The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question: How should community be cultivated?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question about the way of life.

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

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

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

Question about the adult education movement.

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

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

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

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

Question about Muck-Lamberty.

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

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

Question about Fidus and Gertrud Prellwitz.

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

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

A participant: These things should be grasped more seriously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rudolf Steiner concludes the discussion.

Anyone who looks at the building in the neighborhood that is dedicated to the so-called Goetheanum, a free university for spiritual science that aims to serve the spiritual and cultural interests of the future, may initially be struck by the peculiar forms and style that confront them. One might have various objections to what one sees there. Those who are involved in the construction will be able to understand such objections, that it is a preliminary attempt, if they arise from goodwill. But a certain question must be raised about this building, which is characteristic of everything that the spiritual movement wants and strives for, of which this building is supposed to be a representative. If it had been necessary, in the usual way, to erect an independent building somewhere for a certain spiritual movement, for a certain kind of spiritual activity, then one would probably have turned to this or that architect, to this or that artist, and one might have conferred with them about what was to be done in such a building, and then a building would have been erected in some antique, Renaissance or other style, in which this spiritual-scientific activity was to find its home. There would only have been an external relationship between the forms within and around the building dedicated to this spiritual activity, and the activity itself. This was not possible with this spiritual movement. The aim here was to create an outer shell for a particular spiritual current that, in its entirety and in every detail, even the most insignificant, seemed to have been born out of the entire thinking, feeling and willing of this spiritual movement itself. The point was to create something in the external forms, down to the most minute detail, which is an external expression of the inwardly willed in the same way as a word or anything else that is intended to express the content of this spiritual movement itself. In this matter one could not turn to some existing style, to some formal language that has been handed down historically. What is visible to the eye in the structures had to be created from the same spiritual foundation from which the content of the world view is drawn. This is not only the innermost motivation of the spiritual-scientific movement, which also calls itself anthroposophical, but also of the whole way in which this movement conceives of its task, its paths and its goals in relation to the great demands of the present civilized world.

This spiritual movement does not want some abstract theory, a science that only occupies the intellect; it does not want to be something that can only serve the one-sided satisfaction of the inner soul's interests; it wants to be something that can indeed give the most intimate satisfaction to those longings of the human soul that go to a world view. But it wants to anchor this Weltanschhauung so firmly in reality that it can intervene in all practical life. And so it is that what we were able to achieve alone at first was the direct creation of building and art forms for our cause, which are characteristic of this whole movement. In this particular sphere it has intervened in the most practical matters; but this spiritual movement will seek ways and indicate goals which will have an effect on all social and moral aspects of human coexistence, in the widest sense. Those who build on this spiritual science should not be unworldly idealists, but should become idealists who can allow what arises from their soul to flow directly into their practical life. And all that often goes so strangely in the thoughts of man should be harmonized with what is in man's innermost soul striving. The outer practice of life should become one with that through which man seeks his moral impulses, develops his social instincts, and engages in his religious worship. With such a view, however, this spiritual-scientific movement still stands today quite far removed from that which is striven for, willed, and even considered right by the broadest circles of today's educated people.

That this must be so, but also that it is necessary for such a spiritual movement to take its place in our modern civilization, can be seen when we turn our gaze to the way in which our whole life, in which we live today, has actually come together out of the most diverse currents. Today I would like to speak first of two main currents in our civilized life. We have today what we call our spiritual education, in which our religious convictions are rooted, in which our moral ideals arise, but in which our entire higher spiritual life is also rooted. We have that through which man is to educate his abilities and strengths for a spiritual education beyond the ordinary manual work. And we have, in addition to this, the practical activity of life, which has received such intensive impulses in recent centuries. We have around us a technology that has been inspired by our science but that also reaches deeply into social life. This technology has transformed modern civilized life in a way that would certainly have been completely incomprehensible to a person eight or nine centuries ago.

If we now ask ourselves where our intellectual and cultural life comes from, a life that not only dominates our higher schools but also unfolds its impulses down to our elementary schools, and where, on the other hand, our practical life, permeated by such an extensive technology, comes from, we get an answer that the man of the present still gives little account of. But one need only – and we will discuss this in more detail in the third lecture – consider what, so to speak, forms the basis of our Western civilization, especially its higher spiritual part, one need only look at Christianity in the broadest sense, so one will be able to say, even from a superficial world-historical point of view, If we look for the origin of our Christian views and convictions, which have shaped so much of our general intellectual outlook and convictions, and if we look for the origin of these beliefs and convictions, much more than we are willing to admit today, we will eventually come across the path that Christianity took from the Orient to the Occident. And one can continue to look around for the thread that one has gained in such a way, and one will find that those paths that arise when one traces back our spiritual education - those paths that lead into Latin-Roman, into Greek, from which our spiritual education still clearly shows its inner — that these paths ultimately lead to the special state of mind, to the special constitution of the soul, through which, millennia ago, before prehistoric times, our educational life, which is more directed towards the inner, the soul-spiritual, originated from the Orient. Only because this educational life, this inner spiritual view, has changed so much over the centuries and millennia, we no longer notice today how it derives its origin from what, as I said, took its origin before pre-Christian millennia from a state of mind that has become quite alien to today's civilized man. To understand this long journey, we must not only go back to what external historiography, which can be proven by documents, offers, we must go beyond what this historiography can say, and go back to prehistoric times. This is quite difficult for the modern man. For he thinks in his innermost being that he has “made such wonderful progress” in spiritual things in the course of the last few centuries, perhaps only in the very last century, that everything that lies in the times just mentioned must be referred to the realm of the childlike, the primitive.

But anyone who is able to see the ancient culture of the Orient clearly, without being clouded by such prejudices, will see that, although civilization and intellectual development were substantially different in pre-Christian times in the Orient, they offered human souls very intense spiritual content. But these were achieved in a completely different, I would say radically different, way than what is achieved today to influence people who are to acquire a higher education at secondary schools.

In the ancient Orient, anyone who was to acquire a higher intellectual culture had to undergo a complete transformation of their entire human being after being chosen by the leaders and directors of the educational institutions concerned. I am speaking of the educational institutions of this ancient Orient. They are cognitively accessible to the spiritual science that is being discussed here; but if one is unprejudiced enough, if one has a certain courage of thought and cognition, then one can also deduce from what has been handed down historically what was there prehistorically. One must speak of these educational institutions in such a way that what appears separately in us has an inner unity there. These educational institutions, to which everything that we actually still carry within us today refers, but in a significantly transformed form, were at the same time what we call a church today, but also what we call a school today, and were at the same time what we call an art institution today. Art, science, and religion formed a unity in the older human civilizations. And anyone who was to be developed in these educational institutions had to bring their whole being to development. They had to transform their whole being. They had to adopt a different form of thinking from the one that is effective in everyday life. He had to devote himself to contemplative thinking. He had to get used to dealing with thinking in the same way as one otherwise deals with the external world. But he also had to get used to transforming his entire emotional and volitional life. It is difficult to imagine today what was striven for in this direction. For how do we actually think about our lives? We admit: the child, that must be developed. The abilities and powers with which it is endowed when it comes into the world must be developed through education. Now, the child cannot educate itself; the others, the adults, initially have the view that the child's abilities and powers must be developed. And we also make the child different in terms of his thinking, feeling and will than when he is born into the world. But if we now expect the human being to continue this development even when he has already come into his own will, when others no longer take care of his development out of their own views, then the present human being finds this a strange expectation; for one should only be developed as long as one cannot take charge of this development oneself, cannot take it into one's own hands. Once one comes to a certain freedom with regard to one's own development, then one abandons evolution. This is the intellectual arrogance in which we live today. We think in the moment when we would be in a position to take our development into our own hands, we are already finished, and we place ourselves in the world as finished people.

Such a view did not exist within that civilization, but rather, the human being was developed further and further. And just as the child is able to recognize, feel, and do more and more after going through a certain training, as if there were a kind of awakening in the soul, so there is also such an awakening for the further development that the human being can now take into his own hands. The oriental mystery school student was educated for this awakening in soul activities, which were higher than the ordinary ones in the same sense that the higher abilities of adults are higher than those of a child. And it was believed that only the one who has gone through this later awakening in the best sense of the word in life is capable of judging the highest matters of life. And one was not prepared there merely to be a person who, when he reflects, when he develops a certain inner feeling and perception, feels satisfied through the knowledge of his connection with a spiritual world. No, it was not only the ability to develop a worldview that was developed there, but also those abilities through which social and outwardly technical life was guided, through which human coexistence was directed. The whole of life was influenced by spiritual education and development.

It is so difficult for us to place ourselves back in the prevailing situation in the Orient thousands of years ago, at the starting point of our more recent human development, because our whole soul constitution has changed with the further development of humanity, because we have come to different feelings and views about life. For those people who were steeped in the spiritual development I have just hinted at, it was instinctive to move towards such a transformation of the human being. These people's instincts were different. They tended towards such a vision of spiritual life after a certain transformation. Those who did not themselves undergo such training looked up, by virtue of the instincts that were also present in them, to what those who had been trained could give them. They followed them in the training of their inner soul life. But they also followed them in the ordering of their social life, in their attitude to the life of the whole.

