The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! There was a famous esthete in Germany in the last half of the 19th century, and I believe I may say that he was justly famous. He wrote books that can justifiably be said to have been extraordinarily stimulating, books on aesthetic subjects, books on human cultural development, and he gave lectures at the University of Munich that aroused great interest in the broadest circles. Now fate would have it that a few years ago I was sitting in a studio with a famous Munich artist who was already an elderly gentleman at the time, and our conversation turned to this esthete, who had his heyday when the artist I was talking to was still an “art disciple,” was just striving for art and apparently lived in the company of other aspiring artists, who were always present in Munich. From certain backgrounds, I came to the question of how the artists themselves felt inspired by the aesthetic views, by the whole artistic view of life, of this esthete, at the time when the esthete was giving the lectures that interested him so much. And lo and behold, the now elderly artist well remembered some of the moods of his youth and then summarized the answer to my question in the words: “Yes, we artists also often heard this esthete; we just called him the ‘aesthetic grunter of bliss’!”

One could really hear a lot from this artist's view of a famous esthete, much of what one can also experience otherwise when artistic people are to give their judgment on the possible suggestions that they can get from scientific art observation. And one must say that one understands such rejections with truly artistic feeling – for they are mostly rejections; one understands how the artist, who has experienced aesthetics in the style of the usual, or rather, the usual science, cannot have much use for it. And actually, I must say, I understood the “aesthetic blissful grunt” extremely well. But many another artistic judgment about the scientific aesthetics of our time arose before my soul.

The artist feels, when confronted with what has been formed out of the scientific spirit of modern times in terms of aesthetics, he feels almost paralyzed in the fresh originality and in the elementary of his artistic experience. He has the feeling that he, as an artist, must live in an element that someone who views art from the standpoint of today's science cannot enter at all.

And for inner reasons, too, my dear attendees, this can seem understandable. Science, as it has developed in modern times, naturally and quite rightly tends, from its point of view, towards objectivity, towards the establishment of such results into which nothing is mixed from the inner human, from the — as it is said — subjective, from the human-personal. The more this science can ignore the human-personal, that which can be experienced inwardly in the phenomena of the external world, the more objective this science appears. But for this science, the human being is completely excluded from the world view, and in the position that the human being wants to achieve in relation to the world through this science, there is nothing left of what can be experienced within the soul itself, what can make the human being feel warm and inwardly illuminated. This science, to a certain extent, excludes direct experience of the external world from its activity. Man must exclude himself, and then he lives in the results of this science as in a world of ideas, which can only give a true picture of what is outside of man, which contains nothing of the human itself, and which is therefore far removed from the artistic experience, which must find a place in the world and in life with the whole full human personality, with a rich inner life, with an original, elementary inner life. By excluding the human element and extending the world of ideas only to that which is non-human, only a kind of dead idea appears in the consciousness of man as an idea. A sum of concepts, which are actually dead concepts and which are all the more perfect the more dead they are, deals with a dead mineral nature.

Anyone who looks very deeply into what is actually at issue here will therefore find it understandable that I say: It is quite understandable to me that in the artistic community, in view of modern aesthetics, the judgment has arisen that those people who understand least about art generally speak about art in this modern way in an aesthetic way. Yes, I must say that I understand every degree of rejection that artists express towards aesthetic science. It even seems entirely understandable to me when an artist says: if someone is completely unsuitable to understand art, then that is the best preparation for making a name for oneself as an esthete.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, it cannot be my intention to talk you into any popular aestheticism when I speak of the essence of anthroposophy and art. But it is certainly the case that the judgment that has been formed on the artistic side in recent times about the knowledge of art is, quite understandably, a negative one, and that this judgment is now extended to what has been decided within anthroposophy. Artistic natures, who first allow the anthroposophical to approach them externally, are just suspicious – because after all, anthroposophy is ultimately also a form of knowledge – that here too nothing can confront them but something that resembles the aestheticisms that have been gained from more recent science. And it is out of this prejudice, out of this superficial consideration of what actually lives in anthroposophy, that the now understandable rejection of anthroposophy by artists arises.

But here one should consider another thing. Here one should bear in mind that Anthroposophy, although it maintains the full scientific discipline of the human interior, is absolutely striving to elevate human knowledge from the mere observation of the external to the observation of the human, that Anthroposophy wants to penetrate into everything that is currently being suppressed by what is accepted in science today. It is precisely the human being in his essence that is to be given back to human knowledge, and anthroposophy aims to move from corpse-like concepts to living knowledge. The concepts of the world outside of the human being only form the foundation, so to speak. And what can only be gained through the development of certain powers of cognition and life that otherwise lie dormant in the human being, certain powers that are intimately connected through their own essence with the entire human essence itself, is built upon this objective knowledge, which is fully accepted as something justified. And when, within the context of anthroposophical knowledge, what is called imaginative knowledge arises in a healthy way in the human soul, then precisely that which external science is supposed to suppress and hold back rises up out of the depths of the soul into consciousness: The living human soul world itself rises into human consciousness. From the depths of the human organization, the living sum of forces of everything that the etheric human body brings into the physical human body as the greatest work of art in the world rises into human consciousness. And for those who advance to real imagination, what artistic experience is definitely encountered on their way. He advances into those regions from which the unconscious stimuli come to the artist.

Yes, my dear attendees, the imaginative cognizer advances into the regions where the impulses lie that the artist is not initially aware of, but which live and have power in his inner being, which guide his pictorial creation, which guide his hands, which make him a creator, an artist, so that he incorporates into the external material, into the external substance, that which he receives from these regions as inspiration. What the artist does not need to know at first, but what he incorporates out of his unconscious intuition into the material given to him from outside, that comes to the imaginative cognizer before the conscious soul life. Thus, the imaginative cognizer enters precisely those regions from which the life of the artistic creator actually springs. And when one is truly touched by what is found in these regions, then it is not artistic creativity, then it is not productive power that is paralyzed as it is by the science of the dead, but rather that which otherwise remains in the dark is first stimulated by a bright light. And one cannot say that when a person in a dark room has gained an impression of what is in the room through touch, this impression is extinguished by the room suddenly being lit. Those who grasp the meaning of this image will gradually learn to admit that artistic creativity is not killed by anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, but is stimulated in the most eminent sense. For how does this imaginative, and later inspired and intuitive knowledge work? It introduces the artist to that which he incorporates into the material, and he then stands before this aesthetic, which the scientific spirit of the last centuries has produced, in such a way that he recognizes exactly how this scientific spirit, with all its aesthetics, is basically only suitable for scientifically fathoming the outer material into which the artist works.

The external material used by the artist can be the object of conventional science. The spiritual life that he incorporates into the material consciously enters the human soul in imaginative knowledge. And this does not only need to be emphasized for the artistic experience in general, it can also be placed before the mind's eye for the individual concrete arts. There is an inner static of the human organization for imaginative recognition. That which is otherwise completely down in the subconscious, a certain inner static, an experience of inner line, an experience of inner equilibrium, is raised into consciousness. When imaginative knowledge advances to a certain level, then the human being experiences how upright he is, how a cosmic direction, which for our earthly existence coincides with the vertical, cannot only be seen, cannot only be verified with the plumb line, but how it can be experienced inwardly. One experiences how the human organism can experience other states of equilibrium, other powerful inner lines in their mutual relationships. One finds out how the inner static of the whole cosmos imaginatively comes to life again in the human interior. One can immerse oneself in the way, for example, in which the Oriental has experienced his particular bodily positions in instinctive imagination. There is a difference between experiencing the inner static and the inner dynamic of the human organism when one is standing upright on both feet and when one is in the position of a yogi meditating in the sense of Indian meditation. With every change in the posture of the human body, one experiences a different inner static.

Now, esteemed attendees, when the art of architecture was still productive, when the architectural styles, which today are only imitated, still arose from human productive power, then the imaginatively experienced inner statics which the human being carried out of his inner experience, so to speak translating it from the inwardly experienced – I have to express myself in this way – from a negative into a positive and making it the spirit of a temple or another building. A time that cannot experience inwardly cannot create architectural styles. He who wants to understand old architectural styles from what is being built today through our science of mechanics, statics and so on, does not come to the secrets of the older architectural styles, not even of the medieval Gothic architectural style. Only someone who knows how, let us say, certain oriental buildings are an imitation of what is imprinted in the mind through the imaginative experience of the Buddhist position, only such a person can understand this architecture. And again, only someone who can relive the inner experiences of the ancient Egyptians or Greeks with regard to the inner statics of the body can understand the Egyptian and Greek architecture in its style. It was said of medieval architecture that those who studied it kept certain secrets, certain mysteries, that could only be acquired by joining certain secret orders and rising through the degrees. This is no mere legend, it is a fact; for it was in these secret orders, which later became the masons' lodges and so forth, that the imaginative inner experiences of human knowledge were preserved, and from them one built even the Gothic cathedral.

It was only in the Renaissance that this principle of building, which was inspired by the spirit, was lost. It must be regained by penetrating from today's superficial, banal saying that man is a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm — which is nothing more than an abstractly postulated concept — by penetrating from this abstraction to a realization such as that we can, in imagination, piece by piece, present the structure of the universe itself, the wonderful architecture of the universe in the human inner static, in the human inner dynamic, in the dynamic to be experienced, and - as it were with the translation of the photographic negative into a positive - from this architecture in our inner experience, we can approach what today's technology, what today's science teaches, and in turn can appear as style-formers.

In all the phrases that are frequently used in our civilization today about renewal in one field or another, only the shallowest superficiality actually occurs, and progress towards new creative powers today requires a concrete inner view of the human being, requires a patient exploration of the innermost human experiences.

And just as one can experience the inner static and dynamic through imaginative contemplation, so too can one experience every surface of the human organism in its particular formation through this imaginative contemplation. One can therefore experience, by entering into that which works and creates in the human organism in the etheric body, how, with a certain progressive necessity, each individual surface that delimits the human organism outwards is created out of these inner forces. One can behold in imagination the shaping of the human being in creative movement.

But in this way, that in us is developed which guides us, not by imitating, not by adhering to the model, but by adhering to the creative forces in nature itself, to the spirit of nature itself, to conjure up the human form out of any material according to the same maxims by which nature itself conjures up this human form.

Spiritual insight into that which works and lives in the human form provides the true instruction for the sculptor, for the creator. Only a scientific, but unartistic age was obliged to adhere to the model. Anyone with even a modicum of feeling will understand that Greek sculpture, truly great Greek sculpture, does not adhere to the model, that there was a living inner experience of the form of the human arm, of the form of the human hand, and that naturalism arose when man was no longer able to rise from the comprehension of an elementary, human essence to the full plastic development of the human form, whether at rest or in motion. One cannot speak of true imagination in any other way than that, in following the path to imagination, one must at the same time encounter artistic experience unconditionally.

Only those who do not want to go the way to the spirit, but only the way to a refined matter, such as the spiritualists, have no idea of the innermost relationship of that which is present in the artistic experience with that which comes before the soul in the anthroposophical imagination.

Our soul, esteemed attendees, uses the bodily senses to, let us say, first see the world of color. At first, this soul is devoted to the world of color that appears in external objects. When the paths to the imagination are taken, an inner world of color arises in the soul, an inner experience of color, but with that, only then does the truly creative element arise in the soul. Only when we are able to grasp this intimate relationship between the inner life of the soul and color do we begin to understand why, by using the human eyes, we see the colored surfaces of external objects. By no longer looking at colors merely externally, we learn to live with colors. You learn to identify with color in your soul, to identify your soul with color. Through the harmony of colors, you learn to lose yourself in color and at the same time to find yourself in your true essence. In that the soul finds itself experiencing itself in color, it experiences itself at the same time in its inner relationship with outer nature, which it also experiences as colored, by making use of the outer physical organism.

And to become familiar with the inner world of color means to find the creative element in the color itself, it means to learn to create out of color, and it means to penetrate the secret of painting. It is always the case that what unconsciously guides the artist's hand is found to be the goal of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge.

And we can move up into the world of sounds. This world of sounds appears to us as something spiritual, because that which expresses itself as something truly artistic in sound cannot actually be an imitation of nature, because in the artistic experience of the world of sound, something is heard from the outset that is above nature. But when we become familiar with the world of sound, we become aware — and through imaginative insight we can become fully aware — that sound, as we experience it, even in all its beauty in our musical creations, in the earthly, sensual world, it lives only as a banished being, a being that has been pushed down from the higher regions, where it has its true existence, where it is rooted and lives, into the denser air within which we perceive it through the human organization. The world of sound appears to us as if in exile when we perceive it with an external physical organ. And it is in exile. For when we discover the sounding, the lawfully sounding through imagination, then we become immersed in the etheric world, in an ever more spiritual and spiritual world; we become immersed in a world in which the sounding is no longer in exile, in which the sounding is in its very own element.

Yes, my dear attendees, you can learn to recognize sound as twofold. You can learn to recognize it in its banishment in the air with its vibrations, and you can learn to recognize it through the world of imaginations in its own region. When we get to know it in its spiritual region itself, then we see at the same time how the human organism with its internal organs is built out of this element of sounding, out of this element of world harmonies and world melodies, and we get an idea of the innermost nature of the human organism. We learn to recognize how our organs, lungs and so on are formed out of the choruses of the world, how our whole organization is a result of the sounding of the world, and we now understand why the artistic creation of music touches us so deeply inwardly, why many people associate the artistic creation of music with the immediate human inner life, while they associate the other arts more with the outer contemplation. That which our innermost humanity has otherwise formed out of the cosmos, we disassemble in the resonance of musical art creation. What is expressed in the musical work of art is the human being himself, with the innermost secrets of his sustenance. And one then learns to understand how the sound, in its exile, has a peculiar relationship to the human being. Just consider, my dear audience: the air that is set in vibration by the exiled sound, we breathe it in, we breathe it out again. It is not through this inhaling and exhaling that the human being is created in his organization, nor are the human organs built out of the cosmos; they are only maintained more. In our breathing process, we have a tinting, an imitation of what is contained in the depths of the world's existence.

Take that which our organs can only receive from the air in order to sustain life, take that at its original source, which is precisely in the spiritual world, and you have that which not only can sustain these organs – like the breath – you have that which creates these organs. Just as our breath, in its sustaining power for our organs, relates to the supersensible world from which our organs are created, so the banished sound of the world of tones relates to the world into which we ascend through imagination and through the inspiration that leads us to an understanding of breathing and of what I have just hinted at, and what lies behind breathing. And in this realm, where the sounding world has its true essence, lies the musician's unconscious inspiration. Imagination and inspiration penetrate into those regions from which the forces that inspire the musician to create his works are effective. It is the world of the spiritual from which art is born. It is the world of the spiritual that we enter through anthroposophical world knowledge.

The situation is different and yet similar with the art of human language, with poetry. Unlike the musical element, poetry is not inwardly connected with what one sees; but in a certain way it is connected with what is possible progress for the human being, with his possible development. And just as the human being grasps the soul in the world of colors, he grasps the spiritual in the human being in the imagined and inspired world of sounds. And so he experiences in language how those spiritual forces work down from above, directing human progress, human evolution.

And when we learn to recognize how the spiritual tone, banished down into the earthly air, creates its tools through the breath, when we learn to recognize how the tone, trained in a lower region to become one-sided, the breath creates for itself the ear, the ear's organization as a companion organ, then one also learns to recognize the anatomical-physiological connection between the respiratory and auditory systems, which plays such a great role in biology.

But from there one can also ascend to the realization of how the active and passive human speech element creatively participates in the development of the human being itself, and one learns to understand how the poet, who is truly artistic, language, which is connected with the external, to rhythm, meter, to musical or pictorial composition, in order to lead the prosaic element of language back to that which lies deeper than the word calculated for earthly life. The poet wants to lead the word, calculated for earthly life, back to that which can correspond to the word “supernatural” through its rhythms, through its rhyming, through alliteration and assonance, through the thematic. I would like to say that the poet wrestles in the realm of the soul with the problem that nature has solved in man by making the respiratory organism the vehicle of what lives unconsciously in man as his organization, which is formed out of the creative tone of the world. The poet goes through this process, and I would say that it is only shorter, but he goes through it. He tries to lead back to the word in the spirit what is in exile in the word. This can only happen through rhythm, through speech treatment and so on.

And when one becomes acquainted with the human organization and its relationship to the world in the most diverse fields in this way, then one gradually forms an intuitive view of the human organization as a whole, and then one tries to penetrate down to that central power which underlies all human expression of life and also of the senses. And this penetration down to this central power, which is the

* will, is attempted through the art of eurythmy, through that art which seeks to bring the whole human being as a will-being to direct sensory perception.

What the human being experiences inwardly can be expressed in his outer movements down to the smallest detail. And if art must seek its ideal in contemplating a spiritual element in the observation of the sensual, and never to contemplate the spiritual in abstraction, but always to have it before it in sensual revelation, then this revelation is most intensively accommodated by the art of eurythmy. For that which stands before us, the spiritual-soul human being, everything that fills the spiritual-soul human being at the moment of his appearance as a eurythmist, everything that lives spiritually and soulfully in his soul, should pass over into outward, sensually perceptible movement. The spiritual and soul life, the non-pictorial, should become fully pictorial. But no pictorial or sensual aspect is present in such a person performing eurythmy that is not simultaneously imbued and permeated by soul and spiritual experience. All sensual activity is permeated by spirit; everything that wants to reveal itself spiritually does not remain in abstract form, but is expressed in sensual revelation. One must first acquire a feeling for the living, for the directly spiritual, which has anthroposophical knowledge as its subject, then one will learn to think differently about the relationship between artistic experience and anthroposophy than one rightly thinks about the relationship between artistic experience and an aesthetic science that only creates from dead ideas.

Precisely during the heyday of this science, while it was developing, art lost its inner sources and became more or less content with speaking of something unreal. And hardly anyone understands, I would say, tragic world sighs like Goethe's: When nature begins to reveal its apparent mystery to someone, that person has the deepest yearning for its most worthy interpreter, art. That art has a place in the world of truth, in the world of reality, but a reality that cannot be reached with ordinary science, that can only be reached with anthroposophically oriented science, is something that will hopefully be felt gradually. Then people will feel that art and artistic experience, which are so urgently needed today because they have been lost in a scientific approach limited to the external, can receive inspiration, living inspiration, from the inner life, from the formative life, from that which finds the experience of thought itself on its way and which is sought through anthroposophical spiritual science.

If the artistic world, in contrast to a science that today itself requires a deepening in accordance with the spirit, has felt and experienced that it cannot justify itself as a creation of the imagination before that which such a science recognizes as the truly real, then in the future, people will understand what a real artist like Goethe, who was also a real thinker, meant when he said that art is not just a fantasy, but that a true work of art is a truthful representation of the secrets of the world.

And if we understand the relationship between art and anthroposophy, we will also recognize how this relationship can help art to emerge from a certain tragic situation, from the situation in which science fundamentally denies art its right to exist in reality, and in which, when art engages with science, it can only speak in such a way that the artist must reject it. Art and science will enter into a different relationship when there will be a science that will prove, precisely through its own existence, that art is a genuine citizen in the full reality of the world, that art is not merely a product of unreal fantasy, but that art is the great interpreter of the deepest secrets of the world. I believe that the person who does not strive for knowledge through revelation, but through the conquest of the secrets of the world, will be touched by this new relationship between science and art from the bottom of his or her heart.

I wish to give you in three lectures a survey of what Anthroposophy has to say concerning the Human Being and his relation to the Universe. The universe and man are undoubtedly the two most important problems, for they embrace every question dealing with science and life, every problem of greatest and smallest importance.

It lies in the nature of these problems that in regard to these things I must limit myself to the anthroposophical horizon, that is to say, to the things connected with the great life-problems of human existence which transcend the knowledge gained through sensory perception and which lie beyond the sphere of ordinary science.

In regard to the human being, self-knowledge is undoubtedly a problem which must appeal to us most of all. For in order to gain a foundation and a firm standpoint in life, we must first obtain a conception of our own nature. And it must be said that at all times people have sought to gain a knowledge of the universe, for they knew that the mysteries of the world's evolution are connected with man's own being; they knew that they could only learn something about man's being by seeking to know what the universe is able to give them, the universe of which the human being forms part.

Moreover, it cannot be denied that in connection with a knowledge of man and of the universe modern people show a deep interest for everything which transcends ordinary science, and we may say that innumerable attempts are now being made to transcend the spheres of ordinary science in order to investigate what lies beyond birth and death, beyond the world which can be fathomed by ordinary sense-perception and by the understanding which is based upon it.

In recent times we can observe above all that there are scientific investigators who in many ways endeavour to transcend the spheres indicated above, and as an introduction let me mention a few striking conceptions of modern investigators, examples which prove that the keen interest in the problems which will form the subject of my three lectures really exists, but which prove at the same time how very difficult it is, even in the case of people well grounded in science, to penetrate into the sphere of the soul and of the spirit. As I do not wish to speak in abstract terms, let me proceed immediately from concrete examples.

A German scientist who worked very hard to discover how to penetrate into the super-sensible nature of the soul, and how to investigate the influence exercised by the soul's super-sensible nature upon the body's physical nature, tried to give many examples taken from his medical and scientific experience, showing the soul's influence, the influence of an unquestionably psychic essence upon the body. A marked example contained in one of the books written by this physician and scientist named Schleich, who was personally well known to me, is the following. He describes a patient, who came to him in a great state of excitement, because in the office he had pricked his skin with an inky nib. The doctor could ascertain that it was quite an insignificant scratch. But the patient was under the delusion that this prick with an inky nib had given him a blood poisoning and that he would have to die unless his hand was amputated, and he begged the doctor to amputate his hand, his arm as quickly as possible.

The doctor could only tell him to be calm, that he would be quite well again in a couple of days and that there was nothing to be afraid of. As a responsible doctor he had to tell him this and could not, of course, amputate his arm.

But the patient was not satisfied He went to another doctor who told him exactly the same thing and also refused to amputate his arm. Schleich was nevertheless nervous, for he was acquainted with soul-moods, and so he enquired the next day how the patient was feeling and he was told that the man had died.

The autopsy did not reveal any trace of blood-poisoning, or similar symptoms. This was out of the question. Yet the patient had died.

In connection with this case, Schleich remarks: Death caused by radical auto-suggestion.

The patient had the fixed idea that he had to die; it was an extremely radical auto-suggestion and he really did die under its influence.

This is the statement of an investigator well acquainted with all the natural-scientific methods, with all the medical methods. He reports this case in order to show a purely psychical influence, i.e. the influence of a thought, upon bodily processes, an influence showing, according to Schleich, that death set in as a result.

Schleich mentions many other cases, less marked and radical, in order to prove that it is possible to observe the soul, living in thoughts, feelings, sensations and will-impulses, and that the soul can really influence the body. He wishes to describe, as it were, the influence of the super-sensible upon the physical.

Another case is described by a far more conspicuous scientist, by Sir Oliver Lodge. Sir Oliver Lodge lost his son Raymond in the last war. He fell on the Belgian-German frontier, and Oliver Lodge, who had long ago felt the inclination to build a bridge leading from the sensory-natural-scientific sphere to the super-sensible sphere, was deeply stirred by the loss of his beloved son. Through many incidents, which are not directly connected with this matter and which I need not relate, he was induced to use the mediumistic power of a certain person, in order to enter into connection with the departed soul of his son, Raymond.

When such a case arises in ordinary spiritistic circles, it is not necessary to consider it seriously, for one knows how unscientific these meetings are, and how amateurishly and unscientifically such cases are judged and investigated in them. But the matter must be taken more seriously when we have to do with one of the greatest of modern scientists, with a man so thoroughly at home in the sphere of external, natural scientific research and so well acquainted with scientific methods. That is why Oliver Lodge's book on his spiritual intercourse with his son Raymond, made such a deep impression on the world.

On reading this book, we immediately feel that it is written by a man who does not approach the investigation of such things superficially, but by a conscientious and responsible scientist. Even in other things, which I will not mention here, one can see that Oliver Lodge applies to this sphere the same way of thinking, the same scientific method which he is accustomed to apply in his physical laboratory. The real facts which he relates, and which, one might say, rightly produced such a deep impression upon all those who read Sir Oliver Lodge's book, are as follows :

Through the medium in question, Oliver Lodge and a few other people who were present at the seances, were told that his son, that is, the soul, the spirit of Oliver Lodge's son, wished to describe a scene enacted on the Belgian-German frontier shortly before his death, and the medium related that Raymond Lodge had a photograph taken and described this act in detail. It was expressly stated that two photographs were taken; these two photographs were carefully described and attention was drawn to the fact that upon the second photograph Sir Oliver Lodge's son had a somewhat different pose from that on the first one.

When these communications were made in London through the medium (Sir Oliver Lodge describes it so that one can really see—I emphasize this expressly—that he took every possible scientific precaution), at the time when these experiments were made, no one in London knew anything about these photographs, nor that they had been taken. After examining all the facts, Sir Oliver Lodge came to the conclusion that if this message were true, it could only come from his son, from the departed son himself.

In fact, after two or three weeks, the photographs which no one had seen before really arrived in London. They corresponded with the description given by the medium, or, as Sir Oliver Lodge believed, with the description given by the soul of his son. Even a scientist could see in this fact, to begin with, one might say, “experimentum cruris.” Nobody in London could possibly have seen the photographs. It appeared that the description was correct even in regard to the fact that two photographs were taken and that the second one shows a difference. The photographer had taken the photograph of the group which included Raymond Lodge twice, and for the second photograph he had shifted his camera a little. All this had been described exactly. A conscientious scientist could not find the slightest reason for questioning the medium's communication.

The two radical cases I have described to you, show that the longing, the great desire of unquestionably serious modern scientists lead them to seek a knowledge which goes beyond the facts revealed by ordinary external scientific research.

But one who speaks of the foundations of anthroposophical research, one who speaks from an anthroposophical standpoint, must draw attention to the fact that the methods of this investigation differ from those adopted even by such serious minded scientists. For, in regard to a scientific way of thinking and a scientific mentality the foundations of anthroposophical research (I hope that my three lectures will make things clear to you from every aspect) should be stricter and more conscientious than any other, even in comparison with such strict scientists as the above. And one who ventures to criticize such great scientists is perhaps first called upon to judge and to explain the far greater certainty constituting the foundation of Anthroposophy, which is so often accused of advancing fantastic notions; this certainty given by Anthroposophy is far greater than that transmitted by the most conscientious scientific investigators of the present time. In order to indicate the critical attitude, the earnest and truly scientific character of Anthroposophy and its foundations, let me first bring forward the critical objections which can be raised against the scientific interpretations given in the two above mentioned examples.

Let me now begin with these things, for in connection with to-day's subject my last two lectures already contained many [25th November. The Reality of the Higher Worlds. 26th November. Paths to the Knowledge of Higher Worlds.] explanations, so that the essential facts are known to the great majority of those who are now present; allow me therefore briefly to illumine the things already explained to you from another angle.

The following objection must be raised in regard to Schleich and his case of “death through auto-suggestion.” Please accept this, to begin with, as a simple critical objection showing how matters might also be viewed! Let us suppose that the man who pricked his hand with an inky nib and who believed that he had blood poisoning, really had some unknown inner defect, so that sudden death through a natural cause would have arisen in any case during the night after the accident. Such cases of sudden death really exist. On the other hand, all those who seriously investigate what can be achieved by a strengthening and intensification of the human cognitive powers, in the direction which I tried to indicate during the last few days, know that certain undefined soul-forces may be driven to a special climax through some abnormal conditions, through—one can really say—abnormal pathological conditions. Such cases undoubtedly exist and are critically described in books, so that everyone can test them, whenever the human will (and we shall see how this is possible) becomes transformed and thus attains cognitive power. Since the human will is directed towards the future, it is able, under certain pathological conditions, to have a premonition of events which prepare themselves, of events which will take place in the future out of the whole connections of a person's life. It is a matter of indifference whether we call this a foreboding, or whether we give it any other name. But it is a fact that under certain pathological conditions of a lighter nature, which do not clearly appear in the form of illness, a person may foresee, in the form of a picture, that he will, for instance, in fourteen days be thrown from his horse. All precautions will be useless, for he cannot perceive the accompanying circumstances. He has simply had a foreboding, he has simply foreseen an event about to take place.

The critical objection which must be raised by one who really knows the spiritual connections of man in a deeper sense, is that in the case of Schleich's patient, the factors which brought about his sudden death on the following night, can simply have already existed and that he had had an inner presentiment of his approaching death. Such a presentiment need not be fully conscious; it can quite well remain in the subconscious depths of the soul. But its influence upon consciousness manifests itself in symptoms which can be designated as nervousness and restlessness. One does all manner of unpremeditated things, and it is quite possible to prick one's finger with an inky nib under the influence of the nervousness arising from such a premonition. The person in question therefore simply knew unconsciously (let me use this paradoxical expression) that he would die. He did not clothe this in the statement that he had a presentiment of his death, but he grew nervous, pricked his hand with the nib and clung to the belief that he would have to die through blood poisoning. Thus it was not a case of death through auto-suggestion, but the man in question had had a presentiment of his coming death and all his actions were determined by this. In that case Schleich simply mistakes cause and effect, there is no auto-suggestion, as Schleich supposes, to the effect that a conscious thought exercised so strong a suggestion that death ensued; but death would have arisen in any case and the death-presentiment was the cause of the patient's fixed idea.

You see, even such things can be viewed critically, if another, undoubtedly possible thing is borne in mind; namely, that certain subconscious conditions which always exist in the soul, faintly rise to the surface of ordinary consciousness, but masked. In the unconscious depths of the human soul many conscious manifestations have quite a different aspect, and ordinary consciousness simply gives them a different interpretation.

Let us now turn to the other case, that of Sir Oliver Lodge. Undoubtedly you are all acquainted with the phenomenon known as “second sight.” Through an intensification of the human cognitive forces, it is possible to perceive things which cannot be perceived by the ordinary sound senses; it is possible, as it were, to see things in a way which is not in keeping with the ordinary conditions of environing space, so that this perceptive faculty can, so to speak, transcend space and time. This fact supplies the critical objection which must be raised even against the conscientiousness of an Oliver Lodge. For Sir Oliver Lodge uses this experimentum crucis in order to prove that his son's soul and none other must have spoken to him from the Beyond. But those who know the fine and intimate way in which second sight works, and that under certain abnormal conditions the intimate character of such a perceptive capacity is really able to overcome space and time (mediums always possess this perceptive faculty, though in the great majority of cases this is not to their advantage) those who are acquainted with this fact, also know that a person endowed with second sight can go to the point of giving a description as in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge's son, a description which may be characterised as follows:—

The two photographs arrived in London two or three weeks after the séance. The attention of the people who were present at the séance was turned towards these pictures, that is to something pertaining to the future. And this fact pertaining to the future could be interpreted by a kind of second sight which the medium possessed.

In that case, it can no longer be said that Raymond Lodge's soul shone supersensibly into the room where Sir Oliver Lodge was making his experiments. Here, we simply have to do with something enacted completely upon the physical plane, that is to say, with a vision of the future surpassing the ordinary perceptive capacity, but which does not justify the belief that a soul from beyond the threshold manifested itself in the séance room.

I mention these two examples and the objections against them, in order to awaken in you a feeling for the conscientiousness and for the critical attitude of anthroposophical spiritual research. The spiritual investigation practised in Anthroposophy does not at first proceed from any abnormal phenomena (the two last lectures proved this), but from completely normal conditions of human life, which appear in the forces of cognition, of the will and of feeling. Anthroposophical research seeks to develop these forces which enable one to gain a knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, in order to be, as it were, inwardly entitled to this knowledge, and in order to gain the true conscientiousness required in a training which strengthens thought.

Meditation exercises, such as those recently described to you, strengthen our thought to a high degree, so that our way of thinking becomes just as alive and intensive as sensory perception. Then there are the will exercises which I have already mentioned to you, and which will be characterised more fully in these lectures. Will-exercises require above all an intensive observation of normal life, we must become quite familiar with the conditions in which we normally live.

A short time ago, a scientist published a brief resume of the science of Anthroposophy inaugurated by me. This man is in no way a blind believer. He briefly recapitulates what I have been giving you as Anthroposophy, a material which already constitutes a voluminous literature. He recapitulates it, at the same time declaring that he is neither for nor against Anthroposophy, but then he makes a remark which has the semblance of being that of a strong opponent, although the author is neither an opponent nor a follower. I must confess that this cutting remark pleased me exceedingly, particularly if seen in the light in which Anthroposophy appears in comparison with the rest of modern culture. The writer remarks that in the light of ordinary consciousness many of my statements produce an irresistibly comical effect. I must admit that I like this remark for the following simple reason: When things are mentioned, such as Sir Oliver Lodge's case, or the other case reported by me, people prick up their ears, because in a certain way this appeals to their sensationalism and because it differs from what they are accustomed to hear.

