The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Introductory words from Roman Boos: Dear attendees, the appearance of a number of scientifically working personalities is of course not intended to present anything firm, final, or conclusively formulated and to submit it to public discussion. Rather, these lectures are intended to show the direction in which the individual subject areas can be developed what is represented here from the Goetheanum as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and what has been presented to the public for some time now in its artistic effects in numerous eurythmy performances and in the construction of the Goetheanum as an architectural work. In all modesty, however, we believe that our lectures, which are only intended as a beginning, can compete with what is represented today in the circles of the academies and universities.

For anyone who has studied in any faculty with a living soul must have become more and more aware in recent times of how the purely material, the purely quantitative, loads a person with a multitude of facts, so that one can no longer stand up to it, not only in a personal sense, but absolutely in a spiritual sense. This means that the human being, with his spiritual powers, is less and less able to really

21 enormous material is brought to him, really to cope with. And because in anthroposophy the view is directed to the human being, and not just to the human being himself, but to the human being as a point within the whole of reality, what lies within the realities themselves can express itself, but in such a way that these realities do not confront him only quantitatively, weighing on him and oppressing him, but so that, by expressing themselves in man himself, the union of man with the spiritual can also take place and thus also with objective reality.

The opportunity will be given here for a debate from within the circle of scientific workers. In the form of debates, questions and so on, the opportunity is offered to further develop one or other of the topics touched upon in the lectures. For anyone approaching scientific movements with the attitude from which the entire anthroposophical movement builds its works will see a major task in cleansing the field of science and social life from the polemical spirit, which in the field of science takes the form of and in the social life as throwing hand grenades and setting machine guns going; he will see the main task as being the necessity to further expand and deepen the problems, as is to be done here.

And we also hope that at the scientific lectures, Dr. Steiner will be able to add some more to what is given by the experts.

We would also like to ask you to initially only raise questions that are related to today's lecture topic, and to come back to special cases in the following scientific lectures.

The topics of the specialist lectures are:

on March 25, 1920: Dr. Carl Unger on “Anthroposophy and the Epistemological Foundations of Natural Science”

March 26, 1920: Dr. Friedrich Husemann on “Weltanschauung, Nervousness and Spiritual Science”

March 27, 1920: Dr. Rudolf Steiner on “The World Picture of Modern Science”

on March 29, 1920: Dr. Walter Johannes Stein on “Anthroposophy and Physiology”,

on March 30, 1920: Dr. Eugen Kolisko on “Anthroposophy and Chemistry”

on 31 March 1920: E.A.Karl Stockmeyer on “Anthroposophy and Physics”

on 1 April 1920: Dr. Oskar Schmiedel on “Anthroposophy and the Theory of Colors”

on April 6, 1920: Dr. Roman Boos on “Anthroposophy and Jurisprudence”

on April 7, 1920: Dr. Rudolf Steiner on “Hygiene as a Social Question”

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved attendees! This lecture today is intended to serve as a kind of introduction to the following eight lectures, which arise in large part from a circle of friends who have gathered here during this time with a very specific scientific goal. Lectures will be given on the most diverse scientific subjects, from the fields of epistemology and physiology; biological questions will be addressed; physics and chemistry will be discussed, and finally, I would like to point out the problem of hygiene as a sociological problem. Today, the outside world often judges, albeit superficially, that in all that is presented here through the spiritual current of which the Goetheanum is a representative, on the one hand it is a sect and on the other a scientific dilettantism. These lectures should at least partly draw attention to the fact that both are very much mistaken about what is presented here. There is neither scientific dilettantism nor religious sectarianism.

Proof of this is that a circle of serious-minded physicians has come together here in these weeks, and that they have been joined by a small circle of such personalities who are inclined to build bridges from medical science to other branches of life. This group has come together here out of the feeling that something like medical life today needs real new impetus; they have come together with the aim of receiving and giving impulses for this new impetus. What is being presented here, I do not want to say as a medical course, but as a course for doctors, that implies that it is about serious striving, about serious willpower in the face of the great tasks of our time. This course follows on from two courses that I have already held in connection with the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, about the necessary new foundation of the physical sciences. All this will be sufficient proof, even for those who, after superficial evaluation, express the opinion just mentioned, that here we are looking at the great, serious tasks of our time, and that we are seeking to determine what is necessary to impact the spiritual culture and thus the whole culture of the present and the near future, based on what these serious, great tasks dictate. If we look at the terrible events of recent years with the aim of ascertaining, through an unprejudiced judgment, how these terrible events are connected with aberrations of the human consciousness, then we will come away from much of what some, I might say light-heartedly, consider to be sufficient for a renewal of life.

For example, how often is the judgment pronounced today that, in the face of what is swirling in time, what is emerging as chaos in time, care must be taken to broaden knowledge, to broaden understanding. And in many circles it is emphasized on all possible occasions that something is missing in our time; on all possible occasions it is emphasized that knowledge must be spread, let us say through adult education centers or similar institutions. The spiritual scientific worldview movement, for which the Goetheanum is the representative here, cannot readily agree with these assessments, which are being made in this direction. For, my dear attendees, in the face of such judgments, the question arises: Do we actually already have a science that is effective in the future, a science that is capable of intervening in life? Do we have something to carry it into the widest circles in adult education centers?

Based on truly profound judgment, those who are the supporters of the spiritual science practiced here are convinced that, before anything else, a renewal of scientific life itself is needed, an infusion of new elements into scientific life, before we can think of spreading knowledge to the widest circles, for example through adult education centers or the like. We are not thinking here merely of a popularization of present-day science, but rather that an anthroposophically oriented worldview must think in terms of a real renewal of these present-day sciences, based on an understanding of the state of these sciences. Naturally, in this introductory lecture, I can only sketch out the task for these evenings. And so I would like to first point out the two main directions of current scientific endeavor, in order to show how these present sciences actually relate to life.

On the one hand, we have everything that can be characterized by saying that it is scientific in the natural scientific sense; we have to refer to everything that occurs in the field of natural science. In speaking about this field here, I must indeed emphasize again and again that I am not starting from a superficial polemic against the current direction of natural science, but that, on the contrary, because I fully recognize everything that natural science has achieved in the course of the 19th century and into our days, because I must admire the great progress of natural science in itself and of the most diverse branches of human technology, it is precisely out of this admiration that I come to think differently about the further course of natural science than it has developed into our days.

On the other hand, we have the historical sciences with all that belongs to them, which also includes, for example, jurisprudence. You know, my dear audience, that natural science has increasingly come to focus on observing external facts and following experiments. They know that there was a strong endeavor, especially in the 19th century, to connect the enormous wealth of facts that have emerged through observation and experimentation with each other through great ideas and to strive towards certain so-called laws of nature. But the one who can really understand this whole scientific life knows that today, in the most diverse fields – in the field of physics, chemistry, biology – we are faced with the most incisive facts and that, with what is commonly known as science, what the facts tell us, we are not in a position to penetrate in any way into the essence of that which obviously must be behind it, yes, that the facts, I would say, stun us, that we cannot keep up with the abundance of facts using scientific methods. The outward course of science actually confirms this.

Even if very few people still pay attention to this today, it must be said that the last twenty years have actually brought about the greatest conceivable revolution in the field of physics. Ideas that were still considered unshakable thirty years ago have now been thoroughly revolutionized. One need only mention the name Einstein or the name Lorentz, the Dutch physicist, and by mentioning these names one can point to a whole range of facts and discussions that have revolutionized and shaken physics as it was just thirty years ago. Of course, I cannot go into the details here. But the fact that physics has been revolutionized, which is well known in certain circles, must be pointed out. Now, however, one can say: While, for example, something as significant as the revolution of the old concept of mass and matter through the newer radiation theory of electricity is at hand, our scientific ways of thinking cannot cope with what has actually been presented to man through the abundance of experiments. From the observation of radiant matter in a glass vacuum, it could be seen that the same properties that were previously attributed to matter, for example a certain speed and acceleration, must now be attributed to radiant electricity; so, so to speak, the concept of matter has been lost. It became clear from the abundance of experiments that nothing could be put in the place of the old concept of matter; and from Einstein's theory of relativity, with its terribly cold abstractions, nothing can be gained that resembles a real conception of what one is actually dealing with in external nature.

All this is said only to point out how the works have come into a flow that has developed in such a way that there is a wealth of observed and experimental material that cannot be mastered by our modes of representation. I would like to say that the development of science has shown that, although we can look at nature on the surface in the modes of perception that have been preserved from the past, we are not able to interpret what nature presents to us today in countless phenomena in the form of rays. A peculiar method has crept into physics in recent times. It is called the statistical method. Whereas in the past it was believed that precisely formulated natural laws could be arrived at by means of exact measurement, observation or experimentation, today we work very much with what is really similar to that statistical method, which resorts to probability calculation, which we find applied when we set up insurance companies, for example. There we also make assumptions, for example, that of the kind that so many of a certain number of people of a certain age have inevitably died after a certain number of years. With these statistical methods – which are based on probability theory and are similar to the methods of modern physics – one can get along quite well if, for example, one has to arrange something like life insurance; everything is correct and one can rely on this method. But the essential defect of the method is that it says nothing about the nature of that for which the method is used – which is clear from the fact that no one will believe that they must really die in the year that was calculated as their year of death using probability calculations and statistical methods. Such methods serve to summarize the facts, and for a certain action based on statistics, but they say nothing for penetrating into any essence. Thus, in the external, scientific field, we are, as it were, condemned to remain on the surface of things.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is most evident when this scientific method is to be applied in the practical treatment of the sick person, when it is to be applied in medicine. And it is precisely because of the dissatisfaction that arises today from the scientific basis of medicine that an arrangement such as the course for doctors that is taking place here in these weeks has been created. When approaching the sick person, one cannot subject him to treatment without really recognizing his nature. The physical and scientific methods must also be put to the test when approaching the human being. And all that can be deplored about medicine and its effects today is connected with the inadequate scientific foundation of our present-day sciences. This is one of the tasks of anthroposophy in relation to the present-day sciences. It has the task of finding real scientific methods through which the abundance of facts that are available to us today can really be seen through in such a way that we can penetrate through these facts into the essence of what surrounds us in the world.

Something very similar is the case with historical science. While at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century we still have attempts to observe human life in such a way that both the natural course of events in the development of the human race and that which comes from within the human being in a soul-spiritual way are taken as a basis – while At the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, we have studies such as Herder's “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity”. During the 19th century, what historical science is becomes more and more abstract and abstract, more and more intellectual and intellectual. We see how those who cannot profess a certain materialism in history speak of ideas that are supposed to work in history. As if abstract ideas could be any kind of real agent that carries historical development! As if ideas were not initially something merely passive! Because our modes of thought are incapable of penetrating through observation or the facts provided by experimentation to the basis of nature, we remain, I would say, merely on the surface of what takes place in human life with our modes of thought. We are unable to connect what we grasp through our thoughts of the people acting in history or of the events occurring in history with the great forces that carry history.

We see, and this is particularly interesting, how in the 19th century, for example, such minds as Herman Grimm's appear. He is really very characteristic of the historical method of the 19th century. There is perhaps nothing that speaks about historical phenomena in such a wonderfully, deeply satisfying way as Herman Grimm does in his treatises, for example on Goethe's “Tasso” or on Goethe's “Iphigenia”. There is something there that is already in the realm of human spiritual creation. In this case Herman Grimm can set about something that can be grasped by thought because it has already been raised to the level of thought. But when Herman Grimm wants to go further, when he wants to go into reality, when he does not just want to look at something like Goethe's works “Tasso” or “Iphigenia”, but when he wants to present Goethe himself as a real human personality Herman Grimm also wrote a book about Goethe. One sees that the whole Goethe whom he describes is actually a kind of shadow figure and nowhere is there the possibility of penetrating the full intensity of the real. What Herder still attempted, namely to grasp thoughts that are historical and at the same time embrace nature, was no longer possible with the historical method of the 19th century. These thoughts are too thin to penetrate reality from a historical point of view. And so we have a historical science that cannot get out of thought, remains in thought, and cannot penetrate from thought into reality.

Here again, for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, there is the necessity not only to grasp what the soul experiences in abstract thoughts, but to grasp it in such a way that the forces that really underlie the external reality are seen in these soul experiences. On the one hand, we must try to understand nature in such a way that we can apply our understanding to the human being – so that we can understand the human being, as we do in the art of medicine or in the art of education, and on the other hand, we must try not to get stuck in the abstract not to get stuck in abstract thoughts and ideas of history, but to penetrate to such a living inner soul life that we can truly grasp what has happened historically – an understanding so saturated with reality that it in turn is close to natural occurrence, to natural becoming.

Just as the inadequacy of the natural-scientific basis has become apparent in medicine, so too has the inadequacy of the historical method in social life. What has caused so-called historical materialism, the Marxist view, to begin to be put into practice in our time, to the misery of humanity in this much-tried Europe? What has caused people to arise who declare everything spiritual, everything legal, everything moral, and so on, to be an ideology, and see reality solely and exclusively in the economic production process? What has caused this? It has caused the historical methods of the 19th century to be incapable of grasping this reality. The historians or those who wanted to be historians in any field have remained with abstractions that have nothing to do with reality. And social democracy, meanwhile, has developed for itself what was not offered to it by the leading circles, and it did so according to what it alone knew something about: the economic process. The fact that we have a materialistic foundation of history and today a policy of economic science that is ruining Europe is the original sin of non-existent historical thinking. The facts are serious today, and only those who refuse to see their gravity can deny that it is necessary to strive for greater depth in both the natural and historical sciences and to work towards a new foundation.

This is what should be seen through within the spiritual current, for which this building, the Goetheanum, is the representative, so that - this should be explained here in all modesty - so that a science can arise that can really step out into our elementary schools, that can really flow into life. And one would like that not only the intellectual impulses of people of the present would be seized by these efforts, one would like that above all the hearts of people of the present could be there and feel how deeply connected all the social misery of our time, all the decline, the chaos of our time is with the aberrations present in the striving for knowledge and in the scientific striving of our time, which must be healed.

What I have just characterized should be contrasted with what can be gained from the spiritual scientific method for the natural scientific direction and for the historical direction. And I do not want to speak in abstractions, but I would like to point out two facts, which should only serve as examples of what is being sought here. The first example is taken from the field of natural science. It is intended to show the point where the scientific foundation of our scientific endeavor becomes insufficient when confronted with the concepts of the human being. Today, if you look around you at the scientific endeavor of the present, you can repeatedly find an insight into the human heart. This view of the human heart has been developed directly from the natural scientific basis of life. Just as mechanics, physics, chemistry and biology are today, so is our view of the human heart, because we have a very specific chemistry, physics, biology and so on, because we have a specific natural scientific basis. What is this view of the human heart? Well, you find it characterized everywhere as follows: the human heart is a pump that pumps blood through the human organism in such a way that this blood washes away certain useless substances, exchanging them for others that it carries to certain places in the human organism. If today, even the slightest doubt is expressed to certain people that this human heart could be a very ordinary pump, that the human heart works in the middle and pumps blood out to the various parts of the body, then the people who have adopted scientific views today – I have experienced it – they become downright wild. And yet, my dear audience, here is the point where a recovery of the scientific foundation can bring about a complete reversal.

Here the spiritual scientific world view will have to show that the heart is not a pump, but that the heart in its activity is only the result of the self-regulating currents and interactions that occur in the human organism. Man is a dual being. Everything that, to put it schematically, lies below the heart and everything that lies above it is organized in fundamentally different ways. What drives the development of carbon is fundamentally different from what happens when carbon combines with oxygen to form carbonic acid. But the actual agent, the actual driving force, lies in the forces that interact from the lower human being and from the upper human being - from the upper and the lower. Just as positive and negative electricity want each other when there is an electrical charge, and just as an apparatus that would be connected to this charge of positive and negative electricity would carry out certain activities, so the human heart carries out activities as a result of the currents that are in the human organism. The human heart is not the pump of the human organism. Everything that the human heart does is purely the result of the inner life, of a certain current in the human organism. The opposite of popular belief is the case.

But with that, my dear audience, one points at the same time to a complete reversal of the science of the nature of man. For only by considering this great contrast between the upper and lower human being, in which the activity of the heart is harnessed and, as it were, expressed as mediation, only by considering this, are we able to bring the human being into the right contrast to the whole of the environment, to understand how the lower human being stands in a certain relationship to the outer world of solid, liquid and gaseous bodies, and also to the outer world of thermal phenomena, while everything in the upper human being that contrasts to some extent with the workings of the lower human being must be paralleled with light and with other etheric processes in the earthly and extra-terrestrial realm.

We will only learn to place the human being in the right way in the whole universe when we stop believing that the heart is the pump that pumps blood through the organism. In reality, the blood has an inner life, and in the congestion that occurs between the lower human being and the upper human being, the heart is so involved that the result of this congestion becomes apparent in the movement of the heart. In the movement of the heart, we basically have nothing other than where the upper human being and the lower human being touch and where, in certain unconscious regions, the activity of the lower human being is perceived by the upper human being. The heart is, so to speak, a sense organ within the human being. Just as the sense organs that lie outside are organs for mediating the outer experiences of the human being, so the heart is the organ that mediates the experiences of one's own being, albeit in the subconscious. With these things, I only want to suggest that something as essential as the heart teaching, which is suitable for reforming all medical thought, needs a thorough reform today. But that is only one example – it is an example of how cause and effect are almost confused today, I would say in all areas of nature observation.

My dear attendees! Spiritualists claim that they have photographed spirits. Photographing is an external process, and I do not want to dwell here on whether or not one can photograph spirits. But with no more right than the spiritualists claim that they have photographed ghosts, certain physicists today claim that they have photographed the configuration of atoms. Certainly, one can throw X-rays at crystals, one can make these X-rays reflect, the reflected rays interfere, and then photograph them, and one can claim to photograph the configuration of the atoms. The essential question is only: Are we really photographing the atomistic agents here, or are we photographing certain effects that come from the macrocosm and show up only at the points where we believe the atoms are present? It is essential everywhere to find ways of thinking and imagining that are able to go from appearances to the essence of things in the right way. Because scientific methods are so inadequate, they cannot suffice for application to the human being, whether in the field of medicine or in the social realm.

Thus we see that people who believe they have been trained in natural science are now setting about solving social problems, like Lenin and Trotsky. But the fact is that only a few individuals have studied what natural science establishes from its facts, but this is insufficient as conclusions, as results. As a rule, such people do not allow themselves to be drawn into discovering what one believes to know about things and what one believes to have discovered as laws, and then to actually test them against the individual facts. When someone tells you that he has photographed the configuration of atoms, such people do not think about the value of such a photograph. Of course, it is terribly impressive when one announces to the world in popular presentations: Atoms exist; they have even been photographed. - The layman naturally says: Well, how can anyone who is not a layman deny that atoms exist, which are the agents in all natural effects, when these atoms have even been photographed.

But the point is to have an insight into how something like this comes about. We suffer tremendously in the present from the fact that things are asserted as popular worldviews, monistic or otherwise, that consist in nothing more than in abstract summaries of all kinds of results, without going back to their real foundations. What do people present at monistic gatherings other than what they have read about in books or heard in lectures? Where is the opportunity to actually go into the reality of the things from which such results are actually drawn? Therefore, there is no possibility of a real overview of the implications of the results in this field. We are experiencing in today's science - when it develops into a world view and thereby believes itself to be very exact - that the processes that we experience in history are then used to calculate the processes that are supposed to have taken place on our earth over millions of years or that are supposed to have taken place millions of years ago. These calculations are always correct; for if, for example, one calculates how much debris the Niagara Falls deposited in a certain number of years, then one can, of course, calculate a great deal from such layer formations. But what is the actual method of calculation? The method of calculation is as follows: we observe the processes in the human stomach, say for five years, and then we calculate what these processes were like 10, 20 years ago, 150, 200, 300 years ago. We will get exact results – except that the person with this stomach and its processes obviously did not even exist as a physical human being 300 years ago! In this way, one can also calculate the changes in the human stomach and then the nature of the whole person in 10, 20, 30, 100, 200, 300 years – only then the person has long since died, and the whole calculation – which is completely correct as a calculation – has not the slightest value. The same value attaches to calculations that relate to the state of the earth millions of years ago or millions of years in the future, because they do not take into account whether the earth existed at that time or will still exist then. What use is it to know that after so many millions of years, when we, let us say, paint egg white on the wall and this will glow due to the changes in the earth, when the earth will no longer be there! Today, people still do not understand that some calculation or similar result can be absolutely correct, but that it cannot be applied to reality.

Two things are necessary today if one is to make a judgment: first, that the judgment is built on the basis of a correct logical method – the method of calculation is also a logical method – and second, that the judgment is also built on an appropriate insight into reality. A judgment must be both realistic and logical. The former is usually forgotten today, which is why the only logically correct judgments play such a large role in our ordinary scientific life, but under certain circumstances they have no application to reality. This is the concern of the spiritual current of which this Goetheanum is the representative: not only to have logically correct views, which can then also lead to errors, but to have realistic views, ones that really build a bridge between what lives in man as a world view and what develops outside as reality, for only such realistic views can be used for life. Only such realistic views can help our present life, which is drifting so much into chaos, to recover.

So I have shown you by one example – I could only show the one example today, but it could easily be multiplied – by the example of heart science, how necessary it is to strive for a science that is in line with reality, and how the spiritual current that is cultivated here in particular sets itself the serious task of working towards such a necessary reform of this science. I would also like to give an example of how to work towards the historical sciences. Using this example, I would like to show how a rudimentary scientific method, I would say a stunted scientific method, has simply been applied to the historical being, and how this has led to disastrous errors.

In the field of natural science, I would like to point out the so-called biogenetic law. I do not want to talk about the more or less limited validity of this law, but I want to treat it as a kind of hypothetical natural law. What does this biogenetic law state? It states that every higher animal creature, including man, during embryonic development, that is, during the development from conception to birth, briefly undergoes the forms that have been experienced in the development of the species. For example, the human embryo shows a fish-like form during one particular period, then other forms. These forms, the metamorphoses through which the embryo passes, are reminiscent of what has taken place in the developmental series in the history of the species, so that it has been able to come up to the human being through various forms. - This so-called biogenetic law has a certain limited significance. There is no doubt that ontogeny is a brief repetition of phylogeny, that individual development is a brief repetition of tribal development. But now attempts have been made to apply what has been found in the natural field to the historical field. It was believed that what lives in a later culture must, in a brief repetition, also show what lived in an earlier culture. So when a new people emerges somewhere, in its initial stages it must, as it were, pass through the stages of human development as they have been experienced so far, and then add a new one on top, just as the human being adds the mature life to the embryonic repetition of the tribal history. Not much has come of it if one wanted to apply this law, which was initially formulated purely abstractly for historical development and was modeled on a series of scientific observations, to life. I would like to say that life experiences do not actually confirm this law in the historical field in such a way that one can do anything with it in the face of reality.

On the other hand, the following emerges for the spiritual scientist's sharpened sense of observation. The essential thing is that the inner work that the spiritual scientist has to do in order to arrive at his modes of conception, and then to penetrate into nature in the way I have shown, sharpens his view of reality, his sense of observation for reality. This is how it turns out for this sharpened sense of observation: in the early stages of its development, the human being undergoes certain metamorphoses. One must only have an unbiased sense of what is going on in the early stages of human development. We have an important stage of life in human life: from birth to the change of teeth around the age of seven. The soul life of the human being manifests itself in a very specific way during this period, and with the change of teeth it undergoes a transformation. Until the change of teeth, the human being is in the epoch of his life where he is an imitative being who wants to imitate everything that is done in his environment, down to the movements, down to the formation of speech sounds, and who wants to imitate these things through inner forces. Up to the age of seven, he adapts so well to the human environment that he then, up to the next important stage in life, which is linked to the onset of sexual maturity, has the need to accept, on the basis of authority, that which he is supposed to believe. Then the whole organization of the human being changes again, and so does his soul life. And anyone with enough sense of observation will be able to notice how the human being changes even in his early twenties, or perhaps in his late twenties. Later on, what corresponds to this youthful transformation of the human being can only be observed by the keen sense of observation of the spiritual researcher. When a person has really undergone spiritual training, it becomes apparent that towards old age certain, I would say shadowy, transformations of the soul life occur. They only appear in hints, but one notices quite clearly: in the forties, at the end of the forties, one becomes a different person and at the end of the fifties one becomes yet another person. These metamorphoses occur in a shadowy, rudimentary way, as only hinted changes within, but anyone who can observe them can compare them with the hints that occur in embryonic life and that are repetitions of earlier physical forms that have been passed through in tribal development.