The instincts that led to such a life have been transformed just as much as the special soul instincts of the child have been transformed in the adult in the context of today's overall culture of humanity. But through these instincts, in connection with what had been absorbed from the teachings of those educational institutions that can truly be called mysteries, there arose a human soul-disposition that could not but lead to seeking what is at the core of the human being, not here in the sphere of life that includes the human body, but to direct this whole view of life, also to rise, as it were instinctively, in the popular consciousness, to the higher man in man, to that in man which is essentially spiritual-soul-like, to that in man which, although it appears in the sensual body for the time between birth and death, is eternal in itself and belongs to a spiritual world, into which one instinctively looked. Something superhuman, if I may use this expression, which has become somewhat questionable through the followers of Nietzsche, something superhuman was seen as the essence of man. What man looked at as his own nature was something that went beyond this ordinary human being. In this respect, education was great: seeking out the human being in his essence in a spiritual-soul realm, which finds expression only in the physical, reaching out from the spiritual-soul world into the whole human being, directing this human being in his most material expressions from the spiritual-soul realm.

In many metamorphoses, through many transformations, what came about as the content of spiritual education was then worked out in the Orient and came to Greece in many transformations. There it appears, I might say, filtered. While in the oldest Greek period, which Friedrich Nietzsche called the tragic age of the Greeks, we can still see something of such a directing of the whole human being to the higher human being, in the later Greek period what can be called, in a more comprehensive sense, the dialectical, the purely intellectual essence of the human being emerges. The whole rich and intensely all-human content of an original culture was, as it were, filtered and further and further filtered, and in the most diluted state it came over into our age. And so it forms the one current of our life, which went right up to the spiritual and soul-filled human being and gave the human being an awareness through which he felt, in every moment of life, in the presence of the giver and in the most menial of tasks, as an external expression of the spiritual and soul-filled human being.

We shall see in the third lecture that the Mystery of Golgotha, from which Christianity emerged in its development on this earth, stands as a fact in itself, which can be grasped in different ways in different ages. But that from which the next understanding of this Mystery of Golgotha was shaped was what had been brought over from the Orient in the form of education. And in fact, in all that we still summon up today to comprehend Christianity, there lives that which is the last, albeit intellectually diluted, experience of the Orient. There is a certain idiosyncrasy to this entire soul configuration, which lives in us only in its final metamorphosis. And this idiosyncrasy must be sought in what follows.

As great and powerful as this world view is in terms of rising to the superhuman in man and descending to what Western civilization has risen to and become great in, this oriental civilization could never have done so. It could produce the superhuman, the spiritual-soul, it could not produce anything else. It is something I have already hinted at in other contexts here. Just at the time when the last metamorphosis of Oriental spiritual life began to take root in the West, a new spiritual life began to take shape, a spiritual life that has indeed produced enormous blossoms in our time, but blossoms of a completely different kind than the Oriental spiritual life just described. Let us look at these other blossoms.

I would like to point out the following fact again. As I said, I have already mentioned it here from other points of view. If we look through the current handbooks to see how many people live on the earth, we are told that about 1500 million people inhabit the earth. If we look at what is being worked on within human civilization, if we look at the human resources that are active in our human being and human life, then, strangely enough, we have to say something different. We would actually have to say that the Earth works as if it were inhabited not just by 1500 million people, but by 2200 million people. For three to four centuries, our world of machines has been working in such a way that work is being done that could also be done by people. We are replacing human labor with machine power. And if you convert what our machines achieve into human labor, you find, based on an eight-hour working day, that our work on earth involves seven to eight times a hundred million people, that is, not real people, but human labor, which is raised by machines.

This is something that is being introduced into human civilization by those spiritual forces that have arisen from the Western world, those spiritual forces that could never have developed in a straight line from that inner culture of spirit and soul that had so magnificently risen to the superhuman, to the higher human in the human, to the spiritual-soul human being. This culture remained at the level of certain heights of the soul. It did not penetrate what we call practical life today. It could never have brought dead metal or other material into such a context that a man would work among people, not a superman, but an underman, a man who is actually a homunculus compared to people of flesh and blood, a mechanism that introduces into human culture what otherwise people could introduce. This is the essence of our Western intellectual life. It is all the more characteristic of this Western intellectual life the farther west we go, where the mechanical man, the sub-human, has emerged from this intellectual life, just as the spiritual man, the super-human, has emerged from the Oriental intellectual life.

The fact that such a thing could be created in the West is not an isolated phenomenon of civilization. It is connected with the whole development of perception, feeling and thinking. The people who brought this homunculus into being are, in their whole state of mind, of course, greater in the other direction than the Oriental man. Today, one cannot understand life if one cannot see through this contrast in all its intensity. For on the one hand, this modern man still carries within him the last metamorphosis of that which came to him from the Orient, and on the other hand, he has been absorbing for centuries what is most essential to Western spiritual life. A balance has not yet been achieved. They stand there like two separate currents flowing apart: the current of the superman, though much changed, and the current of the subhuman, though only in its beginning. And the modern man, the man of the present, when he awakens to the consciousness that in his soul these two currents live abruptly, he suffers mentally, spiritually and probably also physically from the discord that arises from it. These are matters that become so deeply entwined in the unconscious and subconscious that something quite different from the actual cause enters not only into the consciousness of the person, but even into the constitution of his body. The modern human being finds himself nervous, finds himself dissatisfied with circumstances. There are hundreds of ways in which modern man feels a discord between himself and his surroundings, and how this discord is also expressed in his physical health. What has been mentioned is behind this. Behind this lies the great question: How can we, for the civilization of the future, harmonize what produced the subhuman with what lives in us in its last phase as the legacy of a civilization that has led to the spiritual-soul human being?

The spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy seeks to take on board what is contained in the forces of our civilization, as I have just mentioned. It sees as a necessary goal, borne by the most significant demands of the time, a balancing between the soul forces that have led in one direction and the soul forces that have led in the other direction. And it is aware of how tremendously necessary and significant it is for humanity to find the paths to this goal. Instinctively, I have named the oriental spiritual life.

This spiritual life was born out of the instincts of ancient man. We have received it as an heirloom. But we have received it in an already intellectualized state; it has lived its way into our civilization in concepts and ideas of a rather abstract nature. For we no longer have the instincts that the former bearer of this spiritual life had. No matter how much one may fantasize about it, the fact remains that the present-day human being should return to naivety, that he should become instinctive again. In one respect, one is right to make such a demand. But naivety will express itself in a different way than before. The instinctive life will go in different directions. And to demand that we should become like people of previous millennia is the same as demanding that adults should play like children. No, we cannot go back to satisfy our deepest soul needs, into the civilization of past millennia, nor can we, if we do not want to fall into decadence, call out as Westerners “ex oriente lux”; no, we must not call out, the light comes to us from the Orient. For the light that is there today has also undergone many metamorphoses, and we cannot indulge in the illusion that what can still be found somewhere in the Orient today represents a spirituality that could somehow fruitfully reach into our civilization. It was a decadence of the worst kind when a theosophical movement asserted itself out of the religious and cultural needs of the Occident, out of the machine age, which had also formed a mechanistic world view that cannot satisfy man. It was decadence of the worst kind that one went into the area that today's decadent oriental succession of an intellectual life of earlier times has. When Indian culture was sought out today in order to incorporate it into Western theosophy, it showed just how barren one had become, how the creative powers no longer stir from one's own spiritual life, how one could only be great in the mechanistic, but how one could not find one's own way into those areas that the soul needs for its view of the true spiritual essence of man.

This tendency, by the way, underlies today's life all too much. Do we not see how those who are dissatisfied with present-day Christianity often inquire: What was Christianity like in the past? What was early Christianity like? Let us do it again as the early Christians did. As if we had not progressed since then, as if we did not need a new understanding of Christianity! Oh, the characteristic of infertility is everywhere, the impossibility of one's own creation. No, that is not what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants: borrowing from some ancient culture or from the present-day succession of an ancient culture.

Particularly when one grasps the concrete reality of the roots of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, it is easy to see what has been said. You can hear how the present-day Oriental, I would even say, how old methods are reproduced, seeks the path to the spiritual in a certain breathing process, in a regulation of breathing, seeks to develop the human constitution through which one finds inner powers of knowledge and feeling and will, in order to ascend into the spiritual world, where the spiritual-soul human being is found, where true self-knowledge is. The Oriental of today does what the Oriental has always done in earlier centuries and millennia for such a path: he descends from the mere intellectual life of the head into the life of the whole human being. He knows the inner organic connection between the way we breathe in and the way we breathe out — I will speak of this again in the next few days — and the process of our imagining and thinking. But he also knows that thinking and imagining grow out of the breathing process. And so he wants to go back to the roots of thinking, to the breathing process. He seeks the path up to the spiritual world in a regulation of the breathing process. We cannot imitate this path. If we were to imitate it, we would sin against our human constitution, which has become quite different. The inner structure of our brain and nervous system is different from that from which the instinctive spiritual culture of the Orient emerged. If we were to consider it right today to devote ourselves only to a regulated breathing process, we would be denying the intellectual life. We would be denying what we are constituted for today.

