The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] My task in this series of lectures is to build a bridge between relatively everyday things—between experiences that people may encounter in ordinary life—and the highest concerns of humanity. And in doing so, one of the paths should open up for us from everyday life to what anthroposophy or Spiritual Science can be for our soul and spirit. We know that as we delve ever deeper into what anthroposophy has to offer, it flows into our feelings, into our will, and into the forces we need to rise to the challenge of life’s manifold events. And we also know that, just as we can now experience anthroposophy through the influences coming to us from the higher worlds at this very time, this anthroposophy represents, in a sense, a necessity for humanity today. We know that in a relatively short time, the human race would lose all security, all inner peace, and all the peace necessary for life, if the message we call anthroposophy were not to come to this very humanity, precisely in our age. And furthermore, we know that, through this anthroposophical spiritual current, two distinct currents of human thought, feeling, and perception are, as it were, clashing with one another.

[ 2 ] One is that school of thought and feeling which has been developing over many centuries and has in fact already taken hold of humanity in the broadest circles everywhere, or will most certainly do so in the near future. It is the school of thought and feeling that we call materialistic, in the broadest sense of the term. And it is, so to speak, storming against that other school of thought, which is embodied in anthroposophy itself—against the spiritual school of thought. And as we approach the near future, the struggle between these two schools—these two schools of thought and feeling—will become ever more audible. It will be such that one will not even be able to distinguish everywhere whether one is dealing with a particular school of thought or feeling as an unvarnished truth—let us say, as an unvarnished advocacy of materialism—or whether, under all manner of masks, one is dealing with one school of thought or feeling or another. For there will be enough materialistic currents that will, if we may say so, mask themselves spiritually, and it will sometimes be difficult to distinguish where materialism actually lies and where the spiritual current of thought is truly to be found. How difficult it is to navigate this situation, I have recently sought to demonstrate in various ways through two lectures I delivered in quick succession, in one of which I sought to evoke a sense of how one might, from certain thoughts and ideas that already dominate one’s present, become an honest and sincere opponent of Spiritual Science. “How to refute Spiritual Science”—that is what I sought to demonstrate in one lecture, which I then followed with another: “How to defend Spiritual Science” or “How to justify Spiritual Science.”

[ 3 ] It is not as if I had believed I could present everything in one direction or the other in these lectures; rather, I merely wanted to evoke a sense that one can in fact an extraordinary amount can be put forward with a great semblance of justification against the worldview of Spiritual Science, and that those who simply cannot help but, so to speak, squeeze the opposition out of their very souls, by no means belong to the most untruthful people of the present day, but are often among the most honest seekers of truth. I certainly do not intend to list again all the reasons that can be cited against Spiritual Science; I merely wish to point out that, based on the habits of thought and the views of our present age, there are such reasons that can be built on solid foundations, and that one can indeed thoroughly refute Spiritual Science. But the question arises: if one refutes Spiritual Science, if one cites all the reasons that can be brought against it, how does one achieve the most thorough, the most well-founded refutation? You see, if someone today, based on the fundamental premises of their entire soul, professes a belief in Spiritual Science and then familiarizes themselves with everything that the sciences, within the broad scope of their materialistic basic premise, can present today, then they can, provided they are at all familiar with the scientific world of the present, thoroughly refute Spiritual Science. But he must first establish a certain state within his own soul in order to be able to carry out such a refutation thoroughly. He must establish a specific state of his soul. This state is such that, in order to set out to refute Spiritual Science, such a person must take the purely rational standpoint, the purely intellectualist standpoint. What this means will become clear to us immediately if we consider the matter from the opposite perspective. Let us first take note of what I have presented as a personal experience. If one is familiar with the scientific findings of the present day and relies, so to speak, solely on one’s intellect, then one can thoroughly refute Spiritual Science. Let us pause here for a moment and now try to approach our task from a completely different angle.

