The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! If you advance in the course of the development of today's science, you can make your way from this or that branch of knowledge to the other, to which you are led by certain external or internal necessities. But basically, all this comes from a deeper human essence. You have to say: this path is traversed with a certain inner indifference. Of course, there are exam nerves, and these can lead to inner psychological catastrophes. But these psychological catastrophes – especially those who have gone through them will be able to testify to this – are not really connected with the content of what one is approaching, let us say in mathematics, in medicine, in biology. A researcher can also experience inner joy when he has discovered something. But what is experienced inwardly by the soul is outwardly linked to the content of what has come before the soul in knowledge.

This is certainly a radical way of expressing a phenomenon that does not always occur so radically; but if we contrast it with the opposite that arises when studying, that is, at the same time as inwardly experiencing anthroposophical spiritual science, the validity of what has been said will emerge.

When studying and inwardly experiencing anthroposophical spiritual science, one really does experience inner fateful events. One experiences psychological catastrophes and peripeteia. On the one hand, these experiences are closely and intensely connected with the content of the person approached in knowledge. On the other hand, we experience something that takes hold of human nature in many ways, transforms it, brings it to other levels of soul development, and so on. This fact, which at first glance might appear to be an external one, is in fact intrinsically connected with the nature of anthroposophical spiritual science; it is connected with the fact that, while one rises objectively out of today's scientific spirit into a world picture in a justified way, one does not actually find the human being in this world picture. Of course, one can also construct him out of it; but the human being who can be constructed out of the present evolutionary doctrine, who can be constructed out of present-day biology or physiology, does not present himself in an image that evokes inner tremors and liberations in the soul; he presents himself in an image that leaves the soul cold.

But, dear attendees, is not the essence of the human soul in everyday life that we go through inner turmoil, pain, suffering, joy and satisfaction? Do we not go through catastrophes and peripeteia through our external lives? Can we therefore hope that we can grasp this human being, who is internally changeable and so close to us in his changeability, through a science that, on the one hand, provides us with an image of the human being that must actually leave us indifferent, yes, that must see its perfection in a certain relationship precisely in the fact that it leaves us indifferent? Anyone who sees this fact in the right light will initially be emotionally drawn to the essence of anthroposophical knowledge of man. This essence of anthroposophical knowledge of man — I have tried to describe it in part according to its method in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds?” I have tried to describe it by name in my book “Theosophy” and then in the ” Secret Science. I have tried to show how the striving for knowledge must ascend if it is to arrive at genuine anthroposophical knowledge of man, through three degrees of knowledge, through Imagination, through Inspiration, through Intuition understood in the deeper sense. And I believe I have made it clear in my description of what a person can experience in imaginative, inspired, intuitive life, that going through such a path of knowledge means that a series of inner experiences of destiny take place at the same time. , so that not only the content of knowledge approaches the human being in abstraction, but the image of the human being approaches direct human experience, that which sits within us as the experienced essence of our human dignity.

Imagination is the first step in penetrating the essence of the world as well as the essence of the human being. I have described how imagination can be cultivated through a kind of meditative life and a kind of concentration of the power of thought, in a completely healthy way that is the opposite of a pathological one. Now I would like to draw attention to what actually happens within a person when they strive for this imaginative level of knowledge. It is the case that through this meditative inner experience, through this methodically disciplined inner experience of concentrating thoughts and feelings, the soul forces are, as it were, gathered together, and they are permeated by consciousness more intensely than is otherwise the case. If we then observe what is actually growing when we meditate and concentrate in this way, we find that it is the same thing — only in its continuation — that has brought us to actual self-awareness in our ordinary experience, that has brought us to composure, to calm personality and which has brought us, if I may use the expression, to the actual egoity of the human being, to that in which the human being must find himself so that he can detach himself from the world in a level-headed way, so that he can come to self-awareness in the right way.

This is also the dangerous thing about this path, that first of all this egoity of the human being must be strengthened. That which has led people to egoity must be taken further. Therefore, what is striven for here can basically only be properly achieved if it is preceded by a corresponding preparation, the preparation that I have described truthfully in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”. There you will find a certain method for attaining true inner modesty, that inner modesty which may not always be openly displayed in outer life, owing to outer circumstances, but which must penetrate the life of the soul in depth. If this modesty is not thoroughly developed as an inner strength of the soul experience, then there is indeed the danger of human megalomania on the path to imagination, not pathological megalomania, but psychological, moral megalomania. Those who apply anthroposophical methods correctly cannot lapse into pathology because these methods run directly counter to what can lead people out of their natural state into pathological conditions. However, they may certainly face psychological dangers such as the megalomania referred to here. A certain inner stability, rooted in modesty and unpretentiousness, is necessary for the individual who aspires to that elevation and intensification of egoism which is necessary to achieve imaginative knowledge. In ordinary life and in ordinary cognition, our concepts are too pale, our highest ideas too abstract, to move from their own full saturation to the inner experience of that which actually pushes man towards egoity. That which otherwise lives in the power of forming concepts and shaping ideas must be elevated, must be intensified. Then, indeed, an experience occurs, and by the occurrence of this experience the one striving toward imagination can actually gauge the correctness of his striving. One has done exercises to increase one's egoism, one has done such exercises that one's pale concepts and ideas have been raised to the intensity one experiences when one has a sensory image before one's eyes or ears. One has thereby increased that power which, by its concentration, produces our composure, our sense of personality, our egoism. The experience one has is that from a certain point on, an increase in egoity no longer occurs, that from a certain point on, precisely because of the increase in egoity, in a sense because of the arrival of egoity at a point of culmination, this egoity actually dissolves. That is the significant thing, that our egoity, when it is increased, is increased correctly, does not increase into the excessive as egoity, but that it basically dissolves.

From this alone it can be seen that the experience we have as human beings in the outer physical world, and which, through its own nature, carries us to egoity, is necessary as a transition, that egoity in a healthy way the physical world and through sensory perceptions must be attained before one can turn to that increase that I mean here, which then leads to a dissolution, so to speak, of egoity, or rather, to an outflow of egoity.

Where does our egoity flow into first? In ordinary life, my dear audience, our egoity is actually banished into the moment. We can only say “I” to ourselves by feeling that we are a being experiencing the moment. That which we already experienced yesterday, which was intimately connected with our egoity yesterday, what we were immersed in yesterday, has become objective for us today in this moment. And to a certain extent, we see what we experienced yesterday, in contrast to our sense of self, as something external through memory, just as we see any external experience as external. One time, something objective rises from the depths of our own organization in memory; the other time, it approaches us by announcing itself to us through the external senses.

Of course, we distinguish the remembered experience from the external sensory experience; but at the same time there is something very similar between the two in the way they approach the ego, which can only be fully grasped in the moment. In the endeavor to advance to imagination, the I actually gradually flows out over our physical life on earth between birth and death, and we learn to be immersed in a past experience as we are immersed in the experience of the present moment. We learn to feel ourselves as I in the long-past experience as well as we otherwise do in the present moment. I draw your attention to the fact that you have certainly already experienced in a dream – which I certainly do not regard as some kind of valid source of knowledge, but only use here for clarification – that you have certainly already experienced in a dream that you felt like a person 20 years in the past , as a person 20 years younger, that you imagined your image from 20 years ago and behaved in the dream as if you were only 20 years old, that you did the same things as you did 20 years ago. I would like to remind you that in this dream image you actually objectify yourself in such a way that you feel yourself at the age you were at a distant point in time.

What appears in dreams in a semi-pathological way can be attained by the human being in full consciousness through imaginative knowledge, and can be developed in full consciousness. Then the human being experiences what he has ever experienced in this earthly life – he does not just experience it as an ordinary memory, which is contrasted with the experience of the present moment, he experiences it in such a way that his I, his egoity, fills the entire stream of his experience in this earthly life. He steps out of the moment and into the stream of his experience of time. The I does not flow out in a nebulous way; the I flows out into the stream of real experiences of this earthly life. But in this outpouring one grasps something different than in the ordinary consciousness of the moment, which, according to ordinary logic, must be filled with intellectual images in abstractions. In this outpouring of the life stream, one grasps images, images of the vitality of the life of the senses. That which otherwise stands before the soul as a memory of life becomes inwardly saturated and intense; one learns the nature of imaginative knowledge in oneself. At the same time, one penetrates into the essence of the human being by advancing in knowledge. But from this moment on, one knows that one has submerged with the ego not in a stream of abstract memories, but in a stream of real life forces, the same life forces that, from our birth, or let us say from our conception, are the forces that constitute our organism, that shape our organs, that work on us internally, in growth, in nourishment, in reproduction.

We now become immersed in the stream of those forces that otherwise only have to do with the mediation of our nourishment, that make us grow, and that make our reproduction possible. And now, instead of living in an abstraction, we are living with full consciousness in a concrete reality, and we are learning what the etheric body is. We are learning that our physical body, in which we normally live in our ordinary lives, is based on a body that is an inner formation of forces and that can only be seen in such imaginative knowledge. One becomes familiar with that which has been repeatedly sought by hypothesis by physical and biological science in recent decades, and which is even denied by others today in its existence. One becomes familiar with the real ether world in contrast to the ponderable physical world and learns to recognize how that which underlies our physical human form is really such an ether human being. But in grasping oneself as such an etheric human being, the ego of the earthly human being dissolves in an even higher sense. One cannot grasp this etheric human being without simultaneously seeing in all its individual parts and aspects what the cosmos, what the world, is. At the same time, one is led out of oneself by grasping oneself as an etheric human being, because that which works within us as an organizing etheric human being throws its rays in currents out into the cosmos, bringing us a connection between these or those inner organs, between this or that limb of our physical organism and the cosmos.

What is experienced does not appear in the form of abstract concepts, but in the saturated form of imagery, of imagination. But in that we have, in a sense, surrendered our egoity in the process of knowing, as I have described it, we grasp at the same time that which is now etherically outside of us in the world. We penetrate through our own etheric body into the etheric of the great world, from which we are, after all, born as human beings.

But then a new task arises. The world we now experience is quite different [from the physical one]; it does not have certain things that we rightly consider to be the defining characteristics of our physical world. It initially presents itself to us in a pictorial way, while we recognize our physical world in its true objectivity when we strip away the pictoriality. But when we now ascend from the grasp of our own etheric body to the ethericity of the world, we notice that precisely those senses that otherwise convey the external world to us in the most beautiful way lag behind in their effectiveness. We owe what we have of the physical external world to the eye, the ear and so on. These senses, as it were, recede at first, and the very senses that are ignored in ordinary physical life come to the fore in human experience as we become so attuned to the etheric world: the sense of balance, the sense of movement, the sense of life. These come to the fore. We are freed, as it were, from our own heaviness. We enter into an experience of the world's own equilibrium, into which we find our way. The movements observed through the eyes or those detected by instruments cease. But what can be inwardly experienced in the movement when the human being is in this movement is experienced in the imagination through the resting human being, in that the movement first increases. This is a living penetration into the etheric world. And here I would like to draw your attention, ladies and gentlemen, to the fact that it is really as I characterized it in my introductory words today, when I said that the path of anthroposophical knowledge means a series of inner soul experiences of destiny. For what occurs, so to speak, as a damping of the higher senses and as a spiritualization and strengthening at the same time of the senses usually regarded as low, is connected with such a fate. And, although I know what one is exposed to in such a description, I would like to mention what I want to say here with an example: I was once occupied with the internal mental processing of what a person actually experiences when they profess their soul to these or those worldviews, when they become a materialist, idealist, realist, spiritualist, positivist, skeptic, and so on. These things cannot be exhausted by what ordinary life and ordinary contemporary science produce about them, if one really strives to recognize them from within. Ordinary life and ordinary contemporary science are actually exhausted in the fact that the idealist rails against the realist, criticizes him, and that he refutes what the realist puts forward; the spiritualist becomes haughty, and nevertheless he is often a complete layman in that which can only be recognized in the material world, he indulges in the most disparaging criticisms of materialism, which nevertheless was a cosmic side effect of our modern, justly so praised scientificness. These things, why the human mind leans towards materialism on the one hand, and on the other, for example, towards spiritualism or idealism, these things lie deeper than one usually thinks.

When one seriously engages with these things, then one carries out an inner soul work that is connected with the thought process in a healthy, but also comprehensive sense. One experiences something at the same time as one thinks. If you think abstractly, you experience nothing. But if you experience what becomes an experience for the human being, whether you are a materialist or a spiritualist, a realist or an idealist, then you are led, as it were, into the direct existence of the human soul. In a completely different way, this human soul is grasped by a kind of thinking that I would call deeply introspective, than is the case with the ordinary sciences.

What one can experience in such thinking, which must be meditative and concentrated thinking, leads one further, releases certain powers of the imagination, and leads to the appearance of an inner image for individual concrete things, , but with the complete character of this thought-experience, an inner pictorial experience arises, which, however, is not a dreamt or fantasized pictorial experience, but which is connected with the cosmic, supersensible facts underlying external phenomena.

And so I lived at that time, after I had gone through this concentration, this meditation on what I have just described to you. I lived myself into the imaginative world in such a way that the whole person who emerged in the imagination suddenly became something that stood before the inner eye in a concrete world fact. It was formed out of what one had grasped as the essence of man, as an image of the cosmic, the zodiac, the zodiakus; but not as one has it in mind in its abstract form, but in such a way that the individual formations of the zodiac became truly essential, so that the spiritual essence of the zodiacal constellation emerged and revealed how it now came together with the individual elements of human nature: the world as an image, within a certain sphere as an image, the living out of inner thoughts, striving towards cosmic imagery.

The I not only flows out into this stream of one's own personal experiences for this earthly life, the I flows out into the cosmos. One learns to recognize what is really there in the undulating, surging ether of the cosmos. One does not enter into this undulating, surging life of the cosmos other than by increasing one's egoity to the point where it reaches its culmination, then dissolving oneself in the comprehension of the world and pouring out into the objective existence of the world.

What I am describing to you is basically the character of the etheric world. Experiencing yourself in this etheric world — you will now understand why I call it a destiny experience. Experiencing knowledge is at the same time a destiny experience. In this etheric world one can experience that which cannot be described in any other way than as I have described it in my “Occult Science”. It is the etheric experience of the world that has been presented in this “Occult Science”.

But at the same time, one's inner destiny takes such a turn that one feels the egotism into which one is placed in ordinary life between birth and death, I might say, continually expanding. The point then is that through the continuation of such exercises, as I have indicated in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science” in its second part, that through the continuation of such exercises the I, which one has actually lost in a certain psychological sense, that this I is found again.

If you develop - everyone can develop this - you develop the power to carry your thoughts into the pictorial experience, and if you practice this carrying of your thought power into the etheric pictorial experience long enough - for the individual person it is so long, for the other person differently long - if you practice this long enough, one practices it so to speak until it has the necessary strength to fight against the persistent addiction to lose one's thoughts in images, one maintains the upper hand with one's composure, with the imbuing of one's etheric image experiences with the power of thought. Then the I-experience arises again. But it now appears in a completely transformed form, it now appears before the fully collected soul, before the soul that is as collected as one can only be in the solution of some mathematical problem. The experience of the I emerges from the world of ethereal images, but it emerges in such a way that we see it, so to speak, not as something that dwells in our physical corporeality, but as emerging from the cosmic etheric world, to the contemplation of which we have risen. One would like to say: While otherwise our ego, when it emerges, experiences and is viewed as if it came from the physical body, as if it came from a human center, we now experience it as if our ego radiates from the indeterminate periphery of the universe, as if it wants to converge in a center instead of diverging. And we notice: the world in which we are now placed with full inner reflection, with full inner power of knowledge, the world we actually only dream of in our ordinary life between birth and death when we apply a force that cannot initially be a force of knowledge, when we apply the power of feeling.

What we experience in our ordinary human life through feeling is not imbued with the power of thought to the same extent as our imaginative life. In reality, as I have often discussed, it is only imbued with the power of thought to the extent that our dreams are imbued with the power of thought. What we experience, so to speak, in the shadow of the world of personal feeling, we now experience in its true form: the I, as it descends from the periphery of the world, from the world of etheric substance, as it, instead of dissolving into the indefinite, pushes towards the center of its own being. And in this comprehension, which transforms the ordinary emotional experience into a real thought experience and thus into a real cognitive experience, in this experience we grasp what is called the astral body in anthroposophical knowledge of man. The astral body appears to us as given to us by the world when we look out from our center. We discover how, as it were, what is our astral body is exuded from the etheric force arrangements. It is as if we were suddenly not living in ourselves, but living in the air we breathe in — as if our body were standing there objectively and we were not in this body, but in the air we breathe in — and it is as if we felt that our external physicality was merely this body of air that penetrates into the human interior. It is as if we were looking into the human organs, as if we were approaching the human form in its externality.

Ascending from this breathing experience, Indian yoga philosophy aimed to achieve the experience that I have just described to you as the experience of the astral world. We in the West are not allowed to imitate this yoga experience in the East, due to the nature of our organization. But everything that we can experience in the immediate future, in which we actually experience ourselves outside our body in this way, presents itself in the same way as the world soul in the etheric body of the world. In fact, we never have a physical world body before us in a concrete realization, but in real realization we only reach an etheric world body in the way described, and in this etheric world body we experience the world soul in its configurations, one of which is our own soul, our own astral body, if I may put it this way.

In the same way as I have described in my “Occult Science” what one can see in the ether world, the surging and nature of this ether world in its concreteness, one can also describe the soul-like becoming and weaving of the cosmos. Perhaps it will be incumbent upon me, if it is to come to pass in this life, to show that what has been described in my “Occult Science” as the ether world can also be described as the astral world. It will be seen that then one must speak from quite a different spirit, that then something must be added to the descriptions of this “Occult Science”, which in its description, in its characterizations, must be quite different from the descriptions, the characterizations of this “Occult Science”. And I say to those who approach my writings in this way, that instead of having the will to penetrate into the matter, they quibble over words and look for contradictions. I predict that they will find will find between the book, which is created in this way through the description of the astral in relation to the etheric, that they will find an even greater portion of what they will state as contradictions in their way. These are the contradictions of life, and the one who wants to penetrate life objectively must familiarize himself with these contradictions in a living way, not in abstract logic.

But when what we come to know as our own astral, as our own soul, approaches us in this world, we actually feel like cosmic human beings, and we feel our own astral body, our own soul, only as a part of the cosmos. But we feel it as a member not of the etheric cosmos, but of the soul cosmos, and we now know: the cosmos has a soul. And by being able to present the astral body to our soul as something other than what appears to us only through our outer physical corporeality and through the etheric, a life that precedes our birth or our conception , a life accomplished in the spirit, in the soul world, is placed before this soul of ours, and a life that we enter as a spiritual-soul being when we pass through the gate of death. That which is called immortality, and also that which our civilization has lost and which should be called unbornness, becomes a fact, for one gets to know oneself from the whole world that outlasts the individual human life. One does not just grasp the part of the human being that is embodied in the body between birth and death, but one grasps the human essence that precedes birth and follows death; one grasps oneself as a link in the eternal spiritual world.

And still further can be continued that inner concentration, that inner meditation, whereby one must only see to it that the power one has attained to penetrate the world of images with thoughts is fully maintained with the power of reflection. One can penetrate even further in this penetration of the imagination with thought-content, and the penetration of inspiration with thought-content; one can always intensify that which is the level-headed thought-experience in imagination, in inspiration, and then one comes to the experience of the true form of the central human ego. Then one penetrates through the human astral body, which actually presents itself as developing from the periphery of the world towards our human center, and presents itself as a member of the entire astral cosmos. From there, one arrives at the true self, of which one has only a shadow in ordinary life, to which one says “I”; one arrives at that which one now objectively sees as one's self, in the same way that one otherwise objectively sees external things. For that which one undergoes on the path of knowledge has brought one out of one's own corporeality, and what now moves back into one's own corporeality is not the ego that one has in ordinary life, but a real ego.

This real self initially has nothing to do with much of what shapes us as a human organism from the cosmos, what works in us and lives from the world that we have gone through in the spiritual and soul realm before birth or before conception. This I presents itself as an objective reality, as that which, so to speak, represents the sum of all the I's we have lived through in our past earthly lives.

This is achieved at the level of the intuitive, the truly intuitive. There, that which can be described in anthroposophical knowledge of man as repeated earthly lives becomes wisdom. In fact, anthroposophical knowledge does not consist of formulating abstract insights based on existing facts, which are images of the facts, but rather consists of gradually and truly living one's way into the human essence. What one experiences of this human being, after one has first poured out one's I, one's egoity, into the stream of life between birth and death in the etheric realm, now stands as the subject opposite the I that has become objective on the path from our previous life to our present life. It is from such a path of knowledge that the one speaks who, from inner vision, not from theory, speaks about the existence of repeated human lives on earth. This view of repeated human lives on earth is not a theory, but something that arises as a realization at the same time as the view of the true self, which in our ordinary life we have before us in the same way as we have our soul life before us between falling asleep and waking up. Just as we are between falling asleep and waking up in a state that we do not see into, that is given to us only negatively as an empty part of our experience, so we must, as it were, leave out in our life stream what we have experienced while sleeping. When we look back and let our life appear before us, how for ordinary consciousness we actually only have those stretches of life that run from waking to falling asleep, how these are always interrupted by empty lengths of stream, stream members, so in ordinary life we look down into our ego, into our organization. We see, by experiencing the surging, weaving soul life, a kind of empty space that we oversleep as we oversleep our state of sleep, and to this empty space we say I, not to something really fulfilled. Anthroposophical knowledge of the human being, ladies and gentlemen, can indicate how it arrives at its content, can describe step by step how it advances inwardly to grasp that which it must present to the world as a teaching. And because true anthroposophical knowledge of man carries the thought everywhere - for you have seen that I had to place the main emphasis on this in the description of this anthroposophical method of knowing man, that in imagination, in inspiration, the thought experience has been carried into it with all its sharpness, that this thought experience also appears in the intuitive experience in the end; you have seen that I had to place the special emphasis on this must attach to this, and because the thought experience is everywhere within, because that which man has in the abstract thought experience, which he uses for ordinary science, is everywhere within in all that the spiritual researcher directs his soul and his spirit, his I, therefore everything that the spiritual researcher presents to the world can be relived and also verified by the mere thought experience. The human being must only have the opportunity to follow the spiritual researcher to the thought experience. He must not lose the thought experience immediately when he leaves the sphere of sensory experience. He must have the strength to develop the inner capacity for growth and reproduction that can still have the self-generating thought when the thought stimulated by the external sensory experience ceases to bear its actual character. This intense inner experience can be appropriated at first; then one will find: the spiritual researcher describes things that he has essentially experienced by carrying the thought into imagination, inspiration and intuition.

The thoughts that he incorporates into it can be followed and tested. For the thoughts that he forms in imaginative, inspired and intuitive life can be tested for accuracy by their very nature and essence when you hold them up to yourself. One must only not cling to the human prejudice, which in recent times has become all too strong, that a thought can only be verified if one can have an external sensual fact as proof. One must recognize that the thought itself, the same thought that is used in external science, has an inner life, that it can shape its inner organization. If one experiences only this inner self-fashioning of the power of thought, if one experiences it in a way that Hegel in his time could not yet experience — hence he only unravelled abstract thoughts in his philosophy — if one experiences this living movement of the thought, which I first tried to present in its form in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, then one can really examine every single thought that the spiritual researcher expresses. Those who do not undertake this examination will generally do so because they feel compelled to do so out of an inadequate will: 'I do not follow what you are thinking there, because what I know so far gives me no reason to do so.

Anyone who takes this view is simply not open to discussion about anthroposophy, and in particular about anthroposophical knowledge of the human being. It is not necessary to ascend to imagination, inspiration, and intuition oneself; it is only necessary to bring the thought life, which one already develops in ordinary science, vividly into the whole inner soul life, and from this living grasp of the thought, to follow what the spiritual researcher brings out of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But, ladies and gentlemen, one must be determined to break away from dead thinking, which only arranges concepts in a linear fashion, just as the external sense world unfolds. This dead thinking proceeds in such a way that I form this concept from one piece of the external sense world, then I stick it to the concept that I gain from the other piece of the sense world, and so on. Only those who adhere to this method of gluing for a system of concepts will say that, from the point of view of ordinary thinking, they cannot verify what is given in anthroposophy. But anyone who grasps that the human being really carries within himself, within himself experiences thinking as a living organism — it is only overshadowed, it is only overshadowed by an illusion —, anyone who grasps this thinking that is alive in life, can verify from this thinking everything that the spiritual researcher presents about man and the world.

Thus you see from the whole meaning of what I have taken the liberty of presenting to you that when the spiritual researcher attempts to penetrate to knowledge of man, at the same time as he strives for this knowledge of man, knowledge of the world results. Knowledge of the true human being leads us beyond ourselves into the objective world. Real knowledge of the true objective world gives us, within its content, the human being, the truly outwardly and inwardly living human being, who can feel at home in the world, which he discovers in this way. And so it may be said: Just as it can already be sensed that world and human being must belong together in the most intimate way, as I have already emphasized in my Philosophy of Freedom, so spiritual science presents knowledge to the world that world knowledge must be attained through knowledge of the human being, because world existence can be experienced can be experienced in the innermost human being, that human nature can be recognized from knowledge of the world, because the human being with his innermost nature comes from the objective, true world; that knowledge of the world must be attained through knowledge of the human being [and knowledge of the human being through knowledge of the world].

In this, however, a contradiction or even a paradox can be found, for one might ask: Where should we begin? Should we start with knowledge of the world in order to gain knowledge of the human being from knowledge of the world , as the pantheist or some other philosophically or materialistically minded person would undertake, or should we, as the mystic often does, soar from knowledge of man to knowledge of the world?

But this is dead, this is not alive thought. Knowledge of man and knowledge of the world do not belong together like two dead limbs of an organism, so that one can start with one and move on to the other, but knowledge of man and knowledge of the world belong together like the living limbs of a being itself. And just as little as one can say that the head lives through the limbs or the limbs live through the head, so little can one say that one can start with knowledge of the world in order to arrive at the human being, or start with knowledge of the human being in order to arrive at knowledge of the world. Rather, one must say that both must arise in living unity, and both must mutually illuminate each other in living unity. And in this sense, in the sense of a living realization, a world knowledge gained from spiritual research through true knowledge of man, a true knowledge of man through true world knowledge, must arise for the great questions of our time.

The thoughts which I have been putting before you, will show you that the acquisition of real super-sensible knowledge entails above all, with the aid of the exercises already described, that the two sides of human nature which are usually inexactly designated as man's inner and outer being should be distinctly separated. Perhaps it may be pointed out that in ordinary consciousness one does not make an exact distinction between man's inner and outer being, when speaking of these. The way in which I characterised the going out of man's sentient and volitional being during sleep and the becoming conscious in super-sensible knowledge outside the physical body, shows us that just this super-sensible knowledge enables us to separate distinctly those parts which are usually described vaguely in ordinary consciousness as man's outer and inner being.

I might say that by this separation man's inner world becomes his outer world, and what we usually consider as his outer world becomes his inner world.

What takes place in that case? During sleep, man's sentient and volitional being abandons what we have called his physical body and etheric body, or the body of formative forces, and then this sentient-volitional being looks back upon the physical body and the etheric body as if they were objects. We showed that in this retrospection the whole web of thought appears outside man's inner being. The world of thought which fills our ordinary consciousness and which reflects the external world, does not go out with man's true inner being in falling asleep, but remains behind with the physical body, as the true forces of the etheric body. In this way we were able to grasp that during our waking state of consciousness we cannot grow conscious of that part which goes out during sleep and which remains unconscious for the ordinary consciousness. (Self-observation can easily convince us that during our ordinary waking consciousness the world of thoughts produces this waking state of consciousness).

In that part of the human being which goes out of the physical and the etheric bodies during sleep, there is a dull twilight-life, and we only learn to know this inner being of man when super-sensible knowledge fills it, as it were, with light and with warmth, when we are just as conscious within this inner being as we are ordinarily conscious within our physical body. But we also learn to know why we have an unconscious life during our ordinary sleeping condition. Consciousness arises when we dive down into our physical and etheric bodies at the moment of waking up. And by diving down into the physical body, we make use of the senses which connect us with the external world. As a result, the sensory world awakes and we thus grow conscious in it.

In the same way we dive down into our etheric or life-body, that is to say, into our world of thoughts, and we grow conscious within our thoughts. Ordinary consciousness is therefore based upon the fact that we use the instruments of our physical body, and that we make use, so to speak, of the etheric body's web of formative forces. In ordinary life, man's true inner being, woven out of feeling and will, is not in a position to attain consciousness, because it has no organs. By making the thought- and will-exercises of which I have spoken, we endow the soul itself with organs. This soul-element, which is at first indistinct in our ordinary consciousness, acquires plastic form, even as our physical body and our etheric body acquire plastic form in the senses and in the organs of thought. Man's real soul-spiritual being therefore obtains a plastic form.

In the same measure in which it is moulded plastically and acquires (if I may use this paradoxical expression) soul-spiritual sense-organs, the world of soul and spirit rises up round our inner being. That part of our being which ordinarily lives in a dull twilight existence and which can only perceive an environing world, namely the physical world, when it uses the physical and etheric organs of perception, thus acquires plastic form and enters into connection with a world which always surrounds us, even in our ordinary life, though we are not aware of it, a world in which we lived before descending into our physical being through birth or conception, as described the day before yesterday; a world in which we shall live again when we pass through the portal of death, for then we shall recognise it as a world which belongs to us and which is not limited by birth and death. But there is one thing which rises up before us when we enter the spiritual world. We cannot enter this world in the same abstract theoretic manner with which we can live in the physical world and in the world of thoughts or of the intellect. In the physical world and in the world of thoughts we use ideas and thoughts, which as such, leave us cold. With a little self-observation anyone can discover that when he ascends to the sphere of pure thinking, when he surrenders to the external sensory world without any special interest or a close connection with it, the external physical world, as well as the world of ideas, really leaves him cold. We must learn to know this in detail from particular examples in life. We should note, for instance, how different are the inner feelings with which we consider our home, from those with which we look upon any other strange country which is indifferent to us. This will show us that in order to have a living interest for the environing world, our feeling and our will must first be drawn in through special circumstances. Feeling will indeed always dive down into the physical world when we awake, obtaining from this physical world a connection with the senses and the understanding. The fact that love or perhaps hate are kindled in us when we encounter certain people in the physical world, the fact that we feel induced to do certain things for them out of compassion, all this demands the inclusion of our feelings and of everything which constitutes our inner being, when we come across such things in the external physical world. How conscious we are of the fact that our inner life grows cold, when we rise up to spheres which are generally called the spheres of pale, dry thought and of theoretic study!

The being which lives in a dull twilight state from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, must, as it were, connect itself during the waking daytime condition with thoughts and with sensory experiences through an inner participation in these processes, thus giving rise to the whole wealth of interest in the external world.

And so we recognise that in life itself feeling and will must first be drawn into the sense world and into the world of thoughts. But we perceive this in the fullest meaning of the word only when through super-sensible knowledge, we become free from the physical and etheric bodies, and have experiences outside them within our sentient-volitional being.

And hence it is evident that we must begin to speak of the world in a different way from how we speak in ordinary life, in ordinary consciousness. The dry ideas, the laws of Nature which we are accustomed to find in science and which interest us theoretically, though they leave us inwardly cold, these should be permeated with certain nuances and expressions which characterise the external world differently from the way in which we usually characterize it.

Our inner life acquires greater intensity through super-sensible knowledge. We penetrate more intensively into the life of the external world. When we try to gain knowledge, we are then no longer able to submit coldly to inner ideas. No doubt one is then exposed to the reproach that the objectivity may suffer through a certain inner warmth, through the awakening of feeling and of a subjective sense. But this objection is only raised by those who are not acquainted with the circumstances.

The things perceived through super-sensible knowledge make us speak differently of the super-sensible objects of knowledge. These do not change, they do not become less objective, for in fact they are objective. When I look upon a wonderfully painted picture, it does not change through the fact that I look upon it with fire and enthusiasm; I should be a cold prosaic person if I were to face one of Raphael's Madonnas or one of Leonardo's paintings with a purely analytical artistic understanding, quite coldly and without any enthusiasm. It is the same when the spiritual worlds rise up in super-sensible knowledge. Their content does not change through the fact that we connect ourselves with these worlds with inner feelings, far stronger than those which usually connect us with the external world and its objects.

When speaking from a knowledge of the higher worlds, many things will therefore have to be said differently, the descriptions will have to be different from those which we are accustomed to hear in ordinary life. But this does not render these worlds less objective. On the contrary, one could say: The subjective element which now breaks forth from the physical and etheric bodies becomes more objective, more selfless in its whole experience. And so the first experience which we have when going out of the physical body and experiencing our inner being consciously (whereas otherwise we always experience it unconsciously) is a feeling of absolute loneliness.

In our ordinary consciousness we never have the feeling that by dwelling only within our inner self, independently of anything in the world pertaining to us, complete loneliness fills our soul, that we ourselves, with everything which now constitutes our soul-spiritual content, must rely entirely upon ourselves.

The feeling of loneliness which sometimes arises in the physical world, but only as a reflection of the real feeling, though it is painful enough for many people, becomes immeasurably intensified when we thus penetrate into the super-sensible world. But we then look back upon that which reflects itself as the spiritual environment in the mirror of the physical and etheric body which we left behind. We grow aware, on the one hand, of a complete feeling of loneliness, which alone enables us to maintain our Ego in this world ... for we should melt away in this world of the spirit, if loneliness would not give us this Ego-feeling in the spiritual world, in the same way in which our body, our bodily sensation, gives us our Ego-feeling here on earth. To this loneliness we owe the maintenance of the Ego in the spiritual world. We then learn to know this spiritual world as our environment. But we know that we can only learn to know it through the inner soul-spiritual eye, even as we see the physical world through our physical eyes.

It is the same when the human being abandons his physical and etheric bodies by passing through the portal of death, and in this connection I shall enlarge the explanations already given yesterday. It is true that in this case the physical body is given over to the elements of the earth and that the etheric body dissolves, as I described, in the universal cosmic ether. But what we learned to know as our physical world, through our feeling and will, the world in which we experienced ourselves through the ordinary consciousness between birth and death, this world remains to man. The physical body filled with substance and the body of formative forces permeated by etheric forces, are laid aside with death, but what we experienced within them remains as a mirroring element.

From the spiritual world we look back through death, through which we have passed, into our last earthly life. Just because we have before us this last earthly life as a firm resistance which mirrors everything, just because of this, everything which surrounds us as we pass through the soul-spiritual world between death and a new birth, can also reflect itself. Through these experiences we perceive everything rising up in a far more intensive life than the one which we learned to know here in the physical world. And we first perceive as a soul-spiritual being everything with which we were in some way connected through our destiny, through our Karma. The people we loved, stand before us as souls. In our super-sensible vision we see all that we experienced together with them.

Those who acquire spiritual, super-sensible knowledge, already acquire imaginative vision here in the physical world, through everything which I described to you. Those who pass through the portal of death in the ordinary way, acquire this faculty, though it is somewhat different from spiritual vision on earth, they acquire it after having passed through the portal of death. From the sheaths of the physical and etheric bodies which were laid aside, emerges everything with which we were connected by destiny, or otherwise, in this earthly life—it undoubtedly arises in a different way when those whom we left behind still live on the earth, where the connection with them is more difficult, but when they follow us through death, this connection exists in the free, soul-spiritual life. Everything in our environment with which we were connected as human beings rises up before us. To super-sensible knowledge, the fact that people (if I may now express myself in words of the ordinary consciousness) who belonged together here in the physical world find each other again in the soul-spiritual world, after having passed through the portal of death, is not a belief to be accepted as a vague premonition, but it is a certainty, a fact just as certain as the results of physics or chemistry. And this is in fact something which the spiritual science of Anthroposophy can add to the acquisitions of modern culture.

People have grown accustomed to a certain feeling of certainty through the gradual popularisation of a scientific consciousness. They strive to gain some knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, but no longer in the form of the old presentiments handed down traditionally in the religious beliefs, for they have been trained to accept that certainty which the external world can offer. In regard to that which lies beyond birth and death the spiritual science of Anthroposophy seeks to pave the way to this same kind of certainty. It can really do this. Only those who tread the path already described, the path leading into the spiritual worlds, can carry the knowledge acquired in physics or chemistry further, out into the worlds which we enter when we pass through the portal of death.

Not everything of course, appears to us in this way when we look back upon our physical body through super-sensible knowledge outside the body. There is one thing which then appears to us very enigmatic, and this enigma can show us best of all that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy does not translate the truths which it includes in its spheres of knowledge into a prosaic, dry rationalism. It leads us to spiritual vision, or by communicating its truth it speaks of things which can be perceived through spiritual vision. But in being led to spiritual vision, we do not lose full reverence towards the mysteries contained in the universe, towards everything in the universe which inspires reverence and which can now be clearly perceived, whereas otherwise they are at the most felt darkly. This enigmatic something which I mean and which appears to us, is that we now learn to know man's relationship with the earth, particularly his relationship with the physical mineral earth.

I have already explained to you from many different aspects how our web of thoughts, which is connected with the physical body, remains behind, and in addition to what has been described to you, in addition to what reflects itself and leads us to a knowledge of man's eternal being, we can also recognise the nature of this mirror itself which we have before us.

One might say: Even as in the physical world we face a mirror and in this mirror the environing world appears simultaneously with our own self, so in super-sensible knowledge the spiritual world appears through this mirror. But just as we can touch the material mirror with its foil and investigate its composition, so we can also investigate this mirror of the super-sensible—namely, our physical body and our etheric body—when we are outside with our real soul-spiritual being.

And there one can see that during his earthly life man constantly takes in substances from the external world, in order to grow and to sustain his whole life. We certainly absorb substances from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but all these substances which we absorb from the animal and vegetable kingdoms also contain mineral substances. Plants contain mineral substances, for the plant builds itself up from mineral substances. By taking in vegetable nourishment we therefore build up our own body out of mineral substances.

By looking back upon our physical body from outside, we can now perceive the true significance of the mineral substances which we absorb. For now spiritual vision reveals something of which our ordinary consciousness has not the faintest inkling, namely the activity of thinking. We have, as you know, left behind our thinking. Our thoughts continue, as it were, to glimmer and to shine within the physical body. Thus we can now observe the effects of thoughts in the physical body from outside, as something objective. And we perceive that the effect of thoughts upon man's physical body is a dissolution of its physical substances, which fall asunder, as it were, into nothing.

I know that this apparently contradicts the law of the conservation of energy, but there is no time now to explain more fully its full harmony with this law. The nature of my subject obliges me to express myself in somewhat popular terms. But it is possible to understand that the purely mineral in man, what he bears within him as purely mineral substances, must be within him because it must be dissolved by his thoughts. For otherwise his thoughts could not exist—this is the condition for their existence—his thoughts could not exist if they did not dissolve mineral, earthly substances, a fact also revealed by the spiritual sciences of earlier times, based more on intuitive feeling. This dissolution, this destruction of physical substances constitutes the physical instrumentality of thinking.

When our sentient-volitional part, our true inner being, lives within the physical body and within the etheric body and is filled by the activity of thinking, we now learn to recognise that this activity takes its course through the fact that physical substance is continually destroyed. We now learn to recognise how our ordinary consciousness really arises. We are not conscious because forces of growth hold sway in us, forces which develop in the rest of the organism through nutrition. For in the same measure in which the forces of growth are active within us, thinking is dulled. When we wake up, thinking must, so to speak, have a free hand to dissolve physical substances, to eliminate them from the physical body. To the spiritual science of Anthroposophy, the nervous system appears as that organ which mediates this secretion of mineral-physical substances throughout the whole body. And in this secretion of the mineral-physical develops just that thought-activity which we ordinarily carry with us through the world.

You therefore see that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy not only enables us to recognise the eternal in man, but also to know of the way in which this eternal works within the physical body; that, for instance, thought can only exist through the fact that man continually develops within himself the mineral substances, that is, something dead.

And so we can say: If we learn to know man from this aspect, we also learn to know death from another aspect. Ordinarily death confronts us as the end of life, as a moment in life, as an experience in itself. But when we throw light upon man's physical and etheric body in this way we learn to know the gradual course of death, or the separation of physical-mineral substance,—for death in fact, is nothing but the complete liberator of man's mineral-physical substance—we learn to know the continuous secretion of a dead, corpse-like element within us.

We recognise that from birth onwards, we are really always dying and only when with the whole body we accomplish that which we ordinarily accomplish through the nervous system, in a small part of the body, only then do we die.

We therefore learn to contemplate the moment of death by seeing it on a small scale in the activity of thinking in the human organism. And throughout the whole time that we pass through after death, we can only look back upon our physical body because the following fact exists: Whenever a thought lights up within you during your ordinary life, this is always accompanied by the fact that physical matter is secreted in the physical body, in the same way in which, for instance, physical substance separates from a precipitated salt-solution. This lighting up of thought you owe as it were, to this opaqueness, to this separating off of physical mineral substances. Inasmuch as you abandon the physical body, there is summed up in a comparatively brief space of time what lives in the continual stream of your thoughts. You confront the fact that in death you see lighting up as if all at once that which slowly glimmered and shone throughout your whole earthly life, from birth to death.

And through this powerful impression, in which the life of thoughts illuminates the soul like a mighty flash of lightning, man acquires the memory of his physical lives on earth. The physical body may be cast off, the etheric body may dissolve completely in the universal ether, but through the fact that we obtain in one experience this powerful thought-impression (to mathematicians I might say: this thought-integral in comparison with thought-differentials, from birth to death), we always have before us, throughout the time after death, as a mirroring element, our physical life on earth, even though we have laid aside our physical and etheric parts. And this mirroring element reveals everything which we experience when the human beings with whom we were connected by destiny in love or in hate, gradually come up, when the spiritual Beings who live in the spiritual world and do not descend to the earth, whose company we also now share, rise up before us.

The spiritual investigator may state this with a calm conscience, for he knows that he does not speak on the foundation of illusionary pictures; he knows instead that to super-sensible vision, when super-sensible vision arises through the organ of the physical and etheric bodies which are now outside, these things are just as real, can be seen just as really as physical colours are ordinarily perceived through physical eyes, or physical sounds through physical ears.

This is how the evolution of humanity forms part of the evolution of the world. If we study the development of the world, for instance, the mineral life on earth, we understand why there should be mineral, earthly laws. They exist so that they might also exist within us, and thinking is therefore bound up with the earth. But in perceiving how the Beings who have bound their thinking with the earth emerge from that which produces their thought, we also learn to recognise how man in his true being lifts himself above the merely earthly. This is what connects the development of the world with the development of humanity and unites them.

We learn to know the human being and at the same time we learn to know the universe. If we learn to know man's physical body and its mineralization through thinking, we also learn to know through man's physical body the lifeless mineralised earth. This created a foundation for a knowledge of the evolution of the world from its spiritual aspect also.

When we thus learn to know man's inner being, we can consider the development of the world in the light of the ordinary earthly experiences through which we have passed since our birth.

If you draw out of your memory-store an experience which you had ten years ago, a past event which you have gone through rises up before your soul as an image. You know exactly from the circumstances of life that it rises up as a picture. Yet this picture conveys a knowledge of something which really existed ten years ago.

How does this arise? Through the fact that in your organism certain processes remained behind which now summon up the picture. Certain processes have remained behind in your organism and these summon up in you the picture enabling you to re-construct what you experienced ten years ago. But super-sensible knowledge leads us deeper into man's inner nature. We can perceive, for instance, that the physical body becomes mineralised during the thinking process; we perceive this in the same way in which we learn to know some past experience of our earthly life through the traces which it left behind within us.

In the same way the development of the earth can be understood from the development of man; through the activity of the mineral in man we learn to know the task of the mineral kingdom within the development of the earth. And if, as already set forth, we learn similarly to know (I can only mention this, for a detailed description would lead us too far) how the vegetable kingdom is connected with man, and how the animal kingdom is connected with him (for this too can be recognised), then the development of the world can be grasped by setting out from the human being.

And within the development of the world we can then see something which is again of the same importance to those who are interested in modern civilisation, as are the facts which I explained in connection with a knowledge of the human being, of the eternal inner kernel of man.

