The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] My object here is to present in outline certain conclusions I have reached concerning the relations between the psychic and the physical components of the human being. I may add that, in doing so, I place on record the results of a systematic spiritual investigation extending over a period of thirty years. It is only in the last few of those years that it has become practicable to formulate these results in concepts capable of verbal expression, and thus to bring the investigation to at least a temporary close. I must emphasise that it is the results and the results alone that I shall be presenting, or rather indicating, in what follows. Their foundation in fact can certainly be established on the basis of contemporary science. But to do this would require a substantial volume; and that my present circumstances do not permit of my writing.

[ 2 ] If we are seeking for the actual relation between psychic and physical, it will not do to take as our starting-point Brentano’s distribution of psychic experience into representation, judgment and the responses of love and hate. Partitioning in this way, we are led to shelve so many relevant considerations that we shall reach no reliable results. On the contrary we have to start from that very trichotomy of representation, feeling and will which Brentano rejected. If we survey the psychic experience of representation as a whole, and seek for the bodily processes with which that experience is related, we shall find the appropriate nexus by relying substantially on the findings of current physiological psychology. The somatic correlatives to the psychic element in representation are observable in the processes of the nervous system, extending into the sense organs in one direction and into the interior physical organism in the other. Here, however wide the divergence in many respects between the anthroposophical point of view and that of contemporary science, that very science provides an excellent foundation.

It is otherwise when we seek to determine the somatic correlatives for feeling and willing. There we have first to blaze the requisite trail through the findings of current physiology. And once we have succeeded in doing so, we shall find that, just as representation is necessarily related to nervous activity, so feeling must be seen as related to that vital rhythm which is centred in, and connected with, the respiratory system; bearing in mind that, for this purpose, the rhythm of breathing must be traced right into the outermost peripheral regions of the organism. To arrive at concrete results here, the findings of physiological research need to be pursued in a direction which is as yet decidedly unfamiliar. If we take the trouble to do this, preliminary objections to bracketing feeling with respiration, all disappear, and what at first looks like an objection turns out to be a proof. Take one simple example from the wide range available: musical experience is dependent on some feeling, but the content of musical form subsists in representations furnished by auditory perception. How does musical emotion arise? The representation of the tonal shape (which depends on organ of hearing and neural process) is not yet the actual musical experience. That arises in the measure that the rhythm of breathing, continuing further into the brain, confronts within that organ the effects produced there by ear and nervous system. The psyche now lives, not alone in what is heard and represented, or thought, but in the breathing rhythm. Something is released in the breathing rhythm through the fact that neural process impinges on rhythmic life. Once we have seen the physiology of respiration in its true light, we are led on all hands to the conclusion that the psyche, in experiencing emotion, is supported by the rhythmic process of breathing, in the same way that, in representation and ideation, it is supported by neural processes. And it will be found that willing is supported, in the same way, by the physical processes of metabolism. Here again one must include the innumerable offshoots and ramifications of these processes, which extend throughout the entire organism.

When something is “represented”, a neural process takes place, on the basis of which the psyche becomes conscious of its representation; when something is “felt”, a modification is effected in the breathing rhythm, through which a feeling comes to life; and in the same way, when something is “willed”, a metabolic process occurs that is the somatic foundation for what the psyche experiences as willing. It should be noted however that it is only in the first case (representation mediated by the nervous system) that the experience is a fully conscious, waking experience. What is mediated through the breathing-rhythm (including in this category everything in the nature of feelings, affects, passions and the like) subsists in normal consciousness with the force only of representations that are dreamed. Willing, with its metabolic succedaneum, is experienced in turn only with that third degree of consciousness, totally dulled, which also persists in sleep. If we look more closely at this series, we shall notice that the experience of willing is in fact wholly different from the experience of representation or ideation. The latter is something like looking at a coloured surface: whereas willing is like looking at a black area in the middle of a coloured field. We see nothing there in the uncoloured part of the surface precisely because—unlike the surrounding part, from which colour impressions are received—no such impressions are at hand from it. We “have the idea” of willing, because within the psyche’s field of ideational experience a patch of non-ideation inserts itself, very much as the interruptions of consciousness brought about by sleep insert themselves into the continuum of conscious life. It is to these differing types of conscious apprehension that the soul owes the manifold variety of its experience in ideation, feeling and willing.

There are some noteworthy observations on feeling and willing in Theodor Ziehen’s Manual of Physiological Psychology—in many ways a standard work within the tradition of current scientific notions concerning the relation between the physical and the psychic. He deals with the relation between the various forms of representation and ideation on the one hand and neural function on the other in a way that is quite in accord with the anthroposophical approach. But when it comes to feeling (see Lecture 9 in his book), he has this to say:

The older psychology, almost without exception, treats of affects as manifestations of a special, independent faculty. Kant placed the feeling of desire and aversion, as a separate faculty, between those of cognition and appetite, and he expressly emphasised that any further reduction of the three to a common source was impossible. But our previous discussions have shown that feelings of desire and aversion have in fact no such independent existence, they are not any sounding of the “note of feeling”, but simply attributes or signals of sensations and representations.

Here is a theoretical approach which concedes to feeling no independent existence in the life of the soul, seeing it as a mere attribute of ideation. And the result is, it assumes that not only ideation but feeling also is supported by neural processes. The nervous system is thus the somatic element to which the entire psyche is appropriated. Yet the whole basis of this approach amounts to an unnoticed presupposition of the conclusions at which it expects to arrive. It accepts as psychic only what is related to neural processes and then draws the inference that what is not proper to these processes, namely feeling, must be treated as having no independent existence—as a mere signal of ideation.

To abandon this blind alley and return instead to unprejudiced observation of the psyche is to be definitively convinced of the independence of the whole life of feeling. But it is also to appreciate without reserve the actual findings of physiology and at the same time to gain from them the insight that feeling is, as already indicated, peculiar to the breathing-rhythm.

The methodology of natural science denies any sort of existential independence to the will. Unlike feeling, willing is not even a signal of ideation. But this negative assumption, too, is simply based on a prior decision (cf. p. 15 of Physiological Psychology) to assign the whole of the psyche to neural process. Yet the plain fact is that what constitutes the peculiar quality of willing cannot really be related to neural process as such. Thus, precisely because of the exemplary clarity with which Ziehen develops the ideas from which he starts, he is forced (as anyone must be) to conclude that analysis of psychic processes in their relation to the life of the body “affords no support to the assumption of a specific faculty of will”.

The fact remains that unprejudiced contemplation of the psyche obliges us to recognise the existential independence of the will, and accurate insight into the findings of physiology compels the conclusion that the will, as such, must be linked not with neural but with metabolic processes. If a man wants to form clear concepts in this field, then he must look at the findings of physiology and psychology in the light of the facts themselves and not, as so often happens in the present day practice of those sciences, in the light of preconceived opinions and definitions—not to mention theoretical sympathies and antipathies.¹

Most important of all, he must be able to discern very clearly the mutual interrelation of neural function, breathing-rhythm and metabolic activity respectively. These three forms of activity subsist, not alongside of, but within one another. They interpenetrate and enter each other. Metabolic activity is present at all points in the organism; it permeates both the rhythmic organs and the neural ones. But within the rhythmic it is not the somatic foundation of feeling, and within the neural it is not that of ideation. On the contrary, in both of these fields it is the correlative of will-activity permeating rhythm and permeating the nerves respectively. Only materialistic presupposition can relate the element of metabolism in the nerves with the process of ideation. Observation with its roots in reality reports quite differently. It is compelled to recognise that metabolism is present in the nerve to the extent that will is permeating it. And it is the same with the somatic apparatus for rhythm. Everything within that organ that is of the nature of metabolism has to do with the element of will present in it. It is always willing that must be brought into connection with metabolic activity, always feeling that must be related to rhythmic occurrence, irrespective of the particular organ in which metabolism and rhythm are operating.

But in the nerves something else goes on that is quite distinct from metabolism and rhythm. The somatic processes in the nervous system which provide the foundation for representation and ideation are physiologically difficult to grasp. That is because, wherever there is neural function, it is accompanied by the ideation which is ordinary consciousness. But the converse of this is also true. Where there is no ideation, there it is never specifically neural function we discern, but only metabolic activity in the nerve; or rhythmic occurrence in it, as the case may be. Neurology will never arrive at concepts that measure up to the facts, so long as it fails to see that the specifically neural activity of the nerves cannot possibly be an object of physiologically empirical observation. Anatomy and Physiology must bring themselves to recognise that neural function can be located only by a method of exclusion. The activity of the nerves is precisely that in them which is not perceptible by the senses, though the fact that it must be there can be inferred from what is so perceptible, and so can the specific nature of their activity. The only way of representing neural function to ourselves is to see in it those material events, by means of which the purely psycho-spiritual reality of the living content of ideation is subdued and devitalised (herabgelähmt) to the lifeless representations and ideas we recognise as our ordinary consciousness. Unless this concept finds its way somehow into physiology, physiology can have no hope of explicating neural activity.

At present physiology has committed itself to methods which conceal rather than reveal this concept. And psychology, too, has shut the door in her own face. Look, for instance, at the effects of Herbartian psychology. It confines its attention exclusively to the process of representation, and regards feeling and willing merely as effects consequent on that process. But, for cognition, these “effects” gradually peter out, unless at the same time a candid eye is kept on actual feeling and willing; with the result that we are prevented from reaching any valid correlation of feeling and willing with somatic processes. The body as a whole, not merely the nervous activity impounded in it, is the physical basis of psychic life. And, just as, for ordinary consciousness, psychic life is naturally classifiable in terms of ideation, feeling and willing, so is physical life classifiable in terms of neural function, rhythmic occurrence and metabolic process.

The question at once arises: in what way do the following enter and inhabit the organism: on the one hand, sense-perception proper, in which neural function merely terminates, and on the other the faculty of motion, which is the effusion of will? Unbiased observation discloses that neither the one nor the other of these belongs to the organism in the same sense that neural function, rhythmic occurrence and metabolic process belong to it. What goes on in the senses does not belong immediately to the organism at all. The external world reaches out into the senses, as though they were bays or inlets leading into the organism’s own existence. Compassing the processes that take place in the senses, the psyche does not participate in inner organic events; it participates in the extension of outer events into the organism.² In the same way, when physical motion is brought about, what we have to do with is not something that is actually situated within the organism, but an outward working of the organism into the physical equilibrium (or other dynamic relation) between the organism itself and its environment. Within the organism it is only a metabolic process that can be assigned to willing; but the event that is liberated through this process is at the same time an actual happening within the equilibrium, or the dynamics, of the external world. Exerting volition, the life of the psyche overreaches the domain of the organism and combines its action with a happening in the outer world.

The study of the whole matter has been greatly confused by the separation of the nerves into sensory and motor. Securely anchored as this distinction appears to be in contemporary physiological ideas, it is not supported by unbiased observation. The findings of physiology based on neural sections, or on the pathological elimination of certain nerves, do not prove what the experiment or the case-history is said to show. They prove something quite different. They prove that the supposed distinction between sensory and motor nerves does not exist. On the contrary, both kinds of nerve are essentially alike. The so called motor nerve does not implement movement in the manner that the theory of two kinds of nerve assumes. What happens is that the nerve as carrier of the neural function implements an inner perception of the particular metabolic process that underlies the will—in exactly the same way that the sensory nerve implements perception of what is coming to pass within the sense-organ. Unless and until neurological theory begins to operate in this domain with clear concepts, no satisfactory co-ordination of psychic and somatic life can come about.³

[ 3 ] Just as it is possible, psycho-physiologically, to pursue the interrelations between psychic and somatic life which come about in ideation, feeling and willing, in a similar way it is possible, by anthroposophical method, to investigate that relation which the psychic element in ordinary consciousness bears to the spiritual. Applying these methods, the nature of which I have described here and elsewhere, we find that, while representation, or ideation, has a basis in the body in the shape of neural activity or function, it also has a basis in the spiritual. In the other direction—the direction away from the body—the soul stands in relation to a noetically real, which is the basis for the ideation that is characteristic of ordinary consciousness. But this noetic reality can only be experienced through imaginal cognition. And it is so experienced in so far as its content discloses itself to contemplation in the form of coherently linked (gegliederte) imaginations. Just as, in the direction of the body, representation rests on the activity of the nerves, so from the other direction does it issue from a noetic reality, which discloses itself in the form of imaginations.

It is this noetic, or spiritual, component of the organism which I have termed in my writings the etheric or life-body. And in doing so I invariably point out that the term “body” is no more vulnerable to objection than the other term “ether”; because my exposition clearly shows that neither of them is predicated materially. This life-body (elsewhere I have also sometimes used the expression “formative-forces body”) is that phase of the spiritual, whence the representational life of ordinary consciousness, beginning with birth—or, say, conception—and ending with death, continuously originates.

The feeling-component of ordinary consciousness rests, on the bodily side, on rhythmic occurrence. From the spiritual side it streams from a level of spiritual reality that is investigated, in anthroposophical research, by methods which I have, in my writings, designated as inspirational. (Here again it is emphasised that I employ this term solely with the meaning I have given it in my own descriptions; it is not to be equated with inspiration in the colloquial sense.) In the spiritual reality that lies at the base of the soul and is apprehensible though inspiration there is disclosed that phase of the spiritual, proper to the human being, which extends beyond birth and death. It is in this field that anthroposophy brings its spiritual investigations to bear on the problem of immortality. As the mortal part of the sentient human being manifests itself through rhythmic occurrences in the body, so does the immortal spirit kernel of the soul reveal itself in the inspiration-content of intuitive consciousness.

For such an intuitive consciousness the will, which depends, in the somatic direction, on metabolic processes, issues forth from the spirit through what in my writings I have termed authentic intuitions. What is, from one point of view, the “lowest” somatic activity (metabolism) is correlative to a spiritually highest one. Hence, ideation, which relies on neural activity, achieves something like a perfection of somatic manifestation; while the bodily processes associated with willing are only a feeble reflection of willing. The real representation is alive, but, as somatically conditioned, it is subdued and deadened. The content remains the same. Real willing, on the other hand, whether or no it finds an outcome in the physical world, takes its course in regions that are accessible only to intuitive vision; its somatic correlative has almost nothing to do with its content. It is at this level of spiritual reality, disclosed to intuition, that we find influences from previous terrestrial lives at work in later ones. And it is in this kind of context that anthroposophy approaches the problems of repeated lives and of destiny. As the body fulfils its life in neural function, rhythmic occurrence and metabolic process, so the human spirit discloses its life in all that becomes apparent in imaginations, inspirations and intuitions. The body, within its own field, affords participation in its external world in two directions, in sensuous happenings and in motor happenings; and so does the spirit—in so far as that experiences the representations of the psyche imaginally (even in ordinary consciousness) from the one direction, while in the other—in willing—it in-forms the intuitive impulses that are realising themselves through metabolic processes. Looking towards the body, we find neural activity that is taking the form of representation-experience, ideation; looking towards the spirit, we realise the spirit-content of the imagination that is flowing into precisely that ideation.

Brentano was primarily sensitive to the noetic side of the psyche’s experience in representation. That is why he characterises this experience as figurative, i.e. as an imaginal event. Yet when it is not only the private content of the soul that is being experienced, but also a somewhat that demands judgmental acknowledgment or repudiation, then there is added to the representation a soul experience deriving from spirit. The content of this experience remains “unconscious” in the ordinary sense, because it consists of imaginations of a spiritual that existentially underpins the physical object. These imaginations add nothing to the representation except that its content exists. Hence Brentano’s diremption of mere representation (which imaginally experiences merely an inwardly present) from judgment (which imaginally experiences an externally given; but which is aware of that experience only as existential acknowledgment or repudiation).

When it comes to feeling, Brentano has no eyes for its somatic basis in rhythmic occurrence; instead he limits his field of observation to love and hate; that is, to .vestiges, in the sphere of ordinary consciousness, of inspirations which themselves remain unconscious. Lastly the will is outside his purview altogether; because he is determined to direct his gaze only to phenomena within the psyche; and because there is something in the will that is not encapsulated in the soul, but of which the soul avails itself in order to participate in the outside world. Brentano’s divisive classification of psychological phenomena may therefore be characterised as follows: he takes his stand at a vantage-point which is truly illuminating, but is only so if the eye is focused on the spirit-kernel of the soul—and yet he insists on aiming from there at the phenomena of ordinary everyday consciousness.⁴

• 1. Compare p.79 FN.
• 2. For a critical treatment of this subject see my lecture to the Philosophical Congress at >Bologna, 1911.
• 3. In September 1954, forty-seven years after the above words were written, Dr. J. A. V. Bates of the neurological Research Unit (National Hospital) read his paper, Can Voluntary Movement be Localized in the Cerebral Cortex? to a meeting of the British Association at Oxford. He began by demonstrating, on a number of technical grounds, that the inferences drawn from certain well-known facts of observation are not valid inferences, since those facts do not prove that the so-called motor nerve implements movement in the manner that the theory of two kinds of nerve fibre assumes. We should, he suggested. “cease to regard the cerebro-spinal tract as an efferent tract from an area where movements are represented”; and he drew attention to the fact that a similar interpretation of the then observed facts had been brought forward by Francois Franck as long ago as 1886 but had been rejected in flavour of Ferrier’s hypothesis of efferent and afferent nerve fibres. See also Observations on the Excitable Cortex  in Man by J. A. V. Bates (“Lectures on the Scientific Basis of Medicine” Volume V:1955-56).
  
  While engaged on this translation, I ventured to write to the author to enquire after the subsequent fate of what was clearly an attempt (to quote from this selection) to “look at the findings of physiology and psychology in the light of the facts themselves, and not, as so often happens in the present-day practice of those sciences, in the light of preconceived opinions and definitions....” I gather from him that it has neither been answered on the one hand, nor accepted on the other. It appears in fact to have been, at least explicitly ignored—as (with the possible exception of pure physics) is evidently the normal practice with scientific interpretation or hypotheses, however well supported experimentally, that are radical enough to interfere with theories so long accepted as to have become embodied in definitions. In his obliging reply to my letter Dr. Bates put the present position as follows:
  
  “I would say that in the last fifteen years what I referred to as the classical hypothesis has come to be held with far less conviction by most of those who are researching in the field, but that it is still taught in text books, and will remain a seductive hypothesis for the beginner, I’m afraid for many years.”—Editor
• 4. The Section concludes with a remark that these observations are intended as supplementary to a passage in the memorial address on Brentano, which constitutes Chapter III of Von Seelenrätseln. The passage is on page 90.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Owen Barfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preliminary note: Eugen Kolisko's lecture was not written down. However, Kolisko later gave further lectures on the same topic during the first college course in the fall of 1920. These were printed in a revised form by him in the anthology “Aenigmatisches aus Kunst und Wissenschaft” (Enigmas from Art and Science), Stuttgart 1922.

First question: How do the various qualities of heat, light, electricity and the different states actually relate to the periodic system and how did the periodic system come about?

Second question: In the alchemical literature, chemical substances are classified in such a way as to indicate how the individual metals are assigned to the planets. How does this sevenfold classification of the assignment of metals to planets relate to that found in the periodic system?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, Dr. Kolisko has spoken very beautifully about important aspects of how we might strive to free chemistry from those habits of thought that led from the outset to this atomistic hypothesis or, let us say, to the building of chemistry out of the atomistic hypothesis. In view of the questions that have been asked, I would like to draw attention to one thing first. To me, the discovery of the periodic system does not appear to be something absolutely new. Of course, it is not possible to go into the great diversity that exists between our chemical interpretation of phenomena and older views of the constitution of matter in a short consideration. What makes the periodic system particularly interesting is the attempt – an attempt that has been made, I believe, on several occasions – to arrange the periodic system in such a way that the seven elements are plotted on a curve, and then the next seven elements are plotted on a curve passing over it, and so on, so that when intermediate states are created, the correct structure is obtained in a spiral. We can draw this: Here, for example, is lithium, sodium is, as it were, above it, and above that would be potassium. The point is that with the old Mercury rod you really have to connect something like the idea of a universal remedy of nature to bring about the facts of nature. If we can imagine that the elements are superimposed in the way I have arranged them in the periodic system, and I then connect these elements with lines that represent a spiral, then the emergence of each element would only be possible under certain force relationships that are related to a certain motion of these states.

Now, in an interesting way, Crookes pointed out in a Cambridge lecture at the Royal Society that if you want to get the superimposed spiral, you would do well to imagine that a progression of the heat condition takes place in the direction of the axis of the spiral, that thus, so to speak, the series of the next seven elements compared to the series of the previous seven elements came about in a similar way to a higher temperature degree compared to a lower temperature degree. But it is not a progression merely in an expansion, but in a genesis. We would have something similar in a complicated natural system, as we have it in the elementary case of a simple expansion through temperature. And now it is, of course, extraordinarily suggestive to think not at all of a spiral that has a straight line axis, but perhaps to think of something that has a circular axis, then we would get a solenoid line. But again, we can think of this as a spiral. Then we would get a triple spiral progressing in space.

While Crookes initially assumes only a decrease in heat as an analogy for the progression here on this axis, we would - by expanding on Crookes's idea - already get a progression in the axis towards light and chemical effects, which are, of course, different from the chemical forces that act in the substances. We would thus, as it were, obtain entities in heat, light and chemical effects, that is, in what underlies chemical activity, which are not present in the individual bodies, but which are present in the inner workings of, for example, our earthly nature or otherwise.

What I am drawing here are only spatial sensualizations; there are no things in space, but the spatial images are spatial sensualizations.

We would be given the opportunity to think that these successive elements and then, as it were, the next potencies of the same and the counter-potencies of the same are connected with a confused interaction of heat, light and precisely chemical effects, so that this triple helical structure of the elements would actually be nothing more than a certain kind of interaction of the various ether potencies. But then we would have to assume that these ether potencies are radically different from each other, that they cannot be transformed into each other in their essential nature, but that they act on each other in their own essential nature and that the results arise, not transformation products.

This is just a brief answer to the first question. This question covers so much that it is not possible to answer it exhaustively in a short time.

Now the second question. Here one would have to go back to very ancient principles. You see, you must be clear about the fact that what is active in any substance today, forming shapes, potassium or sodium for example, does not necessarily have to arise in the universe today. It may be something that originated at some time, may have been active a very long time ago, and has been preserved, so that the original forms, the original crystal forms of our elements - whether they are distinct crystal forms or something else - were formed from the cosmos in prehistoric times, let us assume during the lunar period, and that in these elements the tendency remained to preserve these forms. We must therefore be clear about the following: on the one hand, we are dealing with today's forms, which appear as if in an imprint, having formed in a very early period of cosmic development; on the other hand, we are dealing with the effects of what has now become of the factors located around the earth. We are therefore not dealing directly with our elemental forms, so that we could speak of a cosmic effect.

Here, somewhere, would be the earth, here the planets, and the planets bring about something through their constellation. If, for the sake of argument, we have Venus, Mars and Mercury here, the constellation of Venus, Mars and Mercury will not directly cause a tetrahedrally shaped body to appear today, as they act on the earth through their mutual forces. Instead, Venus, Mars and Mercury will have endowed the tetrahedron during the lunar period, and the reason it appears today is because the moon's effect has been preserved. Whereas when Mercury and so forth act from the cosmos today, they act, as it were, according to the laws of the imponderables; they actually counteract the ponderables. Thus, the formation already has its cosmic origin, but every formation that occurs on earth is, so to speak, deformed by that which today emanates from the same cosmic planets that previously caused the formations; so that, for example, we have to understand a volatilization as a cosmic effect that exists today, but a crystallization as one in which the earlier is again produced against the present. Here we have temporal effects that diverge.

Now, you do not have to think of what I have now presented in a somewhat schematic way, of course, as if there were only a few constellations, but there are many constellations. If you imagine this, you naturally get a complicated system, something like a complicated system of curves that you can imagine in the cosmos and in the earth.

If you summarize the original sites where the metal forms is formed in the earth using curves – these curves must be imagined in the interior of the earth because that is where the center is; the metals do indeed come to the surface in later epochs , but it is actually in the interior of the earth that the forces by which the preservation takes place are located – and outside in the cosmos the forces that lead to the crystal forms. And if you now visualize this, we have a sphere and spherical shells intertwining in the most diverse ways and the resultant that would arise from it if I imagine the difference in strength between what is conserved and what is in the cosmos today. If I now imagine the differences in the forces in these two force systems, I actually get what represents the present state of the cosmic effect on earth. And everything that appears in the periodic system must be contained in this. The periodic system is nothing more than the interaction of a pre-earthly state with a present cosmic state that plays around the earth. These are only hints in answer, but I believe one can understand it.

Eugen Kolisko: So what we assign as metals to the individual planets has nothing to do directly with the substances we have in the periodic system?

