The Rudolf Steiner Archive

16. Practical Training of Thinking

[ 1 ] It may seem strange that anthroposophy should feel called upon to speak about the practical training of thinking, for outsiders very often hold the opinion that anthroposophy is something eminently impractical, that it has nothing to do with life. Such a view can only exist if one looks at things externally, superficially. In truth, however, what is to be considered should be a guide for the most everyday life; it should be able to transform itself into sensation and feeling at any moment and enable us to face life with confidence and stand firm in it.

[ 2 ] People who call themselves practical imagine that they act according to the most practical principles. But if you look more closely, you will find that so-called “practical thinking” is often not thinking at all, but merely muddling through with learned judgments and habits of thought. If you observe the thinking of practical people with absolute objectivity and examine what is commonly called practical thinking, you will find that in some cases there is very little real practice behind it, but that what is called practice consists of having learned how the teacher thought, how the person who previously produced this or that thought, and how one should act accordingly. And anyone who thinks differently is considered impractical, because their thinking does not correspond to what they have been taught.

[ 3 ] But when something practical was actually invented, it was by no means done by a practitioner. Take our modern postage stamp, for example. It would be most natural to assume that it was invented by a practitioner of the postal service. But that is not the case. At the beginning of the last century, it was still a very complicated business to post a letter. If someone wanted to send a letter, they had to go to the appropriate place where letters could be posted, and various books had to be consulted, and all sorts of complications were involved. It is only just over sixty years ago that we gained the uniform postage we are accustomed to today. And our modern postage stamp, which makes this possible, was not invented by a practical postal worker, but by someone who was far removed from the postal service, the Englishman Hill.

[ 4 ] And when the postage stamp was invented, the minister responsible for the postal service at the time said in the English Parliament: Yes, firstly, one cannot assume that this simplification will really increase traffic as enormously as this impractical Hill imagines, and secondly, even if it were the case, the post office building in London would not be large enough for this traffic. It did not occur to this great practitioner that the post office building should be designed to accommodate traffic, rather than traffic being designed to accommodate the post office building. Now, in a relatively short period of time, what had to be fought for at the time by an “impractical” person against a “practical” person has become the norm: today, it is taken for granted that letters are transported with postage stamps.

[ 5 ] The situation is similar with the railroad. When the first railroad in Germany was to be built from Nuremberg to Fürth in 1835, the Bavarian Medical Council, which was consulted on the matter, issued an expert opinion stating that it was not advisable to build railroads; but if it were to be built, high wooden walls should be erected on both sides of the tracks to prevent passers-by from suffering nervous shocks and concussions.

[ 6 ] When the Potsdam-Berlin railway line was to be built, Postmaster General Nagler said: “I have two mail cars running to Potsdam every day, and they are empty; if people want to throw their money out the window, they might as well do it right away.” The real facts of life simply go over the heads of the “practitioners,” those who believe they are practitioners. One must distinguish between true thinking and so-called practical thinking, which is merely judging according to ingrained habits of thought.

[ 7 ] I would like to tell you about a little experience I once had myself, and put it at the forefront of our discussion today: During my studies, a young colleague came up to me full of joy, as you often see in people who have had a really clever idea, and said: “I have to go and see Professor Radinger right now – he was teaching mechanical engineering at the university at the time – because I've made a fantastic invention: I've invented a way to use a tiny bit of steam power once to do a huge amount of work with a machine.” He couldn't tell me any more because he was in a hurry to see the professor. However, he did not find the professor in question, so he returned and explained the whole thing to me. The story immediately smacked of perpetual motion to me – but, well, why shouldn't something like that be possible one day? - But after he had explained everything to me, I had to say to him: Yes, look, the idea is quite ingenious, but in practice it's like someone standing in a railway carriage, pushing it really hard and thinking that the carriage will then move. That's the principle behind your invention. He then understood and did not go back to the professor.

