being, that as a rule man regards as authoritative, to be considered the only being to have validity.’ First matter must withdraw itself from the organism and make room for the thoughts, the ideas, then these thoughts and ideas can develop within man. Thus, in that place where we perceive thinking in its reality, we see the destruction of material existence. Therein we perceive how matter goes over into nothingness.

Here is where we stand on the boundary of the laws of the conservation of matter and energy. One must recognise how far these laws of matter and energy extend, so that one can summon up the courage to contradict them when this is necessary. One can never penetrate the nature of thinking in an unprejudiced way to the place where matter destroys itself, if one acknowledges the law of conservation to be absolute, if one does not know that what prevails in the sphere which we survey outwardly in the physical and chemical fields etc., is yet not valid where our thinking takes place on the platform of our human organisation. If it were not necessary out of a certain basis to place this knowledge before the world today, one would not expose oneself to all the mockery and objections that must come quite understandably from those who, according to well-known hypotheses, regard the laws of the conservation of matter and energy as absolute, valid without exception.

But just as through Intuition one learns to know the relationship between thinking and the matter which surrounds us in the physical world, so through intuition one learns to recognise the connection of Inspiration, that Inspiration which is so powerful in Spirit, with the human feeling and rhythmic system. In the nerve-sense being physical substance is annihilated. By this means the nerve-sense system can be the basis for thinking, for ideation. The second system in man is the rhythmic system. With this the feeling life is psychically connected, as is the thinking life with the nerve-sense system. The connection of the objective world outside man which we approach through Inspiration shows us that through Inspiration we become aware of a World Being which plays into us as the sense world plays into us through thinking. This inspired world plays into us through the breathing process, which carries its rhythm right into the brain processes and into the rest of the organism.

Now one learns to recognise what lives within the human being as rhythm. This will not destroy matter, as in the case of the thinking process, but it will retard life so that it must for ever stimulate itself anew. The usual purely mechanical breathing rhythm provides an inner rhythmic basis for this retardation and renewal, which is certainly a two-fold process of breathing and feeling. When the soul-feeling events unite with the physical breathing rhythm we perceive this union as an Inspiration, as a Being which lives objectively in Inspiration and can be perceived through Intuition. In short we learn in this way to recognise the whole connection between the feeling and the rhythmic system in man. We recognise that here a complete annulment of matter does not take place as in the nerve system, but there is a damping down of matter. Thus we learn step by step to ‘see through’ the human being. And in this way we look into the feeling life of man and see what can only be there through the fact that in the rhythmic events life can always be held back and will stimulate itself anew.

Thus we see a second power working in the human being, in that we perceive the harmony of the slowing down and the renewal of life. We see the significance of man's entire rhythmic life, and how it is bound up with his whole being, body and soul. And as we survey this second element in man, it will certainly become clear to us that man bears in himself a real force, which is in rhythmic interchange with an outer force active in the super-sensible. And we could also survey in a similar way the metabolic limb system. In that we raise ourselves to Inspiration, Intuition and Imagination we see, soul-spiritually, what is active in man as a real though unconscious force. Our customary objective knowledge gives us only the forms. Through it we are as it were only observers of the world. That, however, which we reach through Imagination, Intuition and Inspiration we have first as a free inner soul product, obtained from super-sensible knowledge, from something which is objective in man, through which we can see clearly how the human will works in moral deeds. If we have first recognised that pure thinking involves a breaking down of matter, and is connected above all with a death-bringing process, through and through a process working in matter in a backward direction, then one comes to the point of being able to recognise that everything which appears as soul-willing is connected with the up-building processes, the processes of growth. These growths, these up-building processes, the activities of the organs and the reproductive process in us, damp down our ordinary consciousness of the depths of the human organism, and the will arises out of those depths of the human being to which the ordinary consciousness does not reach. Thus, as thinking lives in the death process, willing lives in what is growing, thriving, fructifying.

We then perceive further, through Intuition, how out of the digestive system, through the will when it has its motive in pure thinking, substance in the human organism is pushed into the place where the breaking down process takes place. Thinking as such breaks down, but willing builds up. Indeed this building up activity is such that from the beginning of life right up to death this process is latent in the human organism. An up-building process is certainly there. In that we bring our moral motives, in the sense of my The Philosophy of Freedom to true, free moral intuition, we live such a human life that, out of its organism, through the will process substance is placed where substance has been destroyed. Man becomes inwardly creative, inwardly up-building. In other words, we see within the cosmos, in the human organism, nothingness filled with new creating in a fully material sense. This means nothing else than that in so far as a man consistently follows the way of anthroposophical knowledge he reaches the stage where within man the pure moral ideals are world-building forces reaching right into materiality.

Here we have certainly a place where the moral world itself becomes creative, where something arises out of human morality which guarantees its own reality since it bears itself within itself, since it creates itself. And then we learn through Intuition really to know the outer world. We see how the mineral kingdom is caught up in a death-bringing process, a wasting-away that we have well learned to recognise as a corresponding process in our own thinking. And in the same way we learn to recognise how this wasting-away process draws into itself plant and animal life. Then we do not look to a heat death (an idea which has validity within certain limits, but is somewhat one-sided), but we look to the wasting-away of the entire world, which is permeated with minerality, and which is all around us. We see this, which we recognise as the world of causal necessity, in its transitoriness, and we recognise the world which we build up out of pure moral ideas as that which arises from the ground of the other, dying world.1See Man as Symphony of the Creative Word, Lecture VI, penultimate paragraph. Ed. In other words, we now recognise how the moral world is connected with the world order of physical causality. We have in the pure moral will of the human being something which conquers causality in man, and therefore for the whole world.

Whoever thinks honestly about the causal explanation of nature finds in its domain no place in the world where it does not prevail. And because it prevails, a power must arise which destroys its validity. This is the moral world, recognised within the general nature Of man, which contains within itself the power to break through natural causality, not, to be sure, through working miracles, but through a course of development. For that which finds a place within the human being where causality can be destroyed, sets itself there within him as a means of destroying causality. It is of prime significance for the world of the future. Nevertheless, we now see here the reality of human willing which enters into an alliance with pure thinking. For through it we obtain—and this is the most beautiful life fruit of anthroposophical scientific knowledge—an insight into the value of man in the cosmos, through which we also can feel the dignity, the high office of man within the cosmos.

Things in the world are not so interrelated as with our abstract ideas we often think they are. No, they cohere as realities, and one powerful reality is the following. It is true that not everyone today is able as yet to attain to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But as spiritual investigators we take with us through all these stages of knowledge that thinking which develops one thought out of another with inner necessity. This thinking each man can experience now if he will give himself freely to it. And it stems from this, that the results of spiritual knowledge, when once they are found, can always be proved afterwards, by means of pure thinking, since the spiritual investigator takes this pure thinking into the whole of his life of ideation.

Knowledge of human worth, feeling for human dignity, willing in love for humanity: These are the most beautiful life fruits nurtured in man when he assimilates what is bestowed on him by spiritual science.

For this spiritual science works through the will, so that it can reach up to what I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as moral intuition. And its power streams into human life as the moral ideal. The moral intuitions are gradually permeated with what indeed is love, so that we can become men who act freely out of love springing from our individuality. Thereby Spiritual Science approaches an ideal stemming from Goethe's time. It spoke most clearly through his friend Schiller. When Schiller familiarised himself with Kantian philosophy, he learnt much from Kant about theoretic philosophy, but he could not always accept Kant's moral philosophy. In this Kantian moral philosophy Schiller found a numbing conception of duty, presented by Kant in such a way that duty seemed to stand there in its own right as a natural power, working compulsively on man. Schiller experienced the worth and dignity of man, and would not accept the idea that to be virtuous a man must submit to spiritual compulsion. Schiller gave utterance to this beautiful saying: ‘Gladly do I serve my friend, yet, alas, I act from inclination, so it often vexes me that I am not dutiful.’ For in the Kantian sense, Schiller meant, one must even try first to suppress all liking for one's friend, and then do what one does for him out of a rigid conception of duty.

That the connection of man with morality must be other than this, Schiller revealed as far as it was possible to do so in his time, in his Letters concerning the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, where he wished to show how duty must sink down so that it becomes inclination, how inclination must rise up so that the content of duty becomes congenial. Duty must sink down, natural instinct must rise up in free men, who do out of their inclination what benefits the whole of humanity. And in that man looks for where moral intuition is rooted in the human being, in that he looks for what is the real driving, ethical motive in moral intuition, he finds it at its highest in love purified by spirit. There, where this love has become spiritual, there it draws into itself moral intuitions; and a man is moral because he loves duty, because it is something that comes out of the Individuality itself as a directly active power.

It was this that brought me, in The Philosophy of Freedom, to place against the Kantian moral philosophy a direct antithesis drawn from Anthroposophy. The Kantian thesis says: ‘Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name, that dost embrace nothing charming or ingratiating, but requirest submission,’ thou that ‘settest up a law ... before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly work against it.’

Through such a conception of duty man can never be so spiritualized in his inmost being that he becomes a free creator of his moral activity. Out of this attempt to penetrate the human being by means of anthroposophical knowledge of man, I placed in my Philosophy of Freedom against this stiff Kantian idea what you find there: ‘Freedom, thou friendly, human name, beloved of all who are virtuous, in thee is contained what my humanity values most, which makes me servant to none, thou who settest up no law, but awaitest what my virtuous love itself will recognise as a law because it feels itself unfree against every law that is forced upon it.’