[ 4 ] You see, a person can actually view the world from two different perspectives. One way of viewing the world arises when a person, let’s say, gazes at a beautiful sunrise, where the sun appears to be giving birth to itself out of the gold of the dawn, then glides brilliantly across the earth, and the person then becomes lost in thought about how the sun’s rays and warmth conjure up life from the earth’s depths in an annually recurring cycle. Or a person can also lose themselves in contemplation when the sun has set and the evening glow has faded, when the darkness of night has gradually fallen and countless stars shine in the vault of heaven; a person can lose themselves in the wonders of the night sky. Thus, when one contemplates the nature that surrounds them, one arrives at a mental image that, one might say, must fill them with the deepest bliss. For this mental image may resemble one of Goethe’s fundamental ideas. Goethe once said so beautifully: Ah, when we lift our gaze to the wonders of the starry world and contemplate the course of the universe with all its glories, then we ultimately have the feeling that all this—everything that appears so magnificent around us within the sphere of the universe—only acquires meaning when it is reflected in an admiring human being, in a human soul. — Yes, for the human being comes to realize that just as the air around him forms his being, penetrates into him, so that he can breathe it, and through the process it undergoes within him builds up his own essence—just as he is a result of this air and its laws and its composition— he is in a certain way also a result of the rest of the vast world that surrounds him with all that flows into our senses, not only into the sense of sight, but also into the sense that receives the world of sound and the other worlds that flow in through our senses. That human beings stand before this external sensory world as the synthesized result of this sensory world, so that they can say to themselves: When I look more closely at everything that is out there, reflect upon it, when I perceive it with all my senses, then I see the meaning of all that I survey best fulfilled by the fact that, ultimately, the miraculous creation of the human being itself has crystallized out of all of this.

[ 5 ] And it is true that people can then be overcome by the feeling that, one might say, the Greek poet expressed so primally with the words: “Many mighty things live, but nothing is mightier than man!” How one-sided all the manifestations out there in the world seem to us! In human beings, however, these revelations seem to have converged into a totality when we observe the sensory world outside and then view human beings themselves in the midst of it as sensory beings into whom everything else flows. For the more closely one observes the world, the more human beings appear as the convergence of all the one-sided aspects of the rest of the universe. When one develops this feeling within oneself toward the great world and its convergence in the human being, then a thought imbued with a deeply blissful sensation arises in our soul, the thought of the human being willed by God, of the human being who appears as if the deeds and intentions of the gods had built up an entire universe, from which they let the effects flow out everywhere, so that ultimately these effects could converge in the most worthy work that the gods placed from all sides at the center of the universe: in the human being. A work willed by the gods! This was also said by one who, precisely in this regard, observed the sensory world outside in relation to humanity: What are all the musician’s instruments compared to the marvelous structure of the human ear, this musical instrument, or to the marvelous structure of the human larynx, this other musical instrument! There is much to admire in the world; yet to fail to admire humanity, as it stands right at the center of the world, is possible only if one does not know it in its marvelous structure. The thought then enters our soul when we give ourselves over to such reflections: What have divine-spiritual beings done to bring this human being into being!

[ 6 ] This is one path that a worldview can offer humanity. But there is another path. This other path opens up to us when we develop a sense within ourselves of the majesty, power, and overwhelming nature of what we call moral ideals, when we look into our own souls and allow the meaning of moral ideals in the world to resonate within us. It requires a healthy human nature—a healthy human nature in every respect—to perceive the majesty of humanity’s moral ideals in all its grandeur. And one can develop within oneself, in relation to moral ideals, something that can have just as overwhelming an effect within the soul as the splendor and glory of the universe’s revelations have on us from the outside through human beings. This happens when one kindles within oneself all the love and enthusiasm that can be inspired by human moral ideals and goals. Then an immense warmth can permeate one. But then, quite necessarily, another thought joins this feeling of moral ideals—one different from the thought arising from the aforementioned view of the world, which draws upon the universe’s revelations through humanity. Precisely those who feel the power of moral ideals most deeply and most strongly are the ones who also find this other thought to be the most significant of all. That is, they feel the thought: How far, O human being, are you, as you stand here now, removed from the high moral ideals that can dawn in your heart! How tiny you stand, with all that you can do, all that you do and are capable of, in the face of the greatness of the moral ideals you can set for yourself! And not to feel this way, not to feel so small in the face of moral ideals—that can only arise from a state of mind that is itself quite small. For it is precisely as a certain greatness of soul grows that a person feels their inadequacy in the face of moral ideals. And a thought then dawns in the soul, one that so often overwhelms us as human beings: that we should strive with strength and courage to take every step to make ourselves reasonably mature and ever more mature, so that we may, time and again, make the moral ideals a little more of a force within ourselves than we were able to before. Or, in certain dispositions, the thought of inadequacy in relation to moral ideals can take such deep root that they feel completely shattered within themselves, feel alienated from God, precisely because, on the one hand, they powerfully sense what God intends for the outer human being, who is placed within the sensory world. There you stand, such people might say to themselves, with all that you are outwardly. When you look at yourself as an outward being, you must say: you are a confluence of the entire world willed by God, you are a being willed by God, you bear a godlike countenance! Then you look into your inner self. There the ideals dawn upon you that God has written in your heart, which are undoubtedly meant to be God-willed powers for you. And you find your inadequacy welling up as an experience from your soul.

