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Supersensible Knowledge
GA 84

29 September 1923, Dornach

II. Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Conduct of Life

On last Wednesday I had the opportunity to explain to you how a super-sensible knowledge may come into existence out of the further development of those capacities of the human soul which belong to our every-day life, and which are recognized also in science when methodically applied. I undertook to show how a systematic further development of these capacities of the soul actually brings about for the human being a form of perception whereby he can become aware of a super-sensible world just as he becomes aware of the physical sensible world environing him by means of his physical senses. Through such vision we penetrate upward not only to an abstract sort of conviction that, in addition to the world of the senses, there exists also a world of the spirit, but to acquisition of real knowledge, to a real experience, of spiritual beings, which constitute the environment of man himself to the extent that he lifts himself up into a condition of spirituality, just as plants and animals constitute his environment in the physical world.

Such a super-sensible knowledge is something different in its entire nature from that which we designate as knowledge in ordinary life and for our every-day consciousness, as well as in ordinary science.

In this ordinary knowledge we come into possession, in a certain sense, of ideas—for example such ideas as embrace the laws of nature. But this possession of ideas does not really penetrate into the soul in such a way as to become an immediate power of the soul, comparable as a spiritual power to muscular force as this passes over into activity. Thoughts remain rather shadowy, and every one knows through immediate experiences how indifferent, in a certain sense, is the reaction of the human heart to thoughts when we are dealing with matters which affect the human heart in the profoundest degree.

Now, I think I have shown already in the first lecture that, when a human being actually penetrates into the spiritual world by means of such a perception as we have in mind here, he then becomes aware of his super-sensible being as it was before it descended to the earthly existence. And the fact that he achieves for himself something of this kind as regards his own self in its relationship to the spiritual world, does not leave his heart, the needs of his profoundest sensibilities, to the same extent unaffected, as in the case of abstract forms of knowledge. It is certainly true that one who has himself led a life devoted to the acquisition of knowledge does not undervalue all the inner drama of the soul associated with the struggle for knowledge even in the ordinarily recognized sense, yet the knowledge that we thus acquire remains, nevertheless, mere pictures of the external world. Indeed, if we are scientifically educated at the present time, we are generally proud of the fact that these pictures merely reflect, in a certain sense, quite objectively the external world and do not dart with such inner force through the life of the soul as, in the case of the physical body, the circulating blood drives its pulsing waves through man's being. The fact is that what is here meant by super-sensible knowledge is something which acts upon the human being in a manner entirely unlike that of ordinary knowledge. And, in order that I may make myself perfectly clear precisely in reference to this point, I should like to begin with a comparison—which is, however, something more than a comparison, something that fits the matter completely in its reality.

I should like to begin with the fact that the human being, even in ordinary life, lives in two states of consciousness—we might say three states, but let us consider sleeping and dreaming as constituting a single state of consciousness—that he is separated completely from the external world during sleep, and that a world existent only within him, reveals its effects in dreams in a grotesque and often chaotic manner. Even though we are in the same space with many other persons, our dream world belongs to us alone; we do not share it with the other persons. And a profounder reflection upon the world of dreams is the very thing that may show us that what we have to consider as our own inner human nature is connected with this dream world. Even the corporeal nature of man is reflected in a remarkable way in dreams: it is mirrored in fantastic pictures. One condition or another affecting an organ, a condition of illness or of excitation, may emerge in a special symbol during a dream; or some noise occurring near us may appear in a dream in a very dramatic symbolism. The dream creates pictures out of our own inner nature and out of the external world. But all of this is intimately connected, in turn, with the whole course of our life upon earth. From the most remote epochs of this life the dream draws the shadows of experiences into its chaotic but always dramatic course. And, the more deeply we penetrate into all this, the more are we led to the conclusion that the innermost being of man is connected, even though in an instinctive and unconscious manner, with that which flows and weaves in dreams.

One who has the capacity, for example, for observing the moment of waking and, from this point on, fixing the eye of the mind upon the ordinary daily life, not in the superficial way in which this usually occurs, but in a deeper fashion, will come to see that this waking life of day is characterized by the fact that what we experience in a wholly isolated manner during sleep and during dreams, in a manner that we can share with other persons at most only in special instances,—that this soul-spiritual element sinks down into our corporeal being, inserts itself in a way into the will, and thereby also into the forces of thought and the sense forces permeated by the will, and thus enters indirectly, through the body, into a relationship with the external world. Thus does the act of waking constitute a transition to an entirely different state of consciousness from that which we have in dreams. We are inserted into the external course of events through the fact that we participate, with our soul element, in the occurrences of our own organisms, which are connected, in turn, with external occurrences. Evidences of the fact that I am really describing the process in a wholly objective way can, naturally, not be obtained by the manner of abstract calculation, nor in an experimental way; but they are revealed to one who is able to observe in this field—particularly one who is able to observe how there is something like a “dreaming while awake,” a subconscious imagining, a living in pictures, which is always in process at the bottom of the dry, matter-of-fact life of the soul, of the intellect. The situation is such that, just as we may dive down from the surface of a stream of water into its profounder depths, so may we penetrate from our intellectual life into the deeper regions of the soul. There we enter into something which concerns us more intimately than the intellectual life, even though its connection with the external world is less exact. There we come also upon everything which stimulates the intellectual life to its independent, inventive power, which stimulates this life of the intellect when it passes over into artistic creation, which stimulates this intellectual life even—as I shall have to show later—when the human heart turns away from the ordinary reflections about the universe and surrenders itself to a reverent and religious veneration for the spiritual essence of the world.

In the act of waking in the ordinary life the situation is really such that, through the insertion of our soul being into the organs of our body, we enter into such a connection with the external world that we can entrust, not to the dream, but only to the waking life of day, responsibility for the judgment which is to be passed upon the nature of the dream, upon its rightness and wrongness, its truth and untruth. It would be psychopathic for any one to suppose that, in the chaotic, though dramatic, processes of the dream something “higher” is to be seen than that which his waking experience defines as the significance of this life of dreams.

In this waking experience do we remain also—at about the same level of experience—when we devote ourselves to the intellectual life, to the ordinary life of science, to every-day knowledge. By means of that absorption, immersion, and I might say strengthening of the soul about which I spoke on the previous occasion, the human being exercises consciously at a higher level for the life of his soul something similar to what he exercises unconsciously through his bodily organization for the ordinary act of waking. And the immersion in a super-sensible form of knowledge is a higher awaking. Just as we relate any sort of dream picture to our waking life of day, through the help of our memory and other forces of our soul, in order to connect this dream picture, let us say, with some bodily excitation or external experience, and thus to fit it into the course of reality, so do we arrive by means of such a super-sensible cognition as I have described at the point where we may rightly fit what we have in our ordinary sensible environment, what we fix by means of observation and experiment, into a higher world, into a spiritual world in which we ourselves are made participants by means of those exercises of which I spoke, just as we have been made participants in the corporeal world in the ordinary waking by means of our own organism. Thus super-sensible knowledge really constitutes the dawn of a new world, a real awaking to a new world, an awaking at a higher level. And this awaking compels him who has awaked to judge the whole sensible-physical world, in turn, from the point of view of this experience, just as he judges the dream life from the point of view of the waking life. What I do here during my earthly life, what appears to me by means of my physical knowledge, I then learn to relate to the processes through which I have passed as a spirit-soul being in a purely spiritual world before my descent into the earthly world, just as I connect the dream with the waking life. I learn to relate everything that exists in physical nature, not “in general” to a fantastic world of spirit, but to a concrete spiritual world, to a spiritual world which is complete in its content, which becomes a visible environment of the human being by reason of the powers of knowledge I have described as Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

But, just as a person feels himself in ordinary life to be in different states of soul when awake and when dreaming, so does the whole state of soul become different when one arrives at this higher awaking. For this reason, in describing super-sensible knowledge in the manner that I have employed here, we do not describe merely the formal taking of pictures of the super-sensible world, but the transition of a person from one state of consciousness into another, from one condition of soul into another. In this process, however, even those contents of the soul in which one is absorbed in ordinary life become something entirely different. Just as one becomes a different person in ordinary life through awaking, so does one become, in a certain sense, a different human being through this super-sensible knowledge. The concepts and ideas that we have had in ordinary consciousness are transformed. There occurs not only a conceptual revolution in a person consisting in the fact that he understands more, but also a revolution in his life. This penetrates into the profoundest human conceptions. It is precisely in the profoundest human conceptions, I wish to say, in the very roots of the soul being, that a person is transformed through the fact that he is able to enter into the sphere of this super-sensible knowledge—something which happens, of course, only for momentary periods in one's life.

Here I must call your attention to two conceptions that play the greatest imaginable role in every-day life. These are conceptions completely and profoundly valid in ordinary life which take on an utterly different form the moment one ascends into the super-sensible world. These are the two concepts on the basis of which we form our judgments in the world: the concepts true and false, right and wrong. I beg you not to imagine that in this explanation I intend, through a frivolous handling of the problem of knowledge, to undermine the validity of the concepts true and false, right and wrong. To undermine something which is wholesome in ordinary life is by no means in keeping with a genuine super-sensible knowledge. This higher knowledge enables us to acquire something in addition for ordinary life, but never subtracts from it. Those persons who—whether really or in sentimentality—become untrue in their ordinary lives, unpractically mystical for this aspect of life, are also unsuited for a genuine super-sensible knowledge. A genuine super-sensible knowledge is not born out of fantastic persons, dreamers, but out of those very persons who are able to take their places in their full humanity in the earthly existence, as persons capable in real life. In other words, it is not our purpose to undermine what we experience in our every-day lives, and what is bound up in its very depths with the concepts true and false, right and wrong; on the contrary, truthfulness in this sphere, I should like to emphasize, is strengthened in one's feelings by that very thing which now comes about in connection with a higher knowledge by reason of a metamorphosis, a transformation of the concepts true and false, right and wrong.

When we have really entered into this higher, super-sensible world, we do not any longer say in such an abstract way that a thing is true or false, that it is right or wrong, but the concept of the true and the right passes over into a concept with which we are familiar in ordinary life, though in a more instinctive way; only, this concept belonging to the ordinary life is transmuted into a spiritual form. True and right pass over into the concept healthy; false and wrong pass over into the concept diseased. In other words, when we reflect about something in ordinary life—feel, sense, or will something—we say: “This is right, that is wrong.” But, when we are in the realm of super-sensible knowledge, we do not arrive at this impression of right or wrong but we actually reach the impression that something is healthy, something else is diseased.

You will say that healthy and ill are concepts to which a certain indefiniteness is attached. But this is attached to them only in the ordinary life or the ordinary state of consciousness.

The indefiniteness ceases when the higher knowledge is sought for in so exact a manner as I have explained in the first lecture. Precision then enters also into what we experience in this realm of higher knowledge. Healthy and ill,—these are the terms we apply to what we experience in association with the beings of the super-sensible world of whom we become aware through such a form of knowledge.

Just think how deeply that which becomes an object of super-sensible knowledge may affect us: it affects us as intimately as health and illness of the body. In regard to one thing that is experienced in the super-sensible, we may say: “I enter livingly into it. It benefits and stimulates my life; it elevates my life. I become through it in a certain way more ‘real.’ It is healthful.” In regard to something else I say: “It paralyzes—indeed, it kills—my own life. Thereby do I recognize that it is something diseased.” And just as we help ourselves onward in the ordinary world through right and wrong, just as we place our own human nature in the moral and the social life, so do we place ourselves rightly in the super-sensible world through healthy and ill. But we are thus fitted into this super-sensible world with our whole being in a manner far more real than that in which we are fitted into the sense world. In the sense world we separate ourselves from things in this element of the right or the wrong. I mean to say that right does not benefit us very intensely and wrong does not cause us much distress—especially in the case of many persons. In the super-sensible world it is by no means possible that experiences shall touch us in this way. There our whole existence, our whole reality, enters into the manner in which we experience this super-sensible world. For this realm, therefore, all conflict of opinion ceases as to whether things are reality or mere phenomena; whether they manifest to us merely the effects produced upon our own sense organs; and the like—questions about which I do not wish to speak here because the time would not suffice. But everything about which people can argue in this way in relation to the physical reality,—to carry on such discussion with reference to the spiritual world really has no significance whatever for the spiritual, super-sensible world. For we test its reality or unreality through the fact that we can say: “One thing affects me wholesomely, another thing in an ill way—causing injury,” I mean to say, taking the word in its full meaning and weight. The moment a person ascends to the super-sensible world, he observes at once that what was previously knowledge void of power becomes an inner power of the human soul itself. We permeate the soul with this super-sensible knowledge as we permeate our bodies with blood. Thus we learn also in such knowledge the whole relationship of the soul and the spirit to the human body; we learn to see how the spirit-soul being of man descends out of a super-sensible prenatal existence and unites with the inherited body. In order to see into this, it is necessary first to learn to know the spirit-soul element so truly that through this reality, as healthy or diseased, we experience the actuality in our own—I cannot say body here, but in our own soul.

Supersensible knowledge, therefore—although we make such a statement reluctantly, because one seems at once to fall into sentimentality—is really not a mere understanding but an ensouling of the human being. It is soul itself, soul content, which enters into us when we penetrate to this super-sensible knowledge. We become aware of our eternity, our immortality, by no means through the solution of a philosophical problem; we become aware of them through immediate experience, just as we become aware of external things in immediate experience through our senses.

What I have thus described is exposed, of course, to the objection: “To be sure, one may speak in this way, perhaps, who participates in such super-sensible knowledge; but what shall any one say to these things who is himself not as yet a participant in this super-sensible knowledge?” Now, one of the most beautiful ways in which human beings can live together is that in which one person develops through contact with the other, when one goes through the process of becoming, in his soul nature, through the help of the other. This is precisely the way in which the human community is most wonderfully established. Thus we may say that, just as it is not possible for all persons to become astronomers or botanists and yet the results of astronomy and botany may possess importance and significance for all persons—at least, their primary results—and can be taken in by means of the insight possessed by a sound human intellect, it is likewise possible that a sound human mind and heart can directly grasp and assimilate what is presented by a spiritual-scientist who is able to penetrate into the super-sensible world. For the human being is born, not for untruth, but for truth! And what the spiritual-scientist has to say will always be clothed, of course, in such words and combinations of words that it diverges, even in its formulation, from what we are accustomed to receive as pictures out of the sensible-physical world. Therefore, as the spiritual-scientist lays open what he has beheld, this may work in such a way upon the whole human being, upon the simple, wholesome human mind, that this wholesome human mind is awakened—so awakened that it actually discovers itself to be in that state of waking of which I have spoken today. I must repeat again and again, therefore, that, although I have certainly undertaken to explain in such books as Occult Science—an Outline, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and in other volumes, how it is possible to arrive through systematic exercises at what I must designate as “looking into the spiritual world,” so that every one possesses the possibility today, up to a certain degree, of becoming a spiritual-scientist, yet it is not necessary to do this. For a sound human constitution of soul is such that what the spiritual-scientist has to say can be received when it comes into contact with the human soul—provided only that the soul is sufficiently unprejudiced—as something long known. For this is precisely the peculiar characteristic of this spiritual research, this super-sensible knowledge to which we are referring: that it brings nothing which is not subconsciously present already in every human being. Thus every one can feel: “I already knew that; it is within me. If only I had not permitted myself to be rendered unreceptive through the authoritarian and other preconceptions of natural science, I should already have grasped, through one experience or another, some part of what this spiritual research is able to present as a connected whole.”

But the fact of such a thing as this transformation of the concepts true and false into the healthy and the diseased renders the inner experience of the soul more and more intense. At a higher level man places himself more intensely within a reality than he places himself in the physical reality through the ordinary waking of the daily life. In this way, feelings, sentiments, experiences of the soul are generated in relationship to these items of knowledge, which are altogether exact, just as they are generated through our being confronted by external things. That which the super-sensible knowledge can bestow lays hold upon the whole human being whereas it is really only the head that is laid hold of by what the knowledge of the senses can bestow. I trust you will permit me to visualize this relationship of super-sensible knowledge to the complete human being by referring to something personal, although the personal in this realm is also factual, for the facts are intensely bound up with the personal.

