The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we will develop the different notes we touched on,—the notes which we were striking yesterday. From the material at our disposal, consisting as it does in the last resort of things observed, the true aspect of which we seek to divine,—from this observed material we shall try to gain ideas, to lead us into the inner structure of the celestial phenomena. I will first point to something that will naturally follow on the more historical reflections of yesterday.

We realise that in the last resort both the Ptolemaic system and that used by modern Astronomy are attempts to synthesise in one way or another, what is observed. The Ptolemaic system and the Copernican are attempts to put together in certain mathematical or kindred figures what has in fact been perceived. (I say “perceived”, for in the light of yesterday's lecture it would not be enough to say “seen”.) All our geometry in this case, all of our measuring and mathematizing, must take its start from things perceived, observed. The only question is, are we conceiving the observed facts truly? We must really take it to heart—we must take knowledge of the fact—that in the scientific life and practice of our time what is observed, what is perceivable, is taken far to easily, too cursorily for a true conception to be gained.

Here for example is a question we cannot escape; it springs directly from the observable facts—(In the shortness of time these lectures have to be in bare outline and I have not been able to discuss or even to bring forward all the details. I could do little more than indicate directions.) Now among other things I have tried to show that the movements of heavenly bodies in celestial space must in some way be co-ordinated with what is formed in the living human body, and in the animal too in the last resort, we should by now perceive from the whole way the facts have been presented. And I assure you, the more deeply you go into the facts, the more of the connection you will see. Nevertheless, I have not done nor claimed to do any more than indicate the pathway (let me say again), the pathway along which you will be led to the result: The human living body, also the animal and plant body, are so formed that if we recognise the characteristic lines of form (as for example we did in tracing the Lemniscate in various directions though the human body) we find in them a certain likeness to the line-systems which we are able to draw amid the movements of the celestial bodies. Granted it is so, the question still remains however: What is it due to? How does it come about? What prospect is there for us not merely to ascertain it but to find it cogent and transparent, inherent in the very nature of things?

To get nearer to this question we must once more compare the kind of outlook which under-lay the Ptolemaic system and the kind that underlies the Copernican world-system of today.

What are we doing when we set to working the spirit of the latter system, and by dint of thinking, calculating and geometrising, figure out a world-system? What do we do in the first place? We observe. Out in celestial space we observe bodies which, from the simple appearance of them, we regard as identical. I express myself with caution, as you see. We have no right to say more than this . From the appearance of them to our eye, we regard these bodies (in their successive appearance) as identical. A few simple experiments will soon oblige you to be thus cautious in relating what you see in the outer world. I draw your attention to this little experiment; of no value in itself, it has significance in teaching us to be careful in the way we form our human thoughts.

Suppose it trained a horse to trot very regularly,—which, incidentally, a horse will do in any case. Say now I photograph the animal in twelve successive positions. I get twelve pictures of the horse. I put them in a circle, at a certain distance from myself, the onlooker. Over it all I put a drum with an aperture, and make the drum rotate so that I first see one picture of the horse, then, when the drum has totalled, a second picture, and so on. I get the appearance of a running horse, I should imagine a little horse to be running round in a circle. Yet the fact is not so. No horse is running round; I have only been looking in a certain way at twelve distinct pictures of a horse, each of which stays where it is.

You can therefore evoke an appearance of movement not only by perspective but in purely qualitative ways. It does not follow that what appears to be a movement is really a movement. He then who wants to speak with care, who wants to reach the truth by scrupulous investigation, must begin by saying, whimsical as this may seem to our learned contemporaries: I look at three successive positions of what I call a heavenly body, and assume what underlies them to be identical. So for example I follow the Moon in its path, with the underlying hypothesis that it is always the same Moon. (That may be right without question, with such a “Standard” phenomenon, keeping so very regular a time-table!) What do we do then? We see what we take to be the identical heavenly body, in movement as we call it; we draw lines to unite what we thus see at different places, and we then try to interpret the lines. This is what gives the Copernican system. The school from which the Ptolemaic system derived did not proceed in this way, not originally. At that time the whole human being still lived in his perceiving, as I said yesterday. And inasmuch as man was thus alive and aware, perceiving with all his human being, the idea he then had of a heavenly body was essentially different from what it afterwards became.

A man who still lived thus perceivingly amid the Ptolemaic system did not say. There is the Moon up yonder. No, he did not; the people of today only attribute that idea to him, nor does it do the system justice. If he had simply said, "Up yonder is the Moon", he would have been relating the phenomenon to his whole human being, and in so doing the following was his idea:—Here am I standing on the Earth. Now, even as I am on the Earth, so too am I in the Moon,—for the Moon is here (Figure 1, lightly shaded area).

This (the small central circle in the Figure) is the Earth, whilst the whole of that is the Moon,—far greater than the Earth. The diameter (or semi-diameter) of the Moon is as great as what we now call the distance of the Moon (I must not say, of the Moon's centre) from the centre of the Earth. So large is the Moon, in the original meaning of the Ptolemaic system. Elsewhere invisible, this cosmic body at one end of it develops a certain process by virtue of which a tiny fragment of it (small outer circle in the Figure) becomes visible. They rest is invisible, and moreover of such substance that one can live in it and me permeated by it. Only at this one end of it does it grow visible. Moreover, in relation to the Earth the entire sphere is turning, (Incidentally it is not a perfect sphere, but a spheroid or ellipsoid-of-rotation. The whole of it is turning and with it turns the tiny reagent that is visible, i.e. the visible Moon. The visible Moon is only part of the full reality of it.

The idea thus illustrated really lived in olden time. The form at least, the picture it presents, will not seem so entirely remote if you think of an analogy,—that of the human or animal germ-cell in its development (Fig. 2).

You know what happens at a certain stage. While the rest of the germinal vesicle is well-nigh transparent, at one place it develops the germinative area, so called, and from this area the further development of the embryo proceeds. Eccentrically therefore, near the periphery, a centre forms, from which the rest proceeds. Compare the tiny body of the embryo with this idea of the Moon which underlay the Ptolemaic system and you will have a notion of how they conceived it for it was analogous to this.

In the Ptolemaic conception of the Universe, we may truly say, quite another reality was ‘Moon’—mot only what is contained in the Moon's picture, the illuminated orb we see. This, then, is what happened to man after the time when the Ptolemaic system was felt as a reality. The inner experience, the bodily organic feelings of being immersed in the Moon was lost. Today man has the mere picture before him, the illuminated orb out yonder. Man of the Fifth post-Atlantean Epoch cannot say, for he no longer knows it: “I am in the Moon,—the Moon pervades me”. In his experience the Moon is only the little illuminated disc or sphere which he beholds.

It was from inner perceptions such as these that the Ptolemaic system of the Universe was made: These perceptions we can henceforth regain if we begin by looking at it all in the proper light: we can re-conquer the faculty whereby the whole Moon is experienced. We must admit however, it is understandable that those who take their start from the current idea of ‘the Moon’ find it hard to see any such inner relation between this “Moon” and life inside them. Nay, it is surely better for them to reject the statement that there are influences from the Moon affecting man than to indulge in so many fantastic and unfounded notions.

All this is changed if in a genuine way we come again to the idea that we are always living in the Moon, so that what truly deserves the name of 'Moon' is in reality a realm of force, a complex of forces that pervades us all the time. Then it will no longer be a cause of blank astonishment that this complex of forces should help form both man and beast. That forces working in and permeating us should have to do with the forming and configuration of our body, is intelligible. Such then are the ideas we must regain. We have to realise that what is visible in the heavens is nor more than a fragmentary manifestation of cosmic space, which in reality is ever filled with substance. Develop this idea: you live immersed in substance—substances manifold, inter-related. Then you will get a feeling of how very real a thing it is. The accepted astronomical outlook of our time has replaced this 'real' by something merely thought-out, namely by 'gravitation' as we call it. We only think there is a mutual force of attraction between what we imagine to be the body of the moon and the body of the Earth respectively. This gravitational line of force from the one to the other—we may imagine it as it turns to get a pretty fair picture of what was called the 'sphere' in ancient astronomical conceptions—the Lunar sphere or that of any planet. This, then, has happened: What was once felt to be substantial and can henceforth be experienced in this way once more, has in the meantime been supplanted by mere lines, constructed and thought-out.

We must then think of the whole configuration of cosmic space—manifoldly filled and differentiated in itself—in quite another way than we are wont to do. Today we go by the idea of universal gravitation. We say for instance that the tides are somehow due to gravitational forces from the Moon. We speak of gravitational force proceeding from a heavenly body, lifting the water of the sea. The other way of thought would make us say: The Moon pervades the Earth, including the Earth's hydrosphere. In the Moon's sphere, something is going on which at one place it manifests in a phenomenon of light. We need not think of any extra force of attraction. All we need think is that this Moon-sphere, permeating the Earth, is one with it, one organism all together , an organic whole. In the two kinds of phenomenon we see two aspects of a single process.

In yesterday's more historical lecture my object was to lead you up to certain notions,—essential concepts. I could equally well have tried to present them without recourse to the ideas of olden time, but to do so we should have had to take our start from premises of Spiritual Science. This would have led us to the very same essential concepts.

Imagine now (Fig. 3): Here is the Earth-sphere,—the solid sphere of Earth. And now the Lunar sphere: I must imagine this, of course, of very different consistency and kind of substance. And now I can go further. The space that is permeated by these two spheres,—I can imagine it permeated by a third sphere and a fourth. Thus in one way or another I imagine it to be permeated by a third sphere. It might for instance be the Sun-sphere,—qualitatively different form the Moon-sphere.

I then say I, am permeated—I, man, am permeated by the sun—and by the Moon-sphere. Moreover naturally there is a constant interplay between them. Permeating each other as they do, they are in mutual relation. Some element of form and figure in the human body is then an outcome of the mutual relation. Now you will recognise how rational it is to see the two things together: On the one hand, these different cosmic substantialities permeating the living body; and on the other hand the organic forms in which you can well imagine that they find expression. Form and formation of the body is then the outcome of this permeation. And what we see in the heavens—the movement of heavenly bodies—is like the visible sign. Certain conditions prevailing, the boundaries of the several spheres become visible to us in phenomena of movement.

What I have now put before you is essential for the regaining of more real conceptions of the inner structure of our cosmic system. Now you can make something of the idea that the human organisation is related to the structure of the cosmic system. You never gain a clear notion of it if you conceive the heavenly bodies as being far away yonder in space. You do gain a clear notion, the moment you see it as it really is. Though, I admit, it gets a little uncanny to feel yourself permeated by so many spheres,—just a little confusing!

And there is worse to come, for the mathematician at least. In effect, we are also permeated by the Earth-sphere itself, in a wider sense. For to the Earth belongs not only the solid ball on which we stand but all the volume of water; also the air,—this is a sphere in which we know ourselves to be immersed. Only the air is still very coarse, compared to the effects of heavenly phenomena. Think then of this: Here we are in the Earth-sphere, in the Sun sphere, in the Moon-sphere, and in others too. But let us single out the three, and we shall say to ourselves: Something in us is the outcome of the substantialities of these three spheres. Here then is qualitatively, what in its quantitative form is the mathematician's bugbear—the “problem of three bodies”, as it is called! It is working in us. In us is the outcome of it, in all reality. We must face the truth: to read the hieroglyphic of reality is not so simple. That we are wont to take it simply and think it so convenient of access, springs after all from our fond comfort,—human indolence of thought. How many things, held to be "scientific", have their origin in this! Let go the springs of comfortableness, and you must set to work with all the care which we have tried to use in these lectures. If now and then, they do not seem careful enough, it is again because they are given in barest outline; so we have often had to jump from one point to another and you yourselves must look for the connecting links. The links are surely there.

Now you must set to work with equal care to tackle the same problem from another aspect to which I have referred before, namely the body of man compared to the creatures of the remaining Nature-kingdoms. We can imagine, I said, a line that forks out on either hand from an ideal starting-point. Along the one branch we put the plant-world, along the other the animal. If we imagine the evolution of the plant-world carried further in a real Kingdom of Nature, we find it tending towards the mineral. How real a process it is, we may recall by the most obvious example. In the mineral coal, we recognised a mineralised plant-substance. What should detain us from turning attention to the analogous processes which have undoubtedly taken hold of other realms of vegetable matter? Can we not also derive the siliceous and other mineral substances of the Earth in the same way, recognising in them the mineralisation of an erstwhile plant-life?

Not in the same way (I went on to say) can we proceed if we are seeking the relation of the animal to the human kingdom. Here on the contrary we must imagine it somewhat as follows. Evolution moves onward through the animal kingdom; then however it bends back, returns upon itself, and finds physical realisation upon a higher than animal level. We may perhaps put it this way: Animal and human evolution begin from a common starting—point, but the animal goes farther before reaching outward physical reality. Man on the other hand keeps at an earlier stage, man makes himself physically real at an earlier stage. It is precisely by virtue of this that he remains capable of further evolution after birth, incomparably more so then the animal. (For, once again, the processes of which we speak relate to embryo-development.) That man retains the power to evolve, is due to his not carrying the animal-forming process to extremes. Whilst in the mineral, the plant-forming process has overreached itself; in man on the contrary the animal-forming process has stopped short of the extreme. It has withheld, kept back, and taken shape at an earlier stage amid external Nature.

We have then this ideal point from which it branches (Fig. 6). There is the shorter branch and the longer. The longer is of undetermined length; the other, we may say, no less so, but negatively speaking. So then we have the mineral and plant kingdoms, and animal and human.

Now we must seek to gain a more precise idea: What is it that really happens, in this formation of man as compared to the animal? The process of development, once more, is kept back in man. It does not go so far; that which is tending to realisation is, as it were, made real before its time. Now think how it must be imagined according to what I have told you in these lectures. Study the share of the Solar entity in the forming of the animal body,—via the embryo-development, of course. You then know that the direct sunshine (so to describe it) has to do with the configuration of the animal head, whilst the indirect aspect of the sunlight, as it were the Sun's shadow by relation to the Earth, has in some way to do with the opposite pole of the creature. Strictly envisage this permeation of animal form and development with cosmic Sun-substantiality. Look at the forms as they are. Then you will gain a certain idea, which I shall try to indicate as follows.

Assume to begin with,—assume that in some way the forming of the animal is really brought about by relation to the Sun. And now, apart from the constellation that will be effective in each case as between Sun and animal, let us ask, quite in the sense of the Sun's light in the cosmos, not so immediately connected with the Sun itself? There is indeed. For every time the Full Moon, or the Moon at all, shines down upon us, the light is sunlight. The cosmic opportunity is being made then, so to speak, for the Sun's light to ray down upon us. It is so of course also when the human being comes into life—in the germinal and embyonal period. In earlier stages of Earth-evolution the influence was most direct; today it is a kind of echo, inherited from then. Here then again we have an influence, in the other it is indirect, through the raying back of the Sun's light by the Moon.

Now think the following. I will again draw it diagrammatically. Suppose the development of the animal were such that it comes into being under the Sun's influence according to this diagram (Fig. 4).

This then, to put it simply, would be the ordinary influence of day and night—head and the opposite pole of the creature. This, for the animal, would be the ordinary working of the Sun. Now take that other working of the Sun's light which occurs when the Moon is in opposition, i.e. when it is Full Moon,—when the Sun's light, so to speak works from the opposite side and by reflection counteracts itself. If we conceive this downward arrow (Fig. 5).

to represent the direction of the direct Sun-rays, animal formations, we must imagine animal-formation going ever farther in the sense of this direct Sun-ray. The animal would become animal, the more the Sun was working on it. If on the other hand the Moon is counteracting from the opposite direction—or if the Sun itself is doing so via the Moon,—something is taken away again from the animal-becoming process. It is withdrawn, drawn back into itself (Fig. 5a).

Precisely this withdrawal corresponds to the shortening of the second branch in Figure 6. We have found a true cosmic counterpart of the characteristic difference between man and animal of which we spoke before.

What I have just been telling you can be perceived directly by anyone who gains the faculty for such perception. Man really owes it to the counteracting of the Sunlight via the Moon.—owes it to this that his organisation is withheld from becoming animal. The influence of the Sun-light is weakened in its very own quality (for it is Sun-light in either case), in that the Sun places its own counterpart over against itself, namely the Moon and the Moon's influence. Were it not for the Sun meeting and countering itself in the Moonlight—influences, the tendency that is in us would give us animal form and figure. But the Sun's influence reflected by the Moon counteracts, it. The forming process is held in check, the negative of it is working; the human form and figure is the outcome.

Now, on the other branch of the diagram, let us follow up the plant and the plant-formative process. That the Sun is working in the plant, is palpably evident. Let us imagine the Sun's effect in the plant, not to be able to unfold during a certain time. During the Winter, in fact, the springing and sprouting life in the plant cannot unfold. Nay, you can even see the difference in the unfolding of the plant by day and night. Now think of this effect in oft-repeated rhythm, repeated endless times,—what have we then? We have the influence of the Sun and the influence of the Earth itself; the latter when the Sun cannot work directly but is hidden by the Earth. At one time the Sun is working, at another it is not the Sun but the Earth, for the Sun is working from below and the Earth is in the way. We have the rhythmic alternation: Sun-influence predominant, Earth-influence predominant in turn. Plant-nature therefore is alternately exposed to the Sun, and then withdrawn, figuratively speaking, into the Earth—drawn by the earthly, as it were, into itself. This is quite different from what we had before. For in this case the Sun-quality, working in the plant, is potently enhanced. The solar quality is actually enhanced by the earthly, and this enhancement finds expression in that the plant gradually falls into mineralization.

Such then is the divergence of two ways, as indicated once again in Figure 6. In the plant we have to recognize the Sun's effect, carried still further by the Earth, to the point of mineralization. In the animal we have to recognize the Sun's effect, which then in man is drawn back again, withdrawn into itself, by virtue of the Moon's effect. I might also draw the figure rather differently, like this (Fig. 6a),

—here receding to become human, here on the other hand advancing to become mineral, which of course ought to be shown in some other form. It is no more than a symbolic figure, but this symbolic figure, tends to express more clearly than the first, made of mere lines, the bifurcation—as again I like to call it—with the mineral and plant kingdoms upon the one hand, the human and animal upon the other.

We never do justice to the true system of Nature with all her creatures and kingdoms if we imagine them in a straight line. We have to take our start from this other picture. In the last resort, all systems of Nature which begin with the mineral kingdom and thence going on to the plant, thence to the animal and thence to man as if in a straight line, will fail to satisfy. In this quaternary of Nature we are face to face with a more complex inner relationship than a mere rectilinear stream of evolution, or the like, could possibly imply. If one the other hand we take our start from this, the true conception, then we are led, not to a generatic aequivoca or primal generation of life, but to the ideal centre somewhere between animal and plant—a centre not to be found within the physical at all, yet without doubt connected with the problem of three bodies, Earth, Sun and Moon. Though perhaps mathematically you cannot quite lay hold on it, yet you may well conceive a kind of ideal centre-of-gravity of the three bodies—Sun, Moon and Earth. Though this will not precisely solve you the 'problem of three bodies', yet it is solved, namely in Man. When man assimilates in his own nature what is mineral and animal and plant, there is created in him in all reality a kind of ideal point-of-intersection of the three influences. It is inscribed in man, and that is where it is beyond all doubt. Moreover inasmuch as it is so, we must accept the fact that what is thus in man will be empirically at many places at once, for it is there in every human being,—every individual one. Yes, it is there in all men, scattered as they are over the Earth; all of them must be in some relation to Sun and Moon and Earth. If we somehow succeeded in finding an ideal point-of-intersection of the effects of Sun and Moon and Earth, if we could ascertain the movement of this point for every individual human being, it would lead us far indeed towards an understanding of what we may, perhaps, describe as movement, speaking of Sun and Moon and Earth.

As I said just now, the problem grows only the more involved, for we have so many points,—as many as there are men on Earth,—for all of which points we have to seek the movement. Yet it might be, might it not, that for the different human beings the movements only seemed to differ, one from another ...

We will pursue our conversations on these lines tomorrow.

Today I will deal with some of the things that may be causing you difficulty in understanding what we have done hitherto. I will lead over from these difficulties into a realm of ideas which will show up the inadequacy of those lines of thought on which the people of our time, with all their comfortable mental habits, would gladly found their understanding of universal phenomena.

We have been studying the universal phenomena in their relation to man. We have done so in manifold directions. Again and again we have indicated how a relationship reveals itself between the forming of man and what appears in the celestial phenomena. Whether we go by some ancient cosmic system of by the Copernican theories in forming our pictured synthesis of the movements of heavenly bodies, we must relate the picture to man in diverse ways of course, accordingly. This we have seen. For a true Science we must accept that there is this relation.

Yet the difficulties are formidable. Earlier in these lectures we drew attention to one such difficulty. The moment we try to form ratios between the periods of revolution of the planets of our system we come to incommensurable numbers. Arithmetic runs out, as we might say; we get no farther with it, for where incommensurable numbers enter in there is no palpable unit. Thus, when we look for a synthesis of the phenomena of cosmic space with our accustomed mathematical method and way of thinking, the phenomena themselves are such that we find ourselves driven farther and farther from reality. We may not therefore take for granted that we shall ever be able to explain the cosmic phenomena on the accustomed basis of our Geometry, that is to say, within a rigid three-dimensional space. Nay more, another difficulty has emerged. Yesterday we found ourselves obliged to assume a certain relationship of Sun and Moon and Earth, finding expression in some way in man—in man's very structure. We would fain grasp how the relation is. Yet if we posit this working-together of the Three*, we get into formidable difficulties in spatial calculation.

All these things we have mentioned. Now we can reach a certain starting-point at least, through pure Geometry—yet a Geometry of a higher kind. Thence we may gain an idea of where the difficulties come from when we are trying by dint of spatial calculation to grasp the inter-connection of celestial phenomena. Let us recall our precious attempts to comprehend the form of man himself. We are then let to this:- We can and we should try to take seriously that 'memberment' of the human being of which we have also spoken in these lectures. The human head-organization, we may truly say, centring as it does in the nerves-and-senses system, is relatively independent. So is the rhythmic system with all that belongs to it. The metabolic system too, and all that goes with it in the organization three independent systems are revealed. Taking our start now in an intelligent way from the principle of metamorphosis, as we must always do when dealing with organic Nature, we can try to form ideas upon this question: How are the three members of the three-fold human system related to each other, according to this principle of metamorphosis?

Understand me rightly, my dear friends. We want to gain an idea-though it be only pictorial to begin with—of how the three members of the human system are related to each other. On the face of it, it will of course be difficult. Such organs as are met with in the human head, it will be difficult to recognise in them at all clearly the metamorphosis of those organs which are fundamental to the metabolic and lymph system. But if we go into the morphology of man deeply enough, we can find our way. We only have to think most thoroughly along the lines already indicated. Namely, the essence of the mutual relation of the long bone to the skull-bone and vice-versa is a complete turning-inside-out. The inner surface of the bone becomes the one turned outward. It is the principle by which you turn a glove inside-out, provided only that the turning-inside-out involves a simultaneous change in the inherent relationships of inner forces. If I should turn a tubular bone or long bone inside-out like a mere glove, I should again get the form of a tubular bone, needless to say. But it will not be so if we take our start, as we must do, from the inherent configuration of the bone. As I described before, in its inherent configuration the long bone is oriented inward towards the radial quality that runs right through it. It is obliged therefore to subject its material structure and arrangement to the radial principle. When I have "flipped" it, so that the inner side opens outside, in its configuration it will no longer follow the radial but the spheroidal principle. The "inner side", now turned outward towards the Sphere, will then receive this form (Fig. 1).

What was outside before, is now inside, and vice-versa. Take this into account for the extreme metamorphosis-tubular bone into skull-bone and you will say: The outermost ends of human memberment—lymph-system and skull system—represent opposite poles in man's organization. But we must not think of "opposite poles" in the mere trivial, linear sense of the word. In that we go from one pole to the other, we must adopt the transition which this involves, namely from Radius to surface of a Sphere. Without the help of such ideas and mental pictures, intricate as they may seem, it is quite impossible to gain a just or adequate notion of what the human body is.

We come now to what constitutes the middle, in a certain sense,—the middle member of man's organization. This will be all that belongs to the rhythmic system, and it will somehow form the transition from radial structure to spheroidal.

In the threefold system thus presented we have the key to the morphological understanding of the entire human organism. Of course we need to realise how it will be. Suppose we have some organ in the metabolic system—the liver for example—or any one of the organs mainly assigned to the metabolism. (We must qualify it with the word 'mainly' for there is always an overlapping and interlocking of these things). Suppose then we begin with such an organ and seek what answers to it in the head. We try to find which of the organs in the head-nature of man m ay be connected with it by the metamorphosis of turning-inside-out. We shall then have to recognise the organ when entirely transformed, de-formed; only by so doing shall we understand it. It will therefore not be easy to take hold of mathematically. Yet without finding some mathematical way of access we shall never adequately grasp it. And if you call to mind (even if you only take this as a picture)—if you call to mind that the real understanding of the human form and figure will lead us out among the movements of celestial bodies, you will divine what must be needful also when we wish to comprehend the latter. For a true synthesis of the phenomena of movement among the heavenly bodies, it will be quite inadequate to think of them as if these movements were accessible to a Geometry that simply reckons with ordinary rigid space and therefore cannot master the turning-inside-out. For when we speak of a turning-inside-out in the way we have been doing, we can no longer be thinking of ordinary space. Ordinary space holds good where we can calculate volumes, cubicle contents in the conventional way. We cannot do so if obliged to make the inner outer. We can no longer go on calculating them with the same conceptions which hold good in ordinary space.

If then in thinking of the human form and figure I need the turnings-inside-out, in thinking of the movements of heavenly bodies I shall need them too. I cannot proceed like the current Astronomy which tries to comprehend the celestial phenomena within an ordinary rigid form of space.

Take, to begin with, simply the head-organization and the metabolic organization of man. To pass from one to the other you must imagine, once again, a turning-inside-out—and, what is more, one that involves variations of form. Let us at least try to get a picture of the kind of think involved. We did preliminary work in this direction when speaking of the Cassini curves, and of the circle differently conceived. Ordinarily the circle is defined as a curve, all of whose points are equidistant from one central point. We were speaking of the circle as a curve, all of whose points are at measured distances from two fixed points, and so that the quotient of the two distances is constant. This was our other conception of the circle.

