The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

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.

[ 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.

[ 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.

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.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! First of all, allow me to express my heartfelt thanks to the Federation for Anthroposophical School of Spiritual Science for giving me the opportunity to speak about the relationship between certain scientific peculiarities of the present day and anthroposophy in an introductory lecture. Furthermore, I must ask you today to bear in mind that there is a certain difficulty in such a first, orienting lecture. This is because, of course, much of what needs to be said about a comprehensive topic can only be hinted at and therefore, necessarily, only suggestions can be made that will require further elaboration later on and that, by their very nature, must leave out some of the questions that inevitably arise.

But there are also certain difficulties in a factual sense with today's topic. The first is that in the broadest circles today, especially when the topic is discussed – the relationship between science and anthroposophy in any respect – a widespread prejudice immediately arises, namely that the anthroposophy meant here wants to take up an opposing position to science – to the kind of science that has developed in the course of human history in recent centuries, and which reached its zenith in the last third of the 19th century, at least in terms of its way of thinking and methodology. But it is not the case that there is such an oppositional position, because this anthroposophy, as I mean it here, is precisely concerned with bringing to bear the best fundamental principles of the scientific will of modern times. And it endeavors to further develop precisely that human outlook and scientific human attitude that is needed in order to truly validate the recognition of conventional science.

And in this further development, one finds that precisely from the secure foundations of the scientific way of thinking, if these are only correctly understood and pursued not only in their logical but also in their living consequences, then the path is also found to those supersensible regions of world existence with which the human being must feel connected precisely in their eternal foundations. In a certain respect, simply by continuing the fundamental principles of science, the path to the supersensible realms through anthroposophy is to be found.

Of course, when I speak to you about the relationship between anthroposophy and science, I will speak in such a way that you will not deviate from what you are accustomed to recognize as scientific conscientiousness and thinking. But I will not have to speak about individual fields, but rather, to a certain extent, about the entire structure of the scientific edifice of the present day. And since I have to assume that among you, dear fellow students, there are members of the most diverse fields of science, I will naturally not be able to do justice to the individual needs, and some things will have to be said in a way that is not meant to be abstract, but which is looking in an abstract way, so that perhaps the individual will have to draw the consequences from what I have to say for the individual fields. Agnosticism is a word that is not often used today, but it denotes something that is indeed related to the foundations of our scientific way of thinking. This agnosticism was established, I would say, as a justifiable scientific way of thinking, or perhaps better said, a philosophical way of thinking, by personalities such as Herbert Spencer. It was he who preferred to use this term, and if we want to find a definition of agnosticism, we will have to look for it in his work. But as a basis, as a fundamental note of scientific thought, agnosticism exists in the broadest fields of knowledge in the present day. If we are to say in the most abstract terms what is meant by agnosticism, we could say something like the following: we recognize the scientific methods that have emerged as certain in recent centuries, we use them to pursue appropriate science, as we must pursue it today in certain fields - through observation, through experiment, and through the process of thinking about both experiment and observation.

By pursuing science in this way – and I am well aware that this is absolutely justified for certain fields today – one comes to say to oneself: Of course, with this science one achieves a great deal in terms of knowledge of the laws that underlie the world. And then efforts are made to extend these laws, which have been assimilated, to man himself, in order to gain that which everyone who has healthy thinking within him ultimately wants to gain through knowledge: an insight into man's place in the universe, into man's destiny in the universe.

When one pursues science in this way, one comes, in the course of science itself, to say: Yes, these laws can be found, but these laws actually only refer to the sum of external phenomena as they are given to the senses or, if they are not given to the senses, as they can be inferred on the basis of the material that results from sensory observation. But what is discovered in this way about nature and man can never extend to those regions that are regarded in older forms of human knowledge as the supersensible foundation of the world, with which the deepest nature of man, his eternal nature, if it may be called that, must still have a certain connection.

Thus, it is precisely through the scientific approach that one comes to an acknowledgment of the scientifically unknowable - one comes to certain limits of scientific research. At most, one comes to say to oneself: the human soul, the inner spiritual being of man, must be connected with something that cannot be attained by this science alone. What is connected with it in this way cannot be investigated scientifically; it belongs to the realm of the unknowable. Here we are not faced with Gnosticism, but with an agnosticism, and in this respect contemporary spiritual life, precisely because of its scientific nature, has placed itself in a certain opposition to what still existed at the time when Gnosticism was the attitude of knowledge and was called Gnosis.

Now, what is advocated here as Anthroposophy is not, as some believe, a revival of the old Gnosticism, which cannot be resurrected. That was born out of the thinking of its time, out of the whole science of its time, so to speak. Today we are in an age in which, if we want to found a science on supersensible foundations, we have to take into account what has been brought forth in human development through the work of such minds as Copernicus, Galileo and many others whom I will not name now. And in saying this, one implicitly declares that it is impossible to take the standpoint of Gnosticism, which of course had nothing of modern science. But it may be pointed out that this Gnostic point of view was in a certain respect the opposite of what is often regarded today as the basic note of science. This Gnostic point of view was that it is very well possible for man to penetrate to the supersensible regions and to find there that which, though not religion, can be the basis of knowledge for religious life as well, if he turns to his inner powers of knowledge not applied in ordinary life.

Now, we will most easily come to an understanding of what I actually have to say today in this introductory lecture if I first remind you of something well known that can point to the transformation that the human cognitive process has undergone in the course of human development.

You all know, of course, what a transformation philosophy has undergone in terms of external scientific life. It encompasses – even in this day and age – the full range of scientific knowledge. As a human activity, philosophy was simply something that, as the name itself suggests, has a certain right to exist. Philosophy was something that did not merely flow from the human intellect, from observation and experiment, although philosophy also extended to the results that intellect, observation and even primitive experiment could arrive at. Philosophy was really that which emerged from the whole human being to a much greater extent than our present-day science, and again in a justified way. Philosophy emerged from a certain relationship of the human being's mind and feelings to the world, and in the age that also gave the name to philosophy, there was no doubt that the human being can also arrive at a certain objectivity in knowledge when he seeks his knowledge not only through experiment, observation and intellect, but when he applies other forces - forces that can be expressed with the same word that we use to describe the “loving” of something - when he therefore makes use of these forces.

And philosophy in the age of the Greeks also included everything that we today summarize in the knowledge of nature. Over the course of the centuries, philosophical endeavor has developed into what we know today as knowledge of nature. In recent times, however, this knowledge of nature has undergone an enormous transformation – a transformation that has made it the basis for practical life in the field of technology to the extent that we experience it in our lives today. If we take an unprejudiced survey of the scientific life of the present day, we cannot but say that what science has done especially well in recent times is to provide a basis for practical life in the field of technology. Our natural science has finally become what corresponds to a word of Kant - I quote Kant when he has said something that I can acknowledge, although I admit that I am an opponent of Kant in many fields. Kant said that there is only as much real science in science as there is mathematics in it. In scientific practice, especially in natural scientific practice, this has been more and more recognized.

Today we do natural science while being aware that we connect what we explore in space and time through observation and experiment with what mathematics reveals to us through pure inner vision. And it is precisely because of this that we feel scientifically certain that we are able to interweave something that is so very much human inner knowledge, human inner experience, as is mathematical, with what observation and experiment give us. By encompassing that which comes to us from outside through the mathematical certainty given to us in pure inner experience, we feel that we are connected to this outside in the process of knowledge in a way that is enough for us to experience scientific certainty. And so we have come more and more to see the exactness of the scientific in precisely the scientific prerequisites, to mathematically justify what we do in scientific work.

Why do we do this? My dear fellow students, why we do it is actually already contained in what I have just said. It lies in the fact that, by doing mathematics, we are merely active within our own mental experience, that we remain entirely within ourselves. I believe that those who have devoted themselves specifically to mathematical studies will agree with me when I say: in terms of inner experience, the mathematical, the process of mathematization, is something that, for those who do it out of inner ability and I would say, can do it out of inner enthusiasm, can give much more satisfaction than any other kind of knowledge of the external world, simply because, step by step, one is directly connected with the scientific result. And when you are then able to connect what is coming from outside with what you know in its entirety, whose entire structure you have created yourself, then you feel something in what is scientifically derived from the interweaving of external data and mathematical work that can be seen as based on a secure foundation. Therefore, because our science allows us to connect the external with an inner experience through mathematics, we recognize this as scientific in the Kantian sense, insofar as mathematics is in it.

Now, however, this simultaneously opens the way for a very specific conception of the scientific world view, and this conception of the scientific world view is precisely what anthroposophical research pursues in its consequences. For what does it actually mean that we have come to such a view of our scientific knowledge? It means that we want to develop our thinking inwardly and, by developing it inwardly, arrive at a certainty and then use it to follow external phenomena, to follow external facts in a lawful way. This principle is now applied to anthroposophy in the appropriate way, in that it is applied to what I would call pure phenomenalism in relation to certain areas of external natural science, in relation to mechanics, physics, chemistry, in relation to everything that does not immediately reach up to life. In the most extreme sense, we hold fast to this phenomenalism for the domains that lie above the inanimate. But we shall see in what way it must be supplemented there by something essentially different.

By visualizing the mathematical relationship to the external world, one gradually comes to realize that in inorganic sciences, thinking can only have a serving character at first, that nowhere are we entitled to bring anything of our own thoughts into the world if we want to have pure science. But this leads to what is called phenomenalism, and which, though it may be criticized in many details, has, in its purest form, been followed by Goethe.

What is this phenomenalism? It consists in regarding phenomena purely, whether through observation or through experiment, just as they present themselves to the senses, and in using thinking only to see the phenomena in a certain context, to line up the phenomena so that the phenomena explain themselves. But in so doing, everything is initially excluded from pure natural science that regards hypotheses not merely as auxiliary constructions, but as if they could provide something about reality. If one stops at pure phenomenalism, then one is indeed justified in assuming an atomistic structure from observation and experiment – be it in the material world or in the world of forces – but this tendency towards an atomistic structure can only be accepted to the extent that one can pursue it phenomenologically, that one can describe it on the basis of phenomena.

The scientific world view that constructs an atomism that postulates something actual behind the phenomena that can be perceived with the senses, but that cannot fall into the world of phenomena itself, sins against this principle.

But anthroposophy draws the final conclusion, to which everything in modern natural science actually tends. Even in this modern natural science, we have recently come to a high degree of development of this phenomenalism, which is still little admitted in theory but is applied in practice, by simply not concerning ourselves with the hypothetical atomic worlds and the like and remaining within the phenomena. But if we stop at the phenomena, we arrive at a very definite conclusion. We arrive at the conclusion that we really come to agnosticism. If we merely string together phenomena by thinking, if we bring order into phenomena, we never come to man himself through this ordering, through this tracing of laws. And that is the peculiar thing, that we must simply admit to ourselves: If you draw the final, fully justified conclusion of modern science, if you go as far as pure phenomenalism, if you put unjustified hypotheses of thought behind the veil of the sensory world, you cannot help but arrive at agnosticism. But this agnosticism is something quite different for knowledge than what humanity has actually hoped for and sought through knowledge within its course of development, within its history.

I do not wish to lead you into remote supersensible regions, although I will also hint at this, but I would like to point out something that should show how knowledge has nevertheless been understood as something quite different, for example in ancient times, from what knowledge can become today if we conscientiously build on our scientific foundations. And here I may again point to that Greek period in which all the sciences were still united within philosophy. I may point out that each of us has the deepest reverence for Greek art, to take just one example, for example for what lives in Greek tragedy.

Now, with regard to Greek tragedy, the catharsis that occurs in it has been spoken of as the most important component of it - the crisis, the decisive element that lives in tragedy. And an important question, which at the same time is a question that can lead us deep into the essence of the process of knowledge, arises when we tie in with what the Greek experienced in tragedy. If we define catharsis in such abstract terms, then it is said, following Aristotle, that tragedy should evoke fear and compassion in the spectator, so that the human soul, by evoking such or similar passions in it, is cleansed of this kind of passion. Now, however, it can be seen – I can only mention this here, the evidence for it can certainly also be found through ordinary science – from everything that is present in Greek tragedy, that thinking about this catharsis, about this artistic crisis, was very closely connected in the Greek mind, for example, with medical thinking.

What was present in the human soul through the effect of tragedy was thought of only as a healing process for something pathological in man, which was elevated into the scenic. From this artistic point of view, one can see how the Greeks understood therapy, the healing process. He understood it to mean that he assumed that something pathological was forming in the diseased organism. What is forming there - I must, of course, speak in very abstract terms in an introductory lecture - the organism takes up its fight against that. The human organism overcomes the disease within itself by overcoming the disease process through excretion. This is how one thought in the field of pathological therapy. Exactly the same, only raised to a higher level, was the thinking in relation to the artistic process. It was simply thought that what tragedy does is a kind of healing process for the soul. Just as the remnants of a cold come out of the organism, so the soul, through the contemplation of tragedy, should develop fear and compassion, then take up the fight against these products of elimination and experience the healing process in their suppression.

However, one can only understand the fundamentals of this way of thinking if one knows that even in Greek culture – in this Greek culture, which was healthy in some respects – there was the view that if a person merely abandons himself to his nature with regard to his psychological development, it will always lead to a kind of illness, and that the spiritual life in man must be a continuous process of recovery. Anyone who is more familiar with Greek culture in this respect will not hesitate for a moment to admit that the Greeks conceived of their highest spiritual life in such a way that they said to themselves: This is a remedy against the constant tendency of the soul to wither away; it is a way of counteracting death. For the Greeks, the spiritual life was a revival of the soul in the direction of its essence. The Greeks did not see only abstract knowledge in their science; they saw in their science something that stimulated a healing process in them. And that was also the special way of thinking, with a somewhat different coloring, in those world views that are based more on Judaism, where there is talk of the Fall of Man, of original sin. The Greeks also had this view - only in a different way - that it is necessary for the human soul to devote itself to an ongoing process of healing in life. Within this Greek spiritual life, it was generally the case that man did not juxtapose the activities to which he devoted himself and the ways of thinking that he held. They were rather combined in him, and so, for example, the art of healing was just an art to him - only an art that remained within nature. And the Greeks, who were eminently artistic people, did not regard art as something that could be profaned or dragged down into a lower realm when compared to that which is a healing process for the human being.

And so we see how, in those older times, knowledge was not actually separated from all of human nature, how it encompassed all human activity. Just as philosophy encompasses knowledge of nature and everything that should now arise from science, by developing it further and further, it also encompasses the artistic life. And finally, religious life was seen as the comprehensive, great process of recovery of humanity, so that, in understanding knowledge in the old way, we must actually say: there knowledge is understood as something that comes from the whole human being. Thought was already there, but humanity could not stop at this phase of the development of knowledge. What was necessarily connected with this phase of the development of knowledge? This can be seen quite clearly if one, equipped with today's scientific spirit, delves a little into some work, let us say in the 13th or 14th century, that was considered scientific in the natural sciences, for example. If you want to understand such a work, you not only have to familiarize yourself with the terminology, but you also have to immerse yourself in the whole spirit.

I do not hesitate to say that if you are steeped in today's scientific spirit and have not first done intimate, honest historical studies, you will inevitably misunderstand a scientific work from a period such as the 13th and 14th centuries AD, for the simple reason that even in those days – and the further back we go in human development, the more this is the case – man not only brought mathematics into the external world, but also a whole wealth of inner experiences in which he believed just as we believe in our mathematics. Thus we address nature quite differently today when we chemists speak of sulfur, phosphorus or salt than when people of that time spoke of sulfur or salt. If we apply today's concepts, we do not in the least touch the meaning that was then in a book, even one meant to be scientific, because at that time more and something other than the mathematical or the similar to mathematics was carried into the results of observation of the external world. Man brought a whole wealth of inner experience – qualitatively and not merely quantitatively – into the outside world.

