The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It must be answered, not to meet a human “need to know” but to meet man's universal need to become fully human. And in just what way one can strive for an answer, in what way the ignorabimus can be overcome to fulfil the demands of human evolution—this shall be the theme of our course of lectures as it proceeds.

To those who demand of a cycle of lectures with a title such as ours that nothing be introduced that might interfere with the objective presentation of ideas, I would like, since today I shall have to mention certain personalities, to say the following. The moment one begins to represent the results of human judgment in their relationship to life, to full human existence, it becomes inevitable that one indicate the personalities with whom the judgments originated. Even in a scientific presentation, one must remain within the sphere in which the judgment arises, within the realm of human struggling and striving toward such a judgment. And especially since the question we want above all to answer is: what can be gleaned from modern scientific theories that can become a vital social thinking able to transform thought into impulses for life?—then one must realize that the series of considerations one undertakes is no longer confined to the study and the lecture halls but Stands rather within the living evolution of humanity.

Behind everything with which I commenced yesterday, the modern striving for a mathematical-mechanical world view and the dissolution of that world view, behind that which came to a climax in 1872 in the famous speech by the physiologist, du Bois-Reymond, concerning the limits of natural science, there stands something even more important. It is something that begins to impress itself upon us the moment we want to begin to speak in a living way about the limits of natural science.

A personality of extraordinary philosophical stature still looks over to us with a certain vitality out of the first half of the nineteenth century: Hegel. Only in the last few years has Hegel begun to be mentioned in the lecture halls and in the philosophical literature with somewhat more respect than in the recent past. In the last third of the nineteenth century the academic world attacked Hegel outright, yet one could demonstrate irrefutably that Eduard von Hartmann had been quite right in claiming that during the 1880s only two university lecturers in all of Germany had actually read him. The academics opposed Hegel but not on philosophical grounds, for as a philosopher they hardly knew him. Yet they knew him in a different way, in a way in which we still know him today. Few know Hegel as he is contained, or perhaps better said, as his world view is contained, in the many volumes that sit in the libraries. Those who know Hegel in this original form so peculiar to him are few indeed. Yet in certain modified forms he has become in a sense the most popular philosopher the world has ever known. Anyone who participates in a workers' meeting today or, even better, anyone who had participated in one during the last few decades and had heard what was discussed there; anyone with any sense for the source of the mode of thinking that had entered into these workers' meetings, who really knew the development of modern thought, could see that this mode of thinking had originated with Hegel and flowed through certain channels out into the broadest masses. And whoever investigated the literature and philosophy of Eastern Europe in this regard would find that the Hegelian mode of thinking had permeated to the farthest reaches of Russian cultural life. One thus could say that, anonymously, as it were, Hegel has become within the last few decades perhaps one of the most influential philosophers in human history. On the other hand, however, when one perceives what has come to be recognized by the broadest spectrum of humanity as Hegelianism, one is reminded of the portrait of a rather ugly man that a kind artist painted in such a way as to please the man's family. As one of the younger sons, who had previously paid little attention to the portrait, grew older and really observed it for the first time, he said: “But father, how you have changed!” And when one sees what has become of Hegel one might well say: “Dear philosopher, how you have changed!” To be sure, something extraordinary has happened regarding this Hegelian world view.

Hardly had Hegel himself departed when his school fell apart. And one could see how this Hegelian school appropriated precisely the form of one of our new parliaments. There was a left wing and a right wing, an extreme left and an extreme right, an ultra-radical wing and an ultra-conservative wing. There were men with radical scientific and social views, who felt themselves to be Hegel's true spiritual heirs, and on the other side there were devout, positive theologians who wanted just as much to base their extreme theological conservatism on Hegel. There was a center for Hegelian studies headed by the amiable philosopher, Karl Rosenkranz, and each of these personalities, every one of them, insisted that he was Hegel's true heir.

What is this remarkable phenomenon in the evolution of human knowledge? What happened was that a philosopher once sought to raise humanity into the highest realms of thought. Even if one is opposed to Hegel, it cannot be denied that he dared attempt to call forth the world within the soul in the purest thought-forms. Hegel raised humanity into ethereal heights of thinking, but strangely enough, humanity then fell right back down out of those heights. It drew on the one hand certain materialistic and on the other hand certain positive theological conclusions from Hegel's thought. And even if one considers the Hegelian center headed by the amiable Rosenkranz, even there one cannot find Hegel's philosophy as Hegel himself had conceived it. In Hegel's philosophy one finds a grand attempt to pursue the scientific method right up into the highest heights. Afterward, however, when his followers sought to work through Hegel's thoughts themselves, they found that one could arrive thereby at the most contrary points of view.

Now, one can argue about world views in the study, one can argue within the academies, and one can even argue in the academic literature, so long as worthless gossip and Barren cliques do not result. These offspring of Hegelian philosophy, however, cannot be carried out of the lecture halls and the study into life as social impulses. One can argue conceptually about contrary world views, but within life itself these contrary world views do not fight so peaceably. One must use just such a paradoxical expression in describing such a phenomenon. And thus there stands before us in the first half of the nineteenth century an alarming factor in the evolution of human cognition, something that has proved itself to be socially useless in the highest degree. With this in mind we must then raise the question: how can we find a mode of thinking that can be useful in social life? In two phenomena above all we notice the uselessness of Hegelianism for social life.

One of those who studied Hegel most intensively, who brought Hegel fully to life within himself, was Karl Marx. And what is it that we find in Marx? A remarkable Hegelianism indeed! Hegel up upon the highest peak of the conceptual world—Hegel upon the highest peak of Idealism—and the faithful student, Karl Marx, immediately transforming the whole into its direct opposite, using what he believed to be Hegel's method to carry Hegel's truths to their logical conclusions. And thereby arises historical materialism, which is to be for the masses the one world view that can enter into social life. We thus are confronted in the first half of the nineteenth century with the great Idealist, Hegel, who lived only in the Spirit, only in his ideas, and in the second half of the nineteenth century with his student, Karl Marx, who contemplated and recognized the reality of matter alone, who saw in everything ideal only ideology. If one but takes up into one's feeling this turnabout of conceptions of world and life in the course of the nineteenth century, one feels with all one's soul the need to achieve an understanding of nature that will serve as a basis for judgments that are socially viable.

Now, if we turn on the other hand to consider something that is not so obviously descended from Hegel but can be traced back to Hegel nonetheless, we find still within the first half of the nineteenth century, but carrying over into the second half, the “philosopher of the ego,” Max Stirner. While Karl Marx occupies one of the two poles of human experience mentioned yesterday, the pole of matter upon which he bares all his considerations, Stirner, the philosopher of the ego, proceeds from the opposite pole, that of consciousness. And just as the modern world view, gravitating toward the pole of matter, becomes unable to discover consciousness within that element (as we saw yesterday in the example of du Bois-Reymond), a person who gravitates to the opposite pole of consciousness will not be able to find the material world. And so it is with Max Stirner. For Max Stirner, no material universe with natural laws actually exists. Stirner sees the world as populated solely by human egos, by human consciousnesses that want only to indulge themselves to the full. “I have built my thing on nothing”—that is one of Max Stirner's maxims. And on these grounds Stirner opposes even the notion of Providence. He says for example: certain moralists demand that we should not perform any deed out of egoism, but rather that we should perform it because it is pleasing to God. In acting, we should look to God, to that which pleases Him, that which He commands. Why, thinks Max Stirner, should I, who have built only upon the foundation of ego-consciousness, have to admit that God is after all the greater egoist Who can demand of man and the world that all should be performed as it suits Him? I will not surrender my own egoism for the sake of a greater egoism. I will do what pleases me. What do I care for a God when I have myself?

One thus becomes entangled and confused within a consciousness out of which one can no longer find the way. Yesterday I remarked how on the one hand we can arrive at clear ideas by awakening in the experience of ideas when we descend into our consciousness. These dreamlike ideas manifest themselves like drives from which we cannot then escape. One would say that Karl Marx achieved clear ideas—if anything his ideas are too clear. That was the secret of his success. Despite their complexity, Marx's ideas are so clear that, if properly garnished, they remain comprehensible to the widest circles. Here clarity has been the means to popularity. And until it realizes that within such a clarity humanity is lost, humanity, as long as it seeks logical consequences, will not let go of these clear ideas.

If one is inclined by temperament to the other extreme, to the pole of consciousness, one passes over onto Stirner's side of the scale. Then one despises this clarity: one feels that, applied to social thinking, this clarity makes man into a cog in a social order modeled on mathematics or mechanics—but into that only, into a mere cog. And if one does not feel oneself cut out for just that, then the will that is active in the depths of human consciousness revolts. Then one comes radically to oppose all clarity. One mocks all clarity, as Stirner did. One says to oneself: what do I care about anything else? What do I care even about nature? I shall project my own ego out of myself and see what happens. We shall see that the appearance of such extremes in the nineteenth century is in the highest degree characteristic of the whole of recent human evolution, for these extremes are the distant thunder that preceded the storm of social chaos we are now experiencing. One must understand this connection if one wants at all to speak about cognition today.

Yesterday we arrived at an indication of what happens when we begin to correlate our consciousness to an external natural world of the senses. Our consciousness awakens to clear concepts but loses itself. It loses itself to the extent that one can only posit empty concepts such as “matter,” concepts that then become enigmatic. Only by thus losing ourselves, however, can we achieve the clear conceptual thinking we need to become fully human. In a certain sense we must first lose ourselves in order to find ourselves again out of ourselves. Yet now the time has come when we should learn something from these phenomena. And what can one learn from these phenomena? One can learn that, although clarity of conceptual thinking and perspicuity of mental representation can be won by man in his interaction with the world of sense, this clarity of conceptual thinking becomes useless the moment we strive scientifically for something more than a mere empiricism. It becomes useless the moment we try to proceed toward the kind of phenomenalism that Goethe the scientist cultivated, the moment we want something more than natural science, namely Goetheanism.

What does this imply? In establishing a correlation between our inner life and the external physical world of the senses we can use the concepts we form in interaction with nature in such a way that we try not to remain within the natural phenomena but to think on beyond them. We are doing this if we do more than simply say: within the spectrum there appears the color yellow next to the color green, and on the other side the blues. We are doing this if we do not simply interrelate the phenomena with the help of our concepts but seek instead, as it were, to pierce the veil of the senses and construct something more behind it with the aid of our concepts. We are doing this if we say: out of the clear concepts I have achieved I shall construct atoms, molecules—all the movements of matter that are supposed to ex-ist behind natural phenomena. Thereby something extraordinary happens. What happens is that when I as a human being confront the world of nature [see illustration], I use my concepts not only to create for myself a conceptual order within the realm of the senses but also to break through the boundary of sense and construct behind it atoms and the like I cannot bring my lucid thinking to a halt within the realm of the senses. I take my lesson from inert matter, which continues to roll on even when the propulsive force has ceased. My knowledge reaches the world of sense, and I remain inert. I have a certain inertia, and I roll with my concepts on beyond the realm of the senses to construct there a world the existence of which I can begin to doubt when I notice that my thinking has only been borne along by inertia.

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It is interesting to note that a great proportion of the philosophy that does not remain within phenomena is actually nothing other than just such an inert rolling-on beyond what really exists within the world. One simply cannot come to a halt. One wants to think ever farther and farther beyond and construct atoms and molecules—under certain circumstances other things as well that philosophers have assembled there. No wonder, then, that this web one has woven in a world created by the inertia of thinking must eventually unravel itself again.

Goethe rebelled against this law of inertia. He did not want to roll onward thus with his thinking but rather to come strictly to a halt at this limit [see illustration: heavy line] and to apply concepts within the realm of the senses. He thus would say to himself: within the spectrum appear to me yellow, blue, red, indigo, violet. If, however, I permeate these appearances of color with my world of concepts while remaining within the phenomena, then the phenomena order themselves of their own accord, and the phenomenon of the spectrum teaches me that when the darker colors or anything dark is placed behind the lighter colors or anything light, there appear the colors which lie toward the blue end of the spectrum. And conversely, if I place light behind dark, there appear the colors which lie toward the red end of the spectrum.

What was it that Goethe was actually seeking to do? Goethe wanted to find simple phenomena within the complex but above all such phenomena as allowed him to remain within this limit [see illustration], by means of which he did not roll on into a realm that one reaches only through a certain mental inertia. Goethe wanted to adhere to a strict phenomenalism. If we remain within phenomena and if we strive with our thinking to come to a halt there rather than allow ourselves to be carried onward by inertia, the old question arises in a new way. What meaning does the phenomenal world have when I consider it thus? What is the meaning of the mechanics and mathematics, of the number, weight, measure, or temporal relation that I import into this world? What is the meaning of this?

You know, perhaps, that the modern world conception has sought to characterize the phenomena of tone, color, warmth, etc. as only subjective, whereas it characterizes the so-called primary qualities, the qualities of weight, space, and time, as something not subjective but objective and inherent in things. This conception can be traced back principally to the English philosopher, John Locke, and it has to a considerable extent determined the philosophical basis of modern scientific thought. But the real question is: what place within our systematic science of nature as a whole do mathematics, do mechanics—these webs we weave within ourselves, or so it seems at first—what place do these occupy? We shall have to return to this question to consider the specific form it takes in Kantianism. Yet without going into the whole history of this development one can nonetheless emphasize our instinctive conviction that measuring or counting or weighing external objects is essentially different from ascribing to them any other qualities.

It certainly cannot be denied that light, tones, colors, and sensations of taste are related to us differently from that which we could represent as subject to mathematical-mechanical laws. For it really is a remarkable fact,a fact worthy of our consideration: you know that honey tastes sweet, but to a man with jaundice it tastes bitter—so we can say that we stand in a curious relationship to the qualities within this realm—while on the other hand we could hardly maintain that any normal man would see a triangle as a triangle, but a man with jaundice would see it as a square! Certain differentiations thus do exist, and one must be cognizant of them; on the other hand, one must not draw absurd conclusions from them. And to this very day philosophical thinking has failed in the most extraordinary way to come to grips with this most fundamental epistemological question. We thus see how a contemporary philosopher, Koppelmann, overtrumps even Kant by saying, for example—you can read this on page 33 of his Philosophical Inquiries [Weltanschauungsfragen]: everything that relates to space and time we must first construct within by means of the understanding, whereas we are able to assimilate colors and tastes directly. We construct the icosahedron, the dodecahedron, etc.: we are able to construct the standard regular solids only because of the organization of our understanding. No wonder, then, claims Koppelmann, that we find in the world only those regular solids we can construct with our understanding. One thus can find Koppelmann saying almost literally that it is impossible for a geologist to come to a geometer with a crystal bounded by seven equilateral triangles precisely because—so Koppelmann claims—such a crystal would have a form that simply would not fit into our heads. That is out-Kanting Kant. And thus he would say that in the realm of the thing-in-itself crystals could exist that are bounded by seven regular triangles, but they cannot enter our head, and thus we pass them by; they do not exist for us.

Such thinkers forget but one thing: they forget—and it is just this that we want to indicate in the course of these lectures with all the forceful proofs we can muster—that the natural order governing the construction of our head also governs the construction of the regular polyhedrons, and it is for just this reason that our head constructs no other polyhedrons than those that actually confront us in the external world. For that, you see, is one of the basic differences between the so-called subjective qualities of tone, color, warmth, as well as the different qualities of touch, and that which confronts us in the mechanical-mathematical view of the world. That is the basic difference: tone and color leave us outside of ourselves; we must first take them in; we must first perceive them. As human beings we stand outside tone, color, warmth, etc. This is not entirely the case as regards warmth—I shall discuss that tomorrow—but to a certain extent this is true even of warmth. These qualities leave us initially outside ourselves, and we must perceive them. In formal, spatial, and temporal relationships and regarding weight this is not the case. We perceive objects in space but stand ourselves within the same space and the same lawfulness as the objects external to us. We stand within time just as do the external objects. Our physical existence begins and ends at a definite point in time. We stand within space and time in such a way that these things permeate us without our first perceiving them. The other things we must first perceive. Regarding weight, well, ladies and gentlemen, you will readily admit that this has little to do with perception, which is somewhat open to arbitrariness: otherwise many people who attain an undesired corpulence would be able to avoid this by perception alone, merely by having the faculty of perception. No, ladies and gentlemen, regarding weight we are bound up with the world entirely objectively, and the organization by means of which we stand within color, tone, warmth, etc. is powerless against that objectivity.

So now we must above all pose the question: how is it that we arrive at any mathematical-mechanical judgment? How do we arrive at a science of mathematics, at a science of mechanics? How is it, then, that this mathematics, this mechanics, is applicable to the external world of nature, and how is it that there is a difference between the mathematical-mechanical qualities of external objects and those that confront us as the so-called subjective qualities of sensation, tone, color, warmth, etc.?

At the one extreme, then, we are confronted with this fundamental question. Tomorrow we shall discuss another such question. Then we shall have two starting-points from which we can proceed to investigate the nature of science. Thence we shall proceed to the other extreme to investigate the formation of social judgments.

In the preceding meditations I have spoken to you about three successive but interrelated supersensible modes of knowledge: imaginative knowledge, inspired knowledge and intuitive knowledge. And I have tried to explain to you the views of the world and life that can be arrived at by applying these modes of knowledge. Today I will only add to what I said yesterday the knowledge to be gained through such supersensible insight into the innermost nature of the human being himself, the knowledge about which the human being longs for an answer because not only does the satisfaction of a religious or theoretical need somehow depend on it, but the possibility that the human being may only become fully human at all. All human striving ultimately aims at this: Man wants to become fully human.

That which forms the actual center of our being and which we initially face with the ordinary consciousness that we, so to speak, summarize it in the only point that we then express with the word “I”, we actually face in ordinary life as something unknown. And it is precisely this mode of knowledge, as it is meant and characterized here, that gradually leads to the self-knowledge that is initially accessible to the human being. I would like to use a comparison to make it clear what I actually mean. When we look around us with our eyes, we see things through light, which itself is supersensible, but which, in its effects in the colors of objects, makes them perceptible to us for this one sense. But we can also say that we see that which is not illuminated by light. If we have a white surface somewhere with a dot in the middle, we see the white through the effect of light, as we can imagine. But we also perceive the black dot, that which confronts us as dark. We know something of this black point. If we reflect properly, it is something like this in our ordinary lives with our perception of the self. We perceive the things around us. We also bring thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will from our own soul life to our consciousness. That is, so to speak, the illuminated part. But what belongs to us in all of this, the I, that we actually perceive only as a black spot. In our ordinary consciousness, we only know about it through the fact that we perceive nothing. I would like to expand the comparison even further. I would like to remind you how you actually have to put together your entire life on earth so far in your memory from the parts that you can see because you have lived through them in an awake state. But when you look back, you connect these experiences, which you have spent while awake during the day, in a single continuous stream of reminiscence. But these experiences are everywhere interspersed with what happened while you were asleep, let's say, dreamless sleep. And dreams also mostly belong to what has been forgotten, so that we can say in general: while you were asleep. In fact, in remembering you would always have to imagine these intermediate pauses if you wanted to place the complete stream of your experiences before your soul. But yesterday we saw that the I with the astral body - that is the actual soul being with its center, the actual self - dwells outside the physical body from falling asleep to waking up. They only emerge from their unconsciousness, in which they are during sleep, when they are not left to their own devices, but when they can submerge into the etheric body, the time body, and into the spatial or physical body. With the help of these supports – we cannot call them tools in the proper sense, as we saw yesterday – they have thoughts, mental images and, through mental images, feelings and impulses of will, which are more dream-like and also asleep. In order for the I and the astral body to truly unfold the forces that they have within them, it is necessary for them to submerge into the etheric body and the physical body. Thus, when we look back on our life on earth in our ordinary consciousness, we never actually remember the true form of the I and the astral body, but only what arises when this I and this astral body have support in the physical and etheric bodies.

From this you will see that it is more than a mere comparison when I speak of the fact that the I and the astral body, that is, the actual soul being, is like a dark point within that which is actually perceived. We would have to see the true form and capacity of this ego and this astral body in retrospect if we saw them not only as dark inclusions, but as realities, as we otherwise perceive realities. But we lift these soul entities out of their indeterminacy, their imperceptibility, through imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. As I discussed yesterday, we first lift the thinking part of our soul out of the dark uncertainty by immersing it in the physical body. This thinking part initially only uses the physical body as a kind of thinking power, which is present in this physical body in the form of air-like substance. And then, when sensory perceptions, emotional experiences, will impulses or desires are added to thinking when fully awake, where the soul must fully submerge into the physical body, where everything in the physical body must be utilized by the soul, then what would otherwise would otherwise be mere fleeting thoughts, as long as the processes take place only in the airy substance of the body, can, as it were, condense into the ability to remember and into that which, as thoughts, as mental images, connects with sensory perception or emotional experiences or volitional impulses.

