The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Anthroposophy enters modern life as an uninvited guest. It will only be treated kindly when it is noticed that it brings something “lost”.

Man has possessed it instinctively. He must consciously attain it. What anthroposophy brings is still too difficult for people. They do not want to apply the self-activity that is necessary.

The two most important questions have disappeared from soul contemplation: the eternal and freedom.

They are even lost in the life of the body. If an immortal element were present in the life of the body, it would have to act like the air that is in the body. This immortal element must, as it were, be exhaled when the mortal element begins its existence. It is inhaled again at death.

Only the spirit of man, independent of the body, possesses freedom. Natural science is right when it recognizes no freedom.

Anthroposophy must resort to a different kind of knowledge than is usual. This puts it in a position of being confused with the lower so-called clairvoyance. But this is bound to organ systems, in relation to which sensory perception is a “higher” one.

In sensory knowledge, the human being actually goes beyond “himself”. He is present as a “spirit” in a region where he is not present as a “soul”.

He must go further beyond himself. He must develop a “knowledge” to which there is no ordinary “being”. The first stage [is] “imaginative” knowledge. This “knowledge” will necessarily appear to ordinary consciousness as fantastic. In the moment in which this knowledge touches ordinary reality, it will be destroyed by it. In the life of the body, the human being sleeps through his immortal life. Waking up, he seizes hold of it.

The threefold nature of the human being on both sides.

Death on the outside - from the inside. - Violent death. - Changes in direction in earthly life. - Post Mortem destructive in earthly life. - Presence of mind.

Supernatural knowledge has all the qualities that man does not love, while he desires the object.

Man dreams and sleeps “awake” - for only the life of imagination is really “awake,” and this bears the guilt of its being awake with dead content that can only be applied to the mechanical. Its content can only be the life of nature. The aim of knowing nature is to free the human being.

The experience of feeling is dream-like. The experience of the impulses of the will is asleep. - The ordinary dream is counterfeit. It bears the stamp of the past.

If one were always awake, the sense of “I” would disappear. If one were to see through the wanting in ordinary consciousness, one would be a “different” one.

Both social and historical becoming is dreamed.

What can be reduced to concepts in it is already a historical corpse.

Events do not follow one another in such a way that one can be explained by what has gone before; rather, each sheds light on the next independently.

What is dreamt up cannot be brought into the forms of ordinary consciousness. A parliament of scientifically minded people would ruin the world. Parable of chess.

- Visions that are true to reality because they are rooted in life. The most dazzling example of a social science is socialism itself. It is not a program for the future; it is the conceptualized social dream development of the last few centuries. Marx told the dream and believed in its sense of real reality. But that was at the moment when one must recognize that awakening is taking place. Mauthner speaks of Hegel's “impudence”: “All that exists is reasonable.” The present awakening must not lead to a new dream, but to an imaginative recognition of the social laws. Everything that is scientifically based must be discarded. We must smile at political theories as we would at an esthete who invents the laws of opera.

[ 1 ] In Max Dessoir’s book, From Beyond the Soul¹ there is a brief section in which the systematic noetic investigation, or spiritual science, called “anthroposophical” and associated with my name, is stigmatised as scientifically untenable. Now it might well be argued that any dialogue between someone with the scientific outlook of Dessoir and an upholder of this anthroposophical method must be a waste of time. For the latter necessarily posits a field of purely noetic experience which the former categorically denies and relegates to the realm of fantasy. Apparently then one can speak of spiritual science and its findings only to someone who is antecedently convinced of the factuality of that field.

This would be true enough if the spokesman for anthroposophy had nothing to bring forward but his own inner personal experiences, and if he then simply set these up alongside the findings of a science based on sensory observation and the scientific elaboration thereof. You could then say: the professor of science, so defined, must refuse to regard the experiences of the spiritual researcher as realities; the latter can only expect to impress those who have already adopted his own standpoint.

[ 2 ] And yet this conclusion depends on a misconception of what I mean by anthroposophy.² It is quite true that anthroposophy relies on psychic apprehensions that are dependent neither on sense-impressions nor on scientific propositions based on these and these alone. It must be conceded therefore that prima facie the two types of apprehension are divided from one another by an unbridgable gulf. Nevertheless this turns out not to be the case. There is a common ground on which the two methodologies may properly encounter one another and on which debate is possible concerning the findings of both. It may be characterised as follows.

[ 3 ] The spokesman for anthroposophy maintains, on the basis of apprehensions that are not merely his private and personal experiences, that the process of human cognition can be further developed after a certain fixed point, a point beyond which scientific research, relying solely on sensory observation and inference therefrom, refuses to go. To avoid a lot of tedious paraphrases I propose, in what follows, to designate the methodology based on sensory observation and its subsequent inferential elaboration by the term “anthropology”; requesting the reader’s indulgence for this abnormal usage. It will be employed throughout strictly with that reference. Anthroposophical research, then, reckons to begin from where anthropology leaves off.

[ 4 ] The spokesman for anthropology limits himself to the method of relating his experience of concepts of the understanding with his experience through the senses. The spokesman for anthroposophy realises the fact that these concepts are capable (irrespective of the circumstance that they are to be related to sense impressions) of opening a life of their own within the psyche. Further, that by the unfolding of this energy they effect a development in the psyche itself. And he has learnt how the psyche, if it pays the requisite attention to this process, makes the discovery that organs of spirit are disclosing their presence there. (In employing the expression ‘organs of spirit” I adopt, and extend, the linguistic usage of Goethe, who referred to “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” in expounding his philosophical position).³ These organs amount to formations in the psyche analogous to what the sense-organs are in the body. It goes without saying that they are to be understood as exclusively psychic. Any attempt to connect them with some kind of somatic formation must be ruled out as far as anthroposophy is concerned. Spiritual organs are to be conceived as never in any manner departing from the psychic and entering the texture of the somatic. Any such encroachment is, for anthroposophy, a pathological formation with which it will have nothing whatever to do. And the whole manner in which the development of these organs is conceived should be enough to satisfy a bona fide enquirer that, on the subject of illusions, visions, hallucinations and so forth, the ideas of anthroposophy are the same as those that are normally accepted in anthropology.⁴ When the findings of anthroposophy are equated with abnormal experiences, miscalled “psychic”, or “psychical”, the argument is invariably based on misunderstanding or on an insufficient acquaintance with what anthroposophy actually maintains. Moreover no-one who had followed with a modicum of penetration the manner in which anthroposophy treats of the development of spiritual organs could possibly slip into the notion of its being a path that could lead to pathological syndromes. On the contrary, given such penetration, it will be realised that all the stages of psychic apprehension which a human being, according to anthroposophy, experiences in his progress towards intuition of spirit, lie in a domain exclusively psychic; so that sensory experience and normal intellectual activity continue alongside of them unaltered from what they were before this territory was opened up. The plethora of misunderstandings that are current upon this aspect of anthroposophical cognition arise from the fact that many people have difficulty in focusing their attention on what is purely and distinctively psychic. The power to form ideas fails them, unless it is supported by some surreptitious reference to sensory phenomena. Failing that, their mental capacity wilts, and ideation sinks to an energy-level below that of dreaming—to the level of dreamless sleep, where it is no longer conscious. It may be said that the consciousness of such minds is congested with the after-effects, or the actual effects, of sense-impressions; and this congestion entails a corresponding slumber of all that would be recognised as psychic, if it could be seized at all. It is even true to say that many minds approach the properly psychic with hopeless misunderstanding precisely because they are unable, when it confronts them, to stay awake, as they do when they are confronted by the sensory content of consciousness. Such is the predicament of all in whom the faculty of vigilant attention is only strong enough for the purposes of everyday life. This sounds surprising, but I would recommend anyone who finds it incredible to ponder carefully a certain objection raised by Brentano against the philosopher William James. “It is necessary,” writes Brentano, “to distinguish between the act of sensing and that upon which the act is directed and the two are as certainly different from one another as my present recollection of a past event is from the event itself; or, to take an even more drastic example, as my hatred of an enemy is from the object of that hate.” He adds that the error he is nailing does “turn up here and there”, and he continues:

Among others it has been embraced by William James, who endeavoured to establish it in a longish address to the International Congress on Psychology in 1905. Because, when I look into a room, there is evidently not only the room but also my looking; because fancied images of sensible objects only distinguish themselves gradually from objectively stimulated ones; because, finally, we call some bodies beautiful, and yet the difference between beautiful and ugly relates to different emotions—therefore we must stop regarding physical and psychic phenomena as two different classes of appearance! I find it hard to understand how the speaker himself could be unaware of the weakness of these arguments. To appear simultaneously is not to appear as one and the same. For simultaneity is less than identity. That was why Descartes could recommend his readers, without fear of contradiction, to deny, at least to begin with, that the room which I see is, and to hold fast to the-fact-that-I-see-it as the one thing free from doubt. But if the first argument falls to the ground, then obviously the second one does also. For why should it matter that fancy differs from seeing only by the degree of intensity, since, even if the degrees of intensity were the same total similarity between fancying and seeing could prove no more than the similarity of fancying to a psychic phenomenon? Finally there is the argument from beauty. Surely it is a very odd sort of logic which draws, from that fact that pleasure in the beautiful is something psychic, the conclusion that that, with the appearance whereof the pleasure is connected, must also be something psychic! If that were so, every displeasure would be identical with what we are displeased about; and a man would have to be very careful not to regret a past mistakes, because the regret (being identical with the mistake) would repeat the mistake itself.

For all these reasons there ought not to be much fear that the authority of James, which he unfortunately shares with that of Mach among German psychologists, will seduce many people into overlooking such a glaring distinction.

All the same, this “overlooking of glaring distinctions” is far from rare. The reason is that our faculty of ideation only operates vigilantly with the somatic component of representation, the sense-impressions; the concurrent psychic factor is present to consciousness only to the feeble extent of experiences had during sleep. The stream of experience comes to us in two currents: one of them is apprehended wakefully; the other, the psychic, is seized concurrently, but only with a degree of awareness similar to the mentality of sleep, that is, with virtually no awareness at all. It is impermissible to ignore the fact that, during ordinary waking life, the psychology of sleep does not simply leave off; it continues alongside our waking experience; so that the specifically psychic only enters the field of perception if the subject is awake not only to the sense world (as is the case with ordinary consciousness), but also to the existentially psychic—which is the case with intuitive consciousness. It makes very little difference whether this latter (the slumber that persists within the waking state) is simply denied on crudely materialistic grounds or whether, with James, it is lumped in with the physical organism. The results in either case are much the same. Both ways lead to ill-starred myopias. Yet we ought not to be surprised that the psychic so often remains unperceived, when even a philosopher like William James is incapable of distinguishing it properly from the physical.⁵

[ 5 ] With those who are no better able than James to keep the positively psychic separate from the content of the psyche’s experience through the senses, it is difficult to speak of that part of the soul wherein the development of spiritual organs is observable. Because this development occurs at the very point on which they are incapable of directing attention. And it is just this point that leads from intellectual to intuitive knowledge.⁶

[ 6 ] It should be noted however that such a capacity to observe the authentically psychic is very elementary; it is the indispensable precondition, but it assures to the mind’s eye no more than the bare possibility of looking whither anthroposophy looks to find the psychic organs. This first glimpse bears the same relation to a soul fully equipped with the spiritual organs of which anthroposophy speaks as an undifferentiated living cell does to a full-blown creature furnished with sense organs. The soul is only conscious of possessing a particular organ of spirit to the extent that it is able to make use of it. For these organs are not something static; they are in continual movement. And when they are not being employed, it is not possible to be conscious of their presence. Thus, their apprehension and their use coincide. The manner in which their development and, with that, the possibility of observing them, is brought about will be found described in my anthroposophical writings. There is one point however I must briefly touch on here.

[ 7 ] Anyone given to serious reflection on the experiences occasioned through sense phenomena keeps coming up against questions which that reflection itself is at first inadequate to answer. This leads to the establishment by those who represent anthropology of boundaries of cognition. Recall, for instance, Du Bois-Reymond’s oration on the frontiers of natural knowledge, in which he maintained that man cannot know what is the actual nature of matter or of any elementary phenomenon of consciousness. All he can do is to come to a halt at these points in his reflection and acknowledge to himself: “there are boundaries of knowledge which the human mind cannot cross”. After that there are two possible attitudes he may adopt. He may rest content with the fact that knowledge is only attainable inside this limited zone and that anything outside the fence is the province of feelings, hopes, wishes, inklings. Or he can make a new start and form hypotheses concerning an extra-sensory realm. In that case he is making use of the understanding, in the faith that its judgments can be carried into a realm of which the senses perceive nothing. But, in doing so, he puts himself in peril of the agnostic’s objection: that the understanding is not entitled to form judgments concerning a reality for which it lacks the foundation of sense-perception. For it is these alone which could give content to judgments, and without such content concepts are empty.

[ 8 ] The attitude of an anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit to boundaries of cognition resembles neither the one nor the other of these. Not the second, because it is in substantial agreement with the view that the mind must lose the whole ground for reflection, if it rests satisfied with such ideas as are acquired through the senses and yet seeks to apply these ideas beyond the province of the senses. Not the first, because it realises that contact with those “boundaries” of knowledge evokes a certain psychic experience that has nothing to do with the content of ideation won from the senses. Certainly, if it is only this content that the mind presents to itself, then it is obliged, on further introspection, to admit: “this content can disclose nothing for cognition except a reproduction of sensory experience”. But it is otherwise if the mind goes a step further and asks itself: What is the nature of its own experience, when it fills itself with the kind of thoughts that are evoked by its contact with the normal boundaries of cognition? The same exercise of introspection may then lead it to say: “I cannot know in the ordinary sense with such thoughts: but if I succeed in inwardly contemplating this very impotence to know, I am made aware of how these thoughts become active in me”. Considered as normally cognitive ideas they remain silent, but as their silence communicates itself more and more to a man’s consciousness, they acquire an inner life of their own, which becomes one with the life of the soul. And then the soul notices that this experience has brought it to a pass that may be compared with that of a blind creature, which has not yet done much to cultivate its sense of touch. Initially, such a creature would simply keep on knocking up against things. It would sense the resistance of external realities. But out of this generalised sensation it could develop an inner life informed with a primitive consciousness—no longer a general sensation of collisions, but a consciousness that begins to diversify that sensation, remarking distinctions between hardness and softness, smoothness and roughness and so forth.

[ 9 ] In the same way, the soul is able to undergo, and to diversify, the experience it has with ideas it forms at the boundaries of cognition and to learn from them that those boundaries are simply events that occur when the psyche is stimulated by a touch of the spiritual world. The moment of awareness of such boundaries turns into an experience comparable with tactile experience in the sense world.⁷ In what it previously termed boundaries of cognition, it now sees a pneumato-psychic stimulus through a spiritual world. And out of the pondered experience it can have with the different boundaries of cognition, the general sense of a world of spirit separates out into a manifold perception thereof.

This is the manner in which the, so to say, humblest mode of perceptibility of the spiritual world becomes experiential. All that has been dealt with so far is the initial opening up of the psyche to the world of spirit, but it does show that anthroposophy, as I use the term, and the noetic experiences it ensues, do not connote all manner of nebulous personal affects, but a methodical development of authentic inner experience. This is not the place to demonstrate further how such inchoate spiritual perception is then improved by further psychic exercises and achievements, so that it becomes legitimate to use the vocabulary of touch in this context, or of other and “higher” modes of perception. For a cognitive psychology of this kind I must refer the reader to my anthroposophical books and articles. My present object is to state the principle basic to “spiritual perception” as it is understood in anthroposophy.

[ 10 ] I shall offer one other analogy to illustrate how the whole psychology of anthroposophical spiritual investigation differs from that of anthropology. Look at a few grains of wheat. They can be applied for the purposes of nutrition. Alternatively they can be planted in the soil, so that other wheat plants develop from them. The representations and ideas acquired through sensory experience can be retained in the mind with the effect that what is experienced in them is a reproduction of sensory reality. And they can also be experienced in another way: the energy they evince in the psyche by virtue of what they are, quite apart from the fact that they reproduce phenomena, can be allowed to act itself out. The first way may be compared with what happens to wheat grains when they are assimilated by a living creature as its means of nourishment. The second with the engendering of a new wheat plant through each grain. Of course we must bear in mind that, in the analogy, what is brought forth is a plant similar to the parent plant; whereas from an idea active in the mind the outcome is a force available for the formation of organs of the spirit. It must also be borne in mind that initial awareness of such inner forces can only be kindled by particularly potent ideas, like those “frontiers of knowledge” of which we have been speaking; but when once the mind has been alerted to the presence of such forces, other ideas and representations may also serve, though not quite so well, for further progress in the direction it has now taken.

[ 11 ] The analogy illustrates something else that anthroposophical research discovers concerning the actual psychology of mental representation. It is this. Whenever a seed of corn is processed for the purposes of nutrition, it is lifted out of the developmental pattern which is proper to it, and which ends in the formation of a new plant, but so also is a representation, whenever it is applied by the mind in producing a mental copy of sense-perception, diverted from its proper teleological pattern. The corresponding further development proper to a representation is to function as a force in the development of the psyche. Just as little as we find the laws of development built in to a plant, if we examine it for its nutritive value, do we find the essential nature of an idea or a representation, when we investigate its adequacy in reproducing for cognition the reality it mediates. That is not to say that no such investigation should be undertaken. It can all be investigated just as much as can the nutritive value of a seed. But then, just as the latter enquiry throws light on something quite different from the developmental laws of plant growth, so does an epistemology, which tests representations by the criterion of their value as images for cognition, reach conclusions about something other than the essential nature of ideation. The seed, as such, gave little indication of turning into nourishment: nor does it lie with representations, as such, to deliver copies for cognition. In fact, just as its application as nutriment is something quite external to the seed itself, so is cognitive reproduction irrelevant for representation. The truth is that what the psyche does lay hold of in its representations is its own waxing existence. Only through its own activity does it come about that the representations turn into media for the cognition of some reality.⁸

[ 12 ] There remains the question: how do representations turn into media for cognition? Anthroposophical observation, availing itself as it does of spiritual organs, inevitably answers this question differently from epistemological theories that renounce them. Its answer is as follows.

[ 13 ] Representations strictly as such—considered as what they themselves originally are—do indeed form part of the life of the soul; but they cannot become conscious there as long as the soul does not consciously use its spiritual organs. So long as they retain their original vitality they remain unconscious. The soul lives by means of them, but it can know nothing of them. They have to suppress (herabdämpfen) their own life in order to become conscious experiences of normal consciousness. This suppression is effected by every sense perception. Consequently, when the mind receives a sense impression, there is a benumbing (Herablähmung) of the life of the representation, and it is this benumbed representation which the psyche experiences as the medium of a cognition of outer reality.⁹All the representations and ideas that are related by the mind to an outer sense reality are inner spiritual experiences, whose life has been suppressed. In all our thoughts about an outer world of the senses, we have to do with deadened representations. And yet the life of the representation is not just annihilated; rather it is disjoined from the area of consciousness but continues to subsist in the nonconscious provinces of the psyche. That is where it is found again by the organs of the spirit. Just as the deadened ideas of the soul can be related to the sense world, so can the living ideas apprehended by spiritual organs be related to the spiritual world. But “boundary” concepts of the kind spoken of above, by their very nature, refuse to be deadened. Consequently they resist being related to any sense reality. And for that reason they become points of departure for spiritual perception.

[ 14 ] In my anthroposophical writings I have applied the term “imaginal” to representations that are apprehended by the psyche as living. It is a misunderstanding to confound the reference of this word with the form of expression (imagery) which has to be employed in order to analogously suggest such representations. What the word does mean may be elucidated in the following manner. If someone has a sense-perception while the outer object is impressing him, then the perception has a certain inner potency for him. If he turns away from the object, then he can re-present it to himself in a purely internal representation. But the intrinsic strength of the representation has now been reduced. Compared with the representation effected in the presence of the object, it is more or less shadowy. If he wants to enliven these shadowy representations of ordinary consciousness, he impregnates them with echoes of actual contemplation. He converts the representation into a visual image. Now such images are no other than the joint effects of representation and sensory life combined. But the “imaginal” representations of anthroposophy are not effected in this way at all. In order to bring them to pass, the soul must be familiar with the inner process that combines psychic representation with sense-impression, so familiar that it can hold at arms length the influx of the sense-impressions themselves (or of their echoes in after-experience) into the act of representing. This keeping at bay of post-sense-experiences can only be achieved, if the man has detected the way in which the activity of representing is pre-empted by these after experiences. Not until then is he in a position to combine his spiritual organs with the act itself and thereby to receive impressions of spiritual reality.

Thus the act of representing is impregnated from quite another side than in the case of sense-perception. And thus the mental experiences are positively different from those evoked by sense-perception. And yet they are not beyond all possibility of expression. They may be expressed by the following means. When a man perceives the colour yellow, he has an experience that is not simply optical but is also affective and empathetic, an experience of the nature of feeling. It may be more or less pronounced in different human beings, but it is never wholly absent. There is a beautiful chapter in Goethe’s Farbenlehre on the “sensuous-moral effect of colours”, in which he has described with great penetration the emotional by-effects for red, yellow, green and so forth. Now when the mind perceives something from a particular province of the spirit, it may happen that this spiritual perception has the same emotional by-effect as the sensory perception of yellow. The man knows that he is having this or that spiritual experience; and what he has before him in the representation is of course not the same as in a representation of the colour yellow. But he does have, as emotional by-effect, the same inner experience as when the colour yellow is before his eyes. He may then aver that he perceives the spirit experience as “yellow”. Of course he could choose to be more precise, always being careful to say: “the mind apprehends somewhat that affects the soul rather as the colour yellow affects it”. But such elaborate verbal precautions ought to be unnecessary for anyone who is already acquainted through anthroposophical literature with the process leading to spiritual perception. This literature gives a clear enough warning that the reality open to spiritual perception does not confront the organ of spirit after the fashion of an attenuated sense-object or event, nor in such a way that it could be rendered in ideas that are intuitions of sense (sinnlich-anschauliche) as commonly understood.¹⁰

[ 15 ] Just as the mind becomes acquainted through its spiritual organs with the spiritual world outside of a man, so does it come to know the spirit-being of the man himself. Anthroposophy observes this spirit-being as a member of the spiritual world. It proceeds from observation of a part of the spiritual world to ideas of human being which represent to it the spiritual man as he reveals himself in the human body. Anthropology, too, coming from the opposite direction, proceeds to ideas of human being. Once anthroposophy has reached the stage of developing the methods of observation already described, it attains to intuitions concerning the spiritual core of the human being as that reveals itself, within the sense-world, in the body. The acme of this self-revelation is the consciousness that permits sense-impressions to persist in the form of representations. Proceeding, as it does, from experiences of the extra-human spiritual world to the human being, anthroposophy finds the latter subsisting in a sensuous body and, within that body, developing the consciousness of sensible reality. The last thing it reaches is the soul’s activity in representation which is expressible in coherent imagery. Thereafter, and at the end, so to speak, of its journey of spiritual investigation, it can extend its gaze further; it can observe how positive activity in representation becomes half-paralysed through the percipient senses. It is this deadened representation process that anthroposophy sees (illumined from the spirit-side) as characterising the life of man in the sense-world, in so far as he is a representing being. Its philosophy of man is the final outcome of prior researches conducted purely in the realm of the spirit. Through what has transpired in the course of those researches, it comes at its notion of the human being living in the sense-world.

[ 16 ] Anthropology investigates the kingdoms of the sense-world. It also arrives, in due course, at the human being. It sees him combining the facts of the sense-world in his physical organism in such a way that consciousness arises, and that through consciousness outer reality is given in representations. The anthropologist sees these representations as arising out of the human organism. And at that point, observing in that way, he is more or less brought to a halt. He cannot, via anthropology alone, apprehend any inner structural laws in the act of ideation or representation. Anthroposophy, at the end of the journey that has taken its course in spiritual experiencing, continues contemplating the spiritual core of man so far as that manifests itself through the perceptions of the senses. Similarly anthropology, at the end of the journey that has taken its course in the province of the senses, can only continue endeavouring to contemplate the way in which sensuous man acts on his sense-perceptions. In doing so, it discovers that this operation is sustained, not by the laws of somatic life, but by the mental laws of logic. But logic is not a region that can be explored in the same fashion as the other regions of anthropological enquiry. Logically ordered thought is answerable to laws that can no longer be termed those of the physical organism. Inasmuch as a man is operating with them, what becomes apparent is the same being whom anthroposophy has encountered at the end of its journey. Only, the anthropologist sees this being after the fashion in which it is illumined from the sense side. He sees the deadened representations, the ideas; he also concedes, in acknowledging the validity of logic, that the laws governing those ideas belong to a world, which interlocks with the sense-world, but is not identical with it. In the process of ideation carried on by a logical being, anthropology discovers sensuous man projecting into the spiritual world. By this route it arrives at a philosophy of man as a final outcome of its investigations. Everything that has led up to it is to be found purely in the realm of the senses.¹¹

[ 17 ] Rightly pursued, therefore, the two approaches, anthroposophical and anthropological, converge and meet in one point. Anthroposophy contributes the image of the living human spirit, showing how, through sense existence, this develops the consciousness that obtains between birth and death, while at the same time its supersensible consciousness is deadened. Anthropology contributes the image of sensuous man, apprehending in the moment of consciousness his selfhood but towering into a subsistence in the spirit that extends beyond birth and death. In this coincidence a genuinely fruitful understanding between anthroposophy and anthropology is possible. It cannot fail, if both disciplines, terminate in philosophy and humanity.

Certainly the philosophy of humanity which stems from anthroposophy will furnish an image of man delineated by methods quite other than those of the image furnished by the humanist philosophy stemming from anthropology. Yet close observers of the one image and of the other will find that their ideas accord, as the negative plate of a competent photographer accords with his positive print.

[ 18 ] These observations began by posing the question whether fruitful dialogue is possible between anthropology and anthroposophy. They have perhaps succeeded in showing that the answer, at least from the anthroposophical point of view, is in the affirmative.

• 1. See Introduction, p. 16.
• 2. An exposition in greater detail together with a justification of this conception of “organs of spirit” will be found in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (4th Edition) as well as in my writings on Goethe’s philosophical outlook.
  
  Editor’s Note. And the English reader should compare Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, Chapter XII): “...all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense—and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all alike.”
• 3. An exposition in greater detail together with a justification of this conception of “organs of spirit” will be found in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (4th Edition) as well as in my writings on Goethe’s philosophical outlook.
• 4. The inner experiences, which the psyche has to undergo in order to be able to make use of its spiritual organs, are dealt with in a number of my writings and particularly in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and the second part of >Occult Science: an Outline.
• 5. This quickening of psychic faculties which in ordinary life remain unawakened is dealt with in greater detail in my Vom Menschenrätsel.
• 6. See also Section II. The Philosophical Bearing of Anthroposophy.
• 7. The boundaries of cognition referred to are not only those, comparatively few in number, of which there is general awareness. A great many are encountered along the avenues of self-reflection—4 which have to be explored on the way to immediate relation with reality. See also Section III. Concerning the Limits of Knowledge.
• 8. All this is dealt with at greater length in the final section of Vol. 2 of my Die Rätsel der Philosophie, under the heading: “Sketch Plan for an Anthroposophy”.
• 9. See also Section IV. Concerning Abstraction.
• 10. See also Section V. Concerning the Nature of Spiritual Perception.
• 11. Compare Section II.

[ 1 ] At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was consummated, Gnosis was the form which Thought took amongst that portion of mankind who at the time were able to understand with knowledge and not merely with dim feeling this, the greatest impulse in Man's earthly evolution.

[ 2 ] To understand what was the peculiar disposition of soul in which the Gnosis lived within men, we must keep in sight, that the age of this Gnosis was the age when the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was being developed.

[ 3 ] In this fact we may also find the reason why the Gnosis vanished almost entirely out of human history. That it should thus have vanished, is perhaps—until the cause be understood—one of the most amazing occurrences in the whole progress of mankind.

[ 4 ] The development of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was preceded by that of the Sentient Soul, and this again by the development of the Sentient Body. So long as the facts of the world are being perceived through the Sentient Body, all Man's knowledge lives in his senses. The world is seen coloured, heard sounding, and so on; but in the colours, in the sounds, in the varying states of warmth, a ‘material’ substance, presenting certain appearances of colour, warmth, and so on, there is no question; men talk of spiritual beings who reveal themselves through what the senses perceive.

[ 5 ] In this age, there is as yet no special exercise of an ‘understanding’ that exists in Man alongside of and distinct from sense-perception. Man either yields himself up with his whole human being to the outer world, and then the Gods reveal themselves to him through his senses. Or else he draws back from the outer world within his own soul-life, and then feels in his inner man a dull, indistinct sense of life.

[ 6 ] A notable change sets in when the Sentient Soul begins to develop. The revelation of the divine world through the senses begins to fade. In its place begins an outward perception of sense-impressions, so to speak god-divested, of colours, states of warmth, and so on. Meanwhile, within, the divine world reveals itself in spiritual form, in picture-ideas of the mind. Man now perceives the world from two aspects—from without through the impressions of sense, and from within through the spiritual impressions of the mind, in the form of Ideas.

[ 7 ] Man must next learn to have as distinct, as clearly formed a perception of these inner spiritual impressions, as he had before of the god-informed impressions of the senses. So long as the reign of the Sentient Soul Age lasts, he can do this; for out of his own inner being the Idea-pictures rise up in full and vivid form. His mind is filled from within by a sense-free spirit-content, which is a copy of the World-content. If formerly the Gods revealed themselves to him robed in sense-vestments, they now reveal themselves in spirit-vestments.

[ 8 ] This was essentially the time when the Gnosis came into being and when it flourished. A wonderful living lore is there, in which Man knows himself a partaker when he unfolds his inner being in purity so that the divine content may be revealed within it.

From the fourth down to the first millennium before the coming of the Mystery of Golgotha, this Gnosis was prevalent throughout the portion of mankind who had advanced farthest in the way of knowledge.

[ 9 ] Then begins the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. Now the World-images of Gods no longer rise up of themselves out of the inner man. Man himself must exert inward power in order to evoke them from his soul. The outer world with its sense impressions becomes a question. Man, when he exerts the inward power and evokes the divine World-images, obtains answers.

[ 10 ] But the images are pale in comparison with their earlier form. It is this phase of the human soul which comes to such marvelous expression in Ancient Greece. The Greek felt himself in the midst of the outer world which strikes the senses; and he felt in the outer world the magic which could arouse his own inner power to the unfolding of World-pictures. On philosophic ground, this phase of the human soul found its development in Platonism.

[ 11] But in the background, behind all this, was the world of the Mysteries. Here was faithfully treasured and preserved all that had come over as Gnosis from the age of the Sentient Soul.

Human souls were trained to be its faithful treasurers. The Intellectual or Mind-Soul developed in the ordinary course of evolution. The Sentient Soul was quickened by special training. And so, behind the ordinary religious and social life of the day, there flourished—more particularly in this age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul,—a Mystery life of a very richly developed form.

[ 12 ] Here the divine World-images continued to have life, inasmuch as they were made the spiritual content of cult and ritual. Look into the inner side of these Mysteries, and one sees the world pictured in the most wonderful ceremonies and rituals.

[ 13 ] The human beings in whose inner life this had been awakened were those who were able to penetrate the Mystery of Golgotha, at the time when it was consummated, in its profound, cosmic significance. But it was a Mystery-life which kept quite aloof from the external world and its affairs in order to cultivate the Spirit-picture-world in purity. And it became ever harder for men's souls to call forth the pictures.

[ 14 ] Then, in the highest places of the Mysteries, Spirit-beings descended out of the spiritual Cosmos, to aid struggling men in their efforts after knowledge. So the impulses of the Sentient Age were continued and further developed under the influence of the Gods themselves. There arose a Gnosis of the Mysteries, of which none but a very few had even the faintest conception. Alongside this Mystery-Gnosis, was what men could take in with the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. This was the exoteric Gnosis, of which fragments have come down to posterity.

[ 15 ] In the exoteric Gnosis of the Mysteries men became ever more incapable of rising to the development of the Sentient Soul. And so this esoteric wisdom passed over more and more into the care and cultivation of the Gods alone. This is one of the deep secrets in the historic evolution of mankind: ‘Divine Mysteries,’ so to speak, were at work in it from the first centuries of Christianity down into the Middle Ages.

[ 16 ] In these Divine Mysteries, the treasure which men could no longer preserve, was preserved in earthly life by Angelic beings. And so the Gnosis of the Mysteries lived on whilst the exoteric Gnosis was being diligently exterminated.

[ 17 ] The World-Image-content, treasured in a spiritual way by spiritual beings, preserved in the Gnosis of the Mysteries so long as it was needed for the advancement of mankind, could not indeed be made accessible to the conscious understanding of men's souls. But the feeling-content could be preserved, so that at the right cosmic moment, when men were fitly prepared, it might be given to them and bring them the warmth of soul with which the Spiritual Soul might—later on and in a new way—penetrate into the kingdom of the Spirit. Thus Spirit-beings built the bridge between the old World-content and the new.

