The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the lectures so far, I have spoken of the capacities for supersensory knowledge and I have named them Imagination and Inspiration. Today I would like to say something about acquiring these capacities. At the moment I can only mention a few details. In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, you will find this presented in greater depth. Today, however, I would point out what is important in the context I have chosen for the present lecture. I have indicated that what I call Imagination with regard to knowledge of the world is attained through a development modeled on the memory process, only on another level. The importance of the memory process is that it retains in picture form what the human being encounters in outer experience.

Our first task will be to understand certain characteristics of the ordinary memory process, and then we must distill out what can be called pure memory in the true sense, also in ordinary life. One of the peculiarities of memory is that it tends to alter to a certain degree what has been experienced. Perhaps it is unnecessary to go into detail here, since most of you will be quite familiar with the fact that at times you can despair when you are relating something, and you hear from your own telling what has become of your experience by its passing through your memory. Even in ordinary life a certain self-education is necessary if we wish to come closer to pure memory, to the capacity to have these pictures ready at hand so that they faithfully render our experience. We can distinguish what happens with memory. On the one hand there is an activity of fantasy, quite justified, that goes on in an artistic direction. On the other hand there is a falsification of our experience. It should suffice for the moment to point out the difference between the fantasy tendency and the falsifying tendency, and that we must be able to experience this to maintain a healthy soul life. Certainly we must be aware of how memory is transformed by our fantasy, and how, when it is not subjected to such arbitrary action, when it is allowed to proceed according to a kind of natural similarity in the soul, it becomes increasingly faithful and true. In any case, both from the good tendency to artistic fantasy, as well as from the forces active in falsifying the memories—when we study it psychologically, we can recognize what is alive in the memory forces.

And out of these forces, something can take form that is no longer just memory. For example, one can point to certain mystical teachings that are in fact essentially falsified memory images; and yet we can profit from studying 'such images that have taken the form of earnest mystical experience. What concerns us at this moment, however, is what I have already indicated, that we can attain a power of the soul which is alive in the memory which can be metamorphosed into something else. This must happen in such a way that the original power of memory is led in the direction of inner faithfulness and truth, and not toward falsification. As I have said, when we repeatedly evoke easily surveyable mental images, which we intentionally combine out of their separate elements and then view as a whole, just as easily as the mathematical images: when we call up such images, hold them in our consciousness and dwell upon them, not so that we are fascinated by them, but so that at each moment we continue to hold them through an inner act of will—then gradually we succeed in transforming the memory process into something different, something of which we were previously unaware. The details are contained in the book I named, and also in Occult Science, an Outline.

If we continue long enough with such exercises (how long depends on the individual) and if we are in a position to expend sufficient soul energy on them, then we come to a point where we simply begin to experience pictures. The form of these pictures in the life of the soul is like that of memories. Gradually we win the capacity to live in such imaginations of our own making, although in their content they are not of our making. The exercise of this capacity results in imaginations rising up in the soul, and if we maintain a “mathematical” attitude of soul, we can make sure at any time whether we are being fooled by a suggestion or auto-suggestion, or are really living in that attitude of soul voluntarily. We begin to have mental images with the characteristic form of memory pictures but with a greater degree of intensity. Let me emphasize: at first these imaginations have the character of memory pictures. Only through inspiration do they become permeated with a more intense experience. At first they have the character of memory pictures, but of such a kind that we know their meaning does not relate to any experiences we have lived through externally since our birth. They do, however, express something just as pictorially as memory pictures express pictorially our personal experiences. They refer to something objective, yet we know that this objective something is not contained in the sphere which is surveyed by our memory. We are conscious that these imaginations contain a strong inner reality, yet at the same time we are aware that we are dealing with just images—just pictures of the reality. It is a matter of being able to distinguish these pictures from those of memory, in order that these imaginations remain pure, so that no foreign elements slip into them.

I will describe the outer process, but of course in just a few lectures one cannot go into any great detail. We may form a mental picture of an outer experience and we can see how in a sense the outer experience passes over into our organism, and—expressed abstractly—it then leads a further existence there, and can be drawn forth again as a memory picture. We notice that there is a certain dependence between what lives in the memory and the physical condition of the human organism. The memory is really dependent on our human organism right into the physical condition. In a way we pass on what we have experienced to our organism. It is even possible to give a detailed account of the continuation of the various pictures of our experience in the human organism. But this would be an entire spiritual-scientific chapter in itself. For our memories to remain pure and true, no matter how much our organism may participate in what lives on in the memory process, this involvement may not add anything of real content. Once mental pictures of an experience have been formed, nothing further should flow into the content of the memories.

If we are clear about this fact of memory life, we are then in a position to ascertain what it means when pictures appear in our consciousness that have the familiar character of memory pictures, but a content which does not relate to anything in our personal experience. In the process of experiencing imagination we realize the necessity of continually increasing the power of our soul. For what is it that we must really do? Normally our organism takes over the mental pictures we have formed from life and provides memory. Thereby the mental pictures do not just sink down into an abyss, if I may so express it, but are caught and held by our organism so that they can be reflected back again at any necessary moment. With imaginative pictures, this is just what should not be the case; we must be in a position to hold them through inner soul forces alone. Therefore it is necessary for us to acquire something that will make us stronger than we are ordinarily in receiving and retaining mental images. There are of course many ways to do this; I have described them in the books already named. I wish to mention just one of them. From what I now tell you, you will be able to see the relation between various demands of life which spring from anthroposophical spiritual science and their connection with the foundation of anthroposophical research.

Whoever uses his intellect to spin all kinds of theories about what he confronts as phenomena in the world (which of course can be extraordinarily interesting at times) will hardly find the power for imaginative activity. In this respect, certain developments in the intellectual life of the present day seem specifically suited to suppress the imaginative force. If we go further than simply taking the outer phenomena of the mineral-physical realm and connecting them with one another through the power of our intellect; if we begin to search for things that are supposed to be concealed behind the visible phenomena, with which we can make mental constructions, we will actually destroy our imaginative capacity.

Perhaps I may make a comparison. No doubt you have had some dealings with what could be called phenomenalism in the sense of a Goethean world view. In arranging experiments and observations, Goethe used the intellect differently from the way it is used in recent phases of modern thought. Goethe used the intellect as we use it in reading. When we read, we form a whole out of the individual letters. For instance, when we have a row of letters and succeed in inwardly grasping the whole, then we have solved a certain riddle posed by this row of individual letters. We would not think of saying: Here is a b, an r, an e, an a and a d—I will look at the b. As such, this isolated b tells me nothing in particular, so I have to penetrate further for what really lies behind the b. Then one could say: Behind this b there is concealed some mysterious “beyond,” a “beyond” that makes an impression on me and explains the b to me. Of course, I do not do this; I simply take a look at the succession of letters in front of me and out of them form a whole: I read bread. Goethe proceeds in the same way in regard to the individual phenomena of the outer world. For instance, he does not take some light phenomenon and begins to philosophize about it, wondering what states of vibration lie behind this phenomenon in some sort of “beyond.” He does not use his intellect to speculate what might be hiding behind the phenomenon; rather, he uses his intellect as we do when we “think” the letters together into a word. Similarly he uses the intellect solely as a medium in which phenomena are grouped—grouped in such a way that in their relation to one another they let themselves be “read.” So we can see that regarding the external physical-mineral phenomenological world, Goethe employs the intellect as what I would call a cosmic reading tool.

He never speaks of a Kantian “thing in itself” that must be sought behind the phenomena, something Kant supposed existed there. And so Goethe comes to a true understanding of phenomena—of what might be called the “letters” in the mineral-physical world. He starts with the archetypal or “Ur”-phenomenon, and then proceeds to more complex phenomena which he seeks either in observation or in experiments which he contrives. He "reads" what is spread out in space and time, not looking behind the phenomena, but observing them in such a way that they cast light on one another, expressing themselves as a whole. His other use of the intellect is to arrange experimental situations that can be “read”—to arrange experimental situations and then see what is expressed by them. When we adopt such a way of viewing phenomena and make it more and more our own, proceeding even further than Goethe, we acquire a certain feeling of kinship with the phenomena. We experience a belonging-together with the phenomena. We enter into the phenomena with intensity, in contrast to the way the intellect is used to pierce through the phenomena and seek for all kinds of things behind them—things which fundamentally are only spun-out theories. Naturally, what I have just said is aimed only at this theoretical activity.

We need to educate ourselves in phenomenology, to reach a “growing together with” the phenomena of the world around us. Next in importance is to acquire the ability to recall a fully detailed picture of the phenomena. In our present culture, most people's memories consist of verbal images. There comes a moment when we should not be dependent on verbal images: these only fill the memory so that the last memory connection is pushed up out of the subconscious into consciousness. We should progress toward a remembering that is really pictorial. We can remember, for instance, that as young rascals we were up to some prank or other—we can have a vivid picture of ourselves giving another fellow punches, taking him by the ear, cuffing him, and so on. When these pictures arise not just as faded memories, but in sharp outline, then we have strengthened the power we need to hold the imaginations firmly in our consciousness. We are related to these pictures in inner freedom just as we are to our ordinary memories. With this strengthened remembering, we grow increasingly interested in the outer world, and as a result the ultimate "living together with" all the various details of the outer world penetrates into our consciousness. Our memories take on the quality of being really objective, as any outer experience is, and we have the feeling that we could affectionately stroke them. Or one could say: These memory pictures become so lively that they could even make us angry. Please bear with me as I describe these things to you! It is the only thing I can do with our present language.