We can study the human organism in a much more detailed way with the means of knowledge I have mentioned than we can without them. Ask yourself what a person usually has as a mental image of their physical body when they do not think about it too much. Of course, if you think about it a little, something else immediately arises. He has the mental image that the physical body is limited by the skin, and that inside it is actually a closed mass, which one thinks of as more or less solid or semi-solid. But we must take into account that hardly ten percent of the human body is really solid, that for the most part we are a column of liquid, that we constantly carry air within us, that through the airy we are constantly not separate from the outside world, connected to the outside world. The air that was just outside is then inside me; the air that I have inhaled, that has been processed in the body, is then outside. So that man, if he is to be understood completely in terms of his physical body, must be seen as a solid, liquid, air-like substance. And all this is permeated by the warmth element, which works in these different substances.

When, upon awakening, the soul descends into the body, it is the case with the purely conceptual that it does not descend further than what is present in our body as air-like substance. The thought takes hold of the airy element. It is quite wrong to speak of the thought merely in terms of vibrational nerve processes and the like. All this is revealed to the imaginative view that the mere thought, which also lives in dreams, first takes hold of the airy element. Then, as this air-shaped element enters into certain processes, the thoughts are transferred to the watery element, and from there they imprint themselves on the solid, salt-like element. This makes it possible for the reflexes to arise later as memories, and this through processes that I unfortunately do not have time to describe, although they are very interesting.

In this way one can gain an intimate insight into the workings and weavings of the soul within the body, graduated according to the aggregate states of the human physical body. This physical body gradually becomes transparent. One sees the weaving and workings of the soul within it. One sees that which I had to say remains actually obscure to ordinary consciousness. I put it like this yesterday: When we have the simplest volitional impulse, we first have the mental image that something should be carried out, for example, that the arm should be raised. Then this mental image shoots into our organism to become will. This eludes ordinary consciousness, just as sleep states do. In relation to the will, ordinary consciousness also sleeps in the waking state of the human being. But then one sees the effect again, and that again as a mental image. But then, when one studies the matter with the means of knowledge characterized here, one sees that when the thought becomes an impulse of will in us, this thought first has an effect in the air element of the human physical body. Then it is transferred again to the solid and liquid elements, and it is through the impulse of will that matter is, as it were, burned. In the liquid part of the human physical organism, matter is reduced to nothingness, as I described it yesterday. But because this is taking place, because matter is being reduced to nothingness, empty spaces are created in our physical body, so to speak. These empty spaces create a completely different dynamic. We become immersed in them. So that when we see through something with these means of knowledge, which becomes an act of will, we first perceive the thought, then perceive how the thought shoots into the body, how it destroys matter there, how we witness the rearrangement of the material. This is how the other state of equilibrium comes about, namely that matter is returned to nothing. This witnessing of a different equilibrium leads to the physical body also following this evocation of a different equilibrium in its movements, so that action then occurs, the action that is directly bound to the human being's physical body. In this way, the human being's will also becomes transparent in the soul, transparent down to the last details.

Just to show you that anthroposophy is truly not something that just rambles and rambles in vagueness, but that it enters into the very concrete facts of the world, I would like to give you a small example where there is also a will impulse. This example is taken from language. We have - I will choose a characteristic word, I could also choose another word - we have the German word “hier”. I say: “The box lies here.” What actually happens in the human organism when it comes to pronouncing the word “hier”? The first thing that happens is that what lives in the breath is first grasped in the subconscious. And this, what lives in the breath, is now the thought. The thought lives in the breath. We only have a real mental image of the thought when we know, from anthroposophical knowledge, that the thought can really live in the inhaled air, that it is a force that can act on the inhaled air. Only when we cannot go into these details do we come up against all the difficulties of psychology, taken physically. If we believe that thought can directly move a bone, that is, can have such a robust effect on physical matter, we cannot get by. But if we know that thought is something that is transmitted in a roundabout way through the warmth element into the air element, then what is stimulated there is continued into the rest of the organism, and we begin to grasp what is there with an impulse of will. So we can say: First of all we have the experience of breathing. This experience remains unconscious. Only the insight characterized here can transcend it. Then the second element is added: we inwardly experience that which now continues out of the breathing process into the liquid element of the organism. We experience that which signifies a direction in the speech organism. In the arm, it would mean an outstretching of the arm. We perceive this in the i. So we perceive the continuation of the thought-air into the watery element, so to speak the stretching movement. We see through imagination the transition from the breathing movement into the stretching movement. And then this stretching movement is formed in the right. If I were to say only “here,” I would have to draw it: 1st breathing process 5, 2nd stretching movement ie (the horizontal is drawn). But if I now draw the stretching movement as it is experienced unconsciously when I pronounce “here,” I must draw it like this: I perceive the breathing process, perceive the direction of the stretching, which is not carried out, but rolls along in the r. And then I have really experienced inwardly what is present as a volitional impulse when I pronounce the word “here”. In this way, we can follow the impulses of will that express themselves in language when we use our imagination to look into the whole weaving and ruling of the soul that permeates the physical body and the etheric or formative body.

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With imagination, we can initially gain an overview of the kind of things I have described here. When inspiration comes into play, we see how the soul plays within; how the physical body and the etheric body are something that exists externally in space and time, and how, on this, yes, I cannot say it well: like on an instrument, because this is in turn constantly being created by the soul processes, but like on a support, a ground that is constantly being worked on, the soul plays. Through inspiration, we thus advance to the actual seeing of the work of the soul in a physical organism.

When we then ascend to intuition, we perceive something else. Then we perceive: there is a law in the world that has nothing to do with physical law, but a law that certainly takes hold of people. I can perhaps express myself best about this fact in the following way: When one looks back at a later age on the way in which one's life on earth has passed, then one finds that, if one is honest with oneself, one must admit that one is actually nothing other than what one has become here in one's physical existence on earth as a result of one's experiences. Consider only: solely from this life. Consider how you learned to think, how you learned to feel, how you may have been stimulated to do this or that by meeting a particular person at a particular point in your life, which in turn may have had an effect on your character. Put together all the individual experiences you have gone through and ask yourself whether you would have become something different in relation to what you are for the outside world if different experiences had entered into your existence. If you follow this train of thought properly, you will soon see how something has been living in you from the very beginning, unconsciously drawing you to that which has become so important in your life. It is interesting how sometimes people who have reached a certain age and who have not used their lives to dream, but to grasp the facts of life that have come to them in a deeper sense, how such people, when they look back on their lives, came to say - Goethe's friend Knebel, for example, was such a person - “When I look back on my life, everything is like a dream.” , when they look back on their lives, came to say to themselves: When I look back on my life, everything is so systematically ordered. Not even the smallest event could be missing if I were to be exactly the same in my earthly existence as I am today. If the smallest event were missing, there would be a slight change, but a change nonetheless. Just think what, say, the sixty-year-old Goethe would have been if he had not experienced Italy. With Goethe, it is almost tangible. He did not go to Italy on a whim, but because there was a deep yearning within him. But these deep longings are not just there, if we want to analyze them precisely, so that we can always explain them, the following from the earlier, but they are born with us. We really find something planned in life. Of course, one could be deceived about that at first. I have only mentioned this because, after all, one can approach through the most ordinary observation that which is now given by intuitive knowledge. Intuitive knowledge really does give a full insight not only into what is going on in our organism in terms of the soul, but it also gives an insight into what works in us as the center, the I, the actual self-being. And this self-being reveals itself to intuitive insight at the third stage of supersensible knowledge. It reveals itself in such a way that we really do not stand passively in relation to the facts of the external world, but that we are drawn to them through that which is in us, and not through heredity, but from the deepest central soul being, which has been drawn into us from a spiritual-soul world at birth and has taken on a physical earthly body. Through intuitive insight one comes to realize that this I does not actually enter into earthly life in such a way that it would have to be passively surrendered to the random facts that come its way, but that it is strongly attracted by one fact and strongly repelled by another. It positively seeks its way in the world. In short, it is born carrying within itself the predisposition to its destiny.

And if we then further develop this intuitive insight into the nature of the human self, we come to realize that this ego has undergone repeated earthly lives. These repeated lives on earth did, however, begin at a certain point in time, before the I was so little different from its surroundings in its ancient form of existence that there was no such thing as a change between life on earth and spiritual-soul life. The repeated lives on earth will continue to be experienced until a point in time when the ego will again be so similar in its entire inner makeup to the spiritual world that it will no longer need an earthly life.

Thus, when we fully recognize the ego, we look back on repeated earthly lives. In other words, we look at the entire life of a person as proceeding in such a way that we have parts of that life between birth and death or conception and death, other parts between death and a new birth; that is, in repeated earthly lives the person lives out his full existence.

The usual objection is that people do not remember these repeated lives. This only applies to the ordinary consciousness. The moment intuition sets in, what happens through the repeated lives on earth becomes just as much an inner view of the soul as memories within a single life on earth. So it is here that anthroposophy does not come to its results through abstract proofs, as is the case with ordinary philosophy, but by first preparing the soul for higher knowledge and then recognizing these things through intuition. But this means that anthroposophical knowledge proves to be a continuation of the knowledge we have today in science, but it is a continuation that must work in a completely different way from the mere scientific knowledge that is recognized today.

Often the question is asked: how does anthroposophy prove what it asserts? Those who ask this question and who, because the usual form of proof is not available in anthroposophy, deny that anthroposophy is scientific, do not consider the following – I can only explain these things approximately, but they are absolutely and precisely true. The person who proceeds to prove something shows, by the very fact of proceeding to prove, that what has to be proved is not present in his intuition. Actually, we prove everywhere where we have no intuition. If I have to prove that yesterday a human being was here in this room, I shall need proof only if I myself have not seen the person here. This is basically the case with all proofs, and this is also the case with the proofs in the historical development of mankind. When, in their older, more instinctive knowledge, men had a view of what they called the divine being, they needed no proofs. The proofs of the existence of God began their life in historical evolution only when the view was lost. Proofs begin everywhere when there is no view.

The anthroposophical method, however, consists in first preparing the human soul so that it can then be perceived. When this is described – and this is the peculiar thing about anthroposophy – it can be brought into the forms of common sense and understood in the same way that a non-artist can understand a work of art, even though he cannot make it. Therefore, it cannot be objected that Anthroposophy cannot be grasped with common sense. It can only be investigated by someone who is an anthroposophical researcher himself. It can be understood by anyone who wants to apply their common sense without prejudice.

Thus we see that it is first of all knowledge of man, self-knowledge, knowledge of what the I really is, whereas otherwise, with our ordinary consciousness of the I, we have only a void, a darkness, a gloom, so that a knowledge is imparted of the real I, but that this I can then be seen in its eternity, and in this eternity as continuous through repeated earthly lives. Just as I have shown you that the human organism becomes transparent to the soul right down to the will, so too – as I have already hinted at in the previous days – the outside world is also made transparent. The soul-spiritual of the outside world is recognized through imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Many people who get to know superficially what is presented through anthroposophy, perhaps even only from the writings of its opponents, very often say that anthroposophy is a rehash of old worldviews, for example, of Gnosticism, which, after all, still prevailed among very many people in the first Christian centuries. They therefore say that we are dealing with something that has basically been refuted by the evolution of humanity over time, or at least has been overcome. Anyone who really focuses only on what has been presented in these lectures will not be tempted, even if they are also familiar with Gnosticism and anthroposophy, which certainly appears with new means and methods of knowledge and takes into account the consciousness of present-day humanity, to somehow combine it with Gnosticism. This anthroposophy works in such a way that it presupposes the scientific development of the last centuries. Of course, Gnosticism did not take this into account, because its existence preceded the development of science. But there is something else that could lead one to the temptation to lump anthroposophy together with gnosticism. The only way to avoid doing so is to really delve into the essence of anthroposophy. The only thing that anthroposophy might have in common with gnosis is that it also takes into account, in a certain way, what is a prevailing worldview in our time, and that is agnosticism, which is in a certain respect the opposite of gnosis and is also the opposite of anthroposophy, but in a different respect.

This agnosticism can first be characterized in terms of its theoretical aspect. It is present when a person speaks in the way, for example, Herbert Spencer spoke. Many others have followed in his footsteps, but they are not fully aware that they are agnostics, although they are actually agnostic in their entire way of thinking. He said: We see the world of the senses around us. We have the intellect, which rises from observation and experiment to the contemplation of the laws in this world. - To this we add what we can survey from ordinary consciousness as phenomena of the soul. Here too, a makeshift search is made, for it is only makeshift, for some kind of law. But then those who do not simply reject every supersensible reality, contenting themselves with the intellectual comprehension of sense perceptions and inner soul experiences as they present themselves to ordinary consciousness, , said: Yes, but one cannot penetrate with human abilities to what now lies as some or many origins behind these appearances; one cannot achieve a real gnosis, a real gnosticism, no knowledge. One is an enlightened person precisely because one admits that the origins of things cannot be known or investigated. Agnosticism in this form has taken hold in wide circles. It also exists in different variations. This agnosticism, when it appears philosophically, is a kind of opposite to anthroposophy, and I could, if I felt like it, start from this point in time to turn polemically critical, abusive if you will, against contemporary agnosticism, depending on my mood. What can be said about it, insofar as it really brings corruption to the human forces of progress in civilization, can soon be read in the journal “Die Drei”. I explained it in a lecture I gave at a Stuttgart School of Spiritual Science course. As I said, one could also approach the matter from this side. But I do not wish to do that today. I should like to show that this agnosticism also has its origin in the evolution of the human spirit.

Of course, errors can arise in the individual spheres of life. Then we become critics of these errors. We must root out these errors and illusions. But when something arises with such widespread popularity as agnosticism, then we can indeed fight it, the fight can be justified, but we must also ask: Yes, how is it that within the spiritual development of humanity something like agnosticism has arisen?

Now, anyone who sees more deeply into these matters must ask themselves the following: We once had to advance to that in the development of humanity, which I strictly defended on one of the last lecture evenings for the external natural sciences, especially the inorganic natural sciences; we had to advance to pure phenomenalism, as Goethe also demanded. To that pure phenomenalism, which no longer uses thinking to construct all kinds of atomic worlds behind sense perceptions that can no longer be perceived; which uses thinking merely to read sense perceptions, to remain within the phenomenal world, to arrange the phenomena in such a way that they appear to us as archetypal phenomena in the Goethean sense. All this has been done in the most diverse variations here in recent days. I do not want to deny that something of the kind does not live in a great number of people of the present time. Nevertheless, on the one hand, there is a definite tendency to theorize, where we, so to speak, once we have entered into thinking, pierce through the sensory carpet and continue with thinking for a while beyond sensory perception, where there is no longer anything for thinking to create. There we then posit atoms and all sorts of other things. This corresponds to a kind of law of inertia. Thinking will, in accordance with our present position, our present relationship to the world, actually only be applicable in such a way that we can apply it in the service of grouping, of interpreting phenomena in relation to one another, thus remaining within the phenomenal world, so to speak, reading the phenomenon and not underlying things with all kinds of explanations.

When someone writes down the word “table”, they have details. They try to combine the individual letters into a word. They read. They would start the wrong activity if they said: T, and then had to assume that processes were taking place that combined the T. Then the i. Thus he who, in following an inner law of thought, penetrates the sensory tapestry with his thoughts, instead of reading in the sensory world, exempts himself from having to do so. One penetrates the sensory world and puts forward hypotheses, which is not to say anything against phenomenal atomism. Some people in the present are well aware that there must be a pure phenomenalism. That is simply the direction in which natural science is tending. The natural scientists themselves, after all, are more concerned with experimenting and observing than with reflecting on the methods. Therefore, one cannot really blame them when all kinds of constructs are added to the phenomena. Then they believe they have facts in these constructs. But certain philosophical minds feel that it must come to pure phenomenalism. In particular, among Western thinkers – in the East it is quite different – we often have such personalities who see clearly that the science of the external world must ultimately come to a pure grasp of phenomena and use thinking only to allow the phenomena to interpret themselves reciprocally. “All fact is already theory,” says Goethe. And in William James, the American who established pragmatism, a philosophical interpreter arose in response to pragmatism. In Europe, he has emerged somewhat more blatantly in the so-called “as-if philosophy,” where it is said that one should not interpret anything into the phenomenon. But one must still ascend to something that is no longer an appearance, so one does not say of what arises: it is there, but one acts as if it were there. Much clearer than this “as-if philosophy” is that of William James, who actually gives up any substantial effect of the power of thought. He is clear about the fact that with thinking one can only group external facts and come to a point where one can then control these external facts in practice in the service of human development, of civilization. So that he actually sees nothing in all the laws that man penetrates to but practical guidelines, so to speak, for getting along with the world.

In principle, this is something that phenomenology tends towards. If we study it in its purity in Goethe, where it appears in a wonderful way with its full justification, we recognize that it was bound to arise, it must be there. Only through pure phenomenality can man fully enlighten himself about what is actually in his environment. But then everything that goes beyond the phenomenon is initially something that man cannot cope with. If one knows nothing of methods of knowledge that ascend into the supersensible worlds, that is, that ascend from phenomena as facts to other, but now supersensible facts, then, by tending towards phenomenalism, one must ultimately say to oneself: Only phenomena exist at all. When I examine them with my thinking, I do not discover anything that lives on behind them, other than the phenomena themselves. For the archetypal phenomena are ultimately also only phenomena. So that I actually get nothing out of them but practical principles for using the phenomena in the service of human beings.

Assuming that this were already fully developed; that phenomenalism were there, and thinking were to consist only in regulative principles ordering phenomena, then we have something that we could no longer call knowledge in the sense of the older concepts of knowledge, for example, gnosis. For what did that consist of which, in the past, out of instinctive human worldview, was always called knowledge? In my book 'The Riddles of Philosophy' you can read more about this in Greek times: Cognition consisted in the fact that when one looked at the world, one did not merely perceive the sense perceptions - sounds, colors, qualities of warmth - but that one perceived the thought objectively outside, outside oneself, like a color. Goethe still claims for himself that he sees his ideas in the world as the Greeks saw the ideas in the world, namely as sense perceptions. But now imagine a person in this mental-sensual activity. He looks at something, not just the colors, but the thoughts. By looking at the thoughts, he feels within himself, he experiences within himself not something passive as today, where we have only the sensual before us, but he felt activity within himself. This is the reason for Plato's assertion that there is something active in seeing, something like grasping. He felt something like activity, something that connected him as a human being with what he saw as an object outside. And this was knowledge, this feeling, this experience of an activity, it was not merely the acceptance of a passive thing. This way of experiencing knowledge is today found only in some retarded individuals, in some people who live more by their instincts than by their intellects, or it can be newly acquired by those who, in the anthroposophical sense, work their way up again into higher knowledge, but now fully consciously and not instinctively, as was still the case with gnosticism. But today ordinary consciousness is increasingly approaching the point where it is passively surrendered to external phenomena, where thinking is no longer considered a phenomenon, where it lives only in it as a guiding principle for ordering phenomena more and more practically and putting them at the service of humanity.

What is accomplished there with the phenomenal world does not lead to knowledge in the old sense. Those who, for example, still have the religious content with the God impulse from old traditions, like Spencer, for example, and then see what is called knowledge today, but which is no longer knowledge, gnosis, they profess that they say: One does not actually come to the source in this phenomenal existence. Agnosticism! And basically this agnosticism has two sides. On the one hand, it takes away everything that makes us strong as whole human beings when we have an activity in cognition. On the other hand, however, we have to go through this phase of human development, to be purely passively devoted to the phenomena. It is part of the overall development of the human race to develop this phenomenalism in the Goethean sense, because it conveys to us a level of truth that is necessary for the overall development of humanity.

What follows from the fact that we come to the phenomena and are thus, if we know nothing but the external phenomena, drawn into agnosticism? It follows that if we want to remain human, we have to approach the spiritual world in a different way than by interpreting the external sense world. And for that part of the external world that underlies the sense world, we cannot find it within the sense world. There was a time in my life when I was acquainted with a number of so-called teleologists. These people would come and say that the mechanistic worldview, pure phenomenalism, was not enough for the external world. One of these people even wrote a book, which was admired by many, about “empirical teleology.” He tried to show that mere causality is not enough, that one can also determine a certain purpose in natural phenomena, purely empirically. People felt very exalted about the mere mechanism, which has a certain justification in external natural science, by introducing a kind of teleology in this way.