In order to render it clear that super-sensible knowledge cannot really be a mere head-knowledge, but lays hold upon the human being in a vastly more living and intense way than head-knowledge, I should like to mention the following. Whoever is accustomed to a living participation in ordinary knowledge—as every true super-sensible knower should really be—knows that the head participates in this ordinary knowledge. If he then ascends, especially if he has been active through his entire life in the ordinary knowledge, to super-sensible knowledge, the situation becomes such that he must exert all his powers in order to keep firm hold upon this super-sensible knowledge which comes upon him, which manifests itself to him. He observes that the power by means of which one holds fast to an idea about nature, to a law of nature, to the course of an experiment or of a clinical observation, is very slight in comparison with the inner force of soul which must be unfolded in order to hold fast to the perception of a super-sensible being. And here I have always found it necessary not only, so to speak, to employ the head in order to hold firmly to these items of super-sensible knowledge, but to support the force which the head can employ by means of other organs—for example by means of the hand. If we sketch in a few strokes something that we have reached through super-sensible research, if we fix it in brief characteristic sentences or even in mere words, then this thing—which we have brought into existence not merely by means of a force evoked through the nerve system applied in ordinary cognition, but have brought into existence by means of a force drawing upon a wide expanse of the organism as a support for our cognition,—this thing becomes something which produces the result that we possess these items of super-sensible knowledge not as something momentary, that they do not fall away from us like dreams, but that we are able to retain them. I may disclose to you, therefore, that I really find it necessary to work in general always in this way, and that I have thus produced wagon-loads of notebooks in my lifetime which I have never again looked into. For the necessary thing here lies in the activity; and the result of the activity is that one retains in spirit what has sought to manifest itself, not that one must read these notes again. Obviously, this writing or sketching is nothing automatic, mediumistic, but just as conscious as that which one employs in connection with scientific work or any other kind of work. And its only reason for existence lies in the fact that what presses upon us in the form of super-sensible knowledge must be grasped with one's whole being. But the result of this is that it affects, in turn, the whole human being, grasps the whole person, is not limited to an impression upon the head, goes further to produce impressions upon the whole human life in heart and mind. What we experience otherwise while the earthly life passes by us, the joy we have experienced in connection with one thing or another, joy in all its inner living quality, the pain we have experienced in lesser or deeper measure, what we have experienced through the external world of the senses, through association with other persons, in connection with the falling and rising tides of life,—all this appears again at a higher level, at a soul-spiritual level, when we ascend into those regions of the super-sensible where we can no longer speak of the true and the false but must speak of the healthy and the diseased.

Especially when we have passed through all that I described the last time, especially that feeling of intense pain at a certain level on the way to the super-sensible, do we then progress to a level of experience where we pass through this inner living dramatic crisis as super-sensible experiences and items of knowledge confront us: where knowledge can bestow upon us joy and pleasure as these are possible otherwise only in the physical life; or where knowledge may cause the profoundest pain; where we have the whole life of the soul renewed, as it were, at a higher level with all the inner coloring, with all the inner nuances of color, with all the intimate inwardness of the life of the soul and the mind that one enjoys through being rooted together with the corporeal organization in every-day existence. And it is here that the higher knowledge, the super-sensible experience comes into contact with that which plays its role in the ordinary life as the moral existence of the human being; this moral existence of the human being with everything connected with it, with the religious sentiment, with the consciousness of freedom.

At the moment when we ascend to a direct experience of the health-giving or the disease-bringing spiritual life, we come into contact with the very roots of the moral life of man, the roots of the whole moral existence. We come into contact with these roots of the moral existence only when we have reached the perception that the physical life of the senses and that which flows out of the human being is really, from the point of view of a higher life, a kind of dream, related to this higher life as the dream is related to the ordinary life. And that which we sense out of the indefinite depths of our human nature as conscience, which enables us to conduct our ordinary life, which determines whether we are helpful or harmful for our fellow men, that which shines upward from the very bottom of our human nature, stimulating us morally or immorally, becomes luminous; it is linked up in a reality just as the dream is linked up in a reality when we wake. We learn to recognize the conscience as something existing in man as a dimly mirrored gleam of the sense and significance of the spiritual world—of that super-sensible world to which we human beings belong, after all, in the depths of our nature. We now understand why it is necessary to take what the knowledge of the sense world can offer us as a point of departure and to proceed from this to a super-sensible knowledge, when we are considering the moral order of the world and desire to arrive at the reality of this moral world order.

This is what I endeavored to set forth thirty years ago as an ethical problem, merely as a moral world riddle, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Without taking into account super-sensible knowledge, I sought by simply following out the moral impulses of the human being to establish the fact that the ethical arises in every instance, not out of the kind of thinking which simply absorbs external things, external occurrences or the occurrences of one's own body, but out of that thinking life of the soul which lays hold upon the heart and the will and yet in its very foundation is, none the less, a thinking soul life, resting upon its own foundations, rooted in the spiritual nature of the world. I was compelled to seek at that time in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for a life of the soul independent of the corporeal being of man, a life that seems, indeed, a shadowy unreality in comparison with the solid reality of the external world of the senses, but which is rooted in its true nature in the very spiritual foundations of the universe. And the fact that the ethical impulses proceed from this kind of thinking, purified from the external world of the senses but wholly alive within man, gives to the human being his ethical character. When we learn to see now through super-sensible knowledge that what is rooted in us as our conscience is, in its essence, the mirroring within our inner being of the real spiritual world which weaves and breathes throughout the world of the senses, we then learn to recognize the moral nature of man as that which forever unites us without our knowing this, even when we sense it only as a still small voice within us, with that spiritual world which can be laid open to us through super-sensible knowledge.

But let no one say that this super-sensible knowledge is meaningless, therefore, for our moral life for the very reason that we have the voice of conscience, for the reason that we possess the practical intentions of life for its individual situations. Especially will one who sees that the ancient spiritual traditions, super-sensible knowledge handed down from primeval times and continuing until now, have faded away and continue their existence today as pale religious creeds, will be able to see that man stands in need of a new stimulus in this very sphere. Indeed, many persons are the victims of a great delusion in this field. We can see that scientific knowledge, which is considered by many today as the only valid knowledge—that the form which this scientific knowledge has taken on, with its Ignorabimus, “We cannot know”—has caused many persons to doubt all knowledge, in that they say that moral impulses, religious intentions, cannot be gained out of any knowledge whatever, but that these ethical-religious impulses in the conduct of life must be developed out of special endowments belonging to man, independent of all knowledge. This has gone so far, indeed, that knowledge is declared not to possess any capacity for setting in motion in the human being such impulses as to enrich him in his moral-religious existence through the fact that he takes in his own spiritual being—for this is really what he does take in with super-sensible knowledge. It has gone so far that people doubt this possibility! On the other hand, however, especially if one is not such a practical person as the so-called practical persons of our present-day life, who merely follow a routine, if one takes the whole world into account, on the contrary, as a genuinely practical person—the world consisting of body, soul, and spirit—one will certainly see that, in the individual life situations for which we may be permeated in actual existence with moral-religious content, more is needed than the faded traditions, which cannot really any longer inspire the human being in a completely moral sense. One recognizes something of this sort.

Permit me to introduce here a special example.

Out of everything that fails to satisfy us in that which confronts us today also in the educational life, what concerned us when the Waldorf School was to be founded in Stuttgart on the initiative of Emil Molt was to answer the question how a human being ought really to be educated. In approaching this task, we addressed this question to the super-sensible world of which I am here speaking. I will mention only briefly what sort of purposes had then to be made basic.

First of all, the question had to be raised: “How is a child educated so that he becomes a real human being, bearing his whole being within himself but also manifesting his whole being in the ethical-religious conduct of life?” A genuine knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit was necessary for this. But such a knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit is entirely impossible today on the basis of what is considered valid—most of all such a knowledge as may become actually practical so that it enables one to lay hold upon the manifold duties of life. In connection with this let me discuss the question by pointing out to you very briefly that what we so generally feel today to be a just ground for our pride—external science, dealing through observation and experimentation with material substance—is not qualified to penetrate into the secrets of the material itself. What I shall introduce here now will be stated very briefly, but we can find it set forth with all necessary proofs in my writings, especially in the volume Riddles of the Soul. When we pay attention nowadays to ordinary science, we receive the conception, for example, that the human heart is a kind of pump, which drives the blood through the organs like a pumping machine. Spirit-science, such as we have in mind, which introduces us to a view of what constitutes not only the physical body of the human being, but his spirit-soul nature, shows us how this spirit-soul nature permeates the corporeal nature, how the blood is driven through the human being, not as if by the action of the “heart pumping machine,” but through the direct action of the spirit-soul nature itself; how this spirit-soul nature so lays hold upon the circulation of the blood that it is this spirit-soul element which constitutes the force that causes the blood to pulse through our organism. But the heart is then looked upon as something like a sense organ. As I consciously perceive the external world with my eyes, and through my concepts make this something of my own, thus do I likewise perceive through this inner sense organ of the heart—again, in an unconscious way—that which I develop unconsciously through my spirit-soul forces as the pulsation in my blood. The heart is no pump; the heart is the inner sense organ through which we perceive what the spirit-soul nature develops inwardly in connection with our blood, just as we perceive through the external senses the external world. The moment that we pass over from an intellectual analysis of the human organism to a vision of the whole human being, the heart reveals itself in its true essence, in its true significance—as an inner sense organ. In the heart the effects of the circulation of human blood, with its life impulses, are manifest; the heart is not the instrument causing this pulsation.

This is an example of the tragic fact that the very science bearing a materialistic coloring is not able to penetrate into the secrets of the material life; an example of the fact that we do not penetrate into the secrets of the material life until we do this by observing the spirit in its true work, in its creative work upon matter.

When we become aware through such super-sensible knowledge, on the one hand, of the creative spirit in the very course of material occurrences, we become aware on the other hand of the power-filled spirit—not merely of the abstractly thinking spirit—of the real spirit in its essence. Then only does there result a genuine knowledge of man, such a knowledge as is needed if we wish to develop in the growing child that which can live and breathe in the human being until death, full of power, suited to life, corresponding with reality. Such an intensive vitalizing of the knowledge of man causes the educator to see the child as something fundamentally different from what he is to the merely external observer. In a fundamental sense, from the very first moment of the earthly life, the growing child is the most wonderful earthly phenomenon. The emergence out of the profoundest inner nature, at first mysteriously indeterminate, of something that renders the indeterminate features more and more determinate, changing the countenance, at first so expressionless, into an expressive physiognomy, the manner in which the vague, unskillful movements of the limbs come to correspond to purpose and objective,—all this is something wonderful to behold. And a great sense of responsibility is necessary in bringing this to development. If we stand in the presence of the developing human being in such a way that we say, with all the inner fervor associated with super-sensible knowledge: “In this child there is manifest that which lived as spirit and soul in the pre-earthly existence in super-sensible beauty, that which has left behind, in a certain sense, its super-sensible beauty, has submerged itself in the particular body that could be given to it in the course of physical heredity; but you, as a teacher, must release that which rests in the human body as a gift of the gods, in order that it may lay hold year by year, month by month, week by week upon the physical body, may permeate this, may be able to mold it plastically into a likeness of the soul, you have to awaken still further in the human being that which is manifest in him,”—if we stand thus before the child, we then confront the task of educating the child, not with intellectual principles, but with our whole human nature, with the fullness of our human heart and mind, with a comprehensive sense of human responsibility in confronting the problem of education. We then gradually come to know that we do not have to observe only the child if we wish to know what we must do with him at any particular time, but that we must survey the whole human being. This observation is not convenient. But it is true that what is manifest in a person under certain circumstances in the period of tenderest childhood, let us say, first becomes manifest in a special form as either health-giving or disease-bringing only in high old age after it has long remained hidden in the inner being. As educators, we hold in our hands not only the immediate age of childhood but the whole earthly life of the human being. Persons who frequently say from a superficial pedagogical point of view that we must present to the child only what it can already understand make a very serious mistake. Such persons live in the moment, and not in the observation of the whole human life. For there is a period of childhood, from the change of teeth until adolescence, when it is exceedingly beneficial to a child to receive something that it does not yet understand, something that cannot yet be made clear to it, on the authority of a beloved teacher—to the greatest blessing for this human life, because, when the child sees in the self-evident authority of a teacher and educator the embodiment of truth, beauty, and goodness, in a certain sense, when it sees the world embodied in the teacher, the effect of this is the awaking of the forces of life. This is not something which contradicts human freedom; it is something which appeals to self-evident authority, which in its further development becomes a fountainhead of strength for the whole life. If, at the age of 35 years, we bring something into our heart and mind which is suited by its nature only now to be understood by us as mature persons, but which we took into our hearts upon the authority of a beloved teacher personality even in our eighth year,—if we bring that up into consciousness which we have already possessed, which lived in us because of love and now for the first time at a mature age is understood by us, this understanding of what was present in us in germ is the fountain for an inner enrichment of life. This inner enrichment of life is taken away from the human being when, in a manner reducing things to trivialities, only that is introduced to the child which it can already understand. We view the mode of a child's experience in the right way only when we are able to enter into the whole human being and, most of all, into that which enters as yet primarily into the human heart.

For example, we become acquainted with persons who radiate a blessing when they enter the company of other persons. Their influence is quieting, bestowing peace even upon excited persons whose tempers clash with one another. When we are really able to look back—as I said, this is not convenient—and see how such persons, apart from their innate qualities, have developed such a quality also through education, we often go back into a very tender age of the life where certain teacher personalities have stood very close to these children in their inner heart life, so that they learned to look up with reverence to these personalities. This looking up, this capacity for reverence, is like a mountain brook which flows into a crevice in the rock and only later appears again on the surface. What the soul acquired then in childhood exerts its influence below in its depths, manifesting itself only in high old age, when it becomes a power that radiates blessing.

What I have just introduced to you might be indicated in a picture if we say that, in relationship to the universe as well, the human being may be so educated that he may transmute into forces of blessing in high old age the forces of reverence of his tender childhood. Permit me to indicate in a picture what I mean. No one will be able to open his hands in blessing in old age who has not learned in tender childhood to fold his hands in reverent prayer.

This may indicate to us that in such a special case a life task, education, may lead to an ethical-religious attitude of mind; may indicate how that which our hearts and minds, and our wills, become as a result of entering livingly into spirit-knowledge may enter with vital reality into our conduct of life, so that what we develop otherwise, perhaps, only in an external and technical way shall become a component part of our moral-religious conduct of life. The fact, however, that instruction and education in the Stuttgart Waldorf School, and in the other schools which have arisen as its offshoots, have been brought into such an atmosphere does not by any means result in a lack of attention to the factual, the purely pedagogical; on the contrary, these are given full consideration. But the task of education has really become something here which, together with all its technique of teaching, its practice of instruction and everything methodical, at the same time radiates an ethical-religious atmosphere over the child. Educational acts become ethical-religious acts, because what is done springs from the profoundest moral impulses. Since the practice of teaching flows from a teacher-conscience, since the God-given soul nature is seen in the developing human being, educational action becomes religious in its nature. And this does not necessarily have any sentimental meaning but the meaning may be precisely what is especially necessary for our life, which has become so prosaic: that life may become in a wholly unsentimental sense a form of divine service to the world, as in the single example we have given of education, by reason of the fact that spiritual science becomes a light illuminating the actions of our life, the whole conduct of life. Since super-sensible knowledge leads us, not to abstractions, but to human powers, when these forms of knowledge gained through super-sensible cognition simply become immediate forces of life, they can flow over, therefore, into our whole conduct of life, permeating this with that which lifts the human being above his own level—out of the sensible into the super-sensible—elevating him to the level of a moral being. They may bring him to the stage where he becomes in consecrated love one with the Spirit of the World, thus arriving at truly religious piety.

Indeed, this is especially manifest also in education. If we observe the child up to his seventh year, we see that he is wholly given over, in a physical sense, to his environment. He is an imitator, an imitative being even in his speech. And when we observe this physical devotion, when we observe what constitutes a natural environment of the child, and remains such a natural environment because the soul is not yet awake, then we feel inclined to say that what confronts us in a natural way in the child is the natural form of the state of religious consecration to the world. The reason why the child learns so much is that it is consecrated to the world in a natural-religious way. Then the human being separates himself from the world; and, from the seventh year on, it is his educational environment which gives a different, dimly sensed guidance to his soul. At the period of adolescence he arrives at the stage of independent judgment; then does he become a being who determines his own direction and goal from within himself. Blessed is he if now, when freed from his sensuous organism, he can follow the guidance of thought, of the spirit, and grow into the spiritual just as he lived in a natural way while a child in the world,—if he can return as an adult in relationship to the spirit to the naturalness of the child's feeling for the world! If our spirit can live in the spirit of the world at the period of adolescence as the body of a child lives in the world of nature, then do we enter into the spirit of the world in true religious devotion to the innermost depths of our human nature: we become religious human beings.

We must willingly accept the necessity of transforming ordinary concepts into living forces if we wish to grasp the real nature, the central nerve, of super-sensible knowledge. So is it, likewise, when we view the human being by means of what I described the last time as super-sensible knowledge in Imagination. When we become aware that what lives in him is not only this physical body which we study in physiology, which we dissect in the medical laboratory and thereby develop the science of physiology, when we see that a super-sensible being lives in him which is beheld in the manner I have described, we then come to know that this super-sensible being is a sculptor that works upon the physical body itself. But it is necessary then to possess the capacity of going over from the ordinary abstract concepts which afford us only the laws of nature to an artistic conception of the human being. The system of laws under which we ordinarily conceive the human physical form must be changed into molded contents; science must pass over into art. The super-sensible human being can not be grasped by means of abstract science. We gain a knowledge of the super-sensible being only by means of a perception which leads scientific knowledge wholly over into an artistic experience. It must not be said that science must remain something logical, experimental. Of course, such a demand can be set up; but what does the world care about what we set up as “demands!” If we wish to gain a grasp of the world, our process must be determined in accordance with the world, not in accordance with our demands or even with our logical thoughts; for the world might itself pass over from mere logical thoughts into that which is artistic. And it actually does this. For this reason, only he arrives at a true conception of life who—by means of “perceptive power of thought” to use the expression so beautifully coined by Goethe—can guide that which confronts us in the form of logically conceived laws of nature into plastically molded laws of nature. We then ascend through art—in Schiller's expression “through the morning glow of the beautiful”—upwards into the land of knowledge, but also the land of reverent devotion, the land of the religious.