Then comes the next step: we must practice again and again eliminating these imaginations so that we can dive down again and again into an empty consciousness. If we bring such pictures into our consciousness at will and then eliminate them again in a kind of inner rhythm—meditating, concentrating, creating images, and then freeing ourselves of them—this will quicken powerfully the feeling of inner freedom in us. In this way we develop a great inner mobility of soul—exactly the opposite of the condition prevailing in psychopaths of various kinds. It really: is the exact opposite, and those who parallel what I have just described here with any kind of psychopathic state show that they simply have no idea of what I am talking about.

When we finally succeed in strengthening our forgetting—the activity which normally is a kind of involuntary activity—when now we control this activity with our will, we notice that what we knew before as an image of reality, as imagination, fills with content. This content shows us that what appears there in pictorial form is indeed reality, spiritual reality. At this point we have come to the edge of an abyss where, in a certain sense, spiritual reality shines across to us from the other side of existence. This spiritual reality is present in all physical sense reality. It is essential to develop a proper sense for the external world in order to have a correct relationship to these imaginations. Whoever wishes just to speculate about phenomena, to pierce them through, as it were, hoping to see what is behind them as some kind of ultimate reality—whoever does this, weakens his power to retain and deal with imaginations.

When we have attained a life of inspiration—that is, experiencing the reality of the spiritual world just as ordinarily we experience the physical world through our external senses—then we can say: now I finally understand what the process of remembering means. Remembering means (I will make a kind of comparison) that the mental images we have gained from our experiences sink down into our organism and act there as a mirror. The pictures we form in our minds are retained by the organism, in contrast to a mirror which just has to reflect, give back again what is before it. Thus we have the possibility of transforming a strictly reflective process into a voluntary process—in other words, what we have entrusted to memory can be reflected back from the entire organism and particularly from the nervous system. Through this process, what has been taken up by the organism in the form of mental pictures is held in such a way that we too cannot see “behind the mirror.” Looking inward upon our memories, we must admit that having the faculty of memory prevents us from having an inner view of ourself. We cannot get into our interior any more than we can get behind the reflective surface of a mirror.

Of course what I am telling you is expressed by way of comparisons, but these comparisons do portray the fact of the matter. We realize this when inspiration reveals these imaginations to us as pictures of a spiritual reality. At this moment the mirror falls away with regard to the imaginations. When this happens we have the possibility of true insight into ourselves, and our inner being appears to us for the first time in what is actually its spiritual aspect. But what do we really learn here?

By reading such mystics as Saint Theresa or Mechtild of Magdeburg, beautiful images are evoked, and from a certain point of view this is justified. One can enter into a truly devotional mood before these images. For someone who begins to understand what I have just described to you, precisely this kind of mystical visions cease to be what they very often are for the nebulous types of mystic: When someone comes to real inner vision, not in an abnormal way (as is the case with such mystics) but by the development of his cognitive faculty as I have described it, then he learns not only to describe a momentary aspect as Mechtild of Magdeburg, Saint Theresa and others do, but he learns to recognize what the real interior of the human organization is. If one wants to have real knowledge and not mystical intoxication, one must strive toward the truth and put it in place of their mist-shrouded images. (Of course, this may seem prosaic to the nebulous mystic.) When this is accomplished, the mirror drops away and one gains a knowledge, an inner vision of the lungs, diaphragm, liver, and stomach. One learns to experience the human organization inwardly. It is clear that Mechtild of Magdeburg and Saint Theresa also viewed the interior, but in their case this happened through certain abnormal conditions and their vision of the human interior was shrouded in all manner of mists. What they describe is the fog which the true spiritual investigator penetrates.

To a person who is incapable of accepting such things, it would naturally be a shock if, let's say hypothetically, a lofty chapter out of Mechtild were read and the spiritual researcher then told him: Yes, that is really what one sees when one comes to an inner vision of the liver or the kidneys. It is really so. For anyone who would rather it were otherwise, I can only say: That is the way it happens to be. On the other hand, for someone who has gained insight into the whole matter, this is for him the beginning of a true relation to the secrets of world existence. For now he learns the origin of what constitutes our human organization and at what depths they are to be recognized. He clearly recognizes how little we know of the human liver, the human kidneys, not to speak of other organs, when we merely cut open a corpse—or for that matter, when we cut open the living human organism in an operation—and get just the one-sided view of our organism.

There is the possibility not just to understand the human organism from the external, material side, but to see and understand it from the inside. We then have spiritual entities in our consciousness, and such entities show us that a human being is not so isolated as we might think—not just shut up inside his skin. On the contrary! Just as the oxygen I have in me now was first outside and is now working within me, in the same way—though extended over a long period of time—what is now working in me as my inner organization (liver, kidneys, and so on) is formed out of the cosmos. It is connected with the cosmos. I must look toward the cosmos and how it is constituted if I want to understand what is living in the liver, kidneys, stomach, and so on; just as I must look toward the cosmos and the make-up of the air if I want to understand what the substance is that is now working in my lungs, that continues to work on in the blood stream. You see, in true spiritual research we are not limited to separate pictures of separate organs but we come to know the connections between the human organism and the whole cosmos.

Not to be overlooked is the simple symbolic picture which we have already mentioned of the senses. We can in a way visualize our senses as “gulfs,” through which the outer world and its happenings flow into us. At the same time our senses continue inward as I have described them. Little by little we can see this activity from an inner point of view—the forming and molding activity that has worked on our nervous system since our birth. I have described the subjective experience of this activity as a life review, a life panorama, and we discover in the configuration of the nervous system an external pictorial form of what is really soul-spiritual. It can also be said that first we experience imaginations and then we see how these imaginations work in the formation of nerve substance. Of course this should not be taken in too broad a sense, since, as we know, nerve substance is also worked on before birth. I shall come back to this tomorrow. But essentially what I have said holds true. We can say: here is where the activity continues toward the inside; you can see exactly how it goes farther. It is the same activity, in a certain sense, that "engraves" itself into the nervous system. For the parts of the nervous system that are formed completely, this "engraving" activity can be seen streaming through the nerve paths. In childhood, however, for the parts that are still in the-process of being formed, this “engraving” acts as a real modeling force, a structuring proceeding out of imaginations. This leaves the rest of the human organism, about which we will speak shortly—what underlies the muscles, bones, and so on, also the physical basis of the nervous system—in fact, all of the organic tissue. At this point I should relate to you a certain experience I had; it will make this all a bit clearer.

I spoke once before the Theosophical Society about a subject I called “anthroposophy.” I simply set forth at that time as much of this anthroposophy as had revealed itself to my spiritual research. There was a request for these lectures to be printed and I set about doing this. In the process of writing them down, they turned into something different. Not that anything that had first been said was changed, but it became necessary to add to what was said by way of further explanation. It was also necessary to state the facts more precisely. This task would require a whole year. Now came another opportunity. There was again a general meeting of the Society and there was a request that the lectures should be ready for sale. So they had to get finished. I sent the first signature (16 pages) of the book Anthroposophy to the printer. The printing was rapidly done and I thought I would be able to continue writing. I did continue writing but more and more it became necessary to explain things more accurately. So a whole number of pages were printed. Then it happened that one signature was only filled up to page thirteen or fourteen and I had to continue writing to fill up all sixteen pages. In the meantime I became aware that in order to get this matter done the way I wanted to would require a more accurate, detailed development of certain mental processes, a very specific working out of imaginative, of inspirational cognition and then to apply these modes of cognition to these anthroposophical issues. And so I had to take a negative step, I dropped the whole idea of writing on Anthroposophy. It is still lying there today as it lay then—many pages.¹ For my intention was to make further investigations. Thus I became thoroughly acquainted with what I want to describe to you now. I can only describe it schematically at this time, but it is a sum total of many inner experiences that are really a cognitive method of investigating the human being.

It became increasingly clear to me that before one could finish the book called “Anthroposophy,” in the form intended at that time, one must have certain experiences of inner vision. One must first be able to take what one perceives as soul-spiritual activity working in the nervous system and carry it further inward, until one comes to the point where one sees the entire soul-spiritual activity—which one grasps in imagination and inspiration—crossing itself. This crossing point is really a line, in a vertical direction if looked at schematically. For certain phenomena the point lies farther up, for others farther down. In these lectures I can't describe this in detail, I just wanted to make a kind of cross section through the whole of it. Now because of this crossing, one is no longer free in exercising this activity. In fact, one was not altogether free before, as I have shown; now one is even less free. The whole situation undergoes a change. One is now being held strongly in an imaginative-inspired state. Expressed concretely, if one comes to an imagination of the eye by taking hold of visual sense-perception and the continuation into mental processes with imaginative-inspired cognition, then this activity proceeds inwardly and one comes to a kind of crossing, and with the activity first encompassing the eye another organ is encompassed, and that is the kidney.

The same applies to the other organs. In each case, when one carries one's imaginative-inspired activity into the body, one finds various relatively complete organs—complete at least in their basic form from birth—and one comes to a real inner view of the human organism. This kind of research is very demanding; and as I was not obliged at that moment to finish the book, and had to give another lecture cycle, which also demanded research efforts, you can imagine that it was not easy to continue to work out the method which I had developed at that time—of course, it was quite a few years ago that this occurred.

