The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When I read Richard Wahle's 1885 essay 'Brain and Consciousness', I had the impression that a personality was speaking who knew how to describe in a sharp-sighted way what human consciousness can say about the content given to it when it philosophizes, putting itself in the perspective of currently accepted science. This essay contains the germ of what Wahle would later discuss impressively in his books 'The Whole of Philosophy and its End' and 'On the Mechanism of Spiritual Life', and for which he found such apt formulations in smaller essays, particularly in his 'Historical Overview of the Development of Philosophy up to its Last Phase'. In “fast sündhafter” Kürze is the extract of a thought-provoking work in the preceding short essay given; in extraordinarily commendable detail, the result of this work is in the mentioned works.

I described the impression that I gained from Brain and Consciousness in a short review of this work, which was printed in 1885 in the Deutsche Wochenschrift (No. 86, $. 9), which was then published in Vienna. I concluded this review with the words: “The main significance of this little work lies in the fact that it has shown, in sharp contours, what experience actually gives us and what is often only added to it. All that the individual sciences can find consists only in the observation of related events, whereby we must assume that the connection itself is based on some true fact. We consider the author's arguments to be thoroughly convincing, but we believe that he has not drawn the ultimate conclusion from his views. Otherwise, he would have found that the true facts of the matter are given to us as experiential events themselves – namely, the ideal ones – and that the negation of materialism consistently leads to scientific idealism. Thus, while we see the progression from the thoroughly solid foundation laid by Wahle to a higher level of knowledge as the right thing to do, we unreservedly admit that we see in this writing an outstanding achievement that will have a decisive effect on the branch of science to which it belongs and that will certainly take a place in the history of philosophy.

For me, before I read Wahle's writing, the content of which was given from the philosophical consciousness of the end of the nineteenth century; and I found this content presented in it in a way that seemed convincing to me. It was clear to me, however, that we must not stop at thinking this content through. Otherwise, we lack the 'final consequence'; and this cannot be a consequence of thinking, it must be a consequence of experience.

But must we not also recognize that dreaming encompasses a world of events, and waking another; and that the events of waking arise when dreaming suddenly changes into a different form of event? And must we not also recognize that the reality value of dreaming arises from the point of view of waking? If I have to answer these questions with “Yes,” I do not see myself in contradiction to what Wahle has said about dreaming in his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens.” I want to say, entirely in his spirit: There are series of events of waking and series of events of dreaming. One can think of the two types of series as being connected to each other, as Wahle does. In this way one is protected from the danger that Wahle so aptly characterizes (p. 459 of his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens”): “Dreaming makes a tremendous impression on people and when they talk about dreams they become quite dreamy and mystical.”

But it is different to consciously run through the stages in which waking and dreaming intertwine; it is different to experience waking and dreaming, and also the sudden transition from one experience to the other. It is precisely in the experience of waking, which occurs when one not only “wanted to get to know” Wahle's excellent “elucidations, refutations, demonstrations, analyses” and many “psychological and physiological insights”, but makes them the fully grasped constitution of “spiritual life” - I use this word entirely in Wahle's sense - is the impetus to move from the ranks of dreaming and waking to the others that I describe in imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. The transition of experience is as sudden as that from dreaming to waking; and the events of waking life receive from the standpoint of exact imagination, inspiration, and intuition a similar illumination of reality that they do not possess in themselves, just as dreaming receives one from the standpoint of waking life.

The objection that is raised, that nothing forces people to refer from the point of view of ordinary consciousness to that of imagination, inspiration and intuition, is naturally to be raised against the above statements. It will be raised by all those who do not go far enough in their cognitive life to notice the point in this life at which awakening from ordinary consciousness must occur.

It should not be raised by the man of choice alone. For he has ($. 174 f. of his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens”) written the fact-finding sentences: “We believe that once one realizes what is actually being said when one claims to perceive acts of the ego, one will be horrified by one's own presumptuousness. — Does one see, that is, perceive, not with the eyes, but does one clearly perceive the ego as a being, as a substance? Do you see the ego, which is supposed to appear as apperceiving, judging, willing, feeling in ever different acts, always as a constant thing, as the same being? When you see a person fencing, running, rowing, climbing, for example, you still always see the same person in the different activities. Do you always see the same ego here too? For heaven's sake, who can say that he has perceived this ego-being psychically?” And ($. 177 £.): ”But one must turn away from all this abstruse stuff, which of course was not gained by observation, but by the fear that one could only do justice to the complications by means of peculiar psychic brackets, and often was only gained by indirect spiritizing over literary enunciations. From metaphors and acts, unions, innate categories and symbols, one must turn to the simple representation of the multiplicity of sensual series.

Whoever says this indicates that ordinary consciousness dreams when it wants to claim something other than “series of images and bodily actions”. But then the next step cannot be to remain within ordinary consciousness, but to awaken from it. And with this awakening, the dreaming talk of a “will that shows itself to consciousness as power,” of an “act of loving,” of an “act of desiring, of judging, of imagining,” ceases. And an awakened speech about these “dreams” begins, similar to the way an awakened person speaks about his nocturnal dreams. For what is said in anthroposophy from exact imagination, inspiration, intuition about the phantasms of ordinary psychology, would like to relate to these as the judgments of the waking about the confused, confusing of his dream world.

The difference between awakening from the ordinary dream world to waking everyday life and awakening from this life to supersensible consciousness is only that the former is felt to be involuntary, the latter as brought about by one's own (but trained) will. (I also use the word will here with the same awareness as Wahle himself does in his writings, despite having seen through the fantasy of ordinary psychology with regard to the “will”).

Since Wahle is clear about the dreaming of ordinary consciousness, he cannot really close himself off from awakening either. But then it will also be possible to reach an understanding that by awakening to imagination, inspiration and intuition, one is on the way to the “primal factors” without sinning against one's justified “enlightenment, refutation, demonstration, analysis”. One has only to take a serious look at the corresponding occurrence of this awakening. Dreaming is often joined by nightmare. It is overcome by awakening. Such a “nightmare” is also present when one does not merely mentally imagine the “rows of flat, sensuous occurrences” and the “motoric activity in peculiar types,” but experiences them. This “nightmare experience” is what a person has when, in ordinary consciousness, he strives from the sensory into the supersensible. The dreaming of ordinary consciousness wants to merge into waking in the supersensible, just as the dream wants to merge into ordinary consciousness. Liberation from the “nightmare experience” is all striving for supersensible knowledge and for religious inwardness.

Spintizing about whether the results of imagination, inspiration and intuition now place us squarely in the realm of the “primal factors” ceases to have any significance when it is recognized that the point is not to speak of these “primal factors” in the way of dreaming, but to free ourselves from the nightmare of ordinary consciousness.

Wahle has analyzed and demonstrated the dream in a completely unique way (in his “Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens”). Anyone who moves in such trains of thought as he does, who can thus follow the dream sequences into the sequences of waking consciousness, should be able to understand that in the realm of occurrences not only the “frame principle” is assumed to be justified, but also the image principle. There is not only a framework, there is also a picture in the framework. And precisely those who can strictly experience the events in their immediacy, they arise in the field of the senses as images; in the field of bodily actions as experienced dreams. And through this, they are driven out of the image and the experienced dream into the supersensible reality, just as the (dreaming) dreamer is driven into the sensual.

The world of events is misinterpreted when one says: “Something that corresponds to the scurrying events of the world - still conceived without bodily senses - namely, how the world was and is, insofar as humans and senses are not, there must be it in living active power, and something that corresponds to the senses, there must also be it in truly living active power. Let us arbitrarily call the first substantial being X, the second substantial being in general Y. Then the following must hold: the free-floating, in themselves undeclared occurrences are the function of the interaction of XY. — That is the ultimate conclusion of “knowledge”: put XY, unknown how, the occurrences into the world.

But the occurrences say something else. They do not place all kinds of partial occurrences on the right side of the equals sign and X or Y on the left; nor do they add: Don't dissolve the calculation, but leave X and Y standing. They invite calculation; and calculation consists of imagination, inspiration, and intuition; and then, in the calculation, something comes out. We are not left with X and Y at the end of the path of knowledge, but at the beginning of the path of insight, with calculations to which we have applied the diligence of dissolution.

Actually, other objections to anthroposophy should be discussed here; but this “agreement” must also be of “almost sinful” brevity, and it already comprises more than double Wahle's remarks.

But from these allusions it should be clear that anthroposophy, without betraying itself, can do justice to Richard Wahle's excellent achievements. It will have no objection to the validity of the “destructive psychology” (the first part of “The Mechanism of Spiritual Life”); it will have to illuminate the astute “constructive psychology” (the second part of the aforementioned book) from the point of view of the awakened consciousness. For here Wahle relies on a physiology that, as numerous works in the anthroposophical literature show, is in great need of correction. But how can valid statements be possible for a mode of thinking that Wahle has so precisely analyzed and demonstrated? After all, even the dreamer can only judge his dream world after awakening.

And so I can still subscribe to the final sentences of my review of Wahle's “Brain and Consciousness” from 1885 today. Yes, I can extend them to include his later works.

There is only one thing I would like to say about the review at the time. It contains the sentence: “We consider what the author has presented to be thoroughly convincing, but we believe that he has not drawn the final conclusion from his views. Otherwise, he would have found that those true facts are given to us even as experiential occurrences – namely, the ideational ones – and that the negation of materialism consistently leads to scientific idealism.” What is underlined here often recurs in my writings from the eighties and nineties of the last century in various forms. Certain personalities, who are absorbed in outward appearances, certainly do not want to find in such sentences what leads to the later anthroposophical presentations in my consistent further development. If, when I wrote these sentences, I had not wanted to ward off being lumped together with those “spiritual cognizers” who materialize the spiritual in their imagination after all, if I had not wanted to make my view clearly recognizable as one of the “real spirit,” then perhaps I would not have had to run the risk of what I wanted to say clearly being later distorted by others into something unclear. For example, I could have formulated the above sentence as follows: “. . empirical occurrences, namely spiritual experience based on ideas, are given, and that the negation of materialism leads consistently to spiritual knowledge rooted in scientific idealism.” I do believe that anyone who wants to can see from my formulation decades ago the reference to what I currently call anthroposophy.

Considering all this, I would like to add my own to Wahl's final sentence: At the boundary of his steel-hard, narrow terrain of knowledge stands a turret with windows of frosted glass. If you leave them closed, the view into X and Y becomes cloudy, and you can only let “the hunch wander into a necessary but unsearchable realm”. But you can also open the windows, and then the inkling turns into an unsearchable realm – anthroposophy. But I have to return the sympathies, which are so gratifying to me, wholeheartedly, because one of the “little towers” that one needs to feel secure in the certainty of knowledge has been erected by Richard Wahle as a good master builder.

Criticism of Knowledge and Anthroposophy

by Richard Wahle

One happiness of the mind is to grasp truth, another is to dream. There is said to be truth and there is not said to be knowledge, because truth can consist in knowing that knowledge is impossible. But the mere certainty of knowledge, however sad the state of human knowledge may be, could not give rise to joy; rather, joy can come at most from getting rid of errors and vain hopes, and from having firm, albeit narrow, ground under one's feet instead of shaky ground.

I am free of all philosophical fallacies. Those who want to get to know the relevant explanations, refutations, demonstrations, analyses and many psychological and physiological insights would do best to read my works, especially my Mechanism of Mental Life. Here, in the utmost, almost sinful brevity, I shall mention what should lie behind us, in the night of false concepts and misleading words; I shall show the positive achievement that has been attained through my radical critique. And precisely that formula of the most certain and modest knowledge will then open the gate to the city of dreams.

First, let us recall the simplest analysis. There is no such thing as will essentially revealing itself as power to consciousness; there are only series of images and bodily actions. There is also no such thing as a psychic act of loving, no act of desiring, of judging, no act of imagining; but there are only series of two-dimensional sensory occurrences and motor functions - in peculiar types (which I have described in detail), for which those practical, abbreviated names are used, but behind which there are absolutely no recognized functions.

With the existence of the senses, there is certainly the occurrence of the world of expansion, of physicality; it is simply there, as a sensory occurrence, a reality. But there is no certainty, no chance for the assertion that this expansion is an effective, powerful potency, a factor of creation and energy.

It is quite certain that the extended reality exists on the one hand in the primary form of the real occurrence - as a crystal, a tree, a human body, an eye - and it is equally certain that on the other hand there is a secondary reality of occurrences in the form that is called memory - of crystal, of eye - or further emerging combinations of such occurrences, which are called fantasies. But it is not certain, it is even a deception that these events are found in the possession of an “I”. It is certain that all these primary and secondary occurrences are realities pure and simple, but it does not appear justified to assume that they exist as “known,” existing in the bosom of an “I.” There are free-floating, powerless, shadowy realities, without in any way betraying their origin, their rooting; we know nothing of their origin and their substance! That they are a treasure of an inner core-ego, that there is a consciousness of it, is a lie. It is easy to explain how the lie arises. It arises through the play - through opening and closing the eyes - of the senses, which, however, are themselves nothing but freely fluttering realities that show no power or way of acting and are not suited to tell us the true processes.

If we now summarize our critical certainty in the face of the abundance of unproven and premeditated events, we have to say: something that corresponds to the scurrying events of the world - still without bodily senses - corresponds to the world as it actually was and is, in so far as humans and senses are not present - must exist in living, active power; and something that corresponds to the senses must also exist in truly living, active power. Let us arbitrarily call the first substantial being X, and the second substantial being in general Y. Then the following must apply: the freely floating, in themselves undeclared occurrences are the function of the interaction of XY. That is the ultimate conclusion of “knowledge”: XY, unknown how, bring the occurrences into the world. And now one is pushed further to assumptions that allow a meager fixation, but cannot be thought out far. Thus, the realm of dreams opens up here, and four main streets emerge.

It is a fact in the area of occurrence that there is one circle of primary and secondary occurrences for sensory complex A and another for sensory complex B, and so on. The occurrences show themselves in spheres that are not open to each other, or at least cannot be declared open with certainty. So at first we may or perhaps must say that in the processes of effectiveness XY a principle of the departments exists. I called it the framework principle.

Then it can or must be thought that the X and Y, the elemental force of the extended world under the deduction of the senses, and the elemental force of sensuality are unified in the essence. For in order to interact, they must be equivalent. So perhaps only one elemental substance with an internal elemental differentiation is to be believed, with an internal cause to give itself in spheres, in the framework.

Furthermore, it is easily possible that this original substance in its functions also leaps its bounds, and so those spheres of occurrence could somehow flow together in the depths of the roots. And one can even dream that perhaps threads are spun from sphere to sphere in the realm of occurrences as well.

And finally. From the standpoint of man, we know joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. But an almighty primary substance cannot suffer. And so every pain here must somehow be a part of a whole, in which it is not pain, but perhaps only a spice and an intensification of joy.

My absolutely radical analysis and critique of the existing, which only tolerates neutral realities floating around, unknown from where and how, makes it necessary to rave about true primal forces. At the edge of my steel-hard, narrow terrain of knowledge stands a turret from which the presentiment can roam into a necessary but unknowable realm. — And there is also the bridge over which my sympathies can cross over to the structures of anthroposophy and its thoughts.

When it comes to the life of mind and spirit, people often think they can learn something from philosophers. Richard Wahle, an official representative of modern philosophy, has said something rather strange about philosophy, and not only modern philosophy but also the philosophy of earlier times. He said that earlier philosophers were like people owning restaurants where various chefs and waiters produced and presented unwholesome dishes. Modern philosophy, he said, was like a restaurant where chefs and waiters were standing about uselessly and no longer producing anything useful at all.⁹⁶ By ‘chefs and waiters’ Richard Wahle meant philosophers.

This is certainly a strange thing to say. In a sense, however, it was made in the state of mind which exists in our present time. Of course, we don’t have to be so naive as to think that the public at large would always follow or listen to the views of isolated prophets and reflective philosophers. The significance of what philosophers are telling us lies in another area. We must take what they say as symptomatic. In a sense, though in a special sense, it arises from the general state of mind in a given age. And the impulses that are behind their statements lie in the subconscious souls of people in any given time period. Their philosophies develop on this basis.

In our present enquiry into the life which we live in mind and spirit it should also be possible to look at things differently from the way one would from certain natural scientific points of view. We should be under no illusion in this respect. The situation is that everything newly discovered, or of which people think that it might be found in the great philosophical questions, is considered from the natural scientific point of view by the world at large, at least at the sentient level. Even the things that well forth from the deepest depths of humanity’s ethical and religious life have to have their own justification, as it were, before the natural scientific way of thinking today. In a philosophy where insights are sought beyond the sphere of the senses we must therefore above all always consider the scientific requirements of natural science as it is today. But it is exactly here that confusion and misunderstanding arise only too easily, we might even say naturally, with regard to what is meant here by a science of the spirit with anthroposophical orientation.

I would therefore like to begin this course of lectures by attempting to present the scientific foundations—at least in general terms—for the higher insights sought in this anthroposophy. I am afraid I have to ask your forgiveness especially for today’s lecture which will of necessity be less popular than the three that are to follow. Some of the things I’ll have to say today may sound rather abstract, although they are perfectly real experiences for anyone who works with this particular science of the spirit. Nor will it be possible to characterize every detail of the way in which proofs that will stand up to natural scientific scrutiny have to be found in the present time. The lectures that follow will have to provide individual evidence, especially also with reference to the element of proof in the science of spirit.

Misunderstanding arises above all because investigators and thinkers committed to natural science, and people who imagine they are creating a philosophy based on natural science for themselves in a popular way, tend to think that anthroposophy is in opposition to natural science. I will try and show that the science of the spirit which is meant here is not only not in opposition to natural science but rather pursues the aims of natural science itself, right to its ultimate consequences, taking the spirit of the method of proving things that is used in natural science further than people do in natural science itself.

Another objection that may easily come up, again is, I would say, the objection people will naturally raise when they confuse higher perceptive vision with all kinds of old-established traditions. This tends to come from people who only learn about these things superficially and from the outside, indeed from a long way outside. People will say that what one has in the science of the spirit are all sorts of mystic, that is—to their thinking—dark and unclear, notions and ideas that do not come from the part of the inner life where mature scientific thinking has its foundation. This is another objection which I need not deal with directly. It will have to disappear of its own accord when I am going to show where the starting point for the spiritual investigations under discussion lies, initially in the full inner life.

Spiritual science with an anthroposophical orientation must start from two things that need to be deeply rooted in the inner life. The first is a living experience that we can have especially in the study of nature, the rightly understood observation of nature. If you enter closely into the living inner experiences which the observation of nature engenders in the human being, and the simple demands it makes, you will find that on the one hand it makes good sense to talk about limits set to all insight into nature, whilst on the other hand it loses itself completely in misunderstandings. If we approach modern scientific thinking in a non-theoretical way, not with a belief in specific dogmas but in a state of soul that is really sound, if we come alive in our scientific thinking as we observe nature, with direct perception of natural phenomena and objects, we will realize that this modern science, and indeed any insight into nature, must come up against particular limits. The question merely is if these limits to scientific insights are also limits to human knowledge and insight altogether. Anyone who does not see things rightly on this point will be able to raise all kinds of objections, especially to spiritual investigation.

The task I want to set myself today is to show that although this spiritual science is intended to be the basis for a popular philosophy for everyone, whatever their level of education, it was necessary, before it was established, to give serious consideration to all questions concerning the limits of philosophy and natural science. Having set this task for myself, as I said, I must also specifically consider the questions as to the limits of scientific knowledge that arise in direct living experience when working with natural science, doing so in a seemingly abstract way.

Observing nature we arrive at certain assumptions and these evoke ideas where we have to say: Here are the corner posts of natural scientific investigation; here we can go no further, here we cannot enter wholly into the phenomena with our thinking, here limits are indeed set to our insight. I could mention many natural scientific concepts that mark the boundaries of knowledge. However, we merely need to take the most commonplace natural scientific ideas and we will find that they are too dense, as it were, so that the questing human mind is unable to penetrate directly into what we have there. We need take only two ideas, for instance—the idea of energy and the idea of matter. We look in vain for clear mathematical concepts concerning the nature of energy and above all also of matter if we base ourselves strictly on observation of the natural world. When we come up against obstacles such as energy and matter, for instance, as we study and observe nature, we get the impression—though in a somewhat different way, in fact a radically different way from that of Kantianism—that such obstacles are met due to our human nature itself. We feel inclined not to investigate the world outside but above all to ask, with regard to these questions: How is the human being constituted? How does it come to be due to our human nature itself that we have to come up against such obstacles when observing nature?

We then investigate—as I said, I am characterizing the route taken for conclusive evidence—what it is in the human soul that makes us come up against such limits. And you will find that there are indeed powers in the soul which prevent us from entering wholly into energy and matter, for instance, when seeking insight through thinking. The moment we truly want to enter wholly into them, the constitution of our own psyche prevents us from going all the way in our thinking. We need other powers of soul to take in such things as energy and matter and to unite with them. We need to bring in our sentient faculties, views, something related to feeling that cannot be reached in the immediate light of thought in our thinking. You then feel, in an immediate and living way, that this transition from thinking to dim feeling sets the limits for gaining ideas in natural science.

We ask ourselves: How do those powers of soul benefit us by preventing us, as human beings who want to live in a healthy way in our human existence from birth to death, from going beyond the limits set in natural science?

When we consider the character of those powers of soul we gain the impression that they are truly important and significant. Anyone wishing to be a spiritual investigator must get accustomed to making observations in the inner soul. With immediate observation in the soul we can perceive that the powers that do not allow us to penetrate energy and matter are powers that give us human beings the capacity to love others in the world.

Let us consider the nature of love. Let us try and penetrate the constitution of the psyche so that we may come to know the powers that give us the capacity for love. We find them to be the powers that do not allow us to enter fully with mere thinking, with cold observation, into comer posts of natural scientific investigation such as energy, matter and many other things. We would need to be very differently constituted than the way we are as human beings. We would be bound, as human beings, to have no ability to develop love for other human beings, for other entities, if it were not for those limits set to natural science. It is because of our capacity for love that we must inevitably reach our limits in natural science. Someone with insight can see this immediately in connection with natural science.

Then an epistemology arises which is much more alive than the abstract Kantian epistemology. Having gained this insight we look at the world and human insight into nature in a new and different way. We then say to ourselves: What would become of human beings if they did not have limits set to their natural science? They would be cold and without love! This is the first living experience that has to come for the spiritual investigator.

A second one must come with regard to mysticism. Just as on the one hand he turns to natural science in order to pursue natural science and the observation of nature in the right sense, and comes to realize why this observation of nature has limits, so he turns on the other hand to mysticism, not to make biased judgements about it but to gain living experience from it and to be able to ask himself in a truly living way: Is it perhaps possible gain through mysticism what cannot be gained through natural science—a sphere that lies beyond the limits of sensory observation? Can we enter wholly into our own selves—which is the way of mysticism—and come closer to the riddles of non-physical existence?

The spiritual investigator then discovers that there, too, a significant limit is set to human insight and perception. The inner way which exists to take human beings into the depths of the psyche does offer beatitudes; it also offers something like a prospect of uniting with the spiritual powers of cosmic existence. A spiritual investigator must, however, follow mystic experiences without bias. He will then find that his way cannot be that of ordinary mysticism, for above all such mysticism does not provide enlightenment on the essential nature of the human being as such. Why not? Entering wholly into our own inner life in the mystic way we find that certain powers strike back, I would say. We cannot go down. And someone who pursues observation in the psyche as seriously as one does in the science of the spirit of which we are speaking will be more critical in his approach than is the ordinary mystic. An ordinary mystic will very often believe that when he goes down into the depths of the soul he will find something that shines into those depths from a higher world, just like that, as one follows the way of ordinary mystic clairvoyance. A spiritual investigator who has developed a critical approach will know how memories, events that we recall, are always transformed in the ordinary life of the mind, and that these things are active and alive. People think that this element which bubbles up from remembrance of events is something that is not our own, something that takes us into a higher world as we pursue the mystic way. Spiritual research teaches us to perceive very well that essentially everything we meet as we go down there is our own life and activity. This has, however, had to go through many changes, so that we do not recognize things we have lived through years earlier. They appear in a different form. People imagine them to be original events. The potential for self deception in this area is enormous.

When a true spiritual scientist investigates this approach he finds that he recognizes and respects limits in the mystic approach just as much as in the natural scientific approach. And again he would ask himself: What prevents us from going down into the depths of our own souls, making us unable to gain insight into ourselves by using the mystic approach? One finds that if we were able to gain such insight with this approach, if ordinary mysticism was not almost always delusion, if we were to find our own eternal nature by using the approach of ordinary mysticism, we would not have the human capacity for remembering things. The element in us which enables us to remember things, something with a certain power of striking back in us which holds the memories of past events, prevents us from penetrating to those depths with the powers of a mystic. We need the ability to remember for a healthy life on this earth, from birth to death, and mysticism therefore cannot be the true approach to investigation in the search for self knowledge.

The spiritual investigator must therefore find the limits set in mysticism, and these exist in the place where human powers of memory well up. Just as it is true that we would not be human without the ability to remember and the ability to love, so it is true that, our organization being the way it is, we cannot find the supersensible that lies beyond the limit set to natural science in our ordinary conscious state of mind, nor can we find it by entering deeply into our own nature in the way of a mystic.

In the spiritual investigation with anthroposophical orientation of which we are speaking, we therefore look for the way that shows itself when we have lived through everything we are able to gain for the soul’s constitution from these two experiences. These spur us on, and when they enter into the soul they urge it to observe. Initially the discovery made in the direction of insight into the natural world makes us ask ourselves: What is the situation in our dealings with nature? What is the essential nature of our insight into nature? Anyone who gains a clear, unbiased picture of this insight into nature will find that it arises when in our thinking we perceive what our senses are sending out in a living way towards existing nature. Wanting to gain insight we do not simply take existing nature as it is but penetrate it with our thoughts. We have a feeling of immediate justification in thus summing up our insights into nature in our thinking because the laws that govern events in nature shine out for us. We then have an immediate justifiable awareness that we are in a world that somehow is. In our perceptions we feel ourselves, too, to be entities that are in existence.

Philosophically speaking, it would be possible to raise many objections to this statement. However, it is not meant to apply beyond wider limits than those which arise if one wants to say nothing more than what a person experiences as he perceives nature in a thinking way.

The situation changes when we move away from sensory perception. It is something we do as human beings. We do not only perceive things through the senses but sometimes leave sensory perception aside. We are then reflecting, as we put it, taking our thoughts further. We live in an age where taking our thoughts further in this way, thinking without sensory perception, cannot be specifically developed on the basis of the kind of thinking that we can discipline ourselves to develop in the strict way of natural science. I am now speaking especially of a reflective way of thinking that has not arisen in an arbitrary way but arises exactly for someone who has accustomed himself to strict natural scientific observation of nature and to thinking those observations through. I am speaking of the kind of thinking in which we can train ourselves by means of natural scientific observation which is then taken further in reflection. It is a thinking that comes when we withdraw from observation but do so in full conscious awareness, and then also again look at whatever observation of the natural world gives us. This is the kind of thinking I mean. When you really enter into the nature of spiritual investigation with this way of thinking—in spiritual science everything is based on observation—an experience comes of which nothing less can be said but that people have had the wrong idea about it for centuries. An erroneous and therefore disastrous view about the experience one has to establish in the more recent spiritual science has arisen particularly among the most outstanding and astute philosophical minds.

To show what I mean let me refer to a philosopher of glorious eminence, Descartes,⁹⁷ the founder of modern philosophy. His philosophy had the same basis as that of Augustine.⁹⁸ Both thinkers found thinking itself to be the great riddle of existence. The world perceived by the senses was full of uncertainties to them, but they believed that if they saw themselves immediately as souls, as human beings, in thinking, there could be no uncertainty in what arose in their thinking. If one saw oneself as thinking, even if doubting everything, if thinking was nothing but doubt and one had to say: I doubt in my thinking—then the philosophers thought, one is in that doubt. And they established the thesis which shines out like a beacon, I would say, through the ages: ‘I think, therefore I am.’

In the light of the immediate experience of genuine thinking which has been developed in the natural scientific discipline, nothing can be further from the truth than this. Anyone using the strictest form of thinking learned in natural science has to arrive at a different thesis: ‘I think’—and this refers specifically to thinking where one has withdrawn from the outside world—‘and therefore I am not.’ Any genuine position taken with regard to the spiritual world begins with realization of the truth that we get to know our non-existence as soul entities, the essential nature of our self, in so far as soon as we move to a thinking that is wholly abstracted we are not.

The spiritual science of which I am speaking has a problem in finding its way to human hearts and minds because it does make strange demands on people. If one were to ask people to continue along familiar lines, saying that awakening could come if one continued in the way that one had started, that riddles of supersensible insight would be solved—if that were the prospect offered, then things would be easy, considering the thinking habits of many people today. But this science of the spirit demands a change to a wholly scientific approach, and this would arise from the immediate living experience gained in an unbiased state of mind.

We now need to consider how the thesis ‘I think, therefore I am not’ can be established. For this, we energetically pursue in the science of the spirit the kind of thinking that leads to the erroneous thesis ‘I think, therefore I am’ (cogito, ergo sum). It would be as if we were attaining to thought and then not going any further. In the science of the spirit we cannot simply stop at thinking. Our thinking must be strengthened; we have to apply an inner activity to our thinking which may be called ‘meditation’.

What is this meditation? It is a strengthening rather than a deepening of our thinking. Certain thoughts are brought to mind again and again until they have given our thinking so much inner density that thinking is not just thinking but becomes an event we experience like any other living experience that is more powerful than mere abstract thinking. That is meditation. Meditation calls for considerable effort. Depending on their individual disposition, people have to make great efforts, more or less, for months, years or even longer. The living experience of which I am speaking can, however, arise for everyone. It should provide the basis for spiritual investigation. It is not something arising from the living experience of the chosen few but something everyone can achieve. If we strengthen thinking in isolation, abstracted from sensory perception, it comes alive as much as do the events that happen in metabolism, for example.