We then learn to know—permit me to say this in conclusion—what a state of things we really have with all the doubts that come over a human being when he says that knowledge can never bestow upon us religious and ethical impulses, but that these require special forces far removed from those of knowledge. I, likewise, shall never maintain, on the basis of super-sensible knowledge, that any kind of knowledge as such can guide a human being into a moral and religious conduct of life. But that which really brings the human being into a moral and religious conduct of life does not belong in the realm of the senses: it can be investigated only in the realm of the super-sensible. For this reason a true knowledge of human freedom can be gained only when we penetrate into the super-sensible. So likewise do we gain real knowledge of the human conscience only when we advance to the sphere of the super-sensible. For we arrive in this way at that spiritual element which does not compel the human being as he is compelled by natural laws, but permits him to work as a free being, and yet at the same time permeates him and streams through him with those impulses which are manifest in the conscience. Thus, however, is manifested to man that which he vaguely senses as the divine element in the world, in his innocent faith as a naive human being imbued with religious piety.

It is certainly true that one does not stand in immediate need of knowledge such as I have described in order to be a religious and pious person; it is possible to be such a person in complete naiveté. But that is not the state of the case, as history proves. One who asserts that the religious and ethical life of man must come to flower out of a different root from that of knowledge does not realize on the basis of historical evolution that all religious movements of liberation—naturally, the religious aptitudes always exist in the human being—have had their source in the sphere of knowledge as super-sensible sources of knowledge existed in the prehistorical epochs. There is no such thing as a content of morality or religion that has not grown out of the roots of knowledge. At the present time the roots of knowledge have given birth to scientific thinking, which is incapable, however, of reaching to the spirit. As regards the religious conduct of life, many people cling instead to traditions, believing that what exists in traditions is a revelation coming out of something like a “religious genius.” As a matter of fact, these are the atavistic, inherited traditions. But they are at the present time so faded out that we need a new impulse of knowledge, not working abstractly, but constituting a force for knowledge, in order that what exists in knowledge may give to the human being the impulse to enter even into the conduct of the practical life with ethical-religious motives in all their primal quality.

This we need. And, if it is maintained on the one hand—assuredly, with a certain measure of justification—that the human being does not need knowledge as such in order to develop an ethical-religious conduct of life, yet it must be maintained, on the other hand, as history teaches in this respect also, that knowledge need not confuse the human being in his religious and his ethical thinking. It must be possible for him to gain the loftiest stages of knowledge, and with this knowledge—such, naturally, as it is possible for him to attain, for there will always remain very much beyond this—to arrive at the home in which he dwelt by the will of God and under the guidance of God before he had attained to knowledge. That which existed as a dim premonition, and which had its justification as premonition, must be found again even when our striving is toward the loftiest light of knowledge. It will be possible then for knowledge to be something whose influence does not work destructively upon the moral conduct of life; it may be only the influence which kindles and permeates the whole moral-religious conduct of life. Through such knowledge, however, the human being will become aware of the profounder meaning of life—about which it is permissible, after all, to speak: he will become aware that, through the dispensation of the mysteries of the universe, of the whole cosmic guidance, he is a being willed by the Spirit, as he deeply senses; that he can develop further as a being willed by the Spirit; that, whereas external knowledge brings him only to what is indefinite, where he is led into doubt and where the unity which lived within him while he possessed only naive intimations is torn apart, he returns to what is God-given and permeated of spirit within himself if he awakens out of the ordinary knowledge to super-sensible knowledge.

Only thus can that which is so greatly needed by our sorely tested time really be furthered—a new impulse in the ethical-religious conduct of life: in that, just as knowledge has advanced up to the present time from the knowledge of vague premonition and dream to the wakeful clarity of our times, we shall advance from this wakeful clarity to a higher form of waking, to a state of union with the super-sensible world. Thus, likewise, will that impulse be bestowed upon the human being which he so imperatively requires especially for the renewal of his social existence at this time of bitter testing for humanity in all parts of the world—indeed, we may say, for all social thinking of the present time. As the very root of an ethical-religious conduct of life understanding must awaken for the fact that the human being must pass from the ordinary knowledge to an artistic and super-sensible awaking and enter into a religious-ethical conduct of life, into a true piety, free from all sentimentality, in which service to life becomes, so to speak, service to the spirit. He must enter there in that his knowledge strives for the light of the super-sensible, so that this light of the super-sensible causes him to awaken in a super-sensible world wherein alone he may feel himself to be a free soul in relationship to the laws of nature, wherein alone he may dwell in a true piety and a genuine inwardness and true religiousness as a spirit man in the spirit world.

Die Anthroposophie und die Ethisch-Religiose Lebenshaltung des Menschen

Am letzten Mittwoch durfte ich hier darlegen, wie eine übersinnliche Erkenntnis zustande kommen kann aus einer Fortbildung derjenigen menschlichen Seelenfähigkeiten, die der Mensch im gewöhnlichen Leben hat, und die auch, methodisch angewendet, in der Wissenschaft anerkannt werden. Ich habe zu zeigen versucht, wie durch eine systematische Fortbildung dieser Seelenfähigkeiten in der Tat ein Schauen des Menschen zustande kommt, durch das er gewahr werden kann eine übersinnliche Welt, wie er durch seine physischen Sinne in seiner Umgebung die physisch-sinnliche Welt gewahr wird. Durch ein solches Schauen dringt man nicht etwa bloß in abstrakter Art hinauf zu der Überzeugung, es gäbe außer der Sinneswelt noch eine Geisteswelt, sondern man dringt vor zu einer wirklichen Erfahrung, zu einem wirklichen Erlebnis geistiger Wesenheiten, die um den Menschen, insofern er sich selbst zu einer Geistigkeit erhebt, eine Umwelt bilden, wie Pflanzen und Tiere seine Umwelt in der physischen Welt bilden.

Eine solche übersinnliche Erkenntnis ist ihrem ganzen Wesen nach etwas anderes als dasjenige, was man im gewöhnlichen Leben für das alltägliche Bewußtsein. und auch für die gewöhnliche Wissenschaft Erkenntnis nennt. Da versetzt man sich ja gewissermaßen in den Besitz von Ideen, zum Beispiel von solchen Ideen, welche Naturgesetze umspannen. Aber dieser Besitz von Ideen dringt eigentlich nicht so in die Seele ein, daß er eine unmittelbare Kraft der Seele wird, vergleichbar als geistige Kraft etwa mit der in Aktivität übergehenden menschlichen Muskelkraft. Gedanken bleiben etwas Schattenhaftes, und der Mensch kennt ja aus seinem unmittelbaren Erleben, wie gleichgültig in einer gewissen Beziehung die Gedanken auf das menschliche Herz wirken, wenn es sich darum handelt, die tiefsten Angelegenheiten dieses menschlichen Herzens zu berühren.

Nun glaube ich schon im ersten Vortrage gezeigt zu haben, daß der Mensch, indem er durch ein solches Schauen, wie es hier gemeint ist, tatsächlich hineindringt in die geistige Welt, dann gewahr wird seine übersinnliche Wesenheit, wie sie war, bevor sie zum irdischen Dasein heruntergestiegen ist. Und dadurch, daß er ähnliches für die geistige Welt in bezug auf sein eigenes Selbst sich erringt, dadurch läßt er, ich möchte sagen, sein Herz, seine tiefsten Gemütsbedürfnisse nicht in der gleichen Art unberührt, wie durch die abstrakten Erkenntnisse. Gewiß, wer selbst ein Erkenntnisleben geführt hat, unterschätzt nicht, was alles an innerer Dramatik der Seele auch in dem gewöhnlichen anerkannten Erkenntnisringen liegt; aber immerhin bleiben die Erkenntnisse, die wir uns also erwerben, Bilder der Außenwelt. Ja, wir sind heute, wenn wir wissenschaftlich gebildet sind, am meisten darauf stolz, daß diese Bilder ganz objektiv die Außenwelt gewissermaßen nur abspiegeln, ohne daß sie mit einer gewissen inneren Schlagkraft das seelische Leben so durchzucken, wie etwa im physischen Leibe die Blutzirkulation durch das menschliche Wesen ihre Wellen schlägt. Es ist eben das, was hier als übersinnliche Erkenntnis gemeint ist, etwas, was in ganz anderer Art auf den Menschen wirkt als die gewöhnliche Erkenntnis. Und damit ich mich gerade über diesen Punkt klarmachen kann, möchte ich von einer Art Vergleich ausgehen, der aber mehr ist als ein Vergleich, der die Sache durchaus in ihrer Wirklichkeit treffen kann.

Ich möchte davon ausgehen, wie der Mensch auch im gewöhnlichen Leben in zwei Bewußtseinszuständen lebt — man könnte auch sagen drei, aber fassen wir Schlaf und Traum jetzt als einen Bewußtseinszustand zusammen -, wie erim Schlafzustande völlig abgeschnitten ist von der Außenwelt, und wie eine nur innere Welt sich gewissermaßen grotesk, oftmals chaotisch in ihren Wirkungen zeigt durch den Traum. Wir können mit vielen anderen Menschen in einem Raume sein: unsere 'Traumeswelt ist unsere eigene, wir teilen sie nicht mit den anderen Menschen. Und gerade ein tieferes Betrachten der Traumwelt kann uns zeigen, wie das, was wir als unser inneres menschliches Wesen betrachten müssen, mit dieser Traumwelt zusammenhängt. Schon das körperliche Wesen des Menschen spiegelt sich in merkwürdiger Art im Traume; in phantastischen Bildern spiegelt es sich. Dieser oder jener Zustand eines Organs, ein krankhafter oder erregter Zustand, kann in einem besonderen Sinnbilde im Traume auftauchen, oder es symbolisiert sich etwas, was Geräusch in unserer Umgebung ist, ganz dramatisch im Traume. Der Traum schafft Bilder aus unserem Inneren und aus der Außenwelt. Das alles aber hängt wiederum innig mit unserem ganzen Lebenslauf auf der Erde zusammen. Aus der entferntesten Epoche dieses Lebens zieht der Traum in sein chaotisches, aber immerhin dramatisches Geschehen die Schatten der Erlebnisse hinein. Und je genauer man gerade auf alles das eingeht, desto mehr kommt man darauf, daß wenn auch in einer instinktiven, unterbewußten Art, das innerste menschliche Wesen dennoch mit demjenigen zusammenhängt, was im Traume waltet und webt. Und wer einen Sinn dafür hat, zum Beispiel den Augenblick des Erwachens zu beobachten und von ihm aus das gewöhnliche Tagesleben nicht in jener oberflächlichen Art, wie es oftmals geschieht, sondern in einer tieferen Art ins Seelenauge zu fassen, der wird darauf kommen, wie eigentlich dieses wache Tagesleben sich dadurch charakterisiert, daß was wir im 'Traume, im Schlafe in einer abgeschlossenen Weise erleben, in einer Weise, die wir mit anderen Menschen höchstens in besonderen Fällen teilen, daß das als Seelisch-Geistiges untertaucht in unser Leibliches, gewissermaßen sich in den Willen und damit auch in die willensdurchströmten Gedankenkräfte und Sinneskräfte einschaltet und sich dadurch auf dem Umwege durch den Leib in Beziehung setzt zu der äußeren Welt. Das Erwachen bedeutet dadurch den Übergang in einen ganz anderen Bewußtseinszustand, als wir ihn im Traume haben. Wir werden eingeschaltet in das äußere Geschehen dadurch, daß wir mit unserem Seelischen teilnehmen an Geschehnissen unseres eigenen Organismus, die wiederum mit äußeren Geschehnissen zusammenhängen. Beweise, daß ich den Vorgang eigentlich durchaus objektiv schildere, ergeben sich natürlich nicht auf rechnerisch abstrake Art, auch nicht auf experimentelle Art; aber sie ergeben sich für den, der auf diesem Gebiet beobachten kann, namentlich beobachten kann, wie auf dem Grunde des nüchternen, trockenen Seelenlebens, des Verstandeslebens, immer etwas vorgeht wie ein «wachendes Träumen», ein unterbewußtes Imaginieren, ein Leben in Bildern. Es ist so, daß wir — wie wir von der Oberfläche eines strömenden Wassers in den tieferen Grund hinunterdringen -, so auch von unserem Verstandesleben in die tieferen Regionen der Seele dringen können. Da dringen wir hinein in das, was uns eigentlich, wenn es auch mit der äußeren Welt einen weniger exakten Zusammenhang hat, intimer angeht als das Verstandesleben. Da treffen wir ja auch alles das, was das Verstandesleben anregt zu seiner selbständigen, erfinderischen Kraft, was dieses Verstandesleben anregt, wenn es übergeht in künstlerisches Schaffen, und was sogar — ich werde es später zu zeigen haben - das Verstandesleben anregt, wenn das menschliche Herz sich vom gewöhnlichen Weltenbetrachten hinsenkt zu der religiös-frommen Verehrung der Weltgeistigkeit.

Im Erwachen des gewöhnlichen Lebens ist es eigentlich so, daß wir durch die Einschaltung unseres Seelischen in unsere Leibesorgane mit der Außenwelt in eine solche Verbindung kommen, daß wir dann über das, was der Traum ist, über sein Recht und Unrecht, über seine Wahrheit und Unwahrheit, nicht den Traum, sondern lediglich das wache Tagesleben urteilen lassen können. Es wäre krankhaft, wenn jemand glauben würde, in den chaotischen, wenn auch dramatischen Vorgängen des Traumes irgendwie ein «Höheres» sehen zu können als das, was er als Bedeutung dieses Traumlebens durch das wache Erleben feststellt.

In diesem wachen Erleben, gewissermaßen auf demselben Niveau der Erfahrung, bleiben wir nun auch, wenn wir uns dem Verstandesleben, dem gewöhnlichen Wissenschaftsleben, der alltäglichen Erkenntnis hingeben. Durch jene Versenkung, Vertiefung und, ich möchte sagen, Erkraftung der Seele, von der ich das letztemal gesprochen habe, übt der Mensch bewußt für sein Seelenleben auf einer höheren Stufe ein Ähnliches aus, als er unbewußt durch seine Leibesorganisation ausübt für das gewöhnliche Erwachen. Und das Aufgehen in jener übersinnlichen Erkenntnis ist ein «höheres Erwachen». Und wie wir irgendein Traumbild beziehen auf das wache Tagesleben, indem wir Erinnerung und andere Seelenkräfte zu Hilfe nehmen, um dieses Traumbild, sagen wir, auf eine körperliche Erregung oder ein äußeres Erlebnis zu beziehen und dadurch einzureihen in den Gang der Wirklichkeit, so kommt man durch ein solches übersinnliches Erkennen, wie ich es geschildert habe, dazu, nun dasjenige, was man in der gewöhnlichen sinnlichen Umgebung hat, was man auch durch Beobachtung und Experiment feststellt, einzureihen in eine höhere Welt, in eine geistige Welt, in die man jetzt durch jene Übungen, von denen ich sprach, so eingegliedert wird, wie man beim gewöhnlichen Erwachen durch seinen eigenen Organismus eingegliedert wird in die körperliche Welt. Und so ist es das Aufgehen einer neuen Welt, ein wirkliches Erwachen zu einer neuen Welt, ein Erwachen auf einer höheren Stufe, was eigentlich die übersinnliche Erkenntnis darstellt. Und dieses Erwachen wiederum nötigt dann den Erwachenden, nun die ganze sinnlich-physische Welt so von diesem Erleben aus zu beurteilen, wie er vom Wachleben aus das Traumleben beurteilt. Was ich hier in meinem Erdenleben tue, was mir erscheint durch meine physische Erkenntnis, das lerne ich dann so auf die Vorgänge zu beziehen, die ich als geistig-seelisches Wesen durchgemacht habe in einer rein geistigen Welt vor meinem Heruntersteigen in die irdische Welt, wie ich den Traum auf das wache Leben beziehe. Ich lerne alles, was in der physischen Natur da ist, beziehen - nun nicht «im allgemeinen» auf eine phantastische Geistwelt, sondern auf eine konkrete geistige Welt —, auf eine geistige Welt, die vollinhaltlich ist, die eben durch jene Erkenntniskräfte, die ich geschildert habe - Imagination, Inspiration und Intuition — zu einer geschauten menschlichen Umgebung wird.