This does not seem irresistibly comical to them. But when an Anthroposophist is obliged to establish a connection with altogether normal and human things, with human memory, or with the ordinary expressions of the human will, and explains that through certain exercises human thought may be intensified and that through self-education the will can be developed so that one changes and is able to penetrate as a transformed human being into the super-sensible world—and because he uses ordinary words designating things which ordinarily surround us, words which people do not like to apply to anything else—then he may produce an “irresistibly comical effect.” Many things therefore have such an irresistibly comical effect on people who only wish to apply the words to things to which they are applied in ordinary life. To an anthroposophical spiritual investigator, such views on Anthroposophy frequently appear like a letter which some one is supposed to read, but instead of reading it begins to make a chemical analysis of the ink with which it is written. I must confess that many statements on Anthroposophy really appear to me as if a person were to analyse the ink used in writing a letter, instead of reading it.

The essential point in the foundations of Anthroposophy is that one starts from completely normal human experiences, that one has a good knowledge of modern scientific truths, of modern ethical life, and develops these very things more intensively, so that one can penetrate into the higher worlds through an intensification of the cognitive forces which already exist less intensely in ordinary life and in science. One must of course have an understanding for these ordinary human experiences. One must pay attention to thoroughly ordinary normal experiences, which, however, we are not very much interested in observing carefully. Things must, so to speak, become enigmas and problems. Although they form part of ordinary life, one easily fails to see their enigmatic character. And here already begins for many people the “irresistibly comical effect,” that is, when one begins to say: The questions connected with man's alternating conditions of waking and sleeping must above all be looked upon as enigmas.

During our life, we continually change over from the condition of waking to that of sleeping, but we do not take much notice of this pendulum of life, swaying between the conditions of waking and sleeping. The strangest theories have been advanced in this connection. I might talk for a long time, were I to mention some of these theories relating to the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. But let me mention only one, the most well-known and usual one, namely that one simply takes for granted that when the human being is awake he gets tired and when he is sufficiently tired goes to sleep, and that sleep in its turn counter-balances fatigue. Sleep (this can be described in one or the other way, more or less materialistically) eliminates the causes of fatigue.

I should like to know if radical supporters of this theory can really say that fatigue is the cause of sleep, when for instance, they observe a person who really has no cause whatever for getting tired during the day—let us say, a fat gentleman living on private means, who goes to a more or less solid concert or to a lecture, not late in the evening, but in the afternoon, and who falls asleep not after the first five minutes, but after two minutes!

These things at first may really present a slightly comical aspect, but if they are viewed from every side, their earnest enigmatic character must stand before our soul. Those who believe that the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping can be studied with the aid of the ordinary scientific methods applied to-day, will never reach a satisfactory solution of this problem. Even such completely normal questions of life cannot be approached with the ordinary cognitive forces, but with a thinking intensified by meditation, concentration and other soul-exercises described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in my Outline of Occult Science, and also with transformed forces of the will.

What is attained when we try to strengthen thought by earnest meditation? I already explained to you that meditation must begin by strengthening thought to such an extent that it becomes a transformed memory. Our ordinary memory contains inner pictures which reproduce the experiences of our ordinary earthly life since our birth. Through memory, the picture of some real event stands before the soul, and that our soul-life is healthily connected with the external world in which we live, is guaranteed by the fact that we do not somehow mix up things fantastically, but that our memory-pictures indicate things which really existed.

We must therefore come to the point of being able to place before our soul, in the imaginative understanding described in the last few days, pictures which resemble our ordinary memory pictures. These pictures simply arise by our more and more bringing meditation concepts into our consciousness, and thus strengthening the soul-faculty of thinking, just as a muscle is made strong through exercise. We must reach the point of strengthening thinking to such an extent that it can live within its own content, in the same way in which we ordinarily live within our sense-experiences through our senses.

When such exercises have been made for a sufficiently long time, when we really attain to such a living way of thinking, then something develops which may be designated as a plastic form-giving, morphological way of thinking. Our thinking then contains a living essence, it has a living content which can ordinarily only be found in sense-perception. In that case we begin to notice something new: What modern natural science brings to the fore, is a source of regret to many, it constitutes materialism. But Anthroposophy which aims through its methods at penetrating into the super-sensible worlds, must in a certain sphere become thoroughly “materialistic,” stimulated in the right way by modern science.

This is the case if we learn to strengthen our thinking in the right way, if we can have before us, in imaginative thought, images which are just as alive as sense-perceptions and with which we deal just as freely as with sensory perceptions. When we perceive something through our senses we know unmistakably that we see Red or hear the note C sharp and that these are impressions which come to us from the external world, not impressions which rise out of our own soul. In the same way we know through imaginative thinking that the images which rise up before us are not empty phantasms produced by the soul, but that they are a living essence within, resembling sensory perception.

When we inwardly experience this emancipation from the body, this freedom which also exists in sense-perception, we also know what constitutes memory in ordinary life. When we remember something, we always plunge into our physical body; every memory-thought is connected with a parallel physical or at least etheric bodily process. We learn to know the material importance of that life which constitutes the ordinary life of memory. We then no longer ascribe the contents of memory to the independent soul, as does Bergson, the French thinker, but we know that in the ordinary memory-process the soul simply dives down into the body and that the body is the instrument which conjures up our memories. Now we know that only by imagination we reach the stage of being able to think independently of the body, of being able to think in ordinary life only with the soul, which we never do otherwise. In ordinary life we perceive through our senses, we abstract our thoughts from the sensory perception and retain them in our memory. But this process of retaining the thoughts in memory implies that we dive down into our body.

Imaginative knowledge alone shows us the true process of memory and that of sensory perception. Imaginative knowledge shows us what it means to live in free thoughts, emancipated from the body. It also shows us what it means to dive down into the physical organism with our thoughts, when we remember something. Even as we learn to know these things through an intensification of thinking, through an enhancement and strengthening of thought by meditation, so we may learn to know through the will how to pass through a kind of self-training which leads to similar results.

In ordinary life, the will only acquires a certain value when it passes over to external action; otherwise it remains mere desire, even though we may cherish the highest ideals, the most beautiful ideals, even though we may be true idealists. The highest ideals will remain mere desires, if we are not able to take hold of the external physical reality.

What characterises a desire, a wish? It has the peculiar quality of being abstracted and withdrawn from the world of reality. Symbolically one might say: When we only have desires, this is like drawing back the feelers of the soul. We then live completely within our own being, within the soul-element. But we also know that desires are, to begin with, tinged by the human temperaments. A melancholic person will have desires which differ from those of a sanguine person. The physical foundation of desires could soon be discovered by those who investigate these matters conscientiously with the aid of natural-scientific methods. The etheric foundation of desires can therefore be seen in the temperament, but their physical conditions can be perceived in the special composition of the blood or in other qualities of the bodily constitution.

This calls for that critical attitude mentioned at the beginning of my lecture; such a critical attitude shatters, I might say, many a pleasant dream. Allow me to give you a few indications which show how such pleasant dreams can be dispelled.

I certainly do not mean to be irreverent, nor do I destroy any ideal through lack of reverence, for I have a deep feeling for all the beauty contained, for instance, in the mysticism of a St. Theresa or of a St. John of the Cross. Do not think that I am second to anyone in admiring all the beauty contained in such mystical expressions. But those who have some experience of the special way in which, for instance, St. Theresa or St. John of the Cross produced their visions, know to what extent human desires have a share in these visions. They know that desires which live in the soul's depths have a share particularly in mystical experiences, and these desires may lead a spiritual investigator to study the bodily constitution of these mystics. Nothing is desecrated when a spiritual investigator draws attention to such things, when he indicates that in certain organs he discovers an inner state of excitement, that the nerves exercise a different influence on certain organs, thus producing a certain effect in the soul, which may even take on the beautiful aspect of the visions described by St. John of the Cross or by St. Theresa, or by other mystics of that type. We are far more on the right track if we seek the foundation of such visions, which are so beautiful and poetic in the case of St. Theresa and of St. John of the Cross, in certain bodily conditions than in the beholding of some nebulous mystery.

As I have said I do not wish to pull to pieces something which I revere as much as any other person in this room, but the truth must be shown, and also the critical attitude derived from an anthroposophical foundation. It must be shown that an anthroposophist above all should not fall a prey to illusions. Above all, he should be free from illusion in regard to human desires which are rooted in the human organism, desires rooted in the physical human organism which flare up, come, so to speak, to boiling point, if I may use this expression, and lead to the most beautiful visions.

A person who wishes to become a spiritual investigator in the anthroposophical sense, should not only strengthen his thinking through meditation, but he should also transform his desires through self-training.

This can be done by taking in hand systematically that which otherwise takes place as if of its own accord. Let us honestly admit that during our ordinary life we allow events to guide us far more than we ourselves guide the course of our life. In ordinary life this or that thing may influence us, and if we look back ten years into our past earthly existence, we find that the external conditions and the people whom we met, unfolded within us a side of our character which now presents a different aspect from what it was like ten years ago.

A person who earnestly strives to become an anthroposophical spiritual investigator must, in this connection, also make exercises which influence the will. The ordinary will in life acquires a meaning when directed towards external actions. But an anthroposophical spiritual investigator must apply the impulses of the will to his own development, to his own life. He should be able to pursue the following aim: “In regard to this or that characteristic or expression of life, you must change, you must become different from what you were.” Though it may seem paradoxical, it is a great help if we begin to change something within us through our own initiative, through our own impulse; if we change some strongly rooted habit, or even a small trifle. I repeat that it can be something quite insignificant, for instance, one's handwriting. If someone really strives with an iron will to change his handwriting, the application of energy required for the transformation of a habit may be compared with the strengthening of a muscle because the will is strengthened. By growing stronger and by being applied inwardly instead of outwardly, the will begins to exercise certain influences in man. The transformations in the external world once produced by the effects of the will, now become transformations within human nature.

If we do exercises of the will, as described in detail in anthroposophical books, we reach the point of transforming our life of desire, so that this becomes emancipated from the human organisation, even as our thinking emancipates itself from the body through meditation.

During the moments in which we live in anthroposophical research, we are no longer in a condition which may be described by saying that the wish is father to the thought. When we exercise this self-training, this application of education of oneself at a maturer age, our wishes and desires become an inner power which unites with the emancipated thinking. This leads us to a real perception of the true nature of the will-impulses in ordinary life, and to a perception of the true nature of thoughts in ordinary life. Even as we ordinarily perceive red or blue, or hear C sharp or C, so we now perceive thoughts as realities; we learn to know the will-impulses objectively, that is to say, separated from our own being.

In this way we reach the point of having a right judgment of the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. Only by rendering thought objective through exercise, as objective as a sense-perception, so that we are no longer connected with our body as in the case of a remembered thought, only with this thinking developed in free meditation, can the act of falling asleep be rightly grasped and perceived.

A person who seeks to gain insight into the normal act of falling asleep, with the aid of the ordinary cognitive forces, may set up one hypothesis after the other, but he will not be able to recognise the true nature of sleep.

This strengthened thinking which we acquire, and on the other hand our transformed desires, are those which show us that when we fall asleep we can, in a certain way, still follow the moment in which sleep takes hold of us; we look, as it were, upon the act of falling asleep and we learn to know that when we go to sleep we do not simply have before us a changed bodily condition, but that we really slip out of our body with our independent soul-life; we go out of our body and we leave something behind—namely, our thoughts.

We can leave our thoughts behind consciously, when we fall asleep, only because our thinking has been intensified. The thoughts remain behind with the body and fill it in the shape of formative forces. We notice that we have abandoned our body only with our feeling and with our will. But by perceiving with what part of the soul we leave the body, we obtain at the same time an objective certainty that we have an independent soul-essence and that we go out of the body with this independent soul-essence.

And now we know that what we leave behind on the bed on falling asleep, is not only something which can be investigated by physiology, anatomy and biology, but that it is permeated by the web of thoughts, This web of our thoughts must first be made strong enough, so that we can abandon it consciously, in the same way as we consciously turn our face away from colours and leave off looking at them. Through this strengthened thought we know that we leave behind on the bed our physical body and a body of forces containing thoughts which act like forces; we leave these bodies behind so that they may exist independently between falling asleep and waking up.

These thoughts, these morphological thoughts described to you in recent lectures, exist in our ordinary consciousness only as reflected images. They too have a reality, and with this reality they fill out our physical body as a special etheric body.

Now we know that when we fall asleep we abandon our sensory body and our thought body. (I might also say, the physical body and the etheric body, or the physical body and the body of formative forces). We abandon these bodies with our will and with our feeling. In ordinary life our constitution does not enable our consciousness to remain clear, it is not strong enough to maintain consciousness unless it is filled out by thoughts. Consciousness, such as we have it in ordinary life and in ordinary science, must unite with the body and experience within the body the thoughts of the body; only then it is fully conscious. But when the soul goes out of the body as mere feeling and will, we ordinarily become unconscious.

But a person who attains to the imaginative thinking referred to here recently, experiences the moment of falling asleep consciously, and he can produce conditions which resemble ordinary sleep, except that they are not unconscious, but that forces are at work within him and that he can really experience the organism of feeling and of the will; that is to say, he really experiences that part of his being which can emancipate itself from the body.

If we thus learn to know the moment of falling asleep, we also learn to know the moment of waking up. We now learn to judge that the moment of waking up really consists of two parts: Our attitude on waking up is the same as when a sense-impression is produced. Whenever we wake up, something must stimulate the soul. This need only be our own body, which has slept long enough and which produces this stimulus in its changed condition. But even as there is a stimulus in every sensory impression, so there is always a stimulus when we wake up, and this stimulus works upon our feeling, which left the body when we fell asleep. Even as the eyes and the ears perceive colours and sounds, so the emancipated soul now perceives through feeling something which is outside; the moment of waking up is a perception through feeling; we take hold of the body when we wake up. The independent will takes hold of the physical organism in the same way in which we ordinarily move an arm or a leg. Waking up really consists of these two acts.

In regard to falling asleep and waking up, we have now learned to know the alternating connection between the independent soul which leaves the body every night with its feeling and with its will, and the conditions in which the soul lives from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, when it is united with the body. Anthroposophical investigation is therefore based upon a strengthening of the capacities of thinking and of the will, so that we are able to observe and really perceive things which we ordinarily cannot perceive. And if in this way we are able to perceive the alternating conditions of sleeping and waking, we are then capable of passing on to something else.

For if we continue more and more in the exercises described in the recent lectures and indicated in detail in the books already mentioned we come to the point that we do not always fall asleep when we leave the body, but that we can at will draw out of the body our feeling and our will and really look back upon the body. Then the human body is as objective as a desk or a table in ordinary life. We learn to know a thing only because we are no longer connected with it, no longer penetrated by it subjectively, because it stands before us as an object.

The object which stands before us when we go out of the body with the will and with the feeling is above all the physical body. To-morrow we shall see that this perception outside the body gives us a new aspect of man's physical being. We perceive, above all, the body of formative forces, consisting of a web of thoughts, but active thoughts. We look back upon it as if it were a mirror. And then we are confronted by the strange fact that whereas formerly we were subjectively or personally connected with our thoughts, we now face this world of thoughts as if it were a photographic plate; in looking back upon our body our thoughts stand before us like a photographic plate. This is the same as the miniature reflection of the world which we ordinarily have in our eye. Even as the eye is an organ of sight through the fact that it can reproduce the world within itself, so the etheric and the physical body which remained behind, become a reflecting apparatus, where something becomes reflected through the soul and spirit, whereas the eye only gives us a physical reflection of something outside. By leaving our thoughts behind in the physical body, we see through this mirror not only the web of thoughts, but also the world.

The course of soul-spiritual events can therefore be described in detail, when the cognitive forces are intensified through meditation and a self-training of the will, in order to gain knowledge of the super-sensible worlds. Such a training enables us to develop certain conditions in which we are outside our body, but which do not resemble sleep; they constitute something which is indicated in my books as the continuity of consciousness. In higher knowledge we really go out of the body with our emancipated soul-being. We can recognise that we have left the body through the fact that the mirror of thoughts is now no longer within us, but outside. We go out of the body, yet we remain completely self-conscious, as already explained.

We are able to return into the body whenever we like; we do not fall a prey to hallucinations or visions, but we can follow the whole process with mathematical precision. Since the whole process can be observed in this way, we are also able to judge the ordinary events of earthly life when we return into the body. Now we know what it is like to dive down into the body with the emancipated soul. We not only learn to know the act of falling asleep, when we abandon the body, but now we also learn to return at will into our body with the emancipated soul.

It leaves a special impression upon us when we once experience this emancipated soul and then dive down again into the body, so that the soul becomes imprisoned by the body. The soul-spiritual world which was round about us when we were outside the body, now ceases to exist for us. We feel as if this world had vanished and that the body absorbs us as we dive into it. We also learn to know what it is like to abandon the body; we see how the thoughts go away from us, for they remain with the body, and how we abandon the body with the feeling and willing part of our soul. But in abandoning our body we feel at the same time that the spiritual world begins to rise up before us.

What knowledge have we now gained? Through the processes of waking up and of falling asleep, we have learned to know birth and death. We have experienced how the human being unconsciously abandons his physical and etheric organism with his feeling and with his will and how he returns into the body when he wakes up in the morning.

When we have made the above-mentioned exercises, we grow conscious where formerly we were unconscious, upon leaving our body. In full consciousness we now experience in advance a process which takes place when we die. And when we dive down into our physical body on returning from the spiritual world, when the thoughts outside vanish and once more appear as mere images, asserting themselves within the personality as something which is not real, then we learn to know the process of birth.

Whereas the ordinary scientific methods content themselves with the ordinary understanding, with ordinary thoughts which are applied to external observations and experiments that remain connected with us, anthroposophical investigation transforms the personality by rendering thought objective and by using the body as an all-embracing sense-organ. I might say that the body becomes one large eye. This eye, however, is outside and it is simultaneously a photographic plate.

The world into which we penetrate through spiritual investigation, the soul-spiritual world, now reflects itself in the external world as thought. An insight into completely normal processes, such as sleeping and waking, or birth and death, now enables us also to attain an inner vision of the soul-world, we perceive everything that pertains to the soul. Now our own experience enables us to distinguish whether what Professor Schleich designates as death through autosuggestion was merely an unconscious representation, or whether what was described by Sir Oliver Lodge, was “second sight.”

We can now recognise the attitude of a person who is not a conscious spiritual investigator, but whose independent soul is thrust out of the body by some abnormal conditions. This may be due to some illness of the physical body. Let us suppose that there is a lesion in an organ; this may be quite sufficient to cause the soul-spiritual being of a person not yet capable of independent spiritual vision to be driven out of the physical body not because he falls asleep, but owing to a pathological condition of the body, so that he now obtains an imperfect perception of things which a spiritual investigator perceives consciously and methodically.

We need not deny the truth of the abnormal observations which are interesting those people to-day who wish to go beyond the sphere of ordinary, trivial facts. But we can look upon such abnormal observations critically, and such a critical attitude is due to the fact that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy is not the caricature which many people suppose it to be, but by awakening special spiritual forces and by fully recognising the scientific conscientious method acquired by humanity in the course of the past centuries, it endeavours to rise up to the super-sensible worlds. And since the human being is connected with the super-sensible worlds with the innermost, immortal kernel of his being, spiritual investigation alone can recognise man's mortal and immortal essence. This will be explained more fully in tomorrow's lecture.

Through the fact that the human being dives down into his eternal part, that he does not only build up an anthropology transmitting a knowledge which can only be gained through the physical body, but through the fact that he builds up an Anthroposophy, transmitting a knowledge which man as independent being, obtains through his soul and spirit, through this fact the human being really learns to know the world in its true aspect.

The task of my next two lectures will be to describe the true being of man, his immortal, everlasting being, and the true aspect of the universe, from the stand-point indicated to-day.

I wish to give you in three lectures a survey of what Anthroposophy has to say concerning the human being and his relation to the universe. The universe and man are undoubtedly the two most important problems, for they embrace every question dealing with science and life and every problem of greatest and smallest importance.

It lies in the nature of these problems that in regard to these things I must limit myself to the anthroposophical horizon; that is to say, to the things connected with the great life problems of human existence which transcend the knowledge gained through sensory perception and which lie beyond the sphere of ordinary science.

In regard to the human being, self-knowledge is undoubtedly a problem which must appeal to us most of all. For in order to gain a foundation and a firm standpoint in life, we must first obtain a conception of our own nature. It must be said that at all times people sought to gain a knowledge of the universe, for they knew that the mysteries of the world's evolution are connected with man's own being; they knew that they could only learn something about man's being by seeking to know what the universe is able to give them, the universe of which the human being forms part.

Moreover, it cannot be denied that in connection with a knowledge of man and of the universe modern people show a deep interest for everything which transcends ordinary science, and we may say that innumerable attempts are now being made to transcend the spheres of ordinary science in order to investigate what lies beyond birth and death, beyond the world which can be fathomed by ordinary sense perception and by the understanding which is based upon it.

In recent times we can observe above all that there are scientific investigators who in many ways endeavor to transcend the spheres indicated above, and as an introduction let me mention a few striking conceptions of modern investigators, examples which prove that the keen interest in the problems which will form the subject of my three lectures really exist, but which prove at the same time how very difficult it is, even in the case of people well grounded in science, to penetrate into the sphere of the soul and of the spirit. As I do not wish to speak in abstract terms, let me proceed immediately from a few concrete examples.

A German scientist who worked very hard to discover how to penetrate into the super-sensible nature of the soul, and how to investigate the influence exercised by the soul's super-sensible nature upon the body's physical nature, tried to give many examples taken from his medical and scientific experience, showing the soul's influence, the influence of an unquestionably psychic essence upon the body; a marked example contained in one of the books written by this physician and scientist named SCHLEICH, who was personally well known to me, is the following: He describes a patient, who came to him in a great state of excitement, because in the office he had pricked his skin with an inky nib. The doctor could ascertain that it was quite an insignificant scratch. But the patient was under the delusion that this prick with an inky nib had given him a blood poisoning and that he would have to die unless his hand was amputated, and he begged the doctor to amputate his hand and his arm as quickly as possible.

The doctor could only tell him to be calm; that he would be quite well again in a couple of days and that there was nothing to be afraid of. As a responsible doctor he had to tell him this and could not, of course, amputate his arm.

But the patient was not satisfied. He went to another doctor who told him exactly the same thing and also refused to amputate his arm. Schleich was nevertheless nervous, for he was acquainted with soul moods, and so he inquired the next day how the patient was feeling and he was told that the man had died in the night.

The autopsy did not reveal any trace of blood poisoning, or similar symptoms. This was out of the question. Yet the patient had died.

In connection with this case, Schleich remarks: Death caused by radical auto-suggestion. The patient had the fixed idea that he had to die; it was an extremely radical auto-suggestion, and he really did die under the influence of this auto-suggestion.

This is the statement of an investigator well acquainted with all the natural-scientific methods, with all the medical methods. He reports this case in order to show a purely psychical influence; i.e., the influence of a thought, upon bodily processes, an influence showing, according to Schleich, that death set in as a result.

Schleich mentions many other cases, less marked and radical, in order to prove that it is possible to observe the soul, living in thoughts, feelings, sensations and will impulses, and that the soul can really influence the body. He wishes to describe, as it were, the influence of the super-sensible upon the physical.

Another case is described by a far more conspicuous scientist, by Sir Oliver Lodge: Sir Oliver Lodge lost his son Raymond in the last war. He fell on the Belgian-German frontier, and Sir Oliver Lodge, who had long ago felt the inclination to build a bridge leading from the sensory, natural-scientific sphere to the super-sensible sphere, was deeply stirred by the loss of his beloved son. Through many incidents, which are not directly connected with this matter and which indeed are not related, he was induced to use the mediumistic power of a certain person, in order to enter into connection with the departed soul of his son, Raymond.

When such a case arises in ordinary spiritistic circles, it is not necessary to consider it seriously, for one knows how unscientific these meetings are, and how amateurishly and unscientifically such cases are judged and investigated in spiritistic circles. But the matter must be taken more seriously when we have to do with the greatest modern scientist, with a man so thoroughly at home in the sphere of external, natural-scientific research and so well acquainted with scientific methods. That is why Sir Oliver Lodge's book on his spiritual intercourse with his son Raymond, made such a deep impression on the world.

On reading this book, we immediately feel that it is written by a man who does not approach the investigation of such things superficially, by a conscientious and responsible scientist. Even in other things, which I will not mention here, one can see that Sir Oliver Lodge applies to this sphere the same way of thinking, the same scientific method which he is accustomed to apply in his physical laboratory. The real facts which he now relates, and which, one might say, rightly produced such a deep impression upon all those who read Sir Oliver Lodge's book, are as follows:

Through the corresponding medium, Sir Oliver Lodge and a few other people who were present at the seances, were told that Raymond Lodge; that is, the soul or the spirit of Sir Oliver Lodge's son, wished to describe a scene enacted on the Belgian-German frontier shortly before his death, and the medium related that Raymond Lodge had a photograph taken and described this act in detail. In was expressly stated that two photographs were taken; these two photographs were carefully described and attention was drawn to the fact that upon the second photograph Sir Oliver Lodge's son had a somewhat different pose than on the first one.

When these communications were made in London through the medium (Sir Oliver Lodge describes it so that one can really see—I emphasize this expressly—that he took every possible scientific precaution), at the time when these experiments were made, no one in London knew anything about these photos, nor that they had been taken. After examining all the facts, Sir Oliver Lodge came to the conclusion that if this message were true, it could only come from his son, from the departed son himself.

In fact, after two or three weeks, the photographs which no one had seen before really arrived in London. They corresponded with the description given by the medium or, as Sir Oliver Lodge believed, with the description given by the soul of his son. Even a scientist could see in this fact, to begin with, one might say, an “experimentum crucis.” Nobody in London could possibly have seen those photographs. It appeared that the description was correct even in regard to the fact that two photographs were taken and that the second one showed a difference. The photographer had taken the photograph of the group which included Raymond Lodge twice, and for the second photograph he had shifted his camera a little. All this had been described exactly. A conscientious scientist could not find the slightest reason for questioning the medium's communication.

The two radical cases described to you just now, show that the longing, the great desire of unquestionably serious modern scientists leads them to seek a knowledge which goes beyond the facts revealed by ordinary external scientific research.

But one who speaks of anthroposophical research from an anthroposophical standpoint, must draw attention to the fact that the methods of anthroposophical investigation differ from those adopted even by such serious-minded scientists. For, in regard to a scientific way of thinking and a scientific mentality the foundations of anthroposophical research (I hope that my three lectures will make things clear to you from every aspect) should be stricter and more conscientious than any other, even in comparison with such strict scientists as the above. And one who dares to criticize such great scientists is perhaps called upon to judge and to explain the far greater certainty constituting the foundation of Anthroposophy, which is so often accused of advancing fantastic notions; this certainty given by Anthroposophy is far greater than that transmitted by the most conscientious scientific investigator of the present time. In order to indicate the critical attitude, the earnest and truly scientific character of Anthroposophy and its foundations, let me first bring forward the critical objections which can be raised against the scientific interpretations given in the two above-mentioned examples.

Let me now begin with these things, for in connection with today's subject my last two lectures already contained many explanations, so that the essential facts are known to the great majority of those who are now present; allow me therefore to illumine the things already explained to you from another angle.

The following objection must be raised in regard to Schleich and his case of “death through auto-suggestion.” Please accept this, to begin with, as a simple critical objection showing how matters might ALSO be viewed! Let us suppose that the man who pricked his hand with an inky nib and who believed that he had blood poisoning, really had some unknown inner defect, so that sudden death through a natural cause would have arisen in any case during the night after the accident. Such cases of sudden death really exist. On the other hand, all those who seriously investigate what can be achieved by a strengthening and intensification of the human cognitive powers, in the direction which I tried to indicate during the last few days, know that certain undefined soul forces may be driven to a special climax through some abnormal conditions, through—one can really say—abnormal PATHOLOGICAL conditions. Such cases undoubtedly exist and are critically described in books, so that everyone can test them … whenever the human will (and we shall see how this is possible) becomes transformed and thus attains cognitive power. Since the human will is directed towards the future, it is able, under certain pathological conditions, to have a premonition of events which prepare themselves, of events which will take place in the future out of the whole connections of a person's life. It is quite indifferent whether we call this a foreboding, or whether we give it any other name. But it is a fact that under certain pathological conditions of a lighter nature, which do not clearly appear in the form of illness, a person may foresee, in the form of a picture, that he will, for instance, be thrown by his horse. All precautions will be useless, for he cannot perceive the accompanying circumstances. He has simply had a foreboding, he has simply foreseen an event about to take place.

The critical objection which must be raised by one who really knows the intensification of spiritual conditions, is that in the case of Schleich's patient, the factors which brought about his sudden death on the following night, already existed and that he had had an inner presentiment of his near death. Such a presentiment need not be fully conscious; it can quite well remain in the subconscious depths of the soul. But its influence upon consciousness manifests itself in symptoms which can be designated as nervousness and restlessness. One does all manner of unpremeditated things, and it is quite possible to prick one's finger with an inky nib under the influence of the nervousness arising from such a premonition. The person in question therefore simply knew unconsciously (let me use this paradoxical expression) that he had to die. He did not clothe this in the statement that he had a presentiment of his near death, but he grew nervous, pricked his hand with the nib and clung to the belief that he would have to die through blood poisoning. Thus it was not a case of death through auto suggestion, but the man in question had had a presentiment of his near death and all his actions were determined by this. In that case Schleich simply mistakes cause and effect; there is no auto suggestion, as Schleich supposes, to the effect that a conscious thought exercises so strong a suggestion that death ensued; but death would have arisen in any case and the death presentiment was the cause of the patient's fixed idea.

You see, even such things can be viewed critically, if another, undoubtedly possible thing is borne in mind; namely, that certain subconscious conditions which always exist in the soul, faintly rise to the surface of ordinary consciousness, but masked. In the unconscious depths of the human soul many conscious manifestations have quite a different aspect, and ordinary consciousness simply gives them a different interpretation.

Let us now turn to the other case of Sir Oliver Lodge. Undoubtedly you are all acquainted with the phenomenon known as “second sight.” Through an intensification of the human cognitive forces, it is possible to perceive things which cannot be perceived by the ordinary sound senses; it is possible, as it were, to see things in a way which is not in keeping with the ordinary conditions of environing space, so that this perceptive faculty can, so to speak, transcend space and time. This fact supplies the critical objection which must be raised even against the conscientiousness of an Oliver Lodge. For Sir Oliver Lodge uses this “experimentum crucis” in order to prove that his son's soul and none other must have spoken to him from the Beyond. But those who know the fine and intimate way in which “second sight” works, and that under certain abnormal conditions the intimate character of such a perceptive capacity is really able to overcome space and time (mediums always possess this perceptive faculty, though in the great majority of cases this is not to their advantage) those who are acquainted with this fact, also know that a person endowed with second sight can go to the point of giving a description as in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge's son, a description which may be characterized as follows:

The two photographs arrived in London two or three weeks after the séance. The attention of the people who were present at the séance was turned towards these pictures; that is, to something pertaining to the future. And this fact pertaining to the future could be interpreted by a kind of second sight which the medium possessed.

In that case, it cannot be said that Raymond Lodge's soul shone in supersensibly into the room where Sir Oliver Lodge was making his experiments. Here, we simply have to do with something enacted completely upon the physical plane; that is to say, with a vision of the future surpassing the ordinary perceptive capacity, but which does not justify us to admit that Raymond Lodge's soul manifested itself from Beyond in the séance room.

I mention these two examples and the objections against them, in order to awaken in you a feeling for the conscientiousness and for the critical attitude of anthroposophical spiritual research. The spiritual investigation practiced in Anthroposophy does not at first proceed from any abnormal phenomena (the two last lectures proved this), but from completely normal conditions of human life, which appear in the forces of cognition, of the will and of feeling. Anthroposophical research seeks to develop these forces which enable one to gain a knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, in order to be, as it were, inwardly entitled to this knowledge, and in order to gain the true conscientiousness required in a training which strengthens thought

.Meditation exercises, such as those recently described to you, strengthen our thought to a high degree, so that our way of thinking becomes just as alive and intensive as sensory perception. Then there are the will exercises already mentioned to you, which will be characterized more fully in these lectures. Will exercises require above all an intensive observation of normal life; we must become quite familiar with the conditions in which we normally live.

Meditation exercises, such as those recently described to you, strengthen our thought to a high degree, so that our way of thinking becomes just as alive and intensive as sensory perception. Then there are the will exercises already mentioned to you, which will be characterized more fully in these lectures. Will exercises require above all an intensive observation of normal life; we must become quite familiar with the conditions in which we normally live.