In order to ascend the paths into the spiritual world, we must undergo other metamorphoses. We no longer have to go back from thinking to bodily processes such as breathing; we have to develop thinking itself. That is why today's spiritual science, living at the height of its time, must speak of an education of the intellectual life, but not of the intellectual life that is almost the only one known today. It is precisely this intellectual life that has made us dry and arid, as if parched, for the full scope of life. No matter how much the one-sided intellectualism is railed against from all sides in the present day, nothing is being done to really fight it. One has the feeling that mere concepts, even those taken from serious and conscientious science, leave the soul cold and do not lead it along the paths of true life. On the other hand, however, one does not find the possibility of directing this intellectual life in a direction that can be satisfying, because one wants to avoid precisely that which the spiritual science meant here must regard as the right thing for the modern human being. The modern human being cannot, when he realizes the dryness, the sobriety, the one-sidedness of mere intellectualism, draw on some, as one often says, pre-thought, primitive, elementary life to improve himself as an intellectual person. He cannot, I would say, seek in a life of blind rage, which one does not understand, that which he wants to externally affix to intellectual civilization.

Therefore, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks, through the practice-based development of the soul, that which modern man actually longs for in order to truly satisfy his soul. I have described in detail in the second part of my “Occult Science”, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in other of my writings, how this path is to be followed in a way that is appropriate for Western man. In principle, I will only hint at the fact that it is a matter of taking hold of the soul life in such a way that one avoids developing concepts, notions and ideas in the highest degree, that one does not develop only the life of thought in a one-sided way, but that one exercises the soul in such a way that the most living feelings are connected with the thoughts themselves, which arise, combine and separate. While today the one-sided intellectualist is sober in his thought life, but also lets this thought life wander in the alien fields of science or other fields and otherwise thoughtlessly lives in life, that which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science calls its practice seeks to deepen into thinking, but at this deepening of thinking of thinking, so that one can rejoice, become angry, hate and love what one only thinks, how one hates and loves people, how one becomes angry at outer events, so that a whole inner life arises, arises in such liveliness as the outer life is. The books mentioned are intended to bear witness to the fact that this can be done systematically.

But then, when a person seeks out such paths, when he really develops the forces of knowledge, feeling and will that otherwise lie dormant within him, when he therefore takes his development in hand not from the body, as in the ancient oriental culture, in a regulated breathing process, but from the soul and from the spirit, then he finds the way into the spiritual world. And what forces does he apply? He applies the forces through which his civilization has become great. He applies the forces that he also applied in building his machines, in developing his mechanistic Copernican, Galilean, Keplerian, Newtonian astronomical conceptions. The powers of imagination and ingenuity that are developed by our minds and souls in our machines, what lives in our astronomy, in our chemistry, what lies in our social life, all this is being cultivated. The Oriental had none of this. He could not have continued his spiritual life to the point of developing these powers of the soul. He had to go to the breathing of the body in order to follow the path of knowledge. We must start from the point where we start in our outer practical life. We must proceed from the same soul and spiritual powers that live in our mechanistic culture, which has produced seven to eight hundred million specimens of the subhuman. We must develop a new orientation, that is, a vision of the higher, the eternal, the immortal human being from the most sensual, the most mechanical, from that which proves to be the path to the subhuman in our Western civilization.

However, not everything that wants to be part of modern civilization is appealing to modern people. For this modern man, he demands that the child should develop, because the child cannot yet make its own decision about its development. At the moment when he is supposed to make the decision himself, he no longer allows himself to be involved in the development; at that point he is done; at that point he allows himself to be elected to the city council, to parliament, because he knows everything. One knows everything. There is no need to descend to the development of abilities through which one knows something. One is a critic for everything, if only one has come to the awareness of one's arbitrariness, if only the others are no longer allowed to mess around in relation to development. This modern man must seek the way to ascend again to those heights where one finds the spiritual-soul man.

Now the fact of the matter is that for the time being the inner urge to seek this spiritual-soul-man, to tread the path to these realizations, is still a renunciation-filled one, for this path demands a life that certainly takes place in pain and suffering, a life that not everyone has to live today, not everyone can live, nor does everyone need to live. But just as not everyone can become a chemist, but the results of chemistry can be useful for all people, just as not everyone can become an astronomer, but the results of astronomy can appeal to all souls, so there can be few spiritual researchers, but the results of this spiritual research can be grasped by ordinary common sense, as I have often said here. The few spiritual researchers can communicate their spiritual insights, and common sense will understand them. But that is precisely what people today deny. They come and say: What you spiritual researchers communicate to us may be beautiful fantasies; but we dissect it logically, we do not accept it, because it does not show itself before our human understanding. We have not yet trained ourselves to see higher things.

One does experience very strange things in this area. Just recently another pamphlet has appeared about what I, as an anthroposophically oriented worldview, have to represent before humanity today. A man who is, well, a “university professor” says, where he gives me the brush-off as a philosopher and, as he says, as a theosophist: Yes, there Steiner claims that one must also become a chemist in order to understand chemical things, a physicist in order to understand physical things; one can admit that to him. But now it is very strange how this gentleman behaves strangely. He says: Everyone can agree with what chemists claim about this or that, because if he becomes a chemist himself, he will see that it is correct; everyone can agree with what physicists claim, because if he becomes a physicist himself, he will see that what physicists say is correct. But to understand what spiritual science says, one would have to develop special abilities.

But I am not saying anything else. Just as a person must become a chemist in order to judge chemistry, and as a person must become a physicist in order to judge physics, so a person must become a scholar of spiritual science in order to decide on spiritual science. But now, continuing his text, that strange - perhaps not so strange - university professor says: It is not a matter of what Steiner claims only being justified before people trained in spiritual science, but of it having to be justified before me! That is, it must be justified before someone who not only has no idea about it, but also does not want to get one.

This is, of course, a “common sense” written in quotation marks, which is not good at understanding what spiritual science has to offer. The unbiased common sense will grasp it. Yes, in the future people will perhaps think quite differently about these things than they are accustomed to thinking in many circles today. The world is there. The philosophers have always argued about the world. Well, philosophers will still have common sense. And one can even say, if one is unbiased: philosophy is better than its reputation. But philosophers argue. And if you are unprejudiced, you can even grant a certain acumen in the philosophical field to someone who says the opposite of what another is saying, again out of a certain acumen. Yes, if you are unprejudiced here in this field, you come to a very strange judgment about common sense. It is there. People generally speak in this common sense. But it is not at all suitable for understanding the world, otherwise philosophers would not need to argue. This ordinary common sense does not seem to be at all suitable for grasping the world that is presented to the senses externally, just as it is. Try to see if it can grasp what spiritual science has to say, and you will see: the way will open up for you to grasp precisely that. It is wishy-washy, not even mere prejudice, to say: humanitarians also claim different things; one this or the other that. This is said without knowledge of the facts. If one gets to know the facts, one will no longer claim this.

Of course, many a prejudice and many a preconception will have to be overcome if the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here is to be integrated into modern life. But it will have to be integrated. For the way will have to be found to combine the two spiritual currents you have been shown today. We cannot become reactionaries in order to return to earlier intellectual formations. We must place ourselves in that which the scientific, mechanistic age has produced. But we must spiritualize the forces that have brought forth a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Giordano Bruno, a Röntgen, a Becquerel and so on down to our own day, we must spiritualize these forces so that through the same forces of the human soul, through which we build machines, we also ascend to the knowledge of the spiritual-soul human being. Then we will no longer merely speak of the spirit, but we will be able to give content to the striving for the spirit.

This is what is so disturbing to the deeper observer of contemporary civilization: people today talk a lot about the spirit, but they give no content to this talk about the spirit. This gives rise to world views on the one hand, and to the practice of life in an unorganized way connected with these world views on the other, just as our spiritually scientific world view would be out of place in a house built in an old architectural style. Our spiritually scientific world view wants to live in structures that are born of itself. It should create and can create in such a way that it is able to permeate the external material life down to the technical details and the social interconnections. Then this spiritual science will be able to become the bearer of a civilization that finds the right ways to the goals that have been hinted at today. Then this spiritual science will no longer allow that life to flourish, of which one can say: Well, some strive towards the spirit again; they demand that the person who works hard in the factory no longer works only in the factory, but that he has enough time left over to devote to the spirit as well. Oh, no, spiritual science does not demand that one has to work in the factory and, when one locks the door behind oneself, then steps out of the factory to find spiritual life there. No, spiritual science demands the opposite: that when you enter the factory to go to work, you carry the spirit with you, so that every machine is imbued with the spirit of that which also carries the world view to the highest heights of knowledge, of the immortal. Spiritual science does not want to leave time for the spirit, but to imbue all time with what man can find as the content of his spirit.