Speaking of the Cassini curve, we showed that it has three essential forms. One, not unlike an ellipse:—this form arose when the parameters of the curve bore a certain relation, the which we indicated. The second form was the lemniscate. The third form is that while in the idea of it—and also analytically—it is a single entity, to look at it is not. It has two branches (Fig. 2),

yet the two branches are one curve. To draw the line, we should somehow have to go out of space, coming back into space again when we draw the second branch. Conceptually, our hand would be drawing a continuous line when drawing the two regions which look separate. We cannot draw the line continuously within ordinary space, and yet conceptually what is here above and what is here below (the inner curve in Figure 2) is a single line. Now as I also mentioned, the same curve can be thought of in another way. You can ask what will be the path of a point which when illumined from a fixed point A appears with constant intensity of illumination, seen from another fixed point B. Answer: a Cassini curve. A curve a Cassini will be the focus of all points through which a point must run, if when illumined from a fixed point A it is seen ever with the same intensity of light from another fixed point B (Fig. 2 again).

Now it will not be hard for you to imagine that if something shines from A to C (Fig. 2) and thence by reflection from C to B, the intensity of light will be the same as if reflected from D instead. But it gets rather more difficult to imagine when you come to the Lemniscate. The ordinary geometrical constructions by the laws of reflection and so on, will not be quite so easy to carry through. And it gets still more difficult to imagine with the two-branched curve, that the same intensity of light should always be observed from the point B, inside the one branch of the curve, when the original point-source of light is in A. You would have to imagine (as you pass from the one branch to the other) that the ray of light goes out of space and then shines into space again. You are up against the same difficulty as before, when you were simply asked to draw the two branches as one—with a single sweep of the hand through space.

Yet if we do not develop these conceptions we shall be unequal to the other task, namely of finding the transmutation—or even the mere relationship of form—as between any organ in the head of man and the corresponding organ in the metabolism. To find the connection you simply must go out of space. Once again—strange as it may sound—if with your understanding of any form in the human head you wish to make a transition to the understanding of a form in the human metabolic system then you will not be able to remain in space. You must get out of space. You must get right out of yourself , looking for something that is not there in space. You will find something that is as little inside ordinary space as is what intervenes between the upper and lower branches of a two-branched Cassini curve. This is in fact only another way of expressing what was said before that the metamorphosis must be so conceived as to turn the form completely inside out.

In thinking thus of the connection between the upper and lower branches of the discontinuous curve of Cassini (as shown in Fig. 3) we are still presupposing actual constants, rigid and unchanged, in the equation. Now if we vary the constants themselves as in an earlier lecture, forming equations of twofold variability, we shall be able to imagine the upper branch say, in this form and the low one in this (Fig. 3).

The upper branch will take this form eventually. If then you alter the curve of Cassini by taking variables in place of constants—so that you start with equations instead of starting with invariable constants—you will get two different kinds of branches. Then there will also be the possibility for one of the two branches to come in as it were from the infinite and go out to the infinite again. This is precisely the relationship from which you should take your start when following certain forms within the human head, comprising them in curves and lines, and then relating them to the forms of organs or of complexes of organs in the metabolic system, which in their turn you will comprise in curves and lines. Such is the intricacy of the human form. To make it still less simple, you must imagine the one line (Fig. 3a) with an outward tendency and the other with its tendency turned inward.

You will be prone to say (I hope without insisting on it, but as a passing impression): If this be so, the human organization is so complicated that one would almost prefer to do without such understanding and fall back on the ordinary philistine idea of the body, as in the present-day Anatomy and Physiology. There we are not called upon to make such prodigious efforts, as to let mental pictures vanish and yet again not vanish, or turn them inside-out, and all the rest! May be; but then you never really understand the human form; your understanding is, at most, illusionary.

Now, to go on: Suppose you thus look into it and recognize that there is something in the human organization which falls right out of space, is not in space at all, but obliges you for instance to imagine spatially separated line-systems, inherently united with each other and yet united by another principle than three dimensional space affords. Thinking in this way, you will no longer be too far removed from what I shall now bring forward. You will at least be able to entertain the thought in a formal sense. No-one, I mean can validly object to thinking it as a pure form of thought. For to begin with, all we are called upon to do is to conceive a clear idea, as in mathematics generally. It cannot be objected that the thing is unproved, or the like. We are only concerned to reach a self-contained and consistent idea.

Think therefore for a moment that you had to do not only with ordinary space, conceived in its three dimension, but with a "counter-space" or anti-space". Let me call it so for the moment, and I will try to evoke an idea of it, as follows. Suppose I form the thought of ordinary, three-dimensional, rigid space. I form the first dimension, I form the second dimension and I form the third dimension (Fig. 4).

Then I have, so to speak, filled-in in thought—in the idea and mental presentation of it—three-dimensional space with which I am ordinarily confronted. Now as you know, in any such domain you can not only advance up to a certain degree of intensity; you can subtract from it too, and as you go on subtracting—taking away—you come at last to the negation of ti. As you are well aware, there is not only wealth but debt. Likewise I cannot only make the three dimensions to arise in thought but I can also make them vanish. Only I now imagine the arising and vanishing to be a real process,—something hat is really there. Of course it is possible to think only two dimensions instead of three, but that is not my meaning. What I now mean is this: The reason why I only have two dimensions (Fig. 4a)

is not that I never had a third. The reason is, I had a third and it has vanished. The two dimensions are an outcome of the coming-into being and vanishing-again of the third. I now have a space, which, though it outwardly shows only two dimensions, must inwardly be conceived as having two third dimensions, one positive and the other negative. The negative dimension springs from a source that can no longer be there in my three-dimensional space at all. Nor must I think of it as a "fourth dimension" in the conventional sense. No, I must think of it as being, to the third dimension, as positive to negative (Fig. 4a once more).

And now suppose that what I have been indicating is really there in the Universe; yet, as things generally are in the real world, approximately so. It would then be not a pedantically accurate but an approximate rendering of what I have here drawn. This need not cause you any great surprise, for in outer sense-perceptible reality you never find mathematical figures reproduced in any other way, always approximately. If then I claim that the picture represents something real, you will only expect it to do so in an approximate sense. To represent a reality corresponding to it, I need not repeat exactly the same drawing, but I should have to draw something flattened; that would answer to it. The fact that something has been there and has then vanished, I may perhaps suggest in this way: I will suppose that the density of an effect, indicated by the dark shading, came into being and then partly faded out again, drew weaker (Fig. 5).

You are then left with a sphere that has a denser portion in the middle region. I beg you know, compare what is here drawn with the real cosmic system, such as we see it with our eyes,—the cosmic sphere with all the stars widely dispersed, and then the stars more densely packed in the region of the Milky Way, or what we call the Galactic System.

Yet you may also compare it with something else. Take any popular star-map. The picture we have shown (Fig. 5a)

—let us still take it simply as a picture—is fundamentally equivalent to what is always being shown: the passage of the Sun or of the Earth through the Zodiac, with the with the North and South poles of the ecliptic somewhere out yonder. The idea we have been forming is, as you see, not so very remote from what is there in the outer Universe. In coming lectures we shall of course still have to look for more detailed relations.

Now for an understanding of what was said before about the human being we have not yet gone for enough. We must go farther and make the second dimension also vanish; so then we shall be left with only one,—with a straight line. But this is no ordinary straight line drawn into three-dimensional space. It is the line that has remained when we have made the third and also the second dimension vanish. And now we make the last remaining one to vanish. Then we are left with a mere point. Bear in mind however that we have arrived at the point by the successive vanishing of three dimensions. Now let us suppose that this point were to present itself to us in reality,—as having existence in itself. If it is there, and making itself felt, how then shall we imagine its activity? We cannot relate its activity to any point in the space determined by the x-axis. The x-axis is not there, since it has vanished. Nor can we relate it to anything with an x—and a y-coordinate, for all of this has gone; all this has vanished out of space. Nor can we relate it in its activity to the third dimension of space. What then shall we say? When it reveals its activity we shall have to relate it to what is quite outside three-dimensional space. What then shall we say? When it reveals its activity we shall have to relate it to what is quite outside three-dimensional space. Consistently with the procedure we have been through in our thinking, we cannot possibly relate it to anything that could still be included in this space. We can only relate it to what is outside it three-dimensional space altogether. We can relate it neither to "x deleted" nor to "y deleted" not to "z deleted", but only to what deletes all three of them, z, y, and z together, and is therefore into within three-dimensional space at all.

We put this forward to begin with as a purely formal, mathematical notion. Yet is soon grows real. It grows exceedingly real when we begin to enter into things more deeply than with the easy-going notions with which Science nowadays would gladly master them. Look, with this deeper tendency of understanding,—look at the process of sight and the whole organisation of the eye. You are perhaps aware (in other lectures I have often spoken of it) of how the eye is not merely to be regarded as a thing formed from within the body outward; for it is largely organized into the body from outside. You an trace the forming of it from without inward by studying the phylogenetic development of lower animals and then considering the act of sight itself. You will contrive to understand how the process of sight is stimulated from without and how the organ too is adapted to this stimulation from without. Then as the process works on inward to the optic nerve and farther in, it vanishes at length,—vanishes as it were into the organisation as a whole. I know you can find the termination of the optic nerves, and yet—this too comes to expression approximately—if you go into the inner organisation you will have to admit that it there vanishes.

So much for the process of sight and the associated organs. And now compare with this the process of secretion of the kidneys. Go into it conscientiously. and you will have to relate the duct that leads outward, for the secretion of the kidneys, to what is working from without inward where the eye passes into the optic nerve. If you then look for ideas whereby the two things can be related, so that their mutual relation will help you understand the phenomena of either process, you will find indispensable such forms of thought as we have just been indicating. If you conceive the ideas of three-dimensional space as applying to the process of sight (we might also replace the one by the other, but if you do it in this way. ...), then, if you seek what answers to it in the secretion of the kidneys, you must realize that what is there enacted takes you right out of three-dimensional space. You must go through the same procedure in your thinking as I did just now in extinguishing the spatial dimensions. Otherwise you will not find your way.

In like manner you must proceed if you are trying to understand the curves formed in the Heavens by the apparent paths of Venus and Mercury on the one hand, Jupiter and Mars on the other, I mean quite simply the apparent paths as we observe them with our eyes,—the loops and all. If you use polar coordinates for example, then for the loop of Venus you may make the origin of your coordinate system in three-dimensional space. Here you can do so. But you will not come to terms with reality if you adopt the same principle when examining the curve of Mars. In this case you must start from the ideal premise that the origins of any relevant system of polar coordinates will be outside three-dimensional space. You are obliged to take the coordinates in this way. In the former case you may start from the pole of the coordinate system, taking coordinates in the normal way, as in Figure 6.

But if you do this for the one planetary curve—say for the path of Venus with its loop—you will do equal justice to the paths of Jupiter or Mars with their loops, only by saying to yourself: This time I will not pre-suppose a polar-coordinate system with an origin such that I always have to add a piece to get the polar-coordinates, as in Figure 6. No, I will take as origin of my polar-coordinate system the encompassing Sphere (Fig. 6a),

i.e. what is there behind it, indeterminately far. Then I get such coordinates as these (dotted lines), where in each case, instead of adding, I must leave so much out. The curve I then obtain also has something like a centre, but the centre is in the infinite sphere.

It might prove necessary then, for more profound research into the paths of the planets, that we make use of this idea: In constituting the paths of the inner planets we must indeed attribute to these paths some centre or other within ordinary space. But if we want to think of centres for the path of Jupiter, the path of Mars and so on, we must go right outside this ordinary space.

In fine, we have to overcome space; we must transcend it . There is no help for it. If you are conscientious in your efforts to comprehend the phenomena, the mere ideas of three-dimensional space will not suffice you. You must envisage the interplay of two kinds of space. One of them, with the ordinary three dimensions, may be conceived as issuing radially from a central point. The other, which is all the time annulling and extinguishing the first, may not be thought of as issuing from a point at all. It must be thought of as issuing from the encompassing Sphere—that is, the Sphere infinitely far away. While in the former case the "point" is of zero areas which it turns outward, and a point with the area of an infinite spherical surface which it turns inward. Geometrically it may suffice to conceive the notion of a point abstractly. In the realm of reality it will not. We shall not do justice to reality with the mere notion of an abstract point. In every instance we must ask whether the point we are conceiving has its curvature turned inward or outward; its field of influence will be according to this.

But you must think still farther, my dear friends; there is a another thing. Of course you may imagine that you had somewhere caught this point which is really a Sphere. To begin with, since it is in the infinite far spaces you need not imagine it just here (s, Fig. 7). You can equally well imagine it a little farther out, (b, or c). You can imagine it to be anywhere out there; you only have to leave this sphere free (strongly drawn sphere in Fig. 7).

For this is hollowed out, so to speak; this is the inverted circle or the inverted sphere, if you like. But now suppose the following might be the case. Think of what is within this peculiar circle (namely at a, b, c, etc,) Think of this point that has its curvature turned inward. For in effect, the entire space outside this spherical surface is then a point with its curvature turned inward. And now imagine that this space had, after all, its limit somewhere. You might be able to go far away out,—very far. Suppose however the reality were such that you could not just go anywhere, but somewhere after all there was a limit of quite another kind (dotted circle in Figure7). What there would appear, as if by inner necessity, what in effect belongs to the realm beyond the limit. An equivalent sphere would have to arise within, belonging to what is there outside. You would then have to realize: Out there, beyond a certain sphere, something is still existing, it is true, but if I want to see it I must look in here (P), for here it re-appears. The continuation of what is faraway out there make itself felt in here. What I am looking for as I go out into infinite distances, makes its appearance within, and becomes manifest to me from this centre.

These are the kind of ideas you should develop to an adequate extent. In a formal sense they look sound enough. As forms of thought there can surely be no objection to them. Truly remarkable results will be obtained however, if with their help you try to penetrate outer reality. Think for example that there might be a phenomenon in celestial space,—we may call it "Moon" to begin with,—yet this phenomenon were not to be understood simply by saying: "This Moon is a body, here is its central point; we will investigate it on the understanding that it is a body and that its central point is here." Assume (and please forgive my saying, I put it euphemistically) assume that this way of thinking did not fit the reality, but that I ought to express it quite differently. I ought rather to say: "If I, in my Universe, start from a certain point and go farther and farther out, I come at length to where I shall no longer find heavenly bodies. Yet neither shall I find a mere empty Euclidean space. No, I shall find something, the inherent reality of which obliges me to recognize the continuation of it here (at P)." I should then be obliged to conceive the space contained within the Moon as a portion of the entire Universe with the exception of all that exists by way of stars, etc., outside the Moon. I should have to think on the one hand of all the stars here are in cosmic space. These, I am now assuming I have to treat in one way, according to a single principle; but the inside of the Moon—the space contained within the Moon—could not be treated in this way. It would require me to think as follows: There on the one hand I go out into the far spaces. Somewhere out there, I presume, is the celestial Sphere. Though it be only the "apparent" Sphere to begin with; something effective, something real must be conceived to underlie it. Yet whatsoever realities I find out there, the space within the spherical surface of the Moon has nothing whatever to do with it. It only has to do with what begins where the stars come to an end. It is a fragment, in some strange way, belonging not to my Universe but to that Universe to which all the stars do not belong.

If there is such a thing within a Universe, it is a thing inserted in this Universe, occluded as it were,—thing of altogether different nature and revealing different inner properties from all that is there around it. And we may then compare the relation of such Moon to its surrounding Heavens with the relation which obtains for instance between the secretions of the kidneys—with the organic structure that underlies them—and on the other hand the structure and functioning of the eyes. From this we shall proceed tomorrow.

It is not due to me that I must try to form, and to acquaint you with, such complicated notions of how the Universe is built. Truth is, equipped with any other notions you will not make headway, save on the convention: "Let us comprise the phenomena with our given range of ideas, and if we come to a limit somewhere, well then we do, and we go no further". Ascribe it then to the reality and not to any craving for remote ideas, if in the effort to impart an understanding of how the Universe is built I have unfolded complicated notions.

What we are doing, as you will have seen, is to bring together the diverse elements by means of which in the last resort we shall be able to determine the forms of movement of the heavenly bodies, and—in addition to the forms of movement—what may perhaps be described as their mutual positions. A comprehensive view of our system of heavenly bodies will only be gained when we are able to determine first the curve-forms (inasmuch as forms of movement are called curves), i.e. the true geometrical figures, and then the centres of observation. Such is the task before us along our present lines of study, which I have formed as I have done for very definite reasons.

The greatest errors that are made in scientific life consist in this: they try to make syntheses and comprehensive theories when they have not yet established the conditions of true synthesis. They are impatient to set up theories—to gain a conclusive view of the thing in question,—they do not want to wait till the conditions are fulfilled, subject to which alone theories can properly be made. Our scientific life and practice needs this infusion badly,—needs to acquire a feeling of the fact that you ought not to try and answer questions when the conditions for an intelligent answer are not yet achieved. I know that many people (present company of course excepted) would be better pleased if one presented them with curves all ready made, for planetary or other movements. For they would then be in possession of tangible answers. What they are asking is in effect to be told how such and such things are in the Universe, in terms of the ideas and concepts they already have. What if the real questions are such as cannot be answered at all with the existing ideas and concepts? In that case, theoretic talk will be to no purpose. One's question may be set at rest, but the satisfaction is illusionary. Hence, in respect to scientific education, I have attempted to form these lectures as I have done.

The results we have gained so far have shown that we must make careful distinctions if we wish to find true forms of curves for the celestial movements. Such things as these, for instance, we must differentiate: the apparent movements seen in the paths of Venus and of Mars respectively,—Venus making a loop when in conjunction, Mars when in opposition to the Sun. We came to this conclusion when trying to perceive how diverse are the forms of curves that arise in man himself through the forces that build and form him. We ascertained quite different forms of curve in the region of the head-nature and in the organization of the metabolism and the limbs. The two types of form are none the less related, but the transition from one to the other must be sought for outside of space,—at least beyond the bounds of rigid Euclidean space.

Then comes a further transition, which still remains for us to find. We have to pass from what we thus discover in our own human frame, to what is there outside in Universal Space, which only looks to us plainly Euclidean. We think it nicely there, a rigid space, but that is mere appearance. As to this question, we only gain an answer by persevering with the same method we have so far developed. Namely we have to seek the real connection of what goes on in man himself and what goes on outside in Universal Space, in the movements of the celestial bodies. Then we are bound to put this fundamental question: What relation is there, as to cognition itself, between those movements that may legitimately be considered relative and those that may not? We know that amid the forming and shaping forces of the human body we have two kinds: those that work radially and those which we must think of as working spherically. The question now is, with regard to outer movements: How, with our human cognition do we apprehend that element of movement which takes its course purely within the Sphere, and how do we apprehend that element which takes its course along the Radius?

A beginning has been made in Science as you know, even experimentally, in respect of these two kinds of spatial movement. The movements of a heavenly body upon the Sphere can of course be seen and traced visually. Spectrum analysis however also enables us to detect those movements that are along the line of sight, spectrum analysis enables us to recognise the fact. Interesting results have for example been arrived at with double stars that move around each other. The movement was only recognizable by tackling the problem with the help of Doppler's principle,—that is the experimental method to which I am referring.

For us, the question now is whether the method which includes man in the whole cosmic system will give us any criterion—I express myself with caution—any criterion to tell whether a movement may perhaps only be apparent or whether we must conclude that it is real. Is there anything to indicate that a given movement must be a real one? I have already spoken of this. We must distinguish between movements that may quite well be merely relative and on the other hand such movements as the “rotating, shearing and deforming movements” (so we described them), the very character of which will indicate that they cannot be taken in a merely relative sense. We must look for a criterion of true movement. We shall gain it in no other way than by envisaging the inner conditions of what is moving. We cannot possibly confine ourselves to the mere outer relations of position.

A trite example I have often given is of two men whom I see side by side at 9 am and again at 3 in the afternoon. The only difference is, one of them stayed there while the other went on an errand lasting six hours. I was away in the meantime and did not see what happened. At 3 pm I see them side by side again. Merely observing where they are outwardly in space, will never tell me the true fact. Only by seeing that one is more tired than the other—taking account of an inner condition therefore—shall I be able to tell, which of them has been moving. This is the point. If we would characterize any movement as an inherent and not a merely relative movement, we must perceive what the thing moved has undergone in some more inward sense. For this, a further factor will be needed, of which tomorrow. Today we will at least approach the problem.

We must in fact get hold of it from quite another angle. If we in our time study the form and formation of the human body and look for some connection with what is there in cosmic space, the most we can do to begin with is in some outward sense to see that the connection is there. Man is today very largely independent of the movements of cosmic space; everything points to the fact that this is so. For all that comes to expression in his immediate experience, man has emancipated himself from the phenomena of the Universe. We therefore have to look back into the time when what he underwent depended less upon his conscious life of soul than in his ordinary, by which I mean, post-natal life on Earth. We must look back into the time when he was an embryo. In the embryo the forming and development of man does indeed take place in harmony with cosmic forces. What afterwards remains is only what is carried forward, so to speak. Implanted in the whole human organization during the embryonal life it then persists. We cannot say it is "inherited" in the customary sense, for in fact nothing is inherited, but we must think of some such process, where entities derived from an earlier period of development stay on.

We must now look for an answer to the question: Is there still anything in the ordinary life we lead after our birth—after full consciousness has been attained—is there still any hint of our connection with the cosmic forces? Let us consider the human alternation of waking and sleeping. Even the civilized man of today still has to let this alternation happen. In its main periodicity, if he would stay in good health, it still has to follow the natural alternation of day and night. Yet as you know very well, man of today does lift if out of its natural course. In city life we no longer make it coincide with Nature. Only the country folk do so still. Nay, just because they do so, their state of soul is different. They sleep at night and wake by day. When days are longer and nights shorter they sleep less; when nights are longer the sleep longer. These aspects however can at most lead to vague comparisons; no clear perception can be derived from them. To recognize how the great cosmic conditions interpenetrate the subjective conditions of man, we must go into the question more deeply. So shall we find in the inner life of man some indication of what are absolute movements in the great Universe.

I will now draw your attention to something you can very well observe if only you are prepared to extend your observation to wider fields. Namely, however easily man may emancipate himself from the Universe in the alternation of sleeping and waking as regards time, he cannot with impunity emancipate himself as regards spatial position. Sophisticated folk—for such there are—may turn night into day, day into night, but even they, when they do go to sleep, must adopt a position other than the upright one of waking life. They must, as it were, bring the line of their spine into the same direction as the animal's. One might investigate a thing like this in greater detail. For instance, it is a physiological fact that there are people who in conditions of illness cannot sleep properly when horizontal but have to sit more upright. Precisely these deviations from the normal association of sleep with the horizontal posture will help to indicate the underlying law. A careful study of these exceptions—due as they are to more or less palpable diseases (as in the case of asthmatic subjects for example)—will be indicative of the true laws in the domain. Taking the facts together, you can quite truly put it in this way: To go to sleep, man must adopt a position whereby his life is enabled in some respects to take a similar course, while he is sleeping, to that of animal life. You will find further confirmation in a careful study of those animals whose spinal axis is not exactly parallel to the Earth's surface.

Here again I can only give you guiding lines. For the most part, these things have not been studied in detail; the facts have not been looked at in this manner, or not exhaustively. I know they have never been gone into thoroughly. The necessary researches have not been undertaken.

And now another thing: You know that what is trivially called “fatigue” represents a highly complex sequence of events. It can come about by our moving deliberately. When we move deliberately, we move our centre of gravity in a direction paralleled to the surface of the Earth. In a sense, we move about a surface parallel to the Earth's surface. The process which accompanies our outward and deliberate movements takes its course in such a surface. Now here again we can discover what belongs together. On the one hand we have our movement and mobility parallel to the surface of the earth, and our fatigue,—becoming tired. Now we go further in our line of thought. This movement parallel to the surface of the Earth, finding its symptomatic expression in fatigue, involves a metabolic process—an expenditure of metabolism. Underlying the horizontal movement there is therefore a recognizable inner process in the human body.

Now the human being is so constituted that he cannot well do without such movement—including all the concomitant phenomena, the metabolic expenditure of substance and so on. He needs all this for bodily well-being. If you're a postman, your calling sees to it that you move about horizontally; if you are not a postman you take a walk. Hence the relationship, highly significant for Economics, between the use and value of that mobility of man which enters into economic life and that which stays outside it—as in athletics, games and the like. Physiological and economic aspects meet in reality. In my critique of the economic concept of Labour, you may remember I have often mentioned this. It is at this point that the relation emerges between a purely social science and the science of physiology, nor can we truly study economics if we disregard it. For us however at the present moment, the important thing is to observe this parallelism of movement in a horizontal surface with a certain kind of metabolic process.

Now the same metabolic process can also be looked for along another line. We think once more of the alternation of sleeping and waking. But there is this essential difference. The metabolic transformation, when it takes place with our deliberate movements, makes itself felt at once as an external process, even apart from what goes on inside the human being. If I may put it so, something is then going on, for which the surface of the human body is no exclusive frontier. Substance is being transformed, yet so that the transformation takes place as it were in the absolute; the importance of it is not only for the inside of man's body. (The world “absolute” must of course again be taken relatively!)

That we get tired is, as I said, a symptomatic concomitant of movement and of the metabolic process it involves. Yet we also get tired if we have only lived the life-long day while doing nothing. Therefore the same entities which are at work when we move about with a will, are also at work in the human being in his daily life simply by virtue of his internal organization. The metabolic transformation must also be taking place when we just get tired, without our bringing it about by any deliberate action.

We put ourselves into the horizontal posture so as to bring about the same metabolism which takes place when we are not acting deliberately,—which takes place simply with the lapse of time, if I may so express it. We put ourselves into the horizontal posture during sleep, so that in this horizontal position our body may be able to carry out what it also carries out when we are moving deliberately in waking life. You see from this that the horizontal position as such is of great significance. It is not a matter of indifference, whether or not we get into this position. To let our inner organism carry out a certain process without our doing anything to the purpose, we must bring ourselves into the horizontal position in which there happens in our body something that also happens when we are moving by our deliberate will.