But one cannot simply transfer the scientific biogenetic law to history; instead of looking at the beginning of life, as the natural scientist must do, the historian is compelled to look at the end of life, at these shadowy, rudimentary transformations of the soul life. And just as for the natural man the beginning of life presents itself as a repetition of tribal history, so these rudimentary hints at the end of life turn out to be repetitions of what the human race has gone through on earth as a whole. We learn to understand that what is only rudimentarily present in our aging today was present in a pronounced sense in prehistoric man; we learn to understand that we can go back to a humanity that has undergone such transformations of the organic-mental life into old age as we do during the change of teeth and sexual maturation. And in our aging, we experience a rudimentary repetition of what humanity has gone through in its historical development. This is where it will become clear what the correlate of the biogenetic law is for historical science.

Those who think abstractly are always satisfied when they have found something, they then expand it and build an entire system of worldviews from it; they want to expand the biogenetic law to the historical becoming of humanity. To the real observer – and this is the observable reality for the spiritual researcher – something quite different presents itself. It shows that we are able to see in our own ageing and its rudimentary changes a repetition of what we find in earlier historical stages of human development. We look back to ancient Indian and Persian times and know that even in old age people remained so capable of development that a metamorphosis could be seen in their organism even in the forties and fifties of human life, as can only be observed today during the change of teeth and sexual maturation. You see, here we have the difference between true observation of reality and the abstract desire to transfer, which has arisen precisely through materialism. And we then understand how, in primeval times, the human being lived as a child and young person alongside the old person and said to himself: One experiences something in old age that brings something completely new into life. Let us consider how deeply this true law allows us to see into the inner process of human development, how we can see into a state of humanity in which we understand patriarchal life because young people anticipated old age in such a way that they said to themselves: this old age offers me something completely new. And so we do not look at prehistoric humanity in the same way as today's materialistic anthropologist does. We look at this primitive humanity and understand it, I would say intimately human, and we can also recognize that in its entire element something quite different was present for this primitive humanity than for present-day humanity. But we must take an interest because we are approaching something directly human, for this metamorphosis from primitive man to our present time. And if we have to admit that the human organism has changed, we will also be able to point out other changes in the human organism in the right form.

I will point out just one thing, my dear audience, which is revealed by spiritual science, but which, because it is relatively close to us and can even be proven externally by philological-historical research, is that the Greeks had their culture, which has such a profound effect on us, because they viewed their environment differently than we do today. Spiritual science shows us that what was in the Greeks was still capable of organic development to a much greater age than it is in us. We reach the end of an ascending organic capacity for development at the end of the twenties; the Greeks continued it well into their thirties. This necessitated greater activity in the Greeks, and that meant that the Greeks invested even more activity in their sense organs than we are able to invest. Therefore the

the Greeks were not yet a reflective race. Mankind has only become reflective since the middle of the 15th century. The Greek race was one that still transferred all its inner activity into the world of the senses, still saw the whole world, I might say, more brilliantly, more warmly than we do. We have to imagine that the Greeks had no interest in dark colors, that they had the keenest interest and the greatest sensitivity for bright, warm colors. And we find external confirmation when we discover that the Greeks have a single word for both dark hair color and lapis lazuli, the blue stone used for painting. People have never had blue hair; so if dark hair and lapis lazuli are both referred to by the same word, it is clear that the blue is seen as dark. And the other peculiar thing is that the Greeks had one word for green = chloros, and at the same time they used this word for what we call yellow, honey. And so I could cite many more examples that would prove to us that the Greeks' vision was similar to blue-blind vision. Roman historians tell us that the Greeks painted only in four colors: black, white, red, and yellow.

From this we can see that when we look into history, we do not have to look at the great so-called war events, at the great so-called formations and fallings of states, but we have to look at the intimate, we have to see how the individual human being has developed. In this way we again meet the needs of our present time. The conquests of Alexander the Great interested only those generations who were first oriented towards this interest through school. Today, the broad masses are called upon for education and intellectual life, and they want to be interested in something other than the conquests of Xerxes or Alexander the Great, of Caesar or even later ones; they want to be interested in what emerges in every human being as the truly human. But a science of history arises for our soul's eye that describes how man was different five, six, seven millennia ago, how he was different in Greek times than he is now. A history arises that approaches everything individually human directly, that allows the Greek to arise before our soul's eye, so that the person of the present can compare the Greek with himself spiritually and mentally. What concerns every human being will be of interest to those who, as the broad masses, strive for education today; what concerns not only Alexander the Great or Alcibiades and Caesar, but what concerns every human being, what, so to speak, is in every human being because he himself is a descendant of those who saw the world so completely differently.

Again, it is a serious question, especially in view of the social needs of the present, to strive for a historical science that is closely related to the human being; and such a science, because it touches the innermost part of the human being, will also be able to release the moral and legal impulses in the human being. In the externalized life of the state, we have gradually come to something that is nothing more than a legislative convention. But what lives in our state laws does not reach into the depths of the human soul where the moral impulses arise. How do today's legal measures live in the individual human being? They do not live. The lawyer himself often does not live them until he has looked them up in the law books, because he usually does not know much about them before he has looked up the relevant paragraph. But what has gradually become a mere historical abstraction does not live in people. If we establish another historical science, it will be one that can trigger impulses in life. Such a historical science alone will be able to grasp people and lead them to reasonable social desires – in contrast to the historical materialism that Lenin and Trotsky cultivated. Because people have been offered nothing but abstract, insubstantial ideas, Lenin and Trotsky were able to confront them with what people alone understand: the results of economic life.

Today, the great, serious demands of life raise the question: in what way can natural science and historical science be revitalized? If we want to take life seriously today, we have to think about such a revitalization of the sciences. I can well imagine that those people who today receive their education through everything that such an education achieves today will be shocked by what I am saying here and probably find it radical – while we, after all, must find it absolutely necessary simply because of the seriousness of life. But is it not our time itself that points to the seriousness of life in every moment?

Dear attendees, it can be hypothesized that this hall would be very full today if it were not for the delayed celebration of Carnival – if you can call it a celebration. But it is entirely to my liking that this evening is being held here today, to show that there are still places where people feel that serious matters must be discussed in a time of need, in a time like the one we are living in today. In such a time, there is still much that cannot be reconciled with the seriousness of life that is necessary to think of something like what has been suggested in today's introductory lecture.

But when one expresses something like this, my dear audience, one feels reminded of the saying of someone who, in his time, also felt compelled to speak of the great impulses in contrast to the little interest of human beings: Johann Gottlieb Fichte once spoke about the destiny of the scholar and gave lectures on the subject. When these lectures were published, he introduced them with just a few words. He said, addressing himself to all those who so well proved from their life practice that ideals cannot be realized after all - he actually did not address these, because they are not teachable, but he spoke with reference to these - he said: That ideals cannot be realized in direct life, we others know that just as well as these so-called life practitioners. But that life must be directly oriented towards them, we must say with all seriousness. And Johann Gottlieb Fichte added that there are people who are unable to see how necessary it is, in the serious hours of world history, to also begin something correspondingly serious, which only proves that these people simply cannot be counted on in the world plan. And so, said Fichte, may they be given by the spirit that guides this world plan “in due time rain and sunshine, wholesome nourishment, and undisturbed circulation of the juices” and - if it is possible - also “wise thoughts”; but otherwise one cannot count on them when talking about the impulses that lie in the great world plan.

But one would like, especially in today's serious world situation, to find a sufficiently large number of people who can feel this seriousness and, out of it, can feel the necessity that not small things, but great things must happen in impulses, and that they must happen precisely in the realm of human consciousness itself, so that we can move forward. It is out of such impulses that I have tried to speak to you today, using individual examples to illustrate the relationship between anthroposophy and contemporary science. I have only been able to sketch what I wanted to say, but if, through this sketch, I could evoke such impulses in a sufficiently large number of people, which could then have a stimulating effect on what must happen - a renewal of our entire scientific life - then I would consider what can actually happen through such impulses to have been fulfilled, at least for the time being.

In our time, science is very proud when it says that it wants pure knowledge. In Greek times, when imagination was closer to life, the word “catharsis” was used for the most important moment in a tragedy, when the hero's fate was decided. In this way, something was introduced into aesthetics that was taken from medicine. For in Greek life, “catharsis” was regarded as a kind of crisis, whereby certain pathological processes in the organism are counterbalanced or paralyzed by other processes. In this healthy Greek age, ideas were transferred from what takes place in nature to the artistic field. Today, we need a science that does not allow a rift to develop between theory and practice; we need a science that is viable and full of life, we need a science that can build up life.

However, only those people who really understand and feel the seriousness of contemporary life will long for such a powerful science. And as for the rest, let me say this at the end, we must, in accordance with the old saying of Fichte, leave them today to a kind cosmic plan, which provides them with food and drink at the right time, which gives them sunshine and rain at the right time, which gives them postponed carnival fun and - if possible - also wise thoughts. It will be difficult!

But what is needed today lies in another area and can be described as follows: spirit-estranged research must find its way back to the spirit. And it is this path back to the spirit that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to find, and to this end it calls on humanity. That is the truth, despite all the prejudices and defamations that are otherwise leveled against this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in the world.

[Lively applause.

Roman Boos: In thanking Dr. Steiner for his lecture, I would like to express the hope that the lectures that will now follow will have the effect in our circle and in the outside world that was indicated in Dr. Steiner's lecture. I would now like to ask that after a short break, those who may still have questions about today's lecture come forward. I would particularly like to ask all our scientifically working friends to take this opportunity, since Dr. Steiner is prepared to add something supplementary in this or that respect.

Eugen Kolisko: In what Dr. Steiner said about research into the reverse biogenetic law, how can it actually be established that we are dealing here with a time that lies so far back that it corresponds to a particular period? How can we determine from the processes observed in the phenomena of old age how far back this lies in earlier times?

Friedrich Husemann: Is the blue blindness of the Greeks something that has only to do with the individual development of this people, or is it perhaps something that occurs in the general course of development of a race or a people, which would therefore correspond to a certain age of this race? What about the Chinese, for example, who have been depicted in blue colors since very early times? Are there other factors at work here?

Walter Johannes Stein: How are changes in sensory perception related to changes in thinking among the Greeks, who, according to the book 'The Riddles of Philosophy', still had a much more pictorial perception?

Roman Boos asks Dr. Steiner to give the closing remarks.

Rudolf Steiner: In the sense of a closing word, I would like to address the questions that have been asked. The first question, ladies and gentlemen, is of course one that would require a very comprehensive explanation in order to answer it.

First of all, I have to mention that a real exploration of these things is only possible by applying the spiritual scientific method, that is, the method that actually teaches us to look at what we are otherwise accustomed to looking at from the outside, now to look at from the inside. You can get an idea of what actually comes into consideration in the following way. When you look at the physical organism, you have to take the present moment as your basis. You have to stick to the configuration and outer activity that the physical organism has in the present moment. If you then move on to observing the soul life, you will not find in this soul life the necessity for restriction to the present moment, but you will find in the soul life - initially in the individual soul life - the expansion back into the sixth, fifth, fourth year of life. The experiences are incorporated into memory, so that when you move from observing the physical person to observing the soul, you move from the present to an individual past. To acquire spiritual scientific methods means to develop certain abilities that go beyond the ordinary soul life. These abilities, which go beyond the ordinary soul life, then also expand that which, during the transition from the physical into the soul, extends over a certain period of time, up to the period of childhood. These spiritual scientific methods expand the observation beyond the individual human being, and what enters is the inner observation of the world process. It is certainly a long path, which you will find described in my books, but it is a path that can certainly become a reality for human development.

Just as the inner experiences are immanent in time in a certain way in the memory-based review of the individual life path, one will - but only through comparative treatment of what one has in one's memory - arrive at the design of the time scheme for what presents itself to inner vision, if one only really knows how to work methodically. In this way one arrives at a truly methodical approach. The person who acquires the observant sense for what I have called the rudimentary soul metamorphoses of old age – but which are also matched by rudimentary bodily metamorphoses – will find that there are certain periods of time in which such metamorphoses take place. There is such a period at the end of the forties, again at the end of the fifties, and in the middle of the fifties, so that one does indeed get certain periods of inner experience for this rudimentary soul metamorphosis. Now, if one really applies inner methodology in the expansion of inner vision to the extra-individual realm and thereby arrives at certain time determinations, one can either rely on them directly, which is entirely the case with a developed spiritual-scientific method, or one can try to corroborate what presents itself in this way by verification from outside. For example, you can say to yourself that today, when you have already sharpened your sense of observation, let's say around the age of 35, you experience a certain life metamorphosis. Now you look for this in what is presented to you in the outer historical life, and you thereby fix a certain historical point in time. One then tries to find another life metamorphosis, for example that which presents itself at the end of the 1920s – one arrives at a later point in time. This provides us with individual epochs for what happens historically and what corresponds to an inner metamorphosis of life. In this way, one can relate these individual, unique life epochs to the past historical development of humanity. Is this indicative of the path? Of course, I can only sketch out this path. If you follow the idea, it will become clear to you that this path is an exact one.

As for the so-called blue blindness of the Greeks, I would ask you to please bear in mind that I really only want to speak of a so-called blue blindness. It is more a sensitivity of the Greeks for the bright, warm colors and a lesser interest in the dark, blue, cold colors. One must be clear about the fact that the process itself that is taking place is much more spiritual for the Greek people than it is for today's partially blue-blind people. It is only an analogy, but it is precisely this mental blue blindness that is so strongly present in the Greeks that we can still prove it in the Greek language. But you have probably already been able to deduce from the lecture that we should not regard this as an individual characteristic of the Greek people, but as something that occurs in a particular period of a people's development. Of course, it must be borne in mind that the relative epochs of the peoples living side by side on earth do not coincide absolutely. It must be realized that the Chinese people, for example, had long since emerged from the period of blue blindness when they entered history. So, to a certain extent, one must perceive the periods of time as layered next to each other, then one will see what I have said in the right light. I have tried to describe the thought process as it manifested itself in the Greeks in my “Riddles of Philosophy”; this thought process of the Greeks was also somewhat different from our present-day thought process. Our thought process is that we are aware of a certain activity of thought with which we accompany external facts. We ascribe the formation of thoughts to this activity of thoughts, of which we are aware, and ascribe only the sensory impression to the objective. The Greeks were different. In the Greeks - you can easily prove this by looking at the Greek philosophers with an unbiased judgment - there was a clear awareness that they saw thoughts in things just as they saw colors in things, that they therefore perceived thoughts. The Greeks experienced the thought as something perceived, not as something actively formed. And that is why the Greeks were not really a reflective people in the sense that we are. People have only really become reflective since the middle of the 15th century. The thinking process has become internalized. It has become internalized at the same time as the course of the sensory process. I would say that the Greeks saw more of the active part of the spectrum, the red, warm side of the spectrum; they only sensed the cold, blue side of the spectrum indistinctly. And today we certainly have a very different perception of the red and warm side of the spectrum; we see it much more shifted towards the green than the Greeks, who were still sensitive to it beyond our outermost red. The Greek spectrum was shifted entirely towards the red side. The Greeks therefore saw the rainbow differently than we do. And by having our sensitivity more on the other side of the spectrum, we are turning our attention to the dark side, and that is something like entering a kind of twilight. It makes you think. If I describe it more figuratively now, don't be offended; it is based on a very real process of human development. With the shift of sensitivity from the warm part of the spectrum to the dark part of the spectrum, something similar occurs in the development of humanity as a whole, as it does in a person when they experience twilight from full brightness, where they begin to rely more on themselves, to follow the inner path of thought, and where they become pensive. I would say that in the twilight, in the dark, thinking is more active than when the sensitivity is directed towards the lively, warm colors, where one lives more in the outer world, experiences more of what is in the outer world. The Greek was more absorbed in the outer world with all his thinking. He therefore also saw his thoughts in the outer world. Modern man, who has shifted the whole spectrum of vision more towards the dark side, cannot see his thoughts in the outer world. Just as one will not claim that what the soul experiences is outwardly visible at night when it is dark all around, but knows that it takes place in the soul, so what what man experiences since the shift of the spectrum view, happens more on the dark side in the soul, and one can say that a shift in thinking has occurred since Greek times.

These are the kinds of things that arise from research in spiritual science. I can only sketch them out here; I hope that some of what has been suggested today can be developed further here in the next few days, and I wish my subsequent speakers good luck in dealing with the most interesting questions possible in the next few days.

Jakob Hugentobler: Dear Sirs and Madams! I warmly welcome you to our lecture event. The intention of this lecture is to present you with something positive from anthroposophical spiritual science in contrast to the mostly negative criticism that is so widespread today.

Anyone who keeps their eyes open today, who opens themselves to a deeper understanding of their environment, sees newer phenomena emerging in all cultural fields - in the fields of science, religion and art. They see beginnings that look like something that wants to break through, that has not yet found the actual path for this breakthrough. In anthroposophical spiritual science, an attempt is now being made to show the roots for everything that shows itself as a healthy new thing here in its beginnings - to show how one can penetrate to a deeper spiritual realm and how something can grow out of this spiritual realm, which must again become a union of all that is making itself felt today in so many separate movements. It is because of this possibility of a deeper knowledge that anthroposophical spiritual science claims to extend to all areas of life, to penetrate all areas of life with its new knowledge. This spirit, which wants and must be active as a fertilization of today's entire cultural life, is to be spoken of here. Therefore, we must no longer speak with indignation, amazement, and astonishment about the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science is spreading to all areas of life, as was so often the case in the past. The fact is that it wants to claim to be a truly comprehensive world view. This lecture will be based on such a real world view.

You will have the opportunity to take part in specialist eurythmy courses here – eurythmy, this new art of movement that was inaugurated by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. It is based on anthroposophical spiritual science, and so this new art of eurythmy will be taught in individual courses. Likewise, there will be opportunities to delve more deeply into anthroposophical spiritual science by attending introductory courses, which will also be held here in Zurich. If you are interested, you can write down your name and address. You can see the rest from the programs that have been distributed.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! When a distorted image of anthroposophy is so often created and this distortion is then fought, so that in this fight little of what anthroposophy really represents is actually encountered, it is probably because that today many people still understand anthroposophy as something that stands, as it were, in the middle between science in the strict sense of the word on the one hand and the various religious views on the other.

In order to draw attention to the fact that the judgments that assign such a fluctuating position to anthroposophy, as it is meant here, are inaccurate, I would like to discuss the sources, the actual origins of anthroposophical research, in this introductory lecture today. And here I must first draw attention to the following. However much it is the case that what comes to light through anthroposophy touches people's religious feelings and religious sentiments, anthroposophy itself did not arise from any religious impulse, but rather it emerged from the natural science of our time, from a natural scientific world view. This may at first seem paradoxical from some points of view, but in order to characterize the scientific spirit of anthroposophy in the right way, this origin from a scientific basis must be emphasized particularly strongly.

In turning to anthroposophy, one is thoroughly imbued with the idea that the more recent development of humanity owes its greatest achievements and strongest forces to what are today called scientific insights. And I myself would like to admit that, in my opinion, no other spirit should prevail in anthroposophy than that which has been trained through the scientific research of modern times, which, above all, has come to know the conscientious, exact methods of observation, experimentation and scientific thinking of the present day. However, when we speak of a kind of scientific preparation for anthroposophy, we are less concerned with the results - I would even say triumphant results - of modern science than with the spirit of training that which a person acquires when he learns to work scientifically, that is, experimentally and observantly, to gain a scientific view of the entities and facts of the world in a serious way.

Now it has come about that in the course of the development of natural science in recent times, so to speak, more and more has been drawn into this research the sense of the exclusive significance of the world of sensual facts – of that which is based on certain facts that can be observed through the senses and whose observation can be intensified by instruments. Only what can be based on this is considered a true foundation of modern scientific research. And the more progress was made, the more this was abandoned, in thinking, in methodical reflection, to rise above this world of facts. One has more and more proceeded to regard the facts, so to speak experimentally, in such a way that they express themselves through their own mutual relations, and in this way one arrives at the laws of nature, as they are called.

Of course, not so long ago, when dealing with facts, one did not shy away from going from these facts to more or less bold hypotheses. In more recent times, these have developed into systems of concepts. And so insights have been gained, for example about the universe. We are now living in a time, however, in which some doubt has been cast on hypotheses that appear so plausible in their own way, for example, on the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of the origin of the world. It is certainly regarded as somewhat uncertain, although on the other hand it is admitted that if one wants to arrive at a satisfactory overview of the world of phenomena, such hypotheses cannot be entirely dispensed with. This characterizes one aspect of it. Well, I could only hint at what confronts someone who really goes into the field of natural science today with a sense of inquiry.

But perhaps the second aspect is even more important today. This is that today, in view of the exactitude that has been assumed in natural science, one will no longer be able to get by - not even in the descriptive natural sciences - without a certain basic mathematical education. Indeed, in the natural science of the most recent times a definition has emerged that may seem somewhat paradoxical, somewhat extreme, but which shows the spirit that actually inspires this natural science thinking. The definition has emerged: Being is that which can be measured. Such a definition indicates how much the natural scientist today feels in his element when he has mastered the art that lies in geometry and in the exact measurement that geometry produces, in arithmetic and in the other branches of mathematics. This mathematical training is, so to speak, something that must be brought along today as a basic condition for beneficial scientific research.

What I want to say about anthroposophy today is less about what can be achieved as individual results of scientific research through measurement, counting and so on, but rather about the peculiar state of mind in which the researcher finds himself when he — equipped with the transparent weave of arithmetic, geometric or algebraic concepts, concepts from the world of differential or integral calculus or even synthetic geometry and so on, when he, equipped with the whole weave of these concepts, which are, after all, concepts generated entirely in the human personality itself, approaches the external world of phenomena and then finds: With what you have gained from your own inner being, with what you have formed into formulas and images from your inner being, you can delve into what the senses present to you. And he feels: with what you have, so to speak, spun out of yourself, you can embrace and interweave all that appears to you as completely alien from the external world of facts. This confluence of the mathematical, which is obtained in full clarity, with free, all-encompassing inner volition as a structure, as formulas, this confluence of the mathematical with what confronts us externally, so to speak, from the outside, that is what constitutes the special state of mind of someone who approaches nature in the sense of today's exact natural science.

Now, I would like to draw the attention of those present to what one learns in this way when mathematizing, that is, when forming algebraic or other formulas or geometric structures. I would like to point out that it is indeed possible for a person to observe themselves, as it were, by looking backwards, to see how they behave in this mathematization, how they come to an initially formal certainty in this mathematization, an certainty of the inner truth of these formulas and structures. He can do this on the one hand, and in doing so he gains a kind of insight into the psychological process that takes place when he mathematizes. Certainly, in the emergence of natural science, one has, I would say, been satisfied with the application of the mathematical. One has paid little attention to this psychological process. But if we want to get to nature, if we want to progress from mere scientific research, then it will be necessary to take a really close look at the processes that actually take place in the soul, at what takes place when we develop the mathematical. Because why? When we consider the process that takes place in observation or in controlled experimental observation, when we penetrate the external world with mathematics by observing this process of scientific research, so to speak, observing this scientific research process in one's own personality, one comes to not only conduct scientific research, but also to be able to educate oneself in a conscious way to that kind of grasping of truth that can be grasped through such research. Now, my dear audience, you see, what can truly be called Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, has its origin in such studies - first of all in such a scientific method of research and in such a view of the researcher's activity, the inner researcher's activity. And all that presents itself as Anthroposophy should be measured against this view, this inner view. I freely admit, ladies and gentlemen, that there is an original sense of truth in man, so that numerous personalities, when they hear about the results that appear in the field of Anthroposophy, are inwardly convinced to a certain extent. But, however true it may be that this feeling of truth is based on a certain elementary sense of truth, it is equally true that only those who have undergone the training and self-observation that I have just mentioned, based on natural scientific research, are capable of forming a judgment and, if I may use the term, of “research” in the field of anthroposophy. It is so easy, because of the attractiveness of the anthroposophical results, to lapse into a kind of amateurism that in turn attracts amateurs. But this dilettantism is not at all to be found at the origin of that which, as Anthroposophy, is to present itself to the world today. On the contrary, Anthroposophy seeks to keep every trace of dilettantism out of it, and to be able to give account, so to speak, to the strictest scientific mind of the present time, of its results, and especially of the way in which it has arrived at them. That is why I do not call what occurs in anthroposophy just any kind of religious belief, but something that can stand alongside contemporary science and permeate it. The spirit that has been trained in what is demanded by science today, which underlies today's recognized science, is the same scientific spirit that underlies anthroposophy.