Again we have a surprising result, but a result that can present itself to the soul in sensory experience as clearly as do the plant cells which a botanist sees so clearly as he studies them under the microscope. It is, however, an unusual experience which we then have in our thinking. This inner experience, the inner state of soul which we gain when we strengthen our thinking, can only be compared to the sensation of hunger. This may sound strange and surprising, but it may be compared to a feeling of hunger, though it does not show itself in the way hunger does when we are in need of nourishment. It is a feeling which is above all limited to the human head organization. But it is only this which will show us how the human bodily organization relates to thinking. Anyone who does not have this experience may have all kinds of strange ideas about the way human thinking relates to the human body. Someone who does have it will never say: ‘This human body produces thinking,’ for—and the fact is evident—this human body does not have the impulses in its generative powers that give rise to thinking. Destructive processes happen in the body when we think, as destructive, I would say, as those which happen when we get hungry and body substance is broken down and destroyed. It has thus been rather strange that people whose thinking is more or less materialistic or mechanistic have arrived at the idea that the body gives rise to our thinking. It no more gives rise to it than do the powers that are its generative powers, powers that constitute the human being. If thinking is to happen, therefore, destruction must happen, as in the case of hunger.

We must come to this surprising experience and only then will we essentially know what thinking is. We then know that thinking is not the unfolding of a reality of soul that may be compared with the outer reality perceived by the senses but that on entering into our own organization in our thinking we are entering into its non-real aspect and we cease to be as we enter into our thinking.

Then the big, anxious question arises: How do we go on from here? The science of the spirit does not give you theoretical points in investigation but points of living experience, points that challenge you to continue your investigations with all the strength of living experience. No one will be able to penetrate into the world of the spirit in the right sense who has not had the living experience of which I have been speaking and who has not convinced himself that in thinking we enter into non-being: ‘I think, therefore I am not.’

Gaining insight into the world of nature thus has a remarkable result. We are unable to gain such insight without thinking. And so it is that something which presents itself to us as being in existence in a truly robust way, I might say, tells us of the non-existence of this, our own soul nature. When I come to speak of psychology the day after tomorrow, this line of thought will be taken further in a popular form. At present I have to refer to something that shows the same thing from the other side: I am not and I perceive that when I am thinking I am not in my thinking, that another experience is coming to meet this experience from a completely different side in the human soul. It comes to meet it in so far as something exists for the unbiased observer of soul that is not accessible to any form of thinking. Anyone who considers the history of philosophy with sound common sense, considering those who have seriously taken up the enigmas of human insight and life, will find that there is always and everywhere something in the life of the human soul where one has to say to oneself: However great your acuity may be as you apply perceptiveness trained in the natural scientific discipline, you cannot gain insight into anything that lies in your will.

The enigma to which I am referring is usually hidden because people will enumerate all the problems connected with the idea of free will. Schopenhauer, who showed great acuity in some respects but always went only halfway or just a quarter of the way, pushed the forming of ideas, which has to do with thinking, to one side and the will to the other. He failed to give sufficient consideration to the experience which the human psyche has with the will, for our thinking always fights shy of the will. We simply cannot get to it. There is, however, one thing in human life—this is apparent if we are wholly objective and unbiased in observing the psyche—where the will impulses rush up into the life of the psyche exactly at a time when it has nothing to do with the kind of thinking that develops in observing the natural world. We might say that the thinking gained from observing the natural world and the thinking that comes from the will cannot come together in the ordinary life of the mind; the chemistry is wrong. These two avoid one another—thinking in terms of the natural world and everything that comes from the will.

Because of this we perceive two completely separate spheres in the psyche—on the one hand our thinking, and especially reflective thinking in full conscious awareness; on the other hand the billows that rise up into the life of the psyche from unknown depths, coming from the will. We’ll consider those depths shortly. The billows that come up when the fully conscious thinking gained from the study of nature fades away play into our inner life in form of dreams when we are asleep. We discover that the dream images that rise up in the inner life and truly have nothing to do with the conscious mind, creating images as if by magic that exclude fully conscious thinking, come from the regions where the will, which also cannot be grasped, rises in depths where the human being lives together with nature.

You might well say: You want to take us into the realm of dreams in a highly unsatisfactory way, Mr Spiritual Scientist! Yes, the sphere of dreams in indeed mysterious, and anyone who approaches it in a truly sound spirit of investigation will find vast numbers of things. Yet it is also a sphere which attracts people who want to find their way to the higher world as charlatans or in a superstitious way. Caution is therefore indicated. Above all it has to be said that anyone investigating the world of dreams with reference to the content of dreams is going in entirely the wrong direction. Many people are doing this today. Whole trends in science have thus been developed using inadequate means. If you study the life of dreams with reference to their content, careful observation must inevitably show that something happens between going to sleep and waking up, when fully conscious thinking falls silent. We cannot say if it is in the human being or in the world outside, but something happens and this rises up in dreams. People cannot, however, immediately say what it is that is happening. Sometimes it does not even come to conscious awareness. Without knowing it, you clothe something that does not come to conscious awareness in memories, reminiscences from everyday life in the conscious mind, memory images you can always find if you look with sufficient care and attention. Someone who wants to gain something from the content of dreams, either by wishing for a dream or by recall, is therefore always following the wrong track. It cannot be a matter of wanting to investigate something that corresponds to the content of dreams. The content of dreams really tells us no more about dreams than a child tells us when he wants to say something about the natural world. Just as we do not turn to a child’s mind when we want to find the explanation for something in nature, so we also cannot turn to what dreams tell us if we want to explore the region that is active and coming into its own beneath the surface of the dream.

Approaches to gaining knowledge existed in earlier times of human evolution that can no longer be considered valid in the present age of natural science, possibilities of learning something of the world’s secrets from the content of dream life. Those times have passed, however. I will have something to say about this in the later lectures. Today, someone who has disciplined his thinking by the methods used to observe nature will specifically need to bring the kind of inner experience to mind which we have in our dreams.

Just as enlightenment on reflective thinking can only be gained by meditation, so this enlightenment on the state of soul in which we are in our dreams is only gained by means of a specific activity in spiritual investigation. Just as we may call the other method meditation, so we may call this one contemplation. It is important to ignore all content of dream life, but try and experience inwardly how we are in the life of our dreams, how we then relate to the senses and their development, having on the one hand come free of the senses, but still having a specific connection with life in the senses, and how there is a specific connection with the whole of our inner organic nature. This strange activity and life of dreams can only be experienced if we try, privily, to go consciously in our mind through something that otherwise happens unconsciously in our dreams.

The question now arises as to why so little of this happens in the ordinary life of the conscious mind. There human beings do not give themselves to such an experience of dream life. Quite the contrary, with the aid of subconscious powers they erroneously cover their dream experience over with all kinds of reminiscences and memories of life. If we begin to enter truly into the subtle activity in which we find ourselves when we dream, doing so contemplatively and in conscious awareness, we find ourselves in a different life experience. This is much lighter, not as heavy as our experience when we move and act in the natural world around us. Getting to know this life, we also learn to answer the question as to why human beings cover dream life over with all kinds of images taken from life, why they make wrong interpretations, and would rather accept wrong ideas about dreams than truly enter into the activity of dreams. We come to realize that in this dream life the whole constitution of our life relates to sleep, and this is in exactly the same way as with meditation we have come to know what happens in the organism when we are thinking.

You come to realize that the human being does not want an unconscious feeling of antipathy to come up from certain subterranean depths with which he is connected. The dream impulse impinges on our soul nature and in doing so induces a subconscious feeling of antipathy in the soul. We might say that initially this is a feeling—this may sound strange but it is true—of surfeit which may be compared to the repugnance one has when there is a surfeit. People will not allow certain unconscious impulses of such antipathy to come up, suppressing them with images which they take from their own inner life and use to cover up their dream level of consciousness. We can only overcome the element which initially makes itself known there in feelings of antipathy, we can only learn to find the right attitude to this, if we use the state of soul which we have brought about by meditation on the one hand and by the contemplation I have just described on the other, to connect our thinking, of which we have truly perceived that it takes us into nothingness, with the element against which we first of all have that unconscious antipathy. These two things can be linked—thinking of which we have to say: ‘I think, therefore I am not’ which cannot enter into an inner soul experience that would be similar to the outside world perceived through the senses; this enters into the inner experience we gain when we first of all learn to overcome the antipathy I have described. Someone able to connect these two things—the antipathy which is felt and therefore covered over with dreams, and the element experienced in a hunger, a subconscious sympathy with something which we shall not get to know unless we get to know contemplation—is in the supersensible world. He will find the supersensible world through thinking, a thinking that initially took him to fearful cliffs, seeming to cast him down to the abyss of nonexistence, with the thinking in full conscious awareness which has been developed in modern science itself, and in the forming of ideas from which human beings shy away so much that they will cover them up with dreams. The way into the supersensible world is thus closely connected, as you can see, with inner experiences of the soul that we merely have to look for in the nature of the human organization itself. You see, they do seem to be far removed from what one would usually expect today. Think of the disappointments people have to go through especially in our present time with regard to their expectations. Who would have expected before 1914 the events which now affect the whole world?

The science of the spirit calls for a degree of inner courage, of the will to have a change of heart, to consider something which addresses powers of soul that go deeper than we are used to in modern thinking. These powers will, however, fully meet the demands of modern science and do anything but take us into nebulous mysticism. If human beings learn truly to use the fully conscious thinking trained through modern science and enter into the world of which I have now been speaking, a world that is alive and active beneath the world of dreams, they will find it possible to gain a view—not a concept, but a view—of the will, free will. One must have wrestled with the problem of free will—I have shown this in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity—and have been looking for immediate living experience of the way that hides so mysteriously behind a sphere in our inner life into which our thinking is quite evidently unable to penetrate. Having wrestled with this, you also find the way to a vision of free will. You then find the way into the world of the spirit. For the fully conscious thinking of which we speak in the science of the spirit makes it possible not to weave those childlike, erroneous images, making them into dreams that cover up an unknown reality. This thinking enters into the spiritual reality, the world of images, that lies beneath.

Images then arise that are true reflections of the supersensible world of the spirit. Dreams cast shadows from the supersensible world into the world that has nothing to do with thinking. If we penetrate a little bit below the surface we can bring the reality which truly is there beneath the surface together with fully conscious thinking. Images then arise, but these are images of supersensible reality. And our thinking, which was already threatening to take us into non-being, arises again in the supersensible world through imaginative insight into the world of the spirit as I have called it in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and also in my Occult Science.

This image-based insight, which initially provides images of a supersensible world, images of the spirits and powers that are behind the world perceived through the senses—this image-based thinking is no dream. You can see that fully conscious thinking shines through it, thinking of such power that initially it admits to itself: ‘I think, therefore I am not.’

In choosing to make this transition, our thinking comes from the experience of non-existence to supersensible experience of existence in the spirit. This shows itself first of all in images, or imaginations, because we go down into the will. Because we then truly get to know the world which otherwise remains subconscious, we also penetrate beyond the images. We learn to manage the images in the way in which we otherwise learn to manage our inner life. Living in mere images then opens out into a form of life which I may called inspired insight. The term may meet with objections, because people connect it with all kinds of ideas from earlier times, though, as I have shown in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, it has nothing to do with these. The true nature of the spiritual world begins to speak in the imagination, making itself known in its immediate reality. The imaginations are first of all images; but the human soul penetrates thinking, which was just about to founder in non-existence, with will experience. Ultimately we encounter the will. In the supersensible sphere, our supersensible will comes up against the supersensible will of the spiritual worlds and entities. Inspiration, inspired insight, comes. And the whole progression of imagination and inspiration can then also come to conscious awareness. I call the raising of imagination and inspiration to conscious awareness ‘true intuition'. It is not the nebulous intuition of which people tend to speak in everyday awareness, but true intuition, when one is right inside the world of the spirit.

The later lectures will be about the different things we feel with regard to the human soul, with regard to the spirits and powers that are behind the natural world, behind our social, religious and historical life. Today I would still like to answer the question as to why this science of the spirit, which according to what has been said works with the kind of proofs that demand the best possible training in modern science, proofs that are entirely on the pattern of modern science—why is it so difficult for this science of the spirit to find a home in the minds of modern people.

We have to investigate the obstacles to the science of the spirit. If we do this, we shall discover why the following question is not considered: ‘How does the science of the spirit actually provide proof of supersensible insights?’ You see, the way I have described the path to you, spiritual scientific investigation provides proof firstly on the basis of serious scientific thinking, and then also by a route that is wholly in continuation of the modern scientific way. In spite of this, people will find all kinds of logical reasons that sound very good indeed when they first get to know spiritual scientific investigation of the kind we are speaking of here. Especially as a spiritual investigator, you often feel real respect for the reasons given by your opponents. These opponents are not considered the least bit silly by a spiritual investigator. Nor does one in the usual sense answer those attacks with any degree of fanaticism. We respect our opponents for we often find their reasons not silly but on the contrary, perfectly intelligent. On the other hand conventional scientists may again and again raise the objection against the spiritual investigation of which we are speaking that there simply are limits set to spiritual investigation.

We have seen why there have to be limits. It is because human beings need to be capable of love and memory. Just as we alternate between waking and sleeping in life, and the one cannot exist without the other, so spiritual investigation may take its place beside natural science, beside a life that needs to have the capacity for memory and love. The reason is that firstly, spiritual investigation makes no claim on anything that can be recalled—the day after tomorrow, when we will be talking about spiritual scientific psychology, we shall see what the situation truly is with regard to memory. The discoveries made in spiritual scientific research are the only thing the human soul is able to live in without a claim being made on something that otherwise is so essential in life—the power to remember. On the other hand we have to say with regard to the capacity for love that we increase our power of love by entering more deeply into the element which otherwise rises from the subconscious rather like antipathy, and that spiritual investigation therefore does not destroy the capacity for love but rather increases it. Just as waking and sleeping can exist side by side to maintain human health, so spiritual science may take its place by the side of natural science, for the reasons I have given. In spite of this, natural scientists or people who believe in gaining their popular view of the world on the basis of natural science will always point out, as clear proof, why there have to be those limits to natural scientific insight.

We are considering the objections that are meant to defeat spiritual science as a supersensible science. When the spiritual investigator himself uses the observation of soul which is necessary in order to become aware of all the things which have been said today, when he enters into the human inner life with this self observation he will find the following. Firstly, because thinking tends to cast the human being into the abyss of non-existence—initially non-existence in relation to the outside world perceived with the senses—and because human beings have a certain horror, if I may use the term, of thus entering into thinking, in so far as this thinking gains its true form when truly entered into, people have no desire to enter truly into the nature of reflective thinking with the aid of spiritual science. They shy away from thus entering into the nature of reflective thinking. They fail to realize, however, why they shy away from it. They do so from a subconscious feeling that is no less active and which one is unable to control exactly because it is subconscious. It is a certain feeling of fear, a subconscious fear of starting from such non-existence. At its opposite pole this subconscious fear generates lack of interest in natural phenomena in its spiritual depths. People do not want to look at natural phenomena in all the places where they evidently cannot be explained out of themselves. One has to go further and find their complement in quite a different direction. Lack of interest, stopping where one should really go deeper—that is the opposite pole of the fear. Again it is a subconscious lack of interest. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the one side of it.

On the other side there is this. How should one enter into that world where one feels one is losing oneself, into the subtle activity and essence which otherwise exists in sleep, in dreams? It is a world where we are no longer standing robustly in outside nature, no longer have the robust feeling of existence which we create for ourselves in the outside world perceived through the senses. You think you are losing your equilibrium, the firm ground under your feet. You no longer have the feeling that you had in relation to the world you perceived through the senses. In some way, if one is not prepared to move on, one gets into a state of weightlessness. One feels one is losing the ground under one’s feet.

Again unconscious fear arises, and this is all the more effective because people do not have conscious awareness of it. The subconscious content assumes the form of moving images, ideas, masking itself. Just as in natural life the subconscious life of the mind masks itself in dreams, so do the subconscious fear and the subconscious lack of interest mask themselves. What is there in all truth in the so-called natural scientific view of the world when people reject spiritual investigation? In truth it is a subconscious lack of interest in nature itself. This assumes the mask of all kinds of excellent hypotheses, good logical reasons, speaking of limits of knowledge; only with all this one usually fails to note the real limits to knowledge, limits that have been presented to you today. The limits of knowledge often used as reasons, wrongly, in those views, are masking a subconscious lack of interest. And the good logical reasons, which, as I said, actually have to be respected by the spiritual investigator, because everything human can indeed be understood by him; these good logical reasons which actually always show a certain acuity of intellect—they too, are masks. People need something to suppress the subconscious, so that they will not feel or sense it—fear of the element into which the science of the spirit leads, though this alone holds the truth in it; this fear prevents people from penetrating to the grounds of existence with the science of the spirit. And this fear puts on the mask in human minds of logical reasons. The best possible logical reasons are produced. We cannot say anything against their logic; they are but mask for subconscious fear.

Anyone able to see through the way in which truly excellent highly respectable logical reasons come up, the outcome in people’s minds of subconscious fear, with highly respectable reasons coming up for the limits of knowledge that are said to make spiritual investigation impossible, will see the great scheme of things differently. He will see above all the problems that must arise for a spiritual investigation where the aim is something which every human being is looking for at a deeply subconscious level, as we shall see in the later lectures. The science of the spirit is already presenting this to humanity in a view of the world that can be understood and will truly satisfy humanity for the future. Problems are still arising because people persuade themselves that they have good reasons to be against the science of the spirit, because they do not admit to their fear. They say there are good reasons why limits should not be exceeded in supersensible insight, and this is because they do not admit to their lack of interest in the actual phenomena of nature.

Someone who sees through the veil that shrouds the truth will see the world in a different way. He will also see this human life in a different way. But just as it is true that at a certain time the Copernican view of the world had to take the place of an earlier one, for evolution demanded this, so must the spiritual scientific view of the world come to the fore now and for the future. It will come to the fore, in spite of the obstacles which I have characterized in depth; it will be possible for it to enter into human hearts and minds, in spite of all obstacles, as happened also with the Copernican view of the world. This is because of two evident facts which apply at the present time. On the one hand there is the fact that we have entered into the age of natural science. We shall see in the third lecture that it is exactly the more exact our knowledge of nature is and the less we limit ourselves arbitrarily to a biased view, the more will it be possible to penetrate into supersensible science. The more natural science advances beyond the limits that are still set for it today, moving towards its ideals, the more will it open for itself the gates to supersensible insight. This is the one thing.

On the other hand we only have to look at the realities of life on earth today. We only have to consider the many surprises that recent times have brought for humanity to see what the present and the future demand of the human being in so far as he wants to be simply a human being on this earth. Human beings will have to rely on their own self in a much more intensive way, seeking much more intensively to find their inner equilibrium. This inner equilibrium has much in common in the soul with the equilibrium that has to be found when thinking enters into the world from which dreams will otherwise billow up—the supersensible world. Future humanity will need much more courage, much greater fearlessness also in the social sphere, in the general life of the world. At present humanity has gone asleep in a comfortable but biased way of thinking, forming ideas and developing feelings exactly on the basis of the great advances made in technology. There is hope that the time is not far off when many hearts and minds will find the strength and ability to focus on the inner life through the science of the spirit.

The science of the spirit is not based on theories, nor on abstract ideas. It does not rest on fantasies but always on facts. Even when its prospects are considered we base ourselves on facts. Convinced that this science has evolved from a serious approach to natural science, one feels certain that the progress of natural science will make human minds appreciate spiritual science in due course. The intention is to let it grow out of life, the most inward and powerful life. This gives one the certainty that the science of the spirit will be increasingly called for by human beings who in life—the life of the present and also of the future—will find a real need for the powers to be gained by it and that this science must enable them to enter into such life.

Questions and answers

Following the lecture given in Zurich on 8 October 1918

Question. Would it possible to give an idea as to how matter and energy’ appear when seen from the spiritual world?

We have only been given until 10 o’clock and I’ll therefore first of all speak about the first of the two, which is matter. If we apply the approach I have been characterizing today and this method of research to something such as matter, we find that human beings are always really between two submerged rocks—I have been characterizing these rocks in various ways today—two rocks where their whole relationship to the world is concerned. On the one people always feel the need to think of events and things in an anthropomorphic way, in human terms, applying their own inner experiences, and so on, to something outside them; or they feel the need to stay strictly with mere observation and not develop ideas at all. Most of you, ladies and gentlemen, will know how much these two rocks have challenged humanity with regard to human thinking through the ages. Especially when we come to something like matter and energy, we find that our usual views cannot get us past those rocks. You may imagine that when we approach these things, with the scientific approach completely changed, some things will prove to be exactly the opposite of the usual view.

To approach the concept of matter in the spiritual scientific sense, we will do best, first of all, to get a picture of what it is. It will merely serve to illustrate. If we have a bottle of soda water with carbon dioxide bubbles in it, we see above all the bubbles. The carbon dioxide is really much thinner than the surrounding water, and the bubbles are embedded in the water. One would like to say, relatively speaking, of course: They are carbon dioxide, but there’s relatively less, compared to the water. So we really see an embedded nothing.

We now have to take a big leap. The same thing happens with matter when we look at the world in terms of spiritual science. The senses see something which occupies spaces, and this we call matter. The mind realizes that where the senses see matter, they are in the same position as we are with the carbon dioxide. We actually see something that has been cut out of the spiritual world. This something, cut out from the spiritual world, so that it lives in the spiritual world the way these carbon dioxide bubbles do in water—this we call matter. We really have to say therefore: What we sense when we come upon matter is fundamentally the perception that this is where the spirit ends. In the terms of spiritual science, we therefore do not have to consider this to be the most important thing but only the fact that where the senses tell us that we have come up against matter, this is where the spirit ends. Matter—surprising though this may be—should be described as the hollow spaces in the spiritual element.

Anyone who takes the analogy to its conclusion will know that hollow spaces also have an influence. One would not assume anything that is not filled out and therefore hollow, to have no effect. As you know, if the air is withdrawn from the recipient of an air pump, the vacuum has an effect on the surrounding air, which will whistle as it rushes in. In the sphere of things, therefore, being hollow does not mean being without effect. We need not be surprised then if we stub our toe against a stone, for in its materiality the stone is a hollow space in the spirituality that fills the world. So much to give an indication. It does not enlighten us about matter, but it shows the road we must follow to gain such enlightenment.

Question. How does the principle which you called ‘will’ tonight relate to Bergson’s elan vital?" How does it relate intuitively to the methods of insight in spiritual science?

What I called ‘will’ today is nothing but the principle which many people deny, though everyone knows it from direct observation. It can never be grasped by thinking about it, however.

Psychologists who must be taken seriously, particularly because they are natural scientists—take Ziehen, for instance, or Wahle, or whoever you will—find it possible to show a degree of relationship between the structure of thinking and the structure of the nerves, the brain, and the like. You always see a degree of satisfaction when people succeed in expressing something which is spiritual in the structure of thinking in terms of organic structures, especially in scientific psychology. They are always wrong, of course. The day after tomorrow we’ll see how strange it is for people to believe that the life of the soul comes from the brain. It is just as if one were to believe—if this is a mirror and you go over there and think that the individual who is coming towards us—which is our own image—must be coming from behind the mirror. It depends on the nature of the mirror—if it is level or curved—what kind of image comes to meet us. Still, there’s nothing behind the mirror. Someone looking for something behind the limits set for us by nature, and behind the human brain, which merely mirrors the inner life, is just like the person who smashes the mirror in order to find the reason for the image that comes to meet him in it.

I have thus called ‘will’ what we experience in our ordinary inner life; it is an inner perception, but is more and more considered to be beyond comprehension. ‘Scientific’ psychologists find that the forming of ideas, thinking, has a structure that relates to organic nature. However, as soon they move on from thinking and go just as far as feeling and then to the will, they will say: ‘Here we can at best speak of will or feeling as nuances’—Theodor Ziehen speaks of emotive colouring, ideal colouring—‘for here nothing can be found that might be analogous to sensory perception.’ The will is thus beyond comprehension, though it evidently exists. It is denied only by people who do not go by reality but by the things which they say they are able to grasp scientifically. Only causality has validity in natural science, and as the will does not function causally they will say it does not exist. Something is there, however, and does not go by what can be comprehended. That is merely human prejudice.

I thus call ‘will’ a very real experience and have merely shown that something we know at the most common, everyday level can only be grasped if we use meditative thinking to go down into the world from which usually only dreams, which are remote from us, arise. Here a natural scientific method has merely been transferred to the spiritual sphere, but it does need to be understood in a different way from a mere fact perceptible to the senses. Bergson’s elan vital is mere fantasy, mere abstraction. Taking the sequence of phenomena, thinking is applied to what is happening. We do, of course, have many reasons to think our way into what is happening, but that is not the way of a true science of the spirit. That way is one where facts, even if only spiritual facts, everywhere point to where we can find something, where something lies. It is not a matter of taking hypotheses, things one has merely thought up, into the world of phenomena.

Bergson’s intuition is essentially nothing but a special case of the way which I have firmly rejected today as not being fruitful in spiritual scientific terms. I characterized how the spiritual investigator will know the mystic way, and have the mystic experience, but will show that the mystic way cannot guide him to true insight. Bergson only uses thinking, on the one hand, though it is evident that this does not penetrate to true reality. He gives an extensive description, characterizing it in every respect. He then abandons this thinking. In the science of the spirit we do not abandon this thinking but experience, in all intensity, an abyss into which this thinking appears to lead. We do not deny this thinking, which is what Bergson ultimately does, but look for another way. This is the way of getting out of the abyss which I have characterized, the way to rise again in a spiritual, a supersensible reality. Bergson simply says that thinking does not take us to the reality. He therefore continues his search by pursuing a special mystic way through inward experience.

The intuition at which Bergson arrives essentially does not lead to anything which is real. Today I have only been able to characterize the way of spiritual science. In the next three lectures I am going to characterize definite results, specific results that one gets, results that serve life and the whole of our humanity. Bergson keeps revolving around this: We cannot think, we must grasp the world inwardly. He keeps referring to intuition. But nothing enters into this intuition; it remains an indefinite, darkly mystical experience.

Many people are comfortable with this today, for it means they do not have to undergo what I said was exactly what is demanded for the science of the spirit—a truly radical change of mind, where one does not just want to indulge oneself mystically, but seeks to penetrate in all seriousness into everything of which people are afraid in their minds, because of certain premises, and in which they are not interested, which is all subconscious. Essentially Bergson does not even overcome his lack of interest but actually encourages it. Nor does he let go of his fear. For these intuitions do not lead to real understanding of the spiritual world; they do not go beyond an inward experience.

• 96. Wahle, Richard (1857–1935). Ueber den Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens, Wien und Leipzig 1906, S. 92 (1. Buch, Kap. 4).
• 97. Descartes, Rene (1596–1650), French mathematician and philosopher. ‘Cogito ergo sum’—see Discours de la methode (1637) I, 7, and (not in the exact words) Meditationes de prima Philosophia (1641), 2nd meditation.
• 98. Augustine of Hippo, St (354–430), Numibian Christian, one of the four Latin Doctors of the Church. ‘I think, therefore 1 am’—.see Soliloquia II, 1; De ver. relig. 72f.; De trinit. X, 14.

First appeared in the Golden Blade 1977.¹

Translated by Dorothy Lenn

In the course of these winter lectures I have repeatedly said that there is such a thing as knowledge of supersensible worlds. We have discussed bow the human being can attain to such knowledge, and we have many times spoken of its fruits. I want now to give two lectures which will serve to illustrate what we mean by knowledge of the higher worlds.

With the help of two examples, out of many that might have been selected, I propose to show how clairvoyant knowledge developed in a certain region—the kind of clairvoyant knowledge that has been, or ought to have been, left behind by present-day humanity. Clairvoyant knowledge given by natural forces, by natural capacities, will be my subject to-day. Next time I will discuss, again by means of examples, how clairvoyant knowledge can be acquired through strict training, by specific methods. To-day we will speak of the knowledge that led our ancestors to a form of spiritual perception which has now been superseded; next time I will deal with the kind of clairvoyance which has existed in all ages, but which has to undergo a different training from epoch to epoch.

I have already pointed out that Spiritual Science speaks of an evolution of human consciousness. What we call our consciousness to-day, the consciousness whereby we recreate the outer world within us in thoughts, in mental images, in ideas, is only one stage of evolution. Another stage preceded it, and yet another stage will follow it. When anyone speaks to-day of the theory of evolution, he usually means the evolution of outer form, of the forms of material existence. Spiritual Science speaks of an evolution of the soul, of the spirit, and therefore of consciousness. We can look back to an earlier form of consciousness which has been superseded by the present form, and we can look forward to a future form of consciousness which will develop only gradually. The earlier state of consciousness we may call subconsciousness, and the consciousness to which our present consciousness can be developed, by spiritual-scientific methods, we may call superconsciousness. Thus we can differentiate three consecutive stages—subconsciousness, consciousness, superconsciousness.

In a certain sense all consciousness to-day is a stage of development of consciousness in general, just as the forms of the higher animals are developments of the universal animal form. Present-day consciousness has evolved from a lower stage. It is surrounded by external objects, which it perceives through the senses—hearing, sight, taste and so on. From what was first perception it makes concepts, mental images, ideas. Thus an external world of objects which work upon us is mirrored in our consciousness.

Subconsciousness was not like that. It was of a far more direct nature. We may call it a lower clairvoyant consciousness, because whoever possessed it did not approach objects with sense-organs and straightway seek to make concepts of them, but the concepts were there directly. Pictures arose and faded away. Let us suppose that the clairvoyant consciousness encountered an external object which was dangerous to it. To-day we see the object, and the mental image called forth by the sight of it brings about the consciousness of danger. It was not like that in the earlier clairvoyant consciousness. The external object was not perceived in clear outline, especially in the earliest times. Something like a dream-picture arose and revealed whether the object was sympathetic or unsympathetic. The fluctuating pictures in dreams to-day will serve to illustrate this for us. The dreams of a normal person to-day have no real connection with any outer world. But suppose something quite definite were to correspond to every picture which arose in us like a dream-picture, one picture occurring in case of dangers another in the presence of a useful object, then we could say that it was immaterial whether we were awake or dreaming, for we could direct our lives according to these pictures!