A movement must therefore be going on in our body, which we do not bring about by our deliberate will. A movement which we do not bring about by our deliberate will must be of significance for our body. Try to observe and interpret the given facts and you will come to the following conclusion, although again—for lack of time—in saying this I must leave out many connecting links. Human movement, as we said just now, involves an absolute metabolic process or change of substance, so that what then goes on in our metabolism has, so to speak, real chemical or physical significance, for which the limits of our skin are in some sense non-existent;—so that the human being in this process belongs to the whole Cosmos. And now the very same metabolic change of substance is brought about in sleep, only that then its significance remains inside the human body. The change of substance that takes place in our deliberate movement takes place also in our sleep, but the outcome of it is then carried from one part of our body to another. During sleep, in effect, we are supplying our own head. We are then carrying out or rather, letting the inside of our body carry out for us—a metabolic process of transformation for which the human skin is an effective frontier. The transmutation so takes place that the final process to which it leads has its significance within the bodily organization of man.

Once more then, we may truly say: We move of our own will, and a metabolic process (a transformation of substance) is taking place. We let the Cosmos move us; a transformation of substance is taking place once more. But the latter process goes on in such a way that the outcome of it—which in the former metabolic process takes its course, so to speak, in the external world—turns inward to make itself felt as such within the human head. It turns back and does not go flowing outward and away. Yet to enable it to turn back, nay to enable it to be there at all, we have to bring ourselves into the horizontal posture. We must therefore study the connection between those processes in the human body that take place when we move deliberately and those that take place when we are sleeping. And from the very fact that we are obliged to do this at a certain stage of our present studies, you may divine how much is implied when in the general Anthroposophical lectures I emphasize—as indeed I must do, time and gain,—that our life of will, bound as it is to our metabolism, is to our life of thought and indeation even as sleeping is to waking.

In the unfolding of our will, as I have said again and again, we are always asleep. Here now you have the more exact determination of it. Moving of his own will and in a horizontal surface, man does precisely the same as in sleep. He sleeps by virtue of his will. Sleep, and deliberate or wilful movement, are in this relation. When we are sleeping in the horizontal posture, only the outcome is different. Namely, what scatters and is dispersed in the external world when we are moving deliberately, is received and assimilated, made further use of, by our own head-organisation when we are asleep.

We have then these two processes, clearly to be distinguished from one another:—the outward dispersal of the metabolic process when we move about deliberately in day-waking life, and the inward assimilation of the metabolic process by all that happens in our head when we are sleeping. And if we now relate this to the animal kingdom, we may divine how much it signifies that the animal spends its whole life in the horizontal posture. This turning-inward of the metabolism to provide the head must be quite different in the animal. Also deliberate movement must be quite different in the animal from what it is in man.

This is the kind of thing so much neglected in the Science of today. They only speak of what presents itself externally, failing to see that the same external process may stand for something different in the one creature and in the other. For example—quite apart now from any religious implication—man dies and the animal dies. It does not follow that this is psychologically the same in either case. A scientist who takes it to be the same and bases his research on this assumption is like a man who would pick up a razor and declare: This is a kind of knife, therefore the same function as any other knife; so I will use it to cut my dumpling. Put on this simple level, you may answer: No-one would be so silly. Yet have a care, for this is just what happens in the most advanced researches.

This then is what we are led to see. In our deliberate movements we have a process finding its characteristic expression in curves that run parallel to the surface of the Earth; we cannot but make curves of this direction. What have we taken as fundamental now, in this whole line of thought? We began with an inner process which takes its course in man. In sleep this is the given thing, yet on the other hand we ourselves bring a like process about by our own action. Through what we do ourselves, we can therefore define the other. The possibility is given, logically. What is done to our bodily nature from out of cosmic space when are sleeping, this we can treat as the thing to be defined,—the nature of which we seek to know. And we can use as the defining concept what we ourselves do in the outer world—what is therefore well-known to as to its spatial relations. This is the kind of thing we have to look for altogether, in scientific method: Not to define phenomena by means of abstract concepts, but to define phenomena by means of other phenomena. Of course it presupposes that we do really understand the phenomena in question, for only then can we define them by one-another. This characteristic of Anthroposophical scientific endeavour. It seeks to reach a true Phenomenalism,—to explain phenomena by phenomena instead of making abstract concepts to explain them. Nor does it want a mere blunt description of phenomena, leaving them just as they are in the chance distributions of empirical fact and circumstance, where they may long be standing side by side without explaining one-another.

I may digress a moment at this point, to indicate the far-reaching possibilities of this “phenomenological” direction in research. The empirical data are at hand, for us to reach the right idea. There is enough and to spare to empirical data. What we are lacking in is quite another thing, namely the power to synthesize them,—in other words, to explain one phenomenon by another. Once more, we have to understand the phenomena before w can explain them by each other. Hence we must first have the will to proceed as we are now trying to do,—to learn to penetrate the phenomenon before us. This is so often neglected. In our Research Institute we shall not want to go on experimenting in the first place with the old ways and methods, which have produced enough and to spare of empirical data. (I speak here not from the point of view of technical applications but of the inner synthesis which is needed.) There is no call for us to go on experimenting in the old ways. As I said in the lectures on Heat last winter, we have to arrange experiments in quite new ways. We need not only the usual instruments from the optical instrument makers; we must devise our own, so as to get quite different kinds of experiments, in which phenomena are so presented that the one sheds light on the other. Hence we shall have to work from the bottom upward. If we do so, we shall find an abundance of material for fresh enlightenment. With the existing instruments our contemporaries can do all that is necessary; they have acquired admirable skill in using them in their one-sided way. We need experiments along new lines, as you must see, for with the old kind of experiment we should never get beyond certain limits. Nor on the other hand will it do for us merely to take our start from the old results and then indulge in speculation. Again and again we need fresh experimental results, to bring us back to the facts when we have gone too far afield. We must be always ready to find ways of means, when we have reached a certain point in our experimental researches, not just to go on theorising but to pass on to some fresh observation which will help elucidate the former one. Otherwise we shall not get beyond certain limits, transient though they are, in the development of Science.

I will here draw attention to one such limit, which, though not felt to be insurmountable by our contemporaries, will in fact only be surmounted when fresh kinds of experiment are made. I mean the problem of the constitution of the Sun. Careful and conscientious observations have of course been made by all the scientific methods hitherto available, and with this outcome: First they distinguish the inner most part of the Sun; what it is, is quite unclear to them. They call it the solar nucleus, but none can tell us what it is; the methods of research do not reach thus far. To say this is no unfriendly criticism; everyone admits it. They then suppose the Sun's nucleus to be surrounded by the so-called photo-sphere, the atmosphere, the chromosphere and the corona. From the photosphere onward they begin to have definite ideas abut it. Thus they are able to form some idea about the atmosphere, the chromosphere. Suppose for instance that they are trying to imagine how Sun-spots arise. Incidentally, this strange phenomenon does not happen quite at random; it shows a certain rhythm, with maxima and minima in periods of about eleven years. Examine the Sun-spot phenomena, and you will find they must in some way be related to processes that take place outside the actual body of the Sun. In trying to imagine what these processes are like, our scientists are apt to speak of explosions or analogous conditions. The point is that when thinking in this way they always take their start from premisses derived from the earthly field. Indeed, this is almost bound to be so if one has not first made the effort to widen out one's range of concepts,—as we did for instance when we imagined curves going out of space. If one has not done something of this kind for one' s own inner training, one has no other possibility than to interpret on the analogy of earthly conditions such observations as are available of a celestial body that is far beyond this earthly world.

Nay, what could be more natural—with the existing range of thought—than to imagine the processes of the solar life analogous to the terrestial, but for the obvious modifications. Yet in so doing one soon encounters almost insuperable obstacles. That which is commonly thought of as the physical constitution of the Sun can never really be understood with the ideas we derive from earthly life. We must of course begin with the results of simple observation, which are indeed eloquent up to a point; then however we must try to penetrate them with ideas that are true to their real nature. And in this effort we shall have to come to terms with a principle which I may characterize as follows.

It is so, is it not? Given some outer fact or distribution which we are able thoroughly to illumina with a truth of pre Geometry we say to ourselves: how well it fits: we build it up purely by geometrical thinking and now the outer reality accords with it. It hinges-in, so to speak. We feel more at one with outer reality when we thus find again and recognize what we ourselves first constructed, (yet the delight of it should not be carried too far. Somehow or other, one must admit, it always “hinges-in” even for those theorists who get a little unhinged themselves in the process: They too are always finding the ideas they first developed in their mind in excellent agreement with the external reality. The principle is valid, none the less.)

The following attempt must now be made. We may begin by imagining some process that takes place in earthly life. We follow the direction of it outward from some central point. It takes its course therefore in a radial direction. It may be a kind of outbreak, such for example as a volcanic eruption, or the tendency of deformation in an earthquake or the like. We follow such a process upon Earth in the direction of a line that goes outward from the given centre. And now in contrast to this you may conceive the inside of the Sun, as we are want to call it, to be of such a nature that its phenomena are not thrust outward from the centre, but on the contrary; they take their course from the corona inward, via the chromosphere, atmosphere and photosphere,—not from within outward therefore, but from without inward. You are to conceive , once more,—if this (Fig. 2) is the photosphere, this the atmosphere, this the chromosphere and this the corona,—that the processes go inward and, so to speak, gradually lose themselves towards the central point to which they tend just as phenomena that issue from the Earth lose themselves outward in expanding spheres, into the wide expanse. You will thus gain a mental picture which will enable you to bring some kind of synthesis and order into the empirical results. Speaking more concretely, you would have to say: If causes on the Earth are such as to bring about the upward outbreak for example of an active crater, the cause on the Sun will be such that if there is anything analogous to such an outbreak, it will happen from without inward. The whole nature of the phenomenon holds it together in quite another way. While on the Earth it tends apart, dispersing far and wide, here this will tend together, striving towards the centre.

You see, then what is necessary. First you must penetrate the phenomena and understand them truly. Only then can you explain them by one-another. And only when we enter thus into the qualitative aspect,—only when we are prepared, in the widest sense of the word, to unfold a kind of qualitative mathematics,—shall we make essential progress. Of this we shall speak more tomorrow. Here I should only like to add that there is a possibility, notably for pure mathematicians, to find the transition to a qualitative mathematics. Indeed this possibility is there in a high degree, especially in our time. We need only consider Analytical Geometry, with all its manifold results, in relation to Synthetic Geometry—to the real inner experience of Projective Geometry. True, this will only give us the beginning, but it is a very, very good beginning. You will be able to confirm this if you once begin along this pathway,—if for example you really enter into the thought and make it clear to yourself that a line has not two infinitely distant points (one in the one and one in the opposite direction) but only one,—fact of which there is no doubt. You will then find truer and more realistic concepts in this field, and from this starting-point you will find your way into a qualitative form of mathematics.

This will enable you to conceive the polarities of Nature no longer merely in the sense of outwardly opposite directions, where all the time the inner quality would be the same; whereas in fact the inner quality, the inner sense and direction, is not the same. The phenomena at the anode and the cathode for example have not the same inner direction; an inherent difference underlies them, and to discover what the difference is, we must take this pathway. We must not allow ourselves to think of a real line as though it had two ends. We should be clear in our mind that a real line in its totality must be conceived not with two ends but with one. Simple by virtue of the real conditions, the other end goes on into a continuation, which must be somewhere. Please do not underestimate the scope and bearing of these lines of thought. For they lead deep into many a riddle of Nature, which, when approached without such preparation, will after all only be taken in such a way that our thoughts remain outside the phenomena and fail to penetrate.

May I first refer to a matter from which misunderstandings might arise in future if some of you are thinking further along the lines we have been indicating.¹

This is essential: You must imagine the plane in which I am drawing the Lemniscate (Fig. 1) to be rotating about the Lemniscate axis, ie. about the line joining the two foci,—call it what you will. I should therefore have to draw the Lemniscate in space. This (Fig. 1) is the projection of it. Such is the drawing of the Lemniscate which you must have in mind with regard to all that I have been saying,—so for example when you are tracing the bony system or the nervous system in man. Even the blood-circulation can be traced in this way. You must imagine it all, not in a plane but in space. The figure eight—the Lemniscate—is therefore legitimate, but as I said before, you are really dealing with geometrical figures of rotation. This also underlies what I have just been saying. The forms of our inner organisation, in the nerves-and-senses system and in the metabolic and limb-system respectively, are mutually related upon the principle of a lemniscate of rotation.

We were obliged to seek the criterion of the true spatial movements of our Earth in changes that go on in man himself. We human beings are, after all, in some way spatially united with the Earth. So long as we merely look at the movements from outside,—then, as I said before, we never get beyond the relativity of movements. If we ourselves however are taking part in the movements and by so doing we perceive internal changes in the moving body, then in these inner changes we can, as it were, read the movements and know them to be real. This is the thing that matters.

We pointed out that in the processes of human metabolism we have an inner criterion of man's deliberate movement, wherein he may be said to move his centre of gravity parallel to the surface of the Earth. Then there are processes very similar to these metabolic processes, which accompany our deliberate movements. They give us a criterion of a true movement which we undoubtedly describe in cosmic space together with the Earth. I referred to the phenomena of fatigue occurring in the course of the day,—i.e. while the Sun changes its position in the heavens. We may formulate it thus:—That which takes place between the head and the rest of man in a vertical direction when man is upright, takes place in a direction parallel to the surface of the Earth—that is, in the direction characteristics of the animal spine—when man is sleeping. Comparing human metabolism in sleeping and in waking respectively, we have indeed a kind of reagent for the relations of movement of Sun and Earth.

Thence we can now pass on to the other kingdoms of Nature. We see the plant, maintaining a radial direction,—the same direction we human beings have in waking life. We must be clear however, when comparing our own vertical direction with that of plant growth, that it is not permissible to think of them with the same sign. We must give opposite signs to the two. Many are the compelling reasons for us to do this: to give to man's vertical direction the opposite sign to that of plant growth. I will refer only to one such reason, mentioned before. The process of plant growth, culminating as it does in the organic deposition of carbon, is so to speak cancelled-out in man: It must, as it were, be negatived. The very thing the plant consolidates into itself, man must get rid of. This and other considerations will oblige us, if we put the direction of plant-growth from year to year, so long as we are growing. It represents therefore, a process in us, similar to that in the plant. Hence, my dear Friends, we only find our way alright if we think thus: The plant grows radially upward from the Earth, up onto cosmic space. Ourselves we must imagine in a different way. There is our physically visible growth, but we must think of something super-physical, invisible, growing down to meet it—growing into us as it were, from above downward. Herein we have to seek an understanding of the human form,—its vertical direction. We must imagine that while man no doubt grows upward, a kind of invisible plant-formation grows down to meet him. It is a plant-form with its roots unfolding up towards the head and its flowers downward. It is a negative plant-forming process, opposite to the man-forming process. In this sense we must recognize, which movements are alike in kind. As the plant grows away from the Earth, so have we to imagine this super-physical man-plant growing in from cosmic space, even from the Sun, towards the centre of the Earth. This then is what we have. (I say again, I can only indicate general directions: you will be able to follow them up in the light of empirical phenomena) In what we here see (Fig. 2) as a line of like direction—a line of growth, but in the one case striving positively outward, in the other negatively back and downward—in this we have to seek the connecting line of Earth and Sun. You cannot think of it in any other way. Nay, to imagine it thus is comparatively simple, even trivial. You will perceive in this very line the line of movement both of Earth and Sun. The lines of movement both of Earth and Sun are to be looked for in the line that joins the two. Moreover, the line will always prove to be vertical in relation to the surface of the Earth.

What I have here been putting forward ought really to be the theme of many lectures. I do however still want to give you something more substantial as it were, for you to get to grips with. I want to lead you to a more tangible result, though it will have to follow rather abruptly on the more methodical reflections we have hitherto pursued.

We have been led to realize that Earth and Sun must be thought of as moving in a certain sense in the identical orbit and yet again in a way opposite to one another. You will get a more substantial line of what this means if you recall what was said yesterday. The constitution of the Sun, I said,—with the Sun's nucleus and then the photosphere, atmosphere, chromosphere and corona—can be imagined in no other way than this: While on the Earth craters are formed by outward thrusts and movements, and we think therefore of processes that work from within outward (fundamentally the same is true even of the tides); in the Sun on the contrary we have to go from without inward. The Sun releases its streams and currents from the surrounding periphery inward to the interior, to the solar nucleus. In a sense therefore, we see what is going on the Sun's environment as we should see things going on Earth if we were situated in the Earth's centre and looking outward,—only we should then have bank the convex into the concave. Looking into the Sun, it is as though we should be witnessing earthly processes from the Earth's centre; only for this comparison the Earth's inner surface which is concave must be bent convex, so that the interior of the Earth becomes the exterior of the Sun. Taking your start from this idea you will be able to realize the polar-opposite character of Earth and Sun. This too is most important: to realize how the Sun' s constitution derives from the Earth's once more by a turning inside-out,—by the same process I explained for the relation of the human metabolic and limb-system with the skull-bone. The coordination of Man and the Cosmos is the more thoroughly revealed. The polarity in man is in its inner quality and process like the polarity of Sun and Earth.

I shall now pursue a line of thought which may look problematical to some of you, yet you would feel it to be thoroughly sound if we had time to go into all the connecting links. However as I said just now, I want to give you something more substantial. We have to look for a curve which makes it possible or us to imagine the movements of Sun and Earth taking their course in one and the same path and yet in some sense contrariwise. The curve can be determined, unambiguously. If you envisage all the relevant geometrical positions which are to be found in this way, the curve, I say again, will be uniquely determined. You must imagine it like this (Fig. 3),—a rotating lemniscate which at the same time moves on through space, resulting in a lemniscatory screw of spiral (as indicated in the Figure). Imagine the Earth to be at some point of this curve and the Sun at another, with the Earth following the Sun in movement. So then you have the movement of the Earth up here, the Sun down here. They go past each other. Taking all the valid criteria into account, this is the only way to conceive the real underlying movements both of the Earth and of the Sun. There is no other alternative than to imagine it arising on this basis: Earth and Sun are moving, following one another, along a lemniscatory spiral; what is projected into space arises out of this. Here is the line of sight (ES, Fig. 3). You are projecting the Sun in this position (S); thereafter, you may assume, the Sun has gone up here (S₁). You get the apparent position, including all the relevant and necessary factors, simply as the resulting projection when Earth and Sun move past each other along this line. But I repeat, you must include the manifold corrections,—the Bessel equations and so on,—if you expect your calculation to come true. You must include in the geometrical loci all that is really given. So too you must take into account what I mentioned before, how the Astronomy of today uses three Suns in its calculations: the real Sun, the Dynamical Mean Sun and the Astronomical Mean Sun. Two of them are of course imaginary; only the real Sun is actually there. For our determination of Time however, we reckon first with the Dynamical Mean Sun which coincides with the true Sun at perigee and apogee and no-where else. And then we have the third Sun which only coincides with the other at the equinoxes. You only need correct, according to all this, the accepted notion of the Sun's apparent path. Take all of this together and work it out; then you will certainly get this result,—in full agreement with what we also found observing Man's relation to the Cosmos.

We now need to relate this curve in the right way to our solar system. I will begin by drawing the ordinary hypothetical form of solar system (Fig. 4), omitting the two outermost planets for today, for they are not essential in this connection.

Here (disregarding the relative measures) are the orbit of Saturn, the orbit of Jupiter, the orbit of Mars, the orbit of the Earth with the Moon, the orbit of Venus, the orbit of Mercury, and the Sun. Somewhere along these orbits we should then find the respective planets. Let us assume to begin with what this is a valid perspective from some aspect or other. The question then is how the path of Sun and Earth as we have now described it fits in with this picture. Work out the calculation in the way indicated and you will find that it fits in as follows. We have to draw the path of the Earth with the Earth tending in a sense, towards the place where the Sun has been, and then again the Sun towards the place where the Earth has been. We thus get the one self of the Lemniscate—Earth, Sun, Earth, Sun. When this has been gone round, then it goes on (Fig. 5). They move past each other, as you see.

Thus we obtain the true path of Earth and Sun if we alternately imagine the Earth to be at the place where in our usual drawings we are wont to put the Sun, and the Sun at the place where we are wont to put the Earth. The fact is, we do not get the true relation of movement as between Earth and Sun if we assume either the one or the other to be at rest. We must imagine both to be in movement, whereby the one follows the other, yet at the same time they go past each other. So then we have to picture it. Seen in perspective, the Sun is alternately in the middle point of our planetary system and then again the Earth is where we normally conceive the Sun to be. They change places, taking turns as it were. But it is complicated, for in the meantime the planets too, needless to say, have changed their situation, which brings in no little complication. However, if I take this, to begin with, to be a true perspective, I shall draw it thus (Sun in the middle point). Then as it were I get the other valid order by drawing the ideal sequence of the planets with the Earth here (Earth in the centre) and then Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. You see, we are in a way misled by the perspective's, to the establishment of an extremely simple system, whereas in fact it is by no means simple. It is as though, with respect to the planets, Earth and Sun were taking turns, alternately being in the centre of the system.

I confess it is not at all easy for me to be telling you these things, which at the present stage might still be thought fantastic. We cannot not now bring all the mathematical paraphernalia to bear on them, but I assure you they can be calculated in all detail. The desire was for me to explain the relations of Astronomy to other branches of Science; hence at the end of these lectures I must try to give a resume as clear and as complete as possible.

Tracing the path of Earth and Sun (now, once again, apart from the planetary system as a whole) we have then to imagine a Lemniscate in which the Earth is following the Sun. Here is it, projected (Fig. 6). Incidentally, you may also see in this a possibility of giving meaning to the idea of Gravitation. The one draws the other after it: that is the underlying principle. Think of it in this way, and you will no longer need the somewhat questionable quality of gravitational and tangential forces, for they are here reduced to a single force. Think it through thoroughly and you will find it so. You must admit, it is a rather problematical feature in the Newtonian conception. We are to think of the Sun in the centre and the Planets around it—endowed, one and all, with a kind of “shove” in the tangential direction, one and all, without presupposing which the Newtonian system would break down.

Taking this then (Fig. 5) to be the path of Earth and Sun,—if you wish to bring out in perspective, along with the course of Earth and Sun, the path-forms of the other planets, you must imagine the paths of the inferior planets somewhat in this way (small Lemniscates in Figure 6). This will enable you—if this be the line of sight—to get the perspective of a planetary loop, for a certain position of the planet along its path. The line of sight is here (v). In this position (s) we get the loop, while these two branches (u) will appear to run out into the infinite. On the other hand, taking this once more to be the path of Earth and Sun and this the path of the inferior planets, you must imagine the corresponding paths of the superior planets to be Lemniscates like this (Fig. 7). I should now have to go on drawing upward, but the nearest part would be like this. And now this Lemniscate² moves on, makes its way through,—through the Lemniscate of the superior planets.

It is a system of Lemniscates in determined order and relation. Such are the paths of the planets; such also is the path of Earth and Sun. Now you will easily harmonise what I have here presented in the grammatic outline, with the fact that we see the loops of Venus and Mercury in conjunction and those of Jupiter, Mars and Saturn in opposition. In our perspective it is the necessary outcome. Above all, you will recognize once more what the connection is between the planes and the human being. You need but look at this picture and you will say to yourselves: What you have here, in Mercury and Venus, is near in direction to the path of Earth and Sun. It is in the cosmic neighbourhood, so to speak, of the path of Earth and Sun. It is therefore in this relation: It has to do with the radial line—fundamentally, the connecting line of Earth and Sun. As against this, the other paths—those of the outer or upper planets—work more by virtue of their lateral or spherical direction. In their effects, they more approach what is peripherical in movement. We may then also formulate it thus: What we behold in Venus and Mercury is far more akin to what is living as a cosmical reality in us ourselves. Whilst, what we see in the paths of the superior planets is more akin to the fixed-star Heavens in general. Here too we reach a kind of qualitative valuation of what is taking place in the Cosmos. Of course the lines I have been drawing are only meant diagrammatically. It should really be put this way: An inferior planet has a path, making a lemniscate loop-curve the centre of which is the Earth-and-Sun path itself. A superior planet, on the other hand, embraces the Earth-and-Sun path in its own lemniscate-loop. Such is the essence of the matter; the thing itself is so complicated that the mental pictures we can form scarcely be more than diagrammatic.

You see from this however, my dear Friends,—unwelcome as the news may be to some,—we need to get away from a principle that crept into the explanations of nature with the beginning of modern time. I mean the overriding principle of simplicity. It grew to be the accepted tendency. The simple explanation is the right one! Even today one is severely censured if one puts forward what is not simple enough. Yet Nature is not simple. On the contrary, it would be true to say: Nature the real World—is that which, looking simple proves on examination to be complex. What appears simple on the surface, is as a rule only the outward glory, only the outward semblance of it.

It was not by any means my prime intention to let these lectures culminate in this way. I am not pre-disposed on principle to put forward things out of keeping with the accepted notions. We only want to get at the truth. As it is is however, the assumptions of the modern astronomical world-picture involves so many contradictions that in the end, having studied the current astronomy, one comes away dissatisfied. Hypothetically, it begins by assuming the world-picture I have also indicated in this sketch (Fig. 4),—the elliptic orbits of the planets, the Sun in one focus, and so on. The planetary orbits are then assumed to be in different planes, inclined to one another. For there is no alternative at this stage; the different inclinations are given by the perspective. The complications of it are complications of perspective. Yet the real calculations are not done to the basis of this simple solar system which people have explained to them at school and then retain for life. In practice, they take their start from the Tychonic system. Then one correction after another has to be applied. From the accepted formulae, one calculates, say, the position of the Sun at given time, and it does not come true. Instead of the real Sun being there, it will be the Dynamical of Astronomical Mean Sun,—something fictitious therefore. So it is time and again: Imagined entities are there, and more corrections must be introduced to get to what is real. In these corrections there lies hidden that which would lead to the truth. Instead of holding fast to the conventional formulae and being led to fictitious entities, one should bring movement into the formulae themselves—make them inherently mobile—and then draw curves accordingly. If one did so, one would soon reach the system here drawn, though I repeat, the drawings are diagrammatic.