Rudolf Steiner: No. Why iron is assigned to Mars, silver to the moon and so on, these are things that can no longer be understood by external science, quite impossible, because this assignment was obtained in a completely different way than is believed today, even by occultists. The older occultism, which was still based on atavistic clairvoyance, knew that our earth itself is internally structured, but only latently structured, and that we have to distinguish seven spheres in the earth sphere as a remnant of the pre-earthly cosmic effect on the earth, which were not quite regular, but different. So here there are seven spheres inside, that is the inner cosmos of the earth, that is the mirror image of the outer cosmos. And earthly iron is associated with this part of the earth, that is the Martian part of the earth, and mercury is associated with the Mercury sphere of the earth, and so on. So these substances of ours, as we have them today, would actually ultimately have to be traced back to the seven metals; they would have to. But we have to imagine that all these substances are actually quite complicated things.

We are talking about the atomic weights of these substances, aren't we? But these atomic weights don't really exist. You have to find the atomic weight of lead: 207. It is true that the atomic weight of lead is 207, but when you look for it, you don't actually find 207 in reality, but you actually find a number: 207 + x in an indeterminate way. What you actually find fluctuates back and forth, and the atomic weight for our elements is such that you can say: If you wanted to capture the state that represents the atomic weight, you would have to show an oscillating movement here, not a point. And we would not be allowed to describe the periodic system as it is, but we would have to have it in quivering movements, in inner quivering movement. It is the case that we cannot say at all that the atomic weight shows that we are now really dealing with solid elements. This idea of a rigid atom - think of what it means, what Dr. Kolisko just said: water is no longer water at a certain temperature. But the atomist of today is obliged to imagine hydrogen and oxygen, which are in the water, when the water is no longer there, unchanged, if he imagines atoms correctly. So one comes to regard such a property of matter as the actual determining factor: this rigidity, which is not present even at the point where the element is created. The element is not yet present, but the element is something that already escapes you when you want to grasp it. Because to determine atomic weights strictly is an absurdity. There is no atomic weight, but there are intermediate states around which the atomic weight varies, and one says: in the intermediate state, the atomic weight is such and such. There are just as few atomic weights as there is a certain size to a grain of wheat. Of course there is a mean size for the wheat grain, but the size fluctuates back and forth. It is the same with the atomic weight; there is only a mean state.

These considerations, which Dr. Kolisko has presented today, are extraordinarily fruitful and should be further developed, especially for chemistry. Then one would see that the course of development is such that in alchemical concepts, including the staff of Mercury, which was particularly cultivated there, certain concepts were generated that were appropriate to reality. We must work our way through to a way of looking at things that is appropriate to reality. But to do that, we need to — and this is what I would like to link to Dr. Kolisko's lecture, namely to answer these two questions very precisely — we need to come to that, and I would like to say this to Mr. Blümel as well, we need to learn to understand the extension as a function of the intensive, and vice versa, the intensive as a function of the extensive, so that these two things, which are so parallel to each other, can really be derived from each other. If it is possible to bring the intensive and the extensive into a functional context, it will also be possible to develop the symbolism needed to fully understand this periodic system, otherwise there will always be an ununderstood remainder.

Please forgive me, but these things are so unclear because they cover such a large area that one can say nothing else but just make out the outlines with the concepts. The concepts cannot be sharply contoured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roman Boos: Dear attendees! The aim of these lectures was to attempt to show, from the perspective of specialized science, how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science could lead to the fertilization and further development of the individual specialized scientific fields. The visitors will have had the thoroughly consistent impression throughout the whole event that something is not being hatched in a narrow circle, but that from a central point a real spiritual fertilization into the individual subject areas can take place. Even if not everyone was able to recognize this at the very beginning of their efforts, surely everyone who looked, as it were, at the driving forces present here, who looked at the fertilizing forces that radiate out and not on the value of the first formulated formulations, could be convinced that here is something in relation to our spiritual life, which deserves attention and, as far as possible, also cooperation and goodwill from wide circles – especially here in Switzerland. This is so because it is precisely here that a spiritual force is struggling to the light that can actually claim to have a spiritually fertilizing effect on the social community.

There will be an opportunity for discussion following Dr. Steiner's lecture on “Hygiene as a Social Question.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! That the social question is one of the most pressing issues of our time is not doubted in the broadest circles. And wherever there is even a modicum of concern for the issues arising from the development of human history in the present day, wherever there are threatening or unresolved impulses for the future, all of this can be summarized under the heading of the social question. But we must admit that the consideration and treatment of this social question in the present suffers from the fundamental defect that afflicts so much of our intellectual and moral life, and indeed of our whole civilized life, namely, the intellectualism of our time. It suffers from the fact that its problems are so often viewed only from the standpoint of an intellectualistic consideration. The social question is discussed more from the point of view of the right or the left. The intellectualism of these discussions is shown by the fact that they start from certain theories, from the assumption that this or that must be so or so, that this or that must be abolished. In doing so, little consideration is given to the human being himself. One treats people as if there were something general like “the human being”, as if there were not something that is individually developed in a particular way in each person. One does not turn one's attention to the uniqueness and peculiarity of the individual human being. Therefore, our whole consideration of the social question also takes on something abstract, something that today so rarely translates into social feelings, into the attitudes that play between person and person. The defect in our social thinking is most clearly seen when we focus on a specific area, one that is perhaps more suitable than many others for social reflection, for example, the area of hygiene, insofar as hygiene is a public matter that concerns not the individual but the human community.

Of course, we are not lacking in hygienic instructions, treatises and writings on health care as a public matter. But one must ask: how do these instructions, these considerations of hygiene, fit into social life? And here one must say: they are so introduced that individual discussions about proper health care are published as the result of medical, physiological, and scientific knowledge, whereby the trust that one has in a field whose inner essence one is not able to test is supposed to form the basis for the acceptance of such rules. On the basis of authority alone, the broadest sections of the population can accept the rules on hygiene that emerge from the study chambers and examination rooms, the medical laboratories, and are then made public.

If one is convinced, however, that in the course of modern history, in the course of the last four centuries, a yearning for a democratic order in all matters has arisen in humanity, then, even if it seems grotesque to many today, one is confronted with the undemocratic nature of the pure belief in authority that is demanded in the field of hygiene. The undemocratic nature of this blind faith in authority is juxtaposed with the yearning for democracy, as it has often - albeit, one might say, in a very paradoxical way - culminated in the present day.

I know very well that the sentence I have just uttered is perceived by many as paradoxical, because one simply does not combine the way someone receives health care-related information with the democratic demand that the community of emancipated people should judge public affairs that concern every emancipated person, whether directly or through their representatives. Of course it must be said that something like a hygienic view, a hygienic cultivation of public life, cannot be fully realized in a democratic way, because it depends on the judgment of the person seeking knowledge in a particular field. But on the other hand, the question must arise: should we not be striving for a greater democratization in such a field as this, which concerns every single person and thus the human community as closely, as infinitely closely as public health care does? Today, we are certainly told a great deal about the way in which man should live in terms of air and light, in terms of nutrition, in terms of the disposal of waste products produced either by man himself or by his environment, and so on and so forth. But the rules governing these things that are thrown upon humanity are mostly unworkable for the people to whom they are supposed to apply.

Now I do not wish to be misunderstood; I do not wish to be misunderstood as taking a particular stand on anything in this lecture, which is supposed to be dedicated to the topic “Hygiene as a social issue”. I do not wish to deal one-sidedly with what today tends to be treated one-sidedly from the point of view of a party or of a certain scientific conviction. I would like – perhaps you will permit this small apparent departure from the role in the introduction – I would like neither to take any party for the old superstition that devils and demons go around and move in and out of people as diseases, nor would I like to take sides for the modern superstition that the bacilli and bacteria move in and out of people and cause the diseases. Whether one is dealing with a spiritualist, spiritual superstition of old or with a materialistic superstition, that may concern us less today. But I would like to touch on something that permeates our entire education, especially insofar as this education depends on the fundamental scientific beliefs of our time.

Even if it is asserted from many sides today that scientifically materialism, as it asserted itself in the middle and still in the last third of the 19th century, has been overcome, this assertion cannot apply to the one who really sees through the essence of materialism and its opposite , because this materialism has been overcome at most for some people who see that today's scientific facts no longer allow us to declare in a sweeping way that everything that exists is just some mechanical, physical or chemical process taking place in the material world. It is not enough that, forced by the power of facts, some people have come to this conviction. For in the face of this conviction stands the other fact that now, despite this conviction, those who have it - and the others even more so - when it comes to explaining something specifically, to forming an opinion about something specific, then they do include the materialistic direction in their way of thinking. It is also said that atoms and molecules are harmless accounting coins, of which one does not want to claim anything other than that they are thought-things. But the consideration has therefore remained an atomistic, a molecularistic one. We explain the phenomena of the world in terms of the behavior and the mutual relationship of atoms or molecular processes, and it does not matter whether we now imagine that any thought, feeling or other process is only related to the material processes of atoms and molecules, but rather it depends on the direction of our entire state of mind, the direction of our spirit, when it takes as a basis for its explanations only what is thought in terms of atoms, what emerges from the smallest, the contrived smallest. What matters is not whether one has the conviction, literally or mentally, that there is something other than atomistic effects, than material atomic effects, but what matters is whether one has the possibility of making other explanations of the world the guiding principle of one's mind than deriving phenomena from the atomic. It is not what we believe, but how we explain, how we behave in our souls, that matters. And here, at this point, it must be stated with conviction that only genuine spiritual science, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, can help us to overcome the evil that can be characterized in this way, as I have just done.

I would like to prove that this can now be the case in concrete terms. There is hardly anything that confronts us with more confusion than the differences that are often asserted today between the human body and the human soul or the human spirit, between what are physical illnesses and what are so-called mental or spiritual illnesses. It is precisely the appropriate distinction and the appropriate interrelationship of such facts of human life as those of the sick body or the seemingly sick soul that suffer in terms of understanding under the materialistic-atomistic way of thinking. For what, then, is actually the essence of the materialism that has gradually emerged as the newer world view of many people and that has by no means been overcome, but is in fact in its heyday today? What is its essence? The essence of materialism is not that one looks at material processes, that one looks at the material processes that take place in the human body and that one devotedly studies the miracle-working and miracle-working of the human nervous system and the other human organs or the nervous system of animals or the organs of other living beings; it is not that studying these things makes one a materialist, but it is abandoning the spirit in the study of material processes that makes one a materialist, that one looks into the world of matter and sees only matter and material processes.

But this is what spiritual science must assert - today I can only speak about this point in summary - that wherever material processes appear to us externally for the senses, those processes which today's science alone wants to accept as observable and exact, that wherever these material processes are only the external appearance, the external manifestation of spiritual forces and powers at work behind and within them. It is not the hallmark of spiritual science to look at a person and say: Oh, there is the body; this body is a sum of material processes, but within it the person cannot exist alone, he has his immortal soul independently of it ; and the fact that one is now beginning to develop all kinds of abstract theories and views about this immortal soul, which is independent of the body, in a rather mystical way, does not characterize a spiritual worldview at all. One can certainly say: Man has, in addition to his body, which consists of material processes, an immortal soul that is taken to some spiritual realm after death. One is therefore not yet a spiritual scientist in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

One is only a spiritual scientist when one realizes that this material body with its material processes is a creature of the soul, when one understands in detail how the soul, which was there before birth or, let us say, before conception of the human being, works, how this soul forms, how it sculpts the structure, indeed the substantiation of the human body. If we can truly see the direct unity of this body and the soul everywhere, and if we can see how the soul's activity in the body wears out this body as such, how this body partially dies every minute, and how then, in the moment of death, I would say, the radical realization of what what happens to the body every moment through the influence of the soul and spirit, if one sees through this living interplay, this constant working of the soul in the body, in the individual concrete case, if one strives to say: the soul breaks down into very concrete processes, then it passes over into the processes of liver activity, then it passes over into the processes of breathing, then into the processes of heart activity, then into the processes of brain activity – in short, if one is able to present the physical body as the result of a spiritual one when describing the material in the human being, then one is a spiritual scientist. Spiritual science comes to a true appreciation of the material precisely because it does not see only what today's science sees in the individual concrete material process, what the eye ascertains or what is then recorded as the result of external observation in abstract terms. Rather, spiritual science is spiritual science solely because it shows everywhere how the spirit works in the material, how it looks devotedly at the material effects of the spirit.

That is the one thing that matters. On the other hand, it is important that one is thereby saved from all the abstract, chatty talk about a soul independent of the [physical] human being, about which, as far as life between birth and death is concerned, one can only fantasize. For between birth and death, with the exception of sleep, the soul and spirit are so devoted to the bodily effects that they live in them, through them, and present themselves in them. One must come to the point of being able to study the soul and spirit outside of the human life cycle and to accept the human life cycle between birth and death as a result of the soul and spirit. Then one looks at the real, concrete unity of the spiritual-soul with the physical-bodily. Then one does anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, because then one has the prospect that this human being, with all his individual structures, stands before one as a result of the spiritual-soul, also for knowledge. The mystical theosophical view, which puts forward beautiful theories about all kinds of body-free spiritualities, cannot serve the concrete sciences of life, it cannot serve life at all, it can only serve intellectualistic or soul-based lust, which wants to get rid of life, of the outer life, as quickly as possible and then, in order to have an inner satisfaction, to be able to indulge in an inner lust, weaves all kinds of fantasies about the spiritual and soul.

Here in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement, it is a matter of working very seriously, of cultivating a spiritual science that is able to enliven physics, mathematics, chemistry, physiology, biology and anthropology, so that it is not a matter of stating religiously or philosophically on the one hand that the human being an immortal soul, and then to pursue anthropology, biology, physics and chemistry as if one were only dealing with material processes, but rather it is a matter here of applying what can be gained in knowledge about the soul and spirit to the details of life, of looking into the miracle of the body itself. It may well be said, even if it sounds paradoxical to some: there are those who want to be good mystics or good theosophists and want to talk about everything under the sun, how the human being consists of a physical body, etheric body, astral body, I and so on, but they don't even have a clue about what expression of the soul it is when you sneeze, for example. It depends on seeing matter, not as matter, but as the manifestation of the spirit. Then one also receives sound, content-filled views about the spirit, but then one also receives a spiritual science that can be fruitful for the science of life.

But something else is also achieved with this. It achieves the ability to overcome what, in recent times, precisely because of the materialization of scientific knowledge, has driven us into specialization. I certainly do not want to deliver a diatribe against specialization, because I am well aware of its justification. I know that certain things today must be practiced by specialists simply because a specialized technique is needed for them. But the point is that if someone clings to the material, he can never become a specialist and gain a world view that can be applied in life, because material processes are an infinite field. They are an infinite field out in nature, and they are an infinite field within the human being. If you just study the human nervous system based on what is currently known, you can spend a long time on it, at least as much time as specialists are usually willing to spend on their studies. But if one has only what the material processes are in what happens in the nervous system, only what is expressed in the abstract terms that are the subject of science today, then nothing leads one to anything universal that can become the basis of a worldview. The moment you begin to observe spiritually, let us say, the human nervous system, you cannot observe this nervous system without what you find active in it as spirit leading you immediately to what underlies the muscular system, the bone system, the sense of the nervous system as something spiritual, because the spiritual is not something that can be broken down into individual parts like the material. Rather, the spiritual is something that – and this is only the most basic way of characterizing it – spreads out like a limb or an organism. And just as I cannot look at a person by merely looking at his five fingers and otherwise covering him, so too in spiritual science I cannot look at a single detail without what I perceive in this detail as spiritual-soul leading me to a totality. If we are led to such a totality — even if it is perhaps only a specialist in brain or nerve research — then we will be able to get an overall picture of the human being from the observation of this individual link in the human organism; then we will be led into the position to arrive at something truly universal for a world view, and then the peculiar thing is that we can begin to speak of something that can be understood by all people who have common sense and sound understanding.

That is the great difference between how spiritual science can speak about man and how specialized, materialistic science must speak about man. You see, let us take the simple case of how specialized, materialistic science is presented to you in any of the textbooks in use today. If you, as an ordinary person who has not learned much about the nervous system, take a manual about the nervous system in your hand – well, you will probably soon stop reading or, in any case, you will not gain very much that can give you a basis for looking at the human being as a real human being in his value, in his dignity. But if we listen to what spiritual science has to say about the human nervous system, then what leads to the whole human being follows everywhere. It provides such enlightenment about the whole human being that the idea that arises in one's mind presents something of the value, essence and dignity of the human being with whom one is dealing. And this applies even more when we look at the human being not just in terms of one of his or her many parts, but it applies especially when we look at the sick person, this sick person with his or her many deviations from the so-called normal, especially when we are able to look at the whole person, when he or she is under the influence of this or that disease. What nature presents to our soul in the sick person is apt to lead us deep into the world's interconnections, to show us how this person is organized and how, because of his organization, the atmospheric and even extraterrestrial influences can affect this person, how this human organization is connected to these or those substances of nature, which then turn out to be healing agents, and so on.

We are led into broad contexts, and it may be said that if we supplement what can be recognized in this way about the healthy human being with what can be recognized through the sick human being, then a deep insight into the whole context and the deeper meaning of life will open up. But everything that comes to light in this way is the basis for a knowledge of human nature, and can be expressed in such a way that it can be spoken to all people. Of course, we have not yet reached this point, because spiritual science, in the sense in which it is meant here, has only been working for a short time. Therefore, as Dr. Boos said in his introductory words just now, the lectures given here can often only be seen as a beginning. But the tendency of this spiritual science is to work out what is present in the individual sciences in such a way that what every human being should know about the human being can actually be brought to every human being.

And now imagine if spiritual science first has such a transforming effect on science and if spiritual science then succeeds in developing forms of knowledge for the healthy and sick human being that can be made accessible to general human consciousness If this succeeds, how different human beings will be in social life, how differently understanding one person will be confronted with another than today, when everyone passes by the other and has no understanding for the special individuality of this other person. The social question will only be taken out of its intellectualism when it will emerge from the most diverse areas of life based on factual knowledge, when it is based on the concrete experiences of life. This is particularly evident in the field of health care. Just imagine the social impact of fostering an understanding of what is healthy and what is sick in other people; just imagine what it means when health care is taken into the hands of all of humanity with understanding. Of course, the aim is not to cultivate scientific or medical dilettantism – that must be avoided – but imagine, it simply awakens sympathy, not just feeling, but understanding for the healthy and the sick in our fellow human beings, understanding based on an insight into the human being. Imagine the social effect of such a thing, and you will have to say to yourself: There you can see that social reform, the social reconstruction, must arise out of specialized knowledge in the individual fields, not out of general theories, whether they be Marxist, be they Oppenheim theories, be they theories of any kind that look beyond the human being and want to shape the world out of abstract concepts. Salvation cannot come from this, but from the dedicated study of the individual fields. And health care, hygiene, is such a very special field, because it leads us, I would say, closest to everything that our fellow human being experiences in terms of joy through his healthy, normal way of life or in terms of pain and suffering, of restrictions due to what lies within him as more or less sick.

This is something that immediately points us to the special social way in which spiritual science can achieve results in the field of hygiene. For if in such a way the cultivator of the knowledge of humanity, the cultivator of the knowledge of the healthy and the sick human being, is also the one who specializes as a doctor, with such knowledge in human society, then he will be able to create enlightenment within this human society, because he will be understood. And not only will the doctor develop a relationship with the community in which, if they are not a friend or relative, they will send for the doctor when they have a pain or have broken a leg, but the relationship with the doctor will develop in such a way that the doctor is the constant teacher and instructor of prophylactic health care, that in fact a constant intervention of the doctor is available not only to heal the person when the illness goes so far that he notices it, but also to keep people healthy as far as possible. A lively social activity will take place between the physician and all the rest of humanity. But then health itself will radiate from such knowledge, for it is precisely because materialism has extended to the medical view of life that we have truly come up against strange conceptions.

On the one hand, we have physical illnesses. They are studied by finding degenerations of the organs or whatever else is supposed to be physically perceptible or physically imagined within the human body's skin, and attention is drawn to the fact that any damage found can be repaired. In this direction, thoughts now turn quite materialistically to the physical body of the human being in its normal and abnormal states. Alongside this, the so-called soul or spiritual illnesses arise. These soul or spiritual illnesses have now been reduced, on the one hand, to mere brain illnesses or to illnesses of the nervous system because of materialistic thinking, and the foundations for this have also been sought in the other organ systems of the human being. But because they did not develop any kind of conception about the way in which spirit and soul work in the human body, they could not gain any conception of the relationship between mental illnesses, the so-called mental illnesses, and what the human being otherwise is. And so, I would like to say, mental illnesses stand on one side, even today they are grasped by a strange hybrid science, psychoanalysis, which thinks in a materialistic way but does not understand the materialistic at all; they stand there, these mental and soul illnesses, without being able to be brought together in any reasonable way with what actually happens in the human organism.

Spiritual science can now show – and I have drawn attention to this – that what I am saying here is not just a program, but that it is being pursued in detail – precisely on the occasion of the course for physicians that has been taking place here during these weeks. Spiritual science can indeed show in detail how all so-called mental and soul diseases are based on organ disorders, on organ degeneration, organ enlargement, organ reduction in the human organism. Somewhere in the heart, in the liver, in the lungs, something is not right if at the same time or later something occurs that is a so-called mental illness. A spiritual science that penetrates to recognize the spirit in the normal heart in its effectiveness is also capable of - and need not be ashamed of - seeking a cause for the so-called sick mind or soul in the degeneration of the heart, in the failings of the heart.

The main mistake of materialism is not that it denies the spirit - in which case religion could still ensure that the spirit is recognized - the main mistake of materialism is that it does not recognize matter, because it only observes its exterior. This is precisely the defect of materialism, that it gains no insight into matter, for example in the purely psychoanalytic treatment, in the mere observation of something that has taken place in the soul, which psychoanalysis calls islands of the soul, and thus an abstraction. Rather, one must follow how certain impressions of the soul, which a person receives at this or that time in his life and which are normally bound to the normal organism, impinge on defective organs - instead of, for example, on a healthy liver, on a diseased one; such an impingement may perhaps show itself at a completely different time than when the defect has become organically noticeable.

Spiritual science need not shy away from showing how so-called mental or psychological illnesses are always connected with something in the human body. Spiritual science must strictly point out that if one merely studies the soul, the psychological complex, the deviations of the soul from the so-called normal psychological life, one has at most a one-sided diagnosis. Therefore, psychoanalysis can never be anything more than diagnostic; it can never lead to real therapy in this field. For this reason, because therapy for mental illnesses must begin with the physical examination, we must know the ramifications of the spiritual in matter down to the individual parts if we want to know where to start in the material body – which is, however, spiritualized – to cure that which only shows symptoms in abnormal mental conditions. Spiritual science must most decidedly emphasize that the so-called mental and soul diseases must be traced back to the organology of the human being. However, one can only see into the abnormal organology of the human being if one can follow the spirit into the smallest parts of matter.

And the other way around: what appear to be merely soul phenomena or phenomena that act in the soul, let us say what emerges in the temperaments and in the activity of the human temperaments , in the whole way in which a person plays as a small child, how he walks, what he does, all this, which today is only understood in a mental-spiritual sense, also has its physical side. And a failure in relation to some aspects of a child's education can appear later in a very ordinary physical illness. Indeed, in certain cases, when one is dealing with mental illnesses, one is led to look at the physical aspects in order to explore what is important, and in the case of physical illnesses, to look at the spiritual aspects and explore what is important. For that is the essential thing in spiritual science, that it does not speak in abstractions of a nebulous spiritual, as mystics and one-sided theosophists do, but that it follows the spirit into its material effects, that it nowhere grasps the material as as it is grasped by today's external science, but everywhere, in the contemplation of the material, it penetrates to the spirit and can thus also observe where an abnormal soul life must express itself in that an abnormal bodily life is present, even if it is perhaps hidden externally.

In the broadest circles today, people have completely false ideas about seriously anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – perhaps sometimes rightly so, when one hears those who do not truly want to go into what it is actually about, and only talk about abstract theories, that man consists of this and that, and that there are repeated earth lives and so on. These things are, of course, extremely important and very nice. But when it comes to working very seriously in this spiritual-scientific movement, then the individual chapters, the individual areas of this life, must be dealt with. And in the broadest sense, this in turn leads to a socially minded gathering of people. For when one sees how the soul, appearing sick, radiates its impulses into the organism, when one can feel this connection between the organism and the soul that appears to be sick - feel with understanding - and when, on the other hand, one knows how the institutions of life also affect the physical human being's physical health, how the spiritual, which apparently only exists externally in social institutions, has an effect on the physical health of the human being, if one has an overview of all this, then one is involved in human society in a completely different way. You begin to gain a real understanding of people, and you treat others quite differently; you pursue their character quite differently. You know that certain qualities are connected to this or that, you know how to behave towards these qualities, you know how to place people's temperaments in human society in the right way, and especially how to develop them in the right way, especially when you have associated tasks with them.