I said to people at the time, including this Nikolaus Cossmann: just look at a clock. This clock can be explained completely mechanistically when it is in front of you. There is nothing there that causes us to assume little demons inside that make the wheels turn or anything like that. Any nebulous mysticism is excluded if you just look at the thing. I strictly held the view that the world of phenomena must be explained from itself. All interpretation and carrying in of teleology and the like is harmful. But the clock was made by a clockmaker. I will not get to know the clockmaker from the clock, but I can get to know him as a person. I choose methods other than analyzing the clock to get to know the clockmaker. I seek him out, perhaps in a social context, somewhere other than his shop. - At the moment when one is clear about the fact that the external world is to be grasped phenomenally, at that moment one has not, so to speak, demystified it, but one has shown the necessity of seeking this spirit, this supersensible, on other paths, through other means and methods of knowledge. And these are precisely the ones I have described. They must be added to the phenomenalist methods of knowledge.

As you can see, anthroposophy is currently endeavoring to fully establish and accept phenomenalism because it is clear that what leads to spiritual worlds must be achieved with these other methods of knowledge. This also includes what underlies the external sense world as a spiritual being.

So you see, on the one hand I could have repeated what I said in Stuttgart, as I mentioned earlier. I could have said: mental images become weak within agnosticism, because they are only passively devoted to the external world. But because we have weak mental images, we also have weak feelings. Feelings live in man in such a way that he must stir them up himself. They become sentimental, or else they remain dull, so that they become untruthful. Feelings thus become nebulous, sentimental or dull. As a result, a naturalistic or untruthful tendency has entered into our art, because art particularly emanates from the world of feeling. But because mental images do not enter into the impulses of the will as strong forces, we lack the right kind of determination today. In particular, we lack determination when it comes to taking on something new. We let what seems unfamiliar to us pass us by as a sensation. This is basically how it has been with anthroposophy for twenty years. Many people have heard about it, but they cannot decide, out of their usual experiences of the soul, to let it be more than a sensation. Agnosticism weakens us in our will. It even weakens us in the face of religious experience today. As a result, many people who have long aspired to have an elementary religious experience end up immersing themselves in traditional religions. How many honest seekers have recently returned to Catholicism. Or one returns to oriental mysticism. Because agnosticism weakens our mental images, we do not feel strong enough for elementary religious experiences.

Anthroposophy adds to the passive processing of the world in phenomenalism the impetus of imagination, inspiration and intuition, and thus even comes to a real grasp of that which, as supersensible, enters into our historical existence. She comes to a real grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha. She comes to a grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that she can see how the pure, divine being, the Christ-being, has taken possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This in turn gives real meaning to the mental images of the resurrection, of the connection between the living Christ and our own human development on earth, while it is actually deeply significant that theologians, who are considered enlightened in recent times, have said: Yes, one must just look at the life of Jesus. The resurrection, they say, arose as a belief, but one can only speak of an arising faith. What actually happened in the Garden of Gethsemane cannot really be spoken of. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, will speak of these things, which can only be grasped as supersensible, which cannot be grasped if one wants to grasp them with the usual historical methods taken from the world of the senses. I could speak at length about the deadening of our religious life through the widespread agnosticism of today. But I will only hint at that. It has already been discussed elsewhere.

But there are two sides to every coin. One can also speak of agnosticism in such a way that it has emerged as a necessary phase of development in the more recent history of mankind; that it is, so to speak, the accompanying phenomenon of pure phenomenalism, which we have to work our way towards. But even if this pure phenomenalism is of extraordinary interest to us as we work our way into it, we cannot gain from it that which is most important to us for our innermost humanity. We must gain that in a different way.

Now let me add something personal, not out of vanity or silliness, but because it is relevant. I have already mentioned that I completed my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1894. I am convinced that this “Philosophy of Freedom” could not have been written by someone who is not a pure phenomenalist in relation to natural science. For, although I am a pure phenomenalist in the field of natural science, what was I compelled to do in order to found the moral truth? I was compelled to introduce into this “Philosophy of Freedom” the moral intuition, which I have already characterized here as something thoroughly supersensible and spiritual. Especially resented was my ethical individualism. But it was necessary. I had to show that in the individual human being, the moral impulse can be intuitively experienced in an individualistic way through ordinary consciousness, whereas otherwise intuition can only be attained through higher exercises. This was how it had to be done in order to give the moral world a foundation, if one was a pure phenomenalist who already ascended into the spiritual world at that time. For in the face of pure phenomenalism, the moral impulse disappears when a person is only completely honest with himself. If he is dishonest, he succumbs to all kinds of illusions.

But anyone who has met people who have wrestled with worldviews not in theory but in every fiber of their emotional life knows what the tendency towards phenomenalism, which has agnosticism in its wake, can mean for today's people. I have met people who say to themselves: If we grasp the world with today's scientific means, we see only natural processes in it. We can hypothetically trace it back to a primeval nebula or something similar, which is the event of our earth. We can follow it to the end, to the heat death or something similar. But then we see how we can develop the moral world within us for a long time - it is only a haze and fog that rises above the only real thing, which begins with the primeval nebula and ends with the heat death. And after the heat death there will be the great field of corpses for all that not only lived on earth, but also what strove there for moral impulses, for religious inwardness. All this will be buried. Certainly, not many people feel this discrepancy for their own spiritual life, but there are people who feel it. I have met them, with all the inner tragedy that made them doubt not only the reality of what could be grasped in religious terms, but also the reality of a moral world order. They are haze and mist, rising from the merely externally phenomenal facts.

Now let me add something personal, not out of vanity or silliness, but because it is relevant. I have already mentioned that I completed my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1894. I am convinced that this “Philosophy of Freedom” could not have been written by someone who is not a pure phenomenalist in relation to natural science. For, although I am a pure phenomenalist in the field of natural science, what was I compelled to do in order to found moral truth? I was compelled to introduce into this “Philosophy of Freedom” the moral intuition which I have already characterized here as something thoroughly supersensible and spiritual. My ethical individualism was particularly resented. But that was necessary. I had to show that in the individual human being the moral impulse can be intuitively experienced in an individualistic way through ordinary consciousness, whereas otherwise intuition can only be attained through higher exercises. This was how it had to be done in order to give the moral world a foundation if one was a pure phenomenalist who already ascended into the spiritual world in those days. For in the face of pure phenomenalism, the moral impulse is lost if a person is only completely honest with himself. If he is dishonest, he comes to all kinds of illusions. But anyone who has met people who have wrestled with worldviews not in theory but in every fiber of their soul knows what the tendency towards phenomenalism, which has agnosticism in its wake, can mean for today's human beings. I have met people who say to themselves: If we grasp the world with today's scientific means, we see only natural processes in it. We can hypothetically trace it back to a primeval nebula or something similar, which is the event of our earth. We can follow it to the end, to the heat death or something similar. But then we see how we can develop the moral world within us for a long time - it is only a haze and fog that rises above the only real thing, which begins with the primeval nebula and ends with the heat death. And after the heat death there will be the great field of corpses for all that not only lived on earth, but also what strove there for moral impulses, for religious inwardness. All this will be buried. Certainly, not many people feel this discrepancy for their own spiritual life, but there are people who feel it. I have met them, with all the inner tragedy that made them doubt not only the reality of something grasped in religious terms, but also the reality of a moral world order. They are haze and mist, rising from the merely outwardly phenomenal facts.

This is rooted in the way our society is organized. Millions and millions of people, especially those in proletarian circles, only see reality in external, economic phenomena. What is spiritual – law, morality, art – is nothing, as they say, but an ideological superstructure, something that arises merely as a sham, an ideology. And so we have progressed in the agnostic direction to the point where one speaks of ideology. I myself, having been very active in working-class circles, have experienced the sense in which ideology is spoken of there, which, after all, is basically only the fault of those who, today, also from the direction of science, speak of everything spiritual, not quite clearly, not quite honestly, but actually in the sense of an ideology. We have arrived at the opposite pole of human development compared to the one that was once the oriental worldview. It spoke of Maya and of the true essence. Everything that is only accessible and attainable to the senses was Maya to it, was illusion. And the real, the truly real, was that which is now graspable for man above the sensual. Today we live in a worldview that presents exactly the opposite. For those who are agnostic, the sensory world is the only reality. They could just as easily say maya as ideology about that which can be grasped beyond the sensory world. We should translate this word in this way. Our maya is the spiritual; once the maya was the sum of sensory phenomena.

But this forces us, precisely because we had to arrive at this point, to take our paths of knowledge to the other side. For if we now ascend through imagination, inspiration, and intuition into the spiritual world, then we recognize precisely that which leads us to the actual essence of humanity. And we find the strong impulse to ascend into these worlds when we become fully aware that the sense world may only be explained from within itself, with its own methods. This gives us the impetus. But then, if the sense world can only be explained from its own methods, then thinking serves only as a tool of explanation in it. Then thinking has significance for the sense world only as a servant, for the mutual interpretation of phenomena, in order to bring the phenomena together in such a way that they explain each other. Then thinking, as we have it in pure phenomenalism or agnosticism, is merely an image. Then it no longer contains any reality. The Gnostic felt the reality of thought by looking at it. Our thinking has a mere image existence.

What follows from this if we really ascend to this pure thinking and grasp our moral impulses in it? Now, if I have a mirror here, with images in it, the mirror images cannot force me to do anything through causality. If I want to be led by mirror images, my thinking in the world development of humanity has progressed so far that it really only has the character of an image, so it no longer contains causality for me. Then, when I have moral impulses, pure thinking is formed into impulses of human freedom. By arriving at phenomenalism, and thus at pure image-thinking, and by being able to grasp moral impulses through the power of pure image-thinking, we also pass through the stage of freedom. We educate freedom into our human nature by going through this phase of human development. This is what I wanted to present in my Philosophy of Freedom. But we only become free when we have a thinking that is image-thinking, that proceeds entirely within the physical body, as I have described. At the moment we look further back, we see not freedom but fate. You see, here we have the opportunity to recognize that which we call human destiny, because it rules in the unconscious, because we only come to its rule when we ascend to intuition. Because we find spiritual laws in this destiny that work through repeated lives on earth, we have a spiritual necessity in it. But by entering into life on earth, we free ourselves from necessity for certain actions, and only follow the image-containing thinking, and in the present epoch of humanity we are thereby educated to freedom. There is no contradiction, if one looks into the matter properly, between destiny and freedom. However, in order to be able to present the concept of fate to the world correctly later on, it was necessary that the concept of freedom be presented first in the “Philosophy of Freedom”.

You see, what needs to be done is not a blind railing against agnosticism, because in a certain respect it is only the other side of phenomenalism. We read in natural phenomena, but if we merely read them, we do not find in them what we have to seek on the higher paths of knowledge. But precisely for that reason we need them fully only when we no longer bring forth instinctively from our human nature that which is the impulse of our thinking. In ancient times, even in the times of Gnosticism, man brought forth not only hunger and thirst from within himself, but also active thinking. He was not yet a technician in the modern sense. One only becomes one when one embodies pure thought outwardly in matter. I am even convinced – please forgive me for bringing up something very personal – that if I had studied philosophy in the conventional sense, instead of being educated at a technical university and finding my way into this technical life of the present, I would not have written the Philosophy of Freedom, because it is precisely the opposite pole to the experience of pure fact. And the pure fact, which is experienced in the outwardly mechanistic, and which then also leads to phenomenalism, is absolutely what, on the other hand, first evokes the full opposite pole. Otherwise, we instinctively bring something from within us that dreams little demons into the clock. We first seek the truly spiritual through inner powers of knowledge, which we must first gain when we can no longer approach our physical environment through instinctive forces and bring into it what arises from instinctive observation. On the one hand, the age of technology, with its machines, is precisely the fertile soil for a spiritual, anthroposophical worldview. And in this sense, a clear knowledge of the spirit must be brought about through anthroposophy, precisely from a non-mystical view of the world. We must not arrive at a new gnosis, based on active thinking by instinct, but we must seek for true spirituality in the outer sense and the inner human being, on a path of knowledge to be attained by practice.

We must close this course at some point, and since I wanted to present to you today what anthroposophy is in contrast to the prevailing agnosticism, we who have participated in this course are obliged to part.

Anthroposophy, as I have already mentioned, arose entirely out of the scientific spirit of modern times. Anyone who compares my earliest writings with my later ones will recognize this. It then took on the form in which simple human minds found each other and tried to satisfy certain religious needs within this anthroposophy. It may be said that there have been quite a number of such simple human souls who have found what is most essential, what is absolutely necessary for the human being, already in this anthroposophy.

It has always been a strange relationship with the scientists themselves. I can still see some of them sitting in front of me – I like to be specific – I can see a botanist sitting in front of me, for example. He was a theosophist in the sense that you may also be familiar with, in the sense of orientalizing mysticism, as it prevails in theosophical societies, for example. I had one of the most learned botanists in front of me, so it was natural for me to talk to the gentleman about botany. For me it was something natural. But he did not want to hear about it. No, no, botany must remain what it is in the university cabinet, not only with him, but also with other botanists. It should remain precisely in the way one acquires practical knowledge through the botanizing drum and works with the microscope. He should not interfere with that! Immediately, when I started a botanical topic, he talked about the etheric body, the astral body and even higher bodies. It was the rule in this theosophical movement that one first talked about all possible bodies, until far up, where they became more and more misty. They did not characterize things as I have done here, by pointing out that the etheric body is a time organism, by trying to present the matter concretely, by characterizing the astral body as that which comes from the spiritual-soul realm and inwardly shapes the body. I have tried to give a characteristic of sleep, even if it is still incomplete. I have always tried to give a concrete description. But people like those I am talking about now were not interested in that. If only one had the words for it: physical body, etheric body, astral body, then further kama manas, and then one went into the highest regions, which became thinner and thinner, but always remained material. It was a strange theosophical materialism that confronted me particularly crudely once when I was at a theosophical congress in Paris. Various lectures were held there. I asked a personality, who was actually very advanced, how she had liked the lectures. She said: Yes, it left wonderful vibrations, wonderful resonances. I felt as if she had said: One smells something extraordinarily good in this room after these lectures. — It was all transferred into the material. One knew nothing of the real spirit. And the man of whom I have just spoken always started from what lay in this direction. I always started from something else, for example, the secrets of root formation, stem formation, flower formation, the spiral tendency of plants, their germination or the like. Nothing, nothing - anthroposophy must not come into it, away with it! The astral body and buddhi and atma kept coming up, as did the rounds and the globes and everything else that is doing the rounds in the world in this sense. In short, I am only giving these as specific examples, but it was actually quite futile to approach scientists in their own scientificness.

But then, with the exception of a few people who had been involved in philosophical work from the very beginning, such as Dr. Unger, more and more younger people were coming forward. And we would never have been able to found the Freie Waldorfschule in Stuttgart if a number of people had not been truly seized by the anthroposophical spirit in the individual subjects of science in the anthroposophical sense. For only in this way could it also be transferred into pedagogy and didactics. This has also made it possible to expand more and more what used to be available only to simple minds, and to really return to science in a certain way. Today we can already see a broader field. And you were to be given a sample of this broader field, in which we can already work today, thanks to a number of younger forces who are working with extraordinary dedication on the development of the anthroposophical spirit in the individual concrete sciences. One may say that much would also be desirable in another direction. Work in the therapeutic-medical field is still in its infancy. We have also made all kinds of attempts, for example in the economic field. However, it is precisely in the latter that it is clear – and this can perhaps also be seen from events in recent weeks – that it is still not possible to work fully in the practical economic sphere. Hopefully, the things we have begun will continue to progress, and it will eventually be possible to work in this field in the same way as work is being done today in some areas of science itself, and as work can be done in a thoroughly future-proof way in education and didactics through the Waldorf school.

Following on from this, I would now like to express my heartfelt thanks to those here in Holland who, as friends of the anthroposophical movement, have made these college courses possible. It is certainly no easy task to organize such an event, and above all, in order to muster the necessary work in such a case, a deeper understanding of the matter is needed. That this has come about here, fills us - and I am convinced that I also speak from the hearts and souls of all those who were allowed to speak here during this course week - with a deep feeling of gratitude, and I would like to express this to you; first of all to you, who are the organizers of this course. And I would like to combine this feeling of gratitude with the hope that those who have now turned their attention to what has been discussed here over the last few days will feel that some suggestions have been given to them with the little that could be achieved here in such a short time. We cannot do more than give such individual suggestions. If you have the opportunity to develop these suggestions by trying to penetrate further into what has already been worked out, but which is still little known to the world, what has been worked out through the anthroposophical movement, the anthroposophical work, then you will see that this anthroposophical movement is not only not what its enemies and opponents would like to present it as, who mostly, because they cannot be objective, become personal, but that the anthroposophical movement not only is it not what its enemies and opponents would have us be, but that the Anthroposophical Movement is at least sustained by a truly serious scientific spirit.

And on the other hand, I may perhaps indulge in the hope that the lectures I have tried to formulate here this evening may contribute something to showing how unconscious longings live in a large part of civilized humanity in our time, which, when brought to consciousness, represent nothing other than the desire for something like anthroposophy. But the fact that such a longing exists can also be seen from all kinds of negative instances.

There is a personality in our time, Oswald Spengler, who is also known here in Holland, who wrote the book about the necessary decline of the Occident. I have witnessed how, especially among the youth of Central Europe, this book about the “Decline of the Occident” has made a deep, devastating impression. In this book, however, we are dealing with the work of a man who is fully at home in twelve to fifteen sciences, who truly does not speak from lightly-basted knowledge, but who speaks only from the negative authorities that are effective in our time.

One such negative instance is, for example, agnosticism, when it represents the other side of phenomenalism and one only wants to stop at this phenomenalism. The other, the positive, is part of it. This positive seeks to reach anthroposophy on the spiritual path of knowledge. In this sense, I would like at least a little bit of anthroposophy to have spoken to your souls, given your sincerity. Often, when representing anthroposophy, one has the feeling that it has been around for decades, but we are always at the beginning. And now, after decades, we are talking about the very beginning again, despite having spoken to thousands upon thousands of people over the decades. One feels this — not because of anthroposophy, which can wait — one feels it because of the longings of the time as something tremendously oppressive. But that is also why there is such deep satisfaction when people do come together who want to know what anthroposophy is and who, through their studies and serious engagement with life, have a certain ability to judge. Anthroposophy does not have to fear judgment. I can assure you of that from the spirit of anthroposophy. Critics with the ability to judge will always be most welcome to anthroposophy. Up to now, they have mostly become its adherents after they have got to know it. The more objectively one engages with anthroposophy, even if it means criticizing it, the better for anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is not something that works on the basis of blind faith in authority or that counts on a lack of criticism. It prefers those listeners and readers and collaborators who bring their full, discerning soul nature to it, not the kind that often comes from the agnosticism of the present, but the kind that comes from the truly unbiased human soul.

If one can have the feeling that, even if it was a beginning, such beginnings must ultimately lead to something that is connected with the deepest longings and necessities of human development, then one can say that one leaves such a course with a certain satisfaction. And so I believe that those who have spoken here will leave with a certain satisfaction and, above all, with a grateful heart from what has taken place here. But they would like to hope that some stimulating things may also have taken place for the honored audience.

In this spirit, allow me to conclude this course by saying to you in the warmest possible way, out of this anthroposophical spirit: If we have perhaps connected with each other through some thoughts, then we seek the ways to continue to be together, to work together in spiritual work. In this spirit, I bid you farewell for today.

Question and Answer Session

The Hague, April 12, 1922

Question about multidimensional space.