What I have sought for above all is that a picture should arise in you of the harmony there is between the organisation of Man and the constitution of the Cosmos. If you have really been following thus far, you cannot possibly regard this as offending against the scientific spirit. When the transition emerged from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican World-picture, a profound change was taking place in the whole way of interpreting the connection of man with the celestial phenomenal. In very ancient times—though from a different perspective so to speak, as mentioned a few days ago—man still had clear and penetrating ideas of the harmony between the movements in the Heavens and the form of Man. What they then had was more instinctive; raised into consciousness however, it becomes the true spirit of modern science, to which we too must be faithful,—the more so when venturing upon this problematic ground.

Fundamentally there is no difference between the way of applying mathematics in general and the way we are applying this qualitative mathematic (which we have first had to develop) to man and the celestial phenomena. There is another thing however, you need to recognise in this connection. In the same period when the transition was developing between the old heliocentric system and the new heliocentric, the evolution of mankind suffered a certain break in the life of knowledge, Namely the bridges were demolished between the physically sense-perceptible or natural world-order and the ethical or moral. I have often mentioned in other lectures, how we in our time are thus torn asunder. On the one hand our theoretical ideas about Nature lead us to conceive some primeval cosmic entity in the beginning, from which the Universe was to unfold by purely natural events. So then evolved the Earth on which we are. So it goes on again by dint of purely natural laws and it will one day reach its end. In the midst of it are we. Out of our inner life there arise ethical impulses; no-one knows where they come from. And if one thinks according to this dualism, one cannot doubt that at some future time even these impulses will suffer burial in the universal grave.

This is the way one thinks when failing to build a bridge between the natural world-order and the ethical. I have indicated on other occasions how the transition is to be looked for. It can indeed be found throughout Anthroposophical spiritual science. Here I would only draw your attention to a specific aspect of it,—for the rift between the natural world-order and the moral makes itself felt in diverse realms, and among others it affects our present subject. Here too, in the evolution of mankind the natural aspect and the ethical have in a certain way fallen asunder. The ethical has been cultivated in Astrology; the natural in an Astronomy bereft of spiritual values. There is no need for me to insist that Astrology as pursued today is scientifically unacceptable. I need not prove to you that this is an aberration on the one side. Yet on the other side our Astronomical world-system, as we call it, also involves an abberaction. All these perspective lines—or if you will, projective lines—that are conventionally drawn to represent our solar system, are not to be conceived as realities at all. Nor even are the lines that arise when we observe a further resultant movement, built up again of many components, namely the Sun's proper movement, the whole solar system going with it. All these things are built up of very many components; we are in the midst of relativities and we need some criterion to hold to. The criterion may seem vague to many people, yet it is there and it can lead us to an understanding of the curves in question. We have to penetrate the secret: Why is it man has an inner need to lie down horizontally in sleep,—thus to escape in sleep from the connecting line of Earth and Sun? Just as he can only carry out his voluntary movements while moving his centre of gravity at right angles to the line joining Earth and Sun, so with his involuntary movements: He can only carry them out by lying down, putting himself in a direction at right angles to the path of Earth and Sun. If he wants to escape from the effects of voluntary movement—if he wants, what would otherwise work itself out in voluntary movement, to work inside him and bring about a metabolic interchange between his body and his head—he must lie down, he must align himself in this way. In like manner you will be able to find other directions that are at work in man.

From the directions ascertainable in man—derivable from man's own form and stature—you will be able to compose the curves that are really there in the movement of heavenly bodies. Granted, it is not so easy as what is done with mere telescopes and measured angles. Yet it is the way, the only way, to find the relationship between the human being and the celestial phenomena.

• 1. The beginning of this lecture arose out of a mistaken remark by one of those present, which is omitted. Dr. Steiner's explanations, important for a general understanding of the lemniscatory curves, are reproduced apart from this.
• 2. Namely the lemniscate of Sun and Earth.

If we recall what I said yesterday about the opposite character of Earth and Sun, we shall perceive that in answering such questions it is all-important to follow up the empirical facts in the right way. We cannot form true ideas of what we see if we do not recognize from the outset that radical differences may be called for in the whole way we interpret what is seen in one case and in another. The phenomena that present themselves to us when looking at the so-called body of the Sun will only find their true interpretation if we start from such premises as we were indicating, for example, when we put this question:—

On Earth there are many phenomena the characteristic of which is that they work outward from the given center to the wide circumference,—out into cosmic space We interpret them accordingly. How must we then interpret similar phenomena—or rather, phenomena that seem superficially similar—when we are looking, with or with-out the help of optical instruments, towards the Sun? Truth is, the empirically observed phenomena will only reveal themselves in their true light if we then take our start from some such idea as this: whilst on the surface of the Earth an eruption or the like will naturally be interpreted as tending up and outward (Fig. 1a), a process on the Sun—a Sun-spot for example—must be interpreted rather as tending from without inward (Fig. 1b). Continuing this line of thought: Just as we have to imagine that if we went through and beneath the surface of the Earth we should get into dense matter, so shall we have to imagine that if we moved from outside the Sun towards the Sun's interior we should come into an ever more attenuated state of matter. And we may truly say: Look at the Earth and the whole way it is placed into the Universe. It manifests as so much ponderable matter in the Universe. Not so the Sun. Here we shall only come near the truth if we imagine that as we go from the circumference towards the interior we get ever mere remote from ponderable matter and ever more and more into the imponderable. We have precisely the opposite behavior as we draw near the middle point. The Sun must be conceived as a hollowing-out, shall we say, of cosmic matter, a hollow space, a hollow sphere,—a sphere enveloped by matter,—in contrast to the Earth where we have denser matter enveloped by more attenuated. As to the Earth, we think of air around it. Air is outside and denser matter inside. For the Sun it is the opposite; as we go inward we go from relatively denser matter into more attenuated and at long last into the very negation of matter whoever takes the phenomena with open mind and puts them all together will be obliged to recognize that this is so. The Sun is not only a more attenuated heavenly body, of a materiality less dense than earthly matter, but if we call the Earth's materiality positive, then in the Sun—in the Sun's interior—we shall have negative matter in a certain sense. We only do justice to the phenomena if we conceive that there is negative matter in the inner space of the Sun.

Now, my dear friends, as compared with positive matter negative matter is suctional. Positive matter exerts pressure, negative suction. And if you now conceive the Sun as a collection of suctional force, you need no further explanation of Gravitation. This is the explanation, Now think of it as I explained it yesterday. The movement of Earth and Sun is such that the Earth follows the Sun in the same path, in the same direction. Here then you have the cosmic relation between Sun and Earth. The Sun as a gathering of suctional forces goes on in front, and by this suctional force the Earth is drawn on after, moving through cosmic space in the same course and in the same direction in which the Sun thrusts forward.

You thus perceive and understand what you would otherwise fall short of in your thinking. In no other way will you reach an adequate idea, to comprise all the phenomena. You have to start from such ideas as these. You must imagine that in the realm of matter there is a positive and a negative intensity. Matter itself,—that is, earthly matter—is positive; it is of positive intensity. Solar matter on the other hand is negative—of negative intensity—and is therefore not only empty in relation to matter-filled space, but even “less than empty”. It is a hollowing-out of space itself.

This may be difficult to conceive. Yet if you are accustomed to having mathematical ideas, why should you not think of a certain degree of the fullness of space as a corresponding magnitude, say +a? Empty space would then be Zero, and a space less than empty would be conceivable as -a. This granted, you will be able to conceive a truly mathematical relation—or at least, a relation analogous to mathematical—between the different intensities of matter, as in this instance between terrestrial and solar matter.

As it were in parenthesis I may add the following: No matter how you think of the relation of positive and negative real numbers to imaginary numbers (I will not go into this question now), some interpretation of the so-called imaginary numbers must be discoverable, and since they too emerge in the solution of equations and the like. If in the way we have been saying you recognize a positive and a negative of intensity, you may well conceive that there is also an imaginary [intensity]. You must then have which would enable you to add to positive matter and negative the kind of matter for example (or if you will, the kind of spirituality) which Anthroposophy describes as the Astral. Thus you would find a mathematical way of approach to the Astral too. However, as I said before, this only in parenthesis.

Once again take the connection of what I have been saying with man himself. You will admit: without any doubt the human physical body is related to ponderable earthly matter, and since it is as waking man—upright in his physical body—that man is related to earthly matter, we may compare man's relation to earthly matter with the upright direction of the plant, following what was said in preceding lectures. However, yesterday we saw that the plant must be imagined with the very opposite direction in the human being, while the outer plant must naturally be conceived as growing upwards from below, the plant we have to think of in the human being moves in a manner speaking, from above downward (Fig. 2). What is it then that grows from above downwards? Certainly nothing visible; it must be something invisible. Now we related this to the Sun. It there fore in relating the forces of plant-growth to the path of the Sun and Earth we think of them as tending from the Earth towards the Sun, we must needs think of what grows in the reverse direction in the human being as growing, in effect, in his etheric body. This force of suction therefore, proceeding from the Sun, works also in the human being. permeating his etheric body from above downward. Upon the human being—the human body in this instance—two opposite entities are at work; Sun-entity, Earth-entity.

We should be able to prove in detail that these things are there, and we can indeed, once we perceive the true interpretation. This that is working in the human being from above downward may resolve itself in very many ways. For if we have a force, say, in the direction a - b, we can trace it not only in this direction but also in an imaginary sense. Namely if this (Fig. 3) is its intensity, we need only imagine it resolved into two components. Thus we can every where form components of forces in the direction of the path of Earth and Sun. If I press here with my finger, there will arise over this surface the force or pressure whereby the ponderable matter presses against me. The counter-pressure will then correspond to the force of the Sun that is working through me—through my etheric body, that is to say. Imagine a surface here pressing against the human being,—or against which he is pressing. Here you already have the opposition—the working of the ponderable and of the imponderable able force. It is the interplay of the ponderable pressure from without inward and of the imponderable from within outward (Fig. 4) which gives you the conscious sensation of pressure. If in our mind we see all these things clearly and comprehensively, we may truly say that the polarity of Sun end Earth into the midst of which the human being is placed, is felt by us in every sense-perception. In like manner, everything about the human being can be traced in such a way as to perceive the cosmic realities that are involved. Cosmic forces work into the human being upon every hand.

It is of untold importance for us to overcome the method that excludes the human being and that is always haloing fast to isolated things, see it without any connection with their surroundings. You will remember, I used the same comparison before. If we place man into the world in such a way as to study head, limbs, etc., one by one and in a merely outward sense, it is as though we were to study a magnet-needle, tending as it does ever in the same direction, and seek the cause of this behaviour not in the magnetic pole of the Earth but inside the needle. To understand any fact or object, we must go to the totality from which alone it can be understood. What matters is in every case to look for the totality in question. Precisely this, alas, is foreign to the habitual ways or thought in our time. Before attempting to decide a problem, look first for the totality on which it all depends. You take a crystal of salt into your hand. You may regard it as a totality, just as it is. Even this is only relatively true, but at least relatively you can so regard it. It is, in a sense, a self-contained entity. Not so if you have picked and place a rose before you. Placed there before you in this way, the rose is not a self-contained entity at all. It could not be there in the same way as salt-crystal can. The crystal, it is true, must also have been formed in a surrounding medium; nevertheless it is a totality, the rose can only be looked upon as a totality when seen in connection with the shrub on which it grew. Only there has it the kind or totality which the crystal-cube of salt has on its own. Likewise if we look at man with respect to his full being, we cannot stop short at the limits of his skin, we must regard him in connection with the great universe that is visible to us; only in this connection is he to be understood. Such then must be our method, and as we persevere in it we become able to see a deeper meaning in the phenomenon that present themselves to us,—that can indeed be mastered by our cognition.

During these lectures we haves recalled the fact that in comparing the periods of revolution of the planets incommensurable magnitudes emerge. For if they were commensurable, the planetary paths would presently come into such relation to one another that the whole system would rigidify. Our planetary system does indeed also contain this tendency to become rigid and dead.

We can express what confronts us in the planetary system by means of certain curves—and arithmetical formulae. Yet as we saw, these curves and formulae are never in full agreement with reality. We must therefore admit that if we try to contain the phenomena of the Heavens in succinct formulae or geometrical figures the phenomena elude us. Time and again they elude us. This then is true:—look outward on the one hand and behold the given picture of the celestial phenomena. Look on the other hand at what we are able to make of it by dint of calculation. We never do contrive a formula that coincides entirely with the phenomena. We may devise such a drawing as I was sketching yesterday—the system of lemniscates. We can do so indeed. Even this system however,—we only understand it rightly if we admit the following. Suppose I managed to draw this lemniscatory system in a precise and finished form; it would at most be true of present time. Even a time comparatively near our own—the time I indicated when speaking of the coming ice-age—would require me to modify the system not a little. The constants of the curves must themselves be taken as variable. The very constants would therefore be curves of some complexity by virtue of their variations. Thus I can never draw staple straightforward curves, but only complicated ones. Even when drawing these lemniscate-curves (Fig. 5) I should have to say: Good and well,—I draw a path for some heavenly body. (As we saw yesterday, it will always be a lemniscatory path.) I draw the path. Yet when a certain time has elapsed I must disqualify it; it is no longer valid. I must make the Lemniscate a little broader. And then again after a time I must draw such a Lemniscate (Fig. 5 once more), and so on.

In effect, my dear friends, if I were to trace the paths of the heavenly bodies, I should really have to go out into the Universe and trace them ever anew, varying them all the time. There is no constant path which I may draw. Whatever path I may work out, I must remember in so doing that I ought really to be changing it all the time, since every lapse of time involves a change of path, however slight. To apprehend the heavenly bodies and their paths of movement in any adequate way, I cannot draw ready-made lines at all. Ready-made lines, if I do draw them, will only be lines of approximation, and I shall have to bring in corrections. Whatever finished lines I may devise, the phenomena in the Heavens will presently elude them, No matter what mathematical curve I may devise, once it is fixed and finished the reality will certainly escape me; my finished curve will not contain it, yet in the very act of saying this, I am giving voice to an important reality. Namely, a planetary system has this essential feature: It tends in both directions,—on one hand towards rigidity and on the other hand to the forming of ever-mobile Lemniscates. In the solar Saturn or planetary system there is this contrast between the tendency to become rigid and the tendency to be ever variable, ever escaping from its established form.

If we now follow up this very contrast, not in the way of speculation but in the actual seeing and contemplating of the phenomena, we shall be led to recognize that what we call a comet, a cometary body, is not a body at all in the same sense that a planet is. (What I am giving her, I give once more as guiding lines which you can verify for yourselves. You need only observe the empirical data. Observe them with the greatest possible precision, but do not cling to the theories with which so many scientists would fetter them—theories that lie like shackles upon the facts, You will convince yourselves: what I am about to say is verifiable. It will be verified increasingly, the more the given facts are put together.)

Truth is that in studying the cometary phenomena we get into difficulties if we conceive the cometary body too in the same way as we are wont to think of a planetary body. The planetary body (I refer again to the same question of principle and method as in an earlier lecture),—the planetary body you may represent as though it were a self-contained body moving on in space. You will not go much against the facts in so conceiving it. Not so a cometary body. Again and again you will find yourself in contradiction to the phenomena if you conceive it after the same pattern as the planetary body. You will never understand the cometary body, in the way it moves—or seems to move—through cosmic space, if you regard it as you are accustomed to regard the planetary body.

See what becomes of it on the other hand it you regard it as I shall now describe. Take all the empirical facts that are available and try to thread them on this line of thought. Imagine that in this direction (Fig. 6)—towards the Sun, as we may say—the comet comes into being at every moment. It is for ever coming into existence in this direction. It pushes towards its cometary nucleus, or what appears as such. Behind, it melts away again. In this way it thrusts forward—for ever coming into being on the one hand, passing away again upon the other. It is not a body in the same sense as a planet is,—not at all. It is perpetually coming into being and passing away again—renewed in front, accruing all the time in this direction; losing the old at its tail. It pushes forward like a mere effulgence, a mere phenomenon of light; but please, I do not say that that is all it is.

And now remember what we were saying a few days ago. There is not merely the Moon up there and the Earth here (Fig. 7), but every planet has a certain sphere, and what we see is only a point at the periphery of the said sphere. The true Moon is the sphere, bounded by the lunar orbit. We, with the Earth, are in the Lunar Sphere. So also, in a certain sense, are we in the Solar Sphere and in the spheres of all the planets. The planets are not merely what is out there, moving in lemniscates,—what is at yonder point or yonder at any given moment. The visible point is only a specialized part of the whole; it is, as I was saying, like the ares of germination in the germinal vesicle of the human embryo.

If you remember this, then you will say to yourselves: Here now I have the Earth and the Sun. In fact, two spheres are interpenetrating, thrusting into each other,—spheres which are really due to materialities of opposite tendency and kind. The one comes from the centre of the Sun, towards which negative matter is tending; the other from the centre of the Earth, from which positive matter is raying out. Positive and negative materialities are interpenetrating here. Naturally, the interpenetration will not everywhere be homogeneous. Not even clouds that move through one another would interpenetrate homogeneously. It is essentially inhomogeneous. Imagine how, in this mutual penetration, the different densities will impinge on one another. Then, in the penetration of the one substantiality by the other you have the requisite conditions for such phenomena as comets to arise. Comets are ever-nascent phenomena, perpetually coming into being, passing away again; and if we draw our ideal picture of a planetary system, say the Copernican picture, with the Sun here and Uranus and Saturn here (Fig. 8), we have not to imagine that the comet is arriving there from some great distance and then making its departure. Out there—outside the system—we need not imagine it to exist at all, It is not there to begin with, but becomes; then, at the perihelion, changes the gesture of its form, which is in fact ever-becoming, ever-nascent. Out there at last it melts away again and is no more, The comet comes into being and passes away; that is its very nature. Hence it can sometimes have apparent paths that are not closed at all—parabolic paths or hyperbolic,—for there is nothing moving round such as would have to move in a closed path. All that there is comes into being, and may well do so in a parabolic direction and then vanish and be no more.

Altogether, we must look upon the comet as a fleeting thing. In relation to Sun and Earth, it is a phenomenon of compensation between ponderable and imponderable matter,—a meeting of the two kinds of matter, which do not immediately balance-out as when light extends in air. For in the latter instance too, there is a meeting of the ponderable and the imponderable; here however they spread continuously, homogeneously as it were,—do not impinge on one another. Take for example air, with light of a certain intensity passing through it. The light spreads homogeneously; but if so be the light does not adapt itself to the air quickly enough, a kind of inner friction will ensue between the ponderable and imponderable matter; only I beg you not to understand this in a mechanical sense but as an inward process (Fig. 9). Follow the comet in its movement. It is a mutual friction of ponderable and imponderable matter that moves on through space. It comes into being at every moment and passes away again.

What I have tried to give you in these studies, my dear friends, was meant to bear on scientific method above all. Although the shortness of time has obliged me to deal with some of these things in bare outline, scarcely more than hinting at them, yet if you follow up the thoughts and indications of these lectures you will see that this is what I have been pointing to: It is a transmutation of method, in the whole way of scientific thinking and research. It would be most important for such lectures to become a starting-point for real work. I can only give general directions, as it were; and yet again and again, where we may only seem to have been working with mathematical curves and the like, you will find inspiration for empirical research and experiment. On every hand, both in the coarser and in the finer aspects, you may attempt to verify what has here been presented in seemingly mathematical and geometrical guise. You may take one of those blue or red toy balloons and examine the effect when you forcibly indent it from without inward, where the indentation will of course follow certain laws. See then what form is taken by the same type or phenomenon when in another experiment you make the forces work from within outward radially. Whether, I say, you are examining only this crude phenomenon of stress and deformation or whether you follow the lines along which the heating effect will spread when you heat certain substances—from within outward in one case, from the periphery inward in another,—or again whether you try your hand it optical, magnetic or other phenomena, in every instance you will find that what has here been said about the contrast of Sun and Earth (to mention only this example) can be detected experimentally.

Above all, if such experiments are carried out, you will begin to penetrate the realities quite differently than has been done before. For you will meet with conditions, factual distributions, which have not hitherto been met with, or have been overlooked. From the realms of light and heat and so on, quite other effects will be derivable than hitherto, for the simple reason that the phenomena have not yet been approached in such a way as to become fully manifest.

Such, my dear Friends, are the developments which I would like to have suggested to you. May-be in future lectures, before very long, we can continue and make actual experiments. It will depend on how our physical and other laboratories prosper,—whether you will have reached experimental methods or real value for the future. Let us not pursue the ideal of equipping our new laboratories with the most costly and perfect apparatus from the scientific instrument makers and then experimenting in the same way as other people do. For on these lines they have done splendid work on every hand. What we must do, as I said before, is to devise new kinds of experiment. We should begin therefore, not with a fully equipped Physics Laboratory, but as far as may be with an empty room, which we go into with the thoughts of a new Physics growing in our minds and souls, not with the usual instruments all ready-made. The emptier our laboratories and the fuller our own heads, the better experimenters we shall grow to be in course of time, my dear Friends.

This is what matters most in the present connection, and in this sense we must do justice to the tasks of our time. Think only of the fetters that are cast around you in the different experimental sciences in the normal course of study nowadays; you had no opportunity to see or to set out the phenomena in any other form than was provided for by the accustomed apparatus. With these instruments, how can you expect to study the spectrum in Goethe's sense? You can not possibly. Given these instruments, nothing else can emerge than what you read of in your text books. You cannot even see why we reject the artificial insertion of “light-rays” in the interpretation of the phenomena of light, where in fact, there are no rays at all. We say to ourselves: There is a vessel filled with water (Fig. 10); on the bottom of it lies a coin. The coin seems to be at a different place. We hardly begin to think of this phenomenon, and we have already drawn our diagram with the normal and sundry other lines and rays (Fig. 10). We follow the whole process with such lines, where from the very outset we ought not to be pursuing such an isolated thing at all. Nowhere in reality are we confronted with such isolated things. If this (Fig. 11) is the bottom of the vessel and a coin is lying here, we only begin to see how the coin is to be treated when we think as follows. Imagine on the bottom of the vessel, not an isolated coin, but a circle, for example, made of paper (as in Fig. 12). The phenomenon is, that when seen through a surface of water the paper circle appears lifted and enlargerd. That is the pure phenomenon,—that you can draw. If then at the bottom of the vessel you have not the whole circle but only a little bit of it, you have no right to treat it differently. The coin in effect is like a little fragment of the paper circle. You have not to draw all manner of lines into the picture but to treat it as a portion of the circle, nay of the bottom of the vessel as a whole,—of what is there all the time even if not made visible by differentiation. The mere fact that I have made one point visible at the bottom of the vessel does not justify me theoretically, in treating this visible point as a point by itself. It has not the significance of a point, but only of a part of the larger circle (Fig. 13).

Likewise a magnet-needle: In its reality I may not treat it as though there were a centre here, and here a north pole and a south pole; but I must realize that purely and simply by virtue of this arrangement the whole of it is one unlimited line, with forces working peripherally on the one hand and centrically on the other (Fig. 14). In the electrical phenomena this finds expression in that we set the cathode on the one hand, the anode on the other. On the one hand we can only explain the luminous phenomenon by regarding it at a portion of a sphere, the radius of which is given by the direction in which the electricity is working; whereas the other pole is given as a tiny portion of the radius itself. It Is not justifiable to speak of a simple polarity of poles. We should speak in quite another way. Namely, wherever anode and cathode make their appearance, this will belong to an entire system; purely and simply by virtue of the simple arrangement it belongs to an entire system. Only by speaking in this way shall we attain true understanding of the phenomena.

Now, my dear Friends, I have been reading through the written questions; but I believe, if those concerned will reflect a little, they will find the necessary elements of an answer to their questions in what I have set forth. They should but try, in every case, to find the way from what I have been saying to their several questions. We shall advance in this bit by bit. Only one question I should like to deal with briefly. It is as follows:—

“In representing a Science of this kind to the outer world the question may easily arise, to what extent the higher powers of cognition—Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition—are needed for the discovery of these relations between phenomenon. What will be the answer to this question?”

Well, my dear Friends, and if it were the fact that Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are needed for the discovery of certain things? How then are we to do without Imagination,Inspiration and Intuition, if the fact is that ordinary, “objective”, intellectual cognition will not reveal the truth and the reality? What else are you to do than to proceed to higher 'modes of knowledge—Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition? That there is still this possibility—If it is really so that one is quite reluctant to advance to higher modes of knowledge—there is the possibility of simply taking the results of such research and testing them by what is found in the field of external empirical fact. One will always find them verified, of that you may be sure.

Yet in our time these things are not so remote as is commonly supposed. If only the path were really taken, from the ordinary analytical treatment of mathematics to the projective treatment—to a projective form of mathematics and beyond it—if one would cultivate and pay more heed to the idea from which I took my start some days ago, speaking or curves for which one has to go right out of space, one would not find it so very difficult to press forward to Imagination. It is indeed simply a question of inner courage—courage of soul. Today you need this inner courage of the soul for scientific work. Hence it is needful to maintain, for it is true: to the ordinary forms of observation and reflection the full reality will not reveal itself. But if one does not shrink from developing the latent forces of the human soul, depths of reality which would otherwise remain concealed will become ever more unveiled.

This I would like to have said to you in conclusion. For the rest, I would express the wish that all these things, which I can only claim to have imparted by way of stimulus and suggestion and in the barest outline, may stimulate you to research, experimental above all. For this is what we need. We need empirical verification of these truths, which must be taken hold of to begin with in the way we have been doing here. Sooner or later we must get beyond the old foundations of judgment, which have so long been responsible for such conditions as in the instance I shall now relate. I say again, we must get beyond them.

I was speaking to a Professor of Physics about Goethe's Theory of Color. The man has even published an edition of it, with his own commentary. When we had been discussing Goethe's Theory of Color for some time the man declared himself a strict Newtonian. He said, it is in fact impossible for any man to get a clear conception or Goethe's Theory of Color; no physicist can set a clear idea of what it means. You see, his education as a physicist had brought him to this point; he could get no real notion of Goethe's Theory of Color. I for my part could understand it. The modern physicist if he is candid, will have to admit that he cannot. He must first transcend the accepted foundations of present-day physical thinking; he must somehow be able to get away from these old foundations. If he succeeds in this, then he will find the way—for it can be found—from the actual phenomena to that interpretation which is contained in Goethe's Theory of Color and which can also provide an important starting-point for other physical researches, extending even to Astronomy.