One social area in particular will need to be intensively influenced in terms of hygiene by a knowledge of human nature gained in this way: the area of education. Without really knowing people very well, it is impossible to appreciate what it means when children sit in school with stooped backs, causing their breathing to become irregular, or when they are not encouraged to speak loudly and distinctly, clearly vocalizing and clearly consonanting. The whole of later life depends essentially on whether the child breathes correctly at school and whether he is encouraged to speak loudly and distinctly and with articulation.

In such matters – I am only giving examples here, as the same could be said for other areas – the specialization of overall hygiene in the school system is evident, and this in particular shows the full social significance of hygiene. It also shows, however, how life demands that we do not further specialize, but that we bring together the specialized into an overall view. We need not only the knowledge that enables a teacher to educate a child in a particular way according to certain pedagogical norms, but we also need the knowledge that enables a teacher to judge what it means when he or that sentence of the child's clearly articulated utterances or when he lets the child, after saying half a sentence, lets out another breath and so on and does not ensure that the air is used up while the sentence is being spoken. Of course, there are many clues and rules about this too, but the right way of mutual recognition and the right application of these things only enter our hearts when we grasp the full significance for human life and for social health, for only then does the matter become a social impulse.

These considerations were the basis for the pedagogical-didactic course I gave to the teachers at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, which was the starting point for the founding of the school. Teachers are needed who can work from the full depth of a humanistic worldview for the education and teaching of children. Everything that has been incorporated into the sentences that have been expressed as a pedagogical-didactic art strives to turn the children who are being educated and taught into people who, later on, by being encouraged to perform the functions of life in the right way as a child, will have lungs and liver and heart and stomach in order because the soul has been worked on in the right way.

This world view will never interpret the old saying, “A healthy soul lives in a healthy body,” in a materialistic way.

A materialistic interpretation would say that if you have a healthy body, if you have made it healthy with all possible physical means, then it will automatically become the bearer of a healthy soul. That is nonsense. It makes sense if you proceed in the following way, that is, if you say to yourself: “There is a healthy body in front of me, which shows me that the power of a healthy soul has built it up, shaped it, and made it healthy.” I recognize from this body that an autonomous healthy soul has worked in it. That is the meaning of the saying. But only in this way can this saying also be the basis for healthy hygiene. In other words, we do not need a school doctor who visits the school once a fortnight, if that, and doesn't know what to do with himself, in addition to teachers who only work from an abstract pedagogical science. No, we need a living connection between medical science and the art of teaching. We need a pedagogical art that educates and teaches children in a hygienically correct way in all its measures. That is what makes hygiene a social issue, because the social issue is essentially an educational issue, and the educational issue is essentially a medical issue, but only a question of that medicine that is spiritually fruitful, of a hygiene that is spiritually fruitful.

These things then point to something else that is extraordinarily significant, especially with regard to the topic of “hygiene as a social question”. Because, my dear attendees, when spiritual science is cultivated and when spiritual science is something concrete for the human being, then he knows that in what he receives in spiritual science there is something that differs from what he receives in mere intellectualism and in the natural science of the present, too, is mere intellectualism. He knows that what he has in mere intellectualism or in the merely intellectualistically developed natural science or in the merely intellectualistically developed history or jurisprudence of today is different from what he has in mere intellectualism. All of today's sciences are intellectualistic; if they claim to be empirical sciences, it is only because they interpret the empirically observed results of experience in an intellectualistic way. What is given in the humanities differs quite essentially from these natural science or other results interpreted in an intellectualistic way. It would even be quite sad if that which lives in our intellectualistic culture were not merely an image, but a real power that has a deeper effect on people. Anything intellectualistic remains only on the surface of the human being. This sentence is meant to be very comprehensive.

Those who pursue spiritual science only intellectually, that is, who only make notes: there is a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, an ego, repeated earthly lives, karma, and so on and who notes these down in the same way as in natural science or in today's social science, is not seriously engaged in spiritual science, for he merely transfers the way of thinking he otherwise has to what confronts him in spiritual science. But the essential thing about spiritual science is that it must be thought in a different way, felt in a different way, and experienced in a very different way than the intellectualistic way. Therefore spiritual science is something that, through its very nature, maintains a living relationship to the healthy and the sick person, albeit in a somewhat different way than one might often dream of. People will surely have become sufficiently convinced of how powerless one is with what one, whether as admonishment or as encouragement, begins in the purely intellectualistic culture in relation to the so-called mentally ill. The mentally ill person claims that voices are speaking to him; you tell him all kinds of things that you find based on your intellectual reason – in vain, because he has all kinds of objections for you. This alone could indicate that we are not dealing with an illness of the conscious or even the subconscious soul life, but with an illness of the organism. Spiritual science teaches us to recognize that one cannot, however, use such methods, which are supposed to be so-called spiritual ones, in which, for example, one resorts to hypnosis and suggestion, to treat so-called mental or soul diseases, but that one must treat them in so-called physical ways, that is, by healing the organs, for which, however, one really needs spiritual knowledge of the human being. Spiritual knowledge knows that it should not actually intervene at all in the field of so-called mental illnesses with mere spiritual or psychological procedures, because the mental illness consists precisely in the fact that the spiritual element of the human being is suppressed, as it is otherwise only in sleep, and is weak in this suppression, but that one must cure the organ so that it in turn takes back the soul and the spirit in a healthy way. On the other hand, that which does not arise from the intellect, from the head, but from the whole human being as a spiritual-scientific result, when it appears as imagination, inspiration, intuition, and when it is taken up by the human being, engages the whole organism. It really engages the physical organization of the human being in a healing way, which is what spiritual science really is.

On the other hand, there is no proof that some spiritual scientists feel ill within spiritual science or show the opposite of what I have just said. There are so many who are not spiritual scientists, but who are intellectualistic collectors of notes on spiritual-scientific results. But to spread spiritual science in its true substance is itself a social hygiene, for it affects the whole human being, it normalizes his organology when it threatens to develop this or that tendency towards deviation into the abnormal after dreams or after another side. This is the tremendous difference between what is given in spiritual science and what occurs in mere intellectual science: that the concepts emerging in the field of intellectualism are much too weak because they are merely pictorial to intervene in the human being, to be able to have a healing effect on him. The concepts of spiritual science, on the other hand, are such that they are drawn from the whole human being. In the formation of spiritual-scientific concepts, it is truly not only the brain that has been involved, but also the lungs and liver and heart and the whole human being. And if one imbues oneself with these spiritual-scientific concepts, if one assimilates them through healthy human understanding, they in turn have a hygienic effect on the whole human being. This is what, starting from spiritual science, can intervene in a directive way in hygiene as a social matter.

But in many other ways too — I can only give a few examples — spiritual science will intervene in a guiding way in the whole of humanity's health life, when this spiritual science really takes root among humanity in its full seriousness. I will point out just one example. The relationship between the awake human being and the sleeping human being is one of the chapters that must be studied again and again through spiritual science. The same applies to the enormous difference that exists between the human organization in waking and in sleeping. How spirit and soul behave when we are awake, when the physical and spiritual and soul aspects of the human being interpenetrate each other, and how they behave when they are temporarily separated from each other, as in sleep – this is carefully studied through spiritual science.

Now I can only give a certain sentence, but it is a very certain result of spiritual science. We see so-called epidemic diseases occur in life, diseases that affect whole crowds of people, which are therefore also a social matter at the same time. Ordinary materialistic science studies them in terms of the human physical organism. It knows nothing of the tremendous significance for epidemics and for the predispositions for epidemic diseases that lies in the abnormal behavior of humans in terms of waking and sleeping. What happens in the human organism during sleep is something that, when it happens in abundance, for example, predisposes to a high degree for so-called epidemic diseases. People who, by sleeping too long, set processes in motion in the human organism that should not be there because sleep should not interrupt waking life for so long are predisposed to epidemic diseases in a completely different way and they also engage with epidemics in a completely different way.

Now you can see for yourself what it means to educate people about the correct distribution of sleep and wakefulness. You cannot do that by means of regulations. At best you can order people not to send their children to school when they have scarlet fever; you cannot give lectures when there is an outbreak of influenza: people do not respond to that - because today man tends towards freedom, I mean, because the sense of authority is not as great as in former times - people do not respond to that. I am not saying that they are not right to do so, I am not saying anything against what happens in this way, but you cannot possibly tell people in the same way: you must sleep seven hours. Nevertheless, it is more important than the other rules that people who need it sleep seven hours, the others who do not need it may sleep much shorter and so on. But such things, which are so intimately connected with the most personal aspects of a person's life, have a social effect in a magnificent way. It actually depends on the most intimate aspects of a person how the social effects occur, whether, for example, a larger or smaller number of people are withdrawn from this or that occupation or not, which may have an effect in a completely different place under certain circumstances. Hygiene really does have a tremendous impact on social life. Quite apart from what one thinks about contagion or non-contagion, this element intervenes in social life during epidemics. You cannot work through external regulations, you can only work if you bring a lay audience into human society, but one that has an understanding of people that stands in contrast to the physician's educational prophylaxis, wherever a lively interaction between the expert physician and the layman can occur to maintain health.

If we take all these things into consideration, we can say: Here we have described one side of hygiene as a social question, which in the most eminent sense depends on our having a free spiritual life, on our actually having a spiritual life in which, within the spiritual realm, those who are engaged in the cultivation of the spiritual life, including its practical aspects such as hygiene, are completely independent of everything else that does not give pure knowledge, that does not cultivate the spiritual life itself. What each individual can do for the good of his fellow human beings must arise entirely from his abilities. There must be no state standards for this, nor must there be any dependence on economic powers. This must be placed in the personal sphere of dependence of the individual human being and must continue to be placed in the understanding trust that others who need the application of his abilities can place in the capable person.

What is needed is a spiritual life that is completely independent of all authority, of the state and of the economy, and that works purely from within its own spiritual forces in an expert manner.

If you think about what hygiene can really achieve, which is closely connected with insightful human knowledge and insightful social behavior, and if you look at the individual branch of hygiene with expert insight , then you will come to the conclusion - and this is precisely what the individual, concrete subject area demands, and it could be demonstrated for other areas as well as for hygiene - that the spirit must be taken into administration by those who are involved in its cultivation. No matter what abstract theories may say against the independent position of intellectual life, the individual concrete subject demands that the administrators of intellectual life are not merely experts who work for the ministries, but that those who are active in intellectual life must also be the administrators of that intellectual life, and indeed the sole administrators of that intellectual life. Then, when social insight arising out of a free spiritual life has created a hygiene that really exists as a social institution, it will be possible to work economically for this hygiene in a completely different way, precisely in an independent economic life, in an economic life that is structured as I have described in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, as it has been repeatedly described in the journals that serve this idea of the threefold social organism, for example in the Swiss “Social Future”, which is published by Dr. Boos.

If the forces for the cultivation of hygiene that lie dormant in the bosom of human society are received by society with understanding, if this is accepted with human understanding by society, if this becomes general order, then everything that can be carried out of this independent economic life, without regard to any dependence on impulses of gain or state impulses, everything that can be worked out of this independent economic life purely, can be carried into economic life, into independent economic life, everything that can work purely out of this independent economic life, without any consideration of any dependence on profit impulses or on state impulses, can be carried into economic life, and that which must be cultivated in the service of genuine, true hygiene. But then, and only then, will it be possible for that high spirit to enter into economic life, which is necessary in order for hygiene to be cultivated in human life. If the mere acquisitiveness of our economic life is dominant, which has an ever-increasing tendency to be incorporated into the unified state, and if the general opinion is that one must produce that which earns the most, then the self-contained impulses of a free spiritual life cultivated in this field of hygiene cannot assert themselves; then this spiritual life becomes dependent on the extra-spiritual, on the state or economic, then the economic becomes master over the spiritual. The economic must not become master over the spiritual. This is best seen when one is to produce what is required by the spirit in economic life, when one is to serve a genuine, true hygiene.

The forces of economic life, of free economic life, will be added in the threefold social organism to the insight that becomes a public matter and to the understanding of the human being that becomes a public matter. And when, on the one hand, people are immersed in a free spiritual life in which a hygiene truly based on objective ground can be cultivated, and when, on the other hand, people develop that high spirit through which everyone in economic life will in turn approach production with understanding – but with such understanding does not arise merely from the sense of acquisition, but from the insights that arise in free spiritual activity - then, once this insightful social understanding of people will be there, then people will be able to come together democratically in parliaments or otherwise, because then the insight into the necessity of hygiene as a social phenomenon will be shaped from the free spiritual life. And what is necessary for the maintenance of hygiene will be shaped by the economic life, which is based on practical and professional considerations, through the high spirit that will be developed in it. Then people, having come of age, will be able to negotiate on the basis of the legal system, on the one hand from their insight and understanding of human nature, and on the other hand from their relations with the economic system that serves hygiene. Then people will be able to negotiate as equals on the basis of state or legal life about the measures that can be taken with regard to hygiene and public health care. Then, of course, it will not be laymen, dilettantes, who will be healing, but the person who has come of age will face the expert as an equal with understanding when the expert tells him this or that. But the layman's understanding of human nature makes it possible for him, in the context of what is cultivated together with the physician in social life, to approach specialized knowledge with understanding in such a way that he can say “yes” in a democratically conceived parliament not merely on the basis of authority but on the basis of a certain understanding. If we take a close look at such a specialized field and see how the three members of the social organism interact, then, my dear audience, we find the full justification of this idea of the threefold social organism. One can only fight this idea of the threefold social organism if one has first grasped it only in the abstract.

Today, I could not give you more than a sketchy indication of what follows from the threefold social order in a specific area, the area of hygiene, if one thinks correctly about it. But if the paths I have only been able to hint at today are pursued further, it will be seen that although those who approach the impulse of the threefold social organism with a few abstract concepts may, to a certain extent, oppose it – as a rule, they present reasons that one has long since accepted as objections oneself. But anyone who approaches the individual areas of life with full inner understanding and the living out of these individual areas with all that they bring into human life - that is what social life is about - anyone who really understands something in a specific area of life, who makes an effort to understand something of true life practice in any field, will be led more and more into the direction indicated by the idea of the threefold social organism.

This idea did not arise out of a reverie, out of abstract idealism; it arose as a social demand of the present and the near future precisely from the concrete, appropriate consideration of the individual areas of life. And again, when one penetrates these individual areas of life with what emerges from the impulse of the threefold social organism, then one finds for all these areas that which, it seems to me, is needed for them today. And I just wanted to give you a few brief indications this evening of how the field in which blind submission to authority is still accepted today, can be enriched by the spiritual science that follows from the threefold social organism. For this reason it may be said here: Through this enrichment, which the field of hygiene can receive from a spiritually expanded medicine, hygiene can become a social, a truly social matter, and it can also be cultivated in the most genuine sense in a highly democratic way as a general matter of the people.

Following his lecture, Rudolf Steiner answers a series of questions submitted in writing.

Dear attendees! With regard to the matters discussed today, it is important to first address the whole spirit of what has been said. It is sometimes difficult to answer questions that are formulated from the present way of thinking and feeling without reformulating them or at least without explaining them properly. This first question, which probably seems terribly simple to you or many of you, so that it could be answered in a few sentences or with one sentence, is:

How do you get rid of sleeping too long?

Well, to answer this question, I would have to give an even longer lecture than the one I have already given, because I would first have to gather the various elements in order to answer this question properly. But perhaps the following can be said: Today, there is an intellectualistic state of mind in almost all people. Those who believe that they judge or live from their feelings, or who believe that they are not intellectualistic because of some other reason, are intellectualistic all the more. Now the basic character of intellectualistic soul life is that our instincts are ruined by it. Man's right instincts are ruined. It is actually the case that if you want to point to instincts that have not been completely ruined, you either have to point to primitive man or even to the animal kingdom.

For you see, on another occasion these days I was able to point to an example that says a great deal. There are birds that, out of their greed, eat insects, for example, cross spiders. But they fall into convulsions, into spasms, from eating these cross spiders, which are poisonous to them; they must die miserably very soon after swallowing the cross spider. But if henbane is nearby, the bird flies to it, sucks out the healing juice and saves its life with it. Now think about how something has developed that in us humans has shrunk to the few reflex instincts we have. For example, when a fly lands on our nose, we make a movement to get rid of it without first pondering the situation. A defensive instinct takes effect on the insult stimulus. In the bird that eats the cross spider, the effect that the cross spider has on its organism is followed by such an instinctive defense that it drives it to do something quite reasonable. We can still find such instincts in people who lived in the dim and distant past, if we understand their history correctly. But in our time, we have different experiences. I have always found it extremely painful when I came to someone who sat down at the lunch table and had a scale next to their plate. A scale, you really do experience something like that – I was otherwise accustomed to knife and fork and similar implements lying next to the plate – a scale, and with that he weighed the piece of meat, because only then did he know how much meat he should eat according to his organism, when he had weighed it. Just imagine how far removed from all real, original instincts a humanity has now become, to which something like this has to be prescribed.

It is therefore important not to stop at intellectualism, but to ascend to spiritual-scientific knowledge. You will now believe that I speak pro domo, even if it is pro domo of this great house, but I do not speak pro domo, but I actually express what I believe to have recognized as truth, quite apart from the fact that I myself represent this truth. One can see that if one penetrates not only into the merely intellectual, but into that which is to be grasped spiritually, and which therefore comes before humanity more in a pictorial sense, one you realize that by grasping such knowledge, which is not accessible to the mere intellect, you are led back to healthy instincts, not in individual cases, but more in the things that lie in the depths of life. He who spends at least some time, even if it be ever so little, on developing the quite different frame of mind that is needed to really understand spiritual science, will be led back to sound instincts in such matters as, for instance, the need for sleep. The animal does not sleep too much in normal living conditions. Primitive man did not sleep too much either. One need only educate oneself to healthy instincts, which are being unlearned in today's so intellectualized culture, so that one can say: A really effective way to get rid of sleeping too long is to be able to absorb spiritual truths without falling asleep in the process. If you fall asleep at once when you hear spiritual truths, then you will indeed not be able to get rid of sleeping too long. But if you succeed in really taking an inner human interest in the spiritual truths you are learning, then this inner human interest is activated in such a way that you can actually find out what bedtime is for your organism.

On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to give intellectualized rules, for example, to say that a person who has this or that about his liver or kidneys, which does not exactly make him ill in the usual sense, but which is there nonetheless, must sleep for such and such a length of time. As a rule, this does not lead to anything special. And artificially inducing sleep is not the same as when the body, out of its need for sleep, only denies the mind entry for as long as it needs to. So one can say: Proper hygiene, which follows directly from spiritual science, will also lead people to measure their sleep in the right way. Therefore, the other question that has been asked here cannot be answered so easily:

How can you know how much sleep you need?

I would like to say that you don't need to know this through discursive thought, it's not necessary at all, but you do need to acquire such instincts, which you acquire not by collecting notes from the humanities, but by the way you understand humanities when you take it in with full participation. Once you have developed this instinct, you can then measure the right amount of sleep for you individually. That is what is usually said about it. As I said, I can only give you a guide to answering this question, not what is perhaps expected. But what is expected is not always the right thing.

Is sleeping with the window open healthy?

It is not always possible to give a general answer to such questions. It is quite possible that for one person sleeping with the window open is very healthy, depending on the particular structure of their respiratory organs, but that for another person, for example, a room that is well ventilated before sleeping but then has the windows closed while they sleep is better. It is actually a matter of gaining an understanding of the relationship between the human being and the extra-human environment, in order to be able to judge in individual cases on the basis of this understanding.

How do you explain the occurrence of mental disorders caused by crimes committed from a spiritual point of view, that is, how can the physical illness that underlies the mental disorders be recognized here?

Well, here it would be necessary to go into the whole criminal and, basically, psychiatric anthropology if the question is to be dealt with exhaustively. I would just like to say the following: Firstly, when considering such things, it is important to assume that there are abnormalities among the organ dispositions of a person who becomes a criminal. You only have to follow the studies of Moriz Benedikt, the first important criminal anthropologist, who was really quite objective in his research in this direction, and you will see how, through pathological examination, the forms of individual human organs can indeed be linked to a disposition to commit crimes. So there is an abnormality inherent in it, although, of course, materialistic thinkers like Moriz Benedikt draw false conclusions from it, because someone who shows such signs in this direction is by no means a born criminal from the outset. The point is that one can work on the existing defects in the organism - these are organ defects, not the already existing mental illness - precisely through education and later through appropriate spiritual means, that is, in a spiritual-mental way, if only the facts are examined in a spiritual-scientific way. So the conclusions that Benedikt draws from the pathological investigations are not correct. One can indeed point to such organ defects, but then one must be clear about the fact that in ordinary human life, those things that are not intellectual but are emotional or affective do have an effect. These have an effect, to be sure, first on the glandular activity or the like, on the secretory activity, but in turn also on the organs. In this regard, I advise you to read, for example, an interesting booklet written by a Danish physician about the mechanics of emotional movements. There are many useful things in it in this regard. And now imagine the bodily disposition that can be traced in every person who comes into question as a criminal, and add to this everything that follows for the caught criminal in terms of emotional upheaval and what as a continuation of these mental shocks now in turn affects the organs, then you have the way to look for the defective organs for what produced a mental illness as a consequence, which can occur when a crime is committed. In this way, one must gain an understanding of such connections.

How does Theosophy relate to Anthroposophy? Is the former Theosophy no longer fully recognized here?

In answer to this I would simply say: Nothing but anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has ever been advocated here, and what is advocated here today has always been advocated here, and if this has been identified with what is advocated on many sides as so-called Theosophy, then that is simply due to a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding will also remain a misunderstanding because anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has, within certain limits, been within the framework of the Theosophical Society for some time; but even within the framework of this Theosophical Society, the representatives of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science at that time advocated nothing other than what I advocate here today. They just watched for a long time, as long as it didn't look too heretical. But when they realized that anthroposophy is something quite different from the abstract mysticism that often claims to be theosophy, they threw out the anthroposophists. This procedure has been adopted from the other side, while what is represented here has never had any other form than the one it has today.

Of course, those who deal with things only superficially or who have gained their knowledge only from those members of the Society who themselves have only dealt with it superficially – for one does not always have to stand outside in order to have a superficial understanding of anthroposophy or to confuse anthroposophy with theosophy, one can also stand inside with it in society - those who only acquire knowledge in the way of such superficially grasped activity come to such confusions. But here that is represented, which I have today characterized for a particular area, and never has anything else been represented here, even if, of course, work is constantly being done and certain things today can be characterized more precisely, more fully, more intensely than they could have been fifteen, ten or five years ago. That is precisely the nature of the work: that one progresses, that one progresses in particular in the formulation of making oneself understood in something as difficult as spiritual science. One really need not concern oneself with those people who, out of ill will, have twisted the fact that what was previously expressed in an imperfect way is later expressed more perfectly, and who derive all kinds of transformations of world views from it. For spiritual science, as it is meant here, is something living and not something dead, and the one who believes that it cannot progress, who wants to nail it down to where it once stood, in a way that often happens, does not believe in the living, but wants to make it into something dead.

Would you please explain how an epidemic like the flu or scarlet fever comes about if not through the transmission of germs. For many diseases, the pathogen has been scientifically identified. What is your position on this?

Well, if I were to discuss this question, which I have indicated that I do not want to take sides on, then I would have to give a whole lecture. However, I would like to draw attention to the following. The person who, through his knowledge, is compelled to point out that for illnesses accompanied by the appearance of bacilli or bacteria, there are deeper causes as primary causes than just the appearance of the bacilli, does not yet claim that the bacilli are not there. It is quite another thing to claim that the bacilli are there and that they appear in the wake of the illness than to look for the primary cause in the bacilli. What needs to be said in this regard has just been developed in detail in this course for physicians, which is now being held. But it takes time. This also applies to certain elements that need to be dealt with first. This cannot be quickly settled in a question and answer session. Nevertheless, I would like to point out the following. The human constitution is not as simple as one often imagines. Man is a many-sided being. In my book 'Riddles of the Soul' I show at the beginning that man is a threefold being, a being that can be called, firstly, the nerve-sense human being, secondly, the rhythmic human being, and thirdly, the metabolic human being. That is what man is. And these three aspects of human nature interact with each other; and if the human being is to be healthy, they must not interact in any other way than that there is a certain degree of separation between the areas. For example, the nerve-sense human being, who is more than what today's physiology imagines, cannot simply transfer his effects on the metabolic human being in a different way than that these effects are mediated by the rhythmic movements of the circulation and breathing processes, which extend to the outermost periphery of the organism. But this interaction can be interrupted in a certain way.