But precisely when one is imbued with this scientific spirit, when one looks back from the mere mathematizing indulgence in external facts to the living research, to what is becoming, when one carries this science in one's soul - leaving the outer facts - then, when one looks back, especially when one looks back on what remains for one as a human being from this science, then one is immediately confronted with a problem that stands out as a major central problem. Only someone who has been educated in the scientific way of thinking can truly grasp the full magnitude of this: this is the problem of human freedom.

Natural science and the philosophy dependent on it – today's dependent philosophy – cannot but start from what is so interwoven in things that we have to speak of necessity. It is impossible for us to start from anything other than necessity with the spirit that prevails in natural science today. And it is virtually the ideal of science to see through what confronts us in the external world as a system of internally necessary, interrelated entities and facts. When you engage in scientific research in this way, you do not come close to what confronts you in the inner fact of human freedom as an immediate experience. You do not come close to it. And so we are confronted with the significant question that leads us to a cognitive abyss: freedom as an immediate experience is given to you! Why then, by stretching out your mathematical web of knowledge over scientific facts and in this way creating a world view, cannot you approach what cannot be denied as an immediate experience: freedom!

If I may interject something personal here, I would like to point out that, as early as the 1880s, my spiritual scientific research confronted me with the scientific necessity, on the one hand, the significance of which for objective research should not be denied in the least at first, but fully recognized, and on the other hand, the problem of freedom. And in my Philosophy of Freedom, published in 1893, I tried to deal with philosophy in the way that a scientifically minded person in the present day had to do.

Now, if we already had a psychology or theory of the soul that was developed and suited to our scientific needs – we don't have it, of course – it would be easier to talk about what I have to talk about at this moment. In recent times, the doctrine of the soul has undergone a peculiar development. Whenever I want to characterize the fate of psychology, of the doctrine of the soul, I always have to refer to an outstanding thinker of recent times, who died here a year ago on the Zürichberg, Franz Brentano.

At the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, Franz Brentano was completely immersed in natural science thinking, and when he first formulated his theses for his professorship in Würzburg, he included among them the main thesis that in the science of the soul no other method may be applied than that which is applied in the external sciences. In 1874, Franz Brentano published the first volume of his “Psychology on an Empirical Basis,” and he promised that when this volume of “Psychology” appeared in the spring of that year, he would deliver the second volume in the fall and, in rapid succession, the next four volumes in the following years. Franz Brentano has since died – no continuation of the first volume has appeared!

Anyone who reads this first volume of Brentano's psychology without prejudice will understand, I would say from the way in which this psychology is presented, why such a continuation has not been published. In this first volume, Franz Brentano frankly and freely states that if one were to stop at where he stopped, one would first have to admit to oneself that one actually knows nothing. If you look at the connection of ideas and their relationship to memory, the socialization of ideas, as it is usually called, and so on, if you apply the purely scientific method to that, then that is no substitute for the kind of psychology that Plato and Aristotle had hoped for. It would not be a substitute for a psychology that can also deal with what can be described as the eternal in man, or – as Franz Brentano puts it – that can deal with the part of man that remains when the temporal life falls away from him as a body. Franz Brentano wanted to solve this problem, which in the popular sense could be called the problem of immortality, in a scientific-psychological sense. He wrestled with it. I would like to make it clear that he did not want to enter the field that I have to refer to here as anthroposophy; it did not seem scientific enough to him. But because he was an honest researcher, he simply could not continue writing. Combining honesty in the field of the doctrine of the soul with a scientific spirit of research is only possible if one is able to develop that continuation of scientific thinking along the way, which is precisely what anthroposophical spiritual science demands.

I would like to say that Franz Brentano's unfinished business with psychology is living proof that we do not have a proper psychology today. If we had a psychology, a proper psychology, then we would be able to look at certain things differently than we usually do today. And here I would like to point out one thing in particular. When we indulge in natural science, when we express natural scientific facts in laws and then incorporate these laws into our intellect, so that we carry within ourselves what has been revealed to us through external observation and experimentation, we notice that the The more we distance ourselves from external facts, the more we work inwardly with the intellect, which proves itself so excellently when guided by experiment and observation, the more we continue to work with this intellect, the more we - in other words - enter the realm of hypothesis, the realm in which we seek to formulate, with the aid of the intellect, the principles underlying these phenomena, we feel more and more distinctly that we are entering a realm in which we cannot, in the long run, satisfy ourselves. The more one, I might say, freely indulges at first in the kind of thinking that can be quite well applied in scientific research, the more one indulges in this thinking, in this forming of thought hypotheses, the more one comes to something unsatisfactory. And this unsatisfactory state is basically evident in the whole course of scientific development.

It is evident from the fact that we see how the most diverse hypotheses have been put forward - hypotheses about light, about the phenomena of electricity, about gravity, and so on. We see how these hypotheses are always replaced by others. And anyone who does not want to completely accept the point of view that we have “come so gloriously far” today must, from these feelings that he may have about this building of hypotheses, say: the hypotheses that have been developed recently will in turn be replaced by others. We are, so to speak, in the middle of replacing the old light hypothesis with another, taken from electrical phenomena. And we have to say to ourselves: we are entering an area where we form hypotheses based on the laws of nature that the mind can gain from external observation and through external experimentation in relation to the sensory world. We come into a region where this mind, so to speak, encounters a fluid, a something that cannot evoke in us the feeling that we can actually approach a being with these mental constructs that we hypothetically form and that, if they are to have a value, can only have this value if they point to something real, to something that exists.

And anyone who, in genuine inner empiricism, that is, equipped with unprejudiced observation of the inner facts of the soul, especially of the will, now considers the element in the soul that includes the fact of freedom, finds this in wonderful harmony with the impossibility of arriving at hypotheses in which there is still the same necessity that we have when we classify and systematize natural phenomena with our thinking. One then feels: if one approaches the soul life with this thinking and only wants to develop hypotheses in the soul life, one swims, as it were, in a liquid. One encounters nothing solid in the soul life. And this harmonizes wonderfully with the fact that the impulse is rooted in the soul life, which can be active without necessity prevailing in it, which can therefore move freely.

I would like to say that through external scientific research we come to a region of our soul life that shows us: if we want to extend the area of necessity into it, it also fails theoretically; it does not satisfy us theoretically either. We come across something in our soul life where freedom is rooted, where freedom can be fully experienced. And we will only be able to properly distinguish this area of freedom from the rest of the world that we can see, when we realize that, as long as we are in the necessity of the world that we can see, we cannot use this necessity to approach what is experienced inwardly when we are in the realm of freedom. I believe that a psychology that is equal to today's scientific exactitude would point to the special kind of inner satisfaction that one has in the game of hypotheses and in the harmony with what one now experiences inwardly, in one's soul, by experiencing the fact of inner freedom.

I would like to make it very clear that I am not talking here about some method or other or some theory or other about freedom, but about the fact of freedom, which we simply discover by deepening unselfconsciously into our own soul life. And then, when we are in a position to do so, when we, equipped with a genuine scientific spirit, so to speak, go against ourselves — not going outwards, but against ourselves — to the limit where we can still reach with scientific thinking and where we can move on to what can be experienced in us as freedom, then we come close to sensing the possibility, the justification of anthroposophy. For, in setting forth its scientific character, Anthroposophy must first start from this experience of the impossibility of approaching freedom through the medium of that which has led outwardly to such great theoretical and practical triumphs – namely, natural science.

Now we stand in this experience of freedom. But if we do not stand in it with abstract concepts, but rather stand inwardly before it, as before an intimately experienced inner fact, then we also know, in a sense, by inwardly experiencing the soul, by being permeated and pulsating with what is experienced as freedom: We cannot enter it with the thoughts that the external laws of nature give us, but if we as human beings really want to engage with life, if, for example, we have ideals, if we are familiar with the true demands of life, in order to take hold of it here or there - we do not enter this sphere of freedom thoughtlessly. We stand in the sphere of freedom by developing free thinking, and we can get to know thinking that moves in the element of freedom, free thinking, which is initially only an inner soul activity, which does not have external observation as a guide, does not have external experiment as a guide. As a progressive inner impulse, it is, so to speak, self-created and rooted in the soul. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I call this thinking pure thinking.

This thinking forms, as it were, the content of consciousness when we have trained this consciousness as I have just indicated. But then, when we move in this thinking, we can remember the concept of being, the concept of reality that we have appropriated from the outer world, especially from the scientifically researched outer world as presented to us by natural science. On the one hand, we take this concept of reality. It need not be particularly clear at first; it can simply be the idea that takes root in us through our direct and scientific contact with the external world. We take this concept, this idea of reality on the one hand, and on the other hand we take what we consciously experience when we engage in free thinking, then something occurs in our soul – yes, I could call it a basic law, I could call it an experience – something occurs to which one must inwardly confess to oneself by saying: I think, but I am not in thinking, that is, I am not as I have come to know existence in the outer world. And the momentous sentence appears before us: I think, therefore I am not.

That is the first thing one has to grasp for one's consciousness, my dear audience. And that is why it is so difficult to deal with the present, which is actually the starting point for the scientific nature of anthroposophy, because, as perhaps most of you know, more recent philosophy still more or less consciously or unconsciously starts from Descartes' sentence: Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. So one starts from the great error that in thinking one grasps something of a reality, of a reality such as one has initially formed it as a reality in one's mind. We must first admit to ourselves: Whatever arises as I think, I think freely. This is the experience of non-reality, which is an experience that is at the same time a thinking experience and a will experience, a pure will experience, a desire experience.

Dear attendees, this experience is of tremendous importance for the life of the soul. One should actually spend a long time meditating on this experience until we feel, as it were, that we have hollowed out our ego when we admit to ourselves: I think, and in this thinking my ego lives. It is as if I were looking at a colored wall with a black circle in the middle. There is darkness, there is no light. Nevertheless, I see the black circle. I see the black circle within the light. When I become self-conscious in ordinary life and confess to myself: in that I think, I do not look into a reality, I look, if I may express it this way, into the black circle; I look into the non-light, which is darkness. I believe that I actually see myself, because within the content of my consciousness, the ego is left out. It is precisely because there is a nothing within the content of my consciousness and I see this non-being in the being that I initially consider myself to be an ego in ordinary thinking. This is a fundamental fact of psychology and philosophy. However, it may take a while before philosophers are willing to engage with the analysis that is necessary to do this. I can only hint at it here, I can only point to what is there. Much can still be discussed in very long psychological-philosophical expositions before such an analysis is finally done.

You see, my dear audience, once you have realized that when you think you are actually looking into the emptiness of the inner world, once you have realized that something of a volitional nature is at work there, then you are at the right starting point for what can now occur in inner methodological anthroposophical research. And this inner, methodical, anthroposophical research consists of the following: starting from what one has inwardly experienced in the sphere of freedom in the nature of thinking, and what one has then investigated in the 'I think, therefore I am not' in the sense of the being of the beings outside, by letting it take effect on oneself, by, I would like to say, inwardly grasping this atom of will-being, one can then be in the soul mood from which that meditation starts, which one needs to come to a real inner insight.

May people condemn as heresy what appears as an anthroposophical method and thereby distort it in a certain way before humanity, by presenting it as if it were something inferior in a bad sense, as one often calls it so “inferior” in the field of experiments, pragmatism and so on - in all the fields of manifold superstition, people may, may, as I said, distort all that the spiritual researcher develops there, by starting from a fixed philosophical basis. The methods and meditative techniques developed there, ladies and gentlemen, are nothing other than a further development of those inner soul forces that we have when we do mathematics and whose application in external natural science has yielded such great and significant results. Once we have learned what is present in the soul as an activity when we mathematize, once we have familiarized ourselves with this peculiar, scientifically formed form of creation, we can develop it further by, so to speak, recreating what arises in our memory, so that we have a kind of guiding impulse for our lives from this memory. We have these impulses for our lives as guiding impulses because what occurred as external experiences at a certain point in our childhood is transformed into inner experiences. We can, so to speak, always bring up images from the unfathomable depths of the soul of what we have experienced. But we can also distinguish between the living experience of being inside the experience, as we had it ten years ago, and the act of bringing up what was experienced back then. And no matter how vivid the images may be, the essential thing in this memory life is that we make what we are experiencing temporarily into a lasting one in us through imagination, although it is a lasting one that we cannot immediately determine as to what is going on down there in the soul life - or perhaps also in the organic life. But we can determine what we have before us if we bring up from these depths what we have experienced.

If we now immerse ourselves in the way we have a memory picture, how we have a memory picture vividly within us when we remember something we have experienced over a long period of time, we learn from this 'having' of a memory picture what is necessary for meditation, for the fundamental meditation of the anthroposophical research method. It is necessary for us to place a readily comprehensible idea at the center of our consciousness, and it does not matter whether it refers to something external or whether it is formed only internally, even if it comes from the imagination. The truth of the idea is not important at first, but it is important that we can easily grasp it. I have described all this in relation to this anthroposophical research method in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in “Occult Science” and in other books; there I have described the way in which one enters into this form of meditative imagination in the soul in exactly the same way as one does in mathematizing.

You will then find it absurd if someone compares this activity of the soul, which goes beyond mathematization and is thoroughly permeated by the will, with something hallucinatory or with something subconscious. That is precisely why so much is given to a mathematical preparation for anthroposophy, because it teaches one to recognize how one has a free hand in creating and holding on to ideas in consciousness. And anyone who says that the inner will that anthroposophy aims to achieve could be hallucination, either deliberately or because they are unable to do so, does not fully appreciate the way in which this meditative life is actually pursued, how it is maintained by first placing easily comprehensible ideas into one's consciousness so as not to bring up reminiscences from the subconscious. But by doing so, one exercises an activity - through inner strength, with effort of the will - that one otherwise exercises only on the basis of external facts, because otherwise one proceeds on the basis of external facts and experiences and allows the life of ideas to develop on the basis of these external facts and experiences. But now you free yourself from those external facts and experiences - I can only hint at the principle here, you can find more details in the books mentioned - now it is a matter of holding on to the ideas through inner will and thus constantly evoking an activity of the soul, which otherwise only ignites at external facts and runs in the inner being of man, bound to external existence. But by developing such meditation further and further, by practicing for years to make ideas that are easily comprehensible permanent, by learns to know that soul activity which tears thinking, raised above ordinary existence, away from the bodily, one rises to that which I have presented in the books mentioned as imaginative knowing.

Not fanciful images, not fantastic notions! Imaginative cognition is a state of consciousness filled with images that are present in the soul in the same way as mathematical configurations and formulas. And in this free handling of supersensible reality, which one distinguishes from every [physical] reality just as one distinguishes the triangle drawn with chalk on the blackboard as a mere symbol with full inner consciousness [from the purely spiritual concept of the triangle]. By being able to remain in this imaginative life of the soul for a while, one comes to know the life of the soul as something that can be torn away from the body. We are so used to our life being bound to the nervous system and the rest of the organism that we only really recognize this when we do such exercises. We see that, independently of the organism, the soul-spiritual runs in itself, and that the soul-spiritual can be filled with images. Only through this does one get to know the meditative life. These images are quite like the memory images - not like hallucinations. It is not true that one is filled with something like hallucinations or visions when doing anthroposophical research, but one gets to know the novelty, the new kind of content, through the existence of the memory being, in which the images of imaginative cognition or imaginative consciousness appear. But one also knows that one can no longer say when these images occur: I imagine, therefore I am not – as one can say about thinking.

Now, as I ascend to imagination, I encounter in a strange way what I first encountered in the external world – I encounter necessity. I can form my images in imagination, but I cannot throw them back and forth in any old way in relation to a new world that is now emerging. I see myself gradually forced to relate these images that arise in my imaginative life to a new world that I am getting to know, to a spiritual world. I learn to recognize: I must confront this image, which I have prepared, as a question of some fact of the spiritual world, and through this image, which I have built up, I enter into a connection with this world. I gain access to the spiritual world through the consciously created images of the imagination, just as I come into contact with the sensory world through the images created by my eyes or the sound images created by my ears. These latter images, which are created in the eye and ear, are produced without my arbitrariness. What is produced in the imagination as a world of pictures is, however, attained after such thorough schooling as I have just described in the books mentioned, “How to Know Higher Worlds” and so on. But in this way one acquires the possibility of holding out something to the spiritual world in the way of inner activity, just as our senses can hold out something to the outer, natural world in the way of eye activity, ear activity, so that we receive pictures from it. What spiritual knowledge of the world is to open up for us must first be developed in us, it must first be brought up from the depths of the soul. And that happens in the first stage of supersensible knowledge, in imaginative consciousness. But it is significant that we enter into this state as if by necessity. And now we learn all the more to recognize what freedom actually is.

You see, someone who hallucinates or has visions creates images from his body. He is simply following an inner necessity, an inner compulsion. Someone who lives in fantasy creates images from his soul. He is more or less aware of how he creates these images. And if he is a healthy person and not a lunatic, then he knows that he lives in an unreal fantasy world. What one produces in the imaginative consciousness, one knows – because the ordinary, normal consciousness, the consciousness that experiences itself in freedom, remains present – that in the imaginative consciousness one forms the images oneself, just as in mathematics one forms the formula oneself, through which one comprehends reality. But one also knows that when one enters into the spiritual world, one grasps a spiritual world through these images. So one can see that as human beings with ordinary external consciousness, we can grasp this process. In our ordinary lives and in ordinary science, we have the opportunity to gain freedom – and that is because, with mere pictorial imagining, which is not in reality, one must say: I think, therefore I am not – cogito ergo non sum. If one develops one's freedom with this thinking and then looks back into the spiritual world, one looks back into a world in which the same necessity reigns that one first encountered in the external world. In the external world, one starts from the necessity of facts. One advances into a thinking in which, so to speak, freedom repels the certainty of inner thinking.

One proceeds from this free thinking to imagination, which also claims to have an existence, and thus one comes again into a world of necessity. One comes into this necessity again in an inner way. In this way one learns above all to really see through that which is spoken about so often, but which actually always confronts one in a certain nebulous, poorly mystical way. If one learns to recognize the imaginative consciousness of which I have spoken, then self-observation becomes possible for the first time. I would like to say that what used to be the starting point of the I, when one looked at the non-I, begins to brighten up a little. The will penetrates into it and begins to grasp something. And one also feels oneself again in a world of necessity. This is how one arrives at self-awareness.

If you continue your exercises, you will come to an exercise in particular where you can make the images disappear just as you feel them coming up. And this must be done, otherwise one does not remain master of it, but becomes a visionary and not a spiritual researcher. When one is able to erase the images from one's consciousness, one arrives at the complete inner exercise of will in this world of images, so that one can also erase the image whose becoming one has experienced in the soul. What I have called the second stage - the inspired consciousness - occurs. Please do not be put off by the expression. After all, we have to use expressions as technical aids. It was used in an analogous sense, in reference to old expressions, but it is definitely a new fact, a self-explored fact, that is meant by it; the new, the inspired consciousness is meant by it. And with this one now stands in the spiritual reality. And when one is so immersed in spiritual reality that one is surrounded by it, really surrounded by it, by a world of spiritual beings, then one also beholds one's own soul in its true essence. Then what anthroposophy describes as repeated earthly lives becomes an immediate fact. And one sees more and more of the soul as it passes from life to life, with the intervening life between death and a new birth — one sees this journey of the soul. One has, so to speak, expanded one's imagination so that it can, in principle, when directed inward, move in the opposite direction to which the imagination normally moves.

Let us ask ourselves: How does imagined thinking move? As I said, we first have the experience of being connected to the outside world; we live ourselves into some event in the outside world with our whole being. This speaks to our will impulses, or rather, it speaks to our feelings; it also speaks to our thoughts. We live in it with our whole being. We may even make a physical effort in having the experience. In short, we live in it with our whole being. In this way, this soul, in having our ideas, plunges down into the depths, and in the image we can bring it up again. We can say: in ordinary experience, we proceed from the external experience to ordinary memory in that the external images undergo a certain inner metamorphosis. In meditation, which is available in anthroposophical research, we go the other way. We first learn to have an image that is not allowed to link to an external experience, not to subconscious reminiscences, and learn to progress — now not to an external experience, but to a supersensible experience, also to those experiences that lie before our birth or before our conception. In this way we get to know the pre-existence of the soul, the spiritual being of the soul, in a way that we otherwise only get to know what external experiences have brought us up to a certain point in our childhood. It is the reverse experience, but one that leads us to spiritual experience, where we start from the image and ascend to the experience. And if at the same time we practise a certain self-discipline, namely a self-discipline that increasingly leads us to act out of what we know in ordinary life as the feeling of love, then we learn to recognize objectively where we can develop our activity in love from the tasks that the outer world gives us. If we get to know this life in the outer world, then after much practice, the progression from image to reality will gradually be such that we progress from the imaginative consciousness through the inspired to the intuitive consciousness. This means that we learn to stand within the inner objectivity, within the inner necessity of the spiritual world.

You see, dear attendees, in nature research we start from necessity. In a sense, we approach the human being in such a way that we can only contribute something to thinking if we can inwardly preserve and say to ourselves, in order to be a human being in the right sense, you carry within you something that is connected with the nature of the whole world. But by making the attempt to approach man with that thinking, which is extraordinarily well suited for use in the study of nature, in outer life, one comes to a point – I have characterized this, you can read about it in my Philosophy of Freedom – where one can go no further. The hypotheses become uncertain.

But if you develop what can be experienced in the realm of freedom, you will penetrate the objectivity of the mind in a reverse way. And here you can be helped if you use thinking, in the Goethean sense (as explained in his scientific writings), not to spin out hypotheses, but only to put together phenomena.

By assembling phenomena, one learns to recognize how to approach this world. One does not arrive at the realm of atoms - not at atoms, not at electrons and so on, which are justified to a certain extent, as far as external appearance is concerned. One only comes to the outer appearances in this physical-scientific way of looking at and researching. If, on the other hand, one presents these purely as phenomena, then one can penetrate to what lies behind the phenomenon - to which we ourselves belong in our eternal core - by ascending into the imaginative, inspirational, intuitive. And in this way, ladies and gentlemen, we also arrive at a certain self-knowledge, at realizing what we demand in self-observation. By developing the imaginative consciousness, we learn to look into ourselves. What is memory based on? It is based, so to speak, on the fact that we absorb what we experience in the outside world in our imagination. Not in the way it is the case, for example, in the first days of our childhood — there it is transferred down into the organization — but in such a way that it is mirrored, that it has, as it were, a mirror wall on our organization and that we absorb it by remembering, in the memory image of the experience. By developing the memory that we need for a healthy social and scientific life in this way, we overcome the bond to the physical organization through anthroposophical research. However, ordinary consciousness must always be present; it must not be as in hallucination. Rather, anyone who ascends to imaginative consciousness is always a rational human being at the same time, always has ordinary consciousness alongside. This is precisely what distinguishes imaginative envisioning, inspired envisioning, from hallucination. Hallucinations and visions live in what the body produces, so that when we develop physical images from the body, we are dealing with visions and hallucinations. When we compose images from the soul, we are dealing with imaginative creations; when we compose images from the spirit, which we grasp by learning to work freely from the body, purely in spirit and soul, we are dealing with spiritual reality. So, it is the body that produces the images by coming to hallucinations and visions. The soul composes images by coming to fantasies, not to visionary images. The spirit within us composes images by approaching spiritual realities.

But when we look back into ourselves, we see, as it were, through the looking-glass, just as we should see through an actual looking-glass if we were to pierce it or take away some of the coating. And there we do not encounter in our inner being what the nebulous mystics talk about; we encounter something quite different, because the soul has experienced many things before it believes it unites with some deity in its inner being. They speak of divine manifestations in the ego. They speak of something they dream up. But anyone who penetrates into their inner being with genuine spiritual science comes to something quite different. He comes to see materially that which is otherwise given to him spiritually. Otherwise, his thinking, feeling, willing, desiring and coveting are given to him spiritually; now, however, he sees through everything that he feels, which is more or less connected with memory, and he sees into the actual inner laws of his organism. He gets to know his organism. He will not prattle and ramble on about nebulous mysticism, but will speak of the actual nature of the liver, lungs and stomach, which he gets to know through inner vision. He can add his inner vision to what conscientious external-physical anatomy provides. There you see the possibility of ascending to a real science of pathology. There you see how spiritual science, which does not turn to nebulous, rambling mysticism but which starts from exact methods, can really enter into the whole field of science. Yes, you get to know much more. Above all, one recognizes that even with the mystics who, of course, sound so magnificent, even with St. Therese or Mechthild of Magdeburg, that basically physical abnormalities are involved. One learns to recognize how abnormal liver, spleen and so on functions can arise from an imperfect, inharmonious functioning, from which arise the images that we otherwise so admire in mysticism.