I mention this only to show you some of the difficulties—how one is continually held back by various demands. To continue in this, one must hold one's inner forces firmly together if one is to accomplish it. One must, in fact, repeatedly resolve to intensify one's thinking ability, the force of one's inner soul work—to strengthen it through love of external nature. Otherwise one simply cannot proceed. One goes consciously into oneself, but again and again one is thrown back, and instead of what I would call an inner view, one gets something not right. One must overcome the inward counterblow that develops.

I wanted to tell you all this so that you could see that the spiritual investigator has moments when he must wrestle with certain problems of spiritual research. Unfortunately, in the years that followed the event I have just described to you, my time was so filled with everything imaginable, particularly in recent years, that the needful—indeed, indispensable—activity for finishing my Anthroposophy could not take place.

You see, something that is inwardly understood, something we spoke of above rather abstractly, is in fact what is spun into an enveloping form of an organ, something quite concrete. If you picture this to yourselves, you will realize that such an insight into the human being can also build a bridge to practical activities. These activities must of course be founded on a vision of the human being and his relation to the world. I have already indicated in another connection how through developing imagination we gain knowledge not only of the sensory realm and its continuation into the nervous system, but also of the plant world. When we advance to inspiration, we become acquainted with the whole realm of forces that are at work in the animal world. At the same time we become aware of other things of which the animal world is only the outer expression. We now recognize the nature of the respiratory system, we can understand the external forms of the respiratory system through this relationship. The external form of the respiratory and circulatory system is not directly similar in its outer shape to its inner counterpart, as is the case with the outer form of the nervous system and the inner mental life. I showed this yesterday—how in the case of the nervous system two people, representing very different points of view, were able to draw similar pictures. In a parallel manner we become acquainted with the outer world and its kingdoms and the inner aspect of the human being.

Tomorrow I will consider what this inwardly experienced knowledge adds to our insight into the nature of the human being and his relation to his environment. Naturally, a great deal is revealed to us about specific relationships between the human being and his environment. It is possible to perceive the nature of a specific human organ and its connection to what exists in the outer natural realm. Thereby we discover in a rational way the transition from a spiritualized physiology to a true therapy. What once was won through instinctive inner vision is now possible to be renewed. I have mentioned yoga, and I could name even older systems which made it possible to perceive in an instinctive, childlike way the connection between the human being and the world around him. Many of today's therapeutic measures come from this older time—perhaps in somewhat different form, but they are still among the most fruitful today. Only on this spiritual path can therapy be developed that is suited to meet the real needs of today. Through insight into the connection of the human organs with the cosmos, a medicine will be developed based an inner perceptions, not just external experiment.

I set this before you just as an example of how spiritual science must fructify the various specialized branches of science. That this is needed is obvious when one looks at external research efforts, which have been very active and are magnificent in their own way—but which abound with questions. Take, for example, outer physiology or outer pathology: questions are everywhere. Whoever studies these things today and is fully awake will find the questions there—questions that beg for answers. In the last analysis, spiritual science recognizes there are great questions in outer life, and that they require answers. It does not overlook what is great and triumphant in the other sciences. At the same time, it wishes to study what questions result from this; it wishes to find a way to solutions to these questions in just as exact a manner as can be taught in the other sciences. In the end, the questions can be found (even for sense-bound empirical investigation) only through spiritual investigation. We will speak more about this tomorrow.

• 1. Published in German as Anthroposophie—Ein Fragment, Bibl. Nr. 45; English translation in preparation by Mercury Press.

Unfortunately our time together is so short that I have only been able to deal with our theme in a broad way, just intimating its development. The intention was to present a few ideas that lie, one might say, at the entrance of an anthroposophical spiritual science. From what has been presented, you will surely feel that everything we have touched upon needs further elaboration.

I have spoken of various ways of knowing that through inner soul work can follow as further steps from our everyday kind of knowing and from ordinary scientific cognition. I have already mentioned the first two of these further steps and called them imaginative cognition and inspired cognition. Yesterday I showed how, when imaginative and inspired cognition work together, and when we take account of a certain experience that I described yesterday as an inner crossing in the consciousness, a knowledge of the human being can arise in conjunction with a knowledge of the surrounding world. When this experience that we have in inspired-imaginative cognition is developed further, through certain exercises found in my books, something arises which has a similar name in ordinary life—that is, intuition. In ordinary life intuition refers to a kind of knowing that is not sharply delineated, to something more in the realm of feeling. This dimly experienced knowledge is not what the spiritual researcher means when he speaks of intuition and yet there are good reasons for thinking of the undeveloped, dim experiences of ordinary intuition as a kind of early stage of real intuition. Real intuition is a kind of knowing, a condition of the soul that is just as suffused with clarity of consciousness as is mathematical thinking. This intuition is reached through a continuation of what I have called exercises for the attainment of forgetting. These exercises must be continued in such a way that one really forgets oneself. When these exercises have been carried on in a precise and systematic way, then arises what the spiritual investigator calls intuition in the higher sense. This is the natural form of cognition into which inspired imaginations flow.

Before I go on with my discussion, I would like to stress one thing, to avoid possible misunderstanding. I can easily imagine that someone might raise a certain objection to what I described at the end of yesterday's lecture. First let me assure you that the conscientious spiritual investigator is the first to make various objections for himself. This is inherent in the process of spiritual research. With every step one must be aware from what possible angle objections may come, and how they can be met. To be specific, someone could raise an objection about what I said yesterday concerning the experiencing of a “crossing” that arises in the process of looking within, embracing our own inner organization. It could be said: This is an illusion. The fact is that especially the spiritual investigator (as is meant here) is not allowed to be a dilettante in external science; he is sure to know a thing or two about the inner organization of the human being from conventional anatomy and physiology. One might suspect that the investigator yields to a sort of self-deception, taking what he knows of external science and incorporating this into his inner vision. The spiritual researcher fully reckons with the possibility of self-deception along his path. One can settle the objections that have been raised by noting that what is perceived in the human organism during this inner viewing is totally different from anything one could possibly get from external anatomy or physiology. This perception of the inner organization could really be called a perception of the spiritual aspect of the human interior. The only help ordinary anatomy and physiology can render is the establishment of something like a mathematical reference point—a reference point for what has been spiritually perceived in the soul by inner vision, a definite content of perception at this level of cognition. For example, when we spiritually perceive the inner nature of what corresponds to the lung, it will be easier to connect this with the lung if we are already familiar with it through outer anatomy and physiology than if we knew nothing of it.

These two aspects—an inner vision of the lung, and what we know in an outer way through anatomy and physiology—are two completely different contents that must be reconciled later. At this level of cognition there is only a repetition of the kind of relationship that we experience between what is inwardly grasped in mathematical thinking and what is directly visible in the physical-mineral realm. The difference that exists between what we grasp inwardly in mathematical thought and what we find given in outer observation is very similar to the difference between what we grasp in inspired-imaginative activity and what we can learn through external research. Inner clarity of consciousness throughout is, of course, a basic requirement.

When we rise from inspired imagination to intuition, we encounter a situation similar to the one we described at the beginning of these lectures. We said: The outer world and its phenomena enter into us through our senses as through “gulfs.” Mathematical lines and forms which we construct influence our perception of the outer forms of the world. So with respect to our bodily nature there is a jutting in, a really essential penetration of the outer world into our spatial-bodily condition. We have a similar experience when all that I have described comes into us through intuition. Through this experience we become aware of one thing particularly: that what has been experienced within the human being is inexplicable of itself—or perhaps better said, it is something essentially unfinished. When we come to know ourselves through intuition, as long as we remain within the experience of self-knowledge we are basically dissatisfied. In contrast to this, with inspired imagination, when we apply it to knowledge of the self we feel a certain satisfaction. We learn what the human rhythmic system really is. This is a difficult process of knowledge. It is a process that can really never be completed, because it leads into endless further developments. In this type of knowledge you are learning to know yourself in connection with the world, as I showed yesterday. One can arrive at concrete insights concerning the connection of the healthy organism with its cosmic environment also the connection of the ailing organism with the cosmic environment. In this way the very interior of the human being can be penetrated.

At this point I would like to speak of something I described in the previous lecture course.¹ We are able to perceive through our inspired imagination how the human organism must relate itself to receiving something like a sense organ. It is, in fact, predisposed toward the sense organs. It opens itself outward so as to send a certain force system—if I may use such an expression—toward each separate sense. Beyond the interaction of the force system with our regular senses, one can discover abnormal cases of such tendencies arising in other places. A normal organization for the development of a sense can appear in a wrong place. Such a force system can be inserted into some organ not meant to be a sense organ, whose normal function is something else. The appearance of a metamorphosed force system in a place not right for it causes abnormalities in the human organism. A consequence of the particular abnormality just mentioned is the formation of a tumor where the displaced force system occurs. What we find here in the human organism is a more complex version of what Goethe in his teachings on metamorphosis always looked for, under simpler circumstances. We come to realize that a system of forces correctly associated with growth, when directed differently and in a metamorphosed form, can become the cause of illness. When inspired-imaginative cognition is directed to the whole matter of how man's sensory organization is related to the kingdoms of nature—to his whole environment—one discovers important relationships. These relationships lead us to remedies in our environment that can be used against pathological forms of forces.