Wie aber der Mensch im gewöhnlichen Leben als ein Erwachter in einer anderen Seelenverfassung sich fühlt, denn als ein Träumender, so wird die ganze Seelenverfassung des Menschen eine andere, indem er zu diesem höheren Erwachen kommt. So daß man, indem man in der Art, wie ich es hier getan habe, übersinnliche Erkenntnis schildert, nicht bloß das formale Aufnehmen von Bildern über die übersinnliche Welt schildert, sondern das Übergehen des Menschen von dem einen Bewußtseinszustande in den anderen, von einer Seelenverfassung in die andere. Dadurch aber werden auch diejenigen Seeleninhalte, denen man sich im gewöhnlichen Leben hingibt, durchaus andere. So wie man durch das gewöhnliche Erwachen eben ein anderer Mensch wird, so wird man in gewissem Sinne durch diese übersinnliche Erkenntnis eben ein anderer Mensch. Und was man an Vorstellungen, an Ideen im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein gehabt hat, das ändert sich. Es geschieht nicht nur ein begrifflicher Umschwung in einem, ein Umschwung dahingehend, daß man mehr versteht, sondern es geschieht ein Lebensumschwung. Das geht nun hinein in die allertiefsten menschlichen Begriffe. Gerade in den allertiefsten menschlichen Begriffen, ich möchte sagen, in der Wurzel des Seelenseins, ändert sich der Mensch dadurch, daß er — es geschieht ja immer nur für kurze Augenblicke des Lebens - eintreten kann in das Gebiet dieser übersinnlichen Erkenntnis.

Da muß ich Ihnen zwei Vorstellungen, welche die denkbar größte Rolle im gewöhnlichen Leben spielen, anführen; Vorstellungen, die ihre volle, tiefe Gültigkeit im gewöhnlichen Leben haben, und die in dem Augenblick, wo man in die übersinnliche Welt hinaufsteigt, eine ganz andere Gestalt bekommen. Das sind die beiden Begriffe, durch die wir unsere Urteile in der Welt bilden: die Begriffe wahr und falsch, richtig und unrichtig. Glauben Sie nicht, daß ich in einer Art Erkenntnisfrivolität mit meiner Auseinandersetzung irgendwie rütteln will an der Gültigkeit der Begriffe wahr und falsch, richtig und unrichtig. Rütteln an demjenigen, was für das gewöhnliche Leben heilsam ist, das ist überhaupt nicht nach der Art einer wahrhaftigen übersinnlichen Erkenntnis. Es wird durch diese übersinnliche Erkenntnis etwas hinzuerworben zu dem gewöhnlichen Leben, aber ihm nichts genommen. Jene Menschen, die — sei es wirklich oder sentimental — unwahr werden im gewöhnlichen Leben, die für dieses gewöhnliche Leben unpraktisch-mystisch werden, die taugen auch nicht zu einer wahrhaften übersinnlichen Erkenntnis. Eine wahrhaftige übersinnliche Erkenntnis wird nicht aus Phantasten, nicht aus Träumern geboren, sondern gerade aus denjenigen, die sich voll mit ihrer Menschlichkeit als wirkliche Lebenspraktiker in das irdische Dasein hineinstellen können. Also nicht an demjenigen, was wir im alltäglichen Leben durchmachen und was in seiner Wurzel an den Begriffen wahr und falsch, richtig und unrichtig hängt, soll gerüttelt werden; im Gegenteil: Wahrhaftigkeit auf diesem Gebiete wird, ich möchte sagen, gefühlsmäßig durch dasjenige gerade befestigt, was nun für eine höhere Erkenntnis eintritt durch eine Metamorphose, durch eine Umgestaltung der Begriffe wahr und falsch, richtig und unrichtig.

Man redet, wenn man wirklich in diese höhere, übersinnliche Welt hineinkommt, nicht mehr in so abstrakter Weise: etwas ist wahr, etwas ist falsch, dies ist richtig, jenes unrichtig, sondern der Begriff des Wahren, des Richtigen geht über in einen solchen, den wir ja auch, aber auf eine mehr instinktive Art, aus dem gewöhnlichen Leben kennen, nur verwandelt sich dieser Begriff des gewöhnlichen Lebens in eine geistige Form. «Wahr, richtig» geht über in den Begriff, in die Vorstellung «gesund»; «falsch» und «unrichtig» geht über in die Vorstellung «krankhaft». Während man also im gewöhnlichen Leben, wenn man über irgend etwas nachdenkt oder irgend etwas fühlt, empfindet oder will, dann sagt: das ist richtig, jenes ist unrichtig —- kommt man eigentlich, wenn man im Gebiete der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis lebt, nicht zu diesem «richtig» oder «unrichtig», sondern man kommt eigentlich zu der Empfindung: etwas ist gesund, etwas ist krankhaft. Sie werden sagen, gesund und krank sind Begriffe, denen eine Unbestimmtheit anhaftet. Aber sie haftet ihnen eben nur an im gewöhnlichen Leben oder im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein. Die Unbestimmtheit hört auf, wenn die höhere Erkenntnis so exakt gesucht wird, wie ich es im ersten Vortrage dargestellt habe. So tritt die Exaktheit auch ein in das, was man dann auf diesem Gebiete höherer Erkenntnis eben erlebt. «Gesund» und «krank», so nennt man das, was man im Verkehr mit den Wesenheiten der übersinnlichen Welt, die man durch eine solche Erkenntnis gewahr wird, erlebt.

Nun bedenken Sie einmal, wie unendlich nahe einem dadurch dasjenige gehen kann, was eben Gegenstand der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis wird; es geht einem so nahe wie Gesundheit und Krankheit des Leibes. Man sagt von dem einen, das man im Übersinnlichen erlebt: Ich lebe mich in es hinein, es fördert, regt an mein Leben, es erhöht mein Leben; ich werde gewissermaßen «wirklicher» dadurch, es ist gesund. Ich sage von dem anderen: Es lähmt, ja, es ertötet mein eigenes Leben; ich erkenne daran, daß es ein Krankhaftes ist. Und so wie man durch «richtig» und «unrichtig» sich in der gewöhnlichen Welt forthilft, wie man seinen eigenen Menschen in das sittliche, in das soziale Leben hineinstellt, so stellt man sich in die übersinnliche Welt hinein durch «gesund» und «krank». Dadurch aber ist man in diese übersinnliche Welt mit seinem ganzen Wesen auf eine viel wirklichere Art eingeschaltet, als man in die Sinneswelt eigentlich eingeschaltet ist. In der Sinneswelt sondert man sich von den Dingen in diesem Richtig oder Unrichtig. Ich möchte sagen: «richtig» tut wenig intensiv wohl, «unrichtig» tut — insbesondere manchen Menschen — wenig intensiv wehe. In der übersinnlichen Welt ist es gar nicht möglich, daß die Erlebnisse in dieser Weise an uns herantreten. Da steht unser ganzes Sein, unsere ganze Realität in der Art drinnen, wie wir diese übersinnliche Welt erleben. Daher hört für dieses Gebiet alles Streiten auf wie: Sind die Dinge Wirklichkeiten? Sind sie bloß Erscheinungen? Zeigen sie uns bloß die Wirkungen auf unsere eigenen Sinnesorgane? und so weiter, Dinge, von denen ich hier nicht sprechen möchte, weil die Zeit dazu fehlen würde. Alles das aber, worüber man auf diese Weise diskutieren kann für die physische Wirklichkeit, das zu diskutieren hat eigentlich keinen Sinn für die geistige, übersinnliche Welt; denn ihre Wirklichkeit und Unwirklichkeit erprobt man daran, daß man sagen kann: Das eine berührt mich gesund, das andere berührt mich krank — kränkend, möchte ich sagen, das Wort in seiner vollen Bedeutung und Schwere nehmend. In dem Augenblick, wo der Mensch zur übersinnlichen Welt aufsteigt, bemerkt er sogleich, wie das, was sonst kraftlose Erkenntnis ist, zu einer innerlichen Kraft der menschlichen Seele selber wird. Wir durchdringen die Seele mit dieser übersinnlichen Erkenntnis, wie wir unseren Körper mitdem Blut durchdringen. Daher lernen wir auch in einer solchen Erkenntnis das ganze Verhältnis der Seele und des Geistes zum menschlichen Leibe kennen, lernen dadurch hinschauen, wie aus einem übersinnlichen vorgeburtlichen Dasein das Geistig-Seelische des Menschen heruntersteigt und sich mit dem vererbten Leibe verbindet. Um das zu durchschauen, muß man eben erst das Geistig-Seelische wirklich so kennenlernen, daß man durch diese Realität — wie gesund und krank — die Wirklichkeit, ich kann hier nicht sagen, am eigenen Leibe, aber an der eigenen Seele erlebt.

So ist übersinnliche Erkenntnis, so schwer man das Wort ausspricht, weil man scheinbar sogleich in eine Sentimentalität verfällt, nicht eigentlich ein bloßes Verstehen, sondern übersinnliche Erkenntnis, ist ein «Beseelen» des Menschen. Es ist Seele selber, Seeleninhalt, der in uns hereinsteigt, wenn wir zu dieser übersinnlichen Erkenntnis dringen. Wir werden unsere Ewigkeit, unsere Unsterblichkeit ja nicht durch ein philosophisches Problem gewahr; wir werden sie gewahr im unmittelbaren Erleben, wie wir durch unsere Sinne die äußeren Dinge im unmittelbaren Erleben gewahr werden.

Was ich so geschildert habe, steht allerdings vor dem Einwand: Ja, so kann vielleicht derjenige sprechen, der solcher übersinnlichen Erkenntnis teilhaftig ist; aber was soll denn zu diesen Dingen jemand sagen, der noch nicht dieser übersinnlichen Erkenntnis selbst teilhaftig ist? Nun, es ist die schönste Art des menschlichen Zusammenlebens, wenn der eine Mensch an dem anderen sich heranentwickelt, wenn seelisch der eine durch den anderen wird. Dadurch wird gerade in einer wunderbaren Weise die menschliche Gemeinschaft gestiftet. Und so darf gesagt werden: Geradeso wie nicht alle Menschen Astronomen oder Botaniker sein können, wie aber für alle Menschen das, was Astronomie und Botanik hervorbringen, von Wichtigkeit und Bedeutung — wenigstens in den Hauptergebnissen — sein kann und aufgenommen werden kann durch das, was man durch den gesunden Menschenverstand einsehen kann, so ist es auch möglich, daß durch das gesunde menschliche Gemüt im unmittelbaren Aufnehmen dasjenige erfaßt wird, was durch einen Geistesforscher, der in der Lage ist, in die übersinnliche Welt einzudringen, dargestellt wird. Denn der Mensch ist nicht für die Unwahrheit, sondern für die Wahrheit geboren! Und das, was der Geistesforscher zu sagen hat, wird ja immer in solche Worte und Wortfügungen gekleidet sein, daß es schon in der Formulierung abweicht von dem, was wir gewohnt sind, als Bilder aus der sinnlich-physischen Welt zu empfangen. Und so kann, indem der Geistesforscher seine Schauungen offenbart, dies auf den ganzen Menschen, auf den einfachen, gesunden Menschensinn so wirken, daß dieser gesunde Menschensinn erweckt wird, so erweckt wird, daß er wirklich sich hineinfindet in jenes Erwachen, von dem ich heute gesprochen habe. Daher muß ich immer wieder und wieder sagen: Gewiß, in meinen Büchern «Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß», «Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?» und in anderen habe ich darzustellen versucht, wie man durch systematische Übungen dasjenige erreichen kann, was ich bezeichnen muß als «Hineinschauen in die geistige Welt», so daß heute ein jeder in der Lage ist, bis zu einem gewissen Grade ein Geistesforscher zu werden; aber man braucht es nicht zu werden. Denn die gesunde menschliche Seelenverfassung ist so, daß das, was der Geistesforscher zu sagen hat, indem es an die Menschenseele heranschlägt, von dieser Seele, wenn sie nur unbefangen genug dazu ist, so empfangen werden kann wie eine alte Erkenntnis. Denn gerade das ist das Eigentümliche dieser Geistesforschung, dieser übersinnlichen Erkenntnis, die hier gemeint ist, daß sie nichts bringt, was nicht unterbewußt in jedem Menschen schon vorhanden ist. So daß jeder Mensch fühlen kann: Das habe ich ja gewußt, es steckt ja in mir; hätte ich mich nur nicht in einer gewissen Weise betäuben lassen durch die autoritativen und anderen naturwissenschaftlichen Vorurteile, so hätte ich durch dieses oder jenes Erlebnis schon früher das eine oder das andere von dem erfaßt, was im Zusammenhange diese Geistesforschung vorbringen kann.

Dadurch aber, daß so etwas eintritt wie die Verwandlung der Begriffe wahr und falsch in gesund und krank, dadurch wird das innere Erleben der Seele immer intensiver und intensiver. Der Mensch stellt sich auf einer höheren Stufe eben intensiver in eine Wirklichkeit hinein, als er sich beim bloßen Erwachen des Alltages in die physische Wirklichkeit hineinstellt. Dadurch werden für die Erkenntnisse, die durchaus exakt sind, geradeso wie durch hingestellte äußere Dinge, Gefühle, Empfindungen, Seelenerlebnisse erregt. Der ganze Mensch wird durch das, was die übersinnliche Erkenntnis geben kann, in Anspruch genommen, wie eigentlich sonst nur der Kopf in Anspruch genommen wird durch das, was eine sinnliche Erkenntnis geben kann. — Sie gestatten mir, daß ich dieses Vollmenschliche der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis auch noch dadurch veranschauliche, daß ich auf etwas Persönliches hinweise; aber das Persönliche ist ja auf diesem Gebiete auch ein Sachliches, denn die Sachen werden intensiv mit dem Persönlichen verknüpft.

Um zu veranschaulichen, wie die übersinnliche Erkenntnis wirklich nicht eine bloße Kopferkenntnis sein kann, sondern wie sie unendlich viel lebendiger und intensiver den Menschen ergreift als die Kopferkenntnis, möchte ich das Folgende sagen. Wer gewohnt ist - und das sollte eigentlich jeder wahrhaftige übersinnliche Erkenner — in gewöhnlicher Erkenntnis zu leben, der weiß, wie der Kopf beteiligt ist an dieser gewöhnlichen Erkenntnis. Steigt er dann auf, gerade wenn er durch sein ganzes Leben sich sozusagen auch in gewöhnlicher Erkenntnis betätigt hat, zu der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis, so wird die Sache so, daß er alle Kräfte anstrengen muß, um diese übersinnliche Erkenntnis, die an ihn herankommt, die sich ihm offenbart, festzuhalten. Er merkt: Die Kraft, durch die man eine Idee über die Natur, ein Naturgesetz, den Verlauf eines Experimentes oder einer klinischen Beobachtung festhält, diese Kraft ist ein Geringeres gegen die innere Seelenkraft, die man entfalten muß, um die Anschauung einer übersinnlichen Wesenheit festzuhalten. Und da fand ich mich denn immer genötigt, nicht nur sozusagen den Kopf zu benützen, um diese übersinnlichen Erkenntnisse festzuhalten, sondern die Kraft, die der Kopf anwenden kann, zu unterstützen durch andere Organe, zum Beispiel durch die Hand. Wenn man irgend etwas, was sich einem übersinnlich ergibt, in einigen Strichen aufzeichnet, wenn man es in charakteristischen, aphoristischen Sätzen oder auch bloßen Worten fixiert, dann ist das, was man da nun nicht bloß als eine durch das Nervensystem, das man beim gewöhnlichen Erkennen anwendet, hervorgerufene Kraft zustande bringt, sondern was man durch eine weit im Organismus ausholende Kraft als Unterstützung des Erkennens zustande bringt, etwas, was bewirkt, daß man die übersinnlichen Erkenntnisse nicht als vorübergehende hat, daß sie einem nicht entfallen wie Träume, sondern daß man sie behalten kann. Ich darf Ihnen daher verraten, daß ich im Grunde genommen immer in dieser Weise arbeiten muß und Wagenladungen von Notizbüchern in meinem Leben dadurch zustande gebracht habe, die ich niemals wieder angeschaut habe. Denn das, was da notwendig ist, liegt in der Betätigung; und die Betätigung bewirkt, daß man im Geiste das erhält, was sich einer offenbaren will, nicht daß man es hinterher wieder ablesen muß. Dieses Schreiben oder Zeichnen ist selbstverständlich kein automatisches, mediumhaftes, sondern ein ebenso bewußtes wie das, was man bei einer wissenschaftlichen oder anderen Arbeit anwendet. Es ist auch nur da, weil das, was in übersinnlicher Erkenntnis an einen herandringt, eben mit dem ganzen Menschen festgehalten werden muß. Dadurch aber wirkt es auch wieder auf den ganzen Menschen, ergreift den ganzen Menschen, bleibt nicht bei Eindrücken des Kopfes stehen, schreitet fort zu Eindrücken auf das ganze menschliche Herzens- und Gemütsleben. Und was man sonst erlebt, indem das Leben der Erde an einem vorübergeht, was man über dieses oder jenes erlebt an Freude, Freude mit all ihrer inneren Lebendigkeit, was man erlebt an kleineren oder tieferen Schmerzen, was man erlebt durch die äußere Sinneswelt, durch das Zusammensein mit anderen Menschen, an den auf-und absteigenden Wogen des Lebens, das tritt auf einer höheren, auf einer seelisch-geistigen Stufe wieder ein, indem man hinaufkommt in diejenigen Regionen des Übersinnlichen, wo man nicht mehr sprechen kann von wahr und falsch, wo man sprechen muß von gesund und krankhaft.