Our present consciousness has developed out of such a dream-life, which allowed the inner nature of things, their inner soul-quality, to rise up before us. And this dream-consciousness has passed through manifold forms before reaching its present form. If we look back in history as it is revealed to us by Spiritual Science, we reach at last, in the far-distant past, a state of soul in which the external was not perceptible, but in which the surrounding world, possessed inwardly by the soul, was perceived by an old clairvoyant consciousness. But this consciousness had in consequence one attribute which, contrasted with the fundamental attribute of the soul to-day, must be designated as imperfect. It was not self-conscious; the soul could not say “I” to itself, could not distinguish itself properly from its environment. Only because external objects with sharp contours confront the soul can it distinguish itself from them. Thus man has had to purchase his self-consciousness by the surrender of his old clairvoyance. All evolution is an advance which at the same time involves the renunciation of certain advantages of the earlier stage. Now at each stage something from the earlier stage lingers on into later times, and in certain circumstances we can, from such legacies of the past, see the earlier conditions projected into the present where they rank as abnormalities.

We find traces of such atavisms even in the human body, as for example in the muscles round the ear, which in an earlier stage moved the ear. In animals these muscles still have a purpose; in human beings they still exist, but few men are able to move their ears voluntarily. At one time human beings had a form of body in which such muscles were needed. To-day they are just relics of the past—vestiges of an earlier stage of evolution.

Just as we find certain organic survivals in these outer structures, so, too, we find remains of other early evolutionary conditions. Thus we see traces of the old clairvoyance projected right into our own time, but clouded and changed by our present stage of development, and hence abnormal. This throws light upon the old European clairvoyance, which differs in a certain way from the clairvoyance of the East. To-day I want to go into these differences.

What are these survivals of the old clairvoyant state of mankind? We can distinguish two kinds. One of them speaks for itself and is a true legacy of the past. I am referring to the dream and to dream experiences. The other vestiges of the past are in quite a different category. They are very much coloured and altered by present-day development, whereas the dream has not been changed by man, but by advancing evolution. The other remnants of the past are vision, premonition, and deuteroscopy, or second sight.

Let us first take the dream. It is something left behind from the old picture-consciousness But into that ancient consciousness the nature of the object really penetrated, whereas the dream to-day, although it still shows certain characteristics of the old picture-consciousness, has lost its real value, its reality. Let us take an example. Someone dreams that he sees a tree-frog, snatches at it and catches it Then he wakes up and finds a corner of the bedcover in his band. The dream symbolised the external event. Had the man met the dream with objective consciousness, he would have seen that he had the bedcover in his hand. But this is how the dream symbolises. It can become very dramatic. For example, a student dreams that on leaving the lecture-room he is jostled by another student. It comes to a duel. The seconds are chosen, they go to the agreed place, the distance is measured, the pistols are loaded, the first shot is fired. But in that moment the student wakes up, and knocks over the chair by his bedside. There we have the same thing. If the student concerned had seen the event with his objective consciousness, had he been awake, he would have seen that the chair had been knocked over, or possibly it would not have been knocked over. Now, however, the dream gives a more or less symbolic expression to what happened.

There are all kinds of such dreams; they may even have some element of reality. But in typical cases we have to do with an arbitrary connection between what is pictured and the outer event. The dream itself shows that one is dealing with a picture; but it does not show any direct connection between the picture and the inner qualities of the outer world. In direct consciousness a man would not have been obliged to touch salt with his tongue in order to recognise it, but a quite definite dream-picture would have arisen before him, and there would have been one for vinegar, another for sugar, and yet another for a dangerous being, and so on. With every being in nature there went a specific picture.

Something of this survives in dream-consciousness. But because present-day man has contracted his whole being into self-consciousness, because he has cut himself off from the outer world, differentiated himself from it, his dream-pictures no longer have any connection with it. Through having made the normal transition from dream-consciousness to self-consciousness, he has lost connection with the outer world.

It is different as regards the other three survivals—vision, premonition, and deuteroscopy, or second sight. We have often described the course of human evolution somewhat as follows. The human being, as he is to-day, consists of four members: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. The ego is the last member to develop, and it is through the attainment of the ego that man has become a self-conscious being; he has thereby wrested his being from the life in his lower members. When the ego was not so far developed as it is to-day, when man still lived in his astral body, when the astral body was the bearer of his consciousness, this consciousness was pre-eminently a dream-consciousness. It was the astral body which caused these pictures to come and go. Hence it is easy to understand that man was then more closely united with his lower members. Thus it is as if man had become free in his astral body, as if he had disengaged himself from it and had thereby acquired his present objective consciousness.

As man was once submerged in his astral body, so in still earlier times he was submerged in his etheric and physical bodies. Then he had still lower forms of consciousness. Thus we have three states of subconsciousness below the present objective consciousness.

Imagine that a man is swimming below the surface of the sea. It is then possible for him to see what is in the sea. He sees what happens at the bottom of the sea, what swims and moves there, and so on. What he encounters there is quite different from what confronts him if he rises to the surface and looks up at the star-strewn heavens. Similarly, man has been lifted out of that stage of consciousness in which he was aware of what was conveyed to him by astral, etheric and physical bodies; he has risen to self-consciousness. In certain abnormal cases, however, he can revert to the sea of subconsciousness. In dreams this happens involuntarily. What he has won by rising out of this sea he can take back again into it.

Imagine a man plunging back into this sea and able to compare all that he perceives below with what he has learnt above. That is what it is like to-day. The man takes with him what he has experienced here above. It is not as it is with a diver who takes nothing but his memory with him, who can make comparisons only with the help of his memory. Whoever plunges into the sea of subconsciousness after having become a modern man colours everything below with his experiences above. What has been experienced above is carried as a sheath into the subconscious, and man receives no clear picture of that world, but a picture clouded by the world above.

When a man plunges into his astral body, he transplants himself artificially into the sphere occupied by his consciousness when he himself still lived in his astral body. This is how what to-day we call visions come about. Were man to descend into his astral body without knowing anything of the modern world, he would really experience the inwardness of objects; they would appear to him in their true guise. To-day, however, they appear to him as a distorted reflection of what can be experienced only in the upper world of consciousness. Therein lies both the truth and the deceptiveness of visions. Anyone who descends into the world of vision may always be sure that the cause of what he sees lies in the soul-environment; but it is also certain that the vision confronting him will be distorted, that it will not show him things in their true guise, but will imitate what occurs in the world above. Hence a man’s visions usually indicate what the men of his own day are experiencing. This can be checked in full detail, from decade to decade.

Let us suppose that a man plunged into that world at a time when there were no telegrams and no telephone. Then he would have seen no telegrams and no telephone in the world below, whereas in our own day the incidence of telegrams and telephones in visions becomes more and more frequent. That, too, is why the pious Catholic, who in his objective consciousness has so often seen the figure of the Madonna, takes this figure with him, and she appears to him down there too. It is not an expression of the reality, but something which the person has taken down with him, and in which he clothes the reality. In such a case he has carried down into the world below what he has experienced in the world above. Thus when a man returns in vision into the world from which he has emerged, he gives an abnormal colouring to what he experiences.

If he plunges back again into the etheric body, he experiences what we may call premonition. But this is even more dangerous, because his state of consciousness has gone still further back. There man becomes involved in all the tangled threads of existence out of which he had raised himself into ego-consciousness; but in that case, too, he carries below all that he has acquired above. He is unable to see the threads in their true form.

Just think how little of what is all around man comes within his range. The thoughts which he makes (about cause and effect for example) are limited to a small section of the world. But the whole world in its entire circumference hangs together, and there are other relationships involved. Man is, as it were, standing upon an island of existence, and the island is all he sees. But this island is related to the whole cosmos. In his etheric body man is much more closely connected with the cosmos than he is in his present consciousness. If he were able to receive in its purity what his ether body tells him, he would see future events, because down in his etheric body things converge. He would see that an event, which might not emerge into reality for perhaps ten years, was already there in germ. But man takes down with him his little intellect, his narrow little mind soul. Hence what emerges as premonition is falsified; that is why so little reliance can usually be placed upon premonitions, just as generally there is no objective truth in visions which occur by way of nature.

When man plunges into his physical body, premonition can pass over into penetration of space. Whereas in premonition he sees other times, in deuteroscopy he can see what happens in the far distance, beyond the range of the physical eye. These pictures are like a Fata Morgana. Abnormal phenomena such as those reported by Swedenborg come into this category.² But here the deceptions are even greater, and nothing ought to be accepted which has not been tested by a trained, disciplined seer. Such conditions, which to-day are morbid, are survivals of an ancient clairvoyance which was once thoroughly healthy, was once something which placed the man in a relationship of complete understanding with his environment.

In the evolution of European peoples, in particular, we find everywhere a picture-consciousness of varying antiquity which saw the world in its inner, soul-spiritual nature. But the ego-consciousness of these peoples was still quite undeveloped. Have we anything left of what was seen and related by these people of olden times, who had not yet got the mature ego-consciousness, who had a transitional consciousness between the old picture-consciousness and the objective consciousness? We have indeed a beautiful and precious survival of it in myths and sagas, in the whole range of mythology. The content of mythology is so often described to-day as folk-poetry. Clouds will be described as flocks of sheep, and thunder and lightning as something else. There is nothing more arbitrary than such interpretations. Sagas, myths and fairy tales, too, tell us about what we experienced in the subconscious. All sagas and myths were experienced, not composed—experienced not in our present-day consciousness, but in the ancient, clairvoyant state.

We can penetrate deeply into this consciousness and into the origin of myths and sagas if we turn to an important passage of the Scriptures. You will remember the significant verse in the Old Testament which reads. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. II, 7). A certain formation of the breathing process is here associated with human evolution. We shall see later that this is a reference to the fact that man owes his present-day ego-consciousness, his capacity for living with and in his blood, to the peculiar structure of the breathing process which he has acquired in course of time and still has to-day. Only through having learnt to breathe as an upright being did man raise himself above the picture-consciousness. Animals still have picture-consciousness to-day, either directly or indirectly, because their lungs have not the upright position. It has quite rightly been observed that the dog is much more intelligent than the parrot, and yet it is only the parrot which has learnt to speak. Much depends on the direction in which an organ is placed. The parrot has a larynx in the vertical position, and that is why it learns to speak. It is because of the special configuration of his organs that man has been able to advance to his present objective consciousness.

If we have understood the words of the Bible just quoted we shall say: “Man has been so formed in conformity with the laws of the cosmos that his present breathing process has developed.” Those who understood this process from its spiritual aspect, who knew that a spiritual element lives in all things, said to themselves: “The spiritual element of the air has to penetrate us in the way that this process makes possible; then the free ego-consciousness will evolve.” When this process takes place in us in an irregular way, when the spirits of the air are unable to work into our blood in a way which corresponds to our present state of consciousness, then consciousness is forced back into an earlier stage. That is why the ancient European experienced every irregularity of the breathing process as a suppression of consciousness and an inner experience.

The physical expression of irregular breathing is the nightmare (Alpdruck). The word comes from Alb or Elf, so that it signifies the spiritual which enters into the human being even though it cannot unfold itself fully. When the breathing process becomes irregular, when the ego has to descend into a lower kingdom, the host of lower spirits, which can make an appearance in the astral realm, have access to man. And though you may say this is a kind of illness, that is not the point; the important thing is what the conditions bring about. From our higher standpoint to-day, the condition must of course be called unhealthy.

Although to-day it is a reversion to an earlier condition, it was once a transitional state between the normal and the abnormal. Our present-day breathing has arisen from a breathing process which is found as a survival in the nightmare; the nightmare is the last vestige of it. At one time man needed less oxygen and more carbon dioxide. When that was the normal condition, when man was nearer the state of the plant, he had a different form of consciousness, he was plunged into the ancient clairvoyant consciousness. Then he emerged from this condition, and what was formerly healthy became unhealthy, and during the transition period, when he oscillated between the one form of consciousness and the other, the ancient European experienced all that we find in the elves and sprites, which came to his consciousness before he had acquired consciousness of the self. Thus we look back by way of nature into conditions which were once normal; the nightmare represents a survival of the picture-consciousness which created myths and sagas.

But the change in the breathing has involved many other changes. The seeing of external objects has come about. Picture-consciousness did not involve seeing external contours, seeing the outer surface of things. Then came the time when pictures gradually vanished and were replaced by the world of external objects. And once again there was an intermediate stage when man had already developed sight, but when his external sight might in abnormal circumstances withdraw and he might revert to a state of clairvoyance.

There is a popular expression in German, an expression of ancient origin, for looking at something without seeing it. It is Spannung, Staunen, Spahnen, and the last word has the same derivation as the German word Gespenst (ghost), so that here you have the ghost before you, so to say; you have before you something which is seen by means of inner, astral forces. To-day that is abnormal. In the transitional period, whenever it occurred, the man was admonished to say to himself, “But I will see, I do not wish to be stared at, I wish to see.” Thus what he saw in this way seemed to him to be something which he had to overcome. All the stories about blinding whatever stares at one, so that it can no longer stare, derive from this. In all these stories, from the story of the blinding of the giant Polyphemus right down to the wonderful story in which Dietrich of Berne overcomes the giant Grim, we have this stage of consciousness. The very strangeness of the phenomenon, however, could have an attraction for the soul. Hence there were beings, beings who belonged to the inwardness of things, who could have a seductive influence on men, who could lead them astray.

The key word in German for this enticement is Lur or Lore. And wherever you meet this word, you have the ghost in its “alluring” form. If men were specially liable to meet it at a special place, they said that this place was its home. The word Lei is connected with this, hence the Lorelei rocks. It is there that the alluring form is to be found which withdraws into the Lei, as into its native country. We can find this word Lei in various associations with the word Lure. Thus we have the subconscious experience of seeing, with its Lore or Lure, which emerges as the specific seeing of external objects develops. The Alpe, or elves, have to do with the fact that man retains his ego-consciousness within him.

We have yet another survival, still to be found in certain Slav regions. It is the saga of the Midday Woman.³ When men go out into the fields, and, instead of returning home at mid-day, remain there, the Midday Woman appears to them, clothed in white. She questions them until the clock strikes. If they are able to answer all the time, she says, “Good, you have redeemed me.”

Here once again an ancient clairvoyant experience is expressed. Just as we breathe in with the air the spirit of the ego, so we have gathered together our entire being, our entire microcosm, out of the macrocosm. Everything within us has come from without. Our inner intelligence is a product of the outer intelligence. There is a transitional period between the time when men saw the spiritual beings who directed the structure of the world, the beings who directed the formation of the flowers and of the crystals, and the time when the outer intelligence was formed. This intelligence has taken possession of man; he has become conscious of it. The midday sun, the midday demon, obliterates the ego-consciousness through a partial, undeveloped sunstroke. Then what has entered into man to make him intelligent, the external cause of his intelligence, appears before the man, and in such a way that he has to exercise his intelligence. It is through his having to make a mental effort that the phenomenon occurs. The man is, so to say, confronted objectively by what the cosmos has made of him. He must overcome it. If he can exercise his intelligence so as to be able to answer the Midday Woman until the clock strikes, he can unite himself again with his ego.

We meet the best expression of this in ancient Greece and sculpturally in ancient Egypt, in the great questioner, the Sphinx. The Sphinx is nothing but the highest expression of the Midday Woman. It asks the ultimate question, the question to which the answer is “man.” Whoever is able to solve the riddle redeems the Sphinx. It falls into the abyss—that is, it unites with human nature.

Man has acquired his present clear day-consciousness, which has brought with it self-consciousness, as a victory over the ancient picture-consciousness. In earlier times, although he was unable to see into himself, did not find a self within him, yet when he looked outside himself he saw spiritual beings everywhere—in the waves, in the air, in the trees—all was indwelt by spiritual beings. How could he himself not be so indwelt also? When he felt, “With the air I breathe in. I receive the actual imprint of the ego,” how could he do otherwise than see in the air the embodiment of the god to whom he owed his objective consciousness? When he breathed in the air, he knew, “The air moves my ego.” When the wind blustered without in the stormy winter nights he knew that Wotan was roaming about, the same Wotan who was breathed in by him. We could go through all the myths and sagas in this way. We should doubtless find that literary composition has brought about modifications, but they can all be traced back to the old clairvoyant consciousness.

European clairvoyance, however, differs essentially from that of the East; for every people has a special mission, a special task to fulfil in the course of evolution. Whereas in the time when the Oriental was going through the transition from the old clairvoyance to the formation of the ego, he possessed only a mere rudiment of the ego, so that it very easily surrendered itself to the higher beings, the consciousness of personality developed early in European life. It was a particular characteristic of the European peoples that during the transition period the ego made tremendous inroads. The human being was able to see into the inwardness of things, but he asserted his ego very strongly, felt himself from the outset as a strong opponent of the beings who were trying to entangle him in the threads of the spiritual world around him. Therefore the beings who are man’s helpers are those who work towards the acquisition of self-consciousness, towards the liberation of the ego.

The victory over the astral Spirits, which is the aim of those Spirits who bestow personal self-consciousness, plays a great part in Germanic literature, in European literature. The Alp-spirit, who ensnares man, is present everywhere for European consciousness in the Midgard Snake, or in the forms of the giants. Everywhere we see how the gods ally themselves with men in the formation of personal self-consciousness. We see how the god Wotan, who lives in the breathing, becomes man’s ally in his fight against all the lower spirits; he stands beside man in his struggle to overcome the lower consciousness. It is Donar or Thor, with his hammer, who conquers the giants and the Midgard Snake; he it is who expresses man’s emergence into reality.

This conquest over the astral powers, who prevent men from becoming free, played a great part in preparing the way for Christianity. There was something more impersonal in the Oriental, whereas the warm-hearted European had to experience something unknown to less advanced Eastern peoples. In Europe the urge to emerge from subconsciousness was the dominant motive. Therefore the European felt intensely: “I with my ego have emerged from the spiritual world into the physical-sensible world, in primeval times my soul was in the spiritual world, the world of light. What I have acquired here has made me blind to the old astral world.” This found its strongest expression where the victory over the astral world was most strongly felt. The ancient European consciousness felt Baldur to be the leader of souls in so far as they belong to the land of their birth, to the astral world of light. The leader of the sense-world is Hodur, who slays Baldur.⁴

Thus tragically the ancient Europeans experienced the fading out of the clairvoyant soul, the provisional death of the soul. But they experienced it as a transition; they felt that something new had to follow. Hence the “Twilight of the Gods,” the downfall of the spiritual world. And because in ancient times personal consciousness was strongly marked in the European peoples, the appearance of the personal God, Christ Jesus, could be most deeply understood by the Europeans. The germ for the reception of the personal God was laid down long beforehand.

We have seen how in Europe the present-day consciousness has developed out of the earlier one. It was only a small section of the spiritual world that people could see in this way. But the initiates had their consciousness in still higher worlds. We shall show how the knowledge of the initiates was raised above the clairvoyant consciousness of the masses, what impression the appearance of the Christ made on the Mysteries, and how the Mysteries have evolved right up to the present day. What men saw at lower levels in the past they will see in the future at a higher level; for they will see into the spiritual world in full consciousness.

Man has indeed passed through this process. While still leading a subconscious form of existence, he descended in order to acquire self-consciousness. And with his self-consciousness he will rise again. His earlier clairvoyance was not his own, but a clairvoyance which other beings had instilled into him. What he will acquire for himself will be a free self-conscious possession, best described by a saying of Christ-Jesus. On the occasion (John VIII, 32) when the Christ was emphasising the relationship between truth and freedom, he spoke of the far-distant future in these terms: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

• 1. This lecture is the second of three public lectures (Berlin, April-May, 1906), which in 1955 were published in book form, in German, by the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, under the title of Isis und Madonna: Alteuropäisches Hellsehen, die Europäischen Mysterien und Ihre Eingeweihten. A typescript translation of the first lecture is in the Library at Rudolf Steiner house, London; a translation of the third appeared in the quarterly, Anthroposophy, vol. iv, no. 3, 1929.
• 2. See also the following lectures by Dr. Steiner: Swedenborg's Power of Vision (Dornach, 12/9/15), printed in the Goetheanum English News-Sheet 1939; Die Geschichte des Spiritismus (Berlin. 30/5/04), published in English as the first of two lectures in the booklet, The History of Spiritism, Hypnotism and Somnambulism (Anthroposophic Press, 1943); and Menschlich und Menschheitliche Entwicklungwahrheiten (Cycle 46, Berlin, 1917: not translated).
• 3. See the fourth, lecture in the cycle, The inner Nature of Man between Death and Rebirth (Vienna, 1914), published by Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1928; out of print.
• 4. See the lectures, The Balder Myth and the Good Friday Mystery (Dornach, 2-3/4/15); published in Festivals and the Seasons (Anthroposophical Publishing Company, 1928: out of print).

It was in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century that materialism had its period of greatest development. In today's lecture we will center our interest more on the theoretical side of this materialistic evolution. A great deal of what I shall have to say about the theoretical aspect can also be said in almost the same words of the more practical aspect of materialism. For the moment, however, we will leave that aside and turn our attention more to the materialistic world conception that was prevalent in the civilized world in the middle and second half of the nineteenth century.

We shall find that we are here concerned with a twofold task. First, we have to gain a clear perception of the extent to which this materialistic world view is to be opposed, of how we must be armed with all the concepts and ideas enabling us to refute the materialistic world view as such. But in addition to being armed with the necessary conceptions, we find that from the point of view of spiritual science we are required at the same time to do something more, namely, to understand this materialistic world view. First of all, we must understand it in its content; secondly, we must also understand how it came about that such an extreme materialistic world view was ever able to enter human evolution.

It may sound contradictory to say that it is required of man on the one hand to be able to fight the materialistic world view, and on the other hand to be able to understand it. But those who base themselves on spiritual science will not find any contradiction here; it is merely an apparent one. For the case is rather like this. In the course of the evolution of mankind moments must needs come when human beings are in a sense pulled down, brought below a certain level, in order that they may later by their own efforts lift themselves up again. And it would really be of no help to mankind at all if by some divine decree or the like it could be protected from having to undergo these low levels of existence. In order for human beings to attain to full use of their powers of freedom, it is absolutely necessary that they descend to the low levels in their world conception as well as in their life. The danger does not lie in the fact that something like this appears at the proper time, and for theoretical materialism this was the middle of the nineteenth century. The danger consists in the fact that if something like this has happened in the course of normal evolution, people then continue to adhere to it, so that an experience that was necessary for one particular point in time is carried over into later times. If it is correct to say that in the middle of the nineteenth century materialism was in a certain sense a test mankind had to undergo, it is equally correct to say that the persistent adherence to materialism is bound to work terrible harm now, and that all the catastrophes befalling the world and humanity that we have to experience are due to the fact that a great majority of people still tries to cling to materialism.

What does theoretical materialism really signify? It signifies the view regarding the human being primarily as the sum of the material processes of his physical body. Theoretical materialism has studied all the processes of the physical, sensory body, and although what has been attained in this study is still more or less in its first beginnings, final conclusions have nevertheless already been drawn from it in regard to a world view. Man has been explained as the confluence of these physical forces; his soul nature is declared to be merely something that is produced through the workings of these physical forces. It is theoretical materialism, however, that initiated investigation of the physical nature of the human being, and it is this, the extensive examination of man's physical nature, that must remain. On the other hand, what the nineteenth century drew as a conclusion from this physical research is something that must not be allowed to figure as more than a passing phenomenon in human evolution. And as a passing phenomenon, let us now proceed to understand it.

What is really involved here? When we look back in the evolution of mankind—and with the help of what I have given in Occult Science¹ we are able to look back rather far—we can see that the human being has passed through the greatest variety of different stages. Even if we limit our observation to what has taken place in the course of earth evolution, we are bound to conclude that this human being started with a form that was quite primitive in comparison to its present form, and that this form then underwent gradual change, approaching ever nearer to the form the human being possesses today. As long as we focus on the rough outline of the human form, the differences will not appear to be so great in the course of human history. When we compare with the means at the disposal of external history, the form of an ancient Egyptian or even an ancient Indian with the form of a man of present-day European civilization, we will discover only relatively small differences, as long as we stay with the rough outlines or superficial aspects of observation. For such a rough viewpoint, the great differences in regard to the primitive forms of development emerge only in early man in prehistoric ages.

When we refine our observation, however, when we begin to study what is hidden from outer view, then what I have said no longer holds good. For then we are obliged to admit that a great and significant difference exists between the organism of a civilized man of the present and the organism of an ancient Egyptian, or even an ancient Greek or Roman. And although the change has come about in a much more subtle and delicate manner in historical times, there has most assuredly been such change in regard to all the finer forming and shaping of the human organism. This subtle change reached a certain culmination in the middle of the nineteenth century. Paradoxical as it may sound, it is nevertheless a fact that in regard to his inner structure, in regard to what the human organism can possibly attain, man had reached perfection at about the middle of the nineteenth century. Since then, a kind of decadence has set in. Since that time, the human organism has been involved in retrogression. Therefore, also in the middle of the nineteenth century, the organs that serve as the physical organs of human intellectual activity had reached perfection in their development.

What we call the intellect of man requires, of course, physical organs. In earlier ages, these physical organs were far less developed than they were in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is true that what arouses our admiration when we contemplate the Greek spirit, particularly in such advanced Greeks as Plato and Aristotle, is dependent on the fact that the Greeks did not have such perfect organs of thinking, in the purely physical sense, as had men of the nineteenth century. Depending on one's preference, one might say, “Thank heaven that people in Greek times did not possess thinking organs that were as perfect as those of the people in the nineteenth century!” If on the other hand, one is a pedant like those of the nineteenth century, wishing to cling to this pedantry, then one can say, “Well, the Greeks were just children, they did not have the perfect organs of thought that we have; accordingly, we must look with an indulgent eye upon what we find in the works of Plato and Aristotle.” School teachers often speak in this vein, for in their criticism they feel vastly superior to Plato and Aristotle. You will only fully understand what I have just indicated, however, if you make the acquaintance of people—and there are such!—who have a kind of vision that one may call, in the best sense of the word, a clairvoyant consciousness.

In such people, the presence of clairvoyant consciousness—if there are any in the audience who possess a measure of it, they will please forgive me for telling what is the plain truth—is due to the inadequate development of the organs of intellect. It is quite a common occurrence in our day to meet people who have a measure of clairvoyant consciousness and possess extraordinarily little of what is today called scientific intellect. True as this is, it is equally true that what these clairvoyant people are able to say or write down through their own faculty of perception, may contain thoughts far cleverer than the thoughts of people who show no signs whatever of clairvoyance but function with the best possible organs of intellect. It may easily happen that clairvoyant people who, from the point of view of present- day science are quite stupid—please forgive this expression—produce thoughts cleverer than the thoughts of recognized scientists without being themselves any the cleverer for producing them! This actually occurs. And to what is it due? It comes about because such clairvoyant persons do not need to exercise any organs of thought in order to arrive at the clever thoughts. They create the corresponding images out of the spiritual world, and the images already have within them the thoughts. There they are, ready-made, while other people who are not clairvoyant and can only think have to develop their organs of thought first before they can develop any thoughts. If we were to sketch this, it would be like this. Suppose a clairvoyant person brings something out of the spiritual world in all manner of pictures (see drawing, red). But in it, thoughts are contained, a network of thoughts. The person in question does not think this out, instead, he sees it, bringing it along from the spiritual world. He has no occasion to exercise any organ of thought.

Consider another person who is not gifted with clairvoyance, but who can think. Of all that has been drawn in red below, there is nothing at all present in him. He does not bring any such thing out of the spiritual world. Neither does he bring this thought skeleton with him out of the spiritual world (see drawing on left). He exerts his organs of thinking and through them produces this thought skeleton (see drawing).

In observing human beings today, one can find among everywhere examples of all the stages between these two extremes. For one who has not trained his faculty of observation, it is nevertheless most difficult to distinguish whether a person is actually clever, in the sense that he thinks by means of his organs of reason, or whether he does not think with them at all, but instead by some means brings something into his consciousness, so that only the pictorial, imaginative element is developed in him, but so feebly that he himself is not even aware of it. Thus, there are any number of people today who produce most clever thoughts without having to be clever on that account, while others think very clever thoughts but have no special connection to any spiritual world. To learn to apprehend this distinction is one of the important psychological tasks of our age, and it affords the basis for important insight into human beings at the present time. With this explanation you will no longer find it difficult to understand that empirical super-sensible observation shows that the majority of mankind possessed the most perfectly developed organs of thought in the middle of the nineteenth century. At no other time was there so much thinking done with so little cleverness as in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Go back to the twenties of the nineteenth century—only, people do not do this today—or even a little earlier, and read the scientific texts produced then. You will discover that they have an entirely different tone; they do not yet contain the completely abstract thinking of later times which depends on man's physical organs of thought. We need not even mention what came from the pen of people like Herder, Goethe or Schiller; grand conceptions still dwelled in them. It does not matter that people do not believe this today and that commentaries today are written as if this were not the case. For those who write these commentaries and believe that they understand Goethe, Schiller, and Herder simply do not understand them; they do not see what is most important in these men.

It is a fact of great significance that about the middle of the nineteenth century the human organism reached a culmination in respect of its physical form and that since that time it has been regressing; indeed, in regard to a rational comprehension of the world it is regressing rapidly in a certain sense.

This fact is closely connected with the development of materialism in the middle of the nineteenth century. For what is the human organism? The human organism is a faithful copy of man's soul-spiritual nature. It is not surprising that people who are incapable of insight into the soul and spirit of man see in the structure of the human organism an explanation of the whole human being. This is particularly the case when one takes into special consideration the organization of the head, and in the head in turn the organization of the nerves.