Now, this interaction brings about something very specific. For example, when such questions are asked, you will forgive me for having to answer them appropriately. I will be as discreet as possible, but it is necessary to say some words that have to be heard appropriately. For example, it is quite true that processes take place in the human abdomen that are integrated into the whole organism. If they are integrated into the whole organism, then they work in the right way. If they are either directly increased in the abdomen, so that they become more active there, or if the corresponding processes in the human head or in the human lungs become less intense, then something very peculiar occurs. Then it becomes apparent that the human organism, in order to live normally, must develop processes within itself that are only allowed to develop to a certain extent so that they take up the whole person. If the process is increased, then it localizes itself, and then, for example, a process occurs in the human abdomen whereby what takes place in the human head or in the lungs and what corresponds to certain processes in the abdomen is not properly separated. The processes always correspond in such a way that they run parallel to each other. But as a result, what may only be present in man to a certain extent in order to maintain his vitality, the vitality carried by spirit and soul, is, so to speak, raised above a certain level. Then, I would say, it becomes the atmosphere for all kinds of lower organisms, for all kinds of small organisms, and these small organisms can then develop there. That which is the creative element of the small organisms is always present in the human being, it is only extended throughout the whole organism. When it is concentrated, it provides a breeding ground for small organisms, microbes; they find a home in it. But the reason why they can thrive there is to be found in extremely fine processes in the organism, which then turn out to be the primary ones.

I am not speaking out of antipathy to the germ theory; I fully understand the reasons that people have for believing in germs. Believe me, if I did not have to speak as I am speaking now for factual reasons, I would recognize these reasons, but here it is the realization that necessarily leads to the recognition of something else and that then forces one to say it. [For example, I can say:] I see a certain landscape, there are many extraordinarily beautiful cattle, well cared for. I now ask: Why are these living conditions in the area? They come from the beautiful cattle. I explain the living conditions of this area by explaining that beautiful cattle have moved in from somewhere; they have spread there. I will not do that, but I will examine the primary causes, the diligence and understanding of the people, and that will explain to me why these beautiful cattle are developing on this land. But I would be making a superficial explanation if I just said: It's beautiful here, life is good here because beautiful cattle have moved in.

The same logic basically applies if I find the typhoid bacillus and then declare that one has typhoid fever because the typhoid bacillus has moved in. Much more is needed to explain typhoid fever than simply to refer to the typhoid bacillus. But one is misled in a completely different way if one succumbs to such false logic. Certainly, the primary processes, which provide the typhoid bacillus with the basis for its existence, are in turn the basis for all kinds of other things that are not primary. And it is very easy to either completely confuse or conflate what is secondary with the actual original clinical picture. These are the things that lead to the right point here, or show how what is justified in a certain sense can be shown to have its limits.

Perhaps you can see from the way I have given this answer – although I can only sketch it out and am therefore easily misunderstood – that this is really not about the all-too-popular ranting against the germ theory, but that it is really about examining things very seriously.

Could you give us some examples of how physical organic disorders can cause mental and spiritual suffering?

Well, if it were to be answered in detail, that too would, of course, be taking us much too far today. But I would like to point out just one thing. You see, the development of medical thought in the history of medicine is not as it is presented today, with Hippocrates as the beginning of medicine and Hippocraticism as its further development. As far as we can trace it, we know that Hippocrates was much more the last outpost of an old instinct-based medicine than merely the beginning of today's intellectual medicine. But we find something else as well. You see, in this old instinctive medicine, as long as it was still in force, people did not speak, for example, of a certain kind of mental depression, which is a very abstract way of expressing it, but rather of hypochondria - abdominal cartilaginousness. So they knew that hypochondria is a disorder of the abdomen, a hardening of the abdomen. We cannot say that the ancients were more mystical than we are.

Likewise, it is easy to show how certain chronic lung defects are definitely connected with what could be called a false mystical sense in people. And so we could point out all sorts of things, quite apart from the fact that – again, in line with a correct instinct – the ancients definitely pointed to something organic when it came to the temperaments. They derived the choleric temperament from bile, from white bile, the melancholic from black bile and all that black bile causes in the abdomen. They then derived the sanguine temperament from blood and the phlegmatic temperament from what they called mucus. But then, when they saw degenerations of the temperaments, they were absolutely things that indicated the degenerations of the organic matter concerned. How this was done in instinctive medicine and in instinctive hygiene can certainly be taken up in a strictly scientific way into the state of mind and, from the point of view of our present knowledge, cultivated.

Here is a question that could lead to further misunderstanding: Do you recognize eye diagnosis? Do you accept it as a science?

Now, it is generally true that in the case of an organism, and especially in the case of the complicated human organism, if you look at it in the right way, you can draw conclusions about the whole from all the possible individual parts. And again, the way these individual parts are arranged in the human organism has a great significance. In a sense, what the eye diagnostician examines in the iris is, on the one hand, so very isolated from the rest of the human organism, and on the other hand, it is so peculiarly integrated into the rest of the organism that it is indeed an expressive organ. But precisely with such things, one must not schematize; and the mistake with such things is that one does just that. For example, it is quite true that people of a different mental and physical constitution show different characteristics in their irises than other people. If one wants to apply something like this, one needs such intimate knowledge of what happens in the human organism that, if one has this intimate knowledge, one actually no longer needs to search from a single organ. And if you are instructed to adhere to some intellectualized rules and to do such things schematically, then not much of value will come of it.

What relation do diseases have to the progress of world history, especially the newly emerging diseases?

A chapter of an entire cultural history! Well, I will just note the following. When studying history, one must have a sense for practicing symptomatology, that is, to understand much of what is taken as history today only as a symptom for much that lies much deeper behind it, which is really the spiritual current that only carries these symptoms. And so that which is in the depths of human development does indeed appear symptomatically in these or those diseases of the time. It is interesting to study the relationships between what prevails in the depths of human development and what takes place in the symptoms of this or that disease. One can also conclude from the presence of certain diseases that impulses are at work in historical development that cannot escape a symptomatology of this kind. But the question could then also point to something else that is not insignificant when pursuing the historical development of humanity. This is this: Diseases, whether they occur in individual human beings or take the form of an epidemic in human society, are often also reactions to other degenerations, which may be regarded as less serious from a health point of view, but which must nevertheless be regarded as very serious from a moral or spiritual point of view. What is said here must not be applied to medicine or hygiene – that would be quite wrong. Diseases must be cured. In hygiene, one must work to benefit people. One cannot say, “First I will check whether it is perhaps your karma to have this illness; then I will let you have it, if not, I can cure you.” These views do not apply when it comes to healing. But what does not apply to us humans in our intervention in nature does, therefore, objectively apply in the outside world. And there one must say that, for example, many things that exist as a predisposition to moral excesses are so deeply ingrained in the human organization that reactions occur which then appear in certain illnesses, and that the illness is the suppression of a moral excess.

In the case of the individual, it is not even of such great importance to follow these things, because they should be left to one's individual destiny and one should not interfere in them any more than one interferes with the secrecy of other people's letters - unless one is guided by the view that is so prevalent at the moment: “opened by the authorities under the laws of war”. Just as little as one should interfere with a person's letter secrets, so little should one interfere with his individual karma. But in world history, that is again something else. There it is important because in world history, the individual human being plays only a, I would say statistical role in its laws. It must always be pointed out that statistics provide a good basis for life insurance companies to assess mortality rates, on which their premiums are based. The matter is quite accurate and the calculation is quite correct, it is all quite scientific. But now – one does not have to die at the very moment that has been calculated by the life insurance statistics, nor does one have to live as long as has been calculated. When the individual comes into consideration, other things occur. But when groups of people or even the whole development of humanity comes into consideration, then it may very well be that one is not a superstitious person, but very much a scientific person, when one examines the extent to which symptoms of illness, illnesses that occur are corrective of other excesses, so that one can indeed see a certain reaction of the disease or at least a disease caused by something that, if the disease had not come, would have developed in a completely different form. These are just a few points on how what is touched upon by this question can be considered.

But now our time is so far advanced that we too will now follow the others who have already left in such large numbers.

Preliminary remark: Paula Matthes' lecture was not written down. The question she or one of the audience members asked about the relationship between imagination, inspiration and intuition and ordinary consciousness was also not recorded by the stenographer.

Rudolf Steiner: The best way to solve this, as I understand it, is to think of the scale of imagination, inspiration and intuition not being built in such a way that they stand above one another; rather, it must actually be built in such a way:

And if we were to imagine our ordinary consciousness wandering around there, if we develop in this way, then we have imagination, inspiration and intuition. We then have an ascent to intuition, but when we rise to this height, which really takes place in the spiritual world, we also have a kind of projection of it into our ordinary life - for those abilities of ordinary consciousness that play into the ethical realm. In the ethical realm, the ordinary consciousness is, I would say, instinctively intuitive. This is also what causes the word “intuition” to be used in a popular sense. Today, the word “inspiration” is sharply rejected because inspiration, in a certain sense, goes back a little further, but the word “intuition” is accepted because the moral consciousness that arises in ordinary consciousness already has something akin to intuition, but precisely because it is instinctive. Thus the word intuition occurs very frequently and is sometimes used with some justification. And so, if one proceeds in a straightforward way, as I have done in “The Philosophy of Freedom”, from thinking to enter the realm of living morality, if one wants to speak of intuition by skipping imagination and inspiration, one can have a point of reference in ordinary moral consciousness.

I may then perhaps add a few words at this point - not, of course, to say anything about the lecture by Miss Matthes, which was completely self-contained and very beautiful in itself. She presented a thoroughly self-contained picture that is likely to shed light on the relationship - which would be desirable today - between the general consciousness of the times and what one could get from philosophy. Now, of course, it is a matter of the most diverse circumstances interacting to produce the present situation, which Miss Matthes has so aptly characterized.

You see, it is quite true that in recent years, brought about by the tragic world situation in our Europe, something has emerged that is an increased interest in philosophy among young people. But perhaps we will only be able to fully assess this interest psychologically if we follow how, over time, throughout the entire 19th century and also at the beginning of the 20th century, where there was an opportunity, the interest of young people in philosophy did flare up after all. I would like to cite a few facts in support of this. For example, in Vienna in the 1860s and 1870s, the generally prevailing philosophical view was that of the Herbartian school. The main representative of this Herbartian school in Vienna at the time was Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had a very strange situation in his lectureship when he taught practical philosophy, which was even a compulsory course. In the first two or three lectures, he usually had one of the largest audiences of the University of Vienna; it was all full, overcrowded. But then the audience decreased very quickly, and there were usually only seven or eight who stuck with the course, out of the several hundred who had actually remained. Robert Zimmermann himself, who spoke very beautifully and measuredly, often said of his lectures on practical philosophy: at the beginning the whole lecture hall is full, a large class, then it becomes a thinner thread, and finally, when the test comes, when people need the signatures, then they all come again. - This was not only due to the students and their lack of interest. In 1874 Franz Brentano was called to Vienna, who had an extraordinarily loyal audience. Brentano's lectures in Vienna, as in Würzburg, were very well attended. It cannot be said that this was due to the students only for the reason that it was also a compulsory course, but the lectures were still well attended even when Brentano, who had first been appointed as a full professor in Vienna, became a private lecturer again because of his private circumstances – he had married as a former Catholic priest and therefore had to resign the Vienna professorship. He always hoped that he would be called again, but that could not happen, even though his lecture hall was always overcrowded and the lectures of the other professors, who then had to take the exam, were just as empty as Zimmermann's. Brentano was repeatedly proposed by his colleagues for the full professorship in the first places, but there was always the obstacle that he was excommunicated as a clergyman because he had married, and a Jewish woman at that; the church claims to have authority over those whom it has excommunicated. And when the then emperor, to whom the matter was repeatedly brought, heard that Brentano, as a former clergyman, had married a Jewish woman, he said to the Minister for Education and Worship, who had brought the matter before him and who himself had advocated that Brentano should again have a full professorship: “Is she at least clean, the Jewish woman?” And when they couldn't say that with a clear conscience – she was, incidentally, the daughter of Professor von Lieben in Vienna – the Emperor said, “No, it's no use.” And this went on until Brentano left the professorship as a private lecturer in the 1890s.

So you could see that when really stimulating things were discussed, the students were interested. Brentano had also had a full college in Würzburg in the Auditorium maximum, where, when he first entered it, the students' verdict on his predecessor was written: “sulfur hut”! It had been completely empty before that. The same Auditorium maximum on which the students had written “sulfur hut” was filled by Brentano because he was, after all, a very stimulating personality, regardless of what one thinks of his philosophy.

It is the case that the intellectual development of the 19th and early 20th century actually increasingly suppressed the active pursuit of intellectual life, which emerged from ideas and the like. This suppression of actual intellectual production became more and more pronounced. And of course the spread of the natural sciences is entirely to blame for this. Now a kind of impossible situation has actually arisen from all this. And from this impossible situation, in turn, individual directions have emerged that have at least tried to become philosophically active again.

Now, Miss Matthes has presented the German schools in an excellent way here. For Switzerland, I have the feeling that these four German schools initially have less significance. Here, in broader circles, the Bergsonian school has gained a certain influence. And only to a lesser extent have these four German schools penetrated into the philosophical life of Switzerland. In Switzerland, too, it is probably not possible to perceive the same thing as is said to have been the case at German universities in recent years. In a sense, the emptiness that arose in the souls was already there before the war, where someone like Eucken in Jena, to whom the students trotted, was stimulating, albeit in a, I would say, more talkative way. Eucken's lectures were not very strong, but they were at least attended. And then came the war, with its devastating effects, also in the moral life, in the whole way of life, which nevertheless led to a certain longing in people to somehow hear something about that which is now the determining factor in life, that which holds it together.

Now, these four directions, which have been characterized by Miss Matthes, they all actually already existed before the war, and it is precisely in them that perhaps the bleakness of the intellectual substance of our present can be seen so clearly. The Marburg School has been rightly mentioned, which is based primarily on the very astute thinking of Cohen. Cohen has probably had the most significant influence in the Marburg School, and a great deal can be traced back to his astute thinking. One could also say that at a time when perhaps only Otto Liebmann was a truly astute thinker in German philosophy, except for the Marburg thinker, that the Marburg School actually had a disciplining effect and was educational for the development of a certain astute thinking. This Marburg School is actually quite dependent on a certain one-sided training of Kantianism. One would like to say that it was precisely through Cohen that the Marburg School came to the conclusion that thinking as such should not be regarded merely in its passivity, but that it must be taken in its activity. And of course the age was not at all suited to perceive the inner validity of thinking as something extra-human, as Fichte did, for example, but rather thinking has been thought of, or I should say worked out, more or less as subjective by the moderns, too, albeit with the claim of objective validity, as subjective at least. And it is this active aspect of thinking that was discovered. This was at a time when it was impossible to understand the objective structure of the world process, when it was almost impossible to look at anything other than this activity of thinking.

I would like to ask all philosophers who think along the lines of the Marburg School — and I am only saying a few aphoristic remarks here — how they can see a real being in thinking when the thinking subject, that is, the human being, has this activity of thinking interrupted every time from falling asleep to waking up? This is a crucial question that should be posed to the entire Marburg School. The point is that the Marburg School is basically a consistent elaboration of Descartes's phrase “I think, therefore I am,” but this is only based on a particular judgment about thinking in the present. For there is no denying that we are also then, when we are not thinking in our ordinary consciousness between falling asleep and waking up. And when we think backwards, our retrospective is divided into those currents in which we think and those currents in which we do not think, then think again and so on, and in the meantime we are without thinking. This is the cardinal problem, and it is the source of failure not only for the Marburg School but also for Bergson and certain American schools, which are noteworthy in their own way. First of all, we must overcome the influence of Descartes' “I think, therefore I am”.

It is therefore necessary to get into the scope of human consciousness what encompasses, on the one hand, the activity of thinking and, on the other, the discontinuity of thinking. This is what must be raised as a problem in relation to this school, and it is a problem that has not even been touched upon by this Marburg school. There is not even an awareness that this problem exists, just as little as, for example, in Bergson and in the current epistemological direction; I do not mean James – he develops pragmatism – but I mean some other American directions. The problem is actually not touched upon, and when it is raised, there is no awareness of how to deal with it, not even epistemologically.

Then, of course, there is the direction of Husserl, but it is not given much consideration. My feeling is that he is a disciple of Franz Brentano. In Franz Brentano, the fact that he is a sharply trained Aristotelian and a sharply trained Thomist is evident everywhere, a good, thorough connoisseur of Thomism, so that some of both Aristotelianism and Thomism has been transferred to Husserl. Of course, a modern philosopher like Husserl cannot readily admit this, but it can be seen in his psychology and in everything that comes to light in him.

Now, I don't know what Miss Matthes thinks about this – I must confess that when I wrote my “Riddles of Philosophy” in the new edition and tried to incorporate some of these newer directions, I was repeatedly faced with the question: What should one actually do with Husserl? No matter how hard you try to get at it, to somehow get hold of it, to grasp it, you can't do it; nothing special comes of it. It struck me so strongly how Husserl basically rummages in words, how, despite all his insight into the essence of things and so on, he is completely dependent on the secondary content of words and how he cannot come to a real insight into even the simplest facts of consciousness. It seems, for example, to be impossible for Husserl to grasp the difference between the image of Cologne Cathedral that I have only in my memory, but noted in my consciousness down to the last detail, and the image that I have before me when I actually stand in front of Cologne Cathedral and really look at it. I don't see how, in the whole structure of Husserl's philosophy, a difference between these two images could be found as essentially real. And if I am not mistaken, Husserl himself once used this image of Cologne Cathedral in these two relationships, I believe for the sake of illustration. One does not actually come out of his confusion through all possible discussions to something tangible.

I also have this feeling when I consider Scheler's sometimes quite beautiful treatises. Scheler is a talented person, but I always ask myself why Scheler – who, for example, has written beautiful treatises on the direct perception of feeling, that is, on the direct experience of compassion – why he does not manage to somehow really gain an independent worldview? Why does he so terribly proselytize? Why does he seek the support of old Catholicism? This is something that shows me that these philosophers are disciples of Brentano.

Brentano has only [...] gap in the stenographer's notes] of his philosophy because he could not merge into a real spiritual science. He did not want to, nor could he. And it is not true, for Brentano was so strong that he did not turn to Catholicism, but his students are terribly Catholic in their efforts to find a connection for their world view.

As for the people of Baden – Windelband, Rickert and some others – it seems to me that the whole matter rests on an appalling one-sidedness in their conception of reality. It is not true that these people no longer know what to do with philosophy and want to save themselves by even excluding the value problem. They separate it out in such a way that they then have no need to make any kind of statements about the relationship of value to themselves. They crystallize the value problem out of the scope of the world problems, so to speak, and refer to John Mackay without feeling any obligation to somehow integrate value into the currents of being. This will also be completely impossible as long as we do not overcome the law of the conservation of energy and matter in the near future. For one must realize that with value something is given that is germinal for future values, that is there when the present has decayed. One must therefore come to think of matter and force as transitory and to see the fruits, the germs that they have in them, as values. Only then will one be able to gain a further insight into these problems, into value problems. Today, there is a lack of courage for that. Of course, people completely lack the courage to somehow attack the law of the conservation of energy and matter. There are a few tentative attempts – Drews occasionally points out, after all, that the law of the conservation of matter and energy is only a kind of empirical problem and the like – but one will hardly find any far-reaching insight in this field.

With regard to Nelson and his direction, one should perhaps not overlook the fact that the people started from Hegel and the Fries, which he regarded as the “father of all shallowness”, because the people were all Friesians at first, weren't they? It was a Fries School at first. And now we must not forget that what I have emphasized time and again comes into play here: you can be an extraordinarily astute logician – there is no doubt about that in Nelson's case – but for real life problems, it is not enough. I must say that when he spoke at the Bologna Congress in 1911, among all the various illustrious philosophers, including Bergson, he was actually the very best in terms of dialectical power and solid craftsmanship in the use of thought. But then, especially when I saw Nelson again recently in Bern, I got the feeling that it is not at all sufficient for real life problems, that it leads to an abstractness - which is actually quite dreadful, but which was excellently characterized by Ms. Matthes - in that he tries to gain an ethic in three volumes from an abstract sentence. You see, you can be an excellent dialectician without having the slightest sense of reality. This can also be seen from the way Nelson treats the problem of knowledge. It is ultimately all the same to him whether the problem of knowledge is treated in the way of the many neo-Kantians who actually start from quite secondary things.

You see, it was perhaps in 1888 that I once sat in Berlin with Eduard von Hartmann, and the conversation revolved almost entirely around the fundamental questions of epistemology. Well, Eduard von Hartmann really could not be approached in this direction. So I expressed the opinion that when one speaks of the idea, one can initially say, for my sake, that the idea is something subjective, but that it is not possible to stick to it when one moves on to considerations. I recently compared it to this: if someone takes a letter, E or something else, they cannot raise the abstract question of what this individual letter means in itself. But if you have letters that then combine into words and the words combine into sentences, then the whole thing comes together. And so you can say: Certainly, if you just take a small thing from phenomenology, the problem of how this individual thing relates to the thing in itself and so on becomes a kind of life problem again and again. But if you connect the phenomena with each other, a certain structure arises, and you can no longer think the same about a certain sphere of phenomena in relation to reality as you can about an individual. Non-epistemologists like Nelson completely ignore such things. It really does not matter whether, on the one hand, it is said against epistemology, as Hegel said: you can't recognize without recognizing, because that would be the same as wanting to learn to swim without getting into the water - or whether on the other hand you say: in order to pose a problem of recognition, there would have to be a recognition already. - What is really at issue here is to realize that the problem of recognition could still be a completely valid problem, even though it presupposes a certain recognition. One could practise recognition first, and then afterwards one could observe it, and afterwards one could critically determine - or whatever you want to call it - whether the recognition is valid or not. So an epistemology could never be eliminated by Nelson's arguments.

So these things are there. Other images could be given, some noteworthy philosophical directions could be mentioned. I will only mention that, for example, pragmatism also has a great many followers in Germany, and that neo-Thomism also has a certain significance in the present, especially among Catholic philosophers, even if it is not noticed because of the divisions that exist and because people do not care what some produce when they live in the circle of others.

But all these schools of thought are actually faced with the necessity of finding a transition to a reality, of getting out of the mere formal. When one hears or reads Eucken – every book by Eucken says roughly the same thing – it really is as if someone were not standing on the ground, but were constantly floating in the air, pulling himself up by his hair. It is a lot of beating about the bush for no reason. This is especially striking in Eucken's work. And one must say, when one looks at what is there and what cannot be connected to reality, one can understand that young people, who really have the tendency to absorb something about the world, cannot get their rights and must ultimately be truly disappointed and must become desolate. It is really quite sad when one sees how little that which has been brought to the surface from the last moments of development is inclined to meet this longing of youth. Not true, the students might like to hear something, but what they can hear is really not worth listening to. And what happens next is basically terrible.

At a German university, they tried to interest a man who is actually well-intentioned but who came from the old system in the GDR in the threefold order. At the time, he had resolved, in order to get to know the threefold order, to give a student who wanted to take his exam with him a dissertation on the threefold order, because this would save him from having to read the “key points” himself. He then corrected the dissertation and believed that by becoming acquainted with the ideas of the “key points” in the course of his official duties, he was in this way getting to know the threefold order; because otherwise, directly, he does not do it. This reminds me vividly of how a student once asked his professor about Soloviev at a university. Well, the professor hardly knew the name, but he said to himself: There is the best opportunity for me to get to know him too. [And to the student he said:] Do a dissertation on it. — So it is at a German university when a dissertation is to be done on Soloviev. At the moment he gave the dissertation, the professor had no idea about Soloviev – nor did he later, he didn't know more than what he had taken from the dissertation itself.

It is almost impossible to describe the state we gradually entered into. And the subordination of the spiritual realm to the state structure is closely related to these conditions. And the only thing that can help is a truly emancipated, free spiritual life. Only on the basis of a free spiritual life can anything of what the students are actually looking for succeed today, when the need is so great. Here in Switzerland, people do not know; they do not know the hardship. It is really much more difficult, much worse than one thinks. And that is what I always try to explain to our friends, also in my anthroposophical reflections: that it is much worse than one thinks. If we could somehow manage to reach a sufficiently large number of people with ideas from spiritual science, on the one hand, and with the ideas of the threefold social order, on the other, which are necessary for the public introduction of spiritual science, we would be able to take a significant step forward.

What Ms. Matthes presented today can also fully prove to you that a completely new approach is necessary, that we cannot continue to muddle through in what has developed. We need a new approach in our public life; without it, we will not get anywhere.

The break [in spiritual life] actually happened relatively early on. You see, it may perhaps be pointed out after all that the great philosophers have no longer found great disciples. Take all of Hegel's disciples – the Hennings and Marheinekes and so on, Michelet is the name of one of them – take them all, they can be found first among those who published the Hegelian estate, and then take what actually emerged, the reactionary course of these sages, or take Immanuel Hermann Fichte, and then in philosophy take all those who were philosophers like Carriere and so on, even Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who was a daredevil in many respects, one must still say: there was a major break in intellectual life as such in the mid-19th century. And instead of there being, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Germany, where it would have been natural for there to be a real deepening of intellectual life, there was, in particular, a flood in German philosophy of everything that was less than German philosophy. There was actually a spirit; what was missing was a sense of reality.

