The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] In Brentano’s psychology, the “intentional relation” is treated simply as a fact of ordinary consciousness. It is a psychic fact; but no attempt is made to clarify further by showing how that fact is articulated into the whole psychic experience. Perhaps I may be permitted, in bare outline, to advance a corollary to it on the basis of my own systematic and extensive observations. These latter really call for presentation in much greater detail and with all the supporting evidence. But up to now circumstances have made it impossible for me to go beyond introducing them cursorily into oral lectures; and what I can add here is still only a brief outline statement of the results. I invite the reader to entertain them provisionally on that footing. At the same time they are not put forward merely as hazarded “insights”, but rather as something I have striven year in and year out to establish with the means that modern science makes available.

[ 2 ] In the particular psychic experience which Brentano denotes by the term judgment¹ there is added to the mere representation (which consists in the formation of an inner image) an acknowledgment or repudiation of the image. The question that arises for the psychologist is: What exactly is it, within the psyche’s experience, where through is brought about not merely the presented image “green tree”, but also the judgment “there is a green tree”? This somewhat cannot be located within the rather circumscribed area of representational activity that is assigned to ordinary consciousness. (In the second volume of my Riddles of Philosophy (Die Rätsel der Philosophie), in the section entitled “The World as Illusion”, I gave some account of the various epistemological ideas to which this difficulty has given rise.) We have to do with an experience that lies outside that area. The problem is to find its “where”. Where, when the human being confronts a sense-object in the act of perception, is this “somewhat” to be looked for? Not in anything he so receives in the process of perception, that the receiving can be understood through any physiological or psychological ideas that posit outer object on one side and immediate sensation on the other. When someone has the visual perception “green tree”, the fact of the judgment “there is a green tree” is not to be found in that relation between “tree” and “eye” which is viable to either physiological or psychological explication. The experience had by the psyche, which amounts to this inner fact of judgment, is an additional relation between “man” and “tree” strictly other than the bare relation between “tree” and “eye”. Yet it is only this latter relation that is fully and sharply experienced in ordinary-level consciousness. The former relation remains a dull, subconscious one, which only comes to light in its product—namely the acknowledgment of the “green tree” as an existent. In every perception that reaches the point of a “judgment” we have a double relation to objectivity.

It is only possible to gain insight into this double relation, if the prevailing fragmentary doctrine of the senses is replaced by an exhaustive one. If we take into account the whole of what is relevant in assigning the characteristics of a human sense, we shall find we must allow the name “senses” to more than is usually so labeled. That which constitutes the “eye”, for example, a “sense” is also present when we experience the fact: another “I” is being observed, or: the thought of another human being is being recognised as such. The mistake usually made, in the face of such facts as these, is failure to maintain a certain very valid and necessary distinction. As an instance of this, people imagine that, when they hear somebody else’s words, “sense” only comes in to the extent that “hearing” as such is involved, and that all the rest is assignable to an inner, non-sensory activity. But that is not the case. In the hearing of human words and in the understanding of them as thoughts a threefold activity is involved, and each component of this threefold activity requires separate consideration, if we mean to conceptualise in a scientifically valid way. One of these activities is “hearing”. But “hearing” per se is no more a “becoming aware of words” than “touching” is a “seeing”. And just as it is proper to distinguish the sense of “touch” from that of “sight”, so is it to distinguish the sense of “hearing” from that of “being aware of words”, and again from that of “comprehending thoughts”. A starveling psychology and a starveling epistemology both follow as consequences from the failure to sharply distinguish the “comprehending of thoughts” from the activity of thinking, and to recognise the “sense” character of the former process. The only reason for our common failure to distinguish is, that the organ of “being aware of words” and that of “comprehending thoughts” are neither of them outwardly perceptible like the ear, which is the organ of “hearing”. Actually there are “organs” for both these perceptual activities, just as, for “hearing”, there is the ear.

If, scrutinising them without omissions, one carries the findings of physiology and psychology through to their logical conclusion, one will arrive at the following view of human sensory organisation. We have to distinguish: The sense for perceiving the “I” of the other human being; the sense for comprehending thoughts; the sense for being aware of words; the sense of hearing; the sense of warmth; the sense of sight, the sense of taste; the sense of balance (the perceptual experience, that is, of oneself as being in a certain equilibrium with the outer world); the sense of movement (the perceptual experiencing of the stillness or the motion of one’s own limbs or, alternatively, of one’s own stillness or motion by contrast with the outer world); the sense of life (experience of being situated within an organism—feeling of subjective self-awareness); and the sense of touch. All these senses bear the distinguishing marks by virtue whereof we properly call “eye” and “ear” by the name of “senses”.

To ignore the validity of such distinctions is to import disorder into the whole relation between our knowledge and reality. It is to suffer the ignominious burden of ideas that cut us off from experiencing the actual. For instance, if a man calls the “eye” a “sense” and refuses to accept any “sense” for “being aware of words”, then the idea which that man forms of the “eye” remains an unreal fancy.

I am persuaded that Fritz Mauthner in his brilliant way speaks, in his linguistic works, of a “happening-sense” (Zufallssinnen) only because he has in view a too fragmentary doctrine of the senses. If it were not for that, he would detect how a “sense” inserts itself into “reality”. In practice, when a human being confronts a sensory object, it is never through one sense that he acquires an impression, but always, in addition, through at least one other of those just enumerated. The relation to one particular sense enters ordinary-level consciousness with especial sharpness; while the other remains more obtuse. But the senses also differ from one another in a further respect: some of them afford a relation to the outer world that is experienced more as external nexus; the others more one that is bound up very intimately with our own being. Senses that are most intimately bound up with our own being are (for example) the sense of equilibrium, the sense of motion, the sense of life and also of course the sense of touch. When there is perception by these senses of the outer world, it is always obscurely accompanied by experience of the percipient’s own being. You can even say that in their case a certain obtuseness of conscious percipience obtains, precisely because the element in it of external relationship is shouted down by the experience of our own being. For instance: a physical object is seen, and at the same time the sense of equilibrium furnishes an impression. What is seen is sharply perceived. This “seen” leads to representation of a physical object. The experience through the sense of equilibrium remains, qua perception, dull and obtuse; but it comes to life in the judgment: “That which is seen exists” or “There is a thing seen”. Natures are not, in reality, juxtaposed to one another in abstract mutual exclusion; they, together with their distinguishing marks, overlap and interpenetrate. Hence, in the whole gamut of the “senses” there are some that mediate relation to the outer world rather less and the experience of one’s own being rather more. These latter are sunken further into the inner life of the psyche than, for example, eye and ear; and, for that reason, their perceptual function manifests as inner psychic experience. But one must still distinguish, even in their case, the properly psychic from the perceptual element, just as in the case of, say, seeing one distinguishes the outer event or object from the inner psychic experience evoked with it.

For those who adopt the anthroposophical standpoint, there can be no shirking of refined notional distinctions of this kind. They must be capable of distinguishing “awareness of words” from hearing, in one direction; and of distinguishing, in the other, this “awareness of words” from the “understanding of words” brought about by one’s own intellection; just as ordinary consciousness distinguishes between a tree and a lump of rock. If this were less frequently ignored, it would be recognised that anthroposophy has two aspects; not only the one that people usually dub “mystical”, but also the other one, the one that conduces to investigations not less scientific than those of natural science, but in fact more scientific, since they necessitate a more refined and methodical habit of conceptualisation than even ordinary philosophy does. I suspect that Wilhelm Dilthey² was tending, in his philosophical enquiries, towards the doctrine I have outlined here concerning the senses; but that he was unable to achieve his purpose because he never reached the point of sufficiently elaborating the requisite ideas.

• 1. See Introduction, p. 17.
• 2. Compare the author’s Die Rätsel der Philosophie, 8th Edition

by Owen Barfield

The prolonged historical event now usually referred to as “the scientific revolution” was characterised by the appearance of a new attitude to the element of sense perception in the total human experience. At first as an instinct, then as a waxing habit, and finally as a matter of deliberate choice, it came to be accepted that this element is, for the purposes of knowledge, the only reliable one; and further that it is possible, and indeed necessary, to isolate, in a way that had not hitherto been thought possible, this one element from all the others that go to make up man’s actual experience of the world. The word “matter” came to signify, in effect, that which the senses can, or could, perceive without help from the mind, or from any other source not itself perceptible by the senses.

Whereas hitherto the perceptible and the imperceptible had been felt as happily intermixed with one another, and had been explored on that footing, the philosopher Descartes finally formulated the insulation of matter from mind as a philosophical principle, and the methodology of natural science is erected on that principle. It was by the rigorous exclusion from its field, under the name of “occult qualities”, of every element, whether spiritual or mental or called by any other name, which can only be conceived as non-material, and therefore non-measurable, that natural knowledge acquired a precision unknown before the revolution—because inherently impossible in terms of the old fusion; and, armed with that precision (entitling it to the name of “science”), went on to achieve its formidable technological victories. It is the elimination of occult qualities from the purview of science that constitutes the difference between astrology and astronomy, between alchemy and chemistry, and in general the difference between Aristotelian man and his environment in the past and modern man and his environment in the present.

When two mutually dependent human relatives are separated, so that, for the first time, one of them can “go it alone”, there may be drawbacks, but it is the advantages that are often most immediately evident. By freeing itself from the taint of “occult qualities”, that is, by meticulously disentangling itself from all reference, explicit or implicit, to non-material factors, the material world, as a field of knowledge, gained inestimable advantages. We perhaps take them for granted now; but the men of the seventeenth century—the members of the Royal Society for instance had a prophetic inkling of what the new liberty promised. You have only to read some of their pronouncements. For them it was an emotional as well as an intellectual experience. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive ...”

But when two people separate, so that one of them can go it alone, it follows as a natural consequence that the other can also go it alone. It might have been expected, then, that, by meticulously disentangling itself from all reference, explicit or implicit, to material factors, the immaterial, as a field of knowledge, would also gain inestimable advantages. That is what did not happen. But it will be well to state at once that it is nevertheless precisely this correlative epistemological principle that is the basis of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. It belongs to the post-Aristotelian age for the same reason that natural science does; but in the opposite way. Thus, the parallel terms, “spiritual science” and “occult science”, which he also used, do not betoken a fond belief that the methodology of technological¹ science can be applied to the immaterial. The methodology of technological science is, rightly, based on the exclusion of all occult qualities from its thinking. The methodology of spiritual science is based on an equally rigorous exclusion of all “physical qualities” from its thinking. That is one of the things I hope this book will help to make clear.

What did happen was well expressed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when he pointed out in his Aids to Reflection that Descartes, having discovered a technical principle, which “as a fiction of science, it would be difficult to overvalue”, erroneously propounded that principle as a truth of fact. (The principle in question was the necessity of abstracting from corporeal substance all its positive properties, “in order to submit the various phaenomena of moving bodies to geometrical construction”.) And of course the same point has since been made by A. N. Whitehead and others. But Coleridge could also point prophetically, in another place,² to

the necessity of a general revolution in the modes of developing and disciplining the human mind by the substitution of Life, and Intelligence (considered in its different powers from the Plant up to that state in which the difference of Degree becomes a new kind—man, self-consciousness but yet not by essential opposition) for the philosophy of mechanism which in everything that is most worthy of the human Intellect strikes Death, and cheats itself by mistaking clear Images for distinct conceptions ...

The necessity for such a revolution, he said, arises from the fact that, for self-conscious man, although to experience a world of corporeal substance as existing quite apart from his thinking self is “a law of his nature,” it is not ‘;a conclusion of his judgment”. That this is indeed the case hardly needs arguing today, since it has become the discovery of technological science itself. Whether we go to neurology or to physics, or elsewhere, we are confronted with the demonstrable conclusion that the actual, macroscopic world of nature—as distinct from the microscopic, submicroscopic and inferred world of physical science—is (as, for instance, the biologist, Professor Marjorie Grene, puts it in her book The Knower and the Known) “mediated by concepts as well as presented through the senses”. What is remarkable is the rapidity with which the presence of this Trojan Horse in the citadel of its methodology was detected by technological science itself, as it was progressively realised that everything in nature that constitutes her “qualities” must be located on the res cogitans, and not the res extensa, side of the Cartesian guillotine. But this is as much as to say that those qualities are, in the technological sense, “occult”; and it could be argued without much difficulty that any science which proposes to enquire into them must also be “occult”—unless it is content to do so by extrapolating into the psyche a theoretical apparatus applicable, by definition, only to subject-matter that has first been sedulously dehydrated of all psyche. Yet this last is the approach which the methodology of natural science, as we have it, renders inevitable. If you have first affirmed that the material world is in fact independent of the psychic, and then determined to concentrate attention exclusively on the former, it does not make all that difference whether or no you go to the behaviouristic lengths of explicitly denying the existence of psyche. Either it does not exist or, if it does exist, it is occult and must be left severely alone. In any case you have withdrawn attention from it for so long that it might as well not be there, as far as you are concerned. For the purpose of cognition, it will gradually (as the author puts it on page 77) has “petered out”.

Moreover this continues to be the case even after the failure of science to eliminate psyche from the knowable world has become evident. The demonstrative arguments of a Coleridge, a Whitehead, a Michael Polanyi are perforce acknowledged; but the acknowledgment remains an intellectual, not an emotional experience. The Trojan Horse certainly does seem to be there, and in rather a conspicuous way; but the necessary traffic-diversions can be arranged, and it is much less embarrassing to leave it standing in the market-place than to get involved.

There is however one experience inseparable from the progress of natural science, which is apt to be an emotional as well as an intellectual one. And that is the fact that the exclusion of the psychic, as such, from matter of science entails recognition of the limits of science. This is, of course, the opposite experience from the one that enthralled the scientists of the seventeenth century. They rejoiced in a conviction that all the boundaries had gone and the prospects opened up to human knowledge had become limitless. Whereas, more and more as the nineteenth century progressed, it was the opposite that was stressed. “Ignorabimus.” We shall never know. There are limits beyond which, in the very nature of things, the mind can never pass. One of the things heavily stressed by Steiner (in Section I and again more specifically in Section III) is the significance, from the point of view of anthroposophy, of precisely this experience, and not so much in itself as for what it may lead to. The more monstrous and menacing the Horse is felt to be, towering there and casting its shadow over the centre of the town, the more ready we may be to begin asking ourselves whether there may not perhaps be something alive inside it.

This experience can be an emotional, and indeed a volitional one, because it involves a frustrating, if suppressed, conflict between the scientific impulse, which is a will to know and a refusal to acknowledge boundaries except for the purpose of overthrowing them—and the scientific tradition, followed for the last three hundred years, which has ended in itself erecting boundaries that claim to be no less absolute than the old theological ones it did overthrow.

In developing his contention that the shock of contact with these self-imposed limits of knowledge may itself be the necessary first step towards breaching them, the author refers in particular to two German writers, F. T. Vischer and Gideon Spicker. It would be a mistake to conclude from this, or from the nineteenth century idiom of the quotations, that the theme is out of date. The boundaries are still there and are still felt. The substance is the same, whether it is Gideon Spicker pointing out that

every one, without exception, starts from an unproven and unprovable premise, namely the necessity of thinking. No investigation ever gets behind this necessity, however deep it may dig. It has to be simply and groundlessly accepted ...

or Bertrand Russell, in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, conceding that the foundation, on which the whole structure of empirical science is erected, is itself demonstrably non-empirical:

If an individual is to know anything beyond his own experiences up to the present moment, his stock of uninferred knowledge must consist not only of matters of fact, but also of general laws, or at least a law, allowing him to make inferences from matters of fact ... The only alternative to this hypothesis is complete scepticism as to all the inferences of science and common sense, including those which I have called animal inference.