Und wenn dann insbesondere alles das durchgemacht ist, was ich das letztemal beschrieben habe, namentlich auch das große Schmerzgefühl auf einer gewissen Stufe auf dem Wege zum Übersinnlichen, da dringt man dann vor zueinem solchen Niveau des Erlebens, wo man mit dem Herankommen an übersinnliche Erlebnisse und Erkenntnisse eine solche innere Lebensdramatik durchmacht: Wo einem Erkenntnisse Freude, Lust bereiten können, wie das sonst nur im physischen Leben möglich ist, oder wo einem Erkenntnisse tiefsten Schmerz verursachen können; wo man das ganze seelische Leben, ich möchte sagen, auf einer höheren Stufe erneut hat, mit aller inneren Farbigkeit, mit allem inneren Kolorit, mit aller intimeren Innigkeit des seelisch-gemüthaften Lebens, die man durch sein Zusammengewachsensein mit der körperlichen Organisation im alltäglichen Dasein hat. Und hier ist es, wo sich die höhere Erkenntnis, das übersinnliche Erleben begegnet mit demjenigen, was in das gewöhnliche Leben hereinspielt als das sittliche Dasein des Menschen, dieses sittliche Dasein des Menschen mit alledem, womit es zusammenhängt, mit dem religiösen Empfinden, mit dem Bewußtsein der Freiheit. In dem Augenblick, wo man hinaufsteigt zu einem unmittelbaren Erleben des gesundenden oder kränkenden Geisteslebens, trifft man sozusagen auf die Wurzel des sittlichen Lebens des Menschen, auf die Wurzel des ganzen moralischen Daseins. Auf diese Wurzel des moralischen Daseins trifft man erst, wenn man zu der Anschauung kommt, wie das sinnlich-physische Leben mit demjenigen, was aus dem Menschen fließt, eigentlich für ein höheres Leben eine Art «Traum» ist, so wie der Traum für das gewöhnliche Leben eben ein Traum ist. Und dasjenige, was wir aus unbestimmtenTiefen unseres menschlichen Wesens heraus als Gewissen empfinden, woraus wir handeln können im gewöhnlichen Leben, woraus wir wohltätig oder unheilvoll für unsere Mitmenschen werden, dies, was so, ich möchte sagen, aus Untiefen unseres menschlichen Wesens heraufleuchtet, was uns anregt sittlich oder unsittlich, das wird hell, das wird eingereiht in eine Wirklichkeit, wie der Traum beim Erwachen eingereiht wird in eine Wirklichkeit. Man lernt das Gewissen dennoch als etwas erkennen, was da ist als der im Menschen in einer schattenhaften Weise vorhandene Spiegelglanz des Sinnes und der Bedeutung der geistigen Welt — der übersinnlichen Welt, der wir als Menschen mit dem Tiefsten unseres Wesens doch angehören. Und man begreift jetzt, wenn man die sittliche Weltordnung betrachten und zu einer Wirklichkeit dieser sittlichen Weltordnung kommen will, warum man dann ausgehen muß von dem, was uns die Sinneswissenschaft bieten kann zu einer übersinnlichen Erkenntnis.

Das war es, was ich vor jetzt dreißig Jahren darzustellen versuchte bloß als ethisches Problem, bloß als moralisches Welträtsel in meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit». Da versuchte ich, ohne Rücksicht zu nehmen auf übersinnliche Erkenntnis, rein durch Verfolgen der moralischen Impulse des Menschen, festzustellen, wie das Sittliche in jedem Falle entspringt — nicht aus dem Denken, das in sich aufnimmt die äußeren Dinge, die äußeren Geschehnisse oder die Geschehnisse des eigenen Leibes, sondern wie das Sittliche hervorgeht aus jenem denkerischen Seelenleben, das das Gemüt, das den Willen ergreift, das aber in seiner Grundlage doch denkerisches Seelenleben ist, das in sich selbst begründet ist, das im Geistigen der Welt urständet. Ein Seelenleben mußte ich dazumal in meiner «Philosophie der Freiheit» suchen, das unabhängig ist auch von der menschlichen Leiblichkeit, das zwar wie in schattenhafter Unwirklichkeit gegenüber der robusten Wirklichkeit der äußeren Sinnlichkeit erscheint, das aber in seiner wahren Wesenheit in die Geistgrundlage der Welt eingewurzelt ist. Und das Hervorgehen der sittlichen Impulse aus diesem, von der äußeren Sinneswelt gereinigten, aber im Menschen durchaus lebendigen Denken gibt dem Menschen seinen sittlichen Charakter. Und wenn man durch übersinnliche Erkenntnis nun schauen lernt, wie das, was als Gewissen in uns wurzelt, im Grunde genommen die in unserem Inneren befindliche Spiegelung der realen geistigen Welt ist, die durch die Sinnlichkeit webt und west, dann lernt man die Sittlichkeit des Menschen als das erkennen, was ihn — ohne daß er es weiß, auch wenn er es nur als dumpfe Stimme in seinem Inneren vernimmt — immerdar an jene geistige Welt bindet, die uns dann durch übersinnliche Erkenntnis erschlossen werden kann. Aber man sage nicht, daß diese übersinnliche Erkenntnis deshalb für das sittliche Leben bedeutungslos sein könne, weil wir ja die Stimme des Gewissens, weil wir die praktischen Intentionen des Lebens für die einzelnen Lebenssituationen haben. Wer insbesondere heute sieht, wie alte Geistestraditionen, übersinnliche Erkenntnisse von Urzeiten, die sich erhalten haben, abgeblaßt sind und als blasse Bekenntnisse heute fortleben, der wird auch sehen können, wie gerade auf diesem Gebiete eine neue Anregung des Menschen notwendig ist. Es geben sich ja auf diesem Felde viele Menschen einem großen Irrtum hin. Wir können sehen, wie durch die naturwissenschaftliche Erkenntnis, die ja von vielen auch heute noch als die einzig gültige angesehen wird, wie durch die Gestalt, die diese naturwissenschaftliche Erkenntnis mit ihrem Ignorabimus, ihrem «Wir können nicht erkennen», angenommen hat, viele überhaupt an der Erkenntnis schon verzweifeln, indem sie sagen: Sittliche Impulse, religiöse Intentionen können wir nicht aus irgend etwas gewinnen, was Erkenntnis ist; wir müssen diese ethisch-religiösen Impulse der Lebenshaltung, unabhängig von der Erkenntnis, aus besonderen Anlagen des Menschen heraus entwickeln. So weit ist es ja gekommen, daß man der Erkenntnis alle Fähigkeit abspricht, den Menschen so zu impulsieren, daß er durch die Aufnahme seines eigenen Geisteswesens — denn das ist es ja, was er in der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis aufnimmt — auch in seinem sittlich-religiösen Dasein bereichert wird. So weit ist es gekommen, daß man dies bezweifelt! Aber auf der anderen Seite wird man einsehen — gerade wenn man nicht ein solcher Praktiker ist, wie es die «Praktiker» des heutigen Lebens sind, die ja nur Routiniers sind, sondern wenn man als ein wirklicher Praktiker auf die ganze Welt eingeht, die aus Leib, Seele und Geist besteht -—, dann wird man schon einsehen, wie man in den einzelnen Lebenssituationen, für die man sich im realen Dasein mit sittlich-religiösem Gehalt durchdringen kann, mehr braucht als die abgeblaßten Traditionen, die eigentlich den Menschen doch nicht mehr vollsittlich inspirieren. So etwas sieht man.

Lassen Sie mich da ein besonderes Beispiel anführen. Aus all dem Unbefriedigenden, das ja auch im Erziehungsleben heute an einen herantritt, galt es die Frage zu beantworten: Wie soll eigentlich der Mensch erzogen werden?, als in Stuttgart aus dem Impuls von Emil Molt heraus die «Waldorfschule» begründet werden sollte. Mit dieser Frage an die übersinnliche Welt, von der ich hier spreche, traten wir an diese Aufgabe heran. Ich will nur ganz kurz anführen, was da für Intentionen zugrunde gelegt werden mußten.

Vor allen Dingen mußte die Frage aufgeworfen werden: Wie erzieht man das Kind zum wirklichen, sein ganzes Wesen in sich tragenden, aber auch sein ganzes Wesen in der ethisch-religiösen Lebenshaltung offenbarenden Menschen? Eine wirkliche Menschenerkenntnis nach Leib, Seele und Geist war dazu notwendig. Aber eine solche Menschenerkenntnis nach Leib, Seele und Geist ist heute aus demjenigen, was man gelten lassen will, durchaus nicht möglich, am wenigsten eine solche, welche unmittelbar praktisch werden kann, so daß man durch sie im Leben die mannigfaltigen Aufgaben angreifen kann. Lassen Sie mich das daran erörtern, daß ich ganz kurz zeige, wie eigentlich das, was wir heute so vielfach als unseren Stolz empfinden, die äußere Wissenschaft, die sich experimentierend und beobachtend mit dem Materiellen beschäftigt, nicht imstande ist, gerade in die Geheimnisse des Materiellen einzudringen. Was ich jetzt sage, will ich nur ganz kurz anführen; es kann aber in meinen Schriften, namentlich in meinem Buche «Von Seelenrätseln», mit allen Belegen nachgelesen werden. Wenn wir heute auf die gebräuchliche Wissenschaft hinhören, so bekommen wir von ihr die Vorstellung, zum Beispiel über das menschliche Herz, daß dieses Herz eine Art Pumpe sei, welche das Blut durch die Organe des Menschen wie ein Pumpwerk treibt. Geisteswissenschaft, wie sie hier gemeint ist, die uns einführt in die Anschauung desjenigen, was am Menschen nicht nur sein physischer Leib ist, sondern was im Menschen geistig-seelisches Wesen ist, sie zeigt uns, wie dieses geistig-seelische Wesen das leibliche Wesen durchdringt, wie das Blut nicht durch die Wirkung des «HerzPumpwerkes» durch den Menschen getrieben wird, sondern unmittelbar durch das Geistig-Seelische selber, und wie dieses Geistig-Seelische in die Blutzirkulation so eingreift, daß dieses Geistig-Seelische die Kraft wird, welche das Blut durch unseren Organismus pulsieren macht. Dann aber wird das Herz geschaut als etwas wie ein Sinnesorgan. Wie ich durch meine Augen die äußere Welt bewußt wahrnehme und sie mir in meinen Vorstellungen bewußt zu eigen mache, so nehme ich das, was ich in meinem Blute unbewußt durch meine geistig-seelischen Kräfte als Pulsation entwickele, durch dieses innere Sinnesorgan des Herzens, wiederum auf eine unbewußte Weise wahr. Das Herz ist keine Pumpe, das Herz ist das innere Sinnesorgan, durch welches man dasjenige wahrnimmt, was das Geistig-Seelische an unserem Blute innerlich entwickelt, so wie man durch die äußeren Sinne die äußere Welt wahrnimmt. In dem Augenblicke, wo man vom verstandesmäßigen Zergliedern des menschlichen Organismus übergeht zum Anschauen des ganzen Menschen, in diesem Augenblicke enthüllt sich das Herz in seiner wahren Wesenheit, in seiner wahren Bedeutung: als innerliches Sinnesorgan. Im Herzen offenbaren sich die Wirkungen der menschlichen Blutzirkulation mit ihren Lebensimpulsen, nicht ist das Herz der Veranlasser dieser Pulsation. - Es ist dies ein Beispiel dafür, wie es sozusagen die Tragik gerade der materialistisch gefärbten Wissenschaft ist, in die Geheimnisse des materiellen Lebens nicht eindringen zu können, und wie man in die Geheimnisse des Materiellen erst dadurch eindringt, daß man den Geist in seiner wahren Arbeit, in seinem Schaffen an der Materie beobachtet.

Wenn man aber so auf der einen Seite gerade in dem Geschehen im Materiellen den schaffenden Geist gewahr wird, dann wird man auf der anderen Seite den kraftvollen, nicht bloß den abstrakt denkenden Geist, den wesenhaften, den wirklichen Geist gewahr durch eine solche übersinnliche Erkenntnis. Und dann erst ergibt sich eine wirkliche Menschenerkenntnis, wie man sie braucht, wenn man in dem werdenden Kinde das heranbilden will, was nun im Menschen bis zum Tode kraftvoll, lebensgemäß, wirklichkeitsentsprechend wesen kann. Und so wird durch eine solche intensive Verlebendigung der Menschenerkenntnis das Kind für den Erzieher im Grunde genommen etwas ganz anderes, als es für den äußeren Betrachter bloß ist. Das werdende Kind ist ja vom ersten Augenblicke seines Erdenlebens an im Grunde genommen die wunderbarste irdische Erscheinung. Wie so aus dem tiefsten, zunächst rätselhaft unbestimmten Inneren das herauskommt, was die unbestimmten Gesichtszüge zu immer bestimmteren macht, was das erst verwaschene Antlitz zur sprechenden Physiognomie macht, wie die unbestimmten, ungelenken Bewegungen der Gliedmaßen zu zweck- und zielentsprechenden werden, das zu beobachten ist etwas Wunderbares. Und das auszubilden macht eine große Verantwortlichkeit notwendig.

Steht man vor dem werdenden Menschen so, daß man mit aller inneren Inbrunst, wie sie an übersinnlicher Erkenntnis haften kann, sagt: In diesem Kinde offenbart sich das, was im vorirdischen Dasein geistig-seelisch in übersinnlicher Schöne gelebt hat, was gewissermaßen seine übersinnliche Schöne verlassen hat, untergetaucht ist in denjenigen Leib, der ihm in der physischen Vererbung gegeben werden konnte; du aber, als Erzieher, du hast herauszulösen, was gottgegeben im menschlichen Leibe ruht, daß es ergreifen kann von Jahr zu Jahr, von Monat zu Monat, von Woche zu Woche den physischen Leib, ihn durchdringen kann, ihn plastisch der Seele ähnlich machen kann; du hast im Menschen weiter zu erwecken, was sich in diesem Menschen offenbart — dann steht man nicht nur mit verstandesmäßigen Grundsätzen vor der Erziehung des Kindes, sondern dann steht man mit seinem ganzen Menschen, mit seinem ganzen menschlichen Gemüt, mit seiner umfassenden menschlichen Verantwortlichkeit vor dem Erziehungsproblem. Dann lernt man allmählich wissen, daß man nicht nur das Kind zu beobachten hat, wenn man wissen will, was man zu irgendeiner Zeit mit dem Kinde zu tun hat, sondern daß man den ganzen Menschen überschauen muß.

Das ist unbequem zu beobachten. Aber es ist eine Wahrheit, daß dasjenige, was unter Umständen an einem Menschen sich offenbart, sagen wir, im zartesten Kindesalter, in einer besonderen Gestalt erst im höchsten Alter, nachdem es lange im Innern des Menschen verborgen geblieben ist, sich entweder als gesundend oder krankmachend offenbart. Wir haben als Erzieher nicht nur das unmittelbare kindliche Alter in der Hand, wir haben als Erzieher das ganze menschliche Erdenleben in der Hand. Wer von einem oberflächlichen pädagogischen Standpunkte aus oftmals sagt, man müsse dem Kinde nur das beibringen, was es schon verstehen kann, der irrt gar sehr; er lebt im Augenblicke, er lebt nicht in der Beobachtung des ganzen Menschenlebens. Denn es gibt ein kindliches Alter, das vom Zahnwechsel bis zur Geschlechtsreife geht, wo es dem Kinde außerordentlich wohltätig ist, wenn es auch dasjenige, was es noch nicht begreift, was für es noch nicht anschaulich werden kann, auf die Autorität des geliebten Erziehers hin annimmt — zum größten Segen für das Menschenleben, weil es Lebenskräfte selbst erweckend wirkt, wenn das Kind in der selbstverständlichen Autorität des Lehrenden und Erziehenden gewissermaßen die Verkörperung von Wahrheit, Schönheit und Güte sieht, wenn es die Welt verkörpert sieht in dem Erzieher. Das ist nicht etwas, was gegen die Freiheit des Menschen verstößt, das ist etwas, was appelliert an die selbstverständliche Autorität, die in ihrer Weiterentwickelung eine Kraftquelle für das ganze Leben ist.

Wenn wir, fünfunddreißig Jahre alt geworden, nunmehr in unser reifes Gemüt etwas hereinbringen, was im Grunde genommen veranlagt ist, erst jetzt von uns als reife Menschen verstanden zu werden, und was wir nur auf die Autorität der geliebten Erzieherpersönlichkeit schon im achten Lebensjahre in unser Herz aufgenommen haben, wenn wir das heraufbringen, was wir schon besessen haben, was durch Liebe in uns lebte und jetzt erst im reifen Alter von uns verstanden wird, dann ist dieses Verstehen dessen, was in uns wie im Keime vorhanden ist, die Quelle einer reichen inneren Belebung. Diese innere Belebung wird dem Menschen genommen, wenn man in trivialisierender Weise nur das an das Kind heranbringen will, was es schon verstehen kann. Man schaut ja nur dann auf das kindliche Erleben richtig hin, wenn man auf den ganzen Menschen und vor allem auf das, was noch mehr in das menschliche Gemüt hineingeht, einzugehen vermag.