And just as we express a scientific result with a mathematical formula, just as we seemingly connect subject with object, so in those days subject was connected with object even more, but the subject was filled with a wealth that we no longer have any idea of today and that we dare not allow ourselves to carry back into nature in the same way. Man at that time saw much in the external world that he himself put into it, just as we today put mathematics into nature. He did not think about nature in the same way as we do today, but he projected a great deal into it. In doing so, however, he also projected the moral into nature. Man projected the moral into nature in such a way that in four millennia the moral laws arose in the same way as the laws of nature arose in his knowledge. Man, who projected into nature what in ancient times was thought of as salt, sulphur, phosphorus, etc., was also allowed to project into nature what he experienced as moral impulses, because inwardly he was not doing anything different.

Now, however, we have rightly separated from such a view of the external world, through which we carry all that has been suggested into it. We only carry the mathematical into the external world, and our science therefore becomes a very good basis for technical practice. But by only bringing the mathematical into the external world, we no longer have the right to transfer the moral into objectivity through our science. And we must of necessity – precisely when we are very scientific in the sense that has emerged in recent centuries – fall prey to a moral agnosticism, because we have no other choice than to see only the subjective in moral principles, to see something that we cannot claim comes from nature in the same objective way as the course of a natural process itself.

And so we are obliged to ask ourselves: How do we found moral science and with it the basis of all spiritual science, including all social science? How do we found moral science in an age in which we must justifiably recognize phenomenalism for external nature? That was the big question for me at the time I wrote my “Philosophy of Freedom.” I stood on the ground - completely on the ground! on the ground of modern natural science, yes, on the ground of a phenomenalism regarding what can be fathomed by the process of knowledge from the external world of the senses. But then, if one follows the consequences with all honesty to the end, one must say: If morality is to be justified objectively, then another knowledge must be able to stand alongside this knowledge, which leads to phenomenalism and thus to agnosticism - a knowledge that does not thinking to devise hypothetical worlds behind the phenomena of the senses, but a knowledge must be established that can grasp the spiritual directly in intuition, after it - except for the mathematical - is no longer carried out into the world in the old way. It is precisely agnosticism that, on the one hand, compels us to fully recognize it in its own field, but at the same time also compels us to rouse our minds to activity in order to grasp a spiritual world from which we can, in the first instance, if we do not want to remain merely in the subjective, find moral principles through objective spiritual observation.

My Philosophy of Freedom has been called, with some justification, ethical individualism, but that only captures one side of it. We must, of course, arrive at ethical individualism because what is now seen as a moral principle must be seen by each individual in freedom. But just as in the inner, active process of the mind, mathematics is worked out in pure knowledge and yet proves to be well-founded within objectivity, so too can that which is the content of moral impulses be grasped in pure spiritual insight - not merely in faith, but in pure spiritual insight. And that is why one is compelled, as I was in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” to say: Moral science must be based on moral intuition. And I said at the time that we can only arrive at a real moral view in the modern style if we realize that Just as we extract individual natural phenomena from the whole of nature, we must extract the moral principles, which are only intuitively grasped spiritually but nevertheless objectively grasped quite independently of us, from a contemplated spiritual world, from a supersensible spiritual world.

I spoke first of moral intuition. This brings the process of knowledge into a certain line. Through the process of knowledge — especially if it is to remain genuinely scientific — the soul is driven to muster its innermost powers and to push this mustering so far that the intuition of a spiritual world really becomes possible. Now the question arises: Is only that which can be grasped as moral impulses to be seen in the spiritual world, or is perhaps that which leads us to our moral intuitions merely one area among many? The answer to this, however, arises when one grasps what has been experienced inwardly in the soul as moral intuitions and then continues this in an appropriate way.

Exactly the same thing that the soul experiences when it rises to the purely spiritual grasp of the moral – it has only become necessary in modern times through natural science – exactly the same thing that is lived through there can now also be lived through for further areas. Thus it may be said that anyone who has once practiced self-observation of this inner experience that leads to moral intuition can indeed develop this inner experience more and more. And the exercises presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” serve to develop this inner experience. And these exercises then lead to the fact that one does not stop at thinking and forming hypotheses with it, but that one regards this thinking in its liveliness and develops it further - to what I will now explain in the second part of my lecture and what can be called an exact looking at the supersensible world. What is meant is not the lost mystical vision of earlier times, but an exact vision of the supersensible world, in accordance with science, which can be called exact clairvoyance. And in this way we gradually arrive at those forms of knowledge which I characterized only recently here in a public lecture: imagination, inspiration and the higher intuition — forms of knowledge that illuminate the inner human being.

If we now ask ourselves how we can still have an objectively based moral science and thus also a social science, precisely when we are firmly grounded in natural science, then in these introductory words I wanted to show you first of all how, by honestly place oneself on the ground of today's science, but still wants to turn to life - to life as it simply must be for the person who is to achieve an inner wholeness - how one is thereby rubbed into spiritual research. This now differs from ordinary research in that ordinary research simply makes use of those soul powers that are already there, in order then to spread over the wide field of observation and experiment. In contrast to this, anthroposophical research first turns to the human being so that he may develop higher soul forces, which, when they are precisely developed, lead to a higher vision, which in the supersensible provides the complement to what we find in the sensual through our exact scientific methods.

How this exact higher vision is developed, how one can now penetrate from the sensual into the supersensible outside the moral realm, that will be the subject of my discussions after the break.

Short break

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! The first step in attaining supersensible knowledge is achieved through what we may call meditation, combined with a certain concentration of our thinking. In my last public lecture here in Leipzig, I described the essential point of this from one perspective. Today I would like to characterize it from a different perspective, one that also leads us to a scientific understanding of the world. The essence of this meditation, combined with concentration of thought, consists precisely in the fact that the human being does not remain, for example, with that inner handling of thinking that has been formed once through inheritance, through ordinary education and so on, but that at a certain point in his mature life he regards this thinking, which he has acquired, only as a starting point for further inner development.

Now you know that there are mystical natures in the present day who speak somewhat contemptuously of thinking and who resort to all kinds of other powers of cognition that are more tinged with the subconscious in order to gain a kind of view of the world that is supposed to encompass what ordinary thinking cannot grasp. This dream-like, fantastic immersion in an inner soul life, which crosses over into the pathological realm, has nothing to do with what is meant by anthroposophy. It moves in precisely the opposite direction: every single step that is taken to further develop thinking, to reeducate it to a higher ability, can be pursued with such an inner free and deliberate vividness that can otherwise only be applied to the inner experiences of the soul, which we develop through such a deliberate cognitive activity as that practiced by mathematicians.

Thus one can say: precisely that for which modern man has been educated through his scientific education – mathematical thinking – is taken as a model, not only for seeking out some external connections, but for developing a higher thinking process itself. What mathematics undertakes in the horizontal plane, if I may express myself figuratively, is undertaken in the vertical plane, I would say, by carrying out an inner soul activity, a soul exercise itself, in such a way that you give an account of yourself inwardly with every single step, just as you give an account of yourself with mathematical steps, by placing a certain content of ideas at the center of your consciousness when you control your thoughts, which should simply be a content of thoughts. It does not depend on the content; it depends on what you do with it. You should not suggest something to yourself in any way. Of all these more unconscious soul activities, anthroposophical practice is the opposite.

But if you further develop what you have already acquired as a certain form of thinking by resting with all your soul activity on a manageable content, and if you this resting on a certain soul activity, this attentiveness to this soul activity with the exclusion of everything else that can otherwise penetrate into the soul, is undertaken again and again, the thinking process becomes stronger. And only then do you notice what was, so to speak, the good side of materialism, of the materialistic world view. Because you now realize that all the thinking that you do in ordinary life, especially the thinking that continues in memory, leads us to the fact that what we have experienced in thought can later be brought up again through memory. One notices that all this can only be accomplished by man between birth and death by using his body as a basis - I do not want to say as an instrument, but as a basis. And it is precisely by developing thinking through inner development that we realize that ordinary thinking is entirely bound to the human body and its organs, and that the process of memory in particular cannot be explained without recourse to a more subtle physiology. Only now do we realize that thinking is freeing itself from the body, becoming ever freer and freer from the body.

Only now do we ascend from thinking that takes place with the help of the body to thinking that takes place in the inner processes of the soul; only now do we notice that we are gradually moving into such inner experience, which does not occur, but - I would like to say - is preparing itself. When we pass from the waking state of ordinary consciousness into the state of sleep, our organism simply becomes such that it no longer performs those functions that live out in imagining and in the perceiving associated with imagining.

But because in our ordinary life we are only able to think with the help of our body, thinking ceases the moment it can no longer be done with the help of the body – that is when we fall asleep. The last remnants remain in the pictorial thinking of dreaming, but if one again and again and again pushes thinking further and further through an inner, an exact inner exercise - that is why I speak of exact clairvoyance in contrast to dark, mystical clairvoyance -, through an exact exercise, one learns to recognize the possibility of thinking that is independent of the body. It is precisely because of this that the anthroposophical researcher can point to his developed thinking with such inner certainty, because he knows - better even than the materialist - the dependence of ordinary thinking on the bodily organization, and because he experiences how, in meditation, in practice, the actual soul is lifted out of its bondage to the body. One learns to think free of the body, one learns to step out of the body with one's I-being, one gets to know the body as an object, whereas before it was thoroughly connected with the subjectivity.

This is precisely what is difficult for contemporary education to recognize, because on the one hand, through anthroposophical knowledge, the bondage of the imagination to bodily functions has been understood in modern science, and this is actually becoming more and more apparent through anthroposophical knowledge. But we must be clear about the fact that, despite this insight, we cannot stop at this thinking, but that this thinking can be detached from the body by strengthening it inwardly through meditation. But then this thinking is transformed.

At first, when this body-free thinking flashes, when the experience flashes: you are now in a soul activity that you carry out as if you had simply withdrawn from your body - when this inner experience flashes, then the thinking becomes inwardly more intense. It acquires the same inner satiety that one otherwise has only when perceiving a sensual object. Thinking acquires pictorial quality. Thinking remains in the sphere of composure, just like any other thinking that is bound to the body, but in the body-free state it now acquires pictorial quality. One thinks in images. And this thinking in images was also present in its beginning in what Goethe had developed in his morphology. That is why he claims that he can see his ideas with his eyes. Of course, he did not mean the physical eyes, but what arose in him, so to speak, from an elementary natural process, but which can also be developed through meditation. By this he meant that he saw with the “spiritual” eye what was just as pictorial as otherwise only the physical perceptions, but which was thoroughly mental in its inner quality. I say “thought-like,” not thought, because it is a thought that has been further developed, a metamorphosed thought - it is thought-like.

In this way, however, one rises to the realization of what one is as a human being in one's life on earth - at least initially to the moment in which one is currently living. In ordinary consciousness, we have before us the present moment with all the experiences that are in the environment. Even in ordinary science, we have before us what comes as a supplement to this - there are the thoughts that arise in our minds, which we connect with the experiences of the present moment. This body-free, pictorial thinking, to which we rise and of which I have just spoken and which I call imaginative thinking - not because it is an imagination, but because it proceeds in images and not in abstractions - this thinking encompasses our past life on earth as a unity, as in a single tableau that stands before us. And we now recognize that in us, alongside the spatial organism, there lives a temporal organism - an organism in which the before and after stand in just as organic a connection as the side by side in the outer, physical spatial organism that we carry on us. This organism is recognized as a supersensible organism - in my books I have called it the “etheric body”; one can also call it the life body.

What it comprises is not at all identical with the unwarranted assumption of a “vital force” by an earlier science, which arrived at this vital force only by hypothetical means, whereas this life body comes to the developed imaginative thinking as a real intuition. In this way, one arrives at the fact that what is past for ordinary consciousness in the inner being of man - as something that I experienced ten years ago, for example, and that now emerges in my memory - that this does not now appear as something past, but one experiences it as something directly present, one looks at it with the intensity with which one looks at something present. But as a result, what would otherwise have been lost in the passage of time is suddenly revealed to you in its entirety; your whole life is a single image, one whose individual parts belong together. And one realizes that in reality the past is a present thing, that it only appears as past because we, with our knowledge attuned to present observation, have it only as a memory at this moment. But in objectivity it is an immediate present, a reality.

Thus one comes to the recognition of what is the first supersensible in man. But it also leads to the recognition of something that is present in the entire living world, which inorganic science cannot provide up to the level of chemistry: we come to the insight that is the further development of Goethean morphology; we come to the insight that the individual plant form is only a particular manifestation of that form, which also exists in other plants; we come to what Goethe calls the primordial plant, which is not a cell, but a concretely formed, supersensible form that can be grasped only by imaginative cognition, but which can live in every single plant form — can live in a changed, metamorphosed way. We come to an appreciation of what we find in the vegetable world when we want to understand it fully. And we must realize that if we do not develop this imaginative knowledge, which shows a supersensible, dynamic element in everything vegetable, we learn to recognize only the mechanical, physical, chemical processes that take place in the plant form.

It is to the credit of modern natural science, insofar as it is botany, that it has carefully studied what takes place in the plant form, or rather, in the part of space enclosed by the plant form, what takes place in the mechanical, physical, and chemical processes. These processes are no different from those that are also out there, but they are grasped by something that cannot be grasped by the same methods as the physical and chemical ones. They are grasped by that which lives as a real supersensible and can only be recognized in imagination – in that imagination in which we also find ourselves at the same time as human totality in our experience since birth as if standing before us in a single moment.

We learn, on the one hand, to recognize why we, especially when we apply the modern, exact scientific methods as they have developed, must come to a certain agnosticism with regard to the understanding of the vegetable. And so we can see why there must be a certain field of agnosticism; and so we can also see how anthroposophy adds precisely that which must remain unknown to this agnosticism. We see how anthroposophy leads beyond agnosticism while allowing it full validity in its own realm. That, ladies and gentlemen, is one thing.

The other thing, however, is that at this stage we are acquiring a more detailed understanding of the interaction between the human being and the external world. Physics, mechanics, chemistry are rightly being developed in the present day in such a way that we carry as little of the human as possible into this external world, in that we say: only that has objectivity in which we contain all subjectivity. - Certainly, anthroposophy will not fight the justification of this method in a certain field, but will recognize it. But when we use what we also recognize in the imagination to grasp and behold what lives in the vegetable kingdom, we attain on the one hand an intimate knowledge of our own supersensible being — at least as it is between birth and death — but we also thereby gain a vision of the fluctuating, metamorphosing processes in the world of living forms. In this way we connect ourselves as human beings with the outer world, initially at a first level, in imagination. We incorporate the human element into our world view.

The next level of supersensible knowledge is inspiration. It is attained by developing more and more, I would say, the opposite pole of meditation and concentration. Anyone who has acquired a certain practice in meditation and concentration knows that when you energize thinking, you also get the inner inclination to dwell on what arises as a part of the soul as energized thinking. One must exert oneself more when leaving these energized imaginative thoughts than when leaving any other thought. But if one can now really throw these energized thoughts out of consciousness again - this whole imaginative world that one has first appropriated -, if one can empty consciousness, not cannot be emptied from the ordinary point of view, but can be emptied after one has first inwardly strengthened it, then this emptiness of consciousness becomes something quite different from what the emptiness of consciousness is in ordinary life. There the emptiness of consciousness is sleeping.

The emptiness of consciousness, however, which occurs after one has first strengthened this consciousness, is very soon filled by the phenomena of an environment that is now completely different from all that one has previously known. Now one gets to know a world to which our ordinary ideas of space and time can no longer be applied. Now we get to know a world that is a real external world of soul and spirit. It is just as concrete as our real world of the senses. But it can only flow into us if we have emptied our consciousness at a higher level. After one has first come to imagination, by concentrating on a spiritual content and now being able to perceive outside one's body because one has activity within oneself - not the passivity that is present in ordinary consciousness - and by having gone through the appropriate preparations, the spiritual outer world now penetrates through the developed activity of the freed consciousness, just as the appearances of the world of colors or the world of sounds otherwise penetrate through the senses.