The abiding question is, how we choose to react to the boundaries. We may, with Russell and the empiricists, having once conscientiously “shown awareness” of them, proceed henceforth to ignore them and hope, so to speak, that they will go away; or, with the linguistic philosophers, we may flatly decline to look at them; or we may wrap ourselves in the vatic “silence” of a Heidegger or a Wittgenstein or a Norman O. Brown to be broken only by paradox and aphorism, or fall in behind the growing number of distinguished enthusiasts for metaphor, symbol and myth; or, with the scientific positivists, we may resign ourselves to the conviction that there is really no difference between knowledge and technology; we may even perhaps attempt some new definition of knowledge along the lines of the groping relativism, or personalism, of Karl Popper or of Michael Polanyi. But how far all of these are from the vision that was engendered by the scientific impulse in its first appearance among men! Steiner, as will be seen, advocates a different response, and one which, it seems to me, is more in accord with the fateful impulse itself, however it may differ from the methodology and the tradition which that impulse has so far begotten.

At intervals through the ensuing pages the reader will encounter a passing reference to, and sometimes a quotation from, the German philosopher and psychologist, Franz Brentano. Here too he may be inclined to form a hasty judgment that the book is unduly “dated” by them. But here too it is the substance that matters, and that is far from being out of date. What that substance is, it is hoped, may be sufficiently gathered from the book itself. Brentano is however so little known to English readers that I have thought it best to omit from the translation that part of it which amounts to an exegesis of his psychology. There remain two points to which I wish to draw attention here. In a short section entitled “Direction of the Psychic from the Extra-psychic in Brentano” (also omitted) the author briefly capitulates the former’s refutation of a certain influential and still widely accepted psychological fallacy: namely, that the degree of conviction with which we treat a proposition as “true” (and thus, the existential component in any existential judgment) depends on the degree of intensity—the “passion”³—with which we feel it. This, says Brentano, is based on an impermissible analogy (“size”) between the psyche itself on the one hand and the world of space on the other. If conviction really depended on intensity of feeling, doctors would be advising their patients against studying mathematics, or even learning arithmetic, for fear of a nervous breakdown. What it in fact depends on, adds Steiner, is an inner intuition of the psyche neither similar nor analogous, but corresponding in its objectivity, to the psyche’s outer experience of causality in the physical world. And this experience is considered elsewhere in the book, for instance in Sections VII and VIII.

The other point concerns Brentano’s relation to the present day. It is not always the philosopher whose name is best known and whose works are still read, whose influence is most abiding. Brentano was the teacher of Edmund Husserl, who acknowledged that teaching as the determining influence in his intellectual and vocational life; and without the Phenomenology of Husserl, with its stress on the “intentionality” or “intentional relation” in the act of perceiving, there is some doubt whether Existentialism would ever have been born. Thus, while from a superficial point of view the relation to Brentano, which certainly pervades the book as a whole, may be felt as a dating one, for anyone at all acquainted in detail with the history of western thought it can have the consequence of bringing it almost modishly up to date.

Steiner’s Von Seelenrätseln (of which what follows is a partial translation) is not a systematic presentation of the philosophical basis of anthroposophy. For that the reader must go to his The Philosophy of Freedom, or Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge, or Truth and Science;⁴ and perhaps especially the last. The Foreword to Von Seelenrätseln does in fact describe it as a Rechtfertigung—vindication—of anthroposophical methodology, but my choice of a title for these extracts came from the impression I had myself retained of its essential content after reading the whole and translating a good deal of it. Steiner’s Von Seelenrätseln was published in 1917, the year of Brentano’s death; and its longest section (here omitted) amounts, as its title, Franz Brentano (Ein Nachruf), suggests, to an obituary essay. Steiner had always, he says in a Foreword, been both an admirer and an assiduous reader of Brentano and had long been intending to write about him. The main body of the essay is thus a patient and detailed exposition, supported by quotations, of Brentano’s psychology, in which the word “judgment” is used to name that intentional relation between the psyche and the extra-psychic, or physical world, which enables it either to reject a representation as subjective or to accept it as objective. This “judgment” is an exclusively psychic activity, and must be sharply distinguished as such from both representations and feelings. As the essay proceeds, Steiner makes it clear that he sees Brentano’s emphasis on intentionality as a first step in the direction of that psychological elimination of “physical qualities”, to which I have already referred. And he suggests that the only reason why Brentano himself could not take the logically indicated second step (which must have carried him in the direction of anthroposophy) was that at the very outset of his philosophical career, following Emanuel Kant, he had irrevocably nailed his colours to the back of the Cartesian guillotine, by accepting the axiom that concepts without sensory content are “empty”. Is this why today, although we have a philosophical and an ethical existentialism, and now even an existential psychology, we have as yet no existential epistemology?

This essay is immediately preceded by a lengthy response in detail to a chapter in a then recently published book by Max Dessoir, and that in its turn by the introductory essay entitled Anthropology and Anthroposophy, which also forms the opening section of the book now presented to English readers. The arguments against including Max Dessoir über Anthroposophie seemed to me to be the same, only a good deal stronger than those against including the Brentano obituary.

Steiner felt bound to go into Dessoir’s chapter in some detail, because it echoed irresponsibly a number of flagrant misunderstandings, or misrepresentations, of anthroposophy that were current in Germany at the time. Briefly, Dessoir’s arguments are all based on the assumption that anthroposophy ignores the principles of natural science and must collapse as soon as it is confronted with them; whereas Steiner’s real argument is, as he himself formulates it in the Foreword, that “either the grounds for there being such a thing as anthroposophy are valid, or else no truth-value can be assigned to the insights of natural science itself”. What he disputed was not facts, but hypotheses which have come to be treated as facts. I have omitted the Foreword; but the argument, so formulated, is sufficiently apparent from the rest of the book.

The remainder of Von Seelenrätseln consists of eight Commentary Notes (Skizzenhafte Erweiterungen) of varying lengths, each referring specifically to a different point in the text, but each bearing a title and all of them quite capable, it seems to me, of standing on their own. Seven of them appear here as Sections II to VIII, and I have already borrowed from the eighth (Diremption of the Psychic from the Extra-psychic in Brentano) for the purposes of this Introduction.

We are left with a book rather less than half the length of the original and requiring, if only for that reason, a different title; but still with a book which I have thought it important to make available, as best I can, in the English tongue; and that not only for the general reasons I have already suggested, but also for a particular one with which I will conclude.

One of the Commentary Notes (Section VII) stands on rather a different footing, is perhaps even in a different category, from the others. At a certain point in the Brentano obituary Steiner quotes from a previous book of his own a passage in which he compares the relation between the unconscious and the conscious psyche to that between a man himself and his reflection in a looking glass. In which case the notion that the actual life of the soul consists of the way it expresses itself through the body, would be as fantastic as that of a man, regarding himself in a mirror, who should suppose that the form he sees there has been produced by the mirror. Whereas of course the mirror is the condition, not the cause, of what he sees. In the same way, the ordinary waking experience of the psyche certainly is conditioned by its bodily apparatus; but “it is not the soul itself that is dependent on the bodily instruments, but only the ordinary consciousness of the soul”. Now Section VII is, in form, a Note on this sentence; and it is somewhat odd that Steiner should have chosen a “Note” for the purpose to which he applied it. For he made it the occasion of his first mention (after thirty years of silent reflection and study) of the principle of psychosomatic tri-unity. Moreover it is still the locus classicus for a full statement of that same “threefold” principle, which, as every serious student of it knows, lies at the very foundation of anthroposophy, while at the same time it runs like a twisted Ariadne’s thread through nearly every matter selected for scrutiny. Even those readers, therefore, who are already too well convinced to feel that any “case” for anthroposophy is needed so far as they are concerned, will probably be glad to have it available in book form and in the English language. It has once before been translated—in 1925 by the late George Adams—but his version was only printed in a privately circulated periodical and has been out of print for more than forty years.

It hardly needs adding that this Note in particular will repay particularly careful study. But there is one aspect of it, and of the doctrine it propounds, to which I feel impelled to direct attention before I withdraw and leave the book to speak for itself. If Section I is the statement, Section VII strikes me as a particularly good illustration, of the true relation between Steiner’s anthroposophy and that natural science which the scientific revolution has in fact brought about. Although he criticises, and rejects, a certain conclusion which has been drawn from the evidence afforded by neurological experiments, Steiner does not attack the physiology developed since Harvey’s day; still less does he ignore it; he enlists it. It is not only psychologically (for the reason already given) but also technologically that the scientific revolution was a necessary precondition of anthroposophical cognition. And this has a bearing on an objection of a very different order that is sometimes brought against it. I was myself once asked: What is there in Steiner that you do not also find in Jacob Boehme, if you know how to look for it?

The content of Section VII (here called “Principles of Psychosomatic Physiology”) could never have come to light in the context of an Aristotelian physiology, a physiology of “animal spirits”, for example, and of four “elements” that were psychic as well as physical and four “humours” that were physical as well as psychic, no-one quite saw how. If your need is to know, not only with the warm wisdom of instinctive intelligence, but also with effective precision, you must first suffer the guillotine. Only after you have disentangled two strands of a single thread and laid them carefully side by side can you twist them together by your own act. The mind must have learnt to distinguish soma absolutely from psyche before it can be in a position to trace their interaction with the requisite finesse; and this applies not only to the human organism, but also to nature as a whole. It is the case that there is to be found in anthroposophy that immemorial understanding of tri-unity in man, in nature and in God, and of God and nature and man, which had long permeated the philosophy and religion of the East, before it continued to survive (often subterraneously) in the West in the doctrines of Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Hermetism, etc.; true that you will find it in Augustine, in pseudo-Dionysius, in Cusanus, in Bruno, in William Blake and a cloud of other witnesses, of whom Boehme is perhaps the outstanding representative. It would be surprising if it were not so. What differentiates anthroposophy from its “traditional” predecessors, both methodologically and in its content, is precisely its “post-revolutionary” status. It is, if you are that way minded, the perennial philosophy; but, if so, it is that philosophy risen again, and in a form determined by its having risen again, from the psychological and spiritual eclipse of the scientific revolution. To resume for a moment the metaphor I adopted at the outset of these remarks, it is because the two blood-relations were wise enough to separate for a spell as “family”, that they are able to come together again in the new and more specifically human relationship of independence, fellowship and love.

Just how badly is it needed, a genuinely psychosomatic physiology? That is a question the reflective reader will answer for himself. For my own part, to select only one from a number of reasons that come to mind, I doubt whether any less deep-seated remedy will ultimately avail against a certain creeping-sickness now hardly less apparent from the Times Literary Supplement than in the Charing Cross Road; I mean the increasingly simian preoccupation of captive human fancy with the secretions and the excretions of its own physical body.

A few final words about the translation. I have varied slightly the order in which the Sections are arranged and in most cases have substituted my own titles for those in the original. The German word Seele feels to me to be much more at home in technical as well as non-technical contexts than the English soul; and this is still more so with the adjective seelisch, for which we have no equivalent except soul—(adjectival). It is not however somewhat aggressively technical, as psyche is. I have compromised by using psyche and psychic generally but by no means universally. Habits of speech alter fairly quickly in some areas of discourse. Coleridge apologised for psychological as an “insolens verbum”. The same might possibly have been said of psyche in 1917, but hardly, I think, today and still less tomorrow. The mental or intelligential reference of Geist—operating towards exclusion, even from the sub-conscious imagination, of “physical qualities”—is more emphatic than that of spirit; and once again this is even truer of Geistig and spiritual. I doubt if much can be done about this; but I have sought to help a little by rather infrequently Englishing Geistig and Geist—(adjectival) as noetic. The distinctively English mind and mental sometimes appear to a translator of German as a sort of planets in the night sky of vocabulary and I have here and there adopted them both in seelisch and in Geistig contexts. And then of course there were those two thorns in the flesh of all who are rash enough to attempt translating philosophical or psychological German—Vorstellung and vorstellen. This is a problem that would bear discussing at some length. But it must suffice to say that I have mainly used representation and represent (after considering and rejecting presentation and present) occasionally substituting, where the context seemed to demand it, idea and ideation. The very meaning feels to me to lurk somewhere between the English terms—which is a good reason for using them both. Other usages are based on similar considerations and reflection. As to any habitual reader of Steiner who may suspect that I have taken too many liberties, I can only assure him that, as far as I know, I have at least had no other motive than a keen desire to do the fullest possible justice to thought-laden sentences written by an Austrian in 1917, but being read (as I hope) by an Anglo-Saxon in and after 1970.

• 1. The use of this word is not intended to imply that science, as we have it, is valuable only for the purpose of technical manipulation and construction. It does imply that its cognitive value, as “natural” science, is limited to the extent to which nature is governed by physical laws. The fond belief referred to is of course the assumption underlying the “favourite objection”, to which Section VI replies.
• 2. Letter to William Wordsworth, 30 May, 1815.
• 3. Polyani's word.
• 4. See Bibliography

Preliminary note: Carl Unger's lecture was not written down. However, he spoke about the subject matter on several occasions, for example in his lectures “On the Epistemological Foundations of Natural Science” (1916) and “On the Path from Natural Science to Spiritual Science” (1917), both of which were published in volume I of his “Writings”, Stuttgart 1964.

Rudolf Steiner: The relationship between supersensible knowledge and the will has been asked about here. Now, if we want to form a clear idea about this, we must first consider the relationship between what we usually call will in our daily lives and what we call idea, and then we have to recognize the further path from the idea to supersensible knowledge.

Today, Dr. Unger has spoken to you about pure thinking. Anyone who wanted to make a substantial distinction between the will and pure thinking would probably proceed as one would if asking: What actual difference is there, say, between a boy born in Frankfurt am Main in 1749 who lived at

63 such-and-such, and the privy councillor who lived in Weimar in 1827? One and the same person, one and the same being: it was Goethe. Seen inwardly, the will as the essentially active element is, of course, quite the same as thinking, for that which is active in pure thinking is will — only that one gains nothing for epistemological discussions by emphasizing the will-character of pure thinking.

In order to characterize thinking epistemologically, one must proceed in the same way as the speaker this evening. I would say that thinking is only essential in a different age than the will. The will, where it has not yet struggled through to pure thinking, is younger, so to speak, still in adolescence. When it has developed further and further, it reaches a certain age – this is, of course, a figurative way of speaking – and then it is able to live as pure thinking, which is a further step. This has been demonstrated quite well to you this evening: pure thinking is meditation. Meditation leads to the life of the supersensible world.