A short time ago, a scientist published a brief resume of the science of Anthroposophy inaugurated by me. This man is in no way a blind believer. He briefly recapitulates what I have been giving you as Anthroposophy, a material which already constitutes a voluminous literature. He recapitulates it, by declaring that he is neither for nor against Anthroposophy, but then he makes a remark which has the semblance of being that of a strong opponent, although the author is neither an opponent nor a follower. I must confess that this strong remark pleased me exceedingly, particularly if seen in the light in which Anthroposophy appears in comparison with modern culture. The writer remarks that in the light of ordinary consciousness many of my statements produce an irresistibly comical effect. I must admit that I like this remark for the following simple reason: When things are mentioned, such as Sir Oliver Lodge's case, or the other case reported by me, people prick their ears, because in a certain way this appeals to their sensationalism and because it differs from what they are accustomed to hear.

This does not in any way seem comical to them. But when an Anthroposophist is obliged to establish a connection with altogether normal and human things, with human memory, or with the ordinary expressions of the human will, and explains that through certain exercises human thought may be intensified and that through self-education the will can be developed so that one changes and is able to penetrate as a transformed human being into the super-sensible world—when an Anthroposophist uses ordinary words designating things which ordinarily surround us, words which people do not like to apply to anything else—then he may produce an “irresistible comical effect”. Many things in Anthroposophy have such an irresistible comical effect on people who only wish to apply words to things in ordinary life. To an anthroposophical spiritual investigator, such views on Anthroposophy frequently appear like a letter which someone is supposed to read, but instead of reading it he begins to make a chemical analysis of the ink with which it is written. I must confess that many statements on Anthroposophy really appear to me as if a person were to analyze the ink used in writing a letter, instead of reading that letter!

The essential point in the foundations of Anthroposophy is to go out from completely normal human experiences, to have a good knowledge of modern scientific truths, of modern ethical life, and to develop these very things more intensively, so that one can penetrate into the higher worlds through an intensification of the cognitive forces which already exist less intensely in ordinary life and in science. One must, of course, have an understanding for these ordinary human experiences. One must bear in mind the ordinary normal experience, which falls out of what one likes to observe carefully. Things must, so to speak, become enigmas and problems. Although they form part of ordinary life, one easily fails to see their enigmatic character. For many people the “irresistible comical effect” begins at this point, where one begins to say: The questions connected with the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, these above all must be looked upon as enigmas.

During our life, we constantly change over from the condition of waking to that of sleeping, but we do not take much notice of this pendulum of life, swaying between the conditions of waking and sleeping. The strangest theories have been advanced in this connection. I might talk for a long time, were I to mention some of these theories relating to the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. But let me mention only one of these theories, the most well-known and usual one; namely, that one simply takes for granted that when the human being is awake he gets tired and as a result goes to sleep, and that sleep in its turn counter-balances fatigue. Sleep (this can be described in one or the other way, more or less materialistically) eliminates the cause of fatigue.

I would like to know if radical upholders of this theory can really say that fatigue is the cause of sleep; for instance, when they observe a person who really has no cause whatever for getting tired during the day—let us say, a fat gentleman living on private means, who goes to a more solid concert or to a lecture, not late in the evening, but in the afternoon, and who falls asleep not after the first five minutes, but after two minutes!

These things at first may really present a slightly comical aspect, but if they are viewed from every side, their earnest enigmatic character must stand before our souls. Those who believe that the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping can be studied with the aid of the ordinary scientific methods applied today, will never reach a satisfactory solution of this problem. Even such completely normal questions of life cannot be approached with the ordinary cognitive forces, but with a thinking intensified by meditation, concentration and other soul exercises described in my book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and in my “Outline of Occult Science,” and also with transformed forces of the will.

What is attained when we try to intensify thought by earnest meditation? I already explained to you that meditation must begin by intensifying thought to such an extent that it becomes a transformed memory. Our ordinary memory contains inner pictures which reproduce the experiences of our ordinary earthly life since our birth. Through memory, the picture of some real event stands before the soul, and that our soul life is soundly connected with the external world in which we live, is guaranteed by the fact that we do not somehow mix up things fantastically, but that our memory pictures indicate things which really existed.

We must therefore come to the point of placing before our soul, in the imaginative understanding described in the last few days, pictures which resemble our ordinary memory pictures. These pictures simply arise through the fact that we place them into our consciousness, and by filling consciousness with an ever greater amount of meditative representations we strengthen the soul capacity of thinking in the same way in which a muscle is ordinarily strengthened by exercise. We must reach the point of intensifying thinking to such an extent that it can live within its own content, in the same way in which we ordinarily live within our sense experiences through our senses.

When such exercises have been made for a sufficiently long time, when we really attain to such a living way of thinking, then something develops which may be designated as a plastic, form-giving, morphological way of thinking. Our thinking then contains a living essence; it has a living content which can ordinarily only be found in sense perception. In that case we begin to notice something new: What modern natural science brings to the fore, is a source of regret to many; it constitutes materialism. But Anthroposophy, which aims through its methods to penetrate into the super-sensible worlds, must in a certain sphere become thoroughly “materialistic,” stimulated in the right way by modern science.

This is the case if we learn to strengthen our thinking in the right way, if we can have before us, in imaginative thought, images which are just as alive as sense perceptions and with which we deal just as freely as with sensory perceptions. When we perceive something through our senses we know unmistakably that we see red or hear the note C sharp and that these are impressions which come to us from the external world, not impressions which rise out of our own soul. In the same way we know through imaginative thinking that the images which rise up before us are not empty phantasms produced by the soul, but that they are a living essence within, resembling sensory perception.

When we inwardly experience this emancipation from the body, this freedom which also exists in sense perception, we also know what constitutes memory in ordinary life. When we remember something, we always plunge into our physical body; every memory thought is connected with a parallel physical or at least etheric bodily process. We learn to know the material importance of that life which constitutes the ordinary life of memory. We then no longer ascribe the contents of memory to the independent soul, as does Bergson, the French thinker, but we know that in the ordinary memory process the soul simply dives into the body and that the body is the instrument which conjures up our memories. Now we know that only by IMAGINATION we reach the stage of being able to think independently of the body, of being able to think in ordinary life only with the soul, which we never do otherwise. In ordinary life we perceive through our senses, we abstract our thoughts from the sensory perception and retain them in our memory. But this process of retaining the thoughts in memory implies that we dive down into our body.

Imaginative knowledge alone shows us the true process of memory and that of sensory perception. Imaginative knowledge shows us what it means to live in free thoughts, emancipated from the body. It also shows us what it means to dive down into the physical organism with our thoughts, when we remember something. Even as we learn to know these things through an intensification of thinking, through an enhancement and strengthening of thought by meditation, so we may learn to know through the WILL how to pass through a kind of self-training which leads to similar results.

In ordinary life, the will only acquires a certain value when it passes over to external action; otherwise it remains mere desire, even though we may cherish the highest ideal, the most beautiful ideals, even though we may be true idealists. The highest ideals will remain mere desires, if we are not able to take hold of the external physical reality.

What characterizes a DESIRE, a WISH? It has the peculiar quality of being abstracted and withdrawn from the world of reality. Symbolically one might say: When we only have desires, this is like retracing the feelers of the soul. We then live completely within our own being, within the soul element. But we also know that desires are, to begin with, tinged by the human temperaments. A melancholic person will have desires which differ from those of a sanguine person. The physical foundation of desires could soon be discovered by those who investigate these matters conscientiously with the aid of natural-scientific methods. The etheric foundation of desires can therefore be seen in the temperament, but their physical conditions can be perceived in the special composition of the blood or in other qualities of the bodily constitution.

This calls for that critical attitude mentioned at the beginning of my lecture; such a critical attitude shatters, I might say, many a pleasant dream. Allow me to give you a few indications which show how such peasant dreams can vanish.

I certainly do not mean to be irreverent, nor do I destroy any ideal through lack of reverence, for I have a deep feeling for all the beauty contained, for instance, in the mysticism of St. Theresa or of St. John of the Cross. Do not think that I fall back behind anyone in admiring all the beauty contained in such mystical expressions. But those who have some experience of the special way in which, for instance, St. Theresa or St. John of the Cross produced their visions, know to what extent human desires have a share in these visions. They know that desires which live in the soul's depths have a share particularly in mystical experiences, and these desires may lead a spiritual investigator to study the bodily constitution of these mystics. Nothing is desecrated when a spiritual investigator draws attention to such things, when he indicates that in certain organs he discovers an inner state of excitement, that the nerves exercise a different influence on certain organs, thus producing certain effects in the soul, which may even take on the beautiful aspect of the visions described by St. John of the Cross or by St. Theresa, or by other mystics of that type. We are far more on the right track if we seek the foundation of such visions, which are so beautiful and poetic in the case of St. Theresa and of St. John of the Cross, in certain bodily conditions. This leads us far more on to the right track than if we seek some nebulous mystery as an explanation for these visions.

As stated, I do not wish to pull to pieces something which I revere as much as any other person in this room, but the truth must be shown, and also the critical attitude derived from an anthroposophical foundation. It must be shown that an anthroposophist above all should not fall a prey to illusions. To begin with, he should be free from illusion also in regard to human desires which are rooted in the human organism, desires rooted in a part of the physical human organism which flares up, comes, so to speak to a boiling point, if I may use this expression, and which leads to the most beautiful visions.

A person who wishes to become a spiritual investigator in the anthroposophical meaning, should not only strengthen his thinking through meditation, but he should also transform his desires through self-training.

This can be done by taking in hand systematically that which otherwise takes place as if of its own accord. Let us honestly admit that during our ordinary life we allow events to guide us far more than we ourselves guide the course of our life. In ordinary life this or that thing may influence us, and if we look back ten years into our past earthly existence, we find that the external conditions and the people whom we met, unfolded within us a side of our character which now presents a different aspect from what it was like ten years ago.

A person who earnestly strives to become an anthroposophical investigator must, in this connection, also make exercises which influence the will. The ordinary will in life acquires a meaning when directed towards external actions. But an anthroposophical spiritual investigator must apply the impulses of the will to his own development, to his own life. He should be able to pursue the following aim: “In regard to this or that expression of life, you must change, you must become different from what you were.” Though it may seem paradoxical, it is a great help if we begin to change something within us through our own initiative, through our own impulse, if we change some strongly-rooted habit, or even a small trifle. I repeat that it can be something quite insignificant; for instance, one's handwriting. If someone really strives with an iron will to change his handwriting, the application of energy required for the transformation of a habit may be compared with the gymnastic exercises for the strengthening of a muscle. By growing stronger and by being applied inwardly instead of outwardly, the will begins to exercise certain influences upon the human being. The transformations in the external world once produced by the effects of the will, now become transformations within human nature.

If we do exercises of the will, as described in detail in anthroposophical books, we reach the point of transforming our life of desires, so that these become emancipated from the human organization, even as our thinking emancipates itself from the body through meditation.

During the moments in which we live in anthroposophical research, we are no longer in a condition which may be described by saying that the wish is father of the thought. When we apply this self-training and these pedagogical impulses at a maturer age, our wishes and desires become an inner power which unites with the emancipated thinking. This leads us to a real perception of the true nature of the will impulses in ordinary life, and to a perception of the true nature of thoughts in ordinary life. Even as we ordinarily perceive red or blue, or hear C sharp or C, so we now perceive thoughts as realities; we learn to know the will impulses objectively; that is to say, separated from our own being.

In this way we reach the point of having a right judgment of the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. Only by rendering thought objective through exercise, as objective as a sense perception, so that we are no longer connected with our body as in the case of a remembered thought, only with this thinking developed in free meditation, can the act of falling asleep be rightly grasped and perceived.

A person who seeks to gain insight into the normal act of falling asleep, with the aid of the ordinary cognitive forces, may set up one hypothesis after the other, but he will not be able to recognize the true nature of sleep.

This intensified thinking which we acquire, and on the other hand our transformed desires, are those which show us that when we fall asleep we can, in a certain way, still follow the moment in which sleep takes hold of us; we look, as it were, upon the act of falling asleep and we learn to know that when we go to sleep we do not simply have before us a changed bodily condition, but that we really slip out of our body with our independent soul life; we go out of our body and we leave something behind; namely, our thoughts.

We can leave our thoughts behind consciously, when we fall asleep, only because our thinking has been intensified. The thoughts remain behind with the body and fill it in the shape of formative forces. We then notice that we abandoned our body only with our feeling and with our will. But by perceiving with what part of the soul we leave the body, we obtain at the same time an objective certainty that we have an independent soul essence and that we go out of the body with this independent soul essence.

Now we know that what we leave behind on the bed on falling asleep, is not only something which can be investigated by physiology, anatomy, and biology, but that it is permeated by the woof of thoughts. This woof of our thoughts must first be made strong enough, so that we can abandon it consciously, in the same way in which we consciously turn our face away from color and in the same way in which we turn away from a perception. Through this strengthened thought we know that we leave behind on the bed our physical body and a body of forces containing thoughts which act like forces; we leave these bodies behind so that they may exist independently between falling asleep and waking up.

These thoughts, these morphological thoughts described to you in recent lectures [Lectures given on the 25^th and 26^th of November, 1921.] exist in our ordinary consciousness only as reflected images. They, too, have a reality, and with this reality they fill out our physical body as a special etheric body.

Now we know that when we fall asleep we abandon our sensory body and our thought body. (I might also say, the physical body and the etheric body, or the physical body and the body of formative forces. We abandon these bodies with our will and with our feeling. In ordinary life our constitution does not enable our consciousness to remain clear; it is not strong enough to maintain consciousness unless it is filled out by thoughts. Consciousness, such as we have it in ordinary life and in ordinary science, must unite with the body and experience within the body the thoughts of the body; only then it is fully conscious. But when the soul goes out of the body as mere feeling and will, we ordinarily become unconscious.

A person who attains to the imaginative thinking mentioned in these days, experiences the moment of falling asleep consciously, and he can produce conditions which resemble ordinary sleep, except that they are not unconscious, but that forces are at work within him and that he can really experience the organism of feeling and of the will; that is to say, he really experiences that part of his being which can emancipate itself from the body.

If we thus learn to know the moment of falling asleep, we also learn to know the moment of waking up. We now learn to judge that the moment of waking up really consists of two parts: Our attitude on waking up is the same as when a sense impression is produced. Whenever we wake up, something must stimulate the soul. This need only be our own body, which has slept long enough and which produces this stimulus in its changed condition. But even as there is a stimulus in every sensory impression, so there is always a stimulus when we wake up, and this stimulus works upon our feeling, which left the body when we fell asleep. Even as the eyes and the ears perceive colors and sounds, so the emancipated soul now perceives through feeling something which is outside; the moment of waking up is a perception through feeling; we take hold of the body when we wake up. The independent will takes hold of the physical organism in the same way in which we ordinarily move an arm or a leg. Waking up really consists of these two acts.

In regard to falling asleep and waking up, we now learned to know the alternating connection between the independent soul which leaves the body every night with its feeling and with its will, and the conditions in which the soul lives from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, when it is united with the body. Anthroposophical investigation is therefore based upon a strengthening of the capacities of thinking and of the will, so that we are able to observe and really perceive things which we ordinarily cannot perceive. In this way we are able to perceive the alternating conditions of sleeping and waking, and we are then capable of passing on to something else.

If we continue more and more in the exercises described in these days and indicated in detail in the above mentioned books, we come to the point that we do not always fall asleep when we leave the body, but that we can at will draw out of the body our feeling and our will and really look back upon the body. Then the human body is as objective as a desk or a table in ordinary life. We learn to know a thing only because we are no longer connected with it, no longer penetrated by it subjectively, because it stands before us as an object.

The object which stands before us when we go out of the body with the will and with the feeling is above all the physical body. Tomorrow we shall see that this perception outside the body gives us a new aspect of man's physical being. We perceive, above all, the body of formative forces, consisting of a woof of thoughts, but active thoughts. We look back upon it as if it were a mirror. And then we are confronted by the strange fact that whereas formerly we were subjectively or personally connected with our thoughts, we now face this world of thoughts as if it were a photographic plate; in looking back upon our body our thoughts stand before us like a photographic plate. This is the same as the miniature reflection of the world which we ordinarily have in our eye. Even as the eye is an organ of sight through the fact that it can reproduce the world within itself, so the etheric and the physical body which remained behind, become a reflecting apparatus, where something becomes reflected soul-spiritually, whereas the eye only gives us a physical reflection of something outside. By leaving our thoughts behind in the physical body, we see through this mirror not only the woof of thoughts, but also the world.

The course of soul-spiritual events can therefore be described in detail, when the cognitive forces are intensified through meditation and a self-training of the will, in order to gain knowledge of the super-sensible worlds. Such a training enables us to develop certain conditions in which we are outside our body, but which do not resemble sleep; they constitute something which is indicated in my books as the continuity of consciousness. In higher knowledge we really go out of the body with our emancipated soul being. We can recognize that we have left the body through the fact that the mirror of thoughts is now no longer within us, but outside. We go out of the body, yet we remain completely conscious, as already explained.

We are able to return into the body whenever we like; we do not fall a prey to hallucinations or visions, but we can follow the whole process with mathematical precision. Since the whole process can be observed in this way, we are also able to judge the ordinary events of earthly life when we return into the body. Now we know what it is like to dive down into the body with the emancipated soul. We do not only learn to know the act of falling asleep, when we abandon the body, but now we also learn to return at will into our body with the emancipated soul.

It leaves a special impression upon us when we once experience this emancipated soul and then dive down again into the body, so that the soul becomes imprisoned by the body. The soul-spiritual world which was round about us when we were outside the body, now ceases to exist for us. We feel as if this world had vanished and that the body absorbs us as we dive into it. We also learn to know what it is like to abandon the body; we see how the thoughts go away from us, for they remain with the body, and how we abandon the body with the feeling and willing part of our soul. But in abandoning our body we feel at the same time that the spiritual world begins to rise up before us.

What knowledge have we gained? Through the processes of waking up and of falling sleep, we learned to know birth and death. We experienced how the human being unconsciously abandons his physical and etheric organism with his feeling and with his will and how he returns into the body when he wakes up in the morning.

When we have made the above-mentioned exercises, we grow conscious where formerly we were unconscious, upon leaving our body. In full consciousness we now experience in advance a process which takes place when we die. And when we dive down into our physical body on returning from the spiritual world, when the thoughts outside vanish and once more appear as mere images, asserting themselves within the personality as something which is not real, then we learn to know the process of birth.

Whereas the ordinary scientific methods content themselves with the ordinary understanding, with ordinary thoughts which are applied to external observations and experiments that remain connected with us, anthroposophical investigation transforms the personality by rendering thought objective and by using the body as an encompassing sense organ. I might say that the body becomes one large eye. This eye, however, is outside and it is simultaneously a photographic plate.

The world in which we penetrate through spiritual investigation, the soul-spiritual world, now reflects itself in the external world as thought. An insight into completely normal processes, such as sleeping and waking, or birth and death, now enables us to attain a vision of the soul world; we perceive everything that pertains to the soul. Now our own experience enables us to distinguish whether the process which Professor Schleich designates as death through auto-suggestion, or the “second sight” described by Sir Oliver Lodge, are mere unconscious representations, or not.

We can now recognize the attitude of a person who is not a conscious spiritual investigator, but whose soul is pushed out of the body by some abnormal conditions. This may be due to some illness of the physical body. Let us suppose that there is a lesion in an organ; this alone may suffice that the soul-spiritual being of a person not yet capable of independent spiritual vision is pushed out of the physical body, not because he falls asleep, but owing to a pathological condition of the body, so that he now obtains an imperfect perception of things which a spiritual investigator perceives consciously and methodically.

We need not deny the truth of abnormal observations which interest those people who wish to go beyond the sphere of ordinary, trivial facts. But we can look upon such abnormal observations critically, and such a critical attitude is due to the fact that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy is not the caricature which many people suppose it to be, but by awakening special spiritual forces and by fully recognizing the scientific conscientious method acquired by humanity in the course of the past centuries, it endeavors to rise up to the super-sensible worlds. Since the human being is connected with the super-sensible worlds with the innermost, immortal kernel of his being, spiritual investigation alone can recognize man's mortal and immortal essence. This will be explained more fully in tomorrow's lecture.

Through the fact that the human being dives down into his eternal part, that he does not only build up an anthropology transmitting a knowledge which can only be gained through the physical body, but through the fact that he builds up an Anthroposophy, transmitting a knowledge which can be obtained through the soul and spirit as independent parts, through this fact the human being really learns to know the world in its true aspect.

The aim of my next two lectures will be to describe the true being of man, also his immortal, everlasting being, and the true aspect of the universe, for the standpoint indicated today.

Opening words by Leo Polak: Dear attendees and Mr. Speaker! As the chairman of the local Philosophy Association, I would like to welcome everyone here and believe that I have the right and the duty to make a very brief preliminary remark. We were in fact surprised that the Philosophy Association, a scientific association, organized an evening in the auditorium of the university with Dr. Steiner, whose relationship to philosophy was well known. Some people wanted to see this as a sanction and recognition of the scientific-philosophical value or significance of Dr. Steiner's work. I believe that both sides thought this wrongly. Firstly, our association did not spontaneously invite this evening's speaker from its own ranks, but merely responded to a request from the anthroposophical side to organize such an evening here, and rightly so, as I will have more to say in a few moments. Secondly, organizing this evening does not in any way imply agreement or unanimity with the work of Dr. Steiner. They know that in the same lecture halls here at the university, where, for example, critical philosophy, Kantian philosophy, is read, dogmatic, Thomist philosophy is heard, and rightly so. That is not to say the approval of those who gave rise to it, but purely and exclusively the objective attitude of science itself, which always and everywhere sees and examines everything and retains the good, which always and everywhere says, “audite et alteram partem”. Our philosophical association also wanted to express this idea. We did so in the justified conviction that the speaker this evening also holds exactly the same opinion. We also asked beforehand whether there would be an opportunity to give an account of a dissenting opinion afterwards, and, I might almost say, Dr. Steiner naturally agreed. So he also wanted to apply the “audite et alteram partem”. After these brief but necessary conditions, I ask the speaker to take the floor.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! In the various lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Holland since February 19th, on anthroposophical spiritual science and its practical orientation, my main concern has been to emphasize the practical aspects of these spiritual scientific endeavors. For these spiritual-scientific endeavors seek to accommodate the innumerable souls who, in the broadest circles of life today, long for something that arises out of the facts of this present time.

Today, however, my dear audience, allow me to speak from a completely different point of view. If, on the one hand, the anthroposophical spiritual scientist is condemned to seek their circles in the general public because of its practical approach to life, it is also the case that the roots of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science extend in a very precise way, I believe, into the philosophical foundations of human endeavor. And it is this connection between anthroposophy and philosophical research, with the way of thinking that is philosophical, that I would like to speak to you about today. I will try not to speak in generalizations, but rather to speak in three directions, in the hope that this will shed light on the connections between philosophical research and anthroposophical spiritual knowledge.

Within philosophical research, we recognize a wide variety of problems and problem formulations. Today, I would like to focus mainly on the relationships between anthroposophy and three problem formulations: the epistemological problem, the ontological problem and the ethical problem. It would be tempting, however, to also touch on the aesthetic problem, but that would mean taking up too much of your time.

The epistemological problem, in the way we find it presented today in philosophy in the most diverse forms, is concerned with justifying man's belief in the reality of the external world; it is concerned to show the extent to which we can assume a valid relationship between that which is present within our knowledge in our consciousness and that which we can regard as some kind of objective reality outside ourselves. This problem, as well as numerous others, swings back and forth between dogmatics and skepticism in the history of philosophy, one might almost say as a matter of course. And anyone who is familiar with the history of more recent epistemology knows how extraordinarily easy it is to fall into a kind of skepticism when faced with the epistemological problem. I will have more to say about this later. In any case, here we have something of what must be of particular interest to anthroposophical spiritual science in relation to philosophy: in a certain way, it presents epistemology in a very vivid and very pressing way for human research and knowledge of the limits of knowledge.

The second problem I would like to talk about is the ontological problem. It is much older than the problem of knowledge. It seeks to bring reality – namely insofar as this reality goes beyond the sensory – into consciousness in some way, by means of knowledge, from what man can experience in the entities of consciousness. Now anyone who is familiar with the history of the development of ontology knows that, basically, a very understandable skepticism has entered into the ontological problem since the time that the ontological proof of God's existence has fallen victim to criticism, especially since the criticism of Kantianism regarding this ontological proof of God's existence. Since that time, there has also been little inclination within philosophical research to find something in the ontological that can provide clues for placing oneself in the sphere of reality itself through the development of inner knowledge. So here, too, in a sense, we are approaching a kind of limit, which is probably felt much more clearly in the face of ontology than in the face of many epistemological problems.

With regard to the ethical problem, I would just like to point out in the introduction that, out of a certain – forgive the expression, it is only meant terminologically – philosophical despair, we have come to the so-called value theory in relation to the ethical problem in recent times. But that means basically nothing more than despairing of being able to see through the ethical impulses present in our consciousness in their connection with reality and therefore seeing as based on something that is supposed to have validity in our world view - the value - but which is nevertheless formulated in such a way that one does not want to imagine a certain relationship to reality, to objective being.

I did not want to say anything binding, but only point out certain forms that the three problems have taken and which give reason to intervene in these three problem formulations with anthroposophical spiritual science. Before I can do that, I would like to briefly discuss the methodology of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science here, which I also do in my public lectures. However, I then try to present the things as popularly as possible, which of course has its drawbacks, but in some respects perhaps also some advantages.

I would like to say only this much today about the methodology of anthroposophy: that the entire path of research in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is based on the development of soul forces that already exist in ordinary life, that are also applied in ordinary science, but which are initially obtained from both ordinary life and ordinary science at a certain level, a level to which they are brought by inheritance, by ordinary education and so on. I need not define this stage, to which certain soul-powers are brought, for it is generally known, and what I actually want to say with this will emerge from what I have to communicate about the further development of these soul-powers.

Anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher must, through careful inner soul work, further develop certain soul powers beyond those applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science. He must first further develop what is popularly known as the ability to remember, which underlies our memory, beyond what it is in ordinary life. The method of systematically ordered meditation and concentration, as I have described it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', and in other writings of mine in the anthroposophical literature, serves this purpose. The essence of this further development of the ability to remember is based on the fact that one forms ideas that can easily be overlooked. This fact, that one demands easily comprehensible ideas in the spiritual scientific method, has its profound significance. For nothing may be used for this further development of soul forces that could somehow be a reminiscence of life or that could somehow have an autosuggestive or even suggestive effect. Therefore, it is necessary to keep the images used in meditation and concentration as simple and straightforward as possible. It is not important that such images have a truth value in the usual sense, because they are not intended to point to any reality at all. They are only to be used to develop inner soul forces. Therefore, it is important that we not be deterred by the questionable character of the relationship between a representation and reality; whether the representation is fantastic, whether the representation is somehow made quite arbitrarily, is not the point, but rather that we can survey it in terms of its entire content, so to speak, like a mathematical representation, a geometric representation. Then it is a matter of mustering the strength to go through a certain period of time – this must be learned, at first one can only do it for a very short time, little by little one acquires a certain inner practice – then it is a matter of learning to rest with the whole intensity of the soul on such ideas.

Now a misunderstanding can arise right away. Because if it is done wrongly, if all the things that I have carefully compiled in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” are not observed, then the inner state of mind that is absolutely necessary for the spiritual scientific method to work properly will not be achieved. This state of soul must be exactly the same as when solving problems in geometry or in mathematics in general. In the same way that one is fully aware of one's will at work in the soul when constructing figures, when searching for any algebraic or other relationships, one must remain fully aware of the entire content of consciousness while resting on easily comprehensible ideas. It is therefore very important that anyone who is to become a spiritual researcher in an impeccable way should actually have at least a certain degree of mathematical training, and to such an extent that he has in particular acquired the way of thinking about mathematical problems.

Perhaps I may refer to a personal experience, the following one. I always think, when I am dealing with spiritual-scientific problems, which sometimes become quite difficult for one, because they often slip away from one when one already has them – I always think of the event that helped me decades ago, perhaps forty years ago, to get ahead on the path that I am about to characterize. It was the moment when I was able to grasp the strange fact in synthetic geometry for the first time – we don't want to dwell on the justification of this assumption now – that, based on the assumptions of synthetic geometry, the one infinitely distant point of a straight line on the right side is the same as the infinitely distant point on the left side. It was not so much this mathematical fact, but the whole way of thinking, how this assumption arises from the prerequisites of synthetic geometry, of projective geometry. I am only pointing this out here to draw attention to how the same state of mind, the same way of letting consciousness work, must take place in what I call meditation and concentration.

If one now does such inner soul work for a sufficiently long time — it depends entirely on the inner destiny of the person whether it takes a short time, two or three years, or much longer, until the first inner results of this further development of certain soul abilities occur, But out of the ordinary power of memory, by which we can conjure up past events before our soul, through the further development of this power of memory, a new soul power actually arises, a soul power of which we had no idea before. This soul power is developed memory, and yet it is quite different from ordinary memory. This soul power enables us to link certain states of our consciousness with other ideas than we usually do. In his everyday life, a person lives in the alternating states between waking and sleeping. We are, of course, familiar with the various physiological hypotheses that have been put forward about them, but these are of little interest to us here. What interests us is the state of ordinary consciousness. This ordinary consciousness is dulled, even paralyzed, to the point of complete dullness when we fall asleep, and returns to its bright state when we wake up. Of course, the human being does not arise spiritually and mentally when he wakes up; he must exist in some way between falling asleep and waking up. The fact is that during this time he does not use his senses, does not use his will organization, and does not use the mind that combines sensory perceptions. I will not go into the interruption of sleep by dreams, that would be taking it too far.

The person who has trained their memory in the way described is in exactly the same state in relation to their physical organism. When this trained memory awakens in them, they do not use their ordinary senses in the states in which they induce this memory. He knows how to switch them off, he knows how to switch off everything that is switched off during sleep. But his consciousness is not dulled. He lives in a conscious state, in a consciousness that is filled with content, and he knows that this content is of a spiritual-soul nature. Just as we otherwise receive soul-content in ordinary life through our senses, through the combining mind, so there is soul-content when the spiritual scientist makes use of the developed faculty of memory. Just as we have a sensory environment around us through our physical organism, so the spiritual scientist has a truly supersensible environment that permeates our sensory environment all around him. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a fact of the developing experience that occurs in the spiritual researcher; and any conceit, as if one were dealing with some kind of illusion, is simply excluded by the whole context of life in which one is placed by virtue of the method, which has only been outlined to you in principle, by which one reaches such a developed consciousness. One learns to recognize what it means to have consciousness in the body-free state.

I would like to show you, so that you can see that anthroposophical spiritual science does not speak from some vague, nebulous realm, but from concrete facts, to explain something very specific: our ordinary ability to remember, which is precisely what is needed to recall what we have once experienced. When this ability to remember is further developed in the way I have just described, then it becomes something else, and that is the peculiar thing. It is indeed developed memory, but there is no actual memory; the ability to remember has been transformed into an immediate perception of the spiritual, supersensible environment. This can be seen from the fact that once one has a spiritual-supernatural fact before one and can also characterize it, and one simply wants to recall this spiritual-supernatural state into consciousness again later from memory, one cannot do so immediately. It does not come up directly from consciousness. The ability to remember has been developed, and yet one does not remember exactly what one experiences through this developed ability to remember. You have to do something completely different if you want to see a spiritual state that you have once had again.

You then have to re-establish the conditions through which you called the fact before you. You can remember everything that led you to the moment of seeing the fact, then you can have the fact again, but you cannot simply reconstruct this fact from memory, as is the case with an ordinary memory. Therefore it is true when one speaks of the paradox: the one who writes his books as a spiritual researcher forgets the contents; he writes down the spiritual facts, so to speak, he takes them in, but he forgets them. Nor can he repeat a lecture from memory a second time, but he must recall the conditions under which he was placed before the vision the first time, then he can have the vision again. It is just as one can only have a perception again, if it is just a perception, by approaching the fact. Memory only gives one an image. The developed faculty of memory must simply go back to the event in the spiritual-supernatural world in order to be able to experience it again. This is, in a sense, the first step in entering the supernatural world, in developing the faculty of memory in a certain way so that it becomes a kind of supernatural faculty of intuition. In this way, one gradually comes to truly recognize the spiritual and soul as such, the spiritual and soul that underlies the human being, and the spiritual and soul that surrounds us in the outer world, which is also the basis of the facts and laws of nature.