[ 18 ] There are indications to be found in this mystery of human evolution. The Holy Vessel of the Grail, the Cup of Jasper used by Christ when He broke the Bread, in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the Blood which flowed from the pierced side of Jesus—the Cup, that is, which held the Mystery of Golgotha—was taken, so legend says, into the custody of Angels, until the Castle of the Grail had been built by Titurel, and it could descend upon those human beings who were duly prepared to receive it.

[ 19 ] Spirit-beings treasured the World-Images in which lived the Mystery of Golgotha. And when the time was come they sent down, not indeed the Imaginative content—that was not possible—but the feeling-content into the minds of men.

[ 20 ] It can be but a stimulus, this feeling legacy of an ancient knowledge, implanted in the hearts of men. Yet it is a very powerful stimulus, from which in our age—out of the Spiritual Soul—there may grow up, by the light of Michael's agency, a new and full understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 21 ] Anthroposophy is striving after this new understanding. From the description given, it is clear that Anthroposophy cannot be a revival of the Gnosis, for this was the mode of knowledge of the Sentient soul; whereas Anthroposophy has to draw a no less rich content of knowledge out of the Spiritual Soul, and in a totally new way.

Leading Thoughts

[ 22 ] The Gnosis develops in its characteristic form in the age of the Sentient Soul (fourth to first millennium before the incidence of the Mystery of Golgotha.) “The Divine' reveals itself in this age of Man inwardly, as a spiritual content of the mind, whereas in the previous period—the Age of the Sentient Body—it had revealed itself in and with the sense-impressions of the outer world.

[ 23 ] In the Age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, ‘the Divine,’ as spiritual content, has faded from the inner life, and can be realized but faintly. The Gnosis is preserved in sternly guarded Mysteries; and when men can preserve it no longer, because they are no longer able to requicken the Sentient soul, Spirit-beings take charge of it and carry over into the Middle Ages, not indeed the knowledge-content but the feeling-content of it. (this is indicated in the legend of the Holy Grail.) Meanwhile the exoteric Gnosis, which found its way into the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, is being forcibly exterminated.

[ 24 ] Anthroposophy cannot be a revival of the Gnosis; for Gnosis was connected with the development of the Sentient Soul. The work of Anthroposophy is, by the light of Michael's agency, to evolve out of the Spiritual Soul a new form of understanding of Christ, and the World. Gnosis was the old form of knowledge, preserved from earlier times—the one best able, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, to convey this Mystery to men's understanding.

[ 1 ] When the Mystery of Golgotha took place, the ‘Gnosis’ was the mode of thought of those among humanity who were able, already at that time, to understand this event—the most momentous in the earthly evolution of mankind—with an understanding not only of deep feeling but of clear knowledge.

[ 2 ] To comprehend the mood of soul whereby the Gnosis lived in man, we must bear in mind that its age was the age of unfolding of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. In this same fact we can discover the cause of the disappearance—well-nigh complete—of the Gnosis from human history. [ 3 ] Till we can thus understand it, the disappearance of the Gnosis is, after all, one of the most astonishing occurrences in human evolution.

[ 4 ] The unfolding of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was preceded by that of the Sentient Soul, and this in turn by that of the Sentient Body. When the facts of the world are perceived through the Sentient Body, the whole of man's knowledge lives in his senses. He perceives the world coloured, resonant, and so forth; but within the colours and sounds, within the states of warmth, he knows the presence of a world of Spiritual Beings. He does not speak of ‘substances,’ of ‘matter’ to which the phenomena of colour, warmth, etc., are supposed to adhere, but of Spiritual Beings who manifest themselves through the perceptions of the senses.

[ 5 ] In this age, there is as yet no special development of an ‘intellect’—there is no intellect in man beside the faculty of sense-perception. Man either gives himself up with his own being to the outer world, in which case the Gods reveal themselves to him through the senses; or else in his soul-life he withdraws from the outer world and is then aware of a dim sense of life within.

[ 6 ] But a far-reaching change takes place with the unfolding of the Sentient Soul. The manifestation of the Divine through the senses grows dim and fades away. In place of it man begins to perceive the mere sense-impressions—colours, states of warmth, etc.—empty, as it were, of the Divine. And within him the Divine now manifests itself in a spiritual form, in pictorial ideas. He now perceives the world from two sides: through sense-impressions from without, and through Spirit impressions of an ideal kind from within.

[ 7 ] Man at this stage must come to perceive the Spirit impressions in as definite a shape and clear a form as he hitherto perceived the divinely permeated sense-impressions. And indeed, while the age of the Sentient Soul holds sway he is still able to do this. For from his inner being the idea pictures rise before him in a fully concrete shape. He is filled from within with a sense-free Spirit-content—itself an image of the contents of the World. The Gods, who hitherto revealed themselves to him in a garment of sense, reveal themselves now in the garment of the Spirit.

[ 8 ] This was the age when the Gnosis really originated and had its life. It was a wonderful and living knowledge, in which man knew that he could share if he unfolded his inner being in purity and thus enabled the Divine content to manifest itself through him. From the fourth to the first millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, this Gnosis lived in those portions of humanity which were most advanced in knowledge.

[ 9 ] Then begins the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. Of their own accord the World-pictures of the Gods no longer rise out of the inner being of man. Man himself must apply an inner force to draw them forth from his own soul. The outer world with all its sense-impressions becomes a question—a question to which he obtains the answers by kindling the inner force to draw forth the World-pictures of the Gods from within him. But these pictures are pale now, beside their former shape and character.

[ 10 ] Such was the soul-condition of the portion of humanity that evolved so wonderfully in ancient Greece. The Greek felt himself intensely in the outer world of the senses, wherein he also felt the presence of a magic power summoning his own inner force to unfold the World-pictures. In the field of Philosophy, this mood of soul came forth in Platonism.

[ 11 ] But behind all this there stood the world of the Mysteries. In the Mysteries, such Gnosis as still remained from the age of the Sentient Soul was faithfully preserved. Human souls were definitely trained for this task of preservation. In the time when the Intellectual or Mind-Soul arose by way of ordinary evolution, the Sentient Soul was kindled into life by special training. Most especially in the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, behind the ordinary life of culture there was a richly developed life of the Mysteries.

[ 12 ] In the Mysteries the World-pictures of the Gods lived also in this way, that they were made the inner content of a cult or ritual. We gaze into the centres of those Mysteries and behold the Universe, portrayed in the most wonderful acts of ritual.

[ 13 ] The human beings who experienced these things were also those who, when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, perceived and penetrated it in its deep, cosmic significance. But this life of the Mysteries was kept entirely apart from the turmoil of the outer world, in order to unfold in purity the world of Spirit-pictures. And it became increasingly difficult for the souls of men to unfold the pictures.

[ 14 ] Then it was that in the highest places of the Mysteries, Spirit-beings descended from the spiritual Cosmos, coming to help the human beings in their intense strivings after knowledge. Thus under the influence of the ‘Gods’ themselves the impulses of the age of the Sentient Soul continued to unfold. There arose a ‘Gnosis of the Mysteries’ of which only the very few had any notion. And that which human beings were able to receive with the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was present alongside of this. It was the exoteric Gnosis whose fragments have come down to posterity.

[ 15 ] In the esoteric Gnosis of the Mysteries, human beings grew less and less able to rise to the unfolding of the Sentient Soul. The esoteric Wisdom passed over more and more into the keeping of the Gods alone. It is a great secret of the historic evolution of humanity, that ‘Divine Mysteries’—for as such we may indeed describe them—were at work in it from the first Christian centuries on into medieval times.

[ 16 ] In these ‘Divine Mysteries,’ Angel-beings preserved in Earth-existence what human beings were no longer able to preserve. Thus did the Gnosis of the Mysteries hold sway, while men were diligently wiping out the exoteric Gnosis.

[ 17 ] The World-picture-content, guarded in the Gnosis of the Mysteries by Spirit-beings in a spiritual way, while its influence was still required in the progress of mankind, could not, however, be preserved for the conscious understanding of man's soul. But its deep feeling-content had to be preserved. For in the right cosmic moment this was to be given to a humanity duly prepared to receive it, so that at a later stage the Spiritual Soul—fired by the inner warmth of it—might newly penetrate into the Spirit-realm. Thus, Spirit beings built the bridge from the old World-content to the new.

[ 18 ] Indications of this secret of human evolution do indeed exist. The sacred jasper cup of the Holy Grail which Christ made use of when He broke the bread and in which Joseph of Arimathea gathered the blood from the wound of Jesus—which contained therefore the secret of Golgotha—was received into safe keeping, according to the legend, by Angels until Titurel should build the Castle of the Grail, when they could allow it to descend upon the human beings who were prepared to receive it.

[ 19 ] Spiritual Beings protected the World-pictures in which the secrets of Golgotha were living. And when the time was come, they let down—not the picture-content, for this was not possible—but the full Feeling-content, into the hearts and minds of men.

[ 20 ] This implanting of the Feeling-content of an ancient knowledge can only serve to kindle, but it can indeed kindle most powerfully the unfolding in our age—out of the Spiritual Soul and in the light of Michael's activity—of a new and full understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

[ 21 ] Anthroposophy strives for this new understanding, which—as we may see from the above description—cannot be a renewal of the Gnosis. For the content of the Gnosis was the way of knowledge of the Sentient Soul, while Anthroposophy—in a completely new way—must draw forth a content no less rich from the Spiritual Soul.

January, 1925

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the above Study on Gnosis and Anthroposophy)

[ 22 ] 159. The Gnosis in its proper form evolved in the age of the Sentient Soul (from the fourth to the first millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha). It was an age when the Divine was made manifest to man as a spiritual content in his inner being; whereas in the preceding age (the age of the Sentient Body) it had revealed itself directly in his sense-impressions of the outer world.

[ 23 ] 160. In the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, man could only experience in paler cast the spiritual content of the Divine. The Gnosis was strictly guarded in hidden Mysteries. And when human beings could no longer preserve it, because they could no longer kindle the Sentient Soul to life, spiritual Beings carried over—not indeed the Knowledge-content—but the Feeling-content of the Gnosis into the Middle Ages. (The Legend of the Holy Grail contains an indication of this fact.) Meanwhile the exoteric Gnosis, which penetrated into the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, was ruthlessly exterminated.

[ 24 ] 161. Anthroposophy cannot be a revival of the Gnosis. For the latter depended on the development of the Sentient Soul; while Anthroposophy must evolve out of the Spiritual Soul, in the light of Michael's activity, a new understanding of Christ and of the World. Gnosis was the way of Knowledge preserved from ancient time—which, at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, was best able to bring home this Mystery to human understanding.

Anthroposophy and psychology. Spiritual scientific findings concerning the human soul

Reference to ‘anthroposophy’ in this lecture is not to something coming from a sectarian movement or spiritual stream, but to something much more general and human—a spiritual stream that arises with an inner necessity at this time from the scientific approach that has evolved into its present form in recent centuries.

Please do not, however, think of this approach, which we refer to as ‘anthroposophy’, as the kind of logical consequence arising from consistent judgements based on scientific postulates. No, the idea is that this anthroposophy must develop in its own right, as a living structure, living experience, in an age when we have to think scientifically about many issues in life and in the world. It is more like a live offspring—if I may put it like this—of the scientific way of thinking than just a logical conclusion drawn from it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I will have to try and make these four lectures on widely different fields in modern science into a whole. This means that individual lectures cannot be complete in themselves, and I would ask you to keep this very much in mind.

Beginning the series of lectures with a look at the relationship between anthroposophy and psychology seems natural and indeed obvious since in aiming to be orientated towards the world of the spirit, and seeking to obtain its findings from that world, we will have to be concerned in anthroposophy with the most inward affairs of the human being, that is, with human psychology. That is one side of it. On the other hand we have to consider that in the course of recent centuries, especially the 19th century, the science called psychology has taken on a very different character from that which it had just a short time before. It is exactly because scientific thinking has been applied in many spheres of life that psychology has become more of an enigma perhaps, has been found to be more full of riddles relating to life than any other field of scientific endeavour in recent times. It was only natural that in the light of the great, tremendous results achieved in scientific research, views and approaches based on scientific methods took hold, as it were, of everything that comes within the horizons of human knowledge. The scientific approach has therefore also extended its power, we might say, to the field of psychology in more recent times.

Let me immediately deal with a prejudice or misunderstanding that arises only too easily when it comes to anthroposophical research. People may say that those who do research with an anthroposophical orientation are not prepared to take account of the scientific advances made in recent times. The opposite is the case. The other lectures I will be giving here will show that modern science is in fact only given its proper due by providing it with the firm foundation which anthroposophy or the science of the spirit is able to provide for it. To some degree this will be evident as soon as we consider the relationship between anthroposophy and human psychology. Modern science is justified in making it an ideal to keep all natural processes that have been studied, the content of natural developments and facts of nature, separate from anything that has soul quality, never allowing anything that comes from subjective, psychological experience and therefore arises as inner experience, to be brought into scientific observations and experiments. That is the only way in which anyone using this modern scientific approach can hope that human beings will not cloud the objective view taken of facts in nature with anything they bring to nature out of inner inclinations or experiences.

It was only natural that such an ideal would give psychology a particular character, for in earlier times the soul did not relate to the outside world in the way it now must do in the scientific study of nature. Anyone who is seeking to get a feel for the scientific thinking and the views of the world held in earlier centuries, will find that in those earlier times people did not neatly keep the facts of nature which they sought to explain and understand apart from the soul’s inner response to these facts and to the symbolic, shall we say, or other ideas developed in relation to them. In a way, the experiences people had in relation to nature were mixed up with the objective facts of nature. However, as science itself was not yet free then from some of the things that came from the soul, people did not find themselves as puzzled as they do today when it comes to psychology. If you found soul qualities revealed in nature herself, and gained soul qualities as well as purely material facts from nature, you were also much more likely than now seems possible—when the aim is to consider nature in such a way that anything ‘subjective’, any soul quality, is ignored—to think that you might learn something about how soul quality was created in the nonphysical world so as to be in harmony with what you would observe in nature and world. If you have a scientific approach where the greatest ideal is thought to be that anything to do with the soul is excluded, so that concepts, ideas and methods must be developed that are based on exclusion of the soul element, how can you use such methods to study and gain any kind of insight in the sphere of the soul? How can anything learnt in modern science, where the soul element is excluded, be applied to a study of the inner life?

Nevertheless, we shall see in the third lecture how physiology and another science which has a great future and is currently in the process of having chairs established at universities—experimental psychology—will gain sound foundations if it proves possible to develop a psychology that is a science of the soul in spite of the modern scientific ideal. The approach which is to be presented here does not in any way go against everything that has come to the inner life out of modern science when this served as an aid. Quite the contrary! The work which has been done in psychology laboratories more recently will truly bear fruit and gain real significance when seen from a particular anthroposophical point of view.¹

Now we may ask ourselves: What do human beings really want when they approach the natural world using the methods applied, and rightly so, in modern science? What do people want to discover in that world? We could talk about this for hours; let me give a brief idea of how the question might perhaps be answered.

Human beings develop certain needs as their inner life evolves, for the simple reason that they have inner experiences in the psyche, whilst the realities of nature proceed outside them. Modern science is developing out of those needs. People want to be able to cope with the questions that arise inwardly, with the riddles and doubts that may arise in the psyche when they consider the world of nature. And they want to have an image of nature where justice is also done to their inner experiences. It is really the observer who establishes the directives, the trends in modern science. We only have to recall the words if Du Bois- Reymond² in his famous talk on the limits of science: ‘Insight is gained into nature when our need for causality is met—something subjective, therefore, something based in human experience.’ The postulate is, however, that such a subjective, personal inner experience, with its doubts and questions, comes up against the outer processes in the world of nature as though against a sphinx. Those natural events do not at first sight match the image we have of them in our souls. We can alter the first image which has arisen at first sight, doing so with the processes that occur in the soul, and exactly in this way arrive at modern science.

Can we do the same with regard to the inner life? This is a question we do not always answer with sufficient clarity and accuracy. We cannot relate to the psyche in the same way as we do to the natural world, posing our questions in our usual state of mind. The life of the psyche happens inside us. We can merely experience it, live through it. We will not gain anything, however, by categorizing whatever we have come to know there the way we do when we categorize the natural world according to laws so as to arrive at a science of nature. This inner life can be known as it occurs in ordinary everyday life; but in thus living in it there is really no reason for us to treat it in the same way as we do the facts of the natural world. These take us into the unknown, as it were, at every step, but when it comes to the inner life we are right inside it. We have to train ourselves to consider specific questions in natural science if with regard to the inner life we want to use a method similar to the one generally used in natural science.

Now we might say that with the natural world, the observer is inevitably someone on the outside, but when it comes to the inner life, there is no outside observer. This makes some people doubt that it will be possible to observe the inner life. They are unable to see how such a split might happen, so that one has the evolution of the inner life and at the same time is also an observer.

But it is exactly this strange paradox which has to come about if we want to develop a psychology that will rank equal with natural science, or, I would say, is in the spirit of the demands made in modern science. The question concerning the observer of the inner life must be taken seriously and considered in its full significance and depth. Nothing that lives in us can directly observe this inner life. Where scientists studying the natural world who want to be true to the ideal of modern science remove everything that has soul quality from their way of thinking, making the psyche stand aside completely, as it were, psychologists must go exactly the opposite way today. They must not take away anything that is inner experience but must bring something into those inner experiences; they must penetrate those inner experiences with something that does not exist in our ordinary conscious minds. Psychologists must go exactly in the opposite direction! Modern science has grown great by going its way, and because of this the psychologist must go the opposite way. The big and significant question is, how can this way be found?

Some of the things I am going to say now will sound strange. But perhaps you need to consider that anything new in the course of cultural development has always seemed strange to begin with. Just think of the great, revolutionary scientific achievements—how people felt about them, and the troubles and strife they caused. Human beings are very much closer to the psyche than they are to the natural world. No wonder then if with regard to psychology, as a more recent science, many things will come up again that have also been known in the evolution of natural scientific research.

With anthroposophically orientated psychology it has to be clear from the beginning that, as I said before, the conscious awareness we have in everyday life and which is also commonly used in ordinary scientific research, will not be enough. Psychology is going to be a challenge to conscious awareness. In a book published a year ago,³ I dealt with the subject of psychology as follows. If the soul is basically unable to know anything about its everyday experiences but is only able to live in them the way one lives in the natural world outside before one has gained an image of it through natural science, this indicates that the soul must change if it is to observe facts relating to itself. This will mean quite a few difficulties with today’s dominant school of thought. The current idea is not to touch the soul, whatever we do, but to leave it as we have received it ‘from the hands of nature herself’, as the saying goes, and to direct scientific study to what lives in the psyche. Psychology will, however, need to draw powers from deeper sources, from spheres that lie hidden from ordinary experience, to gain methods of observation and of forming ideas that differ from those we have in ordinary life.

Let me tell you briefly and simply what has to happen to the human psyche if it is to be a real observer of its own inner experiences or, to put it in a better way, awaken the inner observer who lies hidden in it, so that it may investigate its own inner life. Our thinking, all the ways of forming ideas we develop in the study of the natural world, will not be what we need when it comes to the psyche. You will soon note, especially if you struggle inwardly to gain insight, that all those ideas do not take us beyond the facts that can be observed in natural science; they do not get us anywhere near the realm of the psyche.

The situation changes the moment we reach the points—I call them the frontier posts in our search for knowledge—where the human being is full of doubt to begin with and keeps saying to himself: This is as far as we can go in our search for knowledge with what has been granted to humanity; we cannot go beyond this. Just consider how people whose thinking is wholly based on the modern scientific way and who seek to dig down deeper and deeper into existence in their thoughts then come to such frontier posts. Let me give you some examples to show how someone struggling to gain insight truly comes to quite specific points in his inner life.

The first example I would like to give is one I found with a seeker who may not be appreciated so much as a philosopher but is all the more highly esteemed as a person, and that is the well-known aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer.⁴ In his review of Volkelt’s interesting small book on dream fantasy⁵ he put all his inner energies into raising the question as to what the relationship might be between human soul and human body.

There is a difference between considering the issue from a philosophical perspective, taking a conventional view and applying only the rational mind to it, or letting hard effort in thinking create the inner experience of truly facing something like a sphinx. It was out of such apprehensions—one can see it from the way it all goes—that Friedrich Theodor Vischer, known as ‘V Vischer’, asked himself this question. He wrote: ‘The human soul cannot be in the body; yet it also cannot be anywhere but in the body.’⁶ Completely contradictory! The contradiction arises, however, not because it has been dragged in by logic, but out of the fullness of inner thought, a contradiction one is wrestling with, a contradiction that may be the beginning of an inner drama in the struggle to gain insight. And we should not fight shy of such dramas that bring living inner experience if we want to develop a true psychology.

This, then, is one of the highly significant questions at the frontier posts of knowledge. There are many of them. Du Bois-Reymond spoke of seven riddles of the world.⁷ We might refer to hundreds of such questions, both lesser and greater. We may stop at them, saying that this is as far as the human ability to know things goes, but if we admit to this it merely means that we lack courage in the quest for knowledge. What matters here is that we must be able to let such questions live on in us, in the fullness of our inner life, not seeking to consider them rationally, bringing all our inner powers to bear, but to live through them and have the patience to wait and see if something of a revelation will not come from the outside. And this does happen.

If we do not seek to meet such questions with preconceived ideas but enter into the billows, as it were, which such questions raise in the human soul, we come to a completely new living experience which we cannot have in our ordinary state of mind. Let me give you an analogy for this living experience. It is an elementary experience in the psyche and an elementary experience for the genesis of an anthroposophically orientated psychology. We simply must take it in its full reality, not in an abstract, dead sense. Let us think—it does not matter here if the analogy has full justification or not, for it will tell us what it is meant to tell us—let us think of an animal that is very low down in the evolutionary scale, a creature that does not yet have a differentiated sense of touch relating to the outside world. It is more or less just rummaging around inside as it experiences life and bumps into physical objects that exist around it. Now imagine such a life form gaining perfection in terms of the theory of evolution. What can evolve in this case? Where a lower animal merely bumps into objects outside and experiences those bumps inwardly in a completely undifferentiated way, differentiation in the course of evolution causes this to develop into a sense of touch. In the scientific theory of evolution, the differentiation of life in the senses is, I would say, generally presented as bumping into things and differentiation developing from this. The process which here happens externally, physiologically, or physically if you like—with a differentiated sense of touch developing merely from bumping into things—repeats itself purely at the level of the soul, if we take things in a truly living way, as we arrive at those frontier posts of knowledge with the psyche fully involved in the process. First you will feel as if you were in the dark in the world of mind and spirit, bumping into things everywhere. The fact that questions like those asked by Vischer have arisen proves that we live in darkness of soul, in an existence that is grounded in the world of the spirit and touches on that world. But the element which thus comes up against the world of the spirit now needs to be differentiated.

If we truly live with such frontier issues, something enters into the soul, is brought to it by revelation, which previously existed as little for the soul as sensory perception based on a differentiated sense of touch existed for a creature that had not yet developed such a differentiated sense of touch but merely bumped into things. We have to live with and through those frontier issues, the countless, tormenting, sphinx-like questions, so that we may know that the methods we can gain through working with nature, the methods which truly meet the ideal of the modern scientific approach, only take us to the point, where soul and spirit are concerned, where we bump into those boundaries. From there, life itself must forward.

And it can move forward. This can only be empirical fact. I am talking about something which every thinker who bases himself on modern science has perceived only too clearly, too significantly. The time when the soul truly expands its sphere of life into these boundary areas of knowledge can only come slowly as we patiently feel our way. I have given examples of such boundary issues in a brief chapter I have just written in the book which is due to appear shortly.⁸

Let me refer to another such fundamental boundary issue which we find in the work of Friedrich Theodor Vischer. It is an example of how someone who is beginning to live with the drama of insight and knowledge in himself in a very real way comes to the matter I have just been characterizing, inwardly feeling his way and not yet outwardly differentiated in feeling one’s way in mind and spirit. When Friedrich Theodor Vischer was struggling with these issues, the time had not yet come for the soul to break through the boundaries it had met. Vischer wrote:

No mind without a nerve centre, nor a brain, say our opponents. We say: no nerve centre and no brain unless there has been preparation in countless stages, starting from below; it is easy to be derisory about the spirit bumbling about in granite and limestone—no harder than it would be for us to ask derisively how the protein in the brain manages to get to something as sublime as ideas. Human powers of insight lack the ability to establish levels or degrees. It will remain a secret how it comes about that nature, and the spirit must surely slumber beneath her, is there as such a perfect counter thrust of the spirit that we—please note his choice of term here—

get bumps and bruises from it; it is a forcible separation that seems so absolute that Hegel’s concepts of being other and being outside oneself, however brilliantly formulated, really say practically nothing, simply covering up the abruptness of the apparent dividing wall. Fichte gives proper recognition to the fine edge and impact in this counter thrust, but no explanation.⁹

There can be no more accurate description of this inner life. First it feels itself bumping into the world of the spirit when such boundary issues come up, and it longs to let this process of coming up against the world of the spirit become differentiated and be a real way of feeling one’s way in that world, with, to use Goethe’s words, a mental organ developing.¹⁰ Where Goethe spoke of eyes and ears of the mind, we might say that organs of touch¹¹ arise in the mind at a most elementary level as we live in these things. It is truly a vital process, a growth process; it is not a matter of simply applying what one has previously learnt in the sciences; it is something as real as the way a child grows, but it takes the soul into regions it has not known before.

People are often mistaken about this. Thus the philosopher Bergson,¹² who has grown famous, makes one of the absolutely basic errors in this field. Henri Bergson says we cannot comprehend the world with the analytical mind, and especially cannot comprehend the inner life in this way, for in the psyche, and in the whole of existence, everything is evolving, flowing, vital. What is he thinking? That what we need does already exist and we can look for it with powers we already possess. In this, however, he is greatly mistaken. It does not lead to anything that can truly explain the psyche, for the soul must go beyond itself; it must develop something it does not yet have. The soul does not think that the life which it is to explore does already exist, but that it must first be gained.

Many people are really scared—if I may use the term—of entering deeply into the inner drama of gaining insight and knowledge. They believe it will take them into the abyss of subjectivity, the abyss of individual nature. If they were really to enter into this abyss in the way which has just been described, they would find that in doing so they would find something inside themselves that is as objective as are the things we find when we consider the natural world. It is merely an illusion to think that in living through the drama of insight one person would find one thing, and another something else. In a certain respect individual experiences have to differ because they are different aspects, different views of the same thing seen from different sides. Yet if we take photographs of something from different angles and those photographs look different, this does not mean to say that the thing itself does not present something objective in those aspects. We should not be dogmatic about anything someone has gathered from the psyche in this way, making his particular formulation into dogma and believing in it as one believes in any dogma or law of nature. No, we have to be clear in our minds that however subjective something perceived with the mind’s organs of touch may be, seeing that it represents a particular angle—if the methods I have presented only in principle are developed further, organs will truly develop in soul and spirit that may be compared to eyes and ears of the mind—if the world of the spirit is characterized on the basis of a mind that has vision of the kind I referred to in my book,¹³ then something described by an observer may be a subjective aspect; but if we accept it we approach the world of the spirit in the same way as we have a true image of a tree even if it is only from one angle. This is something that needs to be understood, especially in this particular field.

When human beings go beyond themselves in their inner life, something arises which I have described in my book How to Know Higher Worlds. There you find a detailed description of what the soul has to do so that it may go beyond itself in this way. Today I have, of course, only been able to give the principles. If you take what it says in the book to a certain level you will discover why I called the experiences, which are of a completely new kind compared to our ordinary conscious awareness, ‘imaginations’, seeing in images, and referred to the level of awareness which develops as ‘imaginative awareness’.

This imaginative awareness has nothing to do with fantasy. Its content is new compared to what one has known before. ‘Imaginative awareness’ is a term like many others. What matters is that the imaginations or inner images we gain, enriching our inner life, clearly show that they are, well, let us say reflections of a non-physical reality, just as our usual ideas of things are reflections of outer physical reality.

I have now described the process in which the soul rises above itself at the first level to gain imaginative insight. With this imaginative insight one is in fact living in a state for which we have to use a paradoxical term, and this can of course be the subject of derision in view of general thinking habits today. It is that in uniting the soul with the living inner experiences thus gained we are living out of the body. This is the crux of the matter. And above all we learn to distinguish experiences which we have gained in this way, without making use of the body, from those gained in the outside world which we have perceived through the senses; above all, however, also distinguish them from anything by way of visions, hallucinations or illusions.¹⁴

For this is something we must always remember. The way which is shown here goes in the opposite direction to the one which we may call pathological, the way that leads to illusory and visionary life. Those who find their way to a life in images know that anything we perceive with the senses, perceive with normal senses in the world of nature, is of a higher quality than anything that may present itself in visions or hallucinations. If we give ourselves up to visions we enter more deeply into our living physical body, becoming more closely bound up with it; we bring soul quality into the living body but we do not come free of it.

In the third lecture we will consider the human being as part of the natural world, and we will then realize why the contents of visions can be confused with perceptions made in the spirit. Today we are talking about the inner life, the psyche, and it is important to make the distinction quite clear—a visionary goes down into the life of the body, whilst someone seeking imaginative insight enters into a life that is wholly in the soul sphere, and this leads to experience lived independently of the body.

As I said, this is highly unusual in present-day thinking. Someone wanting to reach the world of the spirit on an amateurish basis, with amateurish ideas, would greatly like to think of this world by taking external sensory perceptions for a model; he would greatly like—we can see this in spiritualism, which is so disastrous—to have factual things in the spirit, just as one sees factual natural effects if one performs a physical experiment in a laboratory. He wants a tangible spirit. Yet the things we find in imaginative perception do not compare with anything tangible. In my book¹⁵ I compared this—one can only offer an analogy, for it is not the same—with the memories of past events which we think we call up from the depths of our inner life. The tenuous nature of such memories, which are entirely nonphysical, having soul quality, is the only thing in which it is possible to experience the spirit in which the psyche has its roots. It is just that the images seen independently of the body do not relate to anything one has known in the physical world. They have their own content which tells us that we have entered into a new, non-physical world, a world we did not know before. One gradually has to familiarize oneself with a very different way of inner experience, for the I will not have the support of the physical organs through which we gain our sensory perceptions. It takes some time to get used to this kind of life.

Above all it is this: I may have compared the images gained in the new way with memories of past events, but everything that arises by way of such images, and which therefore is a reflection of a spiritual reality, has one peculiarity which it is hard to get used to, and that is the peculiarity that the more perfect such a non-physical perception is, the less are we able to recall it afterwards. We are used to remembering things that have gone through our minds. Those non-physical experiences do not generate an immediate power to remember. The process is very different. I described it in the above book. It goes like this: If you want to have a specific non-physical image you have to prepare for this, exercising the soul so that it will develop the inner powers by which the image may be revealed. We can remember the things the soul does, what it undertook to gain that image vision. It is then possible to call the image up again. So once you have had a spiritual experience in imaginative insight you will not easily remember it; you have to go through all the inner preparation again; this you can remember. You can say to yourself: you did this, and you did that; do it again and you’ll have the experience again. Only if we succeed in bringing copies of it, as it were, back to our ordinary conscious mind, to our ordinary thinking, as ideas will we be able to recall those copies. But the actual nonphysical image has to be new every time, otherwise it is not the real thing.

Another peculiarity is this. Ideas we gain in our life in the outside world are produced all the more easily the more often we produce them. We get a degree of practice in this, and these things become habit. This is not the case when we have living experience of non-physical images, genuine spiritual realities. It is rather the opposite. The more often we seek to have a non-physical image under the same conditions, the more vague does it grow. Hence you have the strange situation, really quite paradoxical, that students in the life of the spirit who make efforts to gain certain non-physical images will have them and then be surprised that they cannot have them again. The ability to produce something again is often lost very quickly, the second or third time, and we then have to make new efforts, over and over again, to call up something which is escaping us, as it were, having come to us just once from the world of the spirit.

You will find all the individual exercises that will help to overcome the problem in my book How to Know Higher Worlds, though even there it is just a brief outline of things I have said on the subject since.

Another peculiarity is that you will only manage to cope with such imaginative ideas if you have gone through inner training to develop a life of thinking, forming ideas, inner responses and of will that provide reference points, so that one may bring ideas into the non-physical images. If you do not pay careful attention to this, you may fall into inner confusion and darkness, though this would not be pathological. Again and again you come to say to yourself: Here you learn something out of the spirit which you cannot yet understand, for you have not developed concepts that go sufficiently deep for this. At that point you have to stop, you have to find another way, trying to take your ability to form ideas in the world of the senses further, so that you may on a later occasion understand what you have not been able to understand before.

In short, I could mention many more such characteristics. You come across lots of things that take you aback and are paradoxical compared to the inner experiences we have in our ordinary state of mind. Yet it is only when we have torn the soul element away, as it were, from the living body that we are in the world of the spirit. No one can deny this experience, which is spiritual.