[ 8 ] In this way, one can, in a sense, encapsulate oneself with one's thinking. In very special, rare cases, this encapsulation is also clearly evident; but in life, many people encapsulate themselves in this way, and it is not always as noticeable as in our example. However, those who are able to observe the matter more closely know that a large number of human thought processes proceed in this way: they often see how people stand in the car, pushing from inside, and believe that they are the ones moving the car forward. Much of what happens in life would be very different if people were not like these pushers standing in the car.

[ 9 ] The real practice of thinking requires that one acquire the right attitude, the right feeling for thinking. How can one acquire the right attitude toward thinking? No one who believes that thinking is something that takes place only within the human being, in his head or in his soul, can have the right feeling for thinking. Anyone who has this idea will be constantly distracted by a false feeling from seeking the right way of thinking and making the necessary demands on their thinking. If you want to gain the right feeling for thinking, you must say to yourself: if I can think about things, if I can fathom something about things through thinking, then the thoughts must first be in the things themselves. Things must be constructed according to thoughts; only then can I extract the thoughts from the things.

[ 10 ] People must imagine that things outside in the world are like a clock. The comparison of the human organism with a clock is very often used, but people usually forget the most important thing, that there is also a clockmaker. One must be clear that the wheels did not come together by themselves and fit together to make the clock work, but that there was once a watchmaker who put the clock together. One must not forget the watchmaker. The clock came into being through thoughts; the thoughts flowed, as it were, into the clock, into the thing. Everything that is a work of nature, a natural phenomenon, must be imagined in the same way. In the case of human works, this can be illustrated quickly, but in the case of natural works, it is not so easy for humans to notice, and yet they too are spiritual activities, and behind them are spiritual beings. And when humans think about things, they only think about what was first put into them. It is the belief that the world was brought into being through thinking and continues to do so that makes the actual inner practice of thinking fruitful.

[ 11 ] It is always disbelief in the spiritual in the world that produces the worst impracticality of thinking, even on scientific ground. For example, when someone says: Our planetary system came into being in such a way that first there was a primordial nebula, which began to rotate, clumped together into a central body, from which rings and spheres split off, and thus the entire planetary system came into being mechanically — the person who says this is making a great error in thinking. Today, this is taught to people in a nice and cute way. It is demonstrated in a cute experiment in every school today: a drop of fat is placed in a glass of water, a needle is pushed through the drop of fat, and the whole thing is set in rotation. Small droplets then separate from the large drop, and you have a miniature planetary system, which, it is believed, clearly shows the student how this can be formed purely mechanically. Only impractical thinking can draw such conclusions from this cute experiment, because the person who transfers this to the large world system usually forgets something that is perhaps best forgotten: he forgets himself, he forgets that he himself set the thing in rotation. If he had not been there and had not done the whole thing, the division of the drop of fat into droplets would never have occurred. Only if man observed this and transferred it to the planetary system would complete thinking have been applied. Such errors in thinking play an enormously important role today, especially in what is now called science. These things are much more important than is usually thought.

[ 12 ] If one wants to talk about real thinking practice, one must know that thoughts can only be extracted from a world in which thoughts already exist. Just as one can only scoop water from a glass in which there is actually water, so one can only extract thoughts from things in which they exist. The world is built on thoughts; that is the only reason why thoughts can be extracted from it. If this were not the case, then no thinking practice could ever come about. But then, when people fully understand what has been said here, it will be easy to lead them away from all abstract thinking. When people have complete confidence that thoughts lie behind things, that the real facts of life proceed according to thoughts, then, when they have this feeling, they will easily convert to a practice of thinking that is built on reality.

[ 13 ] We will now present something of the practice of thinking that is particularly important for those who stand on anthroposophical ground. Anyone who is convinced that the world of facts proceeds in thoughts will understand the importance of training right thinking. Let us now suppose that someone says: I want to enrich my thinking so that it always finds its way in life. Then he must adhere to what is now to be said. What is now stated should be understood as practical principles which, if one strives again and again to organize one's thinking according to them, will have certain effects, so that thinking becomes practical, even if it may not appear so at first. Indeed, quite different experiences arise for thinking when one carries out such principles.