And I want to characterize a second soul power in its further development. I believe that the development of this soul power as a power of knowledge must justifiably evoke even more contradiction than the development of the memory, because one does not want to accept this second soul power as a power of knowledge at all, it is the power of love. Of course, my dear audience, love is certainly considered to be something subjective. It is also in ordinary life. But if you apply certain spiritual research methods to the ability to love, as I have just described for the ability to remember, then something else emerges from the power of love, which is then also a power of knowledge of the supersensible world. The point is to first become aware of how you are actually undergoing a transformation every moment of your life, how you become a different person. You only have to look honestly into the depths of your soul and you will realize that what you are today was something different ten or twenty years ago. And you will have to say to yourself: In the vast majority of things, one has left oneself to the stream of life, one has had very little influence on the developmental conditions that have made one different from year to year, from decade to decade.

The spiritual researcher must move on to action in this area. He must, so to speak, take the development of his entire soul into his own hands through self-discipline. He must give himself certain directions, without thereby losing the naivety and the elementary of a full life. He must give himself certain directions and must be able to pursue what is formed out of him in metamorphosis, in careful self-observation. In this way, a certain soul power, which is otherwise latent, is drawn out of the depths of the soul. And love, which in ordinary life is bound to the physical organism, becomes independent of this physical organism in a similar way to soul power, just as the developed ability to remember does, except that the developed ability to remember conjures up images and imaginations of a supersensible world before our soul, whereas the developed power of love enables us to inwardly participate in what is presented to us in these images. Objectification of one's own soul life, absorption in objectivity, is the precondition for the knowledge of the supersensible and is achieved by developing the ability to love in this way. Through the development of the ability to remember, we attain the possibility of developing higher worlds of imagination, worlds of imagination about the supersensible. Through the development of the ability to love, we attain the ability to experience the inner reality, the essentiality of the supersensible.

I have only briefly sketched out what actually leads to the knowledge of a spiritual world, to which we belong with our actual inner human nature and in which we find the clues to the knowledge of the eternal nature of this human being. The real knowledge about the question of immortality is achieved on the path I have just characterized. In this way we come to know that part of us which passes through birth and death; we learn to recognize those worlds in which we live as [spiritual beings] before we descend to a birth or to a conception, and into which we also descend when we pass through the gate of death. But I will only hint at this; a more detailed explanation can be found in the literature, it would lead too far now.

Now, by means of such a method of spiritual research, two wrong paths of the human soul are, firstly, seen in the right way; but secondly, the conditions for avoiding them are created. The first thing is that in this way one gains a real insight into what memory actually is, by developing it. We need this power of remembrance; if we want to keep our ordinary life intact, we must be able to conjure up before our soul the images of our experiences from a certain point in our childhood that lies very early. We get to know this ability to remember through the insights I have just described, in that we say to ourselves: it actually prevents us from looking into our inner being. The mystic wants to look into the depths of the soul through direct experience. The spiritual researcher studies the dangers associated with such mystical introspection. It is a peculiarity of the soul life that what one has been experiencing since childhood between birth and death can not only arise in its original form at any given moment in consciousness, but that it can arise in the most diverse met amorphoses, so that there is the possibility that some experience, perhaps quite trivial, may gradually transform itself in the subconscious so that it later enters consciousness as a sublime-looking event. The mystic then perhaps believes he is immersing himself in some divine substratum of the soul and the world, while he has nothing but a transformed memory of life. The exact knowledge of the ability to remember leads us to avoid the mystical paths in the right way. Because if you have developed the ability to remember in the way I have described, you naturally remain a perfectly rational person. You only use this developed ability to remember when you want to. But if you have developed this ability to remember, you can really see through the ordinary memory. One can then take the path that the mystic only believes he can take. The mystic dwells in the same region of the soul where the memory is also present; basically, he sees only sensual, transformed memories. But the one who knows the developed memory, he, so to speak, sees through the ordinary memory region. Then, however, he does not get to see what a Tauler, a Mechthild of Magdeburg or anyone else believed they saw mystically, but he gets to see, but now from the inside, the material organs of the human organism. That is the real way, my dear attendees, to get to know people physically from the inside.

The mystic gets to know nothing else, so to speak, but the soul smoke, the soul mist that rises from the boiling internal organs. That is what needs to be said, that it is not at all the case that mystical raptures are present when one comes to self-knowledge through a developed memory. Rather, self-knowledge radiates into the real human organization, which can of course be recognized from the outside through anatomy and physiology, but its inner essence cannot be seen through. Here, my dear attendees, we reveal those things where we see the inner being of man in an inner connection with the surrounding nature in its various kingdoms. Only when we get to know the inner workings of the human organization in this way do we get to know the kind of physiology that shows the relationship between the various organs in their healthy and diseased states and what is present in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and in the other natural spheres and kingdoms.

This is where it is possible to internalize our medicine, which has advanced so far through external research, to build the bridge between pathology and a therapy based on a real understanding of the human being and the world; last spring I presented to doctors and medical students at our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach about such a deepening of medicine. And it is precisely in this field that one can show how the individual sciences can in turn be fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This was also shown for the other sciences by the university courses in Dornach last fall, which were given by thirty scholars in various fields of science, as well as by artists, by practical people, by commercial people. They showed how anthroposophical spiritual science can enrich the individual sciences by adding to what has led to such research triumphs in recent times, to what external research can offer, that which can be seen inwardly. For just as I have described, that through the real knowledge of the ability to remember, through its further development, the knowledge of the human being truly comes about, so too does a spiritual-supernatural knowledge of nature come about in this way.

The other pitfall to be avoided, which can be seen through with such further developed cognitive abilities, is that of dialectical-philosophical speculation, which is of course present to a certain extent within our scientific research, or at least our thinking. We research by observing phenomena and by causing phenomena through our own experiments. But we do not just apply our combining mind to it, for example in the methodical sense of doing natural science, which remains phenomenology, but we apply it to extrapolate beyond the empirical, and then we arrive at those constructions that are given in atomistics, in molecular theory. It is not the intention here to criticize the significance and justification of molecular and atomic theory, which has been confirmed by experiment. But that which, to a certain extent, is present as the supporting element of natural scientific phenomena in the form of atomistic thinking, is seen through in its unreasonableness when the second power of cognition, that which arises out of the power of love, is developed in the way described. Then we learn to recognize that we must remain within the outer empirical-sensory environment in the world of phenomena. Further penetration then depends on whether we actually get the spiritual-supersensible, and not just a small-scale translation of the sensory world of atoms.

Here, my dear audience, I would like to draw your attention to something that cannot be ignored, especially if you are a spiritual researcher. In philosophical epistemology, we speak of having sensory impressions. We speak of the quite legitimate research results of modern physiology, through which one wants to form an idea of the formation of an objective fact unknown to us, which then continues to the sensory organ. We speak of what takes place in the sensory organ, what possibly takes place in the corresponding brain sphere, and so on. In this way, one arrives at pushing the epistemological problem to the physiological problem in a certain sense, but one considers this problem at every single point in the world. One wants to go from a single phenomenon to what is behind it. One proceeds in exactly the same way as if one wanted to conclude something from a single letter on a written page. You read the whole page; the context of the letters on the whole page reveals the reason why the individual letter is as it is. In this way, we also remain within the world of phenomena. We do not speculate about the individual phenomena in terms of something underlying them, such as a “thing in itself.” Rather, we consider the context of the phenomena, reading the reality of the phenomena to certain totalities, one might say, studying them. This then leads us to that which is expressed spiritually in the phenomena, and can only be grasped spiritually with the supersensible powers of knowledge of which I have spoken.

In this way, I tried to penetrate deeper into the world through a kind of further development of the cognitive abilities of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. However, this also presents the epistemological problem to anthroposophy in a very specific way. This epistemological problem, as I have just mentioned, suffers from such things. We study in a certain way that which is supposed to be unknown to us. We then pursue it to the sense, to the brain. We come to the point where we find no transition to what actually lives in the soul. And if I — naturally leaving out much that could be said, but which is certainly well known to those present from the history of more recent epistemology — if I just pick out the most important things, so it might be the following: The conscientious epistemologist comes to the conclusion that he no longer allows the possibility, within the world of representation – on closer analysis, however, not only the world of representation arises, but also a part of the world of sensation – but let us stick to the world of representation – to relate the representations, as they live inwardly through logic, psychology, to some actual reality or to something that he would like to take as an actual reality. It comes about, so to speak, that one feels very strongly the pictorial character of the life of imagination in the empirical fact; to feel it so strongly that one sees no bridge from this experienced pictorial character of the life of imagination over into reality. Therefore, many of the newer epistemologists have given up trying to build a bridge from the life of imagination over into reality. They appeal to the will, to the will, which they felt to be the elementary point of contact with things; for them, the will has become the thing by which man is actually authorized to speak of the reality of the external world, whereas he should never actually be able to derive the reality of an external world from the world of imagination.

I believe that in this area of epistemology, an enormous amount of conscientious work has been done in recent times, and that ingenious things have come to light; the literature is indeed one of the richest. But I do not believe that one can recognize, by immersing oneself in this literature with a completely open mind, that one is standing on quite uncertain ground within this epistemology and that one cannot build a bridge from something in the soul to some reality that can reasonably be assumed. The world of imagination – if one can grasp it, it shows – really does have the character of a picture. No matter how significant the conclusions we arrive at in this pictorial realm of the life of imagination may be, we cannot escape from the pictorial to arrive at any kind of reality.

On the other hand, I do not believe that the way out of approaching reality through the will can be fully realized epistemologically. Because, dear attendees, in the imagination we are at least completely filled with the full clarity of day-consciousness; in the world of imagination we overlook exactly that which is happening, at least in the imagination, pictorially. In the activity of the will, we are asleep to a certain extent. We do not experience the activity of the will inwardly; it is not transparent to us. Therefore, it was particularly striking to me that a recent epistemologist who rejected the justification of the objective reality of the world of imagination and who assumed the activity of the will in order to establish a reality, Dilthey, that he did not refer to the experiences of the adult, but of the still dreaming child. It is indeed the case that we never come to a full awakening in relation to the actual inner essence of the will in our lives between birth and death if we do not develop the ability to love in the way I have shown. But when that happens, the whole inner soul condition changes. Then one comes to understand the reason why our imaginative life is essentially pictorial.

If one wants to grasp something like the developed capacity for knowledge, one must be prepared for a completely different state of mind. Then, of course, the usual conditions for understanding are not present. Understanding is much more an experience, an immersion in things. But the person must fulfill this prerequisite in order to penetrate into the matter at all. If one now approaches with the developed ability to remember, with one's soul experience — leaving aside bodily functions — and observes what, because of its pictorial nature, prevents the epistemologist from building a bridge to it, then one finds out why the life of imagination is essentially pictorial. One then examines precisely, but now with the developed ability to remember, what the relationship actually is between the imagination and the external, empirical world. And one finds: there is basically no relationship at all between what arises in us as an image and what is, so to speak, reflected back as images of our imagination when our organism is affected by the external world. There is no inner relationship at all between these images. There is a relationship between the content of the images and what is in the external world, but not between the essence, the being of this world of imagination and what is externally the environment. We are confronted with an environment and an inner world that are essentially distinct from one another. One can be reflected in the other, but they are different. Through the developed power of memory, one learns to recognize what actually lives in the imagination, which is essentially bound to the main human organization. It is not what comes from the outside world, which we can look at with our senses, but rather the echo of our prenatal or pre-conception spiritual being. That which essentially underlies our imaginative life is like the penetration of a shadow of our prenatal existence into our existence between birth and death. We think essentially with the powers with which we lived in the spiritual world before our conception.

This analysis is arrived at through the developed faculty of memory; hence the lack of affinity between what is actually the echo of a completely different world and what surrounds us in the external world. It is only in the course of our lives that we establish the relationship between what we bring with us from the prenatal world and what we perceive through our senses. This, ladies and gentlemen, becomes a fact. And now the epistemological problem no longer presents itself before our soul as a mere formality, but now it presents itself, so to speak, like the shadow of a very real world of facts. We learn to recognize what we actually want through conceptual cognition as human beings. Through this conceptual cognition, we want to bring two worlds into concordance: the prenatal purely spiritual world and the postnatal sensual world. The purely spiritual world dismisses us with a question, the sensual world gives us the answer.

I first tried to present this development of the human being in relation to truth in a philosophical way in my small epistemological work “Truth and Science”, where I tried to show how the grasping of reality is not a mere formal, but how man first stands vis-a-vis reality as a half, as a something that is made by himself as something not quite real; how he then acquires knowledge, especially in scientific work. That was purely scientific, philosophical-formal work based on Kantianism, an epistemology that then had to be supplemented by what I have just presented, so that light is shed by the recognition of the supersensible in methodology with regard to this supersensible, in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are some highlights with regard to the epistemological problem. This epistemological problem came to my mind particularly 30 years ago when I devoted myself to the study of the problem of freedom. I will just summarize in a few sentences what I explained in my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1892. I do not want to define freedom now, but just point out how it lives in everyone. It would be impossible to understand free actions in any way if the basis for those free actions were available to us as the result of an external, physical-sensory reality or as the result of an internal, organic reality. Only because we have images in our life of ideas, images that, as it were, mirror our prenatal existence as mirror images do not have reality but mirror what is in front of the mirror, only because such images, for which there is no external reality in relation to their essence, provide the impulses for our free actions; only because of this are free actions possible. If free acts were not based on pictorial impulses, they could not be free acts. The fact that a truly real epistemology leads us precisely to the pictorial character of the life of imagination, and in particular to the pictorial character of pure thinking, makes it possible to base a real philosophy of freedom on such an epistemology.

Now, my dear audience, how has the ontological problem been brought to skepticism? The fact that in the course of human development, which I have shown in relation to philosophy in my two-volume book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, humanity has increasingly lost the inner experience of reality, that humanity has virtually moved on to the pictorial character of conceptualized experience. Why did the ontological proof of the existence of God become invalid in a certain age?

In fact, if one studies the true history of philosophy, one finds that this refutation of the ontological proof of God's existence would have had no value at all for older times, because in those times, not only was the existence of God the existence of God with ontological proofs, but rather, one inwardly experienced the divine in the concepts, and by letting the concepts run dialectically, a reality lived in this dialectical process. This reality was lost inwardly more and more. That is the meaning of the development of the ego in humanity: that more and more the inner connection with reality was lost, so that finally the very theory of knowledge became necessary, which wanted to build a bridge from the non-existing, but merely pictorial concept to external reality. In ontology, this occurs at a higher level. We have mere dialectics instead of the dialectic full of content, instead of the real process, which lived as a supersensible process in the world of concepts. Our ontology – we have almost none anymore, but the one that still remained in older philosophers – is, I would like to say, the filtered dialectical product of an old, inner experience; inner experience that has become mere concept, mere conceptual web.

Now, what I have just characterized as the experience of a supersensible world through the developed powers of knowledge, leads one, as I have already mentioned, to ultimately rising to recognize the simultaneously real, for example, behind natural phenomena. The enrichment of therapy through spiritual science is based on the fact that what lives spiritually and soulfully in natural phenomena can be related to the recognized inner organs of the human being. At the same time, ontology takes on meaning again because the external and the spiritual and soul-like can be seen through objectively. So that what humanity, as humanity becoming free, has felt towards ontology is a kind of intermediate stage. In earlier times, through an instinctive experience of the concepts, reality was in the experience of the concepts. Then this was lost, had to be lost in the process of educating humanity to freedom, to life in pure concepts. For that is what it means to experience freedom: to be able to experience pure image concepts and to act accordingly. Now we are again faced with the possibility of giving ontology a content through the visions of the simultaneously spiritual-supersensible.

Dearly beloved, I have thus pointed out to you two fields of supersensible vision: that which, as it were, precedes our birth, and that which is the supersensible present at the same time.

And a third sphere reveals itself to man when, through a developed psychology, he first looks at what is not his imaginative faculty, but his will; the will and a part - I expressly say a part - of the feeling nature. These spheres, they also lie so far below the threshold of our waking consciousness, as our nocturnal experiences lie below this threshold for the ordinary consciousness. If one analyzes the facts of the soul without prejudice, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the same intensity of inner experience that one sees in the dullness of sleep consciousness is also seen in the experience of what is actually the effect of the will in us.

A careful analysis of consciousness, which has been carried out by numerous psychologists, shows that the human being first experiences ideas of what he should want and what he should do. He does not then experience the whole intermediate stage, where what is imagined passes over into the organism of the will. Then he experiences the other end of this will life, he experiences the transition of his will into the outer deed; he looks at what is happening through him. What lies between these two extremes, that is experienced by man with exactly the same subdued consciousness as he has in deep sleep. The emotional life is not experienced with the same intensity as the imaginative life either, but with the intensity of the dream life. But what is important now is to look at how the actual life of the will is experienced with the dullness of the life of sleep. We not only sleep in time and wake in time, but also while we are awake, we sleep with a part of our being, with our volitional being. What makes us sleep in relation to our volitional being, the reason for this, becomes apparent when knowledge is developed in the way I have explained. If one succeeds in developing the ability to love to the point where one experiences the supersensible, then there arises as a special experience the living over into the process of the will, which otherwise does not enter into consciousness, which otherwise remains dull. One does indeed come to know not only the organs of the body, as I explained earlier, but one also comes to see that part of the will that is otherwise overslept in waking, in the same way as one otherwise looks at an external fact through the senses. One arrives at a self-knowledge of the will. And through this, my dear audience, the ethical world is integrated into the rest of the world, into the world in which natural necessity otherwise prevails. In this way, we learn to recognize something that is still extremely difficult to describe, even for today's ideas.

When we consider the content of our consciousness, we can ascribe certain intensities to it in its individual parts. We can then – this can be said with particular reference to certain senses – we can then go down to intensity zero with regard to certain contents of consciousness. But we can also – and this is usually given little attention, because the necessity for it only emerges in spiritual research – we can also go down from an objectivity with regard to the intensive experience of consciousness, we have to go into the negative. Yes, it turns out to be necessary not just to speak of matter, but to speak of matter, to speak of empty space and of negative matter; thus not just to speak of empty space, but to speak of emptied space, to bring the intensity below absolute zero. This is a concept that necessarily arises for the spiritual researcher when he attempts to make a transition from the essence of the life of thinking to the essence of the life of will and the relationship of this life of will to the physical-organic functions. If we imagine by name — it could also be the other way around —, if we imagine the processes that take place between the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily when imagining, if we imagine these processes as positive, then we must imagine the will processes as negative; to a certain extent, if one represents a pressure effect, we must imagine the other as a suction effect. These are more or less comparative ideas, but they lead to reality. I may briefly characterize this reality.

We usually imagine, through today's psychology, which has become more and more abstract, that there is an interaction between the processes of the brain, that is, the nervous organism, and between the soul and spiritual processes. Certainly, such an interaction exists. But the nature of this interaction presents itself before the developed ability to remember, as I have described it. That which actually comes to life in the act of imagining is not based on the progressive growth of the nervous organism, but rather, quite the opposite, on the wearing away of the nervous organism. Once this has been properly understood, then spiritual science will be followed on this point. I can only sketch it out here, but you will find detailed descriptions of the matter everywhere in our literature. Once this has been understood, you will say to yourself: you are deceiving yourself if you assume a parallelism between spiritual and mental processes and brain processes in the usual way; a deception that I will illustrate with an example.

Let us assume that someone walks over a soft road surface, a car drives over the soft ground, impressions are formed, footprints, wheel tracks. A being from Mars or wherever could now come and speculate about these impressions and say: under the surface of the ground there is a certain force that causes these impressions by pulling down and pushing up. There is no power there that causes these impressions, but they have been caused by a person who has walked over them, or a wagon that has driven over them. In what the spiritual-soulful is acting out, it simply finds a soil, a resistant soil on the physical organization, makes impressions, and in fact it even destroys the organic substance. So the organic substance is worn away. The organic processes are regressed. And by making room for the spiritual in this way, the soul penetrates. If we imagine the process as positive, then the will process is the negative, then the will process promotes organic growth, albeit in a roundabout way. But just as the process of imagination continues in the organism as a process of removal, as a process of destruction, and to a certain extent as a process of excretion of organic substance, so too does the will lie in the increased, more lively construction of the organic. This is the effect of willpower. In this way, we learn to see the interaction between the physical and the spiritual in a positive and concrete way. But through this we also learn to recognize how we not only have a nature around us that contains natural laws, but just as the will integrates itself into our own organism as a growth-promoting, growth-stimulating force, so the spiritual-soul element that we are aware of in our consciousness as ethical impulses integrates itself into the whole of nature around us.

In this way, through this supersensible knowledge, we find not only values, or something that merely corresponds to utility, but we actually find within the world that surrounds us, on the one hand, natural necessity and, on the other, objective ethical necessity. Ethical impulses are actually integrated into objective world existence. And what comes out of it – I would have to describe the process at length, but for now I can only characterize it by way of comparison – what comes out of it is this: we live in the world of natural necessity. The moral ideals arise within us. It is like with a plant. It develops leaves, flowers, and in the center of the flower, the seed of next year's plant. Leaves and flowers fall away, but the germ, which is inconspicuous, remains and develops into next year's plant.

From this point of view, which I have just discussed methodologically, the relationship between natural necessity, everything that surrounds us as natural necessity, and what arises in us as ethical impulses appears as follows. Natural necessity will undergo a process that cannot be understood merely as natural necessity, as Clausius, for example, wants to understand his entropy of the universe. Rather, there is a process of mortifying that which appears physical to us today, and how the germ lives in this physical [that which ethical impulses are] to the physical world of a distant future. And we come to realize that our physical world is the realized ethical world of a distant past, and our ethical impulses of the present are the germs of a physical world of the future. The ethical problem, understood anthroposophically, is part of the cosmological problem. Through this anthroposophical view, the human being is in turn incorporated into the whole cosmos.

This has important social implications. The ethical ideal, the ethical impulse, is intimately connected with the social impulse. The social impulses will only take hold of humanity in the right way again, they will only lead us out of the chaos of the present, when it is grasped that what man does here on earth is not something that disappears like smoke and fog, which is like ideology based on purely external, purely economic processes, but what has a cosmological significance so that, in fact, with a variant, the Christian word is true, which every person can pronounce, can repeat after the Christian master: “Heaven and earth will pass away” – that is, what surrounds us as the physical world will pass away – “but my word,” that is, the logos that lives in me also as the ethical, “will not pass away.” It creates a future world. Thus, that which lives in the human being expands into a consciousness that in turn integrates the human being into the cosmology of world evolution.

I just wanted to show you today, dear attendees, what the relationship is between anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the epistemological problem; how, in fact, what makes this epistemological problem so difficult for today's philosophy, in that on the one hand, cannot get out of the image character of the life of imagination, and on the other hand, cannot really do anything with the will because it cannot be brought out into the bright clarity of consciousness, how this problem, when grasped anthroposophically, places the human being in reality. Because that which he was in reality before his birth or conception takes on the character of an image in our life between birth and death. In this way, what is in the human being in the form of an image is linked to the external reality that he experiences and to which he himself builds the bridge. If one looks between two realities — the external environment and the internal world of ideas —, one can basically come to no solution to the problem, because one is dealing with a [shading] in the actual impulses of the inner world of ideas, an influence of that which was our reality before birth.

The ontological problem is posed anew by the fact that the human being experiences real spirituality again, that is, not only thinks dialectically, but by thinking dialectically, the spiritual-substantial, the essential is within this dialectical thinking.

The ethical problem, viewed anthroposophically, places the human being within the whole of cosmic becoming. It elevates what we do as individuals to a world fact by showing that what is ultimately necessary for a comprehensive world view is that in what happens in a person, there is not only something that is enclosed by his skin, but that, apart from the fact that he experiences it subjectively, it is also a subjective fact, it is also an objective event for the existence of the world. We live the existence of the world with us. Something lives in us, it is our subjective experience, but at the same time it is an objective experience of the world. By connecting the ethical impulses in this way with the cosmological existence, the cosmic experience of existence, the human being transcends death in the same way as he transcends birth in the other way. By understanding the powers of imagination, one comes to understand existence before birth. By understanding the will, one gets to know the germinal forces in the human organization, that which cannot be lived out at all until death, that which lives in us as the germ lives in the plant.

And from there, the path, which I cannot even hint at because of the shortness of time, is to recognize the immortality problem, namely, life beyond death. We have become so unclear about the problem of immortality in recent times because we cannot see it properly by the hand of the other problem. We do not even have a word for this other problem in ordinary language. We talk about immortality, but we do not talk about being unborn, about unbornness. Immortality belongs to the realm of the unborn. Until we are able to think and talk about being unborn in the same way as we do about immortality, we will only grope in matters of faith and not come to certain knowledge.

Dear attendees, I am well aware of how much can be objected to what I have been allowed to explain today. Believe me when I say that the spiritual researcher raises the objections that can be raised, because he is aware of the difficult and questionable areas his research enters into. But perhaps these arguments have shown that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, insofar as it emanates from the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, is not concerned with wild fantasy, nebulous mysticism, or some kind of enthusiastic theosophy, but that it has to do with something that, at least in its striving, wants to continue on the path of serious, even exact science. To what extent this can be achieved today, I cannot say. But serious research is being pursued precisely because the tremendous scientific advances of recent times point not only to themselves, but at the same time beyond themselves. It is my heartfelt conviction that today's good natural scientist is not driven by the results of natural science research, but by what a natural scientist does with mind and soul, into the development of these soul abilities, which are already applied unconsciously in natural science research. He is driven to consciously develop these abilities and is then drawn into a truly concrete grasp of the spirit. A concrete grasp of the spirit, just as science is a concrete grasp of nature, of objective natural facts, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to achieve.

Discussion

Leo Polak: Since no one else wants to take the floor, I would like to do so myself. After we have heard about anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I would also like to hear something from the other side, I would like to say, from the purely philosophical side here, especially from the epistemological side. Because what pleased me most this evening was at least the striving to also give an epistemological foundation for this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as Dr. Steiner also tried to do in his works, which I am familiar with for the most part.

But then it became clear to me that there really is a fundamental contradiction, I would even say a contradiction, between anthroposophy and philosophy. In my opinion, this contradiction is not based on what Dr. Steiner founded it on. He explained somewhere that the real fact of the matter is that it is not philosophy that contradicts anthroposophy, but rather that philosophers, and especially Kant, do not understand philosophy. Now I believe that the whole attitude of philosophy towards anthroposophy is different from the opposite. I would like to say, even if it sounds a little immodest: philosophy is a little more modest; it will never dare to say, “This clairvoyant knowledge does not exist.” It will not dare to say that if Dr. Steiner believes and thinks that by developing certain soul forces he can expand memory or expand it to see a supersensible world, to see the higher world of ideas, to think with prenatal spiritual powers, and what else we have heard here, to purely spiritual in this sense, and when he thus directly beholds the supersensible non-ego, when he beholds what occurred before birth and after death, then we can simply say: We do not see this, we lack this cognitive faculty, in principle, not gradually, but in principle, and so we have to remain silent about it. The only thing we can critically note here is that it is a mistake to speak here of a mere extension of the known forces. Each time, the familiar force is not expanded, but transformed into and transferred into something that is fundamentally opposed to it. Remembering is always only remembering what one has experienced oneself. When remembering becomes beholding, when it becomes supersensible, it becomes something fundamentally different, an insight into something that is no longer and never can be a power of remembrance.

It is exactly the same with love. We do not believe for a moment, at least I am convinced, that it is a lack of my ability to love that I cannot immediately merge with that objectivity in which Dr. Steiner can, that I cannot experience the inner reality of the supersensible and therefore also solve the question of the supersensible when a before and after is experienced. I do not believe that, that is the only thing I can say; and what I can definitely say is that something new is being achieved here, and not just an expansion of our powers of knowledge and love.

But if epistemology and philosophy do not want to and cannot presume to pass judgment on spiritual powers, about which they themselves absolutely do not dispose, do not know and even cannot think, a seeing of a non-ego, then on the other hand, where the spiritual scientist turns to epistemology and wants to judge and condemn epistemological questions, she feels obliged to let her criticism be heard and to say: It is possible that clairvoyance has penetrated into the core of matter, even if epistemology does not recognize this whole matter as reality; this vision may be able to enter into the inner being of matter, but it has not entered into the inner being of epistemology; it has only been able to see epistemology and especially critique, the Kantian one, from the outside, without ever being inside.

It is clear that it would be taking this far too far if one were to expand on this with specific reasons. I would then need a whole evening here, just as the previous speaker would have needed this and more to express his view on epistemology. But there are some words that I just want to touch on briefly because they are of the utmost and greatest interest in principle. In the book 'Philosophy of Freedom', for example, Dr. Steiner particularly addresses the problem of knowledge, and perhaps the most characteristic sentence in the book is that, from the concept of knowledge as we have defined it, we cannot speak of limits to knowledge. Well, there could hardly be a more fundamental contradiction than that between critical epistemology, which I have the honor of representing here at the university and on which I give my lectures, and a statement like this, which rejects every limit of knowledge that the exact research work of so many of the greatest thinkers, and especially Kant, has taught us, could hardly be more fundamentally opposed than this between a theory that denies the limits of knowledge and one that establishes them. And this denial of origin is also the basis of the rest of the antagonism. Dr. Steiner has criticized critical idealism in this book and elsewhere, but he always remained outside the actual problem, never even touching on the essence of actual Kantianism. He believes that the phenomenon of nature is the nature of Kantianism, for which every nature, every material world, for example, not only exists as a physical world for Dr. Steiner, but there is also an ethereal body outside our physical body , we also have an astral body, we not only have the one spirit, but also four kinds of spirit, so to speak, which are then named with these Indian words: manas, budhi, atma and so on. But the physical body is denied by Kantianism as an independently existing reality; it is merely a phenomenon of the thing in itself. We also heard that day that one had even come to speculate, to a “thing in itself,” as if that were the most unreasonable thing one could do. And here, no less a figure than Kant said of the denial of this thing in itself: “I have shown with all my criticism that what we perceive, the things of the world of appearances, are not things in themselves, but appearances. That is, as is well known, the sum total of Kant's entire critique of knowledge: it would be incorrect to consider these appearances to be things in themselves; but it would be an even greater contradiction to want to deny the existence of any “thing in itself” at all. It would, of course, take me much too far afield if I were to elaborate on this point, but I can completely hint at Dr. Steiner's fundamental errors here with a few words: He has partly adopted Hartmann's criticism of idealism and in any case made the big mistake in it – which I believe I have shown in my book, and that is this – that idealism or the phenomenon of matter or nature, that one could arrive there only if one presupposes the reality of nature, the reality of /gap in the text]. This is quite incorrect and is based on the false formulation of this subjectivity of the content of perception. Not a single critical idealist in this sense says, as Dr. Steiner has him say, as he himself believes that it should be said, that colors merely depend on and exist for an eye, but every critical thinker knows here that that the eye is just as much a phenomenon and just as dependent and is not the eye [the first principle] but just as secondary, so he says: All colors exist only for and through the sense of color, the sense of sight, as a mental faculty. And in exactly the same way, all sounds in the whole world only exist if the sense of hearing is presupposed as the [primum], and not the ear or the brain. If one makes this single and absolutely necessary change in this whole critique of Dr. Steiner on Kantian idealism, then it collapses into nothing and then Dr. Steiner's only argument remains, but it is scattered and shown to have been insignificant. I would ask those experts who deal with epistemology to read the relevant passage from Dr. Steiner's work, and I would ask Dr. Steiner to consider the matter in this light and to see whether this change is not enough to show that what he has brought up here in a critical sense is unfortunate.