Man lernt zum Beispiel Menschen kennen, die, wenn sie in eine Gemeinschaft von anderen Menschen kommen, etwas wie Segen-Ausstrahlendes haben. Sie wirken beruhigend, friedenstiftend selbst auf aufgeregte und aufeinanderplatzende Gemüter. Und wenn wir wirklich in der Lage sind das ist, wie gesagt, unbequem — zurückzuschauen, wodurch solche Menschen, abgesehen von ihren Anlagen, auch durch Erziehung so etwas ausgebildet haben, dann kommen wir oftmals zurück in ein sehr zartes Lebensalter, wo diese Kinder dadurch, daß die Erzieherpersönlichkeiten ihnen im Inneren in recht herzlicher Weise nahe gestanden haben, verehrend aufzuschauen gelernt haben zu diesen Erzieherpersönlichkeiten. Dieses Aufschauen, dieses Verehrenkönnen wirkt wie ein Gebirgsbach, der unter das Gestein tritt und erst später wieder an der Oberfläche erscheint. Es wirkt das, was sich die Seele da im Kindesalter angeeignet hat, hinunter in die Tiefen der Seele, äußert sich erst im hohen Alter und wird dann zu etwas wie Segen ausstrahlender Kraft.

Man kann das, was ich eben ausführte, im Bilde andeuten, indem man sagt: Auch der Welt gegenüber kann der Mensch so erzogen werden, daß er die verehrenden Kräfte des zarten Kindesalters in segnende Kräfte im hohen Alter verwandeln kann. Im Bilde möchte ich andeuten, was ich meine: Niemand wird im Alter die Hand zum Segnen ausbreiten können, der nicht im zarten Kindesalter gelernt hat, in Ehrfurcht, ich möchte sagen, betend die Hände zu falten!

Das kann uns zeigen, wie in einem solchen speziellen Falle eine Lebensaufgabe — die Erziehung — zur ethisch-religiösen Stimmung führen kann, wie auch das, was das Hineinleben in die Geist-Erkenntnis aus unserem Gemüt, aus unserem Willen macht, sich hineinleben kann in unsere Lebenshaltung, so daß das, was wir sonst nur äußerlichtechnisch vielleicht ausbilden, zu einem Bestandteil unserer sittlich-religiösen Lebenshaltung wird. Indem jedoch Unterricht und Erziehung in der Stuttgarter Waldorfschule und in den anderen Schulen, die als ihre Dependancen entstanden sind, in eine solche Atmosphäre gerückt worden ist, ist wahrhaftig das Sachliche, das rein Pädagogische nicht etwa unberücksichtigt geblieben, sondern voll berücksichtigt worden. Aber es ist wirklich die Erziehungsaufgabe etwas geworden, was mit aller seiner erzieherischen Technik, mit aller Erzieherpraxis und allem Methodischen zugleich eine ethisch-religiöse Atmosphäre auf das Kind ausstrahlt. Erzieherhandlungen werden zu ethisch-religiösen Handlungen, weil das, was getan wird, aus den tiefsten sittlichen Impulsen heraus getan wird. Weil erzieherische Praxis aus Erzieher-Gewissen fließt, weil in dem werdenden Menschen geschaut wird das gottgegebene Seelenwesen, deshalb wird die erzieherische Handlung zugleich zu einer religiösen. Und es braucht nichts Sentimentales gemeint zu sein, sondern es kann gerade das gemeint sein, was eigentlich unser so nüchtern gewordenes Leben besonders notwendig hat: In ganz unsentimentalem Sinne kann dadurch, daß Geisteswissenschaft eine Leuchte wird, die auf unsere Lebenshandlungen, auf unsere ganze Lebenshaltung Licht wirft, kann das Leben, wie in dem angezeigten einzelnen Beispiele der Erziehung, so eine Art göttlicher Weltendienst werden. Weil wir durch übersinnliche Erkenntnis nicht zu Abstraktionen, sondern zu menschlichen Kräften kommen, wenn diejenigen Erkenntnisse, die im übersinnlichen Erkennen gewonnen werden, unmittelbar eben Lebenskräfte werden: deshalb können sie auch überfließen in unsere ganze Lebenshaltung, können sie durchdringen mit dem, was den Menschen über den Menschen hinausführt, aus dem Sinnlichen zum Übersinnlichen, was ihn zu einem sittlichen Wesen erhebt; können ihn dazu bringen, daß er wirklich in hingebungsvoller Liebe eins wird mit dem Geist der Welt und dadurch zum wahrhaft religiösen Frommsein kommt.

Das offenbart sich ja insbesondere auch in der Erziehung. Wenn wir das Kind bis zu seinem siebenten Lebensjahr beobachten, so ist es ganz hingegeben, physisch hingegeben an die Umgebung; es ist ein Nachahmer, bis in die Sprache hinein ein nachahmendes Wesen. Und wenn wir diese physische Hingabe ansehen, wenn wir das beobachten, was Naturumgebung des Kindes ist, was für das Kind auch, weil die Seele noch nicht erwacht ist, Naturumgebung bleibt, dann möchten wir sagen: Es ist die naturhafte Ausgestaltung des religiösen Hingegebenseins an die Welt, was uns im Kinde naturhaft entgegentritt. Das Kind lernt deshalb so viel, weil es naturhaft-religiös an die Welt hingegeben ist. Dann sondert sich der Mensch aus der Welt heraus; und vom siebenten Jahre ab wird schon seine erzieherische Umgebung das, was seiner Seele eine andere, ahnende Richtung gibt. Dann kommt er mit der Geschlechtsreife zum selbständigen Urteil, dann wird er das, was sich aus sich selbst heraus Richtung und Ziel gibt. Wohl ihm, wenn er jetzt, da er auch aus seinem sinnlichen Organismus losgelöst wird, dem Gedanken, dem Geist folgen kann und hineinwächst in das Geistige, wie er als Kind naturhaft in der Welt gelebt hat, wenn er als Erwachsener für den Geist zurückkehren kann zu der Naturhaftigkeit des kindlichen WeltErfühlens! Wenn unser Geist, nachdem wir geschlechtsreif geworden sind, so in dem Geist der Welt leben kann, wie der Leib des Kindes in der Welt der Natur lebt, dann dringen wir mit dem Innersten unseres Menschenwesens in wahrer religiöser Hingabe in den Geist der Welt hinein, dann werden wir religiöse Menschen!

Man muß sich eben durchaus bequemen, die gewöhnlichen Erkenntnisvorstellungen in lebendige Kräfte umzuwandeln, wenn man das Wesen, den Nerv der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis erfassen will. Und so ist es auch, wenn man durch das, was ich das letztemal als übersinnliche Erkenntnis der Imagination geschildert habe, den Menschen anschaut. Wenn man gewahr wird, wie in ihm nicht nur dieser physische Leib lebt, den wir durch die Physiologie studieren, den wir in der Klinik zergliedern und eben dadurch die Physiologie aufbauen, wenn man sieht, wie in ihm ein übersinnliches Wesen lebt, das so angeschaut wird, wie ich es beschrieben habe, dann wird man gewahr, wie diese übersinnliche Wesenheit ein Plastiker ist, der am physischen Leibe selber arbeitet. Dann muß man aber auch die Möglichkeit haben, von den gewöhnlichen abstrakten Vorstellungen, die uns nur Naturgesetze liefern, überzugehen zu einer künstlerischen Erfassung des Menschen. Dann müssen die Gesetzmäßigkeiten, durch die man sonst die menschliche physische Gestalt erfaßt, zu gestalteten Inhalten werden; dann muß Wissenschaft in Kunst übergehen können. Der übersinnliche Mensch läßt sich nicht durch abstrakte Wissenschaft ergreifen. Die Wissenschaft vom übersinnlichen Menschen erlangt man nur durch ein Anschauen, das ganz und gar die Wissenschaft in ein künstlerisches Erleben hineinführt. Man darf nicht sagen: Wissenschaft müsse etwas Logisches, Experimentierendes bleiben. Gewiß, eine solche Forderung kann man aufstellen; aber was kümmert sich die Welt um das, was wir als «Forderungen» aufstellen! Wenn wir die Welt erfassen wollen, müssen wir uns nach der Welt, nicht nach unseren Forderungen und nicht einmal nach unseren logischen Gedanken richten, denn die Welt könnte sich aus den bloßen logischen Gedanken in ein Künstlerisches überleiten. Und das tut sie auch. Daher gelangt nur der zu einer richtigen Lebensauffassung, der das, was man in den gedachten Naturgesetzen vor sich hat, überleiten kann durch «anschauende Urteilskraft», wie Goethe dies Wort so schön geprägt hat, in gestaltete Naturgesetze. Da steigt man dann durch die Kunst — wie Schiller sagte: «durch das Morgenrot des Schönen» — hinauf in der Erkenntnis — aber auch in des Frommseins, in des Religiös-Seins Land.

Und dann -lassen Sie mich das zum Schluß aussprechen wird man gewahr, was es eigentlich für eine Bewandtnis hat mit all den Zweifeln, die dem Menschen kommen, wenn er sagt: Die Erkenntnis kann uns ja die religiösen, die ethischen Impulse nicht geben; dazu bedarf es besonderer Kräfte, die von den Erkenntniskräften weitab liegen. Auch von mir hier wird aus den Grundlagen übersinnlicher Erkenntnis niemals behauptet werden, daß irgendeine Erkenntnis als solche den Menschen in die sittlich-religiöse Lebenshaltung hineinbringen kann. Dasjenige aber, was den Menschen in Wahrheit in die sittlich-religiöse Lebenshaltung hineinbringt, das liegt nicht auf sinnlichem Gebiete, das kann erst erforscht werden auf übersinnlichem Gebiete. Daher erlangt man erst eine wirkliche Erkenntnis von der menschlichen Freiheit, wenn man eindringt in das Übersinnliche. Und ebenso erlangt man auch erst eine wirkliche Erkenntnis vom menschlichen Gewissen, wenn man zum Übersinnlichen vordringen kann. Denn dadurch gelangt man in jenes Geistige, das den Menschen nicht naturgesetzlich zwingt, sondern ihn als freies Wesen wirken läßt, ihn aber zugleich durchdringt und durchströmt mit den Impulsen, die sich im Gewissen offenbaren. Dadurch aber offenbart sich dem Menschen das, was er als naiver religiös-frommer Mensch in aller Unschuld ahnt als das Göttliche der Welt. Gewiß braucht man die Erkenntnis, wie ich sie geschildert habe, nicht unmittelbar, um ein religiös-frommer Mensch zu sein; das kann man in aller Naivität sein. Aber so liegt ja die Sache nicht, und die Geschichte beweist das. Wer davon spricht, daß das religiös-ethische Leben des Menschen aus einer anderen Wurzel erblühen müsse als aus der Erkenntnis Wurzel, der weiß eben nicht aus der geschichtlichen Entwickelung, daß alle religiösen Befreiungen - die religiösen Anlagen sind natürlich im Menschen immer vorhanden — aus den Erkenntnissen hervorgegangen sind, wie sie eben aus den vorzeitlichen Epochen auch als übersinnliche da waren. Kein sittlicher und religiöser Inhalt, der nicht aus der Erkenntnis Wurzel entsprang! Heute ist aus der Erkenntnis Wurzel das naturwissenschaftliche Denken entsprungen, das aber nicht bis zum Geist vordringen kann. Dafür haften viele Menschen in bezug auf die religiöse Lebenshaltung an den Traditionen, und sie glauben, was in den Traditionen lebt, das offenbare sich aus so etwas wie einem «religiösen Genie» heraus. In Wahrheit sind es die atavistischen, die vererbten Traditionen. Sie sind aber heute so verblaßt, daß wir einen neuen Impuls der Erkenntnis brauchen, der nicht abstrakt wirkt, der für die Erkenntnis Kraft ist, damit durch das, was in der Erkenntnis liegt, dem Menschen der Impuls gegeben werde, nun auch in die Lebenshaltung des praktischen Lebens mit ethisch-religiösen Impulsen in aller Ursprünglichkeit wieder einzutreten.

Das brauchen wir. Und wenn auf der einen Seite behauptet wird - ganz gewiß auch mit einem gewissen Recht -, Erkenntnis als solche brauche der Mensch nicht, um eine ethisch-religiöse Lebenshaltung zu entwickeln, so muß aber auf der anderen Seite gesagt werden — das lehrt wieder die Geschichte -: Auch Erkenntnis darf den Menschen nicht be‚irren in seinem religiösen, in seinem ethischen Sinne. Der Mensch muß die Möglichkeit haben, die höchste Erkenntnisstufe zu erringen, aber mit dieser Erkenntnisstufe — die ihm natürlich zu erlangen möglich ist, denn es bleibt immer noch viel darüber — in derjenigen Heimat anzulangen, in welcher er gelebt hat gottgewollt, gottgeführt, als er noch nicht zur Erkenntnis gekommen war. Dasjenige, was ahnend war und als Ahnung sein Recht hatte, muß wiedergefunden werden, auch wenn nach dem höchsten Erkenntnislichte gestrebt wird. Dann kann Erkenntnis nicht etwas sein, was auf die sittliche Lebenshaltung auslöschend wirkt, sondern dann kann Erkenntnis nur dasjenige sein, was, anfeuernd und recht sie durchströmend, auf alle moralisch-religiöse Lebenshaltung wirken wird. Der Mensch aber wird durch einesolcheErkenntnisden tieferen SinndesLebens gewahr werden, von dem doch gesprochen werden darf. Er wird gewahr werden, daß er durch Fügung der Weltengeheimnisse, der ganzen Weltenlenkung zunächst ahnungsvoll als ein geistgewolltes Wesen dasteht, daß er als ein geistgewolltes Wesen weiter sich entwickeln kann, daß er allerdings dann in einer äußeren Erkenntnis nur auf ein unbestimmtes Meer hinauskommt, wo er schon auf Zweifel geführt und zerrissen werden kann gegenüber dem, was als Einheit in ihm gelebt hat, als er noch naiv ahnend war. Wacht er aber aus der gewöhnlichen Erkenntnis auf zur übersinnlichen Erkenntnis, dann gelangt er wiederum zurück zu dem, was in ihm gottgegeben, geistdurchwirkt ist.

Und so wird schon auch das, was unsere schwer geprüfte Zeit so notwendig hat: einen neuen Einschlag in der ethisch-religiösen Lebenshaltung — dadurch allein wirklich gefördert werden können, daß so wie die Erkenntnis bisher vom dunkelahnenden, träumenden Erkennen zu der heutigen wachen Klarheit vorgeschritten ist, nun auch von dieser wachen Klarheit zu einem höheren Erwachen fortgeschritten werde, zu einem Verbundensein mit der übersinnlichen Welt. Dadurch wird auch dem Menschen jener Impuls gegeben werden können, den er insbesondere für die Erneuerung seines sozialen Daseins in dieser Zeit der schweren Prüfung der Menschheit an allen Orten der Erde so notwendig braucht, und man kann schon sagen: für das ganze soziale Denken der Gegenwart braucht. Als Wurzel in der ethisch-religiösen Lebenshaltung müßte Verständnis dafür erwachsen, daß der Mensch von der gewöhnlichen Erkenntnis durch künstlerisches und übersinnliches Erwachen hineinkomme in eine religiös-ethische Lebenshaltung, in ein wirkliches unsentimentales Frommsein, wodurch sozusagen der Lebensdienst zum Geistesdienst wird; daß er da hineinkommt, indem sein Erkennen zum Lichte des Übersinnlichen strebt, so daß dieses Licht des Übersinnlichen ihn erwachen läßt in einer übersinnlichen Welt, in der er sich erst wirklich als freie Seele gegenüber den Naturgesetzen fühlen kann, in der er erst mit einer wirklichen menschlichen Würde, mit einer wahren Frömmigkeit und echten Innigkeit und wahrer Religiosität als Geistesmensch in der Geisteswelt stehen kann.

Anthroposophy and the Ethical-Religious Attitude of Human Beings

Last Wednesday, I had the opportunity to explain how supersensible knowledge can arise from the further development of those human soul faculties that people possess in ordinary life and which, when applied methodically, are also recognized in science. I have tried to show how, through the systematic development of these soul faculties, human beings can indeed attain a vision through which they can perceive a supersensible world, just as they perceive the physical-sensory world around them through their physical senses. Through such vision, one does not merely ascend in an abstract way to the conviction that there is a spiritual world beyond the sensory world, but one advances to a real experience, to a real encounter with spiritual beings who, insofar as man elevates himself to a spiritual state, form an environment around him, just as plants and animals form his environment in the physical world.