Now, people often cry out for the spirit today. A book about socialism has just been published - there are all sorts of heartfelt and sometimes sensible views - by Robert Wilbrandt, a professor at the University of Tübingen. It sounds: Yes, but we will not get anywhere with socialism if we do not find the new spirit, the new soul. So on the last pages of the book, the cry for the spirit, for the soul! But if you take such a man, such a personality, to the point where the spirit is given content, where you not only interpret in the abstract in terms of spirit and soul, where you speak of spiritual and soul content as science otherwise speaks of natural content, then the personality in question withdraws, because they do not have the courage to profess the real spirit that is full of content. And so we see it in many. They cry out for the spirit. But when the spirit seeks a real content, they do not come forward. They remain in merely pointing to an abstract union of human souls with the spiritual. This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks as a path: the path to real spiritual content, to a real spiritual world, out of our own organic powers of knowledge as a goal: to develop the merely inorganic two currents that have been joined together in us, Orientalism and Occidentalism, to form a striving that finds its way out of our own striving, both down into the mechanism and up into the highest spirituality.

I will conclude today by saying only the following, in anticipation of the further elaboration of this theme that I will give tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, when it will be possible to characterize many things more broadly than I could in today's introduction. The call for a new spirituality is echoing today in many hearts and minds, and in a certain way people already sense that our misfortune, which has manifested itself so terribly in the last five years, is connected in the outer world with the fact that our spirit has reached an impasse. That a wall must be broken through in order to make spiritual progress. There is a sense that we cannot make progress in the social, the political, or the outwardly technical spheres without a new spirit. A man who may not always have played a very favorable role, but perhaps a wiser one than some of his colleagues among the “statesmen” - I say that in quotation marks when I speak of statesmen today - in recent years, has now also - statesmen and generals write war memoirs today, after all - has now also written his war memoirs. They end with the following words:

“War will continue, albeit in a modified form. I believe that future generations will call the great drama that has dominated the world for five years not world war, but world revolution...”

These are the words of Czernin, the Austrian statesman. So at least one person can see how things are connected, even if only to a very limited extent. And he continues:

”... and we shall know that this world revolution has only begun with the world war. Neither Versailles nor Saint Germain will create a lasting work. In this peace lies the disintegrating seed of death. The convulsions that shake Europe are not yet diminishing. Like a mighty earthquake, the subterranean rumblings continue. Soon, the earth will open again and again, here or there, hurling fire against the sky; again and again, events of an elemental nature and force will sweep devastatingly across the lands. Until all that is reminiscent of the madness of this war and the French peace has been swept away.

Slowly, with unspeakable agony, a new world will be born. Future generations will look back on our time as if it were a long, evil dream, but day always follows the darkest night. Generations have sunk into the grave, murdered, starved, succumbed to disease. Millions have died in the quest to destroy and annihilate, with hatred and murder in their hearts.

But other generations are rising, and with them a new spirit. They will build up what war and revolution have destroyed. Every winter is followed by spring. That, too, is an eternal law in the cycle of life, that resurrection follows death.

Blessed are those who will be called upon to help build the new world as soldiers of labor.

Here, too, the call for the new spirit arises from the limited statesmanship of the old days. Now, this call for the new spirit must only be understood and take root truly and earnestly enough in people's souls. For even the most external events in life are connected with the most internal ones, the most external material events with the most internal spiritual experiences. And when we look at what the spirit, which reached its peak at the beginning of the 20th century, has lived out in the events of recent years, we will understand that the call for a new spiritual life must come true. With this new spiritual life, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to have its ways and goals connected to the building of the world, just as those spiritual endeavors that fight it are visibly connected to the terrible events of recent years.

Just recently I read a remarkable lecture that was given in the Baltic region – note the date – on May 1, 1918. A physicist's lecture on May 1, 1918, ends with the words: “The world war has shown that the spiritual aspirations of the present day, the scientific work of the present day, are still too isolated.” The world war – roughly speaking, this physicist says – has taught us that in the future, what is being worked on in the scientific laboratories must be in an inner organic connection, in a continuous inner exchange of ideas, with what is being worked on in the general staffs. The most intimate alliance must be sought – so this physicist says – between science and the general staff. He sees the salvation of the future in this!

As one can see, the science of the past can even view alliances that are formed between it and the most destructive forces of humanity as an ideal. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to form an alliance between its spiritual striving and all truly constructive forces of human civilization.

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.

The beginning of anthroposophy is to be made with a consideration of the human senses. Through the senses, the human being enters into a relationship with an external world. When speaking of the senses, two things should be considered. First, one should disregard how the human being enters into another world, namely the spiritual world, through a different path, as described above. And then one should initially disregard whether there is anything spiritual behind what the senses observe. When speaking of the senses, one should approach the spiritual in such a way that one waits to see to what extent the hint of the spiritual arises naturally from the observation of the senses. The spiritual must not be rejected nor presupposed; its manifestation must be awaited.

It is not the objects of sensory observation, but the senses themselves, as human organs, that are considered here. On the basis of what his senses convey to him, man forms ideas about an external world. This is how knowledge of this external world comes about. In relation to knowledge, one can speak of truth and error. Does error now arise in the realm of the senses, or only where judgment, memory, etc. are used to form ideas about the statements of the senses? We have a right to speak of illusions. If, through some irregularity in the ear or the eye, a sound or a light appears differently than it would with the normal formation of the organs concerned, then, for example, there is an illusion. Does this mean that Goethe was wrong when he said, “You may trust your senses implicitly; they will not let you see anything false if your intellect keeps you alert”? Goethe's statement proves to be immediately justified when we consider the following. An error that is caused by reason or memory is different from a sensory deception. The latter can be corrected by common sense. If, through an error of the eye, a tree standing before him appears to someone as a human being, he will only fall into error if he does not correct the eye defect and sees in the pretended human being an enemy against whom he defends himself. It is not so with an error of the intellect, for there it is this intellect itself that errs, and which therefore cannot at the same time correct its own mistakes. The illusions of the senses only become real errors through the mind. This distinction is not pedantry, but a necessity.

Many people are accustomed to listing five types of sensory perception when speaking of sensory perception: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching (or feeling). But we cannot stop here, because there are other ways in which a person enters into a relationship with the outside world that differ from those of hearing or seeing, for example. Even anthropological science currently speaks of senses other than those included in the above list. It is not necessary here to go into the list given by anthropology. It should only be noted that here lies one of the very gratifying points where science, based on mere sensory-physical facts, is pushed by its own observations to views that partly coincide with what the spiritual researcher must establish. Such points of contact will arise more and more in the course of time; and if goodwill prevails on both sides, a time will soon come when natural science and spiritual research will be mutually accepted.

In anthroposophical terms, everything that causes a person to recognize the existence of an object, being or process in such a way that it is justified to place this existence in the physical world can be called a human sense that leads man to recognize the existence of an object, being or process in such a way that he is justified in placing this existence in the physical world.

Seen in this light, the most indeterminate and general sense appears to be that which can be called the sense of life. Man only really notices the existence of this sense when something is perceived through it that breaks through the order in the body. Man feels weariness and fatigue in himself. He does not hear the fatigue, the weariness; he does not smell it; but he perceives it in the same sense as he perceives a smell, a sound. This kind of perception, which relates to one's own corporeality, is ascribed to the sense of life. It is basically always present in an alert person, even if it only becomes quite noticeable when there is a disturbance. Through it, the person perceives themselves as a corporeal self filling the space.

This sense is different from the one by which a person perceives a movement they have performed, for example. You move a leg, and you perceive this movement. The sense by which this happens is called the sense of self-motion. The difference between this sense and the first arises when you consider that through the sense of life you only perceive something that is present in the inner body without you doing anything about it. The sense of one's own movement perceives such things that require activity or mobility.

The third sense arises when one notices how the human being is able to maintain a certain position in relation to above and below, right and left, etc. It can be called the sense of equilibrium or the sense of static. Its peculiarity arises from the fact that one must have a perception of one's position if one is to maintain oneself in it as a conscious being. If the sense of equilibrium does not function, then dizziness will overtake the person; he will fall over. An unconscious object is maintained in its position without being aware of it. Such an object cannot be affected by dizziness. When speaking of this sense, anthropology points to a small organ in the human ear. There are three semicircular canals in the so-called labyrinth of the ear. If these are injured, dizziness occurs.

If you survey the peculiarities of the three senses listed, you will find that humans perceive something through each of them that relates to their own physical existence. Through the sense of life, he acquires general sensations about his corporeality; through the sense of self-movement, he perceives changes in this corporeality of his; through the sense of equilibrium, he perceives his relationship to the spatial outside world. However, he receives this perception in such a way that it reveals itself to him as a state of his own corporeality, as his own sensation of position. — Through these three senses, the human being acquires the sensation of his own corporeality as a whole, which is the basis for his self-awareness as a physical being. One can say that through the senses of life, of self-movement and of balance, the soul opens its gates to one's own corporeality and senses this as the physical external world that is closest to it.