And there is still another fundamental difference between this merely formal, merely critical idealism and everything that Kant, I believe rightly, called enthusiastic, mystical idealism. The previous speaker wanted to make a fundamental distinction between mysticism and his teaching. I fear that some of those present here were unable or hardly able to find this difference. There was much in it that must be considered enthusiastic from a Kantian point of view, as belonging to that higher idealism. The higher / gap in the text] [is] not for me; for me it is only the pathos, the depth of experience. I believe that for some people what was presented tonight will have had a mystical quality, and quite rightly so. For mystical has always been used to describe that which is based on the direct content of the transcendent, the non-ego, that which is not directly given in the ego, that is, the non-ego. And it is precisely this insight into the supersensible, the other, the non-ego, the non-self-experienced, the previous and the subsequent, all these mystical things that we have heard proclaimed as the elements of anthroposophy. I would like to conclude with a motto from Kant's “Prolegomena”. It goes without saying that I cannot go into everything in detail, that would of course be impossible. Dr. Steiner said: “The interaction between brain and soul certainly exists.” We are very surprised at this certainty, since the whole critical theory of knowledge, in contrast to the psychology Dr. Steiner pointed to, not only denies this interaction in principle, but can also demonstrate the fundamental impossibility of interaction, because interaction requires two, two realities, and for critical idealism one of these realities does not exist materially as such, but in itself something else, something that is in itself psychic and ideal, just as we ourselves are, and just as one's own deeper opinion may be Dr. Steiner's own, but which he merely clothes in this uncritical, dogmatic, duplicated theory of perception, never speaking of images and even mirror images; when criticism shows, never Kantian criticism, that our perception never delivers images, never reproduction, but production. That would be the fundamental error, but I cannot go into that in detail now. The words of Kant with which I would like to end – there are actually two – I would first like to formulate the contrast between this clairvoyance and critical philosophy in Kant's words. Because “this much is certain and certain to me: anyone who has ever tasted criticism is forever disgusted by all the dogmatic drivel they previously had to make do with.” And further: “Criticism relates to ordinary school metaphysics” – and I would like to say also to this new metaphysics, to anthroposophy – “just as chemistry relates to alchemy or astronomy to divinatory astrology”. That is the one word that formulates the opposition in principle. The other is this: “Now suppose what seems most credible even after the most careful examination of the reasons. These may be facts or reasons, but reason does not deny that which makes it the greatest good on earth, namely, the prerogative of being the final touchstone of truth.

With this final touchstone of truth, we want to measure anthroposophy and theosophy. For, as Kant says - and with this I would like to conclude - otherwise you will become unworthy of this freedom and surely lose it.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to just touch on a few points and not keep you any longer. The first is the fundamental point that your esteemed chairman has brought forward, that there is not just a difference in degree between what I characterized as a developed ability to remember and remembering, but a fundamental contradiction. Nothing else emerges from my characterization, of course. Perhaps I may trace it back to the difficulty in communication through language, when your chairman introduced a word to justify his criticism that I have not used and would never use. I spoke of a further development of the ability to remember, not of an extension. I would like to explicitly draw attention to this. Extension is wrong. Further development can also lead to a form of the same thing, a metamorphosis that shows a fundamental opposition to that from which it developed. That just to point out how easily misunderstandings could arise within a critique. Because what I have explained is basically not changed by the fact that this principal opposition, which was already clearly included in my formulation, is particularly characterized. Because, my dear attendees, since there is of course an opposition, yes, a principal contradiction between what I have explained and Kantianism, I will never deny that.

I have never made a secret of the fact that, based on all my research results, I had to become an anti-Kantian. And what I have written in my “Truth and Science” and in my “Philosophy of Freedom” is, of course, to be taken as an examination of Kantianism based on years of effort. It is of little importance whether one says, perhaps with a somewhat imprecise expression, “Without the eye, there is no color,” as Schopenhauer actually said in various places, or whether one says, “Colors are not objective, but phenomena; the eye itself is a phenomenon.” Of course, that is all correct. And if one then goes on to say, “Without the sense of color, there would be no colors,” then one would really have to weave this into a critique, not just hint at it. Of course, all that is correct. And if one then goes on to say, “Without the sense of color, there would be no colors,” then one would really need to weave this into a critique not just in a suggestive way, but then one would need to go into great detail about how to characterize what is called the sense of color. For in my opinion, the transition to the sense of color, as soon as one wants to arrive at clear, sharply contoured concepts, is very mystical. Kantianism becomes a rather nebulous mysticism for me. And in the newer epistemology, Kantianism has become a nebulous mysticism for me in many ways. It would be more fruitful, ladies and gentlemen, to discuss the things that I have actually presented in the lecture. Because to pick out one thing from my “Philosophy of Freedom” is virtually impossible. This sentence stands in the middle of a long development. It is impossible to grasp its meaning without this long development.

When I say that one should not assume any limits to knowledge, it must be borne in mind that the meaning of this sentence emerges from the whole argument. This sentence can be understood in the most diverse ways. It can be understood in such a way that one does not initially speak of fundamental limits to knowledge, as do du Bois-Reymond in his Ignorabimus or as certain representatives of Kantianism do. But it can also be understood in such a way that one does not set any limits to research, but sees research as an [asymptotic] approximation to truth, so that one should not speak of limits to knowledge in order not to hinder the progress of research.

I don't want to try your patience too much by going into all the quotes from my writings, because that would take a really long time. I could only pick out certain things from the whole range of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and, you see, you have to start with certain things with a certain understanding. It seems to me that it is not acceptable to formulate the contrast between anthroposophy and mysticism so sharply, not only defining it so sharply, but also showing how anthroposophy can be used to avoid the danger of going astray into nebulous mysticism. It is not acceptable to describe anthroposophy as mysticism by means of pure definition. You can do that if you have made a definition of mysticism and subsumed everything that does not belong in that which you want to accept. But the progressive path of knowledge must be allowed to go beyond given definitions; you will also find in my “Philosophy of Freedom” that there is no need to rethink Kantianism. It has been considered from all sides precisely by these considerations, which I have tried to employ in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

Today, after I have passed my sixtieth year, it makes a strange impression on me when I am given the advice that I should consider Kantianism. As a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, because I didn't like my history teacher, I stapled the then-published edition of the Critique of Pure Reason into my school notebooks so that I could read Kant while the teacher was teaching history. Since that time, I have been studying Kant and I have followed this advice, given from various sides, to thoroughly consider Kantianism. That was forty-four years ago. If the admonition had not come at this point in Kantianism, with regard to which I want to confess that I am somewhat sensitive, I would not have kept you these few minutes with this purely personal matter, because that is what it is. Otherwise, I would have liked to have been mindful of the fact that I was speaking here only as a guest and therefore should have behaved as a guest. Perhaps I have already gone beyond what is necessary here by making this latter personal remark. But sometimes the personal is necessarily connected with the objective and may then be permitted as personal.

I would just like to have this mentioned for the reason that too little has actually been said about my lecture, and more of what has been formulated by me in completely different contexts has been criticized, which I find very understandable; for anyone who has been involved with Kantianism for forty-four years also understands the enthusiasm for Kant's critique of reason, for Kantian idealism; understands how one can speak of the “thing in itself”. I also appreciate all the objections that have just been raised, and I thank your chair for them. I don't want to bother you any further, but I would ask that what I actually presented in my lecture today be examined more closely.

Leo Polak: If I have perhaps given rise to misunderstandings in my words, I am happy to acknowledge my error. I see that there has also been constant talk here of further development, which I read in my notes as “expansion” of the power of remembrance. If, as the speaker himself says, he does not mean an extension, but something fundamentally new, then we fully agree on this point. And I have also given the reason why it would be unfeasible for me to go into these positive statements in more detail: because I lack all knowledge in this area. I can only say: I do not possess this ability of clairvoyance and therefore do not talk about something I do not know.

And if I might have been a little immodest again in the formulation of my advice, where it appears as if I am telling an older thinker and writer to consider this or that, I did not say he should study Kantianism; I know his work and know what he thinks about it. But he should reconsider his one argument against Kantianism – eyes, colors, sense of color – and I must stick to that. I know that Dr. Steiner has studied Kantianism, has read Kant, and so on; I simply wanted to state that in a sense he would have remained on the outside. Perhaps I am allowed to say one more thing, a saying that was not made this evening either, but that was taken from another book, “Philosophy and Theosophy”, the essay that deals with the relationship between these two, which says that Kant can only imagine a “thing in itself” in material terms, however grotesque it may sound. Therefore, I also understand why Dr. Steiner must deny the “thing in itself” if he thinks that the “thing in itself” must be imagined materially. This “thing in itself” would then be an “un-thing in itself”.

Rudolf Steiner: That is not there.

Leo Polak: Dr. Steiner says it is not there. Here it is!

Rudolf Steiner: You have the translation there. Then the sentence has been mistranslated. It doesn't mean that I refute Kant, that he could only imagine the “thing in itself” materially, but that I find that the “thing in itself”, if you want to imagine it impartially, could be imagined materially. This is not an objection that I am making, but one that many have already made, that the Kantian definition of the “thing in itself” does not exclude a material conception.

Leo Polak: Now this is the fundamental opposition of the whole of Kantianism to this doctrine, that Kant has shown by all means of epistemology and criticism, at any rate, that the “thing in itself”, whatever qualities it may have in addition , can only be in principle and fundamentally non-sensuous, supersensuous; that sensuous qualities are only the sense-thing, that is, the phenomenon. So if I also agree with Dr. Steiner, then so much the better. Then he will see that what he calls the supersensible world is not so far removed from what Kant says, only that Kant does not have a faculty of vindication. I think I have explained why I cannot go into Dr. Steiner's positive assertions: because I am a layman in that field, and that was the first commandment of spiritual science: one should not speak of what one does not understand. And if we can all finally agree that we want to understand and comprehend the world only with the means that the spirit provides us with — as Dr. Steiner ultimately also wants to do, even if he says that one can further develop the powers —, and if we want to understand the world with the spiritual powers that everyone feels within, and if we take as a point of reference, just as Kantianism does with all of critical philosophy, and just as Dr. Steiner does — I grant myself the concession of emphasizing, in a conciliatory way, that we agree — if one no longer, as a past period of science did, regards the objective, the material, the mechanical as the primary and original given, but rather, emphasizing the ego, the ego experience, the psychic, the inner life itself, and seeing, recognizing and knowing it as the primary, the founding, the starting and secure point of all science, then I believe that, marching separately, one can still beat unitedly the forces of of ignorance, of superstition and of enthusiastic mysticism, which, as I was pleased to hear, Dr. Steiner also regards as an opponent; marching separately, but unitedly overcoming these black forces of ignorance and superstition in order to achieve some light, some understanding, some insight, some comprehension. In this happy hope we want to agree and finally thank Dr. Steiner with all our hearts for what he has given with all his conviction after a long life of so many years as the result of his research. That it does not agree with our results, with the results of our research and others, that we object to in principle, I have considered it my duty not to keep to myself. Even if Dr. Steiner is a guest, I have not taken this into account and neither has Dr. Steiner. Even if the guests are friends, [gap in the text].

PREFATORY NOTE

The following pages, entitled “Philosophy and Anthroposophy,” mainly reproduce a lecture which I gave in Stuttgart in 1908.

Under Anthroposophy I denote a scientific investigation of the spiritual world which, while cognizant of the limitations of mere physical science and ordinary mysticism, and before attempting to penetrate into the spiritual world, first develops in the soul faculties not yet evident in ordinary consciousness and science. The development of these faculties renders this advance possible.

A spiritual science of this nature is usually held by accepted philosophy to be an amateurish procedure. In a short description of the evolution of philosophy I attempt to show that this reproach is entirely unjustified. The reproach is only made because contemporary philosophy, having itself erred into false tracks, fails to perceive that the nature of its own origin demands the pursuance of the path which eventually leads to Anthroposophy.

—Rudolf Steiner

PHILOSOPHY AND ANTHROPOSOPHY

The human soul, under normal conditions of life and development, is liable to encounter two obstacles which must be overcome if the soul would avoid being swept like a rudderless ship on the waves of life. A drifting of this nature produces, in time and by degrees, an inner insecurity eventually culminating in some form of distress, or it may rob a man of the power of rightly disposing himself in the order of the world according to the true laws governing life, thus causing him to disturb and not promote this order.

Knowledge in respect of the human self—that is, self-knowledge—is one of the means of ensuring inner security and our true alignment in the order of life's development. The impulse to self-knowledge is found in every soul; it may be more or less unconscious, but it is always present. It may vent itself in quite indefinite feelings which, welling up from the depths of the soul, create an impression of dissatisfaction with life. Such feelings are often wrongly explained, and their alleviation sought in the outer circumstances of life. Though we are often unconscious of its nature, fear of these feelings obsesses us. If we could overcome this anxiety we should realize that no external measures, but only a thorough knowledge of the human being, can prove helpful. But this thorough knowledge requires that we should really feel the resistance of the two obstacles which human knowledge is liable to encounter when it would enter more deeply into the knowledge of the human being. They consist of two illusions, towering as two cliffs, between which we cannot advance in our pursuit of knowledge until we have experienced their true nature.

These two obstacles are: Natural Science and Mysticism. Both these forms of knowledge appear in a natural way upon the path of human life. But they must be inwardly experienced if they are to prove helpful. Whether or not we can acquire a knowledge of humanity depends upon our developing the strength to reach, indeed, both obstacles, but not to remain stationary before them. When confronted by them, we must still retain sufficient detachment to be able to say to ourselves: neither method can lead our soul whither we would go. But this insight can only result from a true inner experience of their cognitive value. We must not shrink from really experiencing their nature; in order to realize thereby that we endow them with their true value by first advancing beyond them. We must seek access to both methods of knowledge; once we have found them, the way of escape from them becomes apparent. The belief that true reality is grasped by Natural Science is revealed, to an unprejudiced insight, to be an illusion. A normal feeling of our own human reality produces quite a definite experience. The latter is intensified the more we tend to apply Natural Science to the comprehension of our own human self. Man as a natural product consists of a sum of natural operations. It may become an ideal of knowledge to comprehend man in the light of the operative forces observed in the realm of Nature. With genuine Natural Science this ideal is justifiable. It may also be admitted that an incalculably distant future will reveal the method of development according to natural law of the miraculous human organization. Efforts in this direction must be accepted as the rightful ideal of Natural Science. Yet it is essential that we should, in the face of this rightful ideal, press forward to an insight promoted by a sound feeling of reality. We must inwardly experience how the results offered us by Natural Science become increasingly foreign to all our inner experience of reality. The more perfect the results, the more foreign are they felt to be to our inner life, with its thirst for knowledge. True to its ideal, Natural Science is bound to offer us material substances; yet, if inwardly unbiased, we cannot avoid finally encountering the difficulty experienced by Du Bois-Reymond, when he asserted, in his famous lecture on the “Boundaries of Natural Science,” that human knowledge would never grapple with the phenomenon haunting space in the guise of matter. To devote all suitable faculties to the pursuit of Natural Science is a sound experience, but we should at the same time feel that the distance between ourselves and reality is not thereby lessened, but increased. The results of Natural Science should give us occasion to make this experience. We must observe that they do not result from comprehension or feeling, and we shall reach the point of admitting that we do not, in truth, devote ourselves to Natural Science in order to draw nearer to reality; we believe this to be the case in our conscious self, but the unconscious origin of our efforts must have an altogether different significance—a significance for human life, into which we must inquire. Knowledge of true reality does not coincide with knowledge of Nature. This insight can prove a turning point in the life of our soul. The knowledge is brought home to us through inner experience that we were bound to follow the course of Natural Science, but that we were disappointed in the expectations raised by our diligent pursuit. This recognition is the final result of genuine experience and insight into the natural processes. We then abandon the belief that Natural Science, however perfect its future development, can supply us with the knowledge of the human being. Not to have reached this standpoint and still to cherish the hope that ideal natural scientific knowledge can enlighten us concerning our own being, is a sign that we have not sufficiently advanced in the experiences that are possible within the scope of Natural Science itself.

This is the first obstacle against which we strike in our effort to attain knowledge of the human being. Many a thinker has felt the thrust on this side, and has faced about towards Mysticism and mystical immersion in the inner self. A certain progress can also be made in this direction, in the belief that actual reality, or something in the nature of unity with the primordial fount of all Being, can be inwardly experienced. If, however, we press on far enough to destroy the force of illusion, we become aware that however deep the immersion in the inner self, this experience leaves us helpless in the face of reality. With however powerful a grip we may be induced to feel that we have seized primal being, this inner experience finally proves to be some effect of an unknown being; we remain incapable of laying hold on true reality and retaining it. The mystic pursuing this path discovers that he has inwardly abandoned the true reality which he seeks and cannot draw near it again.

The natural scientist reaches an outer world which illudes his inner life. The mystic, while seeking to grasp an outer world reaches an inner life which sinks into the void.

Our experiences, on the one hand with Natural Science and on the other with Mysticism, proved to be no fulfillment of our efforts to find reality, but merely the starting-point of our path, for we are shown the chasm that yawns between material occurrence and the inner life of the soul; we are led to see this chasm and to gain the insight that, in respect of true and genuine knowledge, neither Natural Science nor mere Mysticism is capable of bridging it. The perception of this chasm leads us to seek an insight into reality by filling the gap with cognitional experiences which are not yet forthcoming in ordinary consciousness, but must be developed. With true experience of Natural Science and Mysticism, we must admit that another form of knowledge must be sought in addition to these—a knowledge that brings the material outer world nearer to our inner life, and at the same time immerses our inner life more deeply into the real world than this can be the case with Mysticism.

A cognitional method of this nature can be called anthroposophical, and the knowledge of reality thereby attained, Anthroposophy; for at the outset, true and genuine Man (anthropos) is held to be concealed behind the “man” revealed by Natural Science and the inner life of everyday consciousness. This true and genuine Man makes his presence felt in dim feelings, in the more unconscious life of the soul. Anthroposophical research raises him into consciousness. Anthroposophy does not lead away from reality to an unreal imaginary world; it embodies the search for a cognitional method in response to which the real world will reveal itself. With due experience of Natural Science and the Mysticism confined to ordinary consciousness, Anthroposophy presses forward to the perception that a new consciousness must be developed, issuing from ordinary consciousness as, for instance, waking from the dull dream consciousness. Thus the cognitional process becomes for Anthroposophy a real inner occurrence extending beyond ordinary consciousness, whereas Natural Science is nothing but logical judgment and inference within the confines of ordinary consciousness, on the basis of outwardly given material reality, and Mysticism only a deepened inner life which, however, remains within the pale of ordinary consciousness.

In calling attention, at the present day, to the fact that an inwardly real cognitional process and an anthroposophical knowledge exist, habits of thought are encountered whose origin is due, on the one hand, to Natural Science with its wonderful achievements and great expansion, and to certain mystical prejudices on the other. Thus Anthroposophy is repudiated upon the one side for supposedly not doing justice to Natural Science, while upon the other it appears superfluous to the mystically inclined, who believe they can themselves take their stand upon true reality. Others, who aim at keeping “genuine” knowledge free from everything that extends beyond ordinary consciousness, hold that Anthroposophy disowns the true scientific character which philosophy, for instance, and its knowledge of the world should retain, and therefore lapses into dilettantism.

The following exposition will prove how little this reproach of dilettantism (especially at the hands of philosophy) is justified. A short sketch of its development will show how often philosophy has estranged itself from true reality, through not perceiving the very two cognitional obstacles alluded to above, and how an unconscious impulse is at the root of all philosophical effort to steer between these obstacles and strive for Anthroposophy. (I have dealt at greater length with this tendency of all philosophy towards Anthroposophy in my book Die Rätsel der Philosophie.

Philosophy is generally regarded by those concerned therewith as something absolute, and not as something which was bound to come into existence, under particular conditions, in the course of the development of mankind, and be subject to transformation. Many an erroneous view of its true nature is current. It is however precisely when dealing with philosophy that we are in a position to name the period when it originated (and must have originated) in the course of human development—not merely through inner experience, but also on the basis of external historical documents. Most exponents of the history of philosophy, especially of the older school, have estimated this period fairly correctly. In all such presentations we find that a beginning is made with Thales, and the course of philosophy traced from him onwards in continuity down to our times. Some modern writers on the history of philosophy, aiming at unusual comprehensiveness and perspicacity, have placed the beginning of philosophy in still earlier times, drawing upon the various teachings of ancient wisdom. This, however, is only due to a particular form of dilettantism wholly ignorant of the fact that all the teachings of Indian, Egyptian, and Chaldean wisdom were entirely different, both in respect of method and origin, from purely philosophical thought with its leaning towards the speculative. The latter developed in the world of Greece, and there the first thinker to be considered in this sense is, in fact, Thales.

We need not describe at length the characteristics of the various Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales; we need not dwell on Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Anaximenes, or yet on Socrates and Plato. We may begin at once with that personality who appears as the very first philosopher in the narrowest sense, the philosopher par excellence—Aristotle. All other philosophies were in reality but abstractions inspired by the wisdom of the Mysteries; in the case of Thales and Heraclitus, for instance, this could easily be shown.¹

Neither Plato nor Pythagoras is a philosopher in the real sense of the word, seership being the source from which both of them draw. The chief interest in a characterization of philosophy as such does not centre round the fact that someone or other expresses himself in ideas, but round the question where the sources from which he draws are to be found. Pythagoras drew from the wisdom of the Mysteries, which he translated into concepts and ideas. He was a seer, only he expressed his experiences as seer in philosophic form; and the same was the case with Plato.

But the essential characteristic of the philosopher, manifested for the first time in Aristotle, is the fact that he necessarily rejects all other sources (or has no access to them), and works exclusively with the technique of ideas. And since this may be said for the first time of Aristotle, it is not without good historical reason that it should be precisely this philosopher who founded logic and the science, of thought. All other efforts in this direction had been of a precursory nature only. The way and the manner in which concepts and judgments are formed and conclusions drawn this entire range of mental activity was discovered by Aristotle as a kind of natural history of subjective thought, and everything we meet within him is closely connected with this inauguration of the technique of thought. As we shall revert to certain points in connection with Aristotle which are of fundamental importance for all later aspects of the subject, this short historical indication will suffice to characterize in a few words the point from which we depart. Aristotle remains the representative philosopher for later times also. His achievements were not only embodied in the post-Aristotelian period of antiquity, up to the founding of Christianity, but he was regarded most especially in the first Christian period and onward into the Middle Ages as that philosopher in whom direction was to be sought in all efforts to formulate a conception of the universe. By this we do not mean that men had Aristotle's philosophy before them as a system, as a collection of dogmas—especially in the Middle Ages, when the original texts were not obtainable; but thinkers had become familiar with the process of applying the technique of pure thought and thereby ascending step by step to knowledge, up to the point where thought encompasses the fundamental problems of life. Aristotle became to an increasing extent the Master of Logic. The medieval thinkers would say to themselves: whatever be the source of the knowledge of positive facts, be it due to man's investigation of the outer world by means of his senses, or be it due to revelation by means of divine Grace, as through Christ Jesus, these things have simply to be accepted, on the one hand as the deposition of the senses, and on the other as revelation. But if any matter, however given, is to be substantiated by a purely conceptual process, this must be done with that technique of thinking which Aristotle discovered. And, in fact, the inauguration of the technique of thinking was achieved by Aristotle in so signal a fashion that Kant was but right in declaring that, since Aristotle, logic had not advanced by so much as a single sentence.² Indeed, this statement is in all essentials true of the present day; the fundamental teachings embodying a logical system of thought will be found today almost unaltered, if compared with what Aristotle set down. The additions made today are due to a somewhat mistaken attitude, prevalent even in philosophical circles, towards the conception of logic.

Now it was not merely the study, of Aristotle, but above all the assimilation of his technique of thinking, that became the standard of the central period of the Middle Ages, or the early Scholastic period, when Scholasticism was at its prime—a period which came to a close with St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. When mention is made of this early Scholasticism, it should be clearly understood that no philosophical judgment is possible at the present time in this connection, unless we are unhampered by all authority and dogmatic belief. It is indeed almost more difficult nowadays to speak of these things purely objectively, than disparagingly; for if we speak of Scholasticism with disparagement, we run no risk of being charged with heresy by the so-called freethinkers; but if we speak purely objectively, it is highly probable we shall be misunderstood, because a positive and most intolerant ecclesiastical movement of the present day often bases—its appeal upon totally misunderstood Thomism. There is no question of discussing here what is accepted by orthodox Catholic philosophy; neither should we be intimidated by the possible reproach of being concerned with what is professed and determined in dogmatic quarters. Let us rather be undisturbed by what may be asserted on the right and on the left, and simply seek to characterize what Scholasticism in its prime felt of science, the technique of thinking and supernatural revelation. Early Scholasticism does not bear the character attributed to it in a ready-made modern definition. Far from being dualistic in nature, as many imagine, it is pure Monism. It sees the world's primal source as an undoubted unity; only the Scholastic has a particular feeling with regard to the perception of this primal being. He says: there exists a certain fund of supersensible truth, a store of wisdom which was revealed to mankind; human thought with all its technique falls short of penetrating, of itself, into those regions which embody the content of the highest revealed wisdom. The early Scholastic appealed to a certain fund of wisdom which transcends the technique of thinking; that is, it is only in so far attainable as thought is capable of elucidating the wisdom which has been revealed. This portion of the Wisdom must be accepted by the thinkers as revelation, and the technique of thinking merely applied for its elucidation. What man can evolve from his inner self has its being only in certain subordinate regions of reality, and here the Scholastic applies active thought for the personal investigation of man. He presses forward up to a certain boundary where revealed wisdom meets him. Thus the content of personal research and revelation becomes united in an objective, unified, and monistic conception of the universe. That a kind of dualism, owing to human limitations, is associated with the matter is only of secondary importance; this is a dualism in cognition and not a dualism in the world whole.

The Scholastic, therefore, pronounces the technique of thinking to be suitable for the rational elaboration of the material gathered by empirical science in sense-observation; further, it may press forward a stage, even up to spiritual truth. Here the Scholastic, in all humility, presents a portion of wisdom as Revelation, which he cannot himself discover, but which he is called upon to accept.

Now this special technique of thinking, as applied by the Scholastics, sprang entirely from the soil of Aristotelian logic. There was, in fact, a twofold necessity for the early Scholastics (whose period drew to its close in the thirteenth century) to concern themselves with Aristotle. The first necessity was provided by historical evolution. Aristotelianism had become a permanency. The second arose from the fact that, as time went on, an enemy to Christianity sprang up in another quarter.

The teachings of Aristotle did not expand to Western countries only, but also to the East; and everything that had been brought by the Arabs into Europe by way of Spain was, in respect of thought technique, saturated with Aristotelianism. It was a certain form of philosophy, in particular of Natural Science, extending into Medicine, which had been brought over, and which was eminently saturated with Aristotelian technique of thinking. Now the belief had grown in that quarter that nothing but a kind of Pantheism could be the consistent outcome of Aristotelianism—a Pantheism which, particularly in philosophy, had evolved from a very vague Mysticism.

There was, therefore, in addition to the fact that Aristotle's influence was still paramount in the technique of thinking, yet another reason for men to concern themselves with his teachings, for in the interpretation placed upon him by the Arabs, Aristotle is made to appear as the opponent and foe of Christianity.

It had to be admitted that if the Arabian interpretation of Aristotelianism were true, the latter could provide a scientific basis adapted for the refutation of Christianity. Now let us imagine what the Scholastics felt in this extremity. Upon the one side they adhered firmly to the truth of Christianity, yet upon the other they were bound by all their traditions to acknowledge that the logic and the thought technique of Aristotle were alone right and true. Placed in this dilemma, the Scholastics were faced by the task of proving that Aristotle's logic could be applied and his philosophy professed, and that it was exactly he, Aristotle, who provided the very instrument by means of which Christianity would be really conceived and understood. It was a task imposed by the trend of historical development.

Aristotelianism had to be handled in such a way as to make it evident that the teaching brought by the Arabs was not Aristotle's, but only a mistaken conception thereof; that, in short, one had but to interpret Aristotle correctly in order to find in his teaching a basis for the conception of Christianity. This was the task Scholasticism set itself, to the achievement of which the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas were largely devoted.

Now, however, something else happened. When the day of Scholasticism had drawn to its close, there occurred in course of time a complete rupture along the whole line of logical and philosophical thought-evolution. No criticism is here intended of this fact; we do not wish even to suggest that it could have happened otherwise; the actual course taken was necessarily such as it was, and we merely put the case hypothetically when we say that the most natural thing would have been to have increasingly expanded the technique of thinking, so that ever higher and higher portions of the supersensible world should have been grasped by thought. But the next development was not of this nature. The fundamental conceptions, which, with St. Thomas Aquinas for instance, were applicable to the highest regions, and which could have received such development that the boundaries restricting human research would have receded ever farther and upwards into the supersensible regions—this body of thought was robbed of its power and possibility, and survived only in the conviction that the highest spiritual truths transcend altogether the activity of human thought and are beyond elaboration by concepts which man can evolve from himself. By such means a break in man's spiritual life occurred. Supersensible knowledge was pronounced to be entirely beyond the compass of human thought and to be unattainable by subjective cognitional nets; it must have its roots in faith. There had always been a tendency in this direction, but it ran to extremes towards the close of the Middle Ages.

Pains were taken to accentuate the breach between faith on the one hand, which must be attained by objective conviction, and, on the other hand, whatever logical activity can elaborate as the basis of a sound judgment.

Once this chasm was opened, it was only natural that knowledge and faith should be increasingly thrust asunder and that Aristotle and his technique of thinking should also become the victims of this breach occasioned by historical development. This was more especially the case at the beginning of the modern era. It was maintained on the scientific side (and we may consider many of the statements as well founded) that no progress could be made in the search for empirical truth by merely spinning out what Aristotle had placed on record. Furthermore, the trend of historical events was such that it became inadvisable to make common cause with the Aristotelians; and as the era of Kepler and Galileo drew near, mistaken Aristotelianism had become the very bane of knowledge.

It repeatedly happens that the adherents and followers of some particular philosophy of the universe corrupt an uncommon amount of the teaching which the founders themselves presented in the right way. Instead of looking to Nature herself, instead of exercising the faculty of observation, it was found easier at the end of the Middle Ages to have recourse to the old books of Aristotle and base all academic dissertations on his written word. It was characteristic of the epoch that when an orthodox Aristotelian was invited to convince himself by inspecting a dead body, that the nerves do not proceed from the heart, as he had mistakenly gathered from Aristotle, but that the nervous system has its centre in the brain the Aristotelian replied: “Observation certainly shows me that this is actually the case, but Aristotle states the reverse, and I have greater faith in him.” The followers of Aristotle had, in fact, become a grievance; empirical science was bound to make a clearance of this false Aristotelianism, basing its authority on pure experience, and we find a particularly strong impulse in the direction given by the great Galileo.

On the other side we see an entirely different development. An aversion to the technique of thinking was felt by those who, so to speak, sought to save their faith from this invasion of independent thought. They were of the opinion that this technique of thinking was powerless when faced by the fund of wisdom acquired through revelation. When the worldly empirics invoked the book of Aristotle, their opponents confronted them with arguments gathered from a different but equally misunderstood book—namely, the Bible. This was more particularly the case at the beginning of the modern era, as we may gather from Luther's hard words; “Reason is deaf and purblind fool” that should have naught to do with spiritual truths, adding further that pure faith by conviction can never be kindled by reason in a thought founded upon Aristotle, whom he calls “hypocrite, sycophant, and stinking goat.” These are, indeed, hard words; but when considered from the standpoint of the new era, they may be better understood. A deep chasm had opened between reason and its technique of thinking on the one hand, and supersensible truth on the other. A final expression of this break is found in a philosopher through whose influence the nineteenth century has become entangled in a web from which it can only with difficulty extricate itself. This philosopher is Kant. He is, virtually, the last representative thinker whose methods can be traced to that division which occurred in the Middle Ages. He differentiates sharply between faith and that knowledge which man may claim to attain. Externally the Critique of Pure Reason is associated with the Critique of Practical Reason, and Practical Reason seeks to handle the problem of Knowledge from the standpoint of rational faith. On the other hand Kant asserts most emphatically of Theoretical Reason that it is incapable of comprehending the Actual, the “thing-in-itself.” Man receives impressions from the thing-in-itself, but he is circumscribed by his own ideas and conceptions. We could not describe Kant's fundamental error without going deeply into the nature of his philosophy and its history; but this would lead too far from the present subject, moreover the reader will find the question adequately treated in my Truth and Science.

What is of far greater interest to us at the present moment is this web in the meshes of which the philosophical thought of the nineteenth century has become entangled. Let us examine how this came about. Kant was especially alive to the necessity of demonstrating to what extent something absolute was given us in thought, something in which there could be no uncertainty, as against the uncertainty, according to him, of everything which proceeds from experience. Our judgment can only derive certainty from the fact that a portion of knowledge does not originate with external things, but with ourselves. In the Kantian sense, we see external things as through a coloured glass; we receive them into ourselves, grouping them according to lawful connections which we ourselves evolve. Our cognition has certain forms—the forms of space, time, the categories of cause and effect, and so on. These are immaterial for the thing-in-itself, at least we cannot know whether the thing-in-itself has any existence in space, time, or causality. The latter are forms created by the subjective mind of man and imposed upon the thing-in-itself the moment of its appearing; the thing-in-itself remains unknown. Thus when man finds the thing-in-itself before him, he endows it with the forms of space and time, and finds an apparent association of cause and effect, thus enveloping the thing-in-itself with a self-made network of concepts and forms. For this reason man may claim a certain security of knowledge, since, as long as he is as he is, time, space, and causality possess actual significance for him. And whatever man thrusts into the things he must also extract from them. Of the thing-in-itself, however, he can have no knowledge, for he remains ever a captive of the forms of his own mind. This view was finally expressed by Schopenhauer in his classical formula; “The world is my conception.”