With the development which I have been describing so far, you are able to gain certain insights. You come to see that apart from the physical body, which is part of us and which is the object of anatomy, physiology and of modern science altogether, something else is also truly our own. In my more recent books I have called it the ‘body of creative powers’, so that there may be no misunderstanding; previously I called it the ‘ether body’.¹⁶ It is really a second element in us, and can never be perceived by ordinary sensory perception, ordinary inner experience. It can only be perceived if this inner experience progresses to become the capacity for vision in images. For this body of creative powers does not exist in space; it is something which lives only in time, but lives in time in such a way that everything which is active in our physical body from birth or conception to death, let us say, wells forth from this body of creative powers. We have a second body in us, a body of creative powers. It becomes a reality for us when we gain the power of awareness in images.

This awareness will not, however, take us beyond the principle which is with us from birth to death as our body of creative powers. This may sound odd, but that does not matter. We are able to go beyond it if we find additional ways of inwardly strengthening the soul, which has now become free of the body. Exercises have to be done again and again, with patience, to develop a completely new relationship to the principle we call the life of ideas or concepts.

In ordinary life we bring objects around us to mind by forming ideas of them. When we have an idea of something we think we possess whatever we are inwardly able to have of such an external object. This is a notion we must abandon when we come to gain experience in the spiritual realm. We need to be able, as it were, to put ourselves in a position where we let our ideas of things be like forces and powers that fight one another in the inward drama of gaining insight and knowledge. We have to develop the ability to let one idea enter into conflict with another. We must long to characterize anything we have characterized from one point of view also from another. At this level terms like materialism, idealism, spirituality, sensuality, and so on, all become empty phrases, for all of them, woven from the webs of concepts we have, prove to be like photographs taken from different angles.

We come to realize that in the realm of the spirit we have to deal with our concepts the way we work with our sense organs in the sphere of the senses. We walk around objects. We do not consider concepts as snapshots but merely as something which characterizes objects for us from one perspective or another, giving a one-sided view.

The spiritual scientist will therefore develop an inner tendency to characterize things from one angle, and then to characterize them also from the opposite angle. He will above all feel a longing to develop certain ideas and then refute them again, thus truly going through this inner combat. I am just giving some important inner aspects which one has to make progressively come true when a certain point has been reached at the frontier post of knowledge and insight.

The soul then continues to develop. It manages to develop the faculty I have called ‘inspired insight’ in my books. Please leave aside all superstition or prejudiced ideas with regard to this. The soul then separates from the body to a higher degree. Having gained this level of insight and knowledge one is not merely able to perceive the body of creative powers which is with us in time, from birth to death, but also spiritual realities that are outside our bodies, just as we see physical realities with our physical eyes. In my next lecture I will be speaking of the spiritual reality outside the human being. Now I am first of all going to talk about what the human being sees with this inspired insight, a spiritual reality that lies within him.

Something arises in inspired insight which does not live in our existence between birth and death; it lived before us, before we entered into the earthly body at birth, or, let us say, conception. It will live with us when we enter into the world of the spirit at our death. It has united with the physical genetic material we have from our parents and ancestors; it has penetrated this physical material. Inspired insight will truly allow us to perceive what preceded our physical existence at the soul level, what happens after our physical death, for we learn to see, in the spirit, the part of us which is wholly independent of the physical body. The body of creative powers is still bound to our physical existence; it will disperse when it is cut off from this physical existence. The principle which inspired insight is able to perceive does not disperse; it remains by itself; it is the part of us which goes through births and deaths. In the field of inspired insight the human being is able to investigate properly what connects him with worlds that are wholly of the spirit, what works most powerfully so that he becomes this particular human being when physical genetic material connects with his spiritual part.

The third ability we acquire is called intuition. This is not the kind of vague idea generally called an ‘intuition’ but something else. I’ll just refer to it briefly. At the third level of spiritual insight you can become fully aware—this will happen at a particular point of time in our inner development—that you are someone else, that through the efforts you made as you progressed through vision in images and inspiration you have truly found an inner observer in you.

Something significant then occurs in the drama of insight and knowledge, as I have called it. At this point we may say: You can see that it is not only this physical body of ours which the spirit has helped to create; you come to see that our soul itself, with its feelings, tendencies, ambitions, affects and will qualities, has come to be what it is through spiritual processes. The drama thus becomes an inner stroke of destiny.

You may have destiny experiences in life that make you shout for joy or feel very low, you may know the worst and also great happiness—the things you experience when you perceive the development not only of the physical aspect but of also of the soul principle, are a stroke of destiny, an inner stroke of destiny that means more to someone who experiences it to the full in the drama of knowledge and insight than the highs and lows, pleasures and pain of destiny experiences in everyday life.

If this is possible, if there truly is this inner power to bring about change, so that the inner eye perceives not only the physical and bodily aspect out of the spirit but the soul principle itself within the process of spiritual evolution, then intuitive perception arises. A sphere is entered which encompasses repeated earth lives, the ability to look back on earlier lives on earth, and the certainty that this life on earth will be followed by others. Knowledge is gained that the whole of human life consists of successive lives on earth, with lives in the world of the spirit in between them that extend from death to rebirth.

With all this, the inner eye needs to be directed to something for which a relationship with the natural world outside has not really trained it. With reference to the natural world we always ask about the origin and cause of facts. When it comes to things of the spirit, questions as to origin and causes will not serve. When the realm of the spirit opens up to someone in the way I have mentioned, he finds that everything that has to do with growth, thriving, progression and development has retrogressive development mixed in with it, with existence progressively crumbling away and destruction in progress all the time. This is what made individuals who were able to see this—perhaps not in this modern way, but in the ways in which such things were known in the past—say that insight into the spirit takes us to the gates of death.¹⁷ You come to realize that conscious awareness, life in mind and spirit, and living in the spirit in full conscious awareness can only arise if a principle that makes existence crumble away enters into all our growth, healthy development and progression. You come to see that death is but a single major event which we can think of as divided up, broken up into its atoms, as it were, and happening in us all the time when we gain conscious awareness in physical life. In this world, to know is to enter a little bit into something that will come all at once when we go through the gates of death.

You get to know the relationship between the conscious mind and the process of dying. In doing so, you also get to know how this conscious awareness goes through the gates of death, and that death actually awakens us to a different conscious awareness. We enter into this when we lay aside our physical body. We lay this aside, as it were, merely in order to gain such insight in images, inspiration and intuition.

If you want to get a real idea of gaining insight in the spirit, you have to get used to seeing your relationship to the world in a very different way from the one you have been used to. Above all it is necessary to give up the idea that you can somehow find the spirit by interpreting the material world, looking at it critically in some way, and by finding laws based on the material world. The laws we discover in relation to the material world only apply in that world. You will not find the spirit by interpreting the world you perceive through the senses; when you are in the physical body you find the spirit in connection with the world of the senses; but you find it through independent life in the realm of the spirit.

Let me clarify this by using an analogy. When we read sequences of words, which are letters put in a row, we do not say: There’s a vertical line, there’s a horizontal line; we do not identify the letters but consider the row of letters or words as a whole, and an inner content then arises. This content has nothing to do with identification of the letters. You must have learned to read. And something quite different from the identity of individual letters arises in the reader’s mind. You cannot find the spirit which you discover from the letters by looking in the printers’ letter case. Nor can you find the life of the spirit by spelling out nature. You will only find it if you let the soul rise beyond itself and thus find the element which extends from the spirit itself into this physical life, in so far as the soul finds itself living in the physical world between birth and death.

You see, this leads to a psychology that can well hold its own side by side with the natural sciences. It does not transfer the methods developed in the study of nature to the psyche, nor does it stop at the inner life as we know it in everyday life. Instead it brings an objective principle into the inner life, and out of this the psyche experiences itself. The living body has also been born out of this principle, as we shall see in the third lecture.

These are first, elementary indications; you will have to refer to my books for the rest. They show how human beings can find the immortal element that lies in them, and how a psychology with this anthroposophical orientation truly guides us in this direction. Then such things as happened to Franz Brentano,¹⁸ the great psychologist who died in Zurich in March this year, need no longer happen. Brentano was a significant figure, but also a tragic one in the way he bore with his thinking. He came to the study of psychology at a time when the modern scientific way of thinking was developing. He wanted to apply this approach to the inner life. One can get no further with this approach, however, than to compare ideas as to how feelings want to rise in the soul, what attention is and so on in outer physical life. In his work on psychology from the empirical standpoint—in the first volume he wrote, which has remained the only one—Franz Brentano regretted the things psychology could not achieve, saying: What help is it to us, even if we are thoroughly scientific in our approach, to compare ideas, make associations of ideas, the way inclinations and disinclinations arise, and so on, if the great hopes held by Plato and Aristotle cannot be fulfilled. They hoped that with psychology we would gain insight into how the better part of our nature lives on when we have gone through the gates of death.¹⁹

Franz Brentano regretted the fact that he did not have the means of tackling these problems. It is remarkable to see how he struggled with them to the end of his life. The straight, honest nature of his struggles is evident especially from the tragic circumstance I referred to in an obituary for Franz Brentano which appears in the third chapter of my above-mentioned book. He was always saying he would continue his book on psychology, the first volume of which had been published. The work was intended to be in four or five volumes. The first volume appeared in the spring of 1874. He promised the second for the autumn of that year, to be followed by the rest. He did not publish any of those, however. He wanted to master the inner life with the modern scientific method; he wanted to set about this in a straight and honest way. If he had been able to do so, if the modern scientific method had not been like a dead weight on his powers of investigation because he misunderstood it, he would have been able to enter through the gates into a life in the spirit that gathers something from the depths of the soul that cannot be there if one has only the methods of modern science.

We can see from the tragedy of Franz Brentano’s life as a scientist—and of the lives of many others, but especially in his case, because he was such a significant figure who at the same time was absolutely honest—that there is a need for a psychology that can only be found through inner experiences gained out of the living body. Then the great problems can be considered again, issues that must be foremost in the minds of those who consider their own inner life—the problem of immortal life, if we find the truly immortal part by the methods I have described, and also the problem of free will, which we are going to consider later on in these lectures. These are the two most important and compelling problems. But look at the works on psychology published in recent years. These problems are completely left aside in them; indeed, they have disappeared from psychological studies, simply for the reasons we have been considering today.

There is more to it, however, than being able to work with those great questions. The insights psychologists are seeking with methods they have developed by going more deeply into the modern scientific approach can only be fully clear if one can consider them from the point of view which I have indicated. That is the way it is. Modern science will prove valid on the one hand, the science of the spirit and spiritual investigation on the other. But it is just the way it is when one is digging a tunnel from two sides and must have worked things out carefully in advance so that one may meet in the middle. Spiritual science and natural science must come together if the knowledge and insight sought by humanity is to be a whole.

Let me give you just one example of how ordinary psychology, too, can be conquered if we enter the higher regions which I have briefly outlined today. Among the questions considered by people who do research in psychology are those concerning memory or recall. It is enough to drive you to despair to see how the memory problem is dealt with in the ordinary approaches to psychology. There you can really see the frontier posts in the process of gaining insight. Someone has an idea which he develops from something he has perceived through the senses; this idea then ‘goes down’ into the soul sphere; it ‘vanishes’, as they say, and later the person is able to recall it. Where has it been?

I won’t go into everything that has been said on the matter for centuries. On the one hand people say that such ideas vanish into the unconscious and then come up again across the threshold to conscious awareness. I’d like to know someone who is able to find any real meaning in such words as he says them. All meaning is immediately lost when you talk of ideas ‘going down’ and ‘coming up’. You can say anything; but you cannot envisage it; for it does not relate to any kind of reality. Psychologists more inclined towards physiology will talk about ‘traces engraved’ in the nervous system or brain; these traces then ‘call’ the ideas ‘up again’. People try painfully to explain how the idea which has gone down is dug out from those traces. As I said, it can drive you to despair when you consider the different approaches to psychology. Just think of how much serious, noble, genuine research effort goes into working on these problems. We certainly would not deny that such honest and genuine work is being done.

In truth, however, this simple fact relating to the inner life can only be seen in the right light if we consider it with the power in our souls that has the spiritual organs to observe the ordinary inner life, too, from the point of view taken in the world of the spirit. You then find that there is no question of an idea which I have ‘going down’ to anywhere or ‘coming up’ again somewhere. People altogether have the wrong idea of memory. An idea I form on the basis of something perceived in the world around me does not live in me as something real at all, but as a mirror image which the soul creates by means of the body’s mirroring. We will go into this in the third lecture. And this idea lives only now! It is no longer there once I have lost it from the inner life. There is no such thing as ideas going down and coming up again, thus creating memories. The commonly held idea of memory is wrong.

What matters is this. Having sharpened the soul’s power to see things in the spirit, you see—you can observe this in the spirit just as you observe things in the world outside—that something else is going on at the same time as we form an idea based on something we have perceived. It is not the process of forming the idea but this other, unconscious process running parallel to it which produces something that does not come directly to conscious awareness but lives on in me. So if I have an idea, a subconscious process develops that is wholly bound up with the physical body. When occasion arises to call this process up again, the idea forms again because the soul now looks to this process, which is a purely bodily one. A remembered idea is a new idea created from the depths of the living body. It is like the earlier idea because it has been called up in the unconscious process that had been produced in the living body. The soul reads the engram engraved in the body, as it were, when it recalls an idea.

This, then, does correct the ideas ordinarily held by psychologists. You now have the right idea instead of something perceived in entirely the wrong way in ordinary experience. I could go through the whole of psychology with you and show you many points where genuine insight shows that the inner experiences which people think they have prove to be illusory. People have quite wrong ideas about the inner life, and these need to be corrected by the soul coming free of the body and then observing its life from a truly spiritual point of view.

It is exactly with ideas like these, which on the one hand really make the spirit accessible to scientific study, that on the other hand the fruits of faithful hard work with the modern scientific method in experimental psychology and physiological psychology as well as other fields find their right place. Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science is neither hostile nor unsympathetic towards such work. Knowing that the ordinary methods developed in the study of the physical world cannot solve but only raise questions, real questions, work done in spiritual science can make the results of natural scientific investigation truly fruitful by casting a new light on those questions.

The work done in anthroposophically orientated spiritual science is truly moving towards natural science, like digging a tunnel from opposite directions. Another example will show this. Scientists with a Darwinian orientation have recently made some very interesting findings, which I am going to tell you about in a minute. But first let me say that the unconscious activity which underlies memory recall is something different from the powers of heredity or of growth, but, having developed parallel to the forming of ideas, it is also related to those powers. Powers that take effect at an unconscious level when we form an idea on the basis of sensory perceptions are related to the powers that grow in us. They create dispositions in the living body that can later be read, leading to memory recall. Genuine observation in the soul gives us a clear idea of how the powers of memory relate to those of heredity and growth. A bridge is built—we will be saying more about such bridges in the next few days—between soul and spirit on the one hand and the living body on the other.

Consider how Darwinian Richard Semon starts with heredity in his very interesting book, with the emergence of characteristics, and then brings these hereditary powers together with the powers of memory.²⁰ The scientist thus sees a relationship between hereditary and memory powers. The psychologist has come to connect the unconscious powers that lie behind heredity with those of memory recall.

These things happen quite independently of one another. What Richard Semon called ‘mneme’ in his most interesting book agrees with the views held in anthroposophically orientated psychology, where consideration extends to regions in the human being that are also studied by modern scientific methods. We will speak of this in the third lecture.

What I have been saying today at an elementary level about the results of genuine spiritual experience in the soul that provide the basis for a more up-to-date psychology, must inevitably sound strange in many ways to people used to thinking in the way that is usual today. This is perfectly understood by someone who is in the midst of these things, yet perhaps one may also say that it needs more than just hearing an interesting lecture. You need to enter deeply into the serious process of spiritual scientific investigation. You will find that one’s powers are used differently from the way they are in natural science, but that the route followed in anthroposophical research is no less serious, no less demanding than the route taken in natural scientific research. The fact is, however, that the fruits, the results of natural science only provide the starting point for spiritual research. We come to concepts, ideas and natural laws when we want to investigate the natural world. We make it our premise that the work done in natural science takes us to the frontier posts from which we set out to make investigations in the science of the spirit and in anthroposophical psychology.

I would say, therefore, that psychology based on anthroposophy should not be said to go against the justifiable demands of today’s natural scientific way of thinking. Quite the contrary. It does not reject anything resulting from justifiable investigations in natural science. Nowhere does it oppose such justifiable science. However, it cannot stop at merely drawing logical conclusions from things that are already given in natural science. Spiritual science is not a philosophy where one merely wants to draw conclusions based on natural science. No! In anthroposophically orientated spiritual science we have to adopt a different device, the device that this spiritual investigation must follow from natural science not as an abstract logical conclusion, but as a live offspring.

The spiritual investigator holds the belief, which is stronger than the belief of many a natural scientist who rejects spiritual investigation, that natural science is sufficiently robust not only to lead to its logical consequences but to bring forth, from itself, as it were, something that is very much alive. This has its own vital energies and must thrive by having its own independent life. This is what the science of the spirit should be, a science which natural science itself demands.

Questions and answers

Several questions related to repeated lives on earth.

Ladies and gentlemen, the nature of the questions which have been asked is such that a brief answer cannot be satisfactory. One would indeed have to speak volumes to answer them in full. First of all we have the question:

What purpose does reincarnation serve?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, essentially the question as to purpose—I have to answer in a scientific way, otherwise it is just empty words—and the question as to reason—I am afraid I cannot go into the question as to whether teleology is justifiable or not—is a question arising in the physical world and therefore has validity in the physical world. Reincarnation—if we want to use this term for repeated lives on earth—I like to avoid jargon, which is why I spoke of ‘repeated lives on earth’—is governed by laws that belong to the world of the spirit and have significance in that world. This is something people find most difficult to get used to—that in moving from the physical world to the world of the spirit one must also change, or metamorphose, one’s concepts, and that concepts which apply in the physical world lose in significance, in importance, when we enter into the world of the spirit. Once you have started to know the nature of the spiritual world you do not really ask about the ‘purpose of the human being’ the way one would ask about the purpose of a machine, and certainly not about the ‘purpose of reincarnation’.

I said in my lecture that the way of thinking developed in the natural sciences is essentially the way of thinking developed in relation to the physical world around us. It will at best lead to the right questions being asked. One must then, however, seek to obtain the answers from the world of the spirit.

Someone asking: ‘What purpose does reincarnation serve?’ will of course have a reason for asking. There is a need to know, despite the fact that the question as to the purpose is not really applicable in the sphere one is dealing with. I would, however, ask you to consider the following. I would like to say that I have to bring together the building blocks needed to answer these questions. The science of the spirit is not like something you can quickly make your own by using a small handbook. It is in fact a very comprehensive field.

When we ask questions in life, one way is to continue with further questions until we come to an end. But this may not apply in every case. You see I am asked a question like this one hundreds of times. On many occasions I have said the following on the subject: People wanting to go from Zurich to Rome may want to know the route. And indeed, if no one in Zurich is able to give them the exact route, in every detail, they may decide that they don’t want to go to Rome after all. On the other hand there may be people who’ll be happy to know the route from Zurich to Lugano, and once in Lugano will be satisfied to learn how they should go on from there, and later on again how to go further. This is an analogy. It is meant to say that when we are in one life on earth, this has relevance for subsequent lives on earth. We have a progression. We are going to gain things in other lives on earth that we are not going to gain in this one. We go through experiences that present different trials and learning experiences. If we were able to answer all questions in this life on earth, then this life would not generate future lives on earth.

For the science of the spirit, it is therefore a matter of presenting the fact of reincarnation, if I am to use that term. Just as an individual gives purpose to a particular life on earth out of a free impulse, so he will give successive purposes, with one arising from the other, to repeated lives on earth. And he will not imagine that he can define the whole compass of human existence—which involves a number of lives one earth—in one of those lives. You altogether get out of the habit of producing definitions meant to be comprehensive when you enter into the true inner life in the spirit. Definitions are quite useful in ordinary physical life; in the life of the spirit, where it is all about perspectives, we are reminded, when someone just asks for definitions, of the example of a definition given in Greek literature. Asked how to define a human being, it was said—for definitions must always refer to individual characteristics—that a human being was a creature with two legs and no feathers.²¹ The next time someone brought along a cockerel which he had plucked—a ‘human being’!

Well, I do of course know the requirements for a proper logical definition. However, from the spiritual point of view, definitions show definite bias. So do all statements of purpose, of causality, and so on. Reality is something into which you find your way, in which you are alive and active, but you do not define it using biased terms. You will find the purposes in successive lives on earth. But when someone asks about the ‘purpose of reincarnation’, this lacks substance.

Question. Is reincarnation a product of ideas developed in the spiritual realm?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, one might say so. One will, however, have to take into account what I said in my book. The kind of ideas we have in our ordinary way of thinking are not really true ideas from the spiritual point of view. They have been deprived of life and are like corpses of ideas. This is the strange thing. Much more lives in the soul than does normally come to conscious awareness. Much of it is partly deprived of life because we would be unable to bear it in our ordinary way of thinking. It is then like the corpse of an idea. Hence the abstract notions we have. They are really only a reflection, something that arises and passes away again. We do not remember it at all, as I have shown in the lecture. Behind it, however, is the living, spiritual reality which enters into vision in images, which goes through death and does live in the powers of reincarnation. Perhaps this would answer the question.

Question. Does reincarnation follow absolute established laws rather than being the outcome of creative etheric powers?

Only life between birth and death, or rather conception and death, is the outcome of creative etheric powers. The principle we are calling ‘reincarnation’ is subject to much higher spiritual laws. It is difficult to say if it is ‘established law’; it is simply a fact. Repeated lives on earth are a fact. ‘Outcome of creative etheric powers?’ Human beings only acquire an ether body as they are moving towards conception; they lay it aside again after death; the body of creative powers is not eternal, as I said in my lecture. But the powers to be considered when we speak of the laws of reincarnation do not enter into the human I’s awareness nor do they enter into the sphere of the ordinary physical world.

You see, the way would open up for many people even in this realm if we were only to look for it in the right way. The point is—and I have spoken of this with reference to individual instances—that experiences gained in the world of the spirit seem paradoxical compared to those we have in everyday life. In many respects the things you find in the other world are completely different from those we know in the physical world. We have to say that with their capacity for forming ideas based on experiences gained in natural life, through natural events, human beings are hardly able to go beyond ideas relating to space. Honest and more accurate self knowledge shows how little we are able to go beyond concepts of space. Just consider, how do we gain ideas of time? Really from ideas of space. Changes in space, the sun’s and moon’s changes in position, and indeed the hands of a clock in our case—that is how we gain our ideas of time. In reality they are ideas of space. The spiritual principle, on the other hand, lives in time even in its lowest form, which is the body of creative powers. Here we need a real idea of time!

Very few people are able to get a real idea of time today. And one is even less able to get a real idea of the different velocities—not times, therefore, but velocities—that apply in the realm of soul and spirit. Our inner life depends on the fact that our thinking, the forming of ideas, for instance, goes at quite a different speed from our feeling, and this again goes at a different speed from our doing. These things—that different velocities are layered one inside the other in the inner life—actually cause conscious awareness to arise in us. Conscious awareness only arises where something meets with interference. This is actually why it is also related to death—for death interferes with life. But it is altogether the situation that interference occurs. This is why Bergson’s view is so wrong, for instance, that one should always look to life and movement;²² instead we come to the nature of movement by impeding it, and to the nature of life by seeing how death takes hold of life. To enter into the essential nature of life is something different from having a view of life.

All this makes us realize that the nature of law itself changes when you enter into the life of the spirit, and many people find this highly inconvenient. They therefore do not even take courage and enter into that life with their concepts and ideas, for those concepts and ideas would have to change. In genuine spiritual investigation you essentially get to know this very, very well. I do not like to bring in anything personal, for personal elements have not much to do with being objective. But many years ago an important question arose for me which has proved fruitful in a particular field. Herbart²³ and other psychologists applied arithmetic or mathematics to research in their field; they tried to calculate facts relating to the psyche. Eduard von Hartmann²⁴ even tried to calculate facts that must be taken in a moral sense when he undertook to establish the basis of pessimism mathematically. He put all pleasures on the debit side of life and all negative experiences on the credit side, and then said: the negative experiences show a surplus; therefore life is bad.

I have shown the whole of this to be nonsense. You will find the proof I gave in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity²⁵ written in 1894. If you want to speak of calculations, you have to make quite a different start, not establishing the balance by subtraction but writing a division, a fraction, making all pleasure, delight, experiences that prove elevating in life the enumerator and all pain and suffering the denominator. Let us look at this division. When would life seem to be no longer worth living? If the denominator were zero, if there were no pain at all, the figure would be infinitely great. But the denominator would have to be infinitely great if the fraction were to equal zero. This means that life would no longer seem worth living only if the pain was infinitely great. This cannot be decided by any kind of abstract reckoning but only by life itself. Life does its reckoning in this way.

When it comes to the psyche, we cannot do calculations about inner events the way Herbart or Hartmann wanted to do it. Life gives the result, and when you get up into the worlds of the spirit the result divides up—a sum into summands, a fraction into enumerator and denominator. You get exactly the opposite. Here in physical life, you have the individual summands and enumerators and denominators and then get your result. There it is the other way round. You have the result, it is inner experience, and the individual elements that lead to the result go into the world of the spirit. So you see, many of our ideas have to be completely rethought if we want to cross the threshold from the physical world to the world of the spirit.

Perhaps the things I have said in connection with this question will give you the idea that this science of the spirit really is not something straight off the bat, nor is it the offspring of fantasy. It is something which, as I said in the lecture, needs no less effort to gain than any other kind of scientific work. Only the powers needed for this belong to another sphere. We therefore have to say that there is a law to the progression of repeated lives on earth. But the nature of this law is something we must first of all get hold of. This is why I said it is not a matter of interpreting natural phenomena but of truly rising above them so that we may live freely in the spirit inwardly. This, then, answers the question.

Now a strange question—strange after this lecture: Question: Which are the spiritual organs of touch?

Well, we should not think of this as something physical. I made it quite clear that it is something that exists in the realm of soul and spirit and can only be compared with something that arises from memory. If you want the kind of answer where you have the specific ‘spiritual organs of touch’ and are then looking for a generic term, you’ll not achieve anything. Instead, we have to find our way through, as I have shown. The soul reaches limits, differentiates and develops ‘spiritual organs of touch’ which in the realm of soul and spirit can be compared to the organs of touch we have in the physical realm, just as we may compare ‘eyes of the spirit’ and ‘ears of the spirit’ with physical eyes and physical ears.

Question. Are there clear definitions of what we understand by 'belief’?

I would really need to give you the history and origins of the word ‘belief’ to make the answer complete, and then show how the different kinds of belief evolved from this. Let me say the following, however. In more recent times the meaning of the word ‘belief’ has been limited to ‘taking something to be true’ on a subjective basis—insight, therefore, that is not real insight but a subjective surrogate of insight. The word did not always have such a limited meaning. To understand the background to the idea of belief we have to consider the following.

In today’s lecture I mentioned just briefly that the soul related to reality in a different way in earlier times. It has only come to stand apart from the reality of the natural world in more recent times. In those earlier times, when the soul was still more closely connected with the spiritual reality and had developed an inner awareness of soul content that was other than it has to be now in modern anthroposophy, people knew that if they took something to be true, this was not just a theoretical attitude, for their believing something to be true also had the power of living reality in it. If I have an ideal and believe in my ideal, this is not just a matter of letting the idea of the ideal be present in the mind; a power of soul connects with the ideal. And this is part of the human being’s reality. Human beings are involved in creating reality. Here ‘belief’ means a positive way of generating inner power.

The concept ‘belief’ is presented in a similar way in Ricarda Huch’s interesting book on Luther’s faith.²⁶ There, too, the concept of belief is found to be not just believing something to be true but connecting oneself with the reality as it evolves. I would like to say that when one is in the power of belief, one has something in oneself like the seed which a plant holds in itself; it is not yet a real plant but has the power to grow into a real plant.

Belief thus should not be the image or reflection of an insight but an element in the realm of ideas that connects with a genuine power, so that we are wholly within reality with our belief. And if someone were to insist that belief gives him no insight, he would nevertheless have to admit that if he uses the concept ‘belief’ in this way, the reality in it places him in the real world.

These are just hints, brief comments.

• 1. See Steiner R. Von Seelenrätseln, IV. Skizzenhafte Erweiterungen des Inhalts dieser Schrift, 8. Ein oft erhobener Einwand gegen die Anthroposophie. GA 21.
• 2. Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896). Swiss-born professor of physiology in Berlin. Lecture entitled ‘Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens’ given in Leipzig on 14 August 1872.
• 3. Steiner R. The Riddle of Man. Tr. W. Lindemann. Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1990.
• 4. Vischer, Friedrich Theodor (1807–1887). Altes und Neues. Stuttgart 1881, Erste Abteilung.
• 5. Volkelt, Johannes. Die Traum-Phantasie. Stuttgart 1875.
• 6. Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, loc. cit. I, S. 194: ‘The soul, as the highest union of all processes, cannot, however, be located in the body, though it does not exist anywhere but in the body.’
• 7. Du Bois-Reymond, as note 2. ‘The seven riddles of the world’ lecture was given at a public meeting at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin to celebrate the Leibniz anniversary on 8 July 1880. Publ. Leipzig 1882.
• 8. See Von Seelenrätseln (note 1), Kap. IV, 6, S. 150 ff.
• 9. As note 4, S. 229 f.
• 10. ‘We learn to see with eyes of the spirit. Without them we stumble about blindly as in anything else and thus also in the study of nature.’ Goethe, Erster Entwurf einer allgemeinen Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie, ausgehend von der Osteologie VII, B (1795), in Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften herausgegeben und kommentiert von Rudolf Steiner in Kuerschners Deutsche National-Litteratur (1883-97), 5 Bände, Nachdruck Dornach 1975, GA Bibl.-Nr. la-e, Bd. 1, GA Bibl.-Nr. la, S. 262. With ref. to ‘ears of the spirit’, see also Goethe’s Faust 2, Act 1, Pleasing landscape, ‘Hark, the Hours, with furious winging, Bear to spirit-ears the ringing Rumours of the new day-springing.’ Tr. P. Wayne. Penguin Books 1959.
• 11. Spiritual organs of touch - see questions and answers following the lecture.
• 12. Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), French philosopher.
• 13. Steiner R. The Riddle of Man (note 3).
• 14. See also public lectures Errors in Spiritual Investigation given in Berlin on 6 March 1913; tr. WW. Ringwald, A. Wulsin. Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1983 (from GA 62), and ‘Die Wege der übersinnlichen Erkenntnis’, Berlin, 21 Nov, 1912, in Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung, GA 62. Lectures to members in Dornach on 1 and 2 July 1921 in Steiner R. Therapeutic Insights (from GA 205), tr. M. Laird-Brown, A. Wulsin, G. Kamow. Spring Valley: Mercury Press 1984.
• 15. See Von Seelenrätseln ( as note 1).
• 16. Also called ‘formative forces body’ by some translators. [Tr.] For basic details see Steiner R. Theosophy (various translations) I, 4; Steiner R. Occult Science (GA 13; various translations), chapter on essential nature of humanity, and subsection on human ether body.
• 17. In his Phaedo (67 d-e), Plato had Socrates say: "... people really do not seem to have an idea that men who are faithful followers of philosophy are in life, in their whole lives, concerned over nothing but their dying and their death. And if that is true, it would be entirely wrong to think of death all one's life and then in the hour of death turn against one’s own wish and goal." Sec also Rudolf Steiner on Arnold Fortlage in the lecture of 7 November 1917 in this volume.
• 18. Brentano, Franz (1838–1917), German psychologist and philosopher. Rudolf Steiner had written about Franz Brentano in an essay on the future of psychology in 1893 (in Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie, GA 30), referring to his views on extending the natural scientific approach to certain areas, for instance in psychology. The essay concludes: ‘General acceptance of Brentano’s statement would for me mean the general decline and decay of philosophy.’ Rudolf Steiner also wrote extensively in appreciation of Brentano, e.g. in Von Seelenrätseln (note 1), and spoke about him in a lecture he gave in Berlin on 12 December 1911 (in A psychology of Body, Soul and Spirit, GA 115, tr. M. Spock; Hudson: Anthroposophie Press 1999).
• 19. The actual words are: ‘For the hopes Plato and Aristotle had of gaining certainty concerning the continued existence of the better part of us once the body has dissolved, the laws of association of ideas, the development of convictions and opinions and the budding and growth of pleasure and love would be anything but genuine compensation ... And if the difference between the two views did truly mean accepting or rejecting the question of immortality, it would have to be considered highly significant for psychology, and we would inevitably have to enter into a metaphysical investigation of substance as the vehicle for states and conditions.’ Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte, Leipzig 1874, S. 20.
• 20. Semon, Richard (1859–1919). Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens. Dritte Auflage, Leipzig 1911. Semon explored changes in organic matter (plant, animal, human) due to external stimuli. He called them engrams and the ‘sum of engrams an organism possesses’ its ‘engram resource’, distinction having to be made between an ‘inherited and an individually acquired engram resource’. ‘The name I give to the phenomena in an organism resulting from the presence of a particular engram or sum of engrams, is “mnemic phenomena”. The quintessence of an organism’s mnemic faculties I call “Mneme”.’ S. (page) 15. Semon deliberately avoided the terms ‘memory’ and ‘recall’, using instead a terminology that ‘permitted’ him ‘to abstract from this completely whether or not the material processes concerned manifest through higher conscious sentience in the given case or not.’ S. (page) 390.
• 21. Diogenes Laertius (2nd century AD), Greek writer. Peri bion doniaton kai apophthegmaton ton en philosophia endokimesanton (lives of the Greek philosophers). Book 6, ch. 2, 40: ‘When Plato made the definition that man is a two-legged featherless creature, and people applauded this, he [Diogenes of Sinope] plucked a cockerel and brought him to the school, saying: This is Plato’s man.’
• 22. Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner. His views on our inability to grasp life, or anything that moves, in our thoughts are above all presented in La pensée et le mouvant. Essais et conférences, 3rd edn, Paris 1934, especially in the lecture given in Bologna on 10 April 1911, entitled ‘L’intuition philosophique’.
• 23. Herbart, Johann Friedrich (1776–1841), German philosopher and educationist. See his Psychologie als Wissenschaft neu gegruendet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik, Koenigsberg 1824.
• 24. Hartmann, Eduard von (1842–1906), German philosopher.
• 25. See Steiner, Rudolf The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (GA 4), Tr. R. Stebbing rev. Bristol: Rudolf Steiner Press 1963. ch. 13. A number of other translations have been published, the most recent being Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. A Philosophy of Freedom. Tr. M. Lipson. Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1995.
• 26. Huch, Ricarda (1864–1947), German novelist and historian. Luthers Glaube, Briefe an einen Freund (Luther’s faith, letters to a friend), Leipzig 1916. See also Rudolf Steiner's lecture on Luther given in Berlin on 11 September 1917, in Karma of Materialism (GA 176) tr. R. Stebbing; New York & London: Anthroposophic Press & Rudolf Steiner Press 1985.