With the following senses, the human being encounters the external world that does not belong to him in this way. The first sense to be considered here is that through which man comes into closest contact with what is called matter. Only gaseous or airy bodies allow close contact with the material. And this is conveyed through the sense of smell. Without a substance being divided into the finest particles and thus spreading like air, it cannot be perceived by the sense of smell.

The next stage of sensory perception is that by which not only the substance as such, but also the effects (deeds) of the substance are perceived. This happens through the sense of taste. This sense can only perceive a watery body, or one that is dissolved in the fluid of the mouth in order to be tasted. Through the sense of taste, man penetrates one degree deeper into the external materiality than through the sense of smell. With the latter, it is the substance itself that approaches the person and manifests itself in its own way; with the sense of taste, what is felt is the effect of the substance on the person. This difference can best be felt by considering how, in the sense of smell, the gaseous nature of the substance must be ready to approach the person so that he can perceive it as it is; in the sense of taste, the person, through his own liquid, dissolves the substance, thus making a change with it, in order to penetrate into those peculiarities of that substance which it does not reveal to him by itself. The sense of smell is suited to perceive the outer side of material things; the sense of taste penetrates more into the inner side of material things. And this inner aspect of material things man must first induce to reveal itself by changing the outer aspect.

Man penetrates even deeper into the inner aspect of the physical external world through the next sense. It is sight. Whether man sees a body as red or blue reveals more about the inner aspect of this body than is contained in the effect conveyed by the sense of taste. It depends on the nature of a body whether it behaves towards the colorless sunlight in such a way that it appears red or blue under its influence. Color manifests itself as the surface of a body. But one can say how the body reveals itself on its surface; this is an appearance of its inner essence through the medium of light.

The sense of warmth penetrates even deeper, as it were, below the surface of the bodies. If you feel a piece of ice or a warm object, you are aware that cold or warmth is something that does not just appear on the surface like color, but that permeates the body completely. You will notice how the sequence of senses characterized here is such that with each successive one, the human being delves deeper into the interior of the bodies of the external world.

A further advance in this immersion is given with the sense of hearing. It leads to the interior of the bodies to a far greater degree than the sense of warmth. Sound causes the interior of the bodies to tremble. It is more than a mere image when one speaks of the soul of a body being revealed through sound. Through the warmth that a body carries within itself, one experiences something of its difference from its surroundings; through sound, the intrinsic nature, the individuality of the body emerges and communicates itself to perception.

If, as is appropriate, one speaks of meaning where knowledge comes about without the participation of understanding, memory, etc., then one must recognize other senses than those listed. If we apply this distinction, it is easy to see that in everyday life the word “sense” is often used in a non-literal way. For example, when we speak of a sense of imitation, a sense of concealment, etc. In what appears as imitation, concealment, etc., the intellect and judgment are already involved. Here we are not dealing with mere sensory activity.

But the situation is quite different when we perceive in language what is revealed by the sound. It is certainly self-evident that a complicated act of judgment is involved in the perception of something spoken, that comprehensive soul processes come into play that cannot be described by the word “sense”. But there is also something simple and direct in this area that represents a sensation before all judgment, just as a color or a degree of warmth is. A sound is not felt only in terms of its pitch, but something much more inward is grasped with it than the tone itself. If we say that the soul of a body lives in the tone, we may also say that in the sound this soul-life reveals itself in such a way that it is released and freed from the physical, and enters into manifestation with a certain independence. Because the sensation of sound precedes judgment, the child learns to sense the sound-meanings of words before it can use judgment. It is through speech that the child learns to judge. It is entirely justified to speak of a special sense of sound or sense of language. The reason that recognizing this sense is difficult is because the most diverse exercise of judgment usually occurs in addition to the direct sensation of what is revealed in the sound. But a careful examination of oneself shows that all hearing of what is given in sounds is based on an equally direct, judgment-free relationship to the being from which the sound emanates, as is the case when a color impression is perceived. It is easier to grasp this fact if we visualize how a sound of pain allows us to directly experience the pain of a being, without any kind of reflection or the like interfering with our perception. It is important to consider that the audible sound is not the only thing through which such inwardness is revealed to a person, as is the case with the sound of speech. Gesture, facial expression, and physiognomy ultimately lead to something simple and direct, which must be counted as much a part of the meaning of speech as the content of the audible sound.

To an even greater degree, the sensory character is hidden in the next sense to be characterized. When we understand a person who communicates through speech, gestures, etc., it is true that judgment, memory, etc. play a predominant role in this understanding. But here too, right self-contemplation leads us to recognize that there is a direct grasping and understanding that can precede all thinking and judging. The best way to develop a feeling for this fact is to realize how one can understand something even before one has developed the ability to judge it. There is, in fact, a very direct perception of that which reveals itself in the concept, so that one must speak of a sense of concept. What a person can experience as a concept in his own soul, he can also receive as a revelation from another being. Through the perception of the concept, one delves even deeper into the inner being of another person than through the perception of sounds. It is not possible to delve even further into another person than to the sensation of what lives in him as a concept. The sense of concept appears as that which penetrates into the innermost being of an external being. With the concept that lives in another person, the human being perceives what lives in him or her in a soul-like way. The sensory character of what is usually called the sense of touch does not appear in the same way as with the ten senses mentioned. This sense conveys external pressure, resistance, hardness, softness. One must visualize the essence of what is meant by “pressure”. The process is by no means a simple one. In reality, we do not perceive the pressing body directly, but rather the fact that it causes us to recoil at this or that point on the skin, or that we have to make a greater or lesser effort to make an impression on the body. There is a remarkable difference between this perception and that of, for example, a degree of warmth that is revealed on a body. Even if it is absolutely true that a cold bath will appear in a different state of warmth to a person who is hot from exercise than to a person who is freezing, that is, that in the perception of warmth, the subjective state is also perceived, it remains true that essentially the nature of the external object is revealed in the warmth. This results in a direct relationship between the feeling person and the object. It is not the same as saying to oneself that one must exert oneself more or less to make an impression on a body or to overcome the resistance it offers through its hardness or softness. What one says to oneself is the reproduction of an experience that one has within oneself in the body. And even if the fact is hidden, it is still true that in such a perception the judgment plays along, as it were secretly: “I find strong resistance, therefore the body is hard.” Just as it is true that, for example, in the sense of language, perception can be a completely direct one without any judgment, it is also true that, in the sense of touch, there is always an underlying judgment, however hidden. What is directly sensed by the sense of touch can always be found within the realms of the first three senses listed here. A body that presses on me, for example, causes a shift in the position of my body, which is sensed by the sense of life, or the sense of self-movement, or the sense of balance.

It is necessary to clearly define the differences between the individual sensory areas. With each sense, the relationship that a person has with an external object is different than with the other senses. Through the sense of life, the sense of self-movement, and the sense of balance, a person is immersed in his or her own physicality and perceives him or herself as a being of the external world. Through the sense of smell, the sense of taste, and the sense of sight, the physical reveals itself insofar as it manifests itself outwardly. Through the sense of warmth, it reveals inwardness, but still in an external way. With the help of the sense of hearing, the sense of speech, the sense of thought, the human being perceives an alien inwardness that is external to him. If one pays attention to these differences between the sensory areas, then one will not be tempted to speak too much in general terms about what a sense, sensory perception, etc. is. Rather, one will pay attention to the particular relationship through which the human being enters into the external world through each sense. It does not say much to characterize sensory perception, for example, as an impression that is directly caused by a stimulus of the sensory nerve in the soul. Through such definitions, it is all too easy to lose the characteristic of each individual sense in blurred generalizations. But it is important to note that the impression we experience from the warmth of a body is quite different in nature from that caused by a light impression. If we do not take this into account, we are easily led, for example, to place far too much value on judgments such as: “Man perceives the external world through the senses and forms ideas and concepts on the basis of sensory perceptions.” Here sense perception is simply set against conceptual thought. Such a judgment obscures the necessary free view of the fact that, for example, the sensation of smell is very far removed from the conceptual experience, but that the sense of hearing as a sense perception already approximates to what is present within the soul as such an experience.

The basis for the further life of the soul is given in the sensory perceptions. Based on the sensations of the first three senses, as well as those of smells, tastes, colors, sounds, etc., the ideas arise from the interaction of the human being with the outside world, through which what is given from the outside is reflected in the soul. The judgments arise through which the human being orients himself within this outside world. Experiences of sympathy or antipathy arise, in which the emotional life is formed; desires, longings and will develop. If one wants to have a characteristic for this inner life of the human soul, one must focus one's attention on how it is held together and, as it were, permeated by what one calls one's own “I”. A sensory perception becomes a soul experience when it is taken up from the realm of the senses into the realm of the “I”. One can gain a justified idea of this fact by making the following simple consideration. For example, one perceives the warmth of a certain object. As long as one touches the object, there is an interrelationship between the “I” and the external world. In this interrelationship, the idea of the temperature of the object in question is formed in the “I”. When you remove your hand from the object, the idea remains in the “I”. This idea now forms something essential within the soul life. It should not be neglected to note that the idea is that which detaches itself from the sensory experience and lives on in the soul. Within certain limits, a person can now call the experiences that he has with the help of the senses, and which then continue in the soul, his world.