[ 7 ] These two ways of viewing the world exist within the human being. A person can look at themselves from the outside and feel deeply blessed by their God-given nature, and a person can look at themselves from the inside and feel deeply contrite about their soul that has become estranged from God. A healthy feeling, a healthy sensibility, however, can only say this: From the same divine source, from which come the forces that have placed human beings right at the center like a mighty distillation of the entire universe, from that same divine source must also spring forth the moral ideals that are written in our hearts. — Why is one so far removed from the other? That is actually the great enigma of human existence. And truly, there would never have been theosophy, nor even philosophy in the world, had this conflict—which has just been characterized—not arisen in human souls, whether consciously or unconsciously, intuitively or with more or less intellectual clarity. For it is from the experience of this conflict that all deeper human reflection and inquiry has actually sprung. What stands between the human being willed by God and the human being alienated from God? That is actually the fundamental question of all philosophy. Even though this question has been formulated and characterized in the most diverse ways, it nevertheless underlies all human thought and all human feeling. How can human beings even conceive of the possibility that a bridge can be built between the undoubtedly blissful perception of the external world and the perception of our soul, which undoubtedly plunges us into deep conflict?

[ 8 ] Well, you see, we must first outline the path that the human soul can take to rise, in a proper and dignified manner, to the highest questions of existence, in order to then determine where the origins of these errors might lie. For in the world outside—insofar as this world is today dominated by external science—when one speaks of knowledge or insight, one will undoubtedly always say: Yes, insight and truth must follow if one makes correct judgments, if one has thought correctly. I recently used a very simple comparison to illustrate just how profound the error is in this assumption—that insight, that truth must result when one makes correct judgments—and I would like to recount it here as well, from which you will see that what is correct by no means must lead to what is real. Once upon a time, in a village, there was a little boy whom his parents always sent to fetch rolls. He was always given—let’s say this was in a place where they used the Kreuzer currency—ten Kreuzer, and he would bring back six rolls for that. If you bought a roll, it cost two Kreuzer. So for ten Kreuzer, he always brought six rolls home. The little boy wasn’t particularly good at arithmetic and didn’t pay much attention to how it made sense that he always got ten kreuzers, that a roll cost two kreuzers, and yet he still brought home six rolls for his ten kreuzers. But then he got a sort of foster brother. A boy from another town was brought to the same house—a boy who was about the same age but was good at math. He noticed that his new companion went to the baker, that he was given ten kreuzers, and he knew that a roll cost two kreuzers, so he said: “So you must necessarily bring home five rolls.” He was a very good at math and thought correctly: A roll costs two kreuzers, he gets ten kreuzers, so he will certainly bring five rolls home. But lo and behold, he brought six. Then the good mathematician said: “But that’s completely wrong. Since a roll costs two kreuzers and you were given ten kreuzers—and since two is contained in ten five times over—it’s impossible for you to bring back six rolls. Someone must have made a mistake, or you’ve pinched a roll—that is to say, stolen it.” Well, lo and behold, on the second day the boy again brought home six rolls for ten kreuzers. For it was customary in that place to always get one extra on top of five, so that in fact, if one bought five rolls for ten kreuzers, one received six. It was a very pleasant custom for people who needed exactly five rolls for their household.