In the course of my lectures in Stuttgart,² I mentioned an experience that is really suited to throw light on this point. It happened at the beginning of the twentieth century in a gathering of the Giordano Bruno Society of Berlin.³ First, a man spoke—I would call him a stalwart champion of materialism—who was a most knowledgeable materialist. He knew the structure of the brain as well as anyone can know it today who has studied it conscientiously. He was one of those who see in the analysis of the brain's structure already the full extent of psychology—those who say that one need only know how the brain functions in order to have a grasp on the soul and to be able to describe it. It was interesting; on the blackboard, the man drew the various sections of the brain, the connecting strands, and so on, and thus presented the marvelous picture one obtains when one traces the structure of the human brain. And this speaker firmly believed that by having given this description of the brain he had described psychology. After he had finished speaking, a staunch philosopher, a disciple of Herbart,⁴ rose up and said, “The view propounded by this gentleman, that one can obtain knowledge of the soul merely by explaining the structure of the brain, is one I must naturally object to emphatically. But I have no cause to take exception to the drawing the speaker has made. It fits in quite well with my Herbartian point of view, namely, that ideas form associations with one another, and connecting strands of a psychic character run from one idea to another.” He added that as a Herbartian, he could quite well make the same drawing, only the various circles and so on would for him not indicate sections of the brain but complexes of ideas. But the drawing itself would remain exactly the same!

A most interesting situation! When it is a matter of getting down to the reality of a subject, these two speakers have diametrically opposed views, but when they make drawings of the same thing, they find themselves obliged to come up with identical drawings, even though one is a wholehearted Herbartian philosopher and the other a staunchly materialistic physiologist.

What is the cause of this? It is in fact this: We have the soul-spirit being of man; we bear it within us. This soul-spirit being is the creator of the entire form of man's organism. It is therefore not surprising that here in the most complete and perfect part of the organism, namely the nervous system of the brain, the replica created by the soul-spirit being resembles the latter in every way. It is indeed true that in the place where man is most of all man, so to speak, namely in the structure of his nerves, he is a faithful replica of the soul-spiritual element. Thus, a person who, in the first place, must always have something the senses can perceive and is content with the replica, actually perceives in the copy the very same thing that is seen in the soul-spiritual original. Having no desire for soul and spirit and only concentrating, as it were, on the replica, he stops short at the structure of the brain. Since this structure of the brain presented itself in such remarkable perfection to the observer of the mid-nineteenth century, and considering the predisposition of humanity at that time, it was extraordinarily easy to develop theoretical materialism.

What is really going on in the human being? If you consider the human being as such—I shall draw an outline of him here—and turn to the structure of his brain, you find that first of all man is, as we know, a threefold being: the limb being, the rhythmic man, and the being of nerves and senses. When we now look at the latter, we have before us the most perfect part of the human being, in a sense, the most human part. In it, the external world mirrors itself (see drawing, red). I shall indicate this reflection process by the example of the perception through the eyes. I could just as well sketch the perceptions coming through the ear, and so on. The external world, therefore, reflects itself in the human being in such a way that we have here the structure of man and in him the reflection of the outer world.

As long as we consider the human being in this way, we cannot help but interpret him in a materialistic manner, even though we may go beyond the often quite coarse conceptions of materialism. For, on the one hand, we have the structure of the human being; we can trace it in all its most delicate tissue structures. The more closely we approach the head organization, the more we discover a faithful replica of the soul-spiritual element. Then we can follow up the reflection of the external world in the human being. That, however, is mere picture. We thus have the reality of man, on the one hand, traceable in all its finer structural details, and on the other hand we have the picture of the world.

Let us keep this well in mind. We have man's reality in the structure of his organs, and we have what is reflected in him. This is really all that offers itself initially to external sensory observation. Thus, for sensory observation, the following conclusion presents itself. When the human being dies, this whole human structure disintegrates in the corpse. In addition, we have the pictures of the outer world. If you shatter the mirror, nothing can mirror itself any longer; hence, the pictures, too, are gone when the human being has passed through death. Since external sense observation cannot ascertain more than what I have just mentioned, is it not natural to have to say that with death the physical structure of the human being disintegrates? Formerly, it reflected the outer world. Human beings bear but a mirror-image in their soul and it passes away. Materialism of the nineteenth century simply presented this as a fact. It could not do otherwise, for it really had no knowledge of anything else.

Now the whole matter changes when we begin to turn our attention to the soul and spirit life of man. There, we enter a region which is inaccessible to physical sensory observation. Take a fact pertaining to the soul that is near at hand, the simple fact that we confront the outer world by observing it. We observe and perceive objects; then we have them within us in the form of percepts. We also have memory, the faculty of recollection. We can bring up in images from the depths of our being what we experience in the outer world. We know how important memory is for the human being.

Let us consider this set of facts some more. Take these two inner experiences: You look through your eyes at the external world, you hear it with your ears, or in some other way you perceive it with your senses. You are then engaged in an immediately present activity of the soul. This then passes over into your conceptual life. What you have experienced today, you can raise up again a few days later out of the depths of your soul in pictures. Something enters into you in some manner and you bring it up again out of your own being. It is not difficult to recognize that what enters into the soul must originate in the external world. I do not wish to consider anything else for the moment except the fact that is clearly obvious, namely, that what we thus remember has to come from the outer world. For if you have seen some red object, you remember the red object afterwards, and what has taken place in you is merely the image of the red object which, in turn, arises again in you. It is therefore something the external world has impressed upon you more deeply than if you occupy yourself only with immediate perceptions in the outer world.

Now picture what happens: You approach some object, you observe it, that is to say, you engage in an immediate and present soul activity in regard to the observed object. Then you go away from it. A few days later, you have reason to call up again from the depths of your being the pictures of the observed object. They are present again, paler, to be sure, but still present in you. What has happened in the interval?

Let me ask you here to keep well in mind what I have just said and compare this singular play of immediate perceptual thoughts and pictures of memory with something that is quite familiar to you, the pictures appearing in dreams. You will easily be able to notice how dreaming is connected with the faculty of memory. As long as the dream images are not too confused, you can easily see how they tie in with the memory images, hence, how a relationship exists between dreams and what passes from living perceptions into memory.

Now consider something else. Human beings must be organically completely healthy if they are to tolerate dreaming properly, so to speak. Dreaming requires that a person has himself fully under control and that at any time a moment can occur when he is certain he has been dreaming. Something is out of order when a person cannot come to the point of perceiving quite clearly: This was a dream! You have met people who dreamed they were beheaded. Suppose they could not distinguish afterwards between such a dream and the actual beheading; suppose they thought they really had been beheaded and yet had to go on living! Just imagine how impossible it would be for such people to sort out the facts without becoming totally confused! They would constantly feel that they had just been beheaded, and if they presumed they had to believe this—one can just about imagine what sort of words would break from their lips!

You can see, therefore, that human beings should be able at any moment to have themselves in hand so well that they can distinguish dreams from the thought life within reality. There are people, however, who cannot do this. They experience all kinds of hallucinations and visions and consider them realities. They cannot distinguish; they do not have themselves well enough in hand. What does this signify? It means that what dwells in dream has an influence on their organization, and that the organization is adapted to the dream picture. Something in their nervous system is not fully developed that should be developed; therefore, the dream is active in them and makes its influence felt.

Thus, if someone is not able to distinguish between his dreams and experienced realities, it means that the power of the dream has an organizing effect on him. If a dream were to possess itself of our whole brain, we would see the whole world as a dream! If you can contemplate such a fact and appreciate its full value, you will gradually learn to apprehend the facts to which ordinary science today does not wish to aspire because it lacks the courage to do so. You will learn to perceive that the very same power that energizes the dream life is present in us as organizing and quickening power, as power of growth. The only reason why the dream does not have the power to tear asunder the structure of our organism is that the latter is too strongly consolidated, that it has so firm a structure as to be able to withstand the effects of the ordinary dream. Thus, the human being can distinguish between the dream experience and that of reality.

When the little child grows up, becoming taller and taller, a force is at work in it. It is the same force as the one contained in the dream; only in the case of the dream we behold it. When we do not behold it, when it is instead active inside the body, then it, the very same power that is in the dream, makes us grow. We need not even go so far as to consider growth. Every day, for example, when you eat and digest and the effects of digestion spread throughout your organism, this happens by means of the force that dwells in dreams. Therefore, when something is out of order in the organism, it is connected with dreaming that is not as it should be. The force we can, from the outside, observe working in dream life is the same as the one that then works inwardly in the human being, even in the forces of digestion.

Thus, we can say that if we only consider the life of man in the right way, we become aware of the working of the dream force in his organism. When I describe this actively working dream force, I actually enter upon the same paths in this description that I must tread when I describe the human etheric body.

Imagine that someone were able to penetrate with his vision everything that brings about growth in the human being from childhood on, everything that causes digestion in man, everything that sustains his whole organism in its state of activity. Imagine that I could take this whole system of forces, extracting it from the human being and placing it before him, then I would have placed the etheric body before the human being. This etheric body, that is, the body that reveals itself only in irregularities in a dream, was far more highly developed prior to the point in time in the nineteenth century to which I have referred. Gradually it became weaker and weaker in its structure. In turn, the structure of the physical body grew correspondingly stronger. The etheric body can conceive in pictures, it can have dreamlike imaginations, but it cannot think. As soon as this etheric body begins to be especially active in a person of our time, he becomes a bit clairvoyant, but then he can think less, because, for thinking, he particularly needs the physical body.

Therefore, it need not surprise us that when people of the nineteenth century had the feeling that they could think particularly well, they were actually driven to materialism. For what aided them in this thinking the most was the physical body. But this physical thinking was connected with the special form of memory that was developed in the nineteenth century. It is a memory that lacks the pictorial element and, wherever possible, moves in abstractions.

Such a phenomenon is interesting. I have frequently referred to the professor of criminal anthropology Moritz Benedikt.⁵ Today as well, I would like to mention an interesting experience he himself relates in his memoirs. He had to address a meeting of scientists, and he reports that he prepared himself for this speech for twenty-two nights, not having slept day or night. On the last day before giving the address, a journalist who was supposed to publish the speech came to see him. Benedikt dictated it to him. He says that he had not written down the address at all, having merely impressed it onto his memory. He now dictated it to the journalist in his private chamber; the following day he gave this speech at the meeting of scientists. The journalist printed what he had taken down from dictation, and the printed speech agreed word for word with the speech Benedikt delivered at the meeting.

I must confess, such a thing fills me with admiration, for one always admires what one could never find possible to accomplish oneself. This is indeed a most interesting phenomenon! For twenty-two days, the man worked to incorporate, word for word, what he had prepared into his organization, so that in the end he could not possibly have uttered a single sentence out of the sequence impressed onto his system, so firmly was it imbedded!

Such a thing is possible only when a person is able to imprint the whole speech into his physical organism purely out of the gradually developing wording. It is actually a fact that what one thinks out in this way stamps itself onto one's organization as firmly as the force of nature firmly builds up the bone system of man. Then, the whole speech rests like a skeleton in the physical organism. As a rule, memory is tied to the etheric body, but in this case the latter has imbedded itself completely in the physical organism. The entire physical system then contains something in the way it contains the bones, something that stands there like the skeleton of the speech. Then it is possible to do what Professor Benedikt did. But this is only possible when the nerve structure of the physical organism is developed in such a way that it receives without resistance into its plasticity what is brought into it; gradually, of course, for twenty-two days, even nights, it had to be worked in.

It is not surprising that somebody who relies so much on his body acquires the feeling that this physical body is the only thing working in the human being. Human life had indeed taken such a turn that it worked its way completely into the physical body; people therefore arrived at the belief that the physical body is everything in the human organization. I do not think that any other age but ours, which has attached this high value on the physical body, could have come to such a grotesque invention—forgive the expression—as stenography. Obviously, when people did not rely as yet on stenography, they did not attach so great a value to preserving and accurately recording words and the sequence of words such as is the aim in stenography. After all, only the imprint in the physical body can make so fast and firm a record. It is therefore the predilection for imprinting something in the physical body that has brought about the other preference for preserving this imprinted word, but by no means for retaining anything that stands one level higher. For stenography could play no part if we wished to preserve those forms that express themselves in the etheric body. It takes the materialistic tendency to invent something as grotesque as shorthand.

All this, of course, is added only by way of explanation of what I wish to contribute to the problem of understanding the appearance of materialism in the nineteenth century. Humanity had arrived at a certain condition that tended to engrain the soul-spiritual into the physical organism. You must take what I have said as an interpretation, not as a criticism of stenography. I do not favor the immediate abolition of stenography. This is never the tendency underlying such characterizations. We must clearly understand that just because one understands something, this does not imply that one wishes to abolish it right away! There are many things in the world that are necessary for life and that yet cannot serve all purposes—I do not want to go further into this subject—and the need for which still has to be comprehended. But we live in an age, and I have to emphasize this again and again, when it is absolutely necessary to penetrate more deeply into the development of nature as well as into that of culture, to be able to ask ourselves: Where does this or that phenomenon come from? For mere carping and criticizing accomplish nothing. We really have to understand all the things that go on in the world.

I would like to sum up what I presented today in the following way. The evolution of mankind shows that in the middle of the nineteenth century a certain culmination was reached in the process of the structural completion of the physical body. Already now, a decadence has set in. Further, this perfection of the physical body is connected with the rise of theoretical materialism. In the next few days, I shall have to say more about these matters from one or another viewpoint. I wished to place before you today what I have just summed up.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1972.
• 2. See lecture of March 21, 1921 (in GA 324), where a more detailed description is given, also in regard to the conclusions.
• 3. Meeting of the Giordano-Bruno Society in Berlin: Date and title of this lecture could not be ascertained. Concerning this society, see Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life, chapter XXIX; Anthroposophic Press, NY, 1970.
• 4. Johann Friedrich Herbart, 1776–1841; German philosopher, psychologist and educator.
• 5. Moritz Benedikt, 1835–1920; Criminal psychologist. See Moritz Benedikt, Aus meinem Leben. Erinnerungen and Eroerterungen; Vienna 1906, vol. III, p. 315.

If we look again at the three most important phases of elementary school, then we see that they are: first, from entering elementary school at about the age of six or seven until the age of nine; then second, from the age of nine until about the age of twelve; and finally from twelve until puberty. The capacity to reason independently only begins to occur when people have reached sexual maturity, even though a kind of preparation for this capacity begins around the age of twelve. For this reason, the third phase of elementary school begins about the age of twelve.

Every time a new phase occurs in the course of human life, something is born out of human nature. I have previously noted how the same forces—which become apparent as the capacity to remember, the capacity to have memories, and so forth—that appear at about the age of seven have previously worked upon the human organism up until that age. The most obvious expression of that working is the appearance of the second set of teeth. In a certain sense, forces are active in the organism that later become important during elementary school as the capacity to form thoughts. They are active but hidden. Later they are freed and become independent. The forces that become independent we call the forces of the etheric body.

Once again at puberty other forces become independent which guide us into the external world in numerous ways. Hidden within that system of forces is also the capacity for independent reasoning. We can therefore say that the actual medium of the human capacity for reason, the forces within the human being that give rise to reasoning, are basically born only at the time of puberty, and have slowly been prepared for that birth beginning at the age of twelve.

When we know this and can properly honor it, then we also become aware of the responsibility we take upon ourselves if we accustom people to forming independent judgments too soon. The most damaging prejudices in this regard prevail at the present time. People want to accustom children to forming independent judgments as early as possible.

I previously said that we should relate to children until puberty in such a way that they recognize us as an authority, that they accept something because someone standing next to them who is visibly an authority requests it and wants it. If we accustom children to accepting the truth simply because we as authorities present it to them, we will prepare them properly for having free and independent reasoning later in life. If we do not want to serve as an authority figure for the child and instead try to disappear so that everything has to develop out of the child’s own nature, we are demanding a capacity for reason too early, before what we call the astral body becomes free and independent at puberty. We would be working with the astral body by allowing it to act upon the physical nature of the child. In that way we will impress upon the child’s physical body what we should actually only provide for his soul. We are preparing something that will continue to have a damaging effect throughout the child’s life.

There is quite a difference between maturing to free judgment at the age of fourteen or fifteen—when the astral body, which is the carrier of reasoning, has become free after a solid preparation—than if we have been trained in so-called independent judgment at too early an age. In the latter case, it is not our astral aspect, that is, our soul, which is brought into independent reasoning, but our physical body instead. The physical body is drawn in with all its natural characteristics, with its temperament, its blood characteristics, and everything that gives rise to sympathy and antipathy within it, with everything that provides it with no objectivity. In other words, if a child between the ages of seven and fourteen is supposed to reason independently, the child reasons out of that part of human nature which we later can no longer rid ourselves of if we are not careful to see that it is cared for in a natural way, namely, through authority, during the elementary school period. If we allow children to reason too early, it will be the physical body that reasons throughout life. We then remain unsteady in our reasoning, as it depends upon our temperament and all kinds of other things in the physical body. If we are prepared in a way appropriate to the physical body and in a way that the nature of the physical body requires—that is, if we are brought up during the proper time under the influence of authority—then the part of us that should reason becomes free in the proper way and later in life we will be able to achieve objective judgment. Therefore the best way to prepare someone to become a free and independent human being is to avoid guiding the child toward freedom at too early an age.

This can cause a great deal of harm if it is not used properly in education. In our time it is very difficult to become sufficiently aware of this. If you talk about this subject with people today who are totally unprepared and who have no good will in this regard, you will find yourself simply preaching to deaf ears. Today we live much more than we believe in a period of materialism, and it is this age of materialism that needs to be precisely recognized by teachers. They need to be very aware of how much materialism is boiling up within modern culture and modern attitudes.

I would now like to describe this matter from a very different perspective. Something remarkable happened in European civilization around 1850, although it was barely noticed: a direct and basic feeling for rhythm was to a very large extent lost. Hence we now have people a few generations later who have entirely lost this feeling for rhythm. Such people are completely unaware of what this lack of rhythm means in raising children. In order to understand this, we need to consider the following.

In life people alternate between sleeping and being awake. People think they understand the state called wakefulness because they are aware of themselves. During this time, through sense impressions they gain an awareness of the external world. But they do not know the state between falling asleep and awakening. In modern life, people have no awareness of themselves then. They have few, if any, direct conscious perceptions of the external world. This is therefore a state in which life moves into something like a state of unconsciousness.

We can easily gain a picture of the inner connections between these two states only when we recognize two polar opposites in human life that have great significance for education. I am referring here to drawing and music, two opposites I have already mentioned and which I would like to consider from a special point of view again today.

Let us first look at drawing, in which I also include painting and sculpting. While doing so, let us recall everything in regard to drawing that we consider to be important to the child from the beginning of elementary school. Drawing shows us that, out of his or her own nature, the human being creates a form we find reflected in the external world. I have already mentioned that it is not so important to hold ourselves strictly to the model. Instead we need to find a feeling for form within our own nature. In the end, we will recognize that we exist in an element that surrounds us during our state of wakefulness in the external world, in everything that we do forming spatially. We draw lines. We paint colors. We sculpt shapes. Lines present themselves to us, although they do not exist in nature as such. Nevertheless they present themselves to us through nature, and the same is true of colors and forms.

Let us look at the other element, which we can call musical, that also permeates speech. Here we must admit that in what is musical we have an expression of the human soul. Like sculpting and drawing, everything that is expressed through music has a very rudimentary analogy to external nature. It is not possible to simply imitate with music that which occurs naturally in the external world, just as it is not possible, in a time where a feeling for sculpting or drawing is so weak, to simply imitate the external world. We must ask ourselves then if music has no content. Music does have its own content. The content of music is primarily its melodic element. Melodies need to come to us. When many people today place little value upon the melodic element, it is nothing more than a characteristic of our materialistic age. Melodies simply do not come to people often enough. We can well compare the melodic element with the sculptural element. It is certainly true that the sculptural element is related to space. In the same way the melodic element is related to time. Those who have a lively feeling for this relationship will realize that the melodic element contains a kind of sculpting. In a certain way, the melodic element corresponds to what sculpting is in the external world.

Let us now look at something else. You are all acquainted with that flighty element in the life of our souls that becomes apparent in dreams. If we concern ourselves objectively with that element of dreaming, we slowly achieve a different view of dreams than the ordinary one. The common view of dreams focuses upon the content of the dream, which is what commonly interests most people. But as soon as we concern ourselves objectively with this wonderful and mysterious world of dreams, the situation becomes different. Someone might talk about the following dream.

I climbed up a mountain, but just before I came to the peak there was an obstacle that I was unable to overcome. I was therefore unable to reach the peak. As I attempted to overcome that obstacle, I was met by evil, unfriendly animals, beings with demonic forms.

Another person might describe the following:

I was walking along a path and came to a cave. I went into the cave and it grew suddenly dark so I could go no further. I then encountered all kinds of obstacles, but I could go no further and could not reach my goal.

A third or a fourth person could tell still other stories. The pictures are quite different. One person dreams about climbing a mountain, another about going into a cave, and a third about still something else. It is not the pictures that are important. The pictures are simply woven into the dream. What is important is that the person experiences a kind of tension into which they fall when they are unable to solve something that can first be solved upon awakening. It is this moving into a state of tension, the occurrence of the tension, of becoming tense that is expressed in the various pictures.

What is important is that human beings in dreams experience increasing and decreasing tension, resolution, expectations, and disappointments, in short, that they experience inner states of the soul that are then expressed in widely differing pictures. The pictures are similar in their qualities of increase and decrease. It is the state of the soul that is important, since these experiences are connected to the general state of the soul. It is totally irrelevant whether a person experiences one picture or another during the night. It is not unimportant, however, whether one experiences a tension and then its resolution or first an expectation and then a disappointment, since the person’s state of mind on the next day depends upon it. It is also possible to experience a dream that reflects the person’s state of soul that has resulted from a stroke of fate or from many other things. In my opinion, it is the ups and downs that are important. That which appears, that forms the picture at the edge of awakening, is only a cloak into which the dream weaves itself.

When we look more closely at the world of dreams, and when we ask ourselves what a human being experiences until awakening, we will admit that until we awaken, these ups and downs of feeling clothe themselves in pictures just at the moment of awakening. Of course, we can perceive this in characteristic dreams such as this one:

A student stands at the door of a lecture room. He dreams about how another student comes up to him and says such nasty things that it is obvious that this is a challenge to duel. The student dreams that the seconds are chosen, that they go out into the forest, and that everything is prepared. First shot. The student hears this sound and awakens to find that he has knocked over a chair standing next to his bed: that was the shot. That was the only external event.

Thus the entire picture of the dream flashed through his head at that moment. However, what was clothed in those pictures is a lasting state of his soul.

Now you need to seriously compare what lies at the basis of these dreams—the welling up and subsiding of feelings, the tension and its resolution or perhaps the tendency toward something which then leads to some calamity and so forth. Compare that seriously with what lies at the basis of the musical element and you will find in those dream pictures only something that is irregular (not rhythmic). In music, you find something that is very similar to this welling up and subsiding and so forth. If you then continue to follow this path, you will find that sculpture and drawing imitate the form in which we find ourselves during ordinary life from awakening until falling asleep. Melodies, which are connected to music, give us the experiences of an apparently unconscious state, and they occur as reminiscences of such in our daily lives. People know so little about the actual origins of musical themes because they experience what lives in musical themes only during the period from falling asleep till awakening. This exists for human beings today as a still-unconscious element, though revealed through forming pictures in dreams. However, we need to take up this unconscious element that prevails in dreams and which also prevails as melody in music in our teaching, so that we rise above materialism.

If you understand the spirit of what I have just presented, you will recognize how everywhere there has been an attempt to work with this unconscious element. I have done that first by showing how the artistic element is necessary right from the very beginning of elementary school. I have insisted that we should use the dialect that the children speak to reveal the content of grammar, that is, we should take the children’s language as such and accept it as something complete and then use it as the basis for presenting grammar. Think for a moment about what you do in such a case. In what period of life is speech actually formed? Attempt to think back as far as you can in the course of your life, and you will see that you can remember nothing from the period in which you could not speak. Human beings learn language in a period when they are still sleeping through life. If you then compare the dreamy world of the child’s soul with dreams and with how melodies are interwoven in music, you will see that they are similar. Like dreaming, learning to speak occurs through the unconscious, and is something like an awakening at dawn. Melodies simply exist and we do not know where they come from. In reality, they arise out of this sleep element of the human being. We experience a sculpting with time from the time we fall asleep until we awaken. At their present stage of development human beings are not capable of experiencing this sculpting with time. You can read about how we experience that in my book How to Know Higher Worlds. That is something that does not belong to education as such. From that description, you will see how necessary it is to take into account that unconscious element which has its effect during the time the child sleeps. It is certainly taken into account in our teaching of music, particularly in teaching musical themes, so that we must attempt to exactly analyze the musical element to the extent that it is present in children in just the same way as we analyze language as presented in sentences. In other words, we attempt to guide children at an early age to recognize themes in music, to actually feel the melodic element like a sentence. Here it begins and here it stops; here there is a connection and here begins something new. In this regard, we can have a wonderful effect upon the child’s development by bringing an understanding of the not-yet-real content of music. In this way, the child is guided back to something that exists in human nature but is almost never seen.

Nearly everyone knows what a melody is and what a sentence is. But a sentence that consists of a subject, a predicate, and an object and which is in reality unconsciously a melody is something that only a few people know. Just as we experience the rising and subsiding of feelings as a rhythm in sleeping, which we then become conscious of and surround with a picture, we also, in the depths of our nature, experience a sentence as music. By conforming to the outer world, we surround what we perceive as music with something that is a picture. The child writes the essay—subject, predicate, object. A triplet is felt at the deepest core of the human being. That triplet is used through projecting the first tone in a certain way upon the child, the second upon writing, and the third upon the essay. Just as these three are felt and then surrounded with pictures (which, however, correspond to reality and are not felt as they are in dreams), the sentence lives in our higher consciousness; whereas in our deepest unconsciousness, something musical, a melody, lives. When we are aware that, at the moment we move from the sense-perceptible to the supersensible, we must rid ourselves of the sense-perceptible content, and in its place experience what eludes us in music—the theme whose real form we can experience in sleep—only then can we consider the human being as a whole. Only then do we become genuinely aware of what it means to teach language to children in such a living way that the child perceives a trace of melody in a sentence. This means we do not simply speak in a dry way, but instead in a way that gives the full tone, that presents the inner melody and subsides through the rhythmic element.

Around 1850 European people lost that deeper feeling for rhythm. Before that, there was still a certain relationship to what I just described. If you look at some treatises that appeared around that time about music or about the musical themes from Beethoven and others, then you will see how at about that time those who were referred to as authorities in music often cut up and destroyed in the most unimaginable ways what lived in music. You will see how that period represents the low point of experiencing rhythm.

As educators, we need to be aware of that, because we need to guide sentences themselves back to rhythm in the school. If we keep that in mind, over a longer period of time we will begin to recognize the artistic element of teaching. We would not allow the artistic element to disappear so quickly if we were required to bring it more into the content.

All this is connected with a question that was presented to me yesterday and which I can more thoroughly discuss in this connection. The question was, “Why is it not possible to teach proper handwriting to those children who have such a difficult time writing properly?” Those who might study Goethe’s handwriting or that of other famous people will get the odd impression that famous people often have very strange handwriting. In education, we certainly cannot allow a child to have sloppy handwriting on the grounds that the child will probably someday be a famous person and we should not disturb him. We must not allow that to influence us. But what is actually present when a child writes in such a sloppy manner? If you make some comparisons, you will notice that sloppy handwriting generally arises from the fact that such children have a rather unmusical ear, or if not that, then a reason that is closely related to it. Children write in a sloppy way because they have not learned to hear precisely: they have not learned to hear a word in its full form.

There may be different reasons why children do not hear words correctly. The child may be growing up in a family or environment where people speak unclearly. In such a case, the child does not learn to hear properly and will thus not be able to write properly, or at least not very easily. In another case, a child may tend to have little perception for what he or she hears. In that case, we need to draw the child’s attention to listening properly. In other situations it is the teacher who is responsible for the child’s poor handwriting. Teachers should pay attention to speaking clearly and also to using very descriptive language. They do not have to speak like actors, making sure to enunciate the ending syllable. But they must accustom themselves to living into each syllable, so that the syllables are clearly spoken and children will be more likely to repeat the syllables in a clear way. When you speak in a clear and complete way, you will be able to achieve a great deal with regard to proper handwriting for some children. All this is connected with the unconscious, with the dream and sleep element, since the sleep element is simply the unconscious element. It is not something we should teach to children in an artificial way.

What is the basis of listening? That is normally not discussed in psychology. In the evening we fall asleep and in the morning we awake; that is all we know. We can think about it afterward by saying to ourselves that we are not conscious during that period. Conventional, nonspiritual science is unaware of what occurs to us from the time we fall asleep until we awaken. However, the inner state of our soul is no different when we are listening than when we are sleeping. The only difference is that there is a continual movement from being within ourselves to being outside ourselves. It is extremely important that we become aware of this undulation in the life of our souls. When I listen, my attention is turned toward the outer world. However, while listening, there are moments where I actually awaken within myself. If I did not have those moments, listening would be of absolutely no use. While we are listening or looking at something, there is a continual awakening and falling asleep, even though we are awake. It is a continual undulation—waking, falling asleep, waking, falling asleep. In the final analysis, our entire relationship to the external world is based upon this capacity to move into the other world, which could be expressed paradoxically as “being able to fall asleep.” What else could it mean to listen to a conversation than to fall asleep into the content of the conversation? Understanding is awakening out of the conversation, nothing more. What that means, however, is that we should not attempt to reach what should actually be developed out of the unconsciousness, out of the sleeping or dreaming of the human being in a conscious way.

For that reason, we should not attempt to teach children proper handwriting in an artificial way. Instead we should teach them by properly speaking our words and then having the child repeat the words. Thus we will slowly develop the child’s hearing and therefore writing. We need to assume that if a child writes in a sloppy way, she does not hear properly. Our task is to support proper hearing in the child and not to do something that is directed more toward full consciousness than hearing is.