You see, I knew a philosopher who actually didn't play a role at all, but who was truly smarter than many who did play a role. His name was Gregor Itelson. As a dialectician, he actually outwitted everyone, and you can be sure that he would easily outwit Nelson in a discussion as well. Gregor Itelson, if he wanted to, could brilliantly refute someone who spoke in such a way as Father Wasman, for example. When he had appeared in Berlin – it was on the occasion of this Life-Jesus movement, in 1905 or so, at the beginning of the 20th century in any case – Gregor Itelson gave a brilliant speech against the Jesuit Father Wasman. But just recently I have again heard it said that Gregor Itelson, when a monist was defending his world view, did everything in the most brilliant way to bring the monist in question to his knees. But I never heard Gregor Itelson put forward any of his own positive thoughts. A brilliant dialectician – but no positive thoughts whatsoever! I once had a discussion with him, perhaps in 1901 or 1902. I said something like: What you said again today is nice, but why have you never said anything that is your own view? Yes, he said, that's what I'm working on; I've been working on a revision of logic since my youth, but I'm not finished yet. If you listen to people talking today, everywhere, whether they are natural scientists or theologians and so on – he was right, you can prove logical errors everywhere. And he said: We don't need a revolution in logic, we just need a revision of logic. Then he said, as we talked a little further: But this revision of logic, it is actually not that difficult, you can write it on two quart pages. I said: Yes, why don't you finally write these two quart pages? Why does it have to be two quart pages? But he still hasn't written them, at least I haven't seen them in front of me.

It is not a lack of logic or dialectics. During the time I knew Itelson, he got up at 10 o'clock in the morning, then went to the coffeehouse, read his newspapers; then he went to lunch, then he went back to the coffeehouse, and if you came to the coffeehouse after some lecture, you would meet him there as well. He was a dawdler, but he could still be extraordinarily stimulating, even at midnight, for example, talking about the impossibility of Maeterlinck's ideas. And a person like Nelson differs from dialecticians like Itelson only in that he is more brazen, that he relies more on his legs, is more brazen in his appearance, is not a drifter, is a hard-working person, an intellectual giant. Nelson has a brutal, not very wide-meshed [way of thinking], not the slightest finesse in his thinking. It is actually sad, basically, that a whole number of young people today let themselves be taken in tow by Nelson.

These also include people like Mühlestein, who appeared in Basel in the discussion after a lecture and said that threefolding was not possible after all, that everything had to be united into one unit. I replied that the right also has its place in the life of the spirit and in economic life; I said: Yes, the unit is, for example, a farming family, which includes the farmer, the farmer's wife, the children, the farmhands and also the cows. If the cows give plenty of milk, the whole family will have milk. Therefore, it is not necessary to demand that all members of the family give milk. And so it is in the social threefold order: if only the political state provides the law, then economic life and spiritual life will also have the law. Just as the farmer's wife or the farmer himself do not have to provide milk for the family to be supplied with milk, economic life and spiritual life do not have to produce law. Thoughts such as these, when they are examined with a sense of reality, are very easy to unhinge. And so it is with Nelson, especially in his ethical and political views.

What all such considerations point to, however, is that today, above all, we need the courage to leap the river and really penetrate into spiritual science. Then, as Miss Matthes quite rightly said, philosophy too will be able to become something very fruitful again. Without spiritual science, philosophy will always remain something that cannot be put into practice in life and that cannot prove that it has a solid foundation. Today, philosophy without spiritual science only leads to an empty formalism, not to content.

That is what I might add to what Miss Matthes said. We can certainly be very grateful to Miss Matthes for raising this topic in such an excellent and vivid way before us today.

Public lecture given to students at the Technical University

Dear students, If I attempt to present to you today something from the field of what for a number of years I have called anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I do so in the knowledge that this evening, in what is effectively my first lecture, I will be able to give nothing more than a few suggestions, and that I am under no illusion that such a presentation will instantly create any kind of conviction. But perhaps it will be possible, after the general description that I will give, to satisfy specific wishes and address specific questions in the discussion that follows.

In order not to take up too much of our time, I would like to address the most important point first, and that is to give a characteristic of what spiritual science in an anthroposophically oriented sense actually wants to be. It differs from what is usually called science in the method of its research. And it is convinced that, in the latest period of time, a serious and honest striving in science, if consistently pursued, must ultimately lead to its method. I would like to speak to you in a thoroughly scientific sense, since I myself truly did not start from any theological point of view, nor from any world-view questions or philosophies in the sense in which they are usually cultivated, but rather I myself started from technical studies. And out of technical studies themselves, this spiritual science presented itself to me as a necessity of our historical period of development. Therefore, I am particularly pleased to be able to speak to you this evening.

When we do natural science, in the sense of today's thinking, we first have something in front of us that extends around us as the world of sensual facts. And we then use our thinking, we use in particular our methodically trained thinking, to find laws from a corresponding pursuit of these sensual facts. We look for what we are accustomed to calling natural laws, historical laws and so on. This way of relating to the world is not something that the humanities reject, but they want to stand on the firm ground of this research. But it does its research, standing on this firm ground, I might say, by starting from the point of view of human life itself. It comes, precisely because it wants to do serious scientific research, simply to the limit of scientific knowledge, which is fully admitted by level-headed natural scientists. And with regard to what natural science can be, it is firmly grounded in the view of those who say: In summarizing external facts, we advance to a certain level with scientific methodology, but we cannot go beyond a certain limit if we remain on the ground of this natural scientific research itself.

But then, when what is sought in ordinary life and in ordinary natural science is achieved, only then does the goal of spiritual science as it is meant here begin. By thinking about and understanding the facts around us, we arrive at certain boundary concepts. I am mentioning here only such limiting concepts, whether they are conceived as mere functions or as realities, limiting concepts such as atom, matter and so on. We operate at least with them, even if we do not seek demonic entities behind them. These limiting concepts, limiting ideas, which confront us particularly when we follow the scientific branches that are fundamental to technology, stand there as it were like pillars. And if you want to stop at the limits of ordinary science, you will remain standing right in front of these boundary pillars.

But for the spiritual researcher, as I mean him here, the actual work begins only at these border pillars. There it is a matter of the spiritual researcher, in what I call meditation - please do not take offense at this, it is a technical term like others - entering into a certain inner struggle, an inner struggling of life with these concepts, more or less with all the border concepts of natural science. And this inner struggle does not remain unfruitful for him.

In this context, I must mention a man who taught here in this city, at this university, in the second half of the last century, and who repeatedly emphasized this struggle that man enters into when he comes to the limits of ordinary science. It is Friedrich Theodor Vischer who knew something of what the human being can experience when he arrives at the concepts of matter, atom, natural law, force, and so on. What I mean here does not consist in brooding, but in consulting everything in the depths of our soul that has led to these concepts, in trying to live with these concepts in meditation.

What does that actually mean? It means establishing the inner discipline within oneself to be able to look, just as one otherwise looks at external objects, at what one finally has in one's soul when one arrives at such a borderline concept; I could name many others to you besides those I have just mentioned. Then, when one tries to concentrate the whole range of the soul on such concepts, abstracting from all other experiences, one makes an inward discovery. And this inner discovery is a shattering one. It shows us that from a certain point in life, in our inner life, our concepts become something that grows in our soul through itself, that is different after such inner meditative work than it is when we take it only as the result of external observation. Just as we observe in the growing child how certain organs, which first appear more undifferentiated, become more differentiated, how we perceive how organs grow, so in such meditative devotion to the results of scientific experience we feel how an inner growth of the soul takes place. And then comes the shocking realization that it is not through speculation, not through speculative philosophy that one goes beyond what is called the limit of natural knowledge, but through direct experience, that is, by transforming what one has gained through thinking into inner experience of beholding.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the first step that is taken. It can be clearly felt how the method becomes quite different and how, therefore, something completely new occurs in comparison to the usual scientific method, which can be objectively recognized more than by anyone else, but also by me, in that mere thinking, mere comprehension, passes over into inner experience. And then, through consistent, patient, persistent experience in this direction, something occurs that cannot be called anything other than an experience of spiritual existence. One cannot speak about the experience of the spiritual world in any other way from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Because this experience of the spiritual world is not something that is innate in man. It is something that must be achieved by man. When one has reached a certain level of this experience, one realizes that our thinking, which we otherwise use to grasp our environment, is in a different relationship to our entire physical being than one is forced to assume from mere knowledge of nature.

From the mere knowledge of nature, one notices how the physical changes and transformations, with youth, with old age and so on, also change the states of the soul. With scientific thinking, one can go further physiologically. It can be shown how the nervous system and the brain actually express the structure and configuration of our thinking. And if you follow the matter consistently from one side, you can say: Yes, something emerges from something else, which today could only be stated hypothetically, that which is thinking, that which is life in thought.

The person who has experienced this inwardly, which I have characterized as being able to be experienced, speaks differently, saying: When one walks, for my part over a soggy road, or when a car drives over a soggy road, then one has the impression of furrows, of footsteps. It would obviously be quite wrong to put forward the theory that it must have been an extraterrestrial being that created these footsteps, these furrows, just because one does not know, or to hypothesize that there are certain forces below the earth's surface that work in such a way as to have caused these footsteps, these furrows.

Thus one says – and I say expressly, with a certain right – from a scientific point of view: That which is the physiological formation of the brain is what, in the end, is expressed in the function of thinking. The person who has experienced what I have characterized does not say it that way; they say: Just as these grooves and furrows are not raised from within by the earth's inner forces, but rather as if something has passed over them, so the physical brain has been placed in its furrows by the body-free thinking. And that which, in a certain way, when we entered physical existence through birth, changes these furrows, that is also what, descending from spiritual worlds, does the work of shaping these furrows in the first place.

In this way, it is established that the soul is absolutely the active principle, that it is the soul that gives form to the body. I know, esteemed readers, that, of course, hundreds of objections can be raised against what I am saying, if one starts only from the intellectual-theoretical point of view. But spiritual science must point to the experience. It must point out that until this experience takes place, one is justified in believing that thought arises from the physical brain as a function, whereas when one experiences this thought life oneself, one knows how it is active in itself, how it is substantial and in motion in itself, and how it is actually active in relation to the passivity of the physical body.

So what is presented as a first initial experience is not something that is gained through a straightforward continuation of ordinary scientific methods, but only through a metamorphosis, only through a transformation of the ordinary scientific method into a method that can only be experienced, which consists not in speculation but in an inner experience.

That is one side of it. The other side of this inner experience relates more to the inner development of the human will. By looking at our lives, we can see the transformations we have undergone in life. We think back to how we were in our inner soul and outer bodily state one, five, ten years ago, and we say to ourselves: we have undergone changes, transformations. These changes, these transformations that we undergo, how do we undergo them? We passively surrender to the outside world in a certain way. We just need to say: hand on heart, how active are we in what we have initially become through the outside world? The outside world, heredity, upbringing and so on, shapes us; and what shapes us in it continues to have an effect. As a rule, we are actually the passive ones. If we now transform this into activity, if we form out of it what might be called in the most eminent sense self-discipline, and in the way I will characterize it in a moment, then the second element is added to what we have characterized as the first element in the path of spiritual research. If one can bring it to that, and that can only be achieved through methodical schooling in the sense described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in other books, if one can bring it to say to oneself: I will plan, even if only a small part of what what is to arise in me, I will resolve that this or that quality shall become mine; and if I can bring it to produce such a quality in me by a strong arousal of the will, perhaps only after years, when I make out of myself what I would otherwise only passively encounter in life , if I take my will, if I may express it somewhat paradoxically, into my own hands and take full control of my development – in a certain part one can of course only do so – then what otherwise is merely memory, in a certain way, also comes together to form a real area. You get a kind of overview of your life, as if you were looking at a series of things, and you then come to know the will in its true character.

While one gets to know thinking as something that actually detaches itself from the physical the more one delves into life, one comes to recognize one's will in such a way that it actually encompasses the physical more and more, permeates us more and more, flows through us, and that basically death is nothing more than a struggle of the will with the bodily functions have reached a certain limit when we pass through an earlier or later death, and that then that which can no longer work our body in this way, the will, is completely absorbed in what the body does, that this will detaches itself and that an element of the soul now actually enters a real, spiritual world when we pass away.

So it is a matter of the fact that what is usually called the idea of immortality is not pursued by any speculation of the spiritual science meant here, that basically this spiritual science completely breaks with the way the world usually approaches this idea. The point is that spiritual science, as a continuation of natural science through the training of thought and will, actually manages to grasp what we carry within us, thinking and willing, in such a way that we can also grasp it when this soul, which lives in thinking and willing, lives in a disembodied way that cannot be reached by the senses.

Of course, what I have briefly explained here will be regarded by the widest circles of our present time as something fantastic and visionary. But how could it be otherwise? Everything that comes into the world as something new and seemingly contradicts what was already there is initially regarded as something fantastic and visionary. But I do not believe that it will remain so for all time, that people will not recognize that what has been described here as the method of spiritual science, at least in two of its characteristic elements, is only a continuation, but a lively continuation, of what natural science actually achieves, but with which natural science comes up against a certain limit.

Today, when one speaks of the spirit in general, it is no longer entirely taken amiss. This was still the case in the last third of the 19th century, when a certain materialistic way of forming a world view out of scientific knowledge was used to draw the only logical conclusion of scientific thinking itself. Today it is again permitted to speak of the spirit, at least in a speculative way. But one is still very much taken aback when one speaks of the spirit in the way I have just done, because that has a certain consequence.

When one has acquired what I have called the “seeing consciousness” in my book “The Human Council,” when one has acquired what arises from such developed thinking and willing, then one knows oneself in a spiritual world through this seeing consciousness — just as one knows oneself through one's eyes and ears in a world of color and sound. In a sense, the world around is permeated with spirit. Just as the world around a person who was born blind undergoes a transformation when, after an operation, he begins to see colors at a certain point in his life, and the world that was previously around him is now filled with something different, so it is when this seeing consciousness occurs. The world that one was previously accustomed to seeing as the world of the senses and of the combining mind is filled with spirituality. And the spirit becomes something concrete. The spirit becomes something that one can also follow in its concrete form. One no longer speaks of the spirit in general. When someone speaks of the spirit in general, it is as if a person were walking across a meadow with flowers. If you ask him, “What kind of flower is that and what kind is that?” He will say, “They are all plants, plants, plants.” So today people are also allowed to say: Behind the sensory world is a spiritual world. But spiritual science cannot stop there. Rather, it must examine the spiritual facts in the concrete — because the spiritual world is around us just as the colored or the sounding world is — in the same way as one otherwise examines the colored and sounding world with the senses and the combining intellect. And there one acquires, before everything else, a quite definite way of relating to the world. It is also the case that if one is born blind and suddenly gains sight, one acquires a different relationship to the world. One must first find one's bearings; one knows nothing about spatial perspective, one must first learn it. So, of course, one must also acquire a certain relationship, a certain position to the world when one passes over into the consciousness of observation. Then many things appear in a peculiar way. That is why the spiritual researcher is still misunderstood by his contemporaries.

You see, the spiritual researcher never says that what has been gained through the method of strict natural science, or what has been drawn from the consequences of these results of strict natural science, is in any way logically incorrectly followed or anything of the sort, but he is compelled to add something from his spiritual insight, which is then not merely added on, but which in many respects completely changes the results of natural science.

Take geology, for example. I will pick out one example. It is better to talk about specific questions than to use general phrases. I understand completely and have followed this method myself: if, from what is happening around us today in the formations of rock, in the deposits of rivers and water and so on, we examine the geological layers that lie on top of each other and then calculate – even if it is not always a real calculation, but only something approximate, if you calculate how long these respective rock layers have existed, then you get the known figures. And then, as you all know, we arrive at the beginning of the earth's development, where the earth - as is hypothetically assumed - formed out of something, out of a kind of primeval nebula or something similar. I do not need to go into this in more detail. You are familiar with all this.

But for the spiritual researcher it is so, simply because he has experienced such things as I have described to you - though only in outline, to stimulate interest, not to convince - for the spiritual researcher it is so that he must say to himself: I assume that someone is examining the changes in a human organism, say the changes in the heart every five years. I follow how the human heart or another organ changes over the course of five or ten years, what happens there. And now I calculate what I have seen, if I simply consistently deduce from what I have calculated what it was like three hundred years ago. I get a certain result, albeit purely arithmetical, as to what this human heart was like three hundred years ago. The only objection to this is that this heart did not even exist at that time. Just as correct as the geological approach would be to conclude from the small changes in the human heart what that heart was like three hundred years ago – only it was not even there at that time. Equally correct – for I fully recognize that what geology reveals has at least a relative correctness – is also everything that is deduced from the geological facts for the development of the earth. But then we transpose what presents itself to us as a consequence of our calculations into times when the earth did not yet exist in its present form. Or we transpose what arises from our observations, which were made over a limited period of time, into an epoch that lies millions of years ahead, by calculating an end state and speaking of entropy or the like. For the spiritual researcher, this is the same as if he were to calculate what the nature of the human heart will be after three hundred years.

That is what you arrive at when you convert the ordinary scientific method into something that can be experienced. Because, you see, man is actually like an extract of the whole cosmos. In man you find - somehow changed, somehow extracted, compensated or the like - what is present in the cosmos as a law. You will ask me: Yes, how can you enthusiast claim that the earth has not yet existed in its present form? You must show us a way to claim something like that.

I will, however only sketchily, characterize how one comes to such assertions as I have put forward. One discovers, by experiencing the volition, the thinking, as I have described to you, that man really is a kind of microcosm. I do not say this as a phrase, as the nebulous mystics say, but in the awareness that it has become as clear to me as any solution to a differential equation, out of complete logical clarity. Man is inwardly a compendium of the whole world. And just as in our ordinary life we do not know only what is sensually surrounding us at the moment, just as we, by looking beyond what is sensually surrounding us at this moment, look at the image of something we have experienced about ten or fifteen years ago , how it emerges before us as something that no longer exists – but something of it is present in us, which enables us to reconstruct what was present back then – it is the same with the expanded consciousness that arises from the transformation of ordinary thinking and willing. In that man was actually connected with all that is past, only in a more comprehensive sense, in a completely different sense, in a more spiritual sense, was connected with what is past than he was connected with experiences ten or fifteen years ago, which he can bring up again from his inner being, so it is possible, when consciousness is broadened, we simply find out, as from a cosmic memory, that which we were part of, which simply does not live on in us for ordinary consciousness, but which lives on for the consciousness that has arisen through the metamorphosis that I have described.

It is therefore nothing more than an expansion, an increase of that power which is otherwise our power of remembrance, whereby man inwardly, simply from his own nature, which is a summary of the macrocosm, constructively resurrects that which actually was on our earth in a certain period of time. Man then looks at a state of the earth when it was not yet material. And while he otherwise has to construct something from the present-day experiences of geology that is supposed to have existed at that time, he now looks at a point in time when the earth was not yet there, when it was in a much more spiritual form. He sees, by constructively recreating what lives in him, that which actually underlies the formation of our earth.

And it is the same with what can emerge in us from a future state of the earth as something constructive in a certain way. I know how unsatisfactory such a sketchy description must be, but you can see from it that what I characterize as spiritual science is not drawn from thin air or from fantasy. It is, of course, something unusual. But once you have undergone the metamorphosis of consciousness, what you constructively represent inwardly is as clear to your consciousness as what you conjure up in mathematics or geometry, which is also constructed from within the human being.

And when someone comes and says, “Yes, but you have to assert something that all people can understand,” I say, “Yes, that is also the case, but the first thing to be considered is that the person who wants to understand something must first go through everything that is necessary to do so – just as someone who wants to solve a differential equation must first go through what will enable him to solve it.

And if someone objects on the other hand: Yes, mathematical geometry only presents something to our consciousness that we apply when we follow the reality of the external world – then I say: Yes, that is so, but if we constructively present this to ourselves, then we arrive at the conviction that it is a mere formality. If you are aware of what has been characterized, you know that it is a reality. And if someone says that this is perhaps self-suggestion, then I say: everything that gives us the possibility of saying that something is real is only a result of experience. And when some people object that someone could be mistaken, that someone could, for example, have the vivid thought of citric acid when drinking something and if they are sensitive, they could even have the taste of lemon – I say: that is possible. But just as in ordinary life one can distinguish the mere thought of heat from the heat that comes from actually touching a hot iron, so too, through inner experience, if one has the seeing consciousness, one can distinguish between what is mere imagination, what is mere suggestion, and what is reality, because the grasping of all reality is an inner experience. And it is necessary to follow things through to the end, not to stop somewhere. Anyone who stops short of where the path should actually lead may succumb to suggestion. I therefore say: It is indeed possible, if someone is sensitive and gives themselves over to autosuggestion, to say: I have the thought of lemonade, I even feel the taste – but the thought of lemonade will not quench one's thirst. What matters is that one passes from the sensation of taste to quenching one's thirst, that one follows the path consistently. The experience must be pursued consistently, then the fact that one designates something as reality in the spiritual sense is also entirely the result of the experience. The designation of a sensual reality or reality cannot be theoretically established, but is a result of experience.

Now, dear attendees, I have characterized the spiritual science that comes to a modern, natural scientific person when they go through what life offers today. This life has truly changed extraordinarily in the last thirty to fifty years, especially through the advances in technology. When I think back to the time when the first chair of technology was established in Vienna in the early 1880s, and consider all that has happened since then, I get some idea of how much this modern man has changed as a result of everything that has been drawn into our cognitive, our moral, but especially our social life. Those who have honestly gone through this, who do not say out of some prejudice: Oh well, science can't give us anything! but who takes the view that natural science can give us a great deal, who is completely absorbed in the triumphs of modern natural science, can come to the realization that the spiritual foundations of the world must be grasped in the way I have tried to present to you today.

Then one looks back to earlier times in the development of humanity and says to oneself: In these earlier times of human development, people hardly spoke of the spirit at all. And the way in which they spoke of the spirit has been preserved traditionally in various religious denominations, which, if one is completely honest and does not want to keep double accounts of life, one truly cannot reconcile with the results of ordinary natural science today. These spiritual experiences, it must be said, arise from a completely different state of consciousness in people. What we have learned through the three to four centuries in which scientific methods have been developed, what we have become as a state of mind through the Copernican and Galilean way of thinking, through Kepler, we have gone through everything that has subtracted the technical laws from the laws of nature in more recent times, through Kepler, through the Copernican and Galilean way of thinking, through Kepler, The entire configuration of the soul has changed, not by becoming more theoretical, but by becoming more conscious. Through the development of humanity, we have necessarily left certain instinctive states of earlier ages. And we look back at what earlier ages sensed as spirituality, which has been preserved in religious traditions, and we say to ourselves: What was there then as spirituality was grasped by human instinct. One could not say that this was dependent on such a heightening of consciousness through the methods of natural science, through the methods of social experience in modern times. People spoke in such a way that, when they saw natural phenomena, these natural phenomena, as it were, endowed them with the spirit of what they were speaking about. How did an ancient civilized Egyptian relate to the world? He looked up, followed the course of the stars, the configuration of the starry sky. He did not just see what Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler saw in this starry sky, but he saw something that at the same time revealed a spiritual reality to him. Just as, when I move my arm, a soul-active underlies this hand movement, so the person of earlier epochs felt in what happened externally that which underlies this external event as a spiritual, but instinctively.

Then came the more recent period, the time of natural science. I would like to say that we look back on a long period of human development that did not actually reach its conclusion until around the middle of the 15th century, a long period in which people could not help but see what was around them with their senses as something spiritual at the same time. When we speak of physical states today, of solid, liquid, gaseous forms, we speak in such a way that we consider the material. Ancient man, when he spoke of what are for us today the physical states, saw them as elements, but these elements were not merely material; they were the spiritual that manifested itself in them. What surrounded man as the material world was for him just as much the external physical-spiritual expression of the spiritual-soul as the physical organism is for us an expression of the spiritual-soul - but all instinctively. This path has necessarily been abandoned in the last three to four centuries, when humanity passed over to something quite different, which then became guiding in civilization. Mankind moved on to what distinguished the observation of nature from mere observation, which is always connected with the instinctive, with the spiritual observation of nature, which is still hidden in the name 'contemplation'. Man moved on from mere observation of nature to what could be called experimental comprehension of nature.

Since Bacon and others have been working, the mere observation of nature has been replaced by the experimental comprehension of nature. We do the experiment in the laboratory, in the physics cabinet, which we then extend to the technical work. In that which we ourselves bring about as a condition for some natural event, we survey these very conditions. Through the experiment, we are in a different position than in mere observation of nature. In nature, I cannot know whether what is revealed to me, be it for my mind or for my imagination, whether that is also some totality or whether I have to delve into it, much, much deeper than the thing initially presents itself to me. In short, despite all exact observation, what I observe in nature remains before me as an unknown. When I have an experiment before me, I establish the conditions myself; I follow how one thing is evoked out of another, and what is then still unknown is basically what is actually of interest. When you design an experiment and then observe what can be observed, you are actually looking at the result of what follows from the conditions that are manageable for you. In the experiment, everything is transparent in a completely different way than what I observe in nature.