[ 9 ] Well, the good mathematician thought quite correctly; he made no mistake in his reasoning, but this correct reasoning did not correspond to reality. We must admit that correct reasoning did not reach reality, for reality does not conform to correct reasoning. You see: just as it is here in this case, one can demonstrate that even the most meticulous, intricate thoughts one can ever logically spin out may indeed yield the most correct conclusion, but when measured against reality, it can be completely wrong. That can always be the case. Therefore, a proof derived from thought is never in any way authoritative for reality—never. One can also be quite mistaken in the peculiar chain of cause and effect as it applies to the external world. I’d like to give you an example of that as well. Suppose a person is walking along the bank of a stream. He comes to a certain point; from a distance, one sees him stumble over the edge of the stream, fall into the water, and one rushes over to save him, but he is pulled out of the water dead. Now one sees the body there. One can now state, for my sake, that the person in question drowned, and can go about it quite astutely. Perhaps there was a rock at the spot where he fell into the water; so, one says, he tripped over the rock, fell into the water, and drowned. For the line of reasoning is correct: if a person was walking along the bank like that, tripped over the rock that was lying there, fell into the river, and was pulled out dead, then he drowned. It cannot be any other way. Only in the case of this particular person does it not have to be so. For if one does not allow oneself to be dominated by this chain of cause and effect, one can find: this person suffered a heart attack at the very moment he fell into the water; consequently, because he was at the edge of the river, he fell into the water. He was already dead when he fell in; he merely went through the same things that anyone who falls into the water alive goes through. You see, if someone here, based on the sequence of external events, comes to the conclusion: the person in question slipped, fell into the water, and drowned—that is wrong; it does not correspond to reality, since he fell into the water because he was dead, and was not pulled out of the water dead because he had fallen in. Judgments, you see, that are as mistaken as this one—where the error is so obvious—are found at every turn in our scientific literature; only one does not notice it there, just as one would never notice it if one did not examine that case of the person who fell into the water and was struck by a heart attack. For in more subtle chains of cause and effect, such errors are constantly being made. I mean nothing more by this than that our thinking is, in fact, initially absolutely incompetent in the face of reality, not decisive, and not a true judge.

[ 10 ] Yes, but how, so to speak, do we ever escape from sinking into doubt and ignorance if our thinking really cannot serve as a reliable guide? For anyone who has experience in these matters, anyone who has spent a great deal of time engaging with thought, knows that everything can be proven and everything can be refuted, and is no longer impressed by the subtleties of philosophy. They may admire the subtleties, but they cannot surrender to mere rational judgment, because they know that equally sound rational judgments can be found in the opposite direction. This applies to everything that can be proven or disproven. In this regard, one can often make the most interesting observations precisely in life. There is a certain appeal—albeit only a theoretical one—in getting to know people who have just reached a certain point in their spiritual development: namely, the point where they experience and feel inwardly that one can actually prove and disprove everything, and who have not yet matured into what one might call a spiritual worldview.