As I mentioned yesterday, we should also take such things into account when teaching music. We must not allow artificial methods to enter into the school where, for instance, the consciousness is mistreated by such means as artificial breathing. The children should learn to breathe through grasping the melody. The children should learn to follow the melody through hearing and then adjust themselves to it. That should be an unconscious process. It must occur as a matter of course. As I mentioned, we should have the music teachers hold off on such things until the children are older, when they will be less influenced by them. Children should be taught about the melodic element in an unconscious way through a discussion of the themes. The artificial methods I mentioned have just as bad an effect as it would have to teach children drawing by showing them how to hold their arms instead of giving them a feeling for line. It would be like saying to a child, “You will be able to draw an acanthus leaf if you only learn to hold your arm in such and such a way and to move it in such and such a way.” Through this and similar methods, we do nothing more than to simply consider the human organism from a materialistic standpoint, as a machine that needs to be adjusted so it does one thing properly. If we begin from a spiritual standpoint, we will always make the detour through the soul and allow the organism to adjust itself to what is properly felt in the soul.

We can therefore say that if we support the child in the drawing element, we give the child a relationship to its environment, and if we support the child in the musical element, then we give the child a relationship to something that is not in our normal environment, but in the environment we exist in from the time of falling asleep until awakening. These two polarities are then combined when we teach grammar, for instance. Here we need to interweave a feeling for the structure of a sentence with an understanding of how to form sentences.

We need to know such things if we are to properly understand how beginning at approximately the age of twelve, we slowly prepare the intellectual aspect of understanding, namely, free will. Before the age of twelve, we need to protect the child from independent judgments. We attempt to base judgment upon authority so that authority has a certain unconscious effect upon the child. Through such methods we can have an effect unbeknownst to the child. Through this kind of relationship to the child, we already have an element that is very similar to the musical dreamlike element.

Around the age of twelve, we can begin to move from the botanical or zoological perspective toward the mineral or physical perspective. We can also move from the historical to the geographical perspective. It is not that such things should only begin at the age of twelve, but rather before then they should be handled in such a way that we use judgment less and feeling more. In a certain sense, before the age of twelve we should teach children history by presenting complete and rounded pictures and by creating a feeling of tension that is then resolved. Thus, before the age of twelve, we will primarily take into account how we can reach the child’s feeling and imagination through what we teach about history. Only at about the age of twelve is the child mature enough to hear about causality in history and to learn about geography.

If you now look at what we should teach children, you will feel the question of how we are to bring the religious element into all this so that the child gains a fully rounded picture of the world as well as a sense of the supersensible. People today are in a very difficult position in that regard. In the Waldorf School, pure externalities have kept us from following the proper pedagogical perspective in this area. Today we are unable to use all of what spiritual science can provide for education in our teaching other than to apply the consequences of it in how we teach. One of the important aspects of spiritual science is that it contains certain artistic impulses that are absorbed by human beings so that they not only simply know things, but they can do things. To put it in a more extreme way, people therefore become more adept; they can better take up life and thus can also exercise the art of education in a better way.

At the present time, however, we must refrain from bringing more of what we can learn from spiritual science into education than education can absorb. We were not able to form a school based upon a particular worldview at the Waldorf School. Instead from the very beginning I stipulated that Protestant teachers would teach the Protestant religion. Religion is taught separately, and we have nothing to do with it. The Protestant teacher comes and teaches the Protestant religion, just as the Catholic religion is taught by the Catholic priest or whomever the Catholic Church designates, the rabbi teaches the Jews, and so forth. At the present time we have been unable to bring more of spiritual science in other than to provide understanding for our teaching. The Waldorf School is not a parochial school.

Nevertheless the strangest things have occurred. A number of people have said that because they are not religious, they will not send their children to the Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish religion teachers. They have said that if we do not provide a religion teacher who teaches religion based solely upon a general understanding, they will not send their children to religion class at all. Thus those parents who wanted an anthroposophically oriented religion class to a certain extent forced us to provide one. This class is given, but not because we have a desire to propagate anthroposophy as a worldview. It is quite different to teach anthroposophy as a worldview than it is to use what spiritual science can provide in order to make education more fruitful.

We do not attempt to provide the content. What we do attempt to provide is a capacity to do. A number of strange things then occurred. For example, a rather large number of children left the other religion classes in order to join ours. That is something we cannot prohibit. It was very uncomfortable for me, at least from the perspective of retaining a good relationship to the external world. It was also quite dangerous, but that is the way it is. From the same group of parents we hear that the teaching of other religions will soon cease anyway. That is not at all our intent, as the Waldorf School is not intended as a parochial school. Today nowhere in the civilized world is it possible to genuinely teach out of the whole. That will be possible only when through the threefold social organism cultural life becomes independent. So long as that is not the case, we will not be able to provide the same religious instruction for everybody. Thus what we have attempted to do is to make education more fruitful through spiritual science.

If, in the forthcoming lectures, we are to become acquainted with a few things in further detail, today we have to put the question: If music essentially is the flow of Melos, and if it is Melos in particular which should be expressed in the gestures of eurythmy, what then is the musical element as such, the music shown in eurythmy, meant to express?

Here we meet with two extremes. On the one hand it may be said that the melodic element is tending more and more towards what is thematic, towards the expression of something which is not in itself musical. I have often mentioned that, especially in recent times through a Wagnerian influence, as well as other influences, music on the one hand has become expression, expression of something that is not music. On the other hand, especially in the beginning of the age of Wagner, we also find pure, absolute music (the musical element as such, simply the weaving of musical sounds)—of which it was said (not without a certain justification) that it made music into a tonal arabesque, a progression of notes without content.

Naturally these are both extreme cases. To put forward the idea that music embodies nothing and is merely a tonal arabesque [37] is nonsense, utter nonsense. But such nonsense may very easily arise when there is no real understanding of where the essential musical element lies. It cannot lie in the notes themselves, as I have repeatedly emphasized. The person engaged in tone eurythmy has constantly to bear in mind the necessity for expressing in the movements, in the actual gestures themselves, that which lies between the notes, regarding the notes as merely giving him the occasion for the movement.

It may help you to carry out these gestures I have already indicated, with inner correctness, and the right inner feeling, if we make a certain basic provision. And the provision should consist that you, as eurythmists, regard the actual note, and in a certain sense the chord too, as that which pushes you into movement, causes you to move, and gives the impetus (Ruck: ‘jolt’) towards movement. You must continue the impetus between two notes and again regard the next note as the impetus which is given to you. In this way the movement will not express the note, and will not emphasize the note, but will express in the fullest possible way everything that lies between the notes and what comes to the fore, for instance, in the intervals. This is of great importance.

Now, why is there such a strong urge in our modern age to deviate from the purely musical realm? Something quite beautiful may sometimes result from this deviation from what is purely musical, but why is the urge to deviate from it so strong? It is because the contemporary person has gradually acquired an attitude of mind in which he is no longer able to dream, no longer able to meditate. He has nothing within to set him into movement, and wants to be set into movement from outside. But this being-set-into-movement from outside can never produce a musical mood. In order that modern civilization could furnish proof of its unmusical nature, it has laid hold of a drastic means to do so. It is really as though, in its concealed depths of soul, modern civilization wanted to provide the clearest proof that it is unmusical. And the proof is given in that it has produced the film. The film is the clearest proof that those who like it are unmusical. For the whole basis of films is that they only permit those things to be active in the soul which do not arise out of the inner life of the soul, but which are stimulated from outside [See Appendix 6].

It must be admitted that a lot of modern music-making [1924] tends to lay special stress upon that which is stimulated from outside. Attempts are made to imitate what is external—not by means of the pure melodic element, but rather by employing some subject matter as far remote from the melodic element as possible.

There is a very simple way, once more a kind of meditation (I recently spoke to you about the TAO meditation, which may be helpful to eurythmists in the way I have already explained), whereby you may gradually accustom yourself to seek for that which is musical even in what lies outside the musical sphere. It consists in comparing a sequence of vowels, such as: Lieb ist viel or Eden geht grell. There need be no meaning. Compare these for instance with: Gab man Manna or Ob Olaf warm war.

And now repeat such sentences one after the other:

Lieb ist viel ... Eden geht grell ... : does not resonate
Gab man Manna ... Ob Olaf warm war ... : musical

You will most certainly feel that the second examples are musical, whereas the first exist as if they would not resound. Just try to repeat these sentences one after the other: Lieb ist viel. Gab man Manna. Eden geht grell. Ob Olaf warm war. You will easily recognize that the vowels ah[1] and o lie within the musical sphere, whereas the vowels ee and a depart from it. This is an important matter for eurythmists to observe, for eurythmy must, of course, represent a wholeness. When in tone eurythmy you wish to express something very inward, the movements may be led over into ah or o, or likewise into oo. But the gestures of tone eurythmy may not readily be led over into e or a. Thus the sounds ah, o, oo may be employed in pieces of music for eurythmy in order to emphasize the mood, but a and ee should only be used when it is definitely intended to pass, at some point or other, out of the musical realm. This is important.

These things are of such a nature that we have to acquire a consciousness of them above all. It is interesting, for example, when we follow the German language through several centuries, to observe that it has gradually dropped many ah, o, and oo sounds, and has taken on many ee and a sounds. In other words, the German language has become progressively more unmusical in the course of centuries. (I am speaking now of the vowels, not of the intervals.)

It is really important to bear this in mind in tone eurythmy, and indeed in other eurythmy too. For the knowledge that the German language has a marked tendency towards a distorted phonetic imagination may be quite valuable. With the western Germanic languages this is even more the case. But all this rightly leads us to put the question: ‘What does music really express?’ This question cannot easily be answered by anyone who is unable to dream. For, you see, in very truth the poet, the artist, must basically be able to dream, to dream consciously—that is to say, to meditate. Either he must hold dream- pictures in recollection, or be able to find dream-pictures of the realities of the spiritual world.

But what does this mean? It means leaving behind everything that makes sense in the sensory world. Take a dream (I have often spoken of these matters). Take a dream: if we are to get at its nature, we must not look at it as an interpreter of dreams does. For the interpreter of dreams takes the dream's content. Anyone who really understands the nature of dreams does not take the dream's content, but considers whether the dream rises up in fear and calms down, whether the dream stirs up an inner uneasiness which is intensified to anxiety, ending perhaps in this anxiety, or whether there is a state of tension which is afterwards resolved. This is really the decisive thing in a dream. And in the description of spiritual processes this becomes even more necessary.

It is, of course, exceedingly difficult today to speak to humanity about the things which spiritual science has to impart. For instance, when I described the progression of world-evolution (Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on), people thought the very things important that were unimportant to me. It is certainly correct that the processes on Saturn were as I described them. But that is not the essential point. The essential point is the inner movement which is described. And I have always been most delighted when somebody said that he would like to compose in music what has been described in the evolution of Saturn, Sun and Moon. Of course, he would have to leave out some of it, leave out the colour element, as I described, the warmth phenomena, even the smells on Saturn (for apart from the ‘smelling-harmonium’ [38] we have no musical instrument functioning to smells, do we!). Even so, particularly Saturn evolution is such that its essence could be expressed quite well in music and could be composed. [39]

When anyone dreams, and (setting aside its content) takes the tension and relaxation, the culmination of the picture sequence, or the culmination of bliss when flying, and so on; if he takes all this movement and says: ‘I am quite indifferent to the meaning of the dream; for me it all depends on how its movements take place’—then the dream already is a piece of music, then you cannot write it down except in musical notation. Once you feel that the dream can only be written down in musical notation, then you are just beginning to understand the dream, I mean really to understand it by looking at it directly.

From this you will see that the musical element has content: not the thematic content, which is taken from the sensory world, but a content which appears everywhere when something is expressed in terms of the senses, but in such a manner that everything sensory can be left aside, revealing the essence of the matter. You have to treat the musical element precisely in this way. And the eurythmist has above all things to bear this strongly in mind. And he will bear it strongly in mind when he pays more attention than is usual in listening, when he pays attention to the sustained notes and the rests.

For the eurythmist, the sustained note (the pedal-point) and the rest are of special importance. And it is a serious question whether a pedal- point or anything that recalls in some way the sustained note (this really is of great importance) is being adequately treated. It will be adequately treated if, every time he or she comes to a held note, or to something which either is a pedal-point in germ, or might become such, the eurythmist carries out the eurythmy in the greatest possible calmness, emphasizing standing calmly, in other words not proceeding further in space as long as the sustained note is heard.

On the other hand, it is important for the eurythmist to penetrate inwardly into the musical significance of everything connected to the rest. And so it will be good to take an example. Here (see musical example) you have the opportunity of moving up after the descending mood, with a corresponding rest which even contains a bar line, something which may seem a contradiction, from the point of view of the eurythmist.

(Fig. 11 From Mozart's Piano Sonata in F major (K.332), III, bars 58–61)

I mention this because after what I just said it must appear contradictory to the eurythmist. I previously said that the bar line signifies a holding-on, doing the movement in yourself; that the transition from one motif to another signifies moving in space, if possible with a swinging movement—naturally suited to the notes in question. As a eurythmist you may say: ‘Now here I really do not know what to do. I am supposed to move forwards and yet at the same time remain standing.’ That is in fact just what you should do! You should move forwards two steps and remain standing between them. You should accomplish this when you want to express anything similar to this example, taken from Mozart's Piano Sonata in F major, where you can have a longer rest during which the bar line occurs—then you should move with a swing from one note to the other, but calmly stand still in yourself in the middle of this swinging movement, in the rest. Here you will see how you radically indicate, precisely through eurythmy, that the musical element lies between the notes, for in such a case it is the rest which you specially emphasize through eurythmy. It is this that is so very important.

And now consider I said on the one hand that when a note is sustained, you should try as far as possible to stand still, remaining within yourself. Now, the pedal-point, the sustained note, frequently lies in a second voice and of course it may be aesthetically expressed when the two parts are taken (as they always have to be) by two people, each moving a different form. In this way a very beautiful interplay (Variation) may result between the two people. When the one proceeds in the movement, the other remains standing with the sustained note. The movements are carried out so that the person remaining standing moves a shorter curve, during which time the person moving onwards in the form makes a fuller curve—and they re-encounter each other. In this way the whole thing is brought into a satisfactory movement, which on the one hand may be shown between the swinging over, between the interval (which may go as far as the rest), and on the other hand in the pedal-point or the sustained note in general.

Fig. 12

It is in this way that the actual quality of tone eurythmy has gradually to develop. Only when you feel things in this way will you be able to bring out the actual quality of tone eurythmy.

This shows you at the same time that music of several parts will essentially be expressed by a number of people moving a number of forms. The forms must be carried out in such a way that they really correspond to each other, just as the different voices correspond in the music itself.

When you further develop the feeling of which I have spoken (the realization that the musical element lies in the tension, relaxation, in the rising and falling of the movement), you will indeed have something which the music expresses. For music does not express that which creates the meaning of words, but it expresses the spiritual element itself living in the movement of musical sound. It is consequently specially important for eurythmists to pay great heed to what the movement expresses quite inwardly in the greatest sense, that is discord and concord. Now, you know, a composer will never make use of a discord unintentionally, and indeed music without discords is not really music, because it is without inner movement. Composers and musicians in general make use of discords. Concords are actually there in order to calm the discords, to bring the discord to some sort of completion.

In the experience of discords and concords something makes its appearance which approaches the mysteries of the world closer than we can put into words. Let us suppose that we hear a discordant phrase which resolves into a concord. Let us observe what the eurythmist does. He or she of course can bear in mind all that I have indicated, and shall possibly still indicate, with regard to forms. He or she will go on to a concord and may use as form the various intervals that I have indicated. But the transition from a discord to a concord, or vice versa, should be brought out in the presentation. It should be that the eurythmist, while moving on in a discord, at the moment of going over from a discord to a concord, must insert an abrupt movement (Ruck) into the movement itself.

Fig. 13

Something very significant is expressed in this way. By this means we express the fact that here, with the transition from discord to concord, or vice versa, something is brought about which the human being places outside of himself. What I have drawn above could also be drawn like this:

Fig. 14

Observe how I erase a small part. That is where you go back. You will feel that a small part has been erased. It is a passing over into the spiritual. When you erase a piece of your path you annul all musical sound [that is present] in the movement, and you indicate: ‘Something is present that is no longer possible to express in the sensory realm. Here I [the eurythmist] can only suggest the bounds to you [the onlooker]; your imagination must take you further.’

You see, it is only when we come so far in doing such things that we reach the point where the arts should be. Philistines may think, when they see something of this kind (see Fig. 15, drawing on the left), that it is a face. It is not a face; it is a line. A face is as follows: I must manage in such a way that no actual line is drawn, but a line, as it is, is allowed to arise out of the light and shade (see drawing on the right). Anyone who draws these lines, from the very moment he begins to draw, is no painter, indeed no artist at all. Only someone who allows the lines to arise either out of the colour, or out of the chiaroscuro [light and shade], is an artist.

Fig. 15

You can draw in a philistine fashion, like this:

Fig. 16

This represents the boundary between sea and sky. But in reality it does not exist! It is absolutely non-existent. The sky exists: blue. The sea exists: green. The boundary between them both comes about because they touch each other (see Fig. 17).

If you want to paint a house, surrounded as it is by air, leave room for your colours within the area which the air leaves free. The house will come about. That's what art has to work for! In this matter one can indeed sometimes reach a fine state of despair. [40]

`
` Fig. 17

You see, such despair is very difficult for someone of today to understand. Now, many and various are the types of people who apply for teaching posts at the Waldorf School [Stuttgart], amongst them, teachers of drawing. They have certainly learned something (namely drawing) that is quite useless at the Waldorf School. They say: ‘I can draw.’ Indeed there is no such thing as drawing! It is damaging when children are taught to draw, for there really is no such thing as drawing.

When you reach the point of understanding this erasing of your line in eurythmy, you will also have reached the point when this understanding of the musical element in doing eurythmy really leads into the artistic realm. Thus whenever transitions occur, try (once again without being pedantic) to develop a movement which goes back over itself so that the onlooker is obliged to go back, so that he says to himself: ‘He or she was already further and is now going back.’ He will notice all this unconsciously, but he will at that moment be urged out of the sensory realm, to enter into the spiritual realm where everything to do with the senses is erased.

In this way you will discover the possibility of looking for the essential nature of eurythmic movement in the rest, (Pause: ‘rest’, ‘pause’), even bringing more and more into the rest. Let us once more consider our example (see Fig. 11). Here you have a transition which, in its note values, already presents a marked feeling of going-out-of-yourself, of going with your inner being out of your skin. With the interval of the fifth there is still the feeling of being just at the boundary of the skin.

The fifth is the human being. Going further, we actually pass over into what lies beyond the human realm, but in this case, because we are dealing with music, into the spiritual realm. If you achieve this emphasis of the rest by means of specially pronounced movement, and yet introduce into this movement a momentary calmness (as I have indicated), you will express the whole meaning of this ascending passage in a really satisfactory eurythmical way.

When you are practising, try to find examples of musical phrases containing long rests and very pronounced leaps in pitch, and then try to make the movement as characteristic as possible. This will result in a eurythmy perfectly adapted to the expression of instrumental music; I might say, a singing eurythmy. This will also affect your eurythmy as a whole. For by this means you will feel the very marked contrast which lies between the vowels and the consonants for eurythmic expression. Even if it is true that ee and a actually tend towards a distortion of phonetic imagination, they are nevertheless vowels, and remain within the sphere of music, whereas the consonants are merely noises and lead away from the musical realm.

I have also said that the consonants are really the apology for using the vowel sounds for something in the outer world. This will closely concern you, for in speech eurythmy it will cause you to introduce as much of the vowel element as possible into the consonants. This means, in other words, that you should try in eurythmy to make the consonants as short and the vowels as long as possible.

Now this is not what I wanted to impress on you (for this will arise from your feelings) that there must be a certain parallel between declamation and recitation, and eurythmy. What I do want you especially to take to heart is that for speech eurythmy, too, it is most important to bear in mind that it is also the task of the speaker not only to say something when he speaks, but at times to say something even more essential when he doesn't speak. I do not mean by this those dashes of which recent poets are so enamoured, presumably because they have so much spiritual matter to communicate that they are compelled to express it in continual dashes! I expect you are acquainted with an ironical poem by Morgenstern, consisting only of dashes. [41] It does not contain a single sound, not a single word—simply dashes. I do not mean these dashes, then, but rather the fact that, in order to bring out certain effects in a poem, it is absolutely necessary, just as necessary in declamation as in eurythmy, to understand how to make proper pauses.

Think of the hexameter, with its caesura, where a pause has to be made, and you will realize that something is actually said by means of the pause. Sometimes the pauses need only be short, but it is important that they should also be given their place in declamation and recitation. Imagine the phrase: Was hör ich draussen vor dem Tor was auf der Brücke schallen? recited without any pause—appalling!

Was hör' ich draussen vor dem Tor—
Was auf der Brücke schallen?

is correct. Now as eurythmists, when you are concerned with the expression of a rest, and in speech eurythmy too, the effect will be eminently correct and aesthetically good as well as intrinsically justified, if you cultivate the goingback-into-yourself (going back in the form) which you have been able to learn from tone eurythmy. So that at times even in the short pauses of speech eurythmy, this retracing, this erasing the form, should by all means be seen.

In conclusion I only want to add something which will serve to complete what was left out in the preceding lectures. It is this: You know that the keynote is best expressed by the position, or also by means of the step: position, step (as I explained in connection with the triad). Now imagine that you have to form the interval of the second. The second in music is something which actually does not quite express the musical element, but in which the musical element makes a beginning. It stands at the gateway of the musical realm. The second is a musical question. Thus it is necessary (and you will feel the necessity) when forming a second, which follows any keynote, that you as second (whilst the second follows from another note) strive to turn the palms of the hands upwards. Any sort of movement you like can be produced while trying to arrive with the palms of the hands turned upwards, when ascending from one note to the next, or just a movement upwards, straightening the palm of the hand. Of course you must see to it that the hand does not appear in this position beforehand. The important thing is always to acquire a view of the whole. Through this, it [the second] manifests itself

Now, on the basis of what I have said, we have still to arrange the next two sessions.

Notes:

1. Phonetic spelling, see p. xiv. (Translator's note.)

Many friends have come here to-day for the first time since the Christmas Foundation Meeting and I must therefore speak of it, even if only briefly, by way of introduction. Through this Christmas Foundation the Anthroposophical Society was to be given a new impulse, the impulse that is essential if it is to be a worthy channel for the life which, through Anthroposophy, must find embodiment in human civilisation. Since the Christmas Foundation an esoteric impulse has indeed come into the Anthroposophical Society. Hitherto this society was as it were the administrative centre for Anthroposophy. From its beginning onwards, Anthroposophy was the channel for the spiritual life that has been accessible to mankind since the last third of the 19th century. Our conception of the Anthroposophical Movement, however, must be that what takes its course on earth is only the outer manifestation of something that is accomplished in the spiritual world for the furtherance of the evolution of humanity. And those who wish to be worthily connected with the Anthroposophical Movement must also realise that the spiritual impulses are also at work in the sphere of the Anthroposophical Society itself.

What does it really amount to when a man has a general, theoretical belief in a spiritual world? To believe in theory in a spiritual world means to receive it into one's thoughts. But although in their own original nature thoughts represent the most spiritual element in modern man, the thoughts themselves are such that in their development as inner spirit during the last four to five centuries, they are adapted only to receive truths relating to material existence. And so people to-day have a spiritual life in thoughts, but as members of contemporary civilisation they fill it with a material content only. Theoretical knowledge of Anthroposophy also remains a material content until there is added to it the inner, conscious power of conviction that the spiritual is concrete reality; that wherever matter exists for the outer eyes of men, not only does spirit permeate this matter, but everything material finally vanishes before man's true perception, when this is able to penetrate through the material to the spiritual.

But such perception must then extend also to everything that is our own close concern. Our membership of the Anthroposophical Society is such a concern; it is a fact in the outer world. And we must be able to recognise the spiritual reality corresponding to it, the spiritual movement which in the modern age unfolded in the spiritual world and will go forward in earthly life if men do but keep faith with it. Otherwise it will go forward apart from earthly life; its link with earthly life will be maintained if men find in their hearts the strength to keep faith with it.

It is not enough to acknowledge theoretically that spiritual reality hovers behind mineral, plant, animal and man himself; what must penetrate as deep conviction into the heart of every professed Anthroposophist is that behind the Anthroposophical Society too—which in its outward aspect belongs to the world of maya, of illusion—there hovers the spiritual archetype of the Anthroposophical Movement. This conviction must take real effect in the work and activity of the Anthroposophical Society. Such a conception will in the future contribute in many ways to the provision of the right soil for that spiritual Foundation Stone which was laid for the Anthroposophical Society at the time of the Christmas Meeting.

And this brings me to speak of what I shall have to say to you in the coming days, for which this introductory lecture is intended to provide guiding lines. I want to show how at this serious point in its existence the Anthroposophical Movement is actually returning to its own germinal impulse. When at the beginning of the century the Anthroposophical Society came into being out of the framework of the Theosophical Society, something very characteristic was foreshadowed. While the Anthroposophical Society—then the German Section of the Theosophical Society—was in process of formation, I gave lectures in Berlin on Anthroposophy. Therewith, at the very outset, my work was given the hallmark of the impulse which later became an integral part of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Apart from this, I can remind you to-day of something else.—The first few lectures I was to give at that time to a very small circle were to have the title, “Practical Exercises for the Understanding of Karma.” I became aware of intense opposition to this proposal. And perhaps Herr Guenther Wagner, now the oldest member of the Anthroposophical Society, who to our great joy is here to-day and whom I want to welcome most cordially as an Elder of the society, will remember how strong was the opposition at that time to much that from the beginning onwards I was to incorporate in the Anthroposophical Movement.

Those lectures were not given. In face of the other currents emanating from the Theosophical Movement it was not possible to proceed with the cultivation of the esotericism which speaks unreservedly of the reality of what was always there in the form of theory.

Since the Christmas Foundation, the concrete working of karma in historical happenings and in individual human beings has been spoken of without reserve in this hall [The temporary lecture-hall in the “Schreinerei” (workshop) at the Goetheanum.] and in the various places I have been able to visit. And a number of Anthroposophists have already heard how the different earthly lives of significant personalities have run their course, how the karma of the Anthroposophical Society itself and of the individuals connected with it has taken shape. Since the Christmas Foundation these things have been spoken of in a fully esoteric sense; but since the Christmas Foundation, also, our printed Lecture-Courses have been accessible to everyone interested in them. We have thus become an esoteric and at the same time a completely open society.

Thus we return in a certain sense to the starting-point. What must now be reality was then intention. As many friends are here for the first time since the Christmas Foundation, I shall be speaking to you in the coming lectures on questions of karma, giving a kind of introduction to-day by speaking of things which are also indicated, briefly, in the current News Sheet for members of the society.

As is clear from our anthroposophical literature, the development of human consciousness is bound up with the attainment of those data of knowledge which point to facts and beings of the spiritual world and with penetration into these facts. We shall hear how this spiritual world, the penetration into which has become possible through the development of human consciousness, can then be intelligible to the healthy, unprejudiced human intellect. It must always be remembered that although actual penetration into the spiritual world requires the development of other states of consciousness, the understanding of what the spiritual investigator brings to light requires only the healthy human intellect, the healthy human reason that endeavours to put prejudice aside.

In saying this, one immediately meets stubborn obstacles in the modern life of thought. When I once said the same thing in Berlin, a well-meaning article appeared on the subject of the public lecture I had given before a large audience. This article was to the following effect: Steiner maintains that the healthy human intellect can understand what is investigated in the spiritual world. But the whole trend of modern times has taught us that the healthy human intellect can know nothing of the super-sensible world, and that if it does, it is certainly not healthy!

It must be admitted that in a certain sense this is the general opinion of cultured people at the present time. What it means, translated into bald language, is this: If a man is not mad, he understands nothing of the super-sensible world; if he does, then he is certainly mad! That is the same way of speaking about the subject, only put rather more plainly.

We must try to comprehend, therefore, how far the healthy human intellect can gain insight into the results of spiritual investigation achieved through the development of states of consciousness other than those we are familiar with in ordinary life. For centuries now we have been arming our senses with laboratory apparatus, with telescopes, microscopes and the like. The spiritual investigator arms his outer senses with what he himself develops in his own soul. Investigation of nature has gone outwards, has made use of outer instruments. Spiritual investigation goes inwards, makes use of the inner instruments evolved by the soul in steadfast activity of the inner life.

By way of introduction to-day I want to help you to understand the evolution of other states of consciousness, first of all simply by comparing those that are normal in present-day man with those that were once present in earlier, primitive—not historic but prehistoric—conditions of human evolution.

Man lives to-day in three states of consciousness, only one of which, really, he recognises as a source of knowledge. They are:

Ordinary waking consciousness;

Dream consciousness;

Dreamless sleep consciousness.

In ordinary waking consciousness we confront the outer world in such a way that we accept as reality what can be grasped through the senses, and allow it to work upon us; we grasp this outer, material world with the intellect that is bound to the brain, or at any rate to the human organism, and we form ideas, concepts, emotions and feelings, too, about what has been taken in through the senses. Then in this waking consciousness we grasp the reality of our own inner life—within certain limits. And through all kinds of reflection, through the development of ideas, we come to acknowledge the existence of a super-sensible element above material things. I need not further describe this state of consciousness; it is known to everyone as the state he recognises as pertaining to his life of knowledge and of will here on earth.

For the man of the present time, dream consciousness is indistinct and dim. In dream consciousness he sees things of the outer world in symbolic transformations which he does not always recognise as such. A man lying in bed in the morning, still in the process of waking, does not look out at the rising sun with fully opened eyes; to his still veiled gaze the sunlight reveals itself by shining in through the window. He is still separated as by a thin veil from what at other times he grasps in sharply outlined sense-experiences and perceptions. Inwardly, his soul is filled with the picture of a great fire; the heat of the fire in his dream symbolises the shining in of the rising sun upon eyes not yet fully opened.