So I believed I must speak in The Philosophy of Freedom of how moral human worth shines out in fullest splendour when it is one with human freedom, and is rooted in true human love. For one can show by means of anthroposophy how this love of duty can become in the widest sense love for mankind and therefore, as we will further consider, can become a true ferment in the social life. What arises today as the most urgent, the most hotly discussed social question can only be resolved if man bestirs himself to recognise the connection between freedom, love, the human being, spiritual and natural necessity.

Siebenter Vortrag

Die bedeutsamste Frage im Geistesleben der Gegenwart, die aber ihre Schatten in das gesamte Kulturleben hineinwirft, ist eine solche, die eigentlich gefühlsmäßig heute schon für jeden Menschen vorhanden ist, die aber ihren Lösungsversuch nur finden kann auf dem Wege, der zur übersinnlichen Erkenntnis, von dem gewöhnlichen, gegenständlichen Erkennen aus durch Imagination und Inspiration zur Intuition führt. Diese bedeutsamste Frage muß sich jede Seele aufwerfen, die in voller Unbefangenheit und mit einem wahren, innerlich ehrlichen Interesse für das Menschenwesen sich gegenübergestellt sieht der heute möglichen Auffassung des moralischen, des ethischen Lebens auf der einen Seite, und desjenigen Lebens, das sich aus der mit Recht anerkannten naturwissenschaftlichen Weltanschauung andererseits ergibt. Das ethische, das moralische Leben steht heute deshalb auch mit brennenden Fragen vor uns, weil wir in dem Zeitalter leben, in dem das Ethische zu gleicher Zeit das Soziale ist und die soziale Frage als eine brennende Frage von jedem Menschen empfunden werden kann.

Betrachten wir dasjenige, was sich uns vom Dasein in Gemäßheit des heutigen Denkens durch die Naturerkenntnis vor die Seele stellt. Das Streben nach einer wirklichen Naturerkenntnis geht dahin, die Dinge der Welt in ihrer Notwendigkeit, in ihren ursächlichen, in ihren kausalen Zusammenhängen zu begreifen. Und dieser ursächliche Zusammenhang, diese Notwendigkeit, sie sollen gemäß einer konsequenten Weltanschauung auf alles ausgedehnt werden, was sich in die Weltenordnung hineingestellt sieht, also auch auf den Menschen. Insofern wir heute den Menschen naturwissenschaftlich erkennen wollen, dehnen wir mit einer gewissen Selbstverständlichkeit diejenige Erkenntnis auf ihn aus, die wir gewöhnt sind, für die Naturerscheinungen außerhalb des Menschen anzuwenden, und wir versuchen dann in mehr oder weniger kühnen Hypothesen das, was sich aus der Naturerkenntnis für die uns zunächst vorliegende, von uns zu beobachtende Natur ergibt, auszudehnen auf die Welttatsachen und Weltwesen. Wir bilden Hypothesen über Erdenanfang und Erdenende aus den naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisvorstellungen heraus. Da kommen wir mit dieser naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis an einen Punkt, wo wir uns sagen müssen dann, wenn wir konsequent vorgehen: Wir dürfen nicht haltmachen vor der menschlichen Freiheit. Ich habe das hier vorliegende Problem ja bereits angedeutet.

Wer einfach aus einer gewissen Konsequenzsucht heraus eine formale einheitliche Welterklärung sucht, der wird, indem er sich zu entscheiden hat zwischen der Annahme einer Freiheit, die eigentlich empirisch im unmittelbar menschlichen Erleben gegeben ist, und zwischen der allwaltenden Naturnotwendigkeit, der wird sich aus dem, was der Menschheit an Denk- und Erkenntnisgewohnheiten in den letzten Jahrhunderten anerzogen worden ist, für die Naturnotwendigkeit entscheiden. Er wird trotz des Erlebens der Freiheit diese für eine Illusion erklären und den Bereich absoluter Notwendigkeit bis in die intimsten Intimitäten des menschlichen Wesens herein fortsetzen, so daß damit der Mensch völlig in den Kreis naturwissenschaftlicher Notwendigkeit eingesponnen ist. Und ebenso wird man sich verhalten mit Bezug auf die hypothetische Vorstellungswelt über dasjenige, was etwa Erdenanfang und Erdenende ist. Man nimmt jeneGesetzmäßigkeiten und Zusammenhänge, welche Physik, Chemie und so weiter ergeben, und man bildet aus ihnen dann solche Hypothesen wie die Nebularhypothese, das heißt die Kant-Laplacesche Theorie über den Erdenanfang. Man bildet aus dem zweiten Hauptsatz der mechanischen Wärmelehre Hypothesen über den Wärmetod, in den die Erde verfallen werde.

Man kann auf diese Weise bis in die Intimitäten des Menschenwesens hinein und bis an die Grenzen des Weltenalls dasjenige ausdehnen, dessen nicht zu bestreitende Fruchtbarkeit sich der neuesten Zeit ergeben hat für die Erklärung der Naturerscheinungen, wie sie uns umgeben in der Welt, in der wir zwischen Geburt und Tod herumwandeln. Aber dann, wenn wir, zu einer gewissen Selbstbesinnung kommend, uns fragen: Worin ruht denn die eigentliche Menschenwürde, worin besteht denn der eigentliche Menschenwert? - dann kommen wir dazu, unseren Blick auch auf die moralische Welt zu werfen, auf dasjenige, was in uns ethisch-sittlichen Antrieb für unser Bewußtsein sein läßt. Wir fühlen, daß wir nur in der Nachfolge gegenüber den sittlichen Idealen, die wir durchdringen mit religiösem Erfühlen, ein vollständig menschenwürdiges Dasein erlangen können. Wir können sozusagen uns nicht in vollem Sinne des Wortes Mensch nennen, wenn wir nicht diejenigen Motive in uns wirksam denken, die wir als die moralischen bezeichnen und die dann hinausströmen in das soziale Leben und die wir uns innerlich durchpulst denken von dem, was wir das Göttliche in der Weltenordnung nennen. Aber wenn man heute völlig ehrlich sich auf den Gesichtspunkt stellt, von dem aus man die mechanisch-kausale, die notwendige Naturordnung überblickt, dann gibt es keine Brücke herüber von dieser Naturordnung, in die man wegen einer gewissen Erkenntnisehrlichkeit auch den Menschen einspannen muß, zu der andern Ordnung, die die moralische ist und mit der der Mensch seine ganze Würde, seinen ganzen Wert verbunden denken muß.

Die neueste Zeit hat allerdings ein gewisses Auskunftsmittelpersonnen, um sich über diesen Abgrund hinwegzutäuschen, der zwischen zwei wesentlichen Bestandteilen unseres Menschentums sich aufgetan hat. Man hat gesagt: In wahrem Sinne wissenschaftlich ist nur dasjenige, was im Sinne der Naturnotwendigkeit die Welt einschließlich des Menschen, einschließlich Weltenanfang und Weltenende, erklären will. - Und man läßt von diesem Gesichtspunkt aus nichts als wissenschaftlich gelten, was nicht in widerspruchsloser Weise in ein Denken von dieser Naturordnung eingesponnen werden kann. Daneben aber richtet man ein Reich mit einer ganz andern Art von Gewißheit auf, ein Reich mit der Glaubensgewißheit. Man sieht hin auf dasjenige, was in uns als das moralische Licht leuchtet, und man sagt sich: Keine wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis kann irgendwie garantieren die Bedeutung dieses moralischen Reiches, aber der Mensch muß in sich eine Glaubensgewißheit finden; er muß aus dem Subjektiven heraus sich dazu bekennen, damit er auf irgendeine Art seinem Wesen nach mit jenem Reiche verbunden ist, das von den moralischen Notwendigkeiten durchströmt wird.

Zunächst mag eine große Anzahl von Menschen wohl Beruhigung finden, wenn sie gewissermaßen reinlich voneinander sondern, was man wissen kann und das, was man glauben soll; und man könnte sich denken, daß diese Sonderung auch eine gewisse Lebensberuhigung, eine gewisse Lebenssicherheit abgeben könnte. Aber wenn man tief genug schürft, nicht mit einem einseitigen Denken, sondern mit alldem, was das Denken erleben kann, wenn es sich mit den vollmenschlichen Seelen- und Geisteskräften verbindet, dann muß man zu folgendem kommen. Dann muß man sich sagen: Wenn das Reich der Naturnotwendigkeit so ist, wie man im Laufe der letzten Jahrhunderte gewöhnt worden ist, es sich vorzustellen, dann gibt es demgegenüber keine Möglichkeit, das Reich des Moralischen zu retten. Man muß das sagen aus dem Grunde, weil dieses Reich des Moralischen einfach nirgends die Macht zeigt, gegen das Reich der Naturordnung aufzukommen. Man braucht nur daran zu denken, wie mit einer gewissen inneren Berechtigung gerade aus der Anschauung über die Wärmeentropie sich die Vorstellung entwickeln mußte — ich sage ausdrücklich: entwickeln mußte —, daß einmal alle unsere übrigen Erdenkräfte sich verwandelt haben werden in Wärme, daß diese Wärme sich nicht mehr in irgendwelche andere Kräfte zurückverwandeln kann, und daß dann die Erde als solche befallen werden wird von dem, was man den Wärmetod nennt. Damit gibt es aber für ein ehrliches Denken, das nach den Denkgewohnheiten der neuesten Zeit an der Naturkausalität festhalten will, keine Möglichkeit, anderes sich zu sagen als: Diese vom Wärmetod befallene Erde stellt ein großes Leichenfeld nicht nur für alle Menschen dar, sondern auch für alle moralischen Ideale; die müßten in das Wesenlose hingeschwunden sein, wenn unter Anerkennung der Alleingültigkeit der Naturnotwendigkeit der Wärmetod die Erde ergriffen hätte.