We know that modern civilisation has succeeded, at least up to a certain point, in so regarding man's relationship to the development of the world as to attach him to the evolution of the animals,—even though the corresponding theories, or the hypotheses, as some people say, still contain much that is unclear, requiring completion and modification. We follow the development of the simplest organic beings up to the higher animals, and if we continue this line of observation we come indeed to the point of placing man at the summit of animal development. One person does it in this way, and the other in that way, one more idealistically, and the other more materialistically in accordance with Darwin's theory of evolutionary descent, but methodically, it can hardly be denied that if we wish to study man's physical nature according to natural-scientific methods, we must rank him with the animal kingdom,—as has been done for some time.

We must investigate how his head has changed in comparison with the heads of the different animal-species; we must investigate his limbs, etc., and we thus obtain what is known as comparative anatomy, comparative morphology, comparative physiology, and we then also form concepts as to how man's physical form has gradually developed out of lower beings in the course of the world's evolution. But in so doing we always remain in the physical sphere. On the one hand people take it amiss to-day if the anthroposophical spiritual investigator speaks of the spiritual world as I have taken upon myself to do in this lecture; from many sides this is viewed as pure fantasy, and although many people believe that it is well-meant ... they nevertheless look upon it as something visionary and fanciful.

Those who become acquainted to some extent with what I have described, those who at least try to understand it, will see that the preparations and preliminary conditions for it are just as serious as, for instance, the preparations for the study of mathematics, so that it is out of the question to speak of sailing into some sort of fanciful domain. But just as on the one hand people take it amiss if one describes the spiritual world as a real visible world, so they take it amiss on the other hand if in regard to man's physical development one fully accepts those who follow man's development Darwinistically, with a natural-scientific discipline, along the animal line of descent, as far as man. No speculations should enter the observations made in the physical sphere and all sorts of things sought for there, as is done for instance, to-day in Neo-vitalism. This is full of speculations; the old vitalism was also full of speculative elements. But whenever we consider the physical world, we must keep to the physical facts.

For this reason, the anthroposophical spiritual investigator who on the one hand ventures to speak in a certain way of the conditions after death and before birth, as I have done, does not consider it as a reproach (i.e. he is not affected by it) when people tell him that his description of the physical world is completely that of a modern natural scientist. He does not bring any dreams into the sphere which constitutes the physical world. Even though people may call him a materialist when he describes the physical world, this reproach does not touch him, because he strictly separates the spiritual world, which can only be observed with the aid of a spiritual method, from the physical-sensory world, which has to be observed with the orderly disciplined methods of modern natural science.

A serious spiritual-scientific investigator must therefore feel particularly hurt and pained at reproaches made to him with regard to certain followers of spiritual science who sometimes rebuke natural science out of a certain pride in their spiritual-scientific knowledge and out of their undoubtedly shallow knowledge of natural science. They think that they have the right to speak negatively of science and of scientific achievements but the spiritual investigator can only feel deeply hurt at their amateurish, dilettantish behaviour. This is however not in keeping with spiritual science. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy is characterised by the fact that it deals just as strictly and scientifically with the external physical world, as with the spiritual world, and vice versa.

With this preliminary condition, the anthroposophical spiritual investigator stands entirely upon the ground of strictest natural-scientific observation in regard to the study of the world's development, but at the same time he turns his gaze towards the soul-spiritual world. And even as he knows that not only a physical process is connected with man's individual embryonic origin in the physical world, but that a soul-spiritual element unites with the human embryo, with the human germ, so he also knows that in the whole development of the world—though to the physical body it appears as a tapestry of sensory objects, and though it manifests itself to the web of thoughts, i.e. to the etheric body, in laws of Nature—he also knows that the physical world is permeated and guided in its whole development by spiritual forces, under the sway of spiritual Beings, that can be known through the methods I have described.

The anthroposophical investigator therefore knows that when he contemplates the external physical world in the sense of genuine science, he comes to the right boundary, where he may then begin with his spiritual investigation.

If we have conscientiously traced evolutionary development through the animal kingdom up to man, as Darwin or other Darwinians or Haeckel did, and if we have gone into its scientific justification we can then continue this in a spiritual-scientific direction, after having reached the boundary to which we are led by natural science.

We now discover that contemplation of the form into which we penetrate through super-sensible knowledge, shows us the whole significance of forms, as they appear in the kingdom of man on the one hand, and in the animal-kingdom on the other; we discover the whole significance of these forms.

Equipped with the knowledge supplied by super-sensible research, we see how the animal (this is at least the case with most animals, and exceptions can be easily explained) stands upon the ground with its four limbs, how its spine is horizontal, parallel with the surface of the earth, and how in regard to the spine, the head develops in an entirely different position from that of man. We learn to know the animal's whole form, as it were, from within, as a complex of forces, and also in relationship with the whole universe. And we thus learn to make a comparison: We perceive the transformation, the metamorphosis in the human form, in the human being whom we see standing upon his two legs, at right angles, so to speak, with the animal's spine, with his own spine set vertically to the surface of the earth and his head developing in accordance with this position of the spine.

By penetrating into the inner art of Nature's creative process, we learn to distinguish the human form from the animal form; we recognise this by entering into the artistic creative process of the cosmos. And we penetrate into the development of the world by rising from otherwise abstract constructive thoughts to thoughts which are inwardly filled with life, which form themselves artistically in the spirit.

The important thing to be borne in mind is that when it seeks to know the development of the world, anthroposophical spiritual research changes from the abstract understanding ordinarily described—and justly so—as dry, prosaic, systematic thought, or combining thought, into more concrete, real thought. Not for the higher spiritual world, in which concepts must penetrate by the methods described, but for the physical world, the forms in world-development should first be grasped through a kind of artistic comprehension, which in addition develops upon the foundation of super-sensible knowledge.

By thus indicating how science should change into art, we must of course encounter the objection raised by those who are accustomed to think in accordance with modern ideas: “But science must not become an art!” Now this can always be said, as a human requirement. People can say: Now I forbid the logic of the universe to become an art, for we only learn to know reality by linking up thought with thought and by thus approaching reality. Yes, if the world were as people imagine it to be, one could refuse to ascend to art, to an artistic comprehension of forms; but if the world is formed in such a way that it can only be comprehended through an artistic comprehension, it is necessary to advance to such an artistic comprehension. This is how matters stand. That is why those people who were earnestly seeking to grasp the organic in the world-development really came to an inner development of the thinking ordinarily looked upon as scientific thinking, they came to an artistic comprehension of the world. And as soon as we observe with an artistic-intuitive eye the development of the world, beginning with the point where the ordinary Darwinistic theory comes to a standstill, we perceive that man, grasped as a whole, cannot simply be looked upon by saying that once there were lower animals in the world, from which higher animals developed, that then still higher animals developed out of these, and so forth, until finally man arose.

If we study embryology in an unprejudiced way, it really contradicts this conception. Although modern scientists set up the fundamental law of biogenetics and compare embryology with phylogeny, they do not interpret rightly what appears outwardly even in human embryology, because they do not rise to this artistic comprehension of the world's development. If we observe in a human embryo how the limbs develop out of organs which at first have a stunted aspect, how everything is at first actually head, we already obtain the first elements of what is revealed by the artistic comprehension of the human form as I meant it. It is not possible to range the whole human being with the animals. One cannot say: The human being, such as he stands before us to-day, is a descendant of the whole animal species. No, this is not the case. Just those who penetrate with genuine scientific conscientiousness into scientific Darwinism and its modern description of the development of the world, will discover that through a higher understanding it is simply impossible to place man at the end, or at the summit of the animal-chain of development; they must instead study the human head as such, the head of the human beings. This human head alone descends from the whole animal kingdom. Though it may sound strange and paradoxical, the part which is generally considered as man's most perfect part, is a transformation from the animal kingdom.

Let us approach the human head with this idea and let us study it carefully. Observe with a certain morphological-artistic sense how the lower maxillary bones are transformed limbs, how also the upper maxillary bones are transformed limbs, how everything in the head is an enhanced development of the animal form; you will then recognise in the human head that upon a higher stage it reveals everything which has been developed in the animal under so many different forms. You will then also understand why it is so.

When you observe the animal, you can see that its head hangs upon one extremity of the spine and that in the typical animal it is entirely subjected to the law of gravity. Observe instead the human head, observe how the human being stands within the cosmos. The human head is set upon a spine which has a vertical direction. It rests upon the remaining body in such a way that the rest of man protects the head, as it were, against being subjected to the force of gravity alone. The human head is really something which rests upon the remaining organism with comparative independence. And we come to understand that through the fact that the human head is carried by the remaining body, it really travels along like a person using a coach; for it is the rest of the body which carries the human head through the world. The human head has its transformed limbs which have become shrivelled, as it were, and it is set upon the rest of the organism. This remaining organism is related to the human head in the same way in which the whole earth with its force of gravity is related to the animal. In regard to the head, the human being is “membered” into his whole remaining body in the same way in which the whole animal is “membered” into the earth.

We now begin to understand the human being through the development of the world. And if we proceed in this knowledge of the human form with an artistic sense and understanding, we finally comprehend how the human head is the continuation of the animal-series and how the remaining body of man developed later, out of the earth, and was attached to the human head. Only in this way we gradually learn to understand man's development.

If we go back into earlier times of the past, we can only transfer into these primordial epochs that part of man which lies at the foundation of his present head-development. We must not seek the development of his limbs or of his thorax in those early ages, for these developed later. But if we observe the development of the world by setting out, as I described, from the human being, if we observe it in the same way in which we look upon some past experience through memory, we find that the human being had already begun his development in the world at a time when our higher animals, for instance, did not as yet exist. There were however other animal forms present at that time from which the human head has developed, but the higher animals of to-day were not in existence.

We can therefore say: (let us now take a later epoch of the earth) In the further course of his development, man developed his head out of earlier animal-beings through the fact that his spiritual essence animated him. That is why he could bring his head to a higher stage of development. He then added his limbs, which developed out of the regular forces of the earth. The animals which followed, could only develop to the extent to which man had developed with the exclusion of his head. They began their development later, so that they have not come as far as the human development of the head; they remain connected with the earth, while the human being separates himself from it.

This proves that it has a real meaning to say: Man is organised into the development of the universe in such a way that while he is connected with the animal kingdom, he rises above it through his spiritual development. The animals which followed man in their development could only develop as much as man had developed in his limbs and thorax ... the head remained stunted, because a longer time of development should have preceded it, such as that of man, in order that the real head might develop.

Through an artistic contemplation of the forms in the world's development, the conscientiously accepted Darwinistic theory is transformed, in so far as it is scientifically justified to-day. And we recognise that in the development of the world the human being has behind him a longer time of development than the animals,—that the animals develop as their chief form that part which man merely adds to his head. In this way man reaches the point of lifting one part of his being out of the force of gravity, whereas the animals are entirely subjected to it. Everything which constituted our head with its sense-organs, is raised above the force of gravity, so that it does not turn towards heavy ponderable matter, but towards the ether, which fills the sensory world. This is the case above all with the senses; we should see this, if we were to study them more closely. In this way, for instance, the human organ of hearing depends upon an etheric structure, not only upon the air structure.

Through all this, the human being forms part not only of the material world, of the ponderable physical world, but he forms part of the etheric outer world. Through the etheric world he perceives, for instance, what the light conjures up before him in the world of colours, etc., etc. Even through his external form he rises above heavy matter, up to the free ether, and for this reason we see the development of the world in a different way when we ascend from natural science to spiritual science.

But when we rise up to an artistic conception, we also perceive the activity of the soul-spiritual in man, and we must rise up to such a conception if we wish to understand the human being. We should, for instance, be able to say: In regard to his soul-spiritual, sentient-volitional being, we must speak of loneliness and of a life in common with others, as if these were theoretical concepts, as I described to-day; we must rise up to the moral world and finally we come to the religious world. These worlds are interwoven and form a whole.

If we study the human being in accordance with a natural-scientific mentality and in the sense of modern civilisation, we find on the one hand the rigid scientific necessity of Nature into which the human being is also inserted, and on the other hand, we find that man can only be conscious of his dignity and can only say: I am truly man, if he can feel within him the moral-religious impulses. But if we honestly stand upon the foundation of natural science, we have pure hypotheses as to the beginning and the end of the earth, hypotheses which speak of the Kant-Laplace nebula for the beginning of the earth and of a heat-death for the end of the earth.

If in the face of the natural-scientific demands we now consider, in the sense of modern civilisation, the moral-religious world which reveals itself intuitively (I have shown this in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity), if we consider this world we must say: We really delude ourselves, we conjure up before us a fog. Is it possible to believe that when the earth passes through the death by heat, that there should still exist anything else in the sense of natural science than the death too of all ideals?

At this point spiritual science, or Anthroposophy steps in, and shows that the soul-spiritual is a reality, that it is working upon the physical and that it has placed man in the human form, into the evolution of the world. It shows that we should look back upon animal-beings which are entirely different from the present animals, that it is possible to adhere to the methods of modern science, but that other results are obtained. Anthroposophy thus inserts the moral element into the science of religion, and Anthroposophy thus becomes moral-religious knowledge.

Now we no longer merely look towards the Kant-Laplace nebula, but we look at the same time to an original spiritual element, out of which the soul-spiritual world described in Anthroposophy has just as much developed as the physical world has developed out of a physical-earthly origin. And we also look towards the end of the earth and since the laws of entropy are fully justified, we can show that the earth will end through a kind of death by heat. But we look towards the end just as from the anthroposophical standpoint we can view the end of the single human being: his corpse is handed over to the elements, the human being himself passes over into a spiritual world. This is how we envisage the end of the earth. The scientific results do not disturb us, for we know that everything of a soul-spiritual nature which men have developed will pass through the earth's portal of death when the earth no longer exists; it will pass over into a new world-development, even as the human being passes over into a new world-development when he passes through death.

By surveying the development of the earth in this way, we perceive in the middle of its development the event of Golgotha. We see how this event of Golgotha is placed in the middle of the earth's development, because formerly, there only existed forces which would have led man to a kind of paralysis of his forces. We really learn to recognise (I can only allude to this at the end of my lecture) that in the same way in which through the vegetable and animal fertilization a special element enters the fertilised organism, so the Mystery of Golgotha brought something into the evolution of the world from spiritual worlds outside the earth, and this continues to live, it accompanies the souls, until at the end of the earth, they pass on to new metamorphoses of earthly life. I should have to describe whole volumes were I to show the path leading in a strictly conscientious scientific way from what I have described to you to-day in connection with the evolution of humanity and of the universe, to the mystery of Golgotha, to the appearance of the Christ-Being within earthly existence.

But through a spiritual-scientific deepening many passages in the Gospel will appear in an entirely new light, in a different way from what it has hitherto been possible for Western consciousness. Let us consider only the following fact: If we take our stand fully upon a natural-scientific foundation, we must envisage the physical end of the earth. And those who continue to stand upon this scientific foundation, will also find that finally the starry world surrounding the earth will fall away; they will look upon a future in which this earth below will no longer exist and the stars above will no longer exist. But spiritual science gives us the certainty that just as an eternal being goes out of the physical and etheric body every evening and returns into them every morning, so an eternal being will continue to live on when its individual body falls away. When the whole earth falls away from all the human soul-spiritual beings, this eternal part will continue to live and it will pass over to new planetary phases of world evolution.

Now Christ's words in the Gospels resound to us in a new and wonderful way: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away, and connected with these words are those of St. Paul: Not I, but Christ in me. If a Christian really grasps these words, if one who really understands Christianity inwardly and who says, “Not I, but Christ in me,” understands Christ's words, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away,” that is, what lives within my everlasting Being shall not pass away,—these words will shine forth from the Gospel in a remarkable way, with a magic that calls forth reverence, but if one is really honest they cannot be directly understood without further effort.

If we approach such words and others, with the aid of spiritual science and in the anthroposophical sense, if we approach many other sayings which come to us out of the spiritual darkness of the world-development, of the development of the earth and of humanity, a light will ray on to them. Indeed, it is as if light were to fall upon such words as “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away”—light falls upon them, if we hear them resounding from that region where the Mystery of Golgotha took place, that event through which the whole development of the earth first acquires its true meaning.

Thus we see that spiritual science in the sense of Anthroposophy strives above all after a conscientious observation of the strict methods of the physical world, but at the same time it seeks to continue these strict scientific methods into regions where our true eternal being shines out towards us, regions where also the spiritual being of the world-development rays out its light towards us, a light in which the world-development itself with its spiritual forces and Beings appears in its spiritual-divine character.

At the conclusion of my lecture let me express the following fact: Spiritual-scientific Anthroposophy can fully understand that modern humanity, particularly conscientious, scientifically-minded men, have grown accustomed to consider as real and certain the results of causal natural-scientific knowledge, the results of external sense-observation, intellectual combinations of these sensory observations, and experiments. And by acquiring this certainty, they acquired a certain feeling in general towards that which can be “certain.” Up to now no attempt has been made to study super-sensible things in the same way in which physical things are studied. This certainty could therefore not be carried into super-sensible regions. To-day people still believe that they must halt with a mere faith at the thresh-hold of the super-sensible worlds, that feelings full of reverence suffice, because otherwise they would lose the mystery, and the super-sensible world would be rationalised. But spiritual science does not seek to rationalise the mystery, to dispel the reverent feeling which one has towards the mystery: it leads man to these mysteries through sight. Anthroposophy leaves the mystery its mystery-character, but it sets it into the evolution of the world in the same way in which sensory things exist in the sphere of world-evolution.

And it must be true that men also need certainty for the spheres transcending mere Nature. To the extent in which they will feel that through spiritual science in the sense of Anthroposophy they do not hear some vague amateurish and indistinct talk about the spiritual worlds, but something which is filled by the same spirit which comes to expression in modern science, to this same extent humanity will also feel that the certainty which it acquired, the certainty which it is accustomed to have through the physical world, can also be led over into the spiritual worlds. People will feel: If certainty exists only in regard to the physical world, of what use is this certainty, since the physical world passes away? Man needs an eternal element, for he himself wants to be rooted in an eternal element. He cannot admit that this certainty should only be valid for the transient, perishable world. Certainty, the certainty of knowledge, must also be gained in regard to the imperishable world.

This is the aim pursued in greatest modesty (those who follow the spiritual science of Anthroposophy know this) by Anthroposophy. Its aim is that through his natural certainty man should not lose his knowledge of the imperishable; through his certainty in regard to perishable things he should not lose the certainty in regard to imperishable things. Certainty in regard to the imperishable, that is to say, certainty in regard to the riddle of birth and death, the riddle of immortality, the riddle of the spiritual world-evolutions, this is what Anthroposophy seeks to bring into our civilisation.

Anthroposophy believes that this can be its contribution to modern civilisation. For in the same measure in which people courageously recognise that certainty must be gained also in regard to imperishable things, and not only in regard to perishable things, in the same measure they will grow accustomed to look upon Anthroposophy no longer as something fantastic and as an idle individual hobby, but as something which must enter our whole spiritual culture, like all the other branches of science, and thereby our civilisation in general.

The explanations which I took the liberty to give you, will have shown you that the acquisition of real super-sensible knowledge entails above all, with the aid of the exercises already characterized, that the two sides of human nature which are usually incorrectly designated as man's inner and outer being should be distinctly separated. Perhaps I may point out that in ordinary consciousness one does not carefully distinguish man's inner and outer being, when speaking of these. The way in which I characterized the exit of man's sentient and volitional being during sleep and the acquisition of conscious super-sensible knowledge outside the physical body, shows us that just this super-sensible knowledge enables us to separate distinctly those parts which are usually designated vaguely in ordinary consciousness as man's outer and inner being.

I might say that by this separation man's inner world becomes his outer world, and what we usually consider as his outer world becomes his inner world.

What takes place in that case? During sleep, man's sentient and volitional being abandons what we designated man's physical and etheric body, or the body of formative forces, and then this sentient-volitional being looks back objectively upon the physical body and upon the etheric body as if they were objects. We showed that in this retrospection the whole woof of thought appears outside man's inner being. The world of thoughts which fills our ordinary consciousness and which reflects the external world, does not go out with man's true inner being during sleep, but remains behind with the physical body, as the etheric body's real forces. In this way we were able to grasp that during our waking state of consciousness we cannot grow conscious of that part which goes out during sleep and which remains unconscious for the ordinary consciousness. (Self-observation can easily convince us that during our ordinary waking consciousness the world of thought produces this waking state of consciousness).

In that part of the human being which goes out of the physical and the etheric bodies during sleep, there is a dull twilight life, and we only learn to know this inner being of man when super-sensible knowledge fills it, as it were, with light and with warmth—when we are just as conscious within this inner being as we are ordinarily conscious within our physical body. But we also learn to know why we have an unconscious life during our ordinary sleeping condition. Consciousness arises when we dive down into our physical and etheric bodies at the moment of waking up. By diving down into the physical body, we make use of the senses which connect us with the external world. As a result, the sensory world awakes and we thus grow conscious of it.

In the same way we dive down into our etheric or life body; that is to say, into our world of thoughts, and we grow conscious within our thoughts. Ordinary consciousness is therefore based upon the fact that we use the instruments of our physical body, and that we make use, so to speak, of the etheric body's woof of formative forces. In ordinary life, man's true inner being, woven out of feeling and will, simply cannot attain consciousness, because it has no organs. By making the thought and will exercises of which I have spoken, we endow the soul itself with organs. This soul element, which is at first indistinct in our ordinary consciousness, acquires plastic form, even as our physical body and our etheric body acquire plastic form in the senses and in the organs of thought. Man's real soul-spiritual being therefore obtains a plastic form.

In the same measure in which it is moulded plastically and acquires (if I may use this paradoxical expression) soul-spiritual sense organs, the soul-spiritual world rises up around our inner being. That part of our being which ordinarily lives in a dull twilight existence and which can only perceive an environing world; namely, the physical world (when it uses the physical and etheric organs of perception), thus acquires plastic form and enters in connection with a world which always surrounds us, also in our ordinary life, even though we are not aware of it, a world in which we lived before descending into our physical being through birth or conception, as described the day before yesterday, a world in which we shall live again when we pass through the portal of death, for then we shall recognize it as a world which belongs to us and which is not limited by birth and death.

But there is one thing which rises up before us when we enter the soul-spiritual world. We cannot enter the soul-spiritual world in the same abstract, theoretical manner with which we can live in the physical world and in the world of thoughts or of the intellect. In the physical world and in the world of thoughts we use ideas and thoughts, which as such, leave us cold. With a little self-observation anyone can discover that when he ascends to the sphere of pure thinking, when he surrenders to the external sensory world without any special interest or a close connection with it, the external physical world, as well as the world of ideas, really leaves him cold. We must learn to know this in detail from single examples in life. We should note, for instance, how different are the inner feelings with which we consider our home, from these with which we look upon any other strange country which is indifferent to us. This will show us that in order to have a living interest for the environing world, our feeling and our will must be drawn in through special circumstances; we must include the feeling and the will which ordinarily dive down into the physical world only when we awake, obtaining from this physical world a connection with the senses and the understanding. The fact that love or perhaps hate are kindled in us when we encounter certain people in the physical world, the fact that we feel induced to do certain things for them out of compassion, all this demands the inclusion of our feelings and of everything which constitutes our inner being, when we come across such things in the external physical world. How conscious we are of the fact that our inner life grows cold, when we rise up to spheres which are generally called the spheres of pale, dry thought and of theoretic study!

The being which lives in a dull twilight state from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, must, as it were, connect itself during the waking daytime condition with our thoughts and with our sensory experiences through an inner participation in these processes, thus giving rise to the whole wealth of interest in the external world.

We thus recognize that in life itself feeling and will must first be drawn into the sensory world and into the world of thoughts. But we perceive this in the fullest meaning of the word only when super-sensible knowledge, which has become emancipated from the physical and etheric bodies, enables us to have experiences outside these bodies within our sentient-volitional being.

There we see that we simply must begin to speak of the world in a different way than is the case in ordinary life, during the ordinary state of consciousness. The dry ideas, the laws of Nature which we are accustomed to find in science and which interest us theoretically, though they leave us inwardly cold, these should be permeated with certain nuances and expressions which characterize the external world differently from the way in which we usually characterize it.

Our inner life acquires greater intensity through super-sensible knowledge. We penetrate more intensively into the life of the external world. When we try to gain knowledge, we are then no longer able to submit coldly to inner ideas. Of course, this gives rise to the objection that the objectivity may suffer through a certain inner warmth, through the awakening of feeling and of a subjective sense. But this objection is only raised by those who are not acquainted with the circumstances.

The things perceived through super-sensible knowledge make us speak differently of the super-sensible objects of knowledge. These do not change; they do not become less objective, for they are objective. When I look upon a wonderfully painted picture, it does not change through the fact that I look upon it with fire and enthusiasm; I would be a cold prosaic person if I were to face one of Raphael's Madonnas or one of Leonardo's paintings with a purely analytical artistic understanding, quite coldly and without any enthusiasm. It is the same when the spiritual worlds rise up in the super-sensible knowledge. Their content does not change through the fact that we connect ourselves with these worlds with inner feelings, far stronger than those which usually connect us with the external world and its objects.

When speaking from a knowledge of the higher worlds, many things will therefore have to be said differently, the descriptions will have to be different from those which we are accustomed to hear in ordinary life. But this does not render these worlds less objective. On the contrary, we might say: The subjective element which now comes out of the physical and etheric bodies becomes more objective and less selfish in its whole experience. The first experience which we have when going out of the physical body and experiencing our inner being consciously (whereas otherwise we always experience it unconsciously) is therefore the feeling of absolute LONELINESS.

In our ordinary consciousness we never have the feeling that by dwelling only within our inner self, independently of anything in the world pertaining to us, complete loneliness fills our soul, that we ourselves, with everything which now constitutes our soul-spiritual content, must rely entirely upon ourselves.

The feeling of loneliness which sometimes arises in the physical world, but only as a reflection of the real feeling, though it is painful enough for many people, becomes immensely intensified when we thus penetrate into the super-sensible world. We then look back upon that which reflects itself in the mirror of the physical and etheric body, as the spiritual environment which we left behind. We grow aware, on the one hand, of a complete feeling of loneliness, which alone enables us to maintain our Ego in this world … for we would melt away in this world of the spirit, if loneliness would not give us this Ego-feeling in the spiritual world, in the same way in which our body, our bodily sensation, gives us our Ego feeling here on earth. To this loneliness we owe the maintenance of the Ego in the spiritual world. We then learn to know this spiritual world as our environment. But we know that we can only learn to know it through the inner soul-spiritual eye, even as we see the physical world through our physical eyes.

It is the same when the human being abandons his physical and etheric bodies by passing through the portal of death, and in this connection I shall enlarge the explanations already given yesterday. It is true that in this case the physical body is given over to the elements of the earth and that the etheric body dissolves, as described, in the universal cosmic ether. But what we learned to know as our physical world, through our feeling and will, the world in which we experienced ourselves through the ordinary consciousness between birth and death, this world remains. The physical body filled with substance and the body of formative forces permeated by etheric forces, are laid aside with death, but what we experienced inwardly remains as a mirroring element.

From the spiritual world we look back into our last earthly life through death, through which we passed. Just because we have before us this last earthly life as a firm resistance which mirrors everything, just because of this, everything which surrounds us as we pass through the soul-spiritual world between death and a new birth, can also reflect itself. Through these experiences we perceive everything rising up in a far more intensive life than the one which we learned to know here in the physical world. And we first perceive as a soul-spiritual being everything with which we were in some way connected through our destiny, through our Karma. The people we loved, stand before us as souls. In our super-sensible vision we see all that we experienced together with them.

Those who acquire spiritual, super-sensible knowledge, already acquire the imaginative vision here in the physical world, through everything which I described to you. Those who pass through the portal of death in the ordinary way, acquire this faculty, though it is somewhat different to the spiritual vision on earth; they acquire it after having passed through the portal of death. From the sheaths of the physical and etheric bodies which were laid aside, emerges everything with which we were connected by destiny, or otherwise, in this earthly life—it undoubtedly arises in a different way, when those whom we left behind, still live on the earth, where the connection with them is more difficult, but when they follow us through death, this connection exists in the free, soul-spiritual life. Everything in our environment with which we were connected as human beings rises up before us. To super-sensible knowledge, the fact that people (if I may now express myself in words of the ordinary consciousness) who belonged together here in the physical world find each other again in the soul-spiritual world, after having passed through the portal of death, is not a belief to be accepted as a vague premonition, but it is a certainty, a fact just as certain as the results of physics or chemistry. This is something which the spiritual science of Anthroposophy can add to the acquisitions of modern culture.

People have grown accustomed to a certain feeling of certainty through the gradual popularization of a scientific consciousness. They strive to gain some knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, but no longer in the form of old presentiments handed over traditionally in the religious beliefs, for they were trained to accept that certainty which the external world can offer. In regard to that which lies beyond birth and death the spiritual science of Anthroposophy seeks to pave the way to this same kind of certainty. It can really do this. Only those people who tread the path already described, the path leading into the spiritual worlds, can lead the knowledge acquired in physics or chemistry beyond, into worlds which we enter when we pass through the portal of death.

Of course, not everything appears to us in this way when we look back upon our physical body through super-sensible knowledge outside the body. There is one thing which then appears to us very enigmatic, and this enigma can show us best of all that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy does not translate the truths which it includes in its spheres of knowledge into a prosaic, dry rationalism. It leads us to spiritual vision, or by communicating its truths it speaks of things which can be perceived through spiritual vision. But in being led to spiritual vision, we do not lose the full reverence towards the mysteries contained in the universe, towards everything in the universe inspiring reverence and which can now be clearly perceived, whereas otherwise they are at the most felt darkly. This enigmatic something which I mean and which appears to us, is that we now learn to know man's relationship with the earth, particularly his relationship with the physical-mineral earth.

I have already explained to you from many different aspects how our woof of thoughts, which is connected with the physical body, remains behind, and in addition to what has been described to you, in addition to what reflects itself and leads us to a knowledge of man's everlasting being, we can also recognize the true nature of this mirror which stands before us.

I might say: Even as in the physical world we face a mirror and in this mirror the environing world appears simultaneously with our own self, so in super-sensible knowledge the spiritual world appears through this mirror. And in the same way in which we can touch the material mirror with its foil and investigate its composition, so we can also investigate this super-sensible mirror; namely, our physical body and our etheric body, when our real soul-spiritual being is outside.

There we see that during his earthly life the human being constantly takes in substances from the external world in order to grow and to sustain his whole life. We absorb substances from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but all these substances which we absorb from the animal and vegetable kingdoms also contain mineral substances. Plants contain mineral substances, for the plant builds itself up from mineral substances. By taking in vegetable nourishment we therefore build up our own body out of mineral substances.

By looking back upon our physical body from outside, we can now perceive the true significance of the mineral substances which we absorb. Spiritual vision reveals something of which our ordinary consciousness has not the faintest inkling; namely, the activity of thinking. We have left behind our thinking. Our thoughts continue, as it were, to glimmer and to shine within the physical body. Now we can observe the effect of thoughts in the physical body from outside, as something objective. And we perceive that the effect of thoughts upon man's physical body is a dissolution of its physical substances, which fall asunder, as it were, into nothing.

I know that this apparently contradicts the law of the conservation of forces, but there is no time now to explain more fully its full harmony with this law. The nature of my subject entails that I express myself in more popular terms. But it is possible to understand that the purely mineral in man, what he bears within him as purely mineral substances, must be within him because his thoughts must dissolve these substances. For otherwise his thoughts could not exist—this is the condition for their existence—his thoughts could not exist if they did not dissolve mineral, earthly substances, a fact also revealed by the spiritual sciences of earlier times, based more on feeling. This dissolution, this destruction of physical substances constitutes the physical intermedium of thinking.

When our sentient-volitional part, our true inner being, lives within the physical body and within the etheric body and is filled by the activity of thinking, we learn to recognize that this activity takes its course through the fact that physical substance is continually destroyed. We now learn to recognize how our ordinary consciousness really arises. It does not arise in such a way that forces of growth hold sway in us, forces which develop in the remaining organism through nutrition. For in the same measure in which the forces of growth are active within us, thinking is dulled. When we wake up, thinking must, so to speak, have a free hand to dissolve physical substances, to eliminate them from the physical body. To the spiritual science of Anthroposophy, the nervous system appears as that organ which transmits this elimination of mineral-physical substances throughout the whole body. This elimination gives rise to that thought activity which we ordinarily carry with us through the world.

You therefore see that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy not only enables us to recognize the eternal in man, but also how it works within his physical body; that, for instance, thought can only exist through the fact that man continually develops within himself the mineral substances; that is, something dead.

We can therefore say: If we learn to know man from this aspect, we also learn to know death from another aspect. Ordinarily death confronts us as the end of life, as a moment in life, as an experience in itself. But when we throw light upon man's physical and etheric body in the manner described, we learn to know the gradual course of death, or the elimination of physical-mineral substance—for death is nothing but the complete elimination of man's mineral-physical substance—we learn to know the continual elimination of a dead, corpse-like element within us.

We recognize that from birth onwards, we constantly pass through a partial process of death, and real death sets in when the whole body does that which we ordinarily do through the nervous system, within a small part of the body.

We therefore learn to look upon the moment of death by gaining insight on a small scale into its being through the activity of thinking in the human organism. Throughout the whole time after death, we can only look back upon our physical body because the following fact exists: Whenever a thought lights up within you during your ordinary life, this is always accompanied by the fact that physical matter is eliminated in the physical body, in the same way in which, for instance, physical substance separates from a precipitated salt solution. This lighting up of thought you owe to this obscuring, to this casting-off of physical mineral substance. When you abandon the physical body, you sum up in a comparatively brief space of time what lives in the continual stream of your thoughts. You confront the fact that in death there flares up all at once that which slowly glimmered and shone throughout your earthly life, from birth to death.

Through this strong impression, in which the life of thoughts illuminates the soul like a great flash of lightning, we acquire the memory of our physical lives on earth. The physical body may be cast off, the etheric body may dissolve completely in the universal ether, but through the fact that we obtain in one experience this powerful thought impression (to mathematicians I might say: this thought-integral in comparison with thought differentials, from birth to death), we always have before us, throughout the time after death, as a mirroring element, our physical life on earth, even though we have laid aside our physical and etheric parts—and this mirroring element reveals everything which we experience when the human beings with whom we were connected by destiny in love or in hate, gradually come up, when the spiritual Beings who live in the spiritual world and do not descend to the earth, whose company we now share, rise up before us.

The spiritual-scientific investigator may state this with a calm conscience, for he knows that he does not speak on the foundation of illusionary pictures; he knows instead that to super-sensible vision, when super-sensible vision arises through the organ of the physical and etheric bodies which are now outside, these things are just as real, can be seen just as really as physical colours are ordinarily perceived through physical eyes, or physical sounds through physical ears.

This is how the evolution of humanity forms part of the evolution of the world. If we study the development of the world, for instance the mineral life on earth, we understand why there should be mineral, earthly laws. They exist so that they might also exist within us, and thinking is therefore bound up with the earth. But in perceiving how the beings whose thinking is connected with the earth emerge from that which produces their thought, we also learn to recognize how man's true being rises above that which pertains only to the earth. This is what connects the development of the world with the development of humanity and unites them.

We learn to know the human being and at the same time we learn to know the universe. If we learn to know man's physical body and its mineralization through thinking, we also learn to know through man's physical body the lifeless mineral earth. This creates a foundation for a knowledge of the evolution of the world also from its spiritual aspect.

When we thus learn to know man's inner being, the development of the world appears in the same way in which the ordinary earthly experiences appear before us, the experiences through which we passed since our birth.

When you draw out of your memory-store an experience which you had ten years ago, this past event rises up before your soul as an image. You know exactly that it rises up as a picture. Yet this picture conveys a knowledge of something which really existed ten years ago.

How does this arise? Through the fact that in your organism certain processes remained behind which now summon up the picture. Certain processes remained behind in your organism and these summon up in you the picture, enabling you—as I once designated it—to construct what you experienced ten years ago. But super-sensible knowledge leads us deeper into man's inner being. We can perceive, for instance, that the physical body becomes mineralized during the thinking process; we perceive this in the same way in which we learn to know some past experience of our earthly life through the traces which it left behind within our being.

In the same way the development of the earth can be understood by envisaging the development of man; through the activity of the mineral in man we learn to know the task of the mineral kingdom within the development of the earth. And if, as already set forth, we learn similarly to know (I can only mention this, for a detailed description would lead us too far how the vegetable kingdom is connected with man, and how the animal kingdom is related with him (for this, too, can be recognized) the development of the world can be grasped by setting out from the human being.

Within the development of the world we can see something which is again of immense importance to those who are interested in modern civilization, just as interesting as the facts which I explained in connection with a knowledge of the human being, of the eternal inner kernel of man.

Modern civilization shows us that up to a certain point it is possible to consider man's relationship to the development of the world by linking up the human being with the evolution of the animals—even though the corresponding theories, or the hypotheses, as some people say, still contain many unclear facts, requiring completion and modification. We follow the development of the simplest organic beings up to the highest animals, and if we continue this line of observation we come to the point of placing man at the summit of animal development. One person does it in this way, and the other in that way; one more idealistically, and the other more materialistically in accordance with Darwin's theory of evolutionary descent, but methodically it can hardly be denied that if we wish to study man's physical nature according to natural-scientific methods, we must link him up with the animal line of descent (this has been done for some time).

We investigate how his head changed in comparison with the heads of the different animal species; we investigate his limbs, etc., and we thus obtain what is known as comparative anatomy, comparative morphology, comparative physiology, and also ideas on the way in which man's physical form gradually developed out of lower beings in the course of the world's evolution. But we always remain in the physical sphere. On the one hand people take it amiss today if the anthroposophical spiritual investigator speaks of the spiritual world as I take the liberty to do in this lecture; from many sides this is viewed as a pure fantasy, and although many people believe that it is well meant … they nevertheless look upon it as something fantastic.

Those who become acquainted to some extent with the things described by me, those who at least try to understand them, will see that the preparations and preliminary conditions for them are just as serious as, for instance, the preparations for the study of mathematics, so that it is out of the question to speak of sailing into a fantastic region. But just as on the one hand people take it amiss if a person describes the spiritual world as a real, objective world, so they take it amiss on the other hand if in regard to man's physical development one fully accepts those who follow man's development darwinistically, with a natural-scientific discipline, along the animal line of descent, as far as man. No speculations should enter the observations made in the physical sphere, as is, for instance, the case today in Neovitalism. This is full of speculations; the old vitalism was also full of speculative elements. But whenever we consider the physical world, we must remain by physical facts.

For this reason, the anthroposophical spiritual investigator who on the one hand ventures to speak in a certain way of the conditions after death and before birth, as I have done, does not consider it as a reproach (i.e., he is not touched by it) when people tell him that his description of the physical world is completely in the meaning of a modern natural scientist. He does not bring any dreams into the sphere which constitutes the physical world. Even though people may call him a materialist when he describes the physical world, this reproach does not touch him, because he strictly separates the spiritual world, which can only be observed with the aid of a spiritual method, from the physical-sensory world, which has to be observed with the orderly disciplined methods of modern natural science.

A serious spiritual-scientific investigator must therefore feel particularly hurt and pained at reproaches made to him on account of certain followers of spiritual science who sometimes rebuke natural science out of a certain pride in their spiritual-scientific knowledge and out of their undoubtedly shallow knowledge of natural science; they think that they have the right to speak negatively of science and of scientific achievements, but the spiritual-scientific investigator can only feel deeply hurt at their amateurish, dilettantish behaviour. This is, however, not in keeping with spiritual science. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy is characterized by the fact that it deals just as strictly and scientifically with the external physical world, as with the spiritual world, and vice-versa.

With this preliminary condition, the anthroposophical spiritual investigator entirely stands upon the ground of strictest natural-scientific observation in regard to the study of the world's development, but at the same time he turns his gaze towards the soul-spiritual world. And even as he knows that not only a physical process is connected with man's individual embryonic origin in the physical world, but that a soul-spiritual element unites with the human embryo, with the human germ, so he also knows that in the whole development of the world—though to the physical body it appears as a tapestry of sensory objects, and though it manifests itself to the woof of thoughts; i.e., to the etheric body, in laws of Nature—he also knows that the physical world is permeated and guided in its whole development by spiritual forces, handled by spiritual Beings, that can be recognized in their own appropriate way, as already described.

The anthroposophical investigator therefore knows that when he contemplates the external physical world in the meaning of genuine science, he comes to the true boundary, where he may begin with his spiritual investigation.

If we conscientiously trace the evolutionary development through animal descent up to man, as Darwin or other Darwinians or Haeckel did, and if we penetrate into the justifiable scientific aspects of the world development of man, we can continue this in a spiritual-scientific direction, after having reached the boundary to which we are led by natural science.

We now discover that a CONTEMPLATION OF THE FORM into which we penetrate through super-sensible knowledge, shows us all the SIGNIFICANCE OF FORMS, as they appear in the kingdom of man on the one hand, and in the animal kingdom on the other; we discover the whole significance of these forms.

Equipped with the knowledge supplied by super-sensible research, we see that the animal (this is at least the case with most animals, and exceptions can be easily explained) stands upon the ground with his four limbs, so that its spine is horizontal, parallel with the surface of the earth, and so that in regard to the spine, the head develops in an entirely different position from that of man. We learn to know the animal's whole form, as it were, from within, as a complex of forces, and also in relationship with the whole universe. And we thus learn to make a comparison: We perceive the transformation, the metamorphosis in the human form, in the human being whom we see standing upon his two legs, at right angles, so to speak, with the animal's spine, with his own spine set vertically to the surface of the earth and his head developing in accordance with this position of the spine.

By penetrating into the inner art of Nature's creative process, we learn to distinguish the human form from the animal form; we recognize this by entering into the artistic creative process of the cosmos. And we penetrate into the development of the world by rising from otherwise abstract constructive thoughts to thoughts which are inwardly filled with life, which form themselves artistically in the spirit.

The most important thing to be borne in mind is that when it seeks to know the development of the world, anthroposophical spiritual research changes from the abstract understanding ordinarily described—and justly so—as dry, prosaic, systematic thought, or combining thought, into concrete, real thought. Not for the higher spiritual world, in which concepts must penetrate in the manner described, but for the physical world, the forms in the world development should first be grasped through a kind of artistic comprehension, which in addition develops upon the foundation of super-sensible knowledge.

By thus indicating how science should change into art, we must of course encounter the objection raised by those who are accustomed to think in accordance with modern ideas: “But science must not become an art!” My dear friends, this can always be said, as a human requirement; people can say: I forbid the logic of the universe to become an art, for we only learn to know reality by linking up thought with thought and by thus approaching reality. If the world were as people imagine it to be, one could refuse to rise up to art, to an artistic comprehension of forms; but if the world is formed in such a way that it can only be comprehended through an artistic comprehension, it is necessary to advance to such an artistic comprehension. This is how matters stand. That is why those people who were earnestly seeking to grasp the organic in world development really came to an inner development of the thinking ordinarily looked upon as scientific thought; they came to an artistic comprehension of the world. As soon as we continue to observe with an artistic-intuitive eye the development of the world from the point where the ordinary Darwinistic theory comes to a standstill, we perceive that man, grasped as a whole, cannot simply be looked upon by saying that once there were lower animals in the world, from which higher animals developed, that then still higher animals developed out of these, and so forth, until finally man arose.

If we study embryology in an unprejudiced way, it really contradicts this idea. Although modern scientists set up the fundamental law of biogenetics and compare embryology with phylogeny, they do not interpret rightly what appears outwardly even in human embryology, because they do not rise to this artistic comprehension of the world's development. If we observe in a human embryo how the limbs develop out of organs which at first have a stunted aspect, how everything is at first merely head, we already obtain the first elements of what reveals itself in the artistic comprehension of the human form. It is not possible to link up the whole human being with the animals. One cannot say: The human being, such as he stands before us today, is a descendant of the whole animal kingdom. No, this is not the case. Just those who penetrate with genuine scientific conscientiousness into scientific Darwinism and its modern description of the development of the world, will discover that through a higher understanding it is simply impossible to place man at the end, or at the summit of the animal chain of development; they must instead study the human head as such, the head of the human being. This human head alone descends from the whole animal kingdom. Though it may sound strange and paradoxical, the part which is generally considered as man's most perfect part is a transformation from the animal kingdom.