Dear attendees! Knowledge is one thing that cannot be grasped by means of life prejudices, no matter how beautiful they may be. I believe that for those who can immerse themselves in knowledge without prejudice, there is a deeper insight into the foundations of existence, because they know how the human organism “boils” such beautiful things as they encounter in the noblest forms, namely in a Saint Therese or even in a Mechthild of Magdeburg, when they mystically indulge in raptures in the mist and dream of all kinds of things that are supposed to arise from the soul and spirit within. That is the remarkable thing: that we are progressing to the materiality of the human organism through self-observation. This will increasingly distinguish exact anthroposophy from all the ramblings and ramblings of inner mysticism, namely that it does not lead into the nebulous, but into realities. It teaches that which cannot be developed through external anatomy, because what can be learned from external physiology and anatomy is only one side; in this way it shows that the soul is pre-existent. She shows how this soul works down from its more comprehensive being to shape what is formed in the mother's womb from the spiritual. Thus, the real arises out of the spiritual world. We delve into the realm of reality by meditatively penetrating forward.

In science, we approach the human being from the outside world, whereas in anthroposophy, the full knowledge of the human being extends to the realm of nature. This is how we arrive at the harmony of spirit and matter that the human being must experience if they are to be fully human in the appropriate sense. He arrives at the point where, out of an inner urge, he passes directly from inner feeling and will to direct knowledge. It follows that without this knowledge we are always compelled to appeal to an atomistic world, and that we do not really get to the heart of the material. When we learn to recognize more and more of the material, then we also learn to recognize the nature of the spiritual outwardly. We really learn to build that bridge that leads us cognitively from spirit to matter, from matter to spirit. We need not believe that it is possible to solve all the riddles of the world at once. Weak-minded natures may perhaps say: The life of today's man must be a tragic one, since he inevitably comes up against the limits of knowledge, which make the riddles of the world appear insoluble to him. But it is not so. When we ascend in this way and get to know the spiritual life as it really is, when it suddenly flashes into us and when, on the other hand, we encounter the material world again when we approach the world with real powers of perception, , we learn, in essence, by ascending to such knowledge, not to experience something that carries us into the slumber from the outset in relation to knowledge, but we learn to recognize the struggle in which we are interwoven as human beings. Man sees how he lives outside in the struggles of spiritual worlds and beings, how he participates in this struggle through the moral world, the religious world, how he brings social life out of this struggle. He gets to know something that does not, so to speak, superficialize the inner soul state in solving the riddles of the world, but on the contrary, deepens it.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophy basically wants. It is the way to meet natural science. Anyone who wants to fight anthroposophy from a scientific point of view or, following on from science, from a philosophical point of view, is tilting at windmills, because anthroposophy addresses everything that science legitimately brings up; it can only accommodate what can be achieved through such science and philosophy through full knowledge. But this full realization was not wanted. Over a long period of time, the newer spiritual life and the newer life of civilization has brought about what has become known in recent times as agnosticism. Again and again, those thinkers who did not want to come to a further development of thinking, who did not want to enter into the world of the imaginative, inspired and intuitive, spoke of an ignoramus and thus presented something to people - which is significant - that must be considered as something unrecognizable and incomprehensible. But because man always knows that he is spirit, he should actually be able to distinguish the spiritual origin from nebulous mysticism and the like. The cause of all that is literally superstition in the various areas of life does not lie in anthroposophy, which strives for clarity and exact natural science, but the origin of it lies in ignorabimus, in agnosticism. These created the “foggy” mysticism. It is precisely the ignorabimus that leads to agnosticism, because man must continually seek the spirit. All nebulous movements emanate from the ignorabimus and agnosticism.

Anthroposophy does not want to be fog, Anthroposophy wants to be light, Anthroposophy wants to be the continuation of the light that it itself recognizes in modern science as a truly spiritual light that carries humanity forward. This is how it itself sees the relationships between modern science, modern philosophy and itself as Anthroposophy.

For decades it has been the conviction of many people that scientific materialism must be superseded. When opinions are expressed on this subject, they usually refer to the mode of thought current in the 19th Century, which was considered inseparable from a true scientific attitude. To this mode of thought any mention of spirit and soul as beings who may be observed independent of their material conditions was unscientific. Only when the human being was observing material processes did he feel himself standing on solid scientific ground. The development of spirit and soul was seen in connection with material processes; and, by pointing to these material processes which take place during spiritual and psychic phenomena, people believed they did the only thing scientifically possible.

There have always been thoughtful people who did not believe it possible to gain knowledge of the spirit and soul by means of the mode of thought characterized above. There were many, however, who could not concede that science as such can speak of anything but the material conditions of the spiritual and psychic. Under this trend of thought, psychology slipped into the habit of merely describing the processes in the nervous system. Thus, what can be observed by means of the senses was made the basis for gaining knowledge concerning the soul.

Today there are many who hold that by this method of consideration the soul is lost to human perception. It is felt that in observing the life of the nerves we are confronted with the merely material, and that the latter cannot give answers to questions which spirit and soul must ask about themselves.

There are today scientific thinkers, worthy of being taken seriously, who as a result of such feelings forsake the materialistic point of view and come to the conviction that the spiritual must be thought of as effective within the material.

In the middle of the 19th Century it was the common belief that, by overcoming the old conception of “life-force,” great scientific progress had been made. According to this conception, a special force is active within the life processes, capable of drawing into its sphere physical and chemical agencies in such a way that life is called forth. This conception was rejected. The physical and chemical were thought to be so constituted as to be able—in their complicated formations—to reveal themselves as life. There was the sustaining hope that gradually clear concepts of these complicated formations might be evolved

The thinkers of today who again hold that underlying, file there is something special, which employs the physical and chemical for the purpose of higher activity, find themselves dis appointed in this hope.

New hope is linked to what is undertaken in regard to the problem. The unprejudiced observer, however, must oppose this with the same reasoning which in the 19th Century led to discarding the prevalent conception of a “life-force.” The reasoning ran thus: The kind of thinking which permits the clear survey of relationships in the physical and chemical spheres loses itself, when it speaks of “life-force,” in the unclear and nebulous. It was recognized that the approach which leads to physical and chemical relationships cannot lead to the “mystical” life-force.

What was thus recognized was thoroughly justified. And when those entertaining new hopes in the sense indicated will have gained full clarity in the matter, they will have arrived at the same conclusions which in the 19th Century led to a rejection of “life-force.”

A healthy development is possible in this connection only it we recognize that the mode of thought fully justified in the realm of the physical and chemical must be transformed when we advance to a consideration of the regions of life, soul, and spirit. The human being must first transform his thinking, it he would acquire the right to speak about these regions scientifically.

Anthroposophy rests upon this basis. It does not, therefore, feel compelled to destroy the scientific edifice of physics and chemistry in order to build with the same thought-methods something different. It holds that this edifice of science has been established on secure foundations, but that within it must not seek life, soul, and spirit.

If this be true, say those passing superficial judgment, then Anthroposophy places itself outside of science and may claim for itself, at best, certainty of belief.

Anyone who talks that way is not turning vigorously from a consideration of nature back to a consideration of the human being. At the present time, our manner of observing the physical and chemical is based upon a particular constitution of the human soul. And scientific certainty is not the result of something revealed by nature, but of an inner experience of observation. What is experienced by the soul while observing nature gives certainty. Anthroposophical knowledge advances from this to other soul experiences which may be ours if thinking, trained in physical and chemical science, has transformed itself and acquired the faculty of imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive perception. And the latter experiences of the soul permit a similar certainty to gleam forth.

Those who deny the certainty of these other forms of knowledge fail to tell us why they admit the certainty of physics and chemistry. From habit they give themselves up to the latter and reject what has not become a fixed habit. Anthroposophy asks: Why do we accept as certain the knowledge of physics and chemistry? It sees the reason in a particular mode of soul experience. It acquires this mode as a guiding line for knowledge. And it does not deviate from it even when, through transformed thinking, it tries to gain truths concerning life, soul, and spirit.

For this reason, Anthroposophy is fully able to acknowledge the mode of thought which in physics and chemistry has led to the most significant results in the modern age. It is even obliged to credit materialism with the development of that mode of human perception which leads to sound judgment in the sphere of the non-living. But it is likewise obliged to consider it impossible for this mode of perception to establish anything but physics and chemistry. But whoever takes pains to make clear to himself how such a mode of perception comes into being can see that, with the same inner certainty, other modes are possible: those for the regions of life, soul, and spirit. The person who does not treat science as something external to which he accustoms himself, but experiences it in inner clarity, cannot stop short at the physical and chemical realm; for to him the metamorphosis of sensuous and intellectual knowledge into the forms of imagination, inspiration, and intuition is nothing bill an advancement of the child's form to that of the adult The same forces are active in the adult as in the child. The same scientific method is employed in the knowledge of life, soul, and spirit as in physics and chemistry.

What I have to say to-day will be, in a sense, an interlude within this course of lectures, for I shall try, from the scientific point of view, to glance at the field of artistic creation. I hope, however, that to-day's considerations will show that this interlude is really a contribution which will help to elucidate what I said on the preceding days and what I shall have to say in the days that follow.

When the Anthroposophical Movement had been active for some time, a number of members became convinced that a building should be erected for it. Various circumstances (which I need not mention here) led finally to the choice of the hill at Dornach, in the Jura Hills near Basle, Switzerland. Here the Goetheanum, the Free High School for Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, is being built.¹ It is not yet completed, but lectures can already be held in it and work can be done.

I should now like to speak of the considerations (inneren Verhältnissen) that prevailed with us when designing this building. If any other spiritual movement of our time had decided to erect its own building, what would have been done? Well, one would have applied to one or more architects, and a building would have been erected in one or other of the traditional styles—Antique, Renaissance or Gothic. Then, in accordance with what is being done here or there in the various branches of art, craftsmen would have been called in to decorate the building with paintings and plastic forms.

Nothing like that could be done in the case of the Dornach building—the Free High School for Spiritual Science; it would have contradicted the whole intention and innermost character of the anthroposophical conception of the world. This conception is not an attempt to achieve something one-sidedly theoretical—an expression of cosmic laws in a sum of ideas. It intends to be something born from man as a whole and to serve his whole being. It would be, on the one hand, something that can very well be expressed in thought forms—as one expects of any view of the world that is propounded. On the other hand, the anthroposophical world-view would be essentially more comprehensive; it strives to be able to speak from the whole compass of man's being. It must therefore be able to speak, not only from the theoretical, scientific spirit, but from an artistic spirit also. It would speak from a religious, a social, an ethical spirit; and to do all this in accordance with the needs of practical life in these fields.

I have often expressed the task confronting us in Dornach with the help of a trivial comparison. If we think of a nut with its kernel inside and the shell around, we cannot think that the grooves and twists of the shell result from other laws than those that shape the kernel. The shell, in clothing the nut, is shaped by the same laws that shape the kernel. When the building at Dornach, this double cupola, was erected, our aim was to create an architectural, plastic, pictorial shell for what would be done within it as an expression of the anthroposophical view of the world. And just as one can speak in the language of thought from the rostrum in Dornach about what is perceived in super-sensible worlds, so must one be in a position to let the architectural, plastic, pictorial frame for the anthroposophical world-view proceed from the same spirit.

But a great danger confronts us here: the danger of having ideas about this or that and then simply giving them external expression in symbolic or insipidly allegorical form. (This is frequently done when world-views are given external representation: symbols or allegories are set up—thoroughly inartistic products which flout the really artistic sense.) It must be clearly understood, above all, that the anthroposophical conception of the world rejects such symbolic or allegorical negations of art (Widerkunst, Unkunst). As a view of the world, it should spring from an inner spiritual life so rich that it can express itself, not allegorically or symbolically, but in genuinely artistic creations.

In Dornach there is not a single symbol, not a single allegory to be seen. Everything that has been given artistic expression was born from artistic perception, came to birth in the moulding of forms, in creating out of the interplay of colours (aus dem Farbig-Malerischen heraus); it had its origin in a thoroughly artistic act of perception and had nothing to do with what is usually expressed when people come and ask: What does this mean? What does that signify? In Dornach no single form is intended to mean anything—in this sense. Every form is intended to be something—in the genuinely artistic sense; it means itself, expresses itself.

Those people who come to Dornach to-day and maintain that something symbolic or allegorical is to be seen there, are just projecting into our building their own prejudgements; they are not expressing what has come to birth with this building. Our aim is that the same spirit—not the theoretical spirit but the living spirit that speaks from the rostrum or confronts us from the stage—should speak also through the artistically plastic forms, through the architecture, through the paintings. The spirit at work in the “kernel” the spirit that finds expression through the spoken word—is to shape the “shell” also.

Now, if the anthroposophical view of the world is something new entering human evolution in the way I have ventured to describe in the two previous lectures, then, naturally, what had been in the world before could not find expression in our architectural style, our plastic and pictorial forms—i.e. in the visual art of our building. No artistic reminiscences, Antique, Renaissance or Gothic, could be brought in. The anthroposophical world-view had to show itself sufficiently productive to evolve its own style of visual art.

Of course, if such intentions press on one's heart and soul, one becomes very humble and one's own most severe critic. I certainly know that, if I had to build the Dornach building a second time, much that now appears to me imperfect, often indeed wrong, would be different. But this is not the essential thing. The essential thing, at least for to-day's lecture, is the intention (das Wollen) that I have just described. It is of this that I wish to speak.

When we speak of visual art, in so far as we have to consider it here—that is, the plastic art to which the anthroposophical world-view had been directed, as by inner necessity, through the fact that friends came forward and made the sacrifice required in order that the building at Dornach could be started—when we speak of visual art in this sense, we need, before all else, to understand thoroughly the human form. For, after all, everything in visual art points to, and proceeds from, the human form. We must understand the human form in a way that really enables us to create it.

I spoke yesterday of one element, the spatial element, in so far as this is an element in our world and, at the same time, proceeds from our human being. I said that the three spatial dimensions, by which we determine all the forms underlying our world, can be derived from the human form. But when one speaks as I spoke yesterday, one does not arrive at the apprehension of space needed for sensitive, artistic creation if one intends to pursue plastic art—that plastic art which underlies all visual art—with full consciousness. Precisely when one has space in its three dimensions so concretely before one's mind's eye as in yesterday's considerations, one sees that the space arrived at in this way cannot be the space in which one finds oneself when, for example, one forms—also in “space”, as we say—the human form plastically. One cannot obtain the space in which one finds oneself as a sculptor. One must say to oneself: That is quite a different space.

I touch here on a secret pertaining to our human way of looking at the world—a secret that our present-day perception has, one might almost say, quite lost. You will permit me to set out from a way of looking at things that is apparently—but only apparently—quite abstract, theoretical. But this excursion will be brief; it is intended only as an introduction to what will be able to come before our minds' eyes in a much more concrete form.

When we intend to apply to objects in this world the space of which I spoke yesterday—we apply it, of course, geometrically, using, in the first place, Euclidean geometry—we set out, as you all know, from a point and set up three axes at right angles to one another. (As I pointed out yesterday, one ought to take this point in concrete space to be within the human body.) Any region of space is then related to these axes by determining distances from them (or from the three planes that they determine). In this way we obtain a geometrical determination of any object occupying space; or, as in kinematics, one can express motion in space.

But there is another space than this: the space into which the sculptor enters. The secret of this space is that one cannot set out from one point and relate all else to it. One must set out from the counterpart of this point. And what is its counterpart? Nothing other than an infinitely remote sphere to which one might look up as at, let us say, the blue vault of heaven.

Imagine that I have, instead of a point, a hollow sphere in which I find myself, and that I relate all that is within it to this hollow sphere, determining everything in relation to it, instead of to a point by means of co-ordinates. So long as I describe it to you only in this way, you could rightly say: Yes, but this determination in relation to a hollow sphere is vague; I can form no mental picture when I try to think it. Well, you would be right; one can form no mental picture. But man is capable of relating himself to the cosmos—as we, yesterday, related ourselves to the human being (the “anthropos”). As we looked into the human being and found the three dimensions—as we can determine him in relation to these three dimensions, saying: his body extends linearly in one of the dimensions; in the second is the plane of the extended arms and all that is symmetrically built into the human organism; and in the third dimension is all that extends forwards and backwards, backwards and forwards—so, when we really look at the “anthropos” as an organism, we do not find something extended in an arbitrary way in three dimensions. We have before us the human organism built in a definite way.

We can also relate ourselves to the cosmos in the same way. What occurs in the soul when we do so? Well: imagine yourself standing in a field on a clear, starry night, with a free view of the sky. You see regions of the vaulted sky where the stars are closely clustered, almost forming clouds. You see other regions where the stars are more widely spaced and form constellations (as they are called). And so on. If you confront the starry heavens in this merely intellectual way—with your human understanding—you achieve nothing. But if you confront the starry heavens with your whole being, you experience (empfinden) them differently.

We have now lost the perceptive sense for this, but it can be reacquired. Facing a patch of sky where the stars are close together and form almost a cloud, will be a different experience from facing constellations. One experiences a patch of sky differently when the moon is there and shines. One experiences a night differently when the moon is new and not visible. And so on. And precisely as one can “feel” one's way into the human organism in order to have the three dimensions—where space itself is concrete, something connected with man—so one can acquire a perception of the cosmos, that is, of one's cosmic environment (Umkreis). One looks into oneself to find, for example, the three dimensions. But one needs more than that. One can now look out into the wide expanses and focus one's attention on their configurations. Then, as one advances beyond ordinary perception, which suffices for geometry, one acquires the perception needed for these wide expanses; one advances to what I called, yesterday and the day before, “imaginative cognition”. I have still to speak about its cultivation.

If one were simply to record what one sees out there in cosmic expanses, one would achieve nothing. A mere chart of the starry heavens, such as astronomers make to-day, leads nowhere. If, however, one confronts this cosmos as a whole human being, with full understanding of the cosmos, then, in face of these clusters of stars, pictures form themselves within the soul—pictures like those one sees on old maps, drawn when “imaginations” took shape out of the old, instinctive clairvoyance. One receives an “imagination” of the whole cosmos. One receives the counter-image of what I showed you yesterday as the basis, in man, of the three geometrical space-dimensions. What one receives can take an infinite variety of shapes.

Men have, indeed, no idea to-day of the way in which men once, in ancient times, when an instinctive clairvoyance still persisted among them, gazed out into the cosmos. People believe to-day that the various drawings, pictures—“imaginations”—which were made of the zodiacal signs, were the products of phantasy. They are not that. They were sensed (empfunden); they were perceived (geschaut) on confronting the cosmos. Human progress required the damping-down of this instinctive, living, imaginative perception, in order that intellectual perception, which sets men free, should come in its place. And from this, again, there must be achieved—if we wish to be whole human beings—a perception of the universe that attains once more to “Imagination”.

If one intends to take, in this way, one's idea of space from the starry heavens, one cannot express it exhaustively by three dimensions. One receives a space which I can only indicate figuratively. If I had to indicate the space I spoke of yesterday by three lines at right angles to one another, I should indicate this space by drawing everywhere sets of figures (Konfigurationen), as if surface forces (Kräfte in Flächen) from all directions of the universe were approaching the earth and, from without, were working plastically on the forms upon its surface.

One comes to such an idea when, advancing beyond what living beings—above all, human beings—present to physical eyes, one attains to what I have been calling “Imagination”. In this the cosmos, not the physical human being, reveals itself in images and brings us a new space. As soon as one gets so far, one perceives man's second body—what an older, prescient, instinctive clairvoyance called the “etheric body”. (A better name is “body of formative forces” (Bildekräfteleib).) This is a super-sensible body, consisting of subtle, etheric substantiality and permeating man's physical body. We can study this physical body if, within the space it occupies, we seek the forces that flow through it. But we cannot study the etheric body (body of formative forces) which flows through the human being if we set out from this space. We can study this only if we think of it as built up out of the whole cosmos: formed plastically from without by “planes of force” (Kraftflächen) converging on the earth from all sides and reaching man.

In this way, and in no other, did plastic art arise in times when it was still an expression of what is elemental and primary. Such a work as, for example, the Venus of Milo reveals this to an intuitive eye. It was not created after a study of anatomy, in respectful reliance on forces which are merely to be understood as proceeding from the space within the physical body. It was created with a knowledge, possessed in ancient times, of the body of formative forces which permeates the physical body and is formed from out of the cosmos—formed from out of a space as peripheral as earthly space (physical space) is central. A being that is formed from the periphery of the universe has beauty impressed upon it—“beauty” in the original meaning of the word. Beauty is indeed the imprint of the cosmos, made with the help of the etheric body, on a physical, earthly being.

If we study a physical, earthly being in accordance with the bare, dry facts, we find, of course, what it is for ordinary, physical space. But if we let its beauty work on us—if we intend to intensify its beauty by means of plastic art, we must become aware that the beauty impressed upon this being derives from the cosmos. The beauty of this individual being reveals to us how the whole cosmos works within it. In addition, one must, of course, feel how the cosmos finds expression in the human form, for example.

If we are able to study the human form with inward, imaginative perception, we are induced to focus our attention, at first, on the formation of the head apart from the rest. But, looking at this formation as a whole, we do not understand it if we try to explain it merely by what is within the head. We understand it only if we conceive it as wrought from out of the cosmos through the mediation of the body of formative forces.

If we now pass on to consider man's chest formation, we reach an inward understanding of this—an understanding in respect to the human form—only if we can picture to ourselves how man lives on the earth, round which the stars of the zodiacal line revolve. (Only apparently revolve, according to present-day astronomy, but that does not concern us here.) Whereas we relate man's head to the pole of the cosmos, we relate his chest formation—which certainly functions (verläuft) in the recurrent equatorial line—to what runs its course, in the most varied ways, in the annual or diurnal circuit of the sun.

It is not until we pass on to consider the limb-system of man, especially the lower limb-system, that we feel: This is not related to the external cosmos, but to earth; it is connected with the earth's force of gravity. Look with the eye of a sculptor at the formation of the human foot; it is adapted to the earth's gravitational force. We take in the whole configuration—how the thigh bones and shin bones are fitted together by the mediation of the knee—and find it all adapted, dynamically and statically, to the earth, and to the way in which the force of gravity works from the earth's centre outwards, into the universe.

We feel this when we study the human form with a sculptor's eye. For the head we need all the forces of the cosmos; we need the whole sphere if we want to understand what is expressed so wonderfully in the formation of the head. If we want to understand what finds expression in the formation of the chest, we need what, in a sense, flows round the earth in the equatorial plane; we are led to earth's environment. If we want to understand man's lower limb-system, to which his metabolic system is linked, we must turn to the earth's forces. Man is, in this respect, bound to the forces of the earth. Briefly: we discover a connection between all cosmic space—conceived as living—and the human form.

To-day, in many circles (including artistic circles), people will probably laugh at such observations as those I have just made. I can well understand why. But one knows little about the real history of human development if one laughs at such things. For anyone who can enter deeply into the ancient art of sculpture sees from the sculptured forms created then that feelings (Empfindungen), developed by the “imaginative” view of the starry heavens, have flowed into those forms. In the oldest works of sculpture it is the cosmos that has been made perceptible in the human form.

Of course, we must regard as knowledge, not only what is called such in an intellectual sense, but knowledge that is dependent upon the whole range of human soul-forces. One becomes a sculptor—really a sculptor—from an elemental urge, not just because one has learnt to lean on old styles and reproduce what is no longer known to-day, but was known in this or that period, when this or that style was alive and sculptors were yet creative. One does not become a sculptor by leaning on traditions—as is usual to-day, even with fully fledged artists; one becomes a sculptor by reaching back, with full consciousness, to the shaping forces which once led men to plastic art. One must re-acquire cosmic feelings; one must be again able to feel the universe and see in man a microcosm—a world in miniature. One must be able to see the impress of the cosmos stamped upon the human forehead. One must be able to see from the nose how it has received the imprint of what has also been stamped upon the whole respiratory system: the imprint of the environment—of what revolves round the earth in the equatorial and zodiacal lines. Then one senses what one must create (darstellen). One does not work by mere imitation, copying a model, but one recreates by immersing oneself in that force by which Nature herself created and shaped man. One forms as Nature herself forms. But then one's whole mode of feeling, in cognition and artistic expression, must be able to adapt itself to this.