On the one hand, through this spiritual outer world, we arrive at an understanding of what we were as human beings before we descended from a spiritual and soul world into the physical world, before we united with what had been prepared in the mother's womb through conception as the physical human germ. One gains an insight into what first lived in a spiritual-soul world and then united with the physical human being. So one gets to know that which, between birth and death, is basically quite ineffective, which is, so to speak, excluded from our sensory perception, but which was effective in us and which worked in its purity before we descended into a physical body. That is one thing: we gain a deeper knowledge of human nature by ascending to this second stage of supersensible vision, which is developed just as precisely as the other, the imaginative stage. And this knowledge, through which a spiritual world flows into us, just as pure air flows from outside into our lungs and is then further processed, this knowledge, which we process in the subconscious for ordinary consciousness, but in the subconscious for the developed consciousness, fully consciously, I have allowed myself to call this influx “inspirative knowledge”.

This is the second step. Through it, we first come to recognize our eternal as pre-existing. But with this we also have the possibility to penetrate into what now not only lives in the external world, but what lives and feels, what thus lives out in the living formation of the inner life in such a way that this inner life becomes present to itself in feeling. Only through this do we learn to recognize what lives around us as animalistic. We supplement our knowledge with what we can never attain through an ordinary view, as we have developed it in physics and chemistry. We come to look at what lives in the sentient being as a higher, supersensible reality. We now learn through observation, not through philosophical hypotheses in the modern sense, to actually follow a new, higher world: the world of the spiritual and soul in the sentient physical. But in doing so, we move a step further away from agnosticism. This must exist if we only follow the chemical processes in the sentient living. We must follow these, and it is the great merit of modern natural science that these can be followed, but with that, this natural science must become agnostic. This must find its completion in the fact that precisely now, in free spirituality, one experiences through inspiration that which must be added in order to arrive at the full reality of sentient life. But in this way one achieves something else, of which I would like to give you an example. In this way one comes to recognize that the process that takes place in the human being, for example - it is similar for the animal - that this process is not only an ascending one, but at the same time also a descending one. Only now are we really learning to look at ourselves properly from within; we learn, by ascending to this inspired realization, to know more precisely what is actually going on in our ordinary consciousness. Above all, one learns to recognize that it is not a process of building up, but of breaking down, that our nervous life is essentially a life of breakdown. If our nerves could not be broken down - and of course rebuilt from time to time - we could not develop ordinary thinking. Vital life, when it appears in abundance, is basically a numbing of thought, as it occurs in every sleep. The kind of life that is interspersed with feeling and thinking must, at the same time, carry within it a process of decomposition, I would say a differential dying process.

This process of disintegration is first encountered in healthy life, that is, in the life in which it occurs in order for human thinking in the ordinary sense of the word to come about at all. Once one has acquired an understanding of the nature of these processes, one also becomes familiar with the abnormal occurrence of these processes. There are simply certain organs or organ systems in the human organism in which parallel processes to ordinary thinking occur. But if the catabolic processes, which are otherwise the physical basis of thinking, extend to organs to which they are not otherwise assigned, so to speak, through an internal infection – the word is not quite used in the actual sense – then disease states arise in these organs.

It is absolutely necessary that we develop pathology in such a way that we can also find the processes that we recognize in physiology in pathology. However, this is only possible if we can see the essence of these processes in our human organization; it is similar in the animal organization, but still somewhat different - I say this again so that I am not misunderstood. By observing the processes in our human organism in such a way that we recognize one polarity as an organization that is designed for breakdown and the other polarity as one that cannot be affected by this breakdown in a healthy state, we learn to see through these two aspects in inspired knowledge.

If we learn to see through this and can we then connect this seeing through of our own organism with an inspired recognition of the outer world, of the processes in the plant kingdom, if we learn to see through this mineral kingdom and also the animal kingdom through inspired knowledge, then we learn to recognize a relationship between human inner processes and the outer world that is even more intimate than that which already existed at the earlier stage of human history. I have shown how, at this earlier stage, man felt related to external nature by seeing in all that appears in the most diverse metamorphoses in the vegetable world something that he found in the soul, in his own life between birth and death.

But if, through inspired knowledge, he now learns to see that which he was in his pre-existent life, then at the same time he sees through that in the outer realm which not only lives in feeling, but which has a certain relation, a certain connection, to that which lives in the human organization, which is oriented towards feeling, towards thinking. And one learns to recognize the connections between the processes outside and the processes inside, and also the connections with the life of feeling. One learns to recognize what is brought forth in man when the organs are seized by the breakdown, which actually should not be seized by it, because the breakdown in this sense must only be the basis for the thinking and feeling process. When, as it were, the organic activity for thinking and feeling seizes members of the human organism that should not be seized, then what we have to grasp in pathology arises. But when we grasp the outer world with the same kind of knowledge, then we find what must be grasped by therapy. Then we find the corresponding process of polar counteraction, which - I would express it this way - normal internal breakdown. In short, through an inner vision we find the connection between pathology and therapy, between the disease process and the remedy. In this way we go beyond medical agnosticism – not by denying present-day medicine but by recognizing what it can be – and at the same time we find the way to add to it what it cannot find by itself.

If anyone now believes that anthroposophy wants to develop some kind of dilettantism in the most diverse fields of science, then I have to say: that is not the case! It consciously wants to be the continuation of what it fully recognizes as the result of today's science, but it wants to supplement it with higher methods of knowledge. She wants to go beyond the deficiencies of mere trial and error therapy, which basically everyone who is also active in practice has already sensed, to a therapy gained from observation that has an inner, organic connection with pathology, which is, so to speak, only the other side of pathology. If one succeeds in finding pathology simply as a continuation of physiology in the way described, then one also succeeds – by getting to know the relationship between man and his natural environment – in extending pathology into therapy in a completely rational way, so that in the future these two need not stand side by side as they do today in a more agnostic science.

These are only suggestions that I would like to make in the sense that they could show a little – I know how incomplete one has to be in such an orienting lecture – how far it is from anthroposophy to ant opposition to recognized science, but rather that it is precisely important for it to draw the final consequence from the agnostic form of science and thereby arrive at the view of what must be added to this science. This is already being sensed, and basically there are many, especially members of the younger generation, who are learning to feel that science as it exists now is not enough, who feel: we need something else, because it is not enough for us. Precisely when we are otherwise honest about it, then we have to come to something else through it. And it is precisely for those who get to know science not just as an answer but, in a higher sense, as a question that anthroposophy wants to be there — not to drive them into dilettantism, but to progress in exactly the right, exact way from science to what science itself demands if it is pursued consistently.

But then there is a third higher stage of knowledge. This is attained when we extend the exercises to include exercises of the will. Through the will, we initially accomplish mainly what a person can do in the external world. But when we apply the same energy of the will to our own inner processes, then a third stage of supersensible knowledge arises on the basis of imagination and inspiration. If we are completely honest with ourselves, we will have to admit at every moment of our lives: We are something completely different today than we were ten or twenty years ago. The content of our soul has changed, but in changing it, we were actually quite passively surrendered to the outside world. It is precisely in relation to our inner transformation that a certain passivity reigns in us.

But if we take this transformation into our own hands, if we bring ourselves to radically change what is habitual in us, for example, in a certain relationship - where a change seems possible - if we behave inwardly towards ourselves in such a way that we make ourselves into a different person in a certain direction through our own will, then we have to actively intensify our inner experience over years, often decades, because such exercises of will take time. You make up your mind: you will develop a certain quality or the form of a quality in yourself. After months you notice how little you succeed in doing this, in this way, what otherwise the body makes out of you. But if you make more and more effort, then you not only see your inner, supersensible human being, but you also manage to make this inner human being, so to speak, completely transparent. A sense organ such as our eye would not be able to serve us as a visual organ if it did not selflessly - if I may use the term - withdraw its own substantiality. As a result, it is transparent, physically transparent. Thus, through exercises of will, we become, so to speak, inwardly transparent to the soul.

I have only hinted at a few things here. You will find a very detailed account in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” We really do enter a state in which we see the world without ourselves being an obstacle to fully penetrating into the supersensible. For, in fact, we are the obstacle to entering fully into the supersensible world because, in our ordinary consciousness, we always live in our body. The body only imparts to us what is earthly, not what is soul-spiritual. We now look, by being able to disregard our body, into a stage of the spiritual world through which that appears to us before the spiritual gaze, which becomes of our soul, when it has once passed through the gate of death. Just as we get to know our pre-existent life through the other way I described earlier, so now we get to know our life in the state after death. Once we have learned to see the organism no longer, we now learn, as it figuratively presents itself to us, the process by which we find ourselves when we discard this physical organism altogether and enter the spiritual-soul world with our spiritual-soul organism. The demise of our physical existence, the awakening of a spiritual-soul existence: this is what we experience in the third stage of supersensible knowledge, in the stage that I have called higher intuitive knowledge.

By having this experience, by being able to place ourselves in a spiritual world without being biased by our subjectivity, we are able to recognize this spiritual world in its full inwardness. In inspiration, it is still as it flows into us; but now, in higher intuition, we get to know it in its full inwardness. And now let us look back at what first presented itself to us as a necessity: moral intuition. This moral intuition is the only one for ordinary consciousness that arises out of the spiritual world during proper self-contemplation of pure thinking - I have presented this in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. But if we now go through imagination and inspiration, we do exercises that teach us to completely detach ourselves from ourselves, to develop the highest activity of the spiritual and soul, and yet not to be subjective, but to be objective, by living in objectivity itself. Only when we have achieved this standing in objectivity is it possible to do spiritual science.

Only then is it possible to see what is already living as spiritual in the physical world; only then does one gain a real understanding of history. History as a series of external facts is only the preparation. What lives as spiritual driving forces and driving entities in the historical can only be seen through intuitive knowledge. And it is only at this level of intuitive knowledge that we truly see what our own ego is. At first, our own ego appears to us as something we cannot see through. Just as a dark space within a brightness appears to us in such a way that we see the brightness from the darkness with our eyes, so we look back at our soul, see its thoughts, feel further inner processes, live in our will impulses. But the actual I-being is, so to speak, like a dark space within it. This is now being illuminated. We are getting to know our eternal being. But with that, we are only getting to know the human being in such a way that we can also fully understand him as a social being. Now we are at the point where the complement to social agnosticism occurs.

This is where things start to get really serious. What is social agnosticism? It arises from the fact that we apply the observation that we have learned to apply correctly to external, natural phenomena, and that we now also want to apply this trained observation to social phenomena. This is where the various compromise theories in social science and sociology come from – in fact, all the theories about the conception of social life that we have seen arise. This is where the approach to the conception of social life that starts from the natural sciences comes from, but which must therefore disregard everything cognizable, everything that is alienated from thought and only present in the life of instincts. The extreme case of this occurred in Marxism, which regards everything that is spiritual as an ideology and only wants to see the impulses of social life realized if these impulses develop out of the instinctive, which belongs to agnosticism. Class consciousness is actually nothing more than the sum of all that is not rooted in a knowledge of man, but that comes from the instincts - only it must be recognized by those who develop such instincts in certain life circumstances.

If you look at our social life with an unbiased eye, you will find that we have come to agnosticism precisely in the social sphere. However grotesque and paradoxical it may still appear to modern man, in this field of spiritual science we can only go beyond this kind of knowledge, insofar as it is agnostic, if we rise to truly intuitive knowledge and thus to the experience of the human being. We humans today actually pass each other by. We judge each other in the most superficial way. Social demands arise as we develop precisely the old social instincts most strongly. But an inner, social soul mood will only come about if the intuitions from a spiritual world permeate us with life. In the age of agnosticism, we have necessarily come to see everything spiritual more or less only in ideas. However, ideas, insofar as they are in ordinary consciousness, are not alive. Today's philosophers speak to us of logical ideas, of aesthetic ideas, of ethical ideas. We can observe them all, we can experience them all inwardly and theoretically, but they have no impulsive power for life. The ideas only become a reality of life when they are wrung out in intuitive experience of the spiritual. We cannot achieve social redemption and liberation, nor can we imbue our lives with a religiosity that is appropriate for us, if we do not come to an intuitive, vitalized grasp of the spiritual.

This life-filled comprehension of the spiritual will differ significantly from what we call spiritual life today. Today, we actually call the ideational life spiritual life; in other words, life in abstract ideas that are not impulses. But what intuition provides us with will give us as humanity a living spirit that lives with us. We have only thoughts, and because they are only thoughts, we have lost the spirit altogether. We have thoughts as abstractions. We must regain the life of thoughts. But the life of thought is the spirit that lives among us - and not the spirit that we merely know. We will only develop a social life if, in turn, spirit lives in us, if we do not try to shape society out of the spiritless - out of what lives in social agnosticism - but if we shape it out of that attitude that understands through intuition to achieve the living spirit.

We may look back today on earlier ages - certainly, we have overcome them, and especially those of us who stand on anthroposophical ground are least likely to wish them back in their old form. But what these earlier ages had, despite all the mistakes we can easily criticize today, is that in certain epochs they brought the living spirit - not just the spirit of thought - among people. This allowed the existing basis of knowledge to expand to include artistic perception of the world, religious penetration of the innermost self, and social organization of the world. We will only achieve a new social organization of the world, a new religious life, and new artistic works on the basis of knowledge, on which they have always fundamentally stood, when we in turn gain a living knowledge, so that not only the thoughts of the spirit, but the spirit itself lives in humanity. It is this living spirit that Anthroposophy seeks. Anthroposophy does not want to be a theory or a theoretical world view; Anthroposophy wants to be that which can stir the spirit in its liveliness in the life of the human being, that which can permeate the human being not only with knowledge of the spirit, but with the spirit itself.

In this way we shall go beyond the age that has brought phenomenalism to its highest flowering. Of course, one can only wish that it will continue to flourish in this way, one can only wish that the scientific way of thinking will continue to flourish in the conscientiousness in which it has become established. But the life of the spirit must not be allowed to exist merely by continuing to live in the old traditions. Fundamentally, all spiritual experiences are built on traditions, on what earlier humanity has achieved in the way of spirit.

In principle, our art today is also built on traditions, on the basis of what an earlier humanity has achieved. Today, we cannot arrive at new architectural styles unless we reshape consciousness itself, because otherwise we will continue to build in Renaissance, Gothic, and antique styles. We will not arrive at creative production. We will arrive at creative production when we first inwardly vitalize knowledge itself, so that we do not merely shape concepts but inner life, which fills us and can form the bridge between what we grasp in thought and what we must create in full life.

This, dear attendees, dear fellow students, is what anthroposophy seeks to achieve. It seeks to bring life into the human soul, into the human spirit, not by opposing what it recognizes as fully justified in the modern scientific spirit, as it is often said to do. It seeks to carry this spirit of science further, so that it can penetrate from the external, material and naturalistic into the spiritual and soul realms. And anyone who can see through people's needs in this way today is convinced that in many people today there is already an inner, unconscious urge for such a continuation of the spirit of science in the present day. Anthroposophy seeks only to consciously shape what lives in many as a dark urge. And only those who get to know it in its true light, not in the distortions that are sometimes created of it today, will see it in its true light and in its relationship to science.

Pronunciation

Walter Birkigt, Chairman: I would like to thank Dr. Steiner for the lecture he has given here, and I would now like to point out that the discussion is about to begin. Please submit requests and questions in writing.

Dr. Dobrina: Dear attendees! After such a powerful picture of the present and past intellectual history of humanity has been presented, it is not easy to give a sharp summary in a few words. But I think that before proceeding to a critique, one must first appreciate the depth of the whole presentation. One must appreciate and admit that a synthesis is sought between natural science with its exact trains of thought and spiritual science with its partly antiquated forms.

In the last few centuries, natural science has indeed managed to rise to the throne and even to push philosophy down from the throne as antiquated. Now, however, those who cannot be satisfied with the philosophy that has been overthrown and deified are again looking for an impetus to bring philosophy back to the old podium on which it stood in Greece. And I believe that anthroposophy, as developed for us by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, is an attempt to shape the synthesis in such a way that, although it only recognizes natural science in the preliminary stages and makes every effort not to object to its exactness, it then goes beyond it to penetrate into the supersensible realm. However, the step into the supersensible world seems to me to be based on very weak foundations, especially since Dr. Rudolf Steiner works with concepts such as preexistence. Those who have more time could ask more pointed questions about what he means by this preexistence or what he has to say about the “post-mortem” life, about life after death.