Let us approach the human head with this idea and let us study it carefully. Observe with a certain morphological-artistic sense how the lower maxillary bones are transformed limbs, also the upper maxillary bones are transformed limbs, how everything in the head is an enhanced development of the animal form; you will then recognize in the human head that upon a higher stage it reveals everything which appears in the animals under so many different forms. You will then also understand why it is so.

When you observe the animal, you can see that its head hangs upon one extremity of the spine and that in a real animal it is entirely subjected to the law of gravity. Observe instead the human head; observe how the human being stands within the cosmos. The human head is set upon a spine which has a vertical direction. It rests upon the remaining body in such a way that the human being protects the head, as it were, against falling a prey only to the force of gravity. The human head is really something which rests upon the remaining organism with comparative independence. And we come to the point of understanding that through the fact that the human head is carried by the remaining body, it really travels along like a person using a coach; for it is the remaining body which carries the human head through the world. The human head has transformed limbs which have become shriveled, as it were, and it is set upon the remaining organism. This remaining organism is related to the human head in the same way in which the whole earth with its force of gravity is related to the animal. In regard to the head, the human being is related to his whole remaining body in the same way in which the whole animal is related to the earth.

We now begin to understand the human being through the development of the world. And if we proceed in this knowledge of the human form with an artistic sense and understanding, we finally comprehend why the human head is the continuation of the animal chain and why the remaining body of man developed later, out of the earth, and was attached to the human head. Only in this way we gradually learn to understand man's development.

If we go back into earlier times of the past, we can only transfer into these primordial epochs that part of man which lies at the foundation of his present head development. We must not seek the development of his limbs or of his thorax in those early ages, for these developed later. But if we observe the development of the world by setting out, as described by me, from the human being, if we observe it in the same way in which we would look upon some past experience, we find that the human being had already begun his development in the world at a time when our higher animals, for instance, did not as yet exist.

We can therefore say (let us now take a later epoch of the earth): In the further course of his development man developed his head out of earlier animal beings through the fact that his spiritual essence animated him. That is why he could raise his head above the former stage of development. He then added his limbs, which developed out of the regular forces of the earth. The animals which followed could only develop to the extent in which man developed with the exclusion of his head. They began their development later, so that they did not go as far as the human development of the head; they remained connected with the earth while the human being separated himself from it.

This proves that it has a real meaning to say: Man belongs to the development of the universe in such a way that he is related with the animal kingdom, but he rises above it through his spiritual development. The animals which followed man in their development could only develop as much as man had developed in his limbs and thorax … the head remained stunted, because a longer time of development should have preceded it, such as that of man, in order that the real head might develop.

Through an artistic deepened contemplation of the forms in the world's development the conscientiously accepted Darwinistic theory changes, insofar as it is scientifically justified today. We thus recognize that in the development of the world the human being has behind him a LONGER TIME OF DEVELOPMENT than the animals—that the animals develop as their chief form that part which man adds to his head. In this way man reaches the point of lifting one part of his being out of the force of gravity, whereas the animals are entirely subjected to the force of gravity. Everything which constituted our head with its sense organs is raised above the force of gravity, so that it does not turn towards ponderable matter but towards the ether, which fills the sensory world. This is the case above all with the senses; we would see this, could we study them more closely. In this way, for instance, the human organ of hearing depends upon an etheric structure, not only upon an air structure.

Through all this the human being forms part not only of the material world, of the ponderable physical world, but he forms part of the etheric world outside. Through the etheric world he perceives, for instance, what the light conjures up before him in the world of colours, etc., etc. Even through his external form he rises above heavy matter, up to the free ether, and for this reason we see the development of the world in a different way when we ascend from natural science to spiritual science.

But when we rise up to an artistic conception, we perceive the activity of the soul-spiritual in man, and we must rise up to such a conception if we wish to understand the human being. We should, for instance, be able to say: In regard to his soul-spiritual, sentient-volitional being, we must speak of loneliness and of a life in common with others, as if these were theoretical concepts, as described today; we must rise up to the moral world and finally we come to the religious world. These worlds belong together and form a whole.

If we study the human being in accordance with a natural-scientific mentality and in the meaning of modern civilization, we find on the one hand the rigid scientific necessity of Nature to which also the human being belongs, and on the other hand we find that man can only be conscious of his dignity—that he can only say “I am truly man”—if he can feel within him the moral-religious impulses. But if we honestly stand upon the foundation of natural science we only have hypotheses in regard to the beginning and the end of the earth, hypotheses which speak of the Kant-Laplace nebula for the beginning of the earth and of a death through heat for the end of the earth.

If in the face of the natural-scientific demands we now consider, in the meaning of modern civilization, the moral-religious world which reveals itself intuitively (I have shown this in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, if we consider this world we must say: We really delude ourselves, we conjure up before us a fog. Is it possible to believe that when the earth passes through the death by heat, in accordance with the natural-scientific concept, that there should still exist anything besides the death of all ideals?

At this point spiritual science, or ANTHROPOSOPHY, sets in, and shows that the soul-spiritual is a reality, that it is active within the physical and that it placed the human form, the human being, into the evolution of the world; it shows that we should look back upon animal beings which are entirely different from the present animals, that it is possible to adhere to the methods of modern science, but that other results are obtained. Anthroposophy thus inserts the moral element into the science of religion, and Anthroposophy thus becomes a moral-religious science.

Now we no longer look upon the Kant-Laplace nebula, but we look at the same time upon an original spiritual element, out of which the soul-spiritual world described in Anthroposophy developed in the same way in which the physical world developed out of a physical-earthly origin. We also look towards the end of the earth and since the laws of enthropy are fully justified, we can show that the earth will end through a kind of death by heat, but at the same time we can envisage from the anthroposophical standpoint the end of the single human being: his corpse is handed over to the elements, but the human being himself passes over into a spiritual world. This is how we envisage the end of the earth. The scientific results do not disturb us, for we know that everything of a soul-spiritual nature which man develops will pass through the earth's portal of death when the earth no longer exists; it will pass over into a new world development, even as the human being passes over into a new world development whenever he passes through death.

By surveying the development of the earth in this way, we perceive IN THE MIDDLE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT THE EVENT OF GOLGOTHA. We see how this event of Golgotha is placed in the middle of the earth's development; before this event, there only existed forces which would have led man to a kind of paralyzation of his forces. We really learn to recognize (I can only allude to this at the end of my lecture) that in the same way in which through the vegetable and animal fertilization a special element enters the fertilized organism, so the Mystery of Golgotha brought something into the evolution of the world from regions outside the earth, and this continues to live; it accompanies the souls until at the end of the earth they pass on to new metamorphoses of earthly life. I would have to describe whole volumes were I to show the path leading in a strictly conscientious scientific way from what I have described to you today in connection with the evolution of humanity and of the universe, to the Mystery of Golgotha, to the appearance of the Christ-Being in relationship with the earth.

But through a spiritual-scientific deepening many passages in the Gospels will appear in an entirely new light, in a different way from what it has hitherto been possible through the occidental consciousness. Let us consider only the following fact: If we entirely stand upon a natural-scientific foundation, we must envisage the physical end of the earth. And those who continue to stand upon this scientific foundation, will also find that finally the starry world surrounding the earth will decay; they will look upon a future in which this earth will no longer exist, and the stars above will no longer exist. But spiritual science gives us the certainty that even as an eternal being goes out of the physical and etheric body every evening and returns into them every morning, so an eternal being will continue to live when the single human bodies shall have decayed. When the whole earth falls away from all the soul-spiritual beings of men, this eternal part of the earth will continue to live and it will pass over to new planetary phases of world development.

Now Christ's words in the Gospels resound to us in a new and wonderful way; “HEAVEN AND EARTH SHALL PASS AWAY, BUT MY WORDS SHALL NOT PASS AWAY,” and connected with these words are those of St. Paul: “NOT I, BUT CHRIST IN ME.” If a Christian really grasps these words, if a person who really understands Christianity inwardly and who says, “Not I, but Christ in me,” understands Christ's words, “Heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away”—that is, “what lives within my everlasting Being shall not pass away”—these words will shine forth from the Gospel in a peculiar manner, with a magic producing reverence, but if one is really honest they cannot be understood without further ado.

If we approach such words and others, with the aid of spiritual science and in the anthroposophical meaning, if we approach many other sayings which come to us out of the spiritual darkness of the world development, of the development of the earth and of humanity, a light will ray out of them. Indeed, my dear friends, it is as if light were to fall upon words such as “heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away”—light falls upon them, if we hear them resounding from that region where the Mystery of Golgotha took place, and the whole development of the earth only acquires its true meaning through such words!

Thus we see that spiritual science in the meaning of Anthroposophy strives above all after a conscientious observation of the strict methods of the physical world, but at the same time it seeks to continue these strict scientific methods into regions where our true eternal being shines out towards us, regions where also the spiritual being of the world development rays out its light towards us, a light in which the world development itself with its spiritual forces and Beings appears in its spiritual-divine character.

My dear friends, at the conclusion of my lecture (I thank you that you showed so much interest in it) let me express the following fact: Spiritual-scientific Anthroposophy can fully understand that modern humanity, particularly conscientious, scientifically-minded men, have grown accustomed to consider as real and certain the results of causal natural-scientific knowledge, the results of external sense observation, intellectual combinations of these sensory observations, and experiments. This gave them a feeling of certainty. And by acquiring this certainty, they acquired a certain feeling in general towards that which can be “sure.” Up to now no attempt has been made to study super-sensible things in the same way in which physical things are studied. This certainty could therefore not be carried into super-sensible regions. Today people still believe that they must halt with a mere thought at the threshold of the super-sensible worlds, that feelings full of reverence suffice, because otherwise they would lose the mystery, and the super-sensible world would be rationalized. But spiritual science does not seek to rationalize the mystery, to dispel the reverent feeling which one has towards the mystery: it leads to these mysteries through vision. Anthroposophy leaves the mystery its mystery-character, but it sets it into the evolution of the world in the same way in which sensory things exist in the sphere of world evolution.

And it must be true that people also need certainty for the spheres transcending mere Nature. To the extent in which they will feel that through spiritual science in the meaning of Anthroposophy they do not hear some vague amateurish and indistinct talk about the worlds, but something which is filled by the same spirit which comes to expression in modern science, to this same extent humanity will feel that the certainty which it acquired, the certainty which it is accustomed to have through the physical world, can also be led over into the spiritual worlds. People will feel: If certainty exists only in regard to the physical world, of what use is this certainty, since the physical world passes away? Man needs an eternal element, for he himself wants to be rooted in an eternal element. He cannot admit that this certainty should only be valid for the transient, perishable world. Certainty, the certainty of knowledge, must also be gained in regard to the imperishable world.

This is the aim pursued in greatest modesty (those who follow the spiritual science of Anthroposophy know this) by Anthroposophy. Its aim is that through his natural certainty man should not lose his knowledge of the imperishable; through his certainty in regard to perishable things he should not lose the certainty in regard to imperishable things. Certainty in regard to the perishable; that is to say, certainty in regard to the riddle of birth and death, the riddle of immortality, the riddle of the spiritual world developments, this is what Anthroposophy seeks to bring into our civilization.

Anthroposophy believes that this can be its contribution to modern civilization. For in the same measure in which people courageously recognize that certainty should be gained also in regard to imperishable things, and not only in regard to perishable things, in the same measure they will grow accustomed to look upon Anthroposophy no longer as something fantastic and as an individual hobby, but as something which must enter our whole spiritual culture, like all the other branches of science, and thereby our civilization in general.

Dear attendees! Man only really faces the riddles of existence when he has developed a degree of awareness of life, when he is compelled to form ideas, sensations and feelings about his relationship to the world. But then, when he has reached such a situation, the riddles of existence mean to him what can be called a vital question. For they are not only connected with some theoretical longings, they are not merely external questions of education, but the whole position of man in the world depends on them, the way in which man can find his way in the world, the degree of security he can have in life, and the inner support with which he can move through this life.

But there is a considerable difference between the various types of existential conundrums. Man is confronted with nature and must form ideas and feelings about his relationship to nature. And if I may use a comparison, I would like to say: When man has come to consciousness in the way I have characterized it, and he cannot find his way into certain things that confront him as mysteries of nature, then existence, to which he once belonged – as I said, it is only expressed as a comparison – appears to him as a spiritual darkness. He feels as if he has been placed in a dark world, and cannot find his way about in it. But to a certain extent this whole relationship to the secrets of the outer, natural world remains something external to the human being; it concerns his outer relationship to existence.

But the situation for the human being is quite different when it comes to the riddles of his soul, these riddle questions themselves. He lives in these riddle questions, these riddle questions basically constitute what can be mental health and illness in the first instance, but what can also become physical health and illness. Because, ladies and gentlemen, the life of the soul is something extraordinarily complicated, however simple it may initially appear. What we carry in our consciousness during our waking hours from morning to evening is, as is now also scientifically recognized, only part of our soul life. A large part of our soul life rests in unconscious or, as I could also say, subconscious depths, and it surges up in the form of vague feelings, of vague moods, and also of all kinds of other soul content, and forms what is an indeterminate basic state of our soul life. But that which takes place and rises in this more or less indeterminate way in the depths of our soul life is intimately connected with what actually constitutes the happiness or suffering of our lives. And anyone who attempts to penetrate the soul life of a human being by anthroposophical means will very soon notice how everything that flows up from the depths of the soul in this kind of indeterminate way with the physical body, how at first quietly, then more and more, our entire state of health, which makes us capable of living or unable to live, can depend on these subconscious soul moods.

Now I do not want to speak to you today, my dear audience, in the way that this unconsciousness of the soul is very often spoken about at present, by placing everything that shimmers unclearly in consciousness in this great container of this unconscious and forming more or less vague ideas about how this unconscious or subconscious works. I have been speaking here in this place about questions of anthroposophical research for many years and therefore cannot start from the most elementary of this research today, but would like to consider the questions of the soul life in their very own sense, as they are connected in a certain sense with the happiness and unhappiness of life. But to do that, we have to look at what, in the human soul, permeated by all kinds of things that are initially unknown, which we just want to point out more or less clearly through today's reflections, can have a disturbing or calming, happy or sorrowful effect in this soul life, and what lies in between.

Now, if we take a glance, even a superficial one, at our soul life, we find two clearly distinguishable poles: on the one hand, the life of the imagination, which actually encompasses everything that takes place clearly and brightly in our consciousness. And on the other hand, we find the life of the will, which initially plays out from the depths of the soul in a somewhat dark, gloomy way.

As I have mentioned here before, we distinguish between two states of consciousness in the ordinary course of a person's life, of which only one is actually a distinct state of consciousness. We distinguish between the waking state and the sleeping state. In the state of sleep, the conscious life of imagination ceases, the whole life of the soul sinks down into a more or less dark darkness. But if we look at our soul life quite impartially when we are awake, we can actually only speak of the fact that in relation to everything that is conceptual, we are really awake. To a certain extent, we have ourselves in our hands as waking human beings, insofar as we have filled our consciousness with clear images, with thoughts full of light. We also accompany our will impulses, we accompany our actions with thoughts. But even with the simplest movement of the human body, how the thought of consciousness is connected with what actually happens during a will impulse, during an action, remains completely dark. How dark it is, what actually happens inside the arm when I just lift this arm, when the thought that has the goal of lifting this arm wants to realize itself, wants to shoot into it, so to speak, and wants to set the arm in motion willfully.

What happens in our own organism eludes our waking consciousness just as much as what actually happens in the human soul from falling asleep to waking up, so that we actually have to say: It is the case for the human soul life that even when we are awake we have an element of sleep, that the state of being asleep pervades us continually, and that we are fully awake only in thinking, in the experience of clear, light-filled thoughts. Between these two states, between the — I would like to say — fully waking state of imagination and the life of will immersed in darkness, lies, participating in both, the life of feeling and of the mind. Our feelings permeate our ideas. We bring certain sympathies and antipathies from our feelings into the life of our ideas, and thus we usually either connect or separate our ideas. We accompany what flows into our will impulses with our emotional judgment, in that we perceive some actions as being in accordance with duty and others as transgressions against duty. And because we experience a certain emotional satisfaction when we fulfill our duties, or a certain dissatisfaction when we fail at something, or when we cannot succeed at something, or when we fail at something for some other reason, our emotional life flows back and forth between our mental and our volitional life.

But the real soul mysteries do not present themselves to the dull person who, in the manner just described, devotes himself to the life of ideas on the one hand and to the life of feeling and the life of will on the other, but these soul mysteries emerge as the person becomes more and more conscious of himself. And even then the actual experienced soul mysteries do not occur in full consciousness, but they belong precisely to the more or less subconscious experiences of the human being. Man never becomes completely clear in his consciousness about what actually influences the mood, the states of his soul life, his daily happiness, his daily suffering, where these actually come from.

And one must seek out and clearly express that which lives unclearly in consciousness, and I ask you to take this into account in the remarks that I am about to make, that I will be obliged to express in clear words something that express in clear words what never lives in consciousness with such clarity, but what is present in the life of the soul, either healing or causing illness, and what the human being senses without being able to bring it to consciousness. And because this is so, the soul puzzles are not merely theoretical, they are thoroughly existential puzzles that are experienced.

When a person lives, as it were, according to the life of imagination, then he feels – as I said, I am speaking clearly about what is only felt unclearly, what is never fully brought to consciousness – then the person feels something like the vanity of his own existence. The life of imagination is a life of images. The life of imagination is something that we fill during our waking day-to-day life with what we receive from the outer world in the way of impressions and perceptions. What we experience from nature forms the content of our imagination; it lives in us and is what we draw from our memories. But although we are aware that Yes, you are active in processing these experiences into representations. You are inwardly active in separating and connecting representations, but you are not fully aware of this activity in your mind. What is present in your mind is basically a reflection of the outer world. We know that we have to align our imaginative life with this external world. What we have is merely a reflection of the external world. We live by living in our imaginations, in images. We do not feel a full sense of existence in our imaginative life.

And this feeling, it lives out subconsciously, however strange, however paradoxical that may sound. And as little as it is present in consciousness, it is alive in the subconscious; this feeling lives out in certain anxious feelings, in feelings of fear, in relation to the life of imagination.

It sounds paradoxical, dear audience, but there is an undercurrent to the life of the human soul. Most people know nothing about it, but most people, or all people in fact, are constantly under its influence. And this undercurrent is a fearful current, that we can, so to speak, lose ourselves in the world, that we stand over an abyss because our world of ideas is a world of images. And again, the indefinite longing lives in the human soul: How do I find existence in this mere world of images?

This unconscious feeling in the undercurrent of the soul can certainly be compared to the feeling that a person has when they are physically short of air, when they suffer from air hunger and thus consciously fall into anxious feelings. What a person consciously experiences through physical conditions is actually always unconsciously felt as a concomitant of the life of the imagination. And so, on the one hand, we can point to a soul enigma, not in a theoretical formulation, but by bringing up from the depths of the soul what is germinating or slumbering in this soul.

And on the other hand, by living towards the element of will, the human being feels — I would say — the opposite state. There is a different undercurrent in the life of the soul. The human being senses how he is exposed to his drives, his emotions, his instincts, how something natural plays into the human soul life that does not open up to the clarity of thinking, that is always immersed in a certain way in a reality that we cannot penetrate with light, that forms a darkness within ourselves. And if you can penetrate into these undercurrents of the soul with unbiased observation, you can indicate how that which exists in the depths of the soul is unconsciously felt. One must then characterize it by saying: It is felt in the same way as anger is felt in consciousness, or also how a person feels when he cannot breathe, when his blood circulation is disturbed in such a way that the inhaled air is not properly converted in his body, when a kind of suffocation sets in. Something like anger-fortitude is always there in the human soul as a result of such a way of living towards the element of the will.

These are forces that live deep in the unconscious of the human soul, that flood up and that constitute the real mystery of the human soul life. And the one who merely takes the ideas in their pictorialness, the will in its instinctuality, as they present themselves to consciousness, does feel these soul riddles as something indeterminate, as an indeterminate sensation of the soul, but he does not make these soul riddles clear to himself. He does not really know what the indeterminate workings in him are, but they deeply influence his happy or unhappy mood in life.

It must be said again and again: the soul puzzles are not the same as those we experience in nature; the soul puzzles are those that are experienced inwardly, that flood up from the deep undercurrents of the soul and that must first be interpreted. Therefore, my dear audience, every scientific discipline – against which, of course, as has been emphasized here many times before, I have no objection in its legitimate field – therefore every scientific discipline has little to do with the actual riddles of the soul. We can see this, and I would like to give two examples. We can see it in all of modern scientific thinking, how helpless science, which celebrates such great triumphs in other fields, is when it comes to the soul, despite the fact that the greatest existential riddles are connected to the human soul. I would like to recall two examples, which, however, are deeply significant for what is there and for what is scientifically necessary in order to penetrate into the actual field that man experiences as a soul riddle.

It is now almost half a century since the great physiologist du Bois-Reymond gave a speech at the 45th Naturalists' Conference in Leipzig that must always be referred to, despite the fact that it has been talked about an extraordinary amount and has now almost been forgotten and disappeared from the discussion. This speech was about the “limits of knowledge of nature”, and du Bois-Reymond rightly states on the one hand, the limits of knowledge of nature, the material world in its essence. He says: Wherever matter comes into play, the human mind cannot penetrate. It penetrates from the external observation of the external sensory phenomena to the revelation of material existence, but it cannot specify what matter itself actually is. This is the one limit du Bois-Reymond indicates. He indicates the other limit as that of human consciousness, but today this is nothing other than the human soul. He says: Even with the most complete knowledge of nature, one cannot even gain any idea of how the simplest sensation comes about in the human soul. Even if one knew quite clearly how carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen atoms move in the human brain, one would never be able to fathom from a clear insight into these movements how the simplest sensation – “I see red”, “I smell the scent of roses” – comes about, that is, how the first elements of mental life come about.

And du Bois-Reymond is actually completely right in this statement. There is a second limit for external natural science here, except that du Bois-Reymond's conviction is the one that must be overcome through anthroposophical research. Du Bois-Reymond believes that the limits of knowledge of nature are the limits of all science. Therefore, he says: If you want to penetrate into this realm of the spiritual and soul, you have to do it by means other than scientific ones. Because where supernaturalism begins, where, in other words, one enters the realm of the spiritual and soul, that is where science ends. This is precisely what anthroposophical research wants to defend before the world: that science does not have to be limited to the external-natural existence, that science can develop the means to penetrate into the spiritual-mental as well.

The other example I want to give is that of an excellent personality, Franz Brentano, who wanted to establish a psychology entirely according to the method of modern natural science. That was his ideal. I have — dear ladies and gentlemen — discussed the whole state of affairs underlying Franz Brentano's research in detail in the third part of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (On the Riddle of the Soul) and would like to mention only a few fundamental points here. Franz Brentano then tried, at the beginning of the 1870s, to write a psychology, a psychology. The first volume appeared in the spring of 1874. The second volume was promised for the fall; it never appeared. The whole work was intended to be in four volumes; except for the first volume, nothing ever appeared except individual attempts, which, however, are always only attempts. The whole work remained a torso. In the work mentioned, I have discussed why this had to be so. Franz Brentano wanted to conduct research into the life of the soul in the same way as in the natural sciences, and in this first volume one finds a remarkable confession by Franz Brentano. He says, for example: With this scientific research, it is indeed possible to modestly find one's way in the details of mental life. One can indicate how one representation connects with another, how one representation separates from another, how certain feelings attach to representations, how volitional impulses attach to representations, how memory works, and so on. But if, as Franz Brentano says, we have to content ourselves with investigating only these details of mental life, and if knowledge of the most important questions of human existence has to be bought at the price of this strict scientific method, where would that leave us? For Brentano finds justified the longing, already present in Plato, in Aristotle, in ancient Greece, to lead what can be investigated in the individual soul to the great questions from birth to immortality. And it would be sad, says Franz Brentano, if, in the desire to be scientific in the exploration of the soul life, one had to renounce knowledge of what happens to the better part of man in us when the physical part is handed over to the earth at death.

And it is evident from what Franz Brentano has expounded in the first volume of his psychology that his whole scientific yearning is to lead the individual questions, which basically can touch the wider public little, which this wants to leave to the scholar, but to lead these individual questions on a long path to the great questions of human immortality and the divine-spiritual content of the world, as it is reflected in the soul. But Brentano could not find this way out of his scientific way of thinking, and because he was an honest researcher, he left the following volumes, for which he could not find a research path, unwritten until his death a few years ago.

I would like to say that it is precisely this researcher's fate that shows in the truest sense how tragic it is that what is often recognized today as the only scientific approach must falter when faced with the great riddles of the human soul. That is it – I must say it again – that Anthroposophy must defend before the world today: that the path that Brentano could not find out of natural science, out of mere natural science, can be found, dear ladies and gentlemen! And it can be found if we do not stop at the ordinary abilities of the soul, as they present themselves in the outer life and as they are used in ordinary science.

I have often spoken of the fact that there are dormant, let us say with a scientific term, latent cognitive abilities in every human soul that must first be brought up out of this soul, just as certain abilities must be brought up out of the child through external education. Once a person has matured to the point where they have developed ordinary cognitive abilities, they must undergo such an inner education through devotional inner soul exercises. In this way he can develop those abilities in the soul through which it is no longer unclear what I have characterized on both sides as human, enigmatic soul experience; the experience in relation to the ideas, the experience in relation to the will impulses, so that, as it were, the human soul process becomes transparent, so that one can penetrate into what is actually going on in the human life of ideas and the human life of will. For without penetrating into these everyday soul puzzles, one cannot find the way to the great questions of immortal existence and the divine-spiritual content of the world, in which the human soul also originates.

Now, in my lectures here, I have often described how a person can do inner exercises, purely soul and spiritual exercises, through which he awakens the otherwise dormant cognitive abilities to existence, so that they can really help him in his knowledge. I have pointed out how one can strengthen one's own imaginative life. Just as we strengthen a muscle when we use it continually in work, so we can strengthen our imaginative life when we work at it in the way I have described in detail, for example, in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds.” If we direct this life of imagination through inner, soul work in a certain direction, if we move certain easily comprehensible images into the center of consciousness and always devote ourselves to this kind of imaginative work, to which we would otherwise not devote ourselves. I can only hint at this in principle here, but you will find clear indications in the work just mentioned and also in the second part of my “Occult Science” that the imaginative life of the human being can become something quite different through such meditation and concentration exercises of thinking. I would like to say that a stronger, more vigorous life of imagination can be produced without any kind of abnormal action, but through the mere further development of what is normal in the life of thought, in the life of imagination in man. And by generating this stronger imaginative life, by elevating ourselves through meditation and concentration above that which is actually merely pictorial in our ordinary imaginative life, we come to what I call in the books mentioned, the imaginative presentation that is rich in content.

This imaginative presentation, lives with such an inner liveliness in the mere thought, as otherwise the human being lives in his outer perceptions. But through this — my dear audience — one gradually comes to the point where the life of presentation is no longer this merely abstract, this — I would say — merely pictorial, but through purely inner research, which is, however, pursued with the same seriousness as any other kind of scientific research, through inner research one makes the discovery that the soul, which otherwise could only fill its mental life with the results of external impressions, that the soul is inwardly filled by forces that, as it were, shoot into the soul life. The images are no longer just this light liquid when they are formed through meditation and concentration, but they are permeated and imbued with forces that I would call formative forces, forces that make up an inwardly spiritual-plastic element. And after some time, one discovers that through this development of the life of imagination, one grows together with that which the formative forces of the human body itself are. After some time, one discovers that the life of thought is, so to speak, nothing other than the rarefied life of forces in human growth. That which inwardly shapes us plastically in the physical body from birth to death is – I would say – in a rarefied state our life of imagination in ordinary consciousness.

We look at the newly born child. We know, dear listeners, that in this newly born child, the formative forces are at work in the brain, shaping the body. We follow the growth of the child, how it radiates straight from the plastic brain activity, we follow it to a certain point in human life, until the teeth change, until around the age of seven. We will, by feeling this life of strength that pulsates in man, that is vividly active in him, by feeling this first as something indefinite. We will, on the other hand, by powerfully developing our life of imagination through meditation and concentration, be unconsciously led to the same element that worked so vividly in us from our earliest childhood. And this is a significant discovery of the inner human life: that one can strengthen one's imagination in such a way that one can make it so intense inwardly that one then feels oneself in that which is the formative forces of the human being, which formative forces are in one's growth, in one's metabolism. However strange it may still sound to today's research. It is the case that it is possible, by strengthening the soul life, to grow into that which then, in a sense, takes us up as that which plastically shapes our outer physical body as its formative forces. One grows through the life of the imagination into reality, one grows into a formative element. And in this way one gets to know – dear ladies and gentlemen – what lies behind the mere thought process. One learns to recognize how a spiritual, with which one has now connected, works on the human organism from birth to death. The life of the imagination acquires its reality, the life of the imagination is no longer the mere life of the image, the life of the imagination becomes a life of strength that is inherent in existence itself.

And only through such an insight can that which - one could say - the undercurrent of anxiety, of fear, produces in the human soul, can this fear, this anxiety, be overcome from consciousness, so that it is indeed not a theoretical solution to the riddles of the soul that anthroposophy points to here, but a thoroughly inward, practical solution that can be experienced. Anthroposophy must point out that, as a result of its research, human consciousness can be opened to an understanding of what lives in the human being, which — I would like to say — only appears to be so diluted that it emerges as our ordinary life of imagination, but which, in truth, is the inner sphere of growth of our existence. And on the other hand, when a person loses their center of gravity in their mental life and gets caught up in a fearful undercurrent of their soul life, they can absorb the results of spiritual science anthroposophy about the mental life and can maintain this mental life through the path of knowledge. Anthroposophy does not offer a solution to this soul riddle by putting forward a theory, but by putting forward a result that the human being can fully grasp with his or her common sense and that then — by lending heaviness — occurs in the life of ideas for his consciousness, for his soul life, so that into the soul mood, into the soul condition, solving riddles can flow that which Anthroposophy seemingly asserts as mere knowledge of the life of ideas. On the one hand, we recognize how the human being is a formed being, how he appears as a whole in a certain form, how his individual organs are formed out of the spirit and how we, in order to be free beings, can act not only through these inner forces but can also surrender to free mirror images, how we can develop our mere pictorial representations into a plastic form.

What is presented here, I have - my dear audience - explained in the early 1890s of the last century in my “Philosophy of Freedom” by showing that man is a free being precisely because he can live in pure thoughts that are not related to any external reality for his consciousness, that he can shape his moral impulses in these pure thoughts. One is faced with the fact that one must carry out something oneself if one's mirror image is to change; mirror images do not determine one causally. One would never become free if one were determined by a reality in one's ordinary consciousness. In one's ordinary consciousness, ideas live as images. One is not determined by them, just as one is not determined by mirror images. One is free. In order for him to be free, his life must be distinguished from that which permeates it plastically as a growth force, as a growth body – one could say – as a body of formative forces. But the human being must pay for this life in freedom with the characterized anxious undercurrent in his soul life. And so, in his ordinary consciousness, the human being must come to fully experience his sense of freedom, but also, as a polar opposite, be able to contrast this experience of freedom with what anthroposophy can give as a way of strengthening the life of ideas in the manner indicated.

But if we continue along this path, we move from what I would call the very rarefied, purely pictorial life of ideas to that which is real, which lives and forms in the human being. It is not the physical body, it is not the physical organs, it is a supersensible force, but it is there. One grasps something that lies outside the physical body. And one can penetrate into it by simply pursuing the riddles of the soul on one side; one can penetrate into that which, independently of the human physical body, has a supersensible reality in man. One advances to what, through birth or through conception, let us say, as a human physical body, is prepared by mere hereditary relationships, by mere external natural facts, what is preformed as a human body. One learns to recognize how the inherited traits, which come from parents or ancestors, connect with the whole body, which is formed in the maternal organism, from the spiritual world, and how one finds this again in life when one strengthens one's imaginative life. One arrives – I would say – at one side of the question of immortality. We look at what is immortal, what is eternal in human nature, because it penetrates from a spiritual world through conception and birth into what is humanly physical, and because it continues to have an effect even during earthly life as the inner, plastic formative power with which we connect by strengthening our thought life in the manner indicated.

Thus, dear attendees, anthroposophy offers the perspective that someone like Franz Brentano was looking for. Brentano also began with an investigation of thoughts, but he left thoughts as they are in ordinary consciousness. He limited himself to merely registering what is present in ordinary consciousness. Only the strengthening of the thought life through meditation and concentration leads this thought life to the inner, plastic formative power. And it really leads to the path that begins with the simple, everyday thought and ends with the spiritual-soul element of the human being that lived there before birth, before conception, in the spiritual-soul world itself and that connected with the powers of inheritance, with the physical powers of the human body. There is no other way to solve the riddle of the soul than to find this path from the simplest phenomena of everyday life to the great riddles of existence.

I have — my dear audience — so far pointed to what man can achieve in relation to his thought life. There he comes to that which, as it were, drives man out into space, which plastically permeates the spatial corporeality of man, which lives itself out in the form, which descends from the spiritual world, as I have indicated, and flows into the outer form of man, and also into the form of his inner organs. But that is only one side of human life. And the soul also participates in the other side of human life, if we can also develop the life of thought through meditation and concentration. If we do not develop the life of will on the other side in such a way that one can say in the proper sense that it is strengthened, but rather develop it in such a way that we make it more devoted, more spiritualized.

This can be achieved by, in a sense, tearing ourselves away from our everyday life of will. I have again given many individual exercises that would have to be practised for years — spiritual science is no easier than research in an observatory or in a clinic —. But I would like to pick out a few individual exercises to indicate the principles involved. When we consider what functions as will in ordinary thinking — for there is always a will present in thinking, thoughts are shaped by the will, the thought-life is only one side of it, in the life of the soul will is always interwoven with thoughts and thoughts with the will. When the will element that lives in the thoughts is thereby torn away from its usual course, which adheres to external physical facts, for example, by presenting something backwards, let us say. While one is accustomed to presenting a drama from the first to the fifth act, we present this drama backwards, from the last events to the beginning. Then one proceeds to presenting external facts backwards. For example, one can imagine one's usual daily life in reverse, proceeding in as small portions as possible, from evening to morning, even to the extent of imagining going up a staircase in reverse, imagining it as going down backwards from the top step to the penultimate step and so on.

Because we are accustomed to always thinking in the same sense as the external facts unfold, thinking actually plays a passive role for us in relation to the will that unfolds in it. It becomes actively inwardly active, permeated with inward initiative, when we train it through such exercises as retrospection, where we tear it away from the course of external facts and make it rely on itself. For when we reinforce what we achieve in this way through careful and energetic exercises with truly serious self-observation, observing what we do as a person of will as if we were standing next to us and observing ourselves piece by piece in our development of will; or also when we would go over to action, when we do exercises for the purpose of making a resolution and then executing it with iron energy, so that we live completely in the element of will. I just wanted to mention in principle such exercises that not only tear the will away from external facts, but also from its and its being to the body itself, which make the will independent, spiritualize it - then we actually come to a development of the will in this way, so that we experience ourselves with our soul life, which now develops the will, outside of our body. It is a significant experience.

But only through this does one begin to understand what the will is. In ordinary life, the will is bound to the organs. We see it unfold as we move our limbs. We observe, as it were, only through our thought life the processes, the effects of our will. We see into it when we have torn it away from the body, when we experience it in itself, becoming completely one with it. Then it is permeated by an elevation of the power that is otherwise also bound to our physical organism, permeated by the power of love. And that devoted element in the life of the soul is developed into a transparent, bright clarity, which otherwise — I would like to say — appears to us darkly as the emotional life of the will in love.

I know how little people today want to accept love as a force of knowledge. In ordinary life it is not. But when it is developed in such a way that the will is no longer rooted in instincts, in drives, in emotions, but in the pure soul, apart from the body, then this will is actually only understood in terms of its essence. And then it shows itself to be something quite different from what the thought element has shown itself to be. The thought element, in its intensified form, has shown itself to be that which shapes constructively, which — I would say — allows an organ to flow out, which culminates in human reproduction. The thought element unfolds as the plastic activity, from the soul into the human body. The will element unfolds in such a way that – especially when it is recognized separately from the body – one can then see how it affects the body. It unfolds in the body in such a way that it does not shape the physical in a plastic way, but the plastic-shaped is regressed, dissolved, atomized, made to flow. The will element is what constantly — I would like to say, I beg you not to misunderstand me — what constantly, the expression is meant figuratively, but it means something very important, what constantly burns the formed elements of the human being again, lets them rise in flames — spiritually speaking.

Human life, as it pours out of the soul into the physical body, can only be understood by looking at it, on the one hand, as this plastic element and, on the other hand, as the re-dissolving of the plastic element, as that — I would like to say — into the atomized, into the dissolving of the plastic element. And in that everything that unfolds as will in the human being is such a dissolving, atomizing, and melting element in the human body, this will-like element is what is now experienced as pointing the way to the other side of human life, pointing the way to death.

In the same way that we first get to know the spiritual-plastic element of the human soul through the plasticity of thinking, which enters the physical body through birth or conception, we learn to recognize how the will-like element dissolves the human body, but in the dissolution – I would like to say, as I said, figuratively speaking – pure spirituality emerges from the flame. We get to know the soul's departure from the body. In this way we understand death as a result of the dissolution of the will element. We understand what happens to a person in death because we understand what happens in the everyday act of will. Everyday volitional decision brings about a kind of combustion process in the physical body, but from this combustion process emerges that which is our inner soul life. What we feel inwardly as soul could not be there if we were always merely bodies, merely shaped in a plastic way. The plastic must be broken down, flow, and from the flowing of the plastic, from the continually being destroyed of the bodily, the experiencing of the soul arises. And we understand the departure of the human soul with death from the physical body, which only in an instant summarizes what is always unfolding in the will to the spirituality of the soul. Just as I experience my will in the present moment, how it forms a kind of process of combustion, of dissolution in the body, how through this destruction the spiritual comes to life in the human body, so I learn to recognize how, with the other destruction of the body in death, which is nothing other than the last effect of the will hidden in the body, how the spiritual returns again to the spiritual-soul world.

This is the living teaching of Anthroposophy that leads to the riddle of the soul. Anthroposophy is not a theory; it certainly wants to give knowledge, but not a theoretical knowledge, it wants to give a knowledge that is soul food. And in this way it can present the individual daily experiences of the soul being before the spiritual eye. From these individual experiences, it can then move on to the big questions of the soul's life.

Dear attendees, allow me to elaborate on this one detail so that you can see what anthroposophy is based on to guide people into the riddles of the soul. Allow me to give you the details of human memory.

Once you have developed the intensified life of imagination that I have characterized, and once you have also become familiar with how the plastic is continually being broken down by the life of will, then you can also see the inner soul processes with transparent clarity. One sees how the human being faces the outer world, how he receives his impressions from the outer world, how he then forms ideas, thoughts about these outer impressions, how he then after some time – or even after a long time – brings up these ideas as memories from certain sources, or how they also arise by themselves – as one says today – as freely rising memory ideas.

For anyone who wants to look at the human soul with an open mind, the mere emergence of these recollected images heralds a significant mystery of the soul. It can be said that, in a rather curious way, people have spoken of what the essence of memory actually is. They have imagined – and sometimes still do today – that: Well, a person receives impressions through perception, they are evoked by his senses, then they are continued through his nervous system, he transforms them through his imagination. These images then plunge into certain depths of his soul life and then come up again when they are remembered. Now, no person who thinks impartially can form any clear idea about how these images, when we do not have them, are supposed to go for a walk down there in unknown depths of the soul's life, only to come up again when they are needed, either through arbitrariness or because they want to lean against something that appears as a new perception, as a new impression of the outside world.

Anthroposophy goes beyond this to the real, true observation of the human soul life itself. It sees through the intensified life of imagination and the spiritualized life of will, it sees through the whole process that takes place from the perception of the external thing through the formation of imagination, through the formation of memory, to the re-emergence of the remembered imaginations. One would like to say: in that anthroposophical research penetrates to the forces of knowledge through such a shaping of the life of imagination and will — as I have indicated — the whole soul and bodily process, the way these two interact with each other, is transformed in such a way that, if I may compare it, something that I have before me as something very dark and opaque is suddenly made transparent by being illuminated. The whole human soul process becomes transparent through this strengthened life of imagination and spiritualized life of will.

And what do we now see in relation to what I have indicated? My dear audience, we see how external impressions stretch for miles through the senses, how the whole process continues, and how, in fact, what I have described as the formative, plastic element of the thought life, of the intensified thought life, how that works in the ordinary process of perception as a continuation. I perceive outwardly, but it is not only the abstract thoughts that I have in ordinary consciousness that work in me, but also that which is merely fathomed by spiritual science, that works continually. This plasticity in these representations has an effect down into the depths of the human soul and body. And then, when this has happened, when the thought has had a formative effect in the depths of the soul and body, then the person moves on to something else. A volitional decision is at work, the will is at play, but the spiritualized will is present. In that part of the human being that is connected to the outer brain, this will unfolds. It breaks down what is there for the ordinary consciousness by dissolving the plasticity of the brain, it breaks down what the impression has built up, so that we have an outer brain surface – if I may express myself crudely – spread over substrates, but where the plasticity continues to have an effect.

Now let us assume that I remember something in an arbitrary way, then it happens in such a way that I unfold this will out of a certain series of images. The development of the will is in turn connected with a breakdown, if external impressions do not now penetrate again, and the fact that these do not come is ensured by the development of the will, which is a breakdown. And this dismantling allows that which is in the subsoil to emerge as a sculpture of the human being when the memory is voluntarily recalled. If free-rising images come up, it happens the other way around. There is some external impression present that forms into a thought. The thought is vividly active. It is imprinted on the brain. This plastic activity is similar to the plastic activity that once developed in the substrate that which can live in the substrate in a certain form. This lives in the plastic activity that the thought has now formed.

In short, as you can see, the life of the soul becomes transparent in this way. You learn to recognize it in its inner plastic structure, in its continuous extinguishing, burning away through the will element. And by learning to understand every single moment of life, one learns to grasp in these currents of life what the great questions of life are. One learns to recognize from the thoughts that which enters into physical life through birth, and one learns to recognize from the will that which moves out into the spiritual world through the death of the human being. In this way, the results of anthroposophical research emerge as something that penetrates from the details of life to the enigmatic essence of the human soul.

In this way, my dear audience, by recognizing how thought already works vividly in ordinary memory, as if something is being formed in the body. In memory, we also experience how that which is not yet in the body, but connects with the body through birth and conception, how that intervenes in the body in a plastic way. We get to know the human life element in this plastic formation because we get to know the individual plastic element that already appears in the formation of memory.

Anthroposophy wants to look at the riddles of the soul with a full life! This should be understood as the essential thing about anthroposophical research: that it stops everywhere at the scientific conscientiousness to which one has been trained today by the great, powerful advances of external natural science, but that, by stopping at this conscientiousness, it simultaneously goes beyond what mere external observation and mere external experiment can offer, that it progresses from the abilities which, precisely by their special presence, make the human soul a mysterious being for the human being himself, that through the development of these abilities it leads to the soul's riddles being solved not theoretically but practically.

There is no need to fear, dear attendees, that someone who is on the point of view of such a so-called solution of the soul's riddle questions might one day want to present it as a finished thing, as a completed realization of what solves the soul's riddle, so that the soul could then fall into inertia towards its own life, into carelessness. No, my dear audience, the soul poses the riddles that I have presented today as the living, as the experienced soul riddles, the soul poses these riddles in every moment of life, and in every moment of life we need the results of spiritual research anew, which have a balancing effect on that which arises so mysteriously from the dark depths of the soul. What I have called the anxious current of human soul life, what I have called the wrathful undercurrent of human soul life, is nothing other than the inner call of the human soul not to take itself for granted, but to take itself in full, continuous experience, to take itself in such a way that this human soul is constantly a mystery to itself, that it constantly needs the solution to this mystery.