[ 14 ] Let us assume that someone tries the following: Today, he carefully observes a process in the world that is accessible to him, that he can observe as accurately as possible, let us say, for example, the weather. He observes the configuration of the clouds in the evening, the way the sun set, and so on, and he now forms a precise picture of what he has observed. He tries to hold on to this image in all its details for a while; he holds on to as much of this image as possible and tries to preserve it until tomorrow. Tomorrow, at about the same time, or at a different time, he observes the weather conditions again and tries to form an accurate picture of the conditions.

[ 15 ] If he forms accurate pictures of successive states in this way, it will become extremely clear to him how he gradually enriches and intensifies his thinking, for what makes thinking impractical is that people are usually too inclined to omit the details in the successive processes in the world and retain only very general, vague ideas. What is valuable, what is essential, what fertilizes thinking, is precisely to form precise images in successive processes and then to say to oneself: Yesterday the thing was like this, today it is like that—and in doing so to bring the two images, which lie apart in the real world, as vividly as possible before the mind.

[ 16 ] This is initially nothing more than a special expression of trust in the thoughts of reality. People should not immediately draw any conclusions and infer from what they observed today what the weather will be like tomorrow. That would corrupt their thinking. Rather, they should have confidence that things are connected in reality, that tomorrow is somehow connected to today. They should not speculate about it, but rather first think about what follows each other in time in as accurate mental images as possible, and then let these images stand side by side and merge into one another. This is a very specific principle of thinking that must be followed if one really wants to develop proper thinking. It is good to apply this principle to things that one does not yet understand, where one has not yet penetrated the inner connection. Therefore, especially in the case of processes that one does not yet understand, such as the weather, one should have confidence that they, which are connected outside, also bring about connections within us; and this should be done by refraining from thinking, only in images. One must say to oneself: I do not yet know the connection, but I will let these things live within me, and they will have an effect on me if I practice refraining from speculation. You will easily be able to believe that when a person, refraining from thinking, forms as accurate as possible images of successive processes, something can happen in the invisible members of the human being.

[ 17 ] Human beings have the astral body as the carrier of their imaginative life. As long as human beings speculate, this astral body is the slave of the ego. But it is not absorbed in this conscious activity; it also stands in a certain relationship to the whole cosmos.

[ 18 ] To the same extent that we refrain from letting our arbitrary thoughts take effect, to the same extent that we abstain from forming images of successive events, the inner thoughts of the world work within us and imprint themselves on our astral body without our knowing it. To the extent that we conform to the course of the world by observing the processes in the world and allowing the images to enter our thoughts as unclouded as possible and to work within us, to the same extent we become increasingly intelligent in the members that are withdrawn from our consciousness. Once we are able to allow the new image to merge into the old in such processes that are internally connected, just as this transition takes place in nature, then after some time we will see that our thinking has acquired a certain flexibility.

[ 19 ] This is how we should proceed with things we do not yet understand; but we should behave somewhat differently toward things we do understand, for example, toward processes in our everyday life that take place around us. For example, suppose someone, perhaps a neighbor, has done this or that. We think: Why did he do that? We think that perhaps he did it today in preparation for something he wants to do tomorrow. Now we say nothing more, but imagine exactly what he has done and try to picture what he will do tomorrow. We imagine: That's what he'll do tomorrow—and wait to see what he really does. It may be that tomorrow we notice that he really does what we imagined. It may also be that he does something else. We'll see what happens and try to improve our thoughts accordingly.

[ 20 ] In this way, we look for events in the present that we can follow in our minds into the future, and wait to see what happens. We can do this with what people do and with other things. Where we understand something, we try to form a picture of what we think will happen. If what we expected happens, then our thinking was correct, and that is good. If something different happens than what we expected, then we try to think about where we made a mistake and thus try to correct our wrong thoughts by calmly observing and examining what the mistake was and what caused it to happen. If we have done the right thing, then we must be especially careful not to boast about our prophecy: “Yes, I knew yesterday that this would happen!”