Consider without bias the warmth-region of the spectrum and the chemical region of the spectrum, their quite different behavior towards a number of reagents. Even in the spectrum you will detect the contrast I have been describing—the contrast of terrestrial effects and solar. In the spectrum itself we have a picture of the contrast of Earth end Sun,—the same contrast which finds expression in the whole bodily organization of man. Every time you touch another body, perceiving it with your sensation of touch, Sun and Earth are at work. So too, in the spectrum, Sun and Earth are at work. Taking it as the solar spectrum you cannot truly think of it as being put into space just arbitrarily here or there. You must be clear that it is always in the real space—the space that is between Sun and Earth.

Indeed you never have to do with space in the abstract where real phenomena are concerned, for the real things are always there and have to be included. If you do not bear this in mind, you will at last be explaining the origin of the celestial system on the good old pattern—a little drop of oil floating in water, bearing a disk of paper with a pin stuck through it as a pivot, which you begin to turn. The drop of oil gets flattened and little drops detach themselves. A planetary system has arisen: You explain it to your audience: “You see, it is a planetary system”. You compare it with the solar system in the Universe outside—the Copernican conception,—it is the very same! Well and good. Yet you must not forget: There were you the teacher, turning the pin, and therefore—not to be untrue—you should also add the demon giant in the universe outside, turning the cosmic axis, for only so can there arise what you have been alleging. You have no right to use this illustration if you do not include the giant demon. In scientific explanation too, we need to be more scrupulous and careful.

Upon these inner and methodical conditions above all, I have been wanting to lay stress in the present lectures. Next time then we will speak again from other points of view, of certain realms of Science.

The spiritual science that underlies this course in anthroposophy, must fight for its validity in the truest sense of the word. This can seem strange to one who has become familiar with the motivating forces of this anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science, for it stands solidly on a common ground with scientific and other cultural demands of our time. It deals with all that is necessary and basic for spiritual life in these times.

One can see, however, that spiritual science must fight, if one takes into consideration the many prejudices that exist at present. Spiritual science is in some ways a natural adversary of certain reactionary forces that remain and can be observed in the souls of human beings of our time.

In these lectures it will be my task to present to you in a direct and scientific manner the significance of what we understand here as spiritual science. I will gradually proceed from relatively elementary things to a real knowledge of man from the point of view of this anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. I will take pains to introduce some chapters and some special questions by speaking of the methodology, and by the choice of special examples indicate their significance.

Today in this first lecture I would like to point out how present-day scientific thinking has increasingly come to rely on the experiment for its main support. In this regard present-day scientific thinking stands in a certain polarity to older kinds of knowledge acquisition, especially to those which start from simply observing nature and the world as it presents itself.

One can start by observing the established facts of nature and the world, or—as we often do today—by first creating the conditions of an event and then, with the knowledge of these conditions, observing a fact and being led by this to certain scientific results. Along with this methodology, one can see the tendency of this newer scientific thinking to observe the entire field of natural science through mathematics, and with these mathematical thoughts, arrive at mathematical results. You all know the saying by Kant: In every individual science there is only so much real knowledge as there is mathematics.

It is thought that in observation, as well as in experimentation, mathematics must be introduced. Through this, one feels oneself in a secure element, one feels in a position to have an overview of a series of facts with the use of mathematical formulas. This is a totally different relationship to knowledge than when such facts are simply described in their natural state. This feeling of certainty which one has in treating knowledge mathematically, has been characteristic of scientific thinking for a long time. One cannot say we have today a really clear idea of the reasons why one feels so certain and safe with the mathematical handling of the natural world. A clear knowledge of the feeling of certainty accompanying the use of mathematics will lead us to acknowledge the necessity that a spiritual science must come about with an equivalent degree of certainty.

This spiritual science does not have to beg for acceptance from natural science or any other special field. This spiritual science will conform in every discipline to the scientific conscientiousness of modern times; it will, in addition, oppose all that is brought forward by modern science that is suspect, and it will answer questions that often go unanswered. Spiritual science will be on a very sure mathematical foundation.

I only have to ask a very simple question for you to see that this feeling of certainty derived from the mathematical treatment of certain subjects leads quickly to uncertainty. What would we do with a science like history if in every science there were only so much real knowledge as there is mathematics? How shall we understand and get the facts straight in matters of the human soul if we have to struggle to understand what modern psychology, by the use of mathematics, has developed in order also to secure certainty of understanding? One must come to recognize that in this field it is not possible to introduce mathematics into actual knowledge.

One of the first questions that must occupy us is this: What is the significance of this mathematical certainty in the context of human cognition? It is in approaching an answer to this question that we will be led to the justification for spiritual-scientific investigation. I have also said that the newer science prefers the experiment, where one knows the conditions of a process exactly, to outer observation where the determining conditions are more hidden; even in the case of psychology and also the field of education, attempts are made to go over from mere observation to experiment. In saying this, I must emphasize that spiritual science has nothing against the correct use of experimentation in psychology and education. The point I wish to call attention to is this: What draws the scientists in these fields to obtain knowledge by the use of experiment? In these areas we can actually find reasons for the inclination toward the use of experimentation. Let us therefore explore the transition to experimentation in the fields of psychology and education.

We can see how until recently investigators in psychology and education have carefully observed the details of the daily life of man, be it fully mature men and women or the transitional developmental life. We might ask: What is fundamentally necessary for an observation of the soul life of the grownup or the developing child? It is to acquire a certain inner relationship to what one observes. Try to put yourselves into the observational methods of olden times, in the fields of psychology and education. You will find that the inner relationship that once existed between human beings has diminished in recent times. We are not so intimately connected in an objective way with the soul life of another human being as was the case in the past. We are no longer aware when our own soul vibrates in sympathetic reverberation with what lives in the soul of another. We are more removed from the objective soul life of the other; formerly it could be directly observed. We are becoming more and more estranged from any really intimate contact with the soul of the other, where in a directly intuitive way one takes part with one's own inner nature in the inner nature of the other soul. Now an effort is made to approach the human soul from the outside through the use of instruments. There is an effort to explore the human soul through the use of apparatus in an external way. This effort is in the character of our time and must be acknowledged as being partially justified. If one has become estranged from a direct perception of the inner activity, then one must accept the outer expression of the inner activity, and at the same time be content with the outer use of experimentation.

It is especially true that when we are estranged from the spirit and soul elements of our fellow man, and yet our experiments are the material expression of this soul-spiritual element, these experiments must be explained in a spiritual sense. They should be wrought throughout with the results of spiritual research. I do not want to speak against experiments as such, but there is a need (I will speak today only in an introductory way) to illuminate the results of these experiments spiritually from within. To explain this properly, I will give you the following example.

Investigations have established that the rate of growth differs between boys and girls. In the development of a boy, it has been shown that in certain phases he grows more slowly, while in the same time period the girl grows faster. One can take notice of these facts even if one only looks at the outer expression of the soul life. But to explain such facts one must know how the soul motivates the growing process, how the soul of the boy is inwardly different, and how the force of the soul expresses itself in different phases of life. Then one will be able to see how the difference of growth rates between boys and girls permits a comprehension of what goes on in the soul of a boy and what goes on in the soul of a girl. It is just here that one can know that a human being who develops very rapidly during the period of 14 to 17 years, develops different forces than those of a human being who grows rapidly in a somewhat earlier period of life.

Especially in our age, in which there is real proficiency in the handling of facts in an outer experimental way, especially now if we are not to be drawn into superficiality, into externalities, what is investigated experimentally must be permeated with the results of spiritual research. This consciousness is opposed to the more mathematical type of consciousness that gives the researcher such a feeling of extraordinary sureness. If one wishes to examine the different ways of research, one might ask oneself the question: How does one actually know things mathematically when one applies mathematics to the facts of the outer sense-accessible world? And what distinguishes this mathematical approach from other modes of dealing with the facts given to us?

Let us start with the fact that the outer objects and events of the world are given to man through his senses. From childhood on, the outer factual world presents itself to us as a kind of chaos. But as time passes we strengthen ourselves inwardly with all kinds of mental images and concepts. (I have set this forth in detail in my booklet Truth and Science.) Through the process of making mental pictures of the outwardly perceived world, we take what may lie far apart in observation and we bring the mental pictures of these observations close together within us. Through this activity we thus create, in our mental life, a certain order in what otherwise is chaotic in the purely sense-perceptible.

We must, however, look very exactly at how we treat the perceptual facts of the world when we do not use our mathematical knowledge. We might ask what happens when we simply observe the outer world and make mental pictures about the connections between the observable facts—for instance, when we use the familiar law of cause and effect. We must acquire some thoughts about what we are doing when we simply observe the facts of the outer world. What do we really do when we bring order into the sense-perceptible chaos? It appears to me that in relation to this question David Hume has spoken quite correctly; however, his fault lies in that he has taken to apply to the universal field of human cognition what is meant only for this particular field, namely, the “observation of outer nature free of mathematics.”

Most errors and one-sidednesses are based an the application of very correct thinking in one field to the totality of human cognition. This makes it so difficult to take the assertions considered to be universally true. Arguments can be raised for the universal truth being applicable to specific areas, and arguments can also be raised for the opposite point of view. David Hume says: We observe the outer world and we arrange it in a lawful way through our own mental pictures. However, what we then have in our soul as law is not directly representative of something in the objective world. We cannot say that the outer world is always going to follow the course predicted by such a law. We can only say, according to David Hume, that until today we have been able to see the sun rise every morning. That is a statement that fits the facts. We can put these facts into the form of a general law. But in doing so we have no guarantee that we have anything other than a series of events that have happened in the past, of which we made a comprehensive mental picture. What is it really in us that brings about these lawful connections between the sense-perceptible occurrences? What kind of significance do these lawful connections have for the field which we are considering? Is David Hume correct when he says: It lies in the habit of our souls to gather together in a lawful manner the facts as they present themselves to us and, because we respond to this soul habit, we create for ourselves various natural laws? These natural laws are nothing else than what has been gathered together from individual facts through habit of our souls.

Thus one can say: Above all, man develops a practical life by bringing order and harmony into the otherwise chaotic stream of everyday facts; and the more one advances in this knowledge, in this special kind of knowledge, the more one inclines to this characteristic soul habit. This being the situation, one is not inclined to preserve individual phenomena as such; one wants to respond to the soul habit of bringing into uniformity what faces one as sense-perceptible, empirical manifoldness. If one is honest, one has to admit that all the knowledge obtained in this way stands as a closed door to the outer world in that it does not allow the essence of this outer world to enter our cognition. In this kind of cognition we must say: Out there are the material facts; we arrange them habitually into our system of mental pictures, and thus have a comprehensive view of them. We know when a series of facts have happened, that this series will happen a second time in a similar way when the same facts appear again before us. But as long as we remain in this field of knowledge, we cannot see through the outer appearances; we also, of course, do not claim to do so. When we want to present rash metaphysical hypotheses concerning matter, that it consists of this or that, we are attempting to change the state of affairs in which we do not deal with the material itself. We say to ourselves: We cannot see through matter to find out what it really is in its inner being, so what we are inclined to do is to arrange sequences of mental pictures and put these in the form of laws.

By doing so, we remain outside what appears as outer reality; we only create pictures of the external material happenings. Basically, we need this kind of knowledge to maintain our normal human consciousness, and to this end, we concern ourselves with these pictures. Try to think for a moment what it would mean for human consciousness if we were not able to give ourselves up to the kind of knowledge consisting only of pictures of the external world—if every time we wished to know something of the outer world, this world had to flow into us, as it does when we eat or drink, if it had to become part of our soul's apprehension before we could know anything. Just imagine how incompatible such a uniting of the material existence and our inner life would be with what our soul-constitution must be in acquiring knowledge of the outer world! We are in the position where we must tell ourselves: In our activity of knowing, nothing flows into our soul life from the outer world; we form pictures of what we experience in the outer world and these pictures really have nothing to do with the outer world.

Permit me to make an analogy out of the field of art to explain what I have been saying. Suppose I am painting something. The outer world is completely unconcerned about anything I might paint on a canvas. Take, for example, a couple of trees we see out there of which, let's say, I have painted a likeness on a canvas: the trees are completely indifferent as to how I have painted them, or if I do paint them. My picture is added to what is out there as something foreign, something that has nothing directly to do with that outer reality. In the field of theoretical and psychological knowledge it is basically the same as I have just described with the example of painting. If we were not separated from the world as just described, and were to take the content of the world into our soul in a way similar to when we eat or drink, our soul would grow together with, be one with, the world around us, and we would be unable to distinguish ourselves from our surroundings.

We will take up the subject of human freedom at a later time and show that it can only be understood if the way of knowing the material world is as I have characterized it.

This, however, is not so when I know something mathematically. Let's start by imagining how you know something of a mathematical nature, whether it is in the field of arithmetic, algebra, higher mathematics, or in the field of analytical or synthetic geometry. There we are not confronted by an outer world, we live directly and immediately in the objects of our mathematical knowledge. We form mathematical objects inwardly with all their interconnections and relationships, and when at times we sketch these forms, it is only for our own ease and comfort. What we refer to as mathematical is never some part of the outer world which we perceive with the senses, it is always something inwardly constructed. It is something that only lives in the part of our soul life that is not concerned with the senses as such. We build up, we inwardly construct, the mathematical content of our soul. There is a radical difference between the field of knowledge concerned with the empirical outer world presenting itself to the senses and that of the mathematical. In the external given world the objects of our knowledge remain strictly outside of us. In mathematical knowledge we stand with our whole soul within the objects of our knowledge, and what is observed as substance is the result of an experience in our soul of what we ourselves constructed.

Here we have a significant problem which forms, as it were, the first stage to what will be the next higher stage of considerations: How does one arrive at the anthroposophical spiritual science when starting from the familiar science of the present day? I don't believe anyone will be able to answer this question in a truly scientific way who cannot first answer the question: How is our knowledge of a purely observational kind raised to the kind of knowledge of nature that is permeated with mathematics?—how is this knowledge related to mathematical knowledge as such?

Now a further question arises which the scientist can answer himself, out of his own experience with scientific work. I have already mentioned what Kant called our attention to, that in every science there is only so much knowledge as there is mathematics contained in it. And, I repeat, this is a one-sidedness, because it is only applicable to a certain field. Kant's error lies in the fact that he takes a specialized truth and tries to make it into a universal law. We have a tendency not to want to leave the facts alone as they are presented to us, but rather to color them with what we have created as mathematical formula, so that we may measure and compare them.

What really lives in us when we strive in this direction, when we don't want to remain standing still, habitually combining the outer facts with general rules, when we permeate the given facts with what we have formulated in full consciousness mathematically as objects in our soul life? It is clear that anyone who has experience in the field of objective observation will admit that the whole of nature surrounding his own being is felt, in regard to its materiality, as something foreign. Please notice that, in a sense, we can submerge ourselves into what we feel as a foreign material element, with the help of what we have ourselves inwardly constructed as mathematical formulas. What we describe in a mathematical way actually seems as if what happens in nature has occurred according to the mathematical formula that we have constructed. What is at the basis of this perception? It is the fact that we desire above all else to become one with what we perceive at first as foreign surroundings. We group what is presented to us externally in order to be able to reconstruct it in the same way that we construct something in the purely mathematical realm. We strive to experience what presents itself to us externally in an inwardly exact manner.

This internalization of the outer world with the wish to experience exactness is what motivates a mathematical explanation of nature. This is especially characteristic of our present-day scientific efforts in the direction of technology. Today's science has an intense longing to penetrate outer occurrences with mathematical concepts. This means that we bring something we have created in our own soul out into what presents itself to us in raw perception. We do this so that we may understand what is perceived, but in doing so we can have the impression that the outer occurrence actually proceeds in the way we portray it mathematically. When we have gone so far that we have achieved this ideal, as we have in the field of optics and light theory, where every phenomenon is represented in terms of a formula, what really have we done? What really is the content of our soul when instead of plain external appearances a sum of mathematical formulas seem to present themselves? What does our soul receive from this? We look at this edifice, the world portrayed as mathematical relationships, and then we turn our gaze to the actual outer world and we find something strange. We find that all that we look at, all that we consider outer material world, appears inwardly dark until it is brightened by the introduction of mathematical concepts. But at the same time we cannot deny the fact that the picture we have created of the outer world no longer contains reality, no longer the reality which presented itself to us originally.

Take, for example, optical appearances, the whole field as it presents itself to our eyes; contrast this with what we have, to a certain extent, correctly constructed as mathematical geometric optics, full of rules. If one uses just a little objectivity, it is clear that in what is constructed as a mathematical picture there is nothing left of the abundance of color. Everything that our senses first offered us, namely, actual outer reality, has been pressed out of the picture. The picture of the outer world is in sharp contrast to what is really out there; it lacks reality, it lacks the tremendous abundance that actually exists in the world.

In the coming lectures I will be speaking of a comparison, that to begin with I would like you to consider as an analogy. When we permeate empirical facts with mathematics, our activity consists of two stages: First we must look at the empirical facts, let's say the facts of the eye. The second is the arrangement of these percepts into mathematical formulas. In a certain way, as a result of this we have essentially an experience of mathematical formulating. We no longer view the empirical world of phenomena. This process can be compared to our inhaling life-sustaining oxygen; we saturate our whole organism with it. The oxygen then combines with carbon and we exhale carbon dioxide, which is no longer the life-sustaining air. But the combined process was necessary for our inner life. We had to inhale the life-strengthening oxygen and combine it with something in us. What is produced in this way is something killing; we can contrast it with what was inhaled, which was life-sustaining.

For the time being, this should only be considered as a picture of the way in which we pursue the knowledge of nature. We take something into ourselves that is presented to the senses and try to unite it intimately with something we produce only in ourselves, with mathematical construction. We feel that something is created by this union. Nature is not contained in what we have created; the living quality is not there, just as the life force is no longer in the air we exhale. We can say that our perception of the outer world is like an inhaling by the soul of what then is changed into the opposite. If one looks closely at this process of striving for mathematical knowledge of nature, it is proof of the fact that mathematical knowledge is something completely different from the merely perceptual knowledge of nature. This mere perceptual knowledge of nature contrasts with the habitual state of our soul, which consists of a feeling of competence derived from the use of inwardly formed mathematical knowledge. This state of soul wishes to have something that will explain the outer world in accordance with our own being, to unite something inner with something outer.

When one realizes how the longing for mathematical explanations of nature are based on this soul habit of longing to take inner possession of the outer world, then it will also be clear that what one attains by this is completely different from the content of sense experience. One goes more deeply into human inner life with mathematical knowledge. One believes that one gets correspondingly closer to the outer world through an inner representation of the nature of the outer world. One has an inner experience of what has been changed into mathematical formulas; at the same time, one has basically lost the fullness of the outer world. One must, however, be conscious of the fact that what the outer world has given has been connected with something constructed purely inwardly.

One must really experience what goes on in one's soul when one makes mathematical formulas; one must experience this correctly. One must see that a mathematical formula actually is constructed within us. One must realize that this inner human construction has been achieved apart from the outer world, and yet in a sense it has brought one closer to the outer world. Even so, this inner mathematical construction cannot be regarded as inner reality as compared to what we find in the outer world. If this were not true, we would have the feeling that this mathematical construction contained true reality instead of a bland version of the outer world which it does actually present to us. Think what the situation would be if in our spiritual contemplation of a mathematical construction we had the whole content of the eyes' original experience in all its color intensity. If this were the case, we would experience in the formula itself the lighting up, the intensity of colors, when considering the wave theory, or “interference phenomena,” in mathematical form. This we certainly do not see. The fact that we do not see this proves that with our mathematical formulas we penetrate only to some degree into the outer world. We do come closer to it, but at the same time we no longer have the full reality of it.

We have shown a progression from an ordinary sense-based knowledge to a knowledge of inner mathematical construction. The question then arises: Can this progression be continued further in human soul life? First, we have an outer world before us; then we confront it in such a way that the laws which we create, based on observation, are entirely different from it in form. We go through this and we can do so because we become inwardly separated from the outer world. We are inwardly completely separated from the outer world while experiencing these mathematical formulas. We do gain a certain penetration through these mathematical formulas, but it is obvious that they are not filled with reality or we would see the whole outer reality recreated in the formulas.

When we take a closer look we see that not only are they not real in themselves but in fact they have the effect of destroying reality. The question now arises: would it be possible to strengthen our capacity to make these inner mathematical constructions by which we then penetrate the sense-perceptible world? Is it possible that what is first experienced mathematically as pale abstractions can be made stronger? In other words, could the force which we have to use to attain a mathematical knowledge of nature be used more effectively?—with the result not just a mathematical abstraction, but something inwardly, spiritually concrete? In that case, we would not just see a re-created version of the outer world or an abstract mathematical picture, but we would have something formed in an entirely different manner. We would have gained something with the full character of reality, but obtained similarly to the way we obtain mathematical pictures. We would then have before us spiritually a reality that shines out toward us in the same way that the outer sense-perceptible world streams toward us. But we would have this from pictures filled with reality, not from mathematically abstract pictures. We would have lifted ourselves, through strengthening our mathematical capacity, to a higher level, and in doing so we would reveal more of our own inner reality. This we can see as a third step in our attainment of knowledge. The first step would be the familiar grasping of the real outer world. The second step would be the mathematical penetration of the outer world, after we have first learned inwardly to construct the purely mathematical aspect. The third would be the entirely inner experience, like the mathematical experience but with the character of spiritual reality.

So we have before us: The ordinary outer empirical knowledge of nature, then mathematical knowledge, and finally, spiritual knowledge. We have, as the last step, through an inwardly creative activity, spiritual worlds before us .

As preparation for viewing these worlds as real, we start by creating mathematical, pictorially-abstract elements. We use this mathematics in relation to the outer world, but if we are honest we must say: What we construct mathematically is still not a reality in itself; it does not bring reality up out of the depths of our souls, rather it is a picture of reality. In spiritual science we gain the ability to bring out of the depths of our souls what is not just a picture of the outer existence, but reality itself, true reality.

The three levels of human knowledge are: Knowledge of physical nature, mathematical knowledge, and spiritual knowledge. This is not just taking spiritual science out of thin air with the purpose of constructing a spiritual science method; rather, it arises naturally. Starting from merely empirical research we come to a mathematical approach, and the continuation of this leads us to study an anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science.

This, my dear friends, is what I wanted to say today as an introduction to this course of lectures. I wanted to show you that this anthroposophical spiritual science knows where its place is in the whole system of sciences. It is not born out of some kind of subjective caprice, some kind of dilettantism; it is born out of an exact theory of knowledge. It is born out of the knowledge that must be used even to understand the correct use of mathematics. It was not for nothing that Plato demanded of his pupils that they must first of all have a good grounding in the knowledge of geometry and mathematics. Plato did not require an arithmetical or geometric knowledge of some particular kind, but rather a sound understanding of what really happens in a man when he does mathematics or geometry. This is based an a seemingly paradoxical but deeply meaningful saying of Plato: “God geometrizes.” He did not mean by this that God just created with mathematics, or with five- or six-sided figures; rather, He creates with the force of which we can only make pictures to ourselves, in our mathematical abstract thinking. Therefore I believe that he who understands the place of mathematics in the whole field of the sciences, will also understand the correct place of spiritual science. Spiritual science will battle for its right to exist, no matter what adversaries it may have, for it builds on an exact foundation thoroughly in accord with historical necessity. Therefore I can say: We welcome any and all opponents who will seriously enter into what spiritual science has to say; we welcome any serious dialogue. Spiritual science has no fear of opposition because it is well supplied with all the scientific weapons of ordinary science and it knows how to use them. It would only not like to be continuously interrupted by those who don't understand it, due to their dilettantism and uninformed opinions. Spiritual science as we mean it here is actually a necessity for the other special sciences. The borders of these other special sciences must be crossed over with the help of spiritual science. We must inwardly resolve at least to confront those who, without reason, oppose this spiritual science, and sometimes even be a bit rude with them. There is a fundamental need for humanity to adopt this spiritual science as quickly as possible, and in all seriousness. This can really happen if only we bring good will to the understanding of it.

I pointed out yesterday in my introductory lecture that we can observe a transition from the ordinary knowledge of the world around us to mathematical knowledge, and that this is the beginning of a path of knowledge. This path when continued will lead to an understanding of the spiritual scientific method, as we mean it here, and ultimately to acceptance of it. It will be my special effort in these lectures to characterize the spiritual scientific method in such a way as to completely justify it. To accomplish this task will take the remaining seven lectures.

Today, once again, I would like to consider in greater depth the first stage. I would like to place before you today something which as normal scientific thinking appears here and there in fragments. As these fragments are not always found in the same place and are not seen as a whole, we have the situation that it is not possible to rise in a methodical way from a science that is free of mathematics to one that includes it. We will also have difficultly following in an entirely methodical way the transition from a mathematical penetration of the objective world to a spiritual-scientific penetration into reality. I shall also, as I have already mentioned, try to reach this last phase in a methodical way. We will start today by observing the human being as he experiences himself when he looks at the outer world.

You will know from my lectures, also my book Riddles of the Soul,¹ that one cannot reach a comprehensive observation of man without splitting the entire human organization into three distinctly different members. Naturally we have eventually to deal with the complete human being. This complete man is however a most complicated organism and its members have a certain independence. Finally we will see how what is contained independently in these members combines into a whole.

First we have to look at what I have named in Riddles of the Soul as the nerve-sense man: The member of the human organism that has its primary expression in the head, although from there it extends over the entire organism. Despite this extension we can clearly differentiate this member from the rest of the organism. This physical member is the mediator of our conceptual life. As human beings we make mental pictures and we are able to take the life of these mental pictures to ourselves through our sense organs. From the senses it flows toward our inner organism.