Now this entire process of reasoning has been transmitted to almost the entire thought of the nineteenth century; not only to the theory of knowledge, but also, for instance, to the theoretical principles of Physiology. Here philosophical speculation was amplified by certain experiences. If we consider the doctrine of the specific energies of the senses, there would seem to be a corroboration of the Kantian theory. At all events that is how the matter was recorded during the nineteenth century. “The eye perceives the light”; yet, if the eye be affected by some other means, say by pressure or by electric current, a perception of light is also recorded. Hence it was said: the perception of the light is generated by the specific energy of the eye and transferred to the thing-in-itself. It was Helmholtz in particular who laid this down in the crudest manner as a physiological-philosophical axiom, declaring that not even a pictorial resemblance can be claimed between our perceptions and the objects exterior to ourselves. A picture resembles its prototype, but in so called sense-perception the resemblance to the original cannot be so close as even in a picture. The only designation, therefore, we can find for the experience within ourselves is “symbol” of the thing-in-itself, for a symbol need have no resemblance to the thing it expresses.

Thus the philosophical thought of the nineteenth century, until the present day, became thoroughly impregnated with elements which had long been in preparation, so that the relation of human cognition to reality could not be conceived except in the sense of the ideas given above. I often recall a conversation I had the privilege of having years ago with a highly esteemed philosophical thinker of the nineteenth century, with whose views, however, on the theory of knowledge I could by no means agree. To qualify human conceived thought as purely subjective was, I urged, a cognitional assertion which should not be assumed a priori. He replied that one need only bear in mind the definition of the word “conception,” which pronounces the latter to exist only in the soul; but since reality is only given us by means of conceptions, it follows that we have no reality in the act of cognition, but only a conception thereof. This truly ingenious thinker had allowed a preconceived opinion to condense to a definition (which, for him, was indisputable), to the effect that conceptual thought reaches only as far as the boundary of the thing-in-itself, and is, therefore, subjective. This habit of thought has become so predominant in the course of time that all writers on the theory of cognition who pride themselves on understanding Kant, consider every man a dullard who will not agree with their definition of conceptual thought and the subjective nature of apprehension. All this has resulted from the split which I have described as occurring in the spiritual development of mankind.

Now a real understanding of Aristotle enables us to find that an entirely different principle and theory of cognition might have resulted from a direct, that is, from an undistorted, development of his teaching. In the matter of the theory of knowledge, Aristotle already admitted ideas to which man today can but slowly and gradually ascend through the intellectualistic undergrowth which is the outcome of Kant's influence. We must, above all things, realize that Aristotle, by means of his technique of thinking, was able to elaborate true concepts capable of transcending those limits which were imposed upon knowledge in the way described above.

We need only concern ourselves with a few of Aristotle's fundamental conceptions in order to recognize this. It is entirely in conformity with him to say: Our initial knowledge of the things which we apprehend around us is provided by our sense-perception. Sense presents to us the individual thing. When we, however, begin to think, the things group themselves; we gather diverse things into a unit of thought. Here Aristotle finds the right connection between this unity of thought and an objective reality (which, leads to the thing-in-itself), in showing that if we think consistently we must conceive the world of experience around us as composed of “matter” and what he terms “form”—two concepts which he genuinely differentiates in the only true and possible sense. It would entail a lengthy exposition to treat exhaustively of these concepts and all they involve; some elementary notions, however, in this connection will help us to understand Aristotle's teaching of “matter” and “form” as differentiated by him. He clearly realizes that, in respect of our cognition, it is essential that we should grasp the “form” of all things which constitute our world of experience, since it is the form which is the vital principle of things, and not matter.

There are even in our day personalities endowed with a true comprehension of Aristotle. Vincent Knauer, who in the 'eighties was lecturer at the University of Vienna, was in the habit of explaining to his hearers the difference between form and matter by means of an illustration which may, perhaps, appear grotesque, but is none the less pertinent. “Think,” he said, “how a wolf, after eating nothing but lambs for a part of his life, consists, strictly speaking, of nothing but lamb—and yet this wolf never becomes a lamb!” This argument, if only rightly followed up, gives the difference between matter and form. Is the wolf a wolf by reason of matter? No! His being is given him by his form, and we find this “wolf-form” not only in this particular wolf, but in all wolves. Thus we find form by means of a concept expressing a universal, in contradistinction to the thing grasped by the senses, which is always particular and single. Our thought moves altogether along Aristotelian lines, if we, like the Scholastics, exert ourselves to conceive the nature of form by dividing the universal into three kinds. The universal, as essence of the form, is conceived by the Scholastics, firstly as pre-existent to all operation and life of the form in the single thing; secondly as permeating the single thing with life and activity; thirdly, they found that the human soul, by observing the things inwardly, endows the universal form with life in a manner consistent with its (the soul's) nature. The philosophers, accordingly, differentiated the universal that lives in the thing and comes to expression in human cognition, in the following way:

1. Universalia ante rem: the essence of the form before its incorporation in the single thing.

2. Universalia in re: the essential forms existent in the things.

3. Universalia post rem: these essential forms abstracted from the things and appearing in cognition as an inner experience of the soul, through the reciprocal relation of the soul to the things.

Until we approach this threefold difference, no genuine insight is possible, in this connection, into what is here of importance. For only consider for a moment what is involved. The insight is involved that man, in so far as he remains within the universalia post rem, is confined to a subjective element. Further (and this is especially important), that the concept in the soul is a “representation” of universally existent real forms (Entelechies). The latter (universalia in re) have incorporated themselves in the things, thanks to their having previously existed as universalia ante rem.

A purely spiritual form of existence must be attributed to the universal essences before their incorporation in the single things. The conception of such essential universalia ante rem will naturally appear as a fanciful abstraction in the eyes of those for whom only the world of sensible objects is real. But it is of essential importance that an inner experience should induce us to accept this conception. That experience is meant, thanks to which the general concept “wolf” is not merely regarded as a condensation, effected by the intellect, of all the various single wolves, but is perceived as a spiritual reality extending beyond the single thing. This spiritual reality enables us to recognize difference between animal and man in a genuinely spiritual sense. What is inherent in the species “wolf” does not find its realization in the single wolf, but in the totality of these single wolves. In man, an entity of soul and spirit is immediately revealed in the individual, whereas, in animals, only through the species, in the totality of the individuals. Or, in Aristotelian terminology with individual man the “form” finds its immediate expression in the physical human being; in the animal world the “form,” as such, remains in a supersensible region and extends itself along the line of development comprising all the individuals of the same “form.” It is permissible, in the sense of Aristotelianism, to speak of “group-souls” (the souls of kind or species) in the case of animals, and of individual souls in the case of man. If we succeed in acquiring an inner experience in the light of which the above distinction becomes equivalent to a perceived reality, we have advanced one step farther on the path of knowledge, along which Aristotelianism and Scholasticism had only progressed as far as the technique of concepts and ideas. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science seeks to prove that the above experience can be acquired. The “forms” are then not merely the outcome of conceptual differentiation, but the object of supersensible vision. The group-souls of the animals and the individual souls of men are perceived as beings of similar kind. This entire process is perceived as physical reality is perceived by the senses. The method by which Anthroposophical Spiritual Science seeks to acquire this experience will be indicated in the course of this treatise. At this point the writer's intention was to show how ideas within the range of Aristotelian doctrine can be found to corroborate Anthroposophy. There is, however, in addition to all that we have met with in Aristotle, something which finds less and less favour in modern times. We are required to exert ourselves to think in concise, finely chiseled concepts, in concepts which we have first carefully prepared. It is necessary that we should have the patience to advance from concept to concept, and above all things cultivate clarity and keenness of thought; that we should be aware of what we are speaking when we frame a conception. If, for instance, we speak, in the Scholastic sense, of the relation of a concept to that which it represents, we are required in the first place to work our way through lengthy definitions in the Scholastic writings. We must understand what is meant when we find it stated that the concept is grounded “formally” in the subject and “fundamentally” in the object; the particular form of the concept is derived from the subject and its content from the object. That is but a small, quite a small, example. The study of Scholastic works involves labouring through massive volumes of definitions most unpleasant task for the scientist of today; for this reason he looks upon the Scholastics as learned pedants and condemns them downright. He is totally unaware that true Scholasticism is naught but the detailed elaboration of the art of thinking, in order that thought may provide a foundation for the genuine comprehension of reality.

It is of course far easier to bring a few ready-made conceptions to bear upon everything that confronts us in the nature of higher reality—far easier than to construct a firm foundation in the sphere of thought. But what are the consequent results? Philosophic books of the present day leave one with a dubious impression: men no longer understand each other on higher questions; they are not clear in their own minds as to the nature and scope of their conceptions. This could not have happened in the days of the Scholastics, for thinkers of that period were necessarily acquainted with the aspect of every concept they used. A way of penetrating to the depths of a genuine thought-method was clearly in existence, and, had this path been duly pursued, no entanglement in the web of Kant's “thing-in-itself,” and the (supposedly subjective) conception thereof, would have been possible. On the contrary, two results would have been attained. In the first place, man would have achieved an inwardly sound theory of knowledge; secondly (and this is of great importance), the great philosophers who lived and worked after Kant would not have been so completely misunderstood in accepted philosophical circles. Kant was succeeded by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; what are they to the man of today? They are held to be philosophers who sought to fashion a world from purely abstract concepts. This was never their intention.³

But Kant's principles of thought were the dominating influence and prevented the greatest philosopher in the world being understood. People will only by degrees ripen an understanding of all that Hegel has given to the world; only when they have east off this hampering web of theories and cognitional phantoms. Yet this would be so simple! No more is necessary than the effort to think naturally and without constraint, rejecting the set habits of thought which have developed under the questionable influence of the Kantian school. The question must clearly be settled whether man (as proceeding from the subject) encompasses the object with a conception which he himself constructs within that subject. But does it necessarily follow that man is unable to penetrate into the “thing-in-itself?” Let me give a simple example. Imagine, for instance, that you have a seal bearing the name of Miller. Now press the seal on some sealing-wax and again remove it. There can be no doubt, I take it, that the seal being, let us say, of brass, no property of the brass will pass over into the wax. Were the sealing-wax to exercise the function of cognition in the Kantian sense, it would say: “I am entirely wax; no brass passes over into me, there is therefore no connection whereby I may learn the nature of that which has approached me.” And yet the point in question has in this case been entirely neglected—namely, the fact that the name “Miller” remains objectively imprinted upon the sealing-wax, without any portion of the brass having adhered to it. So long as people cling to the materialistic principle of thought that no connection is possible unless matter passes over from one to the other, they will in theory maintain: “I am sealing-wax and the other is brass-in-itself, and since none of the brass-in-itself can enter me, therefore the name of Miller can be no more than a sign. But the thing-in-itself which was in the seal and which has impressed itself upon me so that I can read it, this thing-in-itself remains forever unknown to me.” With this final formula the argument is clenched. Continuing the illustration, we might say: “Man is all wax (conception). The thing-in-itself is all seal (that which is exterior to the conception). Now since I, being wax (the subject conceiving), can but attain to the outer surface of the seal (the thing-in-itself), I remain within myself and nothing passes into me from the thing-in-itself.” So long as Materialism is allowed to encroach upon the theory of knowledge, no understanding is possible of what is here of importance.⁴

It is true that we are limited by our own conception, but the element that reaches us from outer reality is of purely spiritual nature, and is not dependent upon the transmission of material atoms. What passes over into the subject is not of material but of spiritual nature, as truly as the name Miller passes into the wax. This must be the starting-point of a sound theory and investigation of knowledge, and it will soon become apparent to what extent Materialism has gained a footing even in philosophical thought. An unbiased review of the state of affairs leaves us no alternative but to conclude that Kant could only conceive the “thing-in-itself” as matter, however grotesque this may seem at first sight. For the sake of a complete survey of the subject we must new touch upon another point. We have explained how Aristotle distinguished between “form” and “matter” in all things within our range of experience. Now if the process of cognition allows us to approach the “form” in the manner indicated above, the question arises to what extent is a similar approach possible in the direction of “matter.” It must be noted that, for Aristotle, matter was not synonymous with material substance, but comprised the spiritual element underlying the world, of physical reality. It is therefore possible not only to comprehend the spiritual element that reaches us from external things,* but also to seek immediate access to the things and identify ourselves with matter. This question is also of importance for the theory of knowledge, and can be answered only by one who has gone deeply into the nature of thought, that is, of pure thought. The concept of “pure thought” is one which we must be at pains to acquire. Following Aristotle, we may look upon pure thought as an actual process. It is pure form and, in its initial mode of existence, void of content as far as the single, individual things of the external physical world are concerned. Why? Let us make it clear how pure conception comes into being in contradistinction to perception through the senses. Let us imagine we wish to form the conception of a circle. We can, for this purpose, put out to sea until we see nothing but water around: this perception can provide the conception of a circle. There is another way, however, of arriving at the conception of a circle without appealing to the senses. I can construct, in thought, the sum of all places which are equidistant from one particular spot. No appeal to the senses is necessary for this exclusively internal thought-process; it is unquestionably pure thought in the Aristotelian sense; pure actuality.

And now a further significant fact presents itself. Pure thought thus conceived harmonizes with experience; it is indispensable for the comprehension of experience. Imagine Kepler evolving, by means of pure constructive thought, a system in which the elliptical courses of the planets are shown, with the sun in the focus, and then observation, by means of the telescope, subsequently confirming an effort of pure thought conceived in advance of experience. Pure thought is thus shown to possess significance for reality—for it harmonizes therewith. Kepler's method affords a practical illustration of the theories which Aristotelianism founded upon the science of knowledge. The universalia post rem are grasped, and, upon nearer approach, it is found that they became united with the things in a previous form, as universalia ante rem. Now if these universals are not perverted in the sense of a false theory of knowledge, if they are not made to appear as subjective notions, but are found to exist objectively in the things, it follows that they must first have become united with that “form” conceived by Aristotle as the underlying foundation of the world.

Thus the discovery is made that the apparently most subjective activity (when something is determined independently of all experience) provides the very means for attaining reality in the most objective manner possible.

Now what is the reason why human thought, in so far as it is subjective, cannot at first find free access to the world? The reason is that it finds its way obstructed by the “thing-in-itself.” When we construct a circle we live in the process itself, if only formally to begin with. Now the next question is: To what extent can subjective thought lead to the attainment of any permanent reality? As we have pointed out, subjective thought is, in the first place, expressly constructed by ourselves; it is of merely formal nature and, as far as the objective world is concerned, has the appearance of an extraneous addition. We are indeed justified in claiming that it is a matter of complete indifference to any existing circle or sphere whether our thought concerns itself therewith or not. My thought is brought externally to bear upon reality, and is of no concern to the world of experience around me. The latter exists in its own accord irrespective of my thought. It can therefore follow that our thought may possess objectivity for ourselves, yet be of no moment for the things. What is the solution of this apparent contradiction? Where is the other pole to which we must now have recourse? Can a way be found, within pure thought to create not only form, but together with form its material reality? As soon as the possibility is given of a simultaneous creation of form and matter a point of security is reached upon which the theory of knowledge may build.

When we, for instance, construct the circle, we may claim that whatever we assert concerning this circle is objectively true; but the question whether our assertions are applicable to the things will depend upon the things themselves eventually showing us to what extent they are subject to the laws which we construct and apply to them. When the totality of forms resolves itself in pure thought, some residue (Aristotle's “matter”) must remain, where it is not possible by the process of pure thought to reach reality.

Fichte may at this point supplement Aristotle. A formula along Aristotelian lines may be reached to the effect that everything about us, including all things belonging to the invisible worlds, necessarily call for a material reality to correspond with form-reality. To Aristotle the idea of God is a pure actuality, a pure act, that is, an act in which actuality (the formative element) possesses the power to produce its own reality; it does not stand apart from matter, but by reason of its own activity fully and immediately coincides with reality.

The image of this pure actuality is found in man himself, when by the process of pure thought he attains to the idea of the “I.” Upon this level (in the “I”) he is within the sphere of what Fichte calls “deed-act.” He has inwardly arrived at something which not only lives in actuality, but together with this actuality produces its own “matter.” When we grasp the “I” in pure thought we are in a centre where pure thought produces its own essential “matter.” When we apprehend the “I” in thought, a threefold “I” is at hand; a pure “I” belonging to the universalia ante rem; an “I” wherein we ourselves are, belonging to the universalia in re; and an “I” which we comprehend and which belongs to the universalia post rem. But here we must especially note that, in this case, when we rise to a true apprehension of the “I,” the threefold “I” becomes merged into one. The “I” lives within itself; it produces its own concept and lives therein as a reality. The activity of pure thought is not immaterial to the “I,” for pure thought is the creator of the “I.” Here the “creative” and the “material” coincide, and we must but acknowledge that, whereas in other processes of cognition we strike against a boundary, this is not the case with the “I” which we embrace in its inmost being when we enfold it in pure thought.

The following fundamental axiom may therefore be formulated in the sense of the theory of cognition: “In pure thought a particular point is attainable wherein the complete convergence of the 'real' and the 'subjective' is achieved, and man experiences reality.” If we now set to work at this point, if we cultivate our thought so that it shall bear fruit and issue from itself—we then grasp the things of the world from within. In the “I,” therefore, grasped in pure thought and thereby also created, something is given whereby we may break down the barrier which, in the case of all other things, must be placed between “form” and “matter.”

A well-founded and thoroughgoing theory of cognition may thus advance to the point of indicating a way into reality by means of pure thought. If this path be pursued, it will be found that it must eventually lead to Anthroposophy. Very few philosophers, however, have any understanding of this path. They are mostly entangled in their self-made web of notions; arid since they cannot but regard the concept as something merely abstract, they are incapable of grasping the one and only point where it is a creative archetype, and equally incapable of finding a bond of union with the “thing-in-itself.”

For a knowledge of the “I” as an instrument whereby the human soul's immersion in the fullest reality may be clearly perceived, we are required to distinguish most carefully between the real “I” and the “I” of ordinary consciousness. A confusion of these might lead us to assert, with the philosopher Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”; in this case, however, reality would refute us during every sleep, when we “are” though we do not “think.” Thought does not vouch for the reality of the “I.” On the other hand, it is equally true that an experience of the true “I” is not possible except by means of pure thought. As far as ordinary human consciousness is concerned, the true “I” extends into pure thought, and into pure thought alone. Mere thinking only leads us to a thought (conception) of the “I”; experience of all that may be experienced within pure thought provides our consciousness with a content of reality in which “form” and “matter” coincide. Apart from this “I,” ordinary consciousness can know of nothing which carries both “'form” and “matter” into thought. All other thoughts do not image full reality. Yet by acquiring experience of the true “I” in pure thought we become acquainted with full reality; moreover, we may advance from this experience to other regions of true reality.

Anthroposophy attempts this advance. It does not remain stationary on the level of the experiences of ordinary consciousness, but strives to achieve an investigation of reality through the agency of a transformed consciousness. With the exception of the “I” experienced in pure thought, ordinary consciousness is excluded for the purpose of this investigation.

A new consciousness takes its place, whose activity in its widest range is commensurate with the activity of ordinary consciousness at such moments when the latter can rise to the experience of the “I” in pure thought. To achieve this purpose, our soul most acquire the strength to withdraw from the apprehension of all external things and from all conceptions with which we are inwardly so familiar that we can recall them in our memory. Most seekers after the knowledge of reality deny the possibility of the above; they deny it without trial. Indeed, the only method of trial is the accomplishment of those inner processes which lead to the above-mentioned transformation of consciousness. (A detailed description of these processes will be found in my book, among others, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.) An attitude of denial in this matter effectively hinders the attainment of true reality. Only the main points in connection with these processes can here be given; the subject is treated in detail in the author's above-mentioned and other books. The soul forces which in ordinary life and science are devoted to the perception of things and to the activity of such thought as can be recalled in memory—these forces can be applied to the perception and experience of a supersensible world. Our initial experience in this way is the perception of our supersensible being. The reason why we cannot attain this supersensible being if we remain within the limits of ordinary consciousness becomes conspicuous to us. (Though we attain it at that one point of the true “I,” as explained above, we are unable immediately to recognize it in its state of isolation.) Ordinary consciousness is produced when man's physical, bodily nature, as it were, engulfs his spiritual being and acts in its place. In the ordinary apprehension of the physical world we have an activity of the human organism which is maintained by the transformation of man's supersensible being into a sensible (physical) being. The activity of ordinary thought originates in the same way, with the difference that apprehension is ensured by the reciprocal relation of the human organism to the outer world, whereas thought evolves within the organism itself.

An insight into these facts is conditional to all true knowledge of reality. The seeker after knowledge must make the attainment of this insight the object of inner, spiritual exertion. The habits of thought prevalent in our day tend to a confusion of this spiritual exercise with all manner of nebulous, mystical amateurishness. Nothing can be more irrelevant. The effort is entirely in the direction of the fullest clarity of soul. Strictly logical thought is both the point of departure and the standard of exercise, to the exclusion of all experiences deficient in such inner clarity. But this purely logical thought is related to the inner exercise in question, as a shadow to the object which casts it. The exercise of the inner faculties strengthens the soul to such an extent that the struggle towards knowledge becomes fraught with more than the experience of mere abstract thought; the experience of spiritual realities is achieved. Knowledge is kindled in the soul, of which a non-transformed consciousness can have no conception. This development of consciousness has nothing to do with any form of visionary or other diseased condition of soul. These are inseparable from a debasement of the soul below the sphere in which clear, logical thought is active; anthroposophical research, however, transcends this sphere and leads into the spiritual. In the above-mentioned conditions of soul the physical body is always implicated; anthroposophical research strengthens the soul to such an extent that activity in the spiritual sphere is possible independently of the physical body. The attainment of this strengthened condition of soul requires, to begin with, exercise in “pictorial thought.” Consciousness is made to centre upon such clear and pregnant conceptions as are otherwise only formed under the influence of external apprehension. An inner activity is thus experienced of such intensity as only external tone or colour or another sense-perception can otherwise evoke. In this case, however, the activity is purely the result of strong inner effort. It is of the nature of thought; not such thought as accompanies sense-perception with abstract concepts, but thought which becomes intensified to the point of (inner) visibility such as ordinarily is only evident in the imagery of sense-perception. The importance does not lie in “what” we think but in the consciousness of an activity not undertaken in ordinary consciousness. We thus learn to experience ourselves in the supersensible being of our “I” which, in ordinary life, is concealed by the manifestations of the physical, bodily organization. A consciousness thus transformed becomes the instrument for the perception of supersensible reality. For this purpose, however, further exercise in respect of feeling and willing is necessary, in addition to the above-mentioned exercise, which is only concerned with the transformed faculties of perceiving and conceiving.

In ordinary life, feeling and willing are associated with beings or processes external to the soul. To bring supersensible reality within the range of cognition, the soul must give vent to the same activity which, in the case of feeling and willing, is outwardly directed; this activity, however, must now apprehend the inner life itself. For the purpose of and during supersensible investigation, feeling and will must be entirely diverted from the outer world; they must solely grasp what the transformed faculties of perceiving and conceiving create within the soul. We “feel,” and we permeate with “will” solely what we inwardly experience as consciousness transformed through thought intensified to the point of inner visibility. (A more detailed account of this transformation of feeling and willing will be found in the books mentioned above.) The life of the soul thus becomes completely transformed. It becomes the life of a spiritual being (our own) experienced in a real supersensible, spiritual world—as man, within ordinary consciousness, experiences his “self” in a sensible, physical world through his senses and the faculty of conceptual thought connected therewith. The knowledge of true reality is the goal of human effort, and the first step towards its realization consists of the insight that neither Natural Science nor ordinary mystical experience can provide this knowledge; for between them there yawns an abyss (as was shown at the outset) which must be bridged. This is effected through the transformation of consciousness as outlined in these pages. The knowledge of true reality can never be attained unless we first realize that the usual instruments of knowledge are inadequate for this purpose, and that the requisite instrument must first be developed. Man feels that something more is slumbering within him than his own consciousness can encompass in ordinary life and with ordinary science. He instinctively yearns for a knowledge which is unattainable for this consciousness. For the purpose of attaining this knowledge he must not shrink from transforming the faculties which in ordinary consciousness are directed towards the physical world, so that they shall apprehend a supersensible world. Before true reality can be apprehended, a condition of soul appropriate for the spiritual world must first be established! The range of ordinary consciousness is dependent upon the human organization, which is dissolved by death. Hence it is conceivable that the knowledge resulting from this consciousness falls short of being knowledge of the spiritual and eternal in man. Only the transformation of this consciousness ensures a perception of that world in which man lives as a supersensible being, that is, as a being which remains unaffected by the dissolution of the physical organism.

The acceptance of this transmutability of consciousness and, hence, of a possible investigation of reality, is alien to the habits of thought of the present day. More so, perhaps, than the physical system of Copernicus to the men of his time. But as this system, in spite of all obstacles, found its way to the human soul—so, too, anthroposophical Spiritual Science will find its way. An understanding of anthroposophy is also difficult for contemporary philosophy, for the latter derives its origin from a mode of thought which failed to fructify the germs of an unprejudiced technique of thought which were implanted in Aristotelianism. This shortcoming, as was shown above, was followed by the seclusion of thought and investigation, through an artificial web of concepts, from true reality, which became a “thing-in-itself.” Owing to this fundamental tendency, contemporary philosophy cannot but refuse to accept anthroposophy. In the light of the philosophical conception of scientific method, anthroposophy cannot but appear as dilettantism, and this reproach is easily conceivable if the essentials of the question are kept in view. The origin of this reproach has here been explained.

These pages will possibly have made clear what must necessarily occur before the philosophers can undertake to agree that anthroposophy is no dilettantism. It is necessary that philosophy, with its conceptual system, should work its way to an unprejudiced recognition of its own fundamental basis. It is not the case that anthroposophy is at variance with sound philosophy, but that a modern theory of knowledge, accepted by science, is itself at variance with the deeper foundation of true philosophy.

This theory of knowledge is wandering in false tracks and must relinquish these if it would develop an understanding of anthroposophical world-comprehension.

• 1. Under “Wisdom of the Mysteries” a wisdom is meant which flourished in ancient times, and differed essentially from later methods of knowledge. Its origin as an inner experience of the soul whereby the secrets of the Cosmos were revealed. During the sixth century B.C., this method of knowledge was succeeded by another which, rejecting the inner experience of the soul, sought to gain an understanding of the world by the rational observation of the physical and spiritual phenomena. The inner vision of the more ancient method was sustained by an instinctive logic. In the following period logical thought became to an increasing extent a conscious faculty. Intuitive vision disappeared and the wisdom of the Mysteries was succeeded by philosophical speculation. The philosophers of the earliest period, however, were acquainted with the wisdom of the Mysteries, either through inner vision (if they still retained this faculty) or through tradition, and applied to it the newly evolving faculty of rational thought. The reader will find a description of this historical transition in the author's Die Rätsel der Philosophie
• 2. Little or no weight can be laid on the objections raised against this statement of Kant in certain quarters.
• 3. The author is well acquainted with certain modern philosophic works in which reference is made to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel with a view to obtaining direction from the utterances of these thinkers. But he finds such treatises deficient in a point of vital importance for the philosophers in question, namely as regards their attitude towards a spiritual reality which must be experienced in the soul. A mere reference to the abstract logical element in their philosophy falls short of attaining the vital principle therein.
• 4. It clearly follows that the term “Materialism” must be used far more comprehensively than is usually the case. A man is a “materialist” when his method of thought constrains him to believe that the real thing-in-itself remains external to his soul, because no portion of its “matter” is transmitted. He is a materialist even though he deem himself an idealist for admitting the soul, as such. And it is to a masked materialism that Kant's doctrine can be traced. Viewed in this light, the modern claim that “Science has superseded nineteenth-century materialism” appears in all its hollowness. On the contrary, Science, failing to recognize materialistic thought as such, has plunged still deeper into Materialism.

For the development of human spiritual life, there is a self-contained period between the demand, sounding from the Greek striving for knowledge, “know thyself” and the confession, “ignorabimus”, which was derived from the natural scientific view of the world in the last third of the nineteenth century.

The ancient Greek sage found the human soul in harmony with life only when knowledge of the world culminated in knowledge of the human being, revealed in self-awareness.

The modern thinker who believes that science has pushed him to his confession denies man precisely this culmination of his mental state. When Du Bois-Reymond spoke his “Ignorabimus,” the belief lived in him that all human knowledge could only move between the two poles of matter and consciousness. But these two poles elude human knowledge. We shall be able to recognize the manifestations of matter in so far as they can be expressed in terms of measure, number and weight; but we shall never be able to know what lies behind these manifestations as “matter in space”. Nor shall we be able to recognize how the experience arises in our own soul: “I see red”, “I smell the scent of roses”, and so on, that is, what takes place in our conscious life. For how could one grasp that a mass of moving carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen atoms in the brain is not indifferent to how they move, how they have moved, how they will move. We can grasp how the substance in the brain moves, we can define this movement according to mathematical concepts; but we cannot form any idea of how the conscious sensation arises from this movement, like smoke from a flame.

Should man go beyond these “limits of his knowledge,” he would have to proceed from knowledge of nature to knowledge of the spirit. And where the talk of the spirit begins, knowledge ends and must give way to faith. That is the ignorabimus (“we shall not know”) confession.

It cannot be said that the modern state of mind has gone beyond this confession of ignorance in the recognized quest for knowledge. Certainly, all sorts of attempts have been made to do so; but these are limited to pointing out this or that path to knowledge; however, they do not muster the energy to actually follow these paths with real knowledge in practice. One or other recognizes that in forming his ideas man experiences something that bears within it an independent, non-material entity; but one does not summon up the energy to live so energetically in this spiritual way of experiencing ideas that one passes from the realization that “ideas are spirit” to an understanding of the real spiritual world, which reveals itself in ideas only as on their surface.

One only arrives at the experience: when natural phenomena approach man, he answers them from within with ideas. But one does not grasp life in ideas themselves. One looks at how one is stimulated by nature to form ideas; but one does not place oneself in the inner experience that is woven into ideas themselves.

Anthroposophy is the first to take this step. And one recognizes it as such because in its experience of ideas, the ideas do not remain ideas but become a spiritual form of perception. Anyone who only sees through the spiritual essence of the ideas must stop at seeing in them spirit-like images of the nature of being, in which he has to content himself with the only incomprehensible content of the spirit. Only he who brings to inner experience the soul activity unconsciously at work in the forming of ideas stands before a spiritual reality through this experience. And this experience can be pursued with a full consciousness, just as it belongs to the mathematician when he pursues his problems. From the habits of thinking that one has acquired from sensory observation and experimentation, one fears today to immediately fall into the nebulous and fantastic if one does not have, when forming ideas, the support of what the senses say, what the measuring methods, what the scales reveal. This does not lead to the conscious activation of the inner soul power that flows through the formation of ideas, and in the experience of which one encounters the spiritual just as much as one encounters the spatially extended through the sense of touch.

What is described by anthroposophy as a thought exercise leads to this experience. And because every step of this experience is carried out with the same deliberation as in the field of natural research, measuring and determining weight, anthroposophy can be described as an exact spiritual research. Only those who do not understand the exact nature of their endeavors will lump them together with the nebulous forms of mysticism that so many people are fascinated by today.

Some people also claim that precisely because anthroposophy starts from experience, it should not ascribe to itself the character of knowledge. For knowledge is only present where there is a transition from experience to the derivation of the one from the other, to logical processing and so on.

Those who say this have failed to notice how all the soul activities through which modern man justifies his scientific approach pass through anthroposophy into experience. In this experience, one does not abandon the scientific approach in order to move on to a fantastic soul activity; rather, one takes the full scientific approach into the experience.

In every step of the types of spiritual knowledge described in this weekly from various points of view – imagination, inspiration and genuine intuition – the full fundamental character of science lives on, only in the realm of the spirit rather than in the realm of nature.

When Du Bois-Reymond made his confession “We will not know”, he had before his soul how man experiences inwardly: “I see red”, “I smell the scent of roses” and how, beyond this experience, “matter haunts space” and man cannot approach it. He cannot do so along this path either. But when he brings the formation of ideas to conscious experience in the imagination, then he opens the spiritual perception to the spirit, which then reveals itself in inspiration, and the person unites as spirit with the spirit in intuition. In this way, the person finds the spirit. But if he experiences himself in this way, he does not enter through the surface of the rose into the rose through the experience of “seeing red” or “smelling the scent of roses”; but he comes to experience what shines towards him from the rose as red, what streams towards him from the rose as the scent of roses; he finds that he has come to the other side of the red radiance and the scent of roses; matter ceases to “haunt space”; it reveals its spirit, and it is realized that belief in matter is only a preliminary stage to the realization that it is not matter that haunts space either, but spirit that reigns. And the concept of “matter” is only a provisional one, which is justified as long as its spiritual character is not understood. But one must speak of this “justification” after all. For the assumption of matter is justified as long as one faces the world with the senses. Anyone who, in this situation, attempts to assume some spiritual essence behind the sensory perceptions instead of matter is fantasizing about a spiritual world. Only when one penetrates to the spirit in one's inner experience does that which initially 'haunts' one as matter behind the sense impressions transform into a form of the spiritual world, to which one belongs with the eternal part of one's being. This transformation is not dream-like, but vividly and precisely imaginable.