[ 21 ] This was again a principle arising from the confidence that there is an inner necessity in things and events themselves, that there is something in the facts themselves that drives things forward. And what works there from one day to the next are thought forces. If we delve deeply into things, we become aware of these thought forces. We make these thought forces present in our consciousness through such exercises, and we then agree with them when what we have foreseen comes to pass; then, through our thinking activity, we stand in an inner connection with the real thing. In this way we accustom ourselves to thinking not arbitrarily, but out of inner necessity, out of the nature of things.

[ 22 ] But we can also train our thinking practice in another direction. Any event that happens today is also related to what happened yesterday. For example, a boy has been naughty; what could be the causes? We trace the events back from today to yesterday and construct the causes that we do not know. We say to ourselves: I believe that because this is happening today, it was prepared yesterday or the day before by this or that.

[ 23 ] We then learn about what really happened and thereby recognize whether we thought correctly. If we have found the right cause, that is good; if we have formed a false idea, we try to clarify the errors and find out how the thought process developed and how things actually happened.

[ 24 ] The important thing is to carry out these principles: that we really find the time to look at things as if we were inside them with our thinking, that we immerse ourselves in things, in the inner thought activity of things. When we do this, we gradually notice how we literally grow together with things, how we no longer have the feeling that things are outside and we are inside thinking about them, but rather get a feeling as if our thinking were moving inside things. When a person has achieved this to a high degree, many things can become clear to them.

[ 25 ] A person who had achieved to a high degree what can be achieved, such a thinker who always stood inside things with his thoughts, that was Goethe. The psychologist Heinroth said in his 1822 “Textbook of Anthropology” that Goethe's thinking was concrete thinking. Goethe himself was pleased with this remark. It meant that such thinking does not separate itself from things; it remains within things, it moves within the necessity of things. Goethe's thinking was at the same time a way of seeing, and his seeing was at the same time a way of thinking.

[ 26 ] Goethe achieved a great deal with this kind of developed thinking. It happened more than once that Goethe had something in mind, went to the window, and said to whoever happened to be there: “In three hours it will rain” – and so it happened. From the small section of sky he could see through the window, he was able to predict what the weather would be like in the next few hours. His faithful thinking, which remained constant in all things, enabled him to sense what was preparing itself from the preceding as the subsequent event.

[ 27 ] One can achieve much more through practical thinking than one usually thinks. If one has what has now been described as principles for thinking, then one will notice that thinking really becomes practical, that one's view broadens and one grasps the things of the world quite differently than without this. Gradually, people will relate to things and also to other people in a completely different way. It is a real process that takes place within them, changing their entire behavior. It can be of tremendous importance for people to actually try to grow together with things through their thinking, because doing such exercises is a practical principle for thinking in the most eminent sense.