Diese Erwägung erzeugt eben eine Empfindung, die für einen Menschen, der unbefangen der Welt sich gegenüberstellt, etwas ist, was ihm die Sicherheit für die moralische Weltordnung nimmt und damit ihn überhaupt dazu führt, zwiespältig die Welt sehen zu müssen in der Weise, daß er eigentlich nur sich sagen kann: Wie Schaumblasen steigt das moralische Ideal aus der Naturnotwendigkeit auf, wie Schaumblasen werden die moralischen Impulse verschwinden. Denn, was im Innersten mit Menschenwert und Menschenwürde zusammenhängt, das kann nicht als Seiendes hineingeschoben werden in die Anerkennung der bloßen Naturnotwendigkeit. — Wie gesagt: formell ließe sich zwischen Wissen und Glauben trennen, aber wenn man schon diese Glaubensgewißheit annimmt, so kann sich gegenüber der dann anspruchsvoll sein müssenden Wissenschaft die Glaubensgewißheit keine innerliche Garantie für die Realität des Moralischen verschaffen.

Das wirkt nicht bloß auf des Menschen theoretische Vorstellungen. Ein Mensch, der es mit dem Leben ehrlich meint, bei dem muß das in die tiefste Empfindungswelt hineinwirken, und da ergreift es durch Vorgänge, die tief im Uhnterbewußtsein liegen, zerstörend dasjenige, was dem Menschen innere Sicherheit gibt, was ihm überhaupt möglich macht, sein Verhältnis zur Welt als ein gefestigtes nicht nur zu denken, sondern zu empfinden, zu wollen. Und wer für solche Zusammenhänge einen Sinn hat, der wird sich sagen können: Was in einer so unheimlichen Weise aus den Tiefen des Menschenlebens im 20. Jahrhundert als verheerende Wellen heraufgeworfen ist, das geht letzten Endes dennoch aus dem Zusammenklang alles desjenigen hervor — man könnte auch sagen: aus dem Mißklang alles desjenigen -, was die einzelnen menschlichen Individualitäten bei sich erleben. Unsere furchtbare katastrophale Zeit ist doch schließlich aus den innersten Verfassungen der Menschenseelen und Menschenherzen herausgeboren. Ein solcher innerer Zwiespalt, wie ich ihn geschildert habe, läuft nicht nur ab an der Oberfläche des Seelenlebens als theoretische Weltanschauung; er senkt sich hinunter in die Tiefen, aus denen das instinktive Leben, das Gewissensleben kommt. Und da schlägt dann dieser Zwiespalt um in die innerhalb der Erdenordnung diskrepanten Gefühle, die Unordnung, Unsoziales hervorbringen statt möglicher sozialer Gestaltung.

Gewiß, für viele Menschen hat dasjenige, was ich geschildert habe, heute noch nicht das volle Gewicht; aber man kann schon voraussehen, wenn man nur ein wenig unbefangen den Gang der menschlichen Geistesentwickelung in den letzten Jahrhunderten, insbesondere in der neuesten Zeit verfolgt, zu welch einem moralischen Ausleben, zu welch einer sozialen Gestaltung dieser Zwiespalt in den Menschenseelen in der allernächsten Zukunft führen muß. Man wird niemals Antwort bekommen auf die brennende Frage: Warum leben wir in einer solchen Zeit der Not? — wenn man sich nicht einläßt, die Bausteine zu suchen für dasjenige, was man in den Tiefen des Menschenlebens selber nötig hat.

Demjenigen, was ich Ihnen hier geschildert habe, steht gegenüber das, was nun von anthroposophischer Geisteswissenschaft an Welterkenntnis auf dem Wege durch Imagination, Inspiration zur Intuition erstrebt wird. Wir werden sehen, wie sich anthroposophische Geisteswissenschaft mit der heute geschilderten brennendsten Frage der Gegenwart und der nächsten Zukunft vermöge dessen abzufinden vermag, was sie eben auf ihrem Wege glaubt erkennen zu können. Ich habe Ihnen den Weg geschildert, den Geisteswissenschaft zurücklegt durch Imagination und Inspiration. Ich habe darauf aufmerksam gemacht, wie jene Übungen, die ich hier nicht ausführlich schildern kann, die Sie in meinen Büchern, welche ich öfter hier genannt habe, geschildert finden, wie jene Übungen zur imaginativen Erkenntnis das Geistig-Seelische in derselben Weise zum bewußten Inhalt bringen, wie das gewöhnliche Bewußtsein von einem Inhalte durchsetzt ist, wenn es in der Erinnerung lebt. Hinter dem, was als Erinnerungen aufsteigt, willkürlich oder unwillkürlich, steckt unsere physische und ätherische Organisation. Dasjenige, was in dieser physischen und ätherischen Organisation vor sich geht, rückt da herauf in das Bewußtsein. Was bei der gewöhnlichen Erinnerung unsere physisch-ätherische Organisation macht, das bewirkt man auf rein seelisch-geistigem Wege durch jene ausführlichen Übungen, die in meinen Büchern geschildert sind, und man gelangt dadurch zu Vorstellungen, die den Erinnerungsvorstellungen jetzt rein formell ähnlich sind, die aber hinweisen auf einen äußeren objektiven, nicht auf einen persönlich erlebten Inhalt. Dadurch aber bereiten wir uns durch die Imagination vor für das Erkennen einer wirklichen objektiven, übersinnlichen Welt.

Wir müssen dann, um zur Inspiration aufzusteigen, nicht nur auf geistig-seelische Art das Hervorbringen solcher Vorstellungen üben, die den erinnerten Vorstellungen ähnlich sind, sondern wir müssen dahin arbeiten, auch geistig-seelisch gewissermaßen das Vergessen zu üben, das Hinausbringen solcher Imaginationen aus dem nun erlangten Bewußtsein. Wir müssen uns üben, nicht mehr die ja unrealen Imaginationen zu haben, sondern diese willkürlich aus unserem Bewußtsein zu entfernen, so daß wir dann dieses Bewußtsein, wenn ich mich so ausdrücken darf, mit einer gewissen Leerheit haben. Gelangen wir dahin, dann haben wir die Möglichkeit, mit dem durch alle diese Übungsvorgänge verstärkten Ich uns in dieOffenbarungen der objektiv-übersinnlichen Welt hineinzufinden. Statt der vorherigen subjektiven Imaginationen leuchten auf im Bewußtsein objektive Imaginationen, und das Aufleuchten solcher objektiver Imaginationen, die jetzt nicht von uns selber kommen, die aus der geistigen Objektivität kommen, das ist eben die Inspiration. Wir gelangen gewissermaßen bis an die Grenzen des Übersinnlichen, das sich uns in seiner Außenseite durch diese Imaginationen offenbart. Genau in derselben Weise, wie wir durch unsere sinnliche Wahrnehmungswelt, wenn wir nur den ganzen Menschen in dieser sinnlichen Wahrnehmungswelt tätig sein lassen, uns überzeugen von der Realität der dieser Sinnenwelt zugrunde liegenden objektiven Außenwelt, so offenbaren uns die nunmehr erlangten Imaginationen mit voller Überzeugungskraft die übersinnliche Welt, deren Ausdruck sie sind.

Nun handelt es sich zunächst darum, diesen Erkenntnisweg noch bis zu einer nächsten Stufe fortzusetzen. Das aber erlangen wir dadurch, daß wir nicht bloß das Vergessen so weit treiben, daß wir Imaginationen aus uns herausschaffen, sondern noch um einen Schritt weitergehen. Gelangt man nämlich zur imaginativen Welt, so zeigt sich einem ja zuerst das eigene Leben in seinem Verlaufe. Man lebt nicht nur im Augenblick mit seinem Bewußtsein, man lebt in dem ganzen Strom des Lebens fast bis zur Geburt zurück. Ist man dann imstande, vorzurücken zur Inspiration, dann erweitert sich die Überschau, die man vorher über das Leben seit der Geburt gehabt hat, bis zu dem Wahrnehmen einer übersinnlichen Welt, aus der heraus man durch die Geburt oder durch die Empfängnis in die sinnlich-physische Welt hereingekommen ist. Es dehnt sich das geistige Blickfeld aus über diejenigen Welten, die wir vor der Geburt oder vor der Empfängnis durchlebt haben und die wir durchleben werden, wenn wir durch die Pforte des Todes gegangen sind. Der Ausblick auf die übersinnliche Welt, der wir angehören, ergibt sich durch die inspirierte Erkenntnis.

Wenn wir uns nun weiter bemühen, nicht nur diejenigen Imaginationen fortzuschaffen, die Einzelheiten innerhalb des Horizontes der imaginativen Welt enthalten, sondern wenn wir die Imagination unseres ganzen Wesens als Mensch gewissermaßen vergessen, das heißt, wegschaffen, wenn wir die Kraft erlangen, auszutilgen dasjenige, was sich in unserem Ich zusammenfaßt aus den Erlebnissen seit unserer Ge burt, was sich auch hinzufügt dadurch, daß sich der Horizont erweitert in eine geistige Welt, dann gelangen wir dazu, das Ich jetzt nicht zu schwächen, sondern gerade dadurch, daß es sich selbst vergißt, erst recht zu stärken. Und dadurch kommen wir allmählich hinein in die Wirklichkeit der geistigen, der übersinnlichen Welt. Wir leben uns zusammen mit der Wirklichkeit dieser geistigen Welt. Wir gelangen dazu, die Anschauung von den vorangegangenen wiederholten Erdenleben als etwas zu erkennen, was uns unser Ich auf verschiedenen Stufen zeigt. Dann, wenn wir uns die Fähigkeit erworben haben, dieses Ich auf seiner heutigen Stufe zu vergessen, das heißt, seinen imaginativen Inhalt auszuschalten, dann gelangen wir dazu, das ewige Ich zu schauen.