Rudolf Steiner: If I have the usual coordinate system, I have characterized three-dimensional space. Now, let us just discuss it schematically, we proceed from certain algebraic assumptions by abstractly continuing the same process that leads from the plane into three-dimensional space, and we arrive at the fourth dimension, the fifth and so on, at an n-dimensional space. And then it is even possible, let's say, to construct bodies – Hinton did that – to construct the tessaract, but that is not a real body, but the projection of the real tessaract into three-dimensional space. Now the thing is this: in purely theoretical-abstract terms, of course, there is nothing to be said against such derivations. In theory, one can also pass from three-dimensional space to the fourth dimension of time, if one proceeds within the calculation formulas in such a way that one takes into account the leap that is actually made, because it is different after all, if one passes from the first to the second dimension and to the third dimension of space, than if one passes into time. But if you refine it, ... then you can pass over into time. In this way one arrives at an abstract four-dimensional space. If one remains abstract, one can go on doing this as long as one remains in the purely intellectualistic, as long as one is not compelled to follow the matter vividly. But then one is confronted with a problem which, while the purely abstract train of thought leads to a regressus ad infinitum, vividly becomes an elasticity problem. We could also think of the pendulum as continuing to swing forever. But in the dynamic, we will get a state of vibration. That is how it is in reality. If you can get into imaginative thought, you simply can no longer carry out the process in infinitum by assuming a fourth and so on dimension. Then, if I call the first dimension +a, the second +b, the third +c, if I take real space, I am obliged not to write the fourth +d, but by the nature of things I am obliged to write -c. So that the fourth dimension simply cancels out the third bit by bit and only two remain. So instead of four, I end up with two dimensions. And so I am also forced, if I assume the fifth, to set - b, and with the sixth - a. That is, I come back to the point. Elasticity has struck back to the starting point. And that is not something that exists only in the imagination, for example, that is, a subjective experiment, but it is realized in the way I described the day before yesterday. As long as we have, let us say, the earth here and look at the root of the plant, we are really dealing with a special formation of gravity. Here one is in the ordinary dimensionality of space. But if one wants to explain the form of the blossom, then one cannot get away with that. Then, instead of taking the point of origin of the co-ordinates, one must take infinite space, which is, after all, only the other form of the point. And then one comes to going in centrifugally instead of going out centrifugally. You come to this wave surface. Instead of the thing spreading out, it pushes in from the outside, and then you get those movements, which are sliding or scraping movements or pressure movements, where you would go wrong if you took coordinate axes from the center of coordinates, but you have to take the infinite sphere as the center of coordinates and then all the coordinates going towards the center. So, one also gets the qualitatively opposite coordinate axis system as soon as one enters the etheric. The fact that this is not taken into account is the mistake in the ordinary ether theory. Herein lies the difficulty in defining the ether. Sometimes it is seen as liquid, sometimes as gas. The mistake here is that one starts from the coordinate system seen from the center. But as soon as one enters the ether, one must take the sphere, and construct the entire system not from the inside outwards, but the other way around.

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Things become interesting when they are followed mathematically and cross over into the physical, and much could still be contributed to the solution of borderline problems if these theories, which begin to become very real here, were developed. But there is still a terrible lack of understanding for this. For example, I once gave a lecture at a mathematical university society where I tried to introduce these things. I explained that if you have the asymptotes of a hyperbola here and the branches of the hyperbola here, what you have to imagine on the right here, spreading out, you have to imagine on the left here, spreading together, so that a complete reversal takes place. These things gradually lead to a more concrete treatment of space. But today there is little understanding for this. Even pure analysts often show a certain dislike of synthetic geometry. And this newer synthetic geometry is the way to get out of the purely formal mathematical and to the problem where one has to grasp the empirical. As long as one calculates with mere analytical geometry, one does not approach the realms of reality. There one has only developed the end points of the coordinates, the geometric location of the coordinates and so on. If one remains with constructing with the linear and with circles, then one stands in lines within them, but is compelled to take a certain visualization to help. This is what makes synthetic geometry so beneficial for getting out of the formal and showing how to think the mathematical in nature.

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Question: What does Dr. Steiner mean when he says that the physical body is a spatial body and the body of formative forces is a temporal body? The physical body also lives in time, growing and decaying.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, that is only imprecisely thought, if I may say so. In order to trace this back to an exact thinking, you would first have to undertake an analysis of the concept of time. Just consider: as the usually meant reality stands before us, space and time are interwoven. One can only think such things when one distinguishes between space and time. In ordinary objective knowledge, you have not given time at all. You measure time with nothing but spatial quantities, and changes in spatial quantities are the means of recognizing what then counts as time. Just imagine a different way of measuring time. Otherwise, you always measure time according to space. This is not the case in the moment when you move on to the real experience of time. People usually do this unconsciously. Actually, thinking is elevated into consciousness through imaginative knowledge. But you have a truly temporal experience when, for example, let us say, on April 12, 1922 at 4:4 minutes and so many seconds, you take your soul life.

When you take your soul life in this moment, it has a temporal cross-section. You cannot say that there is any spatial cross-section within this temporal cross-section. But within this temporal cross-section lies your entire earthly past, and if you want to draw schematically, if that is the flow of your experience from a to b, you have to draw the cross-section A to B. You cannot avoid placing all of your experience in this cross-section, and yet there is a perspective in it. You can say that experiences that lie further back in time are represented with less intensity than those that are closer in time. But all of this is represented in the one cross-section. So that you get different relationships when you really analyze time. We can only form a mental image of time if we do not use the analysis that we are accustomed to in physics, according to space-cognition means, but only by reflecting on our soul life itself. But in your soul life, even if you only have abstract thoughts, you are in the time body. What is important is that we are now able to understand this time body as an organism. You see, when you experience any indisposition, let us say a digestive disorder, in the stomach, you may be able to see that it affects other areas of your spatial organism as well. The spatial organism is such that the individual areas are spatially dependent on each other. In the case of the temporal organism, although we have a later and an earlier, later and earlier are connected in an organic way. I sometimes express this by saying: Let us assume we have a very old person. We find that when such an old person speaks to younger people, for example to children, that his words bounce off the children, that his words are of no use to the children. And we find another person. When he speaks to children, it is something quite different. His words flow by themselves into the child's soul. If you now study — one only does not study these things because one very rarely considers the whole human being, one does not, so to speak, pause with one's attention long enough to observe, for example, the basis of the blessing of an older man or woman, one must sometimes go back to early childhood. Today, observation does not extend that far. Anthroposophy has to do that. Go back and you will find that those who can bless in old age, who have this peculiar spiritual power in them that their words flow into young people like a blessing, have learned to pray in their youth. I express it figuratively: folded hands in youth become blessing hands in old age.

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There you have a connection between what influences other people at a later age and what, let's say, pious feelings and the like were present in the life in early childhood. There is an organic connection between the earlier and the later. And only when you know the whole person do you see how he has an infinite number of such connections. Today we are stuck with our whole life outside of this reality. We imagine that we are full of reality, but we are abstract creatures in our culture of life. We do not pay attention to true reality. For example, we do not pay attention to such things. We also do not pay attention to the fact that when we teach a child, we must avoid, if possible, giving him sharply contoured concepts, especially in primary school. These are really for a later age, as if one were to constrict the limbs and prevent them from growing larger. What we pass on to the child must be an organism, must be mobile. Now you are gradually approaching what I mean by an organism. Of course, it is only possible within the imagination. But one can still arrive at a mental image of an organism, if one is clear about the fact that what takes place in time in the human being does not relate to the spatial organism, but to the temporal organism. Now you see that there is a reality in time. You can also see this in mathematics. There was once a very nice discussion about this. I believe it was Ostwald who pointed out - not a supporter of the humanities, but someone who is not exactly a materialist - that the organic processes that take place in time cannot be reversed with the mechanical process. But the fact is that you can't even get close to the time processes with the usual calculations. You actually always remain outside of the time processes with the usual calculations. They do not follow the processes as such. If, for example, you insert negative quantities into a formula for the lunar eclipse, you get the more distant things, but you do not move away with the things. You only move in the spatial sphere. And so you only get a correct concept of what the human physical body actually is if you can separate the spatial from the temporal. In the case of man it is of fundamental importance, because one does not arrive at any understanding at all if one does not know that with him everything temporal proceeds as an entity for itself, and the spatial is ruled by the temporal as by something dynamic, while with a machine the temporal is only a function of that which has a spatial effect. That is the difference. For humans, the temporal is real, while for a mechanism, the temporal is only a function of space. That is what it ultimately comes down to.

The lectures this week are to be arranged in such a way that each day is devoted to a different subject, so that it can be seen what is to be achieved as a fertilization of the individual subject areas and branches of practical life by spiritual science. Today we shall begin with the subject that is most closely related to spiritual science as it is meant here: the subject of philosophy. What I myself will have to say here is intended as a kind of introduction to the questions that will be dealt with in the course of today.

I would like to start from one of the most interesting and even most significant phenomena of recent philosophical development. It is certainly not always the case that the most significant and interesting phenomena are those that are soon recorded in the usual historical works. And so I would like to start from a phenomenon that has yet to be expressed historically, from the whole meaning of a philosophical work published in 1888 by Ludwig Haller, a government councilor and public prosecutor, entitled “All in All: Metalogic, Metaphysics, Metapsychics». I may all the more base myself on this phenomenon in the life of philosophy, as anyone who has followed my own literary career can see that I myself have remained quite uninfluenced by this phenomenon, because that which constitutes my position on philosophy already contained in my writings that appeared before this “Metalogik, Metaphysik, Metapsychik,” and what I said later is only a proper and consistent elaboration of what was contained in my first writings.

Above all, in the prosecutor and government councilor Ludwig Haller, who wrote nothing but the aforementioned work, we encounter a person for whom what is called philosophy is not just a specialized science—although in a certain respect he is thoroughly qualified to engage with this specialized science—but for whom what he presents comes from direct personal philosophical experience. We are dealing with a personality for whom philosophical endeavor has become the most intimate personal experience. And if we go straight to the most significant thing about Ludwig Haller, then we have to note that he is actually at loggerheads with the whole way of philosophical thinking in modern times. He has obviously been around a lot in all kinds of philosophy and also in those works of literature in which “philosophy of life” bubbles. He has familiarized himself with the philosophical thinking of his time and he has found – this is, as I said, his opinion – that with this philosophical thinking one actually goes around in a kind of unreal circle, that with this philosophical thinking one never comes into a position to delve into reality itself.

Ludwig Haller wants to penetrate into spiritual reality with his philosophy, which he, having evidently outgrown more religious ideas due to his education, calls “the divine” or even “God”. In this “divine” or in “God” he seeks the source of all that which, as the actual essence, also lives in the human soul and of which the human soul must also become aware. But he comes to the conclusion that this soul, by processing the conceptual fabric that is customary in his time, cannot penetrate into this center of its being, where it is one with the divine-spiritual of the world.

Since the thought-weaving of philosophers at the end of the 1980s, when the aforementioned work was published, was still influenced by Kant in many ways and thus Kantian thought lived in this thought-weaving, Ludwig Haller felt compelled above all to deal with Kantianism and all that stems from Kantianism. But precisely in all the thoughts in which something Kantian somehow flows in, he saw the unreal, that which can never be immersed in the reality of the world. And he was actually unhappy about the fact that he, because he wanted to speak philosophically in his time, had to deal with this thinking, which was thoroughly infected by Kantianism, that he had to keep coming back to it, to deal with Kantianism. He found very sharp words, first to characterize Kantianism itself, and then also for the having to deal with Kantianism, which he found so unappealing. I would like to share with you two samples from this assessment of Kantianism, so that you can see what a person for whom philosophy is an innermost personal matter struggles with in our times.

On one occasion, Ludwig Haller speaks of Kantianism in such a way that he says of it: the “pseudo-dialectical, half-true, deeply dishonest character of this misosophy, which tries to steal the weapons from the arsenal of light in order to use them in the service of darkness”. On another occasion, he becomes, I might say, literarily enraged that he repeatedly finds himself compelled to deal with Kantian thought because he must engage with his contemporaries , and he says: “I, who could and would like to talk about God and his glory, see myself condemned again and again to talk about Kant and his wretchedness – I, a dandy's dandy.”

I wanted to point out this phenomenon because it is an imprint of the struggles that a truly philosophically inclined nature had to endure at the end of the 19th century. Today, what is meant by philosophical speech and writing is also taken to mean that it is a matter that, so to speak, hovers a bit above people's heads, and that one is not personally involved in it. That is why the inner tragic phenomena of philosophical life are far too little appreciated in our time. And I believe that this phenomenon, which is one of the most tragic inner philosophical experiences of our age, is actually quite unknown in wider circles.

Those who are truly familiar with the intellectual life of our time know how much of such moods has been lived in people of our age. And actually, if one wants to explain the essence of philosophical thought in our time, one must speak precisely of these phenomena, which are not considered by the philosophical experts, but which are all the more important for the actual human experience.

Now, building on this phenomenon, I would like to characterize another one that is basically also only a subjective, personal philosophical experience, so to speak. The philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, who became better known as Ludwig Haller, dealt with Ludwig Haller. In this discussion, one point is of particular importance. Ludwig Haller, who makes a lot of work for himself, as you saw, he calls himself “a dandy dandy” because of this making-a-lot-of-work-for-himself, with the introduction into the Kantian-infected thought-weaving of his time, of our age - he he feels, namely, by going from concept to concept with his thinking, by abandoning himself to philosophical thinking, which can be clearly seen to permeate his book from cover to cover — he feels that the concepts he is now following with his thinking take on a remarkable inner life. It is as if the concepts in his mind began to lead an independent life. He emphasizes this in the most diverse places in his “Metalogic, Metaphysic, Metapsychic”.

If we want to explore this interesting phenomenon from a psychological perspective, we cannot do other than say the following: Ludwig Haller puts all his energy into the particular nature of contemporary philosophical thinking. But his inner human experience actually wants something different; he cannot come to this other because in the 1880s there was not even a trace of a truly modern spiritual science. What could fill this human inner life with real spiritual science is lacking. But I would like to say that he lives in it in a strangely instinctive, unconscious way. He is unaware of this, but he notices from this strange phenomenon that the world of concepts comes to life for him and leads an independent life.

Anyone who is able to conduct research in the sense of the spiritual science represented here is very familiar with this independent life of concepts. But they can also master it. They can master it in the sense that one can master the transition from one mathematical concept to another mathematical concept in the ordinary process of mathematization. But this mastery must be achieved through inner practice. It is quite natural that one enters into a life that is very far removed from ordinary consciousness when one suddenly notices – something that otherwise only the food in our organism does, that they lead their own life in digestion without our intervention – that the absorbed concepts begin to lead their own inner life. It is not incomprehensible, but very, very understandable, that a philosopher like Eduard von Hartmann, who was indeed brilliant, who also achieved something quite penetrating in some areas, but who had completely outgrown the philosophical thinking of his time, could not do anything special with this experience of Ludwig Haller. And when Eduard von Hartmann writes his critique of Ludwig Haller, one notices that on the one hand he feels quite queasy. What is to become of it, the modern philosopher asks himself, when the concepts to which I devote myself suddenly begin to dance like goblins within me, to embrace each other or the like? That is something terrible, one cannot expose oneself to it! And so, as a true contemporary philosopher, he also offers this criticism in a very significant way by saying that he never noticed anything of this playful, goblin-like activity of concepts that have come to life independently.

We can readily believe Eduard von Hartmann when he says that he felt this inner sultriness when reading Ludwig Haller's “Metalogik, Metaphysik, Metapsychik”. However, as his critique shows, this did not stop him from reading the whole book, and in a sense he even found it very significant. I believe that many others who have been professionally involved with philosophy in the period since 1888 have hardly got beyond the first pages of this book, if they have even seen the title page!

What I am pointing out to you is a very significant phenomenon. And we can only understand it if we follow the philosophical development of the West as I have tried to do in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”. If we go into what I have explained in detail there with reference to the history of philosophy, and what I can only hint at here, we see that in the age of Greek philosophy the whole human soul was different from what it later became and especially from what it is in our time. We see how in Greek philosophizing, what we call thinking, what we call imagining, is linked in a similar way to the conditions of the external world, insofar as it presents itself to man, as for us only the qualities of sensory perception. When we perceive, we ascribe, at least in naive consciousness, the sensual qualities to what we perceive. Certainly, the epistemological discussions since Locke and others think differently, but they need interest us less at this moment; I want to refer only to naive consciousness for the fact that has been brought up. In this naive consciousness, one attributes the sensory qualities red, blue, white, warm, cold, lukewarm, sweet, bitter, etc., to things, and today it is clear that what one thinks and imagines about sensory objects is separated from the objective in the process of becoming conscious, that it is experienced subjectively. But the Greeks attributed their thinking, their ideas, to the object just as we attribute red, blue, sweet, bitter and so on to the object; they had what they experienced in knowing, to an even greater extent, so to speak, in perceiving than we have. They were fully aware that they perceived the conceptual content at the same time as the red, green and so on.

And what emerged in the most logical way in Greek thought, I would say, was basically a peculiarity of the general enquiring consciousness right up to the 13th, 14th, 15th centuries, up to the Galilei-Copernicus period. Anyone who delves into what has come to light in scientific achievements, which, after all, were still one and the same with philosophical research for that time, anyone who delves into the corresponding literature, insofar as it exists, will say that these older researchers and thinkers, when they talk about things, still describe the objective aspects of things, whereas today's researchers think entirely separately from things and ascribe them to the subject.

One can follow, and this pursuit is extraordinarily interesting, how in the age of scholasticism, philosophical life takes the direction of becoming clear about how what we call thinking in concepts may still be thought of as connected to the objective. Before the scholastic age, the connection between what is experienced as an idea and concept in things was self-evident. This connection only became a question, a mystery, when the conceptual and the imaginative were separated from what is called objective perception in human experience. And it was out of this philosophical experience that scholasticism arose, the problem of which should be studied much more thoroughly today than it is studied, the problem of 'realism' and 'nominalism'. Today, these words conjure up completely different ideas than they did in the scholastic era. In the age of scholasticism, a realist was, for example, Ihomas of Agquino, who attributed an objective reality to concepts and ideas, so that he said: Concepts and ideas have something objective in their content, something that does not merely belong to the subject, that is not merely thought. A nominalist was someone who sought reality only in that which lies outside the conceptual, who saw in the concepts only something by which man summarizes what is given to him as perception, so that for the nominalist, the concepts were mere names.

Such a problem always arises in the development of humanity when something is experienced inwardly. In the Middle Ages, people had to undergo this inwardly, that they became more and more familiar with the conceptual life in their own inner being, that they saw what is called the external world only in the perceptible. Hence the question arose for him: How can one justify relating to external perceptions in some way that which one basically has only as a name within oneself, which one grasps only by associating it with external perceptions? A significant skepticism emerges from nominalism.

And basically, what then emerged in Kantian philosophy is nothing other than, I would say, the last consequence of this scholastic problem. It is just that Kant arrived at his formulation of the scholastic problem in a peculiar way: in the age in which Kant, as a young man, was pursuing his philosophical studies, a somewhat diluted Leibnizianism prevailed in the circles in which Kant was pursuing his studies. Leibnizianism, which is something great in its own way, albeit somewhat abstract, and which still has a connection to the spirit of reality, was philosophically sublimated and diluted in Wolffianism, which formed the stage of Kant's youth. During this time, people were already dealing with the demands of mathematizing science, with the demands of science, which is precisely composed of the results of external observation of the world. But out of the old habit that man has something to say when something is being determined about the world, one had established the broad doctrine of reason alongside this empirical science, alongside this science of experience. It was decreed that uncertain judgments can be gained through experience, through empiricism, about everything that is transitory; but these judgments are directed only at the transitory and are uncertain. One cannot know whether what one recognizes through observation and intellectual knowledge about any fact of the transitory world must necessarily be so for all time. We cannot even know that the sun must rise every morning, because we have only the one piece of empirical evidence that it has risen every morning so far. From this we can conclude that it will also rise in the future; but it is just an empirical conclusion. Beyond this empirical science, Wolffianism, and Kant in his youth, were looking for a rational science, in complete harmony with Wolffianism. It is characteristic that one of Wolff's books is called: “Rational Thoughts about God, the World, and the Soul of Man, and about All Things in General.”

So the aim was, on the one hand, to gain empirical knowledge about the world, insofar as it is accessible to experience, and, on the other hand, to gain rational knowledge that extends over everything, which, so to speak, is to be gained from reason alone. And so, alongside, say, revealed theology, a rational, a rational theology was established, alongside empirical psychology a rational psychology, alongside the knowledge of the world gained through experience, a rational geology, and so on. The underlying reason for this search for a particular science of reason was that people said: there is no certainty for scientific research in an external world. But if one wants to have such certainty, it can only be gained by deriving it from reason itself.

However, the whole research of Wolffianism is still based on the fact that a reality has first been placed in this reason, from which man then derives his “truths of reason”, in some transcendent way.

In Kant's work, two things occurred, and anyone who studies Kant with an open mind will be sharply reminded of what emerges in his work from two sides: on the one hand, he had become accustomed to searching for “certain judgments”. For example, he had said to himself: in mathematics we have such judgments that always apply quite necessarily, that cannot come from experience because experience does not give rise to such judgments. We also have such judgments in some areas of scientific thought, which are valid forever, and which can only be gained from the human being itself. There must be certainty in philosophy. That was one side of what Kant wanted. And anyone who does not grasp how firmly Kant stood on the ground: there must be certainty — also in the sense of Wolffian philosophy — does not understand Kant, because he cannot engage with Kant's insistence on the certainty of certain judgments.