Now you may see the vistas that are opened up by what I have described. This is not just fantasizing into the blue—nor is it nebulous mysticism to evoke satisfaction in the soul. Either would be completely foreign to what is meant here by anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science. This spiritual science wishes to penetrate into the real nature of the world in a serious and exact manner. At the same time, it must be admitted that much of what can be achieved in this way is still in its infancy today. And yet a fair amount of what I presented last spring in the course for physicians and medical students (which I plan to continue shortly) on pathology and therapy, made—I believe—a favorable impression on the listeners. Its view of the essential being of nature and the world, of the inner relationships, gave rise to the impression that here is something that can fertilize and complement outer observation and experiment. The contemporary world should see that here is at least an attempt to find out what it is that is creating the questions of external science, when there is no sign of any possibility in the scientific field of finding satisfactory answers to the questions.

As we advance along this path of knowledge (keeping always to what is spiritually real and concrete and avoiding abstraction), we have an experience on the other side of the human organization, of something similar to the "jutting" of the outer world into our sensory life. I said earlier that when we come to self-knowledge through intuition, it proves inevitably to be unfinished. We understand this now, for we see that here on the other side we have the reverse relationship to that of the sense organs. The senses are “gulfs” into which the outer world flows. On the other hand, we discover that the entire human being, becoming a sense organ in intuition, now reaches into the spiritual world. On the one hand, the outer world reaches into the human being; on the other, the human being reaches into the spiritual “outer world.” As I mentioned earlier in connection with the eye organization, the human being has a certain active relation to the depth dimension; with intuition he has (as long as he remains with intuition in the realm of self-knowledge) a certain relation to the vertical dimension. Thus something very similar to sense perception takes place, except that it is reversed.

We find that through intuition the human being places himself with his entire being in the spiritual world. Just as through the senses the external sense world projects inward, through intuition one consciously places oneself in the spiritual world. In this conscious projection into the spiritual world through intuition, the human being has a similar feeling to the feeling he has toward the outer world through perception. The feeling of being in the spiritual world, a kind of dim feeling of standing within the spiritual world, in ordinary life we call intuition. But this intuition is suffused with bright clarity when the stage of cognition is striven for which I have described. Thus you can realize that perception is just one side of our human relation to the outer world. In perception we have something indefinite, something that first must be inwardly worked upon. As perception is worked upon by our intellect and we discover laws at work in this perception, there is at the same time something corresponding to this that initially has just as indefinite a relation to us as does perception. It must be penetrated by inner knowledge that has been achieved, in the same way that perceptions must be penetrated by mathematical thinking. In short, our ordinary experience must be penetrated by our inwardly achieved knowledge.

In ordinary experience we call this kind of intuition belief or faith. Just as the human being faces the outer sense world and has the experience of perception, so, participating in a dim way in the spiritual world, he has the experience of belief. And just as perception can be illumined by the intellect or reason, so the content of this indefinite dim experience of belief can be illumined by our steadily increasing knowledge. This dim experience of faith becomes one of scientific knowledge just as perception attains scientific value through the addition of the intellect. You see how the things relate. What I am describing to you is truly a progression through inner spiritual work to transform the ordinary experience of faith into an experience of clear knowledge. When we rise into these regions, transforming faith into an experience of knowledge, we find this similar to the process of subjecting our perceptions to what has been worked out mathematically or logically. What is inherent here is not some artificial construction, it is a description of something a human being can experience—just as, for instance, one experiences what develops from early childhood when the intellect is not yet useable to a later time when the intellect and reason are in full use.

There are other experiences bound up with these—for example, the following: The moment we advance to inspired cognition, we have already had what I have described as the life panorama, which extends back to early childhood and, at times, even to birth. With this we have gained an inner kind of perception. It is only with the attainment of inspired cognition, however, that a kind of enhanced faculty of forgetting comes about which I must characterize as a complete extinguishing of the surroundings that up to this point were given through sense perception. In other words, a state of consciousness arises in which our own inner life, indeed our inner life in time up to birth, becomes the object of our consciousness. At this time one has the subjective feeling that one is inwardly empty, that one is in the outer world with one's consciousness, not within one's body. When we have succeeded in reaching this enhanced forgetting whereby the outer sense-perceptible world is really extinguished for a moment, then something appears through this experience being combined with what is attained intuitively. I must describe this in the following way.

We have already discussed imagination and we know it does in fact relate to reality, although at first it appears to have pictorial character. It relates to a reality, but at first we have only pictures in our consciousness. When we experience inspiration, we advance from the pictorial to the corresponding spiritual reality. When we reach the moment in which external sense perception is completely extinguished through inspiration, a new content appears for the first time. The content that appears corresponds to our existence before conception. We learn to look into our soul-spiritual being as it was before it took possession of a physical organism arising out of the stream of heredity. Thus this imagination fills itself with a real spiritual content that represents our pre-birth existence. Characterized in this way, this may still seem paradoxical to many people of our time. One can only indicate the exact point in the cognitive process where such a view of the human soul-spiritual self enters in, and where what we call the question of immortality takes on real meaning. At the same time we gain a more exact view of the other pole of the human organization. When we penetrate what we have at first only as intuitive belief and raise this to knowledge, the possibility arises to relate imaginations—although in another way than in the case just described—to the conditions after death. In short, we have a view of what one can call the eternal in man and I will only just mention the following. When intuition has developed further, to the point it is really capable of reaching, we develop our true “I” for the first time. And within the true “I” there appears to inner vision what in anthroposophical spiritual science is referred to as knowledge of repeated earth-lives. The knowledge that we were a soul-spiritual being before conception and that we will continue to be after death: this is really experienced in inspired imagination. The knowledge of repeated earth-lives is added to this only in intuition.

When we have reached this area, we first begin to discover the full significance of waking up and falling asleep, and the condition of sleep as such. Through a deepening of the cognition related to the pole of perception, we discover the experience of falling asleep, which otherwise remains unconscious. At the other pole of intuitive thought, we discover the experience of waking up. Between these two is the experience of sleep, which I would like just to characterize as follows: when the human being falls asleep in ordinary consciousness, he is in a condition in which his consciousness is completely dimmed. This empty consciousness in which the human being lives between falling asleep and awakening, is a state which he cannot know from his own subjective point of view. The inspired-imaginative condition is very similar. In this condition the will impulses are silenced just as in sleep the senses are silenced. The subjective human activity is silent in both sleep and inspired imagination. The major difference is this: in sleep the consciousness is empty. In the condition of inspired imagination one's consciousness is filled; one's inner experiences are independent of sense perception and will impulses; in a certain sense one is awake while one is asleep. One has therefore the possibility of studying the life of sleep.

I would like to return to something that I spoke of this morning in the history seminar. The historical problems we spoke of take on new meaning when seen in connection with the experiences we have just been speaking of. At one time or another you may have reflected upon such historians as Herodotus. He and others were really precursors of what we call history in the modern scientific sense. The way history is written today developed with the intellectual culture that finds special satisfaction in experiment. In other words, those who find special satisfaction in experiment also find satisfaction in the external aspect of history. This science of history proceeds empirically, and rightly so from its own point of view. It collects data, and from this data it pieces together a picture of the course of history. One can, however, object that this way of interpreting empirical data easily allows that history could have developed differently. As I put it this morning, one could hypothesize that Dante somehow died as a boy. We would then be faced with the possibility that what we experience as coming through Dante would be absent, at least it would be absent as manifested in the person of Dante. In the study of history one will meet with great difficulties in reaching true insight, unless one is satisfied with the ready-made scholarly harangues.

Let us take another example. Historians set out to study the Reformation, using the available facts of external history. (We cannot go into detail here; you can research this yourself if you are interested.) For instance, if the monk Luther had died young, I would really like to know what would have been recorded as derived purely from the external historical method! Certainly something quite different from what is recorded today. Quite serious difficulties arise when one wants truly to characterize historical knowledge. One may say if one focuses on the philosophy of history, one can follow the observable outer events from the point of view of some abstract element of necessity, or one may want to find an element of purpose shaping the events as Strindberg did. The fact that the other reforms would not have been there either if Luther had died as a boy, would not affect this theoretical finding of purpose or necessity, in whatever might have taken place instead of the Reformation. If Luther had died, the other reformers would not have been there either.

One must be very careful in coming to conclusions when one is working in the field of external historical observation. However, the course of human development reveals something quite different when it is observed from the level of knowledge that I have been describing to you. Let me give you a concrete example. One would see that there were certain forces at work in European civilization around the fourth century between the time of Constantine and Julian the Apostate. The outer aspect of this world would appear differently if records existed of a personality so impressive as, for instance, Dante. There really is a problem here, and I confess I am not finished with it yet but must pursue it a bit further. The problem is a most concrete one. I am not yet finished in that I cannot tell you whether important documents, important evidence concerning an important figure around the period of 340 or 350 A.D. somehow disappeared from the view of external history, or whether he died in his youth—or somehow perished in those turbulent, war-filled times. It is a fact, however, that one sees forces at work in this period that cannot be traced in external history today. These forces would only be accessible to external history through some stroke of luck, like the chance discovery of written documents in some monastery. It is beyond any doubt for the spiritual investigator, however, that these forces are active. The spiritual investigator can truly establish what otherwise would be seen as forces abstracted from outer circumstances.