[ 11 ] Such thoughts have often occupied my mind in recent weeks as I recall a man who once came before me with the most wonderful expression of such a spiritual disposition, without ever having attained a true grasp of reality through Spiritual Science. But he had come to realize, in essence, the refutability and also the justifiability of all claims that can be made philosophically. He was, in fact, a professor at the University of Vienna who died a few weeks ago, an extremely witty man; his name was Laurenz Müllner. An extraordinarily witty man who could present all the evidence with great clarity for all manner of philosophical systems and ideas, but who could also refute everything and who always described himself as a skeptic; from whose mouth I once heard the remark—in a certain sense, a rather dreadful one: “Ah, all philosophy is really nothing more than a very beautiful intellectual game!” And having often observed the intellectual brilliance of that man’s intellectual game, it was also interesting to see how Laurenz Müllner, in particular, could never be pinned down on any point, because he admitted nothing at all—except, at most, when someone else raised an objection against a worldview: then he could lovingly present everything that could be brought forward in defense of that worldview, which he might have astutely torn to shreds just a few days earlier. He was an extraordinarily interesting mind, indeed, in a certain sense, one of the most significant philosophers who lived in that era. What led him to this fundamental outlook is also interesting. For, apart from being a thorough expert on the philosophical development of humanity, he was at the same time a Catholic priest and was actually always willing to remain a good Catholic priest, even though he was ultimately a professor at the University of Vienna for many years. And the way he immersed himself in Catholic thought caused him, on the one hand, to regard as trivial—in practice, when compared to lines of thought inspired by a certain religious fervor—everything that had otherwise seemed to him in the world to be a mere intellectual game; but the fact that he nevertheless could not escape mere doubt was due to his Catholicism. He was too great to remain at the level of mere dogmatic Catholicism, but on the other hand, Catholicism was too great within him for him to have been able to rise to a grasp of reality by Spiritual Science. It is extraordinarily interesting to observe such a soul, which had just reached the point where one can actually study what is necessary for a human being to approach reality. For, of course, even this astute man was clear that he could not approach reality through his thinking. Even in ancient Greece it was stated what sound human reflection must start from if it is to have any hope of ever reaching reality. And that statement, which was already made in ancient Greece, certainly still holds true. For it was said even in ancient Greece: All human inquiry must start from wonder. But let us take this in a positive sense, my dear friends! Let us take it in the positive sense that, in the soul that seeks to penetrate to the truth, this state of standing in wonder before the universe must indeed be present. For whoever is able to grasp the full power of this Greek saying will come to say to themselves: If a person, regardless of the circumstances through which they come to human inquiry and reflection, proceeds from wonder—that is, not from anything else, but from wonder at the facts of the world—then it is as if one were to plant a seed in the earth and a plant were to grow from it. For all knowledge must, in a certain sense, have wonder as its seed. But it is different when a person does not start from wonder, but perhaps from the fact that, during a certain period of his youth, his well-meaning teachers drummed into him certain principles that made him a philosopher; or when he became a philosopher simply because, in the social class in which he grew up, it is customary to study such things, and he came to philosophy through the circumstances that happened to be present. As is well known, the exam in philosophy is also the easiest to pass. In short, there are hundreds and thousands of starting points for philosophy that do not stem from wonder, but from something else. All such starting points lead only to a kind of coexistence with truth that can be compared to making a plant out of papier-mâché rather than growing it from a seed. The comparison holds true, for all genuine knowledge that hopes to have anything at all to do with the world’s mysteries must spring from the seed of wonder. And one may be a thinker of the sharpest intellect; one might even say he suffers from a certain exuberance of acumen: if he has never passed through the stage of wonder—nothing will come of it; it will be a shrewd, clever chaining of ideas, and nothing that is not correct, but the correct need not apply to reality. It is simply absolutely necessary that, before we begin to think, before we even set our thinking in motion, we have gone through the state of wonder. And a thinking that sets itself in motion without the state of wonder remains, in essence, merely a mental game. Thus, thinking must, if one may use this expression, have its origins in wonder.

[ 12 ] And further. That is not enough. If thinking now arises from wonder, and the human being is predisposed by his karma to become quite astute, and through a certain arrogance very soon comes to take pleasure in his own astuteness and then develops only that astuteness, then even the initial wonder is of no help to him. For if, after wonder has taken root in the soul, the human being then thinks only in the further course of his thinking, he cannot penetrate to reality. Mind you, I emphasize this here as well: I do not mean to say that a person should become thoughtless or that thinking is harmful. For this is a widespread view even in theosophical circles: people regard thinking as downright bad and harmful, because they say that a person must start from wonder. But once they have begun to think a little and can enumerate the seven principles of the human being and so on, they need not stop thinking again; rather, thinking must continue. However, after wonder, another state of the soul must follow, and that is the one we can best describe as reverence for that which thought approaches. After the state of wonder, the state of reverence, of awe, must follow. And any thinking that emancipates itself from awe, from the reverent looking up to what presents itself to thought, will not be able to penetrate into reality. Thinking must never, so to speak, dance lightly through the world on its own two feet. Once it has moved beyond the stage of wonder, it must take root in the sensation, in the feeling of reverence for the foundations of the world.