Such supersensible knowledge is, in its very essence, something different from what we call knowledge in ordinary life, in everyday consciousness, and also in ordinary science. There, we take possession, as it were, of ideas, for example, ideas that encompass the laws of nature. But this possession of ideas does not actually penetrate the soul in such a way that it becomes an immediate power of the soul, comparable as a spiritual power to, for example, human muscular power in action. Thoughts remain something shadowy, and human beings know from their immediate experience how indifferent thoughts are in a certain respect to the human heart when it comes to touching the deepest matters of that human heart.

Now, I believe I have already shown in the first lecture that when a person actually penetrates into the spiritual world through such vision as is meant here, he then becomes aware of his supersensible being as it was before it descended into earthly existence. And by achieving something similar for the spiritual world in relation to his own self, he does not, I would say, leave his heart, his deepest emotional needs, untouched in the same way as through abstract knowledge. Certainly, anyone who has led a life of knowledge does not underestimate all the inner drama of the soul that lies even in the ordinary, recognized pursuit of knowledge; but nevertheless, the insights we acquire in this way remain images of the outer world. Yes, today, if we are scientifically educated, we are most proud of the fact that these images reflect the external world quite objectively, without penetrating our soul life with a certain inner force, as, for example, the circulation of blood through the human being causes waves in the physical body. This is precisely what is meant here by supersensible knowledge, something that affects human beings in a completely different way than ordinary knowledge. And in order to clarify this point, I would like to start with a kind of comparison, but one that is more than a comparison, one that can truly capture the reality of the matter.

I would like to start from the fact that human beings live in two states of consciousness in ordinary life — one could also say three, but let us now combine sleep and dreaming as one state of consciousness — how they are completely cut off from the outside world in the state of sleep, and how an inner world alone manifests itself in a grotesque, often chaotic way through dreams. We can be in a room with many other people: our ‘dream world’ is our own, we do not share it with other people. And it is precisely a deeper observation of the dream world that can show us how what we must regard as our inner human being is connected with this dream world. Even the physical being of the human being is reflected in a strange way in dreams; it is reflected in fantastic images. This or that condition of an organ, a diseased or excited state, can appear in a special symbol in dreams, or something that is noise in our environment can be symbolized quite dramatically in dreams. Dreams create images from our inner world and from the outside world. But all of this is intimately connected with our entire life course on earth. From the most distant epoch of this life, dreams draw the shadows of experiences into their chaotic but nevertheless dramatic events. And the more precisely one examines all this, the more one realizes that, even if in an instinctive, subconscious way, the innermost human being is nevertheless connected with what reigns and weaves in dreams. And anyone who has a sense for observing, for example, the moment of awakening and, from that point, perceiving ordinary daily life not in the superficial way that often happens, but in a deeper way with the eye of the soul, will come to realize how this waking daily life is actually characterized by the fact that what we experience in dreams in sleep in a closed-off way, in a way that we share with other people at most in special cases, that this submerges as soul-spiritual into our physical being, in a sense interconnects itself with the will and thus also with the thought forces and sense forces permeated by the will, and thereby establishes a relationship with the outer world via the detour through the body. Awakening thus means the transition to a completely different state of consciousness than we have in dreams. We become involved in external events through our soul participating in events within our own organism, which in turn are connected with external events. Evidence that I am actually describing the process objectively is not, of course, provided in a mathematical or experimental way; but it is evident to those who can observe in this field, namely those who can observe how, at the bottom of our sober, dry soul life, our intellectual life, there is always something going on like “waking dreams,” subconscious imagining, a life in images. It is so that we — just as we penetrate from the surface of flowing water into the deeper depths — can also penetrate from our intellectual life into the deeper regions of the soul. There we penetrate into what, even if it has a less exact connection with the outer world, concerns us more intimately than intellectual life. There we also encounter everything that stimulates intellectual life to its independent, inventive power, everything that stimulates this intellectual life when it transitions into artistic creation, and even — as I will show later — stimulates intellectual life when the human heart descends from its ordinary view of the world to a religious and pious reverence for the world spirit.

In the awakening of ordinary life, it is actually the case that, through the intervention of our soul in our bodily organs, we come into such a connection with the outside world that we can then judge not the dream, but only waking daily life, about what the dream is, about its right and wrong, about its truth and untruth. It would be unhealthy for anyone to believe that they could somehow see something “higher” in the chaotic, albeit dramatic, events of dreams than what they determine to be the meaning of this dream life through their waking experience.

We remain in this waking experience, at the same level of experience, so to speak, when we devote ourselves to intellectual life, to ordinary scientific life, to everyday knowledge. Through that immersion, deepening, and, I would say, strengthening of the soul that I spoke of last time, the human being consciously exercises something similar for his soul life on a higher level than he unconsciously exercises for ordinary waking life through his bodily organization. And the immersion in that supersensible knowledge is a “higher awakening.” And just as we relate some dream image to our waking daily life by using our memory and other soul forces to relate this dream image, say, to a physical excitement or an external experience, and thereby classify it in the course of reality, so through such supersensible knowledge as I have described, we come to to classify what one has in the ordinary sensory environment, what one also determines through observation and experiment, into a higher world, into a spiritual world, into which one is now integrated through those exercises I spoke of, just as one is integrated into the physical world through one's own organism in ordinary waking life. And so it is the dawning of a new world, a real awakening to a new world, an awakening on a higher level, which actually represents supersensible knowledge. And this awakening in turn compels the awakening person to judge the whole sensory-physical world from this experience, just as he judges dream life from waking life. What I do here in my earthly life, what appears to me through my physical knowledge, I then learn to relate to the processes that I, as a spiritual-soul being, went through in a purely spiritual world before my descent into the earthly world, just as I relate dreams to waking life. I learn to relate everything that exists in physical nature—not “in general” to a fantastical spiritual world, but to a concrete spiritual world—to a spiritual world that is full of content, which, through the powers of cognition I have described—imagination, inspiration, and intuition—becomes a visible human environment.

But just as a person in ordinary life feels awake in a different state of mind than when dreaming, so too does the whole state of mind of a person become different when they attain this higher awakening. So that when one describes supersensible knowledge in the way I have done here, one is not merely describing the formal reception of images about the supersensible world, but the transition of the human being from one state of consciousness to another, from one state of mind to another. But this also means that the contents of the soul to which one devotes oneself in ordinary life become completely different. Just as one becomes a different person through ordinary awakening, so in a certain sense one becomes a different person through this supersensible knowledge. And the ideas and concepts one had in ordinary consciousness change. It is not only a conceptual change that takes place within one, a change in the sense that one understands more, but a change in one's whole life. This now goes into the deepest human concepts. Precisely in the deepest human concepts, I would say, in the root of the soul's being, the human being changes through the fact that he can enter the realm of this supersensible knowledge — although this only happens for brief moments in life.

Here I must mention two concepts that play the greatest conceivable role in ordinary life; concepts that have their full, profound validity in ordinary life and that take on a completely different form the moment one ascends into the supersensible world. These are the two concepts through which we form our judgments in the world: the concepts of true and false, right and wrong. Do not think that I am trying to undermine the validity of the concepts of true and false, right and wrong in some kind of intellectual frivolity. Undermining what is beneficial to ordinary life is not at all in keeping with true supersensible knowledge. This supersensible knowledge adds something to ordinary life, but takes nothing away from it. Those people who — whether genuinely or sentimentally — become untrue in ordinary life, who become impractical and mystical for this ordinary life, are also not suited to true supersensible knowledge. True supersensible knowledge is not born of fantasists or dreamers, but precisely of those who, with their full humanity, can place themselves in earthly existence as real practitioners of life. So it is not what we go through in everyday life, which is rooted in the concepts of true and false, right and wrong, that should be shaken; on the contrary: truthfulness in this area is, I would say, emotionally reinforced by precisely that which now enters into a higher knowledge through a metamorphosis, through a transformation of the concepts of true and false, right and wrong.

When one truly enters this higher, supersensible world, one no longer speaks in such an abstract way: something is true, something is false, this is right, that is wrong, but rather the concept of the true, the right, merges into one that we also know from ordinary life, but in a more instinctive way, only this concept of ordinary life is transformed into a spiritual form. “True, right” merges into the concept, into the idea of “healthy”; “false” and ‘wrong’ merge into the idea of “unhealthy.” So while in ordinary life, when we think about something or feel something, perceive something or want something, we say: this is right, that is wrong — when we live in the realm of supersensible knowledge, we do not actually arrive at this “right” or “wrong,” but rather we arrive at the feeling: something is healthy, something is unhealthy. You will say that healthy and unhealthy are terms that are subject to uncertainty. But they are only subject to uncertainty in ordinary life or in ordinary consciousness. The uncertainty ceases when higher knowledge is sought as precisely as I described in the first lecture. Thus, precision also enters into what one then experiences in this realm of higher knowledge. “Healthy” and “unhealthy” are the terms used to describe what one experiences in contact with the beings of the supersensible world, which one becomes aware of through such knowledge.

Now consider how infinitely close to you can be that which becomes the object of supersensible knowledge; it is as close to you as the health and illness of the body. One says of the one that one experiences in the supersensible: I live myself into it, it promotes and stimulates my life, it elevates my life; I become, in a sense, “more real” through it, it is healthy. I say of the other: It paralyzes, indeed, it kills my own life; I recognize that it is pathological. And just as one helps oneself in the ordinary world through “right” and “wrong,” just as one places one's own human being in moral and social life, so one places oneself in the supersensible world through ‘healthy’ and “sick.” But in this way one is connected to this supersensible world with one's whole being in a much more real way than one is actually connected to the sensory world. In the sensory world, one separates oneself from things in this right or wrong. I would like to say: “right” does little intense good, “wrong” does — especially to some people — little intense harm. In the supersensible world, it is not at all possible for experiences to approach us in this way. Our whole being, our whole reality, is contained in the way we experience this supersensible world. Therefore, all arguments cease in this area, such as: Are things realities? Are they merely appearances? Do they merely show us the effects on our own sensory organs? And so on, things I don't want to talk about here because there wouldn't be enough time. But everything that can be discussed in this way for physical reality actually makes no sense to discuss for the spiritual, supersensible world; for its reality and unreality are tested by the fact that one can say: One affects me healthily, the other affects me unhealthily — offensively, I would say, taking the word in its full meaning and gravity. The moment a person ascends to the supersensible world, they immediately notice how what is otherwise powerless knowledge becomes an inner power of the human soul itself. We permeate the soul with this supersensible knowledge, just as we permeate our body with blood. Therefore, in such knowledge we also learn about the whole relationship of the soul and spirit to the human body, learning thereby to see how the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being descends from a supersensible pre-birth existence and connects with the inherited body. In order to understand this, one must first really get to know the spiritual-soul nature in such a way that through this reality — whether healthy or sick — one experiences the reality, I cannot say here, in one's own body, but in one's own soul.

Thus, supersensible knowledge, as difficult as the word is to pronounce because it seems to immediately fall into sentimentality, is not actually mere understanding, but supersensible knowledge is an “inspiration” of the human being. It is the soul itself, the content of the soul, that descends into us when we penetrate this supersensible knowledge. We do not become aware of our eternity, our immortality, through a philosophical problem; we become aware of it in direct experience, just as we become aware of external things through our senses in direct experience.

What I have described is, however, subject to the objection: Yes, perhaps those who have such supersensible knowledge can speak in this way; but what can someone who does not yet have this supersensible knowledge say about these things? Well, it is the most beautiful form of human coexistence when one person develops through another, when one person becomes the other in spiritual terms. This is how human community is established in a wonderful way. And so it can be said: just as not all people can be astronomers or botanists, but what astronomy and botany produce is important and significant for all people — at least in its main results and can be understood by common sense, it is also possible for the healthy human mind to grasp, through direct perception, what is presented by a spiritual researcher who is able to penetrate the supersensible world. For human beings are not born for untruth, but for truth! And what the spiritual researcher has to say will always be clothed in such words and phrases that it already differs in its formulation from what we are accustomed to receiving as images from the sensory-physical world. And so, when the spiritual researcher reveals his visions, this can have such an effect on the whole human being, on the simple, healthy human sense, that this healthy human sense is awakened, awakened in such a way that it truly finds its way into that awakening of which I have spoken today. Therefore, I must say again and again: Certainly, in my books “An Outline of Esoteric Science,” “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds,” and in others, I have tried to show how, through systematic exercises, one can achieve what I must call “looking into the spiritual world,” so that today everyone is in a position to become a spiritual researcher to a certain degree; but one does not need to become one. For the healthy human soul is such that what the spiritual researcher has to say, when it strikes the human soul, can be received by that soul, if it is sufficiently open-minded, as an old insight. For this is precisely what is peculiar about this spiritual research, this supersensible knowledge that is meant here, that it brings nothing that is not already present in the subconscious of every human being. So that every human being can feel: I knew that, it is within me; if only I had not allowed myself to be numbed in a certain way by authoritative and other scientific prejudices, I would have grasped one thing or another earlier through this or that experience, which in context spiritual research can bring forth.

But when something like the transformation of the concepts of true and false into healthy and sick occurs, the inner experience of the soul becomes more and more intense. On a higher level, the human being places himself more intensely into a reality than he does when he merely awakens to everyday physical reality. As a result, feelings, sensations, and soul experiences are aroused for insights that are entirely accurate, just as they are by external things, feelings, sensations, and soul experiences. The whole human being is engaged by what supersensible knowledge can provide, just as otherwise only the head is engaged by what sensory knowledge can provide. — Allow me to illustrate this full humanity of supersensible knowledge by referring to something personal; but the personal is also objective in this field, for things are intensely connected with the personal.

To illustrate how supersensible knowledge really cannot be mere intellectual knowledge, but how it affects people infinitely more vividly and intensely than intellectual knowledge, I would like to say the following. Anyone who is accustomed to living in ordinary knowledge — and this should actually be the case for every true supersensible knower — knows how the head is involved in this ordinary knowledge. If they then ascend to supersensible knowledge, especially if they have been engaged in ordinary knowledge throughout their entire life, so to speak, they will find that they must exert all their powers to hold on to this supersensible knowledge that comes to them, that reveals itself to them. He realizes that the power by which one grasps an idea about nature, a law of nature, the course of an experiment, or a clinical observation is less than the inner soul power that one must develop in order to grasp the vision of a supersensible being. And so I always found myself compelled not only to use my head, so to speak, to hold on to these supersensible insights, but also to support the power that the head can apply with other organs, for example with the hand. When one records something that arises super-sensibly in a few strokes, when one fixes it in characteristic, aphoristic sentences or even mere words, then what one now brings about is not merely a force evoked by the nervous system that one uses in ordinary cognition but something that is achieved through a power that reaches far into the organism as a support for cognition, something that ensures that the supersensible insights are not temporary, that they do not slip away like dreams, but that they can be retained. I can therefore tell you that I basically always have to work in this way and have produced cartloads of notebooks in my life that I have never looked at again. For what is necessary here lies in the activity; and the activity causes one to receive in the spirit what wants to reveal itself, not that one has to read it again afterwards. This writing or drawing is, of course, not automatic, mediumistic, but just as conscious as what one uses in scientific or other work. It is also only there because what approaches one in supersensible knowledge must be grasped with one's whole being. But in this way it also has an effect on the whole person, takes hold of the whole person, does not remain with impressions of the head, but proceeds to impressions on the whole human heart and mind. And what one otherwise experiences as life on earth passes by, what one experiences in this or that joy, joy with all its inner liveliness, what one experiences in smaller or deeper pains, what one experiences through the outer sensory world, through being together with other people, in the rising and falling waves of life, all this reappears on a higher, spiritual-soul level as one ascends into those regions of the supersensible where one can no longer speak of true and false, but must speak of healthy and unhealthy.

And when, in particular, one has gone through everything I described last time, namely the great feeling of pain at a certain stage on the path to the supersensible, one then advances to such a level of experience where, as one approaches supersensible experiences and insights, one undergoes such an inner drama of life: Where insights can bring joy and pleasure, as is otherwise only possible in physical life, or where insights can cause deepest pain; where one has the whole of one's soul life, I would say, on a higher level, with all its inner colorfulness, with all its inner character, with all the more intimate depth of the soul-emotional life that one has through its intertwining with the physical organization in everyday existence. And this is where higher knowledge, the supersensible experience, encounters what plays into ordinary life as the moral existence of human beings, this moral existence of human beings with everything connected with it, with religious feeling, with the consciousness of freedom. At the moment when one ascends to a direct experience of the healing or afflicting life of the spirit, one encounters, so to speak, the root of the moral life of human beings, the root of the whole moral existence. One encounters this root of moral existence only when one comes to the realization that the sensory-physical life, with all that flows from human beings, is actually a kind of “dream” for a higher life, just as the dream is a dream for ordinary life. And that which we feel as conscience from the indeterminate depths of our human being, from which we can act in ordinary life, from which we become benevolent or harmful to our fellow human beings, this, which, I would like to say, from the depths of our human being, which inspires us to be moral or immoral, becomes clear, becomes classified into a reality, just as the dream is classified into a reality upon awakening. Nevertheless, we learn to recognize conscience as something that is present in human beings in a shadowy way, as the mirror image of the meaning and significance of the spiritual world — the supersensible world to which we as human beings belong with the deepest part of our being. And when we consider the moral world order and want to arrive at a reality of this moral world order, we now understand why we must start from what sensory science can offer us in order to arrive at supersensible knowledge.