The way we are connected with our life of feeling is similar to the way our mental pictures are related to our nervous system. The present-day psychological approach to these things is quite inexact. Our feeling life is not directly connected to our nerve-sense system, only indirectly. It is directly connected to what we call the rhythmic system in the human organism, consisting mainly of breathing, pulse, and blood circulation. The mistaken idea that the life of feeling, as part of the soul life, is directly connected to our nervous system originates from the fact that what we experience as feeling is always accompanied by mental pictures. The physical expression of this is that the rhythmic system is connected throughout the organism with the nerve-sense system. The fact that our life of feeling is always accompanied by a mental picture of some kind is related organically to the fact that the rhythmic system works back onto the nervous system. This can give the appearance that the life of feeling is directly connected to the nerve-sense system. I have pointed out in Riddles of the Soul that if one studies what occurs in us when we listen to music, one can see the relationship correctly between feeling and the forming of mental pictures.

Besides these two systems, the nerve-sense system which provides the mental image, and the rhythmic System which mediates the life of feeling, we have the metabolic system. Every function of the human organism is contained in these three systems. The metabolic system is the expression of the will, and the real connection between willing and the human organism will become clear only if you study how a metabolic transformative action comes about in us when there is an act of will or even an impulse of will. Every metabolic activity is consciously or unconsciously the physical basis of some act of will or impulse of will. Our capacity for movement is also connected with our will activity and therefore is connected with some kind of metabolic activity. One must be clear about the fact that when we complete a movement in space, this is a primitive activity of the will. To use a saying of Goethe, the “ur-phenomenal” activity of the will can be seen as expressed by the physical transformations that occur in the organism. And, as in the case of feeling, the will activities are indirectly connected with the nerve-sense system through our following our will activities with mental pictures. So we can say, to start with, that our soul life and also our physical life can be divided in three ways organically as well as into three soul aspects.

Let us try today to look at man from a certain point of view so that we may see how these three members of our physical organism and our soul organization relate to one another. We must also go into some detail to achieve our task of showing that spiritual science is a continuation of the familiar scientific way of considering things. First of all, let us consider what I have named the nerve-sense organism. This nerve-sense organism is contained mainly in the head, as I have already mentioned, but from there it extends over the rest of the organism, in a certain way impregnating it. This is not obvious if one looks at just the outer form of a human being, but it does in fact extend inwardly through the whole organism. Take the sense of warmth as an example, which extends over the entire organism. This can be seen as a part of our nerve-sense organization that for the most part is concentrated in the head, in the life of the senses, and yet is extended over the whole organism, making the whole human being into a kind of head in regard to this particular sense of warmth.

For most people it is distasteful nowadays to try to understand this kind of problem. Because we have become so used to an outer way of considering things, the three members of the human organism are considered spatially, as separate from one another. There is a professor of anatomy who takes this view, who has asserted that anthroposophy separates the human organism spatially into head system, chest system, and abdominal system. This is clearly erroneous. It is of course not what we have said; we wish to approach these things precisely, not in dilettante fashion. One must know these things correctly, especially if one also wants to understand how three elements flow into one another and compose the threefold social organism.

To begin with it is empirically evident that it is the head organization that has most to do with cognition, at least mathematical cognition, as it approaches man in the outer world. In relation to this head organizatiion we can now empirically establish that what we can call “dimensionality” confronts us initially as a kind of intimation. You will see best what I mean if we consider the three modes of human activity.

The first of these I would like to call the total act of seeing, observation of the world with our own two eyes. Secondly, I would mention man's arms and hands. Even though they are attached to man's trunk and are therefore in a certain way connected with the metabolic system, they also have an inner relationship to the rhythmic system. Through their attachment near the rhythmic system, they are influenced by the life and functioning of this system. The fact that they are located beside the rhythmic system, which is more hidden, allows them to reveal the nature of what would normally be hidden. Please listen carefully; I repeat: The arms and hands, because of their specific location on the human body and through their life functions, can be seen as belonging to the rhythmic system. The most obvious demonstration of this connection is the way they are used freely in gestures to express feelings. When they are used in this way, they are lifted to a higher function than serving merely the body. In the case of animals, the corresponding members, the legs, are used only to serve the body, but in human beings the arms are freed for a higher function. Through the fact that they are used for gestures in connection with speech, they have the higher function of making the invisible aspects of speech visible.

The third mode is the activity of walking, an activity primarily of the limb system. Let us consider the activities of seeing, arm movement, and walking from a scientific point of view. In general, what you see with both eyes presents itself to you in two dimensions and these dimensions are independent of any mental activity. I can represent these two dimensions by these perpendicular coordinates. I will draw these as dotted lines for the purpose of later references I wish to make. With these dotted lines representing two dimensions, I want to express the fact that our mental activity of comprehension is not really involved when we look only at these two dimensions.

The third dimension is in sharp contrast to this. The third dimension of depth does not stand ready-made before our soul independent of any mental activity. It confronts us as something we undergo as an inner operation of the mind when we supplement what we normally see as the surface of things with the depth dimension and thus obtain a three-dimensional body. Roughly speaking, what we actually do in this case is not brought to consciousness. But when we enter into the activity more precisely, we see that one experiences the depth dimension in a different way from width and height dimensions. We can become aware, for instance, how we are able to guess how distant something is from us. In ordinary observation something is added to the mere observation of the eyes when we progress from a surface-picture consciousness to a full-bodied three-dimensional consciousness. So long as we remain within our consciousness, we cannot say how height perception and width perception are achieved. We simply have to accept the height and width dimensions; for the activity of seeing they are simply given. This is not true of the depth dimension. For this reason I will draw it in perspective; I will draw a solid line to represent the difference. In this third dimension of depth, we are able to have the act of perceiving enter our consciousness in a slightly conscious way. Thus we recognize when we examine the act of seeing, that the height and width dimensions are given to us purely in thought; that is, if we penetrate the act of seeing with our thoughts. The depth dimension, however, is based an an activation of consciousness, a kind of half-conscious mental operation. Therefore, what you may already have heard as the physiological and anatomical interpretation of the total act of seeing must be accepted only in reference to the physical components of the act of seeing, to that aspect which does not involve an operation of the mind; only the perception of surface can be attributed to the act of seeing. In contrast, when considering the depth dimension, it is not sufficient to merely consider the activity of the corpora quadrigemina, the organ in the human body upon which the visualizing activity of the eyes depends, the bodily aspect of seeing—here the cerebrum must serve a mediating function, the cerebrum being that part of the brain to which are attributed the anatomical-physiological aspects of the volitional operation of the intellect.

Thus we can grasp this depth dimension when we examine it carefully, using both analytical and synthetic means. The matter of depth perception belongs into the realm of what I would like to call “conscious activation through the human head.”

When we turn our attention from the act of seeing to that activity which may be seen externally through the movement of the arms and hands, we immerse ourselves in an element that is very difficult to grasp consciously. Even so, we can follow what takes place in our life of feeling when we gesture with our arms and hands, which are free for this kind of activity, and we can become aware of the way this action is related to depth perception with our two eyes. What is it really that depth perception mediates to us? It is the exact position of the left and the right eye. It is the convergence of the left axis and right axis of sight. The mental judgment of the distance of some object from us depends upon the distance at which the lines of sight cross each other. Very little of this convergence activity of the eyes lying at the basis of the judgment of depth is outwardly perceptible.

When we turn to the activity of our arms and hands, we find we are able to distinguish more exactly, with little effort of consciousness, what is happening inwardly when we move our arms in the horizontal plane, in the dimension of right-left, in the width dimension. If we look carefully, our judgment in relation to the width dimension is connected with the feeling we have when we consciously move our arms in a horizontal gesture expressing how wide something is. We have a feeling experience of what we call symmetry. This experience takes place particularly in the width dimension, through the feeling that is mediated to us through our left and right arm movements. Through the corresponding movements of our left and right arms we can actually feel our own symmetry. Our grasping in feeling of the width dimension is translated for us chiefly through the medium of symmetry into mental pictures, and we then also evaluate symmetry in our mental life. But we must not overlook the fact that this judging of the symmetry of the width dimension is something secondary: If we only looked at the symmetry without having the accompanying feelings that correspond to the symmetrical aspects of left and right, our experience would be pale, dry and wanting in its full reality. You can understand all that symmetry shows us if you can feel the symmetry. But you can really only feel the symmetry through the delicate process of becoming conscious of the fact that the movements of the left and right arms belong together, and in the same way the movements of the hands belong together. What we experience in feeling thus supports everything we can experience in relation to the width dimension.

But also what we have called the depth dimension in relation to the act of seeing enters our consciousness through something to be found in the activity of our arms. The way the axes of our vision intersect is similar to the way our arms can intersect. When our arms intersect, we have a certain equivalent to the act of seeing. When we cross our arms, first close to us and then farther away, if we follow the points of intersection we can get a sense of depth dimension by trying to experience what is going on in our arms. In these moments we don't experience the width dimension as fully as we do—with no effort on our part—in the act of seeing. But if I would represent symbolically what is expressed in relation to the dimensions by the arms and hands, I would have to sketch the width dimension and the depth dimension as full lines and the height dimension as a dotted line. That is all that I can experience through my arms. The height dimension remains unconscious to us when we make gestures, because we connect our gestures consciously with a surface which is made up of depth and width dimensions.

When does the third dimension show itself in a distinct, conscious way? Actually, it only appears to our consciousness in the act of walking. When we move from one place to another, then the line which is this third, vertical dimension changes continually, and although our consciousness of this third dimension while we walk is almost imperceptible, we must not overlook it. In fact, the half-conscious intellectual awareness we can experience is related to this height dimension.

Therefore, when we examine the act of seeing, which obviously belongs to the head organization, we realize that in the act of seeing there is given ready-made a two-dimensional activity, and in addition we must establish an activity that creates the third dimension—depth. In the action which we have described as representative of the rhythmic system, namely, the free movement of the arms and hands, we can have an inner experience of two spatial dimensions. The third spatial dimension—height—is given to our consciousness in the same way that width and breadth are given for the head organization in the act of seeing. Only in the metabolic-limb system (the connection between these two is only recognized when we study the metabolic activity in the act of walking) is everything open to our consciousness that gives us the full measure of three dimensions.

If you consider the following, you will have something extraordinarily important. The only content of our fully alert consciousness is the life of mental pictures. In contrast to this, our life of feeling does not come into our consciousness with the same clarity. As we shall see later, our feelings by themselves have no greater intensity in our consciousness than our dreams. Dreams are rendered from the clear content of daily life, from the fully alert life of mental pictures; in this way they become distinct mental pictures in our consciousness. In the same way, our feelings in daily life are continually accompanied by the mental pictures representing them during our waking hours. In this way our feelings, which otherwise only possess the intensity of dream life, are brought to the distinct, fully conscious life of mental pictures.

The will-movements remain completely in the subconscious. How do we know anything of the will? Basically, in our everyday consciousness we know nothing of the real nature of the will. This is made clear in the psychology of Theodor Ziehen, for instance, who in his Physiological Psychology speaks only of the life of mental pictures or the representational life of the mind. He says: As psychologists we can only follow the life of mental images, but we find certain mental images to be tinged with feeling. The fact that the life of feeling, as I explained to you just now, is bound up with the rhythmic system and only shines up into the life of mental pictures, this is unknown to Theodor Ziehen. In his view, feelings are only an aspect of the life of mental pictures. This psychologist simply has no insight into the actual organization of the human being, which I have now to describe to you.

Because feelings are bound up with the rhythmic system, they remain in the half-conscious realm of dreaming. And the will activity remains completely unconscious. That's the reason why the average psychologist does not write about it. Just read Theodor Ziehen's strange explanations concerning the activity of the will, and you will see that its real nature is completely missed by such psychologists.

When we observe the result of an act of will, this is only something we are able to look at externally. We do not know what has happened inwardly when a will impulse moves our arm. We only see the arm move; that is, we observe the outer happening afterward. Thus we accompany the manifestations of our will with mental images; they are mediated organically through the metabolic system and the limb system related to it. So it is only in part of the human organism, in the metabolic system—which is the bodily aspect of the soul's will activity—that we experience the reality of all three dimensions of space. In our ordinary process of knowing the reality of the three dimensions cannot be grasped. It cannot be grasped, as we will see, until we are able to look with the same clarity into our will activity as we normally do into our mental activity. It cannot come about in our ordinary way of knowing but only with spiritual-scientific knowledge. It is through the activation of the entire man, of the entire limb-and-metabolic system, that our subconscious experience of the three dimensions comes about. What happens is that what is contained in the metabolic-limb system is lifted into the rhythmic system. There it is experienced in its two-dimensional aspect, not in its total reality. When experienced in two dimensions, the height dimension has already become abstract. Only in the subconscious do we normally experience the height dimension.

You can see how reality becomes an abstraction in the human organization through the human activity itself. In the working of the human organization, the height or vertical dimension already becomes an abstraction, appearing as a mere line, a mere thought in the region of the rhythmic system. Following this up into the nerve-sense system, what occurs? Both height and width become abstraction. We can no longer experience them; they can only be thought by the intellect as we approach the subject afterward. So in the head, the region of our ordinary knowledge, we only have the possibility of expressing the two dimensions abstractly. It is only the depth dimension for which we still have a faint consciousness in the head. So you can see, it is only due to a delicate perception of the depth dimension that we are able to know anything at all in our normal consciousness of the spatial dimensions. Please now consider: With our present constitution, what if depth perception should become equally abstract? Then we would be left with just three abstract lines—and it would never even occur to us to search for the realities represented by those abstract lines.

In this way I have pointed you toward reality. In Kantianism this reality appears in an unreal form. Kantianism speaks of the three dimensions being contained a priori in the human organization, and of the human organization transposing its subjective experience out into space. How is it that Kant came to this one-sided view? He arrived at this because he did not know that what is brought into consciousness in the delicate experience of the depth dimension, and otherwise abstractly, is experienced in its reality in our subconscious. As it is pushed up into consciousness, it is made into an abstraction, with only a small remainder in the case of depth dimension. We experience the reality of the three dimensions through our individual human organization. The reality is present in actuality in the realm of the will, and physiologically in the metabolic-limb system. Initially in this system we are unconscious of reality in our ordinary mind, but we become conscious of it, at first in the thought abstractions of mathematical-geometrical space.

With this subject of the three dimensions I wished to give an example of the ways and means by which spiritual science can penetrate human activity. We don't have to remain on the abstract level—where, for example, Kant regards space and time as a priori—but we can progress to a discovery of the concrete aspects of the reality of the human being. I wanted to use this particular example of the actual meaning of space because it will be useful in the future in leading us to an exact understanding of the mathematical facts from all sides. We will speak further of this tomorrow.

• 1. See The Case for Anthroposophy, Anthroposophic Press.

In yesterday's lecture I tried to consider what the origin is, in the human being, of the mental images of the three dimensions. For the moment I would like to leave this subject alone. When trying to illuminate physical facts with spiritual-scientific reflections, it is best to view things from many sides and I wish to do this in these lectures. Today I want to add something to yesterday's view, in order to bring these separate considerations together. We will then raise the whole to the level of a spiritual-scientific point of view.

The objection is often heard that spiritual-scientific considerations interest only those who can relate to such ideas. In a certain way one may admit this, but only in a very narrow sense can one have such a feeling. The important question is whether or not it is possible for the results of spiritual-scientific investigation to be understood without special capacities of higher vision. It is precisely this question that I would like to answer in the affirmative. The results of spiritual-scientific investigation are indeed intelligible to a sound human understanding. The only essential element is an openness to what spiritual science has to say, justifying itself from various points of view.

One of the attempted refutations of spiritual science, which cannot really stand, is this: that the natural world around us, just as given to us in outer experience, can be explained completely out of itself and there is no possibility of rising from this self-explanatory condition to some more satisfactory explanation. From a certain point of view I would be the first to emphasize that the outer sense world is explicable in itself. On one occasion I tried to make this clear, using an admittedly trivial comparison. I said: when someone examines the mechanism of a clock, he has no need for explanation originating from the world outside the clock if his desire is only to understand the mechanism itself. The clock is from a certain point of view explicable in itself. But of course this does not prevent us from wishing for complete clarity from some other point of view, such as knowledge about the clockmaker and other such things. Naturally these other aspects are outside the mechanism of the clock. Some things cannot be learnt so quickly as is sometimes thought—and for this reason: if one wishes to judge the real inner nature of spiritual-scientific investigation, it is necessary to venture into specifics. One must be willing to observe the way this science actually obtains results originating in the super-sensible realm and applies them in the field of ordinary sensory observation. I would like to speak to you today an this very subject.

It must first become clear that real investigation in the field of spiritual science leads to a different kind of knowledge—I might also say a different condition of soul in relation to reality—than is normally present in everyday life, or in ordinary scientific life. The first level of this super-sensible knowledge I have named the imaginative level. Later I will describe the way in which this imaginative level of knowledge is reached through certain work performed in the soul. Today I would like to develop an understanding of what this imaginative level of cognition actually is. For this we must return to an earlier explanation of the nature of mathematical thinking.

I attempted to characterize the difference in consciousness between an absorption in something which the external sense world presents to us, which we then penetrate with our intellectual activity (and of course with feeling and will impulses also), and on the other hand the absorption in mathematical thought. We can see that what takes place in the soul in the observation of the sense world is—if expressed purely externally—a kind of interaction, an immediate interaction between the human being and some form or other of the outer world. Please take what I am saying quite literally. It is not my intention to put forward some hypothesis—to speak of some reality hidden behind the phenomena. For the moment I wish only to indicate what is there as content of our completely ordinary consciousness when we confront the world on this level of knowing. There would be absolutely no meaning to this ordinary type of knowledge if we did not assume an immediate relationship to some sort of external world.

In contrast to this, in mathematical thought, in the activity of pure mathematical thinking, things are different. The difference is there when we dwell in geometrical, arithmetical, or algebraic regions without any concern for external, concrete sense content. What we bring to inner clarity in this domain, whether it is in some elementary area such as the Pythagorean theorem or in some advanced theory of functions, is something that lives entirely within the creative activity of the soul. What is experienced is the continuity of the activity and the visualization of one's own activity.

This “high” mathematical thinking—if I may call it that—which takes place entirely within the soul, is then found in today's mathematically-oriented science being applied to the outer world. What had been a process of inner work experienced purely inwardly, is then applied to our outer sense world. This should indicate that our mathematics can be characterized as purely pictorial. One can say: what we experience mathematically has as such no content, it has none of the content that we observe in our natural surroundings. In this regard, mathematical thinking is devoid of content, it is mere image. Yesterday, when we spoke of the spatial dimensions, I showed how what mathematical thinking only makes images of, is actually real and full of content; but mathematical thinking itself is merely imagery. If this were not so, we could not apply it as we do today to natural science. If this thinking were not just something pictorial, some reality would have to merge into the act of cognition. And the fact that something real does not merge with the act of cognition becomes conscious experience for us if we really enact this act of cognition.

As we recognize the pictorial character of mathematical thought, we can realize that we experience these mathematical pictures vividly as a content of consciousness. In fact, we are able to experience this content so vividly just because we see that certain things are hidden there which we must assume to exist from the evidence of our senses, in contrast to what we experience as the mathematical thinking itself.

In mathematical thinking we are right inside what actually takes place; we can say that we are entirely bound up with what takes place. This, along with the pictorial character of mathematical activity, permits us to have a clear consciousness of what we are actually experiencing. That is why we really know that when we work in mathematics we are in a realm where certainties of knowledge hold sway. Someone may have noticed the difference in the experience one has studying external sense realities or if one is active in the field of pure mathematics.

Most important is the fact that in the process of mathematical thinking, one is assured of continually following everything one does with full, clear consciousness. I believe I am not exaggerating when I say that clarity of consciousness can be measured against mathematical thought, its highest standard. In fact, when we engage in mathematical thinking, there is no possibility to doubt that each single manipulation we perform is accompanied by our inner conscious activity—for each is inwardly visible. We have ourselves in complete control, so to speak, when we think mathematically.

And, dear friends, the condition of consciousness present in mathematical thinking is in fact what a person strives for who strives toward what I call imaginative knowledge. When we think mathematically, what is really the content of our soul? It is the numerical world, the spatial world, and so on. I will speak of this later. Thus we have in our soul the content of a particular field with a certain pictorial representation. To work in a similar condition of soul but toward another pictorial content, is what constitutes the development of imaginative cognition. And this brings me to the following.

When we apply mathematics to outer nature (at first we can hardly do otherwise if we are accustomed to this approach), we apply it to only one part of nature, which we call the mineral world. In the mineral world we are presented with something that in a certain way is fully suited to a pure mathematical approach. But the moment we rise from the merely mineral to the plant or other kingdoms of nature, then the mathematical approach to which we are accustomed is of no use to us. A person who strives to rise to the imaginative level of knowledge desires to gain something more in his soul life than geometrical constructs or numerical relationships. He would like to gain forms that will live in his soul in exactly the same way as these mathematical forms, but which go beyond the mathematical in their content. He would like to gain forms that he can apply in the same way to the plant kingdom as he applies purely mathematical forms to the mineral kingdom. I will speak later concerning exact methods which lead in the direction of imaginative forms. Our first concern must be that everything that leads to an imaginative level of knowledge shall take place in a condition of soul that is absolutely equivalent to mathematical cognition. Actually, the best preparation for the development of imaginative cognition is to have dealt as much as possible with mathematics—not so much in order to reach particular mathematical insights as to be able to experience clearly what the human soul does when it moves in the realm of mathematical structures. This activity of the human soul, this fully conscious activity, is now to be applied to another area. It is to be applied in such a way that out of our inner constructs—if I may use the expression in a wider sense—we form further constructs which enable us to penetrate plant life in the same way that we penetrate mineral nature, chemical-physical nature with mathematical constructs.

I must raise all this into particularly sharp relief because of the way the word “clairvoyance” is normally used, and the way this incorrect usage is applied to the supersensory vision exercised in spiritual science. Frequently, what can quite correctly be designated as clairvoyance is confused with phenomena that can arise in the human constitution when conscious functions are suppressed so that they fall below the level of everyday consciousness—as in hypnosis, under the influence of suggestive mental images, and so forth. This suppression of consciousness, this entering into a subconscious realm, has absolutely nothing to do with what is meant here by the attainment of imagination. For in the case of imagination we have an enhancement of consciousness, we go in exactly the opposite direction from what is often called clairvoyance when the term is used in a trivial sense. As it is commonly used, the word is not given its correct meaning (“clear vision,” or “seeing in the light”), but rather “a reduced vision” or “dim vision.” At the risk of being misunderstood, it would not be incorrect to describe the upward striving toward imaginative knowledge as a striving toward clairvoyance. From the few words I have said on this subject, the difference should be clear to you between “dim vision” and a truly “clear vision.”

Everything we encounter in a state of soul more or less inclined toward mediumship, shows us a reduction of consciousness. It may entail an artificial lowering of the consciousness, or it may be that the human being was somewhat feeble-minded in the first place, making his consciousness easily suppressible. In no case is it ever what you could compare to an inner state as luminous and clear as a mathematically-attuned state should be. What is widely called clairvoyance today—no doubt you have experienced this—has extremely little to do with a striving toward a mathematical clarity of soul. Quite the contrary, what is usually found is the desire to plunge as deeply as possible into the darkness of confusion. Imaginative vision is the opposite of this, as I will now describe to you.

To begin with, imaginative vision is something that can only be present in the soul after being developed. After all, a five-year-old child is not yet a mathematician; the mathematical pictorial capacity must first be developed. It is also not strange that a development of soul from a pre-mathematical capacity to a mathematical capacity can be continued further in a certain way. That is, what has already been brought to a certain clarity of inner experience in mathematical thought can be developed further. Now, however, we must ask ourselves if someone is correct who says, "Yes, but the relationship must be established to ordinary sense-perceptible observation." In one way he is quite correct, and it is important to pursue this relationship in a detailed way.

For this purpose let us consider once again what I called yesterday the nerve-sense system of the human being. The nerve-sense system is concentrated primarily in the head, as I said yesterday, but it extends throughout the human organism. This head organization can also be looked at in the following way. As our starting point let us take something that has proved difficult for modern science for a long time. I have dealt with this in my book Riddles of Philosophy, in the chapter entitled, "The World as Illusion." For the modern way of thinking, it is difficult to establish a proper relationship between the content of sensation itself and what is actually experienced by the human being in his pictorial representation of this content or in his feeling. Indeed, this difficulty has led some to say: What takes place in the world outside us cannot become the content of our consciousness. In fact, they say, the content of our consciousness is the reaction of the soul to the impressions of the outer world; the actual impressions are beyond the perceptible. The domain of the perceptible only consists of what is a reaction of the soul to the sense-world. For quite a while people imagined the situation in a rather crude way, saying—and many still say so even today: Outside in the world are vibrations from some kind of medium, extremely rapid vibrations, and these vibrations somehow make an impression on us. Our soul then reacts to this impression and we conjure up the whole world of color out of our soul, the whole world that can be called the visual realm. What to our consciousness seems spread out all around us—the entire world of color—is in fact only the reaction of the soul to what exists out there, completely in the realm of the unknowable, as some sort of vibrations of a medium that fills space. I offer this only as an example of how such things are pictured, and I would now like to describe what at first is intended as an alternative way of looking at the matter.

Let us return to what I spoke of yesterday as the total act of seeing. This may serve as a basis for regarding the same process in the other senses. Let us consider external sense perception: what does it represent for the human being? To make this clear let us think of the realm of the eye. If we consider the eye in a descriptive way, even though it must really be regarded as a living member of a living organism, we can note processes in it that can be followed in the same way as processes in the extemal mineral world. Even though the eye is something living, we can construct a model to show how light falls into it. Through the way the eye is formed, the effect is similar to when we let light pass through a small hole in a wall and then fall on a screen, producing a picture. In short, it is possible to apply to the eye the interpretation that we feel justified in applying to the external, mechanical, mineral world. This can be carried further into the human organism. In spite of differences in the various senses, the eye can be regarded as offering an example for a series of phenomena also occurring in the other senses. You see, what takes place with our model does in fact take place in the eye and thus in our whole organism. And the question is: can we learn what really takes place in our organism? If one insists on a purely external approach, one will say something like this: Well, some sort of unknown outer world exerts an impression on the eye. In the eye something or other happens; this in turn exerts an impression on the optic nerve, and so on up to the central nerve organs. Then, inexplicably, a reaction to all this comes about in the soul. Out of our soul we conjure up the whole world of color as a reaction to this impression.