When we have the human form before us, we direct our artistic eye at first to the head. We do this with the urge to give plastic form to the head. We then try to bring out all the details of this head, treating every surface with loving care: the forehead, the arches above the eyes, the ears and so on. We try to trace, with all possible care, the lines that run down the forehead and over the nose. We proceed, in accordance with our aim, to give this or that shape to the nose. In short, we try to bring out, with loving care, through the different surfaces, what pertains to the human head.

Perhaps what I am now about to say may sound heretical to many, but I believe it flows from fundamentally artistic feelings. If, as sculptors, we were striving to form human, human legs, we should feel persistent inhibition. One would like to shape the head as lovingly as possible, but not the legs. One would like to hide them—to by-pass them with the help of pieces of clothing, with something or other that conforms sculpturally to what finds expression in the head. A human form with correctly chiselled legs—calves, for example—offends the sculptor's artistic eye. I know that I am saying something heretical, but I also know that it is thereby the more fundamentally artistic. Correctly chiselled legs!—one does not want them. Why not? Well, simply because there is another anatomy for the sculptor; his knowledge of the human form is different from the anatomist's. For the sculptor—strange as it may sound—there are no bones and muscles. For him there is the human form, built out of the cosmos with the help of the body of formative forces. And in the human form there are for him forces, effects of forces, lines of force and force-configurations. As a sculptor I cannot possibly think of the cranium when I form the human head; I form the head from without inwards, as the cosmos has moulded it. And I form the corresponding bulges on the head in accordance with the forces that press upon the form from within outwards and oppose the forces working in from the cosmos.

When, as a sculptor, I form the arms, I do not think of the bones but of the forces that are active when, for example, I bend my arm. I have then lines of force, developing forces, not what takes shape as muscle or bone. And the thickness of the arm depends on what is present there as life-activity, not on the muscular tissue. Because, however, one has above all the urge to make the human form with its beauty conform to the cosmos, but can do so only with the head—the lower limbs being adapted to the earth—one leaves the lower limbs out. When one renders a human being in art, one would like to lift him from the earth. One would make a heavy earth-being of him, if one were to give too definite shape to his lower limbs.

Again, looking at the head alone, we see that only the upper part, the wonderfully vaulted skull, is a copy of the whole cosmos. (The skull is differently arched in every individual. There is no general, only an individual, “phrenology”.) The eyes and the nose resemble, in their formation, man's chest organism; they are formed as copies of his environment, of the equatorial stream. Hence, when I come to do the eyes of a sculptured figure of a human being, I must confine myself—since one cannot, as you know, represent a man's gaze, whether deep or superficial, by any shade of colour—to representing large or small, slit or oval, or more or less, less straight eyes. But how one represents the way the eye passes over into the form of the nose, or how the forehead does this—how one suggests that man sees by bringing his whole soul into his seeing—all that is different when the eyes are slit, oval or straight. And if one can only feel how a man breathes through his nose, this wonderful means of expression, one can say: As a man is in respect to his chest, as its form is shaped by the cosmos, working inwards, so does he, as a human being, press what breathes in his chest, and what beats in his heart, up into his eyes and nose. It comes to expression there in the plastic form.

How a man is in respect to his head only finds proper expression in the cranium, which is, in respect to its form, an imprint of the cosmos. How a man reacts to the cosmos, not only by taking in oxygen and remaining passive, but by having his own share of physical matter and, in his chest, exposing his own being to the cosmos—that finds sculptured expression in the formation of the eyes and his nose.

And when we shape the mouth? Oh, in shaping the mouth we really give shape to the whole inner man in his opposition to the cosmos. We express the manner in which the man reacts to the world out of his metabolic system. In forming the mouth and shaping the chin—in forming all that belongs to the mouth-formation—we are giving form to the “man of limbs and metabolism”, but we spiritualise him and present him as an outwardly active form. Thus one who has a human head before his sculptor's eye has the whole man before him—man as an expression of his “system”: the “nerve-sense-system” in the cranium with its remarkable bulges; the “eye-nose-formation” which, if I were to speak platonically, I should have to call an expression of the man as a man of courage—as a man who sets his inner self, in so far as it is courageous, in opposition to the external cosmos; and the mouth as an expression of what he is in his inner being. (Of course, the mouth, as a part of the head-formation, is also shaped from without, but what a man is in his inner being works from within against the configuration from without.)

Only some sketchy hints that require to be thought out could be given here. But you will have seen from these brief indications that the sculptor requires more than a knowledge of man gained from imitating a human model; he must actually be able to experience inwardly the forces that work through the cosmos when they build the human form. The sculptor must be able to grasp what takes place when a human being is plastically formed from the fertilised ovum in the mother's body—not merely by forces in the mother's body, but by cosmic forces working through the mother. He must be able to create in such a way that, at the same time, he can understand what the individual human being reveals of himself, more and more, as the sculptor approaches the lower limbs. He must, above all, be able to understand how man's wonderful outer covering—the form of his skin—results from two sets of forces: the peripheral forces working inwards, from all directions, out of the cosmos, and the centrifugal forces working outwards and opposing the former. Man in his external form must be, for the sculptor, a result of cosmic forces and inner forces. One must have such a feeling towards all details.

In art one needs a feeling for one's material and should know for what this or that material is suited; otherwise, one is not working sculpturally but only illustrating an idea, working novellistically. If one is forming the human figure in wood, let us say, one will know when at work on the head that one must feel the form pressing from without inwards. That is the secret of creating the human form. When I form the forehead, I am constrained to feel that I am pressing it in from without, while forces from within oppose me. I must only press, more lightly or more strongly, as required in order to restrain the forces working from within. I must press, lightly or strongly, as the cosmic forces (which indicate how the head must be formed) permit.

But when I come to the rest of the human body, I can make no progress if I form and build from without inwards. I cannot but feel that I am inside. Already when I come to form the chest, I must place myself inside the man and work plastically from within outwards. This is very interesting.

When one is at work on the head, one comes through the inner necessity of artistic creation to work from without inwards—to think of oneself on the extreme periphery and working inwards; when one forms the chest, one must place oneself inside and bring the form out. Lower down one feels: here I must only give indications; here we pass over into the indefinite.

Artistic creation of our time is very often inclined to regard the sort of things I have been saying here as an inartistic spinning of fancies. But it is only a matter of being able to experience artistically in one's soul what I have just hinted at: of being able actually to stand, as an artist, within the whole creative cosmos. Then one is led, from all sides, to avoid imitating the human physical form when one approaches plastic art. For the human physical form is itself only an imitation of the “body of formative forces”. Then one will feel the necessity felt, above all, by the Greeks. They would never have produced the forms of their noses and foreheads by mere imitation; an instinct for such things as I have just described was fundamental with them. One will be able to return to a really fundamental artistic feeling only if, in this way, one can place oneself with all the inner feeling of one's soul—with one's inner “total cognition” (if I may use this expression)—within nature's creative forces. Then one does not set to work on the external, physical body, which is itself only an imitation of the etheric body, but on the etheric body itself. One forms this etheric body and then only fills it out (in a sense) with matter.

What I have just described is, at the same time, a way out of the theoretical view of the world and into a living perception of what can no longer be viewed theoretically. One cannot construct the sculptor's space by analytical geometry, as one constructs Euclidean space. One can, however, perceive (erschauen), by “imagination”, this space—pregnant with forms, everywhere able to produce shapes out of itself, and from such perception (Schauen) one can create forms in plastic art, architectural or sculptural.

At this point I should like to make a remark which seems important to me, so that something which could easily be misunderstood will be less misunderstood. If someone has a magnetic needle, and one end points to the north, the other to the (magnetic) south, it will not occur to him—if he does not want to talk as a dilettante—to explain the direction of the needle by inner forces of the needle: that is, by considering only what is comprised within the steel. That would be nonsense. He includes the whole earth in his explanation of the needle's direction. He goes outside the magnetic needle. Embryology makes to-day the dilettantish mistake; it looks at the human ovum only as it develops in the mother's body. All the forces that form the human embryo are supposed to be therein. In reality, the whole cosmos works through the mother's body upon the configuration of the embryo. The plastic forces of the whole cosmos are there, as are the forces of the earth in directing the magnetic needle. Just as I must go beyond the needle when studying its behaviour, so, when considering the embryo, I must look beyond the maternal body and take account of the whole cosmos. And I must immerse myself in the whole cosmos if I want to apprehend what guides my hand, what guides my arm, when I strive, as a sculptor, to form the human figure.

You see: the anthroposophical world-view leads directly from merely theoretical to artistic considerations. For it is not possible to study the etheric body in a purely theoretical way. Of course one must have the scientific spirit, in the sense in which I characterised it yesterday, but one must press on to a study of the “body of formative forces” by transforming into “imaginations” what weaves in mere thoughts; that is, by grasping the external world, not only by means of thoughts or natural laws formulated in thoughts, but by “imaginations”. What we have so grasped, however, can be expressed in “imaginations” again. And if we become productive, it passes over into artistic creation.

It is strange to survey the kingdoms of nature with the consciousness that such a body of formative forces exists. The mineral kingdom has no such body; we find it first in the plant kingdom. Animals have a body of formative forces; man also. But the plant's is very different from the animal's or man's. We are confronted here by a peculiar fact: think of yourself as equipped with the sensitive powers of an artistic sculptor and expected to give plastic shape to plant forms. It is repugnant to you. (I tried it recently, at least in relief.) One cannot give a form to plants; one can only indicate their movements in some vague way. One cannot shape plants plastically. Just imagine a rose, or any other plant with a long stalk, plastically formed: impossible! Why? Because, when one thinks of the plastic shape of a plant, one thinks instinctively of its body of formative forces; and this is within the plant, as is its physical body, but directly expressed. Nature sets the plant before us as a work of plastic art. One cannot alter it. Any attempt to mould a plant would be bungling botchwork in face of what Nature herself produces in the physical and formative-force bodies of a plant. One must simply let the plant be as it is—or contemplate it with a sculptor's mind, as Goethe did in his morphology of plants.

An animal can be given plastic shape. The artistic creation of animal forms is, indeed, somewhat different from artistic creation when we are confronting a human being. One needs only to understand that if an animal is, let us say, a beast of prey, it must be apprehended as a “creature of the respiratory process.” One must see it as a breathing being and, to a certain extent, mould all the rest around the respiratory process. If one intends to give plastic shape to a camel or a cow, one must start from the digestive process and adapt the whole animal to this. In short, one must perceive inwardly, with an artistic eye, what is the main thing. If one differentiates further what I am now indicating in more general terms, one will be able to give plastic shape to the various animal forms.

Why? Well, a plant has an etheric body, created for it from out of the cosmos. It is finished. I cannot re-shape it. The plant is a plastic work of art in the world of nature. To form plants of marble or wood contradicts the whole sense of the factual world. It would be more possible in wood, for wood is nearer to the plant's nature; but it would be inartistic. But an animal sets its own nature against what is being formed from without, out of the cosmos. With an animal, the etheric body is no longer formed merely from the cosmos; it is also formed from within.

And in the case of a human being? Well, I have just said that his etheric body is formed from the cosmos only so far as the cranium is involved. I have said that the respiratory organisation, working in a refined state through eyes and nose, opposes the cosmic action, while the whole metabolic organisation, through the formation of the mouth, offers opposition also. What comes from the human being is active there and opposes the cosmos. Man's outer surface is the result of these two actions: the human and the cosmic. The etheric body is so formed that it unfolds from within. And by artistic penetration to “within”, we become able to create forms freely. We can investigate how an animal forms its etheric body for itself from its being (Wesenheit), and how a courageous or cowardly, a suffering or rejoicing human being tunes his etheric body to his soul life; and we can enter into all that and give form to such an etheric body. If we do this, and have the right sculptural understanding, we shall be able to form the human figure in many different ways.

Thus we see that, when we come to study the etheric body—the “imaginative body”—we can let ordinary scientific study be thoroughly scientific, while we, however, pass on to what becomes, of itself, art. Someone may interpose: Indeed, art is not science. But I said, the day before yesterday: If nature, the world, the cosmos are themselves artistic, confronting us with what can only be grasped artistically, we may go on asserting that it is illogical to become artistic if we would understand things, but things simply do not yield to a mode of cognition that does not pass over into art. The world can be understood only in a way which is not confined to what can be apprehended by thoughts alone, but leads to the universal apprehension of the world and finds the wholly organic, natural transition from observation to artistic perception, and to artistic creation too. Then the same spirit that speaks through the words when one gives expression, in a more theoretical way—in the form of ideas—to what one perceives (erschaut) in the world, will speak from our plastic art. Art and science then derive from the same spirit; we have in them only two sides of one and the same revelation. We can say: In science, we look at things in such a way that we express in thoughts what we have perceived; in art, we express it in artistic forms.

From this inner, spiritual conviction was born, for example, what has found expression in the architecture, and in the painting too, in the building at Dornach. I could say much about painting also, for it belongs, in a sense, to the plastic arts. But that would bring us to what pertains more to man's soul life and finds direct expression, not in the etheric body alone, but in the soul tingeing the etheric body. Here, too, you would see that the anthroposophical apprehension of the world leads to the fundamentally artistic level—the level of artistic “creativity”—whereas we to-day, in the religious as well as in the artistic sphere—though this is mostly unknown to artists themselves—live only on what is traditional, on old styles and motives. We believe we are productive to-day, but we are not. We must find the way back into creative nature, if our work is to be artistically spontaneous, original creation.

And this conviction has led, of itself, to Eurhythmy: the branch of art that has grown upon the soil of Anthroposophy. What the human being does in speech and song, through a definite group of organs, as a revelation of his being, can be extended to his whole being, if one really understands it. In this respect all the ancient religious documents (Urkunden) speak from old, instinctive, clairvoyant insights. And it is significant that it is said in the Bible that Jahwe breathed into man the living breath. This indicates that man is, in a certain respect, a being of respiration. I indicated yesterday that, in olden times of human evolution, the view predominated that man is a “breather”, a being of respiration. What man, as a being of respiration, becomes in “configurated breathing”—i.e. in speech and in song—can be given back to the whole man and his physical form. The movements of his vocal cords, his tongue and other organs when he speaks or sings, can be extended over his whole being—for every single organ and system of organs is, in a certain sense, an expression of his whole being. Then something like Eurhythmy can arise.

We need only remind ourselves of the inner character of Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis, which is not yet sufficiently appreciated. Goethe sees, correctly, the whole plant in the single leaf. The whole plant is contained in the leaf in a primitive form; and the whole plant is only a more complicated leaf. In every single organ he sees a whole organic being metamorphosed in some way or other, and the whole organic being is a metamorphosis of its individual members (Glieder). The whole human being is a more complicated metamorphosis of one single organic system: the glottal system. If one understands how the whole human being is a metamorphosis of the glottal system, one is able to develop from the whole man a visible speech and visible song by movements of his limbs and by groups of performers in motion. And this development can be as genuine, and can proceed with as much inner, natural necessity as the development of song and speech from one specialised organ. One is within the creative forces of nature; one immerses oneself in the way in which our forces act in speaking or singing. When one has grasped these forces, one can transfer them to the forms of motion of the whole human being, as one transfers, in plastic art, the forces of the cosmos to the human form at rest. And as one gives expression to what lives within a man—emerging from his soul in poetry or song, or in some other art—as one expresses what can be expressed through speech, song or the art of recitation, so, too, can one express through the whole human being, in visible speech and song, what lives within him.

I should like to put it in this way: When we, as sculptors, give plastic shape to the human form, creating the microcosm out of the whole macrocosm, we create one pole; when we now immerse ourselves in the man's inner life, following its inner mobility, entering into his thinking, feeling and willing—into all that can find expression through speech and song—we can create “sculpture in motion” (bewegte Plastik). One could say: when one creates a work of plastic art, it is as if the whole wide universe were brought together in a wonderful synthesis. And what is concentrated in the deepest part of the human being, as at a point within his soul, strives, in the formed movements put out by the eurhythmist, to flow out into cosmic spaces. In the art of Eurhythmy—in “sculpture in motion”—the other pole responds from the human side. In the sculptor's plastic art we see the cosmic spaces turn towards the earth and flow together in the human form at rest. Then, concentrating on man's inner life, immersing ourselves in it spiritually, we perceive (schauen) what, to some extent, streams out from man to all points of the periphery of the universe and would meet those cosmic forces that flow in upon him from all sides and build his form; we design Eurhythmy accordingly.

I should like to add: the universe sets us a great task, but the beautiful human form is the answer. Man's inner life also sets us a great task; we explore infinite depths when, with our soul's loving gaze, we concentrate on man's inner life. This human inner life, too, strives out into all the wide expanses and, in darting, oscillating movements, would give rhythmic expression to what has been “compressed” to a point—as plastic art strives to have all the secrets of the cosmos compressed in the human form (which is, for the cosmos, a point). The human form in plastic art is the answer to the great question put to us by the universe. And when man's art of movement becomes cosmic and creates something of a cosmic nature in its own movements—as in the case of Eurhythmy—then a kind of universe is born from man, figuratively at least.

We have before us two poles of visual art: in the very ancient plastic art and in the newly created art of Eurhythmy. But one must enter into the spirit of what is artistic, as we did above, if one would really understand the right of Eurhythmy to be considered an art. One must return to the way in which plastic art once took its place in human life. One can easily picture to oneself shepherds in a field who, in the small hours of the night, turn their sleepy, but waking, eyes to the starry heavens and receive unconsciously into their souls the cosmic pictures formed by the configured “imaginations” of the stars. What was revealed to the hearts of primitive men in this way was transmitted to sons and grandsons; what had been inherited grew in their souls and became plastic abilities in the grandsons. The grandfather felt the cosmos in its beauty, the grandson formed beautiful plastic art with the forces which his soul had received from the cosmos.

Anthroposophy must look into, and not only theorise about, the secrets of the human soul. It must experience the tragic situation of the human soul, all its exultations and all that lies between. And Anthroposophy must be able to see more than what evokes the tragic mood, what is now exultant and all that lies between. As one saw the stars clearly in older “imagination”, and was able to receive into one's soul the formative forces from the stars, so one must take out of the human soul what one perceives there, and be able to communicate it through outer movements; then Eurhythmy begins.

What I have said to-day is only intended to be once more a cursory indication of the natural transition from Anthroposophy as a body of ideas to Anthroposophy as immediate, unallegorical, unsymbolical plastic art, creating in forms—as is our aim. Anyone who sees this clearly will discover the remarkable relation of art to science and religion. Science will appear on one level, religion on another, and art between them. It is to science, after all, that man owes all his freedom—he would never have been able to attain to complete inner freedom without science—and what man has gained as an individual—what his being, regarded impartially, has gained by his becoming scientific—will be apparent. With his thoughts he has freed himself from the cosmos; he stands alone and is thereby a human individuality. As he lives with natural laws, so does he take them into his thoughts. He becomes independent in face of nature. In religion he is drawn to devotion; he seeks to find his way back to the essential foundations of nature. He would be again a part of nature, would sacrifice his freedom on the altar of the universe, would devote himself to the Deity—would add to the breath of freedom and of individuality the breath of sacrifice. But art, especially plastic art, stands between, with all that is rooted in the realm of beauty.

Through science man becomes a free, individual being. In religious observance he offers up his own well-being, on the one hand maintaining his freedom, but already, on the other, anticipating sacrificial service. In art he finds he can maintain himself by sacrificing, in a certain sense, what the world has made of him; he shapes himself as the world has shaped him, but he creates as a free being this form from out of himself. In art, too, there is something that redeems and sets free. In art we are, on the one side, individuals; on the other, we offer ourselves in sacrifice. And we may say: In truth, art sets us free, if we take hold of it scientifically, with ideas—including those of spiritual science. But we must also say: In beauty we find again our connection with the world. Man cannot exist without living freely in himself, and without finding his connection with the world. Man finds his individuality in thought that is free. And by raising himself to the realm of beauty—the realm of art—he finds he can, again in co-operation with the world, create out of himself what the world has made of him.

Translated by V. C. Bennie.

• 1. The first Goetheanum, burnt down on New Year's night, 1922/23. The second Goetheanum, modelled by Rudolf Steiner not long before his death in 1925, was opened in 1928.

Before I begin my lecture today may I express to our esteemed guests my heartiest greetings out of the spirit that prevails here in the Goetheanum and that underlies all the work that is developed here. This kind of spirit does not spring from any human one-sidedness, but from a total all-encompassing humanness. For this reason, what is offered and accomplished here can originate in scientific knowledge, art and religious devotion while at the same time its spirit should be that of a free humanness, combined with generosity of heart and soul.

Now when the construction of the Goetheanum was begun in 1913 it was upon this spirit that it rested, as on the finest foundation stone. At a period when the whole of Europe and vast areas beyond were embroiled in warfare and bitter hostilities, here in Dornach people from all the nations of Europe worked together out of a free, encompassing humanness. Here, the international work never ceased. Allow me to point to this fact especially today because I desire to bring you this greeting out of such an international spirit. Out of no other spirit can the work done here be carried on, for only this spirit of many-sided, universal, free humanness can produce genuine spiritual science, spiritual art and truth-filled religion, which in itself can only be spiritual and international. But this spirit also gives, I think, that largeness of heart that is able to welcome and greet every human being affectionately. So, it is out of this spirit that rules here at the Goetheanum that I speak of these first words of greeting. They are therefore meant from the heart. In this heartfelt manner, then, may I express the wish that in the days to come we may successfully work together and exchange ideas on some topics drawn from the most varied areas of science and life, something that everyone who had wanted to come here will carry home with a certain measure of gratification. When we who have worked at the Goetheanum for years find that our visitors look back with joy to what they have experienced here, we are filled with special satisfaction. With this feeling let me welcome you and thank you for coming and express the wish that your visit may prove gratifying to you all.

As already indicated, the aim here is to engage in spiritual research so that it will be the foundation for making life in all its aspects more fruitful. The spiritual knowledge we seek here at this Goetheanum should not be confused with much that today is promoted as occultism, or the many things that go by the name of mysticism. This occultism, pursued today in many forms, actually runs contrary to the spirit of our age, the spirit of real modern life, which results from the development of natural scientific knowledge in recent times. What is cultivated here as spiritual knowledge must certainly reckon with what in the strictest sense of the word is in keeping with the spirit of modern scientific knowledge. What is frequently called occultism today is founded on ancient traditions; it is not directly governed by the spirit of the present time. Old traditions are revived. But since present-day humanity cannot unfold corresponding perceptions from the same substrata of soul, one can say that these old traditions are often misunderstood; as such, they are presented in dilettante fashion by one or the other group today as a knowledge intended to gratify the human soul.

We have as little to do with such partly misunderstood traditional occultism as we have with the kind of occultism that seeks to do research in the supersensible worlds by borrowing the usual scientific methods of sense observation and experimentation. If this is done, the fact is overlooked that the methods of scientific research developed during the past few centuries are preeminently adapted for gaining knowledge of the external sense reality; for this very reason, however, they are unsuitable as a means of research into the supersensible realm.

On the other hand, much is said today about mystical immersion, inner mystical experience. There, too, one often has to do with nothing else than immersing oneself in the soul experiences of the old mystics, trying to repeat these soul experiences of the past. But again, the unclear introspection that is used can lead only to a dubious knowledge.