Die Dinge, von denen anthroposophische Geisteswissenschaft spricht, sind so, daß man sie nicht aus irgendeiner blaudunstigen Mystik heraus erhält, sondern daß man Schritt für Schritt zu jeder einzelnen Erkenntnis den Weg angeben kann. Der Weg ist nicht nur kein äußerlicher, er ist ein innerlicher in seinem ganzen Verlauf, aber ein solcher, der zu dem Erfassen einer wirklichen objektiven, aber übersinnlichen Realität führt. Dadurch aber, daß man sich auf diese Weise zur wahrhaft intuitiven Erkenntnis erhebt, gelangt man eigentlich erst zu einem wirklichen, zu einem wahren Durchschauen desjenigen, was eigentlich unser Denken, unser Vorstellen ist, das wir im gewöhnlichen Leben anwenden, mit dem wir unsere Wahrnehmungen durchsetzen. Man gelangt zur vollen, zur ganzen Wirklichkeit von dem, wovon man bis zu einem gewissen Grade sich eine Vorstellung, eine empirische Vorstellung verschaffen kann auch auf die Art, wie ich es versucht habe darzustellen in meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit». Da habe ich versucht, auf das reine Denken hinzuweisen, auf dasjenige Denken, das in uns auch leben kann, bevor wir gerade diese Partie des Denkens mit irgendeiner äußeren Wahrnehmung zur vollen Wirklichkeit zusammengebracht haben. Ich habe hingewiesen darauf, daß dieses reine Denken selber als innerer Seeleninhalt wahrgenommen werden kann; aber was es seinem Wesen nach ist, das läßt sich erst erkennen, wenn die wirkliche Intuition auf dem höheren Erkenntniswege in der Seele auftritt. Dann durchschaut man gewissermaßen dieses eigene Denken; man lebt sich jetzt erst durch Intuition in dieses eigene Denken hinein, denn die Intuition besteht eben darinnen, daß man sich in ein Übersinnliches mit seinem eigenen Wesen hineinlebt, daß man in dieses Übersinnliche untertaucht.

Und so lernt man erkennen etwas, dessen Erleben so, wie ich es eben angedeutet habe, wiederum eine Art Erkenntnisschicksal ist. Man erlebt etwas ganz Gewaltiges, wenn man sich intuitiv in die Natur des Erkennens hineinlebt. Man weiß? dann, wie man als Mensch materiell organisiert ist. Man weiß, wie weit diese materielle Organisation reicht; aber man durchschaut auch durch die Intuition, daß jene nur bis zu dem reicht, was als eine Widerlage, gewissermaßen als Boden dient, auf dem sich das Denken entwickeln kann, aber daß die materiellen Vorgänge in sich selber abgebaut werden müssen da, wo wirkliches Denken erscheint. In demselben Maße, in dem die materiellen Vorgänge abgebaut werden, kann Platz greifen in uns dasjenige, was jetzt an die Stelle der Vernichtung des Materiellen tritt: das Denken, das Vorstellen.

Ich weiß alles, was eingewendet werden kann gegen die Sätze, die ich in diesem Augenblick ausspreche, aber das intuitive Erkennen führt dahin in bezug auf das Materielle, einzusehen, daß dort, wo das Denken sich entwickelt, ein Nichts vom Materiellen zu erblicken ist. Es führt dahin, zu sagen: Indem ich denke, bin ich nicht, wenn ich das materielle Sein, das man sonst als das maßgebende anerkennt, als einziges Sein gelten lasse. Es muß erst die Materie sich zurückziehen im Organismus und Platz machen dem Denken, dem Vorstellen; dann sieht dieses Denken, dieses Vorstellen, die Möglichkeit seiner Entfaltung im Menschen. Dort also, wo wir das Denken in seiner Wirklichkeit wahrnehmen, nehmen wir Abbau, Vernichtung des materiellen Daseins wahr. Wir schauen hinein, wie die Materie ins Nichts übergeht.

Hier ist es, wo wir an der Grenze des Gesetzes von der Erhaltung der Materie und der Kraft stehen. Man muß den Ausdehnungsbereich dieses Gesetzes von Materie und Kraft erkennen, damit man den Mut fassen kann, ihm dann zu widersprechen, wenn es nötig ist. Niemals kann irgend jemand die Wesenheit des Denkens unbefangen an der Stelle, wo Materie sich selbst vernichtet, durchschauen, der das Gesetz von derErhaltung desStoffes als ein absolutes anerkennt, der nicht weiß, daß es gilt im Bereich dessen, was wir äußerlich überschauen im physischen, im chemischen Felde und so weiter, daß es aber nicht gilt dort, wo unser Denken auf dem Schauplatze unserer eigenen menschlichen Organisation auftritt. Wenn es nicht nötig wäre, aus gewissen Untergründen heraus diese Erkenntnis heute vor die Welt hinzustellen, man würde sich nicht all den Spöttereien und all den Einwänden aussetzen, die ganz begreiflicherweise kommen müssen von denjenigen, die aus den bekannten Voraussetzungen heraus das Gesetz von der Erhaltung der Materie und der Kraft für absolut halten, für ausnahmslos geltend.

Aber ebenso wie man durch Intuition das Verhältnis vom Denken zu der gewöhnlichen Materie kennenlernt, die uns sonst in der physischen Welt umgibt, so lernt man durch Intuition das Verhältnis der Inspiration erkennen, der im Geiste waltenden Inspiration, zu dem menschlichen Gefühls- und rhythmischen Leben. Im Nerven-Sinneswesen wird physische Materie vernichtet. Deshalb kann das NervenSinneswesen Grundlage sein für das Vorstellen, für das Denken. Das zweite System des Menschen ist das rhythmische System. Mit ihm hängt seelisch zusammen das Gefühlsleben so, wie das Denkleben mit dem Nerven-Sinneswesen zusammenhängt. Das Verhältnis des außermenschlichen Objektiven, dem wir durch Inspiration uns nahen, zum Menschen, zeigt uns, daß wir durch die Inspiration einer Weltwesenheit uns bewußt werden, die in uns hereinspielt, so wie durch das Vorstellen die Sinneswelt hereinspielt. Diese inspirierte Welt spielt in uns namentlich herein durch den Atmungsprozeß, der seinen Rhythmus auch bis in die Gehirnvorgänge und in den übrigen Organismus fortsetzt.

Man lernt nun erkennen dasjenige, was innerlich im menschlichen Wesen als Rhythmus lebt. Da wird zwar nicht in gleicher Weise wie im Denkvorgang die Materie ertötet, aber es wird das Leben abgelähmt, so daß es sich immer neu anfachen muß. Und dem gewöhnlichen, rein mechanischen Atmungsrhythmus liegt zugrunde dieses Beleben und Ablähmen eines inneren Rhythmus, der sich gewissermaßen dualistisch in den physischen Atmungsvorgang und in den seelischen Gefühlsvorgang spaltet. Die Einheit dieses seelischen Gefühlsvorganges und der physischen Atmungsrhythmen erblicken wir als eine Inspiration, als eine Wesenheit, die in Inspirationen objektiv lebt und durch Intuition durchschaut werden kann. Kurz, wir lernen den ganzen Zusammenhang von Gefühlswelt und rhythmischem Menschen auf diese Arterkennen, lernen erkennen, daß hier nicht wie im Nerven-Sinnessystem eine völlige Aufhebung des Materiellen stattfindet, sondern eine Herablähmung des Materiellen. Wir lernen also nach und nach den Menschen durchschauen. Und so sehen wir hin auf das menschliche Gefühlsleben und sehen in ihm dasjenige, was nur da sein kann dadurch, daß in rhythmischen Vorgängen das Leben immer abgelähmt wird und sich neu anfachen muß.

Auf diese Art sehen wir ein zweites Wichtiges in der menschlichen Wesenheit, indem wir den Zusammenklang von Belebung und Ablähmung in solcher Art durchschauen. Wir sehen, was das ganze rhythmische Wesen im Menschen für eine Bedeutung hat, wie es im Menschen zusammenhängt mit seiner leiblich-seelischen Gesamtwesenheit. Und indem wir dieses zweite Element im Menschen überschauen, wird uns allerdings klar, daß der Mensch in sich selber eine reale Kraft trägt, welche in rhythmischem Wechselverhältnis steht zu einer äußeren Kraft, die aber nun im Übersinnlichen ist. Wir sehen gewissermaßen dieses Hinundherschwingen einer inneren und einer äußeren Kraft. Und in ähnlicher Weise können wir auch den Menschen des Stoffwechsel-Gliedmaßensystems überblicken. Indem wir uns zur Inspiration, zur Intuition, zur Imagination erheben, sehen wir auf geistig-seelische Art dasjenige, was im Menschen als reale Kräfte sonst unbewußt wirkt. Unsere gewöhnliche gegenständliche Erkenntnis gibt uns nur Formales; durch sie sind wir gewissermaßen nur Zuschauer einer Welt. Dasjenige aber, was wir uns erringen durch Imagination, Intuition, Inspiration, haben wir zunächst als freies, inneres seelisches Erzeugnis, aber wir beziehen es in einer übersinnlichen Erkenntnis auf etwas, was objektiv in dem Menschen ist, und können endlich durchschauen, wie der menschliche Wille nun wirkt in der ethischen Handlung. Hat man zuerst erkannt, daß das reine Denken ein Abbauen der Materie ist, überhaupt mit den ertötenden, als Rückentwickelung wirkenden Prozessen zusammenhängt, so kommt man dazu, einzusehen, wie alles, was seelisch-willenshaft auftritt, mit den Aufbauprozessen, mit den Wachstumsprozessen zusammenhängt. Die Wachstums-, die Aufbauprozesse, die Organisations- und Reproduktionsprozesse in uns dämpfen unser gewöhnliches Bewußtsein für die Tiefen der Menschenorganisation herunter, und der Wille steigt aus solchen Tiefen des Menschenwesens herauf, bis zu welchen das gewöhnliche Bewußtsein nicht hinuntergelangt. So wie das Denken im Ertötenden lebt, so lebt das Willenshafte im Wachsenden, im Gedeihenden, im Fruchtenden.