Or again, someone may dream that he is passing through lines of white stones placed along each side of a roadway. He comes to one of the stones and finds that it has been demolished by some force of nature or by the hand of man. He wakes up; the toothache he feels makes him aware of the decayed state of a tooth. The two rows of teeth have been symbolised in his dream-picture; the decayed tooth, in the image of the demolished stone.

Or we become aware of being, apparently, in an overheated room where we feel discomfort. We wake up: the heart is thumping vigorously and the pulse beating rapidly. The feverish movement of the heart and pulse is symbolised in the overheated room. Inner and outer conditions are symbolised in dream; reminiscences of the life of day, transformed and elaborated in manifold ways into whole dream-dramas, absorb the sleeper's attention. Nor does he by any means always know to what extent things are elaborated in the miraculous arena of his life of soul. And concerning this dream-life, which may play over into waking life when consciousness is dimmed in any way, he often labours under slight illusions.

A scientist is passing a bookshop in a street. He sees a book about the lower animal species—a book which in view of his profession has always greatly interested him. But now, although the title indicates a content of vital importance to a scientist, he feels not the faintest interest: and then, suddenly, as he is merely staring at what otherwise he would have seen with keen excitement, he hears a barrel-organ in the distance playing a melody which at first entirely escapes his memory ... and he becomes all attention.—Just think of it: the man is looking at the title of a scientific treatise; he pays no attention to it but is gripped by the playing of a distant barrel-organ which in other circumstances he would not have listened to for a moment. What is the explanation? Forty years ago, while still quite young, he had danced for the first time in his life, with his first partner, to the same tune; he is reminded of this by the tune which he has not heard for forty years, played on the barrel-organ! Because he has remained very matter-of-fact, the scientist remembers the occasion pretty accurately.

The mystic often comes to the stage of inwardly transforming a happening of this kind to such an extent that it becomes something entirely different. One who with deep and sincere conscientiousness embarks upon the task of penetrating into the spiritual life must also keep strictly in mind all the deception and illusion that may arise in the life of the soul. In deepening his life of soul a man can very easily believe that an inner path has been discovered to some spiritual reality, whereas in fact it is no more than the transformed reminiscence of a barrel-organ melody! This dream-life is full of wonder and splendour, but can be rightly understood only by one who is able to bring spiritual insight to bear upon the appearances of human life.

Of the life of deep, dreamless sleep, man has in his ordinary consciousness nothing more than the remembrance that time continues to flow between the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking. Everything else he has to experience again with the help of his waking consciousness. A dim, general feeling of having been present between the moments of falling asleep and waking is all that remains from dreamless sleep.

Thus we have to-day these three states of consciousness: waking consciousness, dream consciousness, dreamless sleep consciousness. If we go back into very early ages of human evolution—not, as I said, in historic times but prehistoric times accessible only to those means of spiritual investigation of which we shall be speaking here in the coming days—then we also find three states of consciousness, but essentially different in character. What we experience to-day in our waking hours was not experienced by the men of those primeval times; instead of material objects and beings with clear shapes and sharp edges, they saw all the physical boundaries blurred.

In those times a man who might have looked at you all sitting here would not have seen the sharp outlines demarcating you as human beings to-day; he would not, like a man to-day, have seen these contours bound by so many lines, but for his ordinary waking consciousness the forms would have been blurred; they would have lacked definition. Everything would have been seen with less precision, would have been pervaded by an aura, by a spiritual radiance, a glimmering, glistening iridescence extending far beyond the circumference that is perceived to-day. The onlooker would have seen how the auras of all of you sitting here are interwoven. He would have gazed into these glimmering, sparkling, iridescent auras of the soul-life of those in front of him. It was still possible in those days to gaze into the life of soul because the human being was bathed in an atmosphere of soul-and-spirit.

To use an analogy: if in the evening of a bright, dry day we are walking through the streets, we see the lights of the street-lamps in definite outlines. But if the evening is misty, we see these same lights haloed by all sorts of colours—colours which modern physics interprets quite wrongly, regarding them as subjective phenomena, whereas in truth they give us an experience of the inmost nature of these lights, connected with the fact that we are moving through the watery element of the fog. The men of ancient times moved through the element of soul-and-spirit; when they looked at other men they saw their auras—which were not subjective phenomena but a real and objective part of the human being. Such was one state of consciousness in these men of old.

Then they had a state of consciousness which linked on to this, just as with us the sleep that is invaded by dreams links on to the waking state; again it was not the same as our present dream condition, but everything that was material around it disappeared, vanished away. For us, sense-impressions become symbols in the state of dream consciousness: sunshine becomes fiery heat, the rows of teeth become two lines of stones, dream-memories become earthly or also spiritual dramas. The sense-world is always there; the world of memories remains. It was different for the consciousness of one who lived in primeval times of human evolution—and we shall realise by and by that this applies to all of us, for those sitting here were present then in earlier earthly lives. In those times, when the sun's light by day grew weaker, man did not see symbols of physical things, but the physical things vanished before his eyes. A tree standing before him vanished; it was transformed into the spiritual and the spirit-being belonging to the tree took its place.—The legends of tree-spirits were not the inventions of folk-fantasy; the interpretation of these legends, however, is an invention of the fantasy of scholars who are groping in a morass of fallacy.—And it was these spirits—the tree-spirit, the mountain-spirit, the spirit of the rocks—who in turn directed the eyes of the human soul into that world where man is between death and a new birth, where he is among spiritual realities just as here on earth he is among physical realities, where he is among spiritual beings as on earth he is among physical beings.—This was the second state of consciousness. We shall presently see how our ordinary dream consciousness can also be transformed into this other consciousness in a man of modern time who is a seeker for spiritual knowledge.

And there was a third state of consciousness. Naturally, the men of ancient times also slept; but when they awoke they had not merely a dim remembrance of having lived through time, or a dim feeling of continuous life, but a clear remembrance of what they had experienced in sleep. And it was precisely out of this sleep that there came the impressions of past earthly lives with their connections of destiny, together with the knowledge, the vision, of karma.

Modern man has waking consciousness, dream consciousness, dreamless sleep consciousness. Early humanity had also three states or conditions of consciousness: the state of consciousness in which he perceived reality pervaded by spirit; the state in which he had insight into the spiritual world; and the state in which he had the vision of karma. In primeval humanity, consciousness was essentially in a condition of evening twilight.

This evening twilight consciousness has passed away, has died out in the course of the evolution of mankind. A morning dawn consciousness must arise—into which modern spiritual investigation has already found its way. And by strengthening his own soul-forces man must learn to look at every tree or rock, every spring or mountain, or at the stars, in such a way that the spiritual fact or spiritual being behind every physical thing is revealed to him.

It can become an exact science, a source of exact knowledge (although people scoff at it to-day as if it were craziness or sheer delusion) so that when a genuine knower looks at a tree, the tree, although it represents a physical reality, becomes a void, as it were leaving the space free before his gaze, and the spirit-being of the tree comes to meet him. Just as the sun's light is reflected to our physical eyes from all outer, physical objects, so will humanity come to perceive that the spiritual essence of the sun, pervading the world with its life, is also a living reality in all physical beings. As the physical light is reflected back to our physical eyes, so from every earthly being there can be reflected back as a reality to our eyes of soul, the divine-spiritual, all-pervading essence of the sun. And as man now says: “The rose is red” ... the underlying truth being that the rose is giving back to him the gift he himself receives from the physical-etheric sun-nature ... he will then be able to say that the rose gives back to him what it receives from the soul-and-spiritual essence of the sun which streams through the world with its quickening life.

Man will again find his way into a spiritual atmosphere, will know that his own being is rooted in this spiritual atmosphere. He will come to realise that within the dream consciousness, which to begin with can yield only chaotic symbolisations of the outer life of the senses, there lie the revelations of a world of spirit through which we pass between death and a new birth; furthermore, that in the consciousness of deep sleep there weaves and lives in us as an actual and real nexus of forces that which, after waking, leads us into connection with the working out of our destiny, of our karma. What we live through in our waking hours as destiny, notwithstanding all freedom, is spun during our life of sleep, when with the soul and spirit, which have left the physical and etheric, we lead a life together with divine Spirits; with those divine Spirits, too, who carry over the fruits of earlier lives into this present life. And one who through the development of the corresponding forces of soul succeeds in penetrating with vision into the life of dreamless sleep, discovers therein the connections of karma. Moreover it is only in this way that the historical life of humanity acquires meaning, for it is woven out of what men carry over from earlier epochs, through the life between death and rebirth, into new life, into new epochs. When we look at some personality of the present or some other age, we understand him rightly only when we include his past earthly lives.

During the coming days, then, we shall be speaking of that spiritual investigation which, while concerning itself first with personalities in history but then also with everyday life, leads from the present life, or a life in some other age to earlier earthly lives.

Today, in preparation for the next two reflections, we want to call to mind something about the nature of the human being, insofar as the human being is a being of thought. It is precisely this characteristic of the human being, that he is a being of thought, that is scientifically unrecognized today, interpreted in a completely wrong way. It is thought that thoughts, as they are experienced by the human being, come about in the human being, that the human being is, so to speak, the bearer of thoughts. No wonder this view is held, for the human being's essential being is only accessible to a finer observation. Precisely this human essence withdraws from coarser observation.

If we regard the human being as a being of thought, it is because we perceive, in the waking state, from waking to sleeping, that he accompanies his other experiences with thoughts, with the content of his thinking. These thought experiences seem to arise somehow from within the person and to cease to some extent during the period between falling asleep and waking up, that is, during sleep. And because one is of the opinion that thought experiences are there for a person as long as he is awake, but get lost in sleep in some kind of vagueness, about which one does not try to get further clarification and one just imagines the matter, one cannot actually enlighten oneself about the human being as a thinking being. A more delicate observation, which does not yet advance very far into the region I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” shows that the life of thought is not at all as simple as one usually imagines it to be. We need only compare this ordinary thought life, the coarse thought life, of which everyone becomes aware when observing a person between waking and sleeping, with an element that is indeed problematic for ordinary consciousness, namely the element of dreaming.

Usually, when we talk about dreams, we do not really get involved in anything other than a general characteristic of dreaming. One compares the state of dreaming with the state of waking thought and finds that in dreaming, arbitrary associations of thoughts are present, as one would say, that images string together without such a connection being perceptible in this stringing together as it is perceptible in the external world of being. Or else one relates what takes place in the dream to the external sense world, sees how it stands out, as it were, how it does not fit into the processes of the external sense world after beginning and end.

Of course, one does advance to these observations, and in relation to these observations, beautiful results can certainly be seen. But what is not noticed is that, firstly, when a person abandons themselves a little, I would say with a touch of contemplation, lets themselves go a little and lets their thoughts run free, they can then perceive how something is mixed into this ordinary train of thought, which follows on from the external course of events, that is not unlike dreaming, even when we are awake. One could say that from the moment we wake until we fall asleep, while we are making an effort to adapt our thoughts to the external circumstances in which we are immersed, there is a kind of vague dreaming. It can seem to us, in a sense, like two currents that are there: the upper current, which we control with our arbitrariness, and a lower current, which actually runs much as dreams themselves run in their succession of images. Of course, you have to give yourself a little to your inner life if you want to notice what I am talking about right now. But it is always there. You will always notice: there is an undercurrent. Thoughts swirl around in just as pictorial a way as they do in dreams, where the most colorful things line up next to each other. Memories arise from all sorts of things, and just as in dreams mere similarity of sound may call other thoughts and connect them with them. And people who let themselves go inwardly, people who are too indolent to adapt themselves to outer conditions with their train of thought, they may notice how there is an inner striving to give themselves up to such waking dreams.

These waking dreams differ from ordinary dreams only in that the images are more faded, more like mental images. But in terms of the mutual relationship of these images, waking dreams do not differ particularly from so-called real dreams. There are, of course, all degrees of people, from those who do not even notice that such waking dreams are present in the undercurrents of their consciousness, who thus let their thoughts run entirely along the lines of external events, to those who indulge in waking dreams and let them run in their consciousness, as, I might say, the thoughts there want to interweave and intertwine. There are, after all, all degrees of human nature, from those of a dreamy nature, as they are also called, to those who are very dry natures, who accept nothing but what exactly matches some factual course of events. And we must say that a large part of what inspires people artistically, poetically, and so on, comes from this undercurrent of waking dreams during the day.

That is one side of the matter. It should certainly be taken into account. Then we would know that a surging dreaming is actually constantly taking place within us, which we only tame through our contact with the outside world. And then we would also know that it is essentially the will that adapts to the outside world and brings system, coherence, and logic into the otherwise randomly flowing inner mass of thoughts. It is the will that brings logic into our thinking. But as I said, that is only one side of it.

The other side of the matter is this: here too one can notice, observe – as soon as one only enters a little into those regions which I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” – how, when one wakes up, one takes something with one from the state in which we were from falling asleep to waking up. And if you add just a little to what you can perceive, you will be able to see very clearly how you wake up, as it were, from a sea of thoughts when you wake up. You do not wake up from a vague, dark state, but rather from a sea of thoughts, thoughts that seem to have been very, very distinct while you were asleep, but you cannot hold on to them when you transition into the waking state.

And if you continue such observations, you will be able to notice that these thoughts, which you bring with you, as it were, from the state of sleep, are very similar to the ideas, the inventions that we have in relation to something we are supposed to do in the outer world, that even these thoughts, which we bring with us when we wake up, are very similar to the moral intuitions, as I have called them in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

While in the former kind of thought weaving, which to a certain extent runs as an undercurrent of our clear consciousness, we always have the feeling that we are standing face to face with our waking dreams, that something is seething and bubbling within us, we cannot say that about the latter. Rather, we have to say to ourselves about the latter: when we return to our body and to the use of our body when we wake up, we are no longer able to hold on to what we have lived in thought from falling asleep to waking up.

Whoever truly realizes these two sides of human life will cease to regard thought as something that is, as it were, produced in the human organism. For what I characterized last, in particular, what we distinguish ourselves from when we wake up, we cannot directly see as some product of the human organism as such, but we can only see it as something that we experience between falling asleep and waking up, when we are torn out of our body with our ego and our astral body.

Where are we then? This is the first question we must ask ourselves. We are outside our physical and etheric bodies with our ego and our astral body. A simple consideration, which one cannot escape from if one simply devotes oneself to life without prejudice, must tell us: in that which appears to us when we direct our senses to the external world, as the sensory veil of the world, as everything that sensory qualities present to us, in that we are when we are outside ourselves. Only then, in ordinary life, does consciousness fade away. And we feel why consciousness fades when we wake up from this state in the morning. We then feel weak in our body, too weak to hold on to what we have experienced from falling asleep to waking up. Our ego and our astral body cannot hold on to what they have experienced by immersing themselves in the physical and etheric bodies. And by then participating in the experiences that are made through the body, what is experienced from falling asleep to waking up is erased for them. And as I said, only when we have ideas that relate to the external world, or when we have moral intuitions, do we experience something like what must appear to us in an immediate contemplation of what we live in between falling asleep and waking up.

If we look at it this way, we see a very clear contrast between our inner and outer world. In a sense, this also sheds light on the statement we often make that the outer world, as it presents itself to us from waking to sleeping, is a kind of delusion, a kind of maya. For in this world, which shows its outside to us, we are in it when we are not in our body, but when we are outside our body. Then we dive into the world that we otherwise perceive only through our sense revelation. So that we have to say to ourselves: This world, which we perceive through our sense revelation, has subsoils, subsoils that actually contain its causes, its essences. And in our ordinary consciousness we are too weak to perceive these causes and these essences directly.

Nevertheless, even unprejudiced observation yields something that reaches far into the regions described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”; unprejudiced observation already yields that which I can schematically present in the following way. If I want to depict the ordinary life of thought, then I do so by having it embrace everything that a person experiences inwardly and mentally from waking up to falling asleep, whether in terms of external perceptions or in terms of physical pain, physical feelings of pleasure, and so on. What is experienced in the mind during ordinary consciousness, I would like to represent schematically as follows (see drawing, white). Below this, like a waking dream, weaves and lives, not subject to the laws of logic, what I first depicted (red below). On the other hand, when we pass into the external world between falling asleep and waking up, we live, as we can perceive in reminiscence after waking up, again in a world of thought, but of thoughts that absorb us, that are not in us, from which we emerge when we wake up (red outside). So that, as it were, we have separated two worlds of thought from each other through our ordinary thinking: an inner world of thought and an outer world of thought, a world of thought that fills the cosmos that receives us when we fall asleep. We can call the latter world of thought the cosmic world of thought. The former is just any world of thought; we will discuss it in more detail in the course of these days.

Thus we see ourselves, as it were, with our ordinary world of thoughts placed in a general world of thoughts, which is kept apart as if by a boundary, and of which one part is in us and one part is outside us. That which is in us appears to us very clearly as a kind of dream. There always rests at the bottom of our soul a chaotic web of thoughts, we can say, something that is not permeated by logic. But this outer world of thoughts, yes, it cannot be perceived by the ordinary consciousness. So only the real spiritual vision can reveal the nature of this outer world of thoughts from direct observation, from direct experience, and then it enters even more deeply into the regions described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But then it also turns out that this world of thoughts, into which we plunge between falling asleep and waking up, is a world of thoughts that is not only as logical as our ordinary world of thoughts is logical, but that contains a much higher logic. If one does not want to misunderstand the expression, I would like to call this world of thoughts a super-logical world of thoughts. I would say that it is just as far above ordinary logic as our dream world, our waking dream world, is below logic.

As I said, this can only be fathomed through spiritual vision. But there is another way by which you can check this spiritual vision on this point. It is clear to you, however, that ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate into certain regions of one's own organism. I have spoken about this a great deal in recent lectures. I have said that in the fact that we have our memory, our ability to remember, for ordinary consciousness, we have, as it were, a skin drawn inwardly towards our inner organs. We cannot observe directly through inner vision what the inner organs are, lungs, liver and so on. But I also said: It is a false mysticism, a nebulous mysticism, which only fantasizes about the inner being and speaks in the manner of Saint Therese or Mechthild of Magdeburg, who find all sorts of beautiful poetic images (the beauty of which should not be denied), but which are nothing more than organic effusions. If instead of devoting oneself to this nebulous mysticism, one really studies the human mind, then, when one penetrates to the inner being of man, one comes to an understanding of the organs. One sees spiritually the significance of the lungs, liver, kidneys, etc., one pierces spiritually the memory membrane and comes to an inner insight into man. But this is something that cannot be achieved with ordinary consciousness. With ordinary consciousness, it is only possible to observe externally through anatomy how the organs look when they are viewed as belonging to the ordinary physical and mineral world. But to look inwardly and see what permeates them, what is active in them, what I have described to you in recent days, requires a truly developed spiritual vision.

So there is something in man that he cannot reach with ordinary consciousness. Why can he not reach it with ordinary consciousness? Because it does not belong to him alone. What can be reached with the ordinary consciousness belongs to the human being alone. That which pulsates down there in the organs does not belong to the human being alone, it belongs to the human being as a world being, it belongs to the human being and at the same time to the world.

Perhaps it will become most clear to us through the following discussion. If we look at the human being schematically and have any organ, lung or liver in him, we have forces in such an organ. These forces are not merely inner human forces, these forces are world forces. And when everything that is the external physical world and appears to us as the physical world, when all this has once disappeared with the end of the earth, what now exists as the inner forces of our organs will continue to work. One might be tempted to say that everything our eyes can see and our ears can hear, the whole external world, will fade away with the end of the earth. What covers our skin, what we carry within us, what is enclosed by our organization, is what spiritually contains that which will continue to exist when the external world that our senses see will no longer be there. In essence, something works within the human skin that lives beyond the earth; within the human skin lie the centers, the forces of that which works beyond earthly existence. We do not stand as human beings in the world merely to enclose our organs for ourselves; we stand in the world as human beings so that the cosmos itself is formed within our skin. In that which our ordinary consciousness does not reach, we enclose something that does not merely belong to us, that belongs to the world. Is what belongs to the world built out of the chaotic processes of waking dreaming?

We need only look at these chaotic processes of waking dreaming and you will say to yourself: the whole structure, everything that you perceive as a kind of undercurrent of your consciousness, is most certainly not the builder of your organs, of your entire organism. The organism would look beautiful if everything that lives chaotically in your subconscious were to build your organs, your whole organism! You would see what strange caricatures you would be if you were a reflection of what pulsates in your subconscious. No, just as the outer world, which reveals itself to us through the senses, so to speak on the surface that it presents to us, is constructed from the thoughts that we experience between falling asleep and waking up, so we ourselves are constructed from the same outer powers of thought, within our ordinary consciousness, in what we do not reach within ourselves. If I want to fully represent what a human being is, then I would have to draw it schematically like this. I would have to say: There is the surrounding world of thought (red). This surrounding world of thought also builds up the human organism, and this human organism produces, as it were, flooding over it, the higher world of thought (white), which inclines towards the sensual outer Maja between our thoughts and the surrounding world (blue).

Try to visualize how only a small part of yourself is actually aware of what you are encompassing with your consciousness, and how a large part of yourself is constructed from the same external world into which you submerge yourself between falling asleep and waking up. But this can also be seen from another point of view when you look at a person impartially, and I have already pointed out this point of view here on several occasions.

Man, in his ordinary consciousness, actually encompasses only his thoughts; his feelings are already like dreams floating among thoughts. Feelings arise and subside. Man does not see through them with the clarity with which he sees through his thoughts, his ideas. But the experience between falling asleep and waking up is quite different from the experience of what is willed in us during the day. And what does a person know – as I have often told you – of what happens when he moves his hand or arm through the will! He knows all of this conceptually; first he knows: I want to move my arm. That is a concept. Then he knows what it looks like in his form when he has moved his arm: again, an idea. What he knows of it in his ordinary consciousness is a fabric of ideas; feelings surge beneath this fabric of ideas. But what works in him as will sleeps just as deeply during waking as our whole being sleeps from falling asleep to waking.

What sleeps there? That which sleeps down there, which is built into us from the outer cosmos, is just as much asleep as the minerals and plants are asleep for us outside. That is to say, we do not penetrate into them from the outside, do not look down into what is cosmic for us. We weave and live in this cosmic from falling asleep to waking up. And to the same extent that we see through the outer world, we live ourselves into our own organization. To the same extent that we stop having mere reminiscences, as we peel them from life's events, we get ideas of forces that constitute and build up our organs — the lungs, liver, stomach, and so on. To the same extent that we learn to see through the outer world, we learn to see through our piece of cosmos, which we have incorporated, in which we are, which is in our skin, without us knowing anything about it in our ordinary consciousness.

What do we take with us from this cosmos when we wake up in the morning? The thing that we take with us is very clearly experienced by the unbiased observer as will. And basically, the difference between the life of waking thought and that which flows dreamily in the subconscious is nothing other than that the former is permeated by the will. It is the will that introduces logic, and logic is basically not actually a doctrine of thinking, but a doctrine of how the will orders and tames thought images and brings them into a certain external order, which then corresponds to the external course of the world.

When we wake up with a dream, we perceive particularly strongly this surge down there of chaotic, illogical swirls of images, and we can notice how we plunge our will into this chaotic swirling of images, and our will then orders what lives in us in such a way that it is logically ordered. But we do not take with us the world logic, what I just called super-logic, we only take the will with us.

How is it that this will now works logically in us? You see, here lies an important human mystery, something extraordinarily significant. It is this: when we delve into our cosmic existence, which is not present in ordinary consciousness, when we delve into our whole organization, then we feel in our will, which is spreading there, the cosmic logic of our organs. We feel the cosmic logic of our organs.

It is extremely important to realize that when we wake up in the morning and plunge into our body, we are forced by this immersion to form our will in a certain way. If our body were not already formed in a certain way, the will would swirl like a jellyfish in all directions when we wake up; the will could strive chaotically in all directions like a jellyfish when we wake up. It does not do that because it is immersed in the existing human form. There it submerges, takes on all these forms; this gives it a logical structure. This is why he gives logic to the otherwise chaotically swirling thoughts within the human body. At night, when man sleeps, he is incorporated into the super-logic of the cosmos. He cannot hold on to it. But when he submerges into the body, the will takes on the form of the body. Just as when you pour water into a vessel and the water takes on the shape of the vessel, so the will takes on the form of the body. But it is not just that the will takes on the spatial forms, like when you pour water into a vessel and the water takes on the whole shape of the vessel. Rather, it flows into the smallest veins everywhere. That cannot move, at most, according to Professor Traub, tables and chairs in the room move by themselves, but that is theological university logic, otherwise such a device does not move – the water takes on the resting form and only touches the outer walls. But in the case of humans, this will is completely integrated into all the individual branches and from there it then dominates the otherwise chaotic sequence of images. What one perceives as an undercurrent is, I would say, released from the body. It is truly released from the body, it is something that is connected to the human body, but which actually constantly strives to free itself from the human body, which constantly wants to get out of the forms of this human body. But what the human being carries out of the body when falling asleep, what he carries into the cosmos, what then submerges, that submits to the law of the body.

Now it is the case that with all the organization, which is the human head organization, the human being would only come to images. It is a general physiological prejudice that we also reason and draw conclusions with our heads. No, we merely imagine with our heads. If we only had a head and the rest of the body were inactive for our imaginative life, then we would be waking dreamers. The head has only the ability to dream while awake. And when we return from the head to the body in the morning, passing through the will, the dreams come to our consciousness. Only when we penetrate deeper into our body, when the will adapts not only to the head but also to the rest of the organization, only then is this will again able to bring logic into the otherwise pictorially intertwined powers of images.

This will lead you to something that I have already mentioned in previous lectures. It must be clear to you that man visualizes with his head and that he judges, as strange and paradoxical as it may sound, with his legs and also with his hands, and then again concludes with his legs and hands. This is how we arrive at what we call a conclusion, a judgment. When we imagine, it is only the image that is reflected back into our heads; we are judging and concluding as a whole person, not just as a head person. Of course, it does not occur to us that if a person is mutilated, they cannot or should not judge and conclude, because it depends on how things are arranged

in such people who, as it were, happen to lack one or other limb. We must learn to relate what the human being is spiritually and soulfully to the whole human being, to realize that we bring logic into our imaginative life from the same regions that we do not even reach with ordinary consciousness, which are occupied by the being of feeling and the being of will. Our judgments and conclusions arise from the same sleeping regions of our own inner being, from which our feelings and our will resound.

The most cosmic region in us is the mathematical region. The mathematical region belongs to us not only as a resting human being, but as a walking human being. We always move somehow in mathematical figures. When we look at a walking person from the outside, we see something spatial; when we experience it internally, we experience the mathematics within us, which is cosmic, only that the cosmic also builds us up. The spatial directions that we have outside also build us up and we experience them within us. And by experiencing them, we abstract them, take the images that are mirrored in the brain and interweave them with what is shown to us externally in the world.

It is important to note today that what man puts into the world in the form of mathematics is actually the same thing that builds him up, that is, what is cosmic in nature. For through nonsensical Kantianism, space has been made merely a subjective form. It is not a subjective form; it is something that we experience in the same region as the will. And there it shines forth. There the shining forth becomes something with which we then penetrate that which presents itself externally.

Today's world is still far from being able to study this inner interweaving of the human being with the cosmos, this standing within the cosmos. I have drawn attention to this relationship in a striking way in my Philosophy of Freedom, where you will find remarkable passages in which I show that, in our ordinary consciousness, human beings are connected with the whole cosmos, that they are a part of the whole cosmos, and that, as it were, the individual human element blossoms out of this general cosmic element, which is then embraced by ordinary consciousness. This passage in particular of my “Philosophy of Freedom” has been understood by very few people; most have not known what it is about. It is no wonder that in an age in which abstraction flourishes to the point of being taken for granted, in an age in which this view, which is admittedly extremely ingenious in itself but absolutely abstract, is presented to the world as something special, that which seeks to introduce reality, true reality, is not understood.

It must be emphasized again and again: it is not enough for something to be logical. Einsteinism is logical, but it is not in touch with reality. All relativism is not in touch with reality as such. Thinking in touch with reality begins only where one can no longer leave reality by thinking. Isn't it true that today man reads, or listens, I should say, quite calmly, when Einstein says, as an example: What would happen if a clock were to fly out into the cosmos at the speed of light? Yes, a person today listens to that quite calmly. A clock flying out into the cosmos at the speed of light is, for someone who lives in reality in his thinking, lives in reality in his soul, roughly the same as if someone were to say: What happens to a person when I cut off his head, and in addition, his right hand and his left hand, or his right arm and so on? He simply ceases to be a human being. In the same way, what one is still justified in imagining when one talks about a clock flying out into the cosmos at the speed of light immediately ceases to be a clock! It is not possible to imagine that. If one wants to arrive at valid thinking, the reality must be adhered to. Something can be logical and ingenious to an enormous degree, but it does not necessarily follow that it is in accordance with reality. And it is thinking in accordance with reality that we need in this age. For abstract thinking ultimately really leads us to no longer seeing reality at all because of all the abstractions. And today humanity admires the abstractions that are presented to it in this way. It does not matter whether these abstractions are somehow logically substantiated or the like. What matters is that man learns to grow together with reality, so that he can no longer say anything other than what is actually spoken from reality.

But such conceptions about the human being, as I have presented to you today, provide a kind of guide to realistic thinking. They are often ridiculed today by those who have been trained in our abstract thinking. For three to four centuries, Western humanity has been trained through mere abstraction. But we live in the age in which a reversal in this direction must take place, in which we must find our way back to reality. People have become materialistic, not because they have lost logic, but because they have lost reality. Materialism is logical, spiritualism is logical, monism is logical, dualism is logical, everything is logical, as long as it is not based on real errors in reasoning. But just because something is logical does not mean that it corresponds to reality. Reality can only be found if we bring our thinking more and more into that region of which I said: in pure thinking, one has the world event at one corner. This is in my epistemological writings, and this is what must be gained as the basis for an understanding of the world.

