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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 331 through 340 of 482

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138. Initiation, Eternity and the Passing Moment: Lecture III 27 Aug 1912, Munich
Translated by Gilbert Church

The one consists of all the ideas we form about the natural world, about the forces and laws of nature. Side by side with all these ideas of ours, there exists in ordinary sensory life what we call the moral world order, the sum of our moral conceptions, thoughts and ideas.
If we are describing a plant, we analyse it according to natural forces and natural laws. Let us suppose it is a poisonous plant. We do not confuse our description with the issue of whether or not it is morally responsible for being poisonous.
In the ordinary world of sense existence, we have only one thing to remind us of a fundamental fact familiar to every clairvoyant, and that is when we speak in symbols and metaphors so that our words re-echo what in actual reality is only experienced in higher worlds.
217. The Younger Generation: Lecture XIII 15 Oct 1922, Stuttgart
Translated by René M. Querido

The door to this knowledge was firmly barred in the nineteenth century, when man arrived at the law of the conservation of matter and of energy, and believed that matter is also conserved in the human organism. The establishment of the law of the conservation of matter is clear proof that the human being is no longer inwardly understood.
George, who comes from outside, who is able to conquer the dragon, is a true spiritual knowledge which conquers this center of life (which, for man's inner being is a center of death)—the so-called law of the conservation of energy so that in his knowledge man can again become man in a real sense. Today we dare not; for so long as there is a law of the conservation of matter and of energy, moral law melts away in the universal death through warmth—and the Kant-Laplace theory is no mere phrase!
204. Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy: Lecture VII 22 Apr 1921, Dornach
Translated by Maria St. Goar

We need only compare this with the people who said later, It will lead nowhere to try and develop a national constitution or social conditions out of human reason. Instead, we ought to study ancient times, concentrate on history.
He stands firmly on the gospel of the threefold social order, but in the spirit of his home town of Wuppertal he is also a devout Christian.” Well, there are as many lies here as there are words!
14. Friedrich von Savigny, 1779–1861, historian of law.15. Leopold von Ranke, 1795–1886, historian.16.
18. The Riddles of Philosophy: The Age of Kant and Goethe
Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln

He transferred all of nature into the human mind and transformed its laws into laws of this mind. He ejected the higher world order entirely from nature and placed this order on a purely moral foundation.
[ 47 ] From this viewpoint, one can also look at man's social life. A man who follows his sensual desires is self-seeking. He would always be bent on his own well-being if the state did not regulate the social intercourse through laws of reason.
“It would be the highest attainment to understand that all factual knowledge is already theory.” The blueness of the sky reveals the fundamental law of color phenomena to us. “One should not search for anything behind the phenomena; they, themselves, are the message.”
323. Astronomy as Compared to Other Sciences: Lecture XVI 16 Jan 1921, Stuttgart
Translator Unknown

Precisely these deviations from the normal association of sleep with the horizontal posture will help to indicate the underlying law. A careful study of these exceptions—due as they are to more or less palpable diseases (as in the case of asthmatic subjects for example)—will be indicative of the true laws in the domain.
It is at this point that the relation emerges between a purely social science and the science of physiology, nor can we truly study economics if we disregard it. For us however at the present moment, the important thing is to observe this parallelism of movement in a horizontal surface with a certain kind of metabolic process.
In our deliberate movements we have a process finding its characteristic expression in curves that run parallel to the surface of the Earth; we cannot but make curves of this direction. What have we taken as fundamental now, in this whole line of thought? We began with an inner process which takes its course in man.
98. Nature and Spirit Beings — Their Effects in Our Visible World: The Mysteries, a Christmas and Easter Poem by Goethe 25 Dec 1907, Cologne
Translated by Antje Heymanns

As was also everything that occurs among mankind, when people establish social communities, when they submit to moral rules and regulate their actions among themselves by laws, when from the forces of nature they create tools for themselves—although they make these tools with the help of the forces of nature, but in a form in which they have not been directly provided by nature.
What lay in the old Jehovah principle, in the old law—the spiritual light of the Moon—was for the esoteric Christian the reflected spiritual light of the higher Christ principle.
The esoteric Christian was still conscious of the fundamental conviction and fundamental knowledge of the Mystery-pupils from the most ancient times to the more recent time.
55. Supersensible Knowledge: Education in the Light of Spiritual Science 01 Dec 1906, Cologne
Translated by Rita Stebbing

Knowledge of human nature and problems of education are intimately connected. No aspect of social life can benefit more from spiritual research than education, because it is possible to provide practical guidelines in this realm through supersensible knowledge.
Inartistic lifeless toys do not foster trust in spiritual life. A fundamental connection exists between today's lack of religious belief and the way young children are taught.
There is no better way for spiritual science to serve humanity than fostering social impulses in the young during the formative years. What takes place in human beings during the time they grow up and mature is one of life's greatest riddles; those who find practical solutions will prove true educators.
Poetry and the Art of Speech: Decline and Re-edification
Translated by Julia Wedgwood, Andrew Welburn

Cleverness, and a dash of temperament, are enough to be going on – absolutely rattling along, with no feeling at all for a wise disposition of aesthetic resources, such as comes from knowledge of our human organization. No knowledge of the laws that are manifestations of divine-creative forces in art, of which for us both man and the world are representations.
Only we must begin by learning to spell. We must concern ourselves with the fundamentals, the speech-sounds themselves, and not with projecting our own one-sided personality. I once saw in Germany a large-scale production of Shakespeare’s Tempest.
Rudolf Steiner saw in a spiritual deepening of art, science and religion and in their mutual fructification an effective remedy for the social ills of mankind. Barbarity might be avoided and, in place of the twilight of European culture that has already been confirmed by science, there might rise out of affliction, misery and delusion the light of a new dawn.
61. Turning Points Spiritual History: Christ and the 20th Century 25 Jan 1912, Berlin
Translated by Walter F. Knox

It is especially difficult for mankind in these modern times to realize that circumstances of fundamental historic significance are directly connected with this outstanding incident, and which are of such momentous import as to form what might be termed the true centre of human evolution.
Further, in the mind of man there must dawn a clear understanding of the fundamental idea in redemption in addition to mere apprehension of causative factors in life. It will be a task of the twentieth century to gain general acceptance of the concepts pertaining to Redemption, Deliverance and Reincarnation, among the external sciences.
He will no longer believe that the world as depicted by science is a mere physical creation, for he will realize that God’s laws are ever operative in such manner as to bring about his gradual unfoldment. If only natural science would extend its sphere of action beyond a mere portrayal of the perceptual world and rightly educate mankind, so that the human soul might break away from a position which is untenable, and rise to a state which would permit of its rebirth into a more exalted life—and if man could but know how glorious would then be the freedom from that restraint which ever hinders his upward progress, he would indeed have developed within himself those things fundamental to a true world concept of the Christ-Impulse.
329. The Liberation of the Human Being as the Basis for a Social Reorganization: The Spirit as a Guide Through the Senses and into the Super Sensible World 06 Nov 1919, Bern

The experience of repeated earthly lives will develop out of the right social life and feelings of modern man. Natural science, in its research, has already come to the conclusion that it no longer wants to be purely materialistic, at least in the case of some minds.
And because most people only have such hazy fantasies, they think that the laws that come into play only come from fantasies. But in truth, no figments of the imagination arise when a person makes an effort to move forward.
In the face of real spiritual knowledge, as it is meant and presented here today, there is truly no shame or anything degrading if one person, in a truly social existence, simply accepts what is transmitted to him from the spiritual world, while another person is able to discover it.

Results 331 through 340 of 482

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