Man durchschaut dann wieder durch Intuition, wie aus dem Stoffwechsel heraus durch den Willen, der aber jetzt seine Motive im reinen Denken hat, der Stoff in der menschlichen Organisation an die Stelle hingeschoben wird, wo abgebaut werden soll. Das Denken als solches baut ab, der Wille baut auf. Er baut allerdings so auf, daß zunächst in dem Leben bis zum Tode hin das Aufbauen latent in der menschlichen Organisation bleibt. Aber es ist ein Aufbauen da. Wir leben also, indem wir es in unseren sittlichen Motiven im Sinne meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit» zu wirklich freien, sittlichen Intuitionen bringen, ein solches Menschenleben, das aus seiner Organisation heraus willenshaft dorthin umgestaltete Materie setzt, wo Materie vernichtet worden ist. Der Mensch wird innerlich schöpferisch, innerlich aufbauend. Mit andern Worten: Wir sehen innerhalb des Kosmos in der menschlichen Organisation das Nichts erfüllt von Neubildung in ganz materiellem Sinne. Das heißt nichts anderes, als daß man, sofern man konsequent den Weg anthroposophischer Erkenntnis verfolgt, dahin kommt, wo innerhalb des Menschen rein sittliche Ideale weltbildend bis zu der Materialität hin auftreten.

Damit haben wir gewissermaßen entdeckt, wo die moralische Welt selber schöpferisch wird, wo etwas entsteht, was aus der menschlichen Sittlichkeit heraus seine eigene Realität verbürgt, weil sie sie in sich trägt, weil sie sie selber schafft. Und lernen wir dann durch diese Intuition die äußere Welt kennen, so stellt sich uns zunächst das mineralische Reich dar als in einem Ertötungsprozesse, in einem Vergehensprozesse begriffen, den wir in dem dem eigenen Denken entsprechenden materiellen Prozesse gut kennengelernt haben. Und wir lernen demgemäß auch erkennen, wie dieser Vergehensprozeß in sich pflanzliches, tierisches Leben mit hineinreißt. Wir blicken dann nicht auf den Wärmetod, der innerhalb gewisser Grenzen Berechtigung hat, aber etwas Einseitiges ist, sondern wir blicken auf das Verschwinden der ganzen Welt, die von Mineralität durchsetzt ist und die um uns herum ist. Diejenige Welt also, die wir als eine kausalnotwendige erkennen, erblicken wir in ihrer Vergänglichkeit, und die Welt, die wir aus den reinen moralischen Idealen aufbauen, die erkennen wir als diejenige, die nun ersteht auf dem Boden der ersterbenden andern Welt. Mit andern Worten: Wir erkennen jetzt, wie die moralische Weltordnung mit der physisch-kausalen Weltordnung zusammenhängt. Wir haben in dem moralisch reinen Willen im Menschenwesen etwas, das im Menschen und dadurch für die ganze Welt die Kausalität selber besiegt.

Wer ehrlich an die kausale Naturerklärung denkt, der findet innerhalb ihres eigenen Bereiches keine Stelle in der Welt, wo sie nicht gilt. Und weil sie gilt, muß es eine Macht geben, die ihre Gültigkeit vernichtet. Diese Macht ist die moralische Welt. Die moralische Welt, aus der Gesamtnatur des Menschen heraus erkannt, enthält in sich die Kraft, die Naturkausalität selber zu durchbrechen, allerdings nicht durch Wunderwirkungen, sondern durch einen Entwickelungsverlauf. Denn dasjenige, was sich innerhalb des einzelnen Menschen also vernichtend für die Kausalität hinstellt, das gewinnt erst eine Bedeutung in Zukunftswelten. Aber wir sehen die Realität des menschlichen Willens, der seinen Bund eingeht mit dem reinen Denken. Dadurch aber gewinnen wir — und das ist die schönste Lebensfrucht anthroposophischer Wissenschaftlichkeit — einen Einblick in den Menschenwert innerhalb des Kosmos, dadurch auch gewinnen wir ein Gefühl für Menschenwürde innerhalb des Kosmos.

Die Dinge hängen in der Welt nicht nur so zusammen, wie wir sie oftmals in unseren abstrakten Begriffen uns vorstellen, nein, sie hängen als Realitäten zusammen, und eine wichtige Realität ist die folgende: Gewiß, es kann nicht jeder heute schon zur Imagination, zur Inspiration, zur Intuition aufrücken. Dasjenige aber, was wir in alle diese Erkenntnisstufen hinein auch als Geistesforscher mitnehmen, das ist das Denken, das einen Gedanken aus dem andern mit innerer Notwendigkeit entwickelt. Dieses Denken kann nun jeder Mensch, der sich ihm unbefangen hingeben will, erleben. Und daher kommt es, daß alle geisteswissenschaftlichen Resultate stets, wenn sie gefunden sind, auch durch das reine Denken nachgeprüft werden können, weil der Geistesforscher dieses reine Denken in alle seine Vorstellungselemente mit hineinnimmt.

Aber im Sinne der ganzen Darstellung, die ich gegeben habe, gliedert sich an dasjenige, was man zunächst nur als ein Bekenntnis anthroposophischer Geisteswissenschaft aufnimmt, etwas ganz Besonderes in der Menschenseele. Die andern Vorstellungen, die sich der Mensch bildet, sind von äußeren Wahrnehmungen abgezogen oder sind an äußeren Wahrnehmungen gebildet. Diese äußeren Wahrnehmungen dienen diesem Vorstellungsleben als Stütze. Und heute gibt es allerdings nach den Denk- und Weltanschauungsgewohnheiten der neuesten Zeit viele Menschen, die lassen es überhaupt nicht gelten, daß an den Menschen etwas herantreten dürfe, das nicht in dieser Beziehung seine Stütze an der äußeren Wahrnehmung findet. Allein dann kommt man eben in Lebensunmöglichkeiten hinein, wenn man nicht gelten lassen will, daß der Mensch auch Wesenhaftes verstehen kann, wenn er sich nur seinem reinen, sich selbst organisierenden, aus sich selbst konkret wachsenden Denken hingibt, und daß er dann aufnehmen kann die Vorstellungen aus der Geisteswissenschaft, die in Imagination, Inspiration und Intuition errungen werden, von denen der steife Philister sagt: Sie sind Phantastereien, denn sie stellen keine Wirklichkeit dar. — Er ist zu bequem, um mit dem Denken hineinzugehen in diejenige Wirklichkeit, die der Geistesforscher durch Imagination, Inspiration und Intuition aufdeckt. Aber diese Wirklichkeit hängt innig zusammen mit dem Menschenwesen. Und mit dem Gefühl, mit der inneren Seelenverfassung, mit denen wir uns zum Aufnehmen geisteswissenschaftlicher Begriffe hindurchringen, die kein Korrelat in der äußeren Sinneswelt haben, die wir frei im Geiste erleben müssen, durchströmen wir unseren ganzen Menschen mit einem neuen Wesen.

Das wird gesehen werden können, wenn Geisteswissenschaft in unser Kulturleben einzieht, daß, weil — wie ich angedeutet habe — dasjenige, was durch Imagination, Inspiration und Intuition geschaut wird, einem lebendigen Wesen im Menschen selber entspricht, daß dadurch auch das lebendige Menschenwesen durch diese Geisteswissenschaft direkt ergriffen wird, daß der Mensch durch dieses Aufnehmen selber eine innerliche Metamorphose und Verwandlung durchmachen kann. Er wird innerlich reicher. Man kann es fühlen, wie er reicher wird dadurch, daß er sich mit einem Elemente durchdringt, das nicht entzündet werden kann an der äußeren physischen Wirklichkeit. Mit diesem Elemente, das dann den ganzen Menschen durchströmt, durchdrungen, tritt man an seine Mitmenschen heran. Dadurch aber erwirbt man sich eine Menschenerkenntnis, die man früher nicht gehabt hat, und man erwirbt sich vor allen Dingen Menschenliebe. Was in uns entzündet wird durch die ins Übersinnliche zielenden Erkenntnisse anthroposophischer Geisteswissenschaft, das ist Menschenliebe, die uns unterrichtet von Menschenwert, die uns empfinden läßt die Menschenwürde.

Erkenntnis von Menschenwert, Erfühlen von Menschenwürde, Wollen in Menschenliebe, das sind schönste Lebensfrüchte, die sich im Menschen heranerziehen durch das Erleben geisteswissenschaftlicher Ergebnisse.