But anyone who now reflects on how this world enters his realm will be forced to assume a different existence for this world. For how can this world only be an experience of the soul; how can man know anything about it? Only through having senses. Before the world can present itself to man as a sensory perception, these senses themselves must first be born out of it. For man the world would be soundless if he had no sense of hearing, and cold if he had no sense of warmth. But just as this is true, so is the other: in a world in which there were no sounds, no sense of hearing could arise; in a cold world no sense of warmth could develop. One need only think of how eyes do not develop in beings that live in the dark; or how, in beings that have developed eyes under the influence of light, these eyes atrophy when their bearers exchange their stay in the light for one in the dark. One need only think this through with complete clarity to realize that the world given to man through his senses, and on which he builds his soul life, must be based on another world, which makes this sensory world possible only by allowing the senses to arise out of itself. And this world cannot fall within the realm of the sensory, since it must precede it entirely.

Thus, contemplation is opened up to a world that lies beyond the sensory world, which cannot itself be perceived by the senses, but from which the sensory world arises as if from an ocean of existence that lies beyond it. The sense of warmth perceives warmth; behind it lies something that has formed the sense of warmth. The eye perceives through light; behind it lies something that forms the eye. One must distinguish between a world as it is given to man through the senses and one that underlies it. Is it impossible to say anything about this latter world through mere reflection? We can say something if we consider the following. Through the interrelationship between man and the external world, as mediated by sense perception, the world of perception, feeling and desire arises within man. In the same way, one can think about the relationship between the assumed other world and man. Through them, the organs of sensory perception arise in him. In everything that can be experienced in the sensory world, the human being is there with his “I”, in which the soul world is built up on the basis of sensory experiences. The construction of the sensory organs, which necessarily precedes all sensory perception, must take place in a realm of reality into which no sensory perception can penetrate. (There is hardly any need to consider the objection that might briefly occur to someone that a person could observe the structure of the sense organs in another being. After all, what he can perceive there, he perceives through the senses. One can indeed observe how a hammer is made without using a hammer; but one cannot observe with the senses how a sense organ is formed without using one.)

It is entirely justified to speak of the sense organs as having to be built from a world that is itself supersensible. And the essence of sense perceptions as described here provides food for thought for saying more about this world. Since the sense organs ultimately appear to be the result of the activity of this world, it can be said that this activity is a manifold one. It acts on man from as many sides as there are sense organs. The currents of this world pour into the wells that lie in the sense organs, so that man can draw from these wells for his soul life. And because that which is drawn from these wells ultimately comes together in the 'I', it must, although it comes from different sides, originally flow from a single source. In the 'I', the various sensory perceptions come together in unity. In this unity, they present themselves as belonging together. What strikes the soul in sensory perception is such that the inner life of the ego can be detached from it. From this it can be seen that behind the sensory world, in a supersensible one, there are as many sources of activity as there are sensory organs. These sources of activity reveal themselves through their effect, which consists in the structure of the sensory organs.

The range of these sources of activity thus includes a number of these sources that is equal to the number of sense organs. And one can say that the outermost limits of this range may be assumed to be the “I” on the one hand and the “sense of touch” on the other, although the sense of touch, like the “I”, may not be counted as part of the actual sensory life. What once belonged to the “I” has detached itself from sensory perception, and so, because it is a completely inner experience, can no longer be counted among the latter. But it belongs to the essential nature of every sensory perception that it can become an “I” experience. To do so, every sense organ must be predisposed from the supersensible world to provide something that can become an “I” experience. And the sense of touch, in a sense, provides experiences of the opposite kind. What it reveals about an object presents itself as something that lies entirely outside of the human being. Thus, the human being as a whole must be constructed out of the supersensible world in such a way that, on the basis of tactile experiences, he confronts a world outside of himself.

If we survey the life of the human soul as it develops out of sense experiences, the sense organs appear as fixed points, as if in a circumference; and the “I” appears as the movable element, which, by passing through this circumference in various ways, gains the experiences of the soul. The whole structure of the human organism, insofar as it is expressed in the sense organs, points to its causes in the supersensible world. There are as many sense areas as there are such causes; and within the realm of these causes, there is a unified supersensible principle, which becomes apparent in the organization towards the unity of the I.

A further consideration shows that the supersensible activity revealed in the structure of the sense organs works in different ways. In the three spheres of the sense of life, the sense of self-movement and the sense of equilibrium, the activity starts from within the human body and manifests itself within the limits of the skin. This kind of activity is also present in the senses of smell, taste, sight, warmth and hearing; but it is joined by another, which must be said to proceed from the outside inward. The organ of hearing, for example, is a member of the human organism. Within this organism, the forces must be at work that shape this organ in accordance with the nature of the body as a whole. From the outside, however, the hidden supersensible forces in the world of sound must come together, forming this organ in such a way that it is receptive to sound. In the case of the five sense organs mentioned, an encounter of forces is thus indicated on the surface of the human body, as it were: forces act in the direction from the inside of the body outwards and shape the individual sense organs according to the nature of the whole organism; the forces that meet them come from the outside inwards and shape the organs in such a way that they adapt to the various manifestations of the external world. In the case of the senses of life, self-movement and equilibrium, only one of these two directions, the one striving from the inside outwards, is present. It further follows that in the case of the senses of speech and of concepts, the direction from the inside outwards does not apply, and that these senses are built into the human being from the outside in. For these senses, therefore, the supersensible activity as characterized reveals itself in such a way that it already approaches the inner life of the soul in terms of its formation. Insofar as we must also see the 'I' predisposed in the above-characterized way in the supersensible forces that build up the senses, we can say that in the 'I' these forces betray their own nature most of all. Only that this essential nature is, as it were, concentrated in a point in the 'I'. If we observe the 'I', we find in it a nature that is spread out in the most abundant profusion in a supersensible world and reveals itself out of this only in its effects, in the building of the senses. In this respect, too, the sense of touch presents itself as the opposite of the 'I'. In the sense of touch, that part of the supersensible world (or, if you will, the extra-sensible world) is revealed that cannot become an inner experience of the human being, but is accessed through corresponding inner experiences.

Anthropology describes the sense organs as sensory phenomena. It is consistent with the above findings that it does not yet designate special organs for the senses of life, self-movement and balance. The forces acting from the inside out shape the human being as a general sense organism that experiences and maintains itself. The organs of these three sense areas spread out, as it were, in the general physicality. It is only with the sense of balance that anthropology points to the three semicircular canals as a hint of a special sensory organ, because it is with this sense that the human being enters into an elementary relationship with the outside world, namely with the spatial directions. For the five intermediate senses there are separate organs, which readily show that the abilities characterized, from outside inward and from inside outward, interact in a variety of ways in their formation. (Even if there are still some doubts for anthropology regarding the external sense organ for warmth, these doubts will be resolved as science advances.) External organs for the sense of sound and the sense of conception cannot be described in the same way as for the other senses because these organs are already located where physical life internalizes itself in the soul. But the organ of touch will present itself to science more and more clearly as what it must be in the sense of the above considerations. It must work in such a way that the human being withdraws into himself in the touched objects, so to speak, shutting himself off from the areas of this sense in inner bodily experiences. We must therefore recognize in the structures spread over the entire surface of the body, which are regarded as organs of touch, something that essentially has to do with the body's surface withdrawing from the external world that is touched. The organs of touch are therefore actually formative for the interior of the human body; they give the body the form through which it withdraws from the external world that touches it from all sides. (In those places where the organs of touch show a greater sensitivity, the human being relates to the outside world differently than in those places of lesser sensitivity. He pushes himself more or less, as it were, against the outside world in one case or the other. From this it can be seen that the shape of the body is, in a certain respect, a result of the nature of the organs of touch at the various points on the surface of the body.)