And it is precisely this kind of ongoing solution to the mystery of the soul that anthroposophical research seeks to offer, linking to the reality of existence in such a way that one can say – if I may use a trivial comparison – Just as a person in their physical life is a being that must constantly take in nourishment, that cannot be satisfied with a single intake of nourishment because it consumes this nourishment, because it connects this nourishment with its life process, so it is also with what is offered to us by anthroposophy as the result of the riddle of the soul. Its intense inner effectiveness eludes us if we do not continually contemplate it, if we do not continually progress. Because we are dealing with a reality in this area – not with a theory that can be learned and memorized, as with the reality of nourishing oneself – we are dealing with something that must penetrate the continuous process of life through anthroposophy.

And it is indeed so - the human being will become aware of the following, especially when he deals with the results of anthroposophy in relation to his own soul puzzles: Learning – dear attendees – however strange it may sound, it is a truth that anyone who deals with anthroposophy can experience, especially with regard to the riddles of the soul. Basically, you cannot learn anthroposophy. You can let its results approach you, you can read books, listen to lectures. But if you do not continually experience what you have absorbed in this way, if you do not connect it with the human soul in an ongoing process — as you continually connect the physical substances of the external world with the physical processes through the process of nutrition and metabolism — if one does not connect with the soul processes that which is presented in anthroposophy, one will see that it loses its significance for the soul, just as the physical loses its significance for the body if it is not continually introduced into this body. And just as hunger and thirst express the absence of physical nourishment, so does a being that is anxious and pathologically irascible, emerging from the depths of the soul, express what needs to be influenced by a real knowledge of the spiritual significance of the life of imagination and will. And if a person advances by always being able to cultivate in his consciousness, as a nourishment for his soul, what anthroposophical research gives him, then he finds what he needs to balance his soul life, what he must feel and experience as a continuous, living solution to the continuously living riddles of the soul.

And it must be said again and again: Anthroposophy does not depend on this – although by allowing and examining what is set out in the books mentioned, one can set out on the path of independent anthroposophical research – that every person can verify through anthroposophy what is presented in anthroposophy. Even if you don't do that, you can still use your common sense to find what is in anthroposophy. Without becoming an anthroposophical researcher, a person can use their common sense to follow what the anthroposophical researcher claims. But apart from this common sense, a person has something else. Even if he is a layman in the fields of physiology or biology, he does not know the chemical composition of the food he eats, but he tests what the food really is for the human being by consuming it and combining the forces with the forces of his bodily processes. In this way, he can unite the results that anthroposophy offers him, the way it shows how to solve the soul's riddles, with his soul life, and he will find that it satisfies him emotionally.

And what are soul riddles in front of this anthroposophical forum? Soul riddles, grasped in their liveliness, are nothing other than the expression of soul-spiritual hunger and thirst. And the solution to the soul riddle is basically nothing other than the assimilation of true spiritual content, true spiritual beings, which unite with the human spirit and with the human soul life. And so, I would say, spiritual saturation, which must continually repeat itself, is the solution to the riddle of the soul. The more vividly one grasps the process and the more one realizes how anthroposophy seeks to reach into every aspect of practical life, how it seeks to take root in the most mundane things and reach up to the great riddle of existence by introducing man to the divine spiritual source of existence, by leading him to his immortal self, the more one will realize that anthroposophy cannot be theory, but something that can be experienced. R

From this point of view, dear ladies and gentlemen, anthroposophy tries to have an effect on the most diverse practical areas of life. From this point of view, it has tried to shape what I have often discussed here as the founding of our Waldorf School by Emil Molt, what is being attempted in the practical social field.

Anthroposophy, as you can see, solves the riddle of the soul by addressing the whole living human being, body, soul and spirit. In doing so, it overcomes the one-sidedness of the knowledge and soul life that would necessarily arise with the fully recognized results of modern natural science in their field, which is also seen as a triumph of anthroposophy.

However, ladies and gentlemen, people would take note of this and would pay attention if anthroposophy were not so misunderstood, as happened, for example, during the past summer here in Stuttgart at the Anthroposophical Congress, where Dr. von Heydebrand, in a lecture that was also printed, presented the one-sidedness of mere external experimental psychology, based on Waldorf education. Not because opposition should be taken against this experimental psychology – it will be possible to appreciate it in its own right and its results in the right way in its own field if, on the other hand, what is explored so externally can be permeated with what can be achieved spiritually and soulfully by anthroposophy. For Anthroposophy comprehends that which works out of spiritual-soul worlds into the physical body of the human being; this is comprehended.

But in this way all outward research can be enlivened, education can be enlivened, medicine can be enlivened – this too has been dealt with in earlier lectures here – and social life can be enlivened.

Here, too, I would like to point to a fine example in the lecture given by Emil Leinhas at the above-mentioned congress, which is also printed here and which explains what economics, which has arisen from merely imitated scientific methods, cannot achieve. A start has been made here for a real recovery of social life that emerges from the spiritual and soul. And what is the ultimate reason for this?

Through anthroposophy, we can see how thought has a formative effect. Now, thought not only has a formative effect in the human body as the soul-spiritual element, it also has a formative effect if we can introduce it into human social life in the right way as social ideals, and the will that has been understood in the right way also works in a social relationship. For just as we know that the human body is dissolved through it, so too that which, as a comprehended element of will, is properly introduced into social life, will recognize at the right moment when any institution has outlived itself and must disappear, so that its fruits can be reborn in a new form. Just as the soul and spirit rise up out of the physical in the way described, so the higher structures of social life rise up through the disappearance of certain external institutions that have outlived their purpose, through this disappearance working together with the plastic-constructive. I would say that the question of social riddles can also flow out into social life, solving that which is seen through in the right anthroposophical grasp of the riddles of the human soul.

But through this, the human being comes to understand himself in the right way, to be imbued with the right inner strength, with the true strength of his real self, which lives in human feeling, in human soul. Between the life of ideas and the life of will, there lives the always incomprehensible, always intangible, but no less tangible emotional life of the human being. And in this emotional being, for those who are able to look at life in this way, as I have characterized it today in relation to the riddles of the soul, they experience the eternal I, which goes through repeated earthly lives. Then one knows how to look at the plastic-creative, developed life of the imagination and the spiritualized life of the will, which breaks down.

In this way, one learns to grasp that in man which has entered him through birth or conception in such a way that it initially points back to earlier earth lives, to the state in primeval times when the outer cosmic was so little separated from the inner life of man that he needed not repeated earth-lives, but one of continuous spiritual, soul and natural progress in order to achieve this progress. One learns to look at repeated earth lives, at spiritual-soul lives lying between them; one learns to look into the future until a state where man will again have connected himself with the spiritual so that the repeated earth-lives lose their meaning, in that man elevates himself to the spiritualization of his existence — I would say — with an experience that strives from the mere inanimate into spirituality.

One is led through the solution of the soul riddle to the true solution of the riddle of the world; one ascends to the human soul, to the cosmos. But through this one attains living knowledge, living insight, which, as I have already indicated, is spiritual nourishment. Thus knowledge, as it is presented by anthroposophy, becomes a real inner support for the soul in the element where life is faltering. Security, sustenance and orientation in life can be found by seeking the spiritual nourishment that comes from anthroposophy. It is something that secretly makes us rejoice, that we could lose ourselves in, and it brings us back to ourselves, transforming it into inner support, giving our inner balance an inner center of gravity. And in the difficult moments of life, too, when we are often in danger of sinking in misfortune; we can find support in a mood of the soul that is inwardly sustained by the full awareness of the spirituality that fills the human being, where we become fully aware of that the life of thought is not in vain, that it can find reality in the power of the soul and the world, which gives plastic form. This gives support in the difficult moments of life, it places life on a firm foundation and leads in the right way to the end of life.

Sometimes words spoken before the turn of the millennium linger on. So we could be reminded here, in reference to what has been said today, of the saying of an old Greek pre-Socratic sage, who, out of an initially intuitive realization, speaks the weighty word: “When the human soul, freed from the body, soars into the free ether, it is an immortal spirit, freed from death.”

Yes, the riddles of the soul can be solved by real science. One can come to this conviction by trying to solve the riddles of everyday life of the soul through real spiritual insight. One can see a glimpse of the knowledge of immortality in the ordinary events of life. And he who can judge the individual unfoldings of thought, feeling and will aright, already sees the immortal in them. And he then looks up to the immortality in the all-embracing sense and thus comes to a real grasp of the eternal in human nature, which is rooted in the eternal ground of existence in the Cosmos, in the evolution of the world.

Any one who speaks today about super-sensible worlds lays himself open at once to the quite understandable criticism that he is violating one of the most important demands of the age. This is the demand that the most important questions of existence shall be seriously discussed from a scientific point of view only in such a way that science recognizes its own limitations, has a clear insight into the fact that it must restrict itself to the sensible world of the earthly existence and would become the victim of a certain fantastic blunder if it should attempt to go beyond these limits. Now, precisely that type of spiritual-scientific conception in accordance with which I spoke at the last Vienna Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement, [West and East: Contrasting Worlds.] and shall speak again today, affirms with regard to itself not only that it is free from hostility toward scientific thinking and the scientific sense of responsibility of our times, but also that it does its work in complete harmony with what may be proposed as objectives by the most conscientious scientific demands of those very persons who take their stand on the platform of the most rigid scientific research. It is possible, however, to speak from various points of view in regard to the scientific demands of the times, imposed upon us by the splendid theoretical and practical results in the evolution of humanity which have come about in the course of the last three or four centuries, but especially during the nineteenth century. I shall speak, therefore, today in regard to super-sensible knowledge to the extent that this tends to fulfill precisely this demand, and I wish to speak in the next lecture about the super-sensible knowledge of the human being as a demand of the human heart, of human feeling, during the present age.

We can observe the magnificent contribution which has been bestowed upon us even up to the most recent time through scientific research—the magnificent contribution in the findings about interrelationships throughout the external world. But it is possible to speak also in a different sense regarding the achievements which have come about precisely in connection with this current of human evolution. For instance, we may call attention to the fact that, in connection with the conscientious earnest observation of the laws and facts of the external world of the senses, as this is afforded by natural science, very special human capacities have been developed, and that just such observation and experimentation have thrown a light also upon human capacities themselves. But I should like to say that many persons holding positions deserving of the greatest respect in the sphere of scientific research are willing to give very little attention to this light which has been reflected upon man himself through his own researches. If we only give a little thought to what this light has illuminated, we see that human thinking, through the very fact that it has been able to investigate in accordance with basic principles both narrowly restricted and also broadly expanded interrelationships—the microscopic and the telescopic—has gained immeasurably in itself, has gained in the capacity of discrimination, in power of penetration, the ability so to associate the things in the world that their secrets are unveiled, the capacity to determine the laws underlying cosmic relationships, and so forth. As this thinking is developed, we see it confronted with a demand—with which it is faced, indeed, by the most earnest research scientists: the demand that this thinking must develop as selflessly as possible in the observation of external nature and in experimentation in the laboratory, in the clinic, etc. And the human being has achieved tremendous power in this respect. He has succeeded in setting up more and more rules of such a character as to prevent anything of the nature of inner wishes of the heart, of opinions, perhaps even of fantasies regarding one's own being, such as arise in the course of thinking, from being carried over into what he is to establish by means of the microscope and the telescope, the measuring rule and the scales, regarding the interrelationships of life and existence.

Under these influences a type of thinking has gradually developed of which one must say that it has worked out its passive role with a certain inner diligence. Thinking in connection with observation, with experiment, has nowadays become completely abstract—so abstract that it does not trust itself to call forth anything of the nature of knowledge or of truth out of its own inner being.

It is this gradually developed characteristic of thinking which demands before everything else—so it appears at first—the rejection of all that the human being is in himself by reason of his inner nature. For what he himself thus is must be set forth in activity; this can really never exist wholly apart from the impulse of his will. Thus we have arrived at the point—and we have rightly reached this point in the field of external research—of actually rejecting the activity of thinking, although we became aware in this activity of what we ourselves signify as human beings in the universe, in the totality of cosmic relationships. In a certain sense, the human being has eliminated himself in connection with his research; he prohibits his own inner activity. We shall see immediately that what is rightly prohibited in connection with this external research must be especially cultivated in relationship to man's own self if he wishes to gain enlightenment regarding the spiritual, regarding the super-sensible, element of his own being.

But a second element in the nature of man has been obliged to manifest its special aspect, which is alien to humanity even though friendly to the world, in modern research: that is, the human life of sentiment, the human life of feeling. In this modern research, human feeling is not permitted to participate; the human being must remain cold and matter-of-fact. Yet one might ask whether it may not be possible to acquire within this human feeling forces useful in gaining knowledge of the world. If it must be said, on the one hand, that inner human willfulness plays a role in feelings, human subjectivity, and that feeling is the source of fantasy, it must be answered on the other hand that, although human feeling can certainly play no important role as it exists at first in every-day life or in science, yet, if we recall—as science itself has to present the matter to us—that the human senses have not always in the course of human evolution been such as they are today, but have developed from a relatively imperfect stage up to their contemporary state, that they certainly did not express themselves in earlier periods so objectively about things as they do today, an inkling may then come to birth within us that there may exist even within the life of subjective feeling something that might be evolved there-from, just like the human senses themselves, and which might be led over from an experience of man's own being to a grasp upon cosmic interrelationships in a higher sense. Precisely as we observe the withdrawal of human feeling in connection with contemporary research must the question be put as to whether some sort of higher sense might unfold within feeling itself if this were specially developed.

But very obviously do we find in connection with a third element of the being of man how we are driven by the altogether praiseworthy scientific view to something different. This is the will aspect of the life of the soul. Whoever is at home in scientific thinking knows how impossible it is for such thinking to proceed otherwise in grasping the inter-relationships of the world than in accordance with causal necessity. We connect in the most rigid manner phenomena existing side by side in space; we associate in the strictest sense phenomena occurring in succession in time. That is, we relate cause and effect according to their inflexible laws. Whoever speaks, not as a dilettante, but as one thoroughly at home in science knows what a tremendous power is exerted by the mere consideration of the realms of scientific fact in this manner. He knows how he is captivated by this idea of a universal causality and how he cannot then do otherwise than to subject everything that he confronts in his thinking to this idea of causality.

But there is human will, this human will which says to us in every moment of our waking life of day: “What you undertake in a certain sense by reason of yourself, by reason of your will, is not causally determined in the same sense applying to any sort of external phenomena of nature.” For this reason, even a person who simply feels in a natural way about himself, who looks into himself in observation free from preconception, can scarcely do otherwise than also to ascribe to himself, on the basis of immediate experience, freedom of will. But when he directs his glance to scientific thinking, he cannot admit this freedom of will. This is one of the conflicts into which we are brought by the condition of the present age. In the course of these two lectures we shall learn much more about these conflicts. But for one who is able to feel this conflict in its full intensity, who can feel it through and through—because he must be honest on the one side as regards scientific research, and on the other side as regards his self-observation—the conflict is something utterly confounding, so confounding that it may drive him to doubt whether life affords anywhere a firm basis from which one may search for truth.

We must deal with such conflicts in their right human aspect. We must be able to say to ourselves that research drives us to the point where we are actually unable to admit what we are every day aware of; that something else must somehow exist which offers other means of access to the world than what is offered to us in irrefutable manner in the order of external nature. Through the very fact that we are so forcibly driven by the order of nature itself into such conflicts, it becomes for us human beings of the present time a necessity to admit that it is impossible to speak about the super-sensible worlds as they have been spoken about up to a relatively recent time. We need to go back only to the first half of the nineteenth century to discover that personalities who, by reason of a consciousness in harmony with the period, were thoroughly serious in their scientific work called attention, nevertheless, to the super-sensible aspect of human life, to that aspect which opens up to the human being a view of the divine, of his own immortality; and that in this connection they always called attention to what we may at present designate as the “night aspects” of human life. Men deserving of the highest regard have called attention to that wonderful but very problematical world into which the human being is transferred every night: to the dream world. They called attention to many mysterious relationships which exist between this chaotic picture world of dreams, nevertheless, and the world of actuality. They called attention to the fact that the inner nature of the human organization, especially in illness, reflects itself, nevertheless, in the fantastic pictures of dreams, and how healthy human life enters into the chaotic experiences of dreams in the forms of signs and symbols. They pointed out that much which cannot be surveyed by the human being with his waking senses finds its place in the half-awake state of the soul, and out of such things conclusions were drawn. These things border upon what is the subject of study also today for many persons, the “subconscious” states of the life of the human soul, which manifest themselves in a similar way.

But everything which appears before the human being in this form, which could still give a certain satisfaction to an earlier humanity, is no longer valid for us. It is no longer valid for us for the reason that our way of looking into external nature has become something different. Here we have to look back to the times when there still existed only a mystically colored astrology. Man then looked into the world of the senses in such a way that his perception was far removed from the exactness which we demand of science today. For this reason, because he did not demand of himself in his sense life that complete clarity which we possess today, he could discover in a mystical, half-conscious state something from which he could draw inferences. This we cannot do today. Just as little as we are able to derive today from what science gives us anything else than questions in regard to the true nature of man, just so little can we afford to remain at a standstill at the point reached by science and expect to satisfy our super-sensible needs in a manner similar to that of earlier times.

That form of super-sensible knowledge of which I shall speak here has an insight into this demand of our times. It observes the form that has been taken on by thinking, feeling, and willing in man precisely by reason of natural science, and it asks on the other side whether it may be possible by reason of the very thing which has been achieved by contemporary humanity in thinking, feeling, and willing to penetrate further into the super-sensible realm with the same clarity which holds sway in the scientific realm. This cannot be achieved by means of inferential reasoning, by means of logic; for natural science justly points out its limitations with reference to its own nature. But something else can occur: that the inner human capacities may evolve further, beyond the point at which they stand when we are in the realm of ordinary scientific research, so that we now apply to the development of our own spiritual capacities the same exactness to which we are accustomed in connection with research in the laboratory and the clinic. I shall discuss this first in connection with thinking itself.

Thinking, which has become more and more conscious of its passive role in connection with external research, and is not willing to disavow this, is capable of energizing itself inwardly to activity. It may energize itself in such a way that, although not exact in the sense in which we apply this term to measuring and weighing in external research, it is exact in relationship to its own development in the sense in which the external scientist, the mathematician for example, is accustomed to follow with full consciousness every step in his research. But this occurs when that mode of super-sensible cognition of which I am here speaking substitutes a truly exact development of this thinking in place of the ancient vague meditation, the ancient indistinct immersion of oneself in thinking. It is possible here to indicate only in general principles what I have said in regard to such an exact development of thinking in my books Occult Science: An Outline and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and other books. The human being should really compel himself, for the length of time which is necessary for him—and this is determined by the varying innate capacities of people—to exchange the role of passive surrender to the external world, which he otherwise rightly assumes in his thinking, for that different role: that of introducing into this thinking his whole inner activity of soul. This he should do by taking into his mind day by day, even though at times only for a brief period, some particular thought—the content of which is not the important matter—and, while withdrawing his inner nature from the external world, directing all the powers of his soul in inner concentration upon this thought. By means of this process something comes about in the development of those capacities of soul that may be compared with the results which follow when any particular muscles of the human body—for instance, the muscles of the arms—are to be developed. The muscles are made stronger, more powerful through use, through exercise. Thus, likewise, do the capacities of the soul become inwardly stronger, more powerful by being directed upon a definite thought. This exercise must be so directed that we proceed in a really exact way, that we survey every step taken in our thinking just as a mathematician surveys his operations when he undertakes to solve a geometrical or arithmetical problem. This can be done in the greatest variety of ways. It may seem trivial when I say that something should be selected for this content of concentration that one finds in any sort of book—even some worthless old volume that we know quite certainly we have never previously seen. The important point is, not what the content of truth in the thing is, but the fact that we survey such a thought content completely. This cannot be done if we take a thought content out of our own memory; for very much is associated with such a thought in the most indeterminate way, very much that plays a role in the subconscious or the unconscious, and it is not possible to be exact if one concentrates upon such a thing. What one fixes, therefore, in the very center of one's consciousness is something entirely new, something that one confronts only with respect to its actual content, which is not associated with any experience of the soul. The matter of importance is the concentration of the forces of the soul and the strengthening which results from this. Likewise, if one goes to a person who has made some progress in this field and requests him to provide one with such a thought content, it is not well to entertain any prejudice against this. The content is in that case entirely new to the person concerned, and he can survey it. Many persons fear that they may become dependent in this way upon some one else who provides them with such a content. But this is not the case; in reality, they become less dependent than if they take such a thought content out of their own memories and experiences, in which case it is bound up with all sorts of subconscious experiences. Moreover, it is well for a person who has had some practice in scientific work to use the findings of scientific research as material for concentration; these prove to be, indeed, the most fruitful of all for this purpose.

If this is continued for a relatively long time, even for years perhaps—and this must be accompanied by patience and endurance, since it requires a few weeks or months in some cases before success is achieved, and in some cases years—it is possible to arrive at a point where this method for the inner molding of one's thoughts can be applied as exactly as the physicist or the chemist applies the methods of measuring and weighing for the purpose of discovering the secrets of nature. What one has then learned is applied to the further development of one's own thinking. At a certain point of time, the person then has a significant inner experience. This consists in the fact that he feels himself to be involved not only in picture-thinking, which depicts the external events and facts and which is true to reality in inverse proportion to the force it possesses in itself, in proportion as it is a mere picture; but one arrives now at the point of adding to this kind of thinking the inner experience of a thinking in which one lives, a thinking filled with inner power. This is a significant experience. Thinking thus becomes, as it were, something which one begins to experience just as one experiences the power of one's own muscles when one grasps an object or strikes against something. A reality such as one experiences otherwise only in connection with the process of breathing or the activity of a muscle,—this inner active something now enters into thinking. And, since one has investigated precisely every step upon this way, so does one experience oneself in full clarity and sober-mindedness of consciousness in this strengthened, active thinking. If the objection is raised, let us say, that knowledge can result only from observation and logic, this is no real objection; for what is now experienced we experience with complete inner clarity, and yet in such a way that this thinking becomes at the same time a kind of “touching with the soul.” In the process of forming a thought, it is as if we were stretching out a feeler—not, in this case, as when the snail stretches a feeler into the physical world, but as if a feeler were stretched out into a spiritual world, which is as yet present only for our feelings if we have succeeded to this stage, but which we are justified in expecting. For one has the feeling: “Your thinking has been transformed into a spiritual touching; if this can become more and more the case, you may expect that this thinking will come into contact with what constitutes a spiritual reality, just as your finger here in the physical world comes into contact with what is physically real.”

Only when one has lived for a time in this inwardly strengthened thinking does complete self-knowledge become possible. For we know then that the soul element has become by means of this concentration an experiential reality.

It is possible then for the person concerned to go forward in his exercises and to arrive at the point where he can, in turn, eliminate this soul content, put it away, in a certain sense render his consciousness void of what he himself has brought into this consciousness, this thought content upon which he has concentrated, and which has enabled him to possess a real thinking constituting a sense of touch for the soul. It is rather easy in ordinary life to acquire an empty consciousness; we need only to fall asleep. But it requires an intense application of force, after we have become accustomed to concentrating upon a definite thought content, to put away such a content of thought in connection with this very strengthened thinking, thinking which has become a reality. But we succeed in putting aside this content of thinking in exactly the same way in which we acquired at first the powerful force needed for concentration. But, when we have succeeded in this, something appears before the soul which has been possible previously only in the form of pictures of episodes in one's memory: the whole inner life of the person appears in a new way before the eyes of his soul, as he has passed through this life in his earthly existence since birth, or since the earliest point of time to which one's memory can return, at which one entered consciously into this earthly existence. Ordinarily, the only thing we know in regard to this earthly existence is that which we can call up in memory; we have pictures of our experiences. But what is now experienced by means of this strengthened thinking is not of the same kind. It appears as if in a tremendous tableau so that we do not recollect merely in a dim picture what we passed through ten years ago, for instance, but we have the inner experience that in spirit we are retracing the course of time. If some one carries out such an exercise in his fiftieth year, let us say, and arrives at the result indicated, what then happens is that time permits him to go back as if along a “time-path” all the way, for instance, to the experiences of his thirty-fifth year. We travel back through time. We do not have only a dim memory of what we passed through fifteen years earlier, but we feel ourselves to be in the midst of this in its living reality, as if in an experience of the present moment. We travel through time; space loses its significance, and time affords us a mighty tableau of memory. A precise picture of the life of the person is now created out of that which appears in an episodic manner, even according to scientific thinkers, when anyone is exposed to great terror, a severe shock, at the moment of drowning, for instance, when for some moments he is confronted by something of his entire earthly life in pictures appearing before his soul—to which he looks back later with a certain shuddering fascination. In other words, what appears before the soul in such cases as through a natural convulsion now actually appears before the soul at the moment indicated, when the entire earthly life confronts one as in a mighty tableau of the spirit, only in a time order. Only now does one know oneself; only now does one possess real self-observation.

It is quite possible to differentiate this picture of man's inner being from that which constitutes a mere “memory” picture. It is clear in the mere memory picture that we have something in which persons, natural occurrences, or works of art come upon us as if from without; in this memory picture what we have is the manner in which the world comes into contact with us. But in the super-sensible memory tableau which appears before a person, what confronts him is, rather, that which has proceeded from himself. If, for instance, at a certain definite point of time in his life he began a friendship with a beloved personality, the mere memory picture shows him how this person came to him at a certain point of time, spoke to him, what he owes to the person, etc. But, in this life tableau what confronts him is the manner in which he himself longed for this person, and how he took every step at last in such a way that he was inevitably led to that being regarding whom he had the knowledge that this being was suited to himself.

That which has taken place through the unfolding of the forces of the soul comes to meet one with exact clarity in this life tableau. Many people do not like this precise clarity, because it brings them enlightenment in regard to much that they would prefer to see in a different light from the light of truth. But one must endure the fact that one is able to look upon one's own inner being in utter freedom from preconceptions, even though this being of oneself confronts the searching eye with reproach.

This stage of cognition I have called imaginative knowledge, or imagination.

But one can progress beyond this stage. In that which we come to know through this memory tableau, we are confronted by those forces which have really formed us as human beings. While confronting this tableau of life, we know: “Within you those forces evolve which mold the substances of your physical body.” Within you, especially during childhood, those forces have evolved which have plastically modeled approximately up to the seventh year the nerve masses of the brain, which did not yet exist in well ordered form after your birth. We then cease at last to ascribe what works formatively upon the human being within to those forces which inhere in material substances. We cease to do this when we have this memory tableau before us, when we see how there stream into all the forces of nutrition and of breathing and into the whole circulation of the blood the contents of this memory tableau—which are forces in themselves, forces without which no single wave of the blood circulates and no single process of breathing occurs. We now learn to understand that man himself in his inner being consists of spirit and soul.

What now dawns upon one can best be described by a comparison. Imagine that you have walked for a certain distance over ground which has been softened by rain, and that you have noticed all the way tracks or ruts made by human feet or wagon wheels. Now suppose that a being should come from the moon and see this condition of the ground, but should see no human being. He would probably come to the conclusion that there must be all sorts of forces underneath the earth which have thrust up these traces and given this form to the surface of the ground. Such a being might seek within the earth for the forces which have produced the tracks. But one who sees into the thing knows that the condition was not caused by the earth but by human feet or wagon wheels.

Now, any one who possesses a view of things such as I have just described does not by any means for this reason look with less reverence, for example, upon the convolutions of the human brain. But, just as he knows that those tracks on the surface of the earth do not derive from forces within the earth, he now knows that these convolutions of the brain do not derive from forces within the substance of the brain, but that the spiritual-psychic entity of man is there, which he himself has now beheld, and that this works in such a way as to cause our brain to have these convolutions. This is the essential thing—to be driven to this view, so that we arrive at a conception of our own spirit-soul nature, that the eye of the soul is really directed to the spirit-soul element and to its manifestation in the external life.

But it is possible to progress still further. After having first strengthened our inner being through concentrating upon a definite content of thought, and then having emptied our consciousness, so that, instead of the images we ourselves have formed, the content of our life now appears before us, we can now put this memory tableau out of our consciousness, in turn, just as we previously eliminated a single concept, so that our consciousness was void of this. We can now learn to apply the powerful force so as to blot out from our consciousness that which we have come to know through a heightened self-observation as a spirit-soul being. In doing this, we blot out nothing less than the inner being of our own soul life. We learned first in concentration to blot out what is external, and we then learned to direct the look of our soul to our own spirit-soul entity, and this completely occupied the whole tableau of memory. If we now succeed in blotting out this memory tableau itself, there comes about what I wish to designate as the truly empty consciousness. We have previously lived in the memory tableau or in what we ourselves have set up before our minds, but now something entirely different appears. That which lived within us we have now suppressed, and we confront the world with an empty consciousness. This signifies something extraordinary in the experience of the soul. Fundamentally speaking, I can describe at first only by means of a comparison what now appears to the soul, when the content of our own soul is blotted out by means of the powerful inner force we apply. We need only to think of the fact that, when the impressions of the external senses gradually die away, when there is a cessation of seeing, hearing, perhaps even of a distinct sense of touch, we sink into a state closely resembling the state of sleep. In the present case, however, when we blot out the content of our own souls, although we do come to an “empty” state of consciousness, this is not a state of sleep. We reach what I might call the state of being merely awake—that is, being awake with an empty consciousness.

We may, perhaps, be enabled to conceive this empty consciousness in the following way. Imagine a modern city with all its noise and din. We may withdraw from the city, and everything becomes more and more quiet around us, but we finally enter, perhaps, a forest. Here we find the absolute opposite of the noises of the city. We live in complete inner stillness, in soundless quiet. If, now, I undertake to describe what follows, I must resort to a trivial comparison. We must raise the question whether this quiet, this stillness, can be changed still further into something else. We may designate this stillness as the zero point in our perception of the external world. But, if we possess a certain amount of property and we subtract from this property, it is diminished; as we take away still more, it is further diminished, and we finally arrive at zero and have nothing left. Can we then proceed still further? It may, perhaps, be undesirable to most persons, but the fact is that many do this: they still decrease their possessions by incurring debt. One then has less than zero, and one can still diminish what one has. In precisely the same way, we may at least imagine that the stillness, which is like the zero point of being awake, may be pushed beyond this zero into a sort of negative state. A super-stillness, a super-quietness may augment the quietness. This is what is experienced by one who blots out his own soul content: he enters into a state of quietness of soul which lies below the zero point. An inner stillness of soul in the most intensified degree comes about, during the state of wakefulness.

But this cannot be attained unless it is accompanied by something else. This can be obtained only when we feel that a certain state associated with the picture concepts of our own self passes over into another state. One who senses the first stage of the super-sensible within himself, who views this, is in a certain state of well-being, that well-being and inner blissfulness to which the various religious creeds refer when they call attention to the super-sensible and at the same time remind the human being that the super-sensible brings to him the experience of a certain blissfulness in his inner being. Indeed, up to the point where we exclude our own inner self, there was a certain sense of well-being, an intensified feeling of blissfulness. At that moment, however, where the stillness of soul comes about, this inner well-being is replaced completely by inner pain, inner deprivation, such as we have never previously known—the sense that one is separated from all to which one is united in the earthly life, far removed not only from the feeling of one's own body but from the feeling of one's own experiences since birth. And this signifies a deprivation which reaches the degree of tremendous pain of soul. Many shrink back from this stage, lacking the courage to make the transition from a certain lower clairvoyance and, after eliminating their own content of soul, to enter into that state of consciousness where resides that inner stillness. But, if we pass into this stage in full consciousness, there begins to enter, in place of imagination, that which I have called in the books previously mentioned inspiration—I trust you will not take offense at these terms—the experience of a real spiritual world. After one has previously eliminated the world of the senses and has substituted an empty consciousness, accompanied by inexpressible pain of soul, then does the external spiritual world come to meet us. In the state of inspiration we become aware of the fact that the human being is surrounded by a spiritual world just as the sense world exists for his external senses.

And the first thing, in turn, that we behold in this spiritual world is our own pre-earthly existence. Just as we are otherwise conscious of earthly experiences by means of our ordinary memory, so does a cosmic memory now dawn for us: we look back into pre-earthly experiences, beholding what we were as spirit-soul beings in a purely spiritual world before we descended through birth to this earthly existence, when as spiritual beings we participated in the molding of our own bodies. So do we look back upon the spiritual, the eternal, in the nature of man, to that which reveals itself to us as the pre-earthly existence, regarding which we now know that it is not dependent upon the birth and death of the physical body, for it is that which existed before birth and before conception, which made of this physical body derived from matter and heredity a human being. Now for the first time does one reach a true concept also of physical heredity, since one sees what super-sensible forces play into this—forces which we acquire out of a purely spiritual world, with which we now feel united just as we feel united with the physical world in the earthly life. Moreover, we now become aware that, in spite of the great advances registered in the evolution of humanity, much has been lost which belonged inherently to more ancient instinctive conceptions such as we can no longer use. The instinctive super-sensible vision of the humanity of earlier ages was confronted by this pre-earthly life as well as human immortality, regarding which we shall speak a little later. For eternity was conceived in ancient times in such a way that one grasped both its aspects. We speak nowadays of the deathlessness of the human soul—indeed, our language itself possesses only this word—but people once spoke, and the more ancient languages still continue to show such words, of birthlessness as the other aspect of the eternity of the human soul. Now, however, the times have somewhat changed. People are interested in the question what becomes of the human soul after death, because this is something still to come; but as to the other question, what existed before birth, before conception, there is less interest because that has “passed,” and yet we are here. But a true knowledge of human immortality can arise only when we consider eternity in both its aspects: that of deathlessness and that of birthlessness.

But, for the very purpose of maintaining a connection with the latter, and especially in an exact clairvoyance, still a third thing is necessary. We sense ourselves truly as human beings when we no longer permit our feelings to be completely absorbed within the earthly life. For that which we now come to know as our pre-earthly life penetrates into us in pictures and is added to what we previously sensed as our humanity, making us for the first time completely human. Our feelings are then, as it were, shot through with inner light, and we know that we have now developed our feeling into a sense organ for the spiritual. But we must go further and must be able to make our will element into an organ of knowledge for the spiritual.

For this purpose, something must begin to play a role in human knowledge which, very rightly, is not otherwise considered as a means of knowledge by those who desire to be taken seriously in the realm of cognition. We first become aware that this is a means of knowledge when we enter the super-sensible realms. This is the force of love. Only, we must begin to develop this force of love in a higher sense than that in which nature has bestowed love upon us, with all its significance for the life of nature and of man. What I shall have to describe as the first steps in the unfolding of a higher love in the life of man may seem paradoxical.

When you undertake, with complete sober-mindedness as to each step, to sense the world otherwise than is customary, you then come upon this higher form of love. Suppose you undertake in the evening, before you go to sleep, to bring your day's life so into your consciousness that you begin with the last occurrence of the evening, visualizing it as precisely as possible, then visualizing the next preceding in the same way, then the third from the last, thus moving backward to the morning in this survey of the life of the day, this is a process in which much more importance attaches to the inner energy expended than to the question whether one visualizes each individual occurrence more or less precisely. What is important is this reversal of the order of visualization. Ordinarily we view events in such a way that we first consider the earlier and then the subsequent in a progressive chain. Through such an exercise as I have just given you, we reverse the whole life: we think and feel in a direction opposite to the course of the day. We can practice this on the experiences of our day, as I have suggested, and this requires only a few minutes. But we can do this also in a different way. Undertake to visualize the course of a drama in such a way that you begin with the fifth act and picture it successively through the fourth, third, toward the beginning. Or we may represent a melody to ourselves in the reverse succession of tones. If we pass through more and more such inner experiences of the soul in this way, we shall discover that the inner experience is freed from the external course of nature, and that we actually become more and more self-directing. But, even though we become in this way more and more individualized and achieve an ever increasing power of self-direction, yet we learn also to give attention to the external life in more complete consciousness. For only now do we become aware that, the more powerfully we develop through practice this fully conscious absorption in another being, the higher becomes the degree of our selflessness, and the greater must our love become in compensation. In this way we feel how this experience of not living in oneself but living in another being, this passing over from one's own being to another, becomes more and more powerful. We then reach the stage where, to Imagination and Inspiration, which we have already developed, we can now unite the true intuitive entrance into the other being: we arrive at Intuition, so that we no longer experience only our self, but also learn—in complete individualization yet also in complete selflessness—to experience the other being.

Here love becomes something which gradually makes it possible for us to look back even further than into the pre-earthly spiritual life. As we learn in our present life to look back upon contemporary events, we learn through such an elevation of love to look back upon former earth lives, and to recognize the entire life of a human being as a succession of earthly lives. The fact that these lives once had a beginning and must likewise have an end will be touched upon in the next lecture. But we learn to know the human life as a succession of lives on earth, between which there always intervene purely spiritual lives, coming between a death and the next birth. For this elevated form of love, lifted to the spiritual sphere and transformed into a force of knowledge, teaches us also the true significance of death. When we have advanced so far, as I have explained in connection with Imagination and Inspiration, as to render these intensified inner forces capable of spiritual love, we actually learn in immediate exact clairvoyance to know that inner experience which we describe by saying that one experiences oneself spiritually, without a body, outside the body. This passing outside the body becomes in this way, if I may thus express it, actually a matter of objective experience for the soul. If we have once experienced in actual knowledge outside the body—”clairvoyantly,” I mean—this spiritual element in existence, we know the significance of the event of laying aside the physical body in death, of passing through the portal of death to a new, spiritual life. We thus learn, at the third stage of an exact clairvoyance, the significance of death, and thus also the significance of immortality, for man.

I have desired to make it transparently clear through the manner of my explanation that the mode of super-sensible cognition about which I am speaking seeks to bring into the very cognitional capacities of the human being something which works effectually, step by step, as it is thus introduced. The natural scientist applies his exactness to the external experiment, to the external observation; he wishes to see the objects in such juxtaposition that they reveal their secrets with exactitude in the process of measuring, enumerating, weighing. The spiritual-scientist, about whom I am here speaking, applies his exactness to the evolution of the forces of his own soul. That which he makes out of himself for the purpose of causing a spiritual world and, with this, the eternal being of man, the nature of human immortality, to appear before his soul, he makes with precision, if I may use an expression of Goethe. At every step which the spiritual-scientist thus takes, in order that the spiritual world may at last lie outspread before the eyes of the soul, he feels obligated to be just as conscientious in regard to his knowledge as a mathematician must be at every step he takes. For just as the mathematician must see clearly into everything that he writes on the paper, so must the spiritual-scientist see with complete exactitude into everything that he makes out of his powers of cognition. He then knows that he has formed an “eye of the soul” out of the soul itself with the same inner necessity with which nature has formed the corporeal eye out of bodily substance. And he knows that he can speak of spiritual worlds with the same justification with which he speaks of a physical-sensible world in relationship to the physical eye. In this sense the spiritual research with which we are here concerned satisfies the demands of our age imposed upon us by the magnificent achievements of natural science—which spiritual science in no wise opposes but, rather, seeks further to supplement.

I am well aware that every one who undertakes to represent anything before the world, no matter what his motive may be, attributes a certain importance to himself by describing this as a “demand of the times.” I have no such purpose, neither shall I have such a purpose in my next lecture; [The second lecture in this brochure.] on the contrary, I should like to show that the demands of the times already exist, and the very endeavor of spiritual science at every step it takes is to satisfy these demands of the times. We may say, then, that the spiritual-scientist whom it is our purpose to discuss here does not propose to be a person who views nature in a dilettante or amateur fashion. On the contrary, he proposes to advance further in true harmony with natural science and with the same genuine conscientiousness. He desires truly exact clairvoyance for the description of a spiritual world. But it is clear to him at the same time that, when we undertake to investigate a human corpse in a laboratory for the purpose of explaining the life which has disappeared from it, or, when we look out into cosmic space with a telescope, we then develop capacities which tend to adapt themselves at first solely to the microscope or telescope, but which possess an inner life and which misrepresent themselves in their existent form. When we dissect a human corpse, we know that it was not nature that made the human being into this bodily form, but that the human soul, which has now vanished, made it. [That is, nature did not create the wonderful human body; it was created by the soul.] We interpret the human soul from what we have here as its physical product, and any one would be irrational who should assume that this molding of the human physical forces and forms had not arisen out of that which preceded the present state of this human being. But everything that we hold in the background while we investigate dead nature with those forces in connection with which we rightly deny our inner activity creates the potentiality, through this very act of holding in reserve, for a further development of the soul forces of the human being. Just as the seed of the plant lies out of sight under the earth when we have laid it in the soil, and yet will become a plant, so do we plant a seed in the soul in the very action of conscientious scientific research. He who is a serious scientist in this sense has within himself the germ of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. He needs only to develop the germ. He will then know that, just as natural science is a demand of the times, so is super-sensible research likewise. What I mean to say is that every one who speaks in the spirit of natural science speaks also in the spirit of super-sensible research, only he does not know this. And that which constitutes an unconscious longing in the innermost depths of many persons today—as will be manifest in the next public lecture—is the impulse of super-sensible research to unfold out of its germ.

To those very persons, therefore, who oppose this spiritual research from a supposedly scientific standpoint, one would like to say, though not with any bad intention, that this brings to mind an utterance in Goethe's Faust all too well known, but which would be applied in a different sense:

The little man would not sense the Devil
Even if he held him by the throat.

Now, I do not care to go into that. But what is contained in this expression confronts us in a different application in that which exists today as a demand of the times: that those who speak rightly today about nature are really giving expression, though unconsciously, to the spirit. One would like to say that there are many who do not wish to notice the “spirit” when it speaks, although they are constantly giving expression to the spirit in their own words!

The seed of super-sensible perception is really far more widespread today than is supposed, but it must be developed. The fact that it must be developed is really a lesson we may learn from the seriousness of the times as regards external experiences. As I have already said, I should like to go into the details next time; but we may still add in conclusion that the elements of a fearful catastrophe really speak to the whole of humanity today through various indications in the outside world, and that it is possible to realize that tasks at which humanity in the immediate future will have to work with the greatest intensity will struggle to birth out of this great seriousness of the times. This external seriousness with which the world confronts us today, especially the world of humanity, indicates the necessity of an inner seriousness. And it is about this inner seriousness in the guidance of the human heart and mind toward man's own spiritual powers, which constitute the powers of his essential being, that I have wished to speak to you today. For, if it is true that man must apply his most powerful external forces in meeting the serious events awaiting him over the whole world, he will need likewise a powerful inner courage. But such forces and such courage can come into existence only if the human being is able to feel and also to will himself in full consciousness in his innermost being, not merely theoretically conceiving himself but practically knowing himself. This is possible for him only when he comes to know this being of his as coming out of that source from which it does truly come, from the source of the spirit, only when in ever increasing measure, not only theoretically but practically, he learns to know in actual experience that man is spirit, and can find his true satisfaction only in the spirit; that his highest powers and his highest courage can come to him only out of the spirit, out of the super-sensible.

To speak from the point of view of Anthroposophy today still means, quite understandably, to have great opposition, for Anthroposophy wants to speak about things of life and reality in a way that seems to many in our time to be something quite outlandish. And in particular, when a subject is discussed, such as the one that has been chosen for this evening, the immortality of the soul, then very powerful voices immediately rise up from the more scientifically educated circles of our time, who believe that such things cannot be discussed at all from the point of view of knowledge, because these things must be left to the beliefs, the revelations of human feeling, which is not based on direct knowledge, and because in relation to them man has insurmountable limits to his knowledge.

Now, however, anthroposophy assumes that it can speak about precisely such things of life in the same way that today, with strict methods and with a discipline that is aware of its responsibility, it speaks from the point of view of the natural sciences. It is only a question of anthroposophy having to address itself to forces of knowledge which are certainly present in ordinary life and in ordinary science, but which are present only for the starting points of their development, not for the further steps. And these further steps must be taken in order to penetrate the spiritual realms of life precisely from the point of view of real knowledge, not from that of nebulous mysticism. The starting point must be what I would call a union of intellectual modesty on the one hand and absolute trust in the perfection of the human powers of cognition on the other. By seeking to unite these two soul impulses, anthroposophy is able to explore the so-called supersensible realm with the same certainty as the senses and the natural sciences are used today to penetrate the realm of the sense world, of physical existence, with such great success and certainty.