Damit aber wirkt diese Geisteswissenschaft auf den Willen so, daß dieser zu dem sich hinaufschwingen kann, was ich in meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit» als die moralischen Intuitionen gekennzeichnet habe. Und es tritt das Gewaltige ins Menschenleben herein, daß diese moralischen Ideale, diese moralischen Intuitionen durchsetzt werden von dem, was sonst die Liebe ist, daß wir frei handelnde Menschen werden können aus der Liebe unserer Individualität heraus. Damit aber nähert sich die Geisteswissenschaft einem Ideal, das nun auch aus der Goethe-Zeit stammt; nur sprach es am deutlichsten Goethes Freund Schiller aus. Als Schiller sich einlebte in die Kantische Philosophie, nahm er vieles von Kant auf in bezug auf das Theoretisch-Philosophische. In bezug auf Kants Moralphilosophie konnte er mit Kant nicht mitgehen. In dieser Kantischen Moralphilosophie fand Schiller einen starren Pflichtbegriff, der von Kant so vorgestellt wird, daß er dasteht wie eine Naturmacht selber, wie etwas, was zwingend wirkt auf den Menschen. Schiller fühlte Menschenwert und Menschenwürde und wollte nicht gelten lassen, daß der Mensch, um sittlich zu sein, einem geistigen Zwang unterliegen müsse. Schiller sprach ja die schönen Worte aus: «Gerne dien’ ich den Freunden, doch tu’ ich es leider mit Neigung, und so wurmt es mir oft, daß ich nicht tugendhaft bin.» Denn im kantischen Sinne, meint Schiller, müsse man eigentlich zunächst versuchen, alle Neigung zum Freunde zu unterdrücken und dann dasjenige, was man für ihn tut, aus dem starren Pflichtbegriff heraus tun.

Daß des Menschen Verhalten zur Sittlichkeit ein anderes sein müsse als dieses kantische, das stellte Schiller, soweit es in seiner Zeit dargestellt werden konnte, in seinen Briefen «Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen» dar, wo er zeigen wollte, wie die Pflicht sich heruntersenken müsse, so daß sie Neigung wird, wie die Neigung heraufsteigen müsse, so daß einem dasjenige sympathisch wird, was der Inhalt der Pflicht ist. Pflicht müsse heruntersteigen, Naturinstinkt müsse heraufsteigen im freien Menschen, der aus seiner Neigung heraus das tut, was der Gesamtmenschheit frommt. Und indem man aufsucht, wo im Menschenwesen die moralischen Intuitionen wurzeln, indem man aufsucht, welches das eigentlich treibende, sittliche Motiv in den moralischen Intuitionen ist, entdeckt man die aufs höchste ins Geistige hinauf geläuterte Liebe. Da, wo diese Liebe geistig wird, da saugt sie in sich die moralischen Intuitionen auf; und man ist ein moralischer Mensch, weil man die Pflicht liebt, weil sie etwas ist, was als ein unmittelbar Kraftendes aus der menschlichen Individualität selbst herauskommt.

Das war es, was mich bewogen hat, in der «Philosophie der Freiheit» eine entschiedene Antithese gegenüber der Kantischen Moralauffassung nun auch aus der Anthroposophie heraus aufzustellen. Die Kantische These lautet ja: «Pflicht! Du erhabener, großer Name, der du nichts Beliebtes, was Einschmeichelung bei sich führt, in dir fassest, sondern Unterwerfung verlangst ...», der du «ein Gesetz aufstellst..., vor dem alle Neigungen verstummen, wenn sie gleich ihm entgegenwirken.»

Durch einen solchen Pflichtbegriff kann der Mensch niemals hinaufvergeistigt werden, so daß er in seinem innersten Wesen der freie Urheber seiner moralischen Handlungen ist. Aus diesen Versuchen heraus, durch wirkliche anthroposophische Menschenerkenntnis zum Durchschauen des Menschenwesens zu kommen, setzte ich in der «Philosophie der Freiheit» diesem starren Begriffe im Kantianismus dasjenige entgegen, was Sie in der «Philosophie der Freiheit» finden: «Freiheit! du freundlicher, menschlicher Name, der du alles sittlich Beliebte, was mein Menschentum am meisten würdigt, in dir fassest, und mich zu niemandes Diener machst, der du nicht bloß ein Gesetz aufstellst, sondern abwartest, was meine sittliche Liebe selbst als Gesetz erkennen wird, weil sie jedem nur auferzwungenen Gesetze gegenüber sich unfrei fühlt.»

So glaubte ich in der «Philosophie der Freiheit» sprechen zu müssen davon, wie das Moralische menschenwürdig erscheint in vollstem Maße, wenn es mit der Freiheit des Menschen eins ist und wenn es wurzelt in wirklicher Menschenliebe. Durch Anthroposophie aber kann gezeigt werden, wie diese Liebe zur Pflicht im weiteren Sinne zur Menschenliebe wird und damit zu demjenigen, was wir weiter betrachten wollen, zu dem eigentlichen Fermente des sozialen Lebens. Was heute sich als gewaltige, brennende soziale Frage vor uns hinstellt, durchschaut werden kann es nur, wenn man sich zu erkennen bemüht den Zusammenhang von: Freiheit, Liebe, Menschenwesen, Geist und Naturnotwendigkeit.

Seventh Lecture

The most significant question in contemporary intellectual life, one that casts its shadow over the whole of cultural life, is one that is already present in the feelings of every human being today, but which can only be solved by following the path that leads from ordinary, objective knowledge to intuition through imagination and inspiration, to supersensible knowledge. Every soul that is completely unbiased and has a genuine, inner interest in the human being must ask itself this most important question when confronted with the current understanding of moral and ethical life on the one hand, and the life that results from the rightly recognized scientific worldview on the other. Ethical, moral life confronts us today with burning questions because we live in an age in which the ethical is at the same time the social, and the social question can be felt as a burning question by every human being.

Let us consider what is presented to our soul by our understanding of nature in accordance with today's thinking. The pursuit of a true understanding of nature aims to comprehend the things of the world in their necessity, in their causal relationships. And this causal connection, this necessity, should be extended, according to a consistent worldview, to everything that is part of the world order, including human beings. Insofar as we want to understand human beings scientifically today, we naturally extend to them the knowledge that we are accustomed to applying to natural phenomena outside of human beings, and we then attempt, in more or less bold hypotheses, to extend what we learn from our knowledge of nature, which is immediately available to us and observable, to the facts and beings of the world. We form hypotheses about the beginning and end of the earth from scientific concepts of knowledge. With this scientific knowledge, we come to a point where, if we proceed consistently, we must say to ourselves: we must not stop short of human freedom. I have already hinted at the problem at hand here.

Those who, out of a certain desire for consistency, seek a formal, uniform explanation of the world will, when faced with the choice between accepting a freedom that is actually empirically given in immediate human experience and the omnipresent necessity of nature, will, based on what humanity has been taught in terms of habits of thought and knowledge over the last few centuries, decide in favor of the necessity of nature. Despite experiencing freedom, they will declare it to be an illusion and extend the realm of absolute necessity into the most intimate intimacies of human beings, so that humans are completely ensnared in the circle of scientific necessity. And one will behave in the same way with regard to the hypothetical world of ideas about what, for example, the beginning and end of the earth are. One takes the laws and connections that result from physics, chemistry, and so on, and then forms hypotheses such as the nebular hypothesis, that is, the Kant-Laplace theory about the beginning of the earth. From the second law of mechanical thermodynamics, one forms hypotheses about the heat death into which the earth will fall.

In this way, we can extend into the intimacies of human beings and to the limits of the universe that which has recently proven to be undeniably fruitful for explaining the natural phenomena that surround us in the world in which we wander between birth and death. But then, when we come to a certain self-reflection and ask ourselves: What is the basis of true human dignity, what is the basis of true human value? – then we come to turn our gaze also to the moral world, to that which in us is the ethical and moral driving force for our consciousness. We feel that only by following the moral ideals that we permeate with religious feeling can we attain a completely dignified existence. We cannot, so to speak, call ourselves human in the full sense of the word if we do not actively think those motives within us that we describe as moral and which then flow out into social life and which we think of as pulsating within us from what we call the divine in the world order. But if we take a completely honest view today, from which we survey the mechanical-causal, necessary order of nature, then there is no bridge from this order of nature, into which we must also incorporate human beings for the sake of a certain honesty of knowledge, to the other order, which is the moral order and with which human beings must think of their entire dignity and value as connected.

Recent times have, however, provided a certain means of information to deceive ourselves about this abyss that has opened up between two essential components of our humanity. It has been said: In the true scientific sense, only that which seeks to explain the world, including human beings, including the beginning and end of the world, in terms of natural necessity is scientific. And from this point of view, nothing is considered scientific that cannot be woven into a way of thinking about this natural order without contradiction. Alongside this, however, a realm with a completely different kind of certainty is established, a realm with the certainty of faith. We look at what shines within us as the moral light and say to ourselves: No scientific knowledge can in any way guarantee the significance of this moral realm, but man must find a certainty of faith within himself; he must profess it out of his own subjective experience, so that he is in some way connected in his essence with that realm which is permeated by moral necessities.