Now meditation, pure thinking in general, truly pure thinking, is not possible without further developing the will. This pure thinking as a human capacity is only possible through a particularly intensive effort, a particularly intensive exercise of the will. But everything that one exercises, one trains, one develops. And it is a very special training of the will when one moves from pure thinking to meditation. It can certainly be said that this entire development of the human being, who initially lives in unclear ideas, towards pure thinking and then towards meditation, this entire effort is essentially a training of the will. Therefore, what is needed to really grasp spiritual knowledge is essentially an effort of the will. And anyone who makes an effort to respond to spiritual knowledge exercises willpower, and in doing so exercises their will in general. Therefore, it can be said that it would be quite good for today's humanity if it would at least respond to spiritual knowledge, because in doing so it would truly develop the will, it would strengthen the will.

It would seem that in modern humanity, the will has basically become something about which one can only entertain illusions – if one is still willing to believe that it exists at all. If we look around today, for example, to see what volitional impulses led to the events of the war in recent years that have so terribly shaken the world, we cannot possibly answer, because the will of human beings was least of all at work in them. There was a kind of determination by powers that had seized control of people's decisions. Almost everywhere we see that in 1914, when decisive resolutions were made, we cannot even begin to hold people responsible. It would be a psychological absurdity to somehow blame Berchtold's diplomatic clumsiness for the Serbian ultimatum or the like. Such things may be part of the campaign of confusion and lies that is sweeping the world today, but they cannot stand up to serious psychological scrutiny. On a large scale, what is expressed on a small scale must be carefully examined.

Analyze what in everyday life is called the will. I call your attention to the fact that most people lie to themselves about what they want. They get up every morning at a certain time. Do you believe that they want to do this in the true sense of the word? If you analyze the whole fact that is expressed in this getting up in the morning, then you come to wanting just as well or just as badly as if you say that the clock strikes 8 o'clock in the morning. That is a complex of facts when the clock strikes 8 o'clock. When a person's legs move out of bed, hands reach for this or that, then that is a different complex of facts. And that in one case we speak of automatism and in the other of will, my dear audience, is based only on an illusion or on a confused psychology. In truth, the human being is only placed in a position to speak of volition when he is approaching pure thinking and then, through pure thinking, rises to the comprehension of supersensible truths. Then the real volition is integrated or, I might say, poured into his organism – the volition that can truly be called volition. And all the impulses that are present in the traditions for a real will are by no means the result of the automatic activity that has almost become the habit of all people today, but rather from older times, when there was still - albeit in an atavistic way, more instinctively - a will that was independent of the usual automatism of life.

That it is not always the thought that must guide the will is best seen from the fact that people, if they are sufficiently emotional, have the greatest influence on their fellow human beings precisely when they have dream-like thoughts, when they have somewhat enigmatic thoughts. As a rule, clear thinkers, who are more inclined to abstractions, have less influence on their fellow men than those who, with a certain inner brutality, are attuned to emotional thoughts.

All this, if properly carried out and followed through to its logical conclusion, will show you that it is precisely the path of development that the human soul takes to pure thinking, to supersensible understanding, that is the path by which the will is at the same time brought out of the depths of the human being, so that one can truly say: The will, which is the actual object of ethics, which is the actual object of moral teaching, this will is cultivated as a reality precisely by the spiritual scientific method.

It is this will that has been virtually lost under materialism. Modern humanity has been seized by the automaton-like. I would like to analyze the will factor, let us say in the case of a current-day philosophy professor who is constantly on the go or in the case of a university professor in general. Yes, my dear attendees, if you disregard what he does in continuous automatization, which has entered into him during his education, what actually remains for his will? What remains for his will is what is contained in the law of appointment, in the decree of appointment; he does what he is driven to do by his being integrated into some state or professorial context or the like. Analyze what actually lies in the element of will in such an activity, that is, in the activity of a quite leading personality, and then try to compare how differently this element of will must be grasped by what spiritual scientific development is in a human being. Then you will get an idea of how this spiritual science is called upon to lead the human being out of the stage of the automaton and to make him truly an individuality.

The fact that today one does not even have an inkling of how to arrive at an understanding of the will proves to you that now even a strange idea has found its way into the newer scientific way of thinking: the strange idea that plants also have something like ensouled will, because there are those among them which, when insects or something like that come near them, fold up their leaves and consume these insects. That means, to summarize a mere external fact, a mere external 'complex of acts, an external complex of phenomena, under the concept of will - but which in this case is only an illusion. I have often said in lectures that I know of another creature that, when small animals come near, also takes the opportunity to get them into its burrow and kill them there, just like the [carnivorous] plant does the insect: namely, a mousetrap. And with exactly the same right with which one thinks of the Venus flytrap as ensouled, one can think of a mousetrap as ensouled.

These things, as they occur today in scientific thinking, are just beginning to prove that there can be no question of an illusion-free conception of will in today's thinking. We will only get a correct idea of the will, of the experience of the will, when the will is actually practised in spiritual science, as it is meant here, in anthroposophy. On the other hand, one could even say that people do not approach this spiritual science because it requires a real inner effort of the will, an exercise of the will, and because the human souls of the present time are actually sleeping souls that are quite happy to surrender to the automatism of thinking and also of willing.

Thus the question as to whether supersensible knowledge has a relation to the will must be answered with a strong yes. For this supersensible knowledge will redeem the sleeping will of present-day humanity, it will awaken the souls, and that is what matters today. The sleeping souls of today will not solve the great tasks of the present time. The will will solve them, and it can be redeemed precisely through devotion to supersensible knowledge.

after the lecture by Friedrich Husemann on “Nervousness, Worldview and Anthroposophy”

Preliminary note: Nothing is known about Friedrich Husemann's lecture because no notes were taken. However, it may be assumed that some of his remarks were also addressed in his lectures on “Questions of Contemporary Psychiatry from the Point of View of Anthroposophy”, which he gave at the first Anthroposophical College in September 1920. A summary of these lectures was published in the collection “Aenigmatisches aus Kunst und Wissenschaft”, volume I, Stuttgart 1922.

After Dr. Husemann's lecture, a question was asked about the possibilities of studying psychiatry in the future.

Rudolf Steiner: It is of course impossible to speak about this subject today, which would require an exhaustive treatment if one wanted to go into it at all, in any other way than with a few hints at most, because the study of psychiatry, especially in our time, certainly requires the most far-reaching reforms. If we consider how it is actually impossible today to formulate the questions that must be asked in psychiatry, we will realize how necessary

70 such a reform of the study of psychiatry is. However, such a reform will not be able to take place – this seemed clear to me from Dr. Husemann's lecture itself – if the individual specialist subjects are not first truly fertilized by spiritual science. For the development that Dr. Husemann has so beautifully described today, which began around the time of Galileo and culminated in the 19th century, has actually driven the whole of human thought life apart into two sharply opposing currents of thought. On the one hand, there are the ideas we have about material things and their processes; on the other hand, there is the life of thought itself, which has increasingly taken on a purely abstract character, so that – since abstractions cannot be forces in the world , and thus cannot be a force in man either that can bring about something - so there is no possibility for man either to understand the material, the physical, from the soul, to build some kind of bridge from the psychic to the material.

Today, at most, man has an idea of a sum of abstractions or even of abstract feelings and the like when he speaks of the soul. This sum of abstractions cannot, of course, set an organism in motion, cannot somehow build a bridge to the organism. Therefore, on the one hand, one cannot speak of being able to influence the external physical, real organism by acting on the soul life, which is, after all, only a sum of abstractions. On the other hand, there is what has been gained through science about the physical organism, because it has been invented that soul phenomena are only parallel phenomena or even effects of the physical organism. What is formed in the way of concrete ideas about this physical organism is not conducive to squeezing anything out of these ideas about the psychic. And so today, regardless of whether one is more or less of a materialist, there coexist an outlook on the soul life that only looks at abstractions, and an outlook on the material life, including the organic life, from which nothing spiritual can be extracted.

It is therefore quite understandable that it is not easy to find a method that can be used for psychiatry. That is why, in recent times, people have stopped talking about the connection between the physical and organic in humans and the psychological, which takes place as a process in consciousness. And since one is in reality constantly in danger of falling on one's face between these two stools, between the physical-material and the abstract-psychological, it is necessary to invent a quite unconscious world, a strange and unconscious world. And that has now been amply done in psychoanalysis, in analytical psychology, a scientific object that is actually extremely interesting. For once there has been a reform of psychiatry, so that we will again have a proper psychiatry, then this scientific object will have to be properly examined from this new psychiatric point of view, because it is actually [itself] an object for psychiatry.

So they tried to imagine an unconscious world so that they would not be completely cut off from the ground between these two chairs. Of course I am not saying anything against the unconscious world, but it must be investigated, it must be really recognized through that which spiritual science introduces as vision; it cannot be fantasized in the way that the Freudians or similar people fantasize it.

Spiritual science will bring about a reform of psychiatry in that it will lead from mere abstract concepts, which have no inner life, to concepts that are in line with reality, to concepts that already live in the world as concepts, that have been gained by immersing oneself in reality with their methods. Then, when one ascends to such spiritual methods, which in turn provide realistic concepts, one will find the transition from such concepts, which are mere abstractions, to that which is now not mere abstraction but reality. That means that it will be possible to build a bridge between the psychic and the physical in man. The psychic and the physical must appear differently in our minds if we seriously desire to have a psychiatry.

The sum of abstractions today, including those that comprise the abstract laws of nature – these laws are becoming more and more filtered – is not capable of being immersed in a real process. Just imagine how, with the abstractions that figure in science today, one could find something like the two important facts — for they are facts — that I mentioned in the first lecture of this series: the spiritual-scientific heart teaching and the spiritual-scientific teaching of the reverse biogenetic law for the historical course of earthly events. From such examples you can see that spiritual scientific methods are capable of finding the way out of the inner life of the soul and into the world of facts, of building a bridge between the so-called spiritual and the so-called physical.

Above all, this is necessary for psychiatry, because only when we are able to properly observe the corresponding facts will we make headway. And the facts of psychiatry are fundamentally even more difficult to observe – because they require greater impartiality – than the facts of the laws of physics. Because in human life, as soon as one moves from the so-called healthy, from the relatively healthy to the relatively sick, there is actually almost no possibility of observing the person in complete isolation. The human being certainly develops into a complete individuality, into an isolated life; he does this precisely through his psyche. But what deviates in the psyche from a linear development, from a linear, so-called normal development, cannot be observed in isolation. I can only hint at this, of course; otherwise one would have to make lengthy explanations if one wanted to prove it in detail. Man is much more of a social being, even in the deeper sense, than is usually thought, and in particular, mental illnesses can actually only rarely be assessed on the basis of the biography of the individual, the isolated individual. That is almost completely impossible.

I would rather use a hypothetical example than theories to suggest what I actually mean. You see, it is possible, for example, that in any community, be it a family or any other community, two people live side by side. After some time, one of them has the misfortune to have an attack, which means that they are transferred to a psychiatric institution. Of course, this person can be treated in isolation. But if you do that, especially if you form an opinion based on an isolated examination of this person, then in many cases you will actually only fall prey to a thought pattern. For the case may be, and in many cases is, that another person, who lives with the person who has become ill, or who has become mentally ill, in a family or in some other community, actually has within himself, let us say, a complex of forces that has led to the mental illness of his fellow human being. So we start with these two people: one person, A, has the attack, from a psychiatric point of view; person B has a complex of forces within him, of a psychically organic nature, which, if you were to look at it in this way, perhaps shows to a much greater extent what is called the cause of the illness in individual A. That is to say, B, who is not mentally ill at all, actually has this cause of mental illness within him to a much greater extent than A, who had to be taken to a sanatorium.

This is something that lies entirely within the realm of reality, not merely of possibility. For it rests on the fact that man A, apart from the complex of forces which is designated as the cause of his mental illness, has a weak constitution and therefore cannot bear this complex of forces. The other, B, who also has the complex of forces within him, perhaps even more strongly, has - apart from this complex of forces - a considerably stronger constitution than the other; it does not harm him. B can bear it, A cannot. But A would not have contracted the disease at all if he had not been continually psychically influenced by B, the person living next to him – an influence that can be extraordinarily significant in this case because B is more robust than A.

There you have an example that is quite common in reality, from which you can see how important the psychiatric approach is if it seriously wants to be based on reality, if it does not play games as it often is in this field today. The point is really not to look at the person in isolation, but to look at them in their entire social environment. Of course, what I mean here will have to be put on a fairly broad basis. After all, it is also the case for the rest of the disease that it makes a big difference whether a weak individual is affected by some complex or a strong, robust individual. Let us assume that two people live next to each other from a certain age onwards and have dealings with each other. One of them still has a robust, rural nature from his youth and background, while the other has been descended from city dwellers for three generations. The person who has a healthy, rural nature and can tolerate some internal damage may carry a much stronger complex, but he can tolerate it and does not become ill. The other, who actually only has it through a psychic infection, through an imitation, through whatever is present from person to person, he does not tolerate the effect.

Here you can see what comes into consideration when you want to talk about psychiatry not from theories and programs, but from reality; you see how, in fact, today one is already turning to the serious that arises from the insight that, basically, especially since the time of Galileo, our scientists have become so one-sided, and you see how necessary it is to take in new ideas in a fruitful way in all fields. Otherwise, human knowledge, especially in those fields that are supposed to lead into practice, into the practice of life, must come to complete decadence. I could say: basically, the same applies to psychiatry as we say about the art of education when we talk about Waldorf schools, namely that one should not just come up with some new formulations of a theoretical nature, but that one should bring the living spiritual science itself into this field. What we have to say about education also applies to psychiatry. We can never approach the matter one-sidedly by saying that this or that can be improved in the field of psychiatry, but we must familiarize ourselves with the idea that Either one accepts the spiritual-scientific basis in the field of knowledge in general, then this spiritual-scientific basis will already transform psychiatry, then it will make something out of psychiatry in particular, which is actually longed for by numerous people today, but which cannot be there at all through the latest natural scientific methods, which have of course been sufficiently explained to you yesterday and today, or... [gap in the transcript].

You see, what must come out of the popularization of spiritual science, to use a trivial word, is that, above all, people will have a much, much better knowledge of human nature than they have today. People today are so out of touch with each other that there can be no question of any knowledge of human nature. People pass each other by, each living only in himself. Spiritual science will open people up to each other. And then, above all, much of what is perhaps still believed today to lie in the field of psychic pathology will be carried over into the field of psychic hygiene. For it is absolutely the case that, I would say, straight lines can be drawn from the symptom complexes of disturbed psychic life to the ideas that are currently widespread in public life and which are not at all considered pathological, but which are generally accepted. And if one were to follow up some of the very generally accepted concepts, one would find that, although more slowly, the same path is taken after all that can be seen in the pursuit of a psychologically abnormal symptom complex, which, however, happens quickly in the case of someone who is found to be mentally abnormal today.

All these things show that ultimately all the talk about details in the reforms of the individual sciences does not lead to much, but that if one decides – although today souls, many souls, are too sleepy – to look for a fertilization of scientific life in the sense of spiritual science, then the most diverse fields of science, but especially that field of science that deals with the various deviations from normal psychic life, psychiatric medicine, will undergo a necessary, I would say self-evident, reform as a result. Even if these cases go as far as the most extreme rebellion, such as raving madness, or feeble-mindedness, and so on – only then will it be found what these psychic aberrations actually mean for normal life in the whole of normal development. And in many respects we shall find that the more and more healthy our world view becomes, the more that will be healed which shines out from public error into the pathological aberrations of the mentally ill.