There is no doubt that such an approach leads to an abyss. Indeed, it is already openly admitted by many scientists today that with such a method of investigation, in which we simply look externally—first, at what stands before the eye, then at the process in the eye, then at processes in the nerves and further back, even in the brain—we will never get beyond material processes. The point will never be found where some reaction of a soul nature to the external stimulus occurs. With this approach we never examine our actual experience of the outer world.

For the spiritual investigator who develops in himself what I call imaginative cognition, the whole problem is transformed. He reaches a point where, when he looks at the eye, he is no longer obliged to see merely an aspect of the physical-mineral world: he can apprehend something else in the eye through his faculty of imagination. In a mathematical way of thinking we permeate the outer physical-mineral world with geometrical and arithmetical pictures, and feel that what we have imagined comes to meet the outer processes. For one who has developed imaginative cognition, it is not only what he develops mathematically that he experiences coinciding with the process in the eye, but also the imaginative images developed in accordance with imaginative cognition coincide with it. In other words, with these imaginative pictures of the eye one has additional content, so that one knows that with the faculty of imagination a reality is grasped, just as in contemplating external nature a reality is grasped when working with mathematical thought.

So now let us understand this properly: in spiritual research, initially the same methods are applied in investigating the eye as are usually applied with the help of mathematics to the external investigation of nature. However, until we have developed imaginative cognition we do not really recognize—especially in regard to the eye—that we are in possession of a reality which is lacking when we confront only the external world. For someone who has advanced to imaginative cognition, outer physical matter is not altered from what it is for ordinary consciousness. Let us keep this firmly in mind. You may have developed imaginative cognition to the highest degree, but if you have developed it correctly and if you maintain the right condition of soul during an imagination, you will not be able to claim, when looking at a physical or chemical or purely mechanical process, that you see more than anyone else who is in full possession of his senses and normal understanding. If someone claims that he sees something different in the inorganic realm from one who has not developed higher vision, then he is on a deviant path of spiritual cognition. He may see all kinds of specters, but the spiritual entities of the world will not reveal their true form to him. On the other hand, the moment one undertakes in imagination to observe the human eye, one has exactly the same experience as one has in mathematical thought when applied to external nature. In other words, when we observe the living human eye with developed imagination, we find ourselves for the first time confronting a complete reality, for now we are not only able to extend our mathematical thought to the eye but we can also extend what we have apprehended in the imaginative realm,

What follows from this? I can construct a model of the process that happens in the eye exactly similar to the process that happens in the outer world. I know that it is quite possible to reproduce this process in a darkroom or something similar in the mineral, mechanical world. But I also know that this whole domain which I can reproduce physically contains something else, which, if I want to proceed in the same manner as with mathematics in the inorganic realm, I can penetrate only with imaginative cognition. What does that mean? There is something in the eye that is not present in inorganic nature, and that is only recognized as a reality when one becomes one with it in the same way that one becomes one with inorganic nature through a mathematical approach. When one achieves this, one has reached the human etheric body. Through imaginative activity one has grasped the etheric nature of the human being, in the same way that one grasps the external inorganic world through a mathematical approach.

Thus it is possible to indicate quite exactly what one does in order to discover the etheric within a sense organ through imagination. It is not true that the idea of an etheric body is arrived at in any kind of fantastic way. One arrives at this idea by first developing imagination and then—at first for oneself—demonstrating with a suitable object that the content of imaginative cognition can unite with its object in the same way that mathematical thought unites with its object.

What light does this throw on the human constitution? Something living in us, the human etheric body, is brought into view in such a way that it joins with what is observed as outer inorganic nature. And what we can assert for the eye holds true, if slightly altered, for the other senses as well. Thus we can say: when we consider one of our senses, what we have is primarily a kind of empty space in our organism (if I may express myself crudely). In the case of the eye, the “organism” is those parts of the brain and of the face that connect with the eye. The outer world has sent “gulfs” into the organism. As the ocean creates gulfs in the Land, so the outer world makes gulfs in our organism and in these gulfs simply continues its inorganic processes. We can reconstruct the inorganic processes that take place there. It is not only outside the eye that we find the inorganic and deal with it mathematically, but we can follow these processes right into the eye. Thus with the eye we can use the same approach as we do to the inorganic realm. What we apprehend through imagination, however, reaches the boundary of the eye and goes beyond it. (I will not speak of this today.) Thus outer nature, which streams in as into a gulf, comes together with a member of the human organism, which does not consist of flesh and blood but nonetheless belongs to the organism and can be known through imaginative cognition. In the eye and the other senses our etheric organization penetrates what streams into these gulfs from the outer world. There is actually an encounter between something of a higher, super-sensible nature—allow me to use this expression; I will explain it in due course—between what can be called our etheric organization and what comes into us from the outer world. We become one with the process in our eye, which we can reconstruct purely geometrically. In the realm of our senses we actually experience the inorganic within us.

This is the significant finding to which imaginative cognition brings us. It leads to the solution of a problem that is central for modern physiology and for what is called epistemology. It is central to such investigations because it discloses the fact that we possess an etheric organism, known only through imaginative cognition, that this organism unites with what is thrust into us by the outer world and completely penetrates it. We are now able to see the problem in a new light. Imagine that the human being could direct his etheric body through a photographic apparatus: he would regard what takes place in the photographic apparatus as connected with his own being. Similarly he regards what happens in the eye as connected with his own being.

The problems dealt with in anthroposophical spiritual science are truly not fanciful ones. They are precisely the problems over which one can inwardly bleed to death—if I may express it in such a way—when one has no choice but to accept what modern science is in a position to offer in this field. Whoever has gone through all that one can inwardly go through when in striving for the truth one acknowledges the illusionary development of the outer world; whoever has suffered the uncertainty that immediately arises when one wants to comprehend—solely from one's physical understanding—what takes place in the process of sense perception: only such a person will know how strong the forces are that draw one to strive toward a higher development of our faculties of knowledge.

I have spoken today of the first stage of imaginative cognition and described its similarity to, and some of its differences from, mathematical thinking. What we experience at this level influences our view of the boundaries of knowledge that are accepted by today's science. If we really approach existence and the world conscientiously as they pose their riddles for us; if we have recognized how helpless ordinary logic and ordinary mathematics are in the face of what is taking place in us at every moment when we are seeing, hearing, and so forth; if we see how helpless we are in our usual approach to knowledge in the face of what normally confronts us in our waking consciousness, then truly a deep longing can arise to widen and deepen our knowledge. A scientist in our modern culture would certainly not claim to be a researcher in some field other than his own; he accepts what a trained investigator in another field has to say to him. The same attitude might well prevail for a while—in a limited sense—toward the spiritual researcher.

But it must be repeated again and again: above all, the world does have a right to require the spiritual scientist to tell how he arrives at his results. And this can be shown in every detail. When I look back at the way I have tried to do this for more than twenty years—to report to the world in purely anthroposophical language—I think I am justified in saying the following: If I have still not succeeded in finding a response in the world to this anthroposophical spiritual science; if again and again it has been necessary to speak for those less capable of going into detail because they are not scientifically trained; and if it has not been possible to any great extent to speak for the scientifically trained: then this, as experience has shown, is really due to the scientific schooling. Until now, the scientific community has shown small desire to hear what the spiritual investigator has to say about his methods. Let us hope that this will change in the future. For without a doubt, it is necessary that we progress through the use of deeper forces than those which have shown so clearly that they are of no value. In the last analysis it is those very forces that have led us into a cultural decline. We will speak further about this tomorrow.

Yesterday I tried to show how, by developing the ability to form imaginative vision, it is possible to gain a different kind of insight into human sense perception than can be gained when we approach it with the logic of the mind. I emphasized especially that this imaginative picturing that lives in the soul—as I said, I will describe its development in due course—has to be built up the way mathematical imagery is built up, the way mathematical constructs are developed, analyzed, and so on.

From this, the rest of what I said will also be clear: how we apply the results of our inner mathematical activity to the outer mineral-physical realm; and how in a similar way we apply our imaginative activity to the human senses. In this way we may know what takes place in those "gulfs"—as I called them yesterday—which the physical sense world sends into the human organism. The fact is that with the development of such an imaginative faculty and of knowledge of the real nature of the senses—of what is mainly the head organization—we also gain something else. We become able, for example, to form mental pictures of the plant kingdom. I indicated this yesterday. When we use only spatial and algebraic mathematics to approach plant growth and plant formation, we do not find that this mathematical form of consciousness is able to penetrate into the plant kingdom as it can penetrate into the mineral kingdom.

When on the other hand we have developed imaginative cognition, at first just inwardly, then we become able to form mental images applicable to the plant kingdom just as we found it possible with the mineral kingdom.

At this point, however, something peculiar appears: we now approach the plant world in such a way that the individual plant appears to us as only part of a great whole. In this way, for the first time we have a clear picture of what the plant nature in the earthly world really is. The picture we receive allows us to see the entire plant kingdom of the earth forming a complete unity with the earth-world. This is given purely empirically to the imaginative view. Of course, with our physical make-up we cannot possibly hold more than part of the earth's plant life in our consciousness. We observe only the plant world of a particular territory. Even if we are botanists, our practical knowledge of the plant world will always remain incomplete in the face of the entire plant world of the earth. This we know by the most simple thought. We know we do not have a whole, we have only part of the whole, something that belongs together with the rest. The impression we have in looking at the partial plant world is very much like being confronted by someone who is completely hidden from view except for a single arm and hand. We know that what is before us is not a complete whole, but just part of a whole, and that this part can only exist by virtue of being connected with the whole. At the same time we arrive at a concept that is completely unlike that of the physicist, mineralogist, or geologist: we see that the forces in the plant world are just as integral a part of the earth as those in the geological realm. Not in the sense of a vague analogy but as a directly perceived truth, the earth becomes a kind of organic being for us—an organic being that has cast off the mineral kingdom in the course of its various stages of development, and has in turn differentiated the plant kingdom.

The thoughts I am developing here for you can, of course, be arrived at very easily by mere analogy, as we see happening in the case of Gustav Theodor Fechner. Such conclusions arrived at by analogy have no value for the spiritual science intended here—what we value is direct perception. For this reason it must always be emphasized that in order to speak of the earth as an organism, for example, one must first speak of imaginative mental pictures. For the earth as an integral being reveals itself only to the imaginative faculty, not to the logical intellect with its analogies.

There is something else that one acquires in this process, and I wish especially to mention it because it would be most useful to students as regards methodology. In present-day discussions on the subject of thinking and also on how we apprehend the world in general, there is a great lack of clarity. Let us take an example. A crystal is held up to view—a cubic salt crystal, for instance—with the idea of illustrating something or other: perhaps something about its relation to human knowledge, its position in nature as a whole, or something similar. Now it could happen that in the same way that the salt cube is used, a single rose is held up for illustration. The person who holds up the rose feels it is acceptable to ascribe objective life to the rose in the same way as to the salt cube. To someone who does not strive for just a kind of formal knowledge, but who aspires to an experience of reality, it is clear that there is a difference. It is clear that the salt cube has an existence within its own limits. The plucked rose, on the other hand, even on its stem is not living its life as a rose. For it cannot develop independently to the same degree (please note the word) as the salt does. It must develop on the rosebush. The whole bush belongs to the development of the rose; separated from the bush, the rose is not quite real. An isolated rose only appears to have life.

I say all this in an effort to be clear. In all observations that we make, we must take care not to theorize about the observations before we have grasped them in their totality. It is only to the entire rosebush that we can attribute an independent existence in the same sense as to the salt cube. When we rise to imaginative mental Images, we acquire the ability to experience reality in a certain completeness.Then what I have just said about the plant world can be accepted. We see it as a whole only if our consciousness is able to apprehend it as a whole, if we can regard everything confronting us separately—all the different families and species—as part of the entire plant organism which covers the earth, or better said, which grows out of the earth.

Thus through imaginative mental images one not only gains understanding of the sense world, one also has important inner experiences of knowledge. I would like to speak of these inner experiences of knowledge in purely empirical terms.

As human beings we are in a position to look back with our ordinary memory to what took place in our waking life, back to a certain year in our childhood; with our power of memory we can call up one or another event in pictorial form out of the stream of our experiences. Still, we are clearly aware that to do this we must exert a distinct effort to raise individual pictures out of the past stream of time. As this imaginative vision develops further, however, we arrive gradually at a point where time takes on the quality of space. This comes about very gradually. It should not be imagined that the results of something like imaginative vision come all at once. It is pointless to think that the acquisition of the imaginative method is easier than the methods employed in the clinic, the observatory, and so on. Both require years of work: one, mental work; the other, inner work in the soul. The result of this inner work is that the individual pictorial experiences join one another. At this point, time—which we usually experience as “running” when we look over the course of our experiences and draw up one or another memory experience—now time, at least to some extent, becomes spatial to us. All that we have lived through in life—almost from birth—comes together in a meaningful memory picture. Through this exertion of imaginative life, of “looking back,” of remembering back, individual moments appear before the soul. These moments are more than a mere remembering. We have a subjective experience of viewing our life lived here on earth. This, as I said, is a practical result of imaginative mental imaging.

What kind of inner experience arises parallel to this inner viewing, this panorama of our experiences? We are quite clear that the strength of our soul which brings these memory pictures to consciousness is related to our ordinary bright, clear power of understanding. It is not itself the power of understanding, but it is related to it.

One can say: What we have been striving to attain—that our consciousness will be illuminated by this imaginative cognition in all our activities as it is in mathematical activity—happens for us when we come to these memory pictures. We have images and we hold them as tightly as we hold the content of our intellect. Thereby we come to a definite kind of self-knowledge, a knowledge of how the power of understanding works. For we do not merely look back at our life: our life presents itself to us in mirror images. It shows itself in such a way that this comparison with a mirror really holds true. We can extend the comparison and speak of understanding reflected images in a mirror by applying optical laws. Similarly, when we come to inner imaginative perceptions, we can recognize the power of the soul that we usually think of as our mental capacity becoming enhanced, so that we experience our intellect creating not only abstract pictures but concrete pictures of our experiences.

At first a kind of subjective difficulty arises, but once we understand it we can proceed. We experience clarity as in mathematics when we experience these pictures. But the feeling of being free—not in a behavioral sense, but in one's intellectual activity—is not present in this kind of imagining. Please do not misunderstand me. The entire imaginative activity is just as voluntary as our ordinary intellectual activity. The difference is that in intellectual activity one always has a subjective experience (I say "experience" because it is more than a mere sensation), one is really in a realm of imagery, a realm that means nothing from the point of view of the outer world. We do not have this feeling in relation to the content of the imaginative world. We have the very definite experience that what we are producing in the form of imaginations is at the same time really there. We find ourselves living and weaving in a reality. To be sure, at first this is a reality which does not have an especially strong grip on us and yet we can really feel it.

What we can gather from this reality, what we become aware of as we think back from our life panorama to the inner activity that created it, acquaints us inwardly, "mathematically," with something that is similar to the formative force of the human being. Just as mathematical mental images match and explain outer physical-mineral reality, so this something coincides with what is contained in the human formative force or growth force. (It also coincides with the formative force of other living beings, but I will not speak of that now.) We begin to see a certain inner relation between something that lives purely in the soul—namely, imagination—and something that weaves through the human being as the force of growth, the force that makes a child grow into an adult, that makes limbs grow larger, that permeates the human being as an organizing power. In short, we experience what is really active in the growth principle of the human being. This insight appears first in one definite area: namely, the nerves. The life panorama and the experiences described in connection with it give us insight at first into the growth principle in the human nerve organism—that is, the creative principle which continues inward in the nerve-sense organism. We receive a mental picture of an imaginative kind that enables us to begin to understand what our sense organs actually represent. This also gives us the possibility of seeing the entire nervous system as a synthetic sense organ that is in the process of becoming, and as embracing the present sense organs. We learn to realize that at birth, though our sense organs are not fully mature, they are complete with regard to their inner forces; this may be evident from the way I spoke about the relation of imagination to the sense world. At the same time we can see that what lives in our nerve organism is permeated by the same force as are the sense organs, but that it is in the process of becoming. It is really one large sense organ in the process of becoming. This image comes to us as a real perception. The different senses as they open outward and continue inward in the nerve organism—during our whole life up to a certain age—are organized by the power we have come to know in imagination.

You see what we are striving to accomplish. We wish to make transparent the forces that work in the human being which would otherwise remain spiritually opaque. For what does the human being know of the way in which these forces are active within him? Something that cannot be mastered by ordinary knowledge, something that can be characterized as ordinarily opaque to the soul and spirit, now begins to be clear. One has the possibility, through a higher kind of qualitative mathematics—if I may use such a phrase—of penetrating the world of the senses and the world of our nerve organism. One might think that when we reach this point we would become arrogant or immodest, but just the contrary, we learn true modesty through knowledge of the human being. For what I have described to you in a very few words is really acquired over a long period of time. For one, the knowledge comes quickly; for another, much more slowly. And often someone who applies the methods of spiritual research with patient inner work is surprised by the extraordinary results. The results that such inner work brings to light, if they are properly described, can be grasped by a healthy human understanding. But to draw these results forth from the recesses of the soul requires persistent and energetic soul work. And what especially teaches us modesty is the recognition that after much hard work, the results of imaginative cognition acquaint us only with our nerve-sense organism. We can realize how shrouded in darkness is the rest of the human organism.

Then, however, to reach beyond mere self-knowledge regarding the nerve-sense system, we must attain a higher level of knowledge. (The word "higher" is of course just a term.) Above all I must emphasize (I will go into it in more detail later) that the attainment of imaginative knowledge is based on meditation—not a confused, but a clear methodically-exercised meditation (to repeat the phrase I used in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment), in which over and over again we set before our soul easily surveyable images. What is essential is that they shall be easy to view as a well-defined whole, not some vague memories, reminiscences or the like. Vague memories would lead us away from a clear mathematical type of experience. Easily pictured mental images are required, and preferably symbolic images, for these are most easily viewed as a whole. The important thing is what we experience in our soul through these images. We seek to bring them into clear consciousness in such a manner that they are like a clear memory image. Thus through voluntary activity mental images we have evoked are taken into our soul in the same way that we take memory images into the soul. In a way, we imitate what happens in our activity of remembering. In remembering, certain experiences are continually being made into pictures. Our aim is to get behind this activity of the human soul; how we do this, I will describe in due course. In our effort to get behind the way remembering takes place, we gain the ability to hold easily-surveyable images in our consciousness (just as we hold memory images) for a certain length of time. As we become used to this activity, we are able to extend the time from a few seconds to minutes. The particular images themselves are of no importance. What is important is that through the effort of holding these self-chosen images, we develop a certain inner power of soul. We can compare the development of the muscles of the arm through exertion to the way certain soul forces are strengthened when mental images (of the kind I have described) are repeatedly held in our consciousness by voluntary effort. The soul must really exert itself to bring this about, and it is this exertion of soul that is crucial. As we practice on the mental images we ourselves have made, something begins to appear in us that is the power of imagination. This power is developed similarly to the power of memory, but it is not to be confused with the power of memory. We will come to see that what we conceive of as imaginations (we have already partly described this) are in fact outer realities, and not just our own experiences as is the case with memory images. That is the basic difference between imaginations and memory images. Memory images reproduce our own experiences in pictorial form, while imaginations, although they arise in the same way as memory images, show through their content that they do not refer merely to our own experiences but can refer to phenomena in the world that are completely objective. So you see, through the further development of the memory capacity, we form the imaginative power of the soul.

And now, just as the power of remembering can be further developed, so it is also possible to develop another capacity. It will seem almost comical to you when I name it—but the further development of this capacity is more difficult than that of memory. In ordinary life there are certain powers by which we remember, but also by which we forget. It seems sometimes that we do not need to exert ourselves in order to forget. But the situation changes when we have developed the power of memory in meditation. For oddly enough, this power to hold onto certain imaginations brings it about that the imaginations want to remain in our consciousness. Once there, they are not so easily got rid of—they assert themselves. This fact is connected with what I said earlier, that in this situation we have to deal with actually dwelling in a reality. The reality makes itself felt; it asserts itself and wishes to remain. We succeeded in forming the power of imagination (in a manner modeled on mathematical thought); now through further exertion we must be able voluntarily to throw these imaginative pictures out of our consciousness. This capacity of the voluntarily developed "enhanced forgetting" must be especially cultivated.

In the forming of these inner cognitive powers—enhanced memory and enhanced forgetting—we must be careful to avoid causing actual harm to the soul. However, just to point out the dangers involved would be like forbidding certain experiments in a laboratory for the reason that something might explode someday. I myself once had a professor of chemistry at the university who had lost an eye while conducting an experiment. Happenings of this nature are of course not a valid reason for preventing the development of certain methods. I think I can correctly say that if all the precautionary measures are applied which I have described in my books regarding the inner development of soul forces, then dangers cannot arise for the soul life. To continue—if we do not develop the capacity to obliterate the imaginative pictures again, then there is a real danger that we could be tethered to what we have given rise to in our meditations. If this happened, we would not be able to go further. The development of enhanced forgetting is really necessary for the next stage.

There is a certain way in which we can help ourselves achieve this enhanced power of forgetting. Perhaps those who are involved in any of the present-day epistemological studies will find this discussion quite dilettante and I am fully aware of all the objections, but I am obliged to present the facts as they happen to be. So—to continue—one can gain help in enhancing the power of forgetting if we further develop, through self-discipline, a quality which appears in ordinary life as the ability to love. Naturally it can be said: love is not a cognitive power, it does not concern knowledge. Perhaps this is true today because of the way cognition is understood. But here it is not a matter of keeping the power of love just as it appears in ordinary life. Here the power to love is to be developed further through work an oneself. We can achieve this by keeping the following in mind.

Is it not so?—living our lives as human beings, we must admit that with each passing year we have actually become a slightly different person. When we compare ourselves at a certain age with what we were, say, ten years earlier—if we are honest—we are sure to find that certain things have changed in the course of time. The content of our soul life has changed—not just the particular form of our thoughts, feelings, or life of will, but the whole make-up of our soul life. We have become a different person “inside.” And if we search for the factors through which we have changed inwardly, we will find the following: We may notice first of all what has happened to our physical organism—for this is always changing. In the first half of life it changes progressively through growth; in the second half it is changing through regression. Then we must look at our outer experiences: what confronts us as our own mental world; all those things that leave pain, suffering, pleasure, and joy in the soul; the forces we have tried to develop in our will life. These are the things that make us a different person again and again in the course of life. If we want to be honest about what is really taking place, we have to say we are just swimming along in the current of life. But whoever wishes to become a spiritual scientist must take his development in hand through a certain self-discipline. He might, for instance, take a habit—little habits are sometimes of tremendous importance—and within a certain time transform it through conscious work. In this way we can transform ourselves in the course of our life. We are transformed through being in the current of life, as well as through the work we do on ourselves with full consciousness. Then when we observe our life panorama, we can see what has changed in our life as a result of this self-discipline. This works back in a remarkable way on our soul life. It does not have the effect of enhancing our egotism, rather it enhances our power to love. We become more and more able to embrace the outer world with love, to enter deeply into the outer world. Only someone who has made efforts in such self-discipline can judge what this means. If one has made such efforts, one can appreciate what it means to have the thoughts we form about some process or some thing accompanied by the results of such self-discipline. We enter with a much stronger personal involvement into whatever our thoughts penetrate. We even enter into the physical-mineral world with a certain power of love—that world which if approached only mathematically leaves us indifferent. We feel clearly the difference between penetrating the world with just our weak power of mental imaging, and penetrating it with a developed power of love.

You may take offense at what I am saying about the developed power of love: you may want to assert that the power of love has no place in a quest for knowledge of the outer world, that the only correct objective knowledge is that which is obtained by logical intellectual activity. Certainly there is need for a faculty that can penetrate the phenomena of the outer world by means of the bare sober intellect alone, excluding all other powers of the soul. But the outer world will not give us its all if we try to get it in this manner. The world will only give us its all if we approach it with a power of love that strengthens the mind's mental activity. After all, it is not a matter of commanding and expecting that nature will unveil herself to us through certain theories of knowledge. What is really important is to ask: How will nature reveal herself to us? How will she yield her secrets to us? Nature will reveal herself only if we permeate our mental powers with the forces of love.

Let me return to the enhancement of forgetting: with the power of love the exercises in forgetting can be practiced with greater force, and the results will be more sure, than without it. By practicing self-discipline, which gives us a greater capacity for love, we are able to experience an enhanced faculty of forgetting, just as surely a part of our volition as the enhanced faculty of remembering. We gain the ability to put something definite, something of positive soul content, in the place of what is normally the end of an experience. Normally when we forget something, this marks the end of some sequence of experiences. Thus in place of what would normally be nothing, we are able to put something positive. In the enhanced power of forgetting, we develop actively what otherwise runs its course passively.

When we have come this far, it is as if we had crossed an abyss within ourselves and reached a region of experience through which a new existence flows toward us. And it is really so. Up to this point we have had our imaginations. If in these imaginations we remain human beings equipped with a mathematical attitude of soul, and are not fools, we will see quite clearly that in this imaginative world we have pictures. The physiologists may argue whether or not what our senses give us are pictures or reality. (I have dealt with this question in my Riddles of Philosophy.) The fact is, we are well aware that these are pictures, pictures that point to a reality, but still they are just pictures. Indeed, to achieve a healthy experience in this region we must know that they are pictures—images—confronting us. However, at the moment when we experience something of the enhanced power of forgetting, these images fill with something coming from the other side of life, so to say. They fill with spiritual reality. And we go to meet this reality. We begin, as it were, to have perceptions of the other side of life. Just as through our senses we perceive one side of life, the physical-sensible side, so we learn to look toward the other side and become aware of a spiritual reality flowing into the images of imaginative life. This flowing of spiritual reality into the depth of our soul this is what in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment I have called “inspiration.” Please do not take exception to the name—just listen to how the word is being used. Do not try to remember instances where you have met the word before. We have to find words for what we want to say, and often we must use words that already have older meanings. So for the phenomenon just described, I have chosen the word inspiration.