At first, a large number of people may find reassurance in making a clear distinction between what can be known and what should be believed; and one might think that this separation could also provide a certain peace of mind, a certain security in life. But if one digs deep enough, not with one-sided thinking, but with everything that thinking can experience when it connects with the full human powers of soul and spirit, then one must come to the following conclusion. Then one must say to oneself: if the realm of natural necessity is as we have become accustomed to imagining it over the last few centuries, then there is no possibility of saving the realm of morality. One must say this because this realm of morality simply shows no power anywhere to oppose the realm of the natural order. One need only think of how, with a certain inner justification, precisely from the view of heat entropy, the idea had to develop — I say explicitly: had to develop — that all our remaining earthly forces will one day be transformed into heat, that this heat can no longer be transformed back into any other forces, and that then the earth as such will be afflicted by what is called heat death. However, for honest thinking that, in accordance with the thinking habits of recent times, wants to hold fast to natural causality, there is no other possibility than to say: this Earth afflicted by heat death represents a great field of corpses, not only for all human beings, but also for all moral ideals; which would have to have vanished into nothingness if, in recognition of the sole validity of natural necessity, heat death had taken hold of the earth.

This consideration creates a feeling that, for a person who faces the world with an open mind, is something that robs them of their certainty about the moral world order and thus leads them to see the world in an ambivalent way, in such a way that they can really only say to themselves: Like bubbles, the moral ideal rises from natural necessity, and like bubbles, moral impulses will disappear. For what is most intimately connected with human value and human dignity cannot be pushed into the recognition of mere natural necessity as something that exists. — As I said, knowledge and belief can be formally separated, but if one accepts this certainty of belief, then, in the face of science, which must be demanding, the certainty of belief cannot provide any inner guarantee for the reality of morality.

This does not only affect people's theoretical ideas. A person who takes life seriously must allow this to affect their deepest feelings, and there, through processes that lie deep in the subconscious, it destructively undermines what gives people inner security, what makes it possible for them not only to think of their relationship to the world as stable, but also to feel and want it. And anyone who has a sense of such connections will be able to say to themselves: What has been thrown up in such an eerie way from the depths of human life in the 20th century as devastating waves ultimately emerges from the harmony of everything that individual human beings experience within themselves — one could also say: from the disharmony of everything that individual human beings experience within themselves. Our terrible, catastrophic time is ultimately born out of the innermost constitution of human souls and hearts. Such an inner conflict, as I have described it, does not only play out on the surface of the soul's life as a theoretical worldview; it descends into the depths from which instinctive life and the life of conscience arise. And there this conflict then turns into feelings that are at odds with the earthly order, feelings that produce disorder and antisocial behavior instead of possible social organization.

Certainly, for many people, what I have described does not yet have its full weight today; but if one follows the course of human spiritual development over the last few centuries, especially in recent times, with just a little impartiality, one can already foresee what kind of moral expression, what kind of social structure this conflict in human souls must lead to in the very near future. One will never get an answer to the burning question: Why are we living in such a time of need? — unless one engages in searching for the building blocks for what one needs in the depths of human life itself.

What I have described here is contrasted with what anthroposophical spiritual science now strives for in terms of world knowledge on the path through imagination, inspiration, and intuition. We will see how anthroposophical spiritual science is able to come to terms with the most burning question of the present and the near future, as described today, by means of what it believes it can recognize on its path. I have described to you the path that spiritual science takes through imagination and inspiration. I have pointed out how those exercises, which I cannot describe in detail here but which you will find described in my books, which I have often mentioned here, how those exercises for imaginative knowledge bring the spiritual-soul into conscious awareness in the same way that ordinary consciousness is permeated by content when it lives in memory. Behind what arises as memories, arbitrarily or involuntarily, lies our physical and etheric organization. What goes on in this physical and etheric organization comes up into consciousness. What our physical-etheric organization does in ordinary memory can be achieved in a purely soul-spiritual way through the detailed exercises described in my books, and this leads to images that are now purely formally similar to memory images, but which point to an external objective content, not to a personally experienced content. In this way, however, we prepare ourselves through imagination for the recognition of a real, objective, supersensible world.

In order to ascend to inspiration, we must not only practice producing such ideas that are similar to remembered ideas in a spiritual-soul way, but we must also work toward practicing forgetting in a spiritual-soul way, so to speak, bringing such imaginations out of the consciousness we have now attained. We must practice no longer having these unreal imaginations, but removing them arbitrarily from our consciousness, so that we then have this consciousness, if I may express it this way, with a certain emptiness. If we achieve this, then we have the opportunity, with the ego strengthened by all these exercises, to find our way into the revelations of the objective supersensible world. Instead of the previous subjective imaginations, objective imaginations shine forth in our consciousness, and the shining forth of such objective imaginations, which now do not come from ourselves but from spiritual objectivity, is precisely what we call inspiration. We reach, as it were, the limits of the supersensible, which reveals itself to us in its outer aspect through these imaginations. In exactly the same way as we convince ourselves of the reality of the objective external world underlying this sensory world through our sensory perception, if we allow the whole human being to be active in this sensory world, so the imaginations we have now attained reveal to us with full persuasiveness the supersensible world of which they are the expression.

Now it is a matter of continuing this path of knowledge to the next stage. But we achieve this not only by pushing forgetfulness so far that we remove imaginations from ourselves, but by going one step further. For when one reaches the imaginative world, one first sees one's own life in its course. One does not live only in the moment with one's consciousness, but lives in the entire stream of life almost back to birth. If one is then able to advance to inspiration, the overview one previously had of life since birth expands to the perception of a supersensible world from which one entered the sensory-physical world through birth or conception. The spiritual field of vision expands beyond the worlds we experienced before birth or conception and which we will experience after we have passed through the gate of death. The view of the supersensible world to which we belong is gained through inspired knowledge.

If we now continue our efforts not only to remove those imaginations that contain details within the horizon of the imaginative world, but also to forget, as it were, the imagination of our entire being as human beings, that is, remove it, when we gain the power to erase what has accumulated in our ego from our experiences since birth, which is also added to by the horizon expanding into a spiritual world, then we succeed in not weakening the ego, but rather in strengthening it precisely because it forgets itself. And in this way we gradually enter into the reality of the spiritual, supersensible world. We live together with the reality of this spiritual world. We come to recognize the view of previous repeated earthly lives as something that our ego shows us at different stages. Then, when we have acquired the ability to forget this ego at its present stage, that is, to switch off its imaginative content, we come to see the eternal ego.

The things that anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of are such that they cannot be obtained from some vague mysticism, but rather that the path to each individual insight can be indicated step by step. The path is not only not an external one, it is an internal one in its entirety, but one that leads to the grasping of a real objective, yet supersensible reality. But by rising to truly intuitive knowledge in this way, one actually arrives at a real, true insight into what our thinking and imagining actually is, which we use in ordinary life to carry out our perceptions. One arrives at the full, complete reality of that which, to a certain degree, one can form an idea, an empirical idea, of in the way I have attempted to describe in my Philosophy of Freedom. There I have attempted to point to pure thinking, to the kind of thinking that can also live within us before we have brought this part of thinking into full reality with some external perception. I have pointed out that this pure thinking itself can be perceived as inner soul content; but what it is in essence can only be recognized when true intuition arises in the soul through higher paths of knowledge. Then, in a sense, one sees through this own thinking; only now does one live into this own thinking through intuition, for intuition consists precisely in living into the supersensible with one's own being, in immersing oneself in this supersensible.

And so one learns to recognize something whose experience, as I have just indicated, is in turn a kind of cognitive destiny. One experiences something quite tremendous when one intuitively lives into the nature of cognition. One then knows how one is materially organized as a human being. One knows how far this material organization extends; but one also sees through intuition that it only extends to what serves as a foundation, as a ground, on which thinking can develop, but that the material processes must be broken down in themselves where real thinking appears. To the same extent that the material processes are broken down, there is room within us for what now takes the place of the destruction of the material: thinking, imagining.

I know everything that can be objected to the statements I am making at this moment, but intuitive recognition leads us to realize, with regard to the material, that where thinking develops, nothing of the material can be seen. It leads us to say: in thinking, I am not, if I accept material existence, which is otherwise recognized as the decisive factor, as the only existence. First, matter must withdraw from the organism and make room for thinking, for imagination; then this thinking, this imagination, sees the possibility of its unfolding in the human being. So where we perceive thinking in its reality, we perceive the dismantling, the destruction of material existence. We see how matter passes into nothingness.

This is where we stand at the boundary of the law of conservation of matter and energy. One must recognize the scope of this law of matter and energy in order to have the courage to contradict it when necessary. No one who recognizes the law of conservation of matter as absolute, who does not know that it applies in the realm of what we can observe externally in the physical, in the chemical field, and so on, but that it does not apply where our thinking occurs on the stage of our own human organization. If it were not necessary, for certain reasons, to present this insight to the world today, one would not expose oneself to all the ridicule and objections that quite understandably must come from those who, based on the familiar premises, consider the law of conservation of matter and energy to be absolute, to be valid without exception.

But just as we learn through intuition about the relationship between thinking and the ordinary matter that otherwise surrounds us in the physical world, so too do we learn through intuition to recognize the relationship between inspiration, the inspiration that reigns in the spirit, and human feeling and rhythmic life. Physical matter is destroyed in the nerve-sense being. That is why the nerve-sense being can be the basis for imagination and thinking. The second system of the human being is the rhythmic system. The life of feeling is connected to it in the same way that the life of thinking is connected to the nerve-sense being. The relationship between the non-human objective, which we approach through inspiration, and the human being shows us that through inspiration we become aware of a world being that plays into us, just as the sensory world plays into us through imagination. This inspired world plays into us, in particular, through the breathing process, which continues its rhythm into the brain processes and the rest of the organism.