For it is indeed quite remarkable how difficult it is to draw a correct line between so-called normal life and mentally abnormal life. For example, it is difficult to say whether a person is mentally normal in the case of, say, an event that occurred not too long ago in Basel, not far from here, in which a man left a large sum of money in his will for someone to lock themselves away in complete solitude until such time as they had succeeded in truly proving the immortality of the soul. That is what a man in Basel did in his will, and I don't know what happened to it after that. I believe the heirs objected and tried to decide, not psychiatrically but legally, to what extent it was related to psychiatry or not. But if you now really set out, each and every one of you, to examine whether it should be assessed psychiatrically or whether it is a mental illness or whether it is really an oversized religiosity or whatever, you will hardly be able to manage with complete accuracy.

The point is that our concepts have gradually become weak in the face of reality; they must become strong again. But they will only become strong through spiritual science. And among many other things, psychiatry in particular will feel the effects of this.

My dear friends! The fact that our friends, who are now gathered here, are giving a whole series of lectures is of a certain importance for the course of events here at the Goetheanum. It is an attempt at appropriate collaboration by our friends; and this must indeed be longed for by our movement, that there should be collaboration in our movement from the most diverse points of view of today's life. Only in this way will the first germs be laid, at least, to meet the strong onslaught that is increasingly evident in the present opposition that is being directed against our movement. Therefore, because I also want to point out the full significance of this undertaking by our friends, today's lecture should be a kind of episode in the series of reflections. It arises, so to speak, from the need to continue speaking today in the tone of the principled scientific questions that have been raised here in recent days by our friends, and to resume other anthroposophical reflections only tomorrow.

We have heard a great deal over the past few days from our friends about the fundamental issues in contemporary science, and what we have heard is accurate, important and essential in various ways. We will hear more.

We will hear more. Today, continuing in this fundamental tone, I would like to present some ideas that will also point to the methodology of the current scientific world view, insofar as this methodology shows the actual state of this current scientific world view when it attempts to go into its experimental observation results in more detail. You have heard, particularly from the few comments made yesterday by Dr. Kolisko in response to Dr. Husemann's impressive lecture, what the psychological value of today's scientific view of the world is, so to speak.

Now, however, the following must actually be said: this atomistic-molecular foundation of natural science actually figures within those circles that talk about natural science today and that already mix their fantastic atomic theories into the description of phenomena, as described by Dr. Kolisko yesterday. But this atomistic-molecular foundation of natural science But this atomistic-molecular foundation of natural science appears even more when laymen or semi-laymen speak today about world-view questions in the most diverse monist and similar associations, through which one wants to make popular world-views that are supposed to be based on real science, but which are actually only based on what has long been devalued by the facts of science today. One could say devalued, even if not refuted, because to refute it would require spiritual science, which would first have to be accepted by wider circles. The situation within contemporary spiritual life, which after all ultimately dominates our world, this situation is indeed a rather bleak one.

On the one hand, we have a scientific foundation of the world view that has gradually, I might say, become quite inadequate. And on the other hand, we have all kinds of philosophers who, although much admired, and this is particularly characteristic of our time, do not really arrive at any substantial content for a world view. For it will hardly take long before it is realized that philosophical prattle of the Eucken type or the like cannot be regarded as something truthful or valuable. If we look back a few decades to the development of world views that have emerged from the natural sciences, we find that just a few decades ago, I might say, the glory of atomistic-molecular thinking was still there. It was taken for granted that matter could be conceived of in such a way that atoms and molecules in various configurations and positions in relation to one another were assumed to underlie material substances. And everything that was easily and conveniently available from the fields of physics and chemistry was collected to serve as a kind of corroboration of this atomistic-molecularist thinking.

What existed as a healthy opposition to this thinking, such as the Goethean worldview, was simply not taken into account during this time; it was viewed as a kind of dilettantism. They thought up a world system that was supposed to be composed of the simplest possible elements: space, time, movement, mass – these were the basic concepts that were assumed and from which, basically, an entire world system was then constructed. Such world systems have sprung up like mushrooms, varying in their details but consistent in the main, and they all actually wanted to be based on the most elementary and primitive concepts alone, on concepts such as space, time, movement and mass. The ideal was to trace the complicated form of movement of the cell, from which one then thought of the whole organism as being built, back to space, time, movement and mass, and thereby to imagine everything organic as emerging from mere space, time, movement and mass, which represent matter. This view is, after all, not based on the facts of the world itself, but is thoroughly thought out. Anyone who has experienced what has come about in this way knows how these things were actually all thought-out world views; certain basic assumptions were made and then built on.

In my lectures, I have often related how, as a very young boy, I was already aware of such a world system, which did not go as far as the organic, but at least as far as the chemical. It was put forward by my headmaster at the time, who thought entirely in the spirit of the times and assumed the following as a basis. He said: Let us take the simplest thing, space to begin with, and then distribute matter throughout space, arranged atomistically. He thought of space as infinite and divided space into nothing but space cubes. Space is filled with matter. Now he said: One can think of matter as being distributed in a certain way in these different space cubes. If you try to visualize how matter is distributed in these different space cubes, you can say the following: under certain circumstances, it could be distributed in such a way that the same number of atoms would be present in all of the infinitely many space cubes. But since we have an infinite number of space cubes and no assumption forces us to decide on a certain number of atoms in a space cube, it is just a probability that there are as many atoms in one space as in another. Because there are infinite possibilities, it is likely that there are as many in one space as in the other spaces: One divided by infinity is zero, so there is a different number of atoms in each spatial part. But if you now introduce time, there is no reason to assume that in the next time part the situation would not be the same again: namely that the probability would be zero that there would be the same number of atoms in a particular spatial part as in the previous spatial part. Therefore, the number of atoms in the successive time periods will be different in the spatial parts. That is to say, matter is in motion.

Now we have derived the movement of matter from the probability calculation and from the division of the space cube. But since it is not probable that the atomistic-material particles go through each other - this contradicts what is shown to us in natural phenomena - so one must assume that the material particles are afflicted with resistance against each other, so they are massive. The simplest assumption is that they are rigid masses. And with that we have time, space, movement, mass, and now we can begin to calculate what results from the mutual impacts. And here we soon see something that is highly intriguing for minds like ours, namely, we can now calculate and we can imagine what the calculations show as a correlate, as a representation of what is happening in matter. And indeed, through these computational magic tricks, we can then figure out the processes, as the [school principal] did, right down to the chemical processes. All chemical processes can still be derived by calculation. And if someone is an even greater magician in this field, he will also succeed in deriving and calculating the organic processes in the cell. One gets a whole world view built up from the most primitive ideas of space, time, movement, mass.

This is something that increasingly haunted minds the further 19th-century thinking progressed. And it was only at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century that a breach was made in this whole way of thinking. I have already indicated from a variety of angles how this breach was made. You see, the man I have been talking about here is only representative of this way of thinking; I am using him as a representative because he confronted me as a twelve-year-old boy at the time and I was surprised at the way in which one can conjure up an entire world view out of space, time, movement and mass in a mathematical way. Those who thought likewise all found that one had to do with the matter that causes the appearance of solid, liquid and gaseous bodies, and then with all that one had to ascribe to - as this man said - a much finer world gas that spreads everywhere; others said the ether. So, for their world view, they had the general cosmic ether, through whose movement the light spreads or in whose movement the light should even exist, and in this ether, floating, ponderable matter, matter that has weight and then receives the effects of these ether processes, and also interpenetrates with them, and so on. Of course, there is actually no room in such a world view for the idea of anything spiritual. One can certainly indulge in illusions in this respect; one can say that one adheres to this world view for physics and for chemistry, possibly also for organic chemistry, and in addition, one still assumes a spiritual one. But then one would like to ask how the mediation is actually to take place between this spiritual and what one imagines to be a mere effect of space, time, movement and mass without this spiritual.

Now, however, in addition to these imaginative ideas, which, as already mentioned, had been developed in the most diverse ways, one was also obliged to take into account what the facts of the world of phenomena itself offered. In such a world picture there is really nothing in it that man sees through his senses. Because in it there are moving little particles that have nothing at all of the properties that the sensory world has; there are moving little particles in it, a pushing and shoving, but nothing of what the sensory world presents. It has certainly occurred to individuals, for example to Mach, that something has been thought up there. He therefore went back to the world of pure sense perceptions, and he also wanted to put together the whole physical world picture only from the temporal sequence and the spatial juxtaposition of sense perceptions. However, even in this Machian way one cannot get along, because if one only presents sense perceptions, then these sense perceptions remain, so to speak, neutrally next to each other. If one does not have the ability to see something essential in sensory perceptions, then one can only bring them into a spatial and temporal relationship with each other, not into an intensive and qualitative relationship. In short, one does not get to the rich world of our sensory experiences with one's thinking in the Machian way. But one can say this: such thinking is extraordinarily captivating.

I know, my dear friends, that many of you do not find such thinking enchanting. But that is only because those who do not find it enchanting have not undergone a very strong mathematical culture and therefore cannot feel the enchantment of calculating all the phenomena in the world. There is a kind of magic in transforming the whole world in one's mind, in one's imagination, into a machine that works as finely as it does through such a world view - there is something enchanting about it. And it did not come about out of, I would say, a little devilry or because someone wanted to fool the world - although the world could appear to be fooled by this world view. It really did not arise out of mere cynicism, but it arose because there exists in man an inner urge to deceive himself as much as one can deceive oneself about the phenomena that occur, if one only follows the mathematical fantasies of one's inner soul life. This urge was already present; it was a completely sincere, honest urge that underlay this terribly empty world view, the forming of this terribly empty world view. And today, when we so clearly recognize the necessity of abandoning this world view, abandoning it thoroughly and replacing it with a spiritual-scientific one, today this question must already be asked: Where does the appeal of this mechanistic world view come from?

Perhaps the best way to answer this question of how the mechanistic conception of the world has become so attractive is to take a look at the revolution in this world view that actually only took place in the last two decades of the 19th century and since the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. You see, when people used to think in terms of empty space, and movements in empty space, movements of matter, both heavy matter and ether, there was no limit to certain ideas. What danced from one cube into another in the space cubes could be imagined to have any speed. And it was also imagined to be rigid, even unchangeable. Such a particle was itself thought of as unchanging and was taken as the basis for the calculation as unchanging. One was not bound to anything other than what the invented ideas of space, time, motion and mass imposed.

In particular, many ether theories have been constructed under the influence of these ideas. The ether was sometimes a rigid body that was just not heavy, sometimes a liquid, sometimes a sum of vortices of matter, and so on. All kinds of formations and configurations were seen in this ether. Models were also made of how the ether actually behaves in certain parts of space. In England, in particular, many such ether models were constructed because people there were keen to imagine everything spatially. We in Central Europe could still hear the echoes of these ether model constructions when we met the old theosophists. Theosophists imitated these ether model constructions, and I knew such an old German theosophist who had learned his whole theory from England. He once took me to his attic, and there were all kinds of ether models, huge ether models. There you could see how the coils and movements took place, this way and then that way, intertwining with each other — everything was intertwined. They were terribly complicated but ingeniously devised intertwinings of what was supposed to take place in the ether. The people who thought up such models were sometimes far removed from what actually lives in reality.

But little by little they were compelled to take this reality into consideration, and out of this endeavor something emerged like Einstein's theory, the so-called theory of relativity, the theories of Mie, Nordström, Hilbert and so on; there is a whole rich literature today about this theory of relativity. I would like to present just two ideas of this relativity theory to the soul's eyes, and then we will see where it has led, at least in terms of the attempt to get out of the purely imaginative world view. The first thing that occurred to people under the influence of Lorentz's experiments and Einstein's terribly abstract thinking, but still with some consideration for reality, was to disregard this world view and these beautiful models altogether. To characterize what was arrived at when one wanted to get out of it, I will tell you how one came to regard the speed of light as the original speed, so to speak, as the original speed in space.

Anyone who fantasizes in this way (see Chart 1) does not need to think about any original speed, because these little comrades in there in the space cubes can move at any speed or slowness and, of course, faster than light. You just have to assume that.

But certain phenomena had to be taken into account, which led to the assumption that light - I am not saying that this is correct, but in any case, it was stated and it was finally accepted - light as the speed beyond which there is no increase in speed, so that nothing can be faster than light. So everything else that exists in the world in terms of speed must then be measured against the speed of light.

Now, such an assumption could no longer be reconciled with the assumption of the ether as this previous world view had assumed. Because if one assumed that light had a speed of 186,000 miles per second and compared everything else with the speed of light, then one could not accommodate the whole sum of ideas associated with the ether in this world view. And so it happened that, for example, Einstein completely left out the ether and now no ether was assumed at all. In Einstein's theory of relativity, you have a world view without an ether. So light propagates through empty space with the maximum of all existing velocities. Everything else must be measured by light. If we take this as our point of departure, we arrive at a significant conclusion. It turns out that all that is required is for a solid body to move fast enough. It can increase its velocity continuously, but it cannot exceed the speed of light. So now we are no longer dealing with the movement of a solid body through the ether. Because the ether is no longer considered, we now speak of the movement as such, which is also carried out by solid bodies, and we speak of the fact that the movement is not without influence, for example, on the expansion, let us say, on the length of a solid body. And so Einstein came to the idea that a solid body of a certain length simply becomes shorter by moving, that is, by nothing other than by moving.

Just think about it: insofar as you yourselves are solid bodies - if you were to move through space at a certain speed, you would become thinner and thinner in the direction in which you are moving, and finally you would become as thin as a sheet of paper. So by leaving out the ether, certain changes to the world view became necessary. And the following two sentences play an extraordinarily important role in the theory of physical knowledge today: firstly, that the speed of light is the maximum speed, that nowhere can a greater speed be assumed than that of light, that light is the original speed, and secondly, the assumption that solid bodies change their size simply by moving, that movement itself can be a cause of a change in size, of the expansion of solid bodies.

If you take these two ideas and consider how different they are from everything we humans think about based on our experiences of our environment, you will be able to form an opinion about what Einstein, Mie, Nordström and so on were compelled to do in the physical world view. You see, there is already a physical world view that has been adopted by a whole series of people, which is based on these ideas of the maximum speed of light and of expansion, change through movement itself in solid bodies. This world view has nothing to do with the world view that we were accustomed to in our youth and that still haunts laymen when they talk about world views. This world view has actually revolutionized all old physical concepts. It is interesting that this world view even seeks to revolutionize the old Newtonian view of gravitation, of weight, of the attractive force of mass, so that Newton's law that masses attract each other in inverse proportion to the square of the distance no longer applies. But what asserts itself as a change in mass according to Einstein's theory is basically also only a calculation result. So one should also only calculate the effects that were previously attributed to gravity, gravitation and so on. However, Einstein is obliged to think of a different geometry for his world view. What is this different geometry? That can be said very simply. In our geometry, the Pythagorean theorem applies and it applies that if two straight lines are parallel, they do not intersect even at infinity. In our geometry, the theorem also applies: the three angles of a triangle are 180 degrees. In the geometry that is assumed [by Einstein], such theorems no longer apply. For example, under certain conditions, the three angles of a triangle are greater than 180 degrees, or even less than 180 degrees. But this is only possible if you imagine space in a completely different way than you have usually imagined it, namely that in this world view you imagine space as an empty vacuum.