That was what I attempted to describe thirty years ago in my Philosophy of Freedom, merely as an ethical problem, merely as a moral world enigma. There, without taking supersensible knowledge into account, I attempted to determine, purely by following the moral impulses of human beings, how morality arises in every case — not from thinking, which takes in external things, external events, or the events of one's own body, but how morality arises from that thinking soul life which seizes the mind and the will, but which is nevertheless, at its foundation, a thinking soul life that is grounded in itself and originates in the spiritual world. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I had to seek a life of the soul that is also independent of human physicality, which appears as a shadowy unreality in contrast to the robust reality of external sensuality, but which in its true essence is rooted in the spiritual foundation of the world. And the emergence of moral impulses from this thinking, purified from the external sensory world but thoroughly alive in human beings, gives human beings their moral character. And when, through supersensible knowledge, one learns to see how what is rooted in us as conscience is basically the reflection of the real spiritual world within us, weaving and flowing through sensuality, then we learn to recognize the morality of human beings as that which — without their knowing it, even if they only hear it as a dull voice within themselves — always binds them to that spiritual world, which can then be opened up to us through supersensible knowledge. But let us not say that this supersensible knowledge is therefore meaningless for moral life, because we have the voice of conscience, because we have practical intentions for individual situations in life. Anyone who sees today, in particular, how ancient spiritual traditions, supersensible insights from primeval times that have been preserved, have faded and live on today as pale confessions, will also be able to see how a new stimulus for human beings is necessary in this very area. Many people are indeed indulging in a great error in this field. We can see how, through scientific knowledge, which many still regard as the only valid knowledge today, and through the form that this scientific knowledge has taken with its ignorabimus, its “we cannot know,” many are already despairing of knowledge altogether, saying: We cannot gain moral impulses, religious intentions, from anything that is knowledge; we must develop these ethical-religious impulses of our attitude to life independently of knowledge, out of special human dispositions. It has come to the point where knowledge is denied any ability to stimulate human beings in such a way that they are enriched in their moral-religious existence by taking in their own spiritual nature — for that is what they take in through supersensible knowledge. It has come to the point where this is doubted! But on the other hand, one will realize — especially if one is not such a pragmatist as the “pragmatists” of today's life, who are only routine workers, but if one approaches the whole world, which consists of body, soul, and spirit, as a real pragmatist — then one will already realize how, in the individual situations of life that one can permeate with moral and religious content in real existence, one needs more than the faded traditions that no longer inspire people to be fully moral. One sees such things.

From all the dissatisfaction that confronts us in education today, the question had to be answered: How should human beings actually be educated? This was when the Waldorf School was to be founded in Stuttgart on the initiative of Emil Molt. We approached this task with this question to the supersensible world, of which I am speaking here. I would like to briefly outline the intentions that had to be taken as a basis.

Above all, the question had to be raised: How can we educate children to become real human beings who carry their whole being within themselves, but also reveal their whole being in an ethical and religious attitude to life? A real understanding of the human being in body, soul, and spirit was necessary for this. But such an understanding of human beings in body, soul, and spirit is by no means possible today from what is generally accepted, least of all one that can be put into immediate practice so that it can be used to tackle the manifold tasks of life. Let me discuss this by showing very briefly how what we so often regard as our pride today, namely external science, which deals with the material world through experimentation and observation, is incapable of penetrating the secrets of the material world. I will only mention what I am about to say very briefly; but it can be read in my writings, particularly in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (On Soul Riddles), with all the evidence. When we listen to conventional science today, it gives us the idea, for example, that the human heart is a kind of pump that drives blood through the human organs like a pumping station. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, introduces us to the view of what is not only the physical body of the human being, but also what is the spiritual-soul being in the human being. It shows us how this spiritual-soul being permeates the physical being, just as blood is not driven through the human being by the action of the “heart pump,” but directly by the spiritual-soul itself. spiritual-soul being permeates the physical being, how blood is not driven through the human being by the action of the “heart pump,” but directly by the spiritual-soul itself, and how this spiritual-soul intervenes in the blood circulation in such a way that this spiritual-soul becomes the force that makes the blood pulse through our organism. But then the heart is seen as something like a sensory organ. Just as I consciously perceive the outer world through my eyes and consciously make it my own in my imagination, so I perceive what I unconsciously develop in my blood through my spiritual-soul forces as pulsation, through this inner sensory organ of the heart, again in an unconscious way. The heart is not a pump; the heart is the inner sense organ through which one perceives what the spiritual-soul aspect of our blood develops internally, just as one perceives the outer world through the outer senses. At the moment when one moves from the intellectual dissection of the human organism to the contemplation of the whole human being, at that moment the heart reveals itself in its true essence, in its true meaning: as an inner sense organ. The effects of human blood circulation with its life impulses are revealed in the heart; the heart is not the cause of this pulsation. This is an example of how it is, so to speak, the tragedy of materialistic science that it cannot penetrate the secrets of material life, and how one can only penetrate the secrets of the material by observing the spirit in its true work, in its creation of matter.

But if, on the one hand, one becomes aware of the creative spirit precisely in the events of the material world, then, on the other hand, one becomes aware of the powerful spirit, not merely the abstract thinking spirit, but the essential, the real spirit, through such supersensible knowledge. And only then does a real knowledge of human beings arise, such as is needed if one wants to develop in the growing child what can now be powerful, true to life, and realistic in human beings until death. And so, through such an intense enlivening of human knowledge, the child becomes something quite different for the educator than it is for the outside observer. From the very first moment of its earthly life, the unborn child is, in essence, the most wonderful earthly phenomenon. It is wonderful to observe how, from the deepest, initially mysterious and indeterminate inner being, what makes the indeterminate facial features increasingly definite emerges, what turns the initially blurred face into an expressive physiognomy, how the indeterminate, clumsy movements of the limbs become purposeful and goal-oriented. And to develop this requires a great responsibility.

When one stands before the developing human being in such a way that one says with all the inner fervor that can cling to supersensible knowledge: In this child is revealed what lived in pre-earthly existence in spiritual and soul beauty, what has, in a sense, left its supersensible beauty and submerged itself in the body that could be given to it in physical inheritance; but you, as an educator, must bring out what is God-given and rests in the human body, so that it can take hold of the physical body year by year, month by month, week by week, permeate it, and make it plastically similar to the soul; you must continue to awaken in the human being what is revealed in that human being — then you are not only faced with intellectual principles in the education of the child, but you are faced with the whole human being, with his whole human mind, with his comprehensive human responsibility. Then one gradually learns that one must not only observe the child if one wants to know what to do with the child at any given time, but that one must also observe the whole human being.

This is uncomfortable to observe. But it is a truth that what is revealed in a person under certain circumstances, say, in the most tender childhood, in a special form only in old age, after it has remained hidden within the person for a long time, reveals itself either as healing or as sickening. As educators, we are not only responsible for the immediate childhood years, we are responsible for the entire human life on earth. Those who, from a superficial pedagogical point of view, often say that children should only be taught what they can already understand are very much mistaken; they live in the moment, they do not live in the observation of the whole of human life. For there is a childhood age, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, when it is extremely beneficial for the child to accept, on the authority of the beloved educator, even that which it does not yet understand, that which cannot yet become clear to it — for the greatest blessing to human life, because it awakens life forces when the child sees in the natural authority of the teacher and educator, as it were, the embodiment of truth, beauty, and goodness, when it sees the world embodied in the educator. This is not something that violates human freedom; it is something that appeals to the natural authority that, in its further development, is a source of strength for the whole of life.

When we, at the age of thirty-five, now bring into our mature minds something that is basically predisposed to be understood by us as mature human beings only now, and which we only took into our hearts at the age of eight through the authority of our beloved educators, when we bring forth what we already possessed, what lived in us through love and is only now understood by us at a mature age, then this understanding of what is present in us like a seed is the source of a rich inner stimulation. This inner stimulation is taken away from the human being when one tries to teach the child only what it can already understand in a trivializing way. One can only look at the child's experience correctly if one is able to respond to the whole human being and, above all, to what goes even deeper into the human mind.

For example, we meet people who, when they enter a community of other people, have something like a blessing about them. They have a calming, peace-making effect even on agitated and quarrelsome minds. And if we are really able to look back—which, as I said, is uncomfortable—and see how such people, apart from their natural talents, have also been shaped by their upbringing, then we often return to a very tender age, when these children, because their teachers were very warm and close to them in their hearts, learned to look up to these teachers with reverence. This looking up, this ability to revere, has an effect like a mountain stream that flows under the rocks and only later reappears on the surface. What the soul has acquired in childhood works its way down into the depths of the soul, only manifests itself in old age, and then becomes something like a blessing of radiant power.

What I have just explained can be illustrated by saying that human beings can also be educated in relation to the world in such a way that they can transform the reverential powers of tender childhood into blessing powers in old age. I would like to illustrate what I mean: No one will be able to extend their hand in blessing in old age who has not learned in tender childhood to fold their hands in reverence, I would say, in prayer!

This can show us how, in such a special case, a life task — education — can lead to an ethical-religious mood, just as what living into spiritual knowledge makes of our mind, of our will, can live into our attitude to life, so that what we might otherwise only develop externally and technically becomes an integral part of our moral-religious attitude to life. However, by placing teaching and education at the Stuttgart Waldorf School and in the other schools that have been established as its branches in such an atmosphere, the factual, the purely pedagogical, has not been disregarded, but has been taken fully into account. But the task of education has truly become something that, with all its educational techniques, all its educational practices, and all its methods, at the same time radiates an ethical-religious atmosphere onto the child. Educational actions become ethical-religious actions because what is done is done out of the deepest moral impulses. Because educational practice flows from the educator's conscience, because the God-given soul being is seen in the developing human being, the educational action becomes at the same time a religious one. And this does not have to be meant in a sentimental way, but can mean precisely what our lives, which have become so sober, particularly need: in a completely unsentimental sense, because spiritual science becomes a light that shines on our actions in life, on our entire attitude to life, life can become a kind of divine service to the world, as in the individual examples of education shown. Because through supersensible knowledge we do not arrive at abstractions, but at human powers, when the insights gained in supersensible cognition immediately become life forces: that is why they can also overflow into our entire attitude to life, they can permeate us with that which leads human beings beyond themselves, from the sensory to the supersensible, which elevates them to moral beings; can lead him to truly become one with the spirit of the world in devoted love and thereby attain true religious piety.

This is particularly evident in education. If we observe the child up to the age of seven, we see that he is completely devoted, physically devoted to his surroundings; it is an imitator, an imitative being even in its language. And when we look at this physical devotion, when we observe what the child's natural environment is, which remains the natural environment for the child because its soul has not yet awakened, then we might say: it is the natural expression of religious devotion to the world that we encounter naturally in the child. The child learns so much because it is naturally and religiously devoted to the world. Then the human being separates itself from the world; and from the age of seven onwards, its educational environment becomes what gives its soul a different, intuitive direction. Then, with sexual maturity, it comes to independent judgment, then it becomes what gives itself direction and purpose. Fortunate is he who, now that he is also detached from his sensory organism, can follow his thoughts and spirit and grow into the spiritual, just as he lived naturally in the world as a child, if he can return as an adult to the naturalness of a child's perception of the world! If, after reaching sexual maturity, our spirit can live in the spirit of the world as the body of a child lives in the world of nature, then we penetrate the spirit of the world with the innermost being of our humanity in true religious devotion, and then we become religious people!

One must be willing to transform ordinary concepts of knowledge into living forces if one wants to grasp the essence, the nerve of supersensible knowledge. And so it is when one looks at the human being through what I described last time as the supersensible knowledge of the imagination. When we become aware that it is not only the physical body that we study through physiology, that we dissect in the clinic and thereby build up physiology, when we see how a supersensible being lives within it, viewed as I have described, then we become aware of how this supersensible being is a sculptor who works on the physical body itself. But then one must also have the opportunity to move from the usual abstract ideas that only the laws of nature provide us with to an artistic understanding of the human being. Then the laws by which one otherwise understands the human physical form must become shaped content; then science must be able to merge into art. The supersensible human being cannot be grasped by abstract science. The science of the supersensible human being can only be attained through a way of seeing that leads science entirely into an artistic experience. One must not say that science must remain something logical and experimental. Certainly, such a demand can be made, but what does the world care about what we demand? If we want to understand the world, we must orient ourselves toward the world, not toward our demands and not even toward our logical thoughts, for the world could transition from mere logical thoughts into something artistic. And that is what it does. Therefore, only those who can transform what they see in the laws of nature as they imagine them into formed laws of nature through “intuitive judgment,” as Goethe so beautifully coined the phrase, can arrive at a correct view of life. Then, through art—as Schiller said: “through the dawn of beauty” — to a higher level of knowledge — but also to the realm of piety and religiosity.

And then — let me say this in conclusion — one becomes aware of what is actually going on with all the doubts that come to people when they say: Knowledge cannot give us religious or ethical impulses; this requires special powers that are far removed from the powers of knowledge. Even I, based on the foundations of supersensible knowledge, would never claim that any knowledge as such can bring people into a moral and religious way of life. But what truly brings people into a moral and religious way of life does not lie in the sensory realm; it can only be explored in the supersensible realm. Therefore, one only attains real knowledge of human freedom when one penetrates into the supersensible. And likewise, one can only attain real knowledge of human conscience by penetrating into the supersensible. For in this way one enters into that spiritual realm which does not compel human beings by natural law, but allows them to act as free beings, while at the same time permeating and flooding them with the impulses that reveal themselves in conscience. Through this, however, what the naive, religiously devout person innocently senses as the divine in the world is revealed to them. Certainly, one does not need the knowledge I have described in order to be a religiously devout person; one can be so in all naivety. But that is not how things are, and history proves it. Anyone who says that the religious-ethical life of human beings must blossom from a root other than the root of knowledge does not know from historical development that all religious liberations—religious dispositions are of course always present in human beings—have arisen from knowledge, just as they existed in prehistoric epochs as supersensible knowledge. There is no moral and religious content that did not spring from the root of knowledge! Today, scientific thinking has sprung from the root of knowledge, but it cannot penetrate to the spirit. Instead, many people cling to traditions in their religious attitudes, and they believe that what lives in traditions is revealed from something like a “religious genius.” In truth, these are atavistic, inherited traditions. But today they have faded so much that we need a new impulse of knowledge that is not abstract, that is a force for knowledge, so that through what lies in knowledge, people are given the impulse to re-enter practical life with ethical-religious impulses in all their originality.

That is what we need. And if, on the one hand, it is claimed — certainly with a certain degree of justification — that human beings do not need knowledge as such in order to develop an ethical-religious attitude to life, then on the other hand it must be said — as history teaches us once again — that knowledge must not mislead human beings in their religious and ethical sense. Human beings must have the opportunity to attain the highest level of knowledge, but with this level of knowledge—which is naturally possible for them to attain, for there is still much above it—they must arrive at the home in which they lived according to God's will, guided by God, when they had not yet attained knowledge. That which was intuited and had its right as intuition must be rediscovered, even if the highest light of knowledge is sought. Then knowledge cannot be something that has a destructive effect on moral conduct, but then knowledge can only be that which, inspiring and flowing through it rightly, will have an effect on all moral and religious conduct. But through such knowledge, man will become aware of the deeper meaning of life, of which it is permissible to speak. He will become aware that, through the providence of the secrets of the worlds, the entire guidance of the worlds, he stands there, at first only vaguely aware, as a spiritually willed being, that he can continue to develop as a spiritually willed being, that he will then, however, in an outer knowledge, only come out onto an indefinite sea, where he can already be led into doubt and torn apart in relation to what lived as unity within him when he was still naively aware. But if he awakens from ordinary knowledge to supersensible knowledge, then he returns to what is God-given and spirit-imbued within him.

And so what our severely tested times so desperately need—a new impact on the ethical-religious attitude to life— — can only be truly promoted by advancing from the dark, dreamlike awareness of the past to today's wakeful clarity, and then from this wakeful clarity to a higher awakening, to a connection with the supersensible world. This will also give people the impulse they so desperately need, especially for the renewal of their social existence in these times of severe trial for humanity in all corners of the earth, and one can already say: for the whole of contemporary social thinking. Rooted in an ethical-religious attitude to life, an understanding should grow that human beings, through artistic and supersensible awakening, should move from ordinary knowledge into a religious-ethical attitude to life, into a truly unsentimental piety, whereby the service of life becomes, so to speak, the service of the spirit; that they should enter into this by striving with their knowledge toward the light of the supersensible, so that this light of the supersensible awakens them in a supersensible world in which they can truly feel themselves to be free souls in relation to the laws of nature, in which they can stand as spiritual beings in the spiritual world with real human dignity, true piety, genuine sincerity, and true religiosity.