We now learn to recognize that which lives inwardly in the human being as rhythm. Although matter is not killed in the same way as in the thought process, life is weakened so that it must constantly rekindle itself. And underlying the ordinary, purely mechanical breathing rhythm is this enlivening and slowing down of an inner rhythm, which is divided, as it were, dualistically into the physical breathing process and the soul's feeling process. We see the unity of this soul feeling process and the physical breathing rhythms as an inspiration, as an entity that lives objectively in inspirations and can be seen through intuition. In short, we learn to recognize the whole connection between the world of feeling and the rhythmic human being in this way, we learn to recognize that here, unlike in the nervous-sensory system, there is not a complete suspension of the material, but a slowing down of the material. So we gradually learn to see through the human being. And so we look at the human emotional life and see in it that which can only be there because life is always weakened in rhythmic processes and must be rekindled.

In this way, we see a second important aspect of the human being by seeing through the harmony of invigoration and weakening in this way. We see what significance the whole rhythmic nature has in the human being, how it is connected in the human being with his or her entire physical and soul being. And by looking at this second element in the human being, it becomes clear to us that the human being carries within himself or herself a real force that is in rhythmic interaction with an external force, which is now in the supersensible realm. We see, as it were, this oscillation between an inner and an outer force. And in a similar way, we can also survey the human being in terms of the metabolic-limb system. By rising to inspiration, intuition, and imagination, we see in a spiritual-soul way what otherwise works unconsciously in the human being as real forces. Our ordinary objective knowledge gives us only formalities; through it we are, in a sense, only spectators of a world. But what we achieve through imagination, intuition, and inspiration is initially a free, inner soul product, but we relate it in a supersensible knowledge to something that is objectively in the human being, and can finally see how the human will now works in ethical action. Once we have recognized that pure thinking is a breaking down of matter, that it is connected with processes that kill and act as a regression, we come to understand how everything that appears in the soul and will is connected with the processes of building up, with the processes of growth. The processes of growth, building, organization, and reproduction within us dampen our ordinary consciousness of the depths of human organization, and the will rises from such depths of the human being that ordinary consciousness cannot reach. Just as thinking lives in what is dying, so the will lives in what is growing, thriving, and bearing fruit.

Then, through intuition, one sees again how, out of metabolism, through the will, which now has its motives in pure thinking, the substance in the human organization is moved to the place where it is to be broken down. Thinking as such breaks down, the will builds up. However, it builds up in such a way that, at first, in life until death, the building up remains latent in the human organization. But there is building up. So we live, by bringing it into our moral motives in the sense of my “Philosophy of Freedom” to truly free, moral intuitions, such a human life that, out of its organization, willingly places transformed matter where matter has been destroyed. Human beings become inwardly creative, inwardly constructive. In other words, we see within the cosmos, in human organization, nothingness filled with new formation in a very material sense. This means nothing other than that, if one consistently follows the path of anthroposophical knowledge, one arrives at a point where purely moral ideals appear within human beings, shaping the world down to its materiality.

In this way, we have discovered, as it were, where the moral world itself becomes creative, where something arises that guarantees its own reality out of human morality, because it carries it within itself, because it creates it itself. And when we then get to know the outer world through this intuition, the mineral kingdom first presents itself to us as being in a process of dying, in a process of passing away, which we have become well acquainted with in the material processes corresponding to our own thinking. And we also learn to recognize how this process of passing away draws in plant and animal life. We then do not look at heat death, which is justified within certain limits but is somewhat one-sided, but we look at the disappearance of the whole world, which is permeated by minerality and which is around us. We see the world that we recognize as causally necessary in its transience, and we recognize the world that we build from pure moral ideals as the one that now arises on the ground of the dying other world. In other words, we now recognize how the moral world order is connected to the physical-causal world order. In the morally pure will in human beings, we have something that defeats causality itself in humans and thus for the whole world.

Anyone who honestly considers the causal explanation of nature will find no place in the world within its own domain where it does not apply. And because it applies, there must be a power that destroys its validity. This power is the moral world. The moral world, recognized from the total nature of the human being, contains within itself the power to break through natural causality itself, not through miracles, but through a process of development. For that which stands within the individual human being as destructive to causality only gains meaning in future worlds. But we see the reality of the human will, which enters into a covenant with pure thinking. Through this, however, we gain — and this is the most beautiful fruit of anthroposophical science — an insight into human value within the cosmos, and through this we also gain a feeling for human dignity within the cosmos.

Things in the world are not only connected as we often imagine them to be in our abstract concepts; no, they are connected as realities, and one important reality is the following: Certainly, not everyone can already advance to imagination, inspiration, and intuition today. But what we take with us into all these stages of knowledge, even as spiritual researchers, is thinking that develops one thought from another with inner necessity. Any person who is willing to devote themselves to it without prejudice can experience this kind of thinking. And that is why all spiritual scientific results, once they have been found, can always be verified through pure thinking, because the spiritual researcher incorporates this pure thinking into all his elements of imagination.

But in the sense of the whole presentation I have given, something very special in the human soul is attached to what is initially taken only as a confession of anthroposophical spiritual science. The other ideas that human beings form are derived from external perceptions or are formed by external perceptions. These external perceptions serve as a support for this life of imagination. And today, according to the habits of thinking and worldview of recent times, there are indeed many people who do not accept at all that anything should approach the human being that does not find its support in this relationship with external perception. But then one encounters impossibilities in life if one does not accept that human beings can also understand essential beings when they devote themselves to their pure, self-organizing, concretely growing thinking, and that they can then take in the ideas from spiritual science that are gained through imagination, inspiration, and intuition, of which the rigid philistine says: They are fantasies, for they do not represent reality. — He is too comfortable to enter with his thinking into the reality that the spiritual researcher discovers through imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But this reality is intimately connected with the human being. And with the feeling, with the inner state of soul with which we struggle to take in spiritual scientific concepts that have no correlate in the outer sensory world, which we must experience freely in the spirit, we permeate our whole being with a new essence.

When spiritual science enters our cultural life, it will become apparent that, because — as I have indicated — what is seen through imagination, inspiration, and intuition corresponds to a living being within the human being itself, the living human being is also directly affected by this spiritual science, and that through this absorption, the human being can undergo an inner metamorphosis and transformation. They become richer inwardly. One can feel how they become richer by being imbued with an element that cannot be ignited by external physical reality. With this element, which then flows through and permeates the whole human being, one approaches one's fellow human beings. In this way, however, one acquires a knowledge of human beings that one did not have before, and above all, one acquires love for humanity. What is ignited in us by the insights of anthroposophical spiritual science, which aim at the supersensible, is love for humanity, which teaches us about human value and allows us to feel human dignity.

Knowledge of human value, feeling human dignity, willing in love for humanity – these are the most beautiful fruits of life that grow in human beings through the experience of spiritual scientific results.

But in this way, spiritual science affects the will in such a way that it can rise to what I have characterized in my Philosophy of Freedom as moral intuitions. And something powerful enters human life when these moral ideals, these moral intuitions, are permeated by what is otherwise love, so that we can become freely acting human beings out of the love of our individuality. In this way, spiritual science approaches an ideal that also originates from Goethe's time; only Goethe's friend Schiller expressed it most clearly. As Schiller became familiar with Kantian philosophy, he took up much of Kant's theoretical philosophy. However, he could not agree with Kant on moral philosophy. In Kant's moral philosophy, Schiller found a rigid concept of duty, which Kant presented as if it were a force of nature, something that compels human beings. Schiller felt human worth and dignity and did not want to accept that human beings must be subject to spiritual compulsion in order to be moral. Schiller expressed this beautifully: “I gladly serve my friends, but unfortunately I do so with inclination, and so it often bothers me that I am not virtuous.” For, according to Schiller, in the Kantian sense, one must first try to suppress all inclination toward one's friends and then do what one does for them out of a rigid sense of duty.

Schiller argued, as far as it could be presented in his time, in his letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” that human behavior toward morality must be different from this Kantian view. He wanted to show how duty must descend so that it becomes inclination, and how inclination must ascend so that one becomes sympathetic to the content of duty. Duty must descend, natural instinct must ascend in the free human being who, out of his inclination, does what is good for humanity as a whole. And by seeking out where moral intuitions are rooted in human nature, by seeking out what is the actual driving, moral motive in moral intuitions, one discovers love purified to the highest degree in the spiritual realm. Where this love becomes spiritual, it absorbs the moral intuitions; and one is a moral person because one loves duty, because it is something that comes directly from human individuality itself as a source of strength.

This is what prompted me to establish a decisive antithesis to Kant's conception of morality in the Philosophy of Freedom, now also from the perspective of anthroposophy. The Kantian thesis is: “Duty! You sublime, great name, which contains nothing pleasant, nothing that leads to flattery, but demands submission ...”, you who “establish a law ... before which all inclinations fall silent when they work against it.”

Such a concept of duty can never elevate the human being spiritually so that he is the free author of his moral actions in his innermost being. Based on these attempts to gain insight into the human being through genuine anthroposophical knowledge of humanity, I contrasted this rigid concept in Kantianism with what you will find in The Philosophy of Freedom: “Freedom! You friendly, human name, which encompasses everything that is morally desirable, everything that most dignifies my humanity, and makes me the servant of no one, you who not only establish a law, but wait to see what my moral love itself will recognize as law, because it feels unfree in the face of any law that is merely imposed.”

Thus, in The Philosophy of Freedom, I felt compelled to speak of how morality appears most humanly dignified when it is one with human freedom and when it is rooted in genuine love for humanity. Anthroposophy, however, can show how this love of duty in the broader sense becomes love of humanity and thus, as we shall consider further, the actual ferment of social life. What stands before us today as a tremendous, burning social question can only be understood if we strive to recognize the connection between freedom, love, human beings, spirit, and natural necessity.