Applause.

In any case, I believe that from this point of view we can and must immediately enter into a sharp discussion with him, and it will probably show that basically the whole conceptualization of Dr. Rudolf Steiner breaks down into two quite separate areas. On the one hand, he makes an effort to plunge into therapy and to consider Greek thinking from the point of view of therapeutic analysis, while on the other hand he works with concepts that come from the old tools of theosophy and are very reminiscent of antiquated forms of spiritual life.

Applause

For this reason, I would like to say very briefly that the whole picture that Dr. Rudolf Steiner has developed here, as well as in the previous public lecture, seems to me to be quite inadequate and that on this basis one can in fact arrive at no criticism of modern life, nor of modern economic struggles, nor of the position that is taken today against the spiritual powers that have fallen into decline.

Applause.

Perhaps Dr. Rudolf Steiner would be kind enough to

respond to this shortly.

Walter Birkigt: Does the assembly understand the statement as a question, that Dr. Steiner should respond immediately? I would therefore ask Dr. Steiner to respond.

Applause.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, dear attendees, I said in my lecture that it should be an orienting one. And I said that an orienting lecture faces the difficulty of being able to only hint at certain things that would require further elaboration, so that a whole flood of unsatisfactory things naturally arise in the soul of the listener, which of course cannot be cleared away in the first lecture either. The point of the comments – I cannot say objections – made by the esteemed previous speaker is that he found that I had used words that he considers old terms.

Now, my dear audience, we can put all our words – even the most ordinary ones – into this category. We must, after all, use words when we want to express ourselves. If you were to try to see what is already available today in contemporary literature, which often seems outrageous to me – I mean outrageous in terms of its abundance – if you were to read everything that I myself have written, for example, ...

Heiterkeit

... when faced with this abundance, it is quite natural that in a first, introductory lecture, only some aspects can be touched upon. So let us take a closer look at what the esteemed previous speaker has just said. He said that pre-existence reminds him of old concepts. But now, he is only reminded of old terms because I have used words that were there before. Of course, when I say that by elevating imaginative knowledge, which I have characterized, to inspired knowledge, which I have also characterized, I arrive at the concept of preexistence. If I merely describe how one comes to the vision of the pre-existent life, then it does not depend on the term “preexistence,” but only on the fact that I describe how a precise practice takes place to arrive at an insight into what was there in the human being before this human being — if I may put it this way — united with a physical body, with what was being prepared in the mother's body through the conception. So, I only used the word pre-existence to point to something that can only be seen when supersensible knowledge has been attained in the way I have described. In Gnosticism one finds a certain attitude towards knowledge. As such, Gnosticism has nothing to do with the aims of modern anthroposophy, but this attitude towards knowledge, as it was present in ancient Gnosticism and which aims at recognizing the supersensible, is reviving in our age - in the post-Galilean, post-Copernican age - but in a different form.

And now I will describe to you in more detail what should follow – I will describe it in a few sentences. You see, if we look from a knowledge that is sought on the basis of the methods I have spoken of, if we look from this kind of knowledge to an older one that is very different from it, we come to an oriental form of knowledge that could in fact be called “theosophical”. Only after this had developed in older times could a philosophy arise out of a theosophy, and only then could anthroposophy arise out of a philosophy. Of course, if you take the concepts in such a way that you only hold them in their abstractness, not in what matters, then you will mix everything up, and the new will only appear to you as a rehash of the old. This theosophy was achieved by completely different methods of knowledge than those I have described.

What were the essentials of this method of knowledge? I do not mean everything, but just a certain phase of it. For example, the ancient Indian yoga process, which should truly not be experienced as a warm-up in anthroposophy. We can see this from the fact that what I am describing initially seems very similar to this yoga process, doesn't it? But if you don't put it there yourself, you won't find that what I am describing is similar to the yoga process. This consisted in the fact that at a stage of human development in which the whole human life was less differentiated than it is today, it was felt that the rhythmic breathing process was connected with the thinking process. Today we look at the matter physiologically. Today we know: When we breathe, when we inhale, we simultaneously press the respiratory force through the spinal canal into the brain. In the brain, the breathing process continues in a metamorphosed way, so that, physiologically speaking, we have a synthesis of the breathing process and the thinking process.

Yoga is based on this process, transforming ordinary breathing into a differently regulated breathing. Through the modified breathing process – that is, through a more physical process – thinking was transformed. It was made into what a certain view in the old, instinctive sense yielded. Today, we live in a differentiated human organization; today we have to go straight to the thought process, but today we also arrive at something completely different as a result. So when you go into the specifics, you will be able to clearly define each individual phase of cognition as it has occurred in succession in human development. And then you will no longer think that what is now available in the form of anthroposophy, as a suitable way of acquiring higher knowledge in the present day, can somehow be lumped together with what was available in older times. Of course, we cannot discuss what I have not talked about at all on the basis of what I have told you in an introductory lecture. I would now, of course, have to continue with what pre-existent life is like. I could say nothing else in my introductory lecture except that the realization of pre-existent life is attained through the processes described, which are indeed different from anything that has ever emerged in history as inner development.

And now I would really like to ask what justification there is for criticism when I use the word pre-existence in the sense in which everyone can understand it. It means nothing other than what it says through the wording. If I understand existence as that which is experienced through the senses, and then speak of pre-existence, then it is simply existence in the spiritual and soul life before sensual existence. This does not point to some old theosophy, but a word is used that would have to be further explained if one goes beyond an orienting lecture. You will find that if you take what may be called Theosophy and what I have described in my book, which I have also entitled “Theosophy” - if you take that, then it leads back to its beginnings in ancient forms - just as our chemistry leads back to alchemy.

But what I have described today as a process of knowledge is not at all similar to any process of knowledge in ancient times. It is therefore quite impossible to make what will follow from my lecture today and what has not yet been said the subject of a discussion by saying: Yes, preexistence, that leads back to old tools. If you have followed it, it does not lead back to old tools, but it does continue certain attitudes of knowledge that were present at the time when the old tools were needed, and which today only exist in their remnants and project into our present as beliefs, whereas in the past they were reached in processes of knowledge. Now, through processes of knowledge that are organized in the same way as our scientific knowledge, we must again come to insights that can fill the whole human being, not just the intellectually oriented one.

Dear attendees, if you want to criticize something, you have to criticize what has been said directly, not what could not be discussed in the lecture and of which you then say that it is not justified or the like. How can something that is just a simple description not be justified? I have done nothing but describe, and that is precisely what I do in the introductory lectures. Only someone who knew what happens when one really does these things could say that something is not explained. If one really does these things, that is, if one no longer merely speaks about them from the outside, then one will see that they are much more deeply grounded than any mathematical science, for they go much more closely to the soul than mathematical processes do. And so such a criticism is an extraordinarily superficial one. And the fact that anthroposophy is always understood only in this external way makes its appearance so extraordinarily difficult. In no other science is one required to give everything when a lecture is given. Only in anthroposophy is one required to give everything in a lecture. I have said from the beginning that I cannot do that.

Applause

But it is not a matter of my describing what is available as old tools of the trade, for example how gnosis has come to such knowledge in inner soul processes or how, for example, the oriental yoga school comes to knowledge. If one knows these tools, if one does not just talk about them, ...

Applause

... then people will no longer claim that anthroposophy reminds them of the old days. This is only maintained as long as one allows reminiscences to come in the form of abstract concepts that arise only from the fact that they are not compared with the concrete, with the real. Of course, I could go on for a very long time, but this may suffice as an answer.

Lively applause

Mr. H. Schmidt: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to criticize something, or rather put a question mark over it: Dr. Steiner said this evening that every scientific world view is dualistic in the sense that it must add to what is immediate and certain something uncertain. It is clear that in anthroposophy this other is the supersensible world. But the scientific value of a philosophy is shown to us in how far it succeeds in presenting the inner relationship between the supersensible and the sensible - I say “scientific” value on purpose, not cultural or psychological. Platonism, for example, which in this respect has not so often succeeded in constructing the relationship between idea and reality, had an enormous cultural significance.

Now, in anthroposophy, Dr. Steiner attempts to describe the relationship between the supersensible and the sensible, that is, he attempts to prove the necessary transition from the immediate sensory world to the supersensible world, or - seen subjectively - from empirical and rational knowledge, from scientific knowledge, to what I would call super-scientific knowledge. He used anthroposophy for this. I am only relying on Dr. Steiner's lecture, and more specifically on the first part – frankly, I didn't have enough strength for the second.

Applause

Anthroposophy is based on the analogy of mathematics. Dr. Steiner explained how we project mathematics into nature. This has already been established in Greek science, and in fact the ideal of mathematical science is at least to mathematize nature, as they said in ancient times. But in what sense can we even talk about this? That is precisely the problem.

Dr. Steiner explained with what affect, with what passion, with what sympathy the individual mathematician imposes his ideas of conceptual things in empirical reality. But what are the structures that the mathematician deals with? They are not his representations at all. The circle, for example, that a mathematician draws on the blackboard to demonstrate his geometric theorems is not his representation. He has nothing to do with the circle as a human being – rather, he has nothing to do with it as a mathematician, but he does have something to do with it as a human being, in that he uses his two eyes to perceive the circle. Restlessness

The concept of a circle, which the mathematician does deal with, cannot be represented in reality at all; it is never perceived by the senses. The concept of a circle is much more general.

Now anthroposophy needs something personally real that it wants to project into nature. The general, which I have in my mathematical head, so to speak, does not exist in reality. If the supersensible world is to be founded on the sensory world in such a way that conclusions can be drawn from the subject to the object, then this can never be done by projecting subjective ideas into nature in the manner of mathematics. In my opinion, the analogy of mathematics is not appropriate for this, because mathematics deals with conceptual things that never occur as such in reality. In my opinion, this is an objection to anthroposophy in general. On the other hand, today's lecture emphasizes the reality of supersensible things.

So, what matters to me: I cannot see how mathematics is supposed to serve here to explain the bridge from the sensory to the supersensible. The main value of the lecture now obviously lay in the fact that personal experience, personal excitement, the totality of personal experience, is to be active in thinking. But that must immediately raise a concern for everyone. The personal, the individual, is precisely what is unnecessary. Yes, anyone can tell me: “That is your imagination, that is your idea, I have nothing to do with it.” In my opinion, this is an objection to anthroposophy in general.

Applause

Then, what Dr. Steiner was particularly concerned about, in the inner participation that his lecture had at this point and that was actually moving for the opponent: the starting point for higher knowledge for Dr. Steiner is moral intuition. Anthroposophy requires a supersensible to derive moral principles from it, and it gains this derivation by looking at the supersensible. To be honest, that doesn't make any sense to me at all. Let's assume that there is a supersensible faculty of knowledge, or rather, such faculties of knowledge that we ordinary mortals do not yet have, and that it would also be possible to actually see the supersensible with this higher faculty of knowledge - the supersensible as an existing thing: how can I see from that what I should do? We can never deduce what we should do from what is. We can never build a bridge from the sphere of being to the sphere of ought.

Walter Birkigt: Since there are no further requests for the floor for the time being, I would like to ask Dr. Steiner to respond. Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, I would like to say the following first: The very nature of the remarks I made this evening prevented me from speaking of analogy where I spoke of mathematics, and I ask you to reflect carefully on the fact that I did not use the word analogy. This is no accident, but a thoroughly conscious decision. I could not use the word 'analogy' because there was no question of an analogy with mathematics, but mathematical thinking was used to arrive at a characteristic of the inner experience of certainty. And by trying to explain how one can arrive at an inner experience of certainty in mathematics, I wanted to show how one can acquire this same degree of certainty in a completely different field, where one tries to arrive at certainty in the same way. It is therefore not about an analogy with mathematics, but about citing two real experiences of the soul that are to be compared with each other in no other way than by pointing to the attainment of inner certainty. Dear attendees, what the previous speaker said is not a reference to my lecture, because then he could not have used the word analogy. I avoided it because it does not belong.

Furthermore, it was said that I spoke of the passion of the individual mathematician. I could not do that either, because I simply referred to the nature of mathematical experience as it is known to those who are initiated into and trained in mathematics. How anyone can even think of speaking of some kind of personal involvement in mathematics is beyond me. On the other hand, I would like to make the following comment: It sounds very nice to say that the inner concept of the circle has absolutely nothing to do with the circle that I draw on the blackboard. I am not going to claim that it has anything to do with it, because it would never occur to me to say that the inner concept of the circle is made of chalk. I don't think that's a very profound truth that is being expressed.

But when we pass from abstract thinking to thinking in terms of reality, we must say the following. Let us take something that we construct mathematically within ourselves, for example, the sentence: If we draw a diameter in a circle and from one end of the diameter a line to any point on the circumference and from this point a further line to the other end of the diameter, then this angle is always a right angle. I do not need to draw this on the board at all. What I recognize there, namely that in a circle every angle through the diameter with the vertex on the periphery is a right angle, that is a purely internal experience. I have no need to use the circle here on the board.

Interjection: That is not true! Only when you have also looked at it, can you construct it afterwards!

But there is no doubt that what I draw on the board is only an external aid.

For anyone who can think mathematically, it is out of the question that they cannot also construct such mathematical truths purely through inner experience, even if they are the most complicated mathematical truths. There is no question of that. Even if I had to draw them with chalk, that would still have no significance for the simple reason that what constitutes the substantial validity of the proposition is to be illustrated in the drawing, but does not have to be concluded in it. If I use the drawing on the board to visualize that the angle is a right angle, then this visualization does not establish anything specific for the inner validity of the sentence. And that is what ultimately matters. There can be absolutely no question of my first needing the drawing on the board. But even if I needed it, that would be completely irrelevant to what I have said about the nature of mathematization – not about solving individual problems, but about mathematization in general. What is important here lies in a completely different area than what has been mentioned here, because when we look at mathematization, we are simply led to say that we experience inner truths.

I did not say that we already experience realities in mathematics. Therefore, it is completely irrelevant to object that mathematics as such does not contain any reality. But in the formal it contains truths, and these can also be experienced. The way in which one comes to truth and knowledge is important, even if these do not initially have any reality within mathematics itself. But when this mathematical experience is transferred to a completely different area, namely to the area where the exactness of mathematics is applied to the real life of the soul, the character of exactness, which is initially experienced in the mathematical-formal, is carried into the real. And only through this am I entitled to carry over into reality what applies to mathematics as merely formal.

I have first shown how to arrive from within at truths which we — of course only in an external way — apparently transfer as unrealities to observation, to experiment, or with which experiment is interwoven. And then I also showed how this formal character is transformed into a real one. But then, what is apparently so plausible still does not apply: what is mathematical only lives in me; the concept only lives in me, it does not live outside in reality. What has been mathematically explored and mathematically worked out would have nothing to do with reality as such. Well, does the concept of a circle really only live in me?

Imagine – I don't draw a circle on the board, but I have my two fingers here. I hold a string with them and make the object move in a circular motion, so that this lead ball moves in a circle. The laws that I now recognize for the movement by mathematically recognizing them – do they have nothing to do with reality? I proceed continually in such a way that I determine behavior in the real precisely through mathematics. I proceed in such a way when I go from induction to deduction that I bring in what I have first determined by induction and then process it further with mathematics. If I introduce the end term of an empirical induction into a mathematical formula and then simply continue calculating, then I am counting on the fact that what I develop mathematically through deduction corresponds to reality. It is only through this that the mathematical is fruitful for reality, not through such philosophical arguments as have been presented.

Let us look at the fruitfulness of the mathematical for reality. One can see the fruitfulness simply when, for example, someone says: I see the irregularities that exist in relation to what has been calculated, and therefore I use other variables in the calculation. And so he initially comes to assume a reality by purely mathematical means; reality arises afterwards – it is there. Thus I have, by continuing my empirical path purely through mathematics, also shown the applicability of the inner experience to the outer world. At least I expect it. And if one could not expect that the real event, which one has followed in sensory-descriptive reality to a certain point, continues in the calculation, then what I just meant would not be possible at all: that one feels satisfied in mathematics. The point is to take the concepts seriously, as they have been dealt with.