[ 28 ] Another thing is an exercise that should be done especially by those people who usually do not think of the right thing at the right moment. What such people should do is, above all, try not to think in such a way that they surrender themselves at every moment to what the course of the world brings with it, to what things bring with them. It is very common that when a person has half an hour to lie down and rest, they let their thoughts run wild. Then these thoughts spin out into a hundred and a thousand different directions. Or perhaps they are preoccupied with this or that worry in their life—it quickly creeps into their consciousness and they are completely absorbed by it. If people do this, they will never come up with the right idea at the right moment. If they want to achieve this, they must behave as follows. If they have half an hour to rest, they must say to themselves: Whenever I have time, I will think about something that I choose myself, something that I bring into my consciousness solely through my own will. For example, I now want to think about something I may have experienced earlier, perhaps on a walk two years ago. I want to bring those experiences into my thinking quite arbitrarily and think about them, even if only for five minutes. Everything else must be put aside for those five minutes! I choose for myself what I want to think about. The choice does not even have to be as difficult as I have just said. It is not important at first to influence your thought process through difficult exercises, but rather to tear yourself away from what you are drawn into by life. It just has to be something that falls outside of what you are caught up in during the ordinary course of the day. And if you suffer from a lack of imagination, if nothing else comes to mind, you can help yourself by opening a book and thinking about what you are reading at first glance. Or you can say to yourself: Today I will think about what I saw when I went to the store at a certain time in the morning and which I would otherwise have ignored. It has to be something that falls outside the ordinary course of the day, something you wouldn't normally think about. If you do such exercises systematically over and over again, you will find that you get ideas at the right time, that what you need to think of comes to mind at the right time. This will make your thinking more flexible, which is extremely important for people in practical life. Another exercise is particularly suitable for improving memory. First, try to remember some event, say from yesterday, in the rough way you usually remember things. Usually, people's memories are gray and dull; as a rule, we are satisfied if we can remember the name of the person we met yesterday. But we must not be satisfied with that if we want to train our memory. We must make that clear to ourselves. We must systematically do the following: we must say to ourselves: I want to remember exactly the person I saw yesterday, including the corner of the house where I saw them and what else was around them. I want to paint a precise picture of them in my mind, including their skirt or vest. Most people will realize that they are unable to do this, that it is impossible for them. They will notice how much they are lacking in order to form a real mental image of what they encountered and experienced yesterday.

[ 29 ] We must now start from the vast majority of cases in which people are unable to recall what they experienced yesterday. Observation of human beings is extremely inaccurate. An experiment conducted by a university professor with his students showed that out of thirty people present, only two had observed the process correctly, while the other twenty-eight had observed it incorrectly. - However, a good memory is the result of faithful observation. The development of memory therefore depends precisely on careful observation. A good memory is achieved through faithful observation; through a certain mental detour, faithful memory is born as the child of good observation.

[ 30 ] But if you are unable to do this, to remember exactly what you experienced yesterday, what should you do? First, try to remember as accurately as possible, and where you cannot remember, try to imagine something false, but it must be something complete. Let us assume that you have completely forgotten whether someone you met was wearing a brown or black skirt, you might imagine that they were wearing a brown skirt and brown leggings; that they had buttons like this and like that on their waistcoat, that their necktie was yellow – and there was that situation, the wall was yellow, a tall person walked past on the left and a short person on the right, and so on.

[ 31 ] You put what you remember into the picture; only what you cannot remember do you add in order to obtain a complete picture in your mind. The picture is initially incorrect, but by striving to obtain a complete picture, you are guided to observe more closely from now on. And you continue to do such exercises. And when you have done this fifty times, the fifty-first time you will know exactly what the person you met looked like, what he was wearing; you will remember everything exactly, down to the buttons on his waistcoat. You will then overlook nothing, and every detail will be imprinted on your mind. In this way, you will first sharpen your powers of observation through the exercises and then improve the accuracy of your memory as the child of your powers of observation.

[ 32 ] It is particularly good to try not only to remember names and individual main features of what you want to remember, but also to try to obtain as vivid an image as possible, covering all the details; and if you cannot remember something, try first to complete the picture, to construct it into a whole. Then we will soon see, as if by a roundabout route, that our memory gradually becomes faithful.

[ 33 ] Thus we see how one can actually specify, as if they were manual tasks, the things that enable human beings to make their thinking more and more practical. The following is particularly important: when thinking about something, human beings have a certain desire to arrive at a result. They think about how to do this or that, and they arrive at this or that result. This is a very understandable impulse. However, it is not what leads to practical thinking. Any hastiness in thinking does not move us forward, but backward. One must be patient in these matters.

[ 34 ] For example, you are supposed to do this or that: you can do it one way or another; there are various possibilities. Now have patience and try to imagine what would happen if you did it that way, and also try to imagine how it would look different. Now there will always be reasons why you might prefer one thing or the other, but refrain from making a decision immediately. Instead, try to imagine two possibilities and then say to yourself: “That's it, now I'll stop thinking about it.”