I only pointed to these things in order to warn against confusing the work here at the Goetheanum with what is often carried on in such an amateur, dilettante fashion, even if out of sincere good-will. Here a scientific method for gaining supersensible knowledge as being cultivated, as rigorous, as exact and as scientific as is demanded today of the methods in the area of natural scientific research. We can reach the supersensible realm only if we do not remain limited to the paths of research suited only to the sense world. We cannot, however, scientifically ascend into the supersensible worlds by proceeding in a spirit other than the one that has proven itself so well in the domain of the sense world. Today I should like to give just a few indications concerning the purposes and goals of the work carried on here. Therefore, more detailed discussions of what I will but mention today will follow in the days to come. May I point out first that for the purpose of supersensible research here we are concerned with drawing from the depths of the human soul those forces for gaining knowledge that can penetrate the supersensible world in the same way as the forces of the outer senses penetrate the physical sense world. What the spiritual research requires first of all is to direct his soul's attention to his own soul-spiritual organism, which is able to approach the super-sensible. This distinguishes the spiritual investigator from the ordinary scientist. The latter uses the human organism as it is, directs it toward nature, and employs the exactness needed to gain results about the facts of outer nature. But the spiritual researcher, just because he is grounded in correct natural scientific knowledge, cannot proceed in this way. He must first direct his attention to the soul-spiritual organ of knowledge—I can perhaps call it 'eye of the spirit.' But this attention, which initially prepares and develops the spiritual eye, must be such that the inner conformity of this spiritual eye appears before it exactly; as exact, for instance, as a mathematical problem appears to a mathematician, or the content of his experiment appears to the experimenter. This work that must be applied by the researcher upon himself in preparation for the actual attainment of knowledge is the essential point in spiritual research. Thus, as the mathematician or natural scientist is exact in the search for results, the spiritual researcher must be exact in preparing his soul-spiritual organism, which then can perceive a spiritual fact as the eye or ear perceives facts in the sense world.

The spiritual research referred to here must be exact, in the same way that mathematics or natural science is exact. But I should say that where natural science with its exactness stops, spiritual science with its own kind of exactness begins. It must be rigorous in developing one's own human nature, so that all the work man does on himself in order to become a spiritual researcher is carried on in rigorous manner. For this exact work, then, fully justifiable to science, turns, as it were, into the inner spiritual eye when it begins spiritual research and encounters the existence of the supersensible world. While what is often termed mysticism has little clear understanding of the soul, in genuine spiritual research every minute step must be taken with the same clarity and insight as is required of a mathematician confronted by a mathematical problem. This will then lead to a kind of awakening, an awakening on a higher level of consciousness comparable to what we experience when we awaken from our usual sleep and have the sense world around us again.

When I speak here of the exactness needed especially for spiritual research, the word relates to the exact, scientific preparation of what must precede the research, namely the soul-spiritual organization of man. It is this above all that must stand before the spiritual researcher in transparent clarity. Then he may begin to penetrate within the world of supersensible phenomena.

This is just a preliminary indication, not one that proves anything. Because one strives for this exactness in preparing for genuine spiritual perception, if one is to call the kind of spiritual perception meant here 'clairvoyance,' one can indeed speak of 'exact clairvoyance.' It is to be the specific characteristic of the spiritual research carried on here that it is based on methodologically exact clairvoyance. The exactness of the clairvoyance is to be the distinctive mark of the spiritual research practiced here. From this point of view, one would want to consider not only a narrowly circumscribed area, but to attain to something into which flow all other sciences and patterns of life of the present age. What is spiritually achieved here is not merely to be a spiritual super-structure having as its foundation the natural scientific mode of observation; what humanity has developed in the spirit of this modern natural scientific point of view should also be led up into the spiritual region in order that the attainments of natural science may be crowned with what spiritual research can provide.

As an example, I may cite medicine. The way this science has developed today out of materialistic knowledge, and has achieved its admirable results, is fully recognized by what is cultivated here as spiritual knowledge. But it is possible to carry further by means of the spirit of an exact clairvoyance what has now been achieved out of a purely external approach to medicine. Only then will the whole fruitfulness of natural scientific medicine as presently practiced be attained. Similarly, we desire to gain here in a spiritual way knowledge that is in a position to lead the artistic into the spiritual. We strive for an artistic element here, which in a spiritual way arises out of the totality of man's nature, as does the knowledge we seek. A religious, a social element is also to be cultivated here in such a way that they both arise as something self-evident flowing from the spiritual knowledge attained.

The spiritual knowledge we strive for is to lay hold of the whole man, is to come forth from him, not from a single human faculty. It is therefore the nature of this knowledge that it desires to have all areas of theoretical as well as practical life flow into the spiritual life, and that thereby only the completely human, the universally human, is to be achieved. From this standpoint I would like to speak to you in these lectures mainly about three areas of knowledge, using these three examples to show to what extent the spirit of modern science can lead into the spirit of higher spiritual science. I would like to speak to you about philosophy, cosmology and religion, in a manner that shows how through anthroposophy they are to gain a certain spiritual form.

Philosophy was once the all-inclusive knowledge, which, in ancient times, threw light on all the separate areas of reality that men experienced. It was not a specialized science. It was the universal science, and all the sciences we cultivate today developed fundamentally out of the substance of philosophy as it still existed in Greece. In recent times, a specific philosophy has arisen by its side that lives in a certain sum of ideas. The strange thing that came about is that this philosophy, out of which all other sciences actually have grown, has now come to the point of having to justify its own existence before them. The other sciences, which have indeed grown out of philosophy, busy themselves with this or that recognized field of reality. The field of reality is there for the senses, or for observation, or experiment.

One cannot doubt the justification for all this scientific pursuit of knowledge. In spite of all these separate areas of study having been born out of philosophy, it is forced today to justify its own existence, to explain why it develops a certain body of ideas, whether these ideas are perhaps quite unreal, do not relate to any reality, are merely something people have thought out. Just consider how much hard thinking is devoted nowadays to justifying those ideas, which, incidentally, have already taken on a quite abstract character and today are called the content of philosophy, in order that they can still enjoy a certain standing in the world. They have nurtured the sciences, which, I might say, are well accredited in regard to their own specific areas of reality. Philosophy, on the contrary, is not accredited today. It first has to prove that its existence is justifiable. In ancient Greece that was never brought into question. There, a man who was capable of developing himself far enough to attain a philosophy felt the reality of philosophizing in the same way a healthy person feels the reality of breathing. But today, when a philosopher examines his philosophy, he experiences the abstract, cold, sober quality of the ideas he has developed in it. He does not feel that he stands solidly in reality. Only a person working in a chemistry or physics laboratory, or in a hospital, has matters well in hand, so to say. One who nowadays has philosophical ideas and acts upon them often feels miles removed from reality.

There is an additional consideration. It is with good reason that philosophy bears a name that does not point merely to theoretical knowledge. Philosophy is “love of wisdom,” and love exists not only in one's reason and intellect but has its roots in the whole human heart and soul. A comprehensive soul experience, the experiencing of love, is what has given philosophy its name. The whole human being should be engaged in the development of philosophy, and one cannot love, in the true sense of the word, what is mere theory, matter of fact and cold. If philosophy is love of wisdom, those who have experienced it assume that this Sophia, this wisdom, is something worth loving, something real and tangible, whose existence does not require to be proven. Just think a moment. If a man were to love a woman, or a woman a man, but would find it necessary to first prove the existence of the loved one—, quite an absurd thought! But this is just the case with philosophy taken in its present sense. From something that was warmly alive and received in a heartfelt way by man, the existence of which was self-evident, philosophy has turned into something abstract, cold, dull and theoretical. What caused this?

When one turns back to the origin of philosophical life—not through outer history but with an inwardly experienced and felt knowledge of history—one finds that philosophy originally did not live in man as it does today. Man, today, basically only recognizes as valid what is achieved through sense observation, or through experiments developed in the field of the senses, when he thinks in a scientific way; this is then put together by the intellect. But these achievements belong to physical man, for the senses are physical organs imbedded in the physical body. What man's physical body attained in knowledge is today considered scientifically acceptable, but in this way one only reaches as far as physical man. In him what the ancients considered as philosophy cannot be found. I will go further into this in the days to follow but must here point out that what was called philosophy in the golden age of Greek philosophy—that spiritual substance experienced within the soul—was not experienced in the physical body but in a human organization that permeates the physical body as etheric man.

In present-day science we really know only physical man. We do not know the body that, as a fine etheric organism, permeates man's physical body and in which the Greek philosopher experienced his philosophy. In the physical body we experience breathing, and the process of seeing. But just as we have this physical organization before us, so man also has an etheric body; he is an etheric man. When we look at the physical body we see something of the breathing process; physically and biologically we can make clear to ourselves the process of seeing. When we look at supersensible, etheric man we see the medium in which the Greek carried on his philosophizing. The Greek constitution was such that a man of that time felt—lived—in his etheric organism. In the activity of exerting himself through his organism—as one does physically in breathing and seeing—philosophy came into being in the etheric man. As there never can be any doubt about the reality of our breathing, because we are conscious of our physical body, so the Greek never doubted that what he experienced as philosophy, as wisdom, which he loved, was rooted in reality, for he was conscious of his etheric body. He was clearly aware that his philosophizing took place in his etheric body.

Modern man has lost perception of the etheric body. In fact, he does not know he has one. Therefore, traditional philosophy is a sum of abstract ideas for the reason that it considers to be reality only what one experiences as reality while philosophizing. If one has lost the knowledge of etheric man, the reality in philosophy is also lost. One feels it as abstract; one feels the necessity to prove that it really exists.

Now imagine that man were to develop an organism still more powerful, solid and material than his present physical body. Then the breathing process, for instance, would gradually appear to be almost imperceptible by comparison with this more powerful experience, until finally he would no longer know anything about what is now his physical body, just as modern man knows nothing about his etheric body. The breathing process would be a theory, a sum of ideas, and one would have to 'prove' that breathing was a reality, just as one must now prove that philosophy is rooted in reality. Doubt as to the reality of what one should love in philosophy has arisen because the etheric body has been lost to human perception, for it is in the etheric, not in the physical body, that the reality of philosophy is experienced. If, then, one is to recover a feeling for philosophy as a reality one must first gain a knowledge of etheric man. Out of this knowledge a true experience of philosophy can come. The first step in anthroposophy therefore is to bring out the facts concerning man's etheric organism.

I want to proceed in three steps and would like to ask Dr. Sauerwein¹ to translate now. After the translation I shall continue.

In philosophy man has initially an inner experience of himself, of his etheric body. From the time humanity began to think it has also felt the need to incorporate each single human being into the whole cosmos. Man not only needs a philosophy, he needs a cosmology. As an individual firmly grounded within his organism at a certain place on the earth, he wants to understand in how far he belongs to the whole universe, and to what extent he has evolved out of it.

In the earliest stages of human evolution man felt himself to be a member of the whole cosmos. As physical man, however, he cannot feel himself as part of the cosmos. His experience as physical man between birth and death belongs directly to the life of his physical sensory surroundings. Beyond this he has his inner soul life, which is completely different from what he bears in his physical body out of his physical sensory environment. Since man wishes to feel, to know himself as a member of the whole cosmos, he also must feel and know his inner life of soul as part of the universe.

In the most ancient periods of human evolution men were actually able to see the soul life in the cosmos, not only by means of what today is mistakenly called anthropomorphism, but through an inner power of vision. They could perceive their own soul life as part of the soul-spiritual life of the universe, as one can see one's physical bodily life as part of natural sense existence. But in most recent times men have only developed in an exact way natural scientific knowledge based on sense observation, experiment, and a thinking similarly limited. Out of the natural scientific results achieved in this way, bringing together all the separate findings, a universal science, a cosmology, has been formed. But this cosmology contains merely the picture of facts from sense reality that are combined by thinking. One constructs a picture of the universe, but the separate parts of this picture are only the recognized laws of physical sensory phenomena.

This picture produced by the natural scientific cosmology of modern times is not like that of ancient times, which also contained the life of soul and spirit, for it contains only the sense world that natural science is able to examine. In this picture that stands as cosmology of the modern age man can re-discover his physical body, but not the inner life of his soul. In ancient times the inner soul life could be derived from the picture of cosmology; the soul's inner life cannot be derived from the cosmological view based upon natural science. This is in turn connected with the fact that modern perception cannot see the soul-spiritual in the same way as an old primitive perception was able to do. So, when modern knowledge speaks of the soul element in the body it speaks of the manifestations, the inner experiences of thinking, feeling and willing. It views the soul's life as being an outflow of what comes to expression in what is thought, felt and willed, separately and intermingled. It makes a picture of those three activities as phenomena playing a role in the soul's inner life.

When one observes the inner life of soul and spirit in this way one is forced to say, “Yes, what you have recognized and designated as an intermingling of thinking, feeling and willing arises in embryonic life, develops in the child, and perishes at death.” A scientist holding this view cannot fail to conclude that the soul must disappear at death. For actually, this thinking, feeling and willing between birth and death appear to be intimately bound up with the life of the physical body. Just as we see its members grow we watch thinking and feeling grow. As the body calcifies and we see it approaching physical decline, we see also how the phenomena of thinking, feeling and willing gradually diminish.

The distinguishing quality of the ancient viewpoint was a perception of the inner soul life that went beyond what lives in mere thinking, feeling and willing. The ancients perceived hidden within these a foundation for the life of soul of which they are only a reflection. We see thought, feeling and will originating and then developing further between birth and death. What lies beneath—of which thinking, feeling and willing are but the outer reflection—was beheld by the old primitive clairvoyance as the astral being of man.

So, as one at first recognizes the etheric body as a super-sensible member in physical man, one recognizes the astral body as a higher member in physical etheric man. This astral being of man does not consist of thought, feeling and will. It is the basis for them. It is the being which, out of soul-spiritual worlds, finds its way into our existence between birth and death. This astral man clothes himself between birth and death with the physical and etheric bodies, and after death goes out into a soul-spiritual world. In regard to this astral nature of man birth and death are only outer manifestations. Thinking, feeling and willing can be understood only in the context of man's physical organization, and can be found only between birth and death. There they develop, gradually decline, and disappear. The astral being underlying them, the foundation for the inner life of the soul, extends above physical and etheric man and is incorporated in a cosmic world. It is not enclosed within man's physical organism.

In order to arrive at a comprehensive cosmology, we need a knowledge of etheric and astral man, of which thinking, feeling and willing are a reflection. But, as manifested in each individual man, they cannot be incorporated in the cosmos. What constitutes their background, what is concealed in them between birth and death and is only accessible to a primitive or an exact clairvoyance—that can be incorporated in a spiritual cosmos of which the physical sensory cosmos is merely the reflection.

Modern cosmology is but a super-structure founded on the results of natural scientific research; a combination of facts found in the physical sense world. In such a cosmic picture man's inner life cannot be incorporated; but we only have such a cosmology because modern knowledge does not provide a picture of astral man. Anyone conceiving soul life as merely a combination of thinking, feeling and willing cannot defend the idea of its continuing beyond birth and death. Only if one first advances from these three activities to what lies concealed within them, to astral man, only then does one arrive at the human element that is no longer bound to the physical body and can be thought of as membered into the soul-spiritual universe. But man will never re-discover such a spiritual cosmos after abandoning it, because he has lost the perception of astral man. He will never be able to construct a picture of such a spirit-soul cosmos until he regains a picture of man's astral being. The possibility of a cosmology that again has soul-spiritual content depends upon the development of a perception of man's astral being. If we have merely an external cosmology comprising the physically perceptible, man himself has no place in it. We have come to such a physical cosmology because the perception of astral man has been lost. If the perception is again achieved, it will be possible to have a picture of the cosmos in which man himself is incorporated.

So, our concern is to succeed in developing a knowledge of man's astral being. Then we will also be able to attain a true cosmology that includes man. This is to be the second step for anthroposophy.

After Dr. Sauerwein has been so kind as to translate the second part, I shall discuss how matters stand with the third step in the last segment of my lecture.

Man experiences himself as condensed together into himself as for example when he philosophizes—and he also feels himself to be a part of the cosmos as depicted by cosmology. But in addition, he experiences himself as an entity independent of his own physical body as well as of the cosmos to which he belongs. He feels himself to be independent of his own corporeality and does not even feel part of the cosmos when he points to his own higher spiritual being—something that is today only hinted at when we utter the word 'I.'

When we say, 'I,' we do not refer to that part of us encompassed by our physical, our etheric, or our astral body, insofar as through the latter we are part of the cosmos. We refer to an inner, self-contained entity. We feel it as belonging to a special world, to a divine world, of which the cosmos is only the outer reflection, the external replica. As human beings who address themselves as “I,” we feel that this entity, this spiritual man indicated by the word “I,” is only enclothed with everything in the cosmos; that even the physical sense body is a covering of the actual being.

Because man in ancient times—through an inner if primitive vision—experienced his human entity as independent both of his body and of the cosmos, he knew he belonged to a divine world. But he also knew that between birth and death he was placed outside of this world and was clothed in a physical body. He knew he was placed in the soul-physical cosmos. He knew that his ego, the essence of his being, is concealed by the cosmic, by the physical-bodily elements, and he sought for union of this I-being with the divine world to which it belongs. In this way primitive man—with his clairvoyant experience of his egohood attained above and beyond his physical and etheric bodies and his astral nature—attained a union, religion , with the divine world. Religious life was that into which flowed a perception that was both philosophical and cosmological. Man found himself united with that from which he had been separated by his own body and by the outwardly visible soul-sensory cosmos. In religious experience he was united with the divine world, and this religious experience was the highest flowering of the perceptual life.

This religious experience on a primitive level, however, depended on a real inner experience of egohood, of the real spirit man. Only when the ego is experienced can the longed-for union with the divine world be attained—the religious feeling.

But to the modern way of thinking, what has the ego, this true spiritual man, become? It has become nothing but the phenomena of thinking, feeling and willing conceived of as a single, abstract idea. The ego has now become a kind of cosmic, or at most one or another composite formulation made up of thought, feeling and will—in any case something abstract. Philosophers themselves arrive at a notion of the ego by combining the experiences of thought, feeling and will into an abstract concept. But in this composite, nothing has been found that is not disproven every night when a person sleeps. Take the characterizations of modern philosophers concerning the “I,” for example, Bergson. Throughout, you will only find in these characterizations something that is disproven every night in sleep, for what the ego absorbs of these concepts, these ideas, is extinguished every night in sleep. Reality refutes these definitions, these characterizations of the ego. Furthermore, what I say here is not refuted by claiming that memory reconnects us after sleep with the “I.” It is not a matter of interpretations, but of facts. This implies that modern knowledge, even the finest philosophical knowledge, has lost perception of the ego, the true spirit man, and with it also the way to an understanding of religion.

So it has developed that in recent times, alongside the knowledge resulting from the attainable world of observation and experimenting, there are traditions handed down from a true religious life of past ages. They are accepted in a historical sense. But man's knowledge no longer has access to them; therefore, he only believes in them. Thus, for modern man, who will not extend knowledge to cover religious experience, science and faith confront each other. The whole content of the faith of today was once knowledge and is brought up only as a memory retained in tradition. No declaration of faith exists that is not a reminder of ancient knowledge. Because mankind today does not have a living perception of the true ego through exact clairvoyance—the ego that is not extinguished with every sleep but underlies both the sleeping and waking conditions—the path of knowledge is not pursued all the way into religion. Faith, which actually only perpetuates the memory of old traditions, is then placed alongside knowledge.

Today, therefore, what once was a unity—knowledge both of the physical and the divine worlds—has split into two external, parallel fields, knowledge and faith. That has come about because the old, primitive clairvoyant vision of the true ego—the foundation of man's being even when sleep extinguishes thought, feeling and will—that ancient knowledge has been lost, and exact clairvoyance is not yet advanced enough to see man's true egohood, the spiritual man. Only when it wants to advance to this point—as it must advance to seeing the etheric and astral parts of man's constitution—only then will a direct extension of knowledge of the outer world into knowledge of the divine world take place. Then, again, the content of science will pour into religious life.

This gap between knowledge and faith exists because the living, clairvoyant vision of the true ego, the fourth member of man's being, has been lost. Therefore, it is the task of the new spiritual life to restore knowledge of the true ego through exact clairvoyance. Then the way will open for advancing out of world knowledge to divine knowledge, out of the knowledge of the world to a renewal of religious life. We shall be able to view faith only as a special, higher form of knowledge, not, as now, something specifically different from knowledge.

So, what we need is the possibility for a real knowledge of the ego. From that will also result the possibility for a new experience of religion. We need to bring about this ego knowledge so that it takes its place within spiritual science just as does the previously characterized cognition of etheric man, who is not perceived in the human physical body, and the perception of astral man, who endures beyond birth and death. Thus, too, a perception of the ego, which exists beyond sleeping and waking as the foundation for both, needs to be cultivated to bring about a revitalization of life. This is to be the third step of anthroposophy. What should result organically from the viewpoint of anthroposophical research is therefore:

A modern philosophy through an exact clairvoyant knowledge of the ether body.

A cosmology that includes man, through a clear grasp of his astral organism.

A renewal of religious life through an exact clairvoyant comprehension of the true human ego which exists beyond sleeping and waking.

From this point of view, I will make further observations in the next lectures on philosophy, cosmology and religion.

• 1. Dr. Jules Sauerwein, born in 1880; one of the most prominent French journalists between World War I and World War II; he met Rudolf Steiner in Vienna in 1906 and translated a number of his works into French.

[ 1 ] No-one, who aims at achieving a radical relation between his own thought and contemporary philosophical ideas, can avoid the issue, raised in the first paragraph of this book, of the existential status of the psyche. This he will have to justify not only to himself, but also in the light of those ideas. Now many people do not feel this need, since they are acquainted with the authentically psychic through immediate inner experience (Erleben) and know how to distinguish that from the psychic apprehension (Erfahren) effected through the senses. It strikes them as an unnecessary, perhaps an irritating, intellectual hair-splitting. And if they are positively averse, the more philosophically minded are often unwilling for a different reason. They are unwilling to concede to inner soul experiences any other status than that of subjective apprehensions without cognitive significance. They are little disposed therefore to ransack their philosophical concepts for those elements in them that could lead on to anthroposophical ideas. These repugnances, coming from opposite sides, make the exposition extraordinarily difficult. But it is necessary. For in our time the only kind of ideas to which cognitive validity can be assigned are such as will bear the same kind of critical examination as the laws of natural science must satisfy, before they can claim to have been established.

To establish, epistemologically, the validity of anthroposophical ideas, it is first of all necessary to conceive as precisely as possible the manner in which they are experienced. This can be done in several very different ways. Let us attempt to describe two of them. The first way requires that we observe the phenomenon of memory. Rather a weak point incidentally in current philosophical theory; for the concepts we find there concerning memory throw very little light on it. I take my departure from ideas which I have, in point of fact, reached by anthroposophical methods, but which can be fully supported both philosophically and physiologically. Limitations of space will not permit of my making good this assertion in the present work. I hope to do so in a future one.¹ I am convinced, however, that anyone who succeeds in candidly surveying the findings of modern physiological and psychological science will find that they support the following observations.

Representations stimulated by sense-impressions enter the field of unconscious human experience. From there they can be brought up again, remembered. Representations themselves are a purely psychic reality; but awareness of them in normal waking life is somatically conditioned. Moreover the psyche, bound up as it is with the body, cannot by using its own forces raise representations from their unconscious to their conscious condition. For that it requires the forces of the body. To the end of normal memory the body has to function, just as the body has to function in the processes of its sense-organs, in order to bring about representations through the senses. If I am to represent a sensory event, a somatic activity must first come about within the sense organs; and, within the psyche, the representation appears as its result. In the same way, if I am to remember a representation or idea, an inner somatic activity (in refined organs), an activity polarically counter to the activity of the senses, must occur; and, as a result, the remembered representation comes forth. This representation is related to a sensory event which was presented to my soul at some time in the past. I represent that event to myself through an inner experience, to which my somatic organisation enables me.

Keep clearly in mind the character of such a memory-presentation, and with its help you approach the character of anthroposophical ideas. They are certainly not memory-presentations, but they issue in the psyche in a similar way. Many people, anxious to form ideas about the spiritual world in a less subtle way, find this disappointing. But the spiritual world cannot be experienced any more solidly than a happening in the sense world apprehended in the past but no longer present to the sight. In the case of memory we have seen that our ability to remember such a happening comes from the energy of the somatic organisation. To the experience of the existentially psychic, on the other hand, as distinct from that of memory, this energy can make no contribution. Instead, the soul must awaken in itself the ability to accomplish with certain representations what the body accomplishes with the representations of the senses, when it implements their recall. The former—elicited from the depths of the psyche solely through the energy of the psyche, as memory-presentations are elicited from the depths of human nature through its somatic organisation—are representations related to the spiritual world. They are available to every soul. What has to be won, in order to become aware of them, is the energy to elicit them from the depths of the psyche by a purely psychic activity. As the remembered representations of the senses are related to a past sense-impression, so are these others related to a nexus between the psyche and the domain of spirit, a nexus which is not via the sense-world. The human soul stands towards the spiritual world, as the whole human being stands towards a forgotten actuality. It comes to the knowledge of that world, if it brings, to the point where they awake, energies which are similar to those bodily forces that promote memory. Thus, ideas of the authentically psychic depend for their philosophical validation on the kind of inquiry into the life within us that leads us to find there an activity purely psychic, which yet resembles in some ways the activity exerted in remembering.