Now to what I said about moral intuition. You may remember that I said in my lecture that the intuition that I established as the third stage of supersensible knowledge occurs last. But moral intuition also occurs for ordinary consciousness. It is the only one that initially arises for a consciousness that has advanced to our level from the supersensible world. Moral intuition is simply an intuition projected down from a higher level to our level of knowledge. I illustrated this clearly in the lecture. That is why I spoke of this moral intuition first, not afterwards. I have described it as the starting point. One learns to recognize it; and when one has grasped it correctly, then one has a certain subjective precondition for also understanding what comes afterwards. For in experiencing moral intuition, one experiences something that, when compared with what is otherwise real, has a different kind of reality, and that is the reality of ought. If you go into what I have said, then the difference between being and ought is explained simply by the fact that moral intuition projects into our ordinary sphere of consciousness, while the other intuition is not a projection, but must first be attained. It was not at all implied that moral intuition is only a special case for the process of knowledge of general intuition, but it is simply the first case where something occurs to us intuitively in our ordinary consciousness, in today's state of consciousness.

So, it is important to understand exactly the concepts that are developed here for anthroposophy. I wanted to give suggestions. I fully understand that objections are possible because, of course, one cannot explain everything in such detail, and so I assume that there are still many doubts and so on in the souls of those present. But imagine how long my lecture would have been if I had already dispelled in the lecture all the doubts that I am now trying to dispel in my answer. That is what one has to reckon with in a first exploratory lecture, not only in anthroposophy but in all fields. That is what it was about today. I did not want to give anything conclusive, and I must say that some people do not want to go into anthroposophy at all. But I have found that the best recognizers of what anthroposophy is were often not those who fell for it right from the start, but that the best workers in anthroposophy became those who had gone through bitter doubts.

Therefore, please do not take what I said with a certain sharpness in the reply as if it were meant with hatred. Rather, I am basically pleased about everything that is objected to, because it is only by overcoming these obstacles of objection that one actually enters into anthroposophy. And I have always had more satisfaction from those who have come to anthroposophy via the reefs of rejection and doubt than from those who have entered with full sails at the first attempt.

Lively applause.

Mr. Wilhelm: I do not wish to criticize, but only to ask a question to which I would find Dr. Steiner's answer very interesting. Dr. Steiner replied to the criticism of the first speaker, who compared Theosophy with Anthroposophy, by saying that the method of knowledge of Anthroposophy is quite different from that of Theosophy, especially the old one, and that in the whole history of Theosophy there is no trace, not a single reference, to the method of knowledge presented by Dr. Steiner this evening. I would just like to ask whether Dr. Steiner is familiar with the passages in 'The Green Face' – a book that has a very strong Theosophical slant and where this method of knowledge actually forms the basis of the whole work. I would be very interested to hear Dr. Steiner's position on this.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I would first like to point out that it would be possible, if there were indeed echoes in the “Green Face”, which appeared a few years ago, of what I have said this evening, to be fundamentally traced back to anthroposophy. Shout: Never!

I only said in general that it would not contradict itself, but since someone here shouted “Never!”, I completely agree with that, because I find nothing anthroposophical in “The Green Face”, but I find that what is said about anthroposophy in “The Green Face” is based on methods of knowledge that I would not want to have anything to do with. That is what I have to say about it.

Dear attendees! With its scientific character, anthroposophy is not doing well with our contemporaries. The scientists find that this anthroposophy does not have the character of what they call science; and in turn, the people of faith, those who, from a religious point of view, advocate a way for people to find paths to the spiritual world, criticize precisely this scientific character of anthroposophy. Scientists are accustomed to taking what is accessible to sense observation , what can be investigated by experiment, to take it in, to combine it rationally, and then to ascend to certain laws that underlie the natural phenomena that are perceptible to the senses.

Anyone who has familiarized themselves with the investigations in this field with the kind of scientific conscientiousness and serious inner discipline that underlie our newer science has often absorbed the opinion that exact, real, scientific only possible when it relies on external sense perception and on what the intellect can fathom with the judgments it makes about sense perception and with the conclusions it draws from them. This kind of research has a certain certainty, I would even say a certain ground in that which cannot be denied in its existence, because it proves itself in this existence independently of the human being and announces itself to him out of this existence. One may, as is the case with many physiologically or even psychologically minded personalities of modern times, believe that what the senses directly perceive, what is the content of human perception, is conditioned by the peculiarity of the senses, and thus has a certain subjective character. But they are certain that even if what is perceived directly has a subjective character, for external observation there still underlies something objective for the human being, which presents itself to this observation and provides a firm foundation for research. Therefore, such personalities, who are, as it were, schooled in the exact investigation of external natural phenomena, feel insecure at the moment when this field of external sensory phenomena is left behind and they ascend to other fields. They believe that the inner certainty that is guaranteed by observation and experiment and by the mind that is bound to them, ceases the moment one leaves the soil of this sensory world. This is the source of such judgments as that made by du Bois-Reymond in his classic speech “On the Limits of Knowledge of Nature”, that science ends where the supersensible begins. Anyone approaching anthroposophy with this attitude will naturally have to deny its scientific character, and basically it is only this psychological background that rebels in the widest circles today when the scientific character of anthroposophy is mentioned.

On the other hand, there are people of faith. They often do not dispute that Anthroposophy presents what it has to say about the supersensible worlds in the form of ideas and concepts, and also in the form of connections between ideas and concepts that are thoroughly scientific in character, or at least endeavor to emulate the scientific character. But they dispute Anthroposophy's legitimacy precisely because it strives for this scientific character. For they say: Whatever can reveal itself to man from the supersensible worlds must reveal itself to him in the most intimate experiences of his soul; man must, above all things, tend towards what he feels from the supersensible with feeling and inclination of will, and this supersensible must bear a certain mysterious character. It is precisely when one stands before the mystery with one's soul fervently and religiously attuned, before that which does not yield to the transparent idea, to the clear concept, that one can develop within oneself that elevation, that selfless devotion, which is necessary for the human being in relation to the supersensible world.

And so it is that precisely such personalities are of the opinion that anthroposophy, because it wants to bring the supersensible into the comprehensible element of human consciousness, thereby distorts the religious feeling of the human being, their pious devotion. What relates to the religious must – so it is said – bear an irrational character. One even says that religion must have a kind of paradoxical character, that it must not be confined to what is scientifically called the comprehensible.

Anthroposophy is now confronted with these two views. It is quite understandable that, compared to the usual schools of thought of our time, all of which can be more or less categorized into one of the two categories described, the scientific character of anthroposophy is incomprehensible and difficult to understand. For anthroposophy seeks to arrive at the supersensible in a scientific way, by paths other than those usually recognized in science, and it seeks to follow this path into the supersensible with courage — until the goal is reached where this supersensible subtle world yields to human ideas in exactly the same way as external nature yields to human ideas for natural science, and it becomes difficult for anthroposophy to justify its scientific character in the face of the often rigid tendency of the spiritual currents of our time. Now, in order to characterize this scientific character in today's debate from certain points of view, it will be necessary to address the methodology of anthroposophy from a certain point of view.

This anthroposophy feels most at home at its starting point when it can fully stand where our time of scientific thinking and scientific research has led. Dilettantism and laymanship in relation to natural science may perhaps be touched on enthusiastically by anthroposophy; but they will not be able to find the deepest inner satisfaction in it, because anthroposophy will seem to them to work far too much in the sense of scientific thinking. But it must be said that anthroposophy begins where today's recognized science ends. Today's recognized science starts from the externally given, rises from this given to the ideas called natural laws of this given. If we then live within these ideas, so to speak connecting the ideas we have gained from nature with our soul life, then we have an inner view of nature, and this inner view satisfies us because we can clearly survey the transition from one idea to another, because inwardly, so to speak, in the whole field of our natural ideas, we have clearly before us what presents itself to us externally in the details of sensory observation and experiment. And when this natural science has arrived at this experience of natural ideas, then it feels at its end. Anthroposophy, however, seeks to begin precisely at this point. It takes up what has entered into the soul as natural ideas, and looks at the state of mind of the person who has united such natural ideas with his soul. It looks at the way in which the human being has applied his own activity, has brought his soul and spirit into action while exploring nature, how he has arrived at his ideas of nature; it looks at the activity that the human being has carried out during the research, and it then seeks to develop this activity further. In a sense, it seeks to make the beginning with an inner soul development, using what natural science has arrived at as its end. This now seems to lead entirely into the subjective.

Yes, by further developing the ideas gained, by seeking an inner soul life as a continuation of what has been applied in relation to external nature, one believes that one can get into the purely subjective, into the purely personal, for which only assertions of a subjective character may be made.

Now, dear readers, for the first steps in this direction, this is undoubtedly the case. But anyone who follows the details of these inner soul exercises for the further development of human soul abilities in my writings “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science: An Outline”, and so on, will find that this subjective approach is only a transitional stage and that in the end, beyond the subjective, one arrives at an objective, an objective that is indeed inwardly experienced subjectively – like the ideas of nature – but which, in its certainty, in its validity, is as independent of human subjectivity subjectivity, as are, after all, the mathematico-geometric judgments that are worked out subjectively, albeit only formally. These judgments, however, are independent of human subjectivity in their truth character, despite being worked out subjectively. Only through the path taken by anthroposophical research does one not enter into a merely formal realm, as in mathematics, but into a realm in which human spiritual content is created that relates to realities. When we draw a triangle in mathematics and examine its laws, it is initially only an inward subjective experience, and we must then apply it outwardly to something that can be perceived by the senses so that we can speak of objectivity. The anthroposophical method leads to certain insights, just as in mathematics, but at the same time they lead to insights that have their meaning and validity in the truly spiritually existing world. This becomes clear when one describes – from a certain point of view, I can do this today – the methods that the anthroposophical researcher applies to his or her own inner soul life in order to enter the supersensible world. I say: from a certain point of view, I can undertake this, because this anthroposophical path of research is a very complicated one, it has to involve many details of inner soul practice, and with regard to these details, I must refer you to the books mentioned.

But now, with regard to today's topic, which is supposed to deal with the scientific character of anthroposophy, I would like to start from a kind of historical perspective, because from this the scientific character of what is currently trying to incorporate anthroposophy into human civilization will perhaps be most apparent. When we speak today of the methods by which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible worlds, many of our contemporaries are reminded of methods that are similar to them, or which they perhaps even consider to be the same as anthroposophy.

Just in the last few weeks, I have had to talk about anthroposophical methods in a wide variety of cities, and again and again I heard the judgment: Europe is not suitable for pointing people to the ancient Asian yoga cult, to the ancient yoga system, where one is to prepare the soul through inner soul exercises in order to see something other than what it is able to see without these exercises in ordinary life and in ordinary science. But people who judge in this way do not realize that there is a radical difference between what I describe as the anthroposophical methods and what was present — albeit going back to a distant gray antiquity — in oriental wisdom schools and oriental spiritual currents as soul exercises for arriving at another world in the manner of those spiritual currents, other than the one ordinary life presents. If we point out what these schools of thought wanted to give to man, we immediately notice that the ancient spiritual and soul character of man in the East was quite different from that of present-day Europeans.

If we are unprejudiced, we must take seriously the idea that we are seeking a progression in human development from one metamorphosis of the soul life to another. Anyone who believes that the human soul was essentially the same in all cultural periods, or at most different in certain primitive, wild tribes, is making a huge mistake. Anyone who is able to immerse themselves in the way in which, for example, the ancient Vedas or other ancient documents of earlier times sought to convey wisdom to the world will find that this way of imparting wisdom relied on a very different receptivity in the human being, in a very different state of mind, and perhaps only anthroposophical research is in a position to provide information about how the human being has changed in this respect in the course of his development. If we immerse ourselves in the ideas that have taken on poetic forms in the Vedas, for example, we find that there is an enormous difference between the way in which the Vedas were absorbed into the soul life and the way in which we feel today that they are appropriate to our soul state. We feel the need today to have strictly defined, sharply contoured ideas, ideas that have a recognizably logical character, that are transparent, that appeal not directly to the feelings but only indirectly. These are only isolated character traits that I can give. But anyone who compares the wisdom handed down to mankind in the Vedas, for example, with what we today call our pursuit of science and wisdom, will find a huge difference. What is the reason for this difference?

Now, what is usually called psychology today is not very capable of entering into the inner workings of the human soul, which is so mobile and carries so many individual, characteristic, essential traits. That is why today we find little that actually resembles the wisdom handed down to us in the Vedas. But some clarity can be gained if we do not compare the content of the Vedas with our sharply contoured, intellectualized concepts, but rather if we consider the following fact.

We imagine a human soul that is in the process of transitioning from a state of sleep to a state of wakefulness. We imagine it is imbued with the content of a dream. This dream content can take on wondrous and beautiful forms, can reveal an inner drama, can have a pictorial character that carries a thoroughly poetic mood. Certainly, this dream content cannot be directly compared with the wonderful wisdom of the Vedas. But there is something to it when Plato senses the poetic reliving of the world's secrets by the human soul as something dream-like. If we follow the soul as it emerges from the state of sleep and has these dream images before it during the transition to the waking state, we follow its path further: the dream images gradually paralyze, the person takes possession of his physical nature, especially of his will nature; because only when he has taken possession of his full will nature does everything dream-like disappear. Then he is able to make use of his senses through his corporeality; then he is aware of his connection with the physical world around him, then he is able to grasp the difference between the world of dreams and the world of reality.

What, then, is actually the essential thing in this transition from the state of sleep to the waking state? We can observe how, as it were, the dream fades more and more as the daytime perceptions emerge; the daytime perceptions dispel the dreamlike. But no one can be in any doubt that it is a real experience of the soul to which we surrender in our dreams, and that that part of us which later takes possession of our physical body lives in these dream images. The dream images escape it by submerging into physicality. With a more refined psychology than is available to our contemporaries, one can follow what I am hinting at here in great detail. Then one will find out how the soul actually emerges from a state that we will leave undefined for the time being, through the dream state, how it is in a state in the dream state of not quite having its body. At the same moment that it has its body, it is no longer dreaming. When anthroposophical research is applied to these facts, the following emerges. Anthroposophical research, as it must be understood today and as it takes account of contemporary civilization, initially aims to develop the human thought life so that thoughts become stronger and more intense than they are in ordinary science and ordinary life. This strengthening of thoughts is achieved through meditation and concentration. One devotes oneself to a particular content of thought, applying all the strength of the soul to it. In this way, the soul strengthens itself in the same way that a muscle strengthens itself when it is used in work. The whole mental life changes. One gradually feels that one no longer lives in abstract, pale thoughts, which can only be stimulated by the external world, but that one lives in thoughts themselves, as in an element that is as lively as otherwise only the experience of the external sense world; and by developing the power of thought further and further, one finally becomes free from one's physical organization in one's thinking. One develops an inner soul activity that, to a certain extent, takes place outside the body. Only now do you begin to realize what it means to have an inner soul activity. At first, through these exercises, they take place in mere thinking. But thinking is independent of all corporeality; one can bring it to such thinking independent of all corporeality. But then, when one has brought it to such inner vividness in thinking, one can distinguish between what occurs in waking life and what is present for the person from falling asleep to waking up in the state of sleep. For now we know through direct observation that when a person is awake and thinking, he must make use of the body for the activity of his thinking. For waking, ordinary thinking, the body is the foundation. The thinking that is peculiar to us in ordinary consciousness cannot, so to speak, illuminate itself to such an extent that it becomes truly conscious through its own power; the body must be its helper. Thought must be thought in the body, so that the thinking that we use in science and in our ordinary lives today is simply thinking with the help of the body. In this respect, anthroposophical research in particular makes people more materialistic than they would otherwise be with regard to ordinary thinking.