Spiritual scientific findings concerning rights and moral and social forms of life

You will have seen from the three lectures I have given here to characterize the way anthroposophically orientated spiritual science relates to three different fields of human endeavour in the sciences, that with this spiritual science it is above all important to develop ideas that relate to the reality of things and make it possible to enter into the fullness of real life in order to gain knowledge of that real world. We may say—and this will have been evident from the whole tenor of my lectures—that for a relatively long period in the evolution of human science, concepts in accord with reality have only been gained in the field of natural science that is based on the evidence of the senses. In some respects these concepts are exemplary scientific achievements. However, with regard to reality they only go as far as lifeless nature—I think it is reasonable to say this. Lifeless nature exists not only where it is immediately apparent to the senses but also as a mineral element in the life forms and mind-endowed entities that live in the physical world. In modern science, people have a grasp of things that is exemplary. I think we have very clear evidence of this in the applications of natural science in human life, applications that have been perfected and are tremendously successful. When concepts are applied to human life we can, under certain conditions, see how far they are in accord with reality. A watch cannot be constructed if one has the wrong concepts of mechanics and physics; it would soon tell us that the wrong concepts have been used.

This is not the case with all areas of life, and especially in the areas we are going to consider today, reality does not always immediately make it clear if we are dealing with concepts that are in accord with it, if they have been gained on the basis of reality or not.

In the field of natural science it is relatively safe to use concepts that are not in accord with the truth, for they will show themselves to be erroneous or inadequate for as long as one stays within the field of natural science, that is, theoretical discussion which may then also be put into practice. However, when it comes to social life, the life of human communities in any form, we have to consider not only how to gain concepts but also how to bring these to realization. Under present-day conditions there are spheres of life where inadequate concepts can indeed be introduced. The inadequacies of the ideas, notions, reactions and so on will then show themselves; but in some respect people living entirely with a natural scientific bias will be helpless in face of the consequences of such concepts. In a sense it would be reasonable to say that the tragic events which have now come upon the human race are essentially connected—more than one would think, and more so than can be even hinted at in one brief lecture—with the fact that for long periods of time people did not know how to develop concepts that were in accord with reality, concepts that could be used to encompass the facts of real life. These facts of real life have become too much to handle for humanity today. In many ways the inadequate ideas humanity developed in the course of centuries are being reduced to absurdity in a most terrible way in these tragic events.

We discover what really lies behind this if—let us now take a view that is different from those taken in the previous lectures—we first of all look at the way attempts have been made again and again in recent times to establish a general human philosophy on the basis of natural science, the way people have tried to introduce natural scientific thinking, so exemplary in its own sphere—let me repeat this over and over again—to all spheres of human life—psychology, education, politics, social studies, history, and so on.

Anyone who knows about developments in this direction will know the efforts people who think in the natural scientific way have made to apply the ideas and concepts they have evolved in natural science to all the above spheres of life. Proof of this is available in hundreds of ways, but let me just give some characteristic details. They may go some way back, but 1 think we can say that the trend they reflect has continued to this day and has indeed been growing.

Someone who in my view is an outstanding scientist spoke at two scientific gatherings in 1874 and 1875 on the sphere of rights, issues concerning morality and law, and human social relationships. In the course of those lectures he said some highly characteristic things. He actually claimed that anyone who in terms of modern scientific education has the necessary maturity ought to demand that the natural scientific way of thinking should be made part of people’s general awareness, like a kind of catechism. The inner responses, needs and will impulses arising in human beings as the basis of their social aspirations would thus have to be closely connected as time goes on with a purely natural-scientific view of the world that would be spreading more and more. This is what Professor Benedikt said at the 48th science congress.⁸⁰ He said the scientific view of the world needed to gain the breadth, depth and clarity to create a catechism that would govern the cultural and ethical life of the nation. It is his ideal, therefore, that everything in social life that speaks out of the cultural, heart-felt and will-related needs of people should be a reflection of natural-scientific ideas!

With regard to psychology, the same scientist said that it, too, had become a natural science since it followed physics and chemistry in casting off the ballast of metaphysics and no longer took hypotheses for its premises that were unfathomable for our present-day organization.

Many scientists—including Oscar Hertwig, whom I mentioned the day before yesterday, Naegeli and many others—emphasize again and again that natural science can only work effectively in its own field. The scientific ideas that are developed are such, however, that the way in which they are developed, as it were, prevents humanity from searching and striving for other spheres of reality than those that can at best be reached with natural science. I have quoted things people said some time ago, but if we were to quote today’s speakers we would find that they are entirely in the same spirit.

It is reasonable to quote Benedikt, who is a criminal anthropologist, for although he wants to take the purely scientific point of view also in looking at social life, he still has so much purely naive conceptual material in him which is in accord with reality that much of what he says—really going against his own theoretical theses—does truly extend into the reality of the world. On the whole, however, one may say that this tendency or inclination to develop a whole philosophy based on natural-scientific concepts, which are excellent in their own field, has gradually produced a quite specific philosophy, and one might almost get oneself a bad name by actually putting the philosophy that has developed out of this tendency into words. Today someone may do excellent work in his field, and if he then establishes a philosophy he extends knowledge which in its own field is indeed excellent to the whole world, and above all also to areas of which he in fact knows nothing. We can certainly say therefore that we have an excellent science today and its contents relate to things which people understand thoroughly. But then there are also philosophies which generally speaking are about things people do not understand at all!

This is certainly not without significance when it comes to the sphere of social life. Here man himself is the reality factor. Human beings are in these social spheres and anything they do is indeed such that anything that lives in their philosophy of life does enter into their impulses and into the social structures and the way in which people live together. This is why the kind of things were created which I referred to briefly at the beginning today.

In what I am saying today, I want again, as in the first three talks, base myself more on individual aspects of real life, on findings made in what I call spiritual investigation. I hope that with the aid of these I will be able to show how we should approach the fields of social studies in spiritual research.

A particular problem arises for modern people who have scientific knowledge, and whose life of ideas is based entirely on scientific training, when they approach the sphere of social life and immediately have to consider a fundamental concept, which is the concept of human freedom. This concept, which doubtless has many nuances, has in some respect become a cross that has to be borne in modern thinking about the world. For on the one hand it is extraordinarily difficult to understand the social structure of today without having clarity with regard to the concept of freedom. On the other hand, however, someone who is thinking in the natural scientific way, in the thinking habits of our time, will hardly know what to do with the concept of freedom. We know that disputes concerning this concept go back a long way and that there have always been two factions, though the nuance has varied—the ‘determinists’ who assumed that all human actions are in a way predetermined, in a more naturalistic or some other way, so that a person only does things under an unknown yet existing compulsion or causality; then there were the ‘indeterminists’ who denied this and concentrated more on subjective reality, that is, on what human beings experience inwardly as they develop their conscious awareness, and who maintained that genuinely free human actions were independent of such fixed predetermination which would exclude the concept of freedom.

Considering the way in which natural science has developed so far it is truly impossible to make something of the concept of freedom in that science. Anyone who makes a training in natural science the basis for establishing a sociology will be forced, in many respects, to take the wrong view of that concept of freedom and produce a structure for life that takes no account of the concept of freedom, ascribing everything to particular causes that lie either outside or inside the human being. In some respects such an approach is easy, for it allows one in a way to determine the social structure from the beginning. It is easier to reckon with human actions if they are predetermined than if one must expect a spirit of freedom in the human being to play a role.

It would be wrong to present as a concept of freedom some kind of visionary concepts, vague mystical ideas that would tend to be more or less the opposite of what modern natural science has to offer. We have to realize that a science of the spirit is only justifiable if it does not go against the true meaning of progress in natural science. Because of this, I must again start today by relating the fundamental concept in developing social life, which is the concept of freedom, to such natural scientific ideas as can be gained with the help of the science of the spirit.

According to the customary natural scientific concepts, human beings depend for their actions on the peculiarities of their organization. These are themselves investigated, as I have shown the last time, by applying the law of conservation of energy like a formula to the inner life, and this leads to the concept of freedom being excluded. If it is true that human beings are only able to develop energies and powers by transforming things they have taken in, then it will, of course, be impossible for the soul to develop any energies and powers of its own—which would be the requirement if freedom were to become a reality.

In the science of the spirit it is, however, evident that it is absolutely necessary to put the whole of the knowledge gained in the natural sciences on a new basis in this particular area. Admirable factual discoveries have been made in the natural sciences, as I have also said in the preceding lectures. But concepts and ideas about nature are so narrowly defined that it is not possible to have a comprehensive view of those discoveries. In the last lecture I referred to the way in which the science of the spirit makes it possible to relate the whole sphere of the human soul and spirit to the whole sphere of the living body, and that it then emerges that we need to relate the actual life of ideas to the life of the nerves, the life of feeling to the ramifications and to anything depending on the breathing rhythm, and the life of the will to metabolism.

If, for a starting point, we take the natural scientific view of the relationship between the life of ideas in the human soul and the life of the nerves, someone familiar with modern scientific ideas will have to say: ‘Processes occur in the life of the nerves; they are the causes of parallel processes in the life of ideas.’ Since there has to be a process in the nerves—and by definition this has its causal origin in the whole organism—for every idea-forming process in the soul, the corresponding process in the mind cannot be free, seeing that the process in the nerves is apparently the result of causal conditions existing in the organism. It thus has to be subject to the same necessity as the corresponding process in the nerves.

That is still the view taken today. It will not be like this in future, seen from the natural scientific point of view! People will then look with very different eyes at certain new approaches that have already been developed in natural scientific research. It will however mean that the directions to be taken in research are indicated out of the science of the spirit, for this alone can make it possible to throw a truly comprehensive light on the findings made in natural science.

The strange thing the spiritual investigator finds is that the life of our nerves relates in a quite specific way to the corresponding rest of the organism. We have to say it is like this: In the life of the nerves the organism destroys itself in a specific way, it is not built up in it. And in the life of the nerves—if we take it as pure life in the nerves, not nutritional life in the nervous system—the first processes to be considered are not growth or development processes, but processes of involution, of destruction.

One is easily misunderstood in this area, for it is still completely new today. And in one short lecture it is difficult to bring in all the concepts that will prevent such misunderstanding. So I simply have to accept the danger of being misunderstood. What I can say is that the life of the nerves as such proceeds in a way that is completely different from all the other organic processes that serve growth, reproduction and the like. The latter mean development in the ascent. This includes the development of cells, the cell division processes we can observe in reproduction and growth processes, as something side by side with cells that are still in the life of reproduction, or at least a degree of partial reproduction. When the human organisation—it is similar for the animal organization, but this is only of minor interest to us today—extends into the life of the nerves, it partly dies off in that life of the nerves. Going into the life of the nerves, developing processes are broken down. We may thus say that even from a purely natural scientific point of view it is evident—and the life of the red blood cells runs to some degree parallel to the life of the nerves—that division processes come to a stop as they enter into nerve cells and red blood cells. This is wholly factual evidence of something which a conscious mind with vision is able to perceive: that the nerve cannot have part in anything that is in any way productive, but that the nerve inwardly brings life to a halt, so that life comes to an end where the nerve branches.

By having a nervous system, we are, as it were, bearing death in us at the organic level. To compare what is really going on in the life of the nerves with something else in the organism, I’d have to say, strange though it may sound: ‘The unconscious processes in the life of the nerves cannot be compared with the process, for example, which happens when someone has taken in food and this food is processed in the organism for constructive development. No, the actual process in the nerves—as a process in the nerves, and not a nerve nutrition process—can be compared to what happens in the organism when it breaks down its tissues because of hunger.’ It is thus a destructive and not a constructive process which extends into the nervous system.

Nothing of any kind can emerge or result directly from this nervous system. This nervous system represents a process that has been stopped, a process that shows itself in progress in the cell life of reproductive cells and growth cells. There it is progressive; in the neural organs it is stopped. In reality, therefore, the life of the nerves merely provides the basis, the soil, on which something else may spread.

The principle which spreads on top of this life of the nerves, extending over this life of the nerves, is the life of ideas—initially stimulated by the outer senses—entering into the life of the nerves. It is only if we understand that the nerves are not the reason for forming ideas but merely provide a basis by having destroyed organic life, that we understand that the principle which develops on the basis of this life of nerves is something foreign to the life of nerves itself.

The mind and soul principle developing on the basis of a life in the nerves which is destroying itself is so foreign to it that we may say: It really is just as when I walk along a road and leave my footprints behind me. Someone following those footprints should not derive the shapes he sees in my footprints from any kind of forces in the soil itself, coming, as it were, from inside the soil to produce my footprints. Every expression of inner life may be seen in the nervous system, like my footprints in the soil, yet it would be wrong to explain the life of mind and soul as something inwardly ‘arising from the nervous system’. The life in mind and soul leaves tracks in the prepared soil, a soil that has been prepared by ‘forgoing’ the possibility of the nerve continuing its own productivity, if I may put it like this in symbolic terms.

Perceptive vision also shows the life in mind and spirit which thus develops on a basis of destruction, of a dying process in the human being, to be connected with organic life, initially the life of nerves; but in such a way that this life of nerves provides only the conditions, the soil, something which has to be there to provide the basis on which it can be active in this place. Seen from the outside, the principle which is active here may seem to arise from the nervous system, to be bound to the nervous system, but this life in soul and spirit is as independent of the nervous system as a child is of his parents when he develops independent inner activity, though the parents are, of course, the soil or basis on which the child must develop. Just as we may see the parents as the cause of the child if we look at this from outside, and just as the child is wholly free in developing his individual spirit and we cannot say that when the child develops independence there is not an activity in him which is in no way connected with his parents, we have to say in exactly the same way that the principle which is coming alive and developing in terms of mind and spirit becomes independent of the soil which it needs to thrive.

I am just referring briefly here to a system of ideas that will develop further in the course of time—the science of the spirit is only in its beginnings now—by taking certain ideas from natural science to their highest extreme. Those very ideas from natural science will not lead to the exclusion of human freedom but to a way of explaining and understanding freedom actually in natural scientific terms, for they will make people observe not only constructive and progressive processes in the organism but also those that are destructive, paralysing themselves in themselves. They will show that if the element of soul and spirit is to arise, the organic principle cannot continue in a straight line of development and so produce something non-physical. No, as the non-physical, spiritual principle begins to come into existence, this organic principle must first prepare the soil by destroying itself, breaking itself down, within itself.

When the ideas of constructive development, which are the only ones to be considered nowadays, have ideas about destructive development added to them, this will bring tremendous advances in the natural scientific approach. A bridge will be built that needs to be built because natural science must not be shut out today—a bridge from nature as it is understood to the sphere of social life which still needs to be understood.

A natural science that is incomplete prevents us from developing the concepts needed for the sphere of social life; once it is completed, its inner sterling character, inner greatness, will help us to establish the right kind of sociology.

I have thus presented, albeit briefly, the fundamental concept of social life, the concept of freedom. This has been set out fully in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, published in 1894, and the inner reasons given there accord fully with what I have now shown in a more natural scientific way. This is also evident from what I have written in my book The Riddle of Man⁸¹ which appeared almost two years ago. Let us now continue our consideration of the connection between man’s life in spirit and soul and other spheres of existence.

The last time and today I referred briefly to the way in which this element of mind, spirit and soul is connected—as life of ideas with the life of the nerves, as life of feeling with life in the breathing rhythm, and as life of will with metabolic life. This only shows the connection in one aspect, however. Just as natural science will one day, when it has perfected itself in this direction, relate the threefold soul as a whole—as I have shown—to the whole bodily human organism, so will spiritual science be able to look for the connections of the human mind and soul with this spiritual principle, that is, in the other direction.

On the one hand, the life of ideas has its bodily foundation in the life of the nerves, on the other it is connected with the world of the spirit, a world to which it belongs. This world, with which the life of ideas is also connected, can only be discerned through perceptive vision. It is perceived by a mind that has reached the first level of this vision, which I have called imaginative perception, or perception in images. This is gained out of the soul itself, like the opening of an inner eye. I characterized this in my first lecture.

As the life of ideas relates to the life of nerves in the body, which is its physical foundation, so it also arises from the realm of the spirit, a purely non-physical world that is seen to be a real world when we come to observe this reality with that vision in images. This real world is not contained within the sense-perceptible world. It is, as it were, the first world that goes beyond the senses, bordering directly on our own.

Here one finds that the relationship which the human being has to the world around him, as he is aware of it in his mind, is only part of his total relationship to the world; anything we have in our conscious awareness is a segment of the reality in which we are. Below this level of awareness lies another relationship to the surrounding world, to the natural world and the world of the spirit. Even the connection between our life of ideas and the life of the nerves in the body has been pushed below the threshold of conscious awareness and can only be brought up from there with an effort if one wishes to characterize it the way I have done today. On the other hand the relationship of our life of ideas to the spiritual world which we can only perceive in images is also such that it does not enter into our ordinary conscious awareness, though it does enter into human reality.

In the human mind we have first of all everything that has been stimulated by the senses and by the rational mind which is bound to the senses; this is the usual content of the conscious mind. Below this, however, lies a sum total of processes that initially do not come to ordinary awareness, but arise as a spiritual principle, which can only be perceived in images; this plays into our soul nature just as sounds, colours, smells and so on play into the everyday life of our souls. Ordinary conscious awareness thus rises, as it were, from another sphere which itself can only be brought to conscious awareness if we are able to perceive in images. The fact that people do not know of these things does not mean that they do not exist in reality. Moving through the world we bear the content of our ordinary conscious awareness with us; we also bear with us everything that comes from the ‘imaginative’ spiritual world, as I’ll call it for the moment.

It is of tremendous importance, especially at the present time, to understand that the human being relates to the world around him in this way. A field for research—I am far from underestimating this field, I appreciate its significance—and there was every reason for it to come up at the present time, has indeed come up at the present time. It is like a powerful pointer to man’s relationship to the world around him which I have just characterized as the spiritual world of images, a relationship that is only little known so far. It is a feature of our present time that much comes to human awareness that can really only be encompassed with the means of insight given through the science of the spirit. Humanity is called upon to perceive these things today in that one’s nose is rubbed in them, to put it plainly, with life taking a course where people cannot avoid seeing them. Yet modern people still cannot overcome their reluctance to tackle this with the means for insight provided by the science of the spirit. They therefore try to use the means of ordinary natural science or concepts developed in relation to other things to approach areas which today literally cry out for investigation.

The field I am referring to is that of analytical psychology, also called psychoanalysis, which is, of course, particularly well known in this city.⁸² What makes it remarkable is that a field opens up to challenge the investigator that lies outside our ordinary conscious awareness; it must refer to something that lies below the threshold of that awareness. People are, however, trying to work with what I may call inadequate tools in this field. As they endeavour to apply these inadequate tools also in practice—only therapeutically and educationally, to begin with, perhaps, but perhaps also pastorally—we have to say that the matter has more than theoretical significance. I am, of course, not in a position to discuss the whole field of psychoanalysis. That would need many lectures.⁸³ Let me, however, refer to some of the principles, some of the real aspects in this context. Psychoanalysis is a field where investigation and social life meet in a point, as happens also in other fields of this kind which we’ll be considering today.

Above all, and as you are no doubt aware, analytical psychology essentially has to do with bringing ‘lost’ memories back to mind for therapeutic purposes. The thesis is that the psyche contains certain elements that do not come to conscious awareness. It is then widely assumed that these memories have gone down into the unconscious or the like, and efforts are made to go and cast light below the threshold of consciousness by using the ordinary memory concept and enter into regions not illuminated by our ordinary consciousness.

Now I did already mention in these lectures that the science of the spirit has the task of illuminating the human memory process in a very major way. Again it will not be possible, of course, to avoid all the misunderstandings that can arise with such a brief review of the subject. I have heard it said, for example—several times, not just once—that psychoanalysis was really on the same road as the science of the spirit which I represent; it was only that psychoanalysts took some things in a symbolic way, whilst I took things which those enlightened psychoanalysts considered to be symbolic to be realities. That is a grotesque misapprehension, and you cannot characterize the relationship of psychoanalysis to the science of the spirit in a worse way than by saying that.

To understand this we need to take another look at the nature of the memory process. Let me emphasize once again that the process of forming ideas, the activity of doing so, is something which in the inner life of man essentially relates only to the present. An idea as such never goes down to some unconscious level of the mind, just as a mirror image seen when passing a mirror will not settle down somewhere so that it may come up again the next time you pass the mirror. The coming up of an idea is a phenomenon that begins and ends in the present moment. And anyone thinking that memory consists in there ‘having been’ an idea which ‘comes up’ again, may well be an excellent Herbartian psychologist, or a psychologist in some other direction, but is not basing himself on a genuinely observed fact.

What we have here is something entirely different. The world in which we live is filled not only with the sensory perceptions that enter into our present life of ideas through eye or ear. This whole world—and that of course also means the natural world—is based on a world that has to be perceived in images, a world which initially does not come to conscious awareness. The contents of this world of images act parallel to my momentary life of ideas: as I form an idea, letting these momentary processes take their course in me, another process runs parallel to them, with a current of unconscious life moving through my soul. This parallel process causes inner tracks to be left—I could characterize these in all detail, but have to limit myself to brief indications here—and these are observed when memory arises later.

When memory arises, therefore, it is not a matter of an old idea, which might have been stored somewhere, being brought back again. Instead we look inwards at tracks left in a parallel process. Memory is a process of perception directed inwards.

The human soul is capable of many things at an unconscious level which it is not able to do consciously in ordinary life. To compare the process that occurs when a ‘forgotten’ event ‘comes back to mind’, doing so in very general terms—let me emphasize this: in very general terms—with something else, I would say that it is quite similar to sensory perception using the outer senses. The difference is that with the latter I recreate my perceptions in temporary images that only exist for the moment. Anything I recreate from memory is a specific form of inner perception. Within myself, I perceive the residue of the parallel process; this has remained stationary. As a crude analogy, recall is a process in which the soul reads at a later time something that had gone parallel to the forming of an idea. The soul has this ability, at an unconscious level, to read in itself what had been developing when I formed an idea. I did not know this at the time, for the idea blocked it out. Now it is recalled. Instead of having a sensory perception of something on the outside, I perceive my own inner process. That is the real situation.

I am fully aware that a fanatical psychoanalyst—none of them see themselves as fanatical, of course, and I know this, too—will say that he has no problem in agreeing to this explanation of memory. But in fact he’ll never do so when considering these things in practice. Anyone who knows the literature will know that it is never done and that this is in fact the source of countless errors. For people do not know that it is not a matter of past ideas that linger somewhere in the unconscious, but concerns a process that can only be understood if we understand the way in which an imaginative world plays into our world in a process that runs parallel to the life of forming ideas.

The first significant errors arise because a wrongly understood memory process forms the theoretical basis and is applied in practice in analytical psychology. When we penetrate to the real process of remembering, there can be no question of looking for elements in the soul which psychoanalysts consider to be pathological in memories that linger somewhere. It is a matter of perceiving how the patient relates to a real, objective world of non-physical processes, which he is, however, adopting in an abnormal way. This makes a huge difference, something which we must of course think through in every possible aspect.

Psychoanalysts who apply their natural scientific training one-sidedly in an important sphere of real life also fall into another kind of error. They use dream images for psychological diagnosis in a way that cannot be justified in the face of genuine observation. We need genuine observation and concepts that relate to reality so that we may enter into this strange, mysterious world of dreams in the right way. This is only done if we know that human beings have their roots not only in the environment in which they live with their ordinary conscious minds but—even in the life of ideas, as we have seen, and later we’ll also see some other things—in a world of spirit. Our ordinary conscious awareness comes to an end when we sleep, but that connection with the world that remains at a subconscious level does not come to an end.

There is a process—I cannot characterize it in detail, time being short—in which the special conditions pertaining in sleep cause the things we live through in connection with our spiritual environment to be clothed in symbolic dream images. The content of those dream images is quite immaterial. The same process—the relationship of the human being to his spiritual surroundings—may appear as a particular sequence of symbolic images for one individual and as a different one for another. Anyone with the necessary knowledge in this field knows that typical unconscious processes in the psyche assume the garb of widely differing reminiscences of life in all kinds of different people, and that the content of the dream does not matter. You only come to realize what lies behind this if you train yourself to ignore the content of the dream completely and consider instead what I’d call the inner dynamic of the dream. It is a question of whether a foundation is first laid with a particular dream image, then tension is created and then an evolution, or whether the sequence is different, starting with tension which is then followed by resolution.

It needs a great deal of preparation before one can consider the evolution of a dream, the whole drama of it, wholly leaving aside the content of the images. To understand dreams one must be able to do something that would be like seeing a play and taking an interest in the scenes only in so far as one perceives the writer behind it and the ups and downs of his inner experience. We must stop wanting to grasp dreams by abstract interpretation of their symbolism. We need to be able to enter into the inner drama of the dream, the inner context, quite apart from the symbolism, the content of the images. Only then will we realize how the soul relates to its spiritual surroundings. These cannot be seen in the dream images which someone who does not have vision in images uses for reality under the abnormal conditions of sleep, but only through awareness in images. The drama that lies beyond the dream images can only be understood if we have imaginative awareness.

As you are probably aware, research in analytical psychology also extends—and in a way this is most praiseworthy—to mythology. Many interesting things have been discovered, and other things that are enough to make your hair stand on end. I won’t go into detail, but it is important to see that individual scientists still work in such a way today that they one-sidedly develop a limited area, taking no account of scientific discoveries that have already been made, though these can often throw much more light on the matter than one is able to do oneself.

An old friend of mine who died quite some time ago wrote a very good book on mythology. He was Ludwig Laistner.⁸⁴ After going right round the world, as it were, with regard to the origin of myths, he showed in a very interesting way that if you want to understand myths it is not at all important to consider the content, that is, what they tell—doing so in one way in one place and in a different way in another—or the actual images of those myths; no, in that case, too, it is important to let the dramatic events come to light that come to expression in the different mythological images. Laistner also considered the connection between mythological images and the dream world, doing so in a way that was still elementary but nevertheless correct. His studies therefore provided an excellent basis for connecting research into dreams with the investigation of myths. If in mythology, too, people were aware that it is merely images that come across into dream consciousness from the creative sphere of myths, images which arbitrarily, I would say, represent the actual process, that would be a much more intelligent way of working. As it is, people working in analytical psychology—and I do fully recognize their importance and that they work with the best and truly honest good will—attempt things that must be askew and one-sided because their means are inadequate.

There is very little inclination to go really deeply into things, and to get help from spiritual life to understand reality in terms that relate to reality. More recent research in psychoanalysis did, apart from the ordinary concept of memory and the kind of dreams that have their origin in individual life, also involve taking account of a ‘super-individual unconscious’,⁸⁵ as it is called. At this point, however, a research method pursued with such inadequate means has led to a most peculiar result. There is a feeling—and we have to be thankful that such a feeling at least exists—that this inner life of the human psyche is connected with a life of the spirit that lies outside it; however, there is nothing one can do to perceive this connection in real terms. I honestly don’t want to find fault with these scientists, and I greatly respect their courage, for in a present world which is so full of prejudice it needs real courage to speak of such things; but it has to be pointed out—especially because these things also enter into practical considerations—that there is a way of overcoming such one-sidedness.

Jung, a scientist of great merit who lives here in Zurich, has taken refuge, as it were, in trans-individual, super-individual unconscious spirit and soul contents. According to him the human soul relates not only to memories which the individual has somehow stored or the like, but also to things that lie outside its individual nature. An excellent, bold idea—to relate this life in the human psyche not only by the means of the body but also in itself to soul qualities in the outside world; it certainly merit's recognition. The same man does, however, ascribe what happens in the soul in this way to a kind of memory again, even if it is super-individual. You cannot get away from the concept of mneme, or memory, though we can’t really speak of memory any longer when we go beyond the individual element. Jung puts it like this: you come to see that ‘archetypal images' live in the soul, images of the myths evolved among the ancient Greeks—archetypes, to use Jacob Burckhardt’s term. Jung says, significantly, that everything humanity and not only the individual person has gone through may be active in the soul; and as we do not know of this in ordinary conscious awareness, this rages and rises up unconsciously against the conscious mind, and you get the strange phenomena that show themselves today as hysterical and other conditions. Everything humanity has ever known of the divine and also of devilish things rises up again, Jung says in his latest book; people know nothing about it, but it is active in them.

Now it is highly interesting to look at an investigation done with inadequate means, taking a characteristic instance. This scientist has come to say, in an extraordinarily significant way that when people do not consciously establish a connection with a divine world in their souls, this connection is created in their subconscious, even though they know nothing about it. The gods live in the subconscious, below the threshold of conscious awareness. And a content of which they know nothing in their conscious minds may come to expression in that they ‘project’ it, as the term goes, on to their physician or another person. Thus a memory of some devilry may be active in the subconscious but not come to conscious awareness; it rages inside, however; the individual must rid himself of it; he transfers it to some other person. The other person is made into a devil; this may be the physician, or, if he does not manage to do this, the individual does it to himself.

From this point of view it is most interesting to see how a scientist comes to his conclusions about these things. Let us look at one of the latest books on psychoanalysis, The Psychology of the Unconscious by Carl Gustav Jung.⁸⁶ He writes that the idea of God is simply a necessary psychological function of an irrational kind. Jung deserves great merit for acknowledging this, for it means that for once recognition is given to the nature of the human subconscious as being such that people establish connections with a divine world in their subconscious. The author then goes on to say that this idea of God has absolutely nothing to do with the question as to the existence of God. This last question, he says, is one of the most stupid questions anyone may ask.

We are not concerned with the scientist’s own view of the idea of God. He may be a very devout person. What concerns us here is what lives in the scientist’s own subconscious life of ideas, if I may use that term. Inadequate means of research mean no less than that one says to oneself: The human soul has to establish relationships to the gods below the threshold of consciousness; but it has to make these relationships such that they have nothing to do with the existence of God. It means that the soul must of necessity content itself with a purely illusory relationship; yet this is eminently essential to it, for without this it will be sick. This is of tremendous import, something we should not underestimate! I have merely indicated how inadequate the means are with which people are working in a quite extensive field.

I’ll now continue my description of the human being and the way he needs to relate to his social environment. The life of feelings—not now the life of ideas, but the life of feelings—has its physical counterpart in the breathing rhythm, as I said, and on the other hand also relates to spiritual contents. The element in the spirit which corresponds to the life of feelings the way the life of the breathing rhythm does at the physical level, can only be penetrated, being a spiritual content, a content of spiritual entities, spiritual powers, with an ‘inspired’ mind, as I have called it in these lectures.

This inspired mind opens up not only the spiritual content that fills our existence from birth, or let us say conception, until death, one also comes to see things that go across birth and death and have to do with our life between death and rebirth, that is, of a spirit that is alive even when the human being no longer has this physical body.

Whereas the human being gains a basis for this physical body through physical heredity, the principle which is born out of the inspired world, creates its physical expression in the breathing rhythm. But into this life of feeling—whereas initially only elements coming between birth and death play into the life of ideas which the human being knows in his ordinary conscious awareness—enters everything by way of powers and impulses that has been active during the time from the last death to the present birth. This will be active again between this death and a new birth. The core of the human being’s eternal reality plays into this life of feeling.

The third thing to be noted is that the human being’s life of will relates on the one hand really to the lowest functions in the human organism, to metabolism, something which in the widest sense comes to expression in hunger and thirst. On the other hand it relates in the spirit to the highest spiritual world, the intuitive world, which I have mentioned on several occasions in these lectures. We thus do indeed have a complete reversal of the situation.