But Kant had become disillusioned with Wolffianism, in terms of its content, through his study of Hume, the English philosopher who wanted to be a mere philosopher of experience. And he said to himself, precisely under the influence of Hume: there is no such thing as spinning a reality out of reason; there is actually only experience. — That was the second side.

On the one hand, there must be certainty; but everything that appears in experience, which is the only basis for real knowledge, does not provide certainty. How can we escape from this dilemma? And the very compulsive search to escape from this dilemma is basically the main impulse of Kantian thinking. I have presented this in detail in my writing “Truth and Science” and have further illuminated it in my “Philosophy of Freedom.” Kant's search did not actually lead to the recognition of anything essential, but to the question: How do you achieve absolute certainty?

Kant's problem is not a problem of truth, nor of knowledge, but of certainty. And if you don't grasp it as a problem of certainty, you can't really understand it. Kant seeks the solution by saying: the human soul is certainly not suited to distilling judgments of reality out of reason, but these judgments do come about; they are applied to external experience, as can be seen, for example, in mathematics. We do not merely look at such figures (it is drawn), but we look at them mathematically and say: there are two triangles or, drawn differently, it is a hexagon. We mix what we spin out of reason inwardly with what comes to us through external experience. We impose what we recognize inwardly a priori over what we experience a posteriori.

Thus Kant came to say: Knowledge of truth cannot be gained from reason. But human reason is applied to experience. It imposes its judgment on external experience. It itself makes its judgment on external experience. Because Kant said: There must be certainty in philosophy, one must be able to find certainty, but one does not find it by searching in a Wolffian way, by believing that one can gain a reality in reason and let experience run alongside – because Kant could not could not bring it together, so he said: Man spins out of his reason that which experience then takes up; man makes knowledge himself; the things of experience are therefore certain and certain to the extent that we make them certain out of our minds.

You see, actually the essence of knowledge is dethroned. Actually, knowledge is eliminated. And it is eliminated in such a subtle way that the Kantians still adhere to this subtlety today and do not realize what is actually involved. When someone like Ludwig Haller comes along and feels how Kantian thinking has actually lost touch with reality, how it snaps at certainty in the unreal, then he finds words like the ones I have shared with you. He finds that human ingenuity is being applied to an impossible problem, to a problem that does not shed light on knowledge but shrouds it in fog. That is why Ludwig Haller says, as he feels it: This misosophy tries to steal its weapons from the arsenal of light and use them in the service of darkness.

But on the other hand, one must also recognize how this whole development of modern times was basically necessary. The development of human thinking and human research since Greek times was not a line of development that can only be followed in the way I have just done, but can also be followed in another direction. I also pointed this out in my book 'Riddles of Philosophy'. Today, we have a knowledge of nature that attempts to understand natural phenomena purely in terms of their essence.

It may be said, however, that the very knowledge of nature which today always prides itself on understanding natural phenomena purely, hardly succeeds in understanding natural phenomena purely, that is, in no longer penetrating them with the web of thoughts of that which is only made in the concept, inwardly subjectively. — All kinds of hypotheses are still being put forward about the external course of phenomena, not only justified ones but also unjustified ones.

But one person did emphasize in modern times, and relatively early on, that in terms of observing external natural processes, this modern age must strive towards the pure phenomenon, towards pure phenomenology. And that person was Kant's opposite number, Goethe. He demanded that phenomena and appearances express themselves purely. He emphasized that what takes place in the development of understanding must remain completely separate from what is presented as a description of phenomena and of the phenomenal process itself. And in the most stringent and admirable way, Goethe repeatedly demands this pure phenomenalism.

But the more one strives towards this pure phenomenalism, the more one must strive for a special peculiarity of the conceptual world. And this peculiarity of the conceptual world is also highly achieved. This peculiarity is thoroughly justified for a certain age of human development. Anyone who, since the age of Cartesius, has not limited himself to studying philosophy, but who has an organ for also entering into the good sides of

of scholastic philosophy and medieval philosophy, and who does not see Aristotle and Plato through the spectacles of modern philosophers and historians of philosophy, but can place them before his soul in their original form, he knows that the way in which the world of concepts and ideas lives in the human soul is quite different today than it was in ancient Greece and even in the scholastic Middle Ages. In the scholastic Middle Ages, the soul still felt that, in experiencing the concept, there was something substantial in this concept, just as there is still something substantial in the red and blue that one perceives. Only in recent times has the concept become a complete image. Only in recent times has the concept been completely emptied of its content. Only in recent times has it become possible in the development of humanity and in philosophy to do what I have called pure thinking in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

If one tries to eavesdrop on the problem of freedom, as I attempted in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” one simultaneously becomes acquainted with this modern character of thinking. One becomes acquainted with a thinking that is basically emptied of all external experiential content. It is brought up on this external experiential content, but lives only as subjective fact.

It is just as true to say of this pure thinking, and I made this clear in the new edition of my Philosophy of Freedom, that it takes place in the realm of the will. But the will has been transformed into thinking, as it were. It is the result of the kind of thinking that has stripped away all external experience. This pure thinking is only an image, and is entirely an image. And if one is at all to arrive at a philosophical understanding in our age, one must reach the soil in which this pure thinking is found.

Goethe sensed what lies in this pure thinking. Others can only feel it with him. That is why they always quote a Goethe saying incorrectly, which says something like that the kind God has saved him from “thinking about thinking”. As Goethe meant it, it is already correct. Goethe never “thought about thinking” because, admittedly, one cannot achieve this pure thinking with the thinking that one has become accustomed to. One must look at it as an image. So that one can say: the thinking itself that one wants to recognize, pure thinking, becomes a looking at this pure thinking. Pure thinking can be achieved not dialectically but vividly. One arrives at this point in philosophical development at the problem of freedom, which is why freedom, real freedom, is not possible at all without attaining this pure thinking, which is a mere image.

As long as a reality within us motivates our actions, our actions cannot be free. Therefore no instinctive action, no traditional action, no action under a habit is really free, but only an action that can follow the images that weave in pure thinking. As soon as you follow a reality, you are pushed. If you want to be free, you must include the unreal in your will. When you bump into something, you feel that the object has an effect on you. When you perform an act under an instinct, under an urge, you must feel that there is something pushing, that there is no freedom. But when you stand in front of a mirror, see the image in the mirror, you will be clear about the fact that the mirror image can never give you a slap in the face, that the mirror image can never push you. The image cannot do anything on its own. It is he who must act, who must act when he confronts this image. But since the image does nothing, the act then becomes a free act. Only a thinking that is not rooted in reality, but is pure image, can motivate a free act. That is why the problem of freedom is the problem of modern thinking, of pure thinking. But in this thinking, one is standing in a world of images.

Modern philosophy, everything that lives in this modern philosophy through Kant and the Kantians, comes instinctively, although it usually does not understand this pure thinking, to this pure thinking. When one begins to think in modern times and trains one's thinking in natural science, which claims all authority for itself and would be real natural science, real science of reality, if it stuffed anything else into us than mere images, one must, when one moves one's thinking in this direction, first approach an unreal. In the thinking through whose peculiarities we are passing with our modern philosophical and scientific development, we have no reality; we have only an image of reality. And in looking at this thinking, we come on the one hand to the problem that concerns the newer epistemologists. They would like to build a bridge from what is inwardly experienced to what outwardly exists in being. They do not realize that they are not building a bridge from one reality to another, but from something that lives in images to something that is supposed to be reality.

And on the other hand, we come to the point where conscientious natural philosophers admit to themselves: with this unrealistic thinking, with this thinking that is absorbed in the pictorial character, we cannot immerse ourselves in reality. The point “where matter haunts” cannot be reached. Because one weaves in pictures. Modern philosophy weaves in images, is unaware of it, and seeks reality in these images. Hence the feeling of a “misosophy” in Ludwig Haller, hence the feeling that one cannot enter into reality if one moves in this thinking.

That is the problem of the more recent development of philosophy: that human history must necessarily drift towards a pure comprehension of unreal pictorial thinking. For the sake of the development of freedom, modern humanity had to rise to this unreal pictorial thinking. But one cannot remain in it if one is a fully human being, if one feels reality in all human beings. For one must feel the contradiction between what is pressing and living and weaving in the human being, and what stands before consciousness as a mere environment of unreal images. We are not dealing with a merely logical or formal problem, but with a real one, which has arisen because man has gradually withdrawn his thinking, his imagining, from external reality.

In the external world there remains for him the dark, obscure matter that he cannot grasp. But his thinking has not become a reality, it has become an image. And he must go further in this image. Thinking, which today is a mere image, was still the content of perception for the Greeks. This thinking has moved in the direction from outside in. It proceeds in such a way that man first submerges into the outer world by thinking. Now, with his philosophizing, he has reached the point where he is weaving in the thinking that has been peeled from the outer world. He must continue in this direction. He must seek reality again. Matter has given man in ancient times and up to our age the support for thinking by making thinking real for him. But thinking, because it had to become the basis for the development of human freedom, has passed into the pictorial character. Thus it hovers between external experience and inner experience. It must submerge into this inner experience. It must in turn become reality. Man must plunge with full consciousness into the regions where Eduard von Hartmann and with him all modern philosophers feel so sultry, because thoughts seem to begin to dance like goblins.

When the human being with his thinking goes out of the pictorial character – where, if he weaves and lives in it, because they are only images, he does not need to be so sultry – when he steps out and enters into his own reality, then, through the exercises of spiritual science, he must indeed include the possibility in his inner abilities to move around in this self-life of the conceptual world, as otherwise in mathematical thinking. He must acquire the ability to grasp reality independently in this self-life. Just as we do not feel stifled when things out there in space do not stand still — lest our knowledge be disturbed — but when they move, run, so man must, in the ascent to spiritual explanation, to spiritual revelation, become capable of giving his image-concept a content again.

If one grasps the actual, pressing philosophical life of the present at this point, then one comes away from all the talk that the philosopher cannot understand what the spiritual researcher is saying. He can understand it as soon as he has understood the pictorial character of his thinking, but also as soon as he has understood that thinking has come to this pictorial character because it moves in world history from the outside in, from the direction of the spirit in matter to the contemplation of the pure spiritual world.

In this way, philosophy must be continued by receiving it from spiritual science, from spiritual research, by immersing thinking in what spiritual science, spiritual research, has to say. This is what I wanted to show you, even if only in a sketchy way with a few lines: in what way philosophy is to be fertilized by spiritual science. In the next few days, we will talk about how other branches of human thought and action can be fertilized by this spiritual science.

Closing words on the occasion of the disputation on philosophy

In the course of the disputation, questions arose that naturally required a broad discussion from a technical point of view. Since we cannot discuss everything in one evening, I would just like to make a few methodological suggestions regarding the questions that arose and that, at least in my opinion, were not formulated very clearly. These suggestions point in the direction in which certain solutions to such questions must be sought.

In view of such questions as, for example, that of the “subjectivity of perception”, there is a lot of confusion of ideas in the most recent philosophical development, an accumulation of concepts that tend to obscure and tangle the problems rather than to illuminate them and lead to a certain solution.

For when one wishes to raise questions concerning the relation between object and subject in perceiving in terms of representation and knowledge, it is always a matter of arriving at the questions by means of the most careful analysis of the facts. For often the questions themselves are wrongly formulated from misconceived ideas. And so it is often the case with questions about the “subjectivity of perception”.

The difficulty was indicated by the example of the partially color-blind person, who is assumed to see a, say, green landscape differently than the so-called normal-sighted person. The difficulty lies in this idea of the partially color-blind person: to what extent must one ascribe subjectivity to what the so-called normal-sighted person, I say quite explicitly, the so-called normal-sighted person, sees?

Well, the first thing to do is to present the whole problem in such a way that it appears correct. “Correct” means that the way in which the elements that have to be brought together to form the problem, that this how of bringing together is done in the right way. Just suppose someone says: Yes, the external world, which appears to me, say, in a green landscape with a green tint, gives me cause to reflect on whether the quality “green” is objective, whether I can ascribe it to the world of objectivity, or whether it must be addressed as subjective. In order to even formulate the problem, one must consider such things as, for example, this: Yes, how does it actually behave when I look at something that is white or yellow, for my sake, through green glasses? There we see it tinged green. Is that now to be ascribed to the sphere of objectivity, or must one speak of subjectivity here? We will soon realize that we certainly cannot ascribe this green, which I see through green glasses, to what is out there. We cannot speak of objectivity in relation to the external environment. But it will certainly not be possible to say that this green tint, which I have seen through green glasses, is based on something subjective. It is objectively determined in a perfectly lawful way, without what I am designating here as green actually being green.

You see, by forming this idea, I am putting the problem in a special light, where I have to consider that which certainly does not belong to the external world, but objectively, as having arisen in an objective way; because the glasses do not belong to me, so they certainly cannot be included in the sphere of subjectivity. Such things might even appear to be sophistry. And yet such sophistries are very often what leads one to put the elements that are supposed to lead one to the questions in the appropriate way, to bring them together. For if one sees through such apparent sophistries in the right way, one will see through the whole threadbareness of the everyday concepts of “subject” and “object”, which have gradually been introduced into modern philosophical reflection. And if one gets into the right line of questioning, one will probably be led more and more to the path that I believe in, which I have taken in my writings “Truth and Science” and “Philosophy of Freedom,” where one does not take the starting point from the concepts of “subject” and “object”, but seeks something independently of these concepts that must lie beyond the sphere of subjectivity and objectivity: that is the function of thinking.

The function of thinking! If you look at the matter independently, thinking actually appears to go beyond the subjective and the objective. And with that, you have gained a starting point from which you can then be led in the appropriate way to where the problem of “subjectivity” and “objectivity”, which presents such difficulties, is at stake. For one is led—and you will find this path thoroughly followed in these two books of mine—not to ask: How does an external “objective” world affect some “subjective” world, for which, say, the mediator is the eye? —but one is led to something quite different. One is led to ask: What is the fact of the senses themselves? What essence does one sense show? For example, the constitution of the eye?

One will then find that in the problem one sets oneself in this way, something comes to light that I want to make clear through a comparison, because I have to be brief – it could, of course, be encompassed with the adequate concept in an explanation lasting hours: I can also look through a pair of glasses and still see the world around me as the naive consciousness perceives it, with its color tinglings, with all its sensory qualities. I must only look through colorless transparent glasses; I must not look through glasses that change the outer world itself for me. And I must now find my way into the difference between glasses that change the outer tinting and glasses that are colorless and transparent and avoid any outer tinting. From this comparison – as I said, long-winded considerations could be used instead of the comparison – I will find: if I take the structure of the so-called normal eye, I have given it a structure that proves to be transparent, that can be compared to the transparent-colorless glass. I find nothing in the normal eye that indicates that the external world is qualitatively changed in any way. But I must not conduct this investigation with the ordinary concepts that I have in everyday consciousness, but with the imaginative consciousness that can truly penetrate the structures of the eye.

For the imaginative consciousness, a so-called normal eye is a transparent organ. An eye that is partially colorblind proves to be comparable to colored glasses for the imaginative consciousness, as something that does, however, make a change in the “subject”.

Thus, by conceiving of subjectivity in a higher sense, one comes precisely to regard the sensory apparatus in the broadest sense as that which can be compared to the transparent, which is precisely designed in such a way that it suspends the production of sensory qualities within itself. One learns to recognize as pure fantasy the idea that in this ideationally transparent sensory apparatus – which is precisely arranged in such a way that it cancels out any production of the sense qualities within itself – something could arise that would first evoke sense qualities, that would be there for something other than the sense qualities.

As I said, I only want to point in this direction. And at the same time, I want to point out that ordinary philosophizing should be aimed at saying: the facts of the world, when examined without prejudice, show me results that are simply insoluble for ordinary mind-consciousness; the facts themselves show me that I must go beyond this ordinary mind-consciousness. It is not honest to conclude, let us say, from the fact of partial color blindness that color qualities are subjective. For every such conclusion contains some logical error that can always be somehow demonstrated. It would be honest to say: one simply does not come to any result with ordinary philosophizing if one wants to solve the difficulty that arises from the comparison of partial color blindness with the vision of the so-called normal eye. The usual consciousness has the task, at this point, of presenting the difficulties and saying, “There they are.” And if one were to become truly aware of the scope of logic, of real-logical thinking within consciousness, one would, I might say, find problems lying everywhere and say, There is one more, insoluble for ordinary consciousness, the second, the third --- and would be glad that in many respects ordinary philosophy is nothing more than a hint at problems and a creation of an atmosphere of waiting for these problems to be solved from a higher level of consciousness. It is only the urge to come to terms with ordinary consciousness that spreads a fog over the problems and does not want to admit that one can only raise the problems with it and that one must point out that the human soul must now undergo a development and exercises to solve these problems. The law of specific sensory energies is certainly not something that can be dealt with within ordinary consciousness.

As I said, I only wanted to point out the main point of the discussions on the subject of colors, and to point out that, above all, philosophy and also philosophical physiology, philology and so on, in the present day would need a very conscientious delineation of what they actually bring before ordinary consciousness through their thinking.

This is the one thing I would like to draw attention to, as I said, quite inadequately. It should only point in one particular direction; but more cannot be done in such a short discussion.

The second point I would like to make – again, purely from a methodological point of view – is the problem of categories that arises here. Of course, one could talk for hours about the categorial nature of human thought, but I would like to point out just one thing for now: within the actual table of categories, “subjectivity” and “objectivity” do not appear at all. And the fact that within the actual category table, the actual, the original category table, “subject” and “object” do not occur at all, this in itself constitutes a kind of proof of the essence of categorical thinking: if one takes the categories in the way not as they arise from some sort of proof, but simply, I might say, as they are derived from logic, then, by dint of being posited, they must be applicable to that which is above 'subjective' and 'objective'. That to which the categories are applicable must be supersubjective and superobjective. But the fact that the categories are applied by man himself is a clear proof that in categorical thinking there is not a subjective, but a subjective-objective.

This is the problem that Goethe also thought about so much. And the way he thought, which led him to always seek out the point where subjectivity and objectivity disappear for the human being in human experience, this endeavor actually made him the opposite of Kant.

Of course it is perfectly true that, as has been said, one could also work out of Kant in a positive sense; but one can work out of everything in the world in a positive way, even out of the greatest error! For there is nothing in the world from which one cannot also extract something positive. We have this positivity, this seeking out of the positive, listed among the basic exercises for those who want to attain higher knowledge. I need only remind you: you will find it discussed in the second part of my “Occult Science”. Of course, this should not blind us to the recognition of aberrations. And finally, if we consider the historical, we can say that a great deal has been worked out positively from Kant. There are not only the critical Kant philologists, not only the neo-Kantians of the likes of Liebmann, Volkelt and so on, but there is the very active Marburg School – Cohen, Cassirer, Dilthey and so on – which tried to work out the positive from Kant in a certain sense.

Now, I have shown how little this 'positive elaboration from Kantianism' can lead to a realistic view: in my 'Riddles of Philosophy', where I also briefly discussed these efforts of the Marburg School. So it is also the case with the category problem that it is necessary to present it correctly in its entire inner essence before the soul in order to see how, precisely through the category problem, the question of the “subjective” in contrast to the “objective” cannot be posed as it has been done by more recent philosophy under the influence of Kantianism. This almost epistemological harnessing to subjectivity is something that has introduced countless unjustified ideas into our modern philosophy and caused us to lose ideas that were already there and that, if developed in a correspondingly straight line, could have led to something quite fruitful.

I must repeatedly draw attention to the fact – which I have already done several times – that an extraordinarily talented 19th-century philosopher, Franz Brentano, published the first volume of his “Psychology” in 1874. It is basically an ingenious book. This volume of Brentano's “Psychology” was published in the spring of 1874. He promised the second volume for the fall of the same year. The three following volumes were then to appear shortly thereafter. Brentano had initially calculated this “psychology from an empirical point of view” to consist of five volumes. The first volume was only a preparation. In it, however, there is a highly remarkable passage in which Brentano indicates how he was in fact aiming at the most significant psychological problems. He says: If all modern thinking should lead only to the examination of how representations arise and fade away, how they associate with each other, how memory is formed, and the like, and if one could only come to uncertainty about about the actual psychological questions of Plato and Aristotle, for example, whether the soul remains when its external physical body decays, then one would not have gained much for the needs of man through modern science! Well, from everything else that Brentano suggests in the first volume of his “Psychology from an Empirical Point of View,” one can already see how he wanted to bring the problem through his five volumes to these fundamental questions of Plato and Aristotle.