But you also learn to recognize something else, namely, the inner state of mind in which you are when you devote yourself to body-free thinking, which has arisen through meditation and concentration, when you have a thinking experience in the soul freed from the body, and you can now compare what you experience with what the state of sleep is like. One now learns to recognize that, with regard to one's body, one is just as independent during the strengthened independent life of thought as one is otherwise independent in sleep; only in sleep, in the independent soul that has left the body, the weakest prevails, which can only with the help of the body inwardly enlighten itself in such a way that it comes to consciousness. Therefore, thinking remains unconscious during sleep; we descend into unconsciousness during sleep. We enter into a very similar state of freedom from the body after meditation and concentration. But now the thinking has become so strong that unconsciousness does not occur, but rather a fullness of consciousness, so that one lives in a state that is radically different from the state of sleep, namely in a soul life independent of the body. Now one gets to know the character of human sleep. One now knows that the human soul leaves the body when it falls asleep, but that in the present state of human development it has only those thoughts that can be inwardly illuminated with the help of the body to the point of awareness; and by has consciously risen to such a state of soul, which is free of the body and is filled with content, one now learns to compare this state with that in which the authors of the Vedas were.

These authors of the Vedas could not make use of the kind of thinking that we have in our present-day civilization, and we are led back to a state of mind from older stages of human development, when man simply did not feel it to be his natural state to convey the secrets of the world through the body in sharply contoured thoughts, but where he could, through a certain instinct, externalize his thoughts, even if they could unfold outside the body. We look back to conditions, not as we have them today, but to dreamlike, dull, but still to conditions in which people developed the most important thing they developed in their soul life, namely the view of the world, outside of their body. One gets a picture of how the development of humanity in relation to the state of the soul was from older times to the present day. It can be said that the last remnants of an earlier state were still present until the middle of the Middle Ages, even until the dawn of modern times. It was only in the age of Galileo and Copernicus, which taught people to see the world in sharp, mathematically modeled terms, that this age progressed to an experience of the soul in thinking through the body ; whereas up to this age one still notices how the last remnants of a soul state free of the body are present in a form of knowledge free of the body, and the further back one goes in older times, the more one finds such knowledge free of the body. This could only express itself in soul formations similar to dreams. In a sense, people passed from the body-free state to the state where they use the body and develop what corresponds to their insight into the spiritual world.

We have to look back to such times if we want to understand what is communicated to us in older literature about the wisdom of the world. We must not criticize this wisdom of the world directly with our conceptual worlds; then we destroy it and cannot recognize it in its truth. But if we can transport ourselves back to these older times, and to that through which these older people wanted to go beyond their ordinary perception, then much will become understandable to us. For these people, it was not our science that was everyday, but rather what they saw in their images, in their instinctive imaginations. They did not need to achieve this through special exercises first. For them, the task of further development had to consist of something different than for us. If we now let ourselves in for this realization with what has been handed down to us, and especially look at the yoga exercises of the Orient, we must say: All these yoga exercises aimed at achieving a way of knowing that goes beyond the body in a body-free state, a way of knowing that uses the body as a tool.

This may sound strange, and yet, to an unbiased observer, it is how it presents itself! The goal of the older humanity was precisely to achieve something that is given to us in everyday life. They did not have the sharply contoured thinking that we apply with such triumph in science; they sought to achieve it through their exercises. Yes, even if you engage in the systematically well-performed yoga breathing exercises, where the personalities devoted to them do not perform the breathing process in the usual way, but in an abnormal but still lawful way, we see that they were designed to enable you to grasp the human body with what you were in a body-free state of mind. One might say: What is given to us as a gift is what these people strove for through their yoga exercises; we see everywhere how they endeavor to think in such a way that the body becomes the tool of thought. Thus, for anyone who fully understands the facts, the ancient yoga exercises that have been preserved to this day have the effect of making them see: These people strove for the state of mind that is, so to speak, partly innate and partly acquired through our upbringing since childhood.

Now, of course, the question may arise: But such a student of yoga has, through his yoga exercises, explored the secrets of the world for his own perception, has settled into wonderful worlds; but when one hears what they describe as the revelations they have heard, one soon gets the idea: what they have experienced is indeed very different from what we can strive for today with our abstract, blown-off thoughts. But here is an important psychological fact that must be considered. What can offer man the highest in a certain relationship in his relationship to the world arises precisely from practice, from striving, from inner work, not from the finished state. The yoga students had to conquer themselves with inner soul conquests to see what is given to us as a finished product, and only during this struggle and through this struggle do we become attuned to the deeper secrets of the world. If what is achieved is innate or acquired, it is taken for granted and presented as the self-evident in the environment; one no longer lives into the secrets of the world, one simply sees through the world according to one's organization in the environment. Therefore, for us, who are on the horizon that the yoga students first had to reach, the contemplation of the deeper secrets of the world, which the yoga students contemplated, has ceased. And today we feel the necessity to continue the practice, to continue it at a different level, to take the starting point where the yoga students left off.

The beginning of the yoga training is dreamlike, instinctively pictorial; but it is precisely to what we today feel is the actual spirit of science that the yoga student sought to develop. Today, because the spirit of science is now the natural state of civilization, we have to start from this state in our soul constitution and develop it further. We can therefore say: the yoga student has developed to our way of thinking, we have to develop further from our way of thinking. The yoga student designed all his exercises to incorporate thinking into his soul activity. Today, when I describe exercises to be practiced for the purpose of attaining higher knowledge, I do say that these exercises must be directed towards strengthening the thinking, elevating it – not just to unconscious imagination, which belongs to antiquity, but to conscious freedom from the body. We must become free from physicality again, whereas the yoga student strove to enter into it; so in a sense we are going in the opposite direction.

But then I must describe this path further, how these exercises must strive to develop a liveliness of soul such as we otherwise have in the experience of external sense perceptions. In our sensory perceptions, we are to a certain extent independent of our physicality. The senses are integrated into our physicality. However, we become relatively independent of our sensory perceptions; it is only in our thinking that we fully take in what is revealed to us from the outside world. Only when we develop further from this thinking, which the yoga student first strove for, does it now become important to suppress this thinking itself at a certain stage and to bring about a state that is similar to sensory perception, which does not merge into thought, but which, so to speak, leaves thought behind in the physical body. The essence of our exercises undertaken for the purpose of anthroposophical research is this: to overcome thinking in turn, to rise to a state that gives the person an experience, so to speak, in a second personality, but in such a way that this second personality now has the intense, the strengthened, the pictorialized thinking, and that the ordinary personality with common sense, with healthy thinking bound to the physical body, remains behind, fully aware.

Thus anyone who, in today's world, seeks to gain direct experience of supersensible knowledge must strive to achieve this twofold division of their personality. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with any kind of pathological condition. In hallucinations and visions, the personality is lost in the hallucinations and in the world of visions; in anthroposophical research, the personality remains and the ordinary, body-bound thinking continues to live. Those personalities who enter the higher worlds live in them with their developed, metamorphosed thinking. Thus the anthroposophical researcher is always in a position to follow up with his ordinary personality what he sees in the higher worlds, and to do so in a strictly critical way.

This training is now an absolute prerequisite for the anthroposophical path of research; and what is in the human personality by virtue of this training, the scientific character of the state of mind, is by no means abandoned. This scientific personality stands there, criticizes, controls - and even narrates - from its scientific concepts that which the other aspect of the personality, the one that has entered the supersensible world, beholds. But then we must say: on the one hand there is the outer sense perception; natural science turns to it, it seeks the laws of nature, it seeks to relive inwardly in the natural ideas, which have the laws of nature as their content, that which appears outwardly to the senses. The anthroposophical researcher finds himself in the state of soul that arises from this. By forming the ideas of nature in nature, we are scientifically satisfied by the character that this world of ideas bears. This scientific conviction is an inner experience! It is not the external world, nature, that tells us what is scientific, but our own methodology. When we give these ideas a content from sense perception with our ordinary thinking, we give them a supersensible content with the higher gaze of our strengthened thinking. There is no other content of thought, no other logic, no other scientific method that prevails in ordinary natural science and that prevails in what is seen supersensibly by the anthroposophical researcher and handed over to the scientific soul disposition for description.

That is the inner connection. The Yoga Training has sought the spirit of science as its ultimate goal. We have trained it in the age of Galileo and Copernicus in the outer world of nature, we are leading it further to conscious inner vision, but we do not deny it. We examine what is seen in the higher sense in the supersensible world, exactly in the same way, through the same ideas, as we examine what can be fathomed through the eyes, ears and other senses in outer experiment. In its development, humanity has striven for science. What science has become has become a human state of soul. This state of soul is cultivated by working one's way up into the supersensible world through anthroposophy.

But developing thoughts is only one part of what is striven for in anthroposophical schooling. In the previous lecture on “The Harmonization of Science, Art and Religion”, I already indicated that by strengthening our thoughts through meditation and concentration, we come to an intuitive perception of the soul and spirit of the human being as it was in a spiritual and soul world before birth or conception. One can rise to the eternal part of the human soul in its prenatal existence by developing the thoughts that are present in ordinary science. But if anthroposophical research is to be complete, exercises of the will must be added to this development of thought. Again, I cannot describe in detail what must be undertaken as exercises of the will for the purpose of anthroposophical research; I must refer to the books already mentioned, but I can again say something in principle.

To train the will, it is above all necessary that we raise the will, insofar as it extends into thinking, to a higher level than it is in ordinary life. A good exercise for this is what I call “reverse imagining”, for example when we look back on our daily life in the evening, preferably in images, so that a different force has to be developed than is contained in the thoughts. When we review our daily life backwards in such a way, allowing it to pass before our mind's eye in great detail, for example when we go down a staircase, we would imagine it in such a way that we start from the bottom step and work our way up to the top; not lose one's whole day to it, but it can be done in a short time if it is practiced correctly; if we get used to thinking about the course of ordinary events, then we have to exert the will to imagine events differently than they usually happen. We can also feel a melody backwards in this way or imagine a drama backwards. In doing so, we develop the will to a greater strength than is usual. We can now help ourselves in such exercises by doing other will exercises. In ordinary life, we proceed – if we consider longer periods of time, we can point out – from metamorphosis to metamorphosis; but it is the circumstances to which we surrender and which then make others out of us. But if you take your own development into your own hands, for example, if you try to break bad habits, if you try to unlearn something that may take years, and make this striving a characteristic of your nature by by taking it up into the will, one tries to take his development into his own hands according to a strictly outlined goal. The will is thereby strengthened, and one attains something in relation to supersensible seeing in a different direction than in the direction of thought. I want to express that through a comparison.

Take the human eye. Because it is transparent and does not bring its own materiality into play, we are able to see through the eye. The moment it brings its own materiality into play through a disease of the eyes, we can no longer see. The eye must be selflessly integrated into the human organism if it is to serve the purpose of seeing. Now I do not want to claim that the human organism is diseased in ordinary life; but for supersensible vision it is just as unsuitable as a strong-sighted eye is for ordinary vision. Through the exercises of the will our organism becomes, as it were, spiritually transparent. Normally the body is spiritually opaque; we carry it with us, we live with our will in its materiality. Through the exercises of the will, it becomes transparent in soul and spirit; it becomes, as it were, a sense organ. Through it, we learn to see spiritually and soulfully, as we see physically through the transparent eye. When we look through our body that has become transparent, we stand – as if through our physical, sensory eye in a physical outer world – in a spiritual world. We have progressed from imagination to inspiration and to the actual experience of being in a spiritual and soul world. We learn to be in the spiritual and soul world with our soul in the same way as we are in the physical world with our organization.

It turns out that we now experience something in the image that we would otherwise experience in death: in death, the body is shed, while the soul and spirit live on. That this is a truth is expressed in the image for this body-free will, that is, for the standing within the spiritual world, in the same way that what applies to our sensory environment is expressed only through a thought. We thus arrive at the other side of human immortality; we add to being unborn, being immortal. The anthroposophical researcher thus ascends to a real vision of immortality.

But when one comes to this vision, one also learns to evaluate other soul states of ordinary life in the right way in a more refined psychology. What is present in the waking state as facts of the soul's life can be recognized through strengthened thinking. That is why I gave the example of the soul waking up through the dream world into the waking state and linked it to the strengthening of strengthened thinking. But when we now do exercises of the will, thereby entering into the spiritual world and also being able to gain an image of our soul after death when we have left the body, then we also get to know the moment of falling asleep more precisely for our ordinary life. At first, we experience falling asleep in such a way that the sharply defined ideas that permeate our soul during waking hours gradually become darker and darker. But now we know that when we pass through the gate of sleep, our consciousness is not killed, but only paralyzed; and by experiencing that we now also live in a strengthened will, we can now also consider the states in which the soul is when it enters the spiritual world after falling asleep. There we experience how the soul becomes more and more immersed in an overall feeling for the world, and when falling asleep, what is seized in a very special way is what is opposed to the pictorial character of dreaming. When we wake up, the soul is more inclined to express in dream images what it has experienced during sleep; when we fall asleep, however, we also enter into a kind of dream, which dampens down our daytime perceptions, but we move towards a general experience of the magnitude of the world. When waking up, thoughts are more likely to be grasped in the form of images, whereas when falling asleep, feelings and especially the devotional will are more likely to be grasped. In short, one now learns to recognize, to recognize psychologically, the transition of the soul as it experiences it when falling asleep, from the experience of one's own self to being devoted to the world in feeling and will.

One learns to recognize what paralyzes thoughts, what dampens them, but on the other hand also what allows the other soul powers to merge into the world, which, when experienced in a kind of state of consciousness while awake – and it can be experienced – represents the state in which the pious soul is, that pious soul that does not want to have its inner soul state clothed in thoughts and ideas, that wants precisely the ideas and thoughts to be subdued in order to give feeling and emotion to the totality, to the majesty of the world, to the divine that permeates the world. In short, through anthroposophical research one gets to know both the state where the human being strives towards thoughts and the state where he strives away from thoughts, and one learns to see through both states at a higher level. One learns to recognize that the human being lives in such a way that he first moves out of the universe to use his body, and then moves back towards the universe when he leaves his body again. The states that are then taken over into consciousness are the states of everyday knowledge and everyday piety; but these states are raised to a higher level in supersensible contemplation, which is achieved through anthroposophical schooling.

Thus it can be said that the scientific character of the soul is not taken away by entering the supersensible worlds through anthroposophical schooling, for what one has gained as a scientific conviction, as the state of mind that goes with it, is carried up when one tries to fathom what the said second personality sees in the supersensible world. On the other hand, however, what the soul selflessly wants to submit to, what it wants to immerse itself in, is woven into the ideas. This does not lose its majesty at all, this does not lose the character of its holiness at all, by being brought out of the mystery and brought to intimate inner vision, by which it makes us look up to it with devotion, with reverence. The way in which anthroposophy brings the mystery into the soul, where it can be grasped, does not take away its sacred character. And so anthroposophy seeks to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge, not only in relation to the objects of ordinary experience, but also to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge of the supersensible. Just as nothing is taken from nature when we know it in the right way, through devotion to its beauty and to its majestic peculiarities, so nothing is taken from what is supersensible when it is brought down into direct human experience in its true form, not in an abstract form.

Thus it is that one cannot convince oneself of the scientific character of anthroposophy through a cursory definition or through cursory logical discussions of the criteria of scientificity, but rather by living oneself into into the course of anthroposophical research. The person who reflects on it must convince himself that here there is real scientificity, and one that certainly does not prevent the supersensible from taking on a religious character again. And so one would like to say: Anthroposophy has the courage to proceed with scientific exactness, with a scientific attitude and scientific method where the ground of the outer sensuality no longer exists. Anyone who objects, saying that there is no ground at all there, is like someone who would say the following: Just as a stone is attracted to the earth and falls until it can rest on it when we live on earth, so all things on earth are attracted to it and must ultimately rest on the earth's surface. This is true as long as we move within the orbit of the [earth] planet. But the moment we ascend from the conditions on our earth to those in our planetary system, we are dealing with something different; there the planets support each other, and they do not need any special ground as a base. Anyone who wanted to say that there must be a special world ground so that the planets do not fall into the depths would be saying something foolish. So it is here too. If we apply the same exactitude of the outer science to the anthroposophical field of research, we find that the two mutually support each other. The totality of supersensible science, the totality of anthroposophy, arises from the mutual support of the individual truths.