Initially the life of ideas is subconsciously in touch with the world of images, and with the life of nerves in its other aspect. In a world that projects beyond our personal life in a body as the core of our reality, the life of feeling goes towards the spiritual side. And the life of will, which comes to physical expression whenever there is a will impulse in some metabolic process, and therefore in the lowest processes in the organism, is on the spiritual side connected with the highest spiritual world, the intuitive world.

We have to enter into this region if we want to investigate ‘repeated lives on earth’, as they are called. Impulses that go from one life on earth to another cannot be grasped in images, let alone in our ordinary conscious awareness, and not even with inspired consciousness. This needs intuitive awareness. Impulses from earlier lives on earth enter into our life. Impulses from this life will enter into later lives on earth. The only possible character our investigations can have at this point is one of having developed a sense for real intuitions, not the wishy-washy kind of which we speak in ordinary life.

The complete conscious mind thus perceives the complete human being as he lives in soul and spirit in three ways—in ideas, feelings and will impulses, all of which rise up and go down again. For he has his basis in three ways in a living physical body and takes his origin in the world of the spirit. The science of the spirit takes us to the eternal in man not in any speculative or hypothetical way, but by showing how the conscious mind must develop if it is to behold the eternal core of the human being who develops in successive lives on earth.

This complete human being—not an abstract human being presented in natural science or by naturalists in an empty, abstract set of ideas that do not hold the whole of reality—this complete human being is part of a social life. Our ordinary conscious mind is able to understand the natural world outside in so far as it is not organic but something in the lifeless, mechanical sphere—in modern science this is often the only thing considered to have validity and be worth considering. This level of the mind is not able, however, to find concepts that are wholly viable when it comes to social life if they have evolved in the pattern used in everyday thinking. The secret of social life is that it does not develop according to the concepts we have in our ordinary thinking but does so outside the sphere of the conscious mind, in impulses that can only be grasped with the higher levels of conscious awareness of which I have spoken.

This insight can throw light on many things which in our present social life must inevitably end in absurdity because the concepts people want to apply to it do not relate to reality. So there we are today, with concepts gained from an education based on natural scientific ideas, and we want to be creative in social life. But this social life needs additional concepts that differ from those we have in our ordinary thinking—just as the subconscious life of the psyche presenting in psychoanalysis also calls for additional concepts.

In the first place three areas in social communities need to have light thrown on them through anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. I’ll only be able to give a rough outline, for the science of the spirit is still in its beginnings and many things still need to be investigated. I will thus merely characterize the general nature of the strands we have to see running from spiritual scientific insights to insight into social life.

Three spheres of social life may be seen. The first sphere where what I have been characterizing just now applies, is the sphere of economics. We know that economic laws live in our social structure, and that we need to know these laws. Anyone involved in legislation or government and anyone who runs any kind of firm which is after all part of the social structure in life as a whole must work with the laws of economics.

The economic structure, as it exists in real terms, cannot be grasped if we apply only the concepts gained in the natural scientific way of thinking, concepts that govern practically the whole of people’s thinking today. The impulses that are active in economic life are entirely different from those in the natural world, and that includes human nature. In basic human nature, our view rests on questions of need, for example. Issues concerning the meeting of needs are the basis of our external economic order. To gain genuine insight into a social community with its economic structure I need to perceive how depending on the geographical and other conditions the means are available to meet human needs. For the individual we start from the question of needs, but to consider the economy we must start from the opposite side. Then we do not consider what people need but what is available to people in a given area as community life develops. This is just a brief indication. Many things would need to be said if we wanted to consider the economic structure in its entirety. Yet the economic structure of a country or community, which is really an organism, cannot be dealt with by using concepts taken from ordinary natural science.

That may lead to some very strange things! Here it is reasonable to say something in particular because I am truly not just referring to it in the light of current events. People might object that I have been influenced by these current events, but that is not the case. What I am going to say now is something I spoke of in a course of lectures I gave in Helsingfors before the present war started.⁸⁷ My reasons for referring to it now have therefore nothing at all to do with the war. I need to say this in advance, so that there shall be no misunderstanding.

At that time in Helsingfors—that is, before the war—I showed how we can go astray if we want to grasp the social structure of human communities wholly with natural scientific ideas. For my example I chose someone who falls into this error to the greatest degree—Woodrow Wilson.⁸⁸ I referred to the strange way in which Woodrow Wilson—academic thinking had in this case advanced to statesmanship—said that if one considers the days of Newtonism, when a more mechanical view was taken of the whole world, one can see that the mechanical ideas which Newton and others had made current had also entered into people’s ideas of the state, their ideas of social life. It is wrong, however, to consider social life in such a narrow way, said Woodrow Wilson; we have to do it differently today and apply Darwinian ideas to social life. He was thus doing the same thing, only with the ideas that are now current in natural science.

Yet Darwinian ideas are of as little use in understanding social structures as were Newtonian ones. As we have heard, not all Darwinian ideas are actually applicable in organic life. This remained at a subconscious level for Wilson, however, and he did not realize that he was making the very mistake which he had identified and censured just before.

Here we have an outstanding example of people unable to realize that they are working with inadequate tools that will not cope with reality when they try to master and understand social life today. Such a situation, where the tools are inadequate even as people make world history, is something we come across wherever we go. And if people were able to see through what is happening here, they would be able to see deeply into the deeper causes of the phrase mongering that goes on at present, reasons that are generally not apparent to the world today.

Economic structures cannot be understood if we use natural scientific concepts—whether gained from Darwinism or Newtonism—for these only apply to the facts of nature. Instead, we must move on to other concepts.

I can only characterize these other concepts by saying that they must rest on if not perhaps a clear idea, then at least a feeling of entering wholly into the social structure, so that ideas come up that belong to life in images. It needs the help of image-based ideas to get a picture of a real social structure that exists in one place or another. Otherwise we only get abstractions of no value that have no substance to them.

We no longer create myths today. But the power to create myths was an impulse in the human soul that went beyond everyday reality. Today, people must take the same inner impulse which our forebears used to create myths; they created, if I may put it like this, images of a spiritual reality out of powers of imagination that related to that reality; we must have ideas in images of economic systems. We cannot create myths, but need to be able to see the geographical and other situations of the terrain together with the given character of people, the needs of people, in such a way that they are seen together with the same power that was formerly used to create myths, a power that is alive and active in the spiritual sphere as the power to form images and which is also reflected in the economic structure.

A second sphere in social life is the moral structure and the moral impulse that lives in a totality. Again we go down into all kinds of unconscious spheres to investigate the impulses revealed in human moral aspirations—moral in the widest possible sense. Anyone wishing to intervene in this, be it as a statesman, be it as a parliamentarian, or also as the head of some firm who wants to take a leading role, will only understand the structure if he is able to master it with concepts that have at least a basis in insights gained through inspiration.

This is even more necessary today than people tend to think; intervening in this social aspect in so far as moral impulses are involved. These moral impulses need to be studied truthfully and in real terms, just as the impulses of organic life cannot be invented but have to be studied by considering the organism itself. If people were to think up concepts about lion nature, cat nature, or hedgehog nature, if you will, the way they think up concepts in thinking up Marxism today, or other socialist theories, and failed to study nature in reality, and if they were to construct purely a-priori concepts of animal nature, they would arrive at strange theories about the animal organization.

The important point is that the social organism also has to be studied in absolutely real terms where moral principles in the widest sense are involved. The forces of need that human beings bring into play—they, too, are moral powers in the wider sense—can only be mastered if we investigate the real social organism on the basis of ideas that have their roots in the inspired world, even if these ideas are only dimly apparent. Today we are still a long way away from such a way of thinking!

In the science of the spirit one comes to study the nature of the impulses that live among the people in Central Europe, Western Europe or Eastern Europe in real terms and in detail. One comes to see in very real terms how the different inner impulses arising from the social organism are just as real and well-founded as the impulses that arise from the physical organism. One comes to see that the way nations live together is also connected with these impulses that can be studied from deep down. In the science of the spirit one finds that the structure of the soul differs greatly between the West and the East of Europe, and one comes to know that such a structure must become part of the whole of European life. Let me remind you that I have been talking about the different soul structures that underlie European social life for decades, speaking out of purely spiritual scientific ideas.⁸⁹ The discoveries made in the science of the spirit are confirmed by people with empirical knowledge who know the reality of life. Look in yesterday’s and today’s issues of the Nene Zürcher Zeitung [major Swiss paper] for what is said there about the soul of the Russian people and Russian ideals, taking a Dostoevskyan view.⁹⁰ There you have complete proof—I can only refer you to this, time being too short for a detailed description—in observations made in an outer way of a result arising very evidently from something that has been put forward for years in the science of the spirit.

You then come to study social impulses and energies in real life. As it is impossible to master life with concepts far removed from reality, this life gets on top of people. They no longer know how to encompass life with concepts as abstract as those used in the sphere of natural science. These prove inadequate in the social sphere. This life, which is surging and billowing deeper down and has not been grasped in conscious awareness, has therefore brought about the catastrophic events we are now going through in such a terrible way.

A third sphere we meet in social life is the one we call the life of rights. Essentially the social structure of any body is made up of economic life, moral life and the life of rights. All these terms must be taken in the spiritual sense, however. Economic life can only be studied in a real sense if we think in images; moral life and its true content can only be studied with the help of inspired ideas; the life of rights can only be understood with the help of intuitive ideas, and these, too, must be gained from full and absolute reality.

We can thus see how the insights sought into nonphysical aspects with the science of the spirit apply to different spheres of social life. In the field of education, too, which essentially is part of the social sphere, fruitful concepts will only arise if we are able to develop image-based concepts so that we may see life which is as yet unformed in images that arise in us—not in the abstract terms that are so common in education today but on the basis of genuine vision in images—and also guide it on that basis.

The life of rights, concepts in the sphere of rights—just think how much has been written and said about this in recent times. Basically, however, people have no really clear idea of even the simplest concepts in the sphere of rights. Here, too, we merely need to consider the efforts of people who want to work entirely out of a training in the natural sciences, Fritz Mauthner, for instance, author of the highly interesting dictionary of philosophy.⁹¹ Read the entry on law, penal law or, in short, everything connected with this, and you’ll see that he dissolves all known ideas and concepts, and also existing institutions, showing that there is no possibility whatsoever, nor ability, to put anything in their place. It will only be possible to put something in their place if people look for what they are seeking in the structure of rights in the world that is the very foundation of social structures, a world open only to intuitive perception.

Here in Zurich I am able to refer to a work in which the author, Dr Roman Boos, has made a start with looking at the sphere of rights in this way.⁹² An excellent beginning has been made in basing real issues in the sphere of rights on the situations pertaining to the structure of rights and the social structure and arriving at realistic ideas concerning individual details in the sphere of rights. Study such a work and you will see what is meant when we demand that social life as a life of rights should be studied in a realistic and not an abstract way, developing our ideas about it in real terms, encompassing it with concepts that relate to reality. It is of course harder to do than if we construct utopian programmes and utopian government structures. For it means that the whole human being has to be considered and one must truly have a sense of what is real.

I have made the concept of freedom the fundamental one in order to show that although we are looking for laws pertaining to the world of the spirit, the concept of freedom is wholly valid in the science of the spirit. It will not be easy, however, to study these things in real terms. For we then come above all to realize the complexity of reality, which cannot be encompassed in one-sided concepts that are like stakes put in the ground here or there. One realizes that as soon as we go beyond the individual person we must encompass this reality in concepts that are like the concepts used in the science of the spirit which I have described in these lectures.

Let me give you a powerful example. People like to live with biased ideas, concepts gained in their habitual way of thinking. When the first railway was built in Central Europe, a body of medical men—learned people, therefore—was also consulted. This has been documented, though it may sound like a children’s tale. The doctors found that no railway should be built, since it would cause damage to people’s nervous systems. And if people insisted after all on having railways, one should at least put high board fences on either side of the railway lines so that people would not get concussion when a train went past.⁹³ This expert opinion from the first half of the 19th century was based on the habitual way of thinking at that time. Today we may find it easy to laugh about such a biased opinion; for those learned gentlemen were, of course, wrong. Developments have overtaken them. Progress will overtake many things which ‘esteemed gentlemen’ consider to be right.

There is, however, another question, strange though it may seem. Were those learned gentlemen simply wrong? It only seems so. They were certainly wrong in one respect, but they were not simply wrong. Anyone who has a feeling for the more subtle things in the development of human nature will know that the development of railways does in a strange way relate to the development of some phenomena of nervousness which people suffer at present. Such a person will know that whilst it may not be as radical as those learned gentlemen put it, the trend of their opinion was partly right. Anyone who truly has a feeling for the differentiated nature of life, for the difference between our life today and life at the turn of the 18th to 19th century will know that railways did cause nervousness, so that the learned doctors were right in some respect.

The idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, which is still applicable to some natural event or some natural human phenomenon, does not apply when it comes to the social structure. Here it is necessary for a person to develop a faculty for more comprehensive ideas by training his inner abilities in a wholly different way. Those ideas need to encompass a social life that goes far beyond anything which one-sidedly abstract ideas taken from natural science—and they have to be abstract—are able to encompass.

Time being short, I have of course only been able to give brief indications that the sphere of social science, of economics, of social morality in the widest sense, law and everything connected with it, will only be mastered when people overcome the laziness which is such an obstacle today. For essentially it is laziness and a fear of genuine ways that lead to insight which prevent people from looking at the world in the light of spiritual science.

In spite of being permitted to give a course of four lectures, I have of course only been able to refer briefly to some things. I am fully aware that I could only give some initial ideas. It also was merely my intention to make the connection to the individual sciences known today in form of initial ideas. I know that many objections can be raised, and am thoroughly familiar with the objections that may be raised. Anyone who bases himself on the science of the spirit must always raise all possible objections for himself at every step, for it is only by measuring his insights against the objections that one truly develops from the depths of the soul the potential vision in the spirit that can cope with reality.

Yet though I am aware how imperfect the ideas I have presented have been—it would need many weeks to give all the details which I was able merely to refer to briefly as results—perhaps I may think after all that I have given some idea in at least one direction, and that is that spiritual science has nothing to do with stirring things up because one has some abstract ideal or other. It is a field of research which the progress of human evolution actually demands at this time. Someone who is working in this field of investigation and truly understands its impulses will know that it is exactly the areas that are demanded in the present time—like the field of psychoanalysis of which I spoke—which show, if truly penetrated, that they can in fact only come fully into their own if illuminated by what we are here calling spiritual science with an anthroposophical orientation. I wanted to show that this is not something dependent on sudden whims or vague mysticism but is pursued in all seriousness by people who are serious investigators, at least in their intentions. I therefore presented a number instances to show that current scientific thinking can gain a great deal from the science of the spirit which we have today.

I do not believe this science of the spirit to be something completely new. We need go back no further than Goethe to find the elementary beginnings in his theory of metamorphosis. These merely need to be developed further in the science of the spirit—though not with abstract, logical scientific hypotheses. They need to be developed in a way that is full of life.

As I myself have been working with the further development of the Goethean approach for more than 30 years, I privately like to refer to the approach called spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation as Goethe’s approach taken further. If it were entirely my own choice, I’d like to call the building in Dornach which is dedicated to this approach a Goetheanum,⁹⁴ to indicate that this spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation is not something new suddenly emerging into the light of day as something arbitrarily developed from a single case but something which the spirit of our age is calling for and also the spirit of human evolution as a whole.

It is my belief that people who have gone along with the spirit in human evolution have in their best endeavours at all times pointed to the principle which must today show itself as the fruits and flowers of scientific endeavour so that genuine, serious insight into the life of the spirit may be established. This must be done with the same seriousness and integrity which has also be brought to the development of natural science in recent centuries and especially in more recent times, a science which those working in the science of the spirit do not reject or denigrate.

My aim in giving these lectures has not been to fight other sciences or go against them in any way, but to show—as I said in my introduction—that I appreciate them. I believe they are great not only in what they are today but also in what may still develop. In my view it shows greater appreciation of natural scientific and other modern ways of thinking if one does not merely stay at the point where one is, but believes that if we enter wholly into everything that is good in the different fields of science, this will not only permit the logical development of some philosophy or other which then does not take us further than what already exists in its basic premises, but will be able to bring forth something that is alive. Spiritual science with anthroposophical orientation wants to be something which thus has life and is not merely based on logical conclusions.

Questions and answers

From the question and answer session⁹⁵ which followed the lecture given in Zurich on 14 November 1917

Question. How does the lecturer explain the process of forgetting?

Well, this is something that can be dealt with briefly. The process of forgetting essentially is due to the fact that the process I referred to as running parallel to the forming of ideas and on which memory depends has a phase of ascent and one of descent. To be more easily understood I might mention that a process which is not the same, but exemplifies the process we are considering, was something Goethe called the ‘fading away of sensory perceptions’. This fading away of sensory perceptions—when a sensory perception has come to an end, the effect of it is still there but fading—is not the process on which forgetting is based, but it helps to clarify the situation. It is exemplary, as it were, of the whole process which occurs there. Let me emphasize that I see this as a process which is mental and physical and not physiological, though it does extend into the physiological aspect. You will find more details about this in my books. But this process, too, has a phase when the effect dies down, and that is the basis of forgetting. The ascending phase is the basis of remembering, and the descending phase of forgetting. The process of forgetting is not all that surprising, I would say, if one takes the view of remembering which I have been presenting.

Question. What does it mean if someone never dreams, or is never aware of his dreams? How should we consider this phenomenon in psychological and anthroposophical terms respectively, that is, how does such a person differ from others in mind and spirit?

This is quite a problematical issue. It is easy for people to say that they never dream, but it is not really the case. What we have here is a certain weakness relating to the subconscious processes that give rise to dreaming. This weakness means a person is unable to bring up from the subconscious what is meant to be read from this subconscious, as I put it metaphorically. Everyone dreams. But just as there are other weaknesses, so some people are in a condition where it is impossible to bring their dreams up to conscious awareness. This weakness should not, however, be regarded the way we may regard an organic weakness, say. It can easily arise if the mind is outstanding in some other area. Thus we are told that Lessing never dreamt. In his case this would have been due to the fact that his was an eminently critical mind. By concentrating his powers as strongly as we know him to have done, thus using them in one aspect of his inner nature, Lessing weakened them in another area. We therefore should not see this weakness as something really bad; it may have to do with strengths in other areas.

To interpret such a thing ‘psychologically’ and ‘anthroposophically’ is, of course, one and the same thing for a spiritual scientist. It cannot even be said that someone with a certain weakness in bringing dreams to mind would also have a weakness, for example, relating to processes that are part of imaginative perception. This need not be the case at all. Someone may not have much of a gift for what is ordinarily called dreaming, and yet develop powers of imaginative perception and so on by using the methods I have given in my books, especially in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. It may be the case that when he now uses his powers specifically for imaginative perception of the world, in full conscious awareness, to look into the world of the spirit—we might say clairvoyant insight if the term can be used without prejudice—this may actually suppress ordinary dreaming, though the reverse may also be the case.

I know a great number of people who use the exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds in their souls and experience a transformation in the life of dreams, which is also described in the book. Ordinary dream life is vague in its contents. It changes strangely under the influence of awakening imaginative perception.

The inability to bring dreams to mind thus points to nothing more than a partial weakness in someone’s nature, and this should be regarded in the same way as when someone has strong muscles in another sphere, and someone else’s muscles are weaker. It is something that lies entirely in the nuances of the way in which people are constituted.

• 80. Moriz Benedikt (1835–1920). Zur Psychophysik der Moral mid des Rechts. Zwei Vortraege gehalten in der 47. und 48. Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher. Wien 1875.
• 81. See note 3.
• 82. See note 79.
• 83. Rudolf Steiner had given two lectures on anthroposophy and psychoanalysis in Dornach on 10 and 11 November 1917: Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology’ (from GA 178), tr. M. Laird-Brown; Hudson: Anthroposophic Press 1990.
• 84. Laistner, Ludwig (1845–1896). Das Raetsel der Sphinx, Grundzüge einer Mythengeschichte, Berlin 1889. See the Rudolf Steiner’s story of his life (GA 28, various translations), chapter 15.
• 85. See Jung, C. G., Psychology of the Unconscious Chapter 5.
• 86. Ibid.
• 87. The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita (GA 146). about Wilson in the 5th lecture, on 1 June 1913.
• 88. Wilson, (Thomas) Woodrow (1856–1924), 28th President of the USA 1913-1921. In The New Freedom, in a chapter on the meaning of progress, he wrote that a government was not a machine but a living entity. It was subject not to the theory of the universe but to that of organic life. It was elucidated by Darwin and not Newton. He went on to say that live political constitutions had to be Darwinian in structure and in the way they were used.
• 89. See e.g. Steiner R. The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls (GA 121); tr. A. H. Parker; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1970.
• 90. This was a review of a volume of Dostoevsky’s political writings which had been published by Piper & Co. in Munich in 1917. It appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 13 November (No. 2134) and 14 November 1917 (No. 2141). The review presents Dostoevsky as someone who took the Slavophile movement to its perfection in Russia, decisively demanding that people ‘turn away from St Petersburg’ and that Russian culture should again have its focus in ‘Moscow’—turning away from Western decadent intellectual thinking and concentrating once more on the thinking of the Russian ‘people’ ...
• 91. Wörterbuch der Philosophy, 1. Bd., München & Leipzig 1910.
• 92. Boos, Roman (1889–1952), social scientist. Active representative of anthroposophy and the threefold commonwealth impulse. His treatise on a labour contract was published by Duncker und Humblot in Munich and Leipzig in 1910.
• 93. The expert opinion of the Royal Bavarian College of Medicine has not survived; its original existence is therefore disputed by some. Reference to it is however made in Hagen, Rudolf, Die erste deutsche Eisenbahn, 1885, p. 45, and in Kemmerich, Max, Kultur- Kuriosa, Munich 1909, p. 282 & 295. Kemmerich was unable to give an ‘authentic source’, but spoke of a ‘sufficiently well-known fact’.
• 94. In a public lecture which Rudolf Steiner gave in Basle on 18 October 1917, he said for the first time that he would like to call the ‘St John’s Building’ in Dornach the ‘Goetheanum’. ‘... Most of all—providing it is not misunderstood—I would like to call the world view which thus arises in a scientific way after the sources from which it has arisen for myself, calling it Goetheanism. In the same way I would greatly prefer to call the building out there in Domach, which is dedicated to this world view, the ‘Goetheanum’, providing this does not lead to misunderstanding upon misunderstanding.’ Published in German in Freiheit—Unsterblichkeit—Soziales Leben (GA 72).
• 95. Some of the questions did not relate directly to the subject and have therefore been omitted.

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy, as it is to be cultivated at the Goetheanum in Dornach, still finds the most diverse opponents today - opponents who stand on the ground of church theology with their views, even from the artistic side many opponents have shown up, especially opponents who do not always start from thoroughly objective points of departure and come from the most diverse party directions and from the most diverse areas of social life. I will not deal with all these adversaries today, my dear audience, but what I would like to do today is to deal with the misunderstandings and antagonism that anthroposophical research has encountered from the scientific community. For it is my conviction that, although it seems absolutely necessary to oppose the various other opponents, these will gradually disappear of their own accord once the debate between anthroposophy and science has been brought into the necessary forms so that present-day official science and anthroposophy can really understand each other. At the moment, the situation is such that it is precisely from the scientific side that anthroposophical research is met with the greatest misunderstandings.

But first of all, I would like to emphasize that the anthroposophical research method that I represent – for that is how I would actually like to call it – definitely wants to stand on scientific ground and that it would like to set up all its arguments in such a way that this scientific ground becomes possible, excluding any kind of dilettantism and so on. The starting point for the anthroposophical research method is such that the scientific requirements and the whole scientific attitude of modern times have been taken into account. Anthroposophy does not place itself in opposition to modern science. On the contrary, it seeks to take up what has emerged over the course of the more recent development of civilization in the way of scientific conscientiousness and exact scientific methods, especially in the field of natural science, over the last three to four hundred years, but particularly in the nineteenth century and up to the present. Although it must go beyond the results and also the field of actual natural science, as it is usually understood today, it would like to include what underlies it as scientific discipline, as scientific methods, in the inner education for the anthroposophical method. Today I will not be able to give a fundamental lecture, but will only touch on certain points, in order to then be able to draw some connecting lines to the scientifically recognized fields of today.

What is initially claimed by anthroposophy are special methods of knowledge - methods of knowledge that differ from what is generally considered to be the usual methods of knowledge today, but which nevertheless grow out of them quite organically. Today, it is generally assumed that one can only conduct scientific research if one is grounded in knowledge as it arises in ordinary life, after having undergone a normal school education and then approaching the various fields of external natural existence, including that of man, by experimenting, observing and thinking in a materialistic sense.

Anthroposophy cannot be based on this, but rather it assumes that it is possible, that just as one first develops one's mental abilities from early childhood to what today is called a normal state of mind or what is regarded as such, further cognitive abilities can be developed by taking one's soul life, if I may use the expression, freely and independently, starting from this so-called normal state of mind. And through these cognitive abilities, one is then able to gain deeper insights into the nature and human existence, into world phenomena, than is possible without such particularly developed abilities. These abilities are not developed by an arbitrary handling of the soul life, but they are developed in a very systematic way, only that one is not dealing with the training of certain external manipulations, with the application of the laws of thought recognized by ordinary logic, but with the development of the intimate soul life itself.

I can only hint at the methods used to develop such supersensible soul faculties. In my various books, especially in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science”, I have given detailed descriptions of how a person can proceed in order to soul-life to such abilities by means of which one can — if I may express myself trivially — see more than one can explore with ordinary intellectual thinking, with experimentation and observation.

I have already mentioned imaginative cognition as the first step towards such knowledge. This imaginative cognition does not mean that one should develop the ability to cultivate illusions or phantasms in the soul, but rather that it is a pictorial cognition, as opposed to ordinary abstract cognition, which is simply needed to explore the real secrets of existence. This pictorial knowledge is acquired, as I said, by way of long soul-searching. It depends on individual ability: one person needs a long time, another only a short time, to try to apply a meditative life to the point of enhancing one's inner soul abilities. This meditative life consists, for example, as already mentioned, and described in more detail in the books mentioned, of easily comprehensible ideas, that is, ideas that one either forms in the moment, so that one can grasp them in all their details, or that you can have them given to you by someone who is knowledgeable in such matters, that you can have such ideas present with all your strength in your ordinary consciousness, that you can, so to speak, concentrate all of your soul abilities on such easily comprehensible ideas.

What is achieved by this? Well, I would like to express what is achieved by this through a comparison. If someone uses the muscles of his arm continually, especially if he uses them in a very definite, systematic way, then he will grow in strength for these muscles. If someone applies the soul abilities in such a way that he concentrates them on a self-appointed goal, on a self-appointed inner soul content, then the soul powers as such will grow stronger, will gain strength. And by doing so, one can achieve – as I said, it takes a long time to do these exercises – one can achieve, inwardly, without paying attention to external sense impressions, a strength of soul that is otherwise only applied to the external sense impressions themselves.

The outer sense impressions are concrete, pictorial. Everyone who has a certain self-contemplation knows that he develops a greater intensity of his soul life when he lives in the outer sense impressions than when he lives in abstract ideas or in memories, when he lives in that which remains for him when he turns his perceptive abilities away from the outer sensory life and limits himself only to his soul as such, as it arises, I might say, as an echo, as an after-effect, through the lively, saturated outer sensory impressions. What is important, ladies and gentlemen, is that the inner life of the soul is so strengthened that one can have something in this inner strengthening that one can otherwise only have in the present human life between birth and death when one is given over to the strength of the external sense impressions. One arrives at a pictorial imagining, an imagining that actually differs from the usual abstract imagining – let us say, if we want to speak scientifically, from that imagining by which one visualizes natural laws on the basis of observation and experiment. One comes to develop such inner strength that one has not only the kind of thinking, the kind of inner soul life that is present, for example, in grasping the laws of nature, but also the kind of inner soul life that is present in grasping outer pictorialness. One attains an inner pictorialness of thinking. One comes to live, not merely in thoughts of an abstract kind, but in inner pictures.

In the moment when one characterizes such a developed inner vision, it is immediately asserted: Yes, anthroposophy wants to develop something that is actually known as subordinate soul abilities, as soul abilities that play over half or completely - as one now wants to take it - into the pathological. And further one says: Those who strengthen their inner vision to such an extent that they develop the ability to see inner images without taking these images from the external sense world are surrendering themselves to an ability that is the same as the hallucinatory ability, to the ability to imagine all kinds of pathological phantasms and the like. And indeed, representatives of today's science have repeatedly objected that what anthroposophy claims as its inner vision in images must be traced back to suppressed nervous forces, which then, at the appropriate moment, arise from the inner being through the intensified inner life, so that one actually has nothing other than a suppressed nervous life in these images. Those representatives of science who confuse anthroposophical vision with hallucinations, as they are called in the trivial life, have simply not thoroughly studied what anthroposophical vision really is. Firstly, one could counter such objections by pointing out that anthroposophy insists that it proceeds in exactly the same strict way as the external natural sciences with regard to what the natural sciences deal with, and that it takes recognized scientific methods as its most important preparation and that it rises only from these, so that one should not really speak of the fact that someone who stands on the true ground of anthroposophy would show signs of indulging in a vision like some random medium or some random fantasist. We will not see any medium or fantasist placing themselves firmly on the ground of scientific research and taking this as their starting point, and then wanting to let what is to become a vision emerge from these strict scientific methods. But I do not want to talk about that at all. Instead, I would like to point out that anthroposophy demands a more thorough and exact method of thinking than is usually evident or applied in such objections.

The main point here is that, above all, such objections do not yet arise from a truly thorough knowledge of the soul or psychology. Our knowledge of the soul still leaves much to be desired today. It is by no means commensurate with the exact methods of external natural science. In many respects, it is actually a chaos of ideas handed down from ancient times and extracted to the point of mere words, and all kinds of abstractions. It is not based on real observation of the life of the soul, on exact empiricism of the life of the soul. Above all, such exact psychological empiricism must ask itself the question: What is the actual state of our sensory perception? What actually works in our sensory perception?

In our overall soul life, there is imagination, feeling and will. But our soul life is not such that we can separate imagination, feeling and will from one another other than in abstraction; rather, imagination, feeling and will are involved in everything that our soul is capable of in some way. We can only say that when we are in the life of imagination, feeling and willing play a part in it. When we form an affirmative or negative judgment within the life of imagination, our soul life is oriented outwards, but the affirmation or negation is carried out by an impulse of the will. This impulse of the will plays a definite part in our life of imagination. And only he can get an exact idea of the soul life and its various expressions who is clear everywhere about what is the part of feeling in willing, or, conversely, of imagining in willing, and so on.

Now it is relatively easy to see that the will plays a role in our imaginative life. I have just drawn attention to the process of judging, and anyone who really studies judging will see how the will plays a role in imagining. But also – and this is important, dear readers – the will plays a role in our sensory perception. And here I must draw attention to something that is usually not even known in today's psychology, or at least not sufficiently characterized. Will most certainly plays a part in our sensory perception, in all our seeing, hearing and other sensory perceptions. What actually takes place in sensory perception?

In the act of perceiving, we are inwardly active in every act of the soul, even in those in which we appear to be passively confronting the outside world. In what we bring to the outer world through inner activity, that is, expose ourselves to some kind of sensory perception, the will certainly lives – albeit, I would say, diluted and filtered – but the will lives in it. And the essence of sensory perception is that this will – I could go on for hours explaining this in detail, but here I can only hint at it – that this will, which we expose from the inside out, so to speak, is repulsed by the various agents. And we shall only comprehend the nature of the stimulus, the nature of the total sensory perception, when we can visualize this play of the will from the inside out and the counter-strike of the natural agents from the outside in. become aware of how in every act of sensory perception there is a reaction of the will and how everything that remains of sensory perception in memories or other forms of perception is actually a withdrawn will impulse. And so we can distinguish, by exposing ourselves sensually, that which plays in such a way from the will, from that which, starting from the whole act and following on from it, then continues in the life of imagination.

In the life of the imagination, as I have already indicated, the will also lives, but it lives in such a way that the inner man has a much greater share in this unfolding of the will into the life of the imagination than in the unfolding of the will into the life of the senses. First of all, our will remains much more active, much more subjective, much more personal in imagining than in sensing. You see, dear Reader, everything I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” for the development of supersensible knowledge, aims to raise to full consciousness the will that plays into sensory perception and that must therefore be applied, even in the most exact natural research. And now one must organize one's inner life of imagination in such a way that in this life of imagination not the subjective arbitrary will - if I may express it in this way - lives, as it otherwise lives in imagining, but the same objective will that lives in sensory perception. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as I understand it, does not aim to bring up all sorts of things from the depths of the soul in a nebulous, mystical way, in order to force a subjective will into the life of ideas. This subjective will is already present in ordinary life, but it must be released from the life of imagination precisely through the exercises for attaining higher knowledge, and the will that one carefully trains oneself to see through, and that lives precisely in sensory perception - and only in sensory perception - must discipline and permeate the life of imagination.