The strange thing is that the second volume did not appear in the fall. It did not appear the next year either. And in the nineties, Brentano promised once again that he would now set about creating at least a kind of surrogate in a kind of descriptive psychology. So the second volume of “Psychology” was supposed to appear in 1874. Nothing appeared until the nineties; then a second promise appeared, but was not fulfilled! Franz Brentano died in Zurich a few years ago. The promise has not been fulfilled to this day. It has remained with the first volume of “Psychology from an Empirical Point of View.” Why? Because Brentano, in his Privatdozentenschrift, posited the sentence, “Philosophy has to follow the same methods that are applied in natural science,” because Brentano wanted to remain true to this methodological sentence that he had posited at the time, and with which one could not make any progress. Brentano was much too honest a nature to want to make headway by any other means than by the means of the external scientific method. Therefore, he simply remained silent about what came after the first volume.

I have expressed this in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Mysteries of the Soul). Brentano's pupil Kraus has indeed said that there were all sorts of other reasons why Brentano did not publish the later volumes; but it must be said that if the reasons were only those that Kraus pointed out, then Brentano must have been a real philistine. And he certainly was not that. He was a personality who followed the impulses of his inner being and only those impulses! But there was something in Brentano that at least gave him hope that one could penetrate into the things of the world. And basically every such philosopher – and there are few who have had this hope in a well-founded way in modern times – has turned against Kant, and of course Franz Brentano as well.

There was something in him that justified this hope. And I find that in a concept that, I might say, occasionally emerges from Brentano's philosophy, and which he borrowed in the sense of an older philosophy – of the kind that still drew from reality, as I suggested this morning: it is the concept of intentional inwardness, which he applies to the concepts of cognition and perception.

This concept must be formulated. Then, from there, one will get an approximation of what I just hinted at: to examine the extent to which the human sense organ is a self-extinguishing one, to which one must not ascribe that it could be the producer of sense qualities. And this concept – now not of the real interiority of some process, but of intentional interiority – contains within itself the life of pointing, which then becomes observable for the imaginative conceiving. And this life of pointing, which is given with the concept of intentional inwardness, then brings the possibility of grasping what, since Johannes Müller, the physiologist from the first half of the 19th century, has been so inadequately grasped in the doctrine of “specific sensory energies”. So that one would like to say that the comparison with the transparent, colorless glass is not quite appropriate for the reason that one has to imagine not an inanimate colorlessness, thus a self-abolition, but a living and precisely through its liveliness and thereby standing in a corresponding process within, which allows an objective experience by not taking in the objective, but by grasping out of itself the process of pointing through and in pointing to this objective.

I have found what lies in a renewal of this concept of intentional interiority, in the sense of a modern world view, only in some recent American philosophers who—probably even without knowing the concept I have just mentioned—try to grasp the continuity of human consciousness. Let us say, for example, that in the twenty-ninth year of life a person looks back, with the help of memory, on what he went through in the eighteenth year of life. Then, if we grasp it inwardly, what returns to the person in the twenty-ninth year of life is something similar to what could be described as an intentional innesein. And in relation to this process, this concept appears again in some recent American epistemologists.

It is precisely in such phenomena that one can see how conceptual work is alive in contemporary philosophical endeavor. But this work must become honest in the way I have described, by coming to show clearly that problems exist; but ordinary consciousness, ordinary intellectual activity, can only pose the problems; and now one must move on to the solution of the problems. If one were to develop scientific honesty in this way, it would be the basis for moving on to the imaginative and the other stages of knowledge.

These are only very inadequate, methodological suggestions.

When my “Philosophy of Freedom” was printed in 1894, I personally handed the book over to Eduard von Hartmann. At the time, I was very keen to engage in a scientific discussion with this man about the fundamental views on which the structure of ideas in my book was based. My expectations in this regard seemed justified, since Eduard von Hartmann had been truly friendly in his approach to my literary work from the very beginning. Every time I sent him my writings published before the “Philosophy of Freedom,” he delighted me with often extensive written responses. In 1889 I had the opportunity of a long conversation with him, the subject-matter of which was the epistemological questions agitating the philosophical world at that time. And I expected much from a discussion of my book, particularly because, on the one hand, I was a warm admirer of the idealism of his philosophy, an attentive observer of his treatment of important vital questions, and, on the other hand, his decided opponent in all essentials of the epistemological foundation of a world view. In one important point, however, I was in complete agreement with him: the philosophical ethics of unselfish devotion of the human soul to the historical process of humanity as an ethical motive. Of course, I could not be taken in by the naive belief that I could convert the creator of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” to my points of view in fundamental matters. But Eduard von Hartmann was always inclined to respond in a truly loving way to views that were contrary to his own; and his responsiveness led to those fruitful confrontations that are desirable in the field of world-view striving. Besides, even then it was far from my mind to make the estimation of a personality dependent on the extent to which I could be an opponent or a supporter of his ideas. The esteem in which I held Eduard von Hartmann led me to ask him in 1891 to accept the dedication of my small writing: “Truth and Science. Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom”. He agreed. And so I was able to have the words printed on the second page of this writing in all sincerity: “Dr. Eduard von Hartmann in warm admiration dedicated by the author.” This happened despite the fact that Eduard von Hartmann had to completely reject the content of the writing from the point of view of his worldview.

I was not mistaken in my expectations regarding a discussion of the “Philosophy of Freedom.” For a few weeks after the presentation of the book, Eduard von Hartmann not only honored me with a friendly letter, but he also sent me the copy of the book that he had received, with his comments and objections, some of which went into great detail. He had entered them almost page by page into the book. At the end he had summarized his overall impression in a few sentences. He had been so sharp in his judgment that I could see in his words the fate that my world view would have to meet within contemporary thought. By concluding the present remarks with a discussion of this judgment, it will be possible for me to show how, from the beginning of my literary career, I strove to establish the epistemological foundation for what I later attempted to present in a series of writings as “spiritual science” or anthroposophy and on whose development I continue to work to this day.

In the 1880s, when I began my writing career, people were confronted with a world view that had basically blocked any access to a world of true reality for human cognition. It seemed necessary to me, above all, to strive for a scientifically sound epistemological basis in matters of world view. The opinions one encountered in this field at that time could be characterized from a myriad of contemporary writings. The one of the poet and philosopher Robert Hamerling shall be cited here. This again for the reason that I found myself in the most fundamental epistemological questions in complete opposition to this personality, whom I highly revered and esteemed. Robert Hamerling was writing his significant “Atomistik des Willens” (Atomism of the Will) at that time. Right at the beginning of this book, we encounter the following thought: “Certain stimuli produce a smell in our olfactory organ... Thus a rose has no scent unless there is a smeller to smell it. Certain vibrations of the air produce a sound in our ear. Thus a sound has no existence unless there is an ear to hear it. The shot of a gun would not resound if no one heard it... Anyone who grasps this will understand what a naive fallacy it is to believe that in addition to the view or idea we call “horse”, there is another, the real “horse”, of which our view is a kind of image. Outside of me there is only – let me repeat it – only the sum of those conditions which cause an idea to arise in my mind that I call a “horse.” Hamerling adds to these sentences: “If this does not make sense to you, dear reader, and if your ‘mind’ rears up before this fact like a shy horse, then do not read a single line further; leave this and all other books dealing with philosophical and scientific matters unread; for you lack the necessary ability to grasp a fact impartially and hold it in your thoughts.” The thoughts that Hamerling expresses were so much a part of the thinking habits of epistemologists in the second half of the nineteenth century that as early as 1879 Gustav Theodor Fechner wrote about them in his book “Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht” (“The Day View Compared to the Night View”): “They are the thoughts of the whole thinking world around me. No matter how much and about what they may quarrel, philosophers and physicists, materialists and idealists, Darwinians and anti-Darwinians, orthodox and rationalists all join hands in it. It is not a building block, but a cornerstone of today's world view... What we think we see and hear in the world around us is all just our inner appearance, an illusion that one can praise oneself for, as I read recently; but it remains an illusion. Light and sound in the external world, ruled by mechanical laws and forces and not yet penetrated by consciousness, are only blind, mute waves that cross the ether and the air from more or less agitated material points, and only when they reach the protein coils of our brain, or rather only when they reach a certain point of it, do they become visible through the spiritualist magic of this medium. and air, and only when they encounter the protein coils of our brain, or rather only when they encounter a certain point of it, are they transformed by the spiritualist magic of this medium into luminous, sounding vibrations. The reason, essence, and details of this magic are debated; the fact is agreed upon; and of all the theories of thought and knowledge, in which philosophy now wants to exhaust and empty itself, as if it wanted to give birth to another philosophy, , none of them leads to doubting the correctness of this fact, unless it is to declare the doubt insoluble or to shatter the world into tiny specks of dust that illuminate only themselves but not the world."

For anyone who has kept his thinking far removed from such considerations, they may appear to be worthless fantasies. In the individual sciences and in activities more closely related to everyday life, they do not arise in such a way that one would have to take them into account. But anyone who wants to have a say in matters of world view must deal with them. In the second volume of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” – in the section “The World as Illusion” – one finds a detailed presentation of the most essential forms in which these considerations have been expressed in recent times. Thirty years ago it would have been fruitless to place oneself in the current direction of thought with a Weltanschhauung without taking a stand on these considerations. For it was on this ground that judgments were formed as to whether a world-view had a legitimate starting-point or not. Gideon Spicker, who wrote a stimulating work on 'Lessing's World-View' and then published the two significant volumes 'From the Cloister to the Academic Chair' and 'At the Turning-point of the Christian World-Period', wrote to me wrote to me in 1886, after the publication of my “Epistemology of the Goethean World View”, that it would be necessary to finally stop constantly pondering the question of how and within what limits man can know. It would be better to start to really know something. But the observation of the time conditions in this field made it seem hopeless to come up with a worldview that did not advance its secure epistemological foundation.

The most diverse formulations of Schopenhauer's sentence: the world is my representation, presented itself at that time in all possible variations. Volkelt, the subtle dissector of Kant, the judicious author of the epistemological book “Erfahrung und Denken” (Experience and Thought), wrote at that time: “The first fundamental proposition that the philosopher must clearly realize is that our knowledge extends to nothing more than our ideas. Our perceptions are the only things we directly experience; and precisely because we experience them directly, not even the most radical doubt can rob us of the knowledge of them. By contrast, knowledge that goes beyond our perceptions – I am using this term here in the broadest sense, so that it includes all mental activity – is not protected from doubt. Therefore, at the beginning of philosophizing, all knowledge that goes beyond the representations must be explicitly presented as open to doubt.” Such assertions had become self-evident truths for philosophers in the last third of the nineteenth century; they still are for many today who are to be heard when it comes to judging whether a world view is based on legitimate ground or not.

One must familiarize oneself with the way of thinking that leads to such assertions if one wants to have a say in matters of world view in our time. It seemed to me that such familiarization showed that the fundamental questions about the process of knowledge must be posed quite differently from the way they are by many epistemologists, if the train of thought that is taken in such questions is not to lead to one standing at the end before a self-dissolution of that train of thought. To seek clarity in this area, clarity about the value and justification of the ideas under consideration, was the task I sought to solve through the research presented in my booklet “Truth and Science” and in my book “Philosophy of Freedom”. “Truth and Science” was intended as a ‘philosophizing consciousness coming to an understanding with itself’. This is also the title of the work as printed in the doctoral dissertation, which already contains its essential content.

At the time when I wrote these writings, I believed, and I still believe today, that the fundamental error of many epistemologies is to be found in the fact that the process of knowledge is viewed quite wrongly at its very root. One first thinks of the opposite: man and the world. One imagines that the world has an effect on man. The latter receives impressions from it. From these impressions, the world view in which he lives imaginatively is formed. From this thought, it is an almost natural progression to the opinion that everything that occurs within human consciousness is only a product of consciousness. Any thing or being of an external world lies beyond consciousness; for only when that which remains unknown, unconscious, of the external world is taken up by consciousness does it become a human world view. What things or beings are like outside of consciousness is a question that goes beyond the human capacity for knowledge. This mode of thought appears in various philosophies, tied up in tangles of concepts that are often thought of in such an unoriginal form, so far removed from their source, that some who have become accustomed to them cannot help but consider anyone who wants to reduce these concepts to their simple form to be a dilettante.

It cannot be denied that the train of thought described appears so firmly established from a certain point of view that an objection becomes almost impossible, and that Hamerling could say with some justification that anyone who does not accept this view lacks the ability to perceive a fact impartially and to retain it in thought. My aim was not to refute or criticize this way of thinking in the usual sense. I did not ask the question: to what extent is this line of thought incorrect? Rather, I tried to answer the other question exhaustively: to what extent is it correct? And it became clear to me that the epistemologists had made the mistake of not completing the answer. They had stopped halfway. A further progression leads from their starting point to different results than those asserted by them. Anyone with a sense for certain more subtle laws of human logic and psychology knows that one very often fails to recognize the truth value of a thought by allowing oneself to be captivated by refuting ideas that arise prematurely in the soul. In this way, fatal traps arise for an unbiased way of looking at things, which can prevent one from arriving at the right cognitive goals. In contrast, it is often better to immerse oneself in a train of thought and follow its course. If one does not lose sight of the scope and range of the individual thought processes, and does not allow oneself to be overwhelmed by the striving for one-sidedness that so many trains of thought entail, then even one-sided and imperfect thoughts can lead to the realm of truth.

Starting from such premises, I tried to arrive at epistemological results. What I found seems to me to be completely certain even today. The way man is placed in the world, he must admit to himself that his world picture is given to him as the essence of his organization demands. In this fundamental idea one can know oneself to be in agreement with Kantians, neo-Kantians, physiologists and their followers. One can profess with them: what appears to human consciousness occurs in such a way as the conditions of the perceiving human being demand. If one now clings to this idea and develops it one-sidedly in thought, without connecting with the reality of the human being in the progression, then one blocks access to a true grasp of the capacity for knowledge. I have tried to explain this in detail in my two aforementioned writings. The first form in which man's world view is given can be followed by a spiritual process in man's inner being that transforms this world view in that it deprives it of its subjective character and allows cognition to submerge into the objective. One can, of course, be of the opinion that this process is only a continuation, a kind of mental or methodical revision of the given world view. If one holds this view, then one will be able to see nothing in all that can occur within consciousness other than a kind of effect of consciousness of the true reality that remains beyond knowledge. I have now endeavored to show that cognition, in its further progress, overcomes the form given to the world picture by the human organization at its first appearance. However, in order to be aware of this fact, cognition must reach an activity that I have called that in pure thinking. This activity is denied from the outset by many epistemologists. But one could, to paraphrase Hamerling, say: anyone who does not accept the idea that an activity is possible in the inner thought process that moves only in inner, living thought processes and that uses the ideas of the sensory world no longer as images but only as illustrative images, lacks the ability to grasp a fact impartially and to hold it in thought. My epistemological research led to the conclusion that man, through his organization, first cuts himself out of true reality into an incomplete one, so to speak, and that he reintroduces himself into this true reality in the further progress of his knowledge, in the elevation to pure thinking. The aim of the books I have mentioned is to show that human knowledge remains unrecognized if we try to view it as an image that is indifferent to the objective process of the world, and then have to admit that it cannot be one. Knowledge presented itself to me as a developmental process rooted in the human being, leading this being from one stage to another. In his cognitive interaction with the external world, the human being initially experiences his own nature incompletely, in that his organization presents him with an incomplete picture of reality. In the further inner experience, he transforms the first form of his world view, which is an incomplete image of the external world, so that he stands in the true reality with his inner experience. Seen in this light, the process of knowledge appears different at its very root than it does to many epistemologists. A comparison can clarify what is being considered here. It is, of course, meant with all the limitations that apply to all comparisons. One can examine the substantial nature of the cereal plant with regard to the extent to which cereals are suitable as human food due to the substances they contain. This investigation can be carried out in a very scientific way. And yet, from a certain point of view, it can be said that such an investigation says nothing about the nature of the plant, insofar as this is expressed in the processes that lead to growth, flowering and fruit bearing. However, the inner nature of the plant is revealed in these processes. And what the plant becomes as human food is, in a sense, a side effect of the plant's nature. The human cognitive process is, by its very nature, a link in human development. What happens through it has its significance within this development. The fact that at a certain stage of this development, a reflection of the external world also comes to light in the activity of thoughts and ideas is not peculiar to the cognitive process in a similar sense to the entry of grain into human nutrition. If one thinks one must pose the main question of epistemology in such a way that one only looks at it: to what extent is cognition a reflection of an external world, then one shifts the consideration just as one would shift the main botanical question if one wanted to seek the essence of the plant through food chemistry.

In the final section of the second volume of my “Riddles of Philosophy” one finds a “sketchy presentation of an anthroposophy” (written in 1914). In it I attempt to show that a completely organic progression must be conceived, from the basic epistemological views of my writing 'Truth and Knowledge' and my 'Philosophy of Freedom', to the content of 'spiritual science' or 'anthroposophy', as I have further developed them. But anyone who reads these earlier writings of mine with an open mind will be able to see that the results developed in them have been obtained through purely philosophical research, and that therefore agreement with what is asserted in them is not dependent on the position that someone takes on the “spiritual science” I represent. In those books I consciously used only the means of thought and methodology that one is accustomed to finding in philosophical works. Thus it seems to me that the kind of research I call “spiritual science” has a secure philosophical foundation in my epistemological presentations, but that the philosophical judgment of this foundation can be kept quite independent of the spiritual-scientific superstructure. But for me there is a clear path from my epistemology to “spiritual science”. Anyone who is able to see without bias what kind of research underlies the content of my later books or the brief presentations in the first and fourth books of this journal will find that the possible epistemological difficulties are cleared up by my earlier writings.

In my spiritual scientific writings, I present those cognitive processes that lead, through spiritual experience and observation, to ideas about the spiritual world in the same way that the senses and the mind bound to them lead to ideas about the sensory world and the human life in it, then, in my opinion, this could only be presented as scientifically justified if it could be proved that the process of pure thinking itself proves to be the first stage of those processes by which supersensible knowledge is attained. I believe I have provided this proof in my earlier writings. I have tried to show in the most diverse ways that man, by living in the pure process of thinking, does not merely perform a subjective activity that is turned away from and indifferent to world processes, but that pure thinking is an event that leads beyond subjective human activity, in which the essence of the objective world lives. It lives in it in such a way that man, in true knowledge, grows together with the objective essence of the world. Anyone who is willing to consider my earlier writings impartially, including the introductory essay I wrote in the 1880s about Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's German National Literature, will feel the weight of the sentence I wrote in 1897 in my book 'Goethe's World View'. “He who speaks of the coldness of the world of ideas can only think ideas, not experience them. He who lives the true life in the world of ideas feels within him the essence of the world at work in a warmth that cannot be compared with anything.” In my recently published book, ‘The Riddle of Man,’ I have described the ‘seeing consciousness’ — in reference to Goethe's idea of the ‘contemplative power of judgment.’ By this I understand the human being's ability to bring a spiritual world to immediate contemplation and observation. My earlier writings treat pure thinking in such a way that it is evident that I include it among the activities of the “contemplative consciousness”. In this pure thinking I see the first, still shadowy, revelation of the stages of spiritual knowledge. Everywhere in my later writings one can see that I regard only those as higher spiritual powers of knowledge that a person develops in the same way as pure thinking. I reject as belonging to the domain of the spiritual powers of cognition every human activity that leads to mere thinking, and I recognize only that which leads beyond pure thinking. No supposed form of knowledge that does not recognize pure thinking as a kind of model and that does not, in the same sphere, possess the same level of deliberation and inner clarity as thinking that is sharp in its ideas, can lead to a real spiritual world. My position regarding the spiritual powers of human cognition, which presupposes the lawfulness of pure thinking for all cognition, placed me in a special position with regard to the kind of thinking that is sometimes called mysticism. If we define mysticism as a form of knowledge through which a person experiences their own being as connected to the essence of the world, then I must apply this definition to my own understanding of true knowledge. I must say that genuine mysticism can only be attained if the epistemological foundations that I believe I have developed are recognized. On the other hand, when I look at what is often referred to as mysticism and what precisely avoids the composure and clarity that characterize the thought process, then I see myself compelled to characterize such mysticism as I did in my book “Goethe's Worldview”: “Mysticism aims to find the source of things, the Godhead, in the human soul. The mystic, like Goethe, is convinced that the essence of the world will reveal itself to him in inner experiences. Only, immersion in the world of ideas is not considered the inner experience that matters. He has roughly the same view of the clear ideas of reason as Kant. For him, they stand outside the creative whole of nature and belong only to the human mind. The mystic therefore seeks to attain the highest knowledge by awakening special powers. He seeks to develop unusual states, for example through ecstasy, to achieve a higher kind of insight... The mystic immerses himself in a world of unclear sensations and feelings; Goethe immerses himself in the clear world of ideas. The mystics despise the clarity of ideas. They consider this clarity to be superficial. They have no inkling of what people feel who have the gift of immersing themselves in the living world of ideas. It freezes the mystic when he surrenders himself to the world of ideas.” This mysticism, which I have to characterize in this way, I must place far outside the realm in which I seek the powers of knowledge that open up the spiritual world. This mysticism drives the life of the human soul into a realm in which it becomes more dependent on the human organization than it is in ordinary sensory perception and in intellectual activity. But the true spiritual faculties of knowledge lead the life of the soul into a realm in which it acquires greater independence from the organization than in sensory perception and imagination, and which is entered with pure thinking even in its simplest form. The cognitive activity by which I think I am building the “spiritual science” has nothing in common with the dreamy, half-conscious soul-life of false mysticism. Unfortunately, the opponents and also those who want to be followers of this spiritual science all too often confuse it with false mysticism, although this confusion is that of a thing with its opposite. Those who do not cling to words and fashion arbitrary creations out of them will see everywhere in my writings where I am aiming at the relatively justified part of the definition of mysticism and where I am rejecting the confusions of false mysticism.