Thus, Anthroposophy has the courage to further develop science from the sensory to the supersensory, and it ensures that the scientific character is not lost. But it is not so timid that it believes that mystery must necessarily prevail over what the supersensible world is, so that man may retain his piety. No! Anthroposophy has the courage to affirm that the greatness of something does not only have its greatness for man because it is unknown to him, but it proves its greatness even when it is known; and through the familiarity with what religious content is, religion must not be thought of as diminished.

Thus anthroposophy seeks to justify itself in the face of the two accusations I characterized at the beginning of today's reflection. For it seeks to penetrate into the supersensible world with full respect for science, and it also seeks to develop the courage to bring down the supersensible into the human heart. And this supersensible is great enough to fill the human heart in such a way that this heart can still develop in true devotion even when the secret is revealed!

Berlin, March 12, 1922

Dear attendees! It is admitted from many sides that today, when it is said that there is an urge to find something for the heart, soul and spirit of man that could not come from the previous traditions and also from the present science, it is not just the ideal or the longing of a few that is being expressed. It is admitted that a need of the times is being expressed. Anthroposophy wants to serve this need of the times. That it can even come close to doing so, however, is disputed by many. It is admitted that the need for spiritual deepening and for an uplift of the soul is present today in the most eminent sense. But people behave very strangely when they judge the anthroposophical spiritual movement on the basis of ideas that they often believe were really born out of these needs of the time. Among many others, one judgment is typical, which goes something like this (I will not give the name of the person who had this judgment printed; names are not important, as they often only annoy, but this is a judgment that is asserted from many sides): Anthroposophy is the wrong path after a correctly recognized goal that is necessary for the needs of the time. There must be something extraordinarily remarkable at its basis if it could be said that Anthroposophy could indeed recognize with a certain certainty the right and even necessary goal for the needs of the time, but that it was also, in the fullest sense of the word, a mistake to pursue this goal.

Let us now, at the end of this week's course on anthroposophy, try to understand what might actually underlie such a judgment.

Anyone who makes such a judgment realizes that the scientific way of thinking has educated the souls of people in the civilized world for centuries, has given their search a certain character, and has left a certain imprint on what they call knowledge. He also realizes that what has been instilled into humanity in this way must be taken into account. This has found its way into all minds, even the simplest ones; it has also given these simplest minds the critical standard for everything that approaches them as a world view. Furthermore, the critic recognizes that it is the old traditional creeds and world views that profess to have a certain knowledge of the supernatural and the eternal in human nature, but that the way in which they present this knowledge to humanity is precisely what fails to satisfy the needs of today's humanity, which has been shaped in the way described by the development of recent centuries. And so a judging person sees: There is humanity thirsting for satisfaction in its world view; there are others who are, so to speak, natural leaders, who see this humanity before them, but who do not know how to speak to this humanity – neither from the perspective of modern natural science nor from that of the old traditional creeds and not even from what they knew how to make out of the two — to speak to this humanity in such a way that humanity is able to receive what is said as a proclamation of what it demands from its thus developed needs of the time. And then those who judge see that anthroposophy appears. One may think as one will about the details of what emerges from the anthroposophical method of research, but even they will admit that anthroposophy is trying to take account of these contemporary needs that have just been characterized.

And then the judges say: Yes, a certain intellectualism, a certain rationalism, has developed precisely in scientific thinking. But if one develops the human soul only in the sense of this rationalism and this intellectualism, and if one offers the seeking souls only what can be achieved in this way, then this human soul does not feel satisfied. For its yearning, its urge, arises from something other than mere intellect or than that which can be satisfied by mere rationalism. Therefore, those who sense the need of our time but are unable to enter into anthroposophy speak of the fact that we cannot approach our contemporaries with intellectualism or rationalism; that which is offered as a world view not be clothed in the forms of pale, abstract thoughts; it must not be won by a [rational] path; it must be brought forth from the irrational depths of the human heart, perhaps even from the subconscious depths of the soul. And then perhaps someone will also say: What man recognizes has already become an object; but what he is to revere as his eternal in the soul must not be an object of knowledge. One can also hear that what man thus turns to must be an Unconditional, which penetrates into the human soul somehow, not by the clear path of thought, but by an irrational path. And one can hear similar things.

Something actually presents itself in a remarkable way when one considers reviews of anthroposophical will today. People criticize anthroposophy for wanting to overcome mere intellectualism, mere systems of thought, but for being something rational itself, for working with thoughts. People shy away from mental work, and with some justification, and it is said – again with some justification – that anthroposophy does not fully want to get rid of thoughts; that is why people are somewhat wary of it. It is said that the newer world view has been burned by the thought life, despite it being so cold and pale. One would like to take from the unthought, from the seething of the soul faculties, which are not touched by the thought, that which is to become the content of a satisfying world view and world knowledge. It is then quite natural that, if one shuns the thought, one guards against wanting to express such a world view in thoughts. And so, when one wants to express the content of one's soul, one chooses the thinnest of thoughts. One must have thoughts after all, because mere feelings or impulses of the will or something merely irrational cannot be incorporated into a worldview, nor can they be incorporated into a life that is merely conceptual. One cannot even become aware of it. But if you want to bring what you are already striving for into consciousness as the content of your soul, then you make your thoughts as thin as possible. You make a very small, tiny thought: the irrational, the unconditional, and so on. But you have not escaped the thought, you just want to make the thought so small, so tiny, so easily manageable, so infinitely trivial that you do not realize that you have a thought at the end, in which you want to summarize something else. In contrast to this, anthroposophy seeks to recognize to the fullest extent, in the most comprehensive sense, what fate the life of thought has actually undergone within the human soul in recent times. Anthroposophy knows that with modern science, the life of thought has acquired a certain character, one that allows it to penetrate into the outer world, into the world of the senses, but not into that with which the soul can feel connected in its eternal essence. But Anthroposophy, taking into account all the tremendous spiritual values gained through the more recent development of thought, cannot simply exclude thought. Rather, it says to itself: Humanity has developed once up to thought, to the comprehension of thought in its purity, and in coming to this, thought has indeed become something that initially has only a very limited field. But Anthroposophy knows: this thought, as it was gained, must be regarded as something absolutely valuable, it must be the starting point. It does not shy away from accepting that as a gift of human development, which has brought great results in a certain area of humanity, but which, in order to achieve these great results, has made the sacrifice that the human soul must have in its eternal perspective.

Thus, Anthroposophy first turns to the realm of thought, regarding thought as a germ that, while it cannot be taken directly for the immediacy of worldviews in the way that natural science has carried it on the waves of its development, but can be developed, from which something can be extracted that is not yet revealed by itself – just as the fully grown and flowering plant that is about to bear fruit is not yet present in the germ, but is only hinted at for those who can judge the germ. And so anthroposophy seeks to strengthen thought through meditation and concentration, the means of inner soul development.

Then, when we strengthen it through meditation and concentration, it becomes something different in our inner experience. And I was able to show that by strengthening the thought inwardly, we first see the supersensible aspect of what lives here on earth as a human being: we see the physical body; we see the formative forces body, the time body, that which is thoroughly organized between birth and death as something spiritual, which underlying the physical body as the [creative] spiritual force and which is so constituted that, when the thought strengthens itself, it can condense so strongly that it itself is identical with the sum of those forces that are at the same time growth forces, formative forces of the physical organism. These formative forces, by being born with us into the physical world, become rarified in the human organism; they become powers of thought. Thus we take them up into abstract thought. But when we condense these abstract thoughts again through meditation and concentration, they become inwardly full of sap, vigorous in growth, and become real growing formative forces of the human organism. In this way, we move up in full, living knowledge to that which forms, permeates and supports the human organism between birth and death. And when we are then able to move from imaginative knowledge to inspired knowledge, that is, when we can remove from consciousness these thoughts, the formative forces, that we have attained through meditation and concentration, so that we can create empty consciousness, then we move we advance to the perception of the spiritual in the natural environment, advance above all [to the perception] of the spiritual soul in the environment, as we ourselves were before we descended into the physical world and connected with a physical body. The inspired knowledge thus shows us the spiritual soul according to the side of the unborn.

What do we do when we do such exercises and thereby gain certain insights that satisfy our need for knowledge? What are we seeking within the human power of thought by doing such exercises?

If I want to hint at what one is looking for, then I must say the following. The human soul is a unified whole; but it appears in three different external revelations: as a thinking soul, as a feeling soul, and as a willing soul. But in thinking, there is also willing; and in willing, there is also thinking. One would like to say that the life of thought is only the main thing in the life of thought; it has a hidden life of will in it. When we connect and disconnect thoughts, so that we enter more and more into reality through the disconnecting and connecting, the will works in this connecting and disconnecting of thoughts. But one does not see that; one overlooks this will, as it were, one hides this will. But when we meditate and concentrate, we disregard what the ordinary consciousness has as the content of thought; through meditation and concentration, through resting on a particular content of thought, we suppress, as it were, precisely that content. But what we bring up into consciousness is the will, as it is never otherwise taken into account, which lives in thinking itself. And it is this will that one grasps in order to then grasp with it the formative forces of the body and the eternal part of the soul, as it was before birth, as it was in the spiritual-soul world, in order to enter into a physical body. Thus, in the will, one grasps what can be grasped by the human being on the one side of eternity. The other exercises I have described are exercises of will; they lead to the will becoming independent of the physical body. And what is it that we are seeking when we practise this strengthening of the will? Just as we seek the will in the power of thought through meditation and concentration, so we seek the thought in the will through the exercises of the will. When we develop our will in our ordinary lives, we actually notice nothing of the power of thought in this will. We do start from the idea, as I have already explained these days, that when we bring about a simple development of will, for example, when we just raise an arm or a hand. But then the will penetrates down into the depths of our organization, and we see the result again only in the raised hand, in the raised arm. But anyone who does such exercises of will as I have described will find that, wherever he turns his will, it is permeated and glowing with the power of thought, with a power of thought that goes down into our limbs, a thought-power, the content of which we cannot even describe as human thoughts, but whose content we must describe as world-thoughts, because we stand in them through those thoughts that are not in our consciousness, but which are in our whole being and in our whole development of will. These thoughts, which are not in our consciousness, we discover as world-thoughts, as wisdom, but also when we lay down our body and go through the gate of death. Within our stream of will, we discover our eternal selves through thoughts that are otherwise deeply hidden in the human soul. This is how the picture of knowledge of dying emerges; this is how we come to know what we are when we have passed through the gate of death and moved back into the spiritual world.

Thus one sees that anthroposophy seeks the will in the power of thought and the thoughts in the power of the will. And by taking into account, in this way, I would say for itself, what a person otherwise leaves out of account in life, it comes precisely to that which otherwise remains hidden for the person, namely, to that which passes through birth and death as the eternal part of the human soul; and at the same time it comes to that which underlies all external nature as its spiritual-soul element. Anthroposophy values the thought. In thought-exercises it values thought as the germ from which other soul faculties are developed, and these are unfoldments of the will. But anthroposophy also appreciates thought when it lies hidden beforehand, like a flower in the bud. However, because one knows the thought beforehand from the ordinary consciousness, it is coaxed out as something well known when one experiences the will independently of the body.

Thus, anthroposophy is able to respect the thought and to endure it quietly when it is said that it is rationalistic after all. It is not rationalistic, as the people who say this believe, but it is able to make something else out of the thought at the same time, by appreciating the level of the thought.

Anyone who now goes through these exercises, both intellectually and will-wise, will sense something before actually entering the spiritual world that should not be ignored if anthroposophical research is to be appreciated in the right way. A true rationalist who immerses himself in the world of thought, which is rejected by the needs of the time, does not actually realize how thin an element of soul thought is. But he who does become aware of this will speak something like Friedrich Nietzsche spoke — it is recorded in his posthumous writings — about the tragic philosophical age of the Greeks, where he shows how those pre-Socratic Greek philosophers came to the first reflections, which, although not yet as pale as ours, nevertheless already had enough of a pallor of thought in them. Nietzsche found these concepts of Heraclitus, Parmenides and the others chilling; the human soul literally feels permeated by the icy cold in these thoughts. Nietzsche describes this in a poignant way as a philosophical experience of the most intimate kind.

Anthroposophical research must come to this experience and must know with whom what lives in the soul can be compared. If one can approach this thinness, this paleness and abstractness of thought, and really experiences it, then one does not set oneself above it by simply returning to the full succulence of life, but one surrenders to these thoughts. If one wants to enter the spiritual world, then a certain fear comes over one, a fear of nothingness, the fear that always arises before the void. And this fear must be overcome in such a way that the person is well prepared beforehand by such things as I have also described in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and in the second section of my “Secret Science.” The person must be prepared to go through this fear in the right way, so that when he arrives at the experience of the pale thought, he has the certainty: You have to go through this fearfulness, just as you have to go through the state of sleep for the time from falling asleep to waking up. But just as you may believe that you will awaken from sleep every morning, so you may believe that when you go through this fearfulness, a world will greet you that you will only be able to judge then. Before that, you have only earned the confidence that the spirit permeates the world and that you will find it when you leave this state of fear. The one who wants to prepare the soul to see the spiritual world must undergo many trials.

And when, on the other side, the human being is to arrive at the pictorial experience of death, he experiences something else. The spiritual world appears in the form of objective world thoughts from the currents of the will. But after it has emerged in this way, after we begin to imbibe these thoughts, which are greater than our subjective thoughts, in which we feel that the laws of the world, as living beings, draw themselves into our organism, we then become aware that something is also drawing into our will impulses, drawing into them like an alien feeling that takes hold of us as a certain anger at the merely finite. However paradoxical it may sound, one must experience a certain anger, one must expose oneself to it, at the experience of the eternal in the finite. This anger gives one something by which one can visualize the great distance between the infinite and the finite. For what is to be experienced by man must be cognitively experienced by the spiritual world. It must be grasped in clear thought, but if it were only that, it might be merely rationalized. But it penetrates into the human being as reality, entering into a relationship with human feeling and also with human will impulses, so that it is clearly announced that we are dealing with the unity of a reality, not mere thoughts, in the human being.

Dear attendees, what can now be clearly and distinctly present in the developed soul in this way is, however, present in all human souls, even in those belonging to the most naive minds, it is present in the subconscious state. It is present in the subconscious state when, from the newer spiritual development, man approaches the abstract thoughts, as they occur in natural science, for example, when he approaches them with the intention of creating a world view out of them. Then he experiences subconsciously what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher experiences consciously, he experiences this fear described. He does not bring it to consciousness, does not bring it up into his mind, but he devises logical reasons why what anthroposophy now wants, for example, by looking at thoughts, would be impossible. He reinterprets it to himself in order to avoid the necessity of transforming the thought in a living way and penetrating through the fear, as one penetrates through the night with the confidence that one will wake up again in the morning. And on the other side stands the shyness — that anger that overcomes one — to enter into the reality of the human soul as eternal.

In this final lecture, I will give you only a few characteristics of what the living knowledge of anthroposophy can do for the human being who, as I said in the previous lecture, can use his or her common sense to can relive with his healthy human understanding what is lived in this way by those who are really entering the path into the spiritual world to seek that which the deepest need of our time in this world is sighing and pushing for in the human soul. And in the face of this, people spend all kinds of energy, and certainly rationalistic developments, in order to avoid admitting to themselves that they shy away from that fear, from that patience in the face of anger, which I have described.

Then such people come along and say: Yes, it is right, people's need for time must be satisfied. But we don't want to know anything about anthroposophy, because it wants to take refuge in thought again – we have seen how it wants to do so not in a rationalistic form, but in a completely different form – but we want to seek out of the irrational what can satisfy the human soul. We want to try to analyze what can be in every human soul in order to find out how it can be expressed in the simplest non-rational way. Then such people believe – at least that is how they speak – that they can bypass anthroposophy by reinterpreting what they experience in their subconscious!