What should be called intellectual modesty in this context? We know that within our soul life we have started from the childlike state of soul. We can very well compare this childlike state of soul with dreaming, even in a certain respect with sleep. And just as we awaken every morning from ordinary sleep, so we have awakened from our childlike state of soul to that which is our capacity for knowledge for science and for the purposes of practical life. If we now take the standpoint of intellectual modesty, we say to ourselves: Those powers which you had then as a small child, you have perfected through education and through the influence of life and your surroundings, and you have developed to that point of view from which you today gain your knowledge and your impulses for human life. This is not said with full intensity without intellectual modesty. Rather, one says: From the point of view that I have once acquired, I must be able to say yes and no to all sorts of things, if only I apply the correct methods that are common today. I must also be able to decide what is recognizable and what is to be relegated to the realm of mere belief. -- Anthroposophy counters this by asserting that it is perhaps possible to go beyond the powers of the soul that one has acquired as an adult, just as one can go beyond the cognitive abilities of the dreamy soul of a small child. Of course, it depends entirely on whether such a progression really succeeds, and I would like to speak to you this evening about this progression with reference to the field of soul immortality.

On the other hand, however, anthroposophy has full and intense confidence that the powers of cognition attained by each person can be perfected more and more. Thus it ventures on such a path of perfection, and it begins by saying something like the following: Today we have achieved a certain concept of knowledge through the great successes of the natural sciences. But has this concept of knowledge really been taken out of the full depths of life? It is certainly justified for everything that we strive for in its field. But is it taken out of the full depths of life by considering precisely those questions of human existence that are connected firstly with the deepest longings of human life, secondly with everything that man calls the consciousness of his human dignity, thirdly with everything from which he derives the actual meaning of life: the moral impulses?

All this nevertheless leads us to take certain borderline areas and borderline phenomena of life into consideration when it comes to gaining insights into precisely these most intimate needs and questions, especially those of the soul's existence.

Not in order to say anything valid for knowledge from the outset, but to gain a comparative starting point, let me point out something that presents itself as a dark area and yet as an area that challenges many riddles in life. It is the area that man knows well, the area of dreaming as man experiences it while asleep. I would like to emphasize this explicitly: Nothing is to be made out for knowledge by my mentioning dreams and sleep, but only a starting point is to be gained for our present understanding. Let us imagine in front of our soul these manifold and colorful worlds of images that dreams conjure up for us. We can be sure that they come from the same depths of human life from which our 'daytime imaginings usually emerge. But even during waking we are quite aware that in this extraordinarily interesting 'dream world we are dealing at most with a relative reality, which we can only understand if we understand it from the point of view of waking life. After all, one can at first imagine hypothetically that man dreams throughout his whole life, that he has never experienced anything in his consciousness other than the colorful, manifold dream images. Couldn't life nevertheless proceed in the same way as it does today? We could be driven by certain forces of nature or spiritual powers, without having an awake consciousness, to our daily work and - even if it may seem reprehensible to some listeners - perhaps even to scientific activity; we could carry out this activity, as it were, sleepwalking. Within ourselves, however, nothing could take place except that which we know as the dream world; the outer world would then be completely different from that which we have in our inner consciousness.

If you think about it properly, you come to say to yourself: This world of dreams, we never know it when we are in it ourselves. We would regard the dream world as our reality, which we would dream from the beginning to the end of our lives in the manner described above. That we recognize the subordinate reality value of the dream depends on the fact that we go through the life-jolt from sleep to awakening, that we become conscious of it - I am not speaking now in philosophical consideration, but from the standpoint of popular consciousness - through this life-jolt. Through it we switch that which is our human nature, namely that which is of a volitional nature, into our physical body. Anyone who observes closely also knows that everything that is conveyed to us through the senses in waking life is based entirely on the unfolding of real life in the physical body during waking. Through this involvement of our will in the physical body we arrive at the point of view from which we distinguish the subordinate reality value of dreaming from that reality value which the sense world has for our awakening consciousness. We now know that we are in contact with an external reality through the will inserted into our body. Again, I do not want to speak about this in philosophical considerations, but entirely from the standpoint of popular consciousness.

Now the question arises: Could there perhaps be a second awakening, a second life-jolt out of this ordinary day-waking on a higher level, through which we switch on our life forces into a new element, just as we switch on our will when we come out of dreaming into ordinary wakefulness? - Of course, this is only a question, and the answer to it depends entirely on whether we can set out on a path that is, firstly, inwardly safe and, secondly, can be walked by every person through their own efforts. If we were to come to such a second awakening, then through this second awakening we would gain a point of view through which we would recognize the reality value of our waking life, observing it from a higher perspective, as we observe it in dreams from the higher perspective of ordinary consciousness.

In order to bring about a second awakening, anthroposophy turns first of all to soul forces as they are present in ordinary life, but which already indicate through their ordinary nature that they are capable of development. Now even philosophers admit that what we call human memory points to a more spiritual nature of the human soul; that we cannot treat memory in the same way as we treat those soul faculties which are directly bound to the impressions of the outer sense world. Again, let us not adhere to philosophical considerations, but, as we do in ordinary consciousness, to that which plays a role as memory in man. Through memory we can call up images of experiences we went through many years ago. Depending on our disposition, these images may be more vivid or more shadowy, but they are there before us. When we indulge in ordinary sensory observation, that which we imagine must be present; that which memory gives is not present, it may be long gone. Through our imaginative power we conjure up, as it were, from our own inner being something before our soul which was once there, but which is no longer there, which cannot have a present existence. In this way we gain the insight that we are able to drive out of the human inner being forces of cognition which imagine something that does not exist in the present. And the question arises: Can perhaps through a certain further development of the powers of the soul, as we have developed them since our first childhood, that which underlies our power of memory be further developed? Can it be developed in such a way that we not only imagine what is not there at present but was once there during our life on earth, but that we imagine something that is not there at all? Then we would make the leap of life into a higher reality, into a reality from which ordinary earthly life would appear as the dreaming life does to the waking consciousness.

Anthroposophy now makes such an attempt to develop that which underlies the ability to remember, in order to arrive at this second awakening through the inner practice of life. It addresses itself to the human powers of thought. After all, they are the ones who conjure up in our imagination what we have once experienced. And anthroposophical research proceeds in such a way that it does something with thought that is not actually done with thought in the present age. Today's thinking is - and rightly so from certain points of view - more oriented towards surrendering to the outside world. To allow the impressions of the external world to act first on the senses, to process them by counting, measuring, weighing, to combine them with thinking, is passive thinking, a thinking that man considers all the more secure with regard to knowledge, the more passive it is, the more it surrenders to what the external senses and organs say. Indeed, in order not to gain a fantastic knowledge as some philosophers do, anthroposophy turns to thinking in such a way that it seeks to develop this thinking further than it is in ordinary life. To this end, easily comprehensible ideas, which at first are not even considered in terms of what they mean, are placed at the center of ordinary consciousness and the whole life of the soul is concentrated on such ideas. The life of the soul is completely withdrawn from external impressions and external life by seeking more and more to make this life of the soul stronger and stronger on one or a series of manageable ideas. The result is something that lasts shorter for one person and longer for another, depending on their soul disposition. One person needs three months, another many years. If you repeat these exercises in rhythmic succession, after a while you will notice something in your soul life that I would like to compare with something in your outer life: If you strain a muscle again and again, it strengthens and becomes strong. In the same way, one feels the soul's imaginative faculty strengthening by always concentrating on an easily comprehensible idea; and finally one feels how the whole thinking becomes active, how real life, inner life in the true sense, moves into this thinking. One gradually feels the great difference, which is not only a figurative but a real one, between dead and abstract thinking and that towards which we strive and which we want to absorb into an inner life in the thinking element.

I said that one must start from a manageable idea. In what I am going to tell you today about the exercises of the life of the soul, it is a question of following each step with full human prudence, as otherwise only the mathematician follows his steps, or the geometer, who is aware, when he brings one out of the other, how figure follows figure, how number follows number. This consciousness, which the anthroposophical researcher feels like the strict mathematician: to be accountable as a researcher - this consciousness must prevail.

Of course, all self-suggestions, everything somehow subjective must be excluded. But this can never be ruled out if we take up arbitrary ideas from our mental life; they have many echoes of life in them, they often suggest something to us. But if we put together ideas that perhaps have no external meaning for us at all, such as “light - wisdom” - and concentrate again and again on such an idea, whose reality value remains indifferent to us, with the whole life of our soul, then the thinking ability in us strengthens. In this way we come to know - as I said, for one person it takes less time, for another it takes longer - what this means: life in thinking; for a kind of detachment of a higher person from the person we know lives in our physical body does indeed gradually take place. Just as we become aware in our physical body that it is something living when we move our legs, move our hands, so we become aware through such an exercise: It is something real, living, real, life-real, when I move in the strengthened thinking.

One could roughly say: We finally come to experience a higher person in us through these power phenomena, through which one gropes spiritually, as one otherwise gropes physically with one's fingers. In this way we gradually experience how a higher man, who is experienced in this thinking, is torn away from the physical man; and we have arrived at the supersensible experience, at the experience of the supersensible man, in so far as he passes through earthly life between birth and death. By the fact that one has risen to observation in the inner ability to think, one comes to the fact that one overcomes space through this ability to think, overcomes the present in general and comes to an experience in time. Yes, one feels that which one experiences as the second, detached human being, not actually as a spatial human being. This is the physical human being. One finds that one experiences the second in this way as a human being fluctuating only in time. And that which one experiences there is structured into a kind of tableau which, in a relatively short time, allows one to survey life on earth from earliest childhood to the point in time one has just reached.

There is a big difference between the two things: the life tableau and my memories. You could say: I can also put together this earthly life from my memories. I can put together from my memory what I experienced a short or long time ago. And if I make the effort and if I take my time, then I will have an overall memory of my life on earth. And it could be that I am deceiving myself that in such an examination I have something in my life tableau, which is manageable in a short time, which with the help of subconscious soul forces would bring something similar to a conscious memory picture before my mind. - But one gradually realizes that there is a great difference between what one puts together in one's memory and such a tableau of the soul's life, which stands before the soul as a first supersensible knowledge, initially as a self-knowledge. For when you compile your experiences as a memory picture, you actually always see in front of you what has had an effect on you from the outside. You see people, natural events, the external things that are of interest to you.

This life tableau is completely different. There you have much less of an eye on what has come to you from the outside, so to speak, and more of an eye on what has worked from within. If I have gotten to know a person in life, I remember much less through this life tableau how he or she came across to me, but rather what longings were aroused in my own breast in order to find something special about this person. If I have any natural phenomenon in this life tableau, it is not so much the interesting aspects of the natural phenomenon that make themselves felt, but those impulses from my own human life that follow this natural phenomenon with particular sympathy or antipathy. That which stands before my soul in this tableau is myself, how I have behaved in relation to what I have gone through. One could say, if one wants to draw rough comparisons: This memory tableau that I have described, which can only be obtained after such an examination, is as different from an ordinary memory tableau brought about by memory as the impression in the seal is from the impression in the sealing wax. It is like the negative image to the positive image of that which we can put together through the ordinary memory image.

Thus, when we have gone through the first stage of spiritual practice, we have come to a true self-knowledge of our earthly life. For such self-knowledge is there. There are always nuances mixed in. In this memory tableau you see what has brought you forward; then you say to yourself: “There is something that has made you imperfect, that has brought you back. -- One places oneself in this tableau of memory with human worth and human dignity, and through the realization that is first awakened one attains an idea of that which one is actually only now entitled to call the “ether” of the world in relation to external reality and the sensual forces. The ether of the world, which lives only in the temporal and which to a certain extent gives us a piece of what I have now described as the first form of the higher human being detached from the physical.

But one has not been long enough with this first step. If you want more, you must undertake to continue these exercises of the soul. The next soul exercises consist in using a strongly activated inner will to remove the ideas from the consciousness, just as one has used one's will to place such ideas into the consciousness to strengthen the being and to concentrate on them. As I said, there must be complete prudence, as with the mathematician. For it must be said: We are in a certain way taken in with our whole soul-life by the conception which soon moves into the center of consciousness. And especially when thinking has already become so vivid that we have only this idea itself in consciousness, and that not only such ideas are there, but that our own inner experience appears as in powerful pictures in the tableau described - then we are strongly taken in by what we have before the soul in such a picture heightened to vividness. A greater power is necessary to remove such images from the consciousness than is necessary to remove ordinary images from the consciousness. One knows, by the way, what it means to remove ordinary ideas from the consciousness. Try to admit this to yourself honestly.

When the senses are silent, moreover when the sensually perceived is silent, when the combination of thoughts is silent and the ideas and sensations are, as it were, removed from the consciousness, then man falls asleep. If there is no stimulation from the imagination, he does not have the strength to maintain the waking state. But if one has that strength of soul which is necessary for what I have described, then one also has the strength to take away the acquired ideas which come into us in this way through an inner strengthened life, to keep the whole consciousness empty of imagination and yet to remain awake. Just being awake, imagining nothing, that is what must be striven for as a second state: A waking consciousness empty of content! But this contentless waking consciousness, one can become aware of it inwardly, but it does not remain so for long. Once it has been established, however, the second stage of spiritual cognition occurs. Then one not only becomes aware of what has just been described, which lives in the human being, then the spiritual content of our world environment forces its way into this waking, content-free consciousness, into this empty consciousness. And the second human being, who has first detached himself from the physical, corporeal human being, who was conscious of himself in the course of his entire life on earth, will now not only be conscious of himself, but through this higher self-consciousness he will absorb a spiritual world of his surroundings. Again something appears before our soul which seems strange and foreign to the present man, but which is nevertheless contained in what I have called the second stage of man's spiritual knowledge, inspiration. An exact inspiration occurs there; just as everything I have described here must not be confused with what is often called clairvoyance in a nebulous mysticism. If one wishes to use this expression, one may only speak of an exact voyance, which is only based on the development of the soul forces, like mathematical thinking, which has no external reality in itself, but only one that is formed internally, and to which only mathematical thinking must be added when it extends to the sensory world, as in measuring, counting, weighing and so on.

To this, what one has conceived in an inwardly living thinking, which is modeled on the particular mathematical thinking, must be added what I have described to you here. And through this spiritual work one arrives at knowledge in the same way that we arrive at knowledge through measuring, counting and weighing. And that which occurs is a state of soul life which is not known in ordinary consciousness because it is not necessary. I would like to make clear what state of soul life occurs when awake, empty consciousness is reached.

First we think of ourselves in a modern metropolis, with all its noise, its din; we ourselves do not come to rest, we ourselves are absorbed in this noise, in this din. Then we move away from this cosmopolitan city - the din, the noise become quieter and quieter; if we move further away, even quieter. We imagine ourselves in the solitude of the forest. There is a silence that we can describe as zero in relation to the noise of the city. Silence around us, silence within us. But now something else can occur, although it is not observed in ordinary life. We have to use a second comparison. As you know, if someone has a certain amount of wealth, this wealth can be spent little by little; he owns less and less. If he earns nothing extra, if he continues to spend, then he is down to zero. If he has nothing at all and continues to spend, he is in debt; then he has less than zero. Mathematicians call this negative values, minus. Now imagine that: We have descended from the loud roar, the noise of the big city to silence zero and descend further, and it becomes quieter and quieter than silence and silence zero, so that we have less around us than mere silence, that it is quieter, quieter than quiet. This is the state of soul that gradually occurs when we pass through the empty but still awake consciousness. Little by little we feel quite clearly what I would like to call the deep silence of the human soul. This deep silence is not just silence, it is more or less, as you like, than silence. In terms of tranquillity, it goes below tranquillity zero. But then, when this deep silence of the soul is really experienced, everything that is of spiritual essence around us emerges from this deep silence of the soul. And the full inspiration occurs.

Then we are put into the position, when we have experienced this deep silence of the soul, to actually also now hear spiritually that what lives in the spiritual world. And the ordinary sensory world becomes a means for us to hint at what lives in this spiritual world. I would like to speak quite concretely of real spiritual knowledge. Something sounds out of the deep silence of the soul that makes an impression on me: it excites me, it strikes me with a certain liveliness. I say it is something that makes an impression on me, just as the yellow color of a lively soul life makes an impression on me. Then I have something in the sensory world through which I can express what I have experienced in the spiritual world. I describe this knowledge by saying: It has an effect on me like the yellow color of the sense world, or like the tone C or C sharp, like warmth or cold. In short, that which I have experienced in the sense world becomes for me a material, just as what appears to me in the spiritual world can be described in ordinary words. The whole sense world becomes something like a language to express what one experiences in the spiritual world. This is not understood by those who want to make progress too quickly and therefore stop at superficial judgment. The investigator encounters an experience that makes the same impression on him as the sensual color, and therefore he describes what he experiences spiritually through colors, sounds and so on. Just as one should not confuse the word “table” with the real table, so now one should not confuse it with that by which it is described, the spiritual world itself, which sprouts from the deep silence.

Once one has reached this point of view, one comes to extinguish this whole tableau of life, which one first conjured up, within oneself; not only to evoke empty consciousness towards individual ideas, but towards the whole earthly life of man, and indeed precisely in his inner form. One then, so to speak, extinguishes oneself as an earthly human being. But by now having the possibility to experience the deep silence of the human soul after the extinction of the earthly self, which is bound to the physical body of man, one now experiences that which one has become as a spiritual-soul man before one has descended from the spiritual world and has clothed the physical body around oneself. Out of the deep silence of the soul one experiences the spiritual-soul that one was in the pre-earthly existence. And just as one arrived at one's physical surroundings in the physical body, so, by placing oneself in that which one was in the spiritual-soul world, one arrives at recognizing how one was in the pre-earthly existence in the surroundings of spiritual-soul beings, even as a soul-spiritual being, as a similar being. One enters fully into that spiritual world from which one has descended to earthly existence.

You can realize that in ordinary life the eternity of the human soul is only explored in one direction, the immortality of the soul. But this immortality of the soul has another side, for which the older language still had a word, but no longer the modern language. This soul immortality has not only one side, that of immortality, but also that of unbornness, and it is only from unbornness and immortality that the full soul immortality is composed. Thus one does not arrive through metaphysical speculation, but by awakening the soul itself, and out of the deep silence of the soul to that which is eternal in the human soul, was eternal and was spiritually present before man descended to earthly existence, and remains eternal by dwelling in the physical human body between birth and death.

But we can only approach the eternal character step by step, also through anthroposophical spiritual research. As the third stage I must mention something that may cause a slight shudder, perhaps an inner mockery, especially for those who are sitting here with the usual scientific ideas. I can understand this very well, as I can understand all opposing objections to anthroposophy. Something that we already have in ordinary life can be further developed into a higher power of cognition, like the powers of a child into what we have developed in our adult state, and that is the power of love. Loving is something quite different when it is bound to the human body, when it surrenders to the passions that live themselves out in loving, than when, as I have described, after the physical ego, even the earthly ego from birth to death, has been stripped away, when the human being lives himself out of the physical existence into the state in which he faces the purely spiritual. When he thereby develops the powers of love, of complete surrender, then that which he has experienced in the pre-earthly state, which he now fully realizes, is transformed into knowledge. He experiences what it means to experience full consciousness with reality outside his physical body. And when he experiences this surrender to spiritual experience in this way, then his ego is returned to him in a new way. The ego, which in earthly life lives in selfishness and egotism, which is overcome by acquiring such self-knowledge as is acquired when this ego is twice extinguished, thus develops full love on a soul-spiritual level, and something then confronts you which at first appears to you like a complete stranger, like a completely alien personality. If you strive for this, it will happen in the least. One should strive for the love I have described. Then, because one can go completely out of oneself, one is confronted by what one is oneself, but like a foreign personality, and one only then realizes what this self was like in the past life on earth, which one went through before one came to this life on earth; one only then realizes how the ego was present in the earlier stage of existence on earth, when one is able to feel like a second person through increased, strengthened love. One looks back to a certain point in the development of time where the ego as ego had a beginning, where the repeated earth lives had a beginning. But we cannot speak of that now. We can only speak of the fact that we can look back on a series of earth lives, which are passed through to full human life, between which there are always lives in pre-earthly or post-earthly existence between death and a new earthly birth.

This is the one thing one experiences of the eternal and immortal character of the soul when one has made up one's mind to the recognizing view. The other thing, however, which one acquires through the love that has increased to knowledge, is to be able to experience the higher human being outside of his physical body. That which one acquires further is that one sees how this being is without a body, and the realization of how the body becomes a corpse in death, how this body falls away, how the human being enters the after-earthly life. Just as one has a view of the pre-earthly life, of the unborn, one now has a view into immortality, into the after-earthly life. The moral impulses one has acquired as an earthly human being, which one carries through the gate of death, and how one prepares a new earthly existence together with the spiritual world in order to descend to earth as an earthly human being, this now appears before the soul in vivid vividness, which is based on intellectual modesty, but also on a certain trust in the powers of the human soul.

This leads knowledge to that area of life which is so close to the longings and needs of man. We look at those whom we have loved in life, who are close to us through blood ties or soul ties; we look at the gate of death and ask: What will become of the ties that the blood has spun and of the ties that the soul and spirit have woven when a person has passed through the gate of death? If one has this insight, one knows how the outer physical shell of the physical body falls away from what man is as an eternal being, how man rises into the spiritual world with those laws and lives there with the forces which he has already brought down and with which he has lived in his physical life on earth. We then experience how that which we have in common with other people as blood ties, as bonds of friendship, as bonds of love, falls away from our communities just as the physical body of man itself falls away; and we know from the realization that we meet again the souls with whom a bond has connected us, in pure communion of the spiritual world, because the physical obstacles are no longer there. That what men do not demand to know out of a curious instinct, that what was human dignity, the fate of the souls, that becomes in this way a real knowledge.

And still other things become a real knowledge. The reality of the outer physical world eludes the dream because the will is not involved in the physical body. In dreams man takes the world of images for reality; thus we take much for reality before we awaken in the manner described to the deep silence of the soul, to the spiritual life. When we wake up to the waking spiritual life, after we have gone through the second life-jolt and the physical reality experienced awake appears to us as mere dreaming, then many things that were reality to us in the physical-bodily life appear to us in the higher sense, in the sense of the physical-spiritual life, as a dream. Just as the dream reality is captured by the physically tangible reality, so that which we experience in physical life as moral or religious people is now captured by that to which we awaken through the second life pressure. And we become aware of what was actually meant by people like Knebel, Goethe's friend, who said as an old man: “When one has grown old, one finds that in the face of the decisive events of existence everything seems as if it had been prepared long ago. Everything seems to have been planned by man himself, which has had a profound influence on him as a man or as a youth. And all his steps as a youth seem to point to this experience. - This idea continues to develop and becomes true in the process of formation. If one penetrates this idea further with the knowledge that one gains in the way described, one sees that this is indeed the case in life. One experiences something quite decisive. One is led to a person with whom the further course of life is to be walked together. You look at the steps that have led you to this person. They come from the longing to experience precisely what you can experience with this person until you reach the goal that corresponds to a longing of the soul, a test of the soul in the right way. That which lives in man, through which he conjures up his destiny as if out of himself, must be connected to the view of the earthly lives lived through, in which one was a morally such and such a person, did this and that. And one sees that what one does now seems instinctive in this life, like chance; it is fatefully linked to what one was in the previous earthly life.

This seems to be a devastating thought. But just as little as the fact that we have blond or black hair, blue or brown eyes, lean or full hands affects our freedom, dignity and full responsibility as human beings, so little does it affect what we are as free, responsible human beings when we know that it is the soul that configures us, that as free human beings we have to carve out our life's destiny on a fated basis. But life becomes comprehensible when man learns to look at it, imbued with this idea of destiny, which is quite compatible with freedom, that he does not stand in life in such a way that every moment is like chance to him, but that he feels himself placed in the world of natural necessity, as in the world of a real spirituality, in which he stands as a higher man with his moral, fateful powers. In this way, such knowledge leads man from outer life to the immortality of the soul.

One can still object: Yes, individual spiritual researchers can indeed recognize this, but what does it mean for the ordinary person? - It means just as much as an artistically painted picture to someone who has not become a painter. It would be sad if you had to be a painter to understand a work of art. You only need a certain healthy feeling to experience the artistic, and only healthy human judgment to experience what the spiritual researcher describes. Only if one throws the unfortunately so numerous prejudices in one's own way, then one places oneself before the pictures which the anthroposophical spiritual researcher sketches, as one places oneself before a picture in which, instead of seeing a world, one sees nothing but splashes of color placed side by side. This world is also fully comprehensible to those who live a simple, ordinary life from the description of the anthroposophical spiritual researcher, although he is always able to understand it through books such as “How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds? “ he is always able to go so far on the path of spiritual research without influencing his outer life that he can check what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher tells him, that he can check whether this anthroposophical spiritual researcher is speaking out of fantasy or whether his view is something that has been firmly acquired, just as mathematical judgments, measuring, counting, weighing and so on are themselves firmly acquired.

This is what spiritual science wishes to introduce into the present spiritual life of mankind. It is that which it must believe corresponds to the numerous innermost needs of the soul. For it is so that today many people instinctively, unconsciously, precisely through what one has become through education, out of the natural scientific prerequisites, gain the longing to know something in a similar way, encompassing the experiences, about that which is so close to the soul and of which I have only spoken today as an example of the immortality of the soul and that which is connected with immortality.

But of course this puts something into the world that is like the Copernican world view compared to the one we were used to at that time. But it is so that what appears to be a human “folly” gradually becomes a matter of course. The Copernican world view even had to wait a very long time before it became self-evident. Anthroposophy can wait. But it must say, out of an obligation to culture and civilization, that it is fully understandable to it when ordinary natural science, which considers itself sovereign with its means, has arrived at a doctrine of the soul without a soul through an ordinary pursuit of the life of the soul with the external means of calculating, counting, weighing, and that it finds an ideal in it. Anthroposophy, however, would like to add to that which it does not deny the justification of on the one hand, to a doctrine gained from natural science, through developed full comprehension of the innermost essence of the human soul, what is soul-spiritual in man as eternal life, what is soul-spiritual in the whole world, in the whole cosmos as eternal life, so that man can recognize himself as eternal, intimately connected with the eternal in the cosmos, as immortal in the cosmos. Anthroposophy therefore wishes to give knowledge of the present human life and the human life of the near future, so that it meets a necessity of the time by adding to the present teaching of the soul without soul a teaching of the soul awakened vividly out of the human soul, which then follows from such a teaching again a teaching of the world permeated by soul, permeated by spirit. And this will be needed more and more.

Dear attendees! The riddles of [nature] first approach man insofar as he is a cognizant being and insofar as he has to implement his knowledge in practical life. The riddles of the soul are different. If knowledge is necessary above all for orientation in the world, if we find ourselves in a world that does not want to be illuminated for us through knowledge, so to speak spiritually as in a dark room, then it must be said: the riddles of the soul are those that are experienced directly, but in a way that very many people have no adequate conception of. Today, there is much talk about the unconscious and subconscious life of the soul. However, since we have hardly enough ways to gain more precise ideas about this subconscious life of the soul — as this very evening is intended to show — it is also the case that the profound influence of the soul's riddle on the human being cannot be sufficiently appreciated from the direct consciousness of the present and from what is recognized science in this present. Doubts about those things that are intimately and closely related to the longings and hopes of the human soul life not only bring the person a sense of instability of the soul, they not only rob him of the security of the soul life, they not only take away the strength to find and maintain his position in life in a moral and social sense, but they intervene in the entire inner constitution of the human organism's life as a whole. What is at issue here cannot be fully understood unless one knows that in the deeper layers of the soul there are forces that are initially unknown to the human being – and yet they work in the same way as the conscious forces, but – one might say – they dig deeper into the whole of human nature.

It seems at first to be a small thing when a person has to give in to doubt about one or other question, for there are indeed enough reasons for doubt regarding the great riddles of the world that can only be solved in the course of a long time. But doubt itself, when it takes root in the most intimate life of the soul, when, as it were, the soul must continually eke out its existence, not consciously, but unconsciously - if the expression may be permitted - tormented by doubt, then this doubt eats so deeply into the organism that it also gradually attacks physical health. For what emanates from the soul does not immediately interfere with physical life. But what gnaws at the soul in this way over a long period of time, little by little and again and again and again, and especially in such a way that it does not fully come to consciousness, ultimately undermines physical health and thus actually the whole existence of the person. For this reason, the whole area of these soul mysteries, especially in recent times, has once again entered the field of vision of even earnestly striving scientists.

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, wants to work strictly on the basis of the most serious scientific conscientiousness and methodology that could only be developed in the course of the last four to five centuries, especially in the nineteenth century, in scientific research. However, since Anthroposophy wants to deal with what the deepest longings, the most earnest hopes and the strongest forces and sources of life of the human soul are, Anthroposophy concerns every human being – and one might say – it is therefore in its nature to address not only the individual field of science, but all people. One can also see how simple, healthy human understanding, if it is not occupied by one or the other prejudice, can certainly find the path to understanding anthroposophical research methods. I spoke about this in the two lectures that I recently gave here in the Philharmonie. Today, my presentation will focus on the riddles of the soul.

These soul mysteries have also recently been brought before the scientific forum with great intensity. This natural science, which, where it is justified, is fully recognized by anthroposophy, and which rightly points out again and again its great triumphs for knowledge and for life in the most recent times, this natural science has, especially in the present day, forced serious thinkers, I might say, to face the riddles of the soul. Scientific research is concerned, after all, primarily with that which is given to man sensually and which can be traced back to its laws through observation and experiment and through the combining mind. But what this scientific research has increasingly lost sight of in recent times is the human being himself. Natural science methods are and will always be applied to the outer human nature, the physical organization of the human being. In the extension of these methods to the great questions of the soul life, anthroposophy must find that these natural science methods do not remain true to themselves, even with great researchers. For this reason, I would like to begin by pointing out the way in which the present-day natural sciences in particular often approach the riddles of the soul, and how anthroposophical research must nevertheless take a negative view of this approach because, as I emphasized in the previous lectures, — must proceed more strictly and critically in the supersensible, in the realm of soul and spiritual life, out of scientific conscientiousness, than one proceeds on the natural science side when questions of soul and spiritual life are to be considered.

I would like to start with an example to show how natural science believes it can approach the riddles of the soul, and how anthroposophy has to approach these riddles in a completely different way. I would like to draw attention to a work that has recently made a great impression in certain circles because it deals with the soul riddle right up to the human question of immortality and breathes a thoroughly scientific spirit. It is the work in which Oliver Lodge wrote about what he was supposedly able to learn about his son Raymond's soul through mediumistic art after his son's death. One may cite this attempt by Oliver Lodge, which is considered a failure for anthroposophy, to penetrate into the soul life up to the question of immortality, because anyone who is familiar with the scientific conscientiousness of natural research will see on every page of I would like to say, can see in every page of this extensive book by Oliver Lodge how the strict methods of natural science are observed, how everything that the natural scientist is accustomed to using in the laboratory or in the physics cabinet is seemingly applied here to the study of the soul. I would like to mention only the experiment that was most striking, and that was almost a kind of “experimentum crucis” for many.

Oliver Lodge, with the help of a medium, allegedly received messages from the soul of his son Raymond Lodge, who died in the war. Among these messages was one of particular significance. As Oliver Lodge believed, the soul of his son made the revelation to him through the medium that Raymond Lodge had had his photograph taken with other comrades a fortnight before his death, that a group picture had been taken, that the photographer had taken two pictures in succession and that the way Raymond Lodge was sitting was slightly different in the first and second pictures. Nobody knew anything about this picture when the medium brought the message that was supposedly coming from Raymond Lodge's soul. Oliver Lodge's family did not know anything. The picture had been taken in France and had not yet arrived in England when the corresponding seance took place. Nevertheless, the matter had been described in full detail by the medium. To the strict naturalist Oliver Lodge, it seemed as if this experiment undoubtedly established that the soul of his deceased son himself had spoken. For who could know anything about what was completely unknown at the place where the experiment was carried out. All sources of error, as we know them from physical research, for example, were carefully excluded. Therefore, the impression of this experiment, as it was described in the detailed book, was extraordinarily striking, even for unbiased readers. And yet, although a strict natural scientist speaks here with observation of all scientific certainty, anthroposophy must point out that its kind of research into the supersensible must be more critical than such a scientific method driven into the soul realm. For ultimately, what has been said here is nothing more than lay opinion regarding soul research.

There are simply abnormal powers and abilities in the human organism, and in certain borderline fields modern science has much to do with such abnormal abilities. Anthroposophy, however, has nothing to do with these abnormal abilities, but only with the further development of the normal human faculty of knowledge into the supersensible realm. It is possible to know how abnormal faculties can work, how it is actually possible that through special — and these are always actually morbid predispositions of the human being, which however mediumship presupposes —, how through such predispositions the conditions of sensory experience can be broken through in certain cases, how space can be overcome, but also how time can be overcome, and how it is a certainly established result that through such abnormal, pathological abilities, the person sees, for example, how he falls from a horse during a ride that is to take place in a fortnight. If the foresight is correct, the event occurs despite all the precautions taken to avert it. Such experiences are verified results; however, they are not based on the normal cognitive abilities of humans, but on abnormal abilities.

But if Oliver Lodge now thinks that some supersensible world has spoken to him, then it must be pointed out that in this case nothing more needs to be present than that the medium has had such foresight. The two photographs did indeed arrive in England later, and Oliver Lodge's eyes rested on them. The later seeing of the photographs can be seen and described through the medium's abnormal abilities based on such foresight. So in this case we are dealing with nothing more than the development of abnormal abilities that do not look into a supersensible realm, but only see what is happening in the ordinary physical world. These abilities can only do this: break through the conditions of space and time that are otherwise given to our sensory abilities.

I only mentioned this example in the introduction to point out how critical anthroposophy is, despite the fact that it points in the strictest sense to the path that really leads into the supersensible realm and shows us how the eternal core of the human being is connected to the eternal in the cosmos, and how the individual, everyday event in the life of the soul can be taken as a starting point for the great questions of birth and death, of immortality and the unborn. Although anthroposophy seeks such paths to the supersensible in the strictest sense, it must nevertheless critically reject that which, in imitation of abnormal human abilities, can only deal with that which after all only takes place in the sense realm. Anyone who understands the significance of such criticism for anthroposophy will not want to see anthroposophy in the light of those misunderstandings in which it is still seen today by many who only deal with it superficially. But the whole of anthroposophy's research methods is based on the need to apply scientific methodology to the most intimate inner soul life. It must awaken slumbering abilities in the soul, and it awakens them — not through any fantastic or mystical methods, but through systematic schooling, as I have described it — at least on a trial basis — in the two lectures already mentioned. But it would be easier for present-day humanity to form an unbiased judgment on such questions if people were willing to educate themselves about how differently people throughout the world want to ground their vision and also their faith from the intimate foundations of their soul life. I would like to point out just two polar opposites, so to speak, when it comes to characterizing the diverse abilities of people around the world.

In this way, the differences between the West and the East in terms of their understanding of the soul are particularly apparent. As a representative spirit of the West, I would like to cite Herbert Spencer, who has indeed gained such tremendous, if unjustified, influence on the way of thinking of the newer view of nature. Where Herbert Spencer talks about education, he also talks about the goal of educating the human being, and in doing so, he gives us the opportunity to really look into how he feels about the riddles of the soul.

I will only briefly present what he implies: Even if we educate people to be good citizens, to be efficient members of human society, to be efficient professionals, the most important thing in education is what enables people to educate others. The parental vocation is the highest in education. And on this occasion, it is particularly interesting to see the reasons Herbert Spencer gives for this view. He says that the highest goal in human life is to produce the next generation, the offspring. Therefore, the highest goal of education is to raise the next generation. No criticism of Herbert Spencer's assertion is intended here. One can make this claim if one is completely on the ground that wants to scientifically justify more or less everything that is valid in human life, only on the ground of external sensory perception, external natural science.

But the polar opposite of this view is presented to us by a thinker of the East who was particularly significant in his work in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Russian thinker Vladimir Solovyov. He turns his gaze to the riddle of the human soul from a completely different angle, so to speak. He says that human life has value only if, on the one hand, it sets itself the goal of perfecting itself in the truth; without this goal, human life would be worthless. But it would also be worthless if man did not partake of immortality, because, in Solowjow's opinion, a striving for perfection that could somehow be abandoned to destruction would be the greatest deception that the universe could perpetrate on a human being. Therefore, he demands that man strive for perfection in the truth and partake of immortality for the highest soul riddles, and on this occasion he speaks again in a very characteristic way – like the polar opposite of Herbert Spencer – by says: How dreary and desolate existence would be if it had to be exhausted only in the succession of generations that are produced one after the other, if the wheel of existence would run in such a uniform manner.

We see, then, that in the West and in the East, two representative human thinkers express themselves in opposite senses about the same area. It can be said that when Herbert Spencer deals with spiritual questions, he looks entirely at the external nature and only applies to the human soul what, in his opinion, can be accepted according to the pattern of recognized scientific conclusions and judgments. Solowjow demands the opposite, and that from the depths of the human soul. He demands something as the goal of human development that is also based on the succession of generations, but which goes far beyond what, in his opinion, would exist in a uniform course of the same wheel, which would only ever turn in history.

Now, one seems to me to be as imperfect as the other. In Herbert Spencer we see how a thinker cannot rise, I might say, from the depths of natural science to the heights of the riddle of the soul. In Solowjew we see how from mystical depths there emerges the indefinite, very mystical-sounding demand for immortality, but how here, too, there is absolutely no way to arrive at real knowledge in this field. And perhaps it may be said, especially in the present time, that if one looks impartially at these two sides and is sincerely and honestly devoted to what has emerged as the highest flowering of Central European, of German intellectual life, that the deepening that is necessary here in relation to the riddle of the soul must be found precisely in this German intellectual life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to say first to show that one must indeed have ideas about the way in which people in the nineteenth century wanted to approach the riddles of the soul, how, so to speak, the soul are today's burning questions, and how the peculiarities of intellectual life in the most diverse regions of the earth present obstacles and hindrances to finding completely unimpeded paths into the regions in which the eternal of the human soul is rooted. At first, the human being appears to us as a unified being. And this is fully justified. But in this unified being, we must seek out the forms of reality that have entered into it. The way in which anthroposophy attempts to do this is often challenged by those who call themselves abstract monists or the like. Anthroposophy does not in any way offend against a justified monism. For no one denies that there is a unified activity in water when one shows how oxygen and hydrogen are effectively present in water. Nor does one deny what we encounter as a unified human nature when one conscientiously searches scientifically for the forms of reality that converge in human nature. But these forms of reality converge in a mysterious way. We see, when we devote ourselves to our external sensory observations and deepen these through recognized science, through physiology, biology and so on, the external physical corporeality of the human being. On the other hand, we see how the soul reveals itself out of this physical corporeality, how it permeates the physical corporeality, enlivens it and allows the spirit to flow into it.

But only when we realize, in an unbiased way, how these different forms of reality – the physical, the soul, and the spiritual – work together in the unified human being, can we hope to approach a solution to the riddle of the soul. Of course, I am not saying that the riddles of the soul can be definitively solved by anthroposophy today, but one can hope to point out the path to the solution. And again and again one is pointed to the two ends of physical earthly existence that approach man so mysteriously, when the great riddles of the soul come before one's eyes. One is pointed to birth and death. Let us first consider these physical ends of human life, and then ascend into the supersensible realm.

What the outer physical body of man is, we basically only see in its very own form in the corpse before us. Therefore, it is actually quite correct what many naturalists have said: that the characteristic of death is actually the presence of the corpse. This is also true for death. But if you look at what you are facing in the corpse without prejudice, it is characteristic enough for the whole human being.

Du Bois-Reymond believed – as he stated in his famous lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” – that the human being, as a conscious, waking being, is not transparent to his own knowledge, that this knowledge reaches certain limits when it comes to human consciousness. From the movements that the matter in our nervous system undergoes, we cannot understand — du Bois-Reymond said — how we feel: “I see red, I hear organ tones, I smell the scent of roses.” But du Bois-Reymond thought that ordinary natural science could be used to understand the sleeping person, in whom consciousness has dawned, and thus precisely that which, in his opinion, is unfathomable for ordinary natural knowledge. No! But through that in which natural science is great today, the sleeping person can be understood just as little as the plant. What pervades a being as life can only be seen in supersensible knowledge, in supersensible contemplation, as I have characterized it in my writings 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and 'Occult Science: An Outline' and in the two lectures already mentioned. What pervades man as a sleeping being, as invigoratingly as a plant, cannot be known through ordinary natural science. Here, man is only accessible as a physical being after he has died. And when he has died and lies before us as a corpse, we see how he begins to follow quite different laws from those he followed from birth or conception to death.

But as the human corpse approaches its dissolution, it follows the same laws that we see in the natural world and that we understand through ordinary science. So that in what happens to the human corpse, we have before us what man would be if he were not permeated, as a corporeal-physical being, by a spiritual-soul element that must snatch him from death, from dissolution, in every moment of life. For the laws of nature that we fathom with ordinary natural science dissolve the human organism, and what holds it together must therefore follow different principles.

Thus, we get to know the human being in his or her physical body, when it is detached from the soul and spirit. The laws that are effective there must be effective in the human being throughout his or her life on earth, because they are the laws of the physical, chemical existence of the substances and forces that the human physical body contains. They are now overcome in the opposite direction by what is in the human being besides these substances and physical forces. But if one wants to get to know the human physical body in its purest form, then one must seek it out in the corpse. There the human being is completely surrendered to external physical nature, and there one can see how he carries this physical organization within him in whatever way.

Now, in the books and lectures mentioned, I have pointed out that there are dormant forces in the human soul that can be awakened, just as forces are gradually awakened in the soul of a child as it lives in a dream-like soul life. If only human beings had the intellectual humility to say to themselves one day: You were once a very small child with a dream-like soul life that poured into your physical being; education and life have brought out of the depths of your thought, feeling and will, which you have today for orienting yourself in the world and for knowing yourself, and which, above all, has led to the triumphs of recognized science, especially natural science. But can we not assume that, when one has everything that life and education and inherited traits can give one, one nevertheless, at some point in one's mature life, presupposes soul abilities - if I want to express myself scientifically - as 'latent' in the soul?

Can we not say that at any given moment in our lives we can take our own soul life into our own hands and continue it from the point where we left off? Only practice can prove that this is possible. But the practice of anthroposophical research also shows this. I would like to mention only briefly that it is through inner soul exercises that such dormant abilities are awakened in people. These soul exercises, which relate primarily to the life of imagination and thought, consist of meditation, of systematically regulating concentration on very specific conceptual complexes. What do we achieve when we strengthen and energize our souls in the way described in the books mentioned?

Just as a muscle, when used, strengthens through use, so our soul abilities are also strengthened and invigorated in a very specific way when such soul exercises are done by a person with perseverance over a long period of time. And if I am to characterize how people come to such abilities in the normal way, I would like to say: When we, as honest people, look at our thoughts and how they develop from our outer perception and from the phenomena of life, then we can only say: It happens in us in such a way that we would have to confess: “It thinks in us.” For the fact that I think, it announces itself to an unbiased self-examination: we notice how “it” thinks in us. And we refer this thinking back to ourselves by seeing thinking revealed through our body and say, “I think,” while for ordinary consciousness and for ordinary science we should actually only express, “It thinks in us.” But when we strengthen the soul life through appropriate meditation and concentration exercises, then we really come to the inner consciousness that may express, “I think.”