If I may express it in this way, something tremendous has been achieved. The entire life of the imagination has acquired the character that otherwise only sense perception has. This is something that each individual must make as his personal discovery. Man knows, he can imagine all sorts of things; the will can play a part in this by turning the judgment one way or the other. What a wealth of life there is in the imagination! But when a person uses his senses, the external world imposes the discipline of the will on him – in the way that the will can be applied to sensory perception – and then it is impossible to bring inner subjectivity into play in an arbitrary way. I would remind you that anthropological psychology has already shown how the will comes to life in sensory perception – I need only remind you of Lotze's local signs and so on. But only when one comes to bring this will, which leaps into objectivity, into the life of the imagination, does one shape the life of the imagination in such a way that it becomes imaginative cognition, that it participates in objectivity in the same way that sense perception otherwise participates in objectivity.

You see, dear ladies and gentlemen, in the face of what I have only been able to hint at in a few strokes, in the face of what is meant in the most exact sense, but which is not meant in such a way that one indulges in all kinds of fantastic ideas about the development of the soul – as is also the case with clear-headed mystics – all the objections, even those raised today by official science, are basically extremely amateurish for anyone who is familiar with the subject. For in comparison with everything that can ever flow into hallucinations, dreams, and everything that arises subjectively only from the human being's organization, in comparison with that, that is, where the person lives without objective orientation, where he is completely devoted only to his inner being, in comparison with that, an imaginative life is developed that is modeled on the outer sense life with its objectivity. In a sense, then, the objectivity of sensory perception is extended inwardly through the life of imagination. In all that is present in mediumship, in all that is somehow present in pathological clairvoyance, on the other hand, what leads to pictorialness, to hallucinatory life, is brought up from within the human being.

But that is not at all the case with those methods that are used for anthroposophical research. Here one does not proceed from the inside outwards, as basically every mysticism has done so far, but one proceeds from the outside inwards. Here one does not learn from one's inner mystical feeling, but one learns precisely from external sensory perception how to relate objectively to the world. And then you discover that by learning in this way through sensory perception, you are able to shape the life of imagination in a way that is just as concrete and just as internally saturated as you would otherwise only have with sensory perception. And when one comes to such an inwardly saturated imagination, which now, just as sensory perception, flows into something objective – that is, it is not merely subjectively oriented – only then is one in a position to ascend from a certain stage of knowledge of nature to another stage, which I will characterize in a moment.

But first of all, I would like to say that the anthroposophical spiritual science, as I understand it, has made a sincere effort to create clarity on all sides regarding the position of such imaginative knowledge. And allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to make a brief personal statement, which is not meant to be personal at all, but is entirely objective and related to to how I myself came to not only develop such anthroposophical methods, but also to truly believe in such anthroposophical methods, to see in them a right to knowledge. For do not believe, ladies and gentlemen, that anyone who takes these things seriously is uncritical, that he does not want to thoroughly examine the most thorough and exact methods of critical knowledge of the present day. As I said, allow me to make a personal remark.

I was about thirteen years old when I came across a treatise that – as was particularly prevalent in the 1770s – was primarily concerned with the exact mathematical investigation of external natural phenomena and actually only accepted as natural laws what could be calculated. This essay endeavored to expel even the last mystical concepts from the knowledge of nature. This essay viewed the force of gravitation, the force of attraction in the sense of Newton, as one such mystical concept. This essay was called “The Force of Attraction Considered as an Effect of Movement”. And the mystical concept of attraction was not to be used, in which two material bodies somehow attract each other through space, but an attempt was made to explain attraction in an extraordinarily exact mathematical way: Ponderable matter is in a world gas, and thus a certain number of impacts between, say, neighboring material bodies can be calculated. If you now compare the number of impacts coming from the inside with the number of impacts coming from the outside, you arrive at a pure, mysticism-free explanation of gravitation.

I mention this for the reason that, as I said, this treatise fell into my thirteenth year. In order to understand this treatise - you can imagine that this is not exactly easy for a thirteen-year-old boy - I had to make an effort to master differential and integral calculus at the age of thirteen, because only by doing so can one really master these ideas. And in doing so, I had the opportunity to gain a starting point for everything that followed, which is actually needed to come to terms with such ideas, which have always lived in me with an indeterminate certainty, in a critical way. You really have to get an idea of how you actually use mathematical laws or laws of phoronomy in all your sensory observation, how you actually proceed, what you bring of yourself to the outside world, and so on. In short, for me that was the starting point for exploring how far this strange inner realm of the soul, which we call mathematics, can actually govern external reality.

Heinrich Schramm, the author of this essay - I still consider it extremely important today - was thoroughly convinced that you can go anywhere with mathematics, that you simply have to assume matter, space, motion and that you can then go anywhere with mathematics. He was convinced that the most diverse properties of natural phenomena in ordinary mechanics, in thermodynamics, in optics, in the field of magnetism and electricity, that one can grasp all these different phenomena with mathematics, that one can correctly arrive at all these different phenomena if one only applies mathematics correctly. So, if you apply this mathematical research to a hypothetical material process, the magnetic application springs to mind; if you apply it to a different process, the electrical application springs to mind. In short, all natural phenomena are explained as an effect of motion. One becomes quite free of mysticism; one limits oneself to the concrete, which one can grasp in purely mathematical presentation. This struggle, one must have gone through it once, this struggle with a knowledge that proceeds mathematically in relation to the external world and now wants to grasp the sense perceptions mathematically, because the external world must be grasped somehow, no matter how mathematically one proceeds.

But now another one presented itself to me in this way. I immersed myself in what is called the probability problem in mathematics, where you try to calculate the probability that - let's say, for example - you get a certain throw with two dice, where one, two, and so on, is on top, so you calculate probabilities. This mathematical field, this probability calculation, plays a very important role in the insurance business. There, probability calculation has a very real application. From the number of deaths within a larger number of people, one calculates the probability that any given person, let's say a thirty-year-old, will still be alive at the age of sixty, and then one determines their ability to take out insurance and also their insurance premium. So here we are calculating something, and in doing so we are using calculation to place ourselves in reality in a very strange way. You can see from the fact that, in theory, anyone can calculate their lifespan in such a way that it is fully sufficient for the insurance industry that calculation places us in reality. For example, I could have decided to insure my life at the age of thirty. It would have been perfectly possible to calculate how long my probable lifespan would be and therefore how much I would have had to pay. But no one will believe that they really have to die when this probable lifespan has expired.

We have here a field in which mathematics is valid for what it wants, but where the individual life as such does not fit into the mathematical formula, where life as such is not included in the mathematical formula. In this way, in certain areas of natural science, we have an inner satisfaction of knowledge when we start from the assumption that what has been mathematically understood is adequate to what appears externally in the sense world. But precisely in those areas where probability theory plays a role, there is something where we have to say to ourselves: Mathematics is sufficient for the outer life, for what takes place in outer observation, but one can never be convinced that the inner life is mastered by it.

I would have to tell a great deal more about the intermediate links if I were now to show how, starting from such ideas, I came to the chapter in my “Philosophy of Freedom” (the first edition of which appeared in 1893) on the value of life, on the value of human life. There I was dealing, above all, with a fight against pessimism as such. At that time, this pessimism dominated the philosophical outlook of certain circles much more than was the case later. This pessimism originated in principle with Schopenhauer, but it was systematically founded by Eduard von Hartmann. Eduard von Hartmann now started from the point of view of calculation with reference to the sphere of ethical life, of socioethical life. If you look up his calculations today, they are extremely interesting. He tries to calculate how, on the one hand, everything that brings people pleasure and joy, happiness and so on in life can be positively assessed, and how, on the other hand, everything that brings people suffering, pain, misfortune and so on can be negatively assessed. And he subtracts and actually comes up with a plausible conclusion that for most people the unhappy things, the painful things predominate, that the negative positions predominate.

You can think what you like about such philosophical “trifles”; for those who want to get to the very foundations of knowledge, these are not trifles, and they must not remain so if we want to escape from the misery of today's knowledge. This became a very important problem for me, because I said to myself, a person does not feel it the way it is calculated here. That is nonsense — you can see that the moment you ask people: If you were to add up your happiness and unhappiness, you would come out with a larger number on the negative side. Would you therefore consider your life a lost one? Would you therefore consider yourself ripe for suicide, as Eduard von Hartmann suggests, that every person should actually do so if they were reasonable? For Eduard von Hartmann, the calculation says yes, but life never says yes. Why not?

Now, in my “Philosophy of Freedom” I have shown that this subtraction, which Eduard von Hartmann carried out, simply cannot be carried out. if one wants to apply an arithmetic operation at all, one must apply a completely different one. you have to use a fraction or a division: the numerator or dividend contains everything that is fortunate, pleasurable, everything that brings satisfaction, and the denominator or divisor contains everything that brings suffering, unhappiness, pain and so on. If you apply the division calculation, then you would have to have an infinite denominator if you want to get a number that means zero as a life conclusion. If you can only divide a finite number of suffering and pain through it, then you will never get a life conclusion that is zero. The human being does not commit suicide as a result of subtraction. And when I showed that here one cannot just subtract, but instead divide, or that a fractional approach must be taken, I was also able to show that for mathematics in a certain case one is obliged to start from life, that one must therefore gain access to life, gain an immediate insight into life, before making a mathematical approach.

Here I have the three points together: on the one hand, in natural science, the mathematical approach, which in probability theory can adequately describe the external facts, but which is nevertheless insufficient when it comes to reality. Then there is reality itself, as it is grasped in its real individual form, and finally there is reality itself, which is directly observed as the master of the mathematical approach. There we have the limit of what is mathematically possible, insofar as we start from mathematics itself. And when one recognizes in this way that it is necessary to go beyond the mathematical when wrestling with this problem, then, on the other hand, when one has gained that conception of which I have spoken today, one finds that one has now made this leap in reality, where one has gone beyond the abstract thinking that we encounter most purely in mathematics and entered into direct reality. And only from there did the possibility arise – one might say in an epistemological way, which Goethe himself could not yet have given – to grasp Goethean morphology in the first place and, secondly, to deepen and expand it. For now, once you have gained that imaginative conception, you begin to grasp what Goethe actually meant when he developed his primal plant, that is, an inwardly and spiritually conceived form that underlies all the various outwardly diverse plant forms. Once you have grasped this archetypal plant, he said, you can theoretically invent plants in the most diverse ways with the possibility of growth, that is, you can inwardly recreate the natural process. We have an inner soul process by which we can, anticipating the natural process, allow the most diverse plant forms to emerge from the one primal plant, to recreate them inwardly, just as nature creates the most diverse plant forms from the one typical primal plant. There Goethe has already made the transition from pure abstract thinking to what I would now like to call 'thinking in forms'. That is why Goethe arrived at a true morphology.

This thinking in forms – perhaps I may still characterize it that way. What do we actually do in geometry? There we are dealing with forms, especially in plane geometry as well as in stereometry. But actually we are trying to master the forms through numbers, because measurement can, after all, be traced back to something numerical. So we try to force the forms into the abstraction of numbers. But the mathematical, as I have just explained, is limited. We have to leave it if we want to get out into reality. And we can also find the transition from merely reducing the geometric forms to numbers to directly grasping the geometric form. Once we have taken this serious approach to an inner grasp of geometry, we can also find the transition to other forms – to those forms that Goethe meant when he spoke of the primal plant, which then develops inwardly in the most diverse ways into the most varied plant forms. Just as a triangle can have one angle greater and the other smaller, thus creating the various special triangles, so too the most diverse plant forms arise from the primal plant once its law has been grasped. I would like to say that Goethe arrived at his morphology in a subjective way and only developed it to a certain degree. But that which one develops in a systematic way, by driving the will, which otherwise only lives in sensory perception, into the life of thinking, what one develops there as imaginative thinking, that is thinking in forms.

And we come to the point where we can now survey the stage of knowledge of nature where we have natural laws that can be grasped in abstract thoughts - we can apply this thinking to the inorganic, to the inanimate world. At the moment we want to ascend into the organic world of plants, we need thinking in forms. Dearly beloved, let no one rail against this thinking in forms; let no one say that real science can only progress in a discursive way, can only advance from one thought to another, that is, according to the method that is recognized today as the logical method; let no one say that only this is true science. Yes, one may decree for a long time that this is true science – if nature does not yield to this science, if nature, for example the plant world, does not allow itself to be molded into this science, then we need a different science. If purely discursive thinking, purely abstract thinking, is not enough, then we need thinking in forms, in inner pictorialness. And this thinking in inner pictorialness makes the plant world understandable to us on the outside, and makes the unity of our entire life between birth and death understandable to us on the inside.

I have often stated in my books and lectures that in those moments when one has truly developed this imaginative thinking, it turns out that life from the time one has learned to say “I” to oneself, when the ability to remember begins, to the present moment shows itself as if unfolding in a single tableau. Just as one normally regards one's external physical body as belonging to oneself and looks at it at any given moment, so one also has one's previous life on earth in the course of time before one, as in a panorama of images. This is the first achievement of truly anthroposophical science: to survey one's inner life as a tableau right up to one's birth, so that one now really has an overview of this time organism. What is called the etheric body of man or the body of formative forces in my various books - what is that other than what is achieved through imaginative visualization? We come to survey our life between birth and the present moment, presenting itself as a unity in the immediate present, at the same time as the impulses that carry us beyond the present moment into our further life on earth. And when we have achieved this, the second step of supersensible knowledge presents itself: it is difficult even today to find a name for this step; inwardly, as a method I have called it inspired knowledge. Do not let the term bother you. It does not refer to anything handed down by tradition, but only to what I have just hinted at in my books and what I will also hint at here in principle.

I have said that imaginative visualization is achieved by placing certain easily comprehensible ideas at the center of our consciousness and that this strengthens that consciousness. Just as we, in a sense, recreate memory when we place such ideas at the center of our consciousness, we must now also develop forgetting as an act of the will in our lives. Just as we can concentrate all the powers of our soul on certain ideas, which we place in our consciousness in the way I have characterized, we must also be able to drive these ideas out of our consciousness whenever we want, through inner arbitrariness. We must therefore also reproduce forgetting just as we artificially reproduce, if I may express it this way, remembering.

If we do these exercises, we will see that such an idea, which we bring into the center of our consciousness in this way, initially attracts all kinds of other ideas – like bees, they come in from all sides, these other ideas. We must learn to exclude them; in fact, we must learn to exclude all imagining. We must learn, so to speak, after we have developed such images, to be able to make the consciousness empty without falling asleep in the process. Just try to imagine what that means! This must be practiced, because as soon as a person, with only the usual strength of consciousness, tries to empty his consciousness - especially after he has first concentrated on a particular idea - he inevitably falls asleep. But that is precisely what must be avoided: empty consciousness after imaginative ideas, that is, initially without subjective content. And at that moment, when this has been achieved, the spiritual world streams into the soul life thus prepared. At this moment one is able to see a world that is not there for external sensory perception, but which is the world that we now see not only as part of our earthly life, as in imaginative knowledge, where we see up to birth, but we see the world that contained us as beings before we descended into earthly life. There we get to know ourselves as spiritual beings in a purely spiritual world. There we get to know that within us that has created this organism that lives here in the earthly world. There we get to know through knowledge the immortal part of the human being.

And from there it is then - I just want to mention this - one step to intuitive knowledge, to also gain the insight that the earthly lives of human beings repeat themselves. But you will have gathered from what I have only been able to hint at that it is a matter of using strict systematic schooling of the inner being to prepare the consciousness, not to create any world out of the inner being, but on the contrary, to free the consciousness after prior imagination for the contemplation of the spiritual world. Just as we encounter the outer world with our outer senses, in that the will lives in these outer senses and enters into a relationship with objectivity, so, after we have completely freed our inner soul life from the physical, we prepare the soul to see the spiritual world as it sees the physical world through the senses. There we get the opportunity to see what being has built us, in that we are built out of individuality, not out of the cosmos, and how this being lived in the spiritual world as a pre-existent being before we accepted the physical body through the hereditary stream through generations. And then we learn to recognize that which, in turn, passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world when we discard this physical body. We learn to recognize what builds up this physical body, what undergoes a certain transformation in this physical body through birth, what is rekindled through the experiences of life and then, through death, enters the spiritual-soul world again. So we are not striving for a fantasy, not for philosophizing, not for speculating about the immortality of man, but we are striving for a real insight into what lives in us as immortal. And when we deepen our spiritual life in this way, then we are standing in a spiritual objectivity, and it cannot be said that this standing in a spiritual objectivity can in any way be compared with hallucinations arising from the mere inner life or with any subjective fantastic creations.

Now I would like to show – albeit more comparatively – how one can arrive at not only an anthropology, but also a cosmology, in this way. Time is pressing, so I can only hint at it.

How does our ordinary life between birth and death unfold? We see, my dear attendees, how we have external experiences through our sensory experiences, how these sensory experiences trigger and develop ideas, and how, after the ideas have been developed, these ideas can in turn be evoked by the powers of memory. So we see, when we survey our soul life, that in what we carry within us we have, so to speak, the images of what we have experienced in the outside world. I am seeking a particular mental image from the very depths of my soul life. This mental image brings something to my mind in the present moment that I may have experienced fifteen years ago: an objective event experienced completely subjectively. But if my entire inner soul life is healthy, if what I am imagining as a memory is in a healthy connection with the rest of my soul life and, in particular, if I am able to orient myself properly through the senses at all times , then I am also able to tell myself what the external objective experience was like fifteen years ago from what I currently have in front of me – by drawing on everything with which it is related.

Between birth and death, we initially carry the world of our experiences within us in our soul. But, esteemed attendees, we also carry other things within us. If we only look at our lives as we usually survey them in our soul life, we are only aware of what I have just mentioned. But we carry other things within us, and through what I have described to you as supersensible knowledge, we look deeper into ourselves - not through nebulous mysticism, but through exact methods related to mathematics. We carry organs within us, the organs of our inner being. They are built out of our pre-existent being; they are built out of the spiritual world.

Those who, with the help of such exact anthroposophy as I have described, not only survey their soul life, which they have gathered together between birth and the present moment, but who learn to recognize the nature of the forces that prevail in the inner organs, he comes to know the world in its development through his organs, which he spiritually understands. And it is not, my dear audience, some reminiscence of some old superstition, of some old star belief or the like, when today anthroposophy speaks of a world development, but it is based on an insight into the human being that recognizes the inner human being in such a way that the mere life of the soul is recognized as an image of the events experienced since birth that are connected with us.

In this way we experience a connection with the whole world. Just as our memories are inner images of our experiences since birth, so our whole inner being - when we learn to understand it - is an image of the whole development of the world. This is what it means to “read the Akasha Chronicle” - not all the confused ideas that are held against anthroposophy. It means that we can gain knowledge of the world from true knowledge of the human being. However, we must not simplify matters, as is often the case today, when we believe that we can grasp something that is contained in a precise process of knowledge with a few concepts that have been pinned up. Nobody today would dare to grasp or even criticize the system of mathematics with a few pinned-up concepts. On the other hand, what is acquired in a much more complicated way, but with true striving, is today casually tried to be characterized with a few concepts. He who takes care to use all inner precautions in order not to fall into subjectivity but to completely immerse himself in objectivity — that is, to first shape the consciousness so that it can immerse itself in spiritual objectivity — is, I might say, slandered in such a way that it is claimed that only suppressed nervous energy is brought up at the appropriate moment and that all kinds of hallucinations arise from this. can immerse itself in spiritual objectivity – is, I might say, slandered in that it is claimed that only suppressed nervous energy is brought up at the appropriate moment and that all kinds of hallucinatory images are developed.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, without wishing to lapse into a counter-criticism, I will merely characterize how it is currently being done, and at the end I will show you this by means of a small example. A pamphlet appeared recently in which the author seeks to show that what the anthroposophist finds can, to a certain extent, be readily admitted, for the simple reason that today's science also finds that the strangest experiences of the soul can arise from the subconscious. And so, as the author of this work believes, it is quite possible to admit to the anthroposophist that he experiences all kinds of things as they are experienced by mediums, as they are experienced when people are put under hypnosis or taught suggestions, or even when they create suggestions for themselves. In particular, what is most essential about anthroposophy is traced back to self-suggestion.

And now something very worthy is being done. It is shown how the most wonderful effects are possible from the soul, how one can develop remarkably extensive healing processes for tuberculosis, metritis, fibroids and so on from the soul life, how even tuberculous deformations of the spine can be balanced out by the soul life: Why should it not be possible to admit that an anthroposophist also draws all kinds of things from his soul life, especially when he first puts himself into self-suggestion? And now it is shown that such subjective life exists, and such subjective life, especially of autosuggestion, of self-suggestion, the anthroposoph should also be devoted. And there is, for example, the following claim:

By means of his....

- that is, by means of the spiritual and soul development as I have described it

... self-aware action, that is, self-reflection in a trance, is made possible.

Now, dear attendees, I had not spoken of trance. I had only told you that consciousness comes to clearer, brighter levels, not that it is led back into darkness and gloom as in trance!

And self-contemplation, in turn, is the prerequisite for supersensible seeing. In other words, the so-called transcendental experiences are products of methodically generated self-contemplation in a trance state under the simultaneous effect of systematic suggestion. The actual agent here is self-suggestion. Proof of this is, among other things, Rudolf Steiner's explicit assurance that “to attain higher knowledge, one must force the will into the imagination.”

So, here it is claimed that I said in a lecture in Bern on July 8 that to attain higher knowledge, one must force the will into the imagination.

Now, first of all, something that shows how curiously exactly today's scientific papers are written! For example, on the same page it is said how such suggestions can actually be carried out, how something can be suggested to someone so that an idea is taught to him, and how he then becomes completely absorbed in this idea and even creates all sorts of things out of himself as a result of this absorption in this idea. And now the author says:

These successes are mainly based on the fact that Coue once understood suggestion as an independent, will-independent (ideo-dynamic) force.

– “ideo-dynamic” is in brackets, this is very important! –

... and that he has recognized the significance of this subconscious power.

So, we are dealing with an ideodynamic force that is independent of the will. Nevertheless, this ideodynamic force, which is independent of the will, is to be utilized by me, by saying that one must drive one's will into the imagination. Now, let us take the sentence first of all as the author claims I said it in Bern: One must force one's will into the imagination.

Today I also spoke about how one must develop the will, which one first gets to know through sensory perception, into the life of the imagination. In this way one fights precisely those influences that are merely suggestive. In this way one works in precisely the opposite sense. This application of the will is precisely what destroys all suggestive possibilities of influence. What I have described takes place in the opposite direction to suggestive influence. This is actually already evident from the fact that these suggestive influences are called “ideo-dynamic impulses”, i.e. not impulses of the will, but ideo-dynamic impulses. And yet, the author has a presentiment that he is not yet able to express properly: One must indeed summon up one's willpower when one wants to introduce subjective ideas into the ideas, but this happens without the person to whom it happens, who experiences the suggestion, applying his own will.

Everywhere I have described that the person who wants to become an anthroposophical researcher applies his will, thus standing out from the possibilities of suggestion. Therefore, I could not say - I read this in this brochure and said to myself: Did I really let my tongue be paralyzed in Bern on July 8, 1920, did I really say that in order to gain higher knowledge, one must force one's will into one's ideas? For anyone can do that, for suggestion can also happen without any activity on the part of the one to whom something is being suggested.

Now I have taken the trouble to look at the shorthand notes of my Bern lecture on July 8, 1920, which I fortunately found today. And now see what I really said in Bern at the time. Everywhere I tried to show how the opposite approach to suggestion should be taken. And then I said:

We must apply ever greater and greater strength. And it is the application of this strength that matters; it matters that we drive the will, with all our might, into the life of the imagination, into the act of imagining, that we actually grow stronger in this driving of the will into the life of the imagination.

That is something else. You can only drive ideas into the images. When one speaks of driving the will into the life of the images, it means precisely not allowing the images to be influenced by suggestions, but taking control of the free life of the images and the nature of the images, which is ruled by the will. You see, it is quoted in quotation marks, and the opposite of what I really said is said in quotation marks.

But this is only one example, ladies and gentlemen, of the way in which anthroposophy is often discussed today, especially from a scientific point of view, and how it is misunderstood. This is extremely characteristic, and the whole brochure actually has this tendency. My dear audience, as for what mediumistic phenomena are, what hallucinations are, what kind of visions arise from within – I have always strictly excluded them from the field of anthroposophical life and explained that I consider all of this to be pathological, that it goes below the level of the sense life, not above it. And I have done this everywhere, in many places in detail, as what Anthroposophy wants, what Anthroposophy gives as descriptions of spiritual-soul worlds, arises from completely different foundations than what is asserted here. And now there is a strange tendency for precisely that which I reject, that which I regard as morbid, pathological, to be seen as the justified thing about anthroposophy! That is, they reverse the facts. They make people believe that I am describing something that is hallucinations or the like. Well, they do exist, he says, so we will readily admit that to the anthroposophist, he is entitled to that. But he must not talk about higher worlds, for there he enters a philosophical realm that is to be valued only as theosophical doctrine, as imagination conditioned by theosophical doctrine.

But something highly characteristic, my dear audience: the man who crystallizes out here first of all, who wants from anthroposophy - although it is the opposite of what anthroposophy really gives - says: What I concede to anthroposophy, we know today; telepathy, clairvoyance, teleplasty and so on are known. But all that belongs to the pathological field, perhaps also to the therapeutic field – the things are connected, after all. I would have to go into what I have repeatedly said in medical courses: how a pathology and a therapy can certainly be derived from anthroposophy that legitimately go beyond what today's merely materialistic view can give. But by first distorting what anthroposophy can give, and then by acknowledging this distortion, it is said: Yes, you can suggest all kinds of things to people, but you have never experienced people experiencing something like astral or mental fairy-tale lands in a trance.

But that is precisely the point! He calls it fairy-tale land because he passes it off as fantasies. That, he says, cannot be experienced by suggestion. Yet it is experienced. A strange polemic! First, what one believes one can understand is selected from the anthroposophical results, although one does not understand it at all. This is then categorized as hallucination and so on; that is accepted. But the other part is dismissed as fairyland, yet it is said that it cannot be suggested. It cannot be suggested either, but must be conquered by exact inner methods as inner knowledge. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I do not blame anyone for misunderstanding in such a grotesque way what anthroposophy can give. I do not blame this respected (and rightly so) collection of scientific, medical and other essays, published in Munich and Wiesbaden by J. F. Bergmann, for including such grotesque criticism of anthroposophy, because the whole booklet by Albert Sichler is actually well-intentioned. He wants to do justice to the matter. He cannot do so because, for the time being, there is still an abyss between what is recognized as official science today and what is needed to really make progress, because ultimately there is an inner connection in spiritual life, between our entire civilized life and the scientific life in modern times. And the bridge must be built over to ethics, to social life. This cannot be done by a science that gets stuck only in the material or at most makes hypotheses about the non-material. This can only be done by a science that truly penetrates into the spiritual, because it is in the social that the spiritual is active, and social laws can only be found by someone who also finds laws, forms, transformations of the spiritual in nature.

Now, in the short time available to me today, I have only been able to give a few points of view, my dear audience. I wanted to show you how anthroposophy strives to work in the spirit of true science, how it takes its scientific and epistemological seriousness very seriously indeed in its quest to arrive at a method modelled on mathematics. On the other hand, however, it still faces many prejudices today, even though it is actually needed by our civilization as something tremendously necessary, because it alone is capable of providing man with a real, satisfying elucidation of his own nature in terms of knowledge.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, as I said, I believe that the antagonisms will disappear once an objective basis is gained for creating harmony and mutual understanding between today's science and the anthroposophical research method. We must wait for that. Until this is achieved, opponents will come from all sides, from political parties or from religion, theology or other fields, who will operate on purely subjective ground. But anyone who is familiar with this anthroposophy, anyone who is serious about it, serious about everything that has its source in Dornach, will say to himself, because he knows how seriously research is conducted within this anthroposophical field, ic field, he says to himself: however great the misunderstandings may be, a balance, a harmony must ultimately be found from the seriousness of modern scientific methods and attitudes. And this is a consciousness that one can have when one is on one's own ground, that in everything one seeks in anthroposophy, one first presents the conscientious demands for examination that are otherwise applied in science today. And that is what makes one expect the external balance. If one proceeds seriously, one can be convinced that from today's science and from what anthroposophy has so far endeavored to achieve - at least for those who know both, contemporary science and anthroposophy - the balance, the harmony can certainly be found today. And this awareness gives confidence that the scientific understanding will come about. And then the other antagonisms against Anthroposophy will disappear by themselves.

There are no requests to speak.

Rudolf Steiner: My dearest attendees! It is of course only possible to consider a few guidelines in a lecture, especially one that is intended as an introductory lecture to a whole series of lectures on Anthroposophy. And so I was unable to consider one thing in particular that would have been very close to my heart: to show the bridge that leads from the cognitive side of anthroposophy to the social, practical-ethical and religious side of it. And about that - we only have time until 10 o'clock - allow me to say a few words. If we consider the scientific world view – I am not saying the natural science, but the scientific world view – as it is widely held today, especially among laypeople, but also among people who do not believe they are laypeople, but who, as members of various monist and other associations, today embrace the scientific ideas of thirty years ago as a religious confession, if one considers what has emerged as a kind of worldview that is more or less materialistic. There is no bridge from what many people today consider to be the only possible way of researching to the reality of ethical ideals and social ideals.

Today, seeing all that science gives us, we are faced with the necessity of forming ideas for a worldview, for example, about the beginning and end of the earth. I can only hint at these things as well. We have the Kant-Laplace theory of the earth's beginning from the primeval nebula, which is presented according to the laws of aerodynamics and aeromechanics. One imagines how the planetary solar system formed out of a primeval nebula, how the earth split off. The question of how living beings could have come into being is, however, continuously critically treated – whereby one will reach the limits of knowledge – and then it is treated how organic life now also sprouts from what was initially only present in the primeval nebula, how man then emerged from this and how he experiences himself today in the self-confident ego.

Now I have met people – and basically life is the greatest teacher, if you only know how to take it correctly – I have met people who took this scientific worldview seriously. I remember one person in particular who is typical of many others. The others often do not realize it, but they set up an altar of faith, an altar of knowledge. Those who take the scientific ideas seriously cannot do this; they come to such hypothetical ideas about the beginning and end of the earth, for example from thermodynamics and entropy theory, which leads to imagining how everything finally merges into a heat death. One meets only few people who have the inner courage to admit from a fully human point of view, in which situation man is placed with his inner being today, if he takes these things seriously as the only ones that apply.

Herman Grimm, for example, says – forgive the somewhat drastic saying that I am quoting – from his feeling, by realizing what is to develop on earth between the Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula and the state to which the theory of entropy is supposed to lead us: A carrion bone round which a hungry dog circles is a more appetizing piece than this world picture, which is already presented to people in schools today. And future ages will struggle to explain how a particularly pathological age once came to form such ideas about the beginning and end of the earth. It will be impossible to understand how something like this could be taken seriously.

Well, my dear audience, the science that stands before us today as natural science – as I said, anthroposophy does not in the least find fault with it – fully recognizes it in its field. Anthroposophy is based on a scientific attitude, because scientifically conscientious methodology and inner discipline, as they have developed, must be recognized as a model, only they must be further developed in the sense that I have characterized today.

But this also leads to a true knowledge of man. This knowledge of man is not as easy to gain as the one we gain today from physiological and biological views. This knowledge of man finally shows us how man is actually a being that is organized quite differently internally according to the head and the metabolic-limb system - these are the two poles of the human being. What I am now briefly hinting at, I have explained in great detail in a series of lectures. But I want to show right away how wrong it is to say, for example, that our thinking arises from processes in our brain. That would be just as if a car were to move along a road that has become soft and were to make its impressions there: you can follow the path of the impressions of the car in the road that has become soft. But consider, someone comes and says: You should explain these impressions by forces that are down there in the earth; you must explain these configurations from these underground forces! — It is the same with the methods used today to explain the brain convolutions, the nerve structure, from the forces of the organs. The nerve structure can be explained by the effects of the spiritual and soul, just as the furrows in a softened road can be explained by the car driving over them.

It is only an image. But in a perfectly exact scientific way, anthroposophy leads us to recognize how thinking and imagining is a spiritual and soul process that only has the brain as a basis. And it has the brain as a substrate because it is not based on the brain's growth processes, on organic processes, but precisely on the brain's slow dying processes. The nervous system does not actually have a life, but rather the opposite of a life, a decline in life. Space must first be made for thought. The nerve centers must die away, and a continuous dying, a constant clearing out of the material processes, must occur so that the spiritual-soul processes can take hold. This must always be compensated for by the limb metabolism system during sleep or other processes. What arises in this way, the consciousness-paralyzing processes, those processes of which physiology speaks today, do indeed abolish imagining, extinguish it. Precisely when these processes are toned down, passing over into a kind of partial dying, then imagining, thinking arises, so that we continually carry life and dying, being born and dying within us. And the moment of dying, it is only, I would like to say, the integral of the differentials that make up life, of the differentials of a continuous dying that make up human existence.