A better understanding of anthroposophy would be gained than is the case today from some quarters if one were to delve into the nature of the intellectual struggles that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This was the time when certain thinkers believed that the victory of scientific research over philosophical endeavor, as it had been active in the previous epoch, seemed decisive. They pointed to Hegel, who, in the opinion of these thinkers, had wanted to develop the whole world out of the idea, but who had completely lost the world of reality in his thought constructions; while the sovereign natural science started from this reality and only engaged with ideas to the extent that observation of the sensory world allowed.

This way of thinking seemed to be confirmed in every respect by the positive results of natural science. One has only to read books such as Moriz Carriere's “Moral World Order,” published in 1877, and one will become acquainted with a spiritual warrior who wanted to defend the right of idealism against “sovereign natural science.” There were many such spiritual fighters in those days. It may be said that the prevailing school of thought has stepped over them, in the knowledge that their cause is lost. Gradually, no more attention has been paid to them. Through their scientific idealism they wanted to save for humanity the knowledge of the spiritual world. They realized that “sovereign natural science” must endanger this knowledge. They contrasted what could be observed with the world of ideas living in human self-awareness and believed that this was a testimony to the fact that spirit rules in the world. However, they were unable to convince their opponents that the world of ideas speaks of a different reality than the one on which natural science is based.

Anthroposophy, looking back at these spiritual warriors, feels differently than the thinkers standing on the ground of “sovereign natural science”. It sees in them personalities who came as far as the door of the spiritual world, but who did not have the strength to open it. Scientific idealism is right; but only as far as someone who sets out to enter a region, but only has the will to reach the border of the region, but not to cross that border.

The ideas to which Carriere and his like pointed are like the corpse of a living being, which in its form points to the living, but no longer contains it. The ideas of scientific idealism also point to the life of the spirit, but they do not contain it. Scientific idealism aspired to the ideas; anthroposophy aspires to the spiritual life in the ideas. Behind the thinking power that rises to the ideas, it finds a spiritual formative power that is inherent in the ideas like life in the organism. Behind thinking in the human soul lies imagination. Those who can only experience reality in relation to the sense world must see imagination as just another form of fantasy.

In our imagination, we create a world of images to which we do not ascribe any reality in relation to our sensory existence. We shape this world for our own enjoyment, for our inner pleasure. We do not care where we got the gift of creating this world. We let it spring forth from our inner being without reflecting on its origin.

In anthroposophy, we can learn something about this origin. What often prevails in man as a frequently exhilarating imagination is the child of the power that works in the child as it grows, which is active in the human being at all when it forms the dead materials into the human form. In man the world has left something of this power of growth, of formative power, something that it does not use up in fashioning the human being. Man takes possession of this remnant of the power that shapes his own being and develops it as imagination. One of the spiritual warriors referred to here also stood at the threshold of this knowledge. Frohschammer, a contemporary of Carrieres, has written a number of books in which he makes imagination the creator of the world, as Hegel made the idea or Schopenhauer the will.

But we cannot stop with fantasy any more than we can with ideas. For in fantasy there is a remainder of the power that creates the world and gives form to the human being. We must penetrate behind fantasy with the soul.

This happens in imaginative knowledge. This does not merely continue the activity of imagination; it first stops in it, clearly perceiving why, in contrast to the sense world, it can only acknowledge unreality, but then turns around and, moving backwards, reaches the origin of imagination and thinking. She thus enters into spiritual reality, which reveals itself to her through inspiration and intuition (spiritual perception) as she advances. She stands in this spiritual reality as sensory perception stands in physical reality.

Imagination can only be confused with fantasy by those who do not feel the jolt of life between the consciousness that depends on the senses and the consciousness that lives in the spirit. But such a person would be like someone who awakens from a dream but does not feel the awakening as a jolt of life, but instead sees both experiences, dreaming and being awake, as equivalent.

The abstract thinker fears that imagination will continue to be fantasized; the artistic person feels slightly uncomfortable that the imaginative activity, in which he wants to develop freely, undisturbed by reality, should accept another activity, of which it is a child, but which reigns in the realm of true reality. He imagines that this casts a shadow over the free child of the human soul. But that is not the case. Rather, the experience of spiritual reality only makes the heart beat faster in the realization that the spirit sends an offspring into the world of the senses through art, which only appears unreal in the world of the senses because it has its origin “in another world”.

Anthroposophy wants to open the gate where noble spiritual fighters stood in the second half of the nineteenth century, without the strength to unlock this gate. The power of thought showed them the way to the ideas; but this power of thought froze in the ideas; Anthroposophy has the task of melting the frozen power.

Just as ¹ Today, mysticism is understood to be the search for inner experiences that satisfy the human being after the longing to know one's own nature and one's relationship to the world has arisen. The not entirely conscious premise here is that man is capable of developing powers of the soul through which he can immerse himself in his own being to the point where he is connected to the roots of world-creating existence.

The path taken into the depths of the soul presents itself on closer inspection as a continuation of the path taken in ordinary memory. This reproduces the experiences of the soul in images of what the person has experienced in his or her dealings with the world. The images can be more or less faithful to the experiences, or they can be imaginatively transformed in the most diverse ways. The easiest way to visualize this process, which is naturally very complicated, is to use the comparison with a mirror. The impressions of the external world are received by the human being through the senses and processed by the powers of thought. Within the organism, they encounter processes in which they are not continued, but stopped and, in a given case, reflected like the light images from the mirror wall. However, the reflection occurs in such a way that the human organism has a more or less modifying effect on the impressions received from outside.

The mystic now penetrates deeper into his own being with intensified soul forces than is the case with ordinary memory. He pushes, as it were, through the intensified soul forces behind the mirror wall. There he encounters regions of his own organization that are not reached by the process of ordinary memory. The forces of these regions do participate when memory is formed, but they remain unconscious. Their effect only comes to light when the memory image is somewhat different from the direct experience. But what the mystic brings into his consciousness as the causes of these effects is experienced like a memory. It has the pictorial character of a memory. But whereas the latter reproduces experiences that were once present in the person's life on earth but are no longer there at the moment of experiencing them, the mystic experiences images that were never earthly experiences at all. He experiences a world of images in the form of memory thoughts, which is precisely what memory is.

When these matters are approached with anthroposophical research, it is found that the processes of one's own body reveal themselves in the mystical images obtained in the manner described. This occurs in a kind of symbolism that is also present in dream images. It can be said that the mystic dreams of the processes of his own bodily organization.

It is certainly a great disappointment for some who think differently about mysticism to discover the above. But for those who want to penetrate the mysteries of the world of reality, every kind of knowledge is welcome, including the fact that, when viewed in a certain way from the soul, the bodily processes appear as a web that is like nocturnal dreams. And if we follow this knowledge further, it shows that this fact is a guarantee of how the human body's organization ultimately has its origin in spiritual sources.

The anthroposophical researcher must know these things; he must understand the paths and prospects of mysticism. But his path is different. He does not penetrate directly behind the mirror of memory and thus into the bodily organization as the mystic does. He transforms the powers of memory while they are still soul-spiritual, while they are pure thought forces. This happens through the concentration of these powers and their meditative application. He dwells on clear images with highly concentrated soul forces. In doing so, he strengthens these forces within the soul region, while the mystic submerges into the region of the body.

The anthroposophical researcher thus arrives at a vision of a finer, more ethereal body of formative forces, which is connected to the physical human body as a higher one. The mystic enters into dreams about the physical body; the anthroposophical researcher arrives at a superphysical reality. This formative forces body no longer lives in spatial forms; it lives in a purely temporal existence. In relation to the spatial physical body, it is a time body. It initially presents the forces at work in the physical body during the earthly existence of the human being in their temporal progression, as in a tableau that can be seen all at once. It differs markedly from a mere comprehensive reminiscence of a person's previous life on earth at a particular moment. Such a memory-image represents more the way the world and people have approached the person remembering; but this characterized life tableau contains the sum and the confused interaction of the impulses coming from within the human being, through which the person has approached the world and other people in sympathy and antipathy. It thus reflects the way in which the person has shaped their life. This life tableau relates to the memory image as the impression in the seal to the imprint in the sealing wax.

This life tableau provides the first object of anthroposophical research; from there, further steps can be taken.

The arguments presented here show how little sense it makes to lump anthroposophy together with other well-known psychic research methods. In it one has not abstract idealism, but concrete knowledge of the spirit; and so one has not grasped its essential character if one identifies it with this or that form of mysticism, only in order not to engage with its very own nature, but to dismiss it with what one posits as an opinion about such a form or presupposes in the case of many. If this is taken into account, many of the misunderstandings that still circulate around the world today with regard to anthroposophy will disappear.

• 1. This article is linked to the previous ones: “Is Anthroposophy Fantasy?” and “Anthroposophy and Idealism”

Anthroposophy strives for an understanding of the world and humanity that it can apply in a fruitful way to the art of teaching and educating. Its knowledge of human nature is not compiled from random observations made about human beings. It goes to the very foundations of the human being. She sees the human being in general in each individual human individuality. But she does not turn into abstract theory that dissolves the human being into general forces in her desire to understand him. Her thoughts about the human being are experiences of the human being. Her insights enliven the feelings for the human being. They reveal the secrets not only of the human being in general, but also of each particular human nature before the soul's gaze.

Anthroposophy unites theoretical world observation with direct, vital insight. It does not need to artificially apply general laws to the individual phenomena of life; it remains in the fullness of life from the very beginning, in that it sees the universal itself as life.

In this way, it is also a practical understanding of the human being. It knows how to help when it perceives this or that quality in the growing human being. It can form an idea of where such a quality comes from and where it points. And it strives for such an understanding of the human being that the knowledge also provides the skill to treat such a quality. In the knowledge of the human being, the insight into the human nature is conveyed.

One need only fully develop the views that anthroposophy comes to about the human being, and they will naturally become the art of education and teaching.

An abstract knowledge of the human being leads away from the love of humanity that must be the fundamental force of all education and teaching. An anthroposophical view of the human being must increase love of humanity with every advance in knowledge of the human being.

If we wish to study the living organism, we must direct our attention to the relation of each individual part to the life of the whole, and also to the way in which the whole is effectively manifested in each part. We cannot understand the brain unless we have a clear insight into the workings of the heart. But it is the same in the life of man as it unfolds in time. One cannot understand the phenomena of childhood without also seeing in them the characteristics of the adult human being. The life of man is a whole; it is an organism in time. The child learns to look up to the adult with reverence. It learns veneration for human beings. This reverence, this veneration for human beings, is imprinted on the being; but it also changes in the course of life. For life is transformation. Reverence for human beings, veneration for human beings, which take root in the human soul during childhood - they appear in later life as the strength in the human being that can effectively comfort another human being, that can give him strong advice. No man of forty-five will have the warmth of comfort and counsel in his words who has not been brought as a child to look at other people with shy reverence, to honor them in the right way. And so it is with everything in human life. It is the same with the physical and the soul-spiritual. One understands the physical only if one grasps it in each of its members as a revelation of the spiritual. And one gains insight into the spiritual only if one is able to observe its revelations in the physical correctly.

Childhood cannot reveal its essence through that which it only allows to be observed in itself. Human life is a whole. And only a comprehensive knowledge of the human being leads to an understanding of the child's life. In the abstract, this is easily admitted. But anthroposophy wants to develop this view into a concrete knowledge and art of life. It must develop into an art of education and teaching that feels responsible for the whole of human life by being entrusted with the growing human being.

It sounds very nice to say: develop the child's individual abilities, get everything you do in your education and teaching out of these abilities. You cannot do anything with such beautiful principles as long as you do not carry in your own soul an understanding of the whole course of human life. And anthroposophical knowledge of the human being strives for such an understanding.

When this is stated, one often hears the retort: you don't need anthroposophy for that. Surely all that is already contained in the principles of modern education. It is there, to be sure, in their abstract principles. But the point is that a real knowledge of the human being in body, soul and spirit leads to the transformation of abstract demands into real, life-filled art. And for this practical implementation, knowledge of the human being is necessary, which, although based on the good foundations of modern scientific knowledge, advances from these to a spiritual understanding of the human being. Anyone who approaches the human being with the ideas that the study of nature gives them may well come to the view that one develops this or that human disposition; but this view remains an abstract demand as long as one does not see the disposition as a partial revelation in the whole human being, in body, soul and spirit.

One would like to say: the world view that is recognized today makes demands on education and teaching; but it lacks the possibility of fulfilling these demands through a practical knowledge of life: anthroposophy wants to provide this practical knowledge of life. Anyone who sees this will not find in anthroposophy an opponent of modern views and developmental forces in any area, but can hope for it to fulfill what lies abstractly in these views and forces.

Humanity will have to admit that much of what it currently considers practical must be relegated to the realm of life illusions; and much of what it considers idealistic and impractical must be seen as the real thing. Such a change of perspective will be particularly necessary in the field of education and teaching. The great questions of human life lead to the children's and schoolroom.

In the preceding meditations I have spoken to you about three successive but interrelated supersensible modes of knowledge: imaginative knowledge, inspired knowledge and intuitive knowledge. And I have tried to explain to you the views of the world and life that can be arrived at by applying these modes of knowledge. Today I will only add to what I said yesterday the knowledge to be gained through such supersensible insight into the innermost nature of the human being himself, the knowledge about which the human being longs for an answer because not only does the satisfaction of a religious or theoretical need somehow depend on it, but the possibility that the human being may only become fully human at all. All human striving ultimately aims at this: Man wants to become fully human.

That which forms the actual center of our being and which we initially face with the ordinary consciousness that we, so to speak, summarize it in the only point that we then express with the word “I”, we actually face in ordinary life as something unknown. And it is precisely this mode of knowledge, as it is meant and characterized here, that gradually leads to the self-knowledge that is initially accessible to the human being. I would like to use a comparison to make it clear what I actually mean. When we look around us with our eyes, we see things through light, which itself is supersensible, but which, in its effects in the colors of objects, makes them perceptible to us for this one sense. But we can also say that we see that which is not illuminated by light. If we have a white surface somewhere with a dot in the middle, we see the white through the effect of light, as we can imagine. But we also perceive the black dot, that which confronts us as dark. We know something of this black point. If we reflect properly, it is something like this in our ordinary lives with our perception of the self. We perceive the things around us. We also bring thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will from our own soul life to our consciousness. That is, so to speak, the illuminated part. But what belongs to us in all of this, the I, that we actually perceive only as a black spot. In our ordinary consciousness, we only know about it through the fact that we perceive nothing. I would like to expand the comparison even further. I would like to remind you how you actually have to put together your entire life on earth so far in your memory from the parts that you can see because you have lived through them in an awake state. But when you look back, you connect these experiences, which you have spent while awake during the day, in a single continuous stream of reminiscence. But these experiences are everywhere interspersed with what happened while you were asleep, let's say, dreamless sleep. And dreams also mostly belong to what has been forgotten, so that we can say in general: while you were asleep. In fact, in remembering you would always have to imagine these intermediate pauses if you wanted to place the complete stream of your experiences before your soul. But yesterday we saw that the I with the astral body - that is the actual soul being with its center, the actual self - dwells outside the physical body from falling asleep to waking up. They only emerge from their unconsciousness, in which they are during sleep, when they are not left to their own devices, but when they can submerge into the etheric body, the time body, and into the spatial or physical body. With the help of these supports – we cannot call them tools in the proper sense, as we saw yesterday – they have thoughts, mental images and, through mental images, feelings and impulses of will, which are more dream-like and also asleep. In order for the I and the astral body to truly unfold the forces that they have within them, it is necessary for them to submerge into the etheric body and the physical body. Thus, when we look back on our life on earth in our ordinary consciousness, we never actually remember the true form of the I and the astral body, but only what arises when this I and this astral body have support in the physical and etheric bodies.

From this you will see that it is more than a mere comparison when I speak of the fact that the I and the astral body, that is, the actual soul being, is like a dark point within that which is actually perceived. We would have to see the true form and capacity of this ego and this astral body in retrospect if we saw them not only as dark inclusions, but as realities, as we otherwise perceive realities. But we lift these soul entities out of their indeterminacy, their imperceptibility, through imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. As I discussed yesterday, we first lift the thinking part of our soul out of the dark uncertainty by immersing it in the physical body. This thinking part initially only uses the physical body as a kind of thinking power, which is present in this physical body in the form of air-like substance. And then, when sensory perceptions, emotional experiences, will impulses or desires are added to thinking when fully awake, where the soul must fully submerge into the physical body, where everything in the physical body must be utilized by the soul, then what would otherwise would otherwise be mere fleeting thoughts, as long as the processes take place only in the airy substance of the body, can, as it were, condense into the ability to remember and into that which, as thoughts, as mental images, connects with sensory perception or emotional experiences or volitional impulses.

We can study the human organism in a much more detailed way with the means of knowledge I have mentioned than we can without them. Ask yourself what a person usually has as a mental image of their physical body when they do not think about it too much. Of course, if you think about it a little, something else immediately arises. He has the mental image that the physical body is limited by the skin, and that inside it is actually a closed mass, which one thinks of as more or less solid or semi-solid. But we must take into account that hardly ten percent of the human body is really solid, that for the most part we are a column of liquid, that we constantly carry air within us, that through the airy we are constantly not separate from the outside world, connected to the outside world. The air that was just outside is then inside me; the air that I have inhaled, that has been processed in the body, is then outside. So that man, if he is to be understood completely in terms of his physical body, must be seen as a solid, liquid, air-like substance. And all this is permeated by the warmth element, which works in these different substances.

When, upon awakening, the soul descends into the body, it is the case with the purely conceptual that it does not descend further than what is present in our body as air-like substance. The thought takes hold of the airy element. It is quite wrong to speak of the thought merely in terms of vibrational nerve processes and the like. All this is revealed to the imaginative view that the mere thought, which also lives in dreams, first takes hold of the airy element. Then, as this air-shaped element enters into certain processes, the thoughts are transferred to the watery element, and from there they imprint themselves on the solid, salt-like element. This makes it possible for the reflexes to arise later as memories, and this through processes that I unfortunately do not have time to describe, although they are very interesting.

In this way one can gain an intimate insight into the workings and weavings of the soul within the body, graduated according to the aggregate states of the human physical body. This physical body gradually becomes transparent. One sees the weaving and workings of the soul within it. One sees that which I had to say remains actually obscure to ordinary consciousness. I put it like this yesterday: When we have the simplest volitional impulse, we first have the mental image that something should be carried out, for example, that the arm should be raised. Then this mental image shoots into our organism to become will. This eludes ordinary consciousness, just as sleep states do. In relation to the will, ordinary consciousness also sleeps in the waking state of the human being. But then one sees the effect again, and that again as a mental image. But then, when one studies the matter with the means of knowledge characterized here, one sees that when the thought becomes an impulse of will in us, this thought first has an effect in the air element of the human physical body. Then it is transferred again to the solid and liquid elements, and it is through the impulse of will that matter is, as it were, burned. In the liquid part of the human physical organism, matter is reduced to nothingness, as I described it yesterday. But because this is taking place, because matter is being reduced to nothingness, empty spaces are created in our physical body, so to speak. These empty spaces create a completely different dynamic. We become immersed in them. So that when we see through something with these means of knowledge, which becomes an act of will, we first perceive the thought, then perceive how the thought shoots into the body, how it destroys matter there, how we witness the rearrangement of the material. This is how the other state of equilibrium comes about, namely that matter is returned to nothing. This witnessing of a different equilibrium leads to the physical body also following this evocation of a different equilibrium in its movements, so that action then occurs, the action that is directly bound to the human being's physical body. In this way, the human being's will also becomes transparent in the soul, transparent down to the last details.

Just to show you that anthroposophy is truly not something that just rambles and rambles in vagueness, but that it enters into the very concrete facts of the world, I would like to give you a small example where there is also a will impulse. This example is taken from language. We have - I will choose a characteristic word, I could also choose another word - we have the German word “hier”. I say: “The box lies here.” What actually happens in the human organism when it comes to pronouncing the word “hier”? The first thing that happens is that what lives in the breath is first grasped in the subconscious. And this, what lives in the breath, is now the thought. The thought lives in the breath. We only have a real mental image of the thought when we know, from anthroposophical knowledge, that the thought can really live in the inhaled air, that it is a force that can act on the inhaled air. Only when we cannot go into these details do we come up against all the difficulties of psychology, taken physically. If we believe that thought can directly move a bone, that is, can have such a robust effect on physical matter, we cannot get by. But if we know that thought is something that is transmitted in a roundabout way through the warmth element into the air element, then what is stimulated there is continued into the rest of the organism, and we begin to grasp what is there with an impulse of will. So we can say: First of all we have the experience of breathing. This experience remains unconscious. Only the insight characterized here can transcend it. Then the second element is added: we inwardly experience that which now continues out of the breathing process into the liquid element of the organism. We experience that which signifies a direction in the speech organism. In the arm, it would mean an outstretching of the arm. We perceive this in the i. So we perceive the continuation of the thought-air into the watery element, so to speak the stretching movement. We see through imagination the transition from the breathing movement into the stretching movement. And then this stretching movement is formed in the right. If I were to say only “here,” I would have to draw it: 1st breathing process 5, 2nd stretching movement ie (the horizontal is drawn). But if I now draw the stretching movement as it is experienced unconsciously when I pronounce “here,” I must draw it like this: I perceive the breathing process, perceive the direction of the stretching, which is not carried out, but rolls along in the r. And then I have really experienced inwardly what is present as a volitional impulse when I pronounce the word “here”. In this way, we can follow the impulses of will that express themselves in language when we use our imagination to look into the whole weaving and ruling of the soul that permeates the physical body and the etheric or formative body.

With imagination, we can initially gain an overview of the kind of things I have described here. When inspiration comes into play, we see how the soul plays within; how the physical body and the etheric body are something that exists externally in space and time, and how, on this, yes, I cannot say it well: like on an instrument, because this is in turn constantly being created by the soul processes, but like on a support, a ground that is constantly being worked on, the soul plays. Through inspiration, we thus advance to the actual seeing of the work of the soul in a physical organism.

When we then ascend to intuition, we perceive something else. Then we perceive: there is a law in the world that has nothing to do with physical law, but a law that certainly takes hold of people. I can perhaps express myself best about this fact in the following way: When one looks back at a later age on the way in which one's life on earth has passed, then one finds that, if one is honest with oneself, one must admit that one is actually nothing other than what one has become here in one's physical existence on earth as a result of one's experiences. Consider only: solely from this life. Consider how you learned to think, how you learned to feel, how you may have been stimulated to do this or that by meeting a particular person at a particular point in your life, which in turn may have had an effect on your character. Put together all the individual experiences you have gone through and ask yourself whether you would have become something different in relation to what you are for the outside world if different experiences had entered into your existence. If you follow this train of thought properly, you will soon see how something has been living in you from the very beginning, unconsciously drawing you to that which has become so important in your life. It is interesting how sometimes people who have reached a certain age and who have not used their lives to dream, but to grasp the facts of life that have come to them in a deeper sense, how such people, when they look back on their lives, came to say - Goethe's friend Knebel, for example, was such a person - “When I look back on my life, everything is like a dream.” , when they look back on their lives, came to say to themselves: When I look back on my life, everything is so systematically ordered. Not even the smallest event could be missing if I were to be exactly the same in my earthly existence as I am today. If the smallest event were missing, there would be a slight change, but a change nonetheless. Just think what, say, the sixty-year-old Goethe would have been if he had not experienced Italy. With Goethe, it is almost tangible. He did not go to Italy on a whim, but because there was a deep yearning within him. But these deep longings are not just there, if we want to analyze them precisely, so that we can always explain them, the following from the earlier, but they are born with us. We really find something planned in life. Of course, one could be deceived about that at first. I have only mentioned this because, after all, one can approach through the most ordinary observation that which is now given by intuitive knowledge. Intuitive knowledge really does give a full insight not only into what is going on in our organism in terms of the soul, but it also gives an insight into what works in us as the center, the I, the actual self-being. And this self-being reveals itself to intuitive insight at the third stage of supersensible knowledge. It reveals itself in such a way that we really do not stand passively in relation to the facts of the external world, but that we are drawn to them through that which is in us, and not through heredity, but from the deepest central soul being, which has been drawn into us from a spiritual-soul world at birth and has taken on a physical earthly body. Through intuitive insight one comes to realize that this I does not actually enter into earthly life in such a way that it would have to be passively surrendered to the random facts that come its way, but that it is strongly attracted by one fact and strongly repelled by another. It positively seeks its way in the world. In short, it is born carrying within itself the predisposition to its destiny.

And if we then further develop this intuitive insight into the nature of the human self, we come to realize that this ego has undergone repeated earthly lives. These repeated lives on earth did, however, begin at a certain point in time, before the I was so little different from its surroundings in its ancient form of existence that there was no such thing as a change between life on earth and spiritual-soul life. The repeated lives on earth will continue to be experienced until a point in time when the ego will again be so similar in its entire inner makeup to the spiritual world that it will no longer need an earthly life.

Thus, when we fully recognize the ego, we look back on repeated earthly lives. In other words, we look at the entire life of a person as proceeding in such a way that we have parts of that life between birth and death or conception and death, other parts between death and a new birth; that is, in repeated earthly lives the person lives out his full existence.

The usual objection is that people do not remember these repeated lives. This only applies to the ordinary consciousness. The moment intuition sets in, what happens through the repeated lives on earth becomes just as much an inner view of the soul as memories within a single life on earth. So it is here that anthroposophy does not come to its results through abstract proofs, as is the case with ordinary philosophy, but by first preparing the soul for higher knowledge and then recognizing these things through intuition. But this means that anthroposophical knowledge proves to be a continuation of the knowledge we have today in science, but it is a continuation that must work in a completely different way from the mere scientific knowledge that is recognized today.

Often the question is asked: how does anthroposophy prove what it asserts? Those who ask this question and who, because the usual form of proof is not available in anthroposophy, deny that anthroposophy is scientific, do not consider the following – I can only explain these things approximately, but they are absolutely and precisely true. The person who proceeds to prove something shows, by the very fact of proceeding to prove, that what has to be proved is not present in his intuition. Actually, we prove everywhere where we have no intuition. If I have to prove that yesterday a human being was here in this room, I shall need proof only if I myself have not seen the person here. This is basically the case with all proofs, and this is also the case with the proofs in the historical development of mankind. When, in their older, more instinctive knowledge, men had a view of what they called the divine being, they needed no proofs. The proofs of the existence of God began their life in historical evolution only when the view was lost. Proofs begin everywhere when there is no view.

The anthroposophical method, however, consists in first preparing the human soul so that it can then be perceived. When this is described – and this is the peculiar thing about anthroposophy – it can be brought into the forms of common sense and understood in the same way that a non-artist can understand a work of art, even though he cannot make it. Therefore, it cannot be objected that Anthroposophy cannot be grasped with common sense. It can only be investigated by someone who is an anthroposophical researcher himself. It can be understood by anyone who wants to apply their common sense without prejudice.

Thus we see that it is first of all knowledge of man, self-knowledge, knowledge of what the I really is, whereas otherwise, with our ordinary consciousness of the I, we have only a void, a darkness, a gloom, so that a knowledge is imparted of the real I, but that this I can then be seen in its eternity, and in this eternity as continuous through repeated earthly lives. Just as I have shown you that the human organism becomes transparent to the soul right down to the will, so too – as I have already hinted at in the previous days – the outside world is also made transparent. The soul-spiritual of the outside world is recognized through imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Many people who get to know superficially what is presented through anthroposophy, perhaps even only from the writings of its opponents, very often say that anthroposophy is a rehash of old worldviews, for example, of Gnosticism, which, after all, still prevailed among very many people in the first Christian centuries. They therefore say that we are dealing with something that has basically been refuted by the evolution of humanity over time, or at least has been overcome. Anyone who really focuses only on what has been presented in these lectures will not be tempted, even if they are also familiar with Gnosticism and anthroposophy, which certainly appears with new means and methods of knowledge and takes into account the consciousness of present-day humanity, to somehow combine it with Gnosticism. This anthroposophy works in such a way that it presupposes the scientific development of the last centuries. Of course, Gnosticism did not take this into account, because its existence preceded the development of science. But there is something else that could lead one to the temptation to lump anthroposophy together with gnosticism. The only way to avoid doing so is to really delve into the essence of anthroposophy. The only thing that anthroposophy might have in common with gnosis is that it also takes into account, in a certain way, what is a prevailing worldview in our time, and that is agnosticism, which is in a certain respect the opposite of gnosis and is also the opposite of anthroposophy, but in a different respect.

This agnosticism can first be characterized in terms of its theoretical aspect. It is present when a person speaks in the way, for example, Herbert Spencer spoke. Many others have followed in his footsteps, but they are not fully aware that they are agnostics, although they are actually agnostic in their entire way of thinking. He said: We see the world of the senses around us. We have the intellect, which rises from observation and experiment to the contemplation of the laws in this world. - To this we add what we can survey from ordinary consciousness as phenomena of the soul. Here too, a makeshift search is made, for it is only makeshift, for some kind of law. But then those who do not simply reject every supersensible reality, contenting themselves with the intellectual comprehension of sense perceptions and inner soul experiences as they present themselves to ordinary consciousness, , said: Yes, but one cannot penetrate with human abilities to what now lies as some or many origins behind these appearances; one cannot achieve a real gnosis, a real gnosticism, no knowledge. One is an enlightened person precisely because one admits that the origins of things cannot be known or investigated. Agnosticism in this form has taken hold in wide circles. It also exists in different variations. This agnosticism, when it appears philosophically, is a kind of opposite to anthroposophy, and I could, if I felt like it, start from this point in time to turn polemically critical, abusive if you will, against contemporary agnosticism, depending on my mood. What can be said about it, insofar as it really brings corruption to the human forces of progress in civilization, can soon be read in the journal “Die Drei”. I explained it in a lecture I gave at a Stuttgart School of Spiritual Science course. As I said, one could also approach the matter from this side. But I do not wish to do that today. I should like to show that this agnosticism also has its origin in the evolution of the human spirit.

Of course, errors can arise in the individual spheres of life. Then we become critics of these errors. We must root out these errors and illusions. But when something arises with such widespread popularity as agnosticism, then we can indeed fight it, the fight can be justified, but we must also ask: Yes, how is it that within the spiritual development of humanity something like agnosticism has arisen?

Now, anyone who sees more deeply into these matters must ask themselves the following: We once had to advance to that in the development of humanity, which I strictly defended on one of the last lecture evenings for the external natural sciences, especially the inorganic natural sciences; we had to advance to pure phenomenalism, as Goethe also demanded. To that pure phenomenalism, which no longer uses thinking to construct all kinds of atomic worlds behind sense perceptions that can no longer be perceived; which uses thinking merely to read sense perceptions, to remain within the phenomenal world, to arrange the phenomena in such a way that they appear to us as archetypal phenomena in the Goethean sense. All this has been done in the most diverse variations here in recent days. I do not want to deny that something of the kind does not live in a great number of people of the present time. Nevertheless, on the one hand, there is a definite tendency to theorize, where we, so to speak, once we have entered into thinking, pierce through the sensory carpet and continue with thinking for a while beyond sensory perception, where there is no longer anything for thinking to create. There we then posit atoms and all sorts of other things. This corresponds to a kind of law of inertia. Thinking will, in accordance with our present position, our present relationship to the world, actually only be applicable in such a way that we can apply it in the service of grouping, of interpreting phenomena in relation to one another, thus remaining within the phenomenal world, so to speak, reading the phenomenon and not underlying things with all kinds of explanations.