If the process of cognition is recognized as an experience of human development, then one can no longer admit the possibility of pointing to a reality that lies beyond all consciousness by means of mere logical conclusions or hypotheses, through concepts and ideas derived from the perceptions of the senses. One can then speak of a world that lies beyond the senses only in the sense that such a world reveals itself to the “visionary consciousness” in the same way as the world of the senses reveals itself to sensory perception. By making this view my own, I found myself in complete opposition to those philosophies that reject any experience of the realms of reality that lie beyond the sensory world and at most want to admit that there is a logical necessity to hypothetically assume a reality that is alien to consciousness. Within these philosophies, Eduard von Hartmann's “transcendental realism” occupies a particularly characteristic position. From his point of view, the given world picture of man, including all experiences attainable in thinking, appears as the result of the subjective human organization. But Eduard von Hartmann emphasizes the necessity, following from the nature of this world picture itself, to hypothetically conclude from the subjective, conscious to an objective reality, which, however, must be decidedly thought of as remaining in the field of the unconscious. In my “Philosophy of Freedom” I try to show that this is a mistaken way of arriving at a metaphysics. I strove for a unified world view and attributed the apparent dualistic form of it to the fact that man, in mere sensory perception, separates an imperfect form of this image from its whole essence, only to overcome this imperfection in the further progress of cognition. Eduard von Hartmann asserts an epistemological dualism that cannot be overcome by human consciousness and that makes all ideas about the nature of the world those that are conceived in terms of dualism. From my point of view, the metaphysical is that which is not unconscious by nature, but is only not seen by the bearer of consciousness as long as the powers of perception are not laid bare, which allow that which lies beyond sense perception to be experienced just as physical reality is for the senses. It hardly needs to be emphasized that the one who speaks in this way of the supersensible does not claim that with the exercise of the “seeing consciousness” all the secrets of the spiritual world are suddenly revealed to man. It is only that knowledge is extended beyond the sense world into a realm that offers explanatory foundations for this sense world and for human life in this world. The essential thing is to enter into the mode of existence of the spiritual, even if one must be convinced that the part of the spiritual world that can be recognized first is only a small area in its wide expanse. Nor should it be overlooked that the investigation of the details of the spiritual world truly requires no less care and scientific conscientiousness than that of the physical world.

In elaborating my two works based on epistemology, it seemed to me that the rejection of any metaphysics that was merely imagined and filled with content that could not be spiritually experienced was to be linked to Eduard von Hartmann's transcendental realism because I warmly approved of the way in which, regardless of this epistemological point of view, this philosopher was able to demonstrate the spirit in the form of the idea in all phenomena of the world and of life. What compelled me to always recognize Hegel's philosophy in its full value, and yet to lead my own understanding beyond it, applied to me in another respect to Eduard von Hartmann as well. In Hegel I saw how he had grasped the content of thinking in its spiritual reality, but was only able to hold it in such a form that thinking could not become the living initial link in a spiritual process of knowledge that opens up the supersensible world. In Hegel's system, the idea is spiritual reality; but as such it is only a means of expressing the sense-perceptible world and the life in it. Therefore, Hegel's philosophy has nothing to say about a spiritual world; its content is only the world of nature and history.

My position in relation to Hartmann's philosophy was that I was able to agree with his idealistic illumination of the sensory world and human life in it in many things; but that I had to see in his fundamental epistemological views not only a only a theoretical contrast to what I consider to be truth, but also a way of thinking that practically deprives human thought of the possibility of discovering and applying the cognitive powers of the “visionary consciousness” that lie dormant in the soul. That is why, in the second volume of my exposition of Goethe's scientific writings (in Kürschner's German National Literature) in 1887, I was able to write the following sentences about Eduard von Hartmann's idealistic illumination of the sensory and historical world with the utmost sincerity: “With his objective idealism, Eduard von Hartmann stands squarely on the ground of the Goethean worldview... He does not want to be a mere idealist. But where he needs something positive in order to explain the world, he does call on the idea for help... But not much is achieved by distinguishing between the conscious and the unconscious... But one must tackle the idea in its objectivity, in its full content; one must not only see that the idea is unconsciously effective, but what this effectiveness is. If Hartmann had stopped at the idea that the idea is unconscious, and had explained the world from this unconscious, that is to say from a one-sided characteristic of the idea, he would have added a new monotonous system to the many systems which derive the world from some abstract formal principle. And his first major work cannot be said to be entirely free from this monotony. But Eduard von Hartmann's mind is too intense, too comprehensive and penetrating to have failed to recognize that the idea cannot be grasped merely as unconscious; rather, one must delve into what one has to address as unconscious, one must go beyond this quality to its concrete content and derive the world of individual phenomena from it.

Since I was in such a frame of mind and in such scientific opposition to Eduard von Hartmann, his overall judgment of my “Philosophy of Freedom” seemed significant to me in 1894. Given the position that Hartmann's philosophy occupies in the intellectual world, it cannot seem offensive that I share this judgment, which was intended only for me at the time, here and discuss it. This may be considered all the more justified since it is clear from the above that I have a high regard for the personality and philosophical significance of Hartmann. At the time, I already foresaw in this judgment the difficulties that my world view would have to face within contemporary thought. All the confusion with other ways of thinking, which I myself reject and which my striving for is also thought to meet with in the unintentional – and now also intentional – combating of it: they were all basically anticipated in Hartmann's judgment. But I had before me the judgment of a personality whom I esteemed and whose scientific seriousness I could acknowledge, despite her rejecting my way of thinking. Eduard von Hartmann wrote: “In this book, Hume's phenomenalism, absolute in itself, is not reconciled with Berkeley's phenomenalism, based on God; nor is this immanent or subjective phenomenalism reconciled at all with Hegel's transcendental panlogism, nor is Hegel's panlogism reconciled with Goethe's individualism. There is an unbridgeable gulf between any two of these components. Above all, however, it is overlooked that phenomenalism leads with inevitable consistency to solipsism, absolute illusionism and agnosticism, and nothing is done to prevent this slide into the abyss of unphilosophy, because the danger is not recognized at all.” - What is it in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom’ that Eduard von Hartmann seeks to attack with this judgment? Absolute phenomenalism, as it was realized in Hume's philosophy, appears to have been overcome by the attempt to characterize thinking in such a way that, through this, the phenomenal character of the sensory world view is lost and it is made into an appearance of an objective world; Berkeley's subjective phenomenalism loses its justification in the face of this view , in that it is shown that in thinking man grows together with the objective world and that therefore the assertion loses all meaning that world phenomena do not exist outside of being perceived; in contrast to Hegel's Panlogism, thinking is seen as the initial link for purely spiritual human cognitive abilities, not as the final link of ordinary consciousness, which only reflects the sensory world in shadowy ideas; Goethe's individualism is developed by showing how the understanding of human freedom is only possible through a world view that is based on the epistemological foundations of the “Philosophy of Freedom”. Only when the objective essence of the world of thought is recognized and the soul connection of man with ethical motives as a supersubjective experience comes to light, can the essence of freedom be grasped. It is this understanding that I also tried to make culminate in the presentation of my book. The accusation of solipsism against my world view is unfounded because it assigns thinking its place in the objective course of the world, thus directly pointing to the means of knowledge that makes the fall into solipsism impossible. Only someone who misjudges the reality value of the living thinking that I characterize can fall prey to the mention of the danger of absolute illusionism and agnosticism in relation to my “Philosophy of Freedom.” And this happens unconsciously, because they are foisting their view of thinking onto me. If one sees only what Eduard von Hartmann sees in thinking, then, upon rejecting transcendental realism, illusionism and agnosticism do indeed result, whereas my view of thinking leads precisely to making all illusionism and agnosticism impossible through the power and scope of thinking. And at the end of his judgment Eduard von Hartmann senses that my fundamental epistemological view leads out of the conceptual as a mere reflection of the sensible and historical world. For him, all philosophy and all possible striving for a worldview ends at this point; for me, it is the point where human cognitive powers enter the world of spiritual science. He calls this the “slide into the abyss of unphilosophy”; I characterize it, as I did in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Human Riddle), as the ascent from ordinary to “visionary” consciousness.

I shall explain later on that my arguments concerning the world view of Friedrich Nietzsche and Haeckel, as they appear in my writings from the 1890s, are a direct continuation of the path that leads from my “Philosophy of Freedom” to the “spiritual science” or “anthroposophy” that I advocate. Anyone who is bent on finding contradictions and then constructing a system of contradictions — perhaps a very spiteful system — will easily find contradictions in the structure of a world view if that world view itself is not based on words and word definitions in a formulaic way, but seeks to draw from the fullness of life with all its contradictions. Such a contradiction-fisherman could indeed reproach the world itself with its contradictions. However, some opponents of my world view are clearly prevented from properly assessing what they call contradictions by their obvious lack of knowledge of the development of philosophical science. Attacks on my world view, even from dubious quarters, cannot appear incomprehensible to me, since I was confronted a long time ago with the judgment in question from a serious and highly esteemed source, and I saw myself confronted with all the difficulties that this world view must face in many circles.

In the lectures so far, I have spoken of the capacities for supersensory knowledge and I have named them Imagination and Inspiration. Today I would like to say something about acquiring these capacities. At the moment I can only mention a few details. In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, you will find this presented in greater depth. Today, however, I would point out what is important in the context I have chosen for the present lecture. I have indicated that what I call Imagination with regard to knowledge of the world is attained through a development modeled on the memory process, only on another level. The importance of the memory process is that it retains in picture form what the human being encounters in outer experience.

Our first task will be to understand certain characteristics of the ordinary memory process, and then we must distill out what can be called pure memory in the true sense, also in ordinary life. One of the peculiarities of memory is that it tends to alter to a certain degree what has been experienced. Perhaps it is unnecessary to go into detail here, since most of you will be quite familiar with the fact that at times you can despair when you are relating something, and you hear from your own telling what has become of your experience by its passing through your memory. Even in ordinary life a certain self-education is necessary if we wish to come closer to pure memory, to the capacity to have these pictures ready at hand so that they faithfully render our experience. We can distinguish what happens with memory. On the one hand there is an activity of fantasy, quite justified, that goes on in an artistic direction. On the other hand there is a falsification of our experience. It should suffice for the moment to point out the difference between the fantasy tendency and the falsifying tendency, and that we must be able to experience this to maintain a healthy soul life. Certainly we must be aware of how memory is transformed by our fantasy, and how, when it is not subjected to such arbitrary action, when it is allowed to proceed according to a kind of natural similarity in the soul, it becomes increasingly faithful and true. In any case, both from the good tendency to artistic fantasy, as well as from the forces active in falsifying the memories—when we study it psychologically, we can recognize what is alive in the memory forces.

And out of these forces, something can take form that is no longer just memory. For example, one can point to certain mystical teachings that are in fact essentially falsified memory images; and yet we can profit from studying 'such images that have taken the form of earnest mystical experience. What concerns us at this moment, however, is what I have already indicated, that we can attain a power of the soul which is alive in the memory which can be metamorphosed into something else. This must happen in such a way that the original power of memory is led in the direction of inner faithfulness and truth, and not toward falsification. As I have said, when we repeatedly evoke easily surveyable mental images, which we intentionally combine out of their separate elements and then view as a whole, just as easily as the mathematical images: when we call up such images, hold them in our consciousness and dwell upon them, not so that we are fascinated by them, but so that at each moment we continue to hold them through an inner act of will—then gradually we succeed in transforming the memory process into something different, something of which we were previously unaware. The details are contained in the book I named, and also in Occult Science, an Outline.

If we continue long enough with such exercises (how long depends on the individual) and if we are in a position to expend sufficient soul energy on them, then we come to a point where we simply begin to experience pictures. The form of these pictures in the life of the soul is like that of memories. Gradually we win the capacity to live in such imaginations of our own making, although in their content they are not of our making. The exercise of this capacity results in imaginations rising up in the soul, and if we maintain a “mathematical” attitude of soul, we can make sure at any time whether we are being fooled by a suggestion or auto-suggestion, or are really living in that attitude of soul voluntarily. We begin to have mental images with the characteristic form of memory pictures but with a greater degree of intensity. Let me emphasize: at first these imaginations have the character of memory pictures. Only through inspiration do they become permeated with a more intense experience. At first they have the character of memory pictures, but of such a kind that we know their meaning does not relate to any experiences we have lived through externally since our birth. They do, however, express something just as pictorially as memory pictures express pictorially our personal experiences. They refer to something objective, yet we know that this objective something is not contained in the sphere which is surveyed by our memory. We are conscious that these imaginations contain a strong inner reality, yet at the same time we are aware that we are dealing with just images—just pictures of the reality. It is a matter of being able to distinguish these pictures from those of memory, in order that these imaginations remain pure, so that no foreign elements slip into them.

I will describe the outer process, but of course in just a few lectures one cannot go into any great detail. We may form a mental picture of an outer experience and we can see how in a sense the outer experience passes over into our organism, and—expressed abstractly—it then leads a further existence there, and can be drawn forth again as a memory picture. We notice that there is a certain dependence between what lives in the memory and the physical condition of the human organism. The memory is really dependent on our human organism right into the physical condition. In a way we pass on what we have experienced to our organism. It is even possible to give a detailed account of the continuation of the various pictures of our experience in the human organism. But this would be an entire spiritual-scientific chapter in itself. For our memories to remain pure and true, no matter how much our organism may participate in what lives on in the memory process, this involvement may not add anything of real content. Once mental pictures of an experience have been formed, nothing further should flow into the content of the memories.

If we are clear about this fact of memory life, we are then in a position to ascertain what it means when pictures appear in our consciousness that have the familiar character of memory pictures, but a content which does not relate to anything in our personal experience. In the process of experiencing imagination we realize the necessity of continually increasing the power of our soul. For what is it that we must really do? Normally our organism takes over the mental pictures we have formed from life and provides memory. Thereby the mental pictures do not just sink down into an abyss, if I may so express it, but are caught and held by our organism so that they can be reflected back again at any necessary moment. With imaginative pictures, this is just what should not be the case; we must be in a position to hold them through inner soul forces alone. Therefore it is necessary for us to acquire something that will make us stronger than we are ordinarily in receiving and retaining mental images. There are of course many ways to do this; I have described them in the books already named. I wish to mention just one of them. From what I now tell you, you will be able to see the relation between various demands of life which spring from anthroposophical spiritual science and their connection with the foundation of anthroposophical research.

Whoever uses his intellect to spin all kinds of theories about what he confronts as phenomena in the world (which of course can be extraordinarily interesting at times) will hardly find the power for imaginative activity. In this respect, certain developments in the intellectual life of the present day seem specifically suited to suppress the imaginative force. If we go further than simply taking the outer phenomena of the mineral-physical realm and connecting them with one another through the power of our intellect; if we begin to search for things that are supposed to be concealed behind the visible phenomena, with which we can make mental constructions, we will actually destroy our imaginative capacity.

Perhaps I may make a comparison. No doubt you have had some dealings with what could be called phenomenalism in the sense of a Goethean world view. In arranging experiments and observations, Goethe used the intellect differently from the way it is used in recent phases of modern thought. Goethe used the intellect as we use it in reading. When we read, we form a whole out of the individual letters. For instance, when we have a row of letters and succeed in inwardly grasping the whole, then we have solved a certain riddle posed by this row of individual letters. We would not think of saying: Here is a b, an r, an e, an a and a d—I will look at the b. As such, this isolated b tells me nothing in particular, so I have to penetrate further for what really lies behind the b. Then one could say: Behind this b there is concealed some mysterious “beyond,” a “beyond” that makes an impression on me and explains the b to me. Of course, I do not do this; I simply take a look at the succession of letters in front of me and out of them form a whole: I read bread. Goethe proceeds in the same way in regard to the individual phenomena of the outer world. For instance, he does not take some light phenomenon and begins to philosophize about it, wondering what states of vibration lie behind this phenomenon in some sort of “beyond.” He does not use his intellect to speculate what might be hiding behind the phenomenon; rather, he uses his intellect as we do when we “think” the letters together into a word. Similarly he uses the intellect solely as a medium in which phenomena are grouped—grouped in such a way that in their relation to one another they let themselves be “read.” So we can see that regarding the external physical-mineral phenomenological world, Goethe employs the intellect as what I would call a cosmic reading tool.

He never speaks of a Kantian “thing in itself” that must be sought behind the phenomena, something Kant supposed existed there. And so Goethe comes to a true understanding of phenomena—of what might be called the “letters” in the mineral-physical world. He starts with the archetypal or “Ur”-phenomenon, and then proceeds to more complex phenomena which he seeks either in observation or in experiments which he contrives. He "reads" what is spread out in space and time, not looking behind the phenomena, but observing them in such a way that they cast light on one another, expressing themselves as a whole. His other use of the intellect is to arrange experimental situations that can be “read”—to arrange experimental situations and then see what is expressed by them. When we adopt such a way of viewing phenomena and make it more and more our own, proceeding even further than Goethe, we acquire a certain feeling of kinship with the phenomena. We experience a belonging-together with the phenomena. We enter into the phenomena with intensity, in contrast to the way the intellect is used to pierce through the phenomena and seek for all kinds of things behind them—things which fundamentally are only spun-out theories. Naturally, what I have just said is aimed only at this theoretical activity.

We need to educate ourselves in phenomenology, to reach a “growing together with” the phenomena of the world around us. Next in importance is to acquire the ability to recall a fully detailed picture of the phenomena. In our present culture, most people's memories consist of verbal images. There comes a moment when we should not be dependent on verbal images: these only fill the memory so that the last memory connection is pushed up out of the subconscious into consciousness. We should progress toward a remembering that is really pictorial. We can remember, for instance, that as young rascals we were up to some prank or other—we can have a vivid picture of ourselves giving another fellow punches, taking him by the ear, cuffing him, and so on. When these pictures arise not just as faded memories, but in sharp outline, then we have strengthened the power we need to hold the imaginations firmly in our consciousness. We are related to these pictures in inner freedom just as we are to our ordinary memories. With this strengthened remembering, we grow increasingly interested in the outer world, and as a result the ultimate "living together with" all the various details of the outer world penetrates into our consciousness. Our memories take on the quality of being really objective, as any outer experience is, and we have the feeling that we could affectionately stroke them. Or one could say: These memory pictures become so lively that they could even make us angry. Please bear with me as I describe these things to you! It is the only thing I can do with our present language.

Then comes the next step: we must practice again and again eliminating these imaginations so that we can dive down again and again into an empty consciousness. If we bring such pictures into our consciousness at will and then eliminate them again in a kind of inner rhythm—meditating, concentrating, creating images, and then freeing ourselves of them—this will quicken powerfully the feeling of inner freedom in us. In this way we develop a great inner mobility of soul—exactly the opposite of the condition prevailing in psychopaths of various kinds. It really: is the exact opposite, and those who parallel what I have just described here with any kind of psychopathic state show that they simply have no idea of what I am talking about.