For then thinking breaks away from what the physical organization is. I know how many paradoxes are expressed for today's consciousness with such a sentence. But here again, anthroposophy, with its research, which is a vivid one, proceeds with great caution and criticism. Anthroposophy is well aware of how ordinary thinking is bound to the physical organization of the human being. It does not present itself in an amateurish or dilettantic way. It agrees with those who study the central organ of the nervous system, the brain, and show us how this or that part of the human soul abilities turns out when this or that part of the brain is removed. Anthroposophy also examines how memory and the ability to remember are connected to the physical organism. And that is why it comes to the conclusion – which some may even misunderstand as a kind of materialism – that for the whole ordinary soul, the physical body is the absolute basis. But then, when appropriate meditation and concentration exercises are done and when the thinking is strengthened, the thinking as soul life breaks away from the physical organization, only then does the soul appear as an independent entity. Then the human being knows: “I think,” and in this “I think” he knows that thinking now proceeds as an independent process, purely soul-spiritual, no longer conditioned, no longer dependent on the bodily organization.

And in addition to the thought exercises, will exercises are added. Again, I would like to characterize only in principle how these will exercises lead to a very specific goal. One might say: Just as it is unjustified to say to ordinary thinking, “I think,” so it should be clear on the other hand that man, insofar as his own will flows into action, faces a real unknown. Take just the simplest volition, for example, raising an arm or a hand: First you have the thought of raising the arm or hand. This thought, however, is clearly in consciousness. But then something completely indeterminate comes, like what is experienced in consciousness as the goal of the action, flows down into the physical organism and asserts itself there as a volitional impulse. For in the end you see only the result of this volitional impulse: the raised hand, the raised arm. We see the beginning and the end of the whole process, the middle is shrouded in complete darkness.

As Anthroposophy develops its vision, it recognizes a similarity between what constantly comes about in the waking day life of the will and what thinking shows as peculiar between falling asleep and waking up. That which lies in between the thought of the goal and the thought that then states the achievement of the goal in the will, is something that stands before the soul just as the life of the soul that takes place between falling asleep and waking up. Anyone who, with the strengthened consciousness that can be achieved through meditation and concentration, observes how sleep approaches a person and how waking up happens again, knows that there is something positive in the process of inducing sleep. Not only does the physical body of the person enter into a different stage , but that in fact the soul and spirit carry out a positive action in falling asleep and waking up, that positive, only unconscious experiences take place in sleep, which are absolutely the same as those experiences that lie between the goal of an action and the thought that states the achievement of an action. So we are actually pursuing the achievement of an action into the waking life of the day when we pursue the will of consciousness in the ordinary life of the day. The exercises of the anthroposophical researcher are intended to penetrate into this darkness, where the will takes place in the ordinary life of the soul, if one does the exercises that I like to suggest on such occasions. There are many exercises, but I will now only mention those that are characteristic because they represent something fundamental.

Whereas otherwise, for example, the sequence of external facts is presented in the order in which they occur, the usual way to begin is to present this process in reverse, so that, for example, one feels a melody backwards or presents a five-act drama backwards in small sections, the fifth act first to the first or, as can be particularly fruitful for everyone, to imagine the course of one's daily life running backwards in pictures in the evening, so that if one has gone down a staircase, one goes up the stairs from bottom to top, from the lowest step to the highest. This causes the will, which lives in thought, to break away from the external world of facts and also from the human being's own physical interior.

So that, as on the one hand, through meditation and concentration, thinking becomes independent, free, and unfolds through these exercises of the will, now the will becomes something that is independent of the organism. While the ordinary will of man, in so far as it is dependent on instincts, drives, desires and emotions that have their basis in the body, while this will also has its basis in the body, it is made independent of physical body through such exercises of will.

And just as the human being, by making his thinking independent of his physical body, is able to look beyond birth and conception into his prenatal existence, and to see the soul and spiritual eternal in that existence as it was in a soul and spiritual world before descending into the physical existence in order to unite with a physical body, how, therefore, through the strengthening of the life of thought, the soul existence can be seen before birth or conception, so the image of what the human being will become after passing through the gate of death also arises through the will being trained. By creating certain aids for the will, which can thus be detached from the body, this will becomes more and more able to penetrate into the external objective existence free of the body.

A good training of the will, for example, is to walk alongside oneself critically, as it were, like a second personality, in relation to one's actions, deeds and moral motives, so that one can objectively view one's own actions as one would otherwise objectively view another person. In this way, one steel one's willpower inwardly so that it becomes independent of all corporeality.

This help is still very useful: I only need to describe how a person is always different after certain periods of time. We all know how we have changed after a decade in our overall state of mind and life. But what has made us different is life itself. Life has taken us into its great school, given us different or altered soul experiences, taken away certain habits, given us others, and so on. We are more or less passively surrendered to life when it is a matter of transformation, of metamorphosis of our own soul or bodily constitution. But if you take what is at work in your moral habits and motives into your own hands, for example by saying to yourself: You have a habit, you want to change it and make it completely different, or something similar, and if you practice it enough, especially if you set goals that run over time, then you will achieve more and more of what is the independence of the will from the physical body of the human being. But through this, something is developed into a power of cognition, of which one rightly says that it, as it is in ordinary life, should not become a power of cognition, and I know very well what speaks against the application of this power, as it is in ordinary life, as a power of cognition. But it should not be used in this way in anthroposophy either; it should be transformed. It should undergo a metamorphosis on a supersensible level.

It is love, the ability to love. In ordinary life, this ability to love is also bound to the physical organism. By doing such exercises of the will as I have indicated, and by inwardly freeing the will from the physical body, the human being becomes able to give himself completely to an external objective. But this is not a sensual objective, it is a spiritual objective. What has happened to man through such exercises, I can characterize as follows. But I ask you not to misunderstand what I give as a characteristic. It is meant in the very real sense, but meant for the further development of man's normal abilities, not for ordinary consciousness.

Take the human eye. It is relatively independent, integrated as a kind of independent organism into the human organism as a whole to a certain degree. We can use the eye appropriately in the service of our entire humanity by being fully transparent within ourselves. I would like to say in a figurative sense: the eye serves us because it is selflessly integrated into our organism. If the eye becomes cloudy, for example if its vitreous body becomes cloudy, if some kind of cataract occurs and it becomes filled with its own matter, then the possibility of looking out into the physical world of the senses through the eye also ceases. Now it is certainly not to be maintained that our physical organism, for example, can be compared to a diseased eye filled with its own substance in the ordinary course of life. But for higher knowledge it is. Precisely what makes it a healthy organism in ordinary physical life also makes it incapable of serving the human being to penetrate into higher, supersensible worlds in ordinary life. If, on the other hand, we do such exercises of the will as I have indicated, in order to penetrate what would otherwise remain dark in the will, then we also make the whole human organism transparent in a spiritual-soul way, so to speak, making it into a sense organ, an overall sense, a total sense. And by thus making the whole human organism as selfless in a certain respect as the eye is in the human organism for external seeing, we enable the human organism to look into the supersensible spiritual world in order to place itself in it. For these exercises, of which I have spoken, make the human organism transparent.

For ordinary consciousness, the ordinary human organism is indeed an obstacle to higher knowledge. It is the tool for ordinary life, for placing oneself in the ordinary world. But the human being can only place himself in the physical world by penetrating into this physical body with his spiritual soul. In a sense, this physical body is opaque. When it becomes transparent in the way indicated, we look out into the spiritual world. But by also tearing the will away from the physical body in this way, an image of death as it really is for the human being as a whole enters into our knowledge. By learning to recognize how we can remain in consciousness as human beings, independent of our physical bodies, and with our will power reaching into the future, we gain an insight into what happens to the soul and spirit of the human being when the corpse is taken up by the external forces and laws of nature. We gain a picture of the soul and spirit that frees itself from the body when the physical body of a person succumbs to death.

As you can see, dear attendees, anthroposophy cannot philosophically speculate or mystically fantasize about human immortality in some frivolous way. It must show step by step how the human being, in a systematic inner development, ascends to a state of insight that enables him, for example, to truly recognize what passes through birth and death as the spiritual-soul, eternal core of the human being, untouched by the physical body. And now we can say how that which, as a corpse after death, succumbs to the external laws of nature as physical corporeality relates to what can be attained as spiritual-soul in meditative or in will development. The path taken by anthroposophical knowledge and life is the opposite of that taken by the human being when, as a physical personality, he passes through death. Death unites the human being with physical-sensory reality, as we can see through it with our intellectual knowledge. What is experienced as an exercise in anthroposophical research methods unites the soul with the spiritual by tearing it away from the physical-bodily in terms of both thought and will. And by tearing the will and the thought away from the physical body, the mind, the sensation and the feeling, which is at the center of the soul's life and the most intimate of the soul's life, is also torn away from the physical body. One learns to recognize what can escape from death, and one learns to recognize it by simultaneously learning to understand what death actually means in human life under such conditions.

I have pointed out that the forces we find at work in the corpse are always present in the human being between birth and death, or between conception and death. The other forces I have spoken of, which are used in supersensible knowledge for the immediate spiritual-soul life that goes into eternity, are always present as the counterforces to those forces that become visible in the corpse at death, so that life is a continuous struggle between these two kinds of forces. And man, with his mind, which stands in the middle between thought and will, thereby takes part in this struggle and sees how the forces at work in the corpse are continually subject to a certain kind of decay. Why is that so? Well, the thinking of ordinary consciousness, being present between birth and death, turns to those forces that are at work in the corpse. You only need to remember the following – I could draw on much evidence from the depths of anthroposophy, but for today it may suffice if I merely point it out.

Whenever the sprouting and sprouted organic life that lives in nutrition takes over and develops particularly when the person remains asleep, whenever the constructive life that we develop particularly in childhood, where we have to shape our organism plastically, then the conscious thought life recedes. In the physical organism, the conscious thought life does not turn to the constructive forces, but to the destructive ones, to the dying forces, to those forces that only appear summarily, highly increased in a single moment, in human death. One would like to say: What appears in death in the highest degree, lives in us continually, and if it did not live in us, then ordinary human thinking would not be able to develop. This ordinary thinking turns to the forces that are always dying in us, to the destructive forces that age us in the second half of life by getting the upper hand against the forces that are also always present in us and rejuvenate us. These rejuvenating forces are active in our will and in the subconscious realm of thinking. But while ordinary cognition deals with the destructive forces, supersensible cognition, as striven for by anthroposophy, turns cognition precisely towards the opposite pole.

By making the human organism into a sense organ in a higher sense, as already indicated, man can make transparent what would otherwise be dormant, asleep, in the will, and can thus look into the spiritual world and get to know that which he cannot see in the state of sleep because of our own organism being opaque. This volition in the spiritual world becomes transparent, and we then look at the thinking of ordinary consciousness by learning to recognize the invigorating thinking that builds up the human being and works in from a spiritual world, by taking over what the human being receives through birth from the forces of heredity. What the human being receives in this way as growth forces can be applied as observing forces in observation and in experiment, while the physical experiment must turn to the dying forces. Thus we see birth and death continually at work in human nature. And by seeing death not only in that one moment of human life, but by seeing it spread in its individual [basic elements] over the whole of earthly existence, we confront it with what constantly fights this death and what, when we see through it, shows how the human being lives in an eternal existence that passes through birth and death unchanging, imperishable, one might say.

Anthroposophy seeks to follow the individual everyday events of the soul life — ordinary thinking, which it feels connected with the forces of dying, and ordinary willing, which it feels connected with the forces of building and growing — in such a way that, in their further pursuit, ways can be found to solve the great soul riddle of human immortality. I would like to say: The soul being is inwardly illuminated in terms of knowledge when we can add to what we have in ordinary soul life only as a reflection of sensory knowledge, in this way, supersensible knowledge. In ordinary life we carry the immortal soul within us, but this immortal soul is only filled with what it receives from external impressions. Even our memories are ultimately only reminiscences of external impressions, even when these external impressions have been taken up and transformed by the will and the mind. And even what ordinary mysticism often mistakes for a revelation proves to be only a reflection of the external physical-sensual existence for an unbiased knowledge. Man bears within himself the immortal, but he must first become conscious of the deeper reasons for this nature of his own in supersensible beholding, by transforming his whole cognitive faculty.

Then he penetrates through the gates that show the paths to the actual great riddles of the soul. In this respect, one can distinguish three levels of consciousness. And in these three levels of consciousness, all three of which can live in man, the path that man must take if he wants to solve the riddles of the soul is clearly shown. We shall disregard for the moment the very dull state of sleep, which is a kind of unconscious consciousness. But emerging from this unconscious state of sleep, as from the depths of a sea, are dreams, which are no less remarkable in their symbolism when they are considered quite impartially, as they sometimes appear to us, to mention just one example, as a visualization of conscience. One need only recall how, in a dream, when one has, for example, committed a sin of omission against a friend, this sin of omission emerges like a visualized conscience. One could point out many things in this regard.

But if one looks with an unbiased eye at what is present in this dream life, one must say: This dream life mocks everything that puts the human being into existence in an orienting way in the waking day life, through which alone he can fruitfully place himself into the world between birth and death. Where does this come from? Precisely those who see through the fact that man is present as a spiritual-soul being during sleep and that his consciousness is only subdued, will, when studying the dream life, be able to observe this sporadic flashing of consciousness in the dream in such a way that man then, with his spiritual soul, only comes to the periphery of the physical, that he does not yet fully enter the physical sphere when he wakes up or, when dreams accompany his falling asleep, step out of it.

When a person lives with their soul and spirit on the periphery of their physical body and this physical body faces them like a dark entity, then dreams burdened with arbitrariness arise. And when the human being's physical organization proves to be too weak to, I would say, fully absorb the soul and spirit into its own organization, to permeate itself with it and to permeate it with itself, then the spiritual-soul experience of dreams continues into the physical organism, where it becomes hallucinatory, visionary, mediumistic life, the kind of life that is easily suggestible, and so on. Yes, it is precisely those formations that arise when what should remain only on the periphery of the physical body as dream-like formations, as dream-like soul experiences, submerge too deeply into the physical organism that occur as pathological manifestations of the soul life. This leads those riddles of the soul life that are connected to the hallucinatory, visionary or medial life towards a solution. Anthroposophy must take a negative view of precisely these phenomena if they are to assert themselves in such a way that something of the spiritual world can really be recognized through them. But when the human being, with his soul and spirit, not only hovers on the periphery of the physical, but when he completely submerges himself in his physical body so that the two become one, when the arbitrary life of the dream the dream images are permeated by the forces of the orientation lines, which are formed from the laws of the full physical body with the outer physical nature, then the healthy, waking day life enters. Then what the physical human organization is has become one with the spiritual-soul in its dying and building powers; then they work together as one.

But the human being, who lives in his spiritual-soul, works through the instrument of the physical body, which gives him orientation in the physical-sensory world. When, through the exercises described, the human being not only becomes completely one with his physical body in his spiritual and mental being, but, beyond that, the whole physical organism of the human being becomes a sense organ, then the third state of consciousness occurs - supersensible consciousness. Then the ordinary waking consciousness of the day relates to supersensible consciousness in the same way that a dream relates to the waking life of the day. In approaching the riddles of the soul, we can distinguish between the darker consciousness of the dream, the lighter consciousness of the waking day, and the supersensible consciousness. It is the last that leads us into the eternal depths of the human soul, to the questions of our pre-birth and our immortality. Even those riddles that point to the morbid side of psychic life can be solved by comparing their phenomena in an appropriate way with what can develop in a healthy way as supersensible knowledge.

I have thus attempted to show what supersensible knowledge can achieve in relation to solving the riddles of the soul. The possibility of developing such supersensible knowledge, as I have described it, is only available today, after humanity has passed through the scientific age and has been able to obtain the corresponding knowledge through the conscientiously developed, serious, scientific methods. Therefore, the safest way to proceed in the field of supersensible knowledge is not to be a layman or a dilettante in the field of natural science, but to have learned how to really research in the field of natural science, and to leave to natural science what is its own, and then to leave to the spiritual what belongs to it.

But in earlier times, people always had some kind of idea of how to penetrate the hidden depths of the soul life, which today is achieved by strengthening the soul life. People spoke of a threshold that must be crossed if one wants to penetrate into the real soul life, and they spoke of how one can speak of crossing this threshold through an intuitive consciousness. But there were also very characteristic ways of speaking about how this knowledge of the supersensible is a healing process. The human striving for health in intimate community was found to be connected with this permeation with supersensible knowledge. Now, in relation to the soul life and its riddles, one will learn again that a process of healing is indeed taking place through the fulfillment with supersensible knowledge. To understand this, one does not need to be a psychologist oneself, just as one does not need to be a painter oneself to appreciate a picture. Just as one will be able to appreciate a picture if one has been raised healthily, so will the one who has been educated correctly in terms of common sense be able to understand what the anthroposophist says and judge whether it is healthy or unhealthy for a person. One can verify through common sense what the anthroposophist claims, and one will feel nothing in it, by taking it in, other than something that connects with the whole soul of man in a healing way, which above all supplies man with the forces that give him moral and social support and lead him to what can give moral impulses from the spiritual world.

For this reason, I was obliged to speak of supersensible forces as early as the beginning of the 1890s in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, where I presented as moral intuition those forces under whose influence man becomes a morally free being, so that what is to be gained through anthroposophical knowledge already exists in a presentiment in our moral life and in our ordinary consciousness. And by inwardly opening our cognitive powers to the forces that live in it, we equip ourselves with currents that have healing powers and give our lives support. In this way, anthroposophical knowledge does not give man theoretical views, but something that flows into his entire existence, connecting the reality of external nature with the inner moral world, so that these two no longer fall apart into two. And anyone who has ever stood before the full extent of the soul questions that arise here will also understand how one can strive for a knowledge of the soul, as spoken of here.

If someone today is honestly grounded in natural science, then he looks to an origin of the earth – even if the Kant-Laplace theory is modified today – from which physical existence emerges from a pure physical nebula gas ball, and from this later emerged what constitutes the higher natural kingdoms and also man. And today's physics shows how the end of the earth will one day be concluded in the heat of death, how through a great corpse that will be buried, which man perceives as the content of his human dignity, his human value and his moral value. Through these scientific ideas, man today gets an idea of the arbitrariness of the sensual-physical world, because the sensual powers necessarily give rise to forms of appearance, in contrast to which the moral world would have to be abandoned to decay if the powers assumed by science were to have exclusive validity.

But if we look at the world in such a way that we do not turn to the ordinary powers of thought, to the powers of dying, to which intellectual knowledge turns, because it is bound to the powers of dying and with these powers can only grasp the dead, inanimate nature, but if we point to the immortal, living nature of the world's existence, by rising from the ordinary knowledge of the soul to that knowledge of the soul that is given to supersensible vision, then our soul is anchored in an immortal world existence, and only then is a prospect of a true solution of the soul's riddles opened up. If someone now wanted to say: But this anthroposophy lacks the secure foundation of external knowledge of facts, because it only wants to build on what has been developed from the inner life of the soul. So anyone who sees through everything that I have only been able to hint at today will still say to themselves: Such an objection is like the one that someone would make who said: Everything must stand on firm ground so that it does not fall. That is of course true for things that stand on the earth. If, on the other hand, we look out into space, it would be foolish to ask: What does the earth rest on, what does the moon rest on, what do the other bodies of the universe rest on? They simply have their support in their mutually interacting forces; they support each other.

And one must recognize how what anthroposophy undertakes to achieve actually characterizes the world from the most diverse perspectives and thus supports each other. Until one has grasped the cosmic aspect of anthroposophical knowledge in this way, one will always think that it is unfounded, just as one could foolishly think that the earth is unfounded because it does not rest on a firm foundation in the universe, as every other body does rest on a foundation. Sensory knowledge and intellectual knowledge must rest on a foundation. But that which is developed out of the soul in the manner indicated bears itself, in that it seeks to penetrate from the most diverse sides into the supersensible realm of existence and thereby also prepares the way for the real, vital solution of the soul riddles.

Thus we can say: just as the soul riddles are connected with the processes of recovery and illness of the whole human being, so too must the processes of recovery lie in the penetration of the knowledge of the supersensible human nature, in the knowledge of the true immortality of the human being. In its own way, the most recent period would have to restore the instinctive knowledge of earlier times.

Words of truth do indeed come up from the depths of man's older striving, but modern times cannot strive for knowledge in the same way as earlier times. Natural science has taught us to strive for knowledge in a different way with regard to human existence and natural existence. And just as knowledge is sought in the natural realm, so too in the supersensible realm, not in the manner of nebulous mysticism, but with a clear development of the powers of knowledge into the eternal. But when this happens, then the modern man, who has found support in life in the face of the riddles of the soul's life, may speak again as the ancient Greek once did: “When you leave the body and ascend to the free ether, you will be an immortal god, having escaped death!”

Dear attendees, Anthroposophy is misunderstood and often denounced today not only because we have to talk about it differently than about the things that conventional science talks about, but rather because it has to talk not only about different things but also differently, in a different way. That it has to talk about different things than ordinary science, that is basically what anyone who expects anything at all from supersensible research expects. But that it must also be done in a different way, I might say, if the word is taken in a higher sense, in a different form of expression, is something that is not expected. For centuries, a very definite way of thinking and expressing what has been thought and researched has been developed, through natural science, which has achieved such great triumphs. This form of expression appears to people of the present as something so certain, so well-founded, that they cannot tolerate it when a different way of speaking about a field of knowledge that is actually much closer to the human being is required.

Now, however, many of our contemporaries undoubtedly feel that the scientific approach does not even come close to the most important thing for humans, especially when it is applied most faithfully and most conscientiously in its field. And that is why many souls of the present are looking for a way to that which is so close to the human soul in terms of questions and riddles, I would even say, that although they do not impose themselves from the outside through nature, they do impose themselves through the very nature of the human being.

If we want to talk about these latter riddles, characterizing them, then perhaps, my dear audience, we may recall a saying of a spiritual mystic, Meister Eckhart, who once said: What use is it to me – or: What use would it be to me to be a king if I didn't know that I am a king! if I had no idea at all that I am a king?

Now one could even admit that one could perhaps still benefit from being a king even if one did not even know it. But what Meister Eckhart wanted to express applies to something else to a much greater extent than to his comparison. It applies to being truly human.

If we ask ourselves impartially, are we actually human in the full sense of the word if we are not aware of our humanity? If we cannot say to ourselves: What is our actual essence as a human being?

When we thoroughly ask ourselves this question, we are already struck by how little the natural sciences actually tell us about the most important aspect of this question: what we are as human beings.

One could cite many things if one wanted to characterize the full depth and full significance – the depth and significance of the soul – of this question. One could approach this characterization from the most diverse sides. Today, since I have often been able to speak in this city on topics similar to today's, I would like to start from the fact of life, I would like to say which, most intensely from the external world of facts, presents the real soul riddle to man.

Perhaps one can say: This fact presents the real soul riddle to man most selfishly. But this mystery of the soul is presented by this fact – presented in a way that is, I would say, generally self-evident. Let us keep this fact in mind, this fact of death in all its significance. Let us try to present this fact simply and impartially to our souls.

Death, as is sometimes said today by natural scientists, is characterized by the fact that a corpse is present. A trivial fact, certainly, but precisely as a trivial fact, perhaps one of the most harrowing of human physical existence. What can we see when we place the fact of death, the existence of the corpse, before our soul without prejudice? It begins at the moment when the physical body has become a corpse. For this physical human being, a path of development begins for what is within him, outwardly material-physical. This path of development takes a completely different course than it did before the point when the human being had to pass through the gate of death.

We see how that which remains of a person as a corpse – regardless of whether it is consigned to the fire or the earth – unites with the elements of nature, how it is taken over by the elements of nature, and how these elements of nature now assert their being, exercise their dominion over that which is handed over to them by the physical person. The substances and forces in the physical body of man no longer follow the laws that they followed until death, at least initially according to the external visible world; they follow the laws that are imposed on them by external physical nature, which until death the human being has only observed.

So that we can say: It is the outer world into which man dies, not only at the moment of his death, but by the fact that it receives him into its laws as a physical human being, he dies into this outer physical world.

If you look at this fact with an open mind, then, I would say, all kinds of human soul mysteries flow out of this contemplation. And above all, an important question presents itself to a person if he is open-minded enough.

He looks at the various elements that receive his corpse, that is, his outer physical body. He says to himself: These elements into which my physical body is absorbed, basically they have the same effect as they do out there, by absorbing my physical body; after all, they bring the same into me every day during my life. By absorbing food and drink, he absorbs those substances and forces into himself, to which he is handed over at death.

Can we reasonably assume that the laws of the substances and forces to which we are consigned at death as physical beings, that these laws only exist out there in the world? Must we not reasonably assume that what takes us in after death, by entering our physical body as food and drink, unfolds the same laws within us? A lawfulness that is only overcome by the inner being of the human individual?

We see, I would like to say, the way to one side: the surrender of the human physical body to the substances and forces with the same laws that we actually take into our physical body.

Of course, one would have to give many details if one wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery of life, I would say of the soul, which this fact so poignantly presents to our soul, if one wanted to go into it in full detail.

But another question immediately arises: Can external natural science, which is mainly devoted to care, to observation through the senses, to knowledge through experiment – thus again to observation through the senses – and which is devoted to the training of that mind that is bound to this observation and to these experiments, can this external natural science get close to the most essential part of the human being? It can certainly get close to that which, after death, is handed over to the physical elements and their laws. It can certainly also approach that which is incorporated into the physical body every day on the basis of these physical laws; and with its conscientious methods, it can also investigate the laws — which, in the human body, are no different in that they concern the substances and forces of the external world, and are thus life in the external world itself — it can follow the laws of that which is absorbed by the human body every day. But it can also follow the human being with his mental expressions; it can follow what significance that which we take in daily has for the mental life of the human being. And in this respect, natural science has already done an extraordinary amount, and there are very justified ideals in this regard.

What can already be known today about the significance of the brain and nervous system for the imagination, what can be known about certain processes that are connected with correct or incorrect nutrition or correct or incorrect food processing, and which also exert an influence on the soul, all this can be conscientiously pursued by external natural science, and it is doing so today. And anthroposophy would not be able to justify its existence at all in the face of what science has been able to achieve if it did not fully recognize what science has been able to achieve in this direction. Therefore, it is always and repeatedly a misunderstanding of what anthroposophy wants to be when it is brought into any kind of opposition to contemporary science. There is no such opposition. Anthroposophy fully recognizes what science is able to achieve!

But now it will also be readily admitted: Yes, in this physical body, into which the substances and forces of nature, endowed with external laws, are taken up, in this physical body all kinds of things happen; all kinds of things happen, of which the soul initially knows nothing, of which the soul gradually acquires knowledge by pursuing science, physiology, biology and so on. In this physical body, however, regardless of whether the soul knows or does not know what is going on, the causes for the way the soul feels in the individual and how it feels through a certain overall mood nevertheless lie. That which one has no need to know for a long time, what one can call general indispositions, whatever diseases may be present in the organs, that may sound in the soul. It is expressed in the soul as a mood. It does not need to take root in consciousness at all; it expresses itself in the general mood of the soul.

So that one must, I would say, presuppose much that is present in the material processes and effects of the physical organism, and which works in such a way that the soul has a share in it. But inasmuch as the soul has a share in it, it has a share in what already works during life, and in the way those forces work to which the physical body is handed over after death.

We carry within us – honored attendees – the same laws that bring about our destruction as a physical human being. And since these same laws come into us with food and drink, our soul participates not only in what is sprouting and sprouting power within us, but our soul participates in all that ultimately expresses itself by destroying our physical being. As the substances and forces of the external world work in us, the soul participates in our decay even during our lifetime. And when the series of facts that arises when it is presented to the soul without prejudice, then one learns to recognize: Death, which stands before us as a single moment at the end of our physical life, is ultimately only that which, as it were, adds up to what basically rules and reigns in us throughout our entire physical life. I would like to say: parts of death, the smallest parts of death, so to speak the atoms of death, are within us in every moment of our physical life, and our life of soul is partaken of these atoms of death.

This is expressed in the human soul in everything that arises in the mood through which the soul participates in the destructive forces of the world, in the world's forces of destruction. And however complicated the human soul may appear, one thing is true: the most important moods of doubt, of despair, those moods that often arise without any external cause, at least without any noticeable external cause, that often weaken the human being and conjure up the most important riddles of life from the deepest depths of his soul, which trouble him in both health and illness throughout his entire life. These riddles arise from the soul's participation in the world's forces of decline.

When we look deeply into what is working its way up out of the depths of the soul and into consciousness – consciousness does not know what it is, but consciousness has the working within it, has the experience of it in its soul mood – when we are fully aware of this, , then those other riddles of the soul emerge before consciousness, those that point, as it were, in the opposite direction, those riddles that people have always associated with the word that is the opposite of death: the word “immortality”.

The question of immortality is not just a selfish question for humans – arising from our desire not to disappear with death, for example – but the question of immortality is intimately connected with what can be called, in the sense of Meister Eckhart, the example of the king, what can be called: Man is only then fully man when he really knows of his own being.

But, my dear attendees, I would like to say: this knowledge, insofar as we can acquire it through external natural science, this knowledge takes away the fact of death. For everything we can know, even if it is the greatest and most significant thing about a human being, which we can know through experiment and observation, can only relate to the body and must lose its significance for the human being with death, because it relates to something that merges into the non-human, that is, non-natural, being. And man must ask himself the question: Can we look at the dissolution of the physical body in a similar way to which we can look at the inner mysteries that the soul experiences by participating in the destructive forces of the world? Can we look in the same sense at the creative forces of the world, at the sprouting, sprouting forces? And this is the direction in which, out of the same spirit that modern science has adopted and out of the same scientific conscientiousness, anthroposophy wants to point.

But it cannot hint, I would say point, to something that can happen every day, like death, before the eyes of every human being; it can only lead, this anthroposophy, to this – when viewed according to the opposite opposite principle of research into the reality of life — only by pointing to something that does not initially reveal itself as an external fact, nor as an internal fact of the soul's life, something that must first be achieved by the soul.

Death – dear audience – voluntarily places itself before the soul. We must first work for the knowledge of the nature of immortality if we want to recognize it. At least in its innermost essence, no knowledge of it can be bestowed upon us.

Therefore, it must be pointed out again and again that anyone who now wants to knowingly follow the path to the world of the soul, the actual essence of the soul, can only do so through inner activity, through inner work. That is, through what I have often referred to here as soul exercises.

Now, my dear audience, we will be able to form an idea of these soul exercises from the point of view that is necessary for today's topic if we first visualize how human soul life is in fact a unity. We first survey this soul life by looking within ourselves. It surges, I might say, up and down. It expresses itself in images through which we visualize the external world. It expresses itself through feelings, sensations, and will impulses that lead us to our actions and that we, as a member of the social order, allow to appear to us from the soul throughout the world.

That which surges and weaves within man as images, feelings, sensations and impulses of will, that which, with the means of external natural science, is pointed to as that which only can be investigated with the means of external natural science, which is pointed to that which only dies with death. This can be seen today by many people who are only unbiased enough to look at what this soul actually is, how it is quite different from that which is accessible to external sensory observation and experimentation. And then such people turn away from scientific considerations, because they believe that only science can exist for external nature, and they then turn to certain - as it is called - mystical endeavors.

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, must not be confused with mysticism, which only wants to penetrate into the soul life, as it is said, through self-absorption; because Anthroposophy is real science and knows how to look back into the ordinary, earthly – if I may put it this way – soul life of man in such a way that one can indulge in great illusions and great deceptions.

Anthroposophy is less prone to delusions than its opponents and well-meaning critics might think! It is very often believed that anthroposophy is devoted to those inner forces that lead to illusions, hallucinations, and all kinds of mediumistic phenomena. They do not notice that the whole way in which Anthroposophy characterizes its research methods goes in the opposite direction to anything that could possibly lead to illusion, hallucination, vision and so on. What Anthroposophy is about is, above all, absolute clarity about what presents itself to the human being at first. There, the one who really looks inside without prejudice, who actually, I would say, follows the instructions of the mystic, will see what an uncertain thing this looking inside is, how, for example, memories that point to earlier childhood, how these memories simply arise in later life and how one does not recognize that what arises as a thought is actually only a memory, a reminiscence of something previously experienced. And if these memories were to emerge unchanged, one would soon recognize that one is dealing with mere memories. But in the human interior, the ideas of external experiences are absorbed into the feelings, into the impulses of the will, even into the temperament, into the whole human organization, I might say into the intimate human health and illness. And after decades, transformed into a completely different form, the ideas can arise, which are nothing other than what was ignited by external observation. The person who often believes he is a mystic

looks into his inner self and has such ideas, they appear to him as if they had never been borrowed from the outside world, as if they came from the eternal depths of the human soul, as if he could directly experience from such ideas how the soul in divine-spiritual worlds, [in] the world's reason, in the eternal is connected and the like.

Those who are aware of the metamorphoses and transformations that memories can undergo also know that they cannot rely on such introspection. And so, on the one hand, the results of natural science appear to the unprejudiced, showing how the soul is bound to the physical in earthly life, to that physical which is handed over to the outer forces of nature at death; and on the other hand, what often appears is the nebulous, foggy mysticism, through which one nevertheless comes to nothing other than to bring up from the soul that which one has again received through this outer world, albeit so transformed that one does not recognize it, that one regards it as belonging to a completely different world.

It is precisely when a person has prepared himself sufficiently to recognize how little external natural science and how little mysticism can give him, that he comes to recognize the value and significance of those soul exercises that simply consist in not merely brooding or looking inwardly at our soul life, but in bringing it into inner activity, so that it becomes something other than it is in everyday existence.

Nature takes our body with us at death; it incorporates the substances and forces of this body into its own laws. What anthroposophy aims for as the path to the opposite goal is the surrender of the soul for incorporation into that which is opposed to outer nature, into the spirit. Just as the physical body is surrendered to external nature at the time of the outer physical death, so now, not in a mere formal act of knowledge but as an inner fact of anthroposophical knowledge, the souls are surrendered to the spirit so that they may unite with the spirit.

And just as the fact of human physical destruction confronts us with death, so the immortality of the human being confronts us with the soul, in that we unite soul life with that which, as spiritual life, as spiritual being and spiritual weaving, underlies the whole world.

What anthroposophical knowledge strives for, as an actual inner experience, is the opposite of what the event of death is for the physical human being. And just as the soul participates in the processes that take place down there in the physical body organization, and how these physical processes play into the soul's mood, even when the soul is unaware of its essence, so it is that our soul is united – it is just becoming apparent in the knowledge that I will speak of in a moment – that our soul is united with the spirit on the other side, that it is only through this side that it comes to know its experiences by striving for knowledge as fact, as actual inner experience. And this actual knowledge can be attained by developing one's thinking on the one hand to a greater extent than in ordinary life, through inner activity, and on the other hand developing the will more than in ordinary life.

Between the will and the thinking lies the mind, with the feeling right in the middle. The most precious treasure of human life is this feeling, this mind. But when we develop thinking on the one hand and will on the other, the mind and feeling go along with it and become something different themselves.

In order for us — my dear audience — to be able to communicate with each other about the way in which thinking is developed on the one hand and will on the other, we must realize that the soul is nevertheless a unity — in its surging, weaving life a unity —, despite the fact that it lives on the one hand according to thinking, on the other hand according to will and in the middle according to feeling.

When we look at the natural world around us, for example, we must first engage our senses. But what we perceive through our senses is then processed by our thoughts. If we were to apply our will in this process, we would not be able to obtain a true knowledge of nature. We would not be able to do so if we let the will that permeates us in everyday life, if we let it flow into our thinking about nature. We would receive fantasies instead of natural laws. The conscientious scientific method cannot be involved in this.

It is precisely in those ideas and thoughts that we have to develop in relation to the external world, in our soul life, where the will recedes for the everyday and also the ordinary scientific life and the thought appears in a certain one-sidedness, as a mere image of what is present externally, and we have the actual will on the other side. Let us be honest about the actual will. Let us take a simple volitional impulse: I raise my arm, my hand. First of all, I have the intention that something should be lifted at some point. And then the intention, which is a thought, goes down into subconscious depths, unites in a certain way with the organism. How this is not seen through in everyday life, because what [happens] is first of all an experience again, that becomes clear again; the beginning and end can be clearly seen. What lies in the middle, how the will shoots into the organism, as it were, and brings the intention about, that has plunged so deeply into the subconscious as the life of a person from falling asleep to waking up.

One is tempted to say: in relation to his will, man is indeed asleep even when he is awake. From the intention to raise the hand, the arm, to the observation of the raised hand, the raised arm, the everyday consciousness basically sleeps, falls asleep, while the will impulse shoots into the organism, and only wakes up again when the result is seen. Then the will comes to meet us, not interspersed with thoughts. But this will is, I would say, something so alien to our consciousness as what takes place around us between falling asleep and waking.

Now, one can develop the human soul further in both directions, both in the direction of thought and in the direction of will, than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. And what do we have to do in these two directions, in the direction of thought and in the direction of will?

I have already said, my dear audience, that the will takes a back seat to the thought. The thoughts that give us clarity about the world make the will recede completely. And the will impulses that are in everyday life make the thought recede, as I have just explained.

But nevertheless, in thought, and in the most abstract and in the most concrete thoughts, there always lives a remnant of will, it is just not conscious. And in every volitional impulse lives a thought. The thought flows in somewhere and then appears again in the result. If we now seek the will in the thought and the thought in the will, then we exercise the soul in both directions. What does it mean to seek the will in the thought? This is achieved by practising what I have already characterised here several times, by practising meditation and concentration, because that means the soul resting on certain ideas that are presented to it in a completely comprehensible and clear way, like mathematical concepts.

In this often years-long devotion — it takes less time for one person and longer for another, depending on their abilities —, in this devotion to comprehensible ideas, a power of thought is developed, as is what is not present in the ordinary consciousness of the will, as is the will element in thinking, how it intervenes in our organism, and now in our complete organism, one discovers —- while otherwise one always only looks at the thought —, one discovers within the life of thought the otherwise hidden life of will; then the first element of supersensible knowledge enters into human consciousness. For what mingles with our thoughts — I would almost say intrudes — is not, as is usually the case, a pale and abstract thought life. It brings something into our thought life that is as alive and intensely inward as we otherwise experience only in our outer sense perceptions. What we otherwise have as a pale, abstract thought life within us becomes so vivid, so alive, by discovering the will in it, that we have an afterimage of the outer sensory perception in our thought life. And so these processes take place in such a way that complete consciousness — as we develop it in a mathematical problem or as we develop it in a geometrical task — is present in all soul exercises that lead to such, I might say will-veiled pictorial thinking.

Anyone who observes what I have described in detail for these concentration and meditation exercises in my books “Occult Science” and “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and in my book “Puzzles of the Soul” and in other writings, will see how unfounded it is to claim that some kind of dreamy soul life should lead to what has been described as imaginative cognition, as pictorial, cognizant inner life, that all processes are such that we, I might say — if I may use the trivial expression — approach them so soberly and with such sound common sense and finally take possession of this imaginative thinking as we approach and take possession of the solution of a geometrical problem. One would like to say: everything that has to be done to achieve such knowledge is practised in such a way that it can be justified before the most transparent, before mathematical knowledge. And actually one has to say that it is most surprising that it is not precisely mathematicians who sympathize with the innermost essence of anthroposophical research method. For the soul activity that is exercised in anthroposophical research is basically the same as that exercised in mathematics, only that the content is different: in mathematics it is formal, while in what is to be considered an anthroposophical research method it is one that leads into reality, into actuality.

And indeed, we are led into a very definite reality if we allow thinking, through meditation and concentration, to grasp the otherwise neglected element of will. For it is here that the first result of supersensible research, of supersensible knowledge, really comes to us. And that is what I have called in my books the formative forces of the human body.

When we have brought thinking to this stage, to imagination, then we learn to live, not in abstract thinking, but in a kind of thinking that is much more real inwardly than abstract thinking. Now we learn to live into a living thinking, into a thinking that flows into reality and takes in our soul. We live ourselves into a thought organism. And the first result appears before us: it is what stands before us in a large tableau of life, what has been working since our birth, inwardly, permeating our physical body as a supersensible one, precisely the body of formative forces.

This body of which I am speaking here is not spread out in space like the physical body; this body is a time body. Just as the individual organs are related to one another and interact in the physical body of space, so the processes of time from our birth to death are a great unity in this formative body. What the formative forces body experiences from, for example, the age of 45 to 50 is connected to what has been experienced between the ages of 10 and 15 in the same way as, let us say, some part of our brain is connected to the part of our heart or stomach in the physical body. We have a temporal body that is attached to us, but which represents a thinking that has become active, a thinking that at the same time has forces of growth within it, forces that are sprouting and sprouting growth. We now not only feel what we have inwardly lived through since our birth here on earth – like the stream of memory from which one or the other memory emerges – but we feel how these memories are only the abstract upper waves of what surface of ordinary consciousness, what lives in our metabolism, what is in the movement of our hearts, what lives in our activity, our nervous system, but what becomes visible as a spiritual body, as a supersensible, etheric body.

The stages of knowledge of earlier epochs, which could not yet recognize these things as clearly as today's anthroposophy strives to, but which had an inkling from dull clairvoyance, knew that such a formative body exists. Then it was called the ether body or life body. I do not want anything other than what I myself have characterized here to be understood by these expressions! And so, as in a large tableau, we discover what we are as a unity, since we have had a physical body on this earth.

The first supersensible element — dearly beloved attendees — is not yet something that leads us beyond our earthly existence. Anthroposophy must continue to advance conscientiously in stages, but it is the content of our earthly existence, the first supersensible element within us, this body of formative forces, which is organized in time, as our physical body is organized in space, characterized.

But we can move forward. We can carry out a next exercise, which, so to speak, is still linked to thinking, to meditation and concentration, but which at the same time leads beyond them. It consists in the fact that, after we have initially concentrated, we first turn our entire soul attention to an idea in meditation, so that we perceive nothing of the rest of the world, but turn the soul only to this one idea; then we strengthen the soul through this concentration, as we otherwise strengthen the muscle that repeatedly and repeatedly performs a task. So, through this ever-recurring concentration and meditation, we grasp some conceptual complex that is easily manageable, and this strengthens the soul; we ascend to what we have just described – to the apprehension of the will element in thinking – so that imaginative knowledge may arise. Although common sense always remains with this anthroposophical method, we must still say that something like a second personality is added to the person as he usually is, which now experiences what I have described, let us say, for example, in imaginative knowledge.

The difference between anthroposophical experience and experience as a medium is that the person experiencing hallucinations or visions as a medium lives with his whole ego, with his whole personality, in these states, which are definitely connected with his physical development. He loses sight of what he otherwise is; he lives only in what presents itself to his soul in an abnormal way.

The person who immerses himself in imaginative knowledge and also in the higher levels of what I am about to describe, sets a second personality apart from himself, the observer of the supersensible; but he always remains there, controlling and criticizing this observer of the supersensible, with his healthy human understanding, as he is in ordinary life.

Therefore, anthroposophy can be presented to anyone, it can be grasped with common sense, because even in the one who is an anthroposophical researcher, what presents itself to him in supersensible vision must first be checked and criticized with what he has remained alongside, with the bearer of common sense. But it is the case that by first concentrating on certain ideas, by doing so one also maintains the tendency, the inner tendency, to now keep these ideas in the soul, not to let go of these ideas again. It takes more strength than for ordinary forgetting to bring such ideas, which one has first placed in the soul with all one's strength, with the strongest strength of inner attention, out of the soul again.

The second exercise has been achieved, which must develop ideas that one has concentrated on sharply, I would say, that have taken over one completely, in order to get them out again. So that, after one has concentrated, I would say, after one has meditated on them, one can put down what I call empty consciousness.

When you develop this empty consciousness, when you develop the power to create this empty consciousness, you apply it from meditation, concentration, and then this consciousness is not filled with memories or impressions of the external world; it is truly empty.

But then, when this consciousness is empty, it does not remain empty for long, because the outer world penetrates into it, because one has initially created this consciousness oneself, one is awake without any content. But after some time, the content comes – which otherwise comes to us through development and is processed with the ordinary mind – that is the content of a supersensible, a spiritual world. And by having attained this imaginative realization through meditation and concentration, by having established this empty consciousness, one thereby gains insights into the spiritual world, into the supersensible world, which surrounds us just as the sensual world surrounds us. Now one learns: Once one has attained this — I now call it the initiated consciousness —, once one has attained this initiated consciousness: Now you stand inside everywhere in the spiritual world and besides with your common sense, your healthy senses, you have the same insight into the physical-sensual world as you otherwise have as an earth human.