[ 35 ] There will be people who will become fidgety in the process, and it will then be difficult to overcome the fidgetiness, but it is immensely useful to overcome it and say to yourself: It can be done this way and it can be done that way, and now I won't think about it for a while. If you can, put the matter, the action, off until the next day and then consider the two possibilities again, and you will find that things have changed in the meantime, that the next day we will decide differently, at least more thoroughly than we would have decided the day before. Things have an inner necessity, and if we do not act impatiently and arbitrarily, but allow this inner necessity to work in us—and it will work in us—it will enrich our thinking the next day and enable us to make a more correct decision. This is extremely useful!

[ 36 ] For example, you are asked for advice about this or that, you have something to decide. Have the patience not to jump in with your decisions right away, but first consider various possibilities and do not make a decision for yourself, but calmly let the possibilities take their course. It is also said in popular parlance that one must sleep on a matter before deciding. But sleeping on it alone is not enough. It is necessary to consider two or, better still, several possibilities, which then continue to work on you when you are not consciously thinking about them, so to speak, and then to come back to the matter later. You will see that in this way you activate your inner powers of thought and that your thinking becomes more and more appropriate and practical.

[ 37 ] And whatever a person is in the world, whether they stand at a workbench or behind a plow, or whether they belong to one of the so-called privileged professions, they will become a practical thinker about the most everyday things if they practice these things. By practicing in this way, they will approach and see things in the world in a completely different way. And however internal these exercises may seem at first, they are particularly suitable for the outside world; they are of the greatest possible importance for the outside world; they have important consequences.

[ 38 ] I will give you an example to show you how necessary it is to think about things in a truly practical way: Someone climbed a ladder to get up into a tree and was doing something there; he fell down, hit the ground and died. Now, it is an obvious thought that he killed himself by falling. One would say that the fall was the cause and death was the effect. Cause and effect seem to be connected. But there can be terrible confusion here. The man up there may have had a heart attack, causing him to fall down. The same thing would have happened if he had fallen down while still alive; he went through the same things that could have been the cause of his death. In this way, cause and effect can be completely confused. Here in this example it is striking, but often it is not so obvious what has been missed. Such errors in thinking occur extremely frequently; indeed, it must be said that in science today, judgments are made every day where cause and effect are confused in this way. People simply do not understand this because they do not consider the possibilities of thinking.

[ 39 ] Let me give you another example that will illustrate very clearly how such errors in thinking arise and show you that they will no longer happen to someone who has done the exercises described today. Consider the following: A scholar says to himself that human beings as they are today are descended from apes; therefore, what I recognize in apes, the powers in apes, are perfected and become human beings. Now, in order to explain the meaning of this idea, let us make the following assumption: Let us imagine that the person who is supposed to come to this conclusion has been transported to Earth all alone by some circumstance. Apart from him, there would only be those monkeys from which, according to his theory, humans can evolve. He now studies these monkeys very carefully, forming a detailed concept of what is present in the monkeys. Now he should try to develop the concept of man from the concept of the monkey, even though he has never seen a human being. He will see that he can never achieve this: his concept of “monkey” never transforms into the concept of man.

[ 40 ] If he had the right way of thinking, he would have to say to himself: Well, my concept does not change within me in such a way that the concept of ape becomes the concept of human being, so what I see in the ape cannot become a human being, because otherwise my concept would also have to change. So there must be something else that I cannot see. This person would therefore have to see something supersensible behind the sensory monkey, something he cannot perceive, which could then pass over into man.

[ 41 ] We do not want to go into the impossibility of the matter, but only to show the error in thinking that lies behind this theory. If humans thought correctly, they would be led to conclude that they cannot think this way unless they presuppose something supernatural. If you think about it, you will see that a whole series of people have made an overwhelming error in thinking. Such errors will no longer be made by those who train their thinking in the manner indicated.