Through developing inspiration we finally gain insight into the human rhythmic system, which is bound up in a certain way with the realm of feeling. This leads us to something I must emphasize: the method leading to inspiration which I have just described can actually be followed only by modern man. In earlier periods of human evolution, this faculty was developed more instinctively—for example, in the Indian yoga system. This, however, is not renewable in our age. It goes against the stream of history. And in the spiritual-scientific sense, one could be called a dilettante if one wanted to renew the yoga system in these modern times. Yoga set into motion certain human forces that were appropriate only for an earlier stage of human evolution. It had to do with the development of certain rhythmic processes, with conscious respiratory processes. By breathing in a certain manner, the yogi worked to develop in a physical way what modern man must develop in a soul-spiritual way—as I have described. Nevertheless, there is something similar in the instinctive inspiration we find running through the Vedanta philosophy and what we achieve through fully conscious inspiration. The way we choose to achieve this, leads us through what I have described.

As modern human beings, we approach this from above downwards, so to say. Purely through soul-spiritual exercises we work to develop the power within us that then finds its way in to the rhythmic system as inspiration. The Indian worked to find his way into the rhythmic system directly through yoga breathing. He took the physical organism as his starting-point; we take the soul-spiritual being as ours. Both ways aim to affect the human being in his middle system, the rhythmic system. We shall see how what we are given in imaginative cognition (which combines the sense system and nervous system) is in fact enhanced when we penetrate the rhythmic system through inspiration. We shall also see how the ancient, more childlike, instinctive forms of higher knowledge (for example, yoga) come to new life in the present day in the consciously free human being.

Next time I will speak further on the relation of the earlier yoga development of the rhythmic system and the modern approach which leads through inner soul-spiritual work to inspiration.

I have tried to show how it is possible to rise to supersensory modes of cognition, how through them we gain access to new realms of experience—realms that are completely accessible only to a super-sensory approach. I spoke of the development of imaginative cognition—how by means of it we can understand what takes place in the activity of the human senses, and also understand the nature of the plant world. We learn these things through imaginative cognition as we understand the physical-mineral phenomena of the world through a mathematical approach. Further, I pointed out that through a continuation of these exercises we can attain to a higher form of knowledge—namely, inspired cognition. This opens the way to certain realms of experience through which we can begin to understand what I have called the human rhythmic system.

I would like to look at the whole problem once again from a certain angle. When one tries to gain a real understanding of what is included in the sphere of human rhythmic activity, one sees—if one is honest—that the processes taking place here elude the kind of comprehension by which physical processes are understood through mathematics. Nor will one find that they can be comprehended through what I have called imaginative cognition. Everything that has to do with the senses and which is developed in the nervous system in the course of life as I have described—thus also providing a basis for the experience of the life panorama when imaginative cognition has been developed: all of this only clarifies the term, nerve-sense organization.

In fact, our sensory organization can only be fully understood when this capacity of imaginative cognition has been acquired by us. Even external natural science has noticed that it is not really possible to understand a particular human sense when it is explained in terms of the general human organization. You will find, if you study what individual scientists have to say in this regard, that the facts themselves—in external phylogeny, or embryology, or ontology—simply point to the necessity of accepting the eye, for instance, as being formed from without. The structure of the eye cannot be understood in terms of the rest of the human organism—as, for example, the structure of the liver or the stomach. It can only be understood as brought about through outer influences, through action from without. But how do we grasp this process of "in-forming from without" in the human organism? Only imaginative cognition makes it comprehensible to us, as a mathematical approach makes physical phenomena comprehensible.

From all this you may now begin to see why external science gives us essentially a deficient physiology of the senses. Before I myself was able through imaginative cognition to develop a physiology of the senses, something in me always resisted any wish to subject the realm of the human senses to the sort of measures applied by conventional physiology and psychology. I always found that what they offered to explain the senses was incomplete for the sense of hearing or sight, for example. Particularly the psychological explanations are deficient in this respect. Basically they always start by asking: how are the human senses constructed in general? Then, having given a general characterization, they proceed to specialize for the various senses. But it never occurs to them that their customary descriptions, particularly in the psychology text books, are really only applicable to the sense of touch. There is always something in their theories that does not fit when one tries to apply them unchanged to any other sense. We can understand this when we remember that the physiologies and psychologies use exclusively the ordinary logic of the intellect to put together the facts which external research presents. However, for someone who is examining the question carefully, it is simply impossible to do justice to the sensory phenomena by only the putting together of physical facts. When we apprehend each separate sense with imaginative cognition (when doing this, I was forced to extend the number of senses to twelve) and not just intellectually, we arrive at their true individual forms. We see that each separate sense is built into the human being from certain entities, certain qualities of the outer world. This reveals again—to one who will see it—the bridge that is thrown across from what I have called clairvoyant research to what is given by empirical observation.

Certainly it can be said that a person endowed with healthy human understanding may still have no inclination to give up a certain point of view, and therefore may find no reason to be interested in clairvoyant research. But there really is an objection to this. When we subject the facts to a thorough analysis, there is a point at which we reach an impasse when we apply only sense observation and the ordinary logic of the intellect. We simply cannot clear up the problems. They leave an unsolved remainder. For this reason we must develop our logical thinking further to imaginative perception. Part of what imaginative perception discloses to us is the individual forms of the various human senses, as well as the gradual formation of the human nervous system.

There is something to add to this—I will explain with a short story. Once I was at a meeting of the society that at that time called itself the Giordano Bruno Association. The first to speak at the meeting was a stalwart materialist who elaborated on the physiology of the brain; by this he believed he had given sufficient explanation for the association of mental images and in fact for everything that takes place in mental life. He made drawings for the different parts of the brain and showed how they are assigned different functions—one to seeing, another to hearing, and so on. Then he tried to show how it might be possible, following the neurologist Meynert, to see the connecting paths as physical formations responsible for connecting the individual sensory impressions, the individual mental pictures, and so on. Whoever wishes to learn about this can read about these extremely interesting investigations by the important neurologist Meynert, for they are still significant even for the present day. Well, after this materialistically tinged but still quite ingenious explanation, in which the brain was presented not as the mediator but as the producer of mental life, another man stepped forward, just as stalwart an Herbartian as the man before him was a materialist. This man said the following:

This is in fact a characteristic experience in the field of knowledge, because when one tries to illustrate mental pictures symbolically through diagrams, as Herbart did (it can also be done in other ways), one actually arrives at something very similar to what one gets when one sketches processes and parts of the brain. How does this happen? This is something that becomes clear only to imaginative cognition, when we see in the retrospective life panorama how the independence of the soul life develops. We see how the etheric body actually organizes—and, in fact, has already at birth to some extent organized—the brain. It permeates the brain in its organization. Then we are not surprised to find out that the brain grows similar in formation to the entity which permeates it. But we do not come to real insight in the matter until we are able to perceive that there is an activity of soul working on the organization of the brain. This is similar to when someone paints a picture and what he paints resembles what he is copying. It is similar because the image he has in his mind works on in his painting and brings about the similarity. In the same way, what is found in the brain—actually in the entire nervous system—as the consequence of a forming activity on the part of the soul, will be similar to the soul's forming activity, or to the soul content itself. But if we wish to understand the activity that works itself into the nervous system, we must simply say: in its origin and development, the whole nervous system is an expression of a reality that may only be viewed imaginatively.

The brain and the entire nervous system are, of course, external physical formations. But we do not really grasp them unless we comprehend them as imaginations that have become physical. Thus what the spiritual investigator generally calls imagination is not, as one might suppose, absent from the phenomenal world—it is indeed present, but in its physical image. This fact occasionally makes itself manifest in a striking way, as in the case of those two men, the one a physiologist, the other a philosopher, who portrayed two different things in the same way.

But this has still another aspect. I have already referred to the research of the psychiatrist, physiologist, and psychologist Theodor Ziehen. Theodor Ziehen undertook to explain mental life in such a way that he replaced it by brain activity in every particular. His explanation is essentially the following: he contemplates mental life; he then considers the brain and nervous system anatomically and physiologically (to the extent that present empirical research permits) and shows which processes, in his opinion, are present in the brain for a particular mental activity (including memory). I have pointed out, however, that his explanation—which is truly valuable for the study of mental life and brain activity—is forced to come to a standstill before our life of feeling and our life of will. You will find this in Ziehen's Physiologische Psychologie (Physiological Psychology). There is, however, a shortcoming in this psychology. Although he makes everything so enticing by explaining mental life in terms of processes in the brain, in the end he does not completely account for such things as the forms that are present in the brain. To do this it is necessary to bring in an artistic principle; and this again is nothing else than the outward expression of imaginative cognition. Were Ziehen to consider this, his explanation of mental life through brain processes would not be fully satisfying to him either. When he wants to move on to the realm of feeling, he finds himself completely at sea. He is not able to account for feelings at all. So he tacks a “feeling coloration” onto the mental images. This is nothing but a word; when one cannot go any further, one makes do with a word. He says: Yes, in certain cases we are dealing not just with mental images, but with feeling-tinged mental images. He comes to this because he is unable to fit feeling into the brain, where it might enter into mental life. Also he does not find an organic basis for feeling that would permit him to make a link to mental life similar to that of the brain and nerves.

In the case of brain and nerve activity it is easier because researchers like Theodor Ziehen are—most of them—extremely clever when it comes to an intellectual or mathematical understanding of the entire natural realm. I mean that exactly—without irony. In science these days an extraordinary amount of intellectual acumen has been applied in this direction. If you should decide to become better acquainted with the whole anthroposophical movement, it would become clear to you that in no way do I favor dilettante talk about abstruse nebulous anthroposophical conceptions while arrogantly disputing what present-day science presents, or that I approve when a speaker does not know present-day science well enough to acknowledge it in all its proper significance. I hold firmly to the standpoint that one can pass judgment on present-day science from an anthroposophical point of view only if one is really familiar with this science. I have had to suffer continually from the actions of anthroposophists who, without having an idea of the importance and task of contemporary science, talk loosely about it. They think a few fine anthroposophical phrases they have learned entitle them to pass judgment on what has been achieved through years of painstaking, conscientious, and methodical work. This stage we must of course leave behind us.

Now, to continue, what actually happens is this: one arrives at the point of finding the relation between mental life and nerve-sense activity. But something is always left unexplained. Something always eludes one's attention. One swims slowly from the point of view of rational, logical, mathematical construction into a realm where things become unclear. One examines the senses and sees their continuation in the nervous system—and that is where one should take the next step into imaginative thought. But to some degree every human being has a dim feeling of the transformation of well-defined mathematically constructible figures into something that cannot be grasped mathematically and yet manifests itself clearly in the brain and nervous system. As a result of this feeling it is said that someday we shall also succeed in penetrating those parts of sensory life and nerve life that evade direct, purely mathematical construction. In other words, something is put off as a future ideal that is in fact attainable now if one will simply admit that it is not possible to penetrate the realm of the senses and nerves merely by rational cognition. This must be led over to something pictorial, something evoked just as consciously as a mathematical figure, but going beyond the mathematical. I mean, of course, imagination.

Perhaps for some of you it would be helpful to make an exact picture of how ordinary analytic geometry relates to so-called synthetic or projective geometry. I would like to say a few words on this subject. In analytic geometry we discuss some equation of the kind y=ƒ(x). If we stay, for instance, in the x-y coordinate system, then we say that for every x there is a y, and we look for the points of the y-coordinate, which are the results of the equation. What is actually occurring here? Here we have to say that in the way we manipulate the equation, we always have our eye on something that lies outside of what we ultimately seek, because what we are really looking for is the curve. But the curve is not contained in the equation—only the possible x and y values are contained in the equation. When we proceed in this manner, we are actually working outside the curve; and what we get as values of the y-coordinate in relation to the x-coordinate we consider as points belonging to the curve. With our analytic equation, we never really enter the curve itself, its real geometric form. This fact has significant implication as regards human knowledge.

When we do analytic geometry, we perform operations which we subsequently look for spatially; but in all our figuring we actually remain outside of a direct contemplation of geometrical forms. It is important to grasp this because when we consider projective geometry, we arrive at a very different picture of what we are doing. Here, as most of you know, we don't calculate, we really only deal with the intersection of lines and the projection of forms. In this manner we get away from merely calculating around the geometrical forms, and we enter—at least to some degree—the geometrical forms themselves. This becomes evident, for example, when you see how projective geometry goes about proving that a straight line does not have two, but only one point at infinity. If we set off in a straight line in front of us, we will come back from behind us (this is easily understood from a geometrical point of view), and we can show that we travel through exactly one point at infinity on this line. Similarly, a plane has only one line at infinity, and the whole of three-dimensional space has only one plane at infinity.

These ideas—which I am only mentioning here—cannot be arrived at by analytical means. It is not possible. If we already have projective-geometric ideas, we may imagine we can do it; but we cannot really. However, projective geometry does show us that we can enter into the geometrical forms, which is not possible for analytic geometry. With projective geometry it is really possible. When we move out of mere analytic geometry into projective geometry, we get a sense of how the curve contains in itself the elements of bending, or rounding, which analytic geometry describes only externally. Thus we penetrate from the environment of the line, the surroundings of the spatial form, into its inner configuration. This gives us the possibility of taking a first step along the way from purely mathematical thinking—of which analytic geometry is the prime representative—to imagination. To be sure, with projective geometry, we do not actually have imagination yet, but we approach it. When we go through the processes inwardly, it is a tremendously important experience—an experience which can actually be decisive in leading us to an acknowledgment of the imaginative element. Also, this experience leads us to affirm the path of spiritual research, inasmuch as we can form a real mental picture of what the imaginative element is. When I was reading the memoirs of Moriz Benedict—a good natural scientist and physician of our day—I found them in general to be unpleasant, blase and arrogant, but at one point I felt real sympathy. There he says something which seems to me quite correct; he finds that medical doctors lack the preparation that the study of mathematics can give. Of course, it would be a very good thing indeed if physicians had more mathematical preparation, but in this regard we must just register the shortcomings in contemporary training. From my point of view, however, while reading his memoirs, I could not help feeling: No matter how good their mathematical conceptions, doctors would still not be in a position with them to properly account for the kinds of forms that exist, for example, in the sense and nervous systems. There one can only succeed by transforming mathematical knowledge and advancing to imaginative knowledge. Only then does the specific nerve or sense structure reveal itself to us in a similar manner as a physical-mineral structure reveals itself to the mathematical representation.

Matters such as these allow you to see how, in every area, the doors stand open for contemporary science to enter into what spiritual research wishes to give. In the coming days, if we manage to enter, even a little bit, into medical-therapeutic aspects, you will see how wide open the doors really are for spiritual research to enter and throw light on all that cannot be revealed through the usual methods of investigation. Let us now suppose we proceed on this path, but we do not wish to proceed any further than imagination, which I will describe further tomorrow. Let us suppose we do not wish to move forward to inspiration. We will then not have the slightest possibility of even recognizing something in the human organism as the approximate image or bodily realization of a soul-spiritual nature—so that two men with completely opposite ways of thinking will draw these structures similarly. Only through inspired cognition will we have our first opportunity to become aware in the human being of the rhythmic system, encompassing primarily the processes of respiration and blood circulation. Only at this point are we able to tolerate—if I may express it thus—the outer lack of similarity between the physical structures and the soul-spiritual. The life of feeling does in fact belong directly to the rhythmic system in the same way as the life of mental representation belongs to the nervous system. The nerve-sense system, however, is a kind of external physical image of mental life, while the rhythmic system—what is accessible to external sense-empirical investigation—shows hardly any resemblance to what takes place in the soul as feeling. Just because this is so, external research never discovers that this similarity exists; it only reveals itself when we come to another kind of cognition than that of imagination. With this step, as I indicated yesterday, we approach a path of knowledge which was followed in a more primitive, or instinctive way in the practice of yoga in ancient India.

Those who practiced the yoga system, (as already pointed out, to try to renew this yoga would be wrong, because it is not suited to the changed constitution of modern man) tried for short periods of time to replace the ordinary, normal, but largely unconscious respiratory process with a more consciously regulated respiration. They inhaled differently from the way we ordinarily do in our normal, unconscious breathing. The breath was then held, to bring to awareness of how long it was held and then it was exhaled in a particular manner. At best, such a method of breathing could give additional support to present spiritual life. In India, however, this process was done by those who wanted to reach the awe-inspiring Vedanta philosophy or the philosophical foundation of the Vedas. This is no longer possible todäy. In fact, it would contradict what the human constitution actually is today. Nevertheless, much can be learned from this way in which a rhythmic process is willfully made conscious by an alteration of normal breathing. What otherwise takes place quite naturally in the course of living is lifted into the domain of conscious will. Thus respiration—all that takes place in the human life-process during breathing—is carried out consciously. Because it is carried out consciously, the entire content of human consciousness changes. In breathing we draw what is in the environment into our own organization. In the kind of consciously structured breathing process I have described, something of a soul-spiritual nature is also drawn into the human organization.

Now consider the following. When we contemplate the human organization as a whole, if we are not satisfied with abstraction but want to move on to reality, then we cannot really say: We are only what is within our skin. We have within us the respiratory process, it may be about to begin, or it may be proceeding with the transformation of oxygen and so on. But what is in us now was outside us before and it belonged to the world. And, what is in us now, when exhaled, will again belong to the world. As soon as we approach the rhythmic system, we do not find ourselves individualized organically in the same way as we picture ourself when we consider only what is not of an aeriform nature within our skin. When the human being becomes fully aware that he exchanges his aeriform organization quite rapidly—now the air is without, now it is within—he cannot help but appear to himself as a self-conscious finger would appear to itself, as a part of our organism. The finger could not say: I am independent—it could only feel part of the whole human organism. As a breathing organism, we must feel the same way. We are members of our cosmic surroundings precisely by virtue of the respiratory organism and the only reason we do not pay attention to the fact that we are a part of it is because we perform this rhythmical organizing activity naturally, almost unconsciously.

When, on the other hand, this fact is raised to consciousness through the yoga process, one notices that, in fact, it is not just material air that is inhaled and combined with one's self, but along with the air something of a soul-spiritual nature is inhaled and assimilated. When exhaling, something of a soul-spiritual nature is returned to the outer world. One comes to know not only one's material connection with the cosmic surroundings; one also comes to know one's soul-spiritual connection with the cosmic surroundings. The entire rhythmic process is metamorphosed so that a soul-spiritual element can incorporate itself.

Just as the cosmic environment integrates itself into the process of mental representation, so into the breathing process (which otherwise is an inner physical-organic process), something of a soul-spiritual nature is incorporated. In this way the transformed yoga breathing becomes a more pantheistically-tinged way of knowing, in which the separate entities are less individualized. Thus in the Indian, a different consciousness takes shape from the ordinary one. He experiences himself in another state of consciousness in which he is, as it were, surrendered to the world. At the same time, this has the effect of leading him into an objective relationship with his accustomed mental world as he moves down, as it were, with his consciousness into the respiratory-rhythmic system. Before this, his conscious life was in the nerve-sense system, in the form of the sum total of his mentally-viewed images. Now he experiences himself, precisely what he experiences he doesn't know, but as soon as it becomes objective it comes into inner view, and through this he learns to recognize the true nature of his accustomed image world. He now experiences himself one level lower, so to speak, in the rhythmic system. When we become acquainted with this inner process of experience, then we can understand in a new way what is breathing through the Vedas. The Vedanta philosophy is not only something that has taken a different form than it takes in the west; it grows out of something immediately experienced—from the experience that is simply given in a consciousness displaced into the breathing process.

There is still a further experience when we descend into this respiratory process. Before I mention it, however, I would like to review more precisely what I indicated the day before yesterday. I said that the yoga-process is not for us any more, and the human constitution has advanced since then. In our age we are no longer capable of entering into the yoga process, simply because our intellectual organization is so strong today; because our mental images are so inwardly “hardened”—this is just meant figuratively—that we would send much more power into the respiratory system than did the Indian with his “softer” mental life. Today the human being would be inwardly numbed or he would disturb his rhythmic system in some other way if he proceeded as the Indian did in the yoga process. As I have pointed out—and as I will describe later in greater detail, we are in a position to advance from a further development of the memory faculty to a development of the process of forgetting. By entering into the depth of the forgetting process, we take hold of respiration from above, and can leave it as it is. We do not need to change it. The right way for modern man is to let it be. With an artificially enhanced forgetting, we shine down, as it were, into the respiratory system. We transfer our consciousness into this region. But now it is possible to do this in a more fully conscious way, with greater penetration of the will than the ancient Indian could use.

In this way, we now have the possibility to recognize the rhythmic system in its association with human feeling life. When we gain the ability to retain a mental imaging capacity in this region, when it becomes possible for us to have inspired mental images, we no longer feel the need for the sense-perceptible structure to be similar to the soul structure—as is the case where the brain structure is similar to the connections between mental images. In fact, the external, sensory structure can be so different from the related soul element that it completely escapes the notice of conventional physiology, as in Theodor Ziehen's case. Looking at the world in a more spiritual way, looking at it purely spiritually, we find that in fact it is the feeling life that enables us to penetrate consciously into the rhythmic system. Thus we begin to see why in earlier times (the Indians, after all, are simply representative of what came from the earlier stages of human development), when human beings strove to go beyond an ordinary everyday understanding of the world, their path to knowledge led them down into the life of feeling. Cognition remained an activity of mental picturing, but it penetrated into the feeling life, it was suffused with feeling. Modern research only speaks of a coloration of feeling. What the yogi of old, and human beings in general in older cultures experienced, was a sinking down into the realm of feeling. Yet this was without the vagueness typical of this realm. The full clarity of conscious mental life remained, and yet not only was feeling not extinguished, but it appeared more intense than in ordinary everyday life, thereby suffusing everything that normally had a sober, prosaic character. At the same time the mental images, in going through a metamorphosis, a deepening, took on other forms. These transformed mental images were so suffused with feeling that the will was directly stimulated. What this human being of earlier times then did was something that we do today in a more abstract way, when we take something we are carrying in our soul and use it as a subject for drawing or painting. What was experienced in yoga in this way was so intense that the mere drawing or painting of it would not have been enough. It was an entirely natural step to transform it into an external symbolism embodied in external objects.

Here you have the psychological origin of all that appeared in the form of rituals in ancient culture. To find the motive for these rituals, one must look at their inner nature. It was not out of some form of childishness, but out of his way of experiencing knowledge that the human being of old came to perform ritualistic ceremonies and to regard them as something real. For he knew that what he molded into his ritual was something inward put into outer form, something rooted in a cognition from which he was not estranged, but which connected him with reality. What he impressed into his ritual was what the world had first impressed into him. When he had reached this state of knowledge, he said to himself: Just as the physical breath from the surrounding cosmos lives within me, now the spiritual essence of the world lives in my transformed consciousness. And when I in turn make an outer structure, when I build into the objects and rituals what first formed itself in me out of the spiritual cosmos, I am performing an act that has a direct connection with the spiritual content of the cosmos.

Thus for the human being of an ancient culture, the outward cultic objects stood before him symbolically in such a way that through them he felt again the original connection with the spiritual entities he had first experienced through ordinary knowledge. He knew that in the elements of the ritual something is concentrated in an outer visible form. This something does not exhaust itself in the outward expression I see before me, for the soul-spiritual powers that live in the cosmos are alive in the ritual while it takes place.

What I am relating to you is what went on in the souls of those human beings who as a result of their inner experiences gave form to the rituals. One reaches a psychological understanding of such rituals when one is willing to accept the idea of inspired cognition. These things simply cannot be explained in the usual external way. One must enter deeply into man's being and must consider how the various functions of the entire human race developed in sequence—how, for instance, in a certain epoch particular rituals developed. The religious ceremonies of today are actually rernnants of something that took form in ancient times and then stood still afterward. This is why it is becoming so difficult for a person today to understand the reason for the religious ritual, for he feels it is no longer a justifiable way of relating to the outer world.

Furthermore, we can see another aspect of how the soul works in the course of mankind's development. Deep knowledge, as I have described, underlies the creation of a ritual or the carrying out of a ritual. But humanity has developed further and another factor has entered in, which still lives more or less in the unconscious. What shows itself most clearly when we reach imaginative cognition is that the nervous system is formed out of our soul-spiritual powers. This too has developed in the course of human history. Particularly since the middle of the fifteenth century, humanity in all its various groups has developed in such a way that this instinctive incorporation of the soul-spiritual powers into the nervous system has become stronger than it was formerly. We simply have a stronger intellect today. This is obvious when one studies Plato and Aristotle. Our intellect is organized differently. In my Riddles of Philosophy I have demonstrated this from the history of philosophy itself. Our intellectual functioning is different. We simply overwork that element of the soul which has grown stronger in the course of human development. And this element which has grown stronger has also become more independent. The increasing independence of our intellect from the nervous system simply has not reached the attention of the philosophers—or of mankind in general. Because the human being has grown stronger on the inside, so to say—because he has penetrated his nervous system with a stronger organizing power from the soul-spiritual realm, he feels the need to make use of this intensified intellectual activity in the outer world. In ancient times, knowledge attained inwardly was used in the creation and the exercise of rituals; there was a striving to carry over what had been originally experienced inwardly as knowledge into what was performed outwardly. In the same way today, the longing arises to satisfy our stronger, more independent intellect in the outer world. The intellect wants a counterpart that corresponds to the ritual.

What is the result of such a wish? Please accept the paradox, for psychologically it is so: Where inner experience is expelled, as it were; where the intellect alone wishes to arrange a procedure so that it can live in the object just as cosmic life was once intended to live in the “object” of the ritual: what results from this is the scientific device, serving the experiment. Experiment is the way the modern human being satisfies his now stronger intellect. Thereby he lives of the opposite pole from the time when man satisfied his relation to the cosmos through the cultic object and ritual ceremony. These are the two opposite poles. In an ancient culture of instinctive clairvoyance, the impulse was to give outer presence to inner cosmic experience in what could be called ritualistic exercise. Our intensified modern intellect, on the other hand, is such that it wishes to externalize itself in controlled movements that are devoid of all inwardness, in which nothing subjective lives—and yet the experiment is controlled just precisely through the subjective attainments of our intellect. It may seem strange to you that the same underlying impulse gives rise on the one hand to the ritual, and on the other to the experiment, but one can understand these polarities if one considers the human being as a whole.

Starting with this as a foundation, we will continue our discussion tomorrow.