In the moment when one still has thinking, despite having no sensory perception, in that moment one has thinking as will at the same time. There is no longer any difference between willing and thinking. For thinking is a willing and willing is then a thinking. When thinking has become completely free of sensuality, then one has a glimpse of world events. And that is what one must strive for above all: to get the concept of this pure thinking. We will continue our discussion from this point tomorrow.

When an earthquake takes place in some part of the world and people feel the earth stirring under their feet, as a rule they experience a feeling of terror, a shudder runs through them.

If we try to find the causes of this feeling of terror, we must turn our attention not only to those occasions when a person faces the unknown, unexpected and inexplicable, but also to those when terror arises because as long as the tremor lasts he is wondering how far it will go and what may still surge up from unknown depths.

This feeling—even if not always apparent in man's daily life—can often be experienced in contrast to conscious existence, to all those conscious thoughts and feelings in the depths of the soul-life, and which sometimes act in a way that suggests earthquakes.

In what flashes up as instincts and desires along with unaccountable moods and inhibitions which often encroach on our conscious life, with the havoc an earthquake makes where things on the earth's surface are concerned, in all this man—however well he believes he knows himself—confronts this uncertainty: Whatever else will be flung up from the innermost depths of my soul? For anyone who delves more deeply into his being soon sees that all the life of ideas playing part in the consciousness—namely, what he controls from waking to falling asleep—resembles the dancing waves on the surface of the sea, the upward striving of which and the way they carry on their game must be traced to depths unknown to ordinary perception. Such is man's life of ideas. This alone should make those pause who, starting from so-called scientific findings, repeatedly raised objections to the statements of spiritual science imparted in these lectures.

If spiritual science cannot view man as so simple a being as people so often see him, the outer testimony of life itself and daily service are proof of his complex nature.

Spiritual science cannot consider man as only composed of what the eye first sees, or as external anatomical physiological science perceives him, dissects him, and with its own methods studies him. But when confronted by everything outer perception and science can master—that is to say, man's physical body—spiritual science must set up in contrast the higher super-sensible members of his being. We must say that these are only perceptible by means of the knowledge I outlined in the lecture on “Death and Immortality”, [an untranslated lecture given in Berlin on October 26th, 1911. GA# 61. e.Ed.] and of which more will be said in forthcoming lectures. From direct observation, unobtainable in the world of the senses and open only to a clairvoyant consciousness, spiritual science must place over against the outer physical body what we may call the next member of man's being—the etheric or life-body. (One need not object to an expression which like others just serves for a description.)

And when spiritual science affirms that the forces and substances belonging to man's physical body are present and equally active in his environment, it must add that the original activity of these forces and substances first appears in man's physical body after he passes through the gate of death. Man brings these forces and substances into the physical world. During the whole of his life they are attached to the higher etheric forces which counteract the decay of the physical substance, which decay sets in the moment the etheric at death is loosened from the physical. As our study today will soon convince us, for an all-embracing experience of life there is nothing strange when, added to man's physical body, we mention a higher one too. For in life divisions appear everywhere, and man is obviously twofold in so far as this physical body contains all that belongs to his physical environment, and is penetrated by the etheric or life-body.

But spiritual science must point out that everything playing its part in our conscious life must be clearly distinguished from all activities and forces present even when consciousness is extinguished, as normally happens in sleep. For it would be logically absurd to claim that all our daytime instincts, desires and ideas, in their pulsating soul life, arises when we awake, but vanish, leaving no trace, when we fall asleep. When a man is asleep what we see belongs to the physical body and the activity of the physical world. This means that when the man lies on his bed we have the physical and etheric bodies for us, but sharply divided from what we will now call the astral body—the actual vehicle of our consciousness.

Where this vehicle of our consciousness is concerned, if we really want to understand our soul life, we must again clearly distinguished between what always lives in us and is subject to our inner thought and the decisions made by our will, and on the other hand what can be said to surge from deeper soul levels, and is responsible for our temperament, the colouring and character of our soul life, although outside our control. From our normal consciousness we must distinguish all that fills our soul in a wider sense, such as those things we possess from earliest childhood to the end of our days, what makes us talented or not, good or evil, what renders us sensitive to aesthetics and beauty but has no connection with what we consciously think, feel or will. In speaking the language of spiritual science we first distinguish two parts of our soul life: one that forms an extended, or subconscious (as it is now called, it being no longer possible to deny its existence) soul-life, and the other, our conscious life playing its part in all our thoughts, will impulses, tastes and opinions.

Whatever one thinks of the need to make this division, if we consider life in the light of experience we are bound to admit it proves that we must begin by distinguishing these four parts of man. By examining without prejudice what on all sides of life presents, proof is found everywhere of what spiritual science declares. This is especially apparent when one examines the more detailed evidence spiritual science offers. One finds first of all that this knowledge not only tells us of etheric forces working in the organism, shaping this body that bears our soul into a purely physical structure, but it tells us besides that all we reckon as memory is anchored in the etheric body. For not the astral but the etheric body carries our memory, and this etheric, though not closely knit to the life of soul, is closely knit to the physical body that, as a rule, remains attached to it when, as normally happens only in sleep, man sinks into subconsciousness. So according to spiritual science, memory, and everything in our depths of which we are not fully conscious, must be sought in the etheric underlying physical body. To justify considering the etheric as the vehicle of memory, apart from the physical, we should admit that everyday life has to offer us proof of the independence of memory from the physical body.

If these assumptions of spiritual science are correct, how do we explain our relation to the outer world, and does our ego register the conscious impressions this outer world makes on our soul?

In regard to all this we, as men belonging to the physical world, must first depend on our sense organs and our intelligence linked with the instrument of the brain. Thus we may say that everything belonging to man's world-picture, the sum of all that lives in his daily consciousness, depends on the physical body and the state of its health, but above all on normal well formed sense organs and a well-developed brain. Are we justified in saying that what lies in the depths of the soul and can only be reflected in memory, is not bound to the outer organism in the same degree as daily consciousness, but lives beneath the threshold of all that relates to the senses and the brain? Have we reason to speak of an independent memory? If this is so, one would have some right to say that the etheric inside the physical body also has an independent existence, and one that is unaffected by the outer injuries afflicted on the bodily organism. An interesting question we can raise is whether the normal course of consciousness, dependent on a well-developed brain, runs parallel with that of memory, or does the latter function separately so that when the physical body no longer acts as the vehicle of perception, the memory proves itself independent? Let us ask life to answer our question. We shall then discover a remarkable fact, that anyone can verify, for it is to be found in literature. For all our queries regarding facts dependent on clairvoyant consciousness can be answered by seeing whether they are verified by life itself.

A personality whose tragic fate is known to all can serve as an example—Frederick Nietzsche. When the final disaster had for sometime been approaching, and Nietzsche had already experienced sudden attacks of insanity, his friend Overbeck (formerly Professor in Basle who died a few years ago) fetched him from Turin and took him to Basle in very difficult circumstances. Now Bernoulli's interesting book relates the following. I shall skip the isolated episodes of the journey from Turin to Basle and just look at what struck Overbeck after returning with Nietzsche to Basle. Nietzsche had no special interest in what took place around him, nor in anything relating to the sphere of normal consciousness. He scarcely noticed it, nor did he apply any effort of will towards anything that happened. He made no difficulty over allowing himself to be taken to a nursing home where he met an old acquaintance who happened to be the director. When Nietzsche, who had lost all interest for the outside world, heard the man's name, something surged up and, to the great surprise of his friend Overbeck, he immediately went on with the conversation he had held with this doctor many years earlier! He took up the matter exactly where it had been left seven years before—so accurately did memory function; whereas the instruments for the outer perception—the brain, the reason and the normal consciousness—had all been destroyed, thus rendering him indifferent and inattentive to what he would have perceived had his consciousness been normal. This palpably shows how that to which we must now concede a certain independence, continues its function in spite of a damaged organism. But we will go further. An experiment so clearly shown by Nature herself lets us see how matters stand when we make comprehensive use of our powers of observation. When Nietzsche was later taken to Jena, and visited there by Overbeck and others, it was evident there too that they could speak only things he had experienced in the past, and nothing that played any part in his immediate surroundings which could only have been observed by the part of him dependent on the physical body. On the other hand, the independent activity of the etheric body, the vehicle of memory, was very much in evidence. And countless such examples could be cited. It is of course true that a completely materialistic thinker can say that certain parts of the brain had remained undamaged and happened to be those that carried the memory; but one who is of this opinion will find it does not hold good when he faces the actual fact and takes an unprejudiced view of everyday life. Thus over against the physical body there stands the etheric or life body, which spiritual science shows us to be also the vehicle of memory.

In considering man from another aspect, that of his inner life, we see how he is daily aware of waves surging up from unknown depths, of which he is not so conscious as of his thinking, feeling and willing. Among things that point to the way these lower regions affect our soul and our conscious life—for this soul extends beyond the ordinary consciousness—belongs something to which I have already alluded, something most important for people to understand—dream-life. Dreams surging up and down in chaotic forms apparently lack all law and order, yet follow a subtle inner pattern of their own, and, although beyond man's control, play their part in the soul's subconscious regions and come in contact with the upper regions. I never intend to make our arbitrary statements in these lectures, but only those statements which I borrowed as in natural science from life, experience, or based on the findings of spiritual science. In wider circles it is scarcely known that a science of dreams exists in the same way as one of physics and chemistry, but it has disclosed a great deal about what lies hidden in the depths of the soul life. We will begin by relating quite a simple dream, which will probably at first seem absurd but it characterises what tries to reach the soul's hidden depths.

A peasant woman once dreamed she was on her way to the church in the town. She dreamed quite clearly how she reached the town, entered the church and how the parson was standing in the pulpit preaching. She heard his sermon quite distinctly. She found the fervent and heartfelt way he preached most wonderful. She was especially impressed by the way the preacher spread out his hands. This indefinite gesture, which affects many folk more than a definite one, deeply impressed this woman. An extraordinary thing then happened. Both the figure and voice of the preacher were transformed, and, after several intermediate phrases had been passed through, nothing was left in the dream of the parson's fine words. His voice had become the crow of a cock and he had turned into a cock with wings! The woman wakes up, and a cock is crowing outside her window!

If we look into all this we find that this dream has a great deal to show us. First it points out that in elucidating a dream we cannot reckon with the ordinary idea of time. The same idea of time expressed when looking back on our waking life is no longer valid in regard to dreams. No doubt time seemed long to the dreamer as she dreamed of going to town step by step, entering the church, watching the preacher ascend the pulpit, listening to the sermon, and so on. In the physical world all this would have taken some time. Of course the cock did not crow for as long as this, yet it awakened her. Now what the crowing of the cock aroused in the woman's soul corresponds to the backward course of the dream pictures. She looks back on a world she believes herself to have experienced and it is filled with pictures borrowed from the daily life. But the occasion was outwardly caused by the crowing of the cock which lasted a very short time. So if we take an external view of the matter, the length of time necessary for the woman's inner experience would be quite brief in relation to what it seemed in the dream. Now when spiritual science informs us that from falling asleep to re-awakening man is absent from his physical and etheric bodies, and finds himself in his astral body and ego in a super-sensible world invisible to the outer eye, we must realise that the cock's crowing has jerked the woman out of this super-sensible life. It would be wrong for man to think he experiences less in the world he inhabits between sleeping and waking than he does in the physical world, only these experiences are of a purely soul nature. As the woman is roused the cock's crowing plays into her waking, and she looks back on her experience. Now we must not consider the pictures and all the illusions of the dream as what she really experienced in sleep. We must realise—otherwise we shall not grasp the true dream phenomena—that the woman cannot really see into the experiences she has had before waking. But when the moment for waking approaches, the impact of the sleeping on the waking life indicates she has experienced not what it really was: something which induces her to insert into sleep-life symbolic pictures borrowed from daily life. It is as if the woman merges what she sees everyday when awake into pictures concealing her real experience in sleep. For this reason the time sequence does not appear as it really runs; but these pictures drawn over her sleep life like a curtain seemed to take as long to unfold as if they had been physical perceptions. So we must say that dream pictures in many respects are a covering or veil rather than a disclosure of what a person experiences in sleep. It is important to note that the dream—through the pictures man places over his sleep life—is itself a reality but no true reflection, and merely points to the fact that something has been experienced in sleep.—Proof of this lies in these dreams being different according to what lives in the man's soul. Anyone who is tormented by a bad conscience or worried by some occurrence during the day will have quite different dreams from anyone who on reaching the spiritual world in his sleep can yield himself to the peace and blessedness through which life acquires meaning. The quality of the experience, not the experience itself, reveals it to be something happening in the hidden depths of the soul. The dream becomes a particularly good revealer when it appears in the following way. We shall now consider dreams of this sort; I have already referred to it in other connections. In the case of a certain man, this dream, evoked by an event in his youth, was periodically repeated.

Already as a school boy he had displayed a certain talent for drawing, for which reason when he was about to leave school his teacher set him the task of drawing something especially difficult. Whereas normally the boy could copy a number of drawings in a short time, owing to the detail and exactitude this one demanded he was unable to complete it during the year. So it happened that when the time for his leaving school was approaching much remained undone and he had only finished a comparatively small part of the work. One must realise that the student, knowing he would not finish, suffered a good deal of anxiety and fear. But the anxiety he felt at the time was nothing compared to what recurred at regular intervals after a number of years. After being free of the dream for several years the man would then dream he was a school boy again, was unable to finish his drawing, and re-experienced the same anxiety. This feeling would rise to a very high pitch, and once it had re-occurred it would be repeated throughout the week. It would then disappear for years, but would again return, be repeated for a week, then disappear again, and so on.

One understands such a dream only by considering the rest of the man's life. As a school boy, then, he had his gift for drawing and it developed in stages. Careful observation revealed that his ability always increased after the dream which announced improvement in his drawing. He was able to achieve more. So we can say that following the dream the man felt himself filled with a greater capacity for expressing himself in his drawing. This is an extraordinarily interesting thing which can play a part in man's world of reality. Now what light can spiritual science shed on such an experience? If we call to mind what was said in recent lectures, namely, that in man lives the super-sensible core of his being, which not only continuously organises his inner forces but shapes his physiognomy too, and note that this core is a super-sensible entity which is man's basis, we must say: This central core works all his life on man's organism enabling him to keep developing new faculties connected with his outer accomplishments. This central core worked on the physical organism in such a way as to keep increasing the man's grasp of form, giving him the faculties needed to look at things as a draughtsman and to express what he saw in forms. The central core of man's being works into his body. Now as long as its activity streams into the body it will be unable to rise into consciousness. The forces all flow into the transformation of the body and then appear as faculties—in this case a faculty for drawing. Only when a certain stage has been reached and the man is ripe to carry this transformation into his consciousness, enabling him to exercise his newly-won faculties, the moment this central core rises to consciousness, he is able to know what is happening and functioning in the hidden depths of his soul. But in this instance we have a transition. While the man remains unaware that the central core is working on his faculty for drawing, no progress being visible, everything remains hidden in the depths of his soul. But when the time is ripe for this central core to rise into consciousness, this is asserted through a particular dream. It is clothed in this form to announce that the inner core has reached a certain termination with the faculties in question. The dream proves each time that something has been achieved. Until the dream appears the soul forces have been working down in the hidden depths of the body so as gradually to produce the faculties in a crystallised form. But this stage having been reached, and the body being now ready for the faculty, a transition takes place. It does not enter the consciousness at first but streams into the semi-consciousness of the dream. By means of the dream the hidden part of the soul life breaks through to the level of consciousness. So this faculty is always enhanced after being symbolically expressed in the dream.

Thus we see how this central core of man's being works in both physical and super-sensible organisations. Then when man has raised it to a certain level of consciousness, its task is completed, and after expressing itself in a dream its activity is transformed into forces evident in conscious life. What lies below, thus corresponds with what plays its part above in the consciousness, so we see why so much cannot find its way there, being still needed first to form the organs which will produce the faculties destined for conscious use. Thus we see how all life is open to observation and how the central core of man's being works upon his organism. When in childhood man gradually develops from within outwards, this same inner core that later goes on working in him functions prior to the advent of ego-consciousness up to the point of time to which the first memory can be traced. The whole being of mankind is involved in continuous self-transformation. Man is sometimes ignorant of what his soul experiences yet this works creatively in him; at other times this creative activity is discontinued and then it rises into consciousness. In this way our higher spheres of consciousness are related to what lies in the sub-consciousness, in the hidden depths of the soul. These hidden depths often speak quite a different language and contain much greater wisdom than the fully conscious man is aware of. That human consciousness cannot be regarded as the equivalent of what we call the intelligence of things, which seems to reflect human consciousness, can be inferred from the fact that rational activity, the ruling of reason, meets us also where we cannot admit that the light of reason is working in the same way as in man. In this respect if we compare man with the animals we find that man's superiority does not consist in his rational actions but in the light his sub-consciousness sheds upon them. In the case of beavers and their constructions, and wasps too, we see that intelligence governs the animals performances. In this way we can survey the whole range of animal activity. We see that here there rules fundamentally the same intelligence man employs when his consciousness illumines some part of the rational activity of the world. Man can never consciously shed light on more than part of this world activity, but a far wider active intelligence streams through our subconscious soul-life. There, not only does intelligence bring about unconscious conclusions and concepts—as a naturalist like Helmholtz points out—but without man's participation, intelligence produces many things artistic and wise.

I may now refer to a subject already mentioned which I should like to call “The Philosopher and the Human Soul”. I am thinking especially of those 19th-century philosophers inclined towards pessimism. The philosopher deals particularly with reason, the conscious activity of the intelligence, and only admits what this activity can investigate. If we take philosophers like Schopenhauer, Mainländer and Eduard von Hartmann, we find them starting from the idea that when man views the world with an open mind, as far as he can judge everything points to the conclusion that evil and suffering far outweigh joy and happiness. Eduard von Hartmann has more over produced in interesting estimate by which he most ingeniously showed how suffering and sorrow predominate. First he put together all man is bound to experience in this way of suffering and sorrow and subtracted this from the sum of joy and happiness. According to his reckoning, suffering and sorrow predominate; the philosopher deduces this by a process of reasoning and so of course has some justification, for if sorrow and suffering predominate life must be viewed with pessimism. Reason is responsible for the philosopher's example based on calculation, and comes to the conclusion that, from the standpoint of conscious life, the world appears to be anything but good.

In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have pointed out that this calculation based on reasoning, this subtraction, is really not applicable. For who performs the operation, even when it is carried out by an ordinary man who is no philosopher? It is performed by the conscious soul-life. But astonishingly enough consciousness makes no distinction between the values of life. For life again shows us that even if man produces such an example, based on calculation, it does not lead him to conclude life is worthless. From this we must realise (I have already said that Eduard von Hartmann's calculation is clever and correct) that if man makes this calculation he can draw no conclusion from it in his conscious life. Robert Hamerling has declared in his “Atomistik des Willens” that there must be an error in this calculation, for every living being including man even when sorrows prevail still desires life and does not want it to come to an end. So in spite of this subtraction man does not conclude life to be worthless. Now in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have indicated that this example is inapplicable, because in the depths of his soul man calculates quite differently. Only consciousness subtracts, the subconscious part of the soul divides. It divides the amount of happiness by that of sorrow. You all know that in subtraction if the amount of sorrow equals 8 and that of joy 8, too, the result is nought. If one divides instead of subtracting, the sum would read: eight divided by eight equals one; so one always obtains one as a result instead of nought. However high the denominator, provided it is not infinite, it still results in desire for existence. This division is made in man's hidden depths of soul with the result that he consciously feels the value and joy of life. In the same context I indicated that this peculiar phenomenon in man's soul life, namely, that, provided his nature is sound, he still has pleasure and joy in existence and appetite for the world, even when faced by overwhelming sorrow—that this phenomenon is comprehensible only because in the depths of his soul man carries out what in arithmetic we may call a division sum.

So we see that in its depths the soul life reveals how man's subconscious is ruled by reason. Just as the beaver building his lodge, or the wasp, displays an intelligence that by no means reaches the animal's consciousness and for which it cannot consciously account, so intelligence rules the depths of man's soul. Like the force in the sea which drives the waves upwards, this intelligence rises into the consciousness that covers a far smaller part of life than is included in the wide horizon of the soul life. We now begin to understand how man has to look upon himself as swimming on the ocean of the life of soul and consciousness, and how consciousness actually illumines his soul life only in part—the part that with his upper consciousness is swimming on the subconscious. In daily life too we see how man's attention is continually drawn to what governs these lower regions, and how differently life deals with outer events in the case of different people. Things of which we know nothing may hold sway in the depths of our soul. We may have experienced them in a far distant past, and are perhaps outwardly no longer conscious of them, but they still work on. To spiritual investigator they appear implanted and functioning in the centre of man's being, even if their activity does not follow a conscious pattern. Thus the following may occur. An experience that has made a deep impression in childhood may remain present in later years in the depths of someone's soul. We know that children are particularly susceptible to injustice. A child is often extremely open to perceive such a thing. Let us say that, in his seventh or eighth year, a child who has done something or other has experienced injustice either at the hands of his parents or anyone else in his environment. In later years the conscious soul-life covered it. It may have been forgotten in so far as consciousness is concerned, but it is not inactive in deeper unconscious regions. Let us say such a child grows up and in his sixteenth or seventeenth year at school again suffers injustice. Another child who has been spared this earlier experience may grow up and be exposed to the same kind of thing. He goes home, cries, protests, and perhaps complains of the teacher, but there are no further consequences. The matter blows over as if it had never happened and sinks into subconscious regions. But the same thing may happen to the other child who grows up having experienced injustice in his seventh or eight year, no longer consciously remembering it, but this time the matter does not pass unnoticed—and may result in a suicide. The explanation is that, whereas the same thing may have affected the consciousness of both children, in the one something came to light that flashed up from hidden depths.

In countless cases we can see how our subconscious soul-life plays into our consciousness. Take the following which we meet with time and again, but which unfortunately are not properly observed. There are people who during their whole later life display a characteristic one could describe as a yearning. It surges up, and if no one asks what they longer for, they reply that the worst of it is they do not know. Everything one offers them by way of comfort they cannot accept; the yearning remains. Adopting the methods of spiritual science, if one looks back into such a man's earlier life, one will remark that this yearning is due to former quite special experiences. One will then find—anyone who observes in this way can convince himself of it—that in early youth these people's attention and interest were constantly turned towards some definite thing not really belonging to the essential part of their being. They were led into a sphere of activity for which their soul had no longing. Hence the soul was denied what it really desired. Attention was focused in quite another direction. So later the following is seen. As the man's former urge had remained unsatisfied, his various successive experiences have grown into something working as a passion or instinct, manifest as the yearning or indefinite hankering for what earlier could have been satisfied. This is no longer possible because in the course of life attention was first focused on matters to which the soul was not drawn. For this reason these concepts have become so fixed that the man in question no longer understands what earlier would have suited him. Formerly no understanding was shown him where what was ruling and weaving in the soul's depths was concerned. He has now become disaccustomed to it, can no longer grasp it, and what is left is not what was meant for him.

So we see how parallel with man's stream of consciousness there runs an unconscious stream, and it appears every day into thousands of instances. But other phenomena show us how the conscious soul-life plunges into subconscious regions, and how man may make contact with these subconscious depths. Here we come to the point where spiritual science indicates how the soul sheds its light into the etheric body when man descends into his own inner depths. But what does he finds there? He finds what carries him beyond the restricted confines of humanity, and unites him with the whole cosmos. For we are related to the cosmos in both our physical and etheric bodies. When our soul life streams into our etheric body we can live ourselves into the wide spaces of the world, and man then receives the first intimation of something no longer belonging to him but to the cosmos. We then reach the life of human imagination. When man descends still further and inwardly expands over what covers the normal conditions of time and space, he senses how his physical and etheric bodies depend on the cosmos and belong to it. So what is outside man illumines his consciousness when he delves into the hidden depths of his soul. Having seen how the soul's hidden life can flash into human consciousness, we must on the other hand realise that we make our descent in full consciousness. We obtained the same result when we start our descent through Imagination, that is, not fantasy but true Imagination as understood by Goethe. On plunging still deeper we come to what we call clairvoyant forces. There are not limited to man's concerns in time and space, but enable us to attain the wide spaces of the cosmos, normally invisible.

In so far as we penetrate beyond Imagination we come to the sphere of the hidden things of existence. The gateway lies deep in our own soul and only after going through it do we find the spiritual and super-sensible depths of existence which, imperceptible to normal consciousness, form the basis of perceptible things. Through imagination—provided that it does not give way to fancy but that man lives with things so that a comprehensive picture replaces his perception—he realises how he forms part of the things. He knows that Imagination will not disclose the essential being, but Imagination is the pathway leading to what lies deeper than anything reason and ordinary science can grasp. Because of this a philosopher, Frohschammer, in a one-sided way calls the world's basis its creative element, “the creative imagination in things”. So according to this philosophical statement, when from his normal consciousness man plunges into subconscious regions—and who will deny that imagination belongs there—he will become more closely related to the essence of things where imagination is more creative in the things than reason can render possible. In spite of the fact that this outlook is extremely one-sided, it is yet in closer agreement with what the world conceals, than a purely intellectual point of view—when man passes from his intellectual activity into the world of imagination—world of a thousand possibilities compared to the hundred his intellect offers—he feels himself leaving his every day world and entering the manifold possibilities provided by the subconscious. In comparison all surface experience seems merely a small extract. Or may it not be that life itself offers millions of possibilities, whereas barely a thousand are realised on the surface of existence, and these we perceive? One need look only at the spawn produced by fish in the sea, the countless seeds brought forth in life, and compare this with what later appears in life—with what becomes reality. This shows how in its depths life holds far greater riches than appear on the surface. The same thing applies when man descends from what his reason can grasp to the realm of Imagination. Just as when we descend from the realm of outer realities to that of manifold possibilities, do we plunge from the world of reason into the magic land of Imagination.

But it is one-sided to think world creative forces run parallel with Imagination, because although it enables man to make his descent he does not go so far as to rise from these depths to the reality of the super-sensible world. This is possible only after evolving the clairvoyant powers found when he descends—consciously of course—from the surface of the soul-life into its hidden depths. Here we reach those forces that flash up merely unconsciously. If a man has this aim he must fashion his soul into an instrument of spiritual perception, in the same way as the chemist and physicist set up their instruments to observe outer objects. The soul must become an instrument which it is not in everyday life. Here indeed Goethe's words ring true:

“Geheimnisvoll am lichten Tag
Lässt sich Natur des Schleiers nicht berauben;
Und was sie deinem Geist nicht offenbaren mag,
Das zwingst du ihr nicht ab mit Hebeln und mit Schrauben”

“Nature will ne'er by day unfold
From out her veils for you her secret stores;
What from your spirit she would fain withhold
You cannot force from her with any tool of yours.”

Instruments and experiments, those “tools”, will never enable one to reach the spirit, for they are based on what is external. But when consciousness illumines what lives in the depths veiled in darkness, one may then enter those spheres where the soul lives as an eternal, infinite being among creative beings who are infinite as the soul. Only by means of its own intimate experience can the soul be forged into such an instrument. It has been fully pointed out in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds how through meditation and concentration one can acquire what is needed to carry the conscious soul to the hidden depths. When we firmly resolve to exclude all sense impressions, to repress all remembrance of anxieties, sorrows, excitements and so on, including all other feelings, we are left with our emptied soul and all external memories are extinguished as in sleep. But in sleep the forces prevailing in the hidden depths are too weak to reach consciousness or, rather, the soul lacks the strength to plunge consciously into these regions. Man only succeeds in this by focusing his will on his subconscious life, for instance, devoting himself to a definite thought or chain of thoughts, thus performing the work normally done subconsciously. The will must govern the whole proceeding. The will must decide the thought, and only what the man's will sets in motion counts. In meditation man places before him a thought-content his will has selected. He takes a first step when for a given time he allows himself to think, contemplate and remember only what he has placed in his consciousness, keeping his spiritual eye focused, and concentrating his normally disbursed soul-forces. He must make of his will a focal point and not allow the thought to work suggestively. In other words, he must not be controlled by the thought but must always be able to extinguish it at the will. He must train his soul to the point where he brings thoughts to his consciousness through the will alone holding them as long as he likes, thereby inwardly strengthening his will. The thoughts belonging to the outer world are less effective than those we define as symbolic, or allegorical. For instance, if a man brings the thought “light” or “wisdom” into his consciousness, he will certainly reach a high point but will still not get very far. It will be different if he tells himself that wisdom is presented in the symbol of light, or love in that of warmth. In other words, he must choose symbols that have their life in the soul itself. In brief, he must dispense with thoughts borrowed from the outer world, bearing in mind, and devoting himself to, those that allow of many interpretations and are shaped by himself. Of course a materialist can say that such a person is in fact a visionary, as these thoughts mean nothing. But it is unnecessary for them to have any meaning. They serve only as training for the soul, enabling it to plunge into these depths. When man so strictly masters his soul that external influences, or those arising from the depths, no longer prevail, when his will controls every conscious thought, enabling strengthened in the forces to play their part, he then lives in true meditation, true concentration. By means of such exercises the soul undergoes a change. He who reaches this point will observe that his soul descends to other regions. If we described the experience open to one who thus meditates, we see at once in what the super-sensible core consists. The following experience is possible.

Man may come to a point where he perceives that the thoughts he develops are affecting him and transforming something within him. He no longer knows the soul only in thought, but perceives that part of it which drives to expand into cosmic space. It works upon him from cosmic space formatively; he feels himself to be growing into one with space, but always under fully conscious control. Now something of very great importance must be added that must never be neglected when investigating the reality of the outer super-sensible world. Man realises he is experiencing something, but he is unable to think of it in the way he ordinarily thinks. He cannot grasp these experiences with clear cut thoughts. They are manifold and allow of numerous interpretations, but he is unable to bring them into his consciousness. It is as if he were to come up against an obstacle when he attempts to bring all these into his usual consciousness. He must realise that a more extensive consciousness is behind him, but he senses resistance and feels powerless to use the ordinary instrument of his body. One then recognises the difference between what lives within us, and that of which we are conscious. We learn that our forces work into the etheric body, but that our physical body lies like a log outside. This is the first experience. And the second experience, following the exercises repeated time after time, is that the physical body begins to yield, so that the things we could not interpret at first and experienced only in the deeper regions of the soul can now be translated into ordinary ideas.