And so, little by little, people have become accustomed to regarding themselves as interpreters of nature in the manageable context of the experiment, to some extent to tracing the law of nature where they themselves can trace the conditions of its manifestation. However, this experimental method is still linked to a certain inner yearning that used to underpin knowledge through and through. In those ancient times, when there was as yet no technology and no natural science in our sense, what was regarded as science arose above all out of the desire for knowledge, out of the desire to recognize, to explore, “what holds the world together in its inmost being,” if I may express it in this way. Now that the experimental method has emerged, it is not only the desire for knowledge that drives us, but also the desire to recreate what forms nature. But the old desire for knowledge still lives on. We recreate what we want to see in the experiment in order to unravel nature itself through what we can see. In recent times, technology has emerged from this experimental method with a certain degree of implicitness, and with technology we have entered a new phase.

We can therefore say that in the history of human development, we first have research determined by the desire for knowledge, then the experimental method, which, however, still combines the yearning of the old quest for knowledge with the recreation of nature. But when we pass over - one need only follow what has actually happened - from what can be experienced with the experiment to what then happens out of the experiment with the recognized laws of nature through the technical designs, which intervenes so deeply in human and social life, we must say to ourselves: there is a third element present that passes over from what we still have in recreating nature to what is now creative in man himself. This creative power – I do not believe that I am speaking to completely insensitive souls when I say the following about this creative power: the person who, with that peculiar characteristic style, with that peculiar state of soul constitution is undergoing a technical training, feels differently in this training than someone who is undergoing, for example, a theological training, which is a reproduction of the oldest methods of knowledge, or an already experimental scientific training. Those who undergo an experimental scientific training apply the mathematical, the geometrical, the theoretical-mechanical, the photometric, and so on, to what they observe there. He, as it were, recalculates nature.

One stands on a completely different level of consciousness when one first has before one what is, as it were, completely inwardly transparent: the mathematical, the geometrical —, and when one applies this not only in experiment, thus in imitating nature, but when one applies it in completely free designing machines, when you see that what you have experienced as mathematics, as theoretical-mechanistic chemistry, penetrates into the design of a technical structure, you experience the world in a completely different way than the mere naturalist or the theorizing technician.

What is the actual difference? One often fails to consider this. Imagine that in our ordinary, trivial lives we describe everything as “real”, even that which is not real in a higher sense. We call a rose “real”. But is a rose real in a higher sense? If I have it here in front of me, torn from the rose stem, it cannot live. It can only be shaped as it is when it grows on the rose stem, when it grows out of the rose root. By cutting it off, I actually have a real abstraction in front of me, something that cannot exist as I have it in front of me. But this is the case with every natural structure to a certain extent. When I look at a natural formation, even at a crystal, which is the least likely to exist, I cannot understand it just by looking at it, because it basically cannot exist by itself any more than the rose can. So I would have to say: this crystal is only possible in the whole environment, perhaps having grown out of a geode in the mountain formation.

But when I have before me something that I myself have formed as a technical structure, I feel differently about it. You can feel that, even feel it as something radically significant in the experience of the modern human being, who looks at what technology has become in modern life from the perspective of his or her technical education. When I have a technical structure that I have constructed from mathematics, from theoretical mechanics, I have something in front of me that is self-contained. And if I live in what is basically the scope of all technical creation, then I have before me not just a reflection of the laws of nature, but in what has become technical entities out of the laws of nature, there is actually something new before me. It is something different that underlies the laws of the technical entities than that which also underlies inorganic nature. It is not just that the laws of inorganic nature are simply transferred, but that the whole meaning of the structure in relation to the cosmos becomes different, in that I, as a freely creative human being, transfer what I otherwise experience from the design of physical or chemical investigations into the technical structure.

But with that, one can say: in that modern humanity has come to extract the technical from the whole scope of the natural, in that we had to learn in modern times to live in the realm of the technical in such a way that we we stand with human consciousness in a completely different relationship to the technical than to that which is produced in nature, we say to ourselves: Now it is for the first time that we stand before a world that is now, so to speak, spiritually transparent. The world of nature research is in a certain way spiritually opaque; one does not see to the bottom of it. The world of technology is like a transparent crystal - spiritually understood, of course. With this, a new stage in the spiritual development of humanity has truly been reached, precisely with modern technology. Something else has entered into the developmental history of humanity. That is why modern philosophers have not known how to deal with what has emerged in this modern consciousness precisely through the triumphs of technology. Perhaps I may point out how little the purely philosophical, speculative way of thinking could do with what has seized modern human consciousness, precisely from the point of view of technology. Today we are much more seized by what emanates from the leading currents of human development than we realize. What is now general consciousness was not yet there when there were no newspapers, when the only spiritual communication was that people heard the pastor speak from the pulpit on Sundays. What is now general education flows through certain channels from the leading currents into the broad masses, without people being aware of it. And so, basically, what came through technical consciousness has, in the course of a very short time, shaped the forms of thought of the broadest masses; it lives in the broadest masses without them being aware of it.

And so we can say that something completely new has moved in. And where a consciousness has become one-sided — which, fortunately, we have not yet achieved in Europe — where a consciousness has become one-sided, almost obsessed with this abstraction, a strange philosophical trend emerged: the so-called pragmatism of William James and others, which says: truth, ideas that merely want to be truth, that is something unreal at all. In truth, only that which we see can be realized is truth. — We as human beings form certain goals; we then shape reality according to them. And when we say to ourselves: this or that is real according to a natural law —, we form a corresponding structure out of it. If we can realize in the machine, in mechanics, what we imagine, then it is proved to us by the application in life that this is true. But there is no other proof than that of application in life. And so only that which we can realize in life is true. The so-called pragmatism, which denies all logical internal pursuit of truth and actually only accepts the truth of truth through what is carried out externally, is presented today in the broadest circles as American philosophy. And that is something that some people in Europe have also been grasping at for decades, even before the war.

All those philosophers who still want to think in the old ways know of no other way to proceed with what has emerged as a newer technique, as the awareness of newer techniques, than to set the concept of truth aside altogether. By stepping out of the instinctive grasping of nature, out of the experimental recreation of nature, into the free shaping of nature, nothing remains for them but free external shaping. The inner experience of truth, that spiritual experience of the soul that can permeate the soul as a spiritual being, is actually denied by this, and only that which can be realized in the external functional forms is considered truth. That is to say, the concept of truth that is inherent in the human soul is actually set aside.

Now, another development is also possible; it is possible that we will experience how something is emerging in the actual substance of technical structures from that which is natural, which now contains nothing that we can intuit, but only that which we can comprehend. For if we cannot grasp it, we cannot shape it. By experiencing this, by thoroughly permeating ourselves with what can be experienced in it, a certain need must awaken in us all the more. This new external world presents itself to us without the inner realization of the ideas, it presents itself to us without the inner experience of the ideas. Therefore, through this new experience, we are prepared for the pure experience of what spirituality is, of what man, subtracted from all external observation, must experience within, as I tried to sketch out for you at the beginning of my reflections today.

And so I believe that, because we have advanced in the developmental history of humanity to a view of that reality that we can survey externally, where we can no longer see any demoniacal, ghostly aspect in externality, because we have finally arrived at the point where we can no longer interpret the external sensual as being opaque to us, behind which we can assume something spiritual. We must seek the forces for the spirit within us through the development of the soul.

It has always seemed to me that a truly honest experience of the consciousness that comes to us precisely from technology calls upon us - because otherwise what is intimately connected with our human nature would almost have to be lost - to experience that what spirituality is, to experience it inwardly, in order to add to the one pole of transparent mechanics, of transparent chemistry, that which can now be attained through spiritual insight, which can be presented to people in the spirit. It seems to me that it is necessary in our time for the spiritual vision of anthroposophy to reveal itself, for the reason that we have indeed reached a certain stage of development in human history.

And another thing, honored attendees, is added: with this newer technology, a new social life has emerged at the same time. I do not need to describe how modern technology has created modern industrialism, how this modern technology has produced the modern proletariat in the way it is today. But it seems to me that if we only want to take the standpoint of the earlier scientific method, the standpoint of that which emerges from observation, then our thoughts fall short. We cannot grasp what is truly revealed in social life. In order to grasp what emerges in social life from the human, it is necessary that we come to truths that reveal themselves only through human nature itself. And so I believe that Marxism and other similar quackery, which today put people in such turmoil, can only be overcome if one finds special methods that are necessary as a counterbalance to technology, applied to the social life of human beings, and if, through this, it becomes possible to bring spirituality into the outer life, into the broad masses, because one has found this spirituality through inner experience.

Therefore it is no mere accident that out of the same soil out of which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science arose for me, there also grew, truly unsought, what I tried to present in my book 'The Core of the Social Question'. I simply tried to draw the consequences for social life from spiritual-scientific knowledge. And what I presented in this book emerged quite naturally.

I do not believe that without spiritual science one can find the methods that grasp how man stands to man in social life. And I believe that, because we have not yet been able to recognize social life, this life will not allow itself to be conquered by us and that we will therefore initially be plunged into chaos at the moment when, after the terrible catastrophe of war, people are faced with the necessity of rebuilding it. It is necessary to carry out what is to be carried out on the basis of spiritual laws, not on the basis of the law that a misconceived understanding believes can be based on natural laws, as is the case in Marxism and other radical formulations of social science.

So, dear attendees, I was able to give a reason for something that is actually quite personal to me, right here in front of you. And I may say: Speaking to you now, I feel transported back to an earlier time, to the 1880s, when we in Central Europe were living in a time that was felt by everyone as a time of ascent. We – those people who, like me, have grown old – have now arrived at a point in time where the hopes of spring that emerged back then stand before our spiritual eyes in a certain, quite tragic form. Those who look back on what seemed like an invincible ascent at the time now look back on something that reveals to many people that it was, after all, a mistake in many respects.

In speaking to you, I am speaking to fellow students who are in a different situation. Many of you are probably the same age as I was when I experienced that springtime hope; now you are experiencing something that is very different from the fantasies that arose from the springtime hopes of that time in the human soul. But someone who is as filled with the possibility and necessity of spiritual knowledge as the one speaking to you can never be pessimistic about the power of human nature; he can only be optimistic. And that is why it does not appear to me as something that I do not present as a possibility before my soul, that once you have reached the age at which I am speaking to you today, you have gone through the opposite path – that opposite path that now leads upwards again from the power of the human soul, above all from the spiritual power of the human soul. And because I believe in man out of spiritual knowledge, I believe that one cannot speak, as Spengler does, of a downfall, of a death of Western civilization. But because I believe in the power of the soul that lives in you, I believe that we must come to an ascent again. Because this ascent is not caused by an empty phantom, but by human will. And I believe so strongly in the truth of the spiritual science described to you that I am convinced: This will of men can be carried, can cause a new ascent, can cause a new dawn. And so, my honored audience, I would like to close with the words that first fell on my ears as a young student when the new rector for mechanics and mechanical engineering in Vienna delivered his inaugural address. At that time, for people who also believed in a new ascent, and rightly believed in it, even if only a technical ascent came later, not a social, not a political ascent. But now we are in a period in which, if we do not want to despair, we can and must think only of an ascent. That is why I say what that man said to us young people back then: “Fellow students, I conclude by saying that anyone who feels honestly about the development of humanity in the face of what is to arise from all science and all technology can only say: Always forward!”

Pronunciation

Question: What entitles us to go beyond the limits of thinking, to leave the unity of thinking and to move from thinking to meditation?

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It seems to me that this question is about something very significant, which, however, can only be fully understood through thorough epistemological and epistemological reflection. But I will try to point out a few things that come into consideration when answering this question.

Perhaps I may draw attention to the last chapter that I added to the second edition of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, in which I described the development of philosophy itself and in which I then tried to show how, at the present moment in human development has arrived at the point where philosophy, so to speak, demands of itself this going beyond of thinking about the point of view of thinking that arises precisely when one has reached the limits of the knowledge of nature. I tried to show the following at the time:

People can, if they study the methods of knowledge acquisition in detail, as the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond did, arrive at the point of view that Du Bois-Reymond expressed in his lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” at the famous natural science conference in Leipzig in the 1870s and also repeated in his lecture on “The Seven World Riddles”. I will only briefly point out that at that time Du Bois-Reymond spoke of the fact that with the application of what has been called “unified thinking” here, one comes to develop the so-called Laplacian mind, that is, to develop such thinking about matter as is possible when one seeks to grasp the course of the planets of a solar system using astronomical-mathematical methods.

If we now turn our attention, through a certain inner vision, to what is taking place within ourselves, if we try to make the subject into the object, then it turns out that this thinking, which we develop, cannot be defined as being there to depict some external world or to combine the facts of an external world. In what is thought about thinking, I must still see a last remnant of that old teleology, that old doctrine of purpose, which everywhere asks not why but for what purpose, which does not ask how it comes that the whole organization of man or any other organism or an organ like the hand is formed in a certain way, but which asks how this hand would have to be formed for a certain purpose. This is extended, even if one is no longer aware of it today or is not yet aware of it, to the consideration of thinking. One asks: What is thinking actually for? One does not always realize this, but unconsciously one asks. One thinks that thinking, and cognition in general, is there to enable one to draw an external world into oneself, so that what is outside is within, even if only in the form of an image. But now, one can follow realistically, but of course spiritually and realistically, what thinking actually is. Then one notices that thinking is a real power that shapes us.

You see, the spiritual science I am talking about here is not an abstract theory, not something that just wants to be a world view in ideas. Among other things, I have recently given a pedagogical course here in which I tried to apply spiritual science to pedagogy. It was a course for teachers before the Waldorf School was founded. In addition to this pedagogical course, I also gave a course that tried to take the therapeutic aspect of medicine from spiritual science and show how spiritual research can shed light on something that can never be fully understood if one only uses today's methods of physiology and biology for research. Now, I do not want to tell you something specifically therapeutic, but there is one thing I would like to mention to characterize the method. That is that today in conventional philosophy there is actually only speculation about the connection between the spiritual-mental and the physical-corporeal. There are all kinds of theories about interactions, about parallelism and so on, all kinds of materialistic interpretations of the soul processes. But actually, in a certain abstraction, we always have on the one hand 'observation of the spiritual-soul' and on the other hand 'observation of the physical body', and then we speculate how these two can come into a relationship with each other. Spiritual science really studies methodically - but precisely with the thinking that is awakened there - how the soul-spiritual works in the physical body. And even if I expose myself to some misunderstanding, that what I say is taken as paradoxical, I want to emphasize one thing:

When we observe a child as it grows up until the change of teeth around the seventh year, we notice that not only does the change of teeth take place, but that the configuration of the soul and spirit also undergoes a significant change. If you now think back over your own life, even if you are not yet conducting methodical research, you will find that the sharply contoured thoughts that then solidify into memories and reproduce themselves in the course of life, that these sharply can only be formed out of the power of thought at the time when the organism drives out what are called second teeth - it is something that comes from the whole organism, not just from the jaw. If one pursues this methodically, one comes to say to oneself: Just as, for example, in physical processes, some kind of force, such as mechanical force, can be transformed into heat and one then says: heat is released, heat appears, so in the human course of life one has to observe what is released in the organism – we have completely lost the expression for this – in the change of teeth, and what is then released when the change of teeth gradually takes place, what then passes from the latent state to the free state, what initially only worked internally. The second teeth have appeared; a certain connection of forces is at work, a system of forces within, until these second teeth emerge. Then this interrelatedness of forces is released, and in its release it appears as that spiritual-soul element which then gives the sharply contoured thoughts of memory.

With this example I only want to show how this spiritual science is actually applied to areas that one does not think of today. It is a continuation of the natural sciences. It is exactly the same form of thinking that is applied when one speaks of the release of warmth. The same form, which has only just emerged, is then applied to human development, and one says to oneself: that which appears as memory, as thinking power, that pushes the second teeth out - if I may express myself trivially.

In this case, one is not speculating about the connection between body and soul, but rather one is pursuing, in a completely empirical way, as one is accustomed to doing as a natural scientist, only with more highly developed methods of thought, that which can be observed. Only the whole of what one has around one is also observed spiritually. And so one comes to speak no longer in an abstract, nebulous way about the interaction of body and soul and spirit, but one states how at a certain age a force works physically, which then emancipates itself as a spiritual-soul force at a different age. And one comes to enter with the spirit into the material, to understand the material spiritually. That is the peculiar thing, that materialism has not understood the material, that it actually stands before matter in such a way that it remains incomprehensible to it. Materialism has not understood matter. Spiritual science, which is meant here, advances to the understanding of the material through its spiritual method. And it was indeed extremely interesting for the doctors and medical students who were listening [to the course for medical professionals] that they were able to be shown how one can really arrive at an effective representation of the spiritual and soul in the physical, how one can, for example, show how the heart, in its function, can be understood in a completely different way from the methods of today's physiology or biology, based on spiritual science.

So it is a matter of developing thinking not just through some kind of fanciful elaboration, but through a real continuation, which must simply pass through a borderline or critical state. In this passage through the borderline state, thinking becomes something else. You must not say that the unity of thinking is somehow destroyed by this. For example, the power that works in ice does not become something that should no longer be when the ice melts and turns into water. And the power that works in water does not become something else when the water passes through the boiling point and through vaporization. So it is a matter of the fact that at the point that I have characterized as a point of development for thinking, this thinking power passes through such a borderline state and then indeed appears in a different form, so that the experience differs from the earlier experience like steam from water. But this leads one to understand the thinking power itself, thinking – I could also prove the same for willing – as something that works realistically in man. In the thinking power that one has later in life, one then sees what has been working in the body during childhood. So everything becomes a unity in a remarkable way.

I readily admit that spiritual science can err in some individual questions. It is in its early stages. But that is not the point. The point is the direction of the striving. And so one can say: an attempt is made to observe that which reveals itself in thinking, in its formation of the human being, to observe it as a real force that forms and develops the human organism. Thought is observed in its reality. Therefore, one says to oneself in the end: Those who still look at thought in a critical way, asking only one question: Why is thought such that it combines external sense perceptions? – they are succumbing to a certain error, an error that I would like to characterize for you now.

Let us assume that the grain of wheat or the ear of wheat grows out of the root tip through the stalk; the plant-forming power manifests itself and can shape a new plant out of the seed, which in turn grows into a seed and so on. We see that the formative power at work in the plant is continuously effective in the plant itself, from formation to formation, as Goethe says: from metamorphosis to metamorphosis. In spiritual science, we try to follow thinking, which expresses itself in human beings, as a formative force, and we come to the conclusion that, in that thinking is a formative force in human beings, a side effect also comes about, and this side effect is actually only ordinary cognition. But if I want to characterize thinking in its essence according to this side effect, then I am doing exactly the same as if I say: What interests me is what shoots up through the root, the stalks into the ear as a formative force in the plant; that does not interest me; I start from the chemistry of nutrition and examine what appears in the wheat grain as a nutritional substance. Of course, this is also a legitimate way of looking at the wheat grain. You can look at it that way. But if I do, then I disregard what actually flows continuously in plant formation. And so it is with cognition. In what is usually thought by epistemologists, by philosophers and by those who want to ground natural science with some kind of observation, there are the same effects that occur when thinking, which actually wants to shape us, expresses itself outwardly in a side effect. It is as if what grows in the wheat plant is only thought of as the basis for the nutrition of another being. But it is wrong to examine the wheat only in terms of this. This has nothing to do with the nature of the wheat grain. I am introducing a different point of view.

Thus, philosophy today is on the wrong track when it examines cognition only in terms of the apprehension of the external world. For the essential thing is that cognition is a formative force in man, and the other thing appears as a mere side effect. And the way of looking at it, which wants to leave thinking only in the state in which it abstracts natural laws, collects perceptions, is in the same position as someone who would claim that one should not do plant biology to learn about the nature of the plant, but nutritional chemistry.

These are things that are not thought of today, but they play a major role in the further development of the scientific future, that scientific future that is at the same time also the future for such a social organization through which man, in grasping social life through the spirit, can truly intervene in this social organization. Because that seems to me to be precisely what led to the catastrophe: that we no longer master life because we have entered a state of human development in which life must be mastered by the spirit, by that spirit that is recognized from within and thereby also recognizes what confronts us in the external world.

Yes, my dear audience, with such things one is considered an eccentric in the broadest circles today, a dreamer, and in any case one does not expect such a person to really see through the outside world realistically. But I believe that I am not mistaken when I say: the application of spiritual science to the entire external world can be compared to the following. If someone lays down a horseshoe-shaped iron, a farmer comes and says: I will shoe my horse with that. Another, who knows what kind of object it is, says to him: That is not a horseshoe, it is a magnet, it serves a completely different purpose. But the farmer says: What do I care, I will shoe my horse with it. This is how it seems today: a scientific attitude that refuses to admit that the spiritual lives everywhere in the material. Those who deny the spiritual in the material are like the man who says, “What do I care about the magnet? I'll shoe my horse with the iron.” I do believe, however, that we must come to the realization that in all material things we have to recognize not only an abstract spiritual essence, but also a concrete spiritual essence, and that we must then be willing to study this concrete spiritual essence in the same way as we do the material, and that this will mean progress in cognitive and social terms for the future.

But it is easier to express speculative results and all kinds of philosophies about what the spirit is, it is easier to be a pantheist or the like out of speculation than to follow the example of strict natural science, only with the experiential method, as I have described it, to continue the scientific research and then to come to it, [to find the spiritual in the material] - just as one brings warmth to light, even if it does not express itself, by showing under which circumstances that which is latent reveals itself. If we apply this method, which is usually applied externally, and continue it internally, but especially to the whole human being, then we will understand the spiritual in the material from the inside out. And above all, that which has actually been resonating to us from ancient times and yet, for human beings, is a profound necessity, that which still resonates from the Apollonian temple at Delphi to the ears of the spirit: 'Man, know thyself!' And just as philosophers and theologians have spoken of this “know thyself”, so too has the naturalist Ernst Haeckel, who was more or less inclined towards materialism. This “know thyself” is deeply rooted in human nature, and the modern age has now reached a point where this “know thyself” must be approached in a concrete way.

With these suggestions, I believe I have shown that it is not a matter of sinning against the unity of thought, but of continuing thought beyond a boundary point. Just as it is not impossible to bring the forces in water to a completely different manifestation after passing through the boiling point, so too, there is no sin against what is experienced in the combining thinking with the perception when this thinking is taken beyond the boundary point. It is quite natural that a metamorphosis of thinking is then achieved. But by no means has a uniformity of thinking been violated. You will not find at all that spiritual science leads to the rejection of natural science, but rather to a deeper penetration of it. One arrives precisely at what I consider to be particularly important for the development of humanity: the introduction of scientific knowledge into the whole conception of the world, which fertilizes life, but which can only be achieved by our ascending from the spiritual observation of nature to the pure experience of the spiritual, which can then also pour into our will and become a living force in us. Because it can do this, because living knowledge makes us not only wise but also skillful, I believe in a future for humanity, in human progress, if in the future more attention is paid to the spiritual in the material than has been the case so far, if the spiritual is sought in the material, and this can then be transferred to the social, so that in the future the solution of the social question will appear to us as the spiritualization of social life, as spiritualization with that spirit which we can gain precisely as a continuation of scientific research.

Professor Dr. Th. Meyer: I am in complete agreement with Dr. Steiner that the limiting concepts of scientific knowledge are not the limiting concepts of existence and reality. I have also heard him speak with warm and moved heart of the hopes that the German people may cherish for the future despite their collapse. But I do have some doubts as to whether spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy will precisely possess the ability to lead to a new height to which Germany should strive. And I think the concern lies in the following: Dr. Steiner has repeatedly emphasized that the path to the higher worlds, of which he has spoken, is achieved through vision, through a seeing consciousness, through an experience, and that this path is absolutely scientific, not imaginative. This inner vision naturally has the same status as something that is evident in logic. That is to say, what I have seen with my outer or inner eyes cannot be disputed. I see a tree and do not need to prove that the tree must be there. There is no metaphysical proof for it, it is evident that the tree is there. Dr. Steiner now claims this evidence for his inner vision. That means he sees the higher world and sees the connections of the higher world, and because he sees them, precisely for that reason this higher world is there; it is indisputable. I do not want to dispute that the higher world is evident to him who beholds it. The only question is whether it is evident to everyone, and here I have a reservation. Ever since I have known anthroposophy, it has been based on the fact that this inner vision, this seeing consciousness, is ancient, that there have long been people who rise to the height of this seeing consciousness, have long since risen to it in India. That is why anthroposophy also adopts a whole series of expressions from the Indian language. It needs Indian expressions for the various spiritual insights it imparts. But the fact of the matter is that Dr. Steiner claims that he is bringing something new. However, there were a number of Theosophical Societies in Germany and England before Dr. Steiner came on the scene. Dr. Steiner originally belonged to these Theosophical Societies, but then came into conflict with them and resigned from these associations. Because he came into inner conflict with them, he no longer referred to his view of things as theosophy, but rather, because his inner vision differs from the inner vision of the other 'theosophists', he called it anthroposophy.