If we continue this train of thought, we come to recognize something that is virtually denied in today's accepted science, but which lies in the real continuation of this science: that the human being has real processes of decomposition and continuous processes of dying within him. The ethical ideals develop in the context of these dying processes, so that these ethical ideals are not dependent on the continuation of organic processes, but on suppressed, regressing organic processes. But this in turn leads to the following: When our Earth reaches a state, whatever its mineral-biological state, when the Earth - for my sake, let's take the hypothesis as valid, it is not quite, but in a certain sense it is - when it reaches heat death - when no other processes are possible because everything has formed according to the second law of the mechanical theory of heat as the remnants that are always there when heat is released into the environment, when heat is converted, when this state has occurred, then what has lived in man as ethical ideals has come to its greatest expression of power. And that carries earthly existence out to new planetary formation.

We discover in our moral ideals the germs for later worlds, for later worlds based on our present-day morals. This gives our ideals a real value. Contemporary philosophy is obliged to speak of mere values. But what is there for a possibility when one speaks of values that arise in man as mere ideas, but which are not the germs of future realities, what is there for another prospect than to say to oneself: We come from the Kant-Laplacean world nebula, and somehow the moral ideals emerge in our self-awareness, but these moral ideals live in us only like haze and fog. That was the personality I was talking about earlier, who accepted the modern scientific development as a law and said to himself: Man is cheated in the world. Natural scientific development has brought him this far, then the moral ideals arise as foam, dissolve again, and everything enters into the heat death, into the great cemetery, because the moral ideals are indeed experienced, but have no possibility of becoming reality.

By following the regressive processes in which moral ideals have been at work, anthroposophy shows us that these moral ideals have only an ideal existence in us, but that, as they develop in the human being, they are seeds for the future. Just as we see in the germ of the plant that will develop in the next year, so anthroposophy allows us to see in moral ideals the germs of future worlds. And we see the idealities of the past as the seeds of the present world, behind the Kant-Laplacean primeval fog. The present world is the realization, the actualization of what was once only thought, just as the present plant is the realization of last year's seed. And what is currently experienced only as moral value is the real seed of future worlds.

We are not only part of the cosmos through our natural organic processes, we are also part of the cosmos through what we experience as moral and social values within us. We are acquiring a cosmology that does not only include natural processes and laws as its agents, we are acquiring a cosmology in which our entire moral world is also a reality. Anthroposophy builds the bridge from the natural to the ethical and religious world.

This is what I wanted to mention in a brief closing word, because it was no longer possible in the lecture.

My dear venerated friends! It is always difficult when you have a serious scientific conscience to translate the traditional expression of “Logos” into some or other younger language. We usually employ “Word” to translate “Logos” as is commonly found in the Bible. However, when we have the word “Logic” in a sentence we don't use “Word” but rather think about “Thought,” as it operates in the human individual and its laws. Yet when we speak about “philology” we are aware that we are developing a science which is derived from words. I would like to say: what we have today in the word “Logos” is basically in everything which is philosophic. When we speak about “philosophy”, we can, even though defined as experience in relation to the Logos, sense how a reflection of these undetermined experiences are contained in all that we feel in “philosophy”.

Philosophy implies that the words—which no doubt came into question when philosophy was created, that only words were implied—indicate a certain inner personal experience; the word philosophy points to a connection of the Logos to “Sophia”; one could call it a particular, if not personal, general interest. The word philosophy is less directly referred to as possessing a scientific nature but rather an inner relationship to the wisdom filled scientific content. Because our feeling regarding philosophy is not as sure as in those cases when philosophy, on the one hand was included with, I'd rather not call it science, but scientific aims, and on the other hand with something which points to inner human relationships; so we have today an extraordinarily undefined experience when we speak about philosophy or involve ourselves with philosophy. This vague experience is extremely difficult to lift out of the depth of our consciousness if we try to do it through mere dialectical or external definitions, without trying to enter into the personal experience which ran its course in the consequential development. To such an examination the present will produce something special.

If we look back a few decades at people in central Europe, the involvement they were looking for with philosophy was quite a different experience, in central Europe, as it is today in the second decade of the twentieth century, where we basically have lived through so much, not only externally in the physical but also spiritually—one can quietly declare this—than what had been experienced for centuries. When one looks back over the experiences, of—if I may use a pedantic and philistine expression—the philosophic zealot of the fifties, sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century, perhaps even later, which the central Europeans could have, it is essentially as follows. Looking at the time of German philosophy's blossoming, you look back at the great philosophic era of the Fichtes, Schellings, and Hegels; surrounding you there had been a world of the educated and the scholars, a world which this philosophic era thoroughly dismisses and which in the rising scientific world view sees what should be taking the place of the earlier philosophic observations. One admires the magnitude of the elevation of thoughts found in a Schelling, one admires the energy and force of Fichte's development of thoughts, one can perhaps also develop a feeling for the pure comprehensive, insightful thoughts of Hegel, but one would more or less consider this classical time of German philosophy as something subdued.

Besides this is the endeavour to develop something out of science which should present a general world view, right from the striving of the “power/force and matter/substance people,” to those who carefully strive to find a philosophic world view out of natural scientific concepts, but who lean towards the former idealistic philosophy. There were all kinds of thoughts and research in this area.

A third kind of thinker appeared in this sphere, who couldn't go along with the purely scientifically based world view but could on the other hand also not dive into solid thought of the Hegel type. For them a big question came about: How can a person create something within his thoughts, which originate in himself, and place this in an objective relationship to the outer world?—There were epistemologists of different nuances who agreed with the call “Back to Kant”, but this way to Kant was aimed in the most varied ways; there were sharp-witted thinkers like Liebman, Volkelt and so on, who basically remained within the epistemological and didn't get to the question: How could someone take the content of his thoughts and imaginative nature from within himself and find a bridge to a trans-subjective reality existing outside human reality?

What I'm sketching for you now as a situation in which the philosophic zealots found themselves in the last third of the nineteenth Century, which didn't lead to any kind of solution. This was to a certain extent in the middle of some or other drama during a time-consuming work of art, to which no finality had been found. These efforts more or less petered out into nothing definite. The efforts ran into a large number of questions and overall, basically failed to acquire the courage to develop a striving for solutions regarding these questions.

Today the situation in the entire world of philosophy is such that one can't sketch it in the same way as I've done for the situation in the last third of the nineteenth century, in its effort to determine reality. Today philosophic viewpoints have appeared which, I might say, have risen out of quite different foundations, and which make it possible for us to characterise it in quite a different way. Today, if we wish to characterise the philosophic situation, our glance which we have homed in the second half of the twentieth century comes clearly before our soul eyes, namely such sharply differentiated philosophic viewpoints of the West, of central Europe and Eastern Europe. Today things appear in quite a different way which not long ago flowed through our experience of the philosophical approach to be found in three names: Herbert Spencer—Hegel—Vladimir Soloviev. By placing these three personalities in front of us we have the representatives who can epitomise our philosophic character of today. Inwardly this had to some extent already been the case for some time, but these characteristics of the philosophic situation only appear today before the eyes of our souls.

Let's look at the West: Herbert Spencer. If I want to be thorough I would have to give an outline of the entire course of philosophic development, how it went from Bacon, Locke over Mill to Spencer, but this can't be my task today. In Herbert Spencer we meet a personality who wanted to base his philosophy on a pure system of concepts, as is determined in natural science. We find in Spencer a personality who totally agrees with science and out of this agreement arrives at a conclusion: ‘This is the way in which all philosophic thought in the world must be won by natural science.’ So we see how Spencer searched in science to determine certain steps to understand concepts, like for example how matter is constantly contracting and expanding, differentiating and consolidating. He saw this for instance in plants, how the leaves spread out and how they drew together in the seed, and he tried to translate such concepts into clear scientific forms with which to create his world view. He even tried to think about the human community, the social organism, only in such a way in which his thoughts would be analogous to the natural organism. Here he suddenly became cornered.

The natural human organism is connected to the confluence of everything relating to it from the surrounding world, through observations, through imagination and so on. Every single organism is bound to what it can develop under the influence of the nervous or sensory system (sensorium). In the human community organism Herbert Spencer couldn't find a sensorium, no kind of centralised nervous system. For this reason, he constructed a kind of community organism, totally based on science, as the crown of his philosophic structure.

What lay ahead for the West with this? It meant that scientific thought could reach its fully entitled, one-sided development. What lay ahead was the finest observational results and experimental talents developing out of folk talents. What came out of it was interest created to observe the world in its outer sensory reality into the smallest detail, without becoming impatient and wanting to rise out of it to some encompassing concepts. What came out of it was also a tendency to remain within this outer sense-world of facts. There was what I could call, a kind of fear of rising up to one encompassing amalgamation. Because they could do nothing else but exist in what the sense world presented to them, simply being pushed directly into the senses here in the West, there appeared the belief that the entire spiritual world should be handed over to the singular faiths of individuals, and that these beliefs should develop free from all scientific influences. Religious content was not to be touched by scientific exploration. So we see with Herbert Spencer, who in his way took up the scientific way of thought consequentially right into sociology, earnestly separated, on the one hand, from science, which would proceed scientifically, and on the other hand with a spiritual content for people who wanted nothing to do with science.

Let's go now from Herbert Spencer to what we meet with Hegel. It doesn't matter that Hegel, who belonged to the first third of the 19th Century, was outwitted during the second third for central European philosophy because what was characteristic for Middle Europe was most meaningful in what exactly had appeared in Hegel. Let's look at Hegel. Already in his, I could call it, emotional predisposition, lies a certain antipathy against this universalist natural scientific way with which to shape the world view as Herbert Spencer had done in the West, but of course had been prepared by predecessors, both by scientific researchers and philosophers as well. We see how Hegel could not stand Newton and was unsympathetic to his unique way by thinking of the world-all as totally mechanical, how he rejected Newton not merely in terms of the colour theory but also in his interpretation of the cosmos. Hegel took the trouble to go back to Kepler's planetary movement formulations, he analysed Kepler's formulations about planetary movements and found out for himself, that Newton had actually not added anything new because Kepler's formulation already contained the laws of gravitation. This he applied from the basis of a scientifically formulated thought, while with Kepler it had resulted more out of a spiritual experience, which he saw as encompassing and that one could try to grasp the outer natural scientific through the spirit. Kepler is for Hegel simply the personality who is capable of penetrating thoughts with the spirit and building a bridge between what is acceptable scientifically, and what simply has to be believed according to the West, and which is also capable of lifting science into the area which for the West is limited to belief.

From this basis Hegel, in tune with Goethe, strongly opposed the Newtonian colour theory. We can see how the Hegelian system had a kind of antipathy against what appeared quite natural in the Newtonian system. For this Hegel had a decisive talent—to live completely in a thought itself. For Hegel Goethe's utterance to Schiller was obvious: “I see my ideas with my eyes.” It appears naive, however, such naivety, when considered correctly, comes out of the deepest philosophic wisdom. Hegel would simply not have understood how one could state that the idea of the triangle is not to be grasped, because Hegel's life went completely—if I might use the expression—according to the plan of thinking. For him there was also a higher world of revelations, a world of higher spirituality, which gradually casts its shadow images on a plane which is filled with thoughts. From up above the spiritual worlds throw their shadow images on the plane of the human soul, on which human thought can develop. Through this the idea of higher spirituality came about for Hegel, that on the plane of the soul it is shadowed as thoughts. Hegel was inclined to experience these thoughts as fully spiritual, and he also experienced natural events not in their elementary present time, but he saw them in mental pictures, thrown on to the plane of the soul.

So it is impossible in Hegel's philosophy to separate, in an outer way, wisdom from belief, which was quite natural in the West. For Hegel his life task was the unification of the spiritual world (which the West wanted to simply refer to as part of the large sphere of belief) with the sensory physical world, into such a world about which one can have knowledge. This means there is no longer knowledge on the one hand and belief on the other; here the human soul faces the great, meaningful problem: How does one find during earthly life the bridge between belief and knowledge, between spirit and nature? To a certain extent it was the tragedy of Hegel that the problem he posed in such a grandiose manner, he wanted to understand actually only on the level of thinking, that he wanted to understand the experience of the inner power, the inner liveliness of thinking, but he could not grasp anything living from the content of thought.

Consider Hegel's logic—he wanted to return repeatedly to the concept of the Logos! He felt that when we actually wanted to attain a true understanding of the Logos, then the Logos must be something which is not merely something thought, but a real activity which floods and works through the world. For him the Logos did not only have an abstract, logical content, but for him it became real world content. If we look at one of the three parts of his philosophy, namely his “logic” we only find abstract concepts! So it is terribly moving for someone who enters on the one side into the Hegelian philosophy, with his whole being, and has the fundamental experience: that which can be grasped through the Logos, must be penetrated with the creative principle of the world. The Logos must be “God before the creation of the world”—to use an expression of Hegel.

This is on the one side. Now how did Hegel develop this idea of the Logos on the other side? He starts with “being” and arrives at “nothing”, goes from “becoming” to “existence.” He arrives at the goal through the causality, to the belief that certain phenomena are best explained in terms of purpose rather than cause. One can look at the all the concepts of Hegel's logic and ask oneself: Is that what, “before the beginning of creation as the content of the divine” could have been there? This is abstract logic, the demand of the creative, the logos as postulate, but as a purely human thought postulate! One finds this tragic. This tragedy goes further, for the Hegelian philosophy is deemed as valid. Yet it contains instances where through action new life can germinate. It contains sprouts. Hegel saw his redemption in this: being—nothing—becoming—existence.

When people are presented with Hegel, they say: ‘This is a dark one, we don't need to be lured into it.’ However, when one makes the effort to allow one's inner soul to enter into it, to experience the concept inwardly, as Hegel tried to experience it, then all the ideas of empiricism and rationalism disappears, then thought experiences and the one who is thinking is directly thought of. Whoever goes along with it finds the impetus of loosening the thoughts from the abstraction, and take Hegel's logic as the sprouts which can become something quite different, when they become alive. For me Hegel's logic looks like the seed of a plant in which one can hardly see what it will become and yet still carries the most varied structures possible within it.

For me it appears that when this seed sprouts, when one lovingly cares for it and plants it into the soul's earth through anthroposophical research, then what emerges is that thought can not only be thought but can be experienced as reality. Here we have the central European aspect.

If we now go to the East, we have in Vladimir Soloviev a man who is able like no other philosopher, to become gradually more the content of our own philosophic striving, who must now become so important to us because we allow the particularities of his character to work in on us. We see in Soloviev both the European-eastern way of thinking, which is of course not Oriental-Asiatic. Soloviev absorbed everything which was European, he only developed it in an Eastern fashion. What do we see being developed in terms of human scientific striving? Here we see how actually this method of thinking, found mostly in the West by Herbert Spencer, which Soloviev basically looked down on, is something against which the truth and knowledge he was seeking, could so to speak be illustrated. In comparison, what he actually presents is a full experience of spirituality itself. It appeared in full consciousness to him, it appeared more atavistically, subconsciously, yet it is an experience in spirituality itself. It was more or less a dreamlike attempt to knowingly experience what in the West—here quite consciously—was transposed into the realm of belief. So we find in the East a discussion which can be experienced in an imprecise way, which looks like a one-sided experience which Hegel wanted to use to cross the bridge out of the natural existence to the spiritual world.

If a person delves into the spiritual development of someone from central Europe, like Soloviev, then he will primarily have an extraordinary uncomfortable feeling. He is reminded of an experience of something misty, mystical; an overheated element in the soul life which doesn't arrive at concepts, which can externally leave him empty completely, but which can only be experienced inwardly. He senses the entirely vague mystical experience, but he also finds that Soloviev makes use of conceptual forms and means of expression which we know, from Hegel, Humes, Mills, even those of Spencer, but only as illustrations. Throughout one can say he doesn't remain stuck in the mist but through the way with which he treats religious aspects as scientific, how he searches for it everywhere and unfolds it as philosophy, he can evermore be measured and criticised according to the philosophic conceptual development of the West.

So we find ourselves today in the following situation. In the West comes the striving to formulate a world view scientifically; science is on the one side and the spiritual on the other side and wrestle in the centre with the problem of how to create a bridge to include both, to express it imprecisely, as Hegel said: “Nature is Spirit in its dissimilarity,” “Spirit is the concept of when it has returned again to itself.” In all these stuttering expressions lie the tragedy that Hegel could only care for abstract ideas, which he strived for. Then in the East, with Soloviev we see how it was somewhat still maintained, how well the church fathers wanted to save it in terms of philosophy, before the Council of Nicaea. It places us completely back in the first three post Christian Centuries of the West.

So we have in the East an experience of the spiritual world, which is not able to soar up into self-owned terminological formulations, formulations and concepts used by the West in which they express themselves, and as a result remain in vague, somewhat extraneous, foreign expressions.

So we see how the threefold nature of the philosophic world view unfolded. By our tracing how the threefold philosophic world view was formed through the characteristics and abilities of humanity in the West, the centre and the East, we can see that we are obliged today—because science as something embracing must spread over all of mankind—to find something which can lift it above these various philosophic aspects which basically still provide elements where philosophy is still a human-personal matter. We see today in different ways in the West, central Europe and the East, how they love wisdom. We understand that in ancient times, philosophy could still be an inner condition of the soul. Now however, in recent times, where people are strongly differentiated, this way of loving wisdom expresses itself in a magnitude of ways. Perhaps we could realise due to this, what we have to do ourselves, particularly what we have to do in Central Europe, where the most tragic and intensified problem is raised even if it is not regarded in the same way by all philosophic minds.

If I want to summarise all of what I have brought into a picture, I would like to express it as follows. Regarded philosophically Soloviev speaks like the old priest who lived in higher worlds and who had developed a kind of inner ability to live in these higher worlds: priestly speech translated philosophically is what one encounters all the time with Soloviev. In the West, with Herbert Spencer, speaks the man of the world who wants to enter practical life—as it has come out of Darwinian theory—to expand science in such a way that it becomes the practical basis of life. In the Middle we have neither the man of the world not the priest: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel have no priestly ways like a Soloviev. In the Middle we have the teacher, the educators of the people and it is also here where the German philosophy emerged, for example, from religious deepening; because the priest became the teacher once again. The educated also adheres to the Hegelian philosophy.

We see recently—as with Oswald Külpe—how it has happened that philosophy, when it was already lost, is no more than a summary of the individual sciences. From inorganic science you can ask—what are the concepts? From organic science you can ask—what are the concepts? Likewise with history, with the science of religion, and so on. One collects these concepts and forms a separate abstract unit. I would like to say that the subject of the teaching in the separate sciences should create the totality of teaching. This is what the science in the Middle must basically come to after the entire assessment.

If we look back at what has happened, we see with Herbert Spencer the unconditional belief in science, the belief for the necessity to cling to observation, experiment and a thinking mind, which can be experienced through the observation and experiment; and one is mistaken about the contradiction which appears here, when the acquired concepts can be applied to the social organism and—although these do not have the most important characteristics of a natural organism, the sensorium—they are nevertheless grasped with the same concepts which arise in natural existence. We see the inclination to the natural sciences so strong that some characters—like Newton—became one-sidedly stuck to the mechanistic and even satisfied their soul-striving with it. It is generally known that Newton had tried in a one-sided mystical way to clarify the Apocalypse; besides his scientific world view he had his own mystical needs.

Let's look, for example, at everything which has arisen from natural science and what it gradually in the course of the 19th Century has subconsciously taken over in Central Europe; because in Central Europe science has simply followed the pattern of the Western scientific way of thinking. There is a tendency not to take notice of it, but still all points of view are modelled on the Western pattern. How wild the people become when someone tries to apply Goethe's way of thinking in physics in contrast to them taking shelter under Newton!

How does the development happen in biology? Goethe created an organism for which the integration into its concepts depended on an understanding of a mathematical nature. Time was short to obtain a biology more appropriate to modern thinking than to that of olden times. The progress in the 19th Century in central Europe however brought about not the Goethean biology but Darwinism, which was interspersed with concepts contrary to those of Goethe, like the concepts of the 16th Century opposed to those of the 18th Century. Only in Central Europe did these concepts develop; in the West people remained with those concepts that sufficed for the understanding of nature. So it happened that certain concepts in the West simply were not available and simply got lost because people in Central Europe had adopted western thinking. For example, that a thought, a lively thought, can form a concept of grasping a reality, quite apart from empiricism, as it had happened with Hegel—this is not present in Central Europe; it got lost because the central European thinking was flooded by western thinking.

So we have the task in Central Europe to look at what scientific thinking can be. Anthroposophists resent it when this scientific way of thinking is cared for with as much love as for the researcher himself. Nothing, absolutely nothing will be said by me in opposition to scientific thinking; if someone believes this then it is a misunderstanding. However, I must understand the scientific way of thinking in its purity and then also try to characterise it in its purity. Now these things are presented to those who confront scientific thinking with impartiality—somewhat like a western researcher will present them, like Haeckel in his genial way did it—these results are presented in a western way of research, when they are thus left and not reinterpreted philosophically, not given as solutions, not as answers, but are presented above all as questions. The totality of natural science does not gradually become an answer to a question for the impartial person, because it turns into the great world question itself. This is experienced everywhere: what is now being researched in the most beautiful way by these researchers—for my sake right up to atomic theory, which I don't negate but only want to put it in its correct place—this comes to a question and out of the West a great question is posed to us. Where does this question come from?

When we link our gaze to the outer world and only turn to the observation of the given elements, we don't fathom its complete reality. We are born as human beings in the world, are constituted as such, as we already were before and take part in the reality by looking at ourselves in our own inner being. As we look then at the outer world, the sense perceptible objects—we find that part which is living in us, is missing in reality, as we can only through human struggle connect to the other half-reality, which observes us from the outside. If we look towards the West, so we see the half-reality is researched with particular devotion; however, it only provides a number of questions because it's only a half-reality. So on the one side there appears only one half of reality as a given; if one really looks at it, it raises questions. In Central Europe you discover examples of questions which Western thinking can answer and one tries to push through to thinking. That is the Hegelian philosophy.

In the East one felt that which lives above the thought, which works down into the thought; but one couldn't come as far as awakening it to life, that so to speak the flesh could also sustain a skeleton. Soloviev was able to develop it in flesh, muscles and even blood in his philosophy—but the skeleton was missing. As a result, he took Hegel's concepts, those of Humes and others, and built in a foreign skeletal system. Only when one is in the position of not using a foreign skeletal system then something comes about which can be lived through spiritually. So, however, as it happened with Soloviev, it leads to a shadowed existence because it didn't manifest into a skeletal system which could as a result be descriptive. If one doesn't want to remain with building only an outer skeletal system, but live spiritually and prepare oneself through strong spiritual work, then one develops for oneself an inner skeleton within spiritual experiences; one develops the necessary concepts. For this, various exercises have been given in my writings, “Occult Science” and “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and in others. Here one develops what really can become a conceptual organism. This is then the other side of reality, and this side of reality has its seed in the eastern philosophy of Soloviev.

In central Europe there is always the big problem of striking a bridge between nature and the spiritual. For us it has at the same time become a meaningful historical problem: to strike the bridge between West and East, and this task must stand before us in philosophy. This task also directs itself into Anthroposophy. If Anthroposophy becomes capable of inward thought experiences developing into living form, then it may on the other side experience quite materialistic natural phenomena as they are experienced in the West, because then it will not be through abstract concepts but through living scientific circles that the bridge is built between mere belief and knowledge, between knowing and subjective certainty. Then out of philosophy a real Anthroposophy will develop and philosophy can be fructified from both sides by these living sciences. Only then would Hegel's philosophy be awakened to life, when through the anthroposophical experience you let the blood of life be spiritually added to it. Then there won't be a logical base which is so abstract that it can't be “Spirit on the other side of Nature”, as Hegel wanted it, but that it really can be grasped, not as abstraction but as the living spirituality of philosophy.

This gives Anthroposophy the following task. How must we, according to our present viewpoints, which lie decades behind Hegel, strike the bridge between what we call truth on the one side, which must encompass all of reality, and that which we call science on the other side, which also must encompass the entirety of reality? Briefly, the problem must be raised—and that is the most important philosophic problem in Anthroposophy: what is the relationship between truth and science?

This is the problem I wanted to present in the introduction today at the start of our consideration, which I believe you will now understand.

My dear venerated guests! To render the Anthroposophical world view understandable, it is always accused of having its ideas and results as based on research by people who first need to be schooled for it, therefore results of Anthroposophical research can't be verified from the outset by anyone and that nevertheless these observations are presented to unprepared people.

Yet this accusation, however justified it seems, belongs to the most unjustified ones that can be made against the Anthroposophical Movement, because it doesn't stipulate that every single person is to be immediately directed towards becoming a researcher in a supersensible area, but it deals with their research results being presented in such a way that every other individual can prove it for themselves, simply with ordinary human understanding and ordinary healthy logic. In any case this doesn't make it unnecessary that at least the first steps towards supersensible research must be striven for, and therefore there are indications in various publications which have been mentioned here already. Everyone can to a certain degree become an anthroposophical researcher—simply out of the conditions of present civilisation—but as proof of results of anthroposophical research this is not necessary because this proof can simply come through a healthy human understanding. One of these areas in which results can really be practically proven, is in the pedagogical area.

Dear friends! The Anthroposophical world view for a long time had to work purely through people coming continuously closer to ideas about the supersensible, before it became possible to bring them into present-day cultural conditions, into practical life, where they felt themselves particularly ready to actually penetrate. This was only possible in a limited area—and also only to a small degree—when Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, whose office was given to me. Already before that, as shown in the small publication “The education of the child from the point of view of spiritual science”, the attempt was undertaken to represent certain educational principles from the basis of Anthroposophy. Only through the founding of the Waldorf School did it become possible to apply these things in practice, and since this time it is also possible to carry out the pedagogical-didactic side of Anthroposophy in detail. It will of course not be possible for me to give more than a few indications in this introductory lecture, but I think other lectures during these days would be able to accomplish more.

Whatever is taken up through anthroposophic ideas, when they are simply verified through healthy human understanding, is not merely theoretical observation, are no mere ideas of abstraction which one can have in order to satisfy some or other need for theoretical knowledge. No, these conveyed ideas are being created out of an anthroposophical source, this is real human power; this is something which passes into the whole person, this makes love more intense, transforms human vigour. While the ideas and thoughts of usual science, which only draw on the sense world, have their peculiarity by being in the service of theoretical interests, and being of the sense-world its characteristic is to only relate practical interests to the sense world, by contrast it is characteristic of the ideas from anthroposophic research that their results work on the entire human being, on his empowerment, on his—if I might call it so—life skill, on his understanding of life, and it is this understanding which enables him to grasp the most varied of life's opportunities. If one takes on this life and fructify it through anthroposophical ideas, one can see how the actions of people, when they allow themselves to be directed by these ideas, acquire greater power, greater urgency and so on. This is what must be especially treasured in the pedagogic didactic sphere.

When we founded the Waldorf School we didn't have the opportunity to choose the outer conditions for the education and teaching of our children. In the present it is repeatedly asserted that for a satisfactory education, satisfactory teaching to be established, then some or other place for the school, for the educational institute or its equivalent, must be chosen. Certainly, much is said about these claims and in practice they are to some extent successful. We didn't have all of this. The next thing was the attempt to use the given circumstances and start with the children in the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette factory. Next, we had a very specific kind of material environment for the children, we had to house ourselves in a place which was obviously hardly suited—it had previously been a tavern—to begin our teaching and education. So we couldn't rely on anything but on what began on a purely spiritual basis for the pedagogical and didactic aspects themselves.

Here it must be stressed again: while Anthroposophy doesn't strive for an abstract head knowledge—if I might use this expression—but an insight into the world and its secrets, it involves the whole human being, possibly leading to self-knowledge, to a self-understanding which one can't achieve in some or another theoretical sphere. In the end all education, all teaching is based on the understanding of the human being, which is proven in the relationship of the teacher, the educators to the emerging, growing adolescent, to the child. For this reason, our Waldorf pedagogy is developed upon an intimate knowledge of the growing person, the child. I only need to give one detail in which it can be seen how true insight into the whole human being must prove in practice.

Today we have a psychology which has more or less been proven by recognized science. However, this psychology theorizes around many questions which always leave unsatisfactory results. They pose the following question, for example: what is the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily aspects of the human being? They have developed all possible kinds of theories about this. Here we have three types of theories. The one tries to come from the soul-spiritual and try to define this in some way, to formulate an abstract concept and then to try in how far the soul-spiritual can work on the bodily-physical. Another, more materialistically coloured theory assumes that the bodily-physical should form the basis, so that the bodily-physical brings forth the soul-spiritual as one of its functions. A third theory is that of psycho-physical parallelism, which assumes that the soul-spiritual and bodily-physical matter equally, and only to pursue how the functions of the one takes place beside the other, without looking for any exchange taking place between them. These are all psychological speculations. At the moment a practical situation is present, through psychology, through soul knowledge, it finds driving forces into the pedagogic didactic impulses.

One can simply say our sphere of observation of the soul-spiritual human being has not yet reached a principle which we are accustomed to follow naturally according to science. In natural science for example, when we look at the phenomena where warmth appears, without the usual kind of warmth coming forth as usual, then this warmth from other circumstances is considered as so-called latent warmth and how it had developed out of latent conditions, and now appears as warmth. Such principles which are common practice in science must—obviously metamorphosed in corresponding manner—also be taken up in the observation of the totality of the human being, in which the soul-spiritual is included.

One comes to such an approach of observation which is fully justified by science—if it hasn't yet been seen today—if one focuses on the first important transformation which happen in the human organisation with the change of teeth around the seventh year of life. Such transformations in the human being are usually only observed outwardly. However, the change of teeth is something which penetrates the entire human life deeply. Whoever trains his abilities of observation will learn to recognise how with the change of teeth an entire change in the child's soul life takes place. He learns to recognise how the child in the fullest sense of the word, didn't really live “in himself”, but completely absorbed his soul-life in his environment. He learns to perceive the most essential of the driving forces in the child organism before the change of teeth, which is imitation. Through imitation the child learns movement.

One can through unbiased observation determine precisely how the movements from the father and mother or others in the child's surroundings enter into the childlike organism itself. One can follow how under healthy conditions speech is learnt under the influence of imitation. One can see how the child, in the fullest sense of the word, comes from his surroundings, with his whole being. This alters completely with the development at the change of teeth. Here we see how forces develop in the child, enabling the child to bring forth independent imagination, in which the inner child up to a certain degree is set free from the surroundings, which is not so before his seventh year of life. With the change of teeth, the child acquires a certain introspection and becomes gradually more accessible to abstraction.

Now the childish nature is again conditioned by everything which lives inwardly in the people surrounding the child, as it is absorbed by the child. That is why in the second period of life which begins with the change of teeth up to adolescence, is seen in such a way that everything which develops in the child is an adaptation of the people surrounding it. Not what the people do in the child's surroundings, because that is imitated, but in what lives in these people, this means what comes to expression in their words, their attitude, the direction of their thoughts, these are passed on to the child—as it were not through imitation but through taking up a power which is as part of him or her, as growth and nutritional powers in them: the power of authority. What is meant by the power of authority is not to be misunderstood because for someone who has written “The Philosophy of Freedom” it is necessary to point out how this authority principle comes under scrutiny in a certain phase of life. This means not the entire education should be put down to what is referred to today as the principle of authority. If one applies the corresponding value to such observations then things become ever more clearly differentiated and one gains the ability gradually to not only being able to observe the transformation in people from year to year, but also from month to month. What then happens actually between the change of teeth and puberty?

When you direct your gaze in order to learn what really happens there between the seventh and fourteenth year—those are of course only approximate numbers—the hidden forces within the child's soul now come to be expressed outwardly. This is hidden in the bodily nature and activates the expression of the human organism, works also in the formation of the brain in the first years of life and in the preparation of the speech organs, works also in everything the child develops in his bodily nature. Thus, you can say the following. Just as for instance the warmth in a body is hidden and can become free under certain circumstances, so the soul-spiritual, which works latently in the first seven years in the physical organism, expressed in every single movement, in every bodily process, only becomes free later. After the seventh year of life the body is left to itself more; the soul-spiritual does not withdraw completely out of the bodily, yet it does to a high degree. The change of teeth is then a kind of termination point of the first developmental phase, where the soul-spiritual was still in harmony with the bodily-physical.

You see that through this manner of observation you can reach a position where you are able to recognise a real relationship between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical. People don't theorize only around the question of how the one works upon the other, and so on. People simply see the soul-spiritual during one period of life as completely in the physical—this is clearly seen in the child's development—and later, after acquiring freedom, the form appears. So a comparison isn't made of what had been understood as abstract concepts earlier, but the reality is followed in the process of the soul-spiritual in the bodily form during the various periods of life. This means, however, that that which in natural science had been openly researched through the outer senses is lifted up into the spiritual sphere.

If you were to enter more into the details, which Anthroposophy wants to do, to penetrate it and not remain stuck in superficial definitions, you would soon see what kind of a faithful continuator of the justifiable scientific thinking of the spiritual scientific anthroposophical viewpoint actually is. Then, however, when in this way you gain the world of concepts and ideas of human knowledge, then the accusations regarding the alienation of the world of ideas is solved by itself.

Dear friends! Anthroposophy is the last to be in opposition to big and important events particularly during the 19th century in the pedagogical sphere, presented by great educators of humanity on pedagogical principles. Anthroposophy fully acknowledges the existence of great, meaningful educational principles and does not stand back before anyone in the recognition of the great educators. Only, you have to admit nevertheless, with all great educational principles there is often a certain dissatisfaction today regarding educational practice, educational methods; the most diverse kinds of educational practices bear witness to the fact that this is so. Why is this so?