Another aspect now becomes part of the sensory life of the human being. Here too we can distinguish a number of areas. First of all, there is the process by which the inner life of the body is sustained from the outside: breathing. In this process, the life of the body touches the outer world; it confronts the outer world, as it were, in a form in which it cannot continue to exist, in order to receive from it the strength to continue. These words express approximately what is revealed to man in the breathing process, without going into the results of sensory science. The latter belong to anthropology. But what is characterized here is experienced by man directly in life, in his desire for air, in the observation of the inhibition of life when there is a lack of air, etc. A further process in this area is that which can be described as warming. For the maintenance of bodily life, man depends on the development of a quite definite degree of warmth within his body, which does not depend on the processes that determine the warmth of his surroundings, but on those that take place within him, and which maintain the intrinsic warmth within definite limits, however the external warmth may be constituted. A third process of this kind is nutrition. Through it, the life of the body enters into a relationship with the external world in such a way that the substances consumed by it are replaced. A fourth process must be added to nutrition if it is to take place. In the mouth, the food consumed must interact with the saliva secreted by the body; similarly, such a process takes place during the further digestive process. This can be described as the fourth process in this area: secretion. Physical self-observation now shows that this process is followed by another. In the secretion that aids digestion, what is secreted is merely able to transform the food in such a way that it can be absorbed into the body. But man must also secrete that which can enter into this bodily life. He must transform the nutrients in such a way that they can serve to build up his body. This is based on a process that goes beyond what is given in the secretion just characterized. This process shall be called the process of preservation. Another process arises when we turn our attention to human growth. This goes beyond mere maintenance. In addition to the maintenance process, which would leave the body as it is at a particular point in time, there is another process that can be described as a growth process. The growth process and the maintenance process reach their conclusion when the finished body presents itself to the human being in a very specific form. This shaping of the human being from the inside out into a very specific form is called production. Reproduction then presents itself as a repetition of this production. That which belongs to one's own body is brought forth in such a way that it remains united with the human being; in reproduction, the brought forth comes out. Since here, for the time being, we are only speaking of the human being as a self-contained physical individuality, the process of reproduction is not taken into account.

The processes that are referred to here as aspiration, warming, nutrition, secretion, maintenance process, growth process and production are now followed by inner experiences for humans in a similar way to how inner experiences follow the processes of sensory perception in the ego. Emotional experiences follow breathing, warming and nourishment. These experiences are less noticed in their middle states, but they immediately stand out when this state is disturbed in one direction or the other. If breathing cannot take place in the appropriate way, anxiety and the like occur. A disturbance of the warmth state manifests itself in the feeling of frost or heating. Disturbance of nutrition manifests itself in hunger and thirst. It can be said that breathing, warmth and nutrition are linked to inner experiences, which reveal themselves as a kind of well-being, comfort, etc. These experiences are always there; they underlie what manifests itself as malaise, discomfort, hunger, etc. when there is a disturbance. Real introspection now shows that such emotional experiences are also related to secretion, the process of preservation, the process of growth and the process of creation. Think of how states of fear and anxiety manifest themselves in excessive perspiration; and you will be able to admit that secretion of this kind, within certain limits, is connected with a feeling that manifests itself in a general sense of comfort, just as one can see that all secretion is accompanied by an emotional state that escapes the attention of consciousness as long as it is normal. And further, self-reflection shows that such emotional experiences are also connected with the processes of preservation, growth and production. One can feel, for example, that the feeling of strength of youth is the expression of what inner experiences follow growth.

These inner emotional experiences are now something that stands in a similar way in the human being to the processes of breathing, warming, growing, etc., as the inner experiences that follow sensory perceptions stand in the “I” to the processes of these perceptions. It is therefore possible to speak of the fact that, for example, breathing is connected with an experience in the human being in a similar way to how hearing is connected with the experience that is designated as sound. The only difference is that the degree of clarity with which external sense perceptions are inwardly relived is much greater than that which is accorded to the inner experiences characterized here. Hidden beneath or within the 'ego-person' is another person who is built up out of inner experiences, just as the ego-person is built up out of the results of external sense perceptions. But this human being who lies beneath the 'I-human' is only really noticed in life when he announces himself to the 'I-human' in the disturbances of his experiences. But just as little as one may throw together the process of sensory perception with the process in the ego that is linked to it, so little may one do so, for example, in relation to the breathing process and the inner experiences (of an emotional nature) that combine with this process. It would be easy to be tempted to completely misunderstand the nature of these inner experiences and to say that there is no essential difference between them and those that develop under the influence of sense perceptions. It must be admitted that the difference between the two types of inner experiences, for example, between the sense of life and the inner emotional experience during the breathing or warming process, is not particularly clear. But it can easily be determined by more exact observation, if one bears the following in mind. It belongs to a sense experience that a judgment can only be attached to it through the “I”. Everything that a person accomplishes under the influence of a judgment must, if it relates to sense perceptions, be such that the judgment is made within the “I”. For example, one perceives a flower and passes judgment on it: this flower is beautiful. What is now evoked by the processes of breathing, warming, nourishment, etc., as inner experiences, points, without the intervention of the “I”, to something similar to judgment. In the experience of hunger there is an immediate indication of something corresponding to hunger and connected with it in the same way that, after making a judgment in response to a sense perception, the human being connects with that sense perception. Just as the activity of the 'I' connects with the sense perception when making a judgment, so with hunger something external is connected without the 'I' establishing this connection. This union may therefore be called an instinctive manifestation. And this applies to all inner experiences that are connected with breathing, nourishment and growth processes. We must therefore distinguish between the instinctive inner experiences of breathing comfort and warmth and well-being, and the corresponding perceptions of the meaning of life. The wave of instinct must, as it were, first beat against the 'I-human being' in order to reach the realm of the meaning of life. The structure of the inner experiences that take place through the processes described behind the 'I-human being' are now to be ascribed to the 'astral human being'. Again, the name 'astral human being' should initially be associated with nothing other than what is described here. Just as the “I-person” draws his experiences from the “sense world” through the sense organs, so the “astral person” draws his from the world that is given to him through the processes of breathing, growing, etc. For the time being, let this world be called the “world of life”.

In order for a “life world” to exist, the organs of life must be built out of a world that lies beyond all life in a similar way to the forces for building the sense organs lying beyond the world of sense perceptions. This world reveals itself again in its effects, in the structure of the organs of life. The individual areas of the life processes: breathing, warming, nourishment, etc., can be interpreted as references to just as many areas of this world. One can now see that the areas of the life processes are less strictly separated from each other than the areas of sensory perception. The sense of taste, for example, is strictly separated from the sense of sight, whereas the areas of life processes are closer; they merge more. Breathing leads to warming, which in turn leads to nutrition. - Anthropology therefore shows essentially separate sensory organs for sensory perception; for the life processes, it shows organs that flow into one another. Thus the lungs, the most exquisite respiratory organ, are connected with the organs of blood circulation, which serve for warming; these in turn flow together with the digestive organs, which correspond to nutrition, etc. — This is an indication that the corresponding areas of the world in which their constructive forces lie also relate to each other in a different way than the forces for building the sense organs. The latter must, as it were, be more mobile in relation to one another than the organs of sense. The experiences of the sense of taste, for example, can only meet with those of the sense of hearing in the common 'I' to which they belong. The feeling of growth, on the other hand, meets with itself through that which is revealed in the breathing process. The feeling of the power of growth is revealed in the ease of breathing, in warming, etc., through increased inner life. Each feeling-like experience of this kind can coincide with another of the same kind. The areas of sensory perception could be depicted as a kind of circumference, with the individual areas resting on it while the “I” moves across them. The life processes can be depicted in a different way. They can all be imagined as being mobile and capable of moving across each other.

Now, however, there are also clear relationships between the sense perceptions and the life processes. Take the breathing process and relate it to the auditory perception. In both cases, the corresponding bodily organ is directed towards the outside world. This is an indication that in the outer world that which has a relationship to both the one and the other organ reveals itself. It is only that, for instance, two things reveal themselves in the air; in relation to one, the respiratory organ is formed and places it at the service of the body; in relation to the other, the structure of the organ of hearing is related. It may be recognized that the forces that shape the organ of hearing must, so to speak, be more original than those that form the respiratory organ. For in the developed human body, everything is interdependent. A human organ of hearing can only unfold from the inside out if the respiratory system is predisposed in just the way it is. From out of the organism, the respiratory system grows towards the outer world, as does the organ of hearing. Now the respiratory organ serves only the inner life of the body; the organ of hearing, however, must be adapted to the outer world - to the realm of sound. In the outgrowth of the respiratory organ from the body, therefore, only the nature of the body itself needs to be taken into account; the organ of hearing must outgrow itself in such a way that it is appropriate for the outer world of sound. No other organ needs to lie in front of the respiratory organ; it grows in accordance with the inner formative forces. The organ of hearing, however, must grow towards an already existing structure. Its adaptation to the outer world must precede its emergence from the inner life of the body. This shows that the forces that form the organ of hearing as a sensory tool belong to a world that is the more original or higher than the other, in which lie the forces that reveal themselves as such, which form both the organ of hearing and the organ of respiration from the body. A similar thing can be shown for other sensory perceptions and life processes. One's attention is drawn to the sense of taste. The secretions can be related to it in a similar way to the respiratory process to the sense of hearing. The saliva of the mouth contains what the food dissolves and thus makes it possible to taste. A similar reflection to the one just made can show that the forces from which the secretory organs are formed are the less original ones compared to those through which the sense of taste arises.

In the light of such considerations, one can therefore assume a higher supersensible entity in man, whose powers reveal themselves in the structure of the human sense organs. Likewise, there is another whose effects reveal themselves in the structure of the human organs of life. The latter world is felt by the 'astral man' as his instinctive inner experiences; the former manifests itself to the 'I-man' as a sensory reality (sensual world). However, neither the first world through the senses nor the second can come directly to manifestation in the astral man.