When someone writes down the word “table”, they have details. They try to combine the individual letters into a word. They read. They would start the wrong activity if they said: T, and then had to assume that processes were taking place that combined the T. Then the i. Thus he who, in following an inner law of thought, penetrates the sensory tapestry with his thoughts, instead of reading in the sensory world, exempts himself from having to do so. One penetrates the sensory world and puts forward hypotheses, which is not to say anything against phenomenal atomism. Some people in the present are well aware that there must be a pure phenomenalism. That is simply the direction in which natural science is tending. The natural scientists themselves, after all, are more concerned with experimenting and observing than with reflecting on the methods. Therefore, one cannot really blame them when all kinds of constructs are added to the phenomena. Then they believe they have facts in these constructs. But certain philosophical minds feel that it must come to pure phenomenalism. In particular, among Western thinkers – in the East it is quite different – we often have such personalities who see clearly that the science of the external world must ultimately come to a pure grasp of phenomena and use thinking only to allow the phenomena to interpret themselves reciprocally. “All fact is already theory,” says Goethe. And in William James, the American who established pragmatism, a philosophical interpreter arose in response to pragmatism. In Europe, he has emerged somewhat more blatantly in the so-called “as-if philosophy,” where it is said that one should not interpret anything into the phenomenon. But one must still ascend to something that is no longer an appearance, so one does not say of what arises: it is there, but one acts as if it were there. Much clearer than this “as-if philosophy” is that of William James, who actually gives up any substantial effect of the power of thought. He is clear about the fact that with thinking one can only group external facts and come to a point where one can then control these external facts in practice in the service of human development, of civilization. So that he actually sees nothing in all the laws that man penetrates to but practical guidelines, so to speak, for getting along with the world.

In principle, this is something that phenomenology tends towards. If we study it in its purity in Goethe, where it appears in a wonderful way with its full justification, we recognize that it was bound to arise, it must be there. Only through pure phenomenality can man fully enlighten himself about what is actually in his environment. But then everything that goes beyond the phenomenon is initially something that man cannot cope with. If one knows nothing of methods of knowledge that ascend into the supersensible worlds, that is, that ascend from phenomena as facts to other, but now supersensible facts, then, by tending towards phenomenalism, one must ultimately say to oneself: Only phenomena exist at all. When I examine them with my thinking, I do not discover anything that lives on behind them, other than the phenomena themselves. For the archetypal phenomena are ultimately also only phenomena. So that I actually get nothing out of them but practical principles for using the phenomena in the service of human beings.

Assuming that this were already fully developed; that phenomenalism were there, and thinking were to consist only in regulative principles ordering phenomena, then we have something that we could no longer call knowledge in the sense of the older concepts of knowledge, for example, gnosis. For what did that consist of which, in the past, out of instinctive human worldview, was always called knowledge? In my book 'The Riddles of Philosophy' you can read more about this in Greek times: Cognition consisted in the fact that when one looked at the world, one did not merely perceive the sense perceptions - sounds, colors, qualities of warmth - but that one perceived the thought objectively outside, outside oneself, like a color. Goethe still claims for himself that he sees his ideas in the world as the Greeks saw the ideas in the world, namely as sense perceptions. But now imagine a person in this mental-sensual activity. He looks at something, not just the colors, but the thoughts. By looking at the thoughts, he feels within himself, he experiences within himself not something passive as today, where we have only the sensual before us, but he felt activity within himself. This is the reason for Plato's assertion that there is something active in seeing, something like grasping. He felt something like activity, something that connected him as a human being with what he saw as an object outside. And this was knowledge, this feeling, this experience of an activity, it was not merely the acceptance of a passive thing. This way of experiencing knowledge is today found only in some retarded individuals, in some people who live more by their instincts than by their intellects, or it can be newly acquired by those who, in the anthroposophical sense, work their way up again into higher knowledge, but now fully consciously and not instinctively, as was still the case with gnosticism. But today ordinary consciousness is increasingly approaching the point where it is passively surrendered to external phenomena, where thinking is no longer considered a phenomenon, where it lives only in it as a guiding principle for ordering phenomena more and more practically and putting them at the service of humanity.

What is accomplished there with the phenomenal world does not lead to knowledge in the old sense. Those who, for example, still have the religious content with the God impulse from old traditions, like Spencer, for example, and then see what is called knowledge today, but which is no longer knowledge, gnosis, they profess that they say: One does not actually come to the source in this phenomenal existence. Agnosticism! And basically this agnosticism has two sides. On the one hand, it takes away everything that makes us strong as whole human beings when we have an activity in cognition. On the other hand, however, we have to go through this phase of human development, to be purely passively devoted to the phenomena. It is part of the overall development of the human race to develop this phenomenalism in the Goethean sense, because it conveys to us a level of truth that is necessary for the overall development of humanity.

What follows from the fact that we come to the phenomena and are thus, if we know nothing but the external phenomena, drawn into agnosticism? It follows that if we want to remain human, we have to approach the spiritual world in a different way than by interpreting the external sense world. And for that part of the external world that underlies the sense world, we cannot find it within the sense world. There was a time in my life when I was acquainted with a number of so-called teleologists. These people would come and say that the mechanistic worldview, pure phenomenalism, was not enough for the external world. One of these people even wrote a book, which was admired by many, about “empirical teleology.” He tried to show that mere causality is not enough, that one can also determine a certain purpose in natural phenomena, purely empirically. People felt very exalted about the mere mechanism, which has a certain justification in external natural science, by introducing a kind of teleology in this way.

I said to people at the time, including this Nikolaus Cossmann: just look at a clock. This clock can be explained completely mechanistically when it is in front of you. There is nothing there that causes us to assume little demons inside that make the wheels turn or anything like that. Any nebulous mysticism is excluded if you just look at the thing. I strictly held the view that the world of phenomena must be explained from itself. All interpretation and carrying in of teleology and the like is harmful. But the clock was made by a clockmaker. I will not get to know the clockmaker from the clock, but I can get to know him as a person. I choose methods other than analyzing the clock to get to know the clockmaker. I seek him out, perhaps in a social context, somewhere other than his shop. - At the moment when one is clear about the fact that the external world is to be grasped phenomenally, at that moment one has not, so to speak, demystified it, but one has shown the necessity of seeking this spirit, this supersensible, on other paths, through other means and methods of knowledge. And these are precisely the ones I have described. They must be added to the phenomenalist methods of knowledge.

As you can see, anthroposophy is currently endeavoring to fully establish and accept phenomenalism because it is clear that what leads to spiritual worlds must be achieved with these other methods of knowledge. This also includes what underlies the external sense world as a spiritual being.

So you see, on the one hand I could have repeated what I said in Stuttgart, as I mentioned earlier. I could have said: mental images become weak within agnosticism, because they are only passively devoted to the external world. But because we have weak mental images, we also have weak feelings. Feelings live in man in such a way that he must stir them up himself. They become sentimental, or else they remain dull, so that they become untruthful. Feelings thus become nebulous, sentimental or dull. As a result, a naturalistic or untruthful tendency has entered into our art, because art particularly emanates from the world of feeling. But because mental images do not enter into the impulses of the will as strong forces, we lack the right kind of determination today. In particular, we lack determination when it comes to taking on something new. We let what seems unfamiliar to us pass us by as a sensation. This is basically how it has been with anthroposophy for twenty years. Many people have heard about it, but they cannot decide, out of their usual experiences of the soul, to let it be more than a sensation. Agnosticism weakens us in our will. It even weakens us in the face of religious experience today. As a result, many people who have long aspired to have an elementary religious experience end up immersing themselves in traditional religions. How many honest seekers have recently returned to Catholicism. Or one returns to oriental mysticism. Because agnosticism weakens our mental images, we do not feel strong enough for elementary religious experiences.

Anthroposophy adds to the passive processing of the world in phenomenalism the impetus of imagination, inspiration and intuition, and thus even comes to a real grasp of that which, as supersensible, enters into our historical existence. She comes to a real grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha. She comes to a grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that she can see how the pure, divine being, the Christ-being, has taken possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This in turn gives real meaning to the mental images of the resurrection, of the connection between the living Christ and our own human development on earth, while it is actually deeply significant that theologians, who are considered enlightened in recent times, have said: Yes, one must just look at the life of Jesus. The resurrection, they say, arose as a belief, but one can only speak of an arising faith. What actually happened in the Garden of Gethsemane cannot really be spoken of. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, will speak of these things, which can only be grasped as supersensible, which cannot be grasped if one wants to grasp them with the usual historical methods taken from the world of the senses. I could speak at length about the deadening of our religious life through the widespread agnosticism of today. But I will only hint at that. It has already been discussed elsewhere.

But there are two sides to every coin. One can also speak of agnosticism in such a way that it has emerged as a necessary phase of development in the more recent history of mankind; that it is, so to speak, the accompanying phenomenon of pure phenomenalism, which we have to work our way towards. But even if this pure phenomenalism is of extraordinary interest to us as we work our way into it, we cannot gain from it that which is most important to us for our innermost humanity. We must gain that in a different way.

Now let me add something personal, not out of vanity or silliness, but because it is relevant. I have already mentioned that I completed my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1894. I am convinced that this “Philosophy of Freedom” could not have been written by someone who is not a pure phenomenalist in relation to natural science. For, although I am a pure phenomenalist in the field of natural science, what was I compelled to do in order to found the moral truth? I was compelled to introduce into this “Philosophy of Freedom” the moral intuition, which I have already characterized here as something thoroughly supersensible and spiritual. Especially resented was my ethical individualism. But it was necessary. I had to show that in the individual human being, the moral impulse can be intuitively experienced in an individualistic way through ordinary consciousness, whereas otherwise intuition can only be attained through higher exercises. This was how it had to be done in order to give the moral world a foundation, if one was a pure phenomenalist who already ascended into the spiritual world at that time. For in the face of pure phenomenalism, the moral impulse disappears when a person is only completely honest with himself. If he is dishonest, he succumbs to all kinds of illusions.

But anyone who has met people who have wrestled with worldviews not in theory but in every fiber of their emotional life knows what the tendency towards phenomenalism, which has agnosticism in its wake, can mean for today's people. I have met people who say to themselves: If we grasp the world with today's scientific means, we see only natural processes in it. We can hypothetically trace it back to a primeval nebula or something similar, which is the event of our earth. We can follow it to the end, to the heat death or something similar. But then we see how we can develop the moral world within us for a long time - it is only a haze and fog that rises above the only real thing, which begins with the primeval nebula and ends with the heat death. And after the heat death there will be the great field of corpses for all that not only lived on earth, but also what strove there for moral impulses, for religious inwardness. All this will be buried. Certainly, not many people feel this discrepancy for their own spiritual life, but there are people who feel it. I have met them, with all the inner tragedy that made them doubt not only the reality of what could be grasped in religious terms, but also the reality of a moral world order. They are haze and mist, rising from the merely externally phenomenal facts.

Now let me add something personal, not out of vanity or silliness, but because it is relevant. I have already mentioned that I completed my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1894. I am convinced that this “Philosophy of Freedom” could not have been written by someone who is not a pure phenomenalist in relation to natural science. For, although I am a pure phenomenalist in the field of natural science, what was I compelled to do in order to found moral truth? I was compelled to introduce into this “Philosophy of Freedom” the moral intuition which I have already characterized here as something thoroughly supersensible and spiritual. My ethical individualism was particularly resented. But that was necessary. I had to show that in the individual human being the moral impulse can be intuitively experienced in an individualistic way through ordinary consciousness, whereas otherwise intuition can only be attained through higher exercises. This was how it had to be done in order to give the moral world a foundation if one was a pure phenomenalist who already ascended into the spiritual world in those days. For in the face of pure phenomenalism, the moral impulse is lost if a person is only completely honest with himself. If he is dishonest, he comes to all kinds of illusions. But anyone who has met people who have wrestled with worldviews not in theory but in every fiber of their soul knows what the tendency towards phenomenalism, which has agnosticism in its wake, can mean for today's human beings. I have met people who say to themselves: If we grasp the world with today's scientific means, we see only natural processes in it. We can hypothetically trace it back to a primeval nebula or something similar, which is the event of our earth. We can follow it to the end, to the heat death or something similar. But then we see how we can develop the moral world within us for a long time - it is only a haze and fog that rises above the only real thing, which begins with the primeval nebula and ends with the heat death. And after the heat death there will be the great field of corpses for all that not only lived on earth, but also what strove there for moral impulses, for religious inwardness. All this will be buried. Certainly, not many people feel this discrepancy for their own spiritual life, but there are people who feel it. I have met them, with all the inner tragedy that made them doubt not only the reality of something grasped in religious terms, but also the reality of a moral world order. They are haze and mist, rising from the merely outwardly phenomenal facts.

This is rooted in the way our society is organized. Millions and millions of people, especially those in proletarian circles, only see reality in external, economic phenomena. What is spiritual – law, morality, art – is nothing, as they say, but an ideological superstructure, something that arises merely as a sham, an ideology. And so we have progressed in the agnostic direction to the point where one speaks of ideology. I myself, having been very active in working-class circles, have experienced the sense in which ideology is spoken of there, which, after all, is basically only the fault of those who, today, also from the direction of science, speak of everything spiritual, not quite clearly, not quite honestly, but actually in the sense of an ideology. We have arrived at the opposite pole of human development compared to the one that was once the oriental worldview. It spoke of Maya and of the true essence. Everything that is only accessible and attainable to the senses was Maya to it, was illusion. And the real, the truly real, was that which is now graspable for man above the sensual. Today we live in a worldview that presents exactly the opposite. For those who are agnostic, the sensory world is the only reality. They could just as easily say maya as ideology about that which can be grasped beyond the sensory world. We should translate this word in this way. Our maya is the spiritual; once the maya was the sum of sensory phenomena.

But this forces us, precisely because we had to arrive at this point, to take our paths of knowledge to the other side. For if we now ascend through imagination, inspiration, and intuition into the spiritual world, then we recognize precisely that which leads us to the actual essence of humanity. And we find the strong impulse to ascend into these worlds when we become fully aware that the sense world may only be explained from within itself, with its own methods. This gives us the impetus. But then, if the sense world can only be explained from its own methods, then thinking serves only as a tool of explanation in it. Then thinking has significance for the sense world only as a servant, for the mutual interpretation of phenomena, in order to bring the phenomena together in such a way that they explain each other. Then thinking, as we have it in pure phenomenalism or agnosticism, is merely an image. Then it no longer contains any reality. The Gnostic felt the reality of thought by looking at it. Our thinking has a mere image existence.

What follows from this if we really ascend to this pure thinking and grasp our moral impulses in it? Now, if I have a mirror here, with images in it, the mirror images cannot force me to do anything through causality. If I want to be led by mirror images, my thinking in the world development of humanity has progressed so far that it really only has the character of an image, so it no longer contains causality for me. Then, when I have moral impulses, pure thinking is formed into impulses of human freedom. By arriving at phenomenalism, and thus at pure image-thinking, and by being able to grasp moral impulses through the power of pure image-thinking, we also pass through the stage of freedom. We educate freedom into our human nature by going through this phase of human development. This is what I wanted to present in my Philosophy of Freedom. But we only become free when we have a thinking that is image-thinking, that proceeds entirely within the physical body, as I have described. At the moment we look further back, we see not freedom but fate. You see, here we have the opportunity to recognize that which we call human destiny, because it rules in the unconscious, because we only come to its rule when we ascend to intuition. Because we find spiritual laws in this destiny that work through repeated lives on earth, we have a spiritual necessity in it. But by entering into life on earth, we free ourselves from necessity for certain actions, and only follow the image-containing thinking, and in the present epoch of humanity we are thereby educated to freedom. There is no contradiction, if one looks into the matter properly, between destiny and freedom. However, in order to be able to present the concept of fate to the world correctly later on, it was necessary that the concept of freedom be presented first in the “Philosophy of Freedom”.

You see, what needs to be done is not a blind railing against agnosticism, because in a certain respect it is only the other side of phenomenalism. We read in natural phenomena, but if we merely read them, we do not find in them what we have to seek on the higher paths of knowledge. But precisely for that reason we need them fully only when we no longer bring forth instinctively from our human nature that which is the impulse of our thinking. In ancient times, even in the times of Gnosticism, man brought forth not only hunger and thirst from within himself, but also active thinking. He was not yet a technician in the modern sense. One only becomes one when one embodies pure thought outwardly in matter. I am even convinced – please forgive me for bringing up something very personal – that if I had studied philosophy in the conventional sense, instead of being educated at a technical university and finding my way into this technical life of the present, I would not have written the Philosophy of Freedom, because it is precisely the opposite pole to the experience of pure fact. And the pure fact, which is experienced in the outwardly mechanistic, and which then also leads to phenomenalism, is absolutely what, on the other hand, first evokes the full opposite pole. Otherwise, we instinctively bring something from within us that dreams little demons into the clock. We first seek the truly spiritual through inner powers of knowledge, which we must first gain when we can no longer approach our physical environment through instinctive forces and bring into it what arises from instinctive observation. On the one hand, the age of technology, with its machines, is precisely the fertile soil for a spiritual, anthroposophical worldview. And in this sense, a clear knowledge of the spirit must be brought about through anthroposophy, precisely from a non-mystical view of the world. We must not arrive at a new gnosis, based on active thinking by instinct, but we must seek for true spirituality in the outer sense and the inner human being, on a path of knowledge to be attained by practice.

We must close this course at some point, and since I wanted to present to you today what anthroposophy is in contrast to the prevailing agnosticism, we who have participated in this course are obliged to part.

Anthroposophy, as I have already mentioned, arose entirely out of the scientific spirit of modern times. Anyone who compares my earliest writings with my later ones will recognize this. It then took on the form in which simple human minds found each other and tried to satisfy certain religious needs within this anthroposophy. It may be said that there have been quite a number of such simple human souls who have found what is most essential, what is absolutely necessary for the human being, already in this anthroposophy.

It has always been a strange relationship with the scientists themselves. I can still see some of them sitting in front of me – I like to be specific – I can see a botanist sitting in front of me, for example. He was a theosophist in the sense that you may also be familiar with, in the sense of orientalizing mysticism, as it prevails in theosophical societies, for example. I had one of the most learned botanists in front of me, so it was natural for me to talk to the gentleman about botany. For me it was something natural. But he did not want to hear about it. No, no, botany must remain what it is in the university cabinet, not only with him, but also with other botanists. It should remain precisely in the way one acquires practical knowledge through the botanizing drum and works with the microscope. He should not interfere with that! Immediately, when I started a botanical topic, he talked about the etheric body, the astral body and even higher bodies. It was the rule in this theosophical movement that one first talked about all possible bodies, until far up, where they became more and more misty. They did not characterize things as I have done here, by pointing out that the etheric body is a time organism, by trying to present the matter concretely, by characterizing the astral body as that which comes from the spiritual-soul realm and inwardly shapes the body. I have tried to give a characteristic of sleep, even if it is still incomplete. I have always tried to give a concrete description. But people like those I am talking about now were not interested in that. If only one had the words for it: physical body, etheric body, astral body, then further kama manas, and then one went into the highest regions, which became thinner and thinner, but always remained material. It was a strange theosophical materialism that confronted me particularly crudely once when I was at a theosophical congress in Paris. Various lectures were held there. I asked a personality, who was actually very advanced, how she had liked the lectures. She said: Yes, it left wonderful vibrations, wonderful resonances. I felt as if she had said: One smells something extraordinarily good in this room after these lectures. — It was all transferred into the material. One knew nothing of the real spirit. And the man of whom I have just spoken always started from what lay in this direction. I always started from something else, for example, the secrets of root formation, stem formation, flower formation, the spiral tendency of plants, their germination or the like. Nothing, nothing - anthroposophy must not come into it, away with it! The astral body and buddhi and atma kept coming up, as did the rounds and the globes and everything else that is doing the rounds in the world in this sense. In short, I am only giving these as specific examples, but it was actually quite futile to approach scientists in their own scientificness.

But then, with the exception of a few people who had been involved in philosophical work from the very beginning, such as Dr. Unger, more and more younger people were coming forward. And we would never have been able to found the Freie Waldorfschule in Stuttgart if a number of people had not been truly seized by the anthroposophical spirit in the individual subjects of science in the anthroposophical sense. For only in this way could it also be transferred into pedagogy and didactics. This has also made it possible to expand more and more what used to be available only to simple minds, and to really return to science in a certain way. Today we can already see a broader field. And you were to be given a sample of this broader field, in which we can already work today, thanks to a number of younger forces who are working with extraordinary dedication on the development of the anthroposophical spirit in the individual concrete sciences. One may say that much would also be desirable in another direction. Work in the therapeutic-medical field is still in its infancy. We have also made all kinds of attempts, for example in the economic field. However, it is precisely in the latter that it is clear – and this can perhaps also be seen from events in recent weeks – that it is still not possible to work fully in the practical economic sphere. Hopefully, the things we have begun will continue to progress, and it will eventually be possible to work in this field in the same way as work is being done today in some areas of science itself, and as work can be done in a thoroughly future-proof way in education and didactics through the Waldorf school.

Following on from this, I would now like to express my heartfelt thanks to those here in Holland who, as friends of the anthroposophical movement, have made these college courses possible. It is certainly no easy task to organize such an event, and above all, in order to muster the necessary work in such a case, a deeper understanding of the matter is needed. That this has come about here, fills us - and I am convinced that I also speak from the hearts and souls of all those who were allowed to speak here during this course week - with a deep feeling of gratitude, and I would like to express this to you; first of all to you, who are the organizers of this course. And I would like to combine this feeling of gratitude with the hope that those who have now turned their attention to what has been discussed here over the last few days will feel that some suggestions have been given to them with the little that could be achieved here in such a short time. We cannot do more than give such individual suggestions. If you have the opportunity to develop these suggestions by trying to penetrate further into what has already been worked out, but which is still little known to the world, what has been worked out through the anthroposophical movement, the anthroposophical work, then you will see that this anthroposophical movement is not only not what its enemies and opponents would like to present it as, who mostly, because they cannot be objective, become personal, but that the anthroposophical movement not only is it not what its enemies and opponents would have us be, but that the Anthroposophical Movement is at least sustained by a truly serious scientific spirit.

And on the other hand, I may perhaps indulge in the hope that the lectures I have tried to formulate here this evening may contribute something to showing how unconscious longings live in a large part of civilized humanity in our time, which, when brought to consciousness, represent nothing other than the desire for something like anthroposophy. But the fact that such a longing exists can also be seen from all kinds of negative instances.

There is a personality in our time, Oswald Spengler, who is also known here in Holland, who wrote the book about the necessary decline of the Occident. I have witnessed how, especially among the youth of Central Europe, this book about the “Decline of the Occident” has made a deep, devastating impression. In this book, however, we are dealing with the work of a man who is fully at home in twelve to fifteen sciences, who truly does not speak from lightly-basted knowledge, but who speaks only from the negative authorities that are effective in our time.

One such negative instance is, for example, agnosticism, when it represents the other side of phenomenalism and one only wants to stop at this phenomenalism. The other, the positive, is part of it. This positive seeks to reach anthroposophy on the spiritual path of knowledge. In this sense, I would like at least a little bit of anthroposophy to have spoken to your souls, given your sincerity. Often, when representing anthroposophy, one has the feeling that it has been around for decades, but we are always at the beginning. And now, after decades, we are talking about the very beginning again, despite having spoken to thousands upon thousands of people over the decades. One feels this — not because of anthroposophy, which can wait — one feels it because of the longings of the time as something tremendously oppressive. But that is also why there is such deep satisfaction when people do come together who want to know what anthroposophy is and who, through their studies and serious engagement with life, have a certain ability to judge. Anthroposophy does not have to fear judgment. I can assure you of that from the spirit of anthroposophy. Critics with the ability to judge will always be most welcome to anthroposophy. Up to now, they have mostly become its adherents after they have got to know it. The more objectively one engages with anthroposophy, even if it means criticizing it, the better for anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is not something that works on the basis of blind faith in authority or that counts on a lack of criticism. It prefers those listeners and readers and collaborators who bring their full, discerning soul nature to it, not the kind that often comes from the agnosticism of the present, but the kind that comes from the truly unbiased human soul.

If one can have the feeling that, even if it was a beginning, such beginnings must ultimately lead to something that is connected with the deepest longings and necessities of human development, then one can say that one leaves such a course with a certain satisfaction. And so I believe that those who have spoken here will leave with a certain satisfaction and, above all, with a grateful heart from what has taken place here. But they would like to hope that some stimulating things may also have taken place for the honored audience.

In this spirit, allow me to conclude this course by saying to you in the warmest possible way, out of this anthroposophical spirit: If we have perhaps connected with each other through some thoughts, then we seek the ways to continue to be together, to work together in spiritual work. In this spirit, I bid you farewell for today.

Question and Answer Session

The Hague, April 12, 1922

Question about multidimensional space.

Rudolf Steiner: If I have the usual coordinate system, I have characterized three-dimensional space. Now, let us just discuss it schematically, we proceed from certain algebraic assumptions by abstractly continuing the same process that leads from the plane into three-dimensional space, and we arrive at the fourth dimension, the fifth and so on, at an n-dimensional space. And then it is even possible, let's say, to construct bodies – Hinton did that – to construct the tessaract, but that is not a real body, but the projection of the real tessaract into three-dimensional space. Now the thing is this: in purely theoretical-abstract terms, of course, there is nothing to be said against such derivations. In theory, one can also pass from three-dimensional space to the fourth dimension of time, if one proceeds within the calculation formulas in such a way that one takes into account the leap that is actually made, because it is different after all, if one passes from the first to the second dimension and to the third dimension of space, than if one passes into time. But if you refine it, ... then you can pass over into time. In this way one arrives at an abstract four-dimensional space. If one remains abstract, one can go on doing this as long as one remains in the purely intellectualistic, as long as one is not compelled to follow the matter vividly. But then one is confronted with a problem which, while the purely abstract train of thought leads to a regressus ad infinitum, vividly becomes an elasticity problem. We could also think of the pendulum as continuing to swing forever. But in the dynamic, we will get a state of vibration. That is how it is in reality. If you can get into imaginative thought, you simply can no longer carry out the process in infinitum by assuming a fourth and so on dimension. Then, if I call the first dimension +a, the second +b, the third +c, if I take real space, I am obliged not to write the fourth +d, but by the nature of things I am obliged to write -c. So that the fourth dimension simply cancels out the third bit by bit and only two remain. So instead of four, I end up with two dimensions. And so I am also forced, if I assume the fifth, to set - b, and with the sixth - a. That is, I come back to the point. Elasticity has struck back to the starting point. And that is not something that exists only in the imagination, for example, that is, a subjective experiment, but it is realized in the way I described the day before yesterday. As long as we have, let us say, the earth here and look at the root of the plant, we are really dealing with a special formation of gravity. Here one is in the ordinary dimensionality of space. But if one wants to explain the form of the blossom, then one cannot get away with that. Then, instead of taking the point of origin of the co-ordinates, one must take infinite space, which is, after all, only the other form of the point. And then one comes to going in centrifugally instead of going out centrifugally. You come to this wave surface. Instead of the thing spreading out, it pushes in from the outside, and then you get those movements, which are sliding or scraping movements or pressure movements, where you would go wrong if you took coordinate axes from the center of coordinates, but you have to take the infinite sphere as the center of coordinates and then all the coordinates going towards the center. So, one also gets the qualitatively opposite coordinate axis system as soon as one enters the etheric. The fact that this is not taken into account is the mistake in the ordinary ether theory. Herein lies the difficulty in defining the ether. Sometimes it is seen as liquid, sometimes as gas. The mistake here is that one starts from the coordinate system seen from the center. But as soon as one enters the ether, one must take the sphere, and construct the entire system not from the inside outwards, but the other way around.

Things become interesting when they are followed mathematically and cross over into the physical, and much could still be contributed to the solution of borderline problems if these theories, which begin to become very real here, were developed. But there is still a terrible lack of understanding for this. For example, I once gave a lecture at a mathematical university society where I tried to introduce these things. I explained that if you have the asymptotes of a hyperbola here and the branches of the hyperbola here, what you have to imagine on the right here, spreading out, you have to imagine on the left here, spreading together, so that a complete reversal takes place. These things gradually lead to a more concrete treatment of space. But today there is little understanding for this. Even pure analysts often show a certain dislike of synthetic geometry. And this newer synthetic geometry is the way to get out of the purely formal mathematical and to the problem where one has to grasp the empirical. As long as one calculates with mere analytical geometry, one does not approach the realms of reality. There one has only developed the end points of the coordinates, the geometric location of the coordinates and so on. If one remains with constructing with the linear and with circles, then one stands in lines within them, but is compelled to take a certain visualization to help. This is what makes synthetic geometry so beneficial for getting out of the formal and showing how to think the mathematical in nature.

Question: What does Dr. Steiner mean when he says that the physical body is a spatial body and the body of formative forces is a temporal body? The physical body also lives in time, growing and decaying.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, that is only imprecisely thought, if I may say so. In order to trace this back to an exact thinking, you would first have to undertake an analysis of the concept of time. Just consider: as the usually meant reality stands before us, space and time are interwoven. One can only think such things when one distinguishes between space and time. In ordinary objective knowledge, you have not given time at all. You measure time with nothing but spatial quantities, and changes in spatial quantities are the means of recognizing what then counts as time. Just imagine a different way of measuring time. Otherwise, you always measure time according to space. This is not the case in the moment when you move on to the real experience of time. People usually do this unconsciously. Actually, thinking is elevated into consciousness through imaginative knowledge. But you have a truly temporal experience when, for example, let us say, on April 12, 1922 at 4:4 minutes and so many seconds, you take your soul life.

When you take your soul life in this moment, it has a temporal cross-section. You cannot say that there is any spatial cross-section within this temporal cross-section. But within this temporal cross-section lies your entire earthly past, and if you want to draw schematically, if that is the flow of your experience from a to b, you have to draw the cross-section A to B. You cannot avoid placing all of your experience in this cross-section, and yet there is a perspective in it. You can say that experiences that lie further back in time are represented with less intensity than those that are closer in time. But all of this is represented in the one cross-section. So that you get different relationships when you really analyze time. We can only form a mental image of time if we do not use the analysis that we are accustomed to in physics, according to space-cognition means, but only by reflecting on our soul life itself. But in your soul life, even if you only have abstract thoughts, you are in the time body. What is important is that we are now able to understand this time body as an organism. You see, when you experience any indisposition, let us say a digestive disorder, in the stomach, you may be able to see that it affects other areas of your spatial organism as well. The spatial organism is such that the individual areas are spatially dependent on each other. In the case of the temporal organism, although we have a later and an earlier, later and earlier are connected in an organic way. I sometimes express this by saying: Let us assume we have a very old person. We find that when such an old person speaks to younger people, for example to children, that his words bounce off the children, that his words are of no use to the children. And we find another person. When he speaks to children, it is something quite different. His words flow by themselves into the child's soul. If you now study — one only does not study these things because one very rarely considers the whole human being, one does not, so to speak, pause with one's attention long enough to observe, for example, the basis of the blessing of an older man or woman, one must sometimes go back to early childhood. Today, observation does not extend that far. Anthroposophy has to do that. Go back and you will find that those who can bless in old age, who have this peculiar spiritual power in them that their words flow into young people like a blessing, have learned to pray in their youth. I express it figuratively: folded hands in youth become blessing hands in old age.

There you have a connection between what influences other people at a later age and what, let's say, pious feelings and the like were present in the life in early childhood. There is an organic connection between the earlier and the later. And only when you know the whole person do you see how he has an infinite number of such connections. Today we are stuck with our whole life outside of this reality. We imagine that we are full of reality, but we are abstract creatures in our culture of life. We do not pay attention to true reality. For example, we do not pay attention to such things. We also do not pay attention to the fact that when we teach a child, we must avoid, if possible, giving him sharply contoured concepts, especially in primary school. These are really for a later age, as if one were to constrict the limbs and prevent them from growing larger. What we pass on to the child must be an organism, must be mobile. Now you are gradually approaching what I mean by an organism. Of course, it is only possible within the imagination. But one can still arrive at a mental image of an organism, if one is clear about the fact that what takes place in time in the human being does not relate to the spatial organism, but to the temporal organism. Now you see that there is a reality in time. You can also see this in mathematics. There was once a very nice discussion about this. I believe it was Ostwald who pointed out - not a supporter of the humanities, but someone who is not exactly a materialist - that the organic processes that take place in time cannot be reversed with the mechanical process. But the fact is that you can't even get close to the time processes with the usual calculations. You actually always remain outside of the time processes with the usual calculations. They do not follow the processes as such. If, for example, you insert negative quantities into a formula for the lunar eclipse, you get the more distant things, but you do not move away with the things. You only move in the spatial sphere. And so you only get a correct concept of what the human physical body actually is if you can separate the spatial from the temporal. In the case of man it is of fundamental importance, because one does not arrive at any understanding at all if one does not know that with him everything temporal proceeds as an entity for itself, and the spatial is ruled by the temporal as by something dynamic, while with a machine the temporal is only a function of that which has a spatial effect. That is the difference. For humans, the temporal is real, while for a mechanism, the temporal is only a function of space. That is what it ultimately comes down to.