You see, a kind of compromise has been reached between those who have overcome the old Euclidean geometry and replaced it with another geometry: Lobachevsky, Riemann, Gauss and so on, who have introduced calculations with more than three dimensions. And Einstein can't get along with anything other than introducing the multidimensional manifold. So, simply by introducing multi-dimensional space, one can, as it were, incorporate gravity into this multi-dimensional space. It's actually terribly simple.

You see, if you assume three-dimensional space and calculate in this three-dimensional space, then the effects of gravity are not included. You have to assume something extra for gravity, namely a force emanating from the masses, through which they attract each other or exert pressure or something similar – pressure forces that cause the masses to collide or the like. But if you assume a fourth dimension in addition to these three and know nothing other than what the calculation yields, then you have a good opportunity to accommodate gravity as well. Because as long as you only calculate with three dimensions, you have to assume something extra for gravity; but if you already take into account what you would otherwise have calculated for gravity by adding another dimension, then what you would otherwise have calculated for gravity can also come out for what you would otherwise have assumed for gravity. In any case, however, you can see that something suddenly appears that intervenes quite newly in the old ideas. Suddenly, something arises such as the paradoxical idea that a body can become smaller purely by moving. A mere solid body – I don't even want to say an animal, which one might assume would shrink or something like that through the exertion of force – a mere solid body does not become smaller when it is cooled, but when it is moved. One is compelled to do so. The world view that you have believed to be so certain suddenly changes, and you come to completely opposite ideas. It is very strange, when you look at something with the eyes of a psychologist, as I have described to you.

This idea of space vacuum, of time, which, so to speak, goes from a non-beginning to a non-end, when you compare this rigid world view, which has something terribly rigid about it, with Einstein's, then the Einsteinian world view - I would say it suddenly becomes something slimy. The former is extremely dry, can be attacked and felt everywhere as something extremely dry, and now it suddenly becomes slimy - the bodies cease to retain their expansion, and through the mere movement they become mollusks. Actually, this is a terrible change of the basic physical concept in the last two decades. The world does not yet appreciate this, although it is repeatedly presented to the world from many sides as one of the greatest achievements of modern thinking. Unfortunately, however, it seems to me, my dear friends, as if modern humanity has become too stupid to think at all. Therefore, it does not care about it at all. Even the newspapers are talking today about Einstein's theory, which actually overturns everything that people still think when they live in the popular world view. Well, it makes no impression on people; they read this Einsteinian revolution in physics just as they read that, well, let's say, milk has become 10 centimes more expensive again. There is no longer anything in humanity that would show that these people are still living with what some of them are thinking.

This revolution in physics has already taken place, and the world view that was still firmly established just four decades ago has, so to speak, been turned upside down into a sum of such ideas that are now of a completely different nature. Anyone who today allows the thoughts of Einstein, Mie, Nordström to take effect on them has something completely different to deal with than what the physical theorists presented to us in the universities four decades ago. Of course, the subject could not yet be broken down into the ramifications of the individual sciences, but that is on the way, for we are already finding a kind of bridge to cytology, and that will come: Einstein's theory will also take hold of cytology, then it will enter into organic chemistry and so on.

You see, for anyone who cares about the fate of humanity, such a change in the ideas of a worldview is of the utmost importance, because they must ask themselves: how did something like this come about in the whole development of modern humanity? What does it actually depend on? You see, in the times that preceded the great turning point, this leap in the development of humanity - which took place in the middle of the 15th century, but which was now a natural one - in such times that preceded this turning point, one could have had neither this physical world view nor Einstein's theory of relativity. In those days, before the time of Galileo, people thought in images, in images that are more similar to the forces present in reality. The abstract concepts by which we today also want to grasp the laws of nature are quite unlike the real forces. In the past, people still had certain imaginations in their concepts. They still had the opportunity to enter into relationships with reality. They had this opportunity because something of the after-effects of the prenatal spiritual-soul life, the life between death and a new birth, still resulted for them. That the ideas did not become abstract, but rather concrete, permeated with pictorial structure, is due to the influence of what one had experienced between the last death and this new birth. This ability was lost, and only abstract thinking remained, which, however, actually has real value only if it is still imbued with the resonance of the forces between death and a new birth. This was gradually distilled out completely, and in the 19th century all that remained of this world view was emptied of everything that had previously had a spiritual origin. The forces used to create this world view actually only make sense if they take their content from the spiritual world, otherwise it is an empty formalism. And this formalism was applied to the external sense world, to which it did not fit at all, for which it was not at all adapted. One was subject, I would say, to a terrible fate: that which could have been vividly revived in an inner experience, that was applied to the outer world.

I believe that you can get a sense of what I am actually talking about if you open Novalis and find true hymns in the aphorisms of Novalis, for example to mathematics, to pure mathematics, which he calls a great poem, a wonderful poem, a most wonderful imaginative creation. I don't know how many people today can relate to Novalis in this, but one can relate to him. One can sympathize with him when one knows that Novalis had an inkling of how mathematics suddenly becomes something wonderful when it is not merely applied to the external world of the senses, where it becomes purely formalistic, but when it is carried up into the spiritual world and filled with imaginations of the spiritual world. For if one applies them to the external sense world, then one really dislikes all talk of this sense world. One no longer speaks of this real world at all; one actually speaks of something quite foolish. One cannot, as was remarked yesterday, present such a world view without dishonesty, because it takes no account of what one otherwise really presents in life. You throw everything out as if it weren't there. You can't imagine such a world that is not red and not blue, not warm and not cold, that is not thick and not thin, that is not loud and not silent, you can't imagine it in reality. You can calculate it, but you can't imagine it. You transform the whole world into an empty formalism.

This stops immediately when you carry this mathematics up into the spiritual world. There it becomes manifest, it becomes something great. And now, you see, the world is at a crossroads today. On the one hand, it should stop developing this formalistic world view, because that is nothing more than squeezing a lemon dry, and it should be willing to find spiritual content in a different way, not by inventing atoms and their weaving, but by looking for the spirit in the phenomena that are all around us. We should do this. We should become agile, we should be able to penetrate into the organic.

The day before yesterday, Dr. Unger so beautifully explained to you how it is necessary for scientific thinking to become inwardly agile, to inwardly transform itself, so that this thinking can follow the metamorphosis of organic forms. Yes, humanity should do this. But under the influence of this new world picture, it has become neurasthenic. Under the influence of this rigid, dry world picture, it has become completely neurasthenic with regard to time and movement and space and mass, fidgety, terribly fidgety. And instead of her thinking feeling its way into the metamorphosing organic world, instead of her thinking having a truly organic metamorphosing effect, her thinking becomes mollusc-like. And instead of thinking in terms of Goethe's metamorphosis, she thinks in a neurasthenic way, how the solid body becomes shorter when it merely moves. There you have the way in which thinking has become mobile under the aegis of our concept of time. There you have what is rightly demanded, but which our time fulfills only in a neurasthenic way. There you have, so to speak, first of all what was to come, but it comes in a neurasthenic way.

These things must be borne in mind, my dear friends, if you want to understand the present. Einstein, Mie, Nordström, Hilbert and so on, they are, I might say, under the impression of the approaching spiritual wave. But these are all neurasthenics, world-view neurasthenics, who go against the thinking that must be demanded by the real modern theory of knowledge; they fulfill it in a neurasthenic way. They cannot conceive of the Goethean metamorphosis; but the old, dry, rigid world-picture, which, I might say, makes one cool to the finger-tips when one touches it in its dryness, they make slimy, mollusc-like. Of course, thinking is “flexible” when it can imagine that a person, if they fly fast enough through space, becomes completely flat like a sheet of paper. There you have “flexible” thinking, but flexible thinking in the light of neurasthenics, in the light of neurasthenic world-view. This world-view neurasthenia, which has often been pointed out to you, is very deeply rooted in our world-views. That is what we have to lead to the soul today. Today, our world view is becoming neurasthenic. Spiritual science should heal this neurasthenia. This is also a demand of the time.

Now, tomorrow, after we have gone through this episode, we want to bring some more anthroposophical considerations into it.

Preliminary note: Walter Johannes Stein's lecture was not written down. The questions from the participants were submitted in writing.

Question: How is it that the color perception on the right and left is of different intensities?

Rudolf Steiner: This is connected with the fact that the entire vitality in the human being is different on the left and right. We are not at all organized in such a way that the human being functions the same on both sides - the left-handed person and the right-handed person, if I may say so. That which lives in our consciousness is actually always an intermediate state between that which lives through the left-handed person and that which lives through the right-handed person, and the extreme states, the lopsidedness and so on, are just radical formations of that which is actually already present in every person by nature. The difference in intensity stems from the fact that we, as symmetrical human beings, live and function with the two [dis]symmetrical parts in varying degrees of intensity.

The next question was: What is the significance of the warmth points? To what extent can the warmth points be regarded as organs of warmth perception, of general inner and outer perception?

In general, however, something comes into consideration that would be extremely difficult to explain in brief. I would have to give you a whole lecture about it. What is referred to here as heat points, they do not actually serve like the sense organs, but they serve to spread the sensations of warmth as such throughout our organization, so that we identify ourselves with the warmth within us.

This spreading is actually essentially there to perceive us in the sensation of warmth as a unified being, as we must generally hold that we as human beings are organized in such a way that we also stand out from our animal nature through our sensory organization. Our animal nature is actually organized in the way our sensory physiologists usually describe it. In contrast, our human senses are formed in such a way that the orientation towards the I is already inherent in the individual sensory activities. The I is basically a resultant of the twelve partial effects that come together from our various senses. We should not actually say, if we formulate the facts precisely, that we perceive through the eye. Perception as such is much more rooted in a process that lies further back. What actually takes place through the eye is the activation of the process of perception in our entire ego process – it is the same with the other senses – so that we are distinguished from animals by the fact that our senses are already oriented towards the ego. This can also be demonstrated externally by the fact that the further down the animal scale we go, the more dissimilar, and to some extent more complicated, the senses become in comparison to our human senses.

The next question: How are the biogenetic and phylogenetic processes to be understood?

This will become very clear once we start to properly study embryology and a reasonably conducted embryology will then also lead to a reasonable interpretation of phylogeny. Present-day embryology is actually a very one-sided science; it actually only considers the development of the ovum in its complexity. However, it attaches very little importance to the decadent organs, to that which disappears in the developed embryo, i.e. to what disappears, such as the amniotic sac, the allantois, the chorion and so on. These things regress, while that which then becomes the visible human organs develops forward. The mistake that is made today is that one actually only looks at the evolutionary processes, not the involutionary processes, not that which develops in the opposite sense as a result of the other evolving. If embryology is ever studied in such a way that the organs that develop in the opposite direction, that then fall away, are also considered, then it will be possible to properly observe the transformations of form in phylogeny as well, and then it will become clear that what has been presented to you schematically today can be characterized as the real summary of everything that can be well traced phylogenetically.

Today, the empirical sciences have a wealth of material available, but this rich material is by no means exploited in a rational sense. There is, so to speak, a great deal of chaos in this rich material, and as a result, the facts on which this more schematic presentation is based are still hidden from the observations of comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, and comparative biology in general. The relationships that have been indicated here, for example, the transformation, the metamorphosis of the sense of taste into the sense of sight, is something that can already be read today between the lines of the usual physiological descriptions. This can already be proven. Likewise, the process can be observed phylogenetically in the animal series: If we go back to lower-formed eyes, which, however, already have the organization of the eyes of higher animals and humans, we will find that this metamorphosis of the taste organ into the organ of vision can actually be demonstrated if we just want to see impartially.

Another question: What does the kidney actually perceive and what role does the adrenal gland play in this?

Well, the perception we are dealing with here is, of course, very much in the subconscious. When we speak of “renal perception”, we are actually dealing with an analogous use of the word. After all, the point is that we can go into this process of perception without thinking of it in the same crude way as the external senses. The perception in question can be characterized as follows:

Let us say that a person perceives with their sense of hearing. They perceive in the way that has been described to you here today: they perceive outwardly, and this perception takes place in the conscious mind. A perception that we can describe as the opposite pole of auditory perception, we would have to characterize as being conveyed to the region of rhythmic activity. Certain processes that take place in human metabolism have to be conveyed to the region of rhythmic activity, these processes, the metabolic processes, are in a certain way conveyed to the rhythmic processes by something analogous to perception, just as, for example, the external vibrational processes are conveyed to the brain by the perception of sound.

It is only possible to connect a clear concept with these things if one can imagine that inner vitality as it is in the three-part human being. What is in the metabolic human being, for example, must be conveyed for the rhythmic human being. The rhythmic person can only be in harmony with the metabolic person through mediation, and this mediation is provided by kidney activity. The strength of the secretion, the quality of the secretion, forms the mediation, so to speak. In this way, the kidney creates a reagent for the rhythmic person in relation to the metabolic person.

Of course, these things can only be characterized superficially. They lead into such profound things of the human organization that they are hardly suitable for a brief answer to a question.

The question was also asked about the nature of the secretion. What is meant by secretion here?

Surely, one can only use the word “seclusion” in this case if one means the following: when we speak of the sense of warmth, we are dealing with the perception of something in the external world that is present in the same way in ourselves, so that, as it were - as was also mentioned in today's lecture - only the difference in level is actually perceived between the external warmth and the internal warmth. And it is indeed the case that, basically, the same process is taking place as with the thermometer, only externalized.

With sound perceptions, it is the case that we not only penetrate into something that we also carry within us, it is the case that we not only penetrate into something that is, so to speak, a common medium in which we are inside and the object is inside, but in the case of sound perception, we penetrate into something that is inherent in the object. We can certainly say, for example, that every metal has its own sound. So in a sense we penetrate into the interior of an object in a weaker way than we penetrate into the interior of another person when we listen to how he speaks and how he reveals his inner self to us. We do not penetrate into something that is common to both us and him – only the mediations are common, but not the content. Thus we penetrate out of ourselves by penetrating into the object through the perception of sound.

This can be characterized by the fact that, while ascending from the sense of sight to the sense of warmth, we still live in something that is a common medium for what is perceived and for ourselves, but that something separates when we go from the sense of sight to the sense of hearing. There is also an intensification in this, because we not only perceive a sound, but we perceive an inner mental process.

Thus, in the sense of sound, a further differentiation can be perceived. And one cannot arrive at a schematization, if I may say so, or a classification of the senses, other than by considering this activity of the human being from the inside out, this absorption, this ever-increasing absorption in the sense of sound. Only in this way can one arrive at an objective classification of the senses. Precisely because this has not been done, it has been overlooked that one really must proceed from the sense of hearing to the sense of sound, and from the sense of sound in turn to the sense of concept. For it is an absolute nonsense to speak of perceiving, let us say, what the other person puts into language as his soul content, with the sense of hearing. To separate these two senses, the sense of sound and the sense of tone, leads only to a failure to understand anything about these things in the world.

It is therefore a matter of actually setting a boundary where such a boundary is given by the objects, and of seeing this separation, which is not yet present in the sense of warmth. What is actually perceived by the subject himself first occurs in the sense of sound, and then increasingly in the other senses, in the sense of sound and so on, or even in the sense of self. Everything is thrown into confusion. In this theory, which we can hear today, it is actually the case that the perception of the other self should come about through me approaching the other person and seeing a nose, two eyes, hair and so on, and then say to myself through a half-unconscious conclusion: I also have a nose, two eyes, hair; what he has, I also have, therefore what I see will have an I like I have.