It has been said that the supersensible world reveals itself in the “I”, as it were shrunk to a point, in its own nature; in the same sense, it can be recognized that the second of the worlds mentioned shows itself in the emotional experiences of the “astral man”, which can be described as life instincts. In these experiences something is expressed with which the other instinctive experiences of the “astral man” merge into one and are an image of a supersensible world in the sense that the “I-man” is an image of such a world.

The “I-person” and the “astral person” represent two human parts that express themselves in inner processes. In order to make the “I-person” possible, the forces of a supersensible world build up the sense organs. In so far as the human body is the carrier of the sense organs, it shows itself to be built out of a supersensible world. Let us now call this carrier of the sense organs the physical human body. The 'I-human' permeates it in order to live with its help in the sense world. We must therefore see in the physical human body an entity that is built out of forces that are related in their nature to the 'I' itself. Within the sense world, the physical human body can only reveal itself in its sensory manifestation. According to its inner reality, it is a being of a supersensible nature. — In order to make the “astral human being” possible, another world, which is added to the characterized supersensible world as a “life world”, builds the organs of life. The forces of this world have proved to be akin to those of the experiences that the “astral human being” has in the instincts of life. What builds up the physical human being reveals itself in the sense world in the sense described above. The forces that build the organs of life can only reveal themselves in the physical world in the processes of life. This is because they generate the organs of life, and only through such organs can a life process manifest itself. The organs of life themselves are not organs of perception. Therefore, not only the forces that build up the organs of life remain imperceptible to the senses, but the manifestation of these forces in the human being cannot become manifest to the senses either, but can only be an intuitive, instinctive experience. This revelation will now be called the 'etheric human body'. (The word 'etheric' should be understood to mean only what is meant here, and in no way what bears the name 'ether' in physics.) Just as the physical human body relates to the 'I-human', so the 'etheric human body' relates to the 'astral human'. The physical body is, in its essence, such that it provides the I with sense experiences; the “etheric body” can only be experienced directly by the “astral human being” in terms of feeling. The relationship between the I and the physical human body is the same as that between the “astral human being” and the “etheric human body”. Thus the organs of life presuppose forces to which they adapt themselves, in that they shape sense organs, such as the organ of hearing, out of the body in the sense of experiences to which they themselves do not serve; and the sense organs in turn presuppose the organs of life in that they are maintained by their processes.

Thus we can distinguish: 1. A supersensible world in which lie the forces for building up the sense organs. 2. A supersensible world in which lie the forces for building up the organs of life. The former presupposes the latter; therefore the former can be called the higher spiritual world and the latter the lower spiritual world. 3. A world in which the astral human being is related to the life processes in such a way that these reveal themselves in him as life instincts. This presupposes the life processes, and thus the second world. It may be called the astral world. 4. A world in which sense experiences reveal themselves to the human being through the sense organs. This, however, is the physical-sensual world.

The physical human body is formed from the higher spiritual world, in so far as it is the carrier of the sense organs. The etheric human body is formed from the lower spiritual world, in so far as it builds up the life organs. In the astral world, the astral human being enters into a relationship with the processes of life, in so far as these reveal themselves in the life instincts. In the physical world, the human ego enters into a relationship with the sense experiences (sound, tone, warmth, light, etc.) that present themselves as the external world, insofar as these reveal themselves as the sense world.

In the previous section, the “astral man” was only considered in terms of how his emotional experiences reflect the processes of the life organs. But these experiences are not the only ones that are peculiar to him. In addition to these experiences, there is, first of all, the ability to move in humans. The human being does not move his body only in response to impulses that arise from life processes. The impulses for movement are located in the inner life, insofar as this is independent of life processes. But self-reflection shows that these impulses do not always have to be triggered by the impulses of the “I-human”; they arise as instinctive experiences and thus belong to the same realm as the instinctive experiences that combine with the life processes, that is, the “astral human”. Furthermore, those experiences of the “astral man” that can be described as instinctive desires also present themselves as such experiences. Desires arise on the basis of sensory perceptions. But in relation to them, self-contemplation shows the following. Sensory perception first leads to a judgment when it is taken up by the “I-person”. This judgment then acts on the “astral person” when it leads to a desire. The experience forms in the “I-person”: the sensually perceived is valuable; interest awakens for it. If this interest is now to become a desire, the judgment must be seized by an impulse of the “astral man”. And desires are also formed on the basis of experiences that are connected with life processes. However, the emotional experiences described above are not yet desires. The experience of hunger is not yet a desire. It only points to the life process in a judgmental way. The desire is an independent experience that the “astral man” adds to the feeling of hunger. In addition, there are desires that are rooted in the “astral man” without being stimulated by life processes or by external perceptions. Certain drives belong to the realm from which such desires arise. — A third kind of independent experience of the “astral human” arises when we consider how something else interposes itself between the process of sense perception and the experience of the “I-human”. It is the “image” that arises in the alternation between sense experience and “I” on the basis of the former. The sense experience is transitory; it lasts only as long as the sense organ is directed towards the object. The “picture” remains; but this “picture” is not yet something that belongs to the judgment, to the I-activity itself. For one can only judge on the basis of the “picture”. The picture contains an experience of the “astral man”, not of the “I-man”. One can also call the “image” the sensation if one does not apply this word to the sense experience itself but to its content. In this sense, sensations are the third kind of independent experiences of the “astral human being”. Just as one speaks of sense organs for the physical human being and of life organs for the etheric human being, so too can one speak of impulses of movement, longings and sensations for the astral human being. The organs for these experiences cannot come from the astral human being itself, because the latter must first have them before it can have the experiences. The organs must be formed out of a world lying outside the astral man. But because the astral man has such experiences in feeling, desire and movement, the impulses of which are rooted in himself, and because he is, so to speak, an observer of what must unfold in himself, the forces that form the corresponding organs can only come from the same sphere as the whole astral man. We must therefore presuppose a world that, although it lies outside the “astral man”, is nevertheless of the same essence as it. The nature of this world can also be revealed here from that experience of the “astral man” which is the innermost. The “sensations” or “image sensations” can be recognized as such in the sense mentioned above. In the desires and impulses of movement, on the other hand, there is something that points beyond the inner experience. The desires and impulses of movement must also be stimulated from a world that is similar to his world of “images”, in the construction of which he is involved as an “astral human being”. We can now distinguish between the “astral human being” as he experiences himself inwardly in “images”, desires and impulses of movement, and the “astral human being” who is the revelation of a world lying outside the impulse of movement and desire. This “astral man” is to be distinguished from the first “astral body” of man. It can be perceived by the senses just as little as the “etheric body,” because it does not produce organs for physical perception, but only for sensation, desire and movement impulse. It is clear that the impulse of movement and desire cannot be perceived by the senses; but this must also be admitted for the intuitive perception, in so far as it is of the same nature as the forces that build up the “astral body”. For the image that arises through a sensory experience also detaches itself from this experience and remains as the content of the “astral man”. But the forces that form the organs of the “astral man” must be conceived as a detached “image”, not as a sensory experience. However, as long as this “image” is imagined as if its content had come from a sensory experience, it cannot illustrate the forces from which the “astral body” is formed. This is because a sensory organ is necessary for the emergence of such an image. It must be thought of an image of this kind, but not of such origin. A fantasy image is of this kind. As long as a fantasy image comes from the mere personal arbitrariness of the “I-human”, it cannot, by its very nature, be considered for the characterization of the world mentioned. It must arise out of a reality that lies outside of the “I-human” and also outside of the “astral human”. Taking into account all that has been said, one can form an idea of what the “astral body” must be like. According to the indications that have emerged, it is an imagistic body rooted in reality, which from within itself kindles the forces of desire and movement.

In the areas corresponding to sensory experiences, something was given that could be visualized as a perimeter along which the individual forces were distributed, which manifest themselves in the sense organs as their effects. In the regions corresponding to the life processes, the picture could be chosen so that the individual corresponding forces run over each other. One must say “run over each other”; for the individual processes do not interpenetrate. Respiration, for example, comes close to the process of maintenance because the latter must continually rebuild the organ of respiration. But the respiratory process itself is not changed by the influence of the process of conservation. The two processes – breathing and the process of conservation – thus work past each other. This is different for the processes of movement, desire and “image sensation”. These three processes work in the following way. Image sensations are effectively generated in desires; desires live on in the impulses of movement. It is therefore justified to say that when an image sensation meets desire, the former permeates the latter, and the content of the image sensation lives on in the desire. Likewise, the desire lives on in the movement - together with the image sensation. Thus the forces of the world out of which the astral body is formed can be visualized in such a way that one thinks of them as three force-structures: that structure which corresponds to the image-sensations acts on that which pours out the longings, and in the structure for the movements the effects of the first two structures then live on.

It will now be easy to see that the world from which the “astral body” originates, is the same as that characterized in the previous chapter as the “astral world”. For the life processes must first be transformed into life instincts in order to be impulses in the “astral man”. Life instincts, pictorial sensations, desires and impulses for movement thus belong to the “astral man” insofar as he already presupposes the lower spiritual world and himself has his origin in the “astral world”.