It is often just a result of the intellectualism of our time. This intellectualism results—more than one normally believes—in a particular hostility towards life, especially in the social areas. It breeds in relation to ideation actually only abstraction. The abstract has no life-forces, it is in a certain way the corpse of the spiritual and is experienced as such. Even in having the most beautiful principles in which you can almost glow with enthusiasm—as long as these principles remain abstract, they can't obtain any kind of favourable influence. Only when these principles are permeated through with spirituality, living spirituality, which merges with the beings of people, could these principles become practical. Thus, Anthroposophy doesn't want to propose new educational principles in an abstract manner; it only wants to be an introduction for pedagogical and didactic skills, for the implementation of the art of education and art of instruction, and wants to present what the most beautiful educational principles can't give: spiritual foundations for the practical implementation, for the inner talents of teachers, to work in the school and in education.

For this reason, the Waldorf School is not so geared—as is often believed—to take our world view as it is conveyed to grownups, and to stuff it into our children. As a result, we have to particularly stress that as far as religious instruction go, the Catholic children are left to the Catholic priests, and the evangelist children to the evangelist priest. We have only arranged free religious instruction for those dissident children and if these lessons had not been organized they would have no religious education. As a result, some experience of the religious feeling can be accomplished because those parents who withdraw their children from religious instruction, send their children now into religious instruction in which we make the effort not to lecture Anthroposophy but to present it as is required at that particular age of the child. So it's not about depositing Anthroposophy into the childish mind, but it comes down to the teachers working through Anthroposophy, the pedagogical didactic methods employed in such a way that they really fulfil true human education.

This results in, simply through the practical implementation of such education and such teaching, not only in the child being looked at but the whole person being considered. It would be highly foolish to take the feet or hands as they are at a child's age and regard them as something complete and force them to remain as they are in childhood. It is obvious that we consider a child's organism as something coming into being, which has to be different later in life. However, in relation to the soul-spiritual we don't always do the same thing. We often even see rigid concepts introduced and that the child is frequently taught from a young age as having something like sharp contours in its soul. This is false! With anything which we want to allow incorporation into the childish organism, it must be introduced in a growing way, that it can gradually be transformed so that the human being later, in his thirtieth year for example, not only has a memory of what he had absorbed in his childhood but that the content of this has been as transformed by him as he had transformed his limbs. Everything of a soul-spiritual nature we give the child must also contain powers of growth, powers of transformation; that means we must make our teaching more and more alive.

Certainly this could be expressed as an abstract principle but practically it can only be accomplished when true intimate human knowledge is present. Such a kind of intimate human knowledge makes it possible to deduce everything from the childish nature into what is understood as the syllabus and goal of learning. Out of this the Waldorf School has taken its syllabus and the objectives of learning from actual human knowledge which can be read from month to month in the developing childish nature itself. The effort has been made to bring all of this about in a living sense.

I only want to mention one thing. Today in various ways teaching has improved even in some public tuition. But, you all know that during the school year the child becomes even more conscious than one is aware, and suffers under a system where the progress of the child is judged. It depends on the one side on the child's performance and on the other, the teacher's judgement of this performance, and is expressed as: “satisfactory”, “nearly satisfactory”, “nearly not satisfactory”, “less satisfactory” and so on. I have to confess to you, I was never really capable of differentiating between “nearly satisfactory” and “nearly not satisfactory” and so on. With us in the Waldorf School it involves that out of the totality of progress made by the end of each school year, the child is given a kind of witnessing presented by the teacher which characterises each individual child and that he simply writes this on a piece of paper as his experience of that child. So the child sees a kind of mirror image of himself, and this practice—which doesn't depend on “satisfactory”, “nearly satisfactory” and so on for the individual items—has been accepted with a certain inner satisfaction and received with joy, even when there is blame. The child also receives a kind of powerful verse which echoes with his own nature, which he takes up and which serves as a mission statement for the following year.

In this way one can, if one has the love for it, enter in a lively way into education, even working through unfavourable relationships in a lively way.

As a result, we come again to something which needs to be overcome, needs to be conquered in pedagogy and didactics in our epoch. Today one will hardly find any evidence in the outer historic descriptions, of how souls' constitutions have changed during the single evolutionary epochs. Whoever is without bias can readily understand how the spiritual utterances which were revealed to souls during the 10th, 11th and 12th Century for instance, are of a completely different character than what had been presented since the middle of the 15th Century to the soul constitutions of civilised humanity. Yes, up to the 20th century intellectualism in humanity has developed up to a culmination point. Intellectualism has the peculiarity, that it—just like the principle of imitation or authority—only shifts at a particular human age out of its latent position and in the case of intellectualism it is related to a later period in life. We see how the human being only when he has reached puberty, actually even later, becomes suitable to progress towards intellectuality. Before this age intellectualism works in a paralyzing, deadening way into soul activity.

As a result, we can say we live in an epoch which is only appropriate for grownups, which has as its most important cultural impulse, something which should only come into expression in adults. As a result, because our entire cultural tone is set towards grown adults, we are actually unable to understand the child—and even young people!

This is the most important aspect our civilization needs to look at. We need to be clear that precisely through those powers which our sciences and our technology have triumphed and have been brought to such a great blossoming, we must take up the possibility to fully understand the child and enter into the human nature of the child. It just needs our own effort to strike our bridge across to the young people and the child. What appears in various forms as the youth movement—one can say whatever one likes—has its deepest entitlement; it is nothing other than the cry of the youth: ‘You grownups have a civilization which we simply don't understand, when we bring our basic natures to it!’—This bridge between the adult and the child's world must be discovered again, and to this Anthroposophy will contribute.

When you go down from the general cultural point of view to the individual you will once again find that these syllabi which are deduced from the essence of the child itself, teach us what syllabus we need to develop for the phases in the child's life. Reading and writing were in earlier times something quite different to what they are today. Take for example the letters: they are something abstract, strangers in relation to life actually. If we go even further back, we find something in the pictorial writing which is directly related to life. We often today don't even think about how intimately life was connected to this image rich writing and how strange these are in life: reading and writing. Yes, we stand within a civilization in which it is natural to have the strangest elements in life developed into civilization's goals. When we in an open-minded way look at for instance a stenographer or a typist sitting at a typewriter, we know that with such activities humanity has been sucked into the strangest civilization.

My dear friends, we don't want to be hostile to culture or become reactionaries, when we express this. Nothing is to be said about these means which have entered in modern times; they must be there. Yet, powers of thought need to be developed which can heal this once again, this, which if it is left to work all by itself could only lead to a definite decline of culture and lead to decadence. The most important moment in which a healing remedy can be introduced, lies in education and in the classroom, to be designed through education.

When the child enters elementary school, then it is indeed so, that the intellect is drowsy. The ability for abstract thinking, which first needs to be experienced through others, only appears later. As a result, abstract forms of writing and reading introduced to the child as it arrives in school, cannot be related to. We can only take something which can reach the child in a lively way, which works in the child itself already as an artistic soul principle, something more pure and splendid than any other art. This works on a subconscious level. We must continue this way and try to find forms of a particular nature, through which the child in an artistic way can be active in his total being in the artistic form of writing which can evolve into reading. With relevance to pedagogy, when the children haven't learnt to read or write at the age of nine or ten, one must have the courage to say: ‘Thank goodness that these children can't read or write yet!’—because it isn't important for the child to learn this or that but that he or she learns in the right way at the right age.

This is why the Waldorf School education is orientated in an artistic way. Out of pedagogic-artistic principles it commences and gradually leads over into the intellectual. We take into account that music must appear early in education while this has a relationship to development of the will forces. As a result, we take into account that the usual physical education, as animated gymnastics are given as Eurythmy, is inserted into the lessons. It needs to be metamorphosed, transformed pedagogically-didactically, then those who have observed it discover that through this art of movement, the soul and spirit have been provided with something meaningful. One discovers that the child in his school-going education experiences him or herself into the art of movement in a similar way as a small child finds its way into speaking, with inner pleasure and inner naturalness.

Working from an artistic basis results in the child handling colours from very early on. Even though it is also sometimes inconvenient and might mean more stringent cleaning rules need to be applied, it will still affirm that the child enters more deeply into life than otherwise. Brought into the bargain is the development of a sense for life, that life doesn't go by but that the child lives with the outer world, that it becomes sensitive for everything which is beautiful, every encounter in nature and in life being meaningful. This is more important than the transference of details from this or that sphere on to the child.

Added to all that I've only indicated in an outline, the Anthroposophical foundation is what flows into the teacher's mindset, what the teacher simply through his entire being attributes to the pedagogical-didactic imponderables, when he closes the classroom door behind him, when he steps in front of the children. Whoever looks in a lively sense—not with abstract ideas—how the child copies and adapts to his environment, knows what works in the child in a soul-spiritual way. The teacher gets to know the child and as a result obtains the requirements with which to judge in quite a different way than is usually done. I want to present an example of this.

You learn quite a bit when you look at life in the following way. Once parents came to me and said their young son, who up to that point had been quite neat and tidy, had suddenly stolen something. I asked: “How old is the child?” The parents answered: “Five years.” I said: “Then you must first examine what the child has actually done because perhaps he has not stolen anything.”—What had he done in fact? He took money out of the drawer in the same way his mother takes money every morning when she wants to go shopping. From the money the little boy had bought treats which he didn't keep for himself but had given to other children. In this case a person can say: There is no reason to see this as stealing; the child simply saw what the mother did each morning and felt capable of doing the same. The child is an imitator. Each relationship of a child to the norms of adults, in which the expressions “good” and “bad” appear, only become applicable when the change of teeth has taken place. Therefore, we must obtain a completely different way to form judgements and learn that everything we do in the child's surroundings need to be so orientated that the child can copy them, can imitate them right into the imponderable thoughts within them. This proves the reality of thoughts. Not only our actions but also the manner and way of our thoughts give substantiality. In the child's surroundings we should not give in to any random thought because this works in on the child. Therefore, we need to look into even the imponderables in thoughts.

If one looks at how the child up to his seventh year lives in his environment one can get the impression of what the child had been before he came down into the physical sense world. Up to then—this is shown in anthroposophic research—the person is surrounded by a soul-spiritual world which is permeated by the cosmos, just like in the physical world his body is connected to the physical world. We become able to see that in the child's life, up to his seventh year, it has been a true continuation of life before birth or conception. This however must be transformed in the pedagogic-didactic experience so the teacher, standing in front of the children, must say to himself: The super-sensible worlds have given me something to unravel, which I must level out in the path of my life.

Teaching and education really becomes an act of sacrifice towards the whole world. There is a conviction being uttered about teaching and education being a force and without which in real teaching and real education, nothing can come about. This conviction which hasn't been adopted from outside, but has come through inner work, through the anthroposophical world view, this is the most important in pedagogical-didactic work. You stand with shy religious reverence to what is hidden within the child's body, you look at one who has risen from eternal world foundations which is gradually revealed in childish movements, gestures and so on, and you know that the riddle of life needs to be solved in a practical way. Only in this way are the entire teach, and educational convictions directed correctly. This atmosphere which spreads in all activities, which needs to take place in the school life, is what Anthroposophy above all wants to have within the teaching and educational being and from where all details need their direction. However, to be master of them, it is necessary that you, through true inner observation of the smallest movement of the child's life, see how the spirit works right into its very fingertips. The teacher will acquire an inner overall view so that he out of an ability, which must become an instinct, meets his class in the spirit and skilfulness that come from his internal processing of the anthroposophical world view.

Here are a few indications which I was able to give; they could be implemented further in the next lectures. These indications should show that Anthroposophy doesn't want to be radically against great pedagogic accomplishments but that it will be the assistant to the great one, if we are not to remain stuck in abstractions, so that we can enter practical life in a vital way, in order for the art of education to become a real impulse, an effective factor in our social life!

My dear venerated guests! As an introduction I have been obliged to refer to a notice in the newspaper which has just been handed to me; a notice in “Christian World,” a publication I don't know and obviously have not thought about. In this notice it says: “From 5 to 12 March an Anthroposophic University Course will take place in Berlin. The day for theologians is Friday the 10th. This event on Friday is now an unequivocal challenge of Steiner and his followers to the theologians ...” and so on.

Now, my dear friends, this event may be anything; what it certainly isn't, even if it was believed to be, it would be misunderstood in the most profound sense, if it is regarded as a challenge to the theologians. I myself would not be involved in any other way than having been asked to cooperate through lectures and introductory observations in this university course which didn't come out of my initiative. I'm least involved in today's event (which is an insertion into this program item of the course) by thinking that what we were dealing with today could be understood as an “unequivocal challenge of today's theologians.”

Thus, you will also allow, my dear friends, that not all sorts of misunderstandings will again be linked to what I have to say in a few introductory words today. I want to limit myself to a theme: The relationship of Anthroposophy to Theology. I want no new misunderstandings to arise; I will renounce some of them in my presentation because otherwise I would have to once again find my intention misjudged.

Dear friends, it has never been my purpose—forgive me if I'm forced by this challenge given to me by shortly mentioning some personal details—it has never actually been my intention to challenge theology and from their starting point Anthroposophy had, insofar as it presents a work sphere in which I participate as well, never attempted to set them apart within the work, with today's theology. This has happened so far, and really from me it has happened as little as possible, but unfortunately it has resulted that many attacks against anthroposophy from the side of theology have taken place, and sometimes people—not me particularly but others—defends themselves. Anthroposophy wants to remain thoroughly neutral in its working sphere, I'd like to say, it wants to work out of present day spiritual science.

Towards the end of the previous century one had a certain scientific direction, certain scientific methods, an attitude and method, out of the foundation of which we have already spoken and which can't be spoken about more extensively, established a method and attitude which people apply to the entire development of recent times and particularly apply to scientific research. Through this natural scientific research the greatest possible triumphs—I don't mean in a trivial but in a deeper sense—have come to human progress and human well-being. During this time natural scientific research stands in a somewhat puzzled manner towards philosophy. Philosophy had to separate itself from those methods which are applied to natural science; the difference of a factual sphere made scientific methods inapplicable in philosophy.

People were not always, one could call it, theoretically and epistemologically clear in what sense the scientific methods or philosophic methods had to apply. Practice lapsed into experimental philosophy in certain areas where it was more or less apparent or more or less really worked, but the uncertainty is basically there as well. By contrast Anthroposophy worked out of the most varied foundations towards its own working methods. On the one hand it wants to take into account what can be achieved in modern thinking and research methods of science, and on the other hand the human needs for the spiritual world and its knowledge. The human being is confronted on the one hand with the fact of fully recognising scientific methods, and in relation to the treatment of the scientific field—I have already mentioned this—I am today as much a student of Haeckel as I was in the 1890's; not in the sense of scientific methodology not to be developed further and not as if, from the side of science Heackel's writings should not be applied, but it comes down to quite a different area being discussed. In the treatment of the purely natural world I'm as much in agreement with Haeckel as at that time. It deals more with the experience of natural scientific observations through which one is educated in scientific precision, in a natural scientific sense which can result in the creation of ideas and concepts, which are needed for working scientifically. This then holds true for all observations in the world—due to our limited time now, I can't give you proof of this. This remains a truth: for all outer sensory observations this sentence is valid: “there is nothing in the mind which wasn't previously in the senses”—certainly on the other hand, Leibniz's statement applies: “Except in the mind itself.”

In the experience of the mind, that means in the weaving of the soul through the mind's categories where ideas are experienced in objects of nature, the examination of facts of nature which need a formulation of natural laws, in which experience of the world of ideas live, there is something which goes beyond the mere sensory experiences, so that when a natural scientific researcher confronts natural science, he must say to himself, if he is sufficiently unprejudiced: everything in the mind must be created out of the senses, only the mind itself can't be created out of the senses.

Once you have understood this in a lively manner then there is no obstacle to now observe what inwardly to some extent can be looked at in the pursuit of the expansion of the mind's categories through an inner soul-spiritual process, through such a process which is inwardly quite similar to the outer growth processes seen in the plant and animal. One remains always true to one's conviction of natural development when one admits that out of the seedling, if you have an inner image of it, you gain a truth which is that the mind itself can't be created out of the sense world. One remains true to that which is learnt from natural existence when you make an attempt to observe the human mind as a seedling which can grow within. When you make this attempt in earnest then the rest is a direct result of what I've suggested here and in other places, of the growth of human intellect in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. This is simply a fact for further progress in inner human development. Through this the result is a true observation of the spiritual world. This observation of the spiritual world Anthroposophy tries to clothe, as well as possible, in words of today's language use. Naturally one is often forced that what one is observing—I admit this without further ado—is clothed inadequately in words from the simple basis that speech, as in all modern languages, in the course of the last centuries adapted to the outer material world outlook and today we have the experience, which we have with words, of already being more or less orientated to this world outlook.

As a result, we always struggle with words if we need to dress in words what we have observed through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition in such a way that it can really be proven again through the ordinary, healthy human mind, because this must also be a goal for Anthroposophical research.

So Anthroposophy was simply a field of work and as such a field of work it has become, in the strictest sense of the word, conceived by me. Those individuals—and they make a very small circle—who have the need to hear about such research methods in the supersensible world, will be told and shown what can be discovered in this way. Nobody in this Movement will be forced in any way to participate in something other than through their own free will. What is said about this, that some or other suggestive means is applied, with one person it is a conscious and with another it is an unconscious defamation of what is really striven for in the Anthroposophic Movement. It is true that whoever thinks it over with a healthy mind, what is researched in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, in his higher senses becomes a more free person than any other people living in the present. His contemporaries for instance follow currents in parties and are influenced by all kinds of suggestions. From this inner soul dependency Anthroposophy must free people, because it claims that everyone, who wants to live into it, will not merely become immobilised in simple passive thinking, but that this thinking will make them inwardly mobile and powerful, and this empowered thinking makes a person more free.

For reasons, into which I don't want to enter today, it happened that from the scientifically orientated people on which Anthroposophy actually depend, in the beginning only very few drew closer to Anthroposophy. Today we have really made a start. Those people who first entered into the Anthroposophical Movement—with more or less naive minds with strong soul needs—they were never told anything other than what could be found in a conscientious way within anthroposophic research. I'm always delighted when things are said to me, for example by one of those present here today, a very honourable personality: ‘It is actually remarkable that you even get a large audience, because you avoid actually talking in the way which is considered popular, which we call understandable. You speak in such a way that people actually always have to do work to listen and this people don't want these days, so one must actually wonder how you still manage to find such a large audience.’—These are what the words sound like, which I've heard for years and now a seated person here has also said them, after they had heard a course of my lectures at that time. For popularity I have never striven because I have the validity of Anthroposophy which I want to bring to the world.

Now it is extraordinary that people from all kinds of circles of life and circles of commitment have come. Because Anthroposophy came their way simply through their work in a certain relationship to religious streams of the present, it actually never came into conflict with religious needs of people who came to it: to people, like I said, from all walks of life. For instance, I have often been asked by Catholics who find themselves in our midst whether in connection with religious practice it would be possible to remain Catholics when they also take part in the Anthroposophical Movement.

With Catholics I must say: Obviously it is possible for a good Catholic to take part in what Anthroposophy has to offer because Anthroposophy is there, not to limit the knowledge which speaks about the supersensible world, but it forms a foundation on which supersensible research can be done. This is my preference, that what comes out of the supersensible world is spoken about without entering into any kind of polemic. Someone who honestly says what he sees, knows how polemic comes about and how unfruitful that really is. My original striving was simply to honestly say what is found through Anthroposophy and to exclude any polemic considerations. Things don't always happen this way in life. Still, within the Anthroposophical Movement people of all faiths are found together, and so I would like to say that Catholics may obviously take part in the Anthroposophic Movement, but it will only come into one single point of conflict in the practical religious exercises and that is the audible confession. Not on the basis of it being an audible confession because that could be considered as a matter of conscience. I have found enough protestant clergymen who have gloated over a kind of confession in order to develop an intimate relationship with the congregation. One can have various opinions regarding this. However, here the point is that the Catholic Church denies the altar sacrament to anyone who has not made an audible confession before it. Due to this impediment, taking part practically in the most important Catholic church sacrament is difficult because those beliefs which are gained from the supersensible world need to be combined with this behaviour which is not freely done but which have nevertheless to be adhered to in the Roman Catholic Church constitution. The audible confession, as it is handled, tears the Catholic away from freely following the supersensible world, not because of Anthroposophy but because of the Roman Catholic Church constitution.

This could be avoided if confession could be avoided. One can't avoid it because otherwise one can't participate in the communion service. Still you can find many Catholics who search within the Anthroposophical Movement to satisfy their soul needs.

My dear friends, it is of course natural that people of all beliefs come to Anthroposophy, it is natural that simply in our time a strong need has developed to express what Christianity is about within the Anthroposophical Society. Now I would like to say the following. Just as with all other phenomena of research, in as far as the phenomena of the supersensible and sensible world flow together, just so Anthroposophy regards the content of Christology; it likewise tries to help with research into the supersensible regarding the content of Christology, help which can be acquired through anthroposophical methods. Now it is difficult to say in only a few words what characterises the position of Anthroposophy regarding Christology, but I would like to say the following.

We observe people in earthly life between birth and death where they have their soul and spirit life in their physical being, that they are bound to their physical body in relation to what they observe and process whatever is presented to them in their environment, also in relation to work itself, in relation to their life of will and finally in the way in which they place themselves in the sensory physical world. When a person looks back at when he wakes up, naturally in his surroundings, he firstly finds perceptions possible through the senses of his body, through his mind, and all of these experiences and observations of his environment he experiences as combined.

However, because his mind, intellect and ancient spirituality are carried within his own spirit, so he can—if he only thinks enough about himself, if he only looks away from the environment and looks at himself—not deny that through his own activity he comes to the conclusion culminating in a concept which only has spiritual content and that this spiritual content—if I may express it this way—is the Father-godly imagination. Here anthroposophical research must be of help with its methods. I can only briefly characterise this. It makes the entire human cognitive work process clear—this will also emerge out of the lectures in this course. It also wants to point to what happens through people when they try to turn their gaze away from the outer world, in order to gradually observe their own past actions and ask themselves: What have you actually done? What justifies you at all to make an imagination of the outer world?—By researching this experience far enough a person—when I may use this expression again—comes to a Father-godly experience. Whoever examines this divine godly-Father experience through Anthroposophy, arrives at quite a definite judgement. I ask that this judgement, which is a fact, which I speak about radically, should not be misunderstood.

A person arrives at this verdict, a person who is totally healthy—totally in full health in his physical body—comes to this godly Father experience, this means that whoever doesn't arrive at this godly-Father experience carries some or another degenerative symptom, even if hidden. In other words, through Anthroposophical research you can say: To not come to a Father-godly experience indicates some human illness. That is of course radical to say because illness is ordinarily seen through physical means because—if I might say so—it dwells in the subtleties of the human organisation. In fact, it is clear to those who research through Anthroposophy: Atheism is illness.

What I've said yesterday about the development of opinions, right or wrong, this is particularly important here. If a person follows only this route then he will come to a Father-godly experience. When he then goes further in this way, if he becomes aware what shortcomings live in his soul, if he only comes to this Father-god experience, he becomes aware that basically in the limitation of modern humanity leaning towards intellectualism there also lies a kind of limitation of this godly-Father experience, then he will realise he must go further with this godly-Father experience. Here outer observations can support this easily.

It is an extraordinary fact that in western countries where natural science has grown to its maximum intensity and where this scientific attitude doesn't want to enter into discussing the supersensible but that religion must remain preserved, that just in these religious movements of western countries the spirit of the Old Testament has particularly and successfully intervened even in our modern time. We see how in the west, when Christianity is outwardly accepted and preached that it is done totally in the spirit of the Old Testament; in a certain sense Christianity reshapes the Father-god and doesn't discern a difference between the Father-god and Christ.

In the (European) east by contrast, where people's minds don't see the division between religion and science as sharply as in the west; in the east where this bridge for the human soul more or less exists as an elementary inner soul experience—we find that for example in the presentations of the great philosopher Vladimir Soloviev—how the Christ experience, as an independent experience, exists beside the Father experience.

In this way one can say to oneself: indeed, a completely healthy person can't be an atheist if he combines everything around him in the outer world into the culmination of a God-imagination, which he must give a spiritual content; yet he remains with only a Father-imagination. With this Father-imagination one doesn't arrive at a summary of outer natural phenomena, it fails immediately when applied to one's own human development; one is then, as it were, abandoned. By deepening this inner development from this point at which one has arrived, having taken up the outer world into one's soul—then by following this inner development one will, if by open-mindedly pursuing it, come to a Christ experience, which is initially present as an indefinite inner experience. This experience continues to be recognised by Anthroposophy. A person, simply through honest observation of the human evolution on earth, comes to seeing before his own eyes, the Mystery of Golgotha, the historic Mystery of Golgotha. He arrives here through the inner development of spiritual organs which direct him to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. If one with the help of these research means pursues the way human development went from antiquity to the Mystery of Golgotha, then one finds that everywhere in religious imagination—not only in the Old Testament religious imagination—lived a gravitation to the coming of the Christ-Spirit.

Then one can simply through observation, learn to recognise how the Christ-Spirit was not united with the earth in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. By pursuing all of this which was sought for in the mysteries, was popular in pre-Christian religions, then we see how the images they made of their gods, finally all melt together into what the Christ-Imagination is. We see how the minds of people all over the world are lifted to the supernatural when they turn to their gods in their souls. We see how the point of origin for earthly mankind's development was simply more given through the human organisation than what was perceived through the senses or the mind in what could be observed in his surroundings. It entered into the human soul—most strongly in ancient times, and then less and less—what I would call instinctive perception—not earthly—of the world, to which the human being felt he belonged. In the moment when a person, through the mysteries or through popular religion, is brought to where he can lift his soul into seeing extra-terrestrially, and with which he knows he is united in his deepest being, at this moment a person experiences a rebirth within himself.

Now my dear friends, when we follow human evolution from an Anthroposophic point of view up to the Mystery of Golgotha, it shows that these abilities, which dwelt within human beings, actually diminished gradually and were no longer there the moment the Mystery of Golgotha took place on the earth. Certainly there can be remnants, for evolution doesn't take place in leaps. Individuals preserved, though perhaps inaccurately but still instinctively, an awareness of what had once been seen; this can be pursued in art. Then the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth. In the Mystery of Golgotha Anthroposophy sees the streaming in of that spirit which previously could only be searched for in the extra-terrestrial: the in streaming of the Christ into the human body of Jesus. How this can individually be imagined, can only be discussed with those who have engaged positively in these fields of research. Here Anthroposophy shows how from that time onwards, from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, another time has begun on earth, a time about which all the old religious knowledge confessed about. The Christ who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ who Paul saw on the way to Damascus, the Christ then remained within in the earth with humanity. This is what these words want to say: “I am with you every day until the end of the world.” He lives among us, He can be found again. The Paul experience can, with certain preparation, be renewed time and time again. Then, if Christ is searched for in this way, a person—by looking at his own inner development—just as since the Mystery of Golgotha happened on earth—can see Christ walking; he discovers Christ in his inner life in the same way as when in the outer world—if he is not ill with atheism—he found the Father-god.

Thus, I can only fleetingly, in a sketch, indicate how Anthroposophy through real research of the Christ event, can arrive at an inner objective fact. With all possible detail Anthroposophy tries to present the Christ event as the most important fact of the earthly life of humanity, as something which happened objectively. For this reason, the entire spirit through which the Christ event is presented in Anthroposophy is done in such a way that this event can be absorbed simply as fact. We have within the anthroposophic movement experienced that for example Jewish confessors found themselves in the most genuine, truest and honest sense in recognising the Mystery of Golgotha. With this, my dear friends, the Anthroposophical Movement has already anticipated what after all must enter into human evolution: through directly pointing to what can be seen in the Mystery of Golgotha, how the way to Christianity can be found again.

There is always a question whether there isn't yet a deep meaning in the book by Overbeck, a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche, that modern theology is no longer Christian. If this is legitimate then one could even, perhaps with a certain right, say: Anthroposophy is suitable for directing people in a lively way to the Christ experience. It states that during the time in which the Christ event took place there still existed an instinctive insight among some individuals, so that the spiritual foundation, or I might call it, the spiritual substantiality of the Mystery of Golgotha could be seen and acknowledged in the first Christian centuries. We then see how this diminished gradually; we see it completely fade in the figure of Scotus Erigena, we see medieval theology spreading where the attempt was being made to separate itself from what modern humanity had to develop in the intellect, that which, when it is left to the person who no longer develops inwardly, he becomes incapable of accessing the supersensible worlds. It split what wanted to enter into the human soul into what was recognisable by the intellect, and what people could not attain themselves, except through a revelation.

On this basis one can understand the entire medieval theology, especially Thomistic theology which was considered by Catholicism as the only authority. Today something can be said about this. What Anthroposophy was and is, is nothing other than simply to express what exists and is available through spiritual observation.

As Anthroposophy comes to the proposition that atheism is actually a hidden illness, it arrives at a second proposition: Not finding the Christ, not finding a relationship with the Christ is destiny for humanity, is the fate of misfortune. Atheism is an illness, not finding the Christ is the fate of misfortune because one can find Him in an inward experience. Then He positions Himself there as that Being who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. One can only discover Christ through one's inner life; one doesn't need anthroposophical research to be a religious person in the Christian sense. Then again, when one has come to Christ, one becomes a member of the spiritual world and one can really speak about a resurrection of the human being in the spiritual world, because the person who fails to find Christ in regard to his world view, is restricted. Atheism is an illness! Not coming to Christ is a destiny, not reaching the spirit is soul obtuseness!

Now, my dear friends, Anthroposophy relates from such foundations basically only to religion (and not theology) and to religion only in as far as people who have religious needs and who are unable to fulfil them through current declarations, approach Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy will only do what is necessary within the needs of today, and that which others fail to do. What ethos is at this basis—I have to always characterise this again—you can find from the following.

Some years ago, I once held a lecture in a southern German town—at that time it was a German town but it no longer is—a lecture entitled “Bible and Wisdom”. Two Catholic priests were present at the lecture. After the lecture they both approached me and said: “We actually haven't found anything in your lecture which could be challenged from a Catholic point of view.”

I answered: “If only I could always be so lucky!”

To this they both replied: “Yes, but we noticed something, it is not what you say but it is the manner and way how you present it. We must add that you speak to people who are prepared in a certain way. You lecture to a kind of congregation who have a certain education; we, however, speak to all people.”

I said: “Reverend, it doesn't come down to how our subjective experiences decide, but it comes down to us living into our work in evolution, that we don't imagine we speak for all people but that we answer such a question according to what objectively lives in the evolution of humanity. So, I can imagine I speak for all people—and could be very mistaken—you can imagine that. It is very good for enthusiasm to have such an imagination. Still, ask yourselves for once: do all people who have the need to hear something about Christ all come to church?”

Both of them couldn't say yes because naturally they knew that a lot of people who search for a way to Christ, do not come to the church.

So I said: “You see, for those who don't come to you and still search for a way to Christ, it is for those I speak.”

This means finding your task in the evolution of time, and not to imagine you speak for everyone, but to ask: are there minds out there who want to accept this or that in a special way?

Anthroposophy never turns to any other mindset, like to some or other religious confession.

When we, in the Waldorf School, manage to apply teaching in a practical way out of Anthroposophy we still completely avoid making the Waldorf School a school which will splice Anthroposophy into the heads of the children. With regards to religious instruction, we leave the Catholic children to be instructed by a catholic priest and the evangelists by an evangelist priest. Only for the dissident children there is a freer kind of religious instruction, but in the thorough Christian sense. We don't introduce abstract Anthroposophy—also no concrete anthroposophy which is presented to grown-ups—but we try with all our good intensions to bring to the children what is suitable to the stage of their development; all of that must first be searched for and determined according to the content and method. Through those of us who have given free religious instruction, we have managed to bring those children who have no religious instruction as such, towards Christianity and they come in droves to take part in this kind of religious instruction. Never have we preached some or other kind of religious propaganda within the Anthroposophical Movement and even less would Anthroposophy embark on something against single theological systems. With this in mind, anthroposophy can only apply itself to finding differences in separate theological systems in order to understand them and not to oppose them. Thus, I've always regarded it to be my task when I speak to people who have come to Anthroposophy: to make it understandable why Catholicism has become Catholic, Protestants Protestant, Judaism Jewish and Buddhism Buddhistic and how all of them—I believe that is a Christian concept—have within them a Being who through their destiny will let them experience the true Christ.

So it is not possible, if attacks have not originated from the other side, to start a struggle between Anthroposophy and theology, and also today I want to utter these words, while it has been asked for from those who organised today's theologian's day. The only task of Anthroposophy is the pronouncement of anthroposophic research results about the supersensible worlds. This is why I have always been reticent in particular regarding attacks originating from the theological side.

Anthroposophy doesn't want to act as a fighter on the scene but to satisfy the legitimate demands of human soul needs of the time. Everyone who in this sense wants to work together with Anthroposophy and wants to bring to the surface the fulfilment of legitimate, soul foundations of human soul needs, everyone who wants to work with her in this sense, is welcome!