Now suppose we would wish to look back on the life of Dante and acquaint ourselves with him. We would try to make him come to life in our soul, really to try to know him inwardly. We would also familiarize ourselves with the forces active in the time of Dante. This is an external approach to knowledge. Naturally, the knowledge that the spiritual scientist gains of the Dantean period will look somewhat different from what can be found in external documents—for example, in the Divine Comedy. One could of course object that the spiritual scientist might confuse what he has learned through external perception with what he has obtained through inner vision. When, however, inner vision operates in such a way that we know beyond any doubt that in a particular age—as in this one just named—the outer events do not correspond to the inner happenings, we know that spiritual powers are really at work. Under these circumstances it is possible to present history as I did recently for a small circle, by looking exclusively at the forces seen inwardly. We come to the point where we have inwardly observed these forces; they penetrate us, they live within us. It would really be a miracle if, for instance, one could just fantasize about the forces at work in Julian the Apostate at the time in question. Those times can only be truly explored spiritually.

The level of historical observation achieved here can be described as a direct viewing of the original spiritual forces that are active in the historical process. Thereby one receives a satisfactory explanation for precisely the parts of history where external facts are missing—because documents are missing, or men and women did not have a chance to live their lives out normally. In such cases what is viewed inwardly can help external history. Examples of the result of such inner knowledge, pointing to the forces behind historical events, are given in my little book, The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind. What is presented there must naturally be preceded by the inner vision of the missing aspects of external history, as I have mentioned. It is only at this point, assuming we intend to be inwardly responsible in our relation to knowledge, that we can feel justified in saying: It is possible simply on the foundation of sound human understanding to rise (as I have repeatedly described) to a level where such real forces are active.

But, you may object, no one could speak of the beings I described in The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind who has not yet advanced to such vision. This is of course true; to speak with this degree of emphasis, one must have a certain level of cognition. But one may take something else into consideration. If we are honest in approaching the facts of history and if we are sufficiently schooled in philosophy to be aware of the riddles and doubts the usual study of history presents, we can still have an inner experience of a certain kind. This experience is similar to the one that the astronomer had when on the basis of certain gravitational forces he predicted the as-yet-unseen planet of Neptune. The discovery of the spiritual laws and essential nature of history is really a very similar process in the spiritual domain to the calculations employed by LeVerrier to predict the existence of Neptune. LeVerrier did not somehow piece together a scientific result as is done in external history—with a positive or skeptical slant, simply avoiding connections: he followed the facts according to their truth. He said to himself: Something must be at work here. This is similar to what the astronomer before him said concerning Uranus. Uranus doesn't follow the course which it ought to according to the forces I already know, so there must be something exercising an influence on these known forces. The conscientious investigator also recognizes certain forces at work. He sees the intervention of these forces much as someone who on finding a limestone or silica shell-form in a rock formation looks for the active forces. From the way the silica fossil looks, he surely does not say: This silica form has somehow crystallized out of its mineral surroundings. Rather he says: At one time this form was filled out with something; it was made by some kind of animal and one can have a mental picture of this animal. If some being were to arrive who had lived at the time the animal was alive in that shell, and he described the animal, such an eyewitness could be likened to the spiritual investigator. The finder of the shell bearing the imprint of the animal is not necessarily the one who uses his sound human understanding to deduce from the outer configuration what must have been there to form the shell. What the living facts were is something only the spiritual investigator can say. The person who is willing to bring a sound sense of logic, a logical view of facts, and healthy human understanding, can follow and inwardly test what the spiritual researcher tells him about the forms in front of him.

It is not necessary to have a blind belief in the spiritual investigator. Naturally, the actual discovery of such things as are presented in The Spiritual Guidance of Mankind requires spiritual research. When the spiritual researcher has presented what he wishes to tell in terms of what he calls higher beings, he will also readily agree to be tested for this vision by those gathering outer facts. His attitude is this: I invite you to rap my knuckles if you discover anything whatever that contradicts the outer order of events predicted by my inner vision.

Something similar appeared in our circle, in connection with interpretations of the gospels which had been worked out in a purely spiritual manner. It has also occurred in such cases as the one given this morning. I am busy with a variety of literature, yet to this day the author was unknown to me of the work Dr. Stein cited this morning giving the date of Christ's death. I have never seen it. Naturally, this is not the sort of evidence that one can accept objectively—I mention this only parenthetically. Nevertheless, such things have occurred within our circle. Verifications have appeared that must be accepted objectively. Through a living involvement in spiritual-scientific work, many of our friends have a real personal conviction; it does not rest on blind faith, but precisely on their experience of the life that goes on in spiritual science. This explains why those who have been involved in the activities of spiritual science for many years can speak in a different tone from those for whom spiritual science is just a theory.

I believe we can show in the context of the evolution of humanity the connections between the state of science today and the state of knowledge today. Naturally, everything has earlier stages; scientific experimentation is no exception. Given this, however, the experimentation of the past, up to the most recent times, cannot help but seem primitive compared to what we have today. When our fully developed experiment is experienced inwardly, it really calls for something more. From what has been combined by the intellect in the actual activity of experimentation something is released in the soul. What is released requires spiritual knowledge to balance it. We have shifted our understanding from mere observation to experimentation. Something happens when we discover the real difference between what is experienced in mere observation and what is experienced in the activity of experimentation: the urge arises in us to rise to a higher level of self-knowledge from the ordinary kind. This higher knowledge is what I have recently been describing. These two things are related. The urge for a higher knowledge, which is natural to human beings striving for knowledge today, has developed quite naturally in the course of history out of an elementary interest in experimentation itself. The scientific data that we have gained in regard to outer nature are, in many respects, really related to questions. The important thing is that if the formulation of the questions is correct, then a correct answer is possible.

What natural science has given us recently is really in large measure no more than a statement of questions for the spiritual researcher. Whether we look at recent astronomy or the views of modern chemistry, when we grasp what is in them, the question arises: how is what is described related to what goes on in the human being himself? Questions arise about man's relation to the world precisely through the scientific results that have come from our shifting from observation over to the experimental realm. So we can see that for someone who really experiences modern science and does not theorize about it, this science is full of spiritual-scientific questions. From the nature of these questions, there simply is no choice but to go to spiritual science for answers. In the year 1859 Darwin came to a conclusion of what he had studied so meticulously; but for someone who studies these results afterwards, in spite of what Darwin took to be scientific conclusions, they appear as questions.

We are helped by the kind of experience we have in experimenting but at the same time we recognize the essentially independent nature of mathematics. When we seek for the realm in which mathematics is applicable, where it will result in an inner satisfying knowledge, then we see a merging of observation and of mathematical thinking, of the results of mathematical thinking, into an understanding of nature. But we may ask, what underlies what we experience in experiment; what is really happening when we feel the necessity for a form of knowledge that can even venture into historical knowledge? Where does this lead? We tend to look for connections everywhere for which the threads are simply not to be found in the material of contemporary science. Once we have grasped what it is that brings order into the connections between the facts, and in all spheres of knowledge—from the study of nature up to the study of history, we sense higher beings revealing themselves, purely soul-spiritual beings. If we come this far, then the door is open to a contemplation of an independent spiritual world.

My honored guests! I know just how much these lectures must seem unsatisfying to you, due to their sketchy and aphoristic nature. But rather than lecture on a narrowly defined subject, I chose to give a wide overview, even though in the particulars it could not be filled in. My intention was that you might learn something of the procedures involved in spiritual-scientific knowledge as it is meant here. I hoped you would get a feeling for the aims toward which it aspires. It aims for the greatest possible exactness and not some sort of fanciful or dilettante activity. For even in mathematics, what makes it so exact is the fact that we have an inner experience of it. In the Platonic age it was known why the words “God geometrizes” were inscribed as a motto on the school; it was clear that all who entered would receive a training in geometry and mathematics. In a similar way modern science of the spirit knows that to attain its goal it must have inner mathematical clarity. I hope you have received the impression, particularly as regards its methods, that the orientation of spiritual science is worthwhile. Perhaps on reflection you may come to ask the question: Can this not indeed lead to a fructification of our other sciences—not to belittle them, but to raise them to their true value? If I have achieved this to some degree, aphoristic and in some ways insufficient as these lectures have been, then my intention have been fulfilled.

• 1. The Boundaries of Natural Science, Bibl.-Nr. 322, eight lectures, Dornach 1920, Anthroposophic Press.

Now we have come to the end of our university courses. We have heard lectures from various individuals who have worked in our anthroposophical spiritual science for some time. We have also had a number of seminars which were intended to fill out what the lectures only sketched as a framework. In spite of the fact that all the participants in these lectures have worked hard, we must also consider the quality of the time spent together given the nature of such an event. All we were able to do was to let some light come in, as through individual windows in a building—that light which we believe is present in our anthroposophical spiritual science. Please consider what is contained in this room, the openings into which we are describing symbolically as windows of the spiritual-scientific movement. The contents of the room are various subjects that are just at their beginning; a richer work will exist ultimately. If you take this into account, you can understand why we could present only a small amount of what we might hope to give in such courses on similar occasions.

With such an event we hoped to draw students from all directions, and to our joy they have in fact appeared in great numbers. It is very gratifying to us and meaningful for the movement. For first and foremost, we would like to show, no matter how sketchily, that a genuine scientific attitude prevails in the anthroposophical movement. No doubt there are other spiritual intentions at work also, but these will have to be shown in other ways. Above all, these lectures are meant to demonstrate at the very least the will to strive toward real scientific knowledge. However, considering present-day conditions, anyone who understands the situation must feel: If we speak of a scientific attitude, a scientific spirit that plays directly into the living conditions of the modern human being, then it must be able to prove itself in the social sphere.