And then you can experience some very strange things in the opposition to anthroposophy. For example, it is said: This need of the time already exists, but anthroposophy is a wrong path to the correctly recognized and necessary goal; and those who correctly recognize this need of the time but do not want to go the wrong path of anthroposophy — oh, they would know how to wait for what Anthroposophy offers, but how the need of humanity for time could be satisfied from completely different, irrational human soul foundations.

Now it is very strange when you address such objections individually, in concrete terms. Today, I will avoid mentioning names for good reasons; but one can find out, for example, I am telling facts, that it is said: Oh, what does this anthroposophy want? There are other people today who are trying to gain a relationship in a very elementary way, firstly to the other human soul, which is also spiritual, and then to the spiritual soul of the world. When something like this is said, a name of a personality is mentioned who, with her writing, is held up in contrast to anthroposophy. I then found out these days that a name of a personality had been mentioned — I have to tell this so that the misunderstandings about anthroposophy are not repeated over and over again, and I am allowed to tell it because I am talking about a personality whom I hold in very high regard. This person, who is said to offer something for which there is no need to wait for anthroposophy, met with me about eighteen years ago to talk about anthroposophy. However, because she could not get to anthroposophy, but would not have been against it if she could muster the inner strength to approach it, she then tried the external methods, which were just appreciated by the opponents of anthroposophy in the manner just described. Then a few years passed and I met the same person again in a different place; she was trying again to get to anthroposophy, but she couldn't — perhaps also taking into account what is valued more in the outside world today than anthroposophical research. And during my last lecture tour a few weeks ago, this personality had come to me again, clearly expressing: There must be something that goes beyond what I can do myself, what I can give myself in my books. And this personality literally said: “There is something that seeks paths into the spiritual world not only from thought, from the rational, but from the will, from ethics; that is something that interests me, I would like to know more about it.” This is roughly what this personality said to me. A few days ago, I heard that the personality who would like to connect with anthroposophy in this way had achieved something that anthroposophy has no need of!

Dear attendees, behind the scenes of existence, things often look quite different than they are presented by those who often have very different goals — perhaps unconsciously — than those who are in the words. So, with our present life and its temporal demands standing before us, we need not be surprised if the position of those who would actually be called upon to understand anthroposophy in the light of the demands of the time is often still a grotesque one.

Listen to how I describe the methods of knowledge in anthroposophy: they are purely inward methods of knowledge, such methods by which the soul enters into the spiritual world through inward experience; what is experienced there is experienced as inwardly as only mathematical experience is; truth and certainty are experienced inwardly as only mathematical certainty is is experienced inwardly, only that mathematical certainty is formal and does not go to reality, whereas the knowledge gained by the soul through meditation, concentration and exercises of will and so on is quite real, and its standing in relation to this knowledge is then a standing in the real supersensible when it attains to it. And it is precisely in such books as “Occult Science”, “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Riddles of the Soul” and others that it is described how the anthroposophical researcher arrives at these results; it is described in such a way that anyone who wants to apply these methods to their own soul can come to verify these things at any time. It is only a matter of the one who wants to verify having to apply the methods to his soul. Those who merely want to understand anthroposophy and make it fruitful for their lives in this way, as I discussed in the last lecture here, do not need to apply the spiritual-scientific methods to themselves, but can certainly stop at taking them in through common sense and a healthy sense of soul.

But even if you are not a very important philosopher or scientist in the present day, you must still gain an idea from this description of anthroposophical methods and their results that a real examination of what anthroposophy says about its results can only be done by applying the same methods that he uses, by checking how he arrives at his results — in our soul — that is, in the spiritual world itself, by also checking it in our soul in the spiritual world itself. Instead of understanding things this way, people who call themselves scientists today come along and say: Somebody who comes to anthroposophical conclusions should come to some experimental laboratory and try to verify whether he can really come to such conclusions! But the nonsense inherent in such a demand is no less than that which would be spread in the following way. Someone says: I am a mathematician, I have solved these and those mathematical problems; see if they are correct by acquiring the appropriate mathematical skills and checking them out. But then people will reply: We don't like that; why should we first acquire these mathematical skills? Come to the laboratory, where we will examine your skull through experimental psychology and so on and determine whether your mathematical results are correct! Such absurd demands are trumpeted out into the world today and unfortunately find a believing audience.

This is what must be said first about the path of anthroposophy in relation to the needs of the present time. But what the soul penetrates into and from which it announces the results to humanity in such a way that these results can be grasped by the healthy human mind, if it really wants to, what is that actually?

To characterize what can be given to the world through it, or – if I may express myself more modestly – would like to be given to the world, we must recall how earlier times related to the content of spiritual life. Let us look back to earlier times, from which the traditional world-view beliefs have remained with us. There people spoke as if of spiritual beings. They naturally did so in terms of concepts and ideas. But even though the knowledge and perception of spiritual beings was instinctive in ancient times, people still had an inner certainty about this spiritual world, so that they knew: you do not just have concepts and ideas about the spiritual world, you have the spiritual world itself within you; you are not just speaking of gods and angels, these gods and angels – one could also choose other terms – do not just live in your ideas, but they live as living beings in that with which you are connected with your soul, they are spiritual realities.

This is what the more recent period has brought about, that this direct spiritual experience is no longer there. When the more recent period speaks of spirit, it means thoughts. No one in earlier times would have understood what it means when we say today: ideas are realized through history. But everyone would have understood what is meant: spiritual beings realize themselves through history. The ideas are only the means of expression for the spiritual world behind them, and this lives in every single activity that a person performs. Just as a person feels at home in the sensory world, so he also feels at home in a spiritual world. But people who come from this direct experience of the spiritual world used to have, for example, when they were faced with a bush – I am talking radically now, but perhaps this will help to adequately characterize it – an immediate relationship with it, so that the spiritual immediately confronted them and the natural object was also immediately seen through.

Recently, we have seen this coming to humanity: to look at the details of nature in such a way that we no longer experience them in an elementary spiritual and soulful way, but that the abstract thought that expresses the natural event is there first. We stand before the bush; in our thoughts, we first consider what we can experience about the bush. But this separates us from the spiritual, and so nature has been de-animated by us. Because we were able to penetrate nature with abstract thought in the newer epoch of human development, abstract thought separated us from the actual spiritual world. But what human beings did not have when they saw the elementary spiritual in each individual thing was human freedom. It could only develop in the age when man now experiences abstract thoughts in nature instead of direct spiritual images, so that nature is no longer compelling and no longer has a direct effect on human nature.

The fact that we have lost the spiritual reality in nature and only retained the image of spirituality in abstract thoughts has made our freedom possible. This is described in detail in my Philosophy of Freedom. But this has also brought about the necessity that if we want to come to the spiritual again, we cannot stop at the thoughts that we find today in bushes and trees, in stones and sun, rivers and mountains; there live the abstract thoughts that the human race had to experience in order to become free. Today we have to condense thoughts through meditation and concentration. Then we will look at nature again in such a way that the spirit looks back at us from all the beings of nature. And in the same way, we find the spirit in social human life in the way we as human beings face each other, by developing love for our neighbor and expressing this love through deeds.

Thus, anthroposophy relates to the experience of thought in modern times in such a way that it says: Thought has also become the thinnest in external natural phenomena, has become what one might say is a last memory of the spirit; it must be condensed again, must be strengthened, then it will lead us back to the spirit again. Anthroposophy is not rationalism; it does not stop at the pale thought, but struggles through to this thought — really to this inner coldness of thought, which Nietzsche also describes in such a poignant way; but by the soul coming to such thin thoughts, it is, as it were, thereby enabled to have windows everywhere. For anthroposophy, abstract thoughts are like windows; the environment reveals itself everywhere. And then, by condensing the power of thought, the soul penetrates through the windows that have been opened by the abstractness into the spiritual world. In this way we come to experience not only a world of abstract ideas and ideals, but again to that which humanity once experienced as a reality, but of which only the abstract copy remains in the present worldviews and religions, even if today one believes that one is looking into a spiritual world in the irrational. And then we come back to not just wanting to know about the spirit, not just to represent it in our thoughts, but to experience it.

Our living knowledge is only a detour to bring living spirituality into our lives, so that we live again from morning till night in such a way that we know: every one of our deeds, every one of our feelings, every one of our thoughts is such that the spiritual lives in it. That the human being does not become unfree as a result, but precisely free, is what I sought to show in the “Philosophy of Freedom”. I tried to show that if man can grasp thinking in such a way that he can also grasp it, that he can, for example, ascend through the moral intuitions into the spiritual world in the ethical and moral spheres – if he ascends to pure thinking in this way, then he is in a position to grasp world events at the root. But that is the second thing, quite apart from the path: it is a God-filled, a spirit-filled world that is coming into being. Anthroposophy is not meant to provide a mere world view, but should become the cause for man to have a real experience through which the divine-spiritual draws into the newer development of humanity, because man — for the sake of his freedom — can no longer go the old ways to the spirit and would remain spiritless if he did not seek the way from the thought and from the will, as I have characterized it.

Thus, anthroposophy does not merely strive for spiritual experience, but strives to prepare a field, a dwelling for the spirit that will permeate humanity, to offer this spirit a field and a dwelling so that it can be among us, so that we can think, feel and want everything not only out of a temporally ephemeral humanity, but out of an eternal divine spirituality! Anthroposophy does not want to be just a process of knowledge, it wants to be a real process. And in that it, I would say, prepares the Lord's dwelling here on earth, in that it wants to be a knowledge that is at the same time life and at the same time builds the dwelling for the Lord, the Spirit, it has a relationship of its own accord to the third aspect of our great contemporary needs: to the social aspect.

The social question, and that which it summarizes, has a deep impact on the soul and heart of today's man, insofar as this man has soul and heart at all in the true sense of the word. That is, of course, the fundamental question. But can it actually be understood in the way it is often understood today?

Of course, esteemed attendees, every well-intentioned human perception must be thoroughly appreciated and valued for the moment; but something else is still needed for the good of humanity. Today we hear how millions are starving; we ourselves may have the opportunity to experience the misery that has remained from the terrible war catastrophe in the civilized world. We learn how unemployment is spreading everywhere, how it has affected the victors even more than the defeated countries, and especially the neutral countries. We look at this world that has been so severely tested. Certainly, we have no objection to those people who now say, out of a good heart and also out of a certain knowledge of the world: “The next thing to do is to create bread, bread to satisfy hunger!” Yes, that is so; that must also be considered the next step. But we, as humanity, must move forward again in such a way that such times of hunger and need will no longer be possible, as they have become possible today. For what caused them?

Anyone who looks at the world with an open mind will say: Even if there is a natural disaster, if there is any kind of natural disaster or infertility, it must be compensated for in the world economy if it is managed properly. On the whole, nature gives people what they need from it. If entire groups of people do not have what they should have, it is not because nature is withholding it from them, but because people do not understand how to properly process and deliver what nature provides! Nature provides everything that could feed and clothe all people, everything that could provide the barest necessities for all people; it just needs to be worked in such a way that people can give and take it for people in the right way. Need is not caused by nature, at least not in the main, leaving out the details. Need is caused by the way people have treated nature, by the way people have behaved towards each other. Need has come and comes from the kind of spirituality that prevails among people, and only the kind of spirituality can remedy the need in the long term. We must not only find abstract concepts in human interaction, through which people envision themselves, for my sake also a spiritual one, but we must find a living spirituality through which we also approach work, through which we find the means and ways to work out what our fellow human beings can demand of us in terms of the results of our work. We must find that spirituality through which trust can be restored in those people who can lead the work, so that its results can flow into the human social organisms in the right way. And we must find the God who is able to permeate social life in the right way. But we will only find him for social action if we have first found him in living knowledge, if we have first found him in nature and introduced him into human life as a living spirit, as I have described. We first need a path to the spirit; but we need a striving for the spirit that leads not only to a theoretical knowledge, but to an experience of spirituality, which, in relation to social life, leads not to abstract ideas about the social order, but to concrete ideas, so that through the flow of these ideas, the divine-spiritual itself flows into the social order. As much Leninism, as much Trotskyism, that is, as much materialism as there is in the world, there are as many forces of destruction in the world! The only help is to draw a spirituality back into humanity. It is quite true that much can be criticized about the social life of older times, but that belongs in a different chapter from the one we are discussing today. What needs to be discussed today is that our time demands a spirituality that can only come from the highest development of thought, and only through this path.

But anthroposophy wants to go this way. There may well be individual aspects of anthroposophy that are capable of improvement and in need of it. But humanity, having to live out of the needs of the time, will not be able to avoid seeking its leaders where such paths into the spiritual world are taken as anthroposophy would like to take them. For it is important that we not only escape materialism, but that we escape the dead thoughts that are mere representatives of something real, and that we grasp the real in the thoughts themselves. This cannot be in abstract thoughts, but only in the condensed thoughts that have been further developed in the soul; this can only be by experiencing the world thoughts in the developed will. To many people today, who have settled into the old currents of science, this seems paradoxical to such an extent that they want to test the anthroposophist in the laboratory using laboratory methods, just as one would test a mathematician in the laboratory to see whether an integral is correct or not; one does not want to follow what he presents as his mathematics, but rather wants to examine his personal behavior. But it must be realized that the spirit can only be experienced in the spiritual realm, in that realm which, however, has the indicated windows everywhere for the spiritual soul. There the thoughts, the windows through which the spiritual can enter the human soul, are experienced, and in this way the reality of the spiritual world is experienced as something with which people grow together as spiritual and soul beings.

This, esteemed attendees, describes the way in which anthroposophy believes it can serve the needs of the times. I have endeavored to explain today what the real path of anthroposophical research is. For I do believe that once we take a close look at this real path, we will not be able to say that anthroposophy represents a wrong path after a correctly recognized goal that is even necessary for the times. No! If you examine what people who judge it call a mistake, you will ultimately discover again and again: it is not the anthroposophical path, it is the caricature that people themselves make of this anthroposophical path; it is the bugbear that they themselves make and then criticize, so that their words have absolutely no relation to the true anthroposophical path. This is what one experiences day after day: people criticizing their own spectres of anthroposophy because they do not want to get to know the true anthroposophy.

Those who, in the days of this college course, represented the anthroposophical method of research in the most diverse scientific fields, have honestly stood up against what is prevailing and for what is needed in our time. They wanted to show how this method of research can fertilize the most diverse fields of science, life, art, and social order. They wanted to advocate for the true nature of that which every honest critique wants to take up, but which today often only sees as it caricatures, turns into a bogeyman and then criticizes in the way I have indicated. Therefore, I would not want to fail, for my part, since I am connected with all my heart with this anthroposophical current, to thank you all here at the end, all those who in the last few days have entered from what they have gained through their science, through their life experience and so on, for anthroposophical research, for the anthroposophical worldview. It is to them that I would like to express my heartfelt thanks, in the name of anthroposophical thinking and the anthroposophical ethos. For whatever one's opinion of what anthroposophy has already achieved and produced, it is making a truly conscientious effort to adjust its intentions to the needs of the present day — not because it wishes to serve only the temporal, but Anthroposophy does not direct itself at all to these temporal needs. It speaks out of the eternal depths of the human soul, and actually of the eternal, but its striving coincides with the needs of the present time. For long enough, humanity has been concerned only with the transitory; today, in response to the demands of the times, it desires to get to know the eternal again, to reintroduce it into human feeling and human action. Anthroposophy can serve these demands of the time, this striving of the human soul, because its striving coincides with the needs of the time. It strives in such a way that I would now like to summarize in the following words what it has achieved today, but what it wants, which is perhaps still a long way off, and which is intended to express what the attitude and the will of the anthroposophical is.

This will knows full well how dark, how gloomy human paths of life are if they are not illuminated by a certain light; and today's humanity is coming to realize its contemporary needs, as I have characterized them, by being surrounded by much darkness in life and therefore must strive to attain that light that can illuminate the darkness, the darkness of life. How can this light be found? For this light, the human soul alone is the lamp. But this lamp can only be ignited by the spirit. The human soul becomes the shining light of life when the spirit ignites it! But when the human soul is ignited by the spirit as a light of life, then it also becomes the torch that can properly illuminate human life: the fruitful insights, the life-warming feelings, the active volitional impulses that are necessary for the human being.