[ 13 ] Here, however, the path of knowledge immediately comes into stark contrast with what is called science today. For if you were to say to someone standing today in a laboratory before their test tubes, analyzing substances and synthesizing compounds: “You cannot actually discover the truth!” You may break things down and put them back together nicely, but what you are doing are merely facts. You approach the facts of the world irreverently, without showing any reverence for them. You should actually face what is happening in your test tubes with the same reverence and awe as a priest stands at the altar. — What would such a man answer you today? He would probably laugh at you, laugh at you terribly, because from the current scientific standpoint it is simply inconceivable that reverence should have anything to do with truth, with knowledge. If he doesn’t laugh at you, the man will at most say: I can truly be enthusiastic about what goes on in my test tubes, but that this enthusiasm of mine should be anything other than my private affair, that it should have anything to do with the search for truth—you really cannot make a reasonable person understand that. — One will appear more or less foolish to today’s scientists if one speaks of the fact that research, and especially thinking about things, must never emancipate itself from what must be called reverence; that one must not take a single step in thinking without being imbued with a sense of reverence for what one is investigating. That is the second point.

[ 14 ] But even a person who has already attained a certain sense of reverence and who, having experienced this sense of reverence, now wishes to proceed by mere thought alone—even such a person would once again end up in the realm of the insubstantial and would once again make no further progress. He would indeed find something true, and because he has passed through the first two stages, his truth would be permeated by various well-founded perspectives. But he would nevertheless soon have to enter into uncertainty. For a third stage must set in within our soul’s state once we have sufficiently experienced wonder and reverence, and this third stage is the one that could be described as: feeling in wise harmony with the laws of the world. Yes, you see, this feeling of being in wise harmony with the laws of the world—one cannot achieve this in any other way than by having already recognized, in a certain sense, the worthlessness of mere thinking, by having told oneself again and again: Anyone who relies solely on the correctness of thinking—whether it is substantiated or refuted, that is irrelevant—is actually in the same situation as our little boy, who calculated the number of rolls correctly. Had the little boy been able to say to himself: What you calculate may be correct, but you must not rely on your correct thinking at all; rather, you must seek the truth, you must bring yourself into harmony with reality—then the boy would have discovered something higher than his correctness: the local custom of adding one roll to every five. He would have discovered that one must step out of oneself into the external world, and that correct thinking has no bearing on whether something is real.

[ 15 ] But this wise attunement to reality is not something that comes easily. If it were that simple, my dear friends, then you—and indeed no human being—would ever have fallen prey to Lucifer’s temptation in this regard. For in truth, the divine guides of the world had indeed intended for humanity what is called the distinction between good and evil, the acquisition of knowledge, eating from the tree of knowledge—but for a later time. What was lacking in humanity is that they sought to acquire this knowledge of the distinction between good and evil too early. What was intended for them later, they sought to acquire earlier under the seduction of Lucifer; that is the crux of the matter. The result could only be an inadequate knowledge, which stands in relation to the true knowledge that humanity should have attained—as it was intended for them—just as a premature birth stands in relation to a full-term child. So that the ancient Gnostics—one senses how right they were—actually used the word: Human knowledge, as it accompanies humanity through its incarnations throughout the world, is actually a premature birth, an ectoma, because humans could not wait until they had gone through everything that should then have led to knowledge. A period of time should therefore have elapsed during which human beings should have gradually allowed certain states of the soul to mature; then knowledge would have come to them. This original sin of humanity is still being committed today; for if it were not committed, one would be less concerned with how to quickly appropriate this or that as truth, but rather with how to become mature enough to comprehend certain truths in the first place.