The fact that these things develop side by side is the essential thing; then man will never be able to enter into pathological states when he is engaged in such research methods. But if one has trained oneself to suppress these forces, these images of meditation and concentration, one can create an empty consciousness and can also suppress the tableau of life that our inner being, our body of the power of becoming, has placed before our soul, how it has worked, how it has woven in all of us a supersensible one, since the beginning of our earthly existence. We can now, when we have appropriated these forces to create the empty consciousness, we can eliminate — when we have first brought the formative body into consciousness —, we can eliminate this formative body itself. We gradually achieve such a strong power that we can now also switch off this, our own spiritual world, that we can create an empty consciousness in relation to it. But then – my dear audience – when we create an empty consciousness in relation to this body, then the human soul, the human consciousness, is not merely filled with spiritual-soul content from the environment, as I have just described, but then this consciousness of the human being is filled with the spiritual and soul content that we ourselves were before we descended from the spiritual and soul world and accepted our physical body through the inheritance of matter and forces from our parents and ancestors. That is to say, we arrive at an understanding of what we were before we took on a physical earthly body. That is to say, we arrive at an understanding of our being before birth or before conception. This arises in supersensible knowledge, the second stage in the inspired knowledge that is attained in the way I have just described.

Anthroposophy is not able to conjure up something out of thin air, nor out of lightly-draped mysticism, but rather, anthroposophy must gradually conquer the insights by first drawing on the strength in the human disposition that leads into the supersensible existence. One defames anthroposophy when one merely calls it a philosophy. It is not based on philosophical speculation, but on a vision that is as vivid as any [sensory] vision can be, but which must be achieved by developing the powers that otherwise only slumber in the soul, as I have indicated in principle, and as you can find in the further explanations of it in the books mentioned.

But now, my dear attendees, something very special presents itself to the spiritual researcher. At the moment when he, so to speak, gets to know his humanity, his soul nature, as it was before his descent to earth, at that moment his physical body appears to him like an external object. He now lives, so to speak, with his newly created personality, as it were, transferred back to his existence before his physical body was. He now has this physical body in front of him as something external. And by having this physical body in front of him as something external, he looks at this physical body – that is what must be taken into account. He does not see this physical body merely as it is in ordinary life for physical perception, but he sees this physical body according to its inner organs, although these inner organs are spiritualized.

If you imagine the human heart, the human lungs, the human brain, the various human organs, not in physical terms with physical contours, but as processes, as inner activity, as ascending processes of becoming and growth, as descending processes of destruction and death, interacting with one another, if you think of the inner human organism in this way – but not the human being as a whole, as we usually have him before the physical observation, but also physically, but the physical in spiritual translation, I would say, if you imagine that, then this is what stands before the human being in the same moment when he sees his spiritual-soul existence as it was before he descended to earth.

I do not shrink back, my dear audience, because the things I am talking about are certain results of spiritual scientific research, and since I am simply, of course, unable to give all the intermediate links, which can, however, be found in the books mentioned can be found in the books mentioned, but I want to list the results — to say, at least in some areas, what must nevertheless seem quite paradoxical to today's man, namely to present that which, at the stage I have just characterized, to man, in the following way.

Consider, my dear audience, look into your inner being, you will find memories in your soul, memories that are connected with experiences, and believe that what emerges in the inner life of your soul as a pictorial life of ideas, as perceptions permeated with feeling, is what has been experienced. You can distinguish exactly, I would say the fine, delicate weaving of the soul that you recognize; and you can relate it to the robust outer physical of life, to which it is to be related. But what would happen if the following were to occur? If suddenly something were to emerge in the soul that makes you say to yourself, “Yes, where does that come from? I have never experienced anything like that.” You will not rest until you can relate what has emerged in your soul, which comes across like a memory, to a specific experience, and then you will be calm. And you always relate what is a fine spiritual weaving in your inner being to something robust and material in the outside world, to which you have had a connection.

Now, in the face of inspired knowledge, it is the case that the person is standing before his soul, I would say the entire interior of his organism with all the individual organs, with the forces that compose these organs, lungs, liver, everything is there; the person is looking at it from the inside as a physical being. Only, in recent times, this physicality appears to him to be more spiritually permeated, but it is the physical organization. And that is like having nothing but memories – we can compare it to that – of which we do not know what they refer to. But we can learn what what we encounter in our own organism refers to in the outside world. We learn, namely, by having acquired the empty consciousness, to see the outside world in a new form.

You see, my dear attendees, through our physical vision, also through physical science – astronomy, astrophysics, astrochemistry – we see the physical sun in a more or less precise or imprecise outline. But that is not the whole of the sun, just as what we see with our physical eyes is not the whole of the human being. In the moment when empty consciousness is established, we see, in addition, what presents itself to the outer eye in outer science, so to speak, a solar element that weaves through all of space that is accessible to us and that wafts as a form of power, that physically concentrates there, but that also spreads. We see a solar element in all of the space that is accessible to us.

And this sun-like quality, which is only recognized by the empty consciousness in inspired knowledge as a living being, this sun-like quality, when we meet a person, it combines in a remarkable way with what we recognize of ourselves. We perceive his physical body with our outer senses. Then, in a sense, what his physical body is as an extension is summarized in his soul. We have to imagine the soul as a concentrated form of the spatially extended; when we look at the outer great nature, at the cosmos, the conditions are the opposite. There is, for example, the physical body of the sun, the concentrated form, and the spiritual, which is now the form that is widely extended in space. But we perceive it. Just as we perceive the physical body of the human being with the outer senses as the widely extended, and only grasp it as concentrated in the soul, so we perceive the sun as an external revelation; and we perceive an inner configured life and weaving through the whole space accessible to us, an extending force-end of the sun-like. We observe how it lives into the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, and also into the physical life of man. We now begin to relate something certain in our heart, in our lungs, to the sun-like, which we have only glimpsed through inspired knowledge.

And in the same way, we learn to recognize the spiritual aspect of the moon, the moon-like, and relate it to something else. We learn to recognize the sprouting, sprouting forces in our organism as the solar aspect; we learn to recognize what are the forces of decomposition, what are the forces of destruction, as the moon-like. We learn to relate other things in the great cosmos to the inner being.

Now, what are we learning now? In our ordinary lives, we encounter external events of a robust nature; these are the physical events. They are reflected in our thinking, in our feelings, as it were. We carry the spiritual within us. Externally, there is the robust physical. In relation to that which we perceive from the cosmos as spiritual, this spiritual is out there, and within us are our physical organs. Just as our ideas, our memories, are images of the physical universe that we experience, so our physical organs — as their spiritual translation shows us — are internal images, if I may use the term, physicalized images of that which is spread out in the great cosmos. We learn to relate our organs to the great cosmos, to relate them to the whole cosmos, that is, to the spiritual content of the cosmos. We grow with the riddles of our soul into the riddles of the cosmos, which we learn to look at externally.

Now we come to the thought exercises, and I would like to say that in addition to the transition from the thought exercises to something else – which I have characterized in the empty consciousness – we must add the will exercises.

A simplest will exercise – my dear audience – can still be done with imagining and thinking. It is carried out by doing what I would call backward thinking. Everyone can do these exercises in a simple way by recalling the events of the day backwards in reverse order in the evening, letting them pass before the soul; first what happened before going to bed, then something that happened a little earlier, and so on back to the morning, in as small portions as possible. One can also feel a special interest, one has a special interest from the event, one has a special interest in the processes from the fifth to the first re-experienced [real process]!

What is achieved through such real processes? It is, despite arising from the imagination, an exercise of the will. Otherwise, by imagining, we abandon ourselves to the external sequence of facts. We develop our soul life on the thread of external events, of external facts. Now we resist with our imagination what is there as a consequence of the external facts. We reverse the thought. To do this, a strong force is to be applied, a strong application of force is necessary, a stronger force than we usually apply. The will gradually moves out of our thinking.

We can then strengthen such exercises of will if we gradually break certain habits that we have and transform them into others. If we go even further; for example, if we say to ourselves at a certain age: You now want to get into the habit of something that for you is like a temperament trait, like a very intimate, inner, ingrained habit. It will take years before it becomes something natural in you, but you want to work on yourself daily. If you take yourself in hand, if you really take something that arises from thought and incorporate it into the will, then the will becomes something completely different! And then what happens is — it seems like just a comparison, but it is absolutely a reality, ladies and gentlemen. How is it that our eye is organized in such a way that it can serve to see? It is because the eye's own substance does not assert itself, but is, so to speak, selflessly integrated into our organism. In the moment when the eye asserts its own substantiality, for example in an eye disease, we can no longer see! Seeing – and the same applies to the other senses – perception is only possible because the organ of perception switches off its own materiality, in that it becomes, as it were, selfless.

Now I would never claim — of course not — that our whole organism is somehow diseased in relation to ordinary life or ordinary science. But this ordinary organism that we carry with us in our earthly life is, after all, designed for our external everyday life, for our ordinary, everyday consciousness. It is very healthy for that, but not for higher experiences, not for penetrating into the supersensible world. In this respect, it is like a diseased eye and, on the contrary, I would say it becomes even less transparent when we merely carry out mental exercises. Through these mental exercises, precisely that which is our heart, our lungs, becomes more opaque, like an external object. Through the exercises of the will, this opacity is accompanied by a transparency. We gradually come to perceive what actually happens between the intention to raise the arm and hand and the actual effect. That which, between one thought and the next, is immersed in sleep, that which descends as will into the organism, becomes tangible to perception.

But through this the organism — of course in the spiritual-soul sense, not as with the eye, but in the spiritual-soul sense — the whole organism becomes spiritually-soul transparent. In spiritual and soul terms, the human being becomes a single sensory organ. In this way, I would say, the human being develops opacity in one direction by getting to know his organs and learning to relate them to the cosmos. And on the other hand, by being able to pass arbitrarily from one to the other – that is what matters – he also develops the transparency of his whole organism.

And when he develops the transparency of his organism, then – my dear audience – that which otherwise appears in the physical world is developed to the highest degree in the spiritual-soul sense: the unfolding of love, that love which also underlies all our truly free actions, as I summarized it for the moral world – presented in my “Philosophy of Freedom” already in the early nineties – and which shows that in the spiritual life which is characteristic of ethics, of morality. I have described this special inclination of the will to the activity that unfolds in love from its ethical point of view; now I have to describe it from the point of view of knowledge.

But in this way, man comes to be truly free with his will from his physical organism, as he is free in seeing with his eye. He sees spiritually and soulfully through his physical organism. And he sees into the spiritual and soul world, so that he stands in it as he stands in the physical through his senses in a physical way. He learns to live in intuitive knowledge, which now stands in the reality of the spiritual.

Now, as the next experience, the image appears, the pictorial content of what the person then really experiences by passing through the gate of death. Man first became aware of his spiritual self in this order of realization, as I have described to you, independently of his physical body in relation to his thinking. In this way he gains knowledge of his being as it was before birth, or before conception. Now he becomes free of this body with his will, in that the body becomes transparent spiritually-mentally, in that the human being is in the spiritual-mental world. Now he has the image-knowledge of the real process that takes place at death, when the body not only becomes transparent, but is discarded, given over to the element of earth, and the spiritual-soul connects with the spiritual-soul world.

This has been prepared for through our entire life on earth, that what we behold through meditation, concentration and empty consciousness of the prenatal, or what lies before conception, is interrelated, that it connects with what emerges from the will. We learn to familiarize ourselves with the nature of thought through will, and in the same way we learn to familiarize ourselves with the nature of will through thought. World thoughts open up to us, not subjective thoughts, but thoughts that work out of the world. The world becomes transparent to us in thought when we place ourselves in this world in intuitive knowledge. The event of death appears before us, but it contains the causes for a real knowledge that has been conscientiously developed and that only those can confuse with all that appears today as occultism and the like who do not enter into that which is repeatedly and described as the conscientious method by which man can ascend to a spiritual realization that really allows him to approach the realm where the soul mysteries are experienced, but where also those experiences come up that are in a certain sense actually the answer to these soul mysteries. For in life we do indeed enter into facts.

We had to point out on the one hand the event, the fact of death. Then the soul leaves the body, leaves the body with which it was connected during its earthly existence. Man connects with the physical-sensual world in its conformity to law. And on the other hand, the person develops inwardly that through which the soul unites with the spiritual, as I have described. There the soul unites with the spiritual, and it experiences how, after it has detached itself from the body, it develops further with the spiritual as a unity after death, until it has developed to the point of birth or - we say - conception in the spiritual-soul world. And just as we have processes below that are simply carried over from the external natural laws, which play into the soul during life on earth, effecting its state, its mood, its happiness and unhappiness — as this is announced from within, so those processes are now weaving themselves, where the prenatal and the post-mortal elements interact. Just as we are dependent on our body, so we are dependent on our spiritual. And just as that which remains unconscious in the body remains unconscious for the soul until it is scientifically investigated by it, so that which flows to the soul from the spiritual, giving it mood, state, happiness and unhappiness, remains unconscious for the soul to which the receptive human soul is accessible at all.

That which is unconsciously experienced in the spiritual as an analogue, as the unconscious in the physical, plays as great a role for the soul and its independence as the physical and that which is linked to the physical. After all, something else is also similar to death, but in its similarity it is opposed to death; with our physical body we live in the outer world. By constantly absorbing this outer world through food, by allowing the laws that are in the outer world to continue to work in us, and by living in the spiritual world on the other hand, we absorb the spiritual laws into ourselves. And the spiritual laws touch the physical laws within us.

But what is the case with regard to physical laws? They are life, they are rhythmic life, they are constantly renewing themselves. We have to eat every day. If I may say something very trivial: we cannot be satisfied with having eaten yesterday or the day before or the day before that and remembering it today. This is the case with the external abstract, the knowledge intended for the ordinary consciousness; we do not assume that the memory of eating is enough for us.

What we take up from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is something that, in the spiritual realm, must have the same rhythmic existence for the human being as the physical and bodily processes otherwise do. We cannot remember — and be satisfied with — what we absorb as anthroposophy, as we can do in chemistry or in the external sciences.

Those who have ascended to the highest regions of anthroposophy feel that they must return again and again to what is for them the perception of the higher, supersensible world; otherwise something arises in them like spiritual hunger. This is just as real. Indeed, one cannot be satisfied with ordinary memories. We enter into a reality by seeking out that which shows us how the soul is connected to spiritual life.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what Anthroposophy has to say about the riddle of the soul, at least the beginning, I would say. In the short time available in a lecture, I had to sketch out how anthroposophy delves into the field of soul mysteries, how it actually shows, not just adheres to everyday life, but how it points beyond birth and death, how it points to a supersensible world, to which the soul with its eternal essence belongs as it belongs to the physical-sensory world with its body. By facing the fact of death, the human being learns to see through the reality of anthroposophical knowledge, and thus to achieve something in anthroposophical experiments, or let us say the beginning of a solution to the riddle of the soul, that becomes a truly necessary spiritual nourishment for him again and again.

But this is how knowledge comes into being that is alive. And anthroposophy is the basis for knowledge that is alive, that is not dead knowledge that is valid only for memory. But this is also how something arises from anthroposophy that can be something for life. But I need only point to one area, to the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and led by me, where teaching is given and education is cultivated entirely in the spirit of such an understanding of the human being, as it can arise from the contemplation of the whole, full human being, even in the child. We do not seek to realize this in the external transmission of a worldview. We do not teach an anthroposophical worldview. It is not suitable for children in the form in which it exists today. But what arises from the anthroposophically oriented worldview for teaching and education is a real engagement with the child's being, a real engagement with the true being of the human being.

What is needed in education today, which will develop humanity? Humanity will have to engage with the great tasks of life in a completely different way than is already the case today. Humanity will have to engage with the ever-increasing tasks of life in education and teaching in a completely different way than people are already capable of today.

And however much one may have against the Dornach building – and this applies to those present – it is shown in the artistic realm that which is otherwise presented in words as a world-view content!

Dear attendees,

I would like to use the following comparison again and again: take a nut and its shell. In the nut shell, in its curves and bends, you have the same laws, the same formations at work as in the nut kernel itself. The anthroposophical world view makes it just as necessary as it is necessary for the nut to form its outer shell according to the nut kernel, to have some corresponding outer framework. It could not have had just an outer shell. It could not have been something that does not have an inner life. No mere architect could possibly have erected a good building; that could not be the case with what we are developing as an anthroposophically oriented worldview.

What is willed by mere life for good seeing, what comes towards us as genuine forms, what comes towards us as genuine artistic forms in the pictorial and sculptural, must, although it remains artistic, contain no single symbol, no single allegory; instead, everything has flowed into the artistic. But it must have the same effect as what is otherwise presented in words at the Goetheanum. What is presented on the stage in Dornach is only a different artistic language for that which lives when it wants to become a word, in order to go out into the world as a word of world-view.

But what leads into spiritual, supersensible worlds, in that it proceeds from clear, methodical thinking and methodical research as never before in any external science, what leads into the supersensible, that not only provides a foundation for a living knowledge, for a living science, not only a creative force for artistic creation and artistic enjoyment.

No matter how much one may have to criticize Dornach and his style – I am my own harshest critic, and some things would not be built the same way again – one only learns through practice. But that is not the point. What matters is the will! What matters is that one can truly strive towards a living artistic style from a living world view, so that the outer shell within the world works according to the same laws as the nutshell according to the nut, and like the nut kernel also has an outwardly corresponding shell. How external some old architectural style would be to a world view that is now being born out of the immediate urges and longings of contemporary humanity! But such a striving must at the same time lead into the deepest foundations of the human being.

What I mention last is not the last, and one might actually think that those who are public representatives of religious denominations would see not some antagonism in anthroposophy, but rather a help. For people today are shaped by popular science, even in the most popular knowledge and in the simplest minds. And that which presents the content of the supersensible must be measured against the education of humanity. Today, even at school, work is done according to the habits and methods of external science. In this way, the connection between the human being and the supersensible world is increasingly being neglected. Religious life would increasingly be allowed to fade away if it did not receive a new foundation, if it did not receive the support of knowledge, of provable knowledge of the supersensible world.

Therefore, the representatives of religious denominations should look to anthroposophy as a helper that wants to support precisely that which they should support most, and to do so in a way that present-day humanity will increasingly want to see. A Christian is truly a fainthearted one who does not realize that his Christianity is only truly supported by Anthroposophy in the present; no longer by that which is traditionally reproduced, but through the living contemplation of the Mystery of Golgotha, which we arrive at when we pass from the solution of the soul riddle, as we have presented it to our souls today, into the depths of religious life.

The third thing that should arise from this world view, which presents itself to the world as Anthroposophy , that does not want to think alone, that wants to become alive inwardly with all the soul forces in man, that wants to make an inner, spiritual man within the outer, bodily man tangible for one's own consciousness.

But that is what makes anthroposophy — however imperfect it still is today —, it is in its infancy, and I am the first to admit its imperfections, but I am also the one who could write all the criticisms that are written today myself. For the one who dares to say such things before the world today, as well as the things that have been said here before you today, also knows what can be objected to them, and he does not need to wait for what comes from this or that side as a judgment, out of an awareness that does not yet want to engage with Anthroposophy. He will not find anything new in the judgments, which mostly arise from a lack of understanding! I want to say this to show that the one who is inside Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, should not be surprised by what is encountered!

Dear attendees! If consciousness that does not engage with anthroposophy were right, then anthroposophy would not be needed. If anthroposophy could easily please everyone today, then it would not need to come forward at all! It does not aspire to be immediately accepted today, for it speaks to forces that lie much deeper in the soul; and yet it knows that even in those who contradict it, these yearning, driving forces for a scientific, artistic and religious deepening are present.

New paths are being sought in all three fields. Anthroposophy is aware of the weaknesses that still afflict the present day. But it would like to be — let me say this at the end, ladies and gentlemen, through its special method of research, through the life it evokes in the soul as a result of this method of research, through the deepening to which it can bring feeling and artistic insight in man —, it would like to be a foundation of a spiritual science. It wants to be that which leads people to the creativity of artistic creation and artistic attitude. And it ultimately wants to be that which inwardly develops a strong, soulful, spirit-filled vehicle for religious life as well.

If it endeavors to work in these three directions, then it may perhaps believe that it is working in the spirit of the most significant demands of today.

As Anthroposophy spreads to fields where men usually seek their religious and, maybe, their moral impulses also, it encounters many persons who feel drawn towards such a spiritual stream. The modern spirit, which yesterday I allowed myself to call “the scientific spirit”, has, in many respects, shaken old, traditional beliefs, and although many people approach the anthroposophical line of research somewhat sceptically, there are, nevertheless, very many to-day whose souls have at least an inclination towards it. But it is correct to say that, in one respect, Anthroposophy encounters difficulties when it would enter the fields of the various sciences. That is the particular aim of this course, and it will be my task to present here, in the main, the general, more comprehensive principles and results of our research, while the other lecturers will deal with special scientific fields.

But precisely such an arrangement must arouse all the antipathies—I use this word more in a theoretical than in a moral sense—which Anthroposophy encounters from scientific quarters. I can only assure you that one who is engaged in anthroposophical research fully understands how difficult it is for a man involved in scientific work to-day to pass from the scientific attitude into Anthroposophy. Although Anthroposophy has certainly much to correct in present-day science, and, at the same time, when organic and spiritual fields are included, very much to add to the present material for research, it does not of itself come into conflict with current science. It accepts the justified results of science and deals with them in the way I have just described. The reverse, however, does not occur; at least, not yet—as one may well understand. Anthroposophy is rejected; its results are not regarded as satisfying the strictly scientific criteria that one feels entitled to impose to-day.

In a short lecture I shall not, of course, be able to go into all that Anthroposophy can itself bring forward to serve as an effective foundation for its results. But I should like in to-day's lecture to attempt to characterise the position of Anthroposophy among the sciences, and to do this in a way that will enable you to understand that Anthroposophy, in laying its foundations, is as conscientious as any science with its own precise technique. For this, however, I shall have to inflict upon you somewhat remote discussions—things which in ordinary life may be called difficult but which are necessary in order to provide a certain basis for what I shall have to offer in an easier and, perhaps, more agreeable form in the next few days.

Many people to-day imagine that Anthroposophy starts somehow from the nebulous attitude of soul to be found in present-day movements that are really “mystical” or “occult”. But to ascribe to Anthroposophy such a very questionable foundation is a complete mistake. Only one who knows Anthroposophy only superficially, or, indeed, through its opponents, can do that.

The fundamental attitude of consciousness in Anthroposophy has been drawn from that branch of present-day science which is least of all attacked in respect to its scientific character and importance. I admit, however, that many of our adherents—and opponents too—fail to perceive correctly what I have now to characterise by way of introduction.

The position of mathematics among the sciences has already been mentioned. Kant's pronouncement, that in every science there is only as much real knowledge—real cognition—as there is mathematics, is widely known. Now I have not to deal here with mathematics itself, with its value for the other sciences and in human life, but rather with the mental attitude a man assumes when “mathematicising”—if I may use this word; that is, when actively engaged in mathematical thinking. His attitude of soul is then, indeed, quite distinctive. Perhaps we may best characterise it by speaking, first, of that branch of mathematics which is usually called geometry and, at least in those parts of it known to the majority of people, has to do with space, is the science of space.

We are accustomed to speak of three-dimensional space; we picture it so constituted that its three dimensions, as they are called, stand at right angles to one another. What we have before our mind's eye as space is, in the first place, quite independent of man and the rest of the world. And because man as an individual being orientates himself in accordance with spatial laws, he pictures space before his eyes, independent of himself. He can certainly say that he is at this or that distance from any selected point; thus he inserts himself into space, as a part of space. And by regarding himself as an earthly being and assigning to himself certain distances from this and that star, he inserts himself into cosmic space. In a word, man regards space as something objective, independent of his own being. It was this that led Kant to call space an a priori intuition (eine Anschauung a priori), a mode of intuition given to man prior to experience. He cannot ask how he comes to have space; he must simply accept it as something given; he must fit himself into it when he has attained full earthly consciousness.

But it is not so in reality. We human beings do actually build space out of our own being. More correctly: we build our idea (Vorstellung), our mental perception (Anschauung), of space from out of ourselves. Only, we do not do this consciously, because we do it at a time of life when we do not think about our own activities in the way that would be necessary if we were to come to a clear understanding of the nature of space in relation to our own being. Indeed, we should not have our intuition of space (Raumanschauung) if, in our earthly life, we did not first experience its three dimensions.

We do experience them. We experience one of them when, from out of our inability to walk upright from birth, we raise ourselves into the vertical position. We learn this dimension from the way in which we build it. And what we learn to know is not just any dimension, set at right angles to the other two. We learn to know this quite definite dimension of space—standing vertically, so to speak, upon the earth's surface—from the fact that we human beings are not born upright, but, in accord with the formative laws of our earthly life, must first raise ourselves into the vertical position.

We learn to know the second dimension of space in an equally unconscious manner. You will be well aware that man—to mention what pertains more to his inner than to his outer being—in developing the capacities which serve him in later life, learns to orientate himself from left to right, from right to left. One need only recall that we have our organised speech centre in a certain area of the brain, the so-called Broca convolutions, while the other side of the brain has no such organisation. One also knows to-day—and from accepted science—that the development of the speech centre on the left side of the human body is connected with the mobility, spontaneous at first, of the right hand. One knows, too, that an orientation from right to left develops, that this activity excited on the left by an activity on the right, or vice-versa, is experienced by us within the laws that form us—just as we experience our achievement of the upright position. It is in this co-ordinated orientation of right with left, or left with right, that we human beings experience the second dimension of space.

The third dimension of space is never really experienced by us completely. We first focus this so-called “depth-dimension” as we try to gauge it. We are constantly doing this, though deep down in the unconscious. When we make the lines of vision of our eyes intersect at a point and focus both eyes on this point, we expand space, which would otherwise have only two dimensions for us, into the third dimension. And with every estimate of spatial depth we build the third dimension unconsciously out of our own being and the laws that form us.

Thus one might say: we place, in a certain way, the three dimensions of space outside us. And what we conceive as space, the space we use in geometry—Euclidean geometry, at first—is nothing more than an abstraction from what we learn to know concretely, with our own organism, as the three dimensions linked to our own subjective being. In this abstraction the quite definite configuration of space is ignored; the definite directions—vertical, horizontal and depth—have equal value. (This is always done when we make abstractions.) And then, when we have constructed, by abstracting from the three-dimensional space experienced within, the external space we speak of in geometry, we extend our consciousness through this external space alone.

We now come to the important thing. What we have won from out of ourselves is now applicable to external nature; in the first place, to inorganic, lifeless forms, though it can also be applied to the spatial and kinetic relations between organic structures. Briefly, this fact largely determines the character of our external world. Having accomplished this transition (this metamorphosis of space) from one domain, which really lives in us, to space commonly so called, we now stand with our spatial concepts and spatial experiences within the outer world and are able to determine our position and motion by spatial measurements. We actually go out of ourselves when we construct space in this way. We lift out of our body what we have first experienced within ourselves, placing ourselves at a point of view from which we look back upon ourselves as filled with space. In thus objectifying space we are able to study the external movements and relative positions of objects with the help of ideas formed geometrically within space; we feel thereby that we are on firm scientific ground when we enter into objects with what we have formed so earnestly from out of ourselves. In these circumstances we cannot doubt that we can live within things with what has come from us in this way. When we judge the distance, or the changing distance, between two bodies in the outer world according to spatial relations, we believe we are determining something completely objective and independent of ourselves. It does not occur to us that this could be otherwise.

Now, however, a fundamental and important problem confronts us here. What we have experienced subjectively in ourselves, transforming it, in the case of space; simply by making from it a kind of abstraction, now becomes something permeating—to a certain extent—the outer world and appearing to belong there.

Anyone who considers impartially what confronts us here must say: In his subjective experience of space in its three dimensions and in his subsequent objectifying of this experience, man stands within the external world with his own experiences. Our subjective experiences, being experiences of space, are at the same time objective. After all, it is not at all difficult, but trivial and elementary, to see that this is so. For when we move ourselves through space, we accomplish something subjective, but at the same time an objective event occurs in the world. To put it another way, whether we see an automaton or a man move forwards, subjectivity does not come into consideration. What occurs when a human being lives spatially is, for the external disposition of the world, quite objective.

If we now focus attention on the human being as, in this way, he objectifies something of his subjective experience, moving himself in an objective domain by himself traversing space—for, in objectifying space, he really bears this space within himself also—we are led to say: If man could do with other experiences what he does when “mathematicising”, he would be able to transfer, to some extent, the mathematical attitude of soul to other experiences. Suppose we could shape other experiences—our mode of perceiving the qualities of colours and tones, for example—in the same way that we create and shape our experience of space from out of ourselves! When we look at a cube of salt we bring the cubical shape with us from our geometry, knowing that its shape is identical with the spatial concept we have formed. If we could create from out of ourselves, let us say, the world of colour, and then confront external coloured objects, we should then, in the same way, project (as it were) into the outer world what we first build up in ourselves. We should thus place ourselves outside our body and even look back upon ourselves. This has been accomplished in mathematics, although it remains unnoticed. (I have given a geometrical illustration; I could give others also.) Neither mathematicians nor philosophers have paid attention to this peculiar relationship that I have just put before you.

In regard to sense perceptions, however, science has become really confused. In the nineteenth century physiologists joined hands here even with epistemologists and philosophers, and many people think with them as follows:

When we see red, for example, the external event is some vibration which spreads itself out until it reaches our organ of vision, and then our brain. The specific sensation of red is then released. Or the tone C sharp is evoked by an external wave motion in the same way.

This confusion has arisen because we can no longer distinguish what lives in us—within the confines of our body—from what is outside. All sense qualities (colours, tones, qualities of warmth) are said to be actually only subjective, while what is external, objective is said to be something quite different.

If now, in the same way in which we build the three dimensions of space from out of ourselves and find them again in things (and things in them)—if we could, in the same way, draw from ourselves what appears in us as sensation, and then set it before us, we should likewise find in things what we had first found in ourselves. Indeed, looking back upon ourselves we should find it again—just as we find in the outer world what we have experienced within us as space, and, looking back at ourselves, find that we are a part of this space. As we have the space world around us, so we should have around us a world of intermingling colours and tones. We should speak of an objectified world of flowing colours and singing tones, as we speak of the space around us.

Man can certainly attain to this and learn to know as his own construction the world which otherwise only confronts him as the world of effects (Wirkungen). As we, albeit unconsciously, construct for ourselves the form of space out of our human constitution and then, having transformed it, find it again in the world, so we can train ourselves, this time by conscious effort, to draw from out of ourselves the whole gamut of qualities contained in the world, so as to find them again in things, and then again in looking back upon ourselves.

What I am here describing is the ascent to so-called “imaginative perception” (imaginative Anschauung). Every human being to-day has the same space-world—unless he be abnormally mathematical or unmathematical. What can live in us in like manner, and in such a way that we experience with it the world as well, can be acquired by exercises. “Imaginative perception”—a technical term that does not denote “fancy” or “imagination” in the usual sense—can be added to the ordinary objective perception of objects (in which mathematics is our sure guide), and will open up a new region of the world.

I said yesterday that I would have to expound to you a special method of training and research. I must describe what one has to do in order to attain to such “imaginative perception”. In this we come to perceive as a whole the qualitative element in the world—just as, in a sense, we come to perceive space (which has, at first, no reality that engages our higher interests) as a whole. When we are able to confront the world in this way, we are already at the first stage of super-sensible perception. Sense-perception may be compared to that perception of things in which we do not distinguish between triangular and rectangular shapes, do not see geometrical structures in things, but simply stare at them and only take in their forms externally. But the perception that is developed in “Imagination” is as much involved with the inner essence of things as mathematical perception is with mathematical relationships.

If we approach mathematics in the right frame of mind, we come to see precisely in the mathematician's attitude when “mathematicising” the pattern for all that one requires for super-sensible perception. For mathematics is simply the first stage of super-sensible perception. The mathematical structures we “perceive” in space are super-sensible perceptions—though we, accustomed to “perceive” them, do not admit this. But one who knows the intrinsic nature of “mathematicising” knows that although the structure of space has no special interest at first for our eternal human nature, mathematical thinking has all the characteristics that one can ask of clairvoyance in the anthroposophical sense: freedom from nebulous mysticism and confused occultism, and the sole aim of attaining to the super-sensible worlds in an exact, scientific way.

Everyone can learn from a study of “mathematicising” what clairvoyance is on a higher level. The most astonishing thing is that mathematicians, who of all people ought to know what takes place when a man is “mathematicising”, do not show a deeper understanding of what must be presented as a higher, qualitative “mathematicising”—if I may use this word—in clairvoyant research. For “imaginative” cognition, the first stage in this research, is only a perception that penetrates other domains of existence than those accessible to “mathematicising”; and it has been gained by exercises. In respect to human perception, however, much is understood differently once one is able to survey, in genuine self-knowledge, the whole inner nature of “mathematicising”. For example, one arrives at the following:

On looking back to the way in which we came to know in early childhood the structure of space—by walking and standing upright, by orientating ourselves to right and left, by learning to gauge the depth-dimension, by connecting all this with the abstractly perceived space of geometry (which the child learns to know from inner experience)—we realise the serious and important consequences that follow if we cannot look back to the living origin, within our own being, of space—of our conception and perception of space—but simply accept it in its already transformed shape, independent of ourselves. For example, in recent times we have come to regard this space (with its three dimensions) in such a way that we have gone on to postulate a fourth and higher dimensions. These spaces and their geometries are widely known to-day. Anyone who has once learnt to know the living structure of space finds it most interesting to follow such an extension of mathematical operations (applicable to three dimensions) and to arrive at a fourth dimension that cannot be visualised, and so on. These operations are logical (in the mathematical sense) and quite correct. But anyone who knows the genesis of our idea of space, as I have described it, will detect something quite special here. We could take a pendulum, for example, and watch it oscillate. Watching it purely externally, we might expect it to swing further and further out. But it does not. When it has reached a definite point, it swings back again to the opposite side. If we know the relation between the forces involved, we know that the pendulum oscillates and cannot go further because of the relation between the forces.

In respect to space, one learns to know (to some extent) such an interplay of forces in the constitution of our soul. Then one views these things differently. From the logical, mathematical standpoint one can certainly keep step with those who extend their calculations from three-dimensional to four-dimensional space. But there one must make a halt. One cannot pass on into an indefinite fourth dimension; one must turn back at a certain point, and the fourth dimension becomes simply the third with a minus sign before it. One returns through the third dimension. The mistake made in these geometrics of more than three dimensions is in going on abstractly from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth dimension, and so on. But what we have here, if I may express it in a comparison, is not simple progression but oscillation. Our perception of space must return into itself. By taking the third dimension negatively, we really annihilate it. The fourth dimension is the negative third and annihilates the third, making space two-dimensional. And in like manner we can find a quite real progression, even though, logically, mathematically, algebraically, these things can be carried further and further. When we think in accordance with reality, we must turn back at the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions to the space that is simply given us. With the sixth dimension, we have abolished space and reach the point.

What really confronts us in the culture of our age? This—that its thinking has become abstract; that one simply continues along the line of thought that takes us from planimetry, stereometry, etc., whereas reality leads us back at the fourth dimension into space. But, in turning back then, we are by no means where we were when we found our way into the third dimension by gauging distances. We return spiritually enriched. If we can think of the fourth dimension (the negative third) in such a way that we return with it into space, then space becomes filled with spirit, whereas three-dimensional space is filled with matter. And we find space filled with ever loftier spiritual configurations when we pass along the negative third and second and first dimension and reach the point where we no longer have spatial extension but stand within the unextended—the spiritual.

What I am now describing is not formal mathematics, but the reality of spiritual perception. It is a path in real conformity with the spiritual and in contrast to the path that has adapted itself so closely to material appearances alone. This latter path, even though keeping close to mathematics—which does not, of course, work in a material way in the soul—leads nevertheless to an imperceptible world in which one can, at most, only calculate and construct imaginary mathematical spaces.

You see here that, by penetrating the mathematical domain completely, we are led to apprehend the inner nature of the spiritual present everywhere in the world. To understand the mathematical attitude of soul is to be led directly to the concept of clairvoyant experience. And then we raise ourselves to “Imagination” and, in the way I have still to describe, come thereby to a comprehensive survey of the spiritual that can be perceived, not in the ordinary way, but in the way I have put it here—that is: by going out of the third and into the fourth dimension, and so on, and coming to the domain of no-dimensions—that is, the point. This leads us spiritually to the highest if we apprehend it, not as an empty point, but as a “filled” point.

I was once—it made a great impression on me—regarded with astonishment by an elderly author who had written much on spiritual matters. Seeing me for the first time, he asked: “How did you first become aware of this difference between perceiving the sense-world and perceiving the super-sensible world?” Because I always like to express myself about these things with radical honesty, I replied: “In the moment when I learnt to know the inner meaning of what is called modern or synthetic geometry.” You see, when one passes from analytic to synthetic geometry—which enables us, not only to approach forms externally, but to grasp them in their mutual relationships—one starts from forms, not from external co-ordinates. When we work with spatial coordinates, we do not apprehend forms but only the ends of the co-ordinates; we join up these ends and obtain the curves. In analytical geometry we do not lay hold of the forms, whereas in synthetic geometry we live within them. This induces us to study the attitude of soul which, developed further, leads us to press on into the super-sensible world.

I have now described the extent to which Anthroposophy can be sure that it proceeds from “mathematicising” as strictly as the natural science of to-day—though from another point of view. Natural science applies mathematics as it has been elaborated to date. But anyone who wishes to understand clairvoyant activity must seek it where it is present in its most primitive form: in the construction of mathematical forms. If he can then raise this activity to higher domains, he will be developing something related to elementary, primitive “mathematicising” as the more developed branches of mathematics are related to their axioms. The primary axioms of clairvoyance are living ones. And if we succeed in developing our “mathematicising” by exercises, we shall not only see spatial relationships in the world around us, but learn to know spiritual beings revealing themselves to us, even with spiritual inwardness—as we learn to know the “cubicity” of a salt crystal. We learn to know spiritual beings when, in this way, we raise to higher domains what we develop by “mathematicising”.

This is what I wished to say, at the outset, about the basis of what must receive recognition as “clairvoyant research” in Anthroposophy. We shall go on to see how, with such clairvoyant research, one can enter different fields of knowledge—the natural sciences as well as therapy, medicine, history, etc. We shall see that the sciences are not to be attacked; they are to be enriched by the introduction of what can be known by super-sensible perception.

A consideration of the course of human evolution over a certain period—how it developed and led at last to the elaboration of our present scientific thinking—can help to a right understanding of what our aims here are.

Let us focus our attention upon scientific thinking to-day. It is able to see clearly the formalism of mathematics, while it nevertheless learns from mathematics inner certainty and exact observation, regarding natural laws as valid only if they can be formulated mathematically. This is, at least, a kind of ideal for scientific method to-day. But it was not always so. The scientific spirit, as acknowledged to-day, has been elaborated in the course of human evolution. I should like to draw your attention to three stages only—of which the present is the third—in this development, and I shall do so in a more narrative form. I shall also touch on some of the things that can be said in support of what I shall relate.

As we look back on human evolution, we do not, in fact, always find the same disposition of soul that man has to-day. He cultivates the scientific spirit as, in a sense, a most lofty thing. If we look back at the ancient Orient—not necessarily so far back as the most ancient Indian times, but to times more recent—we found much of what had been handed down as cognitive principles still retained. The path to knowledge was named quite differently then. In those ancient times—even the history of language can support this—man did not think of himself as he does to-day. Modern man has, on the one hand, his consciousness of self firmly established within him, and, on the other hand, a grasp, through observation, of what is mechanistic. But the man of the Orient, for example, could not have this feeling of himself. (As I have said, the history of language can prove this.) He felt himself, in the first place, as a breathing human being. To him, man was a breather. In self-contemplation he focussed his attention chiefly upon the respiratory process. He even related immortality to the respiratory process: death came to him as a kind of expiration of his soul.

Man a breather! Why did man in this former disposition of soul feel the human being as a breathing being? Because he did actually feel life in the respiratory process (which did not proceed so unconsciously as it does to-day). He felt the vibrations of life, life's rhythm, in his breathing; he felt breathing as one feels hunger and thirst to-day. But this was a continuous feeling in the waking state. When he looked with his eyes, he knew: the process of breathing now enters right into my head and into my eyes. He felt his perceptions permeated by the flow of the breath. It was just the same when the will stirred. He stretched out his hand and felt this movement as if it were something linked up with the respiratory movements. An expansion of the breath through the whole body was felt as an inner life-process. He even felt the more theoretical perception of the outer world through the senses to be ensouled with breath, just as he felt the breath ensouling the movements of the will.

Man felt himself a breathing being, and because he could have said: “My breath is modified in this and that way when I see through my eyes, hear through my ears and receive through the effects of heat”—because in his sensations of all kinds he “saw” differentiated, modified, refined respiratory processes—because of all this the path of knowledge was for him a systematic training of the respiratory process. And this systematic training was for those earlier epochs in the evolution of man's cognition what university study is for us to-day.

We study in a different way now. But in those times, when one sought religious satisfaction or wished to acquire knowledge, one “studied” by systematically modifying the respiratory process; in other words, by developing what was later called Yoga Breathing, Yoga Training. And what did one develop? If we investigate what was attained by one who practised Yoga Breathing in order to reach higher stages of cognition, we find something striking. Those who came to be “savants” through Yoga exercises—the word “savant” is not quite appropriate to these earlier conditions, but perhaps one can use it—required as long for this as we do for a university course. In the knowledge so acquired they had grasped in the disposition of their souls what, in a later age—the Graeco-Roman, for example—was regarded as a world of ideas and present of itself in the soul, thus making Yoga unnecessary.

This is really a very interesting thing—that what men had to strive for in earlier epochs through all kinds of exercises is present of itself in later epochs of evolution. It has then no longer the same significance as before. When Socrates, when Plato were alive, their philosophies had no longer the same significance as they would have had for the ancient pupils or teachers of Yoga, had they reached Socratic or Platonic truths. By this Yoga-breathing the pupil did not acquire exactly the same inner organisation as Plato, Aristotle or Scotus Erigena, but he came to the same disposition of soul [Seelenverfassung]. Thus we find systematic breathing exercises practised in ancient times, and we see that this cognitive path led to a certain vivid world of ideas.

One really gains a correct idea of what lived later in Parmenides and Anaxagoras if one says to oneself: What was given to men in this age as something self-understood, had been achieved in still earlier times through Yoga. It was always through exercises that men strove for the higher knowledge required by their own age. Thus in the perception of the world in later epochs, men were no longer aware of their breathing in self-contemplation, but they perceived as the Greeks perceived (I have given more details of this in my Riddles of Philosophy). At that time one did not construct for oneself isolated thoughts about the world, for ideas and sense-experiences were one. One saw one's thoughts outside, as one saw red or blue and heard C sharp, G or B natural. Thoughts were in the world outside. Without knowing this, nobody understands the Greek view of the world. But the Greeks perceived only spirit permeated with sense-perceptions, or sense-perceptions permeated by spirit, and no longer differentiations in the process of breathing.

Then once again men sought to attain a higher stage of cognition in all domains in which they were seeking higher knowledge. This stage was also gained through exercises. To-day we have rather vague ideas about the early Middle Ages and their spiritual life. A medieval student did not learn so abstractedly as we do to-day. He, too, had to do exercises, and ordinary study was also combined with the doing of exercises. Inward exercises had to be carried out, though not so strenuously as with Yoga breathing; they were more inward, but still a set of exercises.

From this there remains a kind of deposit, little understood now, in what were called then the Seven Liberal Arts. They had to have been mastered by everyone who claimed to have received a higher education. Grammar meant the practical use of language. Rhetoric meant more: the artistic use of language. Dialectic was the use of language as a tool of thought. And when the student had practised these inwardly, as exercises, Arithmetic followed; but this, again, was not our abstract arithmetic, but an arithmetic which entered into things and was clearly aware that man shapes all things inwardly. In this way the student learnt Geometry through inward exercises, and this geometry, as something involving the human being, was the pupil's possession—a tool he could use.