It is really necessary that the scientific spirit of our day shall give rise to ideas that can bring strength and healing into our social life. It is not enough today to have a scientific spirit that calls the human being into an existence estranged from life. We need a scientific spirit that will give us real health in our social life. The social situation confronts us full of riddles and urgent demands, even in a certain way threatening. If we have a feeling for these times, we can sense the need for real solutions—solutions that can be found only by those who grasp the social life with scientific understanding. We believe we are able to recognize this necessity from the most significant signs of this time. It is out of this recognition that our anthroposophical movement is artistically, scientifically and culturally conceived; this includes the building in Dornach called the Goetheanum, the Free University for Spiritual Science. Our wish is that out of a genuine scientific attitude these impulses can come to life in us and become really socially active.

We have attempted in the very structure of our lectures and seminars to make possible a recognition of the truly scientific spirit to which we aspire in our anthroposophical movement. Attacks from various directions accuse us of sectarianism or the desire to found a religion, but they come from those who don't know us, or—in some cases—from a malicious desire to slander us. The scientific spirit cannot of course be seen in the factual content of what is presented. Whoever would exclude empirical content, whether physical or super-sensible, shows that he himself is not imbued with the scientific spirit. It can only be seen in the treatment of the facts, in the striving to follow a definite method. And the real test of its validity—whether its results originated from sensory or supersensory experience—is based on the nature of this striving. Do we strive toward the scientific spirit that rules in the recognized sciences?

Is this striving demonstrated in our methodology, in our thinking with scientific accuracy? This is a justifiable question. It is also a worthwhile point of discussion inasmuch as this scientific spirit, as it prevails among us, is in need of improvement. One can determine whether our movement is scientific or not, not on the content we present but by how we proceed. Let it be shown in any instance that we have proceeded illogically, unscientifically, or in a dilettante fashion and—since we are serious about the correct development of our spiritual-scientific endeavors—we will make the necessary improvements without argument. We do not wish to deny this principle of progress in any way. So, enough about the underlying elements for discussing the scientific status of our endeavors.

We have striven to prove in the social realm, in life itself, what results from our knowledge of the world. In our discussions we have tried to present what we believe to be the truth regarding knowledge of the human being and the world. In the seminars we showed how the Waldorf School movement arose out of the anthroposophical movement. The lively manner of teaching in the Waldorf schools raises the question whether what is found in spiritual science will also prove itself in the shaping of today's young people. We don't want to exhaust ourselves in fruitless theoretical discussion: we want to let reality itself test what we believe is the truth toward which we should strive. Goethe said, “What is fruitful, that alone is true.” Even those far removed from modern philosophical pragmatism or the “as if” school must have their truth proven by its fruitfulness. We can declare ourselves in full agreement with the Goethean principle that only what is fruitful yields proof of its truth before reality—particularly where social truths are concerned. If what flows livingly out of spiritual science can return again into life, and if life can show that the result of recognized truth, or supposed truth, can send a human being out into life with ability, vigor, sureness, and enthusiasm and strength for work, then this is a proof of the truth which has been striven for. At the same time we have attempted something else, but it is really still too much in its infancy to be outwardly demonstrated.

In Der Kommende Tag, in Futura, we have put forth economic ideas which are intended to show that what is derived in a spiritual way, out of reality, also enables us to see the affairs of practical life in the right light. The time has not yet come when we can speak of these things becoming manifest, of fulfilling the conditions for a real proof. However, even in the economic realm, one may grant us the fact that we have not been afraid to extend something that was won purely in the spiritual out into practical life. This is actual testimony that we do not shy away from the tests of reality. How things develop in this region is perhaps not fully within our own will to determine. In such cases, even more than in the field of education, one is dependent on the practicalities of life, as well as how one is understood by the world and one's own circle.

In this way, we try to take into account the signs of the times. We have recently seen in some of our lectures that these signs point directly to spiritual-scientific demands; they also confront us with great social questions. But above all we seek to take into account the inner soul needs of the human being. For someone who is familiar with one area, for example the natural sciences, it is very easy to believe that we are already in possession of an infallible scientific method. Ultimately, however, what arises as science can only be fruitful for the whole evolution of humanity if it joins human evolution in a way that sustains the life of man. With this essential condition in mind, I ask you: Isn't there something in today's universities or in similar circumstances that can cause the soul to come somewhat into error? One can, of course, enter a laboratory and work in the dissection room, believing that one is working with a correct method and that one has an overview of all factors involved, grasping them in accord with present conditions and the level of humanity's evolution. But for humanity's evolution something else is necessary. Something is necessary which perhaps occurs very rarely, and the significance of which is not properly appreciated. It would be necessary that someone who has worked seriously and conscientiously with scientific spirit in the chemistry lab, observatory, or clinic, could then step into a history or aesthetics classroom and hear something there that would live in inner conformity with what he had learned in his technical courses. Such unity is needed—for the simple reason that regardless to what degree individuals may specialize, ultimately the things achieved in separate disciplines must work together in the process of general human evolution, and must spring from a common source.

We believe it is impossible today to experience a unity directly between, for instance, present historical pronouncements and the teachings of natural science. For this reason we strive toward what stands behind all scientific endeavors: the spiritual reality, the source that is common to them all. The aim of our striving is to come to know this spiritual reality. With our feeble powers we are striving to establish the validity of such knowledge of the spirit and its right to exist. In this lecture series and similar events, we have striven to show you what we are doing and how we do it, and we are grateful that you joined us.

May I touch on one additional subject: A short time ago, a coworker of long standing in our movement spoke with me. He knew that for spiritual-scientific reasons I must speak about two Jesus children. Until recently he hadn't told me of his intentions to follow this matter up in a conscientious manner studying the external aspect. His recent conversation with me was after he had finished his investigations. He said that he had compared the gospels thoroughly with one another, and had discovered that they don't begin to make sense until they are regarded from this spiritual-scientific viewpoint.

May research proceed thus in all realms! If it does, we know that our spiritual science will be able to stand fast. We do not fear the testing, no matter how detailed the examination may be. We have no fear of the request to verify. We only worry if someone opposes our viewpoint without proof, proof of all the individual details. The more carefully our spiritual research is tested, the more at ease we can be about it. This consciousness we bear deep within us. It is with such awareness that we have taken the responsibility of calling you all here, you who are striving to build a life of science and of scientific spirit. Today, my honored students, it is impossible to offer you the things of the outer world. In the places where this is done, our efforts are sometimes rejected in a surprising manner. Even so, your appearing here allows us to feel we are correct in saying that there are still souls among today's youth whose concern is the truth and striving toward the truth. Therefore we wish to say—I speak from the fullness of my heart, and I know I am also speaking for the coworkers of these courses we have truly enjoyed working with you. This is particularly gratifying because at the same time from other quarters attacks are raining down on us from ill-will, and we are called upon again and again to refute these attacks. We do as much as we can to make the refutations—as much as time permits. But really, the burden of proof lies with the one who makes an assertion; he should bring evidence of its truth. Otherwise, one could blithely throw assertions at anyone, leaving him to refute everything.

I only wish to indicate how the opposition operates toward us, personally attacking us rather than attempting to understand our ideas by discussing matters seriously with us.

What is most strongly held against us is that in one important area we have to insist upon setting ourselves against the well-intended strivings of the times. We cannot just go along with the general attitude to take what traditional science represents in the various fields and simply let it be carried in a popular way throughout the world. Rather, from our own knowledge we believe there is another need. Something must be brought into those quarters which consider themselves infallible these days. It is generally believed that such authority is held in those quarters that their ideas can be taken unaltered and be disseminated among the masses.

We believe, however, that certain scientific elements still lacking must enter those quarters to fructify their scientific work. The fact that we do not merely want the scientific spirit disseminated from certain quarters into the wide world but also want to bring a different spirit into science—this, I believe, is why we are confronted by such frightful opposition. It would be good if these matters were considered in a calm and objective way. For we must not hide the fact that we are in serious need of the collaboration of wider circles, even though every one of us is convinced of the scientific value of our endeavors. What worries us most is that we have so few coworkers who can really stand their ground. This is why it means so much to us that you, the university youth, have been coming to us now for some time. We have faith in you young students. We believe that what we need can sprout out of your youthful energy. Therefore, my honored fellow students, we would particularly like to work together with you in our field, as far as time and conditions permit.

It is with this spirit that we sought to permeate the work in these courses. Perhaps you can carry away with you the conviction that it has at least been our aspiration to work in this direction. I began today by comparing what we are offering to a closed room, opening out through windows to the surrounding world of spiritual science. Through these windows we have wanted to let fragments shine in of a world of knowledge, which we want to apply in a spiritual-scientific way. Now we are at the end of the course, and I wish to say a heartfelt “goodbye till we meet again” in similar circumstances.