[ 42 ] A large part of our entire literature today, especially scientific literature, is a source of effects, even physical pain, for those who are truly capable of thinking correctly, when they have to read through it. This is not meant to say anything against the enormous amount of observations that have been gained through this natural science and its objective methods. Now we come to a chapter that is related to the short-sightedness of thinking. It is really the case that people usually do not know that their thinking is not very appropriate, but for the most part is only a consequence of habits of thinking. Thus, judgments will be very different for those who see through the world and life than for those who do not see through them, or see through them only a little, for example, for a materialistic thinker. It is not easy to convince such a person with reasons, no matter how sound and good they may be. Trying to convince someone who knows little about life with reasons is often a futile effort, because they do not understand the reasons why this or that can be asserted. If they have become accustomed to seeing only matter in everything, for example, they are stuck in this habit of thinking.

[ 43 ] Today, it is generally not reasons that lead someone to make assertions, but rather the habits of thinking that they have acquired and that influence their entire feeling and perception. When they put forward reasons, it is only the mask of habitual thinking that stands before their feelings and perceptions. Thus, it is often not only desire that is the father of thought, but all feelings and habits of thinking that are the parents of thoughts. Those who know life know how little logical reasons can convince anyone in life. Something much deeper in the soul decides than logical reasons.

[ 44 ] When we have our anthroposophical movement, for example, there are certainly good reasons why we have it and why it works in its various branches. Everyone who works with the movement for a while notices that they have acquired a different way of thinking, feeling, and sensing. For through working in the branches, one does not merely concern oneself with finding logical reasons for something, but acquires a more comprehensive feeling and sense.

[ 45 ] How, for example, did someone who heard a spiritual scientific lecture for the first time a few years ago mock it, and how many things are now completely clear and transparent to him that he might have considered highly absurd some time ago! By participating in the anthroposophical movement, we do not merely transform our thoughts, but we learn to bring our whole soul into a broader perspective. We must be clear that the coloring of our thoughts comes from much deeper sources than is usually thought. It is certain sensations, certain feelings that impose opinions on people. The logical reasons are often just a veneer, just masks for feelings, sensations, and habits of thought.

[ 46 ] To bring oneself to the point where logical reasons mean something to one, one must learn to love logic itself. Only when one learns to love objectivity and what is appropriate will logical reasons become decisive. You gradually learn to think objectively, independently of your preference for this or that idea, so to speak, and then your view broadens and you become practical; not so practical that you can only judge along well-trodden paths, but in such a way that you learn to think your way out of things.

[ 47 ] Real practice is a child of objective thinking, of thinking that flows from things themselves. We only learn to let ourselves be inspired by things when we do such exercises; and such exercises must be done on healthy things. These are things in which human culture has as little influence as possible, which are the least distorted: natural objects. And practicing on natural objects as we have described today makes us practical thinkers. That is truly practical. The most everyday activities will be tackled practically if we train the basic element: thinking. By practicing the human soul as has been described, a practical orientation toward thinking is formed.

[ 48 ] It must be the fruit of the spiritual scientific movement that it truly brings practitioners into life. It is not so important that people believe this or that to be true, but that they bring themselves to see things correctly. Much more important than theorizing about things beyond the senses and into the spiritual realm is the way in which anthroposophy penetrates our souls, guides us to soul activity, and broadens our view. In this, anthroposophy is something truly practical.

[ 49 ] It is an important mission of the anthroposophical movement to set human thinking in motion, to train it so that people think that the spirit is behind things. If the anthroposophical movement kindles this attitude, then it will establish a culture from which such thinking will never emerge that people want to push the cart from within. This flows quite naturally into the soul. Once the soul has learned to think about the great facts of life, it also thinks correctly about the soup spoon. And it is not only in relation to the soup spoon that people become more practical; they also learn to hammer in a nail more practically, to hang a picture more practically than they would otherwise have done. It is of great importance that we learn to view the spiritual life as a whole and that through such a view we learn to make everything more practical and more practical.