Everything spiritual science tells us regarding the spiritual worlds is clothed in concepts belonging to everyday life. But in this case the knowledge has not been acquired by logical processes nor by external judgments, but through super-sensible experience and the light shed by consciousness on the hidden depths of the soul. These things are brought into consciousness only after being supersensibly experienced, and he who has fashioned his soul into an instrument of super-sensible perception has now roused what reaches his physical and etheric forces, transforming his organism, thus enabling these facts to be imparted to the outer world and explained in ordinary terms. Spiritual science is imparted logically. When we clearly grasp what lies in our subconscious we can say: the spiritual investigator beholds what he referred to when he said that a repeated dream showed how the essential core first works inwardly, and how later, when the talent for drawing appeared, the man consciously experienced the result. So we first see this working on the subconscious, followed by a transformation; then what has worked in the depths rises into consciousness. In this conscious descent into the subconscious man starts by consciously living in meditation and concentration, after which the will forces he has applied to this transform the etheric and physical body. We ourselves then carry our super-sensible experience into our everyday consciousness. Thus it is possible by spiritual training to gain direct perception of what we observe in life provided we descend to the hidden depths of the soul.

What I have mentioned here as the result of this method of training, the only one suited to present-day man if he wishes to train himself for clairvoyant vision, makes its appearance in a natural way into man who has a tendency to work out of the centre of his soul. Through this natural tendency man can carry certain forces down into the hidden depths of his soul; then there arises in him a natural kind of clairvoyance. Clairvoyance of this kind can lead to what has been indicated just as well as the fully conscious clairvoyance described. When man thus penetrates down into the depths of his soul and perceives how what he has accomplished in his etheric body through meditation and concentration works on his bodily organisation, he no longer remains in the same spatial and temporal conditions as when he is within his purely external perception; he presses, rather, through space, time, and what is usually in the sense world, and comes to the spiritual things lying at the basis of the things of the senses. When we see a man with trained clairvoyant consciousness penetrating to the nature of things, it is possible for this to happen in certain conditions through a natural tendency. In the lecture on The Meaning of Prophecy, (see November 9, 1911 – Berlin) Nostradamus was shown to be a case where natural tendency resulted in clairvoyant powers. How this plays into life, how it generally works, what extended consciousness is and what means the working of soul forces which lie beyond the usual boundary of the conscious life of the soul—all this may be found in a book I should like to mention here. It gives a wonderful description of how the working of the hidden forces of the soul and spirit appear to ordinary science, and also of the connection of the spiritual forces acquired without particular training with what is given in my book about the relation of man to the higher worlds. The book referred to is written by Ludwig Deinhard and called “Das Mysterium des Menschen im Licht der Psychischen Forschung”. In it you find the two methods of super-sensible investigation described—the one which keeps to the methods of ordinary science as well as that which is in keeping with entrance into super-sensible worlds through actual schooling, that is, through meditation, concentration, and so on. But whoever wishes to penetrate more precisely into the soul's experience should turn to the description in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.

Thus the soul manifests the same remarkable turbulence of underlying force that we experience in earthquakes. On the other hand spiritual science is called upon to point out that man can descend to these hidden depths of existence: an experiment of course only his own soul can make. But only by traveling through these regions and first grasping our own being shall we penetrate the depths where we find the spiritual external foundations of what belongs to the outer world. Spiritual science leads us through the inner depths of the soul to the hidden depths of the cosmos. This is the essential part of the methods of spiritual science. When we view things in this way, Goethe's words are confirmed in a quite special sense—words he spoke after Haller had written in such a mistaken way of nature. When Haller said:

“To Nature's hidden core no living soul can probe;
Happy the one to whom she does not show her shell!”,

Goethe, as one approaching the threshold of clairvoyance, was aware of the relation between human consciousness and the hidden depths of the cosmos. He knew it through his own experience, his life in the outer world, by his contact with nature; so to Haller's words which took account of knowledge of the outer world only, he replied;

“Ins Innre der Natur”—
O du Philister!—
“Dringt kein ershaffner Geist.”
Mich und Geschwister
Mögt ihr an selches Wort
Nur nicht erinnern;
Wir denken: Ort für Ort
Sind wir im Innern.
“Glückselig! Wem sie nur
Die äussre Schale weist!”
Das hör' ich sechzig Jahre wiederholen;
Ich fluche drauf, aber verstohlen
Sage mir tausend tausendmale:
Alles gibt sie reichlich und gern;
Natur hat weder Kern
Noch Schale,
Alles ist sie nit eniem Male;
Dich prüfe du nur allermeist,
Ob du Kern oder Schale seist.

“To nature's hidden core”—
O you philistine!—
“No living soul can probe.”
In voicing such a thought
You surely must forget
Me and my kin.
We think that everywhere
We are within.
“Happy the one to whom
She does but show her shell!”
I've heard this now for fully sixty years
Cursing in secret such ideas;
Again and yet again myself do tell:
Richly she gives of her rich store,
Nature has neither core
Nor has she shell,
For she is all in all and everything;
And at the most you can but find
Whether yourself you're core or rind.

We can truly say that the world contains much that is enigmatical and what enters mans consciousness is scarcely more than the outer shell of his life of soul. But if we adopt the right methods we see that man made break through the shell and reach the core of his being, and from these depths gain insight into cosmic life. Thus we can truly join with Goethe in saying:

“Müsset in Natur betrachten
Immer eins wie alles achten;
Nichts ist drinnen, nichts ist draussen:
Den was innen, das ist aussen ...”

“If you would on nature gaze
You must notice all her ways;
Nothing is without, within her,
What is outer, that is inner.”

Man must simply begin to discover what is hidden within! Since spiritual science has its own way of explaining these hidden depths, it must admit that when we contemplate the outer world we are faced by riddle upon riddle. These riddles may often cause a shudder when we find riddles in our own inner being and perceive how these inner forces work in our immediate experience, or when we stand anxiously facing what unknown things may be in store for us. The outside world presents man with a series of riddles. If we rightly compare our outer life with our inner life, we feel something of the activity of these inner soul forces which are excluded from the restricted range of our ordinary consciousness. But these forces surge into clear consciousness just as those of the earthquake thrust through the crust of the earth. When we see on the one hand, however, that we can entertain certain hope that man made descends to the depths of his being, there solving these manifold riddles, on the other hand, we can entertain the hope that the further promise of spiritual science may be fulfilled. This promise tells us that not only can the soul's riddles be solved, but that in passing the gateway of the spiritual world, further vistas of the great outside world unfold for man's soul, and its riddles, too, find solution. Man penetrates through the riddles and barriers of the soul if he has the courage to comprehend himself as a riddle and if he bestirs himself to raise his soul, as instrument of perception, to the hope and assurance that for his spirit the great riddles of the cosmos may be solved, thus bringing him satisfaction and a sense of security in life.

From the foregoing considerations it follows that it is impossible to prove, by analysis of the content of our perceptions, that our percepts are ideas. This is supposed to be proved by showing that, if the process of perceiving takes place, in the way in which we conceive it in accordance with the naïve-realistic assumptions concerning the psychological and physiological constitution of human individuals, then we have to do, not with things themselves, but merely with our ideas of things. Now, if Naïve Realism, when consistently thought out, leads to results which directly contradict its presuppositions, then these presuppositions must be discarded as unsuitable for the foundation of a theory of the world. In any case, it is inadmissible to reject the presuppositions and yet accept the consequences, as the Critical Idealist does who bases his assertion that the world is my idea on the line of argument indicated above. (Edouard von Hartmann gives in his work Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie a full account of this line of argument.)

The truth of Critical Idealism is one thing, the persuasiveness of its proofs another. How it stands with the former, will appear later in the course of our argument, but the persuasiveness of its proofs is nil. If one builds a house, and the ground floor collapses whilst the first floor is being built, then the first floor collapses too. Naïve Realism and Critical Idealism are related to one another like the ground floor to the first floor in this simile.

For one who holds that the whole perceived world is only an ideal world, and, moreover, the effect of things unknown to him acting on his soul, the real problem of knowledge is naturally concerned, not with the ideas present only in the soul, but with the things which lie outside his consciousness and which are independent of him. He asks: How much can we learn about them indirectly, seeing that we cannot observe them directly? From this point of view, he is concerned, not with the connection of his conscious percepts with one another, but with their causes which transcend his consciousness and exist independently of him, whereas the percepts, on his view, disappear as soon as he turns his sense-organs away from the things themselves. Our consciousness, on this view, works like a mirror from which the pictures of definite things disappear the very moment its reflecting surface is not turned towards them. If, now, we do not see the things themselves, but only their reflections, we must obtain knowledge of the nature of the former indirectly by drawing conclusions from the character of the latter. The whole of modern science adopts this point of view, when it uses percepts only as a means of obtaining information about the motions of matter which lie behind them, and which alone really “are.” If the philosopher, as Critical Idealist, admits real existence at all, then his sole aim is to gain knowledge of this real existence indirectly by means of his ideas. His interest ignores the subjective world of ideas, and pursues instead the causes of these ideas.

The Critical Idealist can, however, go even further and say, I am confined to the world of my own ideas and cannot escape from it. If I conceive a thing beyond my ideas, this concept, once more, is nothing but my idea. An Idealist of this type will either deny the thing-in-itself entirely or, at any rate, assert that it has no significance for human minds, i.e., that it is as good as nonexistent since we can know nothing of it.

To this kind of Critical Idealist the whole world seems a chaotic dream, in the face of which all striving for knowledge is simply meaningless. For him there can be only two sorts of men: (1) victims of the illusion that the dreams they have woven themselves are real things, and (2) wise men who see through the nothingness of this dream world, and who gradually lose all desire to trouble themselves further about it. From this point of view, even one's own personality may become a mere dream phantom. Just as during sleep there appears among my dream-images an image of myself, so in waking consciousness the idea of my own Self is added to the idea of the outer world. I have then given to me in consciousness, not my real Self, but only my idea of my Self. Whoever denies that things exist or, at least, that we can know anything of them, must also deny the existence, respectively the knowledge, of one's own personality. This is how the Critical Idealist comes to maintain that “All reality transforms itself into a wonderful dream, without a life which is the object of the dream, and without a mind which has the dream; into a dream which is nothing but a dream of itself.” (Cp. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen.)

Whether he who believes that he recognizes immediate experience to be a dream, postulates nothing behind this dream, or whether he relates his ideas to actual things, is immaterial. In both cases life itself must lose all scientific interest for him. However, whereas for those who believe that the whole of accessible reality is exhausted in dreams, all science is an absurdity, for those who feel compelled to argue from ideas to things, science consists in studying these things-in-themselves. The first of these theories of the world may be called Absolute Illusionism, the second is called Transcendental Realism [Knowledge is transcendental, when it is aware that nothing can be asserted directly about the thing-in-itself, but makes indirect inferences from the subjective which is known, to the unknown which lies beyond the subjective Transcendental. The thing-in-itself is, according to this view, beyond the sphere of the world of immediate experience; in other words, it is transcendent. Our world can however he transcendentally related to the transcendent. Hartmann's theory is called Realism because it proceeds from the subjective, the mental, to the transcendent, the real.] by its most rigorously logical exponent, Edouard von Hartmann.

These two points of view have this in common with Naïve Realism, that they seek to gain a footing in the world by means of an analysis of percepts. Within this sphere, however, they are unable to find any stable point.

One of the most important questions for an adherent of Transcendental Realism would have to be, how the Ego constructs the world of ideas out of itself. A world of ideas which was given to us, and which disappeared as soon as we shut our senses to the external world, might provoke an earnest desire for knowledge, in so far as it was a means for investigating indirectly the world of the self-existing Self. If the things of our experience were “ideas,” then our everyday life would be like a dream, and the discovery of the true facts like waking. Even our dream-images interest us as long as we dream, and consequently do not detect their dream character. But as soon as we wake, we no longer look for the connections of our dream-images among themselves, but rather for the physical, physiological, and psychological processes which underlie them. In the same way, a philosopher who holds the world to be his idea, cannot be interested in the reciprocal relations of the details within the world. If he admits the existence of a real Ego at all, then his question will be, not how one of his ideas is associated with another, but what takes place in the Soul which is independent of these ideas, while a certain train of ideas passes through his consciousness. If I dream that I am drinking wine which makes my throat burn, and then wake up with a fit of coughing (cp. Weygandt, Entstehung den Traüme, 1893) I cease, the moment I wake, to be interested in the dream-experience for its own sake. My attention is now concerned only with the physiological and psychological processes by means of which the irritation which causes me to cough, comes to be symbolically expressed in the dream. Similarly, once the philosopher is convinced that the given world consists of nothing but ideas, his interest is bound to switch from them at once to the soul which is the reality lying behind them. The matter is more serious however for the Illusionist who denies the existence of an Ego behind the “ideas,” or at least holds this Ego to be unknowable. We might very easily be led to such a view by the reflection that, in contrast to dreaming, there is the waking state in which we have the opportunity to detect our dreams, and to realize the real relations of things, but that there is no state of the self which is related similarly to our waking conscious life. Every adherent of this view fails entirely to see that there is, in fact, something which is to mere perception what our waking experience is to our dreams. This something is thought.

The naïve man cannot be charged with failure to perceive this. He accepts life as it is, and regards things as real just as they present themselves to him in experience. The first step, however, which we take beyond this standpoint can be only this, that we ask how thought is related to perception. It makes no difference whether or no the percept, as given to me, has a continuous existence before and after I perceive it. If I want to assert anything whatever about it, I can do so only with the help of thought. When I assert that the world is my idea, I have enunciated the result of an act of thought, and if my thought is not applicable to the world, then my result is false. Between a percept and every kind of judgment about it there intervenes thought.

The reason why, in our discussion about things, we generally overlook the part played by thought, has already been given above (p. 46). It lies in the fact that our attention is concentrated only on the object about which we think, but not at the same time on the thinking itself. The naïve mind, therefore, treats thought as something which has nothing to do with things, but stands altogether aloof from them and makes its theories about them. The theory which the thinker constructs concerning the phenomena of the world is regarded, not as part of the real things, but as existing only in men's heads. The world is complete in itself even without this theory. It is all ready-made and finished with all its substances and forces, and of this ready-made world man makes himself a picture. Whoever thinks thus need only be asked one question. What right have you to declare the world to be complete without thought? Does not the world cause thoughts in the minds of men with the same necessity as it causes the blossoms on plants? Plant a seed in the earth. It puts forth roots and stem, it unfolds into leaves and blossoms. Set the plant before yourselves. It connects itself, in your minds, with a definite concept. Why should this concept belong any less to the whole plant than leaf and blossom? You say the leaves and blossoms exist quite apart from an experiencing subject. The concept appears only when a human being makes an object of the plant. Quite so. But leaves and blossoms also appear on the plant only if there is soil in which the seed can be planted, and light and air in which the blossoms and leaves can unfold. Just so the concept of a plant arises when a thinking being comes into contact with the plant.

It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through bare perception, as a totality, a whole, while that which thought reveals in it is regarded as a mere accretion which has nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the percept that offers itself to me is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my object. If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see today's state gradually change into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance section out of the continuous process of growth in which the object is engaged. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states, the possibility of which lay in the bud, will not be realized. Similarly, I may be prevented tomorrow from watching the blossom further, and thus carry away an incomplete picture of it.

It would be a quite unscientific and arbitrary judgment which declared of any haphazard appearance of a thing, this is the thing.

To regard the sum of perceptual appearances as the thing is no more legitimate. It might be quite possible for a mind to receive the concept at the same time as, and together with, the percept. To such a mind it would never occur that the concept did not belong to the thing. It would have to ascribe to the concept an existence indivisibly bound up with the thing.

Let me make myself clearer by another example. If I throw a stone horizontally through the air, I perceive it in different places at different times. I connect these places so as to form a line. Mathematics teaches me to distinguish various kinds of lines, one of which is the parabola. I know a parabola to be a line which is produced by a point moving according to a certain well-defined law. If I analyze the conditions under which the stone thrown by me moves, I find that the line of its flight is identical with the line I know as a parabola. That the stone moves exactly in a parabola is a result of the given conditions and follows necessarily from them. The form of the parabola belongs to the whole phenomenon as much as any other feature of it. The hypothetical mind described above which has no need of the roundabout way of thought, would find itself presented, not only with a sequence of visual percepts at different points, but, as part and parcel of these phenomena, also with the parabolic form of the line of flight, which we can add to the phenomenon only by an act of thought.

It is not due to the real objects that they appear to us at first without their conceptual sides, but to our mental organization. Our whole organization functions in such a way that in the apprehension of every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sources, viz., from perception and from thought.

The nature of things is indifferent to the way I am organized for apprehending them. The breach between perception and thought exists only from the moment that I confront objects as spectator. But which elements do, and which do not, belong to the objects, cannot depend on the manner in which I obtain my knowledge of them.

Man is a being with many limitations. First of all, he is a thing among other things. His existence is in space and time. Hence but a limited portion of the total universe can ever be given to him. This limited portion, however, is linked up with other parts on every side both in time and in space. If our existence were so linked with things that every process in the object world were also a process in us, there would be no difference between us and things. Neither would there be any individual objects for us. All processes and events would then pass continuously one into the other. The cosmos would be a unity and a whole complete in itself. The stream of events would nowhere be interrupted. But owing to our limitations we perceive as an individual object what, in truth, is not an individual object at all. Nowhere, e.g., is the particular quality “red” to be found by itself in abstraction. It is surrounded on all sides by other qualities to which it belongs, and without which it could not subsist. For us, however, it is necessary to isolate certain sections of the world and to consider them by themselves. Our eye can seize only single colours one after another out of a manifold colour-complex, our understanding only single concepts out of a connected conceptual system. This isolation is a subjective act, which is due to the fact that we are not identical with the world-process, but are only things among other things.

It is of the greatest importance for us to determine the relation of ourselves, as things, to all other things. The determining of this relation must be distinguished from merely becoming conscious of ourselves. For this self-awareness we depend on perception just as we do for our awareness of any other thing. The perception of myself reveals to me a number of qualities which I combine into an apprehension of my personality as a whole, just as I combine the qualities, yellow, metallic, hard, etc., in the unity “gold.” This kind of self-consciousness does not take me beyond the sphere of what belongs to me. Hence it must be distinguished from the determination of myself by thought. Just as I determine by thought the place of any single percept of the external world in the whole cosmic system, so I fit by an act of thought what I perceive in myself into the order of the world-process. My self-observation restricts me within definite limits, but my thought has nothing to do with these limits. In this sense I am a two-sided being. I am contained within the sphere which I apprehend as that of my personality, but I am also the possessor of an activity which, from a higher standpoint, determines my finite existence. Thought is not individual like sensation and feeling; it is universal. It receives an individual stamp in each separate human being only because it comes to be related to his individual feelings and sensations. By means of these particular colourings of the universal thought, individual men are distinguished from one another. There is only one single concept of “triangle.” It is quite immaterial for the content of this concept whether it is in A's consciousness or in B's. It will however be grasped by each of the two minds in its own individual way.

This thought conflicts with a common prejudice which is very hard to overcome. The victims of this prejudice are unable to see that the concept of a triangle which my mind grasps is the same as the concept which my neighbour's mind grasps. The naïve man believes himself to be the creator of his concepts. Hence he believes that each person has his private concepts. One of the first things which philosophic thought requires of us is to overcome this prejudice. The one single concept of “triangle” does not split up into many concepts because it is thought by many minds. For the thought of the many is itself a unity.

In thought we have the element which welds each man's special individuality into one whole with the cosmos. In so far as we sense and feel (perceive), we are isolated individuals; in so far as we think, we are the All-One Being which pervades everything. This is the deeper meaning of our two-sided nature. We are conscious of an absolute principle revealing itself in us, a principle which is universal. But we experience it, not as it issues from the centre of the world, but rather at a point on the periphery. Were the former the case, we should know, as soon as ever we became conscious, the solution of the whole world problem. But since we stand at a point on the periphery, and find that our own being is confined within definite limits, we must explore the region which lies beyond our own being with the help of thought, which is the universal cosmic principle manifesting itself in our minds.

The fact that thought, in us, reaches out beyond our separate existence and relates itself to the universal world-order, gives rise to the desire for knowledge in us. Beings without thought do not experience this desire. When they come in contact with other things no questions arise for them. These other things remain external to such beings. But in thinking beings the concept confronts the external thing. It is that part of the thing which we receive not from without, but from within. To assimilate, to unite, the two elements, the inner and the outer, that is the function of knowledge.

The percept, thus, is not something finished and self-contained, but one side only of the total reality. The other side is the concept. The act of cognition is the synthesis of percept
and concept. And it is only the union of percept and concept which constitutes the whole thing.

The preceding discussion shows clearly that it is futile to seek for any other common element in the separate things of the world, than the ideal content which thinking supplies. All attempts to discover any other principle of unity in the world than this internally coherent ideal content, which we gain for ourselves by the conceptual analysis of our percepts, are bound to fail. Neither a personal God, nor force, nor matter, nor the blind will (of Schopenhauer and Hartmann), can be accepted by us as the universal principle of unity in the world. These principles all belong only to a limited sphere of our experience. Personality we experience only in ourselves, force and matter only in external things. The will, again, can be regarded only as the expression of the activity of our finite personalities. Schopenhauer wants to avoid making “abstract” thought the principle of unity in the world, and seeks instead something which presents itself to him immediately as real. This philosopher holds that we can never solve the riddle of the world so long as we regard it as an “external” world. “In fact, the meaning for which we seek of that world which is present to us only as our idea, or the transition from the world as mere idea of the knowing subject to whatever it may be besides this, would never be found if the investigator himself were nothing more than the pure knowing subject (a winged cherub without a body). But he himself is rooted in that world; he finds himself in it as an individual, that is to say, his knowledge, which is the necessary supporter of the whole world as idea, is yet always given through the medium of a body, whose affections are, as we have shown, the starting-point for the understanding in the perception of that world. His body is, for the pure knowing subject, an idea like every other idea, an object among objects. Its movements and actions are so far known to him in precisely the same way as the changes of all other perceived objects, and would be just as strange and incomprehensible to him if their meaning were not explained for him in an entirely different way. ... The body is given in two entirely different ways to the subject of knowledge, who becomes an individual only through his identity with it. It is given as an idea in intelligent perception, as an object among objects and subject to the laws of objects. And it is also given in quite a different way as that which is immediately known to every one, and is signified by the word will. Every true act of his will is also at once and without exception a movement of his body. The act of will and the movement of the body are not two different things objectively known, which the bond of causality unites; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect; they are one and the same, but they are given in entirely different ways—immediately, and again in perception for the understanding.” (The World as Will and Idea, Book 2, & 18.) Schopenhauer considers himself entitled by these arguments to hold that the will becomes objectified in the human body. He believes that in the activities of the body he has an immediate experience of reality, of the thing-in-itself in the concrete. Against these arguments we must urge that the activities of our body become known to us only through self-observation, and that, as such, they are in no way superior to other percepts. If we want to know their real nature, we can do so only by means of thought, i.e., by fitting them into the ideal system of our concepts and ideas.

One of the most deeply rooted prejudices of the naïve mind is the opinion that thinking is abstract and empty of any concrete content. At best, we are told it supplies but an “ideal” counterpart of the unity of the world, but never that unity itself. Whoever holds this view has never made clear to himself what a percept apart from concepts really is. Let us see what this world of bare percepts is. A mere juxtaposition in space, a mere succession in time, a chaos of disconnected particulars—that is what it is. None of these things which come and go on the stage of perception has any connection with any other. The world is a multiplicity of objects without distinctions of value. None plays any greater part in the nexus of the world than any other. In order to realize that this or that fact has a greater importance than another we must go to thought. As long as we do not think, the rudimentary organ of an animal which has no significance in its life, appears equal in value to its more important limbs. The particular facts reveal their meaning, in themselves and in their relations with other parts of the world, only when thought spins its threads from thing to thing. This activity of thinking has always a content. For it is only through a perfectly definite concrete content that I can know why the snail belongs to a lower type of organization than the lion. The mere appearance, the percept, gives me no content which could inform me as to the degree of perfection of the organization.

Thought contributes this content to the percept from the world of concepts and ideas. In contrast with the content of perception which is given to us from without, the content of thought appears within our minds. The form in which thought first appears in consciousness we will call “Intuition.” Intuition is to thoughts what observation is to percepts. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge. An external object which we observe remains unintelligible to us, until the corresponding intuition arises within us which adds to the reality those sides of it which are lacking in the percept. To anyone who is incapable of supplying the relevant intuitions, the full nature of the real remains a sealed book. Just as the colour-blind person sees only differences of brightness without any colour qualities, so the mind which lacks intuition sees only disconnected fragments of percepts.

To explain a thing, to make it intelligible means nothing else than to place it in the context from which it has been torn by the peculiar organisation of our minds, described above. Nothing can possibly exist cut off from the universe. Hence all isolation of objects has only subjective validity for minds organized like ours. For us the universe is split up into above and below, before and after, cause and effect, object and idea, matter and force, object and subject, etc. The objects which, in observation, appear to us as separate, become combined, bit by bit, through the coherent, unified system of our intuitions. By thought we fuse again into one whole all that perception has separated.

An object presents riddles to our understanding so long as it exists in isolation. But this is an abstraction of our own making and can be unmade again in the world of concepts.

Except through thought and perception nothing is given to us directly. The question now arises as to the interpretation of percepts on our theory. We have learnt that the proof which Critical Idealism offers for the subjective nature of percepts collapses. But the exhibition of the falsity of the proof is not, by itself, sufficient to show that the doctrine itself is an error. Critical Idealism does not base its proof on the absolute nature of thought, but relies on the argument that Naïve Realism, when followed to its logical conclusion, contradicts itself. How does the matter appear when we recognize the absoluteness of thought?

Let us assume that a certain percept, e.g., red, appears in consciousness. To continued observation, the percept shows itself to be connected with other percepts, e.g., a certain figure, temperature, and touch-qualities. This complex of percepts I call an object in the world of sense. I can now ask myself: Over and above the percepts just mentioned, what else is there in the section of space in which they are? I shall then find mechanical, chemical, and other processes in that section of space. I next go further and study the processes which take place between the object and my sense-organs. I shall find oscillations in an elastic medium, the character of which has not the least in common with the percepts from which I started. I get the same result if I trace further the connection between sense organs and brain. In each of these inquiries I gather new percepts, but the connecting thread which binds all these spatially and temporally separated percepts into one whole, is thought. The air vibrations which carry sound are given to me as percepts just like the sound. Thought alone links all these percepts one to the other and exhibits them in their reciprocal relations. We have no right to say that over and above our immediate percepts there is anything except the ideal nexus of percepts (which thought has to reveal). The relation of the object perceived to the perceiving subject, which relation transcends the bare percept, is therefore merely ideal, i.e., capable of being expressed only through concepts. Only if it were possible to perceive how the object of perception affects the perceiving subject, or alternatively, only if I could watch the construction of the perceptual complex through the subject, could we speak as modern Physiology, and the Critical Idealism which is based on it, speak. Their theory confuses an ideal relation (that of the object to the subject) with a process of which we could speak only if it were possible to perceive it. The proposition, “No colour without a colour-sensing eye” cannot be taken to mean that the eye produces the colour, but only that an ideal relation, recognizable by thought, subsists between the percept “colour” and the percept “eye.”

To empirical science belongs the task of ascertaining how the properties of the eye and those of the colours are related to one another; by means of what structures the organ of sight makes possible the perception of colours, etc. I can trace how one percept succeeds another and how one is related to others in space, and I can formulate these relations in conceptual terms, but I can never perceive how a percept originates out of the non-perceptible. All attempts to seek any relations between percepts other than conceptual relations must of necessity fail.

What then is a percept? This question, asked in this general way, is absurd. A percept appears always as a perfectly determinate, concrete content. This content is immediately given and is completely contained in the given. The only question one can ask concerning the given content is, what it is apart from perception, that is, what it is for thought. The question concerning the “what” of a percept can, therefore, only refer to the conceptual intuition which corresponds to the percept. From this point of view, the problem of the subjectivity of percepts, in the sense in which the Critical Idealists debate it, cannot be raised at all. Only that which is experienced as belonging to the subject can be termed “subjective.” To form a link between subject and object is impossible for any real process, in the naïve sense of the word “real,” in which it means a process which can be perceived. That is possible only for thought. For us, then, “objective” means that which, for perception, presents itself as external to the perceiving subject. As subject of perception I remain perceptible to myself after the table which now stands before me has disappeared from my field of observation. The perception of the table has produced a modification in me which persists like myself. I preserve an image of the table which now forms part of my Self. Modern Psychology terms this image a “memory-idea.” Now this is the only thing which has any right to be called the idea of the table. For it is the perceptible modification of my own mental state through the presence of the table in my visual field. Moreover, It does not mean a modification in some “Ego-in-itself” behind the perceiving subject, but the modification of the perceiving subject itself. The idea is, therefore, a subjective percept, in contrast with the objective percept which occurs when the object is present in the perceptual field. The false identification of the subjective with this objective percept leads to the misunderstanding of Idealism: The world is my idea.

Our next task must be to define the concept of “idea” more nearly. What we have said about it so far does not give us the concept, but only shows us where in the perceptual field ideas are to be found. The exact concept of “idea” will also make it possible for us to obtain a satisfactory understanding of the relation of idea and object. This will then lead us over the border-line, where the relation of subject to object is brought down from the purely conceptual field of knowledge into concrete individual life. Once we know how we are to conceive the world, it will be an easy task to adapt ourselves to it. Only when we know to what object we are to devote our activity can we put our whole energy into our actions.