[ 16 ] This is yet another thing that might seem so strange to people today if someone were to come along and say: You fully understand the Pythagorean theorem; but if you want to grasp it more deeply in its mysterious meaning—that the sum of the squares of the two legs is equal to the square of the hypotenuse—or let’s take a simpler theorem: Before you are ready to understand that 3 × 3 = 9—you must still go through this and that in your soul! And a person today would laugh even more heartily if someone were to tell them: You will only understand this when you bring yourself into harmony with the laws of the universe, which have ordered things in such a way that the mathematical laws appear to us in a certain way. In truth, people are still committing the original sin by believing they can understand everything at every stage, and by paying no heed to the fact that one must first go through certain experiences to understand this or that, that one must be inwardly sustained by the awareness that, in reality, one can achieve nothing at all with all one’s harsh judgments.

[ 17 ] This is part of the third state we are to describe. No matter how hard one tries to make a judgment—error can always creep into it. A correct judgment can only arise when we have attained a certain state of maturity, when we have waited until the judgment comes to us. Not when we strive to find the judgment, but when we strive to make ourselves ready so that the judgment comes to us—only then does the judgment have anything to do with reality. The person who strains so terribly to make a correct judgment can never rely on this inner effort to lead to a judgment that is in any way authoritative. Only the one who devotes all his care to becoming ever more and more mature—so to speak, to expect the right judgments from the revelations that flow to him because he has become mature—can hope to arrive at a correct judgment. For it is there that one can have the most remarkable experiences. A person who is quick to pass judgment will naturally think: If someone has fallen into the water and is pulled out dead, they have drowned. But someone who has become wise, who has matured through life experience, will know that in every single case a general correctness means nothing at all, but that in every single case one must surrender oneself completely to what presents itself, that one must always let the facts unfolding before one be the judge. One can find this very well confirmed in life.

[ 18 ] Consider this scenario: Someone says something today. Well, you may have a different opinion; you may say, “What he’s saying is completely wrong.” You may simply have a different judgment than the other person. Fine, what he says and what you say may both be wrong; in a certain sense, both judgments can be right and both can be wrong. The fact that one person has a different judgment than the other—you will not regard that as decisive at this third stage. It means nothing at all; one is simply standing, as it were, at the pinnacle of one’s own judgment. Here, the one who has become wise always holds back with his judgment, and in order not to commit himself in any way with his judgment, he holds back even when he is aware that he might be right; he holds back as if experimentally, as if tentatively. But suppose a person says something to you today; two months later, he says the opposite: then you can completely step back; you have nothing to do with the two facts. If you let the two facts work on you, then you need not contradict either of them, for they contradict each other. There the judgment is carried out by the external world, not by you. There the wise person begins to judge. It is interesting that one will never understand the way in which, for example, Goethe pursued his natural science if one does not have this concept of wisdom, that things themselves should judge. That is why Goethe also made the interesting statement—you will find it in my introduction to Goethe’s scientific works—: One should actually never make judgments or hypotheses about external phenomena, but rather the phenomena are the theories; they themselves express their ideas when one has prepared oneself to let them take effect in the right way. What matters is not that one, so to speak, sits back and squeezes out of one’s soul what one considers to be correct, but rather that one prepares oneself and allows the judgment to spring from the ‘facts themselves.’ One must approach thinking in such a way that one does not make thinking the judge of things, but rather the instrument for expressing things. This means bringing oneself into harmony with things.

[ 19 ] Once one has passed through this third state, the mind must still not seek to stand on its own two feet; only then does the highest state of the soul—so to speak—arise, which one must attain if one wishes to arrive at the truth. And this is the state that can best be described by the word “surrender.” Awe, reverence, wise harmony with the phenomena of the world, surrender to the course of the world—these are the stages we must pass through, and they must always run parallel to thought; they must never leave thought—otherwise, thought arrives at what is merely correct, not at what is true. Let us pause for a moment at the point to which we have ascended through wonder, reverence, and wise harmony with the phenomena of the world, up to what we have today called surrender, which we have not yet explained, but about which we will speak further tomorrow. Let us hold fast to the fact that we have paused at surrender, and let us hold fast, on the other hand, to the question we have raised: Why one need only be intellectual to be able to refute Spiritual Science. And let us regard these as two questions, to the further answering of which we will then proceed tomorrow.