But I would still like to return to the comparison with which I began the course. It is not generally my habit to pay homage to fine phrases, even when they are time-honored; rather, I like to return to just a simple expression of truth. In our cultural literature, a high-sounding phrase is often quoted as being Goethe's dying words, “Light, more light!” Well, Goethe lay in a tiny room in a dark corner when he was dying, and the shutters on the opposite window were closed. From my knowledge of Goethe I have every reason to believe that in truth his words were simply: “Open the shutters!” Now that I have dealt with that lofty phrase of my beloved and revered Goethe in an heretical manner, I would like to use my version of it as we end our work. My honored students! As we feel ourselves together in the room whose windows open out to spiritual knowledge, windows through which we have sought in a fragmentary way to let in what we believe to be light, I call to you out of the spirit that led us to invite you here: I call out to you, “Open the shutters!”

The eight lectures of Rudolf Steiner were given at the Stuttgart Free University Courses between March 16th and 23rd, 1921. There were other subjects and also other speakers. The invitation was directed to students and scientists. One main intention is formulated by Steiner in his concluding address: “We have attempted to introduce the seminar work in such a way that perhaps it could really be recognized that a genuine scientific spirit is our aspiration”—that no sectarianism or desire to found a new religion is at work ...

The time was that of social upheaval in Germany after World War I. In that period Steiner and his co-workers were intensely active in scientific, social, educational and medical work. In the brief span of not quite seven years after the end of World War I (1918) and Steiner's death in 1925, an incredible amount of advice and concrete instruction was given; but also given were new tasks as to what to investigate, individual prescriptions for doctors (including curative education), to farmers for what is now called Bio-dynamic agriculture and last but not least to Waldorf Education in lectures and regular teacher's conferences.

Growing recognition of Waldorf Education and Bio-dynamic Farming—to name just two representative fields—lead quite naturally to the question: in which form were these things given? Thus, there is a legitimate demand for the lectures given in that period.

Among the different lecture series of that time the one offered here is of special methodological nature. Already the long title gives an idea of the scope of subjects treated.

There could be raised an objection: Mathematics has changed in the more than 70 years that have elapsed. Indeed, it has changed as never before a science has changed its methods, its object and general outlook. No science has moved farther away from the intuitive notions of space and of number which had been the basis of geometry and calculus as developed in the 2000 years before our century.

A similar objection can be raised with regard to the Experiment. Even the hectic search in the forties of this century for the properties of uranium-235 and of plutonium—both didn't even exist in weighable quantities—was still straightforward experimentation of the known type even though refined e.g. to purity of ingredients unthinkable up to then. But compared with them, the more recent experiments at Livermore, CERN, Dubna have completely different goals, quite aside of their difference in method. They do not handle any longer material substances and do not investigate properties of such, they are directed to hypothetical particles like “quarks.”

These, often enough, do not “exist” in a form similar to that of a physical solid, they exist “virtually”; they are thought of first and “produced” afterwards—and by that their outcome verifies a theory or, as to that, refutes it if the particles in question do not turn up, let us say, in predicted numbers. But coming back for a moment to pure mathematics. What is said in the first lecture about the certainty of mathematical knowledge is today far more evident than in those days when still one could believe that mathematical concepts were abstracted from Nature (like John Locke's contention that concepts are only percepts stripped of unnecessary details). Today, we know with absolute certainty that mathematical concepts are free creations of the human mind.

The problems, it is true, connected with the foundations of mathematics have raised some doubts about its "certainty" by questioning whether mathematics is absolutely exempt of contradictions. But for all scientific purposes mathematical reasoning still stands as a model of exactness.¹

Steiner really does not just pay lip service to the scientific method of Natural Science. In this book one will find very brief and concrete descriptions of the step from the ordinary approach to knowledge to the mathematical—and from there to “Imaginative Cognition.” It is discussed how one can proceed from the study of the eye as a physical apparatus to an entity permeated with life and to form an Imagination of the etheric body in the eye. “Through imaginative activity one has grasped the etheric nature of the human being in the same way as one grasps the external inorganic world through a mathematical approach.”(Lecture 3, p. 51)

And it is discussed in detail how to proceed from imagination to inspiration. In comparison to the, so to speak, general method of the “Path of Knowledge” (As in Steiner's Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, here, a method for the scientist is given. Furthermore, whether this method is scientific in the general sense of the word was put to the listener's own judgement as it will be now for the reader.

There is a remarkable passage where Steiner relates the conversation between a pupil of the brain researcher MENGER who had made a drawing an the blackboard of the hypothetical connections between parts of the brain explaining in his opinion its functioning—and a man who spoke in the sense of HERBART stating that he would make the same drawing, but now for the thought masses and their combinations. I think this is quite remarkable because N. WIENER relates in his book Cybernetics (1947, p 32 and 164) a similar situation. In a Symposium about how to make a reading apparatus for blind people, there was a drawing on the blackboard describing a possible circuitry. The connections should symbolize layers of electrical switches (nowadays just called neurons as in anatomy) in a network that should be able to extract shape (“Gestalt”) from the imitation of a retinal image in the eye. Then a brain anatomist (Dr. VON BONIN) saw the drawing and immediately asked whether this represented the fourth layer of the visual cortex of the brain.

Steiner's event must have taken place somewhere in the nineties of the last century; Wiener's event about half a century later in the forties of our century. Of course, there is a difference: Steiner pointed to an archetypical correspondence between certain thoughts, Wiener relates something that was planned for technical development, which now is becoming hardware.

I do not hesitate to take this "coincidence" as a Symptom for the lasting actuality of the lectures presented here.

Georg Unger, Ph. D.
February 1992
Dornach, Switzerland

• 1. Some mathematical concepts have been expressly created in mathematical physics in order to show certain structures which would correspond to this or that “model” and thus would give substance to hunches or pipe dreams of the theorizing physicist, enabling him, in the ideal case, to check this theory with predicted numerical values or else to either refute or modify his brainchild.

[ 1 ] The inner nature of man demands that he experience his relation with ultimate reality. Among thinkers who pursue this goal with untiring energy we find a large number discoursing on certain “boundaries” of knowledge. And, if we listen attentively, we cannot help noticing how collision with these boundaries, when it is experienced by a candid mind, tends in the direction of an inner psychic apprehension, a “purely noetic experience” such as was indicated in the first paragraph of this book. Consider how the profoundly able mind of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, in the packed essay he wrote on Johannes Volkelt’s book Dream-Phantasy (Traumphantasie), reports its own reaction to one such limit of cognition:

“No mind where no nerve-centre, where no brain”, say our opponents. No nerve-centre, we say, no brain unless it had been first prepared for by innumerable stages from below upwards. It is easy to babble, with a sneer, about Mind careering through granite and chalk—just as easy as it is for us to ask, with a sneer, how the albumen in the brain flies up aloft into ideas. Human knowledge is extinguished at any attempt to span the distance from one step to the other.

It will remain a secret how it comes about that nature—beneath which spirit must somehow or other be slumbering—presents itself as such a backlash of spirit that we bruise ourselves on it. The direction appears so absolute that Hegel’s formulation of it as “Being other” and “Being outside itself”, brilliant as it is, says almost nothing; it simply drapes the abruptness of the party wall. We may look to Fichte for a really adequate acknowledgment of the abruption and of the shock of the backlash, but we still find no explanation of it.

(Compare F. T. Vischer: Old and New (Altes und Neues), 1881, Part I, p. 229 f.)

Vischer lays his finger on the kind of issue with which anthroposophy too engages. But he fails to realise that, precisely at such a frontier of knowledge as this, another mode of knowledge can begin. He desires to go on living on these frontiers with the same brand of cognition that sufficed until he reached them. Anthroposophy seeks to demonstrate that the possibility of systematic knowledge (science) does not cease at the point where ordinary cognition “bruises” itself, at the point where this “abruption” and these “shocks” from the backlash make themselves felt; but that, on the contrary, the experiences that ensue from them lead naturally towards the development of another type of cognition, which transforms the backlash into perception of spirit—a perception which at the outset, in its initial stage, may be compared with tactile perception in the realm of the senses.

In Part III of Altes und Neues Vischer says: “Very well: there is no soul alongside of the body (he means, for the materialists); what we call matter simply becomes soul at the highest level of organisation known to us, in the brain, and soul evolves to mind or spirit. In other words, we are to be satisfied with a half-baked concept, which for the divisive understanding is a simple contradiction.” Anthroposophy echoes and supplements this with: Very well: for the divisive understanding there is a contradiction. But for the soul, the contradiction becomes the point of departure of a knowledge before which the divisive understanding is pulled up short, because it encounters the backlash of actual spirit.

[ 2 ] Again, Gideon Spicker, the author of a series of discerning publications, who also wrote Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin (Philosophische Bekenntnis eines ehemaligen Kapuziners, 1910) identifies incisively enough one of the confining limits of ordinary cognition:

Whatever philosophy a man confesses, whether it is dogmatic or sceptical, empirical or transcendental, critical or eclectic, 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; every attempt to prove its validity already presupposes it. Beneath it yawns a bottomless abyss, a ghastly darkness, illuminated by no ray of light. We know not whence that necessity comes, nor whither it leads. As to whether a gracious God or whether an evil demon implanted it in the reason, we are equally uncertain. (p. 30.)

Reflection on the nature of thought, then, leads of itself to one of the frontiers of normal cognition. Anthroposophy occupies this frontier; it knows how necessity confronts and blocks discursive thought like an impenetrable wall. But when the act of thinking is experienced as such, the wall becomes penetrable. This experienced thinking finds a light of contemplation wherewith to illuminate the “darkness illuminated by no ray of light” of merely discursive thought. It is only for the dominion of the senses that the abyss is bottomless; if we do not halt before it, but make up our minds to risk going ahead with thought, beyond the point at which it has to jettison all that the senses have furnished to it, then in that “bottomless abyss” we find the realities of the spirit …*”

[ 3 ] One could continue almost indefinitely exemplifying the reaction of serious minds before the “frontiers of knowledge”. And it would serve to show that anthroposophy has its proper place as the inevitable product of mental evolution in the modern age. There are plenty of prophetic signs, if we know how to read them.