[ 2 ] A second way of forming a concept of the purely psychic is as follows. The attention may be directed to what anthropological observation has to say about the willing (operant) human being. An impulse of will that is to be carried into effect has as its ground the mental representation of what is to be willed. The dependence of this representation on the bodily organisation (nervous system) can be physiologically discerned. Bound up with the representation there is a nuance of feeling, an affective sympathy with the represented, which is the reason why this representation furnishes the impulse for a willed act. But from that point on psychic experience disappears into the depths; and the first thing that reappears in consciousness is the result. What is next represented, in fact, is the movement we make in order to achieve the represented goal. (Theodor Ziehen puts all this very clearly in his physiological psychology.) We can now perhaps see how, in the case of a willed act, the conscious process of mental representation is suspended in regard to the central moment of willing itself. That which is psychically experienced in the willing of an operation executed through the body, does not penetrate normal consciousness. But we do see plainly enough that that willing is realised through an act of the body. What is much harder to see is, that the psyche, when it is observing the laws of logic and seeking the truth by connecting ideas together, is also unfolding will. A will which is not to be circumscribed within physiological laws. For, if that were so, it would be impossible to distinguish an illogical—or simply an a-logical—chain of ideas from one which follows the laws of logic. (Superficial chatter around the fancy that logical consequence could be a property the mind acquires through adapting itself to the outer world, need not be taken seriously.) In this willing, which takes place entirely within the psyche, and which leads to logically grounded convictions, we can detect the permeation of the soul by an entirely spiritual activity.

Of what goes on in the will, when it is directed outwards, ordinary ideation knows as little as a man knows of himself when he is asleep. Something similar is true of his being regulated by logic in the formation of his convictions; he is less fully conscious of this than he is of the actual content of such convictions. Nevertheless anyone capable of looking inward, albeit only in the anthropological mode, will be able to form a concept of the co-presence of this being-regulated-by logic to normal consciousness. He will come to realise that the human being knows of this being-regulated, in the manner that he knows while dreaming. It is paradoxical but perfectly correct to say: normal consciousness knows the content of its convictions; but it only dreams of the regulation by logic that is extant in the pursuit of these convictions. Thus we see that, in ordinary-level consciousness, the human being sleeps through his willing, when he unfolds and exercises his will in an outward direction; he dreams his willing, when, in his thinking, he is seeking for convictions. Only it is clear that, in the latter instance, what he dreams of cannot be anything corporeal, for otherwise logical and physiological laws would coincide. The concept to be grasped is that of the willing that lives in the mental pursuit of truth. That is also the concept of an existentially psychic.

From both of these epistemological approaches, in the sense of anthroposophy, to the concept of the existentially psychic (and they are not the only possible ones), it becomes evident how sharply this concept is divorced from visions, hallucinations, mediumship or any kind of abnormal psychic activity. For the origin of all these abnormalities must be sought in the physiologically determinable. But the psychic, as anthroposophy understands it, is not only something that is experienced in the mode of normal and healthy consciousness; it is something that is experienced, even while representations are being formed, in total vigilance—and is experienced in the same way that we remember a happening undergone earlier in life, or alternatively in the same way that we experience the logically conditioned formation of our convictions. It will be seen that the cognitive experience of anthroposophy proceeds by way of representations and ideas that maintain the character of that normal consciousness with which, as well as with reality, the external world endows us; while at the same time they add to it endowments leading into the domain of the spirit. By contrast the visionary, hallucinatory, etc. type of experience subsists in a consciousness that adds nothing to the norm, but actually takes away from it by eliminating some faculties already acquired; so that there the level of consciousness falls below the level that obtains in conscious sense-perception.

For those of my readers who are acquainted with what I have written elsewhere² concerning recollection and memory I would add the following. Representations that have entered the unconscious and are subsequently remembered are to be located, so long as they remain unconscious, as representations within that component of the human body which is there identified as a life-body (etheric body). But the activity, through which representations anchored in the life-body are remembered, belongs to the physical body. I emphasise this in case some, who jump hastily to conclusions, should construe as an inconsistency what is in fact a distinction made necessary by this particular context.

• 1. I have not been able to trace where, if at all, this intention was carried out—- Editor
• 2. For example, in Occult Science: an Outline, pp. 45-8 and 336.

[ 1 ] It is a great pleasure to me to be able to give this series of lectures in the Goetheanum, which was founded to promote Spiritual Science. What is here called ‘Spiritual Science’ must not be confused with those things which, more than ever at the moment, appear as Occultism, Mysticism, etc. These schools of thought either refer to ancient spiritual traditions which are no longer properly understood, and which give in a dilettante manner all kinds of imagined knowledge of supersensible worlds, or they ape outwardly the scientific methods which we have to-day without realizing that methods of research which are ideal for the study of the natural world can never lead to supernatural worlds. And what makes its appearance as Mysticism is also either mere renewal of ancient psychic experiences, or muddled, very often fantastic, and deceptive introspection.

[ 2 ] As opposed to this, the attitude of the Goetheanum is one which, in the fullest sense, falls in with the present-day view of natural scientific research, and recognizes what is justified in it. On the other hand, it seeks to gain objective and accurate results on the subject of the supersensible world by means of the strictly controlled training of pure psychic vision. It counts only such results as are obtained through this vision of the soul, by which the psychic-spiritual organization is just as accurately defined as a mathematical problem. The point is that at first this organization is presented in scientifically indisputable vision. If we call it ‘the spiritual eye’, we then say: as the mathematician has his problems before him, so has the researcher into the spirit his ‘spiritual eye’. The scientific method is employed for him on that preparation which is in his ‘spiritual organs’. If his ‘science’ has its being in these organs, he can make use of them, and the supersensible world lies before him. The student of the world of the senses directs his science to outward things, to results; but the student of the spirit pursues science as a preparation of vision. And when vision begins, science must already have fulfilled its mission. If you like to call your vision ‘clairvoyance’ it is at any rate, an ‘exact clairvoyance’. The science of the spirit begins where that? of the senses ends. Above all, the research student of the spirit must have based his whole method of thought for the newer Science on the one he applied to the world of the senses.

[ 3 ] Thus it comes about that the Sciences studied to-day merge into that realm which opens up Spiritual Science in the modern sense. It happens not only in the separate realms of Natural Science and History, but also e.g., in Medicine; and in all provinces of practical life, in Art, in Morals, and in Social life. It happens also in religious experiences.

[ 4 ] In these lectures three of these provinces are to be dealt with, and it is to be shown how they merge into the modern spiritual view. The three are Philosophy, Cosmology and Religion.

[ 5 ] At one time Philosophy was the intermediary for all human knowledge. In its logos man acquired knowledge of the distinct provinces of world-reality. The different Sciences are born of its substance. But what has remained of Philosophy itself? A number of more or less abstract ideas which have to justify their existence in face of the other sciences, whose justification is found in observation through the senses and in experiment. To what do the ideas of Philosophy refer? That has to-day become an important question. We find in these ideas no longer a direct reality, and so we try to find a theoretical basis for this reality.

[ 6 ] And more: Philosophy, and in its very name, love of wisdom shows that it is not merely an affair of the intellect, but of the entire human soul. What one can ‘love’ is such a thing, and there was a time when wisdom was considered something real, which is not the case with ‘ideas’ which engage only Reason and Intellect. Philosophy, from being a matter for all mankind which once was felt in the warmth of the soul, has become dry, cold knowledge: and we no longer feel ourselves in the midst of Reality when we occupy ourselves with philosophizing.

[ 7 ] In mankind itself that has been lost which once made Philosophy a real experience. Natural Science (of the outer world) is conducted by means of the senses, and what Reason thinks concerning the observations made by the senses is a putting-together of the content derived through the senses. This thought has no content of its own; and while man lives in such knowledge he knows himself only as a physical body. But Philosophy was originally a soul-content which was not experienced by the physical body, but by a human organism which cannot be appreciated by the senses. This is the etheric body, forming the basis of the physical body, and this contains the supersensible powers which give shape and life to the physical body. Man can use the organization of this etheric body just as he can that of the physical. This etheric body draws ideas from the supersensible world, just as the physical body does, through the senses, from the sense world. The ancient philosophers developed their ideas through this etheric body, and as the spiritual life of man has lost this etheric body and its knowledge, Philosophy has simultaneously lost its character of reality. We must first of all recover the knowledge of etheric man, and then Philosophy will be able to regain its character of reality. This must mark the first of the steps to be taken by Anthroposophy.

[ 8 ] Cosmology once upon a time showed man how he is a member of the universe. To this end it was necessary that not only his body but also his soul and spirit could be regarded as members of the Cosmos; and this was the case because in the Cosmos things of the soul and things of the spirit were visible. In later times, however, Cosmology has become only a superstructure of Natural Science gained by Mathematics, Observation and Experiment. The results of research in these lines are put together to make a picture of cosmic development, and from this picture one can no doubt understand the human physical body. But the etheric body remains unintelligible, and in a still higher sense that part of man which has to do with the Soul and the Spirit. The etheric body can only be recognized as a member of the Cosmos, if the etheric essence of the Cosmos is clearly perceived. But this etheric part of the Cosmos can, after all, give man no more than an etheric organization, whereas in the Soul is internal life; so we have to take into consideration also the internal life of the Cosmos. This is just what the old Cosmology did, and it was because of this view of it that the soul-essence of man which transcends the etheric was made a part of the Cosmos. Modern spiritual life fails, however, to see the reality of the inner life of the Soul. In modern experience, this contains no guarantee that it has an existence beyond birth and death. All one knows to-day of the soul-life can have its origin in and with the physical body through the life of the embryo and the subsequent unfolding in childhood and can end with death. There was something in the older human wisdom for the soul of man of which modern knowledge is only a reflection; and this was looked upon as the astral being in man. It was not what the soul experiences in its activities of thinking, feeling and volition, but rather something which is reflected in thinking, feeling and volition. One ‘cannot imagine thinking, feeling and volition as having a part in the Cosmos, for these live only in the physical nature of man. On the other hand the astral nature can be comprehended as a member of the Cosmos, for this enters the physical nature at birth and leaves it at death. That element which, during life between birth and death, is concealed behind thought, feeling and volition—namely the astral body—is the cosmic element of man.

[ 9 ] Because modern knowledge has lost this astral element of man, it has also lost a Cosmology which could comprise the whole of man. There remains only a physical Cosmology, and even this contains no more than the origins of physical man. It is necessary once more to found a knowledge of astral man, and then we shall also again have a Cosmology which includes the whole human being.

[ 10 ] So the second step of Anthroposophy is marked out.

[ 11 ] Religion in its original meaning is based on that experience whereby man feels himself independent not only of his physical and etheric nature, the cause of his existence between birth and death, but also of the Cosmos, in so far as this has an influence on such an existence. The content of this experience constitutes the real spirit-men, that being at which our word ‘Ego’ now only hints. This ‘Ego’ once connoted for man something which knew itself to be independent of all corporeality, and independent of the astral nature. Through such an experience man felt himself to be in a world of which the one which gives him body and soul is but an image; he felt a connection with a divine world. Now knowledge of this world remains hidden to observation according to the senses. Knowledge of etheric and astral man leads gradually to a vision of it. In the use of his senses man must feel himself separated from the divine world, to which belongs his inmost being: but through supersensible cognition he puts himself once more in touch with this world. So supersensible cognition merges into Religion.

[ 12 ] In order that this may be the case, we must be able to see the real nature of the ‘Ego’, and this power has been lost to modern knowledge. Even philosophers see in the ‘Ego’ only the synthesis of soul experiences. But the idea which they have thereby of the ‘Ego’, the spiritual man, is contradicted by every sleep; for in sleep the content of this ‘Ego’ is extinguished. A consciousness which knows only such an ‘Ego’ cannot merge into Religion on the strength of its knowledge, for it has nothing to resist the extinction of sleep. However, knowledge of the true ‘Ego’ has been lost to modern spiritual life, and with it the possibility to attain to Religion through knowledge.

[ 13 ] The religion that was once available is now something taken from tradition, to which human knowledge has no longer any approach. Religion in this way becomes the content of a Faith which is to be gained outside the sphere of scientific experience. Knowledge and Faith become two separate kinds of experience of something which once was a unity.

[ 14 ] We must first re-establish a clear cognition and knowledge of the true ‘Ego’, if Religion is to have its proper place in the life of mankind. In modern Science man is understood as a true reality only in respect of his physical nature. He must be recognized further as etheric, astral and spiritual or ‘Ego’ man and then Science will become the basis of religious life.

[ 15 ] So is the third step of Anthroposophy worked out.

[ 16 ] It will now be the task of the subsequent lectures to show the possibility of acquiring knowledge of the etheric part of man, that is to say, of clothing Philosophy with reality; it will be my further business to point out the way to the knowledge of the astral part of man, that is to say, to demonstrate that a Cosmology is possible which embraces humanity; and finally will come the task to lead you to the knowledge of the ‘true Ego’, in order to establish the possibility of a religious life, which rests on the basis of knowledge or cognition.

[ 1 ] Anyone who wishes his cognitive approach to be grounded in the philosophical thinking of the present day must justify epistemologically—to himself and to that thinking—the actual soul element referred to in the first chapter of this book. Of the people who recognize the real soul element from direct inner experience and who know how to distinguish it from soul experiences caused by the senses, few are asking for any such justification. Such justification often seems to them to be an unnecessary or even bothersome conceptual hairsplitting. Contrasting with their kind of aversion is the antipathy of philosophical thinkers. They want to regard our inner experience of the soul element as merely subjective, with no claim to scientific value. They therefore have little inclination, in the realm of their philosophical concepts, to seek the elements by which to approach anthroposophical ideas. This aversion, coming from both sides, makes understanding extraordinarily difficult. For, in our time, a scientific value can be ascribed to a cognitive approach only if this approach can validate its views before the same tribunal at which natural-scientific laws seek their justification.

For an epistemological justification of anthroposophical ideas, the essential point is to express in the most exact possible concepts the way these ideas are experienced. We can do this in the most varied ways. Let us attempt to describe two of these ways here. As to the first way, let us start with a consideration of memory. In doing so, we encounter at once a problematical point in modern philosophical knowledge. For, very few clear concepts about the nature of memory are operative there. I will take my start from ideas which, it is true, I have discovered on anthroposophical paths, but which can be thoroughly substantiated by philosophy and physiology. The space I can allow myself in this book, to be sure, is not sufficient for such a substantiation. I hope to present one in a future book. I believe, however, that anyone able to grasp the current findings of physiology and psychology correctly will find what I am going to say about memory to be well-founded.

The mental pictures stimulated by sense impressions enter the realm of unconscious human experience. From there, these pictures can be brought back up; they can be remembered. Mental pictures are of a purely soul nature; but consciousness of them in ordinary waking life is dependent upon the body. Furthermore, the soul bound to the body cannot, through the soul's own forces, lift these pictures out of their unconscious state into a conscious one. For this the soul needs the forces of the body. In ordinary memory the body must be active, just as it must be active in order for sensory pictures to arise in the processes of the sense organs. For me to see a sense-perceptible occurrence, a bodily activity must first develop within the sense organs; produced by them, a picture arises in the soul. For me to remember such a picture, an inner bodily activity (in delicate organs), which is the polar opposite of sense activity, must occur, and as a consequence, the remembered picture arises in the soul. This picture is connected to a sense-perceptible occurrence that stood before my soul in the past. I picture this occurrence through an inner experience that my bodily organization makes possible. Now focus on the nature of such a memory picture. For, through this one can grasp the nature of anthroposophical ideas. These ideas are not memory pictures; but they appear in the soul in the same way as memory pictures do. This is a disappointment for many people who would like to acquire pictures of the spiritual world in a more robust form. But one cannot experience the spiritual world in a form more substantial than that in which, in memory, one experiences a past sense-perceptible event that is no longer visible to one. Now this ability to remember such an event stems from the power of our bodily organization. This organization must play no part, however, in our experience of the actual soul element. Rather, the soul must awaken within itself the ability to accomplish with mental pictures what the body accomplishes with sensory pictures when it conveys the recollection of these sensory pictures. Such mental pictures—which are brought up from the depths of the soul entirely by the power of the soul just as memory pictures are raised from the depths of human nature by our bodily organization— are mental pictures that relate to the spiritual world. They are present in every soul. What must be acquired in order for us to become aware of their presence is the power, purely through the activation of our soul, to bring these mental pictures up from the depths of the soul. As remembered sensory pictures relate to a past sense impression, so these mental pictures relate to a connection—not present in the sense world—of the soul with the spiritual world. The human soul stands in the same relation to the spiritual world as a person ordinarily does to a forgotten reality; and the soul comes to know this world when it awakens powers within itself that are similar to the bodily powers which serve memory.

The essential point, therefore, in the philosophical justification of ideas about the true soul element, is to investigate our inner life in such a way that we find within it an activity which is purely of a soul nature but yet in a certain respect is similar to the activity unfolded in remembering.

[ 2 ] A second way to form a concept of a purely soul element is this. One can focus upon the findings of anthropology when it observes a person exercising will (acting). To begin with, the mental picture of the deed underlies the intended will impulse. This mental picture is known physiologically to be dependent upon the bodily organization (the nervous system). A nuance of feeling, a feeling of sympathy with what is pictured, is connected with the mental picture, and causes the mental picture to provide the impulse for action. But then the soul experience loses itself in the depths and only the result arises again consciously. The human being sees how he moves his body in order to perform what he has pictured. (Th. Ziehen has presented all this with particular clarity in his physiological psychology.)

One can see from this how, when an act of will comes into question, our conscious life in mental pictures ceases with respect to the intermediary element of will. What is experienced in the soul as we will an action performed by the body does not enter our ordinary conscious life of mental pictures. But it is also obvious that such a will impulse realizes itself through the activity of the body. It is also not difficult to recognize that the soul unfolds a will activity when, following logical laws, it seeks truth by connecting mental pictures to each other; a will activity that physiological laws cannot encompass. Otherwise, an illogical connection of mental pictures—or even a merely a-logical one— could not be distinguished from one that takes a logically lawful course. (Dilettantish claims that logical deduction is merely a characteristic acquired by the soul through adaptation to the outer world is not worthy of serious consideration.) In this will activity, which runs its course purely within the soul, and which leads to logically grounded convictions, we can see a permeation of the soul with a purely spiritual activity. Our ordinary mental picturing knows as little what occurs in our outward directed will as a sleeping person knows about himself. But we are also not as fully conscious of the logical determining factors by which we form our convictions as we are of the actual content of our convictions. Anyone who knows, even anthropologically, how to observe inwardly is able, after all, in ordinary consciousness, to recognize the presence of logical determinants. He will realize that the human being knows this logical determination the way he knows something in dreams. One is totally justified in declaring the correctness of the paradox: ordinary consciousness knows the content of its convictions; but it only dreams the logical lawfulness that lives in the seeking of these convictions. We can see: in ordinary consciousness we sleep through the will element when unfolding will to act outwardly through the body; we dream through our will activity when seeking convictions through thinking. And we know, in fact, that in this latter case what we are dreaming cannot be of a bodily nature, for then logical laws would have to coincide with physiological laws. If we form the concept of a will activity living in a thinking quest for truth, then we are conceiving of something with real soul being.

From these two epistemological approaches to the concept of real soul being in an anthroposophical sense (other approaches are also possible), we can see how far removed this essential soul being is from anything in the nature of abnormal soul activity such as visionary, hallucinatory, or mediumistic states. For, the source of all such abnormalities must be sought in the physiological realm. The soul element described by anthroposophy, however, is not only of the same kind as our soul experiences in normal healthy consciousness; within the full waking consciousness of mental picturing, we can also experience this soul element in a way similar to that of remembering past events in our life, or of arriving at convictions that are logically determined. From this we can see clearly that anthroposophy's cognitive experience runs its course in mental pictures that retain the character of ordinary consciousness which is endowed with reality from the outer world; and to this ordinary consciousness anthroposophy adds abilities that lead into the spiritual realm; everything of a visionary, hallucinatory nature, on the other hand, lives in a consciousness that adds nothing to our ordinary one but that takes abilities away from this ordinary consciousness, causing our state of consciousness to sink below the level present in conscious sense perception. For those readers who know what I have written in other books about memory and recollection, I would like to add the following. The mental pictures that have entered our unconscious and can be recollected later are to be found—as mental pictures during the time they are unconscious— within that part of the human being which in those books is called the life body (etheric body). The activity, however, through which the mental pictures anchored in the life body are recollected belongs to the physical body. I add this comment so that those who are quick to jump to conclusions will not construe as a contradiction what is in fact a distinction demanded by the nature of the case.

Welcome: First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Steiner on behalf of everyone for the meeting that he has granted us despite his many commitments. The suggestions that Dr. Steiner gave us at Easter have continued to work in us in the meantime. We have not heard much from each other in the meantime, but when we came together again and talked, we realized that we had all made some progress. Some things that were still a problem at Easter are no longer a problem today. We have already come to specific things today. We believe that special tasks arise for us from our special position between anthroposophy and the youth movement, tasks on two sides: towards the youth movement and towards the anthroposophical movement. We want to bring anthroposophy to the youth movement. This is probably best done on a person-to-person basis. However, this work should be supported and promoted by more “official” work from the community. Therefore, a network of trusted people should be set up throughout Germany, with a center in Tübingen. The task of the trusted people should be to connect with young anthroposophists in their area, to attend conferences of the youth movement, to distribute writings by taking advantage of personal relationships. An article on the youth movement and anthroposophy can be published in an anthroposophical journal for this purpose. The work should be carried out in close contact with the main association. We regard the Catholic youth movement as our most determined opponent. We would ask Doctor to perhaps elaborate on this. We see our work in the Anthroposophical Movement as follows: we know that we have to become richer in knowledge. But we see our particular task as being to work to build community. We want to continue our community life as before with evenings together, hikes, festivals and so on. But we want to gradually let it be permeated and transformed by the Anthroposophical spirit. Here we ask the doctor for some specific suggestions. We are thinking of inviting younger members of the Anthroposophical Society, students and others, to our communities first. I would like to add one more practical question here: is it possible for a young person from the youth movement to also be a sponsor for admission to the Anthroposophical Society?

Rudolf Steiner: Perhaps I may first deal with the last point, the question of how to bring Anthroposophy into the youth movement. To do that, you need to have a real insight into the conditions that prevail there, not only externally but also internally. You see, the anthroposophical movement – you are familiar with most of its history – could not work any differently than to consider the real possibilities from the very beginning. At the beginning of the formation of the Anthroposophical Society, humanity was not yet ripe for the anthroposophical movement. But one could not wait for general maturity to get the movement off the ground at all. There were certain people who had been searching for something for a long time, something from the depths of their souls. People who had not yet found theosophy and mysticism were there, and some of them did not even know that there was such a thing as anthroposophy. People who had a certain longing for something deeper than life offered.

I was invited, for example, to an association where the most diverse people in terms of talent and education were united and had such a longing. And I went because I had more time then than I do now. Among these people, I found something curious. At the time, I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School in Berlin and had my audience there. There, in that place, I was really only invited and a newcomer, but to my surprise I found a small number of my listeners from the Workers' Education School. You see, this longing I spoke of was everywhere, and one had to take it into account, otherwise the anthroposophical movement would not have progressed at all. What one can do today could not be done at all back then. The difficulty was to make those who had this longing understand the things. Many could not go along, they wanted something different. But nevertheless there were always individuals who joined in, and so the movement grew. But as a result, the movement still has the consequences of its teething troubles: unclear, mystical striving, all sorts of things of this kind, as you could also notice here.

Now, for example, the most diverse people want to hear something about what suits them. So someone makes the acquaintance of an anthroposophist. He may ask for an answer to a medical question and end up with someone who says: “You have to read such and such a saying from Dr. Steiner's ‘Calendar of the Soul’. It is true that Steiner has a habit of always giving you something other than what you are looking for, but what you are looking for you would find anyway; it would then pass over into you from the saying.