This unconscious conclusion is what we see at work today. It is often called “empathy” or something similar, as chattering psychologists, for example Lipps, have said. We find this unconscious conclusion at work everywhere, and we do not notice how direct the process is that lies in the fact that I actually perceive the ego of the other person.

Some people who study such things, such as Scheler, have indeed become aware of how immediate this perception of the self of the other is and how fundamentally, radically different this perception of the self of the other is from all the processes that lead me to the inner experiences, which I then summarize into the overall state of the inner life.

I believe that what has been mentioned is a radical process that proceeds in many ways and intervenes in the inner life, while the human being's perception of the self is on the same level as other sensory perceptions, except that here we are entering the realm for which humanity is not yet predisposed today. I would like to say, to speak of organs in the way we speak here of the organ of the sense of self, that would hardly be easy to understand today in the context of our psychology or physiology - which, as I mentioned earlier, has even led to the development of an analytical psychology, a so-called “psychoanalysis” - that would hardly be easy to understand today in the context of these complexities.

But at least the pure fact must be presented to the world today: that I-perception is something other than the summarizing, the synthetic summarizing of those processes that then lead to the confirmation of the fact of the inner I of the subject.

The next question: what processes are involved in dowsing?

With regard to the divining rod, it must be carefully noted that, when the corresponding phenomena occur, there is an intensified sensory process for which, however, the whole human being is the mediator. We are not dealing with inner mechanical or magnetic processes or the like, but with the intensity of the person, which is then expressed in what is transmitted through the person to the divining rod.

The facts of the matter are such that one can indeed point out how people who really have no inclination to engage in spiritual science are quite seriously forced to deal with such a problem, such as that of the divining rod, both physically and physiologically.

I still remember – although I do not want to speak here in favor or against something in this direction – how a Viennese researcher blew the whistle on Hansen – after all, most of the nonsense that Hansen did with hypnotism at the time – and how this same researcher is now forced to seriously deal with the phenomena of dowsing. I need only recall that in fact experiments in locating springs and the like with the help of the divining rod have even played a certain role during this war, so that in fact here in this field exact research is beginning. But this research does not want to consider the fact that we are not dealing here with processes that have been separated from the human being, but with processes that are based on the fact that the human being is involved in the entire process, so to speak. This is confirmed, for example, by the fact that the movements of the rod vary greatly depending on whether one or the other person is using it. We are dealing with something in whose reactions the intervention of the human being plays a role.

These questions are such that if we wanted to answer them exhaustively, we would need the whole night to do so, and that cannot be expected of us.

Preliminary remark: Eugen Kolisko's lecture was not written down. However, Rudolf Steiner said the following about it the next day in his lecture for physicians (March 31, 1920, in GA 312): “It was very interesting how Dr. Kolisko pointed out in yesterday's evening lecture that the chemistry of the future must actually become something completely different, and how the word 'physiology' was mentioned again and again, which testifies that a bridge should be built between the chemical and the physiological. I was always reminded of various things that, of course, cannot be fully expressed where public lectures are concerned, because the prerequisites for understanding are actually completely lacking. We do, of course, find carbon in nature outside of the human being, in what I would like to call seemingly extra-human nature. For what in nature is actually extra-human? Nothing, really, because everything that is extra-human in the extra-human world around us has been removed from the human being in the course of human development. Man had to enter into stages of development, which he could only enter into by certain processes taking place in the external world, opposite to him, and by which he was given the possibility of taking certain other processes into his inner being, so that there is actually always an opposition and also a relationship between certain outer processes and certain inner processes."

After Eugen Kolisko's lecture, a question was asked about the effects of allopathic and homeopathic remedies. The stenographer did not record the wording of the question.

Rudolf Steiner: It is more or less assumed today - because of atomistic thinking - that the process that takes place within a substance is, to a certain extent, the same process that takes place within the human organization, or I could also say the animal organization. But it is a very naturalistic assumption to indulge in the idea that the substance borrowed from the dead organism, so to speak, shows the same properties as the same substance, say for example blood, when it is still within the living human or animal organism. Once we realize what bundles of completely unscientific assumptions and postulates are in the sciences in use, only then will we truly feel what is necessary to put today's scientific view on a healthy basis. And so this healthy basis is also not available for those processes that are brought about when certain remedies are introduced into the human organism. For example, the question of how any substance that we supply to the human organism in this or that form, allopathic or homeopathic, is now dissolved in this human organism, how it behaves in the human organism itself, has not been investigated. For example, no consideration is given to the question of what the human organism actually does with this substance. And here we find – I can only hint at this, as it would take many hours to explain in full detail – that spiritual science shows that those substances which we supply to the human organism all , are in a sense, homoeopathized by it, if I may use the term. This means that they undergo internally the same process that the homoeopathic pharmacist causes to occur with his substances in his experiments. It is the case that the mode of action of the allopathically administered healing substances is also not based on the properties that are chemically ascribed to them today, but rather on properties that they only acquire as a result of the human organism processing them with the help of its own powers.

The question of allopathy and homeopathy, really considered in relation to the human being, is therefore not whether large or fragmented small amounts have an effect on the human organism when they produce healing effects, because the substances also do that when they are administered in allopathic amounts. The question is not this at all, but the question is whether it is permissible to expose the human organism to the side effects that arise from what is added with the allopathic substance and what is not homeopathized by the human organism itself, that is, is not used for healing. The question is whether this method is really permissible in order not to burden the human organism with what must be left over. Whether one supplies a very large quantity, while the organism needs only a small quantity, and whether the dispersion of the substances has the same effect as remedies that otherwise also have an effect in small quantities – that has been explained by Dr. Kolisko. If substances are dispersed in the human organism itself and only a small quantity is necessary for this, why should large quantities be introduced? It seems to me that the question is therefore not based on what is usually stated [in relation to homeopathic and allopathic remedies], but that something essential is actually [unspoken]; the questions should actually arise in other areas or, let us say, in other forms. For example, it should be clear whether the whole view and way of thinking about the clinical picture is healthier in the field of homeopathy or in that of allopathy. By this I mean whether, for example, those doctors who profess homeopathy or those who profess allopathy are more likely to focus on the complexity of the human organism. And here it must indeed be said that the doctors who work on a homeopathic basis are much more willing – experience simply shows this – to move away from the materialistic, atomistic idea and to adapt to certain views that I would say are more in line with the nature of the human organism.

As I said, I do not want to go into the actual discussion here, because it could be misunderstood if you have to explain it so briefly. I just wanted to suggest how our scientific views usually pose the questions in such a way that they cannot be answered at all as they are posed; the points of view are completely shifted, the questions are completely shifted to the point of view of materialism.

Then I was asked to speak about the relationship between Leadbeater's book and “occult chemistry”. Now, dear attendees, I do not want to dwell on the word “occult” here, because it is so misunderstood; it shocks the public, so to speak, when the word “occult” is used. But one can also stop at the word “spiritual scientific” or the like. You see, the occult is only occult as long as it is not known, and with those who know it, it is no longer occult. There are very many people who have every reason to call mathematics an occult science, and some sciences are occult for some people. So this is actually something that is quite relative in this respect. You will not find such a concoction as this so-called “occult chemistry” justified or recognized by anyone who is truly capable of spiritual thinking. This “occult chemistry” of Leadbeater's is modeled entirely on the usual materialistic atomism in the way it is presented. This “occult chemistry” is the best proof of what certain conceptions calling themselves spiritual have already come to in our materialistic time. I need only remind you that in certain theosophical circles the following idea once even emerged: they thought about what could be present in successive earthly lives so that it would remain from one earthly life to the next, and they came up with the grotesquely foolish idea of the so-called permanent atom. A single atom was supposed to be saved from one life from so many hundred years ago to the next life and thereby maintain the continuity of these two lives. That is, these spiritualists had fortunately managed to think along the lines of the materialistic-atomistic view. And Leadbeater has now put together his “occult chemistry” according to the pattern of ordinary atomistic chemistry, in a completely arbitrary way - but he has stated that it is a product of clairvoyance - but it is a completely arbitrary construction and cannot be recognized by any truly serious spiritual researcher in the world.

This is precisely the best example of how certain atomistic ideas have taken hold of humanity today, that one was able to carry these atomistic ideas into the fields of a certain sectarian theosophical direction. This is something that has nothing whatsoever to do with what is being striven for here. And it is precisely this introduction of the atomistic-materialistic way of thinking into spiritual scientific investigations that shows how deeply the present is corroded by atomistic basic ideas. Consider that particularly in certain circles of English scientific thinkers, where one strives for an external visualization, attempts have been made to construct models for those structures that have been presented to you today, so that one could see outwardly that atoms are arranged in such a way in various complicated forms that it is possible to show so beautifully why there is a left-turning and a right-turning acid. You just need to have the atoms arrange themselves symmetrically and then you can say: Because the atoms always arrange their forces in this way in symmetry, there is a left and a right. It is just not understandable, if you can really think logically, why you should attribute the necessity that the shapes occur symmetrically to a configuration of the smallest parts. Please do not take this as a protest. Because if it is really true that only through the forces of the smallest parts the acid appears as right-polarizing, rotating and the other as left-rotating, then it should also be true that the left hand could fit on the right, because the smallest parts are formed in this direction.

These things have emerged in so-called “occult chemistry”, and these things have now been transferred to the views in so-called occult books. There you will also find quite terrible views and constructions of molecules or atoms. All this has also been imitated in the field of spiritual science; the materialistic theory has even been imitated in the spiritual view. I experienced it once at a congress held by so-called Theosophists, in Paris it was. There they talked about this and that, and afterwards I asked someone what impression this congress had made on him. The person in question said: “Oh, there were such good fluids in the whole hall.” So the person concerned saw nothing of all the concrete thoughts and so on that were expressed there, except for a materialistic translation of what people said to each other into material fluid effects between the individual personalities. You have to look at these things in terms of the way of thinking. You are not a follower of a spiritual world view just because you talk about spiritual beings, but only if you can talk about spiritual qualities. What you find, for example, in the theosophical literature today is that the physical body is described, then the etheric body, which is a bit thinner, possibly more nebulous, but still material, then the astral body, again a bit thinner, but just thinner matter, and so on. This continues up to the highest spiritual realms, Manas, Kama-Manas and so on, and actually everything is nothing but rarefied matter, only that in the end it really becomes very <“homeopathic”>. These are the things that show that it does not matter whether one speaks of the spirit today, but whether one is able to show something that really leads into the spiritual realm.

Question: How can chemistry be further developed in line with anthroposophy?

If we undertake the kind of phenomenology that Dr. Kolisko has in mind, then it must be said that this question is so all-embracing that it can only be answered in the most general terms. Above all, it is necessary to realize that one would first have to arrive at a corresponding phenomenology. A phenomenology is not a compilation of mere phenomena in an arbitrary way, or in the way they are obtained by scientific experiments, but a real phenomenology is a systematization of phenomena, as was attempted by Goethe in his Theory of Colors. It is a tracing back of the complicated to the simple, to the fundamental principles, where the basic elements, the basic phenomena, confront us.

Now, of course, I know very well that very clever people will say: Yes, but if one gains such a list in relation to the connection between qualitative phenomena and archetypal phenomena, then such a structure cannot be compared at all with how, for example, complicated geometric connections can be traced back mathematically to axioms; because the geometric connections are, so to speak, built from pure inner construction. The further development of mathematics, [starting from] these axioms, is in turn experienced as a mathematical process seen in inner necessity, while in the development of phenomena and archetypal phenomena we have to rely on observing the external facts.

But this is not the case, even if it is simply asserted – it is asserted more or less clearly and distinctly in the broadest context. The fact that this is asserted is only the result of an incorrect theory of knowledge, and in particular it is the result of a confused muddling of the concept of experience with other concepts. And this confused muddling of the concept of experience with other concepts leads, for example, to the following.

It is not considered that the way in which experience is present is thoroughly formed in relation to the human subject. I cannot form the concept of experience at all without thinking the relationship from the object to the human subject. And now it is merely a matter of whether there is a fundamental distinction between the way in which, for example, I have a Goethean urphenomenon before me and complicate this urphenomenon into a derived phenomenon, where I seem to be dependent on external experience confirming what I express in judgment? Is there a difference in this whole behavior of the subject in relation to the object with regard to experience, when I state in mathematics that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is 180°, or when I state the correctness of the Pythagorean theorem? Is there in fact a difference?

That there is no difference in this respect has already been pointed out by quite ingenious mathematicians of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, who, because they saw that ultimately mathematics is also based on an experience - in a sense, as one speaks of experience in the so-called empirical natural sciences - that have constructed, albeit initially only constructed, a non-Euclidean geometry to the Euclidean geometry. And here one must say: Theoretically it is, of course, perfectly possible to think geometrically that the three angles of a triangle are 380°. However, one must assume that space has a different degree of curvature. In our ordinary space we have a regular [Euclidean] measure, which has a curvature of zero. Simply by imagining that space is more curved [that is, that the curvature of space is greater than 1], one arrives at a sentence like: the sum of the three angles of a triangle is greater than 180°.

Interesting experiments have been carried out in relation to this, for example by Oskar Simony, who examined this. These endeavors show that from a certain point of view it was considered necessary to say: what we express as judgments in mathematical or geometric sentences also requires empirical verification in the same way as what we express in phenomenology.

Preliminary note: In his lecture, E.A.K. Stockmeyer had spoken, among other things, of warmth corresponding to will, light to imagination, chemistry to feeling, which feels the external within. The lecture was not written down; the stenographer merely recorded the following scheme written on the blackboard: “Life forces / chemical forces / light / warmth / gases / fluids / solids”.

Question: Conventional mathematics encompasses solids, liquids and gases in terms of shape, surface and direction of force. How do you imagine a mathematics of the thermal, chemical and life spheres?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, the first thing to do is to extend the field of mathematics in a way that is appropriate to the subject if we want to encompass higher fields, or I should say, even if we only want to encompass them in an analogous mathematical way.

If we consider that in the 19th century there arose the need to extend mathematics itself – I will mention only what has already been mentioned on other occasions, I believe only yesterday, that there arose the need to add to Euclidean non-Euclidean geometry, — when one considers that at that time the need arose to carry out calculations for higher manifolds than we usually do, then we already have a hint at extensions of mathematics. And we may say: When we consider ordinary ponderable matter, we do not come to use any appropriate application of other manifolds than that of the ordinary three-dimensional manifold.

But today there is still so little inclination to enter into an appropriate view of the fields of heat, chemical and life elements that the continuation of mathematical thinking into these fields is still very problematic today.

For example, there is absolutely no contradiction between the failure to recognize the essence of mass, as propagated by physicists, and the failure to consider the essence of the image of light as presented by Goethe. A reasonable physicist will of course reject the idea of considering the essence of things. However, this immediately leads to the dilemma: the physicist may refuse to go into the essence of things; but anyone who then, from the conventional physical, physical point of view, brews up a philosophy no longer just refuses to do so, but declares: one cannot penetrate into the essence of things at all.