Now I would like to say: If the earlier seeing consciousness was mistaken, if Dr. Steiner was the first to bring the right thing, who guarantees me that another will not come and say: This higher seeing consciousness that Dr. Steiner brought has not reached the ultimate goal. Another can come to a completely different goal. In that case Steiner's vision becomes subjective. It is the vision of an individual. It is doubtful whether one can rely on it.

This is my concern, which arises in relation to the supersensible of the whole movement, that there is a different inner vision. There should be no discord between the different visionaries. But I do not want to conclude without expressing my sincere and warm thanks to Dr. Steiner for the many fine suggestions he has given in his speech tonight.

Rudolf Steiner: Ladies and Gentlemen, I do not need to keep you any longer, for I only wish to point out that the esteemed gentleman who spoke before me has made a few errors in the most important point that he has raised.

First of all, I would like to start from the end and correct a few errors. The fact is not that what I have presented to you here was preceded by the teachings of other theosophical societies to which I belonged. It is not like that. Rather, I began to write my interpretations of Goethe's world view in the 1880s. At the time, they were published as an introduction to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's “Deutsche National-Literatur” in Stuttgart. Anyone who follows them will find that the germ of everything I have presented to you today is to be found in those introductions. You will then find that in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, in the first edition of 1894, I tried to show how man gradually develops his thinking to a certain level, and how this is followed by what then leads discursive thinking into intuitive thinking.

Then it came about, in Berlin around 1902, that I was once asked to present what I had to say about the spirit in a circle that called itself a theosophical one. At that time I had become acquainted with various Theosophists, but what they had to say did not really prompt me to follow with any attention the Theosophical literature that was common in this Theosophical Society. And so, at that time, I simply presented what had emerged from my own intuitive research. As a result, people in England who had read my book Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life very soon translated these lectures into English and published them in an English newspaper. I was then invited to give lectures to a number of people in the society that called itself the Theosophical Society. I have never hesitated to speak to those who called upon me, whether they called themselves by this or that name, about what I had to say. But I have never advocated anything but what I myself had arrived at through my own research. During the time that I belonged to the Theosophical Society I advocated nothing but what I myself arrived at through my own research.

That I called what I presented “Anthroposophy” even then may be gathered from the fact that during the same period - not only later, when I had come to a different view from that of the Theosophical Society - I also presented to a different circle of people in Berlin, and I did not present a single iota of what I had to present from my research. And I announced my lectures there – so that people could not possibly be in error – as anthroposophical observations on the development of humanity. So for as long as any human being can bring me into contact with Theosophy, I have called my world view “Anthroposophy”. There has never been a break. That is what I would like to say about it now, so as not to keep you waiting too long.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, some people say that if you study the history of philosophy, you find that philosophers - let's start with Thales and go up to Eucken or others - have put forward all sorts of views and that they have often contradicted each other; how can you arrive at a certainty of knowledge? — That is precisely what I set out to do in my “Riddles of Philosophy”: to show that the matter is not so, but that what appear to be deviations in the various philosophies worthy of the name only ever come from the fact that the one looks at the world from one point of view, [the other from a different point of view]. If you photograph a tree from one side, what you see in the picture is only from a certain side. If you photograph the tree from a different side, you get a completely different picture - and yet it is the same tree. If you now come to the conclusion that many truly truthful philosophies do not differ from one another in that one deviates from the other, but that they simply look at one and the same thing from different points of view, because you cannot come to a single truth at all, then you realize that it is a prejudice to say that the philosophies contradict each other.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, I have shown that it is a prejudice to say that philosophers contradict each other. There are indeed some who contradict each other to a certain extent, but these are the ones who have simply made a mistake. If two children in a class solve a problem differently, one cannot say that it is therefore not certain which of them has found the right solution. If one understands the right solution, one already knows what the right thing is. So it cannot be deduced from the fact that things are different that they are wrong. That could only be deduced from the inner course of the matter itself. One would have to look at the inner course of the matter itself. And it is an external consideration to say that Steiner resigned from the Theosophical Society. First of all, I did not resign. After I was first dragged in with all my strength to present my own world view, nothing else at all, I was thrown out, and I may perhaps use the sometimes frowned-upon expression before you, ladies and gentlemen, for the following reason: dear attendees, because the “other kind of truth,” namely, the madness of those theosophists who finally managed to present an Indian boy who was said to be the newly appeared Christ; he was brought to Europe and in him the re-embodied Christ had appeared. Because I, of course, characterized this folly as folly and because at that time this folly found thousands of followers all over the world, these followers took the opportunity to expel me. I did not care. At any rate, I did not believe that what one had gained through inner research seemed uncertain simply because a society that calls itself theosophical expelled me, a society that claims that the Christ is embodied in the Indian boy.

Such things should not be considered superficially, simply overlooking the specifics and saying, “Well, there are different views.” One must take a closer look at what is occurring. And so I would like to leave it to you, when you have time - but you would have a lot to do with it - to compare all the quackery that has appeared in the so-called theosophical societies with what I have always tried to bring out of good science. I say this not out of immodesty, but out of a recognition of the reality of the matter and out of spiritual struggle. And bear in mind that I myself said today: “Some details may be wrong, but the important thing is to show a new direction.” It does not have to be the case that the absolutely correct thing is stated in all the details. So someone could well say that he is looking at a right-angled triangle and getting all sorts of things out of it. Then someone comes along and says: The square of the hypotenuse [of a right-angled triangle] is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. You can't be sure whether it could be universally true just because he is the only one saying it. No, if it has become clear to you through an intuitive insight that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, then a million people may say that it is not so, but you know it to be so and contradict a million people. For the truth does not merely have an external justification for its agreement, but above all it also has a justification in its inner substantiality.

Of course, anyone can check this. And I have never claimed anything other than that anyone who wants to can learn about the spiritual scientific method just as easily as they can learn about the methods of chemistry. But once the things have been researched, they can be verified by any thinking person. And so, too, can what I say or write and have written from the perspective of spiritual science be verified by any thinking person. There are bound to be various errors in it, of course, but that is the same as with other research. It is not about these errors in particular, but about the basic character of the whole.

Have I used a single Indian expression to you today? And if something is sometimes referred to by using some old expression, then that is just a technical term used because there is no such expression in current usage. Even if I can prove the Pythagorean theorem on the blackboard, or something else, can I be criticized for the fact that it was already there centuries ago? For me, it is not a matter of putting forward ancient Indian or similar ideas, but of putting forward what arises from the subject itself. Just as today, anyone who grasps and understands the Pythagorean theorem grasps it from the subject itself, even though it can be found at a certain point in time as the first to emerge, so of course some things must, but only seemingly, agree with what was already there. But it is precisely this that I have always most vigorously opposed: that what is being attempted here from the present point in the development of human consciousness has anything to do with some ancient Indian mysticism or the like. There are, of course, echoes, because instinctive knowledge found much in ancient times that must resurface today. But what I mean is not drawn from ancient traditions. It is really the case that what is true, what is true for me, is what I wrote down when I wrote the first edition of my book “Theosophy” in 1904: I want to communicate nothing other than what I have recognized through spiritual scientific research, just as any other scientific truth is recognized through external observation and deductive reasoning, and which I myself can personally vouch for. There may well be those who disagree, but I am presenting only that which I can personally vouch for. I say this not out of immodesty, but because I want to appear as a person who does not want to present a new spiritual science out of a different spirit than out of the spirit of modern science and also of newer technology, and because I think that one can only understand this new consciousness in terms of its scientific and technical nature, when one is driven by both to the contemplation of the spirit.

I ask that my words not be taken as if I had wanted to avoid what the honorable previous speaker said. No, I am grateful that I was given the opportunity to correct some factual errors that have become very widespread. But much, very much even, of what is being spread today about what I have been presenting in Stuttgart for decades is based on errors. And it seemed necessary to me, as the previous speaker has commendably done, to address what has been presented, because it is not just a matter of correcting what affects me personally, but also something that the previous speaker brought together with the substantive of the question, by correcting the historical.

Question: If Dr. Steiner proves just one point of spiritual science to me in the same way that the Pythagorean theorem can be proved, then I will gladly follow him, then it is science.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved attendees, who can really prove the Pythagorean theorem? The Pythagorean theorem cannot be proved by drawing a right-angled triangle on the blackboard and then using one of the usual methods to prove it. That is only one illustration of the proof. The point is that anyone who wants to prove the Pythagorean theorem is forced to have what can be constructed mathematically in their inner vision - even if only in the inner vision of the geometric spatial vision. So imagine a consciousness that did not have this spatial vision. He would not have before him the substantial element of that Pythagorean proposition, and it would be quite senseless to prove the Pythagorean theorem. We can only prove the Pythagorean theorem by having before us the substantial element of the conception and shaping of space. The moment we ascend to another form of consciousness, something else is added to the ordinary view of space. [...] The point, then, when it comes to the Pythagorean theorem, if it is to be proved, is that this view of space must underlie it. But for this it is first necessary to find one's way, as it were, into this new configuration of consciousness. But as long as one has no conception of the configuration of space, one cannot arrive at the observation that leads to the proof of the Pythagorean theorem. And one believes that the results of spiritual scientific research cannot be proved in the same way only as long as one has not yet made the transition from ordinary consciousness to the experiencing consciousness that I have described.

I have assumed that the experiencing consciousness is there first. And just as someone who does not have a spatial view cannot talk about the Pythagorean theorem, so one cannot talk about the proof of any proposition of spiritual science if one does not admit the whole view. But this view is something that must be achieved. It is not there by itself. But our time demands that one resolves to do something completely new if one wants to proceed to this progress of science. And I do believe that there is still a great deal to be overcome before spiritual science is advocated in broader circles in the way that Copernicus's world view was advocated over all earlier ideas of the infinity of space. In the past, people imagined space as a blue sphere. Now we imagine: there are limits to the knowledge of nature that cannot be overcome, or: we cannot go beyond ordinary thinking. Such things are well known to anyone who follows the history of human development. And I can only say: either what I have tried to present is a path to the truth – not the finished truth – in which case it will be trodden, or else it is a path to error, in which case it will be avoided. But that does no harm. What must not be extinguished in us, not be swept away by hasty criticism, is the everlasting striving upwards and onwards. And it is only this striving that really animates what I have tried to characterize today as the path that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take.

Question: We must have the firm belief that the effort we expend will also be worthwhile. Is it at all possible to recognize spiritual life in and of itself? Dr. Steiner says it is possible to recognize the spirit of the world, the spirit of all life and of all nature, and to come into contact with it. Is that possible with our spirit, with our thinking? I doubt it. Thinking consists of images. I think in pictures.

Rudolf Steiner: If I were to answer the question, I would have to take up a great deal of your time. I do not want to do that and I will not do it. I only regret that this question was not asked earlier, then I could have answered it more thoroughly.

You can find in my writings everywhere those things that I hypothetically object to and that are also discussed there, so that you can find a remedy for your doubts in the literature. Here, however, I would just like to say the following: It is the case with certain people that they make it virtually impossible for themselves to get ahead of the phenomenon through preconceived notions. They point to the phenomena and then say: What lies behind them, we do not recognize. The whole of Kantianism is basically based on this error. And my whole striving began with the attempt to combat this error. I would like to make clear to you, by means of a comparison, how one can gradually come to a resolution of these doubts.

When someone looks at a single letter, they can say: This single letter indicates nothing other than its own form, and I cannot relate this form to anything else; it tells me nothing more. And when I look at, say, an electrical phenomenon, it is just the same as looking at a letter that tells me nothing. But it is different when I look at many letters in succession and have a word, so that I am led from looking to reading. I also have nothing else in front of me than what is being looked at, but I advance to the meaning. There I am led to something completely different. And so it is also true that as long as one only grasps individual natural phenomena and individual natural elements — elements in the sense of mathematical elements — one can rightly say that one does not penetrate to the inner core. But if one tries to enliven them all in context, to set them in motion with a new activity, then, as in the transition from the mere individual letter to the reading of the word, something quite different will come about. That is why that which wants to be spiritual science is nothing other than phenomenology, but phenomenology that does not stop at putting the individual phenomena together, but at reading them in the context of the phenomena. It is phenomenology, and there is no sin in speculating beyond the phenomena; rather, one asks them whether they have something to say about a certain inner activity, not only in terms of details but also in context.

It is understandable that if one only looks at the individual phenomena, one can stand on the point of view that Haller stood on when he said:

No created spirit penetrates into the innermost part of nature,
happy he to whom it only shows the outer shell.

But one also understands when someone grasps the phenomenology as did Goethe – and spiritual science is only advanced Goetheanism – that Goethe, in view of Haller's words, says:

“Into the innermost recesses of nature –”
Oh, you philistine!
“No created spirit can penetrate,
Happy the one to whom she shows only
the outer shell."

I have heard this repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly;
Nature has neither core
nor shell,
She is all at once everything.
Only you, most of all, test her,
Whether you are core or shell.

Preliminary note: During the first three-week “Anthroposophical College Course” (September 26 to October 16, 1920 in Dornach), at which 30 representatives of various disciplines gave lectures in addition to Rudolf Steiner, Three evenings of conversation also took place, on October 4, 6 and 15, 1920. During these so-called “Conversations on Spiritual Science,” questions on any topic could be asked, to which Rudolf Steiner then responded in more or less detail. The stenographers did not record the conversation evenings in their entirety, and there are gaps in some of them.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I imagine that today, in a kind of conversation, we will discuss all kinds of questions and the like that arise in one or other of the honored listeners in connection with what has been developed here in recent days as anthroposophy. Although, as I have endeavored to arrange, you will be offered a hundred lectures during these three weeks, it is not possible to do more than touch on individual topics in outline. What can be given to you here can only be suggestions at first, but these suggestions may perhaps show that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here is no less well founded

Asa is more firmly grounded than that which is taken from the external life of today's strict science, yes, that it absorbs all the methodical discipline of this science and also perceives that which stands as a great demand of the time, the demand for further development. This demand for further development arises from the fact that those impulses of scientific life, in particular, which have produced great things in the past epoch, are now in the process of dying out and would have to lead to the decline of our civilization if a new impetus were not to come.

The suggestions that have now been made for such a new impact can certainly be expanded in a variety of directions in the context of a discussion such as the one taking place today, and I would now like to ask you to contribute to this expansion. Please ask questions, express your wishes and in general put forward anything you wish to say. The questions can best be put in writing, and I ask you to make good use of this opportunity.

Mr. Conrad: The question I have to ask relates to a therapeutic area. In his lectures, Dr. Steiner pointed to certain illnesses that are currently occurring very frequently. There are certain mental disorders in this regard for which I would be grateful for an answer about the deeper causes. These are mainly speech disorders. I would like to point out that I am not motivated by personal interests, but am only asking to the extent that pedagogical interests are involved. Teachers have often asked me what to do about speech disorders. However, since this question touches on the field of therapy, I do not want to encourage questions that only concern illnesses. I would be very grateful for an answer because this question seems to be very pressing at the moment.

Rudolf Steiner: Perhaps we can start by answering this question. When something specific like this comes up, we must of course bear in mind that such specific disturbances in the human organism can have the most diverse causes and that it is extremely difficult to talk about these things in general if we want to get to the real cause. In all such matters, my esteemed audience, it is actually a matter of using spiritual science to enable one to assess the individual case in the right way. And here I would like to say something that perhaps has a much more general significance than this question requires.

You see, we live in an age of abstraction, in an age when people love to reduce the manifold world, the multiform world, to a few formulas, when people love to establish abstract laws that encompass vast areas of existence. They can only do so in an abstract way, ignoring the individual. Spiritual science will have to bring about a significant change in this direction in particular. It will indulge less in simplifying the manifold existence and will bring insights about the concrete spiritual. But by approaching the concrete spiritual, one's soul is stimulated in such a way that the ability to observe and judge is strengthened and invigorated. This will become apparent in people's general social interaction. A large part of the social question today actually lies in the fact that we no longer have any inclination to really get to know the person we pass by, because our inner being does not have the kind of stimuli that enable us to properly grasp the individual, the particular. Here spiritual science will achieve something different. Spiritual science will enrich our inner life again, enabling it to grasp the particular. And so our powers of observation and discrimination and all that will be particularly developed. Therefore, we will have less desire for abstract generalizations, but more desire for the particular, the individual. In a sense, we will adhere more to the exemplary than to the abstract. And especially when dealing with something like physical disorders, with speech disorders, one must say: almost every single case is different – it is of course a slight exaggeration, but still generally valid – almost every single case is different, and at least one must distinguish typical ones.

We must be clear about the fact that some of the things that cause speech disorders are, of course, organically determined, that is, in a certain way, based on the inadequate development of this or that organ. But a whole series of such disorders in the present day are due to the fact that the human being's spiritual and soul forces are not being developed in the right way. And it may even be said that if a proper development of the spiritual and mental abilities of the human being can be achieved through education in childhood, at a time when the human organism is still pliable, then organic disorders can also be overcome to a certain extent; they can be overcome more easily than at a later age, when the body is more solidified. Our entire education system has gradually become more and more abstract. Our pedagogy does not suffer from bad principles. In general, if we look at the abstract treatment of pedagogical principles, we can see that we had great and significant achievements in the 19th century. And if you look at today's abstract way of applying how to do this or that in school, you have to say that 19th-century pedagogy really means something quite tremendous. But the art of responding to the individual child, of noticing the particular development of the individual child, is something that has been lost in modern times through the rush towards intellectuality and abstraction. To a certain extent, we are no longer able to strengthen the child's soul and spirit in the right way through abstract education. Do not think that when such a demand is made, it is only to point to a one-sided, unworldly education of soul and spirit – oh no. It may seem paradoxical today, but it is actually the case that materialism has had the tragic fate of being unable to cope with material phenomena. The best example of this is that we have such psychological theories as psycho-physical parallelism. On the one hand, we have human corporeality, which is only known from the point of view of anatomy, which only learns from the corpse; on the other hand, we have theories about the soul and spirit that are imagined up or even only live in words , and then one reflects on how this soul-spiritual, which bears no resemblance to the physical body, how this soul-spiritual is to affect the physical body. Spiritual science will lead precisely to the fact that one will be able to deal with the physical in a concrete way, that one will know such things as those which I already hinted at yesterday in the lecture and whose importance I would like to mention again here: From birth until the second set of teeth has come through, something is at work in us as human beings that we can call a sum of equilibrium forces that organize us thoroughly, and something that is mobile forces, that are life forces. This is particularly strong in our organism within this human age. What is at work in the human being is what really, I would say, pushes out the second teeth, what finds its conclusion in the pushing out of the second teeth, what, for its effectiveness in the organism, comes to a certain degree - it continues, of course - but comes to a certain degree to a conclusion with the appearance of the second teeth. It then transforms into what we can call mathematical, geometric thinking, what we can call thinking about the equilibrium conditions in space, thinking about the conditions of movement in space, what we can call finding oneself in the conditions of life in space and in time. We study what emerges from this, what passes, as it were, from a state of latency into a state of freedom, when it has just been released. There it is, as spiritual soul, as a very concrete spiritual soul, as we see it growing up in the child, when the change of teeth begins and continues into the later years of life. And now we look at this and see: what is spiritual and soul-like has an organizing effect in the body during the first seven years of life. And again, we study the connection between the spiritual and soul-like and the physical organization when we consider what the human being can then experience - albeit consciously only in inspiration - that is, what he experiences with ordinary consciousness, but still unconsciously, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. It is more of an immersion into physical corporeality, where in its course, first of all, as the most important phenomenon – but there are others as well – it awakens the love instinct, where it marks the end, for example, with the change of voice in the male sex, and with somewhat broader effects in the female sex. What we recognize when we observe the development of the emotional world, and when we observe, for example, something like the development of the sense of music, especially at the time when the emotional world is developing, we study this again as the connection between the soul and spiritual life and the physical organization from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year.

In short, spiritual science does not ask the abstract question: How does the soul affect the body?, but rather it studies the concrete soul, it knows that one must look at the concrete soul at certain ages and how it affects the body in other ages. Thus it transforms the abstract and therefore so unsatisfactory method of treatment of today's psychology and physiology into very concrete methods. And in the further course, one then comes to the point where one can not only determine in general through spiritual science: in the first seven years of life, equilibrium, movement, and life force are at work; but one can also specialize in how this spiritual force expresses itself in the organs, how it works in the lungs, heart, liver, and so on; one has the opportunity to really look into the human body in a living way. In this way, the knowledge of the material turns out to be quite different from what materialism can [recognize]. The peculiar thing about materialism is that it devotes itself to a false, namely an abstract, a deducted spirituality. The peculiar thing about spiritual science is that it is precisely able to assess the material in the right way. Of course, it also goes in the right way to the spiritual on the other side. More and more clearly should we fight the opinion, which starts from nebulous mystics, that spiritual science is something that deals with phantasms in general talk. No, spiritual science deals precisely with the concrete and wants to provide a view of how the spiritual and soul life works down into the individual organs. For it is only by getting to know the workings of the spiritual in a concrete way in the material existence that one recognizes the material existence. But through such a concrete penetration into the human organism, one gradually acquires — through a kind of imagination, inspiration and so on — an ability, I would say a gift, to really see the individual and then to be able to judge where any particular fault lies, for example, when speech disorders are present. At a certain childlike age, it will be possible to influence the development of the speech organs through special speech exercises. The important thing is to be able to observe what physical disorders may be present at the right age. And although all kinds of obstacles are present simply due to external circumstances – after all, today only that which is officially certified in this direction is recognized and allowed to be practiced in any way – although all kinds of obstacles are present, we can still say that, for example, some beautiful results have been achieved in the case of speech disorders simply by rhythmic speech exercises were carried out, that the particular defect was recognized, and that the person with the defective speech organism was then allowed to recite things in this or that speech rhythm, always repeating them, and that he was then instructed to place himself in the rhythmic process of these or those tones, feeling them particularly. In this direction one can achieve very significant improvements or at least relief from such disorders. But something else is also possible. For example, in the case of speech disorders, one can work particularly on regulating the respiratory process, a regulation of the respiratory process that must, however, be completely individual. This regulation of the breathing process can be achieved by letting the person you are treating develop a feeling between the internal repetition, or perhaps just thinking, but broad thinking, slow thinking of certain word connections [and the breathing process]. The peculiar thing is that if you form such word connections in the right way, then, by surrendering to such a rhythm of thought or inner rhythm of words, you convey a feeling to the person being treated: With this word and its course, its slow or fast course, you notice it in your breathing, it changes in this or that way, and you follow that. In a certain way, you make him aware of what arises as a parallel phenomenon to breathing for speech. You make him aware of it. And when he can then tell you something about it, you try to help him further, so that once he has become aware of the breathing process, he gradually reaches the point where he can consciously snap into it himself, I would even say in word contexts that he forms during this breathing process, which he can now consciously follow in a certain way, in an appropriate manner.

So you have to think of it this way: by first giving rhythms, which, depending on how the matter lies, are to be thought inwardly, murmured, whispered or recited aloud, you cause the person in question to notice a change in breathing. Now he knows that the breath changes in this way. And now he is, in a sense, forbidden from using the very word or thought material that has been given to him. He is made aware that he is now forming something similar within himself, and then he comes up with the idea of consciously paralleling this entire inner process of thinking or speaking or inwardly hearing words with the breathing process, so that a certain breathing always snaps into an inner imagining or inner hearing of words. In this way, a great deal of what I would call a poor association between the processes that are more mental, more soul-like, in speaking, and those processes that take place in the organism as more material, as physical processes, is balanced out. All of this has a particularly favorable effect when applied in the right childhood period. And it can be said that if our teachers were better psychologists, if they really had a concrete knowledge of the human body from the spirit, they would be able to work with speech disorders in a completely different way, especially in a pedagogical way.

Now, what I have mentioned can also be developed into a certain therapy, and it can also be used to achieve many favorable results for later stages of life. But it seems to me to be of particular importance – and here we could already point to certain successes that have been achieved in this direction – that such things can be cured by a particularly rational application of the principle of imitation. But then one must have a much more intimate, I might say subjective-objective knowledge of the whole human organism and its parts.