This had to be reckoned with. And we should not forget that the anthroposophical movement, in its starting point, has something almost edgy and angular about it, which can come across as highly unappealing. But all this had to be reckoned with. You can't go charging headlong into anything. That is part of it, and you should have no illusions about it. You had to reckon with this longing that is in today's youth. But you must not lose sight of the fact, especially at the moment when you want to approach the anthroposophical movement, that the anthroposophical movement has come so far as to break with all old prejudices itself. It will of course work without the prejudices; it is quite possible to break with all philistinism.

That is what I wanted to say at the outset, so that you do not come from your point of view and say that anthroposophists are such terrible people.

The other thing is that community building, hiking together, is by no means excluded; on the contrary, it should be encouraged. Community building, if it is supported by the anthroposophical spirit, can take all kinds of forms. You must not forget that when you talk about the fact that community building is something completely new today, you must not forget that we old people were also young once, and that back then there were always people who formed such communities. I still remember a circle that we had formed in Berlin, which was perhaps nothing more than a clique, in doctrinal terms. But even cliques had good intentions, because every community is, of course, based on such a clique. Of course, the formation of the community also had all kinds of add-ons that were related to the character of the individual people. Even the title of our community in Berlin was actually intended to annoy the philistines. I say this in quotation marks: this community was called “Der Verbrechertisch” (The Criminal Table). Otto Erich Hartleben was also one of them. This is not to say that we broke in and so on. I am only telling you this so that you can get a complete picture that today's youth movement is not the first community to be formed. You have already expressed that.

But then there is absolutely no objection to members of the youth movement being able to act as guarantors for those in the youth movement who want to become members of the Anthroposophical Society. That is something that can absolutely be realized. And that brings me to the other question.

The question of the Catholic youth movement has just been thrown into the debate, and quite rightly so. You must be extremely careful with regard to this youth movement and not lose sight of the possibility of being influenced in one direction or another. There are a great many people in the Catholic youth movement who are hopeful and hardworking. On the other hand, it would be a serious mistake if you were to fall prey to the Catholic youth movement as a Catholic youth movement. Your youth movement arises from the needs of young people themselves. What I would like to mention briefly is that the whole difficulty lies in the following. The entire youth movement has arisen from the needs of the individual, and it is held together only by the cement that resides in the hearts of individuals. This is not the case with the Catholic youth movement. All movements that really want to move towards the future do not have the same opportunities as the Catholic youth movement, which guards something that has been established through the development of humanity, through tradition and so on, with tremendous purpose. The youth movement must be decentralized. The Catholic youth movement is thoroughly centralized. And the greatest danger that exists is falling into the Catholic fundamentals. You must not imagine this to be so easy! Do you think a movement is emerging that says: We want to be good Catholics, we want to do everything to lead people back to a living Christianity, we want nothing to do with the Jesuits. — To the one who hears this, it might seem tolerable. But only those who know that such a movement can be well set up with all the programs against the Jesuits can gain a point of view, but that all of this can be done well by a Jesuit priest. Because it is absolutely in the program of the Jesuits that they set up their opponents themselves. You will hardly believe that many fall for it. But look at the young Catholic movement, which was formed against Jesuitism many years ago, and after only fifteen years it was taken in. This is something that does not need to be left out of the program.

If you do not pay attention to the fact that the Jesuit is reckoning with the most powerful of his opponents and is thus, in a sense, generous, you will never be able to see clearly. Otherwise you would see that one cannot be careful enough against the Catholic youth movement as such, so as not to slip into it. I had good acquaintances who were on the same ground as me at the time. But when I meet someone from them again today, I can see that a large part of them has fallen under the spell of the Catholic Church. The spell of the Catholic Church is so great, and the Catholic Church has an enormous power of attraction. And when you consider all this, you always have to be on your guard against a trap. Therefore, I think that you will only make progress if you maintain the absolute independence of the Catholic youth movement. You must be aware that all strength depends on your finding absolutely uninfluenceable people, of whom you are sure that they have nothing in ambush. You will not find any Jesuit stamp on them; you will not find that they keep everything straight with you. I am telling you this only to characterize the matter and to make you aware that you could get into trouble if you were to give in to the Catholic youth movement, which is now also crying out against Jesuitism. But you have to look at people again in fifteen years, and then you will see which side they have ended up on.

And with the essay on the anthroposophical youth movement, one would achieve even more. It is something very important that emerges from what I have often spoken to you about, that much of what emerges from the youth movement lies deep in the soul. Most of it can only be understood if one grasps what the youth movement is. I can well imagine that such an essay can have a very favorable effect, and it would certainly be good if this were done by young people. If this were to come about, then of course one would have to be prepared for the special opposition that can be connected with individuality in a favorable or unfavorable way. One must necessarily take this into account, even if it does not appear so on the surface. Although many say that anthroposophists only do what they are told, in practice the individuality is nowhere as pronounced as in the Anthroposophical Society. There, everyone only does what they really want. This actually has its disadvantages.

It is true that something must be present uniformly where one is dealing with a movement. And if you now elect representatives, it is necessary that you take care that they do not start disputes, but that they really are people who put the whole above the personal. This will always be necessary in the youth movement. So I think you have to look at your people, because you have to know your people if you want to have confidence in them. That is all I wanted to say in response to your questions.

Question: How should community be cultivated?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, once you have grasped the spirit of anthroposophy, you will think that the way in which the individual community is to be formed comes into consideration only in the second instance. It may well be that the individual communities that already exist will continue to be cultivated entirely out of their own nature and will do what they have always done. It is not a matter of now making a programmatic decision to do this or that. Anthroposophy can only work in such a way that it can be incorporated into every form. It is best if you do not approach it from the outside, changing the existing arrangements, but rather you should think of carrying Anthroposophy into it as such. Anthroposophy is a secret power that could gradually enter everything.

A participant: Anthroposophists always say that hiking will lead to enthusiasm.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, that is not true, the walks as such do not belong to the areas that promote enthusiasm. Walks are enthusiastic when the members are enthusiastic.

A participant: One is always reproached, especially from the anthroposophical side, that the youth movement can do nothing but walk and celebrate festivals.

Rudolf Steiner: That is connected with what I have assumed, which also applies to the Anthroposophical Movement. It also came into being among human beings, and the people who have proven themselves in it from the beginning are naturally more of the kind that are not so attuned to hiking, but are involved in completely different types of work. Therefore, you cannot expect them to have much time for the migratory birds. I think it is natural to understand that you are confronted with all sorts of things. Now you can keep the migrations quiet. All this is something you don't need to worry about. The anthroposophical movement could just as easily have been created among migratory birds. In all these matters, one must speak in such a way that one really has to consider the whole breadth and comprehensiveness of anthroposophy and not limit oneself to some little details. One cannot demand of the anthroposophical movement that it accommodate every wild fanaticism. I can imagine that one could say that one does not need to think at all, but only to wander. This is not to say that all community-building must take on this wild form, but it is the case with many. The anthroposophical movement was brought to fruition by people who naturally had very different feelings from those of today's youth; it did not arise from youth. It will be appropriate when it can be cultivated by young people. But it arose somewhat decrepitly; from the beginning it had nothing youthful about it. I always had to take this old age into account. What confronted me in the first lectures is characteristic of old age. I spoke as I am accustomed to speaking, and an old man approached me and said: If you speak so loudly, you drive away the spiritual essence. You must not talk so loudly, you must also say occult science. Incidentally, this man was later one of the most loyal supporters of anthroposophy until his death. It is best not to be offended by this old man. There is no need to be offended, just stick to the matter at hand.

Question: What do you think of summer solstice celebrations? Could you perhaps say something about them?

Rudolf Steiner: You see, I have already said at Easter that you have to stick to what is a fact for those who are involved in anthroposophy, but which can be experienced everywhere. I said that something is emerging in the development of humanity at the end of the 1980s that is particularly shaping the background of today's youth movement, that is emerging as a longing and so on, as something that is actually emerging from the deeper layers of the soul, and that we can see in its effect.

People of earlier times regarded things that existed as very real powers, and these powers were such that they worked in people until the year: effects that were set at the summer solstice. You will understand what I have said fully if you imagine yourself in ancient times. Man was then quite differently connected with the laws of nature. Man was so connected with the whole of nature, that the thoughts conceived at the summer solstice were the most fruitful for the assimilation of the laws. One must resort to somewhat radical expressions if one wants to form one's own thoughts about what then lived in man. People said to themselves, just as the bull is brought out to fertilize at certain times of the year, so the human soul must expose itself to be fertilized at certain times of the year. Now there is the fact that the earth sleeps in summer, that is, the earth is in a state like that of man when he sleeps. The earth sleeps in summer and wakes in winter. And just as the etheric body is most active during sleep, so is the earth in this state. In the past, people felt most connected to it then. You know how they held their greatest festivals around the summer solstice. In contrast, in the south, in Africa and so on, it was the winter solstice that people regarded as the greatest festival. They wanted to come into contact with what emanated from the awakening etheric body of the earth; this is based on a polar contrast in the human spirit. And ultimately, all customs of the time can be traced back to this.

All this emerged as a feeling in people at that time. For him, it all comes down to the fact that it contains a certain lawfulness. It is absolutely right that things come up again. I suffered pain when a professor came up with the idea that Easter should no longer take place after the sky, should no longer be based on the sky, but should always be moved to April 1st. He thought this was such a clever idea that one should no longer have a movable festival, but that it should always be celebrated on April 1. However, this completely tears man and his feelings out of the whole process in the universe. This human feeling would indeed be corrupted if it were to be removed from the process in the universe, whereas this coexistence in the universe has something in it that also keeps man alive and young. If there is an inclination to experience the spirit of the solstice, so that one knows that one acted out of the highest feelings at that time, then it would be good to promote that. But one should be immersed in concrete life, so that one knows that there is something different about the summer solstice than about the winter solstice. This thinking should be cultivated on such occasions.

Question about the way of life.

Rudolf Steiner: This can only be done if the anthroposophical movement as such is lucky with what is to intervene in the whole of social life. Of course, as long as the anthroposophical movement still has something sectarian in it, it will always be called a sect.

Anthroposophy has found healing methods today. People will come and want to be healed; but then people stand up in the name of a party and rail against the law that something like the anthroposophical movement allows at all. I am giving a specific example! People want to cultivate Anthroposophy in secret, but they shrink from public appearances. But anthroposophy can and must work on a large scale; only then can it prevail. But people must also have the courage to bring the anthroposophical spirit to the general public. From the very beginning, I always tried to realize that we founded a therapeutic institute, a research institute and so on. Work must be done in such a way that it is truly based on anthroposophy. If things continue as they are, this will not be possible. Of course, the effectiveness of the matter always depends on the will of those who work in the public sphere on anthroposophical principles. And of course, if you always speak in abstract terms, you can say that this is not possible in the next few years.

When I presented my threefold social order idea, people said: It could take another hundred years for that to happen, the time frame is poorly chosen. — I can only say that if people thought this through in everything they did, nothing would get done. That is not the right attitude. Instead, the question for me is: What should one do? I must say that the anthroposophical movement would not have come as far as it has if I had not repeatedly asked myself this question. If you stand on anthroposophical ground, it is also a matter of developing the will. The more people we have who unreservedly stand on this ground, the better it is. Our task now is not to reflect on how long it will take for people to be ready for our ideas, but to work on making people ready. Therefore, we must do everything possible as if readiness already existed. We must act as if readiness were already a reality. People always think: Can one do that? This is a certain fear. One is afraid to do it, as if then, when one reflects, whether one can approach the “thing in itself” with thinking. I can imagine it like this: there is a plate of soup and next to it is a spoon. The spoon is thinking, the plate of soup is the thing in itself. If you now think about whether the spoon that was brought to you is now in a real relationship to the soup, or if you wonder what will happen if I now take the spoon in my hand and eat? Then you will not be satisfied, but you just have to grab it!

Question about the adult education movement.

Rudolf Steiner: I have been able to convince myself that improvement cannot be expected from adult education centers. Teachers accept everything that has developed from the older culture without reservation, and then it is taught in adult education centers. Will it be better if adult education centers are founded with the content of contemporary culture? Of course one can only say and think that one should do it in a similar way to the way I have done it when I have been called upon. One should bring into it as much of the living element as one can. But it is a waste of energy. It is true that one cannot withdraw completely. But one must realize that one is not working into a movement of ascent but into one of descent.

I did not just object to this because the lecturers themselves choose a topic for their lectures that is not sustainable. It was important to me to show that we must overcome the method by which it is taught. The spirit that must be behind it is more important than one might think. One can say that the adult education efforts also have high principles. But principles have no effect. People believe that if ten or twelve people get together and work out an ideal school program, something good will come of it. These people are all clever, terribly clever. The most beautiful programs are made of how the adult education center can become a reality. But, you see, that is not what is important. When someone founds something, it is not a program that is important, but rather achieving the greatest possible success with the people involved. Don't you think so? People come to me with ideal programs all the time. But in a school, you have to start with the people who are in it, with whom you can't stick to the program. We have to see that we get out of this way of thinking and get down to the real world.

Now one can say: Yes, fine, I just want to work somewhere. I have a mission area, and I want to bring that to people with whom I can achieve a level of culture, let's say, A. Now, however, everyone can see that A is not the highest that one can achieve, but one must achieve A and B. But now one does not have the people with whom one can achieve that. Then it is better, so they say, to achieve only A. If you reason in this way, you not only fail to achieve A, but you achieve A minus B.

A sense of the real in life must be taken from spiritual science. One must not live in programmatic concepts. One must express oneself in concepts, but the concepts are not what matters. What matters is that what life is, is really carried into everything, not that what is dead is brought into the adult education center.

Question about Muck-Lamberty.

Rudolf Steiner: These things recur in all places. I need only remind you of the Häußer who is up to his tricks here. This man has been wandering around here to the horror of various people, appearing in the Siegle House and also saying all sorts of fierce things in front of people. But I would like to warn against this, especially against those who do not work in a healthy way through their minds, but who work in a suggestive way. These people have a strong power, but it cannot come from a healthy person, but from a madman. And that must not be overlooked. Things must be healthy if they are to embrace broader areas. And if the youth movement is to serve humanity, it must remain healthy. Here we come to things that develop power. But this one is a power of the mad that animals also have. It is not the power that counts, but rather what is expressed through this power. The fact of the matter is that we can only truly penetrate into a matter from an anthroposophical spirit if we eliminate all suggestion. One must not let oneself be overcome by this power. Because I must say, I have seen that very limited people have done colossal things out of this power. One must be careful of spiritual drunkenness, especially in a youth movement. One should behave in this way towards these things.

You see, I believe that there is something that, as simple as it may seem, can give you a great deal of protection, and I would like to point this out to you. In all movements, including the anthroposophical movement, there are people who are terribly mystical. An old Roman friend of mine once said to me: Oh, anthroposophists are all so “sublime”, they all have a face “all the way to the stomach”. — And there are people of that ilk everywhere. That is one extreme. The other is the boundless superficiality with which many people pass over everything. But not true, in order not to be unjust, it is a matter of not placing oneself too strongly in the power of others, but of keeping one's humanity together. And for that there is only one remedy, but it is necessary for everyone, and that is humor. All faces up to the belly and all superficiality are harmful. What is needed to arrive at the right opinion is humor. One can judge such phenomena correctly if one can laugh at them. This is not meant to be ironic, but to allow what they have to have its effect. Humor is needed everywhere for judgment. The youth movement should not become like the one with the face up to the belly, but should really cultivate a healthy sense of humor. I know a strangely large number of pessimists in the youth movement who, because of their pessimism, are exposed to everything. The present generation is so clever that it does not even notice how the whole culture is going crazy. If you ask real “mystics”, they describe the influence of the external world on man as dangerous, as man is dependent on every breath of air. If that were really the case, all human beings would be the most terrible hysterics. If human beings were really so dependent, only hysterical people would live. They would be powerless in the hands of every breath of air. But thank God that is not the case with human beings. There you have it. So it really is important to educate ourselves in such a way that we can also feel more highly, that we can feel every breath and that it does not knock us over.

Question about Fidus and Gertrud Prellwitz.

Rudolf Steiner: People write books and go out into the world without any real experience. Fidus and Gertrud Prellwitz are the archetypal phenomena for this. Such people know absolutely everything. For example, they also know what it is like to be a true anthroposophist. They are simply the type of intellectual of the present time. Gertrud Prellwitz is no different from the rest, so you have to take the matter with humor.

Likewise, the other thing, that one has experienced that people come every moment and say: Oh, something terrible has happened! My child is developing quite unnatural sexuality. — If you then ask about the age of the child, you learn that it is only five years old. Do you believe that sexuality only comes out when you are mature and that it really makes no difference whether a child tickles its nose or scratches itself elsewhere. Don't interpret eroticism into everything, so that you don't pour out terrible theories. If you look at a five-year-old child for eroticism, that's nonsense. In this question, it is much more important to think healthily than to come up with many theories. Because most of what is being developed about it now is simply nonsense. Really, people just need to consider how terribly short-sighted these things are. There have been cultures where eating was accompanied by feelings of shame. Similar theories about eating could now arise from this. You will learn: If you really concern yourself with the comprehensive questions of life, then you will have no time left for such theorizing. |

A participant: These things should be grasped more seriously.

Rudolf Steiner: You asked the question as a question, which one must say: It is asked as if one wanted to build a house and does not yet have the ground for it.

A participant: Muck-Lamberty brings the ground into his craft with art and so on. And then they - the “new crowd” - want to transform life from the ground up.

Rudolf Steiner: But reality is what matters. You can't grow backwards in the world, only forwards. You can't move forward by thinking about eroticism. If you develop healthy foundations, the erotic life will become healthy by itself. The erotic life is such that it must be properly placed in life. As it appears in a person and at a certain age, it also develops in a certain cultural context. You can only let it emerge. If the other things develop healthily, a healthy eroticism will also develop. The greatest harm is done by taking a programmatic approach in this area. In social life, too, things will develop as they must under healthy conditions. Healthy conditions are needed everywhere. Countless people have come to me and asked me about prenatal education. The theories that have been put forward about this are something terrible. Because it is a very hothouse kind of thinking that comes to light. What is needed is for the mother to be healthy and to live properly. The child's organism is dependent on the mother. If the mother keeps herself healthy, the child will automatically be born in good order. There are certain questions that it makes no sense to ask. Just because we live today in an age of intellectual abundance, these questions are asked out of season. People need to have topics. They do not want to await experience. They write, and as a result movements can arise that lead nowhere.

A participant: The movement did not come about through thinking, but quite unconsciously. People live together in small circles and seek a certain naturalness.

Rudolf Steiner: What do you mean by a certain naturalness? — Suppose you have a circle here, a circle there, and a circle there; here a circle of peasant boys, here decadent aristocrats, here healthy people. Each circle lives out itself in a completely different way. You can't say that some theory is useful! — It is really a matter of certain things only being able to develop when a foundation is there. I do not want to be ironic about this. We cannot reflect on how a newborn child cultivates its sexuality. We must have the courage to find the right thing at the right moment. Therefore, we must try to develop humor in this area, to really walk the middle road between philistinism and licentiousness, as already pointed out by Aristotle.

A participant: There must be a strict distinction, because Muck-Lamberty and Gertrud Prellwitz are quite different. What humanity has learned about this, it has learned from older people. Stammler and Fidus have spread false things about Muck. Muck sought young people with whom he wanted to show that there is something between people that is equal. They brought dance, folk dance, as one of the external forms. People flocked to it, but left just as quickly. The suggestive effect quickly faded. Those who remained represent a real spiritual power. The artisan community is one of the healthiest movements. The people of Naumburg are trying to build up all economic activities in a fraternal way and want to be independent of what they negate. In doing so, an erotic life has developed that was healthy until Gertrud Preilwitz introduced her theories into it. But the crisis has now been overcome. The people there have now moved beyond Gertrud Prellwitz. Their spiritual movement is now merging with anthroposophy.

Rudolf Steiner: Things are such that everything can be treated from its good side, and that need not be doubted. But it is important to have the necessary perspective here. For example, it is indisputable that some of the people who supported the anthroposophical movement came from spiritualist circles, and yet something substantial came of it later. But that is no defense of spiritualism. Regarding the events in Naumburg, one must consider how it came about that the matter developed in Naumburg as it did. There were always movements in Naumburg that went backwards at any time. A strong one-sidedness can be brought into something like this. The Naumburg case is no more conclusive than the fact that the people ended up in a student movement. Although I am not going to defend spiritualism, capable people have emerged from it. Of course, something can arise from anything. So you can't take the material for an opinion from such factors. Muck-Lamberty wanted to make humanity happy; he stood up for purity and craftsmanship, and so on. The traveling teachers he set up had a circle of boys around them with whom they lived. He stood up for purity and had two illegitimate [but wanted] children.

[There follows a confusion of voices that could not be written down. ]

Rudolf Steiner: It is therefore certainly necessary that we pursue anthroposophy as such, and that we cannot then expect that something like this is to be feared. The beginnings, of which was spoken today, will have to be the beginnings.

Question: A pedagogical question. How does anthroposophy and the Waldorf school relate to existing independent school communities and country boarding schools where teachers act as friends and human beings? I got the answer from anthroposophists: These schools should be avoided because they want to realize an outdated educational ideal, because they are snobbish.

Rudolf Steiner: The matter is this. The Waldorf School is based on a pedagogy that emerges entirely from the anthroposophical understanding of the human being, in that it places the main emphasis on the fact that the human being is only treated as he wants it in the deepest interior. The Waldorf school is based on this, without programs being made. It is built on knowledge of human nature and the child is not asked, but in a certain sense it is asked what it wants. The main thing is that the Waldorf school is truly a democratic school. It puts proletarian children next to children from the highest levels. It fulfills to a high degree what can be called a democratic comprehensive school. Otherwise, one takes the view that we live in a world that can only recover by absorbing great, comprehensive cultural impulses, but that cannot be acquired through antidotes that remain exceptions. So it is a matter of accepting what exists. I adapt my approach to the educational situation as it arises from the circumstances of the place in question, for example a city. If I have the opportunity to found an anthroposophical school in a city, I found it based on the realities of that city.

As for the educational method, it goes without saying that one cannot say anything against a country education institute that introduces this pedagogy. On the other hand, I believe that this does not represent a social act because young people are led away from the life in which they are placed; they are educated away from it. This is not taken into account. I know an excellent medical practitioner who came to me and said: This person's heart is not normal, something must be done. I said: If you make the man's heart healthy, he can no longer live because his whole organism is attuned to it. Because you always have to have an eye for the whole. Taking young people to the country may well foster a good sense of community, which can be cultivated in seclusion, but these institutions would only prove their worth if these people later proved themselves in the entire social organism. I have certain reservations about this. It is important to make the whole organism healthy. It cannot be a matter of discussing how one discusses in general on anthroposophical ground; that cannot be our concern. I have appointed an excellent teacher from a landerziehungsheim (a land-based school) to Stuttgart. He likes it better here; he must find something here that goes beyond that; the man must be able to compare the two. From this you can see at the same time that one is not one-sided, because otherwise I would not have appointed the teacher. The point is to find the good everywhere. You must not think that you have to push through your program everywhere.

A participant: In these schools, where young people live together, a life should develop that is not unworldly.

Rudolf Steiner: But an individual! The individuals must later work as individuals again. If you were to pursue this, you would find that selfish natures easily develop in the country education homes, and they think it should be like that everywhere. They become terrible critics, terrible busybodies, for whom nothing in the world is right. There is something in it, like a social eccentric spirit. You have to see that you are not asking for the impossible.

What should I have done? If I had started with an abstraction, I would never have founded the Waldorf School. Residential schools in the sense of Wyneken and Lietz, where everything can be created, are basically easy to implement. A landerziehungsheim can basically only be created on the basis of what is taken out of society. Besides, not many proletarian children will be in landerziehungsheims.

A participant: I myself taught at an independent school that has now closed. But we had more free places than others. The rich paid a surplus in school fees, which meant that places could be given to poor children.

Rudolf Steiner: But that is the unsocial thing about it, even with the Waldorf School. It also has to be capitalized. This can only be improved if we implement the threefold social order.

A participant: In boarding schools, a family life is led, while the form of the present-day family is not always the most favorable.

Rudolf Steiner: These are realistic judgments. For example, boarding school life has always existed in English circles. There, boarding school life with its light and dark sides is well known.

Rudolf Steiner concludes the discussion.