All this then passed over into what was called Astronomy: the student integrated his being with the cosmos, learnt to know how his head was related to the cosmos, and how his lungs and heart resulted from the cosmos. It was not an astronomy abstracted from man, but an astronomy in which man had his place. And then, at the seventh stage, the pupil learnt to know how the Divine Being weaves and rules throughout the world. This was called Music; it was not our present music but a higher, living elaboration of what had been elaborated in thought-forms in Astronomy.

It was in this way that men of a later epoch trained themselves inwardly. The breathing exercises of earlier times had been replaced by a more inward training of the soul.

And what did one attain? In the course of the history of civilisation men came gradually to have thoughts apart from sense-perceptions. This was something that had to be acquired. The Greeks still saw thought in the world, as we see colours and perceive tones. We grasp thought as something we produce, not located within things. The fact that men came to feel this in the constitution of their souls, that we can feel this to-day—that is the result of the training in Grammar, Rhetoric and so on to Music. Thought was thereby released. Men learnt to move freely in thoughts. In this way was achieved what we take for granted to-day, possessing it without these exercises—what we find when we go to school, what is offered in the separate sciences (as described yesterday). And precisely as man in different epochs had to advance by means of exercises—in ancient times by breathing exercises (Yoga) which gave him the Graeco-Latin conception of the world as something he took for granted; in later times by exercises that went from Grammar to Music and gave him the scientific standpoint we have to-day—so to-day he can again advance. He can best advance by setting out from what is most certain: namely, mathematics, recognised as certain to-day.

My reply to that author was true, although it so astonished him. It was mainly through synthetic geometry that I became clear about the clairvoyant's procedure. Naturally, not everyone who has studied synthetic geometry is a clairvoyant, but the procedure can be clearly presented in this way. Though that author was so astonished at not being told the sort of thing that people who “prophesy” are wont to relate, it is nevertheless true that Anthroposophy, setting out from the firm base on which science stands to-day, seeks to extend this base; and from this base, which science itself has laid, to carry further, into super-sensible domains, what reliable science brings before us.

From here we must proceed more inwardly. And a still more inward procedure is the path to clairvoyant research which I had to describe in my books Geheimwissenschaft (“Occult Science”) and Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der Höheren Welten (“How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”). But precisely such an historical survey as I have given can show you that anyone who stands to-day with full consciousness within Anthroposophy derives this consciousness from standing within the course of human evolution. My historical survey can also show you that I do not speak from personal predilection or subjective partiality when I assert that we need to undertake exercises in order to carry further the historical movement that has brought humanity to its present standpoint. Anyone who knows the course of history up to the present, and knows how it must continue, stands consciously within the whole historical process, and to this consciousness he adds the insight acquired by taking—inwardly, not outwardly—the spirit of modern science into the constitution of his soul.

Thus one may well say: Anthroposophy knows its position in respect to the science of to-day. It knows this in an absolute sense, because it knows the special character of contemporary science and rejects all that is dilettantish and amateurish. It builds further on genuine science. On the other hand, Anthroposophy knows the historical necessities; knows that man's path must go beyond present achievements—if we do not wish to stand still, unlike all our forerunners, who wanted to advance beyond the stage of civilisation in which they shared. We, too, must go forward. And we must know what steps to take from the present standpoint of the scientific spirit.

In the next few days I shall have to depict what this actually involves. The foundations I have laid to-day will then appear, perhaps, in a more understandable form. But I may have been able to show that Anthroposophy knows from its scientific attitude—from an attitude as scientific as that of science—what its aims are in face of the contemporary world, of human evolution as a whole, and of the separate sciences. It will get to work because it knows how it has to work. Perhaps its path will be very long. If, on the other hand, one sees, in the subconscious depths of human souls, the deep longings for the heights that Anthroposophy would climb, one may surmise that it is necessary for the welfare of humanity that the path Anthroposophy has to take should not be too slow. But whether the pace be slow or fast may be less important for Anthroposophy than for human progress. In many domains we speak of being caught up in the “rapid tempo” of our time. May all that mankind is intended to attain by cognition of the super-sensible be attained as rapidly as the welfare of mankind requires.

Man really only faces the riddles of existence when he has developed a degree of awareness of life, when he feels compelled to form ideas, sensations, feelings about his relationship to the world. But then, when he has reached such a situation, then the riddles of existence mean to him what can be called a vital question, because they are not only connected with some theoretical longings, with mere external questions of education, but the whole position of man in the world depends on them, the way in which man can find his way in the world, the degree of security he can have in life, and the inner support with which he can move through this life.

But now there is a considerable difference between the various types of riddle of existence. Man stands in the face of nature, must form ideas and feelings about his relationship to nature, and if I may use a comparison, I would like to say: When man has come to consciousness in the way I have characterized it, and he cannot find his way into certain things that confront him as mysteries of nature of nature, then existence, to which he once belonged — as I said, it is only expressed as a comparison — appears to him as a spiritual darkness; he feels as if he has been placed in a dark world, he feels that he cannot orient himself in this dark world. But to a certain extent this whole relationship to the world secrets of outer natural existence remains something external for the human being; it concerns his outer relationship to existence.

The human being's attitude to the riddles of his own soul is quite different. These riddles are what he lives by, and what basically constitute mental health and illness, but which can also become physical health and illness. For the life of the soul is something extraordinarily complicated, however simple it may initially appear. What we carry in our consciousness during our waking hours from morning to evening – it is indeed scientifically recognized today – is only a part of our soul life. A large part of our soul life rests in unconscious or, I could also say subconscious depths; it rises to the surface in the form of vague feelings, of vague moods, and also of all kinds of other soul content, and forms what is an indefinite basic state of our soul life. But what takes place and surges up in this more or less indeterminate way in the depths of our soul life is intimately connected with what actually constitutes the happiness or suffering of our lives. And anyone who tries to penetrate into the soul life of a human being by anthroposophical means will soon notice how everything that surges up indeterminately from the depths of the soul is connected with the physical body, and then more and more our entire state of health, which makes us capable of living or unable to live, can depend on these subconscious soul moods.

Today, however, I do not want to speak to you in the way that this unconsciousness of the soul is currently spoken about very often, by simply placing everything that shimmers unclearly in consciousness into the great container of this unconscious and by having more or less vague ideas about how this unconscious or subconscious works. I have been speaking here in this place about questions of anthroposophical research for many years and therefore cannot start from the most elementary of this research today, but I would like to consider the questions of soul life in their very essence in the way that they are connected to the happiness or unhappiness of life. But to do that, we must enter into what, flooded with all kinds of elements that are initially unknown, can have a disturbing or calming, happy or sorrowful effect on human mental life, which we want to point out more or less clearly through today's reflections, and what lies in between.

Now, if we look at our soul life, even if only superficially, we find two clearly distinguishable poles: on the one hand, the life of the imagination, which encompasses everything that takes place clearly and brightly in our consciousness, and on the other hand, the life of the will, which, in a certain way, initially emerges from the depths of the soul in darkness and darkness.

We distinguish – as I have often mentioned here – in the ordinary course of a person's life between two states of consciousness, of which only one is actually a distinct state of consciousness: the waking state and the sleeping state. In the sleeping state, the conscious life of imagination ceases; the entire soul life sinks down into a more or less dark darkness. But when we look at our soul life in the waking state with complete impartiality, we can only speak of the fact that we are truly awake with regard to everything that is conceptual. We have, so to speak, taken possession of ourselves as waking human beings, in that we have filled our consciousness with clear images, with thoughts full of light. We also accompany our volitional impulses, we accompany our actions with thoughts. But even in the simplest movement of the human body, how the thought of consciousness is connected with what actually happens during a volitional impulse, during an action, remains completely dark. How dark it is, what actually happens inside the arm when I just raise this arm, when the thought that has the goal of raising this arm wants to realize itself, so to speak, wants to shoot in and voluntarily set the arm in motion.

What happens in our own organism eludes our waking consciousness just as much as what happens in the human soul from falling asleep to waking up, so that we actually have to say: It is the case for the human soul that even in the waking state we have an element of sleeping, that the state of sleeping constantly permeates us and that we are only fully awake in the act of imagining, in the experience of clear, luminous thoughts. Between these two states, between the, I would say, fully waking state of imagination and the will life immersed in darkness, participating in both, lies the life of feeling and of the mind. Our feelings permeate our ideas. We bring certain sympathies and antipathies from our feelings into our imaginative life, and in doing so we usually either connect or separate our ideas. We accompany what flows into our will impulses with our emotional judgment, in that we perceive some actions as being in accordance with duty and others as transgressions of duty. And because we experience a certain emotional satisfaction when we perform our duties or dissatisfaction when we fail to fulfill our duties or for some other reason, our emotional life flows back and forth between our mental and our volitional life.

But the real soul mysteries do not present themselves to the dull person who, in the manner just described, devotes himself to the life of ideas on the one hand and to the life of feeling and the life of will on the other, but these soul mysteries emerge as man becomes more and more aware and aware. And even then the riddles of the soul do not arise in full consciousness, but they belong to the more or less subconscious experiences of the human being. Man never becomes quite clear in his consciousness as to the actual origin of the moods and dispositions of his soul life, which so influence his daily happiness and daily suffering. One must seek out and clearly express that which lives unclearly in the consciousness. And this is what I ask you to bear in mind first of all when I make the following remarks: that I will be obliged to express something in clear words that never lives in this clarity in the consciousness, but that is present in the soul life, healing and causing illness, that the person feels without being able to bring it to consciousness. And because this is so, the riddles of the soul are not merely theoretical, they are riddles of existence that are thoroughly experienced.

When man devotes himself to the life of imagination — as I said, I am speaking clearly about what is only felt vaguely, what is never fully brought to consciousness — he feels something like the vanity of his own existence. The life of imagination is an experience of images. The life of imagination is something that fills up during our waking day-to-day life with what we receive from the outer world in the way of impressions and perceptions. What we experience from nature forms the content of our imagination, it lives in us, it is what we draw up out of our memories. But we are aware: Yes, you are active in that you process your ideas in your ideas, in that you separate and connect the ideas; you are active inwardly, but you do not have your activity fully present in your mind; what is present in your mind is basically a reflection of the outer world. We know that we have to base our imaginative life on this external world. What we have is merely a picture of the external world; we live in pictures when we live in our imaginations, we do not feel fully alive in our imaginative life.

And this feeling, it lives subconsciously, as strange and paradoxical as it may sound. And as little as it is present in consciousness, it is alive in the subconscious; this feeling lives out in certain anxious feelings in relation to the life of ideas, in feelings of fear.

It sounds paradoxical, but this undercurrent of the human soul does exist. Most people know nothing about it, but most people, or actually all people, are constantly under its influence. And this undercurrent is an anxious current, that we could, so to speak, lose ourselves in the world, that we stand over an abyss because our world of imagination is a world of images. And again, the indefinite longing lives in the human soul: How do I find existence in this mere world of images?

This unconscious feeling in the undercurrent of the soul can be compared to the feeling that a person has when they are physically short of air, when they suffer from air hunger and thus consciously fall into anxious feelings. What a person consciously experiences through physical conditions is actually always unconsciously felt as a concomitant of the life of ideas. And so, on the one hand, attention can be drawn to a mystery of the soul, not in theoretical formulation, but by bringing up from the depths of the soul something that germinates or slumbers in this soul.

On the other hand, by living towards the element of will, the human being feels the opposite state. There is a different undercurrent in the life of the soul. Here the human being senses how he is exposed to his drives, his emotions, his instincts, how something natural plays into the human soul life that does not open up to the clarity of thinking, that is always immersed in a certain way in a reality that we cannot penetrate with light, that forms a darkness within ourselves. And if one can penetrate into these undercurrents of the soul with unbiased observation, one can indicate - one must always say a contradiction if one wants to characterize that which exists in the depths of the soul - how that which lives there is unconsciously felt. One must then characterize it by saying: It is felt in the same way as anger is felt in consciousness, or also the way a person feels when he cannot breathe out, when his blood circulation is so disturbed that the inhaled air is not properly converted in his body, when a kind of suffocation sets in. Something like anger-patience is always there in the human soul as a result of such a way of living towards the element of the will.

These are forces that live deep in the unconscious of the human soul, that surge up and constitute the real mystery of the human soul's life. And if you merely take the ideas in their pictorialness, the will in its instinctuality, as they present themselves to consciousness, you may feel these soul mysteries as something vague, as an indefinite sensation of the soul, but he does not make these soul riddles clear to himself, he does not really know what the indeterminate workings in him are that deeply influence his happy or unhappy mood in life.

It must be said again and again: the soul riddles are not the same as those we feel in nature; the soul riddles are those that are experienced inwardly, that flood up from the deep undercurrents of the soul and that must first be interpreted. That is why all science – which of course, as I have already emphasized here, has nothing to object to in its legitimate field – knows little about the actual mysteries of the soul. We see it – and I would like to cite two examples of this – in all of modern scientific thinking, how helpless science, which celebrates such great triumphs in other fields, actually is when it comes to the soul life, despite the fact that the greatest riddles of existence are connected to this soul life of man. I would like to recall two examples, which, however, I am convinced are deeply significant of what is there and of what is scientifically necessary in order to penetrate into the actual realm that the human being experiences as a soul mystery.

Almost half a century ago, the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond gave a speech at the 45th Naturalists' Conference in Leipzig that must be referred to again and again, although it has been discussed extensively and is now almost forgotten and has disappeared from the discussion. This speech was about the “limits of knowledge of nature”, and Du Bois-Reymond rightly states, on the one hand, that the material world is the limit of knowledge of nature in its essence. He says: Into the realm of matter the human spirit cannot penetrate. It penetrates into the outer observation of the outer sense phenomena to the revelation of material existence, but it cannot state what matter itself actually is. Du Bois-Reymond states this as the one limit. As the other limit, he states that of human consciousness; but today this is nothing other than that of the human soul life. He says: With the most perfect knowledge of nature, one cannot even gain any idea of how the simplest sensation in the human soul comes about. Even if one knew quite clearly how atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen move in the human brain, one would never be able to fathom from a clear insight into these movements how the simplest sensation - “I see red”, “I smell the scent of roses” - comes about, that is, how the first elements of mental life come about.

And Du Bois-Reymond is actually completely right in this statement. There is a second limit for external natural science here, except that Du Bois-Reymond's conviction is precisely the one that must be overcome through anthroposophical research. Du Bois-Reymond believes that the boundaries of knowledge of nature are the boundaries of all science. Therefore, he says: If one wants to penetrate into this realm of the spiritual and soul, one must do so by means other than scientific ones, because where supernaturalism begins, where, in other words, one enters the realm of the spiritual and soul, science ends. Anthroposophical research seeks to defend the idea that science need not be limited to the external natural world, but can develop the means to penetrate into the spiritual and soul realms.

The other example I would like to give is that of an outstanding personality, Franz Brentano, who wanted to establish a psychology entirely according to the method of modern natural science. That was his ideal. I have discussed the whole situation underlying Franz Brentano's research in detail in the third part of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul) and would like to mention only a few principles here. Franz Brentano then tried to write a psychology at the beginning of the seventies of the last century. The first volume was published in spring 1874. The second volume was promised for the fall; it never appeared. The whole work was intended to be in four volumes; except for the first volume, nothing was ever published except individual attempts, which, however, are always only attempts. The whole work remained a torso. In the work mentioned, I have discussed why this had to be so. Franz Brentano wanted to conduct research into the life of the soul in the same way as in the natural sciences, and in this first volume one finds a remarkable confession by Franz Brentano. He says, for example: With this scientific research, it is possible to find one's way around the details of mental life in a modest way; one can indicate how one idea connects with another, how one idea separates from another, how certain feelings attach to ideas, how volitional impulses attach to ideas, how memory works, and so on. But if, as Franz Brentano says, it had to remain the case that one could only investigate these details of mental life, and if knowledge of the most important questions of human existence had to be bought with this strict scientific method, where would that get us? For Brentano finds justified the yearning that already lived in Plato, in Aristotle, in ancient Greece: to pursue that which can be investigated in detail about the human soul all the way to the great questions from birth to immortality. And it would be sad, says Franz Brentano, if, in the desire to be scientific in our exploration of the soul's life, we had to renounce knowledge of how the better part of the human being in us fares when the physical part is handed over to the earth at death.

And it can be seen from what Franz Brentano has expounded in the first volume of his psychology that his whole scientific yearning is to lead the individual questions, which basically have little to do with the wider public and which this wider public is willing to leave to the scholars, on a long path to the great questions of human immortality and the divine-spiritual content of the world, as reflected in the soul. But Brentano did not find this way out of his natural scientific way of thinking, and because he was an honest researcher by nature, he left the following volumes, for which he found no research path, unwritten until his death a few years ago.

I would like to say that it is precisely this researcher's fate that shows in the truest sense how tragic it is that what is often recognized today as the only scientific approach must falter when faced with the great riddles of the human soul. That is it - again I have to say it - that anthroposophy must defend before the world today: that the path that Brentano could not find from natural science can be found! And it can be found if we do not stop at the ordinary capacities of the soul life, as they present themselves in outer life and as they are used in ordinary science.

I have often said that there are dormant, let us say, scientifically latent cognitive abilities in every human soul that must first be brought out of this soul, just as certain abilities must be brought out of a child through education. Those who have already matured for the ordinary cognitive abilities must train themselves in devotional inner soul exercises so that they develop those soul abilities through which not that which I have characterized on both sides as human, enigmatic soul - the experience in relation to the ideas, the experience in relation to the impulses of the will - but so that the human soul process becomes, so to speak, transparent, so that one can penetrate into what actually takes place in the human life of ideas and in the human life of will. For without penetrating into these everyday soul riddles, one cannot find the way to the great questions of human immortal existence and the divine-spiritual content of the world, in which the human soul also originates.

Now, in my lectures here, I have often described how a person can do inner exercises, purely soul-spiritual exercises, through which he awakens the otherwise dormant cognitive abilities to existence, so that they can really help him in his knowledge. I have pointed out how one can strengthen one's own power of imagination. Just as we strengthen a muscle when we use it continually in work, so we can strengthen our imaginative life when we, in the way I have described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” , when we direct this life of imagination in a certain direction through inner soul work, when we bring certain easily comprehensible images into the center of consciousness and thus repeatedly devote ourselves to this kind of imaginative work to which we would otherwise not devote ourselves. I can only hint at this in principle here, but you will find clear indications in the work just mentioned and also in the second part of my “Occult Science” that the imaginative life of the human being can become something quite different through such meditation and concentration exercises of thinking. I would like to say: without any kind of abnormal practice, but through the mere development of what is normal in a person's thought life, a stronger, more powerful thought life can be created.

And by generating this stronger imaginative life, by elevating oneself through meditation and concentration above that which is merely pictorial in our ordinary imaginative life, one comes to what I call in the books mentioned, the imaginative presentation rich in content.

This imaginative presentation lives with such inner vividness in the mere thought as otherwise man lives in his outer perceptions. But through this, one gradually comes to the point where the life of the imagination is no longer merely abstract, I might say merely pictorial, but through purely inward research — which, however, is pursued with the same seriousness as any scientific research — one makes the discovery that the soul, which could otherwise only fill its imaginative life with the results of external impressions, is inwardly filled with forces that, so to speak, shoot into the soul life. The images are no longer merely this light fluid when they are formed through meditation and concentration, but they are imbued and permeated with forces that I would like to call formative forces, forces that make up an inwardly spiritual-plastic element. And after a while one discovers that through this training of the life of imagination one grows together with that which the formative forces of the human body itself are; after some time one makes the discovery that the life of thought is, so to speak, nothing other than the rarefied life of forces of human growth. What gives us our physical body from birth to death in a plastically formative way is, I would say, in a 'diluted' state our imaginative life in ordinary consciousness.

We look at the newly born child. We know that in this newly born child, starting from the brain, the plastic forces are at work shaping the body. We follow the growth of the child, how it radiates straight from the plastic brain activity, we follow it to a certain point in human life on earth, until the teeth change, until around the age of seven. We will initially perceive this life of forces, which pulsates in man and is vividly active in him, as something indeterminate. On the other hand, by powerfully developing our life of ideas through meditation and concentration, we are unconsciously led to the same element that has been vividly working in us from our earliest childhood. And this is a significant discovery of the inner human life: that one can strengthen the life of the imagination to such an extent that one can make it so intense inwardly that one then feels oneself in it, in what the human formative forces are, what formative forces are in one's growth, in one's metabolism. However strange it may still sound to today's research, it is the case that it is possible to grow into what, so to speak, then takes us up as that which plastically shapes our outer physical body as its formative forces, by strengthening our soul life. One grows into reality through the life of the imagination; one grows into a formative element.

And in this way one gets to know what lies behind the mere thought process; one learns to recognize how a spiritual, with which one has now connected oneself, works in the human organism from birth to death. The life of thinking acquires its reality; the life of thinking is no longer the mere life of picturing, the life of thinking becomes a life of strength that is inherent in existence itself.

And only through such an insight can that which the undercurrent of anxiety and fear produces in the human soul be conquered from consciousness, so that it is indeed not a theoretical solution to the riddles of the soul that anthroposophy points to here, but a thoroughly inward, practical solution that can be experienced.

Anthroposophy must point out that, on the basis of its research, what lives in the human being, what, I might say, only appears to have become so rarefied as to emerge as our ordinary life of thought, but which in truth is the inner sphere of growth of our existence, can enter into human consciousness and be grasped through human consciousness. And on the other hand, when a person loses the main focus of their mental life and enters into a fearful undercurrent of this soul life, they can absorb the results of spiritual science anthroposophy through their mental life and can consolidate this mental life through the path of knowledge. Anthroposophy does not offer a solution to this soul riddle by putting forward a theory, but by putting a result in front of the human being that he can fully grasp with his common sense and that then - like giving weight - appears in the life of ideas for his consciousness, for his soul life, so that the soul mood, the soul constitution, can flow into it, solving riddles, which Anthroposophy seemingly asserts as mere knowledge about the life of ideas.

On the one hand, we can see how the human being is a formed being, how he appears as a whole in a certain form, how his individual organs are formed out of the spirit and how we — so that we can be free beings, so that we do not act only through these inner forces, but can surrender to free mirror images until our merely pictorial representations develop into something vividly formed. I explained this at the beginning of the nineties of the last century in my 'Philosophy of Freedom', by showing that man is a free being precisely because he can live in pure thoughts that are not connected with any external reality for his consciousness, that he can form his moral impulses in these pure thoughts. In relation to mirror images, one will be in the position of having to do something oneself if the mirror image is to change; mirror images do not determine one causally. A human being would never be free if he were determined by a reality in his ordinary consciousness. In his ordinary consciousness, ideas live as images, but he is not determined by them, just as one is not determined by mirror images. He is free. In order for him to be free, his life must be distinguished from that which permeates it in a plastic way as a growth force, as a body of growth, one could say, as a body of formative forces. But this life in freedom must be paid for by the person with the characterized anxious undercurrent in his or her soul life, and therefore, in his or her ordinary consciousness, the person must come to fully experience his or her sense of freedom, but also, as a polar opposite, to be able to counter this experience of freedom with what anthroposophy can give as a way of strengthening the life of ideas in the way indicated.

But if one continues along this path, one does indeed advance from what I would call the very rarefied, purely pictorial life of ideas to what is real reality, what lives in the human being in a formative way. It is not the physical body, it is not the physical organs, it is a supersensible force, but it is there. One grasps something that lies outside the physical body, and by simply pursuing the riddles of the soul in one direction, one penetrates into that which has a supersensible reality in man, independently of the human physical body. One advances to that which is prepared by birth or by conception as a human physical body, by mere hereditary conditions, by mere external natural facts. One learns to recognize how the inherited traits, which come from parents or ancestors, combine with the whole body, which is formed in the maternal organism, from the spiritual world, to create what one finds in life when one strengthens one's imaginative life.

One arrives, I would say, at one side of the question of immortality. One looks at what is immortal, what is eternal in human nature, because it penetrates from a spiritual world through conception and birth into what is humanly physical, and because it continues to have an effect during earthly life as the inner plastic formative power with which we connect by strengthening our thought life in the manner indicated.

In this way, anthroposophy offers the perspective that someone like Franz Brentano was looking for. Brentano also began with an investigation of thoughts, but he left thoughts as they are in ordinary consciousness. He confined himself to merely registering what was present in ordinary consciousness. It is only by strengthening the life of thought through meditation and concentration that this life of thought leads to the inner, plastic formative power, and it really leads along the path that begins with the grasping of the simple everyday thought and ends with the spiritual-soul that lived in the spiritual and soul realm before birth, before conception, and that has connected with the hereditary forces and the physical forces of the human body.

There is no other solution to the riddle of the soul than to really find this path from the simplest phenomena of everyday life to the great riddle of existence.

So far, I have pointed out what a person can achieve in relation to their thoughts. There he comes to what, so to speak, drives the human being out into space, what vividly permeates the human being's spatial corporeality, what is lived out in form, what, as I have indicated, descends from the spiritual world and flows into the outer form of the human being, and also into the form of his inner organs. But this is only one side of human life, and the soul also participates in the other side of human life. Just as we can develop our thinking through meditation and concentration, we can also develop our will, not in the sense of strengthening it, but in the sense of making it more devoted and spiritualized.

This can be achieved by, in a sense, tearing the life of the will away from its everyday nature. I have given many individual exercises. Spiritual science is no easier than research in an observatory or in a clinic. These exercises would have to be practised for years, but I would like to pick out just a few to suggest the principles. It can happen that [this breaking away] by the fact that one, which works in ordinary thinking as a will - because in thinking there is always a will, the thoughts are shaped by the will, the thought is only one side, in the life of the soul is always the will is interwoven with the thoughts and the thoughts with the will - that one tears this element of will, which lives in the thoughts, away from its usual course, which adheres to external physical facts, by, for example, presenting something backwards. Let us say, for example, that instead of presenting a drama from the first act to the fifth, we present it backwards, starting from the last scenes and working back to the beginning. We then proceed to present external facts backwards. For example, one can imagine one's usual daily life in reverse, proceeding in as small portions as possible, from evening to morning, even to the point of imagining going up a staircase in such a way that one imagines it as going down backwards from the top step to the penultimate step and so on.

Because we are accustomed to thinking in the same direction as external facts unfold, thinking actually plays a passive role for us in relation to the will that unfolds in it. It becomes actively inwardly active, permeated with inner initiative, when we train it through such exercises as retrospection, where we tear it away from the course of external facts and make it rely on itself. For if we reinforce what we achieve in this way through careful and energetic exercises with a truly serious self-observation, observing what we do as a person of will as if we were standing beside us and observing ourselves piece by piece in our development of will, or even if we were to proceed to action, if we were to do exercises with the express purpose of making a resolution and then executing it with iron energy exactly, so that we live completely in the element of will. I just wanted to mention in principle such exercises that not only tear the will away from external facts, but also from its ties to the body itself, that make the will independent, spiritualize it. Then we actually come to a development of the will in this way, so that we experience ourselves with our soul life, which now develops the will, outside of our body. It is a momentous experience. But only through this do we begin to understand what the will is. In ordinary life, the will is bound to the organs. We see it unfold as we move our limbs. We observe the processes, the effects of our will, only through our thought life. We see into it when we have detached it from the body, when we experience it in itself, when we become completely one with it. Then it is permeated by an elevation of the power that is otherwise also bound to our physical organism, permeated by the power of love. And that devoted element in our soul life is developed into a transparent, bright clarity, which - I would say dark, as an emotional life of will in love - rode towards us.

I know how little people today want to accept love as a force of knowledge. In ordinary life it is not; but when it is so developed that the will is no longer rooted in instincts, in drives, in emotions, but that it lives in the purely soul realm, apart from the body, then this will is actually only recognized in its essence, and then it shows itself as something quite different from what the thought element has shown itself to be. The thought element, in its intensified form, has shown itself to be that which shapes in a constructive way, which, I might say, allows an organ to flow out of an organ, which culminates in human reproduction. The thought element unfolds as the plastic activity, from the soul into the human body. The will element unfolds in the body in such a way that, when it is recognized separately from the body, one can see how it affects the body. The physical body is not shaped plastically, but rather the plastic form is reduced, dissolved, atomized, made to flow. The element of will is what continually — please do not misunderstand me — I would like to say, again burns the formed elements of the human being, lets them go up in flames, spiritually speaking. The expression is meant figuratively, but it means something very important.

Human life, as it pours out of the soul into the body, can only be understood by seeing it, on the one hand, as this plastic element and, on the other hand, as the re-dissolving of the plastic element, as that which, I would like to say, lets the plastic element enter into the atomized and the deliquescent. And in that everything that unfolds as will in the human being is such a dissolving, atomizing, and deliquescent element in the human body, this will-like element is what is now experienced as pointing the way to the other side of human life, pointing the way to death.

Just as we first get to know the spiritual-plastic element of the human soul through the sculpture of thinking, which moves into the physical body through birth or conception, so we learn to recognize how the will-like element dissolves the human body, but in dissolving - as I said, figuratively speaking - pure spirituality emerges from the flame. We get to know the soul's departure from the body. In this way we learn to understand death through the dissolution of the will element. We learn to understand what happens to a person in death because we learn to understand what happens in a person in everyday volitional decisions. The everyday volitional decision brings about a kind of burning process in the physical body, but it is out of this burning process that our inner soul life emerges. What we feel inwardly as soul could not be there if we were always merely body, merely shaped in a plastic way. The plastic must be broken down, flow, and from the flowing of the plastic, from the ever-continuing destruction of the bodily, the experiencing of the soul arises. And we comprehend the departure of the human soul from the physical body at death, which, summarized into a single moment, represents that which is always represented in the unfolding of the will to the spirituality of the soul. Just as I experience my will in the present moment, how it forms a kind of process of combustion, dissolution in the body, how through this destruction the spiritual comes to life in the human body, so I learn to recognize how the other destruction of the body in death, which is nothing other than the last effect of the will hidden in the body, how the spiritual returns to the spiritual and soul world.

This is what leads us from anthroposophy into the riddles of the soul in a living way. Anthroposophy is not intended to be a theory; it certainly wants to provide knowledge, but not theoretical knowledge. It wants to provide knowledge that nourishes the soul. And in this way it can present the individual daily experiences of the soul being before the spiritual eye; it can then proceed from these individual experiences to the great questions of soul life.

Allow me to go into one detail so that you can see what is at the very basis of what anthroposophy is meant to bring to the riddles of the human soul. Allow me to give the details of human memory.

Once one has attained the intensified life of imagination that I have characterized, and once one has also become acquainted with how the plastic is continually being broken down by the life of will, then one also sees the inner soul processes with transparent clarity for the first time. One sees how the human being stands in relation to the outer world, how he receives his impressions from the outer world, how he then forms ideas and thoughts about these outer impressions, how after some time - or even after a long time - he brings up these ideas as memories from certain backgrounds or how they also arise of their own accord, as one says today, as “free-rising” memory ideas. For anyone who wants to look at the human soul with an open mind, the mere emergence of these memories heralds a significant psychological puzzle. It can be said that, in a very curious way, people have spoken of what the essence of memory actually is. People have imagined – and sometimes still do today – that impressions are evoked by the senses, then they are passed on through the nervous system, and finally they are transformed by the power of imagination. These images then enter into certain depths of the soul and come to the surface when they are remembered. Now, no person who thinks impartially can form any clear idea about how these ideas, when we do not have them, are supposed to go for a walk down there in unknown depths of the soul's life, only to come up again through arbitrariness when they are either needed or want to lean against something that appears as a new perception, as a new impression of the outside world.

Anthroposophy goes beyond this to the real, true observation of the human soul life itself. By knowing the intensified life of imagination and the spiritualized life of will, it sees through the whole process that takes place from the perception of the external thing through the formation of imagination, through the formation of memory, to the re-emergence of the remembered imaginations. The fact that anthroposophical research penetrates to the forces of knowledge through such a shaping of the life of imagination and will, as I have indicated, transforms the whole process of soul and body and the way in which these two interact with each other, is so transformed that, if I may compare it to something very dark and opaque that I have before me, it is suddenly made transparent by being illuminated. The whole human soul process becomes transparent through this strengthened life of imagination and spiritualized life of will.

And what do we now see with regard to what I have indicated? We see how the outer impressions stretch for miles, how the whole process continues and how, in fact, what I have described as the formative, plastic element of the intensified life of thought, works in the ordinary process of perception as a continuation. I perceive outwardly, but it is not only the abstract thoughts that I have in my ordinary consciousness that work in me, but also what is merely fathomed through spiritual science, that works continually; this plastic quality in the perceptions works down into the depths of the human soul and body. And then, when this has happened, when the thought has taken shape in the depths of the soul and body, then the human being moves on to something else. A volitional decision is at work here, the will is active, but the spiritualized will is present. In that part of the human being that is connected to the external brain, this will unfolds, it builds by dissolving the plasticity of the brain, what the impression has built up for the ordinary consciousness, so that we have spread an outer brain surface, if I may express myself roughly, over substrates, but where the plasticity continues to have an effect.

Now let us assume that I remember something in an arbitrary way, then it happens in such a way that I unfold this will out of a certain series of images. The development of the will is in turn connected with a breakdown, if external impressions do not now penetrate; and the fact that these do not come is ensured by the development of the will, which is a breakdown. And this dismantling allows what is in the subconscious during the voluntarily evoked memory to emerge as a sculpture of the human being. If free-floating ideas arise, the opposite happens. There is some external impression that forms into a thought. The thought is vividly active. It is imprinted on the brain. This plastic activity is similar to that which has formed in the subsoil that which can live in a certain form in the subsoil. This lives in the plastic that the thought has now formed.

You see, in this way the life of the soul becomes transparent; one learns to recognize it in its interaction with the life of the body, in the interaction of the spiritual with the bodily and with the soul; one learns to recognize it in its inner plastic structure, in its continuous extinguishing, burning away through the will element. And by learning to understand every single moment of life, one learns to grasp in these currents of life what the great questions of life are. One learns to recognize from the thoughts what moves into physical life at birth, one learns to recognize from the will what moves out into the spiritual world at death.

In this way, the results of anthroposophical research appear to penetrate from the details of life to the enigmatic essence of the human soul.

In this way, by recognizing how thought already works plastically in ordinary memory, as if something is being formed in the body, we also experience how that which is not yet in the body, but connects with the body through birth and conception, how that intervenes plastically in the body. We get to know the human life element in this plastic form because we get to know the individual plastic element that already appears in the formation of memory.

Anthroposophy wants to look at the riddles of the soul with a full life! This should be understood as the essence of anthroposophical research: that it stops everywhere at the scientific conscientiousness that has been cultivated today through the great, powerful advances of external natural science, but that by stopping at this conscientiousness, it simultaneously goes beyond what mere external observation and mere external experiment can offer, that it progresses from the abilities which, precisely by their special presence, make the human soul a mysterious being for the human being himself, that through the development of these abilities it leads to the soul's riddles being solved not theoretically but practically.

There is no need to fear that someone who approaches the so-called solution of the soul's riddle from this point of view might one day, as if it were a fait accompli, present the solution as a completed insight, so that the soul might then fall into lethargy and carelessness towards its own life. No, the soul poses the riddles that I have mentioned today as the living, as the experienced soul riddles, in every moment of life, and in every moment of life we need the results of spiritual research anew, which have a balancing effect on that which arises so mysteriously from the dark depths of the soul. What I have called the anxious undercurrent of human soul life and the wrathful undercurrent are nothing other than the inner call of the human soul not to take itself for granted, but to accept itself in such a way in its full ongoing experience that this human soul is constantly a mystery to itself, that it constantly needs the solution to this mystery. And it is precisely such a continuous solution to the mystery of the soul that anthroposophical research seeks to offer, linking it to the reality of existence in such a way that one can say – if I may use a trivial comparison – Just as a person in their physical life is a being that must constantly take in nourishment, that cannot be satisfied with a single intake of nourishment because they consume this nourishment, because they combine this nourishment with their life process, so it is with what is offered to us by anthroposophy as the result of the soul's riddle. Its intense inner effectiveness eludes us if we do not constantly contemplate it, if we do not constantly progress. Because we are dealing here with a reality, not with a theory that can be learned and memorized, as with the reality of nourishment, we are dealing with something that must penetrate the ongoing process of life through anthroposophy.

And it is true. The human being will become aware of the following when dealing with the results of anthroposophy in relation to the riddles of the soul: learning – as strange as it may sound, it is a truth that anyone who deals with anthroposophy can experience with regard to the riddles of the soul – basically, you cannot learn anthroposophy; you can let its results approach you, you can read books, listen to lectures; but if you do not continually experience what you have absorbed in this way, if you do not, in a continuous process, just as one continually connects the bodily substances of the external world with the bodily processes through the process of nutrition and metabolism, one connects that which is presented in anthroposophy with the human soul, with the soul process. If this is not continually introduced into this bodily process, one will see that it loses its significance for the soul, just as the physical loses its significance for the body if it is not continually introduced into this bodily process. And just as hunger and thirst express themselves physically in the absence of physical nourishment, so a fearful and morbidly angry nature that wells up from the depths of the soul expresses itself when it is influenced by a real knowledge of the spiritual significance of the life of the imagination and the will. And if a person advances by always being able to cultivate in his consciousness, as a nourishment for his soul, what anthroposophical research gives him, then he finds what he needs to balance his soul life, what he must feel and experience as a continuous living solution of the soul riddles that are also continuously alive.

And it must be said again and again: although the fact that one allows and examines what is set out in the books mentioned above can lead one to embark on the path of independent anthroposophical research, anthroposophy does not depend on every person being able to verify what is presented in anthroposophy by following this path. Even if one does not do this, one can still use one's common sense to find what comes to light in anthroposophy reasonable or unreasonable. A person can use his or her common sense to follow what the anthroposophical researcher claims without becoming an anthroposophical researcher himself. But apart from this common sense, a person has something else. A person, even if he is a layman in the physiological or biological field, does not know the chemical composition of his food; but he tests what food really is for a human being by consuming it, by combining the forces with the forces of his bodily processes. In this way, he can unite the results that anthroposophy offers him, and the way in which it solves the soul's riddles, with his soul life, and he will find that it satisfies him soulfully. And what, in essence, are soul riddles in front of this anthroposophical forum? Soul riddles, grasped in their vitality, are nothing other than the expression of soul-spiritual hunger and soul-spiritual thirst. And the solution of soul riddles is basically nothing other than the assimilation of true spiritual content, true spiritual beings, which unite with the human spirit and with the human soul life. And so, I would say, spiritual saturation, which must continually repeat itself, is the solution to the riddle of the soul. The more vividly one grasps the process and the more one realizes how anthroposophy seeks to reach into every aspect of practical life, how it seeks to take root in the most mundane things and reach up to the great riddles of existence, by introducing the human being to the divine spiritual source of existence, by leading him to his own immortality, the more one will realize that anthroposophy cannot be theory, but something that can be experienced.

From this point of view, anthroposophy tries to have an effect on the most diverse practical areas of life; from this point of view, it has tried to shape what I have often presented here as the founding of our Waldorf School by Emil Molt, that is, something that is done in the practical social sphere.

Anthroposophy, as you can see, solves the riddle of the soul by addressing the whole living human being, body, soul and spirit. In doing so, it overcomes the one-sidedness of the knowledge and soul life that necessarily had to arise with the fully recognized results of modern natural science in their field, which is also thoroughly recognized as a triumph by anthroposophy.

But people would take note of such things – and they would be taken note of if anthroposophy were not so misunderstood – as happened, for example, here in Stuttgart at the anthroposophical Congress, where Dr. von Heydebrand, in a lecture that was also printed, used Waldorf education to explain the one-sidedness of mere external experimental psychology. Not because opposition should be taken against this experimental psychology – it will be possible to appreciate it in the right way in its own field with its own results, if on the other hand what is explored in such an external way can be combined with what can be achieved spiritually and soulfully through anthroposophy. For it is through anthroposophy that what works spiritually and soulfully out of spiritual and soulful worlds in the physical body of man is understood. But in this way, all external research can be enlivened, as can education, medicine (this too has been discussed here in earlier lectures), and social life.

Here, too, I would like to refer to a fine example in the lecture given by Emil Leinhas at the above-mentioned congress – which is also available in print here – which explains what economics, which has been developed purely on the basis of imitated natural science methods, cannot achieve. A start has been made here on a real recovery of social life that comes from the spiritual and soul realms. And what is the reason for this in the end?

Through anthroposophy, we can see how thought has a formative effect. Now, it not only has a formative effect in the human body as the soul-spiritual, it also has a formative effect when we can introduce it into human social life in the right way as social ideals, and the will that has been understood in the right way also works in a social relationship. For just as we know that the human body is dissolved through it and led to a certain combustion, so that which is introduced into social life as a comprehended element of will will recognize at the right moment when any institution has outlived itself and must disappear so that its fruits can be reborn in a new form. Just as the soul and spirit rise up out of the physical in the way described, so the higher structures of social life rise up through the disappearance of certain external institutions that have outlived their purpose, and through this disappearance working together with the formative and constructive. What is seen in the right anthroposophical understanding of the human soul riddle can flow out into social life, I would even say, solving the riddle of social problems as well.

But this is how the human being comes to understand himself in the right way, to be filled with the right inner strength, with the true strength of his real self, which lives in human feeling, in human soul. Between the life of imagination and the life of will, there lives the always incomprehensible, always unfathomable, but no less tangible emotional life of the human being; and in this emotional being, for those who are able to look at life in this way, as I have characterized it today in relation to the riddles of the soul, the eternal self is revealed, which goes through repeated lives on earth. Then one knows how to look at the plastic-creative, developed life of the imagination and the spiritualized life of the will, which breaks it down.

In this way one learns by touching the human being what has entered into the human being through birth or conception in such a way that it initially points back to earlier earth lives to the state in which, in all primeval times, the outer cosmic was so little separated from the inner human life that it required not repeated earth lives but a continuously progressing spiritual-soul-natural life in order to bring about progress. One learns to look at repeated earth lives, at spiritual-soul lives lying between them; one learns to look into the future until a state where man will again have connected himself so strongly with the spiritual that the repeated earth-lives lose their meaning - in that man rises to the spiritualization of his existence, I might say, with an experience that rises out of the mere inanimate into spirituality.

One is led to the true solution of the riddle of the world through the solution of the riddle of the soul; one rises to the human soul, to the cosmos. But through this one attains living knowledge, living insight, which, as I have already indicated, is spiritual nourishment. But through this, knowledge as it is presented by anthroposophy becomes a real inner support for the soul in the element in which life wants to falter. Security, support and orientation in life can be found by seeking the spiritual nourishment that comes from anthroposophy. It brings us back to ourselves, transforming it into inner support, giving our inner balance an inner center of gravity. And in the difficult moments of life, when we are often in danger of sinking into misfortune, we can also find support in a mood of the soul that is carried inwardly by the full consciousness of the spirituality that fills the human being, when we become fully aware that the life of thought is not in vain, that it can find reality in the power of the soul to shape the world in a plastic way, and that the will is that which always gives this plastic shaping of the soul power. that the life of thought is not in vain, that it can find reality in the power of the soul and the world, and that the will is that which brings this power of the soul back to the spirit again and again. This gives support in the difficult moments of life, it puts life on a firm foundation and leads in the right way to the end of life.

And so, here, in reference to what has been said today, we can be reminded of the saying of an old Greek, pre-Socratic sage, who, out of an initially intuitive realization, speaks the weighty word: “When the human soul, freed from the body, soars into the free ether, it is an immortal spirit, freed from death.”

Yes, the riddles of the soul can be solved through real science. One can come to this conviction by trying to solve the riddles of everyday life of the soul through real spiritual insight. One can see a reflection of the knowledge of immortality in the ordinary events of life. And he who can judge the individual unfolding of thought, of feeling, of will in the right way, already sees the immortal in them, and he then looks up to the immortal in the all-embracing sense and thus comes to a real grasp of the eternal in human nature, which is rooted in the eternal ground of the existence of the Cosmos, of the evolution of the world.