You see, people speak to each other in life; but they are hardly aware of the, I would say imponderable, effects that are exerted from person to person when speaking. But these effects are there nevertheless. We have become so abstract today that we actually only listen to the other person's intellectual content. Very few people today have a sense of what is actually meant when a person with a little more psychic-organic compassion feels, after speaking to another, how he consciously carries the other person's speech to a high degree in his own speech organism. Very few people today have any sense of what is experienced in this respect when one has to speak in succession with four, five or six people, one of whom is coughing, the second hoarse, the third shouting, the fourth speaking quite unintelligibly, and so on, because one's own organism is also involved; it vibrates along with everything, it experiences it all. And if you develop this feeling of experiencing speech, you certainly acquire a strong feeling, I might say, for defense mechanisms too. The peculiar thing is that it is precisely in the case of such things, which are so closely connected with the subjectivity of the human being as speech disorders, that one then finds out how one has to speak to someone who suffers from speech disorders, how one has to speak to him so that he can achieve something through imitation. I have met stutterers; if you have been able to empathize with their stuttering and then spoken to them rhythmically by name, then you could get them to really achieve something like forgetting their stuttering, by running after what is spoken to them, so to speak. However, you then have to be able to develop human compassion to the point where it is organic. In therapy, an enormous amount depends on the ability to make the patient forget the subjective experience associated with some objective process. And in particular, for example, a real remedy for speech disorders is, if the time between the ages of seven and fourteen is used correctly, by lovingly encouraging those with speech disorders to engage in the kind of imitation just described. It is often the case that one experiences that stutterers sometimes cannot pronounce three words properly without stumbling, cannot say three words

properly one after the other. If you give them a poem to recite that they can become completely absorbed in, that they can love, and if you stand behind it as it were as an attentive listener, then they can say whole long series of verses without stuttering. Creating such opportunities for them to do something like this is something that is a particularly good therapeutic tool from a psychological point of view. It is a bad thing to point out such defects to people, no matter what the reason. I had a poet friend who always lost his temper when someone tactless pointed out his stammering. When someone tactfully asked him, “Doctor, do you always stammer like that?” he replied, “No, only when I am confronted with someone who is thoroughly unpleasant to me.” Of course, I would have had to stutter terribly now if I had really wanted to imitate the way this answer was given.

But then, little by little, one will recognize what a significant remedy can be found in eurythmy for such and similar defects in the human organism. Eurythmy can be studied from two sides, as it were. I always draw attention to this in the introductions to the performances. I show how the speech organism and its movement tendencies can be perceived through sensory and supersensory observation of the human being today, and how these are then transferred to the whole human organism. However, the reverse approach is no less important. For, as has been very well presented to you today from a different point of view by Dr. Treichler, in the development of speech, a primeval eurythmy of human beings undoubtedly and most certainly plays a very significant role. Things do not have the sound within them, as it were, in the sense that the bim-bam theory asserts, but there is a relationship between all things, between the whole macrocosm and the human organization, this microcosm, and basically everything that happens externally in the world can also be reproduced in a certain way in movement by the human organization. And so, basically, we constantly tend to recreate all phenomena through our own organism. We do this not only with the physical organism, but also with the etheric organism. The etheric organism is in a state of perpetual eurythmy. Primitive man was much more mobile than he is today. You know, this development from mobility to stillness is still reflected in the fact that in certain circles it is considered a sign of education to behave as phlegmatically as possible when speaking and to accompany one's speech with as few gestures as possible. It is “considered” a mark of certain speakers that they always keep their hands in their trouser pockets, so that they do not make any gestures with their arms, because it is considered an expression of particularly good speech delivery when one stands still like a block. But what is caricatured here only corresponds to humanity's progression from mobility to stillness. We have to recognize a transition from a gestural language, from a kind of eurythmy, to phonetic language at the very bottom of human development in primeval times. That which has come to rest in the organism has specialized in the organs of speech, and has naturally first actually developed the organs of speech. Just as the eye is formed by light, so the speech organ is formed by a language that is initially soundless. And if we are aware of all these connections, we will gradually be able to use eurythmy particularly well by introducing it properly into the didactic process, in order to counteract anything that could interfere with speech. And in this direction, if there is even a little leisure time, it will be a very appealing task to develop our current, more artistic and pedagogically trained eurythmy more and more towards the therapeutic side and to create a kind of eurythmy therapy that will then extend in particular to such therapeutic demands as the one we have been talking about here. I am not sure whether what I have said is already exhaustive, but I wanted to address it briefly. Of course, as questions accumulate, the level of detail in the answers will have to decrease.

A participant asks how the movement of eurythmy is meant in relation to the ether body, and whether, according to spiritual scientific research, it has the same form as the body. Is the ether body localized at the larynx?

Did the Hungarians, who were recently observed by Dr. Steiner playing cards in a Hungarian border town, themselves fall under the tables or only their etheric bodies? Was this a process that could only be observed in the etheric body?

Rudolf Steiner: Please understand me correctly. Eurythmy is such that it can be performed in the physical body and through the physical body, which otherwise only the etheric body of the human being can perform. The fact that a person as a eurythmist performs the movements studied in the ether body with his physical body does not mean that the person who stands there doing eurythmy when he has some horrible thought is not carrying out this horrible thought with his ether body. He can perform the most beautiful movements with his outer, physical body, and then the etheric body, following his emotions, may dance in a rather caricature-like manner. But those people I characterized the other day as being at the Hungarian border playing cards were, of course, characterized entirely on the basis of their physical behavior. I only said that one could study these passions in the soul and spirit, the passions that led them to do such things above and below the table, and that one could study these passions in the soul and spirit.

I would like to say the following. It is generally the case, when you look at a person at rest, that the etheric body is calm and only slightly larger than the physical body. But this is only because, schematically speaking, the physical body has a dilating effect on the etheric body of the human being in all directions. If the etheric body were not held in its form by the physical body, if it were not banished from the physical body, then it would be a very mobile being. The etheric body has the inherent possibility of moving in all directions, and in addition, in an awakened state, it is under the constant influence of the mobile astral, which follows everything of a spiritual nature. The etheric body in itself is therefore something thoroughly mobile. As a painter, for example, one has the difficulty when one wants to paint something ethereal, that one must paint, I would say, as if one could paint lightning. One must translate the moving into stillness. So at the moment when you step out of the physical world, at that moment the concept of distance also ceases to apply, along with all the things that actually only relate to resting space; all that ceases, and a completely different kind of imagining begins. A form of imagining begins that can actually only be characterized by saying that it relates to the ordinary imagining of spatial things as a suction effect relates to a pressure effect. One is drawn into the matter instead of touching it and so on. This is how it is with the relationship between the etheric body and the physical body.

A participant (also speaking for others): Dear attendees, prompted by discussions with many friends, I would like to ask a few questions that may express some of what has been going through many minds and hearts over the past week. We have heard that young students in particular can hear and learn many things here that need to be carried out into our people to build a new culture. Now, in the midst of all the problems that are being discussed here, the question of the fate of our German people often arises. How must our youth place themselves in the context of the fate of our German people if they want to fulfill their inner duties in the right way and of their own free will? Just as Fichte brought forth great and powerful thoughts a hundred years ago, so too are we receiving powerful thoughts today, the realization of which we long for. In wide circles, at least in those circles that are close to the threefold order, the view prevails today that this threefold order will also be realized without intensive work, that it can thus come about all by itself, so to speak, even if people contribute nothing to it.

Now I would like to raise the question: What will actually be the fate of our nation if this fatalistic attitude prevails in our circles – which is, of course, very easily explained from our overall cultural development – and if it is not replaced by the courageous will that is wanted from here? Today one often hears that it is possible that Bolshevism will spread even further, that it is possible that anarchic conditions in Germany will continue to spread. How should we position ourselves in the face of these questions, when this fatalistic element, which I have tried to describe, is confronted with the courageous, forward-storming will?

A second question: we are talking here about anthroposophy, about human wisdom. Now the question has been repeatedly asked in recent days: what would the whole world view actually look like if one did not start from the point of view of the anthroposophist, but if one started from the point of view of some other consciousness? We know from Dr. Steiner's lectures, but also from other lectures, that the three lower realms, that is, the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, are actually the brothers of man who have remained behind. How would this now present itself if we were to relate man again to the higher hierarchy, for example to the angelic beings? Is it conceivable that what is presented from a human point of view today as anthroposophy might be presented from the point of view of a higher consciousness, that is, from the point of view of an angelic consciousness - one could perhaps speak of an angeloisophy in this context - and how would the problems appear from this point of view? I ask this question because it has repeatedly come up in our conversations in recent days.

A third question: From the previous remarks by Dr. Steiner, it is clear that eurythmy is extremely important from a therapeutic point of view. Now I would like to point out that if we observe certain things today, things that appear to be trivial, we can see how absolutely necessary eurythmy is from a different point of view. Even in certain children's toys, we can see how certain forces appropriate to the present time want to come out, push towards manifestation. [There follows a reference to diabolo games and toys that were introduced by French and American soldiers in particular.] Do such toys not show certain forces that pull downwards? Is there not something in them that expresses forces that are polar to human nature, perhaps a hint of the devilish? And so I wanted to raise the question: Is it not possible that the harmful aspects of these or other materialistic games given to children today could be overcome through eurythmy? Just yesterday in children's eurythmy we had a living example of how children can respond to eurythmy in an ingenious way and then reject everything that is contained in such games.

Rudolf Steiner: I will try to answer the questions briefly, although each one would require a lecture in itself. However, I would ask you to bear in mind that if one says something in a brief answer to a question, it is of course easy for some inaccuracies or misunderstandings to arise.

First of all, the question of the fate of the German people: it is true that today an enormous sense of fatalism is emerging within broad sections of the German people. This fatalistic mood can be observed on a large scale and in detail. And this fatalistic mood was also, I might say tragically there when we began in April of last year in Stuttgart to seek understanding for the threefold social organism and for the upliftment of what lies in such a terrible way, that comes from this understanding. But on the other hand, it must be said that we have arrived at a very special point in the development of humanity. I must frankly admit that when I was invited by the Anthroposophical student group in Stuttgart to give a lecture for the students of the Technical University in their assembly hall, I was still under the impression of Spengler's book “The Decline of the West”. Yes, my dear audience, we have come to the point where today we can prove the decline in a strictly methodical way. Now, Spengler's book is by no means a talentless book. On the contrary, in many respects it is extraordinarily ingenious. What is presented there testifies to nothing other than this: if only the forces of which Spengler is aware were to be effective in the future – he is not aware of anthroposophy, but, as can be seen from some of his writing, he would probably turn red with rage just hearing about it — if only what Spengler knows remains effective, then the downfall of Western civilization would be absolutely certain well into the second millennium. Just let everything that has developed in humanity be effective — the downfall is certain. Just as a human being ages when he has reached a certain number of years and is heading towards death, so this culture is heading towards death. What people like Spengler do not know is what has developed in the successive cultural periods, which you will find described in my “Occult Science”.

In the first cultural period — I have called it the primeval Indian period — there was a primeval culture based on the wisdom of the time. Some of this has already been characterized in these lectures. From this there was an inheritance in the next age, in the ancient Persian, in the Zarathustra culture; from there, in turn, diluted into that age, what can be called the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, the third period, which closes approximately in the 8th century BC before the Mystery of Golgotha. Then very little goes into the fourth period, where Plato still lets his teaching and his writings be steeped in ancient mystery wisdom, but where naturalism and intellectualism already begin with Aristotle. During this period, in which human original wisdom is already beginning to decline, Christianity is founded. The Mystery of Golgotha is still understood with the last original wisdom. But as this ancient wisdom itself fades, it finally becomes modern theology, which either degenerates into a material dogmatism and church belief or into a description of Jesus as a simple man from Nazareth, in whom the Christ, the Christ-being, has been completely lost. But of course a new understanding of Christianity itself must come. The origin of Christianity extends into this fourth period, and from the point of view of Primordial Wisdom, it extends a little into our fifth period. The fifth period is the one in which Primordial Wisdom disappears, is paralyzed, and in which man must find a new spirituality from within himself. All talk about this spirituality coming from outside is in vain for the future. In the future, the gods must speak through the human soul. Today, the question is not addressed to any other power of the soul than to our will alone. That is to say, today it is a matter for all mankind to thoroughly overcome fatalism and consciously absorb spirituality into the will. This mission has already fallen to the German people to a very considerable extent. Anyone who studies this in more detail, by looking at the great figures of the German people, will notice how this people in particular has the mission to reshape its world, I would say its social world, out of its will, despite all the hardship and all the terrible things that are now unfolding within this people. Only for the time being there is no awareness of the actual facts and the great world-historical context.

I would like to do as I sometimes like to do, not just give my own opinion, but refer to the opinion of someone else, Herman Grimm, who certainly cannot be said to have been a Bolshevik or anything of the sort. As early as the 1880s, Herman Grimm wrote that the greatness of the German people is not based on its princes or its governments, but on its intellectual giants. But it may also be said that this is precisely what has been most misunderstood and most forgotten. Today there is a significant fact that one must only properly observe. Take the general intellectual life, untouched by a real spiritual upsurge. Study it as it lives itself out in popular literature, be it in Berlin, Vienna or elsewhere – I am not just talking about after the war here, but long before the war. study how it is lived out in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen and so on, study it in popular literature, especially in newspaper literature, which can be said to represent the opinions of a very large number of people. Yes, especially during the war, it turned out that sometimes people also remembered that there was a Goethe, that there was a Schiller, that there was a Fichte – yes, even Fichte's sayings were quoted. But the fact of the matter is this: anyone today who has a feeling, a real receptivity for the inner structure, for the direction, for the whole signature of intellectual life, knows that what was written in the 20th century in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig was more similar to what was written in Paris, Chicago, New York, and London than to what a Herder, a Goethe, or a Fichte felt vibrating through their souls.

This fact is widely misunderstood. What Central Europe's greatness is actually based on has been forgotten. Once we describe figures like Frederick the Great according to the truth, not according to legend, then some of it will melt away in the face of the real intellectual greatness in Central Europe. And this must come. We must learn again, not just to quote the words of Fichte, not just to quote the words of Goethe, but to be able to live again in what lived at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. And we must become aware that only through the individual shaping of the peoples differentiated across the earth can something of what is to be achieved be achieved – not, however, by some unified culture emanating from some side, which is a Western culture, and one that is justified only for the West, has flooded Central Europe, not through the fault of the West alone, but above all because Central Europe allowed itself to be flooded and accepted everything. And this awareness of what is at stake is what must be spread today by those who mean well.

Dear attendees, I knew an Austrian poet; I met him when he was already very old: his name is Fercher von Steinwand. He wrote many important works that unfortunately have remained unknown.

I will just add what I wrote in my booklet [1895] about Nietzsche, a fighter against his time. Right at the beginning, I quoted a saying of Nietzsche that actually deserves to be better known: the saying that Nietzsche wrote down when he served in the Franco-Prussian War, albeit as a military hospital attendant. There he wrote [about the terrible, dangerous consequences of the victorious war and called it a delusion that German culture had also triumphed; this delusion posed the danger of transforming victory into complete defeat,] yes, into the extirpation of the German spirit in favor of the German Reich. In recent decades, when people spoke of the extirpation of the spirit, they understood little of this, if they spoke of the will to let this spirit flow in again.

And when all this is taken into account, it is necessary to recall what Fichte felt and what he expressed so magnificently in his “Addresses to the German Nation”: that the gods serve the will of men, that they work through the will of self-aware men.

And after Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and others, it is precisely this German nation that should be aware that the will must arise, but that will must be imbued with spirituality. What strange mental wanderings this German nation has gone through. There are many things that can be recalled that are only rarely presented in external history.

I advise everyone to buy the Reclam booklet by Wilhelm von Humboldt: “Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State”. You will see how much of it is already contained in the middle part of the threefold social organism, the legal, state part. Of course, the threefolded social organism is not in it, but what can be said about the state itself is there. In this writing, Wilhelm von Humboldt attempts to protect the individual against the state, against the increasing power of the state in the intellectual and economic realms. Wilhelm von Humboldt was Prussian Minister of Education from 1809 to 1819 – one almost dare not say this in view of what happened afterwards.

And so many more examples could be given. What is necessary, above all, is that those who feel this question before their soul really let history come to life in them. My dear audience, as an Austrian, one has a very special feeling for this when one gets to know the school history books of northern Central Europe. In 1889, I came from Vienna to Weimar to work on the publication of Goethe's works at the Weimar Goethe-Schiller Archive. And since I had previously been involved in education and teaching, I was also given the friendly task of guiding the director of the Goethe-Schiller Archive's boys a little. They were then in high school, and it was only then that I got to know their history books a little – I hadn't taken that into account before – starting with the creation of the world and going up to the development of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and only then the actual world history. Several textbooks presented it this way, one being roughly the same as the other. But is it not always a mere radicalism when speaking in this way, but sometimes it is also the right love for the German nation. And the right love, if it can really come through spiritual-scientific stimulation, will in turn give rise to a culture of the will from mere fatalism, and that is what matters. Unless we grasp this either/or, either destruction or ascent through our own will, we will not escape destruction. Of course, ascent will not come, but something quite different. Well, I could say a lot more about this topic, but perhaps that's enough for now. We'll see each other more often.

Regarding the question: What would our world view look like from the standpoint of a different consciousness, for example, an angelic consciousness?

Well, in a certain sense, spiritual science describes completely different forms of consciousness, such forms of consciousness that people had in the earlier stages of development, or such forms of consciousness that one can ascend to through inspiration or imagination. So, in a certain sense, one learns through spiritual science to recognize what the world view of another consciousness is. But as far as the question of an angelic consciousness is concerned, ladies and gentlemen, it is very important that we do not choose more abstract questions than are necessary for a certain, I would say elasticity, of our conceptual ability. Because, you see, we do not have our consciousness to satisfy ourselves with all kinds of sensational news from the most diverse worlds, but so that we can go through our overall human development through its development. And the angels have their consciousness precisely so that they can undergo angelic development. And if someone were to ask what the world would look like with a different consciousness, it would be like someone asking me how a person would eat if they had a beak instead of a mouth. It is a textbook example of moving out of concreteness and into abstraction. Anthroposophy is supposed to achieve precisely that, to remain within the realm of experience and to extend it only

extended only to the spiritual world, that one is always ready to broaden one's experience, but not that one constructs all kinds of questions out of pure abstractness. It is not at all necessary for us to speculate in any way about angelic consciousness or mammalian consciousness or the like, but it is necessary for us to simply abandon ourselves to experience. It gives us the input into our consciousness that we need for our orientation and for our further development in the world. And that is what we have to learn from anthroposophy: to remain within the sphere that concerns us as human beings, because that is where we make appropriate progress.

This is connected with the question I heard here just now, which is asked incredibly often: what is the ultimate goal of human development in the first place?

What is the ultimate purpose of human life, or rather of life?

You see, it is precisely in relation to such questions that spiritual science must be approached not in an abstract but in a concrete way. If you had no possibility of getting a timetable for the journey to Rome here in Dornach, but only as far as Lugano, and you knew that you could get a further timetable in Lugano to go on to Florence, and from there on to Rome, one would do well not to refrain from the journey or to speculate about how I have to organize the journey from here to Rome, but to travel first to Lugano, and then see how things go from there. It is the same with human life, especially if one knows that there are repeated earthly lives. If I now tell you something about the goal of all human life here with the abilities that one can have in this one earth life, then it could indeed be something more perfect next time and then one could answer more completely how one gets the timetable to Rome. So one has to take into account what is immediately given in the concrete, and one must know that human life is in a state of perpetual development. So one cannot ask about its ultimate purpose, but only about the direction of development in which one is moving. If you really look into it, there is truly a lot to be done for the physical, soul and spiritual life. And this path to Lugano is not quite close – I now mean the path in the development of humanity – and how that will continue, we want to leave that to the more fully developed abilities of the future. In short, it is a matter of remaining in the concrete, bit by bit, and of getting rid of the abstractness that also gives birth to such questions. Now, something else is needed here about eurythmy:

Can eurythmy, when used correctly, bring important achievements for our folk culture to light?

Yes, dear readers. From some of the comments I have already made about eurythmy, you will be able to see that eurythmy can have a great pedagogical-didactic significance. If you are convinced of this, and if you are not not only believe it but also recognize that it can even help to alleviate disturbances in life through appropriate eurythmic didactics, then there is much more that can be brought into the right channels in social life through healthy eurythmy. But of course one thing needs to be noted in this regard. You see, we should be able to take this eurythmy into children's play. The esteemed questioner spoke of children's toys and asked whether eurythmy could not be used for a lot of things. And it was also asked whether eurythmy can have a healing effect on children aged five to seven who suffer from epilepsy.

It can certainly do so if it is applied in the right way. Admittedly, we are only just beginning with eurythmy. But the continuation of this beginning does not always depend only on the intellectual momentum. For example, we had intended to build a kind of eurythmeum in Stuttgart to begin with, because of course the Waldorf School is there, and later here in the building itself. You really need opportunities if these things are to be developed bit by bit. You cannot pursue these things without practising them, without having the necessary premises and also the necessary connection with the rest of human culture; you cannot pursue these things out of the blue. It would have been terribly expensive to build a eurythmy in Stuttgart and we only had a small sum of money together. Perhaps I may say the following about this. In the first year, through the dedicated work of our Waldorf teachers, which cannot be sufficiently recognized, we really achieved everything possible for the Waldorf School in the first year. Although, in spiritual and psychological terms, everything that could be expected has been achieved – it is fair to say this without being immodest – this year began with extraordinary worries for those who were sincere about the Waldorf School. It is a fact that the Waldorf School had to be enlarged because a large number of children came from outside; the number of children has more than doubled compared to the previous year. We were facing a very considerable deficit, and the fund that we had for a eurythmy school was first eaten up by the Waldorf School. It is only natural that the Waldorf School should take this on, but it means that we cannot build a eurythmy school. What lets us down is people's lack of understanding. Nowadays people are willing to understand anything, except for work that comes out of the truly concrete soul and spiritual life. I do not want to be polemical here, but I could tell you many things that would show you the dilettantism and the philosophical emptiness that is added to it today, as it performs a few somersaults before all possible reactionary powers in the world. We do not easily find the understanding of those who could do something on the material side to help things move forward. And anyone who wants the didactic, pedagogical, and especially the folk-pedagogical side of eurythmy and other aspects of a spiritual-scientific art of education to be further developed must ensure that understanding of what is actually intended is drawn into as many minds and as many souls as possible, with what is asserted here as anthroposophical spiritual science.

Question: It is often mentioned in spiritual science that those or those of the higher hierarchies have gone through their stage of humanity in these or other circumstances. What does stage of humanity mean in this sense, that is, the goal of human development? Is the goal set as the development of the I, of freedom, which freedom is denied to the higher hierarchies? So what is the stage of humanity?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, I don't know who has denied the higher hierarchies the freedom in its special form of education. What is meant when I speak, for example, in 'Occult Science' or in the other writings of the human stage of other beings, is essentially characterized by degrees, by the different states of consciousness. In spiritual science, the term “stage of human development” is to be understood as follows:

Today, within human development in the broadest sense, we live in a state of consciousness when we are awake, which we can call object consciousness. This state of consciousness can be described as Dr. Stein described it to you in his lectures, according to his activity in imagination, concept, judgment. One can also add perception and the special kind of emotional effect, the volitional emotion, volitional impulses and so on. Then present-day humanity also still knows, but only in reminiscences, in chaotic images, the dream state, but this points back, it is an atavistic remnant of an earlier state of consciousness, of an ego-less image consciousness; this is therefore an underhuman consciousness. And it is preceded by two other states of consciousness, so that we can say: the present state of consciousness is the fourth in the series. It will be followed by a fifth, which we can anticipate today through imagination, inspiration and so on. We can also characterize this progression as future states of the sixth and seventh states of consciousness. The fourth, however, the one we have today, is in the narrower sense the state of consciousness of humanity as it is today. So when we speak of the human stage, we mean beings with object consciousness. Beings who do not perceive through such senses as human beings do, who have a special education, perhaps through very different senses, but who, in their inner being, depend on imagining and grasping and then, in a more or less subconscious activity, connecting perception with ideas and concepts. The higher, fifth state of consciousness would thus be one in which one consciously differentiates between the inner, spiritual realm, which one first grasps in pure thinking, as has been attempted in the Philosophy of Freedom, and then has perception as such as a phenomenon of development in its own right, into which one no longer mixes concepts and ideas, so that, as in the process of inhalation, in inhaling and exhaling, an inner interaction between perception and concept consciously takes place. That would be the next higher state of consciousness.

When we speak of other beings and say that they were at the human stage of development at different times, we mean that they had a perception of the external world in the past – regardless of which senses were involved – which they connected in a more or less conscious way with the inner soul life, so that at that time they were not yet at a stage that humanity will reach in the future, the stage of a separate experience of perception, of the spiritual soul realm, and a conscious synthesis. That is what needs to be said about this question.

Dear attendees, it is now 10 a.m., I think I will collect the questions that have yet to be asked and save them, and we can meet again in the next few days. I think we will be able to discuss the matters on the other notes better and with more focus if we don't rush through it in a few minutes, but instead come together again to answer these questions. I also think you will agree to this, after we have spent two hours having this conversation. So we will conclude today and continue in some way soon.