And so we have [today a very one-sided view of the] earth, since in physics we are never concerned with mere geology, but with what results as a conclusion from such a single field for overall knowledge. Thus we are already dealing with harmful consequences of what has gradually emerged over time for physics, not mathematically, but as a mechanistic world view.

What Goethe means when he says that one should not actually speak of the essence of light, but should try to get to know the facts, the deeds and sufferings of light - for these, after all, give a complete description of the essence of light - is not at all identical with the rejection of the question as to the nature of the light, but precisely the indication that a correct, a real phenomenology - which is arranged in the sense that it was discussed here yesterday - ultimately gives a picture of the essence that is being considered. Insofar as it is and wants to be phenomenology and is correct phenomenology, insofar as it concerns the mechanistic field, it gives us a picture of the essence, namely of the essence of the phenomena.

And so one can indeed say: when it is not a matter of mechanical phenomena or of that which is merely mechanical in physical phenomena, when it is a matter of other areas than the mechanical, then the mechanistic view of these other areas of phenomena hinders any advance towards an actual essence of things that can be recognized by the human being. And in this respect it is necessary to emphasize the radical difference between such a phenomenology, as Goethe means and as it can be cultivated in Goetheanism, and what basically wants to dispense with delving into the essence of things.

This has nothing to do with any supposed advantage of the mechanistic method for the drive to dominate over nature. For, ladies and gentlemen, it is self-evident that in the very field in which there have been great triumphs in recent centuries, namely in the technical-mechanical field, the mechanistic part of knowledge of nature could provide a certain satisfaction of the urge to dominate nature. But just ask to what extent this urge to dominate nature has been left behind in other areas precisely because it has been rejected to penetrate to an equally profound level of knowledge as has been striven for in the mechanistic field.

The difference between the mechanistic field and those fields that start with the physical and then go up through the chemical to the organic and so on is not that in these higher fields one is dealing only with qualitative properties or the like, but the difference lies in the fact that what relates to the mechanistic field, to mechanistic physics, is simple, it can be observed, it is the most elementary. Therefore, we have also achieved a certain satisfaction of the instinct to dominate nature in this most elementary field.

But then the question arises: how do we satisfy this urge to dominate when we move into the higher realms that no longer follow mechanistic [laws]? And here we must certainly expect that there will also come times when our domination of nature extends a little beyond the merely mechanistic realm.

In the mechanistic field it is extremely easy, through lack of control, lack of control in the cognitive sense, to bring about, I would say, revenge of nature, revenge of reality. If someone builds a bridge for the railroad without proper knowledge of the mechanistic laws, then at some appropriate opportunity the bridge will collapse and the train will rush down the embankment. In this case, the reaction will immediately manifest itself in the form of an improper control of the cognitive drive. If the control has to relate to somewhat more complicated areas, which, however, must be taken not from the quantitative or the mechanistic, but must be taken precisely from the procedure of actually working out a phenomenology, then this proof is perhaps not always so easy. It can be said with a fair degree of certainty that a bridge built with a deficient cognitive drive will collapse after the third train has crossed it. But today it is not easy for a doctor to immediately recognize the connection between the cognitive drive and the domination of nature when a patient dies. It is less said that the doctor has cured someone to death than that someone has built a bad bridge.

In short, one should be a little more sparing with this emphasis on the urge to dominate nature, purely on the basis of the well-known fact that it is only in the field of mechanistic technology that such a satisfaction of the urge to dominate has become possible through the mechanistic view of nature. Other views of nature will be able to give a completely different satisfaction of the urge to dominate. For example, I will just point out – I already pointed this out from a different point of view yesterday – that one can never build a bridge from the mechanistic world view to the human being, but that the bridge is immediately built when a correct phenomenology is applied.

In Goethe's Theory of Colors, you not only have the presentation of physiological phenomena, the presentation of physical phenomena, but you have the whole field transferred to the sensual-moral effect of colors, where the phenomenon, the whole field, is immediately brought to the human being. And from this area, to which Goethe is still pointing – the sensual-moral effect of colors – one comes, if one continues to work spiritually, to the complete area of human knowledge and thus again to the complete area of knowledge of nature.

And in a way it would perhaps be good if attention were drawn to the fact that a large part of what humanity experiences today as decadent phenomena within European culture is connected with the fact that we have only brought it to a satisfaction of the urge to dominate on one side, on the mechanistic side. We have indeed come a long way in this respect; not only have we built railways and created telegraphs and telephones, until we came to wireless telegraphy, but we have even gone so far in satisfying the urge to dominate that we have destroyed large parts of Europe by concreting them over. We have taken it as far as destruction by thoroughly satisfying the urge to dominate.

It is now as follows: this satisfaction of the urge to dominate nature, which has led to destruction, was basically a straightforward continuation of the purely technical urge to dominate; it lay in the straightforward continuation. These things also belong to those which must now be thoroughly eradicated if the unhealthy expansion of the mechanistic view to encompass all physical phenomena is to be replaced by something that does not simply eliminate the truly specific nature of physical , but when one actually moves away from the mechanization of ideas, which, in their field, give a very good physics, to that which is specific to physical phenomena.

And here it must be pointed out that precisely this approach, which of course cannot be taken to its ultimate conclusions in one hour, that this approach will lead to an expansion of the mathematical field itself, out of the corresponding reality. We must realize that it is precisely out of the mechanistic confusion that such things have become possible, that over the last thirty, forty, fifty years all sorts of views have been put forward about the so-called ether. It was Planck, the physicist mentioned earlier in relation to another field, who finally came to the conclusion: If one wants to talk about the ether in physics at all, then one must not ascribe any material properties to it. One must not think of it materially. So physics has been pushed to the point of not ascribing any material properties to the ether.

What, then, are the actual errors in the ether ideas, in the ether concepts? Well, my dear audience, they did not consist at all in the fact that too little mathematics were done or something like that, but in the fact that one - because one was only inspired by the tendency to extend the mathematical over the specific extended to the specific physical, that one used wrong mathematics in formulas in which the effects of the ether also played a part, that one used the quantities in the same way as one uses them for ponderable matter. The moment we realize that the possibility of inserting ordinary quantities into mathematical formulas ceases when we enter the etheric realm, the impulse will arise to seek a real extension of mathematics itself. You see, one only needs to point out the twofold aspect. The physicist Planck says: If one wants to talk about the ether at all in physics, then in any case one must not ascribe any material properties to it. And in Einstein's theory of relativity, or in relativity theory in general, one found it necessary to eliminate the ether altogether.

Now, the ether cannot be canceled! This is something that I can only hint at now. Rather, the point is that the moment we move from the ether to our physical formulas, that is, to the mathematical formulas that are applied to physics, we are forced to insert negative quantities into the formulas.

We have to insert these quantities negatively - just as we also move from positive to negative quantities in formal physics - simply because, by advancing from positive matters to zero, we have in the ether neither a nothing - what Einstein means - nor a pure negative that must be thought of as a something - as Planck says - but because the ether must be thought of as something that is endowed with properties that are as opposed to the properties of matter as negative numbers are to positive ones. And here, even before we come to realize the character of the negative itself, the pure extension of the mathematical [into the negative] – one may now dispute what a negative quantity is – gains a certain significance for reality, even before we come to realize the character of the negative itself, the extension of the numerical line into the negative gains a certain significance for reality.

Of course, I am well aware that in the 19th century there was a significant dispute in the field of mathematics between those who saw something qualitative in the positive and negative signs, while others saw only a subtrahend in the negative signs, for whom the negative minuend is missing. But that is not the point. The point is that we may indeed be obliged to follow the same path in physics itself that we follow in formal mathematics from the positive to the negative, by moving from ponderable effects to ethereal effects. Then we have to see what will come out of the formulas if we decide to treat the quantities in this way.

And then it will come about, despite the fact that much solid work has been and can be done in formal mathematics, that we are simply obliged to use imaginary quantities in physics as well, for the positive and negative quantities. But in this way we come to a mediation with the quantities in nature.

I am well aware that this has only been very briefly outlined, summarized in just a few words. But I must nevertheless draw attention to the fact that in progressing from ponderable matter up to where one comes to the life forces, one is compelled everywhere to insert negative quantities into the formulas, precisely for the reversal of the material quantitative in general, and that then, as soon as one goes beyond life, one is compelled to move from mere negative quantities to imaginary quantities. But then you don't just have formal quantities, but quantities that now have the property that they no longer refer to the [positive or negative] material, but to the substantial, which thus qualitatively-internally relates to both the ethereal as well as to the ponderable, just as the imaginary number line relates to the positive and negative numbers, to the real number line - so that one can indeed connect what one has in formal mathematics with certain areas of reality.

It would be very unfortunate if attempts to approximate human ideas to reality, to bring human ideas to submerge into reality, were to fail because of the trivial notion that what truly rational physics has to offer would satisfy human instinct for domination of nature to a lesser extent. It would satisfy him more than the so glorified application of the mechanistic world view to mechanistic technology. This mechanistic technology has certainly brought great things to humanity in the development of culture. But those who are always talking about how calculating physics – that is, physics calculated in the way that physics has calculated up to now – how physics has brought glorious progress in the field of natural science and in the technical field, they should consider that other fields may have suffered greatly from this mere focusing of attention on the purely technical field. And to escape from the plight, from the decadence into which mere technical control and its foundations, mere mechanistic knowledge, has brought us, to escape from this plight, from this decadence, we would be in great need of a leaning towards a physics that really cannot speak in the same way of a rejection of the knowledge of the essence, as it must indeed apply to the mechanical field, which is accessible to mechanistic knowledge.

Yes, you see, it is so easy for the mechanical field to dispense with essence because this essence, I would say, is so obvious, because it is spread out in space. And it is somewhat more difficult to achieve the same in the field of physics as in the field of the mechanistic. Hence all the talk of not getting into the essence. It is easy for the physicist to simply refuse to recognize the essential if he only wants to think in mechanistic terms. Because behind what today's formulas, as they are used today to express this [mechanistic] mathematically, there is no essence. The essence only begins where one no longer just applies these formulas, but where one penetrates into the mathematical essence itself.

That was just to answer the question of how one might think of the mathematical in an extended way beyond the imponderable.

Preliminary remark: A question was asked about the field of electrical forces. The stenographer did not note down the wording of the question.

Rudolf Steiner: This is a question about which one should actually give not just one lecture but a whole series — quite apart from the fact that the question is not related to the topic of this evening.

What was presented yesterday [in Mr. Stockmeyer's lecture] tried to point out how we have to distinguish, so to speak, in the field of the imponderable - in contrast to the field of the ponderable: a field of light, a chemical field and a field of life. Descending from the imponderable to the ponderable, we come to the region of heat, which to some extent is common to both, then to the region of air, then to the region of liquid and solid bodies. Within these regions, nothing can be found, especially for those who are able to consider things phenomenologically, that belongs to the region of electrical forces. The question here was only about electrical forces. And to arrive at an answer to this question, which, I would like to say, is not in any way lay, is only possible if one relates the whole field of phenomena, the whole field of what is empirically given to man in his environment, to man himself. I do not want to say that there cannot also be a way of looking at it that, as it were, disregards the human being and only considers what, in natural phenomena, well, to put it bluntly, is not the concern of human beings. But one comes to an understanding from different points of view, and one of the points of view should be characterized here, at least in terms of its significance.

If you consider everything that belongs to the realm of the ponderable, that is, everything solid, liquid, expandable, expandable, gaseous, you will find, starting from this realm, such effects that also have more or less material parallels in the human organism. But the closer you approach the realm of the imponderable, the more you will find that the parallel phenomena, at least initially given for consciousness, can be attributed to the soul. Those who are not satisfied with all kinds of word definitions or coinages, but who want to get to the bottom of things, will find that even the explanation and experience of warmth rises into the soul.

When we then come to the area of light effects, we have first given the light area as our light field, as something that lies in the area of sensory eye perceptions, and with that these take on a character of the soul. Allow me the expression: we have filtered the scope of eye perceptions into a certain sum of ideas.

If we now proceed to the field of the so-called chemical effects, it might seem doubtful or debatable, according to the usual discussions of today's chemistry, to say that we are also dealing with an ascent to the soul when we speak of the effect of the chemical field on the human being. However, one need only look at what the physiological-psychological study of the visual process has already provided today, and one will find that much of the kind that relates to chemical effects is already mixed into it. It has indeed become necessary, and rightly so, to speak of a kind of chemism if one wants to describe the processes that take place inside the eye during the visual process.

Of course, experiments in this area are thoroughly tainted by current material conceptions; but at this point even contemporary science is to a certain extent, I might say, brought to see, at least in a certain area, the very first, most elementary beginnings of the right way. And when we speak of chemistry in our external life, in so far as it relates to our consciousness of ideas through the process of seeing, we actually speak in a similar way to how we speak when we simply look at the shaped body, that is, the mere surface structure and what we make of the surface structure as an inner image of some solid body. Anyone who, as a proper psychologist, can analyze the relationships between the idea of a shaped, solid body and the exterior that gives rise to this idea will find that this analysis must be fairly parallel to that which relates to what goes on below the surface, so to speak, below the shaped surface of the outer body, as a chemical process, and what is then, through the process of seeing, the inner, soul-like property of the human being.

Something very similar applies to the phenomena of life. Thus, advancing from the ponderable to the imponderable, we come to the conclusion that, in the case of parallel experiences within the human being, we have to assume processes of consciousness that are strongly reminiscent of the imaginative. We can therefore say: if we ascend – if we remember yesterday's scheme [of Mr. Stockmeyer] – from the solid to the liquid, to the gaseous, to the heat-loving, light-loving, to the chemical element – if we ascend here, we come to areas that have their correlate in the human being through the imaginative.

[We ascend] from the ponderable to the imponderable in nature and from the processes that take place in the organism inside the human being - which certainly also underlie consciousness, but which do not enter into consciousness as such - up to the conceptual. Now, however, psychology does not yet have an appropriate method for, I would say, really presenting this whole range of a person's inner experience to human attention in an orderly way.

Today, people tend to avoid talking about the actual affects of the soul, about imagination, feeling, will, and so on. Psychology, too, has suffered from the materialistic world view, and it has suffered from this materialistic world view in that it is unable to find any proper ideas about the soul-related. Anyone who wants to find such proper ideas about the soul-related must, of course, completely abandon the ideas of Wundt or the like, which are still regarded as very scientific by so many today. All this talk is basically nothing that even remotely touches the matter. Anyone who studies Wundt's many books will find that it has indeed had a very strong influence, because Wundt came from materialistic physiology into the field of psychology and then even into the field of philosophy. One will find that there is absolutely no possibility of arriving at an appropriate view of the nature of representation and the nature of will. I could mention many other names, not only Wundt's, about whom the same could be said. If one can arrive at such an objective view of the nature of representations, one sees that just as one must raise the correlate of the ponderable to the correlate of the imponderable – see the following diagram – and thereby find the representational in man, so one must go below the correlate of the ponderable in man in order to advance. And there we come to the correlate of something which I would initially like to describe as X. Let us look for it in the human being itself. We find it in the will element of the human being. To deal with what lies between the two and how it lies between the two would be taking things too far today.