[ 1 ] On page 35 the expression “benumbing” (Herablähmung) is used of representations as they turn into imitations of sensory reality. It is in this “benumbing” that we must locate the positive event that underlies the phase of abstraction in the process of cognition. The mind forms concepts of sensory reality. For any theory of knowledge the question is how that, which it retains within itself as concept of a real being or event, is related to such real being or event. Has the somewhat that I carry around in me as the concept of a wolf any relation at all to a particular reality, or is it simply a schema that I have constructed for myself by withdrawing my attention (abstracting) from anything peculiar to this wolf or that wolf, and to which nothing in the real world corresponds? This question received extensive treatment in the medieval conflict between Nominalism and Realism: for the Nominalists nothing about the world is real except the visible materials extant in it as a single individual, flesh, blood, bones and so forth. The concept “wolf” is “merely” a conceptual aggregate of the properties common to different wolves. To this the Realist objects: any material found in an individual wolf is also to be found in other animals. There must then be something that disposes the materials into the living coherence they exhibit in the wolf. This constituent reality is given by way of the concept. It cannot be denied that Vincent Knauer, the distinguished specialist in Aristotelian and medieval philosophy, has something, when he says in his book, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy (Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, Vienna, 1892):

A wolf, for instance, consists of no different material constituents than a lamb; its material corporeality is composed of assimilated lambsflesh; yet the wolf does not become a lamb even if it eats nothing but lambs all its life. Whatever it is that makes it wolf, therefore, must obviously be something other than the “Kyle”, the sensory material, and that something, moreover, cannot possibly be a mere “thought-thing” even though it is accessible to thought alone, and not to the senses. It must be something active, therefore actual, therefore eminently real.

How after all does one get round this objection on a strictly anthropological view of what constitutes reality? It is not what is transmitted through the senses that produces the concept “wolf”. On the other hand that concept, as present in ordinary-level consciousness, is certainly nothing effective. Merely by the energy of that concept the conformation of the “sensory” materials contained in a wolf could certainly not be brought about. The fact is that, with this question, anthropology comes up against one of its frontiers of knowledge.—Anthroposophy demonstrates that, besides the relation of man to wolf, which is there in the sensory field, there is another relation as well. This latter does not, in its immediate specificity, reach into ordinary-level consciousness. But it does subsist as a living continuity between the human mind and the sensuously observed object. The vitality that subsists in the mind by virtue of this continuity is by the systematic understanding subdued, or benumbed, to a “concept”. An abstract idea is a reality defunct, to enable its representation in ordinary-level consciousness, a reality in which the human being does in fact live in the process of sense perception, but which does not become a conscious part of his life. The abstractness of ideas is brought about by an inner necessity of the psyche. Reality furnishes man with a living content. Of this living content he puts to death that part which invades his ordinary consciousness. He does so because he could not achieve self-consciousness as against the outer world if he were compelled to experience, in all its vital flux, his continuity with that world. Without the paralysing of this vital flow, the human being could only know himself as a scion comprised within a unity extending beyond the limits of his humanity; he would be an organ of a larger organism.

The manner in which the mind suffers its cognitive process to peter out into the abstractness of concepts is not determined by a reality external to itself. It is determined by the laws of development of man’s own existence, which laws demand that, in the process of perception, he subdue his vital continuity with the outer world down to those abstract concepts that are the foundation whereon his self-consciousness grows and increases. That this is the case becomes evident to the mind, once it has developed its organs of spirit. By this means that living continuity with a spiritual reality lying outside the individual, which was referred to on pp. 38/9, is reconstituted. But, unless self-consciousness had been purchased in the first place from ordinary level consciousness, it could not be amplified to intuitive consciousness. It follows that a healthy ordinary-level consciousness is a sine qua non of intuitive consciousness. Anyone who supposes that he can develop an intuitive consciousness without a healthy and active ordinary-level consciousness is making a very great mistake. On the contrary, normal and everyday consciousness has to accompany an intuitive consciousness at every single moment. Otherwise self-consciousness will be impaired and disorder introduced into the mind’s relation to reality. It is to this kind of consciousness alone that anthroposophy looks for intuitive cognition; not to any sedating of ordinary-level consciousness.

[ 1 ] Perceptions in the field of noetic reality do not persist within the psyche in the same way as do representations gained through sense-perception. While it is true that such perceptions may be usefully compared with the ideas of memory, on the lines indicated in Section II, their station within the psyche is nevertheless not the same as that of its memories. This is because what is experienced as spiritual perception cannot be preserved there in its immediate form. If a man wishes to have the same noetic perception over again, he must occasion it anew within the psyche. In other words the psyche's relation to the corresponding noetic reality must be deliberately re-established. And this renewal is not to be compared with the remembering of a sense impression, but solely with the bringing into view once more of the same sense object as was there on the occasion of the former impression.

What can, within the memory, be retained of an actual spiritual perception is not the perception itself but the disposition of soul through which one attained to that perception. If my object is to repeat a spiritual perception which I had some while back, it is no use my trying to remember it. What I should try to remember is something that will call back the psychic preparations that led me to the perception in the first place. Perception then occurs through a process that does not depend on me.

It is important to be very conscious of this dual nature of the whole proceeding, because it is only in that way that one gains authentic knowledge of what is in fact objective spirit. Thereafter, it is true, the duality is modified for practical purposes, through the circumstance that the content of the spiritual perception can be carried over from the intuitive into ordinary-level consciousness. Then, within the latter, it becomes an abstract idea. And this can be later recollected in the ordinary manner. Nevertheless, in order to acquire a reliable psychic relation to the spiritual world, it is a very great advantage to cultivate assiduously the knowledge of three rather subtly differentiated mental processes: 1) psychic, or soul, processes leading up to a spiritual perception; 2) spiritual perceptions themselves; 3) spiritual perceptions translated into the concepts of ordinary consciousness.

[ 1 ] There is one objection often brought against anthroposophy, which is no less understandable than it is impermissible; understandable against the psychological background of those who advance it and impermissible because it traverses the whole spirit of anthroposophical research. I find it quite trivial, because the answer to it is readily available to anyone who follows with genuine understanding the literature written from the anthroposophical point of view. Only because it is always cropping up again do I repeat here some of the observations I added in 1914 to the sixth edition of my book Theosophy. It ought to be possible (so runs the objection) for the alleged findings of anthroposophical observation to be “proved” by strictly scientific, that is experimental, methods. The idea is that a few people, who maintain that they can achieve such results, should be confronted with a number of other people under strictly controlled experimental conditions, whereupon the “spiritual researchers” would be asked to declare what they have “seen” in the examining persons. For the experiment to succeed, their findings would have to coincide or at all events to share a high enough percentage of similarity to each other. It is, perhaps, not surprising that someone whose knowledge of anthroposophy does not include having understood it should keep on making demands of this kind. Their satisfaction would save him the trouble of working his way through to the actual proof, which consists in acquiring, as it is open to everyone to do, the ability to see for himself. But anyone who has really understood anthroposophy will have sufficient insight to realise that an experiment engineered on these lines is about as apt a way of getting results through genuinely spiritual intuition as stopping the clock is of telling the time. The preliminaries leading up to the conditions under which spiritual observation is possible have to be furnished by the psyche itself and by the total disposition of the psyche. External arrangements of the kind that lead to a natural-scientific experiment are not so furnished. For instance, one part of that same disposition must of necessity be, that the will-impulse prompting to an observation is exclusively and without reservation the original impulse of the person to make the observation. And that there should not be anything in the artificial external preparations that exerts a transforming influence upon that innermost impulse. At the same time—and it is surprising how this is nearly always overlooked—given these psychological conditions, everyone can procure the proofs for anthroposophy for himself; so that the “proofs” are in fact universally accessible. It will of course be indignantly denied; but the only real reason for insisting on “external proofs” is the fact that they can be obtained in reasonable comfort, whereas the authentically spiritual-scientific method is a laborious and disconcerting one.

[ 2 ] What Brentano wanted was something very different from this demand for comfortable experimental verification of anthroposophical truths. He wanted to be able to work in a psychological laboratory. His longing for this facility frequently crops up in his writings, and he made repeated efforts to bring it about. The tragic intervention of circumstance obliged him to abandon the idea. Just because of his attitude to psychological questions he would have produced, with the help of such a laboratory, results of great importance. If the object is to establish the best conditions for obtaining results in the field of anthropological psychology (which extends just as far as those “boundaries of knowledge”, where anthropology and anthroposophy encounter one another), then the answer is the kind of psychological laboratory Brentano envisaged. In such a laboratory there would be no need to hunt for ways of inducing manifestations of “intuitive consciousness” experimentally. The experimental techniques employed there would soon show how human nature is adapted for that kind of “seeing” and how the intuitive is entailed by the normal consciousness. Everyone who holds the anthroposophical point of view longs, as Brentano did, to be able to work in a genuine psychological laboratory; but for the present such a possibility is ruled out by the prejudices against anthroposophy that still prevail.