We come to the will element of the human being and must then ask: What is the relationship between this will element of the human being and its relationship to external nature? What is this X? What is the correlate of the will, just as the perceptions are the given of the affects in the imponderable? Then one must say to oneself, in spiritual scientific terms: this correlate in nature is the electrical and also the magnetic phenomena – processes, I could say better. And just as in the subjective-objective there is a relationship between the conceptual and the realm of the imponderable, as I called it yesterday, so there is a relationship between the volitional element in man and the electrical, electromagnetic and magnetic realm in non-human nature. If today, when, I would like to say, empiricism is subjugating the reluctant materialistic minds, if today you are again looking for something that can lead you to, well, I would like to say at least make the first step of materialism towards these things, you will find that physics has been forced in recent years to abandon the old concept of matter and to recognize in the electron and ion theory a certain identity between what, if I may express myself trivially, flies through space as free electricity space and what flies through space as electricity bound to so-called matter; in any case, it has been forced to recognize that which flies through space as electricity and represents a certain speed in flying through space. This speed, when expressed in mathematical formulas, now shows exactly the same properties as matter itself. As a result, the concept of matter merged with the concept of electrical effects.

If you consider this, you will say to yourself: There is no reason to speak of an electromagnetic or other light theory, but what is present is that when we look at the outside world, where we do not perceive the electrical directly through the senses, we must somehow suspect it in what is now usually called the material. It lies further from us than what is perceptible through the senses; and this more distant element expresses itself precisely by being related to what lies further from the subjective consciousness of the human being than his world of ideas, namely his world of will. When you descend into the region of the human being that I have designated as the middle region, and then descend further, you will find this descent to be very much the same as descending into the nature of the will. You only need to see how man, although he lives with his soul in the world of his ideas, does not have the actual entity of the will present in his consciousness, but rather deeply buried in the unconscious.

In spiritual scientific terms, this would have to be expressed as follows: In the life of ideas we are actually only awake, in the life of the will we sleep, even when we are awake. We only have perceptions in our life of will. But what this element of the will itself is like, when I just stretch out a hand, eludes ordinary consciousness. It eludes us inwardly as a correlate, just as the electrical eludes us outwardly in the material, in the direct perception that one has of it, for example, in relation to color or to what is visible at all.

And so, if we are looking for a path for the fields of luminosity, chemism and so on, we come from the ponderable into the imponderable by moving upwards. But then, by moving downwards, we come to the realm that lies below the ponderable, as it were. And we will then penetrate into the realm of electrical and magnetic phenomena. Anyone who wants to see with open eyes how, for example, the earth itself has a magnetic effect, how the earth as such is the carrier of electrical effects, will see a fruitful path opened up in this observation, which is of course nothing more than a continuation of phenomenology, in order to really penetrate not only the field of [extra-terrestrial] electrical phenomena, but also, let us say, the electrical phenomena bound to the earth's planets. And an immensely fruitful field is opening up for the study of telluric and extratelluric electrical phenomena, so that one can almost, or not only almost, say in all fields: If we do not close the door to the essential nature of things by stating from the outset what may be thought about these phenomena of the external world and their connection with man - for example, what can be expressed mathematically - but if we have the will to enter into the real phenomena, then the phenomena actually begin to speak their own language.

And it is simply a misunderstood Kantianism, which is also a misunderstanding of the world view, when it is constantly being said that one cannot penetrate from the outside world of phenomena into the essence of things. Whoever can somehow logically approach such thoughts, whoever has logic, has knowledge in his soul, so that he can approach such things, he realizes that this talk of phenomena and of what stands behind it as the “thing in itself” means no more than if I say: here I have written down S and O, I do not see the other, I cannot get from the $S and O to the thing in itself, that tells me nothing, that is a theory-appearance. But if I don't just look at the $ and O, but if I am able to read further and to read the phenomena, but here in this case the letters, not just look at them in such a way that I say: there I have the phenomenon; I cannot get behind this phenomenon, I do not enter into the “thing in itself,” but when I look at the phenomena, as they mutually illuminate each other, just as darkness is illuminated, then the reading of the phenomena becomes speech and expresses that which is alive in the essence of things. It is mere verbiage to speak of the opposition of phenomena and of the essence of things; it is like philosophizing about the letter-logic in Goethe's “Faust” and the meaning of Goethe's “Faust”: if one has successively let all the letters that belong to “Faust” speak, then the essence of “Faust” is revealed. In a real phenomenology, phenomena are not such that they are of the same kind or stand side by side; they relate to one another, mutually elucidate one another, and the like. The one who practices real phenomenology comes to the essence of things precisely by practicing real phenomenology.

It would really be a matter of the Kantian inert mind of philosophy finally breaking free from the inertia of accumulating the “opposites in themselves” and the “thing in itself”, which have now confused minds and spirits long enough to really be able to look at the tremendous progress that has also been made in the epistemological relationship through Goetheanism.

This is precisely what is so important for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that attention is drawn to such things and that they can indeed be used to fertilize what in turn leads to an inner relationship between the human being and the spiritual substance in the world - while one has artificially put on, let's say, a suede skin, these forms of all kinds of criticism-of-practical-and-theoretical-reason-blinkers, through which one cannot see through. These are the things that are at stake today.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should certainly not be somehow sectarian; it should certainly not consist merely of explaining to people in some closed circles over tea that the human being consists is composed of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. This, of course, is the kind of stuff that is taught in seance circles over a cup of tea, and it is easy to make fun of those who gain some outer, but also misunderstood, knowledge from such quackery. But spiritual science – one can feel this when one really familiarizes oneself with it – spiritual science is actually capable of stimulating many things anew that really need to be stimulated if we want to make progress. The decadence, the destruction and the social chaos that we are experiencing today have not arisen merely from the sphere of the outer life of our time, but also from the inner human powers of destruction; and these inner human powers of destruction have truly not come from the least of what people have thought through long periods of time.

In this time it is not at all surprising that people arise who find it appropriate to compare Goethe's memories of an old mystic, which he expresses in his saying:

If the eye were not sunlike
How could we behold the light?
If the power of God does not live in us,
How can we be delighted with the divine?

to encounter with the saying: “If the eye were not ink-like, how could we see the writing...”

Indeed, esteemed attendees, I could talk at length about the application of Goethe's saying today, but that would take until tomorrow. So, in conclusion, I would like to summarize what I said about Goetheanism and the present time in something similar to a saying that ties in with what I just mentioned. It is indeed true that the present time, with all that is chaotic in it, could not be as it is if the views of people like Ostwald and similar ones did not haunt it.

If the present world were not so Ostwald-like, how could it see all the external effects of nature so wrongly? If there were not so much of Ostwald's power in present-day people, how could they achieve so much in all kinds of materialistic-physical and similar things, which now truly do not work to a high degree for the true progress of science, but rather against it.

Roman Boos: How can the principle of establishing legal norms through codification develop in the future? How can the legal effect be exercised from the parliamentary centers without the codification principle being paralyzed or dying, as is the case today?

Rudolf Steiner: The vitalization of the legal life, of which Dr. Boos spoke, will, it seems to me, be brought about in a very natural way in the threefold social organism. How should we think of this formation of the threefold social organism in concrete terms? Truly in a similar way - it is not intended to express a mere analogy - truly in a similar way as one has to think of the organic threefoldness in the natural human organism.

The view, which Dr. Boos also criticized today, that the heart is a kind of pump that drives blood to all possible parts of the organism, this view must be overcome for physiology. It must be recognized that the activity of the heart is the result of the balanced interaction of the other two activities of the human organism: metabolic activity and nerve-sense activity. If a physiologist who is grounded in reality now wants to describe this human organism and its functioning, then in general it is only necessary to describe the metabolic activity on the one hand and the nerve-sense activity on the other in a truly objective way, for it is through their polar interaction and interpenetration that the balancing rhythmic activity arises; this is already formally present. This is something that must be taken into account if we want to imagine life in the threefolded social organism. This life in the threefolded social organism can only be truly imagined if one still has a sense of the practice of life.

When I had published a few things and spoken about threefolding in a variety of ways, I was met with the objection that it is indeed difficult to imagine how the law can acquire content when it is to be separated in life from the spiritual part of the social organism on the one hand and the economic part on the other. Especially people like Stammler, for example, who has been mentioned often today, they understand the law in such a way that they only recognize a kind of formalism on the one hand. On the other hand, they believe that this [formal system] acquires its material content from the economic needs of the social organism. On the basis of such views, I was told that law cannot be separated from economic life for the simple reason that the forces of economic life must produce the legal statutes by themselves. When one includes something in one's concepts, one constantly thinks of something inanimate, of something that just amounts to making statements, for example, from economic forces, which are then codified and can be used as a guide. One mainly thinks of the fact that such codified statements exist and that one can look them up.

In the natural, living threefold organism, we are dealing, I might say, with two polar opposites: on the one hand, with spiritual life and, on the other, with economic life. Spiritual life, which arises when people are born and develop into existence through their own actions, represents a reality through its own content. The fruitful side of intellectual life will develop if no restrictions are imposed by any standards that limit what one can do. The fruitful side will develop quite naturally simply because it is in the interest of people that those who can do more and have greater abilities can also achieve more. It will be a matter of course that, let us say, a person is taken on as a teacher for a number of children, and those who are looking for a teacher can be sure that he can achieve the desired results in his sphere. If intellectual life is truly free, the whole structure of intellectual life arises out of the nature of the matter itself; the people who are part of it work in this intellectual life. On the other hand, we have the economic part of the threefold social organism. Here the structure of economic life arises out of the needs of consumption and the possibilities of production, out of the various interrelations, out of the relationships that arise. Of course, I can only briefly hint at this in this answer to the question. But the various relationships that can play between people and people or between groups of people and individuals or between different groups of people also play a role. All of this will move economic life. And in these two areas, what is called “law” is actually out of the question, insofar as these two areas take care of their own affairs. If we think in real terms – of course people today do not think in real terms but in theoretical terms, proceeding from what already exists, and so they confuse the legal ideas that the spiritual realm already has with the legal ideas of the economic realm – if we think in real, practical terms, then in the free spiritual life we do not consider legal impulses at all, but we consider impulses of trust, impulses of ability. It is simply absurd to speak in the free spiritual life of the fact that someone who is able has a right to work. There can be no question of speaking of such a right, but one must speak of the fact that one needs him, that he should work. The one who can teach children will naturally be taught, and there will be no question of whether or not there is an entitlement; it is not somehow a question of right as such. It is the same in economic life. Written or oral contracts will play a part, and confidence in the observance of contracts will have to play a part. If economic life is left to its own devices, the fact that contracts are being observed will be seen in the simple fact that economic life cannot function if contracts are not observed.

I am well aware that when such practical matters are discussed today, they are considered by some to be highly impractical because they bring in highly impractical matters from all sides and then believe that what they have brought in and what is supposed to have an effect is practical, whereas what has been described here is impractical. But now we must bear in mind that in these two spheres, in these organs, in the economic sphere and in the spiritual sphere of the threefolded social organism, these things live side by side. If we now honestly consider how this coexistence can be organized democratically, with people living side by side in the two areas - in the economic structure and in the spiritual structure - then the necessity arises for the relationships to be defined from person to person. Here the living necessity simply arises that the one who, let us say, stands at some post of spiritual life, has to establish his relationship to many other personalities and so on. These living relationships must arise between all mature people, and the relationships between mature people and non-mature people arise precisely from the relationship of trust in the field of spiritual life. But all the relationships that arise from the living forces on the one hand of economic life and on the other of spiritual life, all these relationships require that, to a certain extent, people who have come of age begin to define their relationships in their spheres of life among themselves. And this gives rise to a living interaction, which will, however, have the peculiarity that these determinations - because life is alive and cannot be constrained by norms - must be flexible.

An absolutely codified law would appear to be something that contradicts development. If you had a rigidly codified law, it would be basically the same as having a seven-year-old child whose organic life forces you would now determine and, when the child has reached the age of forty, would demand that it still live by them. The same applies to the social organism, which is indeed a living organism and will not be the same in 1940 as it was in 1920. For example, in the case of land, it is not a matter of laying down such codified law, but rather it is a living interrelationship between the soil and the personalities who stand in the other two characterized areas - the spiritual and the economic - and work in such a way that everything can be kept in flux, in order to be able to also change and metamorphose the true democratic soil on which all people live their present relationships. This is what needs to be said with regard to the establishment of public legal relationships. Criminal relationships arise only as a secondary matter when individual personalities act in an anti-social way against what has been established as the right relationship between people who have come of age. However, when considering criminal law in the context of the threefold social organism, it becomes clear that it is necessary to take a closer look at the justification of punishment in a more practical and realistic way. I must say that the much-vaunted legal science has not even managed to develop a clear legal concept in this area. There is a now rather old work, “Das Recht in der Strafe” (The Right to Punish) by Ludwig Laistner. In it, the introduction presents a history of all theories about the right to punish: deterrence impulses, educational impulses, and all the rest. Laistner shows, above all, that these theories are actually quite fragile, and then he comes to his own theory, which consists in the fact that one can only derive a right to punish from the fact that the criminal has entered the sphere of the other person through his own free will. Let us assume, then, that one person has created some circle of life for himself, and that is also hypothetical; the other person enters this circle of life by entering his house or his thoughts, for example, and robbing him. Now Ludwig Laistner says: “He has entered my sphere of life, and that is why I have power over him; just as I have power over my money or my own thoughts, so I now also have power over the criminal because he has entered my sphere. This power over him is conceded to me by the criminal himself by entering my sphere. I can now realize this power by punishing him. The punishment is only the equivalent for him entering my circle. That is the only thing that can be found in legal thinking about the justification of punishing a criminal. Whether this happens directly or in a figurative sense, by having it carried out by the state, are secondary questions. But why are these things actually unclear? Why is there something that constantly prevents us from having really clear-cut concepts? Because these concepts are taken out of social conditions that are already full of ambiguities. It presupposes that there is an organism present and that through the organism there is living movement and thus circulation – just as the heart presupposes that other organs are present in order for it to function. The legal institution is, in a sense, the heart of the social organism and presupposes that other things will unfold; it presupposes that other forces are already present. And if there is any lack of clarity in these other circumstances, then it is also quite natural that there can be no clearly defined legal system. But a clearly defined legal system will come about precisely because the other forces that are inherent to the other members of the social organism are allowed to develop in this three-part social organism. Only in this way can the foundations be laid for the development of a true legal system.

Above all, we have not even clearly raised the question today: What is the actual content of the legal system? Yes, you see, in a certain sense, a legal science must be very similar to mathematics, to a living mathematics. But what would we do with all our mathematics if we could not realize it in life? We must be able to apply it. If mathematics were not a living thing and we could not apply it in reality, then all our mathematics would be no science at all. Mathematics as such is, first of all, a formal science. In a certain sense, a properly elaborated jurisprudence would also be a formal science first of all. But this formal science must be such that the object of its application is encountered in reality. And this object of its application in reality is the relationships of people who have come of age and live side by side, who not only seek a balance between their spheres of life here, but are also still within the spiritual and economic links of the social organism.

Thus, only this threefold structure of the social organism will really make it possible for public thought to be formed, and a right that is not publicly thought is not a naturally established right. This would make it possible for such legal concepts to be formed publicly, which would then be flexible, as has rightly been demanded today. Therefore, I believe that it was a good thing that Dr. Boos called for the reform of legal life precisely from the realization of the threefold social organism.