When we finally succeed in strengthening our forgetting—the activity which normally is a kind of involuntary activity—when now we control this activity with our will, we notice that what we knew before as an image of reality, as imagination, fills with content. This content shows us that what appears there in pictorial form is indeed reality, spiritual reality. At this point we have come to the edge of an abyss where, in a certain sense, spiritual reality shines across to us from the other side of existence. This spiritual reality is present in all physical sense reality. It is essential to develop a proper sense for the external world in order to have a correct relationship to these imaginations. Whoever wishes just to speculate about phenomena, to pierce them through, as it were, hoping to see what is behind them as some kind of ultimate reality—whoever does this, weakens his power to retain and deal with imaginations.

When we have attained a life of inspiration—that is, experiencing the reality of the spiritual world just as ordinarily we experience the physical world through our external senses—then we can say: now I finally understand what the process of remembering means. Remembering means (I will make a kind of comparison) that the mental images we have gained from our experiences sink down into our organism and act there as a mirror. The pictures we form in our minds are retained by the organism, in contrast to a mirror which just has to reflect, give back again what is before it. Thus we have the possibility of transforming a strictly reflective process into a voluntary process—in other words, what we have entrusted to memory can be reflected back from the entire organism and particularly from the nervous system. Through this process, what has been taken up by the organism in the form of mental pictures is held in such a way that we too cannot see “behind the mirror.” Looking inward upon our memories, we must admit that having the faculty of memory prevents us from having an inner view of ourself. We cannot get into our interior any more than we can get behind the reflective surface of a mirror.

Of course what I am telling you is expressed by way of comparisons, but these comparisons do portray the fact of the matter. We realize this when inspiration reveals these imaginations to us as pictures of a spiritual reality. At this moment the mirror falls away with regard to the imaginations. When this happens we have the possibility of true insight into ourselves, and our inner being appears to us for the first time in what is actually its spiritual aspect. But what do we really learn here?

By reading such mystics as Saint Theresa or Mechtild of Magdeburg, beautiful images are evoked, and from a certain point of view this is justified. One can enter into a truly devotional mood before these images. For someone who begins to understand what I have just described to you, precisely this kind of mystical visions cease to be what they very often are for the nebulous types of mystic: When someone comes to real inner vision, not in an abnormal way (as is the case with such mystics) but by the development of his cognitive faculty as I have described it, then he learns not only to describe a momentary aspect as Mechtild of Magdeburg, Saint Theresa and others do, but he learns to recognize what the real interior of the human organization is. If one wants to have real knowledge and not mystical intoxication, one must strive toward the truth and put it in place of their mist-shrouded images. (Of course, this may seem prosaic to the nebulous mystic.) When this is accomplished, the mirror drops away and one gains a knowledge, an inner vision of the lungs, diaphragm, liver, and stomach. One learns to experience the human organization inwardly. It is clear that Mechtild of Magdeburg and Saint Theresa also viewed the interior, but in their case this happened through certain abnormal conditions and their vision of the human interior was shrouded in all manner of mists. What they describe is the fog which the true spiritual investigator penetrates.

To a person who is incapable of accepting such things, it would naturally be a shock if, let's say hypothetically, a lofty chapter out of Mechtild were read and the spiritual researcher then told him: Yes, that is really what one sees when one comes to an inner vision of the liver or the kidneys. It is really so. For anyone who would rather it were otherwise, I can only say: That is the way it happens to be. On the other hand, for someone who has gained insight into the whole matter, this is for him the beginning of a true relation to the secrets of world existence. For now he learns the origin of what constitutes our human organization and at what depths they are to be recognized. He clearly recognizes how little we know of the human liver, the human kidneys, not to speak of other organs, when we merely cut open a corpse—or for that matter, when we cut open the living human organism in an operation—and get just the one-sided view of our organism.

There is the possibility not just to understand the human organism from the external, material side, but to see and understand it from the inside. We then have spiritual entities in our consciousness, and such entities show us that a human being is not so isolated as we might think—not just shut up inside his skin. On the contrary! Just as the oxygen I have in me now was first outside and is now working within me, in the same way—though extended over a long period of time—what is now working in me as my inner organization (liver, kidneys, and so on) is formed out of the cosmos. It is connected with the cosmos. I must look toward the cosmos and how it is constituted if I want to understand what is living in the liver, kidneys, stomach, and so on; just as I must look toward the cosmos and the make-up of the air if I want to understand what the substance is that is now working in my lungs, that continues to work on in the blood stream. You see, in true spiritual research we are not limited to separate pictures of separate organs but we come to know the connections between the human organism and the whole cosmos.

Not to be overlooked is the simple symbolic picture which we have already mentioned of the senses. We can in a way visualize our senses as “gulfs,” through which the outer world and its happenings flow into us. At the same time our senses continue inward as I have described them. Little by little we can see this activity from an inner point of view—the forming and molding activity that has worked on our nervous system since our birth. I have described the subjective experience of this activity as a life review, a life panorama, and we discover in the configuration of the nervous system an external pictorial form of what is really soul-spiritual. It can also be said that first we experience imaginations and then we see how these imaginations work in the formation of nerve substance. Of course this should not be taken in too broad a sense, since, as we know, nerve substance is also worked on before birth. I shall come back to this tomorrow. But essentially what I have said holds true. We can say: here is where the activity continues toward the inside; you can see exactly how it goes farther. It is the same activity, in a certain sense, that "engraves" itself into the nervous system. For the parts of the nervous system that are formed completely, this "engraving" activity can be seen streaming through the nerve paths. In childhood, however, for the parts that are still in the-process of being formed, this “engraving” acts as a real modeling force, a structuring proceeding out of imaginations. This leaves the rest of the human organism, about which we will speak shortly—what underlies the muscles, bones, and so on, also the physical basis of the nervous system—in fact, all of the organic tissue. At this point I should relate to you a certain experience I had; it will make this all a bit clearer.

I spoke once before the Theosophical Society about a subject I called “anthroposophy.” I simply set forth at that time as much of this anthroposophy as had revealed itself to my spiritual research. There was a request for these lectures to be printed and I set about doing this. In the process of writing them down, they turned into something different. Not that anything that had first been said was changed, but it became necessary to add to what was said by way of further explanation. It was also necessary to state the facts more precisely. This task would require a whole year. Now came another opportunity. There was again a general meeting of the Society and there was a request that the lectures should be ready for sale. So they had to get finished. I sent the first signature (16 pages) of the book Anthroposophy to the printer. The printing was rapidly done and I thought I would be able to continue writing. I did continue writing but more and more it became necessary to explain things more accurately. So a whole number of pages were printed. Then it happened that one signature was only filled up to page thirteen or fourteen and I had to continue writing to fill up all sixteen pages. In the meantime I became aware that in order to get this matter done the way I wanted to would require a more accurate, detailed development of certain mental processes, a very specific working out of imaginative, of inspirational cognition and then to apply these modes of cognition to these anthroposophical issues. And so I had to take a negative step, I dropped the whole idea of writing on Anthroposophy. It is still lying there today as it lay then—many pages.¹ For my intention was to make further investigations. Thus I became thoroughly acquainted with what I want to describe to you now. I can only describe it schematically at this time, but it is a sum total of many inner experiences that are really a cognitive method of investigating the human being.

It became increasingly clear to me that before one could finish the book called “Anthroposophy,” in the form intended at that time, one must have certain experiences of inner vision. One must first be able to take what one perceives as soul-spiritual activity working in the nervous system and carry it further inward, until one comes to the point where one sees the entire soul-spiritual activity—which one grasps in imagination and inspiration—crossing itself. This crossing point is really a line, in a vertical direction if looked at schematically. For certain phenomena the point lies farther up, for others farther down. In these lectures I can't describe this in detail, I just wanted to make a kind of cross section through the whole of it. Now because of this crossing, one is no longer free in exercising this activity. In fact, one was not altogether free before, as I have shown; now one is even less free. The whole situation undergoes a change. One is now being held strongly in an imaginative-inspired state. Expressed concretely, if one comes to an imagination of the eye by taking hold of visual sense-perception and the continuation into mental processes with imaginative-inspired cognition, then this activity proceeds inwardly and one comes to a kind of crossing, and with the activity first encompassing the eye another organ is encompassed, and that is the kidney.

The same applies to the other organs. In each case, when one carries one's imaginative-inspired activity into the body, one finds various relatively complete organs—complete at least in their basic form from birth—and one comes to a real inner view of the human organism. This kind of research is very demanding; and as I was not obliged at that moment to finish the book, and had to give another lecture cycle, which also demanded research efforts, you can imagine that it was not easy to continue to work out the method which I had developed at that time—of course, it was quite a few years ago that this occurred.

I mention this only to show you some of the difficulties—how one is continually held back by various demands. To continue in this, one must hold one's inner forces firmly together if one is to accomplish it. One must, in fact, repeatedly resolve to intensify one's thinking ability, the force of one's inner soul work—to strengthen it through love of external nature. Otherwise one simply cannot proceed. One goes consciously into oneself, but again and again one is thrown back, and instead of what I would call an inner view, one gets something not right. One must overcome the inward counterblow that develops.

I wanted to tell you all this so that you could see that the spiritual investigator has moments when he must wrestle with certain problems of spiritual research. Unfortunately, in the years that followed the event I have just described to you, my time was so filled with everything imaginable, particularly in recent years, that the needful—indeed, indispensable—activity for finishing my Anthroposophy could not take place.

You see, something that is inwardly understood, something we spoke of above rather abstractly, is in fact what is spun into an enveloping form of an organ, something quite concrete. If you picture this to yourselves, you will realize that such an insight into the human being can also build a bridge to practical activities. These activities must of course be founded on a vision of the human being and his relation to the world. I have already indicated in another connection how through developing imagination we gain knowledge not only of the sensory realm and its continuation into the nervous system, but also of the plant world. When we advance to inspiration, we become acquainted with the whole realm of forces that are at work in the animal world. At the same time we become aware of other things of which the animal world is only the outer expression. We now recognize the nature of the respiratory system, we can understand the external forms of the respiratory system through this relationship. The external form of the respiratory and circulatory system is not directly similar in its outer shape to its inner counterpart, as is the case with the outer form of the nervous system and the inner mental life. I showed this yesterday—how in the case of the nervous system two people, representing very different points of view, were able to draw similar pictures. In a parallel manner we become acquainted with the outer world and its kingdoms and the inner aspect of the human being.

Tomorrow I will consider what this inwardly experienced knowledge adds to our insight into the nature of the human being and his relation to his environment. Naturally, a great deal is revealed to us about specific relationships between the human being and his environment. It is possible to perceive the nature of a specific human organ and its connection to what exists in the outer natural realm. Thereby we discover in a rational way the transition from a spiritualized physiology to a true therapy. What once was won through instinctive inner vision is now possible to be renewed. I have mentioned yoga, and I could name even older systems which made it possible to perceive in an instinctive, childlike way the connection between the human being and the world around him. Many of today's therapeutic measures come from this older time—perhaps in somewhat different form, but they are still among the most fruitful today. Only on this spiritual path can therapy be developed that is suited to meet the real needs of today. Through insight into the connection of the human organs with the cosmos, a medicine will be developed based an inner perceptions, not just external experiment.

I set this before you just as an example of how spiritual science must fructify the various specialized branches of science. That this is needed is obvious when one looks at external research efforts, which have been very active and are magnificent in their own way—but which abound with questions. Take, for example, outer physiology or outer pathology: questions are everywhere. Whoever studies these things today and is fully awake will find the questions there—questions that beg for answers. In the last analysis, spiritual science recognizes there are great questions in outer life, and that they require answers. It does not overlook what is great and triumphant in the other sciences. At the same time, it wishes to study what questions result from this; it wishes to find a way to solutions to these questions in just as exact a manner as can be taught in the other sciences. In the end, the questions can be found (even for sense-bound empirical investigation) only through spiritual investigation. We will speak more about this tomorrow.

• 1. Published in German as Anthroposophie—Ein Fragment, Bibl. Nr. 45; English translation in preparation by Mercury Press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Short break

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pronunciation

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

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

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

Applause.

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

Applause

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

Applause.

Perhaps Dr. Rudolf Steiner would be kind enough to

respond to this shortly.

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

Applause.

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

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

Heiterkeit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Applause

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

Applause

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

Lively applause

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

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

Applause

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

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

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

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

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

Applause

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lively applause.

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

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

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

We have seen that one arrives at two limits when one seeks either to penetrate more deeply into natural phenomena or, proceeding from the state of normal consciousness, to penetrate more deeply into one's own being in order to uncover the essential nature of consciousness. Yesterday we showed already what happens at the one limit to knowledge. We have seen that man awakes to full consciousness in coming into contact with an external, physical world of sense. Man would remain a more-or-less drowsy being, a being with a sleepy soul, if he could not awake in confronting external nature. And what has happened in the spiritual evolution of humanity, in man's gradual acquisition of knowledge about external nature, is actually nothing other than what happens every morning when we awake out of sleep or dream-consciousness by confronting an external world. This latter is a kind of moment of awakening, and in the course of the evolution of humanity we have to do with a gradual awakening, a kind of long, drawn-out moment of awakening.

Now, we have seen that at this frontier a certain inertia on the part of the soul very easily comes into play, so that when we come up against the extended world of phenomena we do not proceed in the manner of Goethean phenomenology by halting at this frontier and ordering the phenomena according to the representations, concepts, and ideas we have already gained, describing them in a systematic, rational manner, and so forth. Instead, we roll on a bit farther beyond the phenomena with our concepts and ideas and thereby create a world, for example a world of metaphysical atoms, molecules, and so forth. This world, when it is so constituted, is merely a fabrication of the mind, a world into which there enters a creeping doubt, so that we have to unravel again the theoretical web we have spun. And we have seen that it is possible to guard against such a violation of this frontier of our knowledge through phenomenalism, through working purely with the phenomena themselves. We have also had to show that at this point in our striving for knowledge something emerges that commends itself to our use as an immediate necessity: mathematics and that part of mechanics that can be comprehended without any empirical observation, i.e., the entire compass of so-called analytical mechanics.

If we call to mind everything comprehended by mathematics and analytical mechanics, we have before us the system of concepts that allows us to enter into phenomena with the utmost certainty. And yet, as I began to indicate yesterday, one should not deceive oneself, for the whole manner in which we call forth the notions of mathematics and analytical mechanics, this process within our souls, is entirely different from that employed when we experiment with or observe sensory data and then seek to comprehend them, when we try to gather knowledge from sensory experience. In order to arrive at the fullest clarity regarding these matters one must bring all one's mental energy to bear, for in this realm full clarity can be attained only with the greatest mental exertion.

What is the difference between accumulating knowledge from sensory experience in a Baconian manner and the more inward mode of apprehension we find in mathematics and analytical mechanics? One can sharply differentiate the latter from those modes of apprehension that are not inward in this way by formulating clearly the concepts of the parallelogram of motion and the parallelogram of forces. One theorem of analytical mechanics states that two angular vectors proceeding from one point result in a third vector. To say, however, that a vector of a specific force here [see diagram: a] and a vector of a specific force here [b] result in a third force, which can also be determined according to the parallelogram—that is another notion altogether.

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The parallelogram of motion lies strictly within the province of analytical mechanics, for it is internally consistent and demands no external proof. In this it is like the Rule of Pythagoras or any other geometrical axiom, but the existence of the parallelogram of forces can be determined only by experience, by experimentation. In this case, we bring something into that which we work through inwardly: the force that can be given only empirically from without. Here we no longer have a pure, analytical mechanics but an “empirical mechanics.” One can thus differentiate sharply between that which is still actually mathematical—as we still conceive mathematics today—and that which leads over into conventional empiricism.

Now one stands before this phenomenon of mathematics as such. We comprehend mathematical truths. We proceed from mathematical phenomena to certain axioms. We weave the fabric of mathematics out of these axioms and then stand before an architectonic whole apprehended by the mind's eye [im inneren Anschauen]. If we are able by means of energetic thinking to differentiate sharply this inner apprehension from anything that can be experienced outwardly, we must see in this fabric of mathematics something that arises through an activity of soul entirely different from that which underlies our experience of the outer objects of sensation. Whether or not we arrive at a satisfactory comprehension of the world depends to a tremendous extent on our being able to make this clear distinction out of inner experience. We thus must ask: where does mathematics originate? Nowadays this question is still not pursued rigorously enough. One does not ask: how is this inner activity of the soul that we need in mathematics, in the wonderful architecture of mathematics—how is this inner activity of the soul different from that whereby we grasp external nature through the senses? One does not pose this question and seek an answer with sufficient rigor, because it is the tragedy of the materialistic world view that, while on the one hand it presses for sensory experience, on the other hand it is driven unawares into an abstract intellectualism, into a realm of abstraction where one is isolated from any true comprehension of the phenomena of the material world.

What kind of capacity is it, then, that we acquire when we engage in mathematics? We want to address ourselves to this question. In order to answer this question we must, I believe, have reached a complete understanding of one thing in particular: we must take fully seriously the concept of becoming as it applies to human life as well. We must begin by acquiring the discipline that modern science can teach us. We must school ourselves in this way and then, taking the strict methodology, the scientific discipline we have learned from modern natural science, transcend it, so that we use the same exacting approach to rise into higher regions, thereby extending this methodology to the investigation of entirely different realms as well. For this reason I believe—and I want this to be expressly stated—that nobody can attain true knowledge of the spirit who has not acquired scientific discipline, who has not learned to investigate and think in the laboratories according to the modern scientific method. Those who pursue spiritual science [Geisteswissenschaft] have less cause to undervalue modern science than anyone. On the contrary, they know how to value it at its full worth. And many people—if I may here insert a personal remark—were extremely upset with me when, before publishing anything pertaining to spiritual science as such, I wrote a great deal about the problems of natural science in a way that appeared necessary to me. So you see it is necessary on the one hand for us to cultivate a scientific habit of mind, so that this can accompany us when we cross the frontiers of natural science. In addition, it is the quality of this scientific method and its results that we must take very seriously indeed.

You see, if we consider the simple phenomenon of warmth that appears when we rub two bodies together, it would be utterly unscientific to say, regarding this isolated phenomenon, that the warmth had been created ex nihilo or simply existed. Rather, we seek the conditions under which this warmth was previously latent and now appears by means of the bodies. We proceed from the one phenomenon to the other and thus take seriously this process of becoming [das Werden]. We must do the same with the concepts that we consider in spiritual science. So we must first of all ask: is that which manifests itself as the ability to perform mathematics present in man throughout his entire existence between birth and death? No, it is not always present. It awakes at a certain point in time. To be sure, we can, while still remaining empirical regarding the outer world, observe with great precision how there gradually arise out of the dark recesses of human consciousness faculties that manifest themselves as the ability to perform mathematics and something like mathematics that we have yet to discuss. If one can observe this emergence in time precisely and soberly, just as scientific research treats the phenomena of the melting or boiling point, one sees that this new faculty emerges at approximately that time of life when the child changes teeth. One must treat such a point in the development of human life with the same attitude with which physics, for example, teaches one to treat the melting or boiling point. One must acquire the ability to carry over into the complicated realm of human life the same strict inner discipline that one can acquire by observing simple physical phenomena according to the methods of modern science. If one does this, one sees that in the course of human development from birth, or rather from conception, up to the change of teeth, the soul faculties enabling one to perform mathematics manifest themselves gradually within the organism but that they are not yet fully present. Now we say that the warmth that manifests itself in a body under certain conditions was latent in that body beforehand, that it was at work within the inner structure of that body. In the same way we must be entirely clear that the capacity to perform mathematics, which becomes most evident at the change of teeth and reveals itself gradually in another sense, was also at work beforehand within the human organization. We thus arrive at an important and valuable insight into the nature of mathematics—mathematics taken, of course, in the very broadest sense. We begin to understand how that which is at our disposal after the change of teeth as a soul faculty worked previously within to organize us. Yes, within the child until approximately its seventh year there works an inner mathematics, an inner mathematics not abstract like our external one but full of active energy, a mathematics which, if I may use Plato's expression, not only can be inwardly envisioned [angeschaut] but is full of active life. Up to this point in time there exists within us something that “mathematicizes” us through and through.

When we ask at first entirely superficially what can be seen by looking empirically at this “latent mathematics” in the body of the young child, we are led to three things resembling inner senses. In the course of these lectures we shall come to see that one can indeed speak of senses within as well. Today I want only to indicate that we are led to something that develops an inward faculty of perception similar to the outward perception developed by the eyes and ears, except that the former remains unconscious within us during these first years. And if we look within, look into our own inner organization not like nebulous mystics but with all our powers of apprehension, we can find within three functions similar to those of the outward senses. We find inner senses that exercise a certain activity, a certain inner mathematics, just in those first several years. One encounters first of all what I would like to call the sense of life. This sense of life manifests itself in later years as a perception of our inner state as a whole. In a certain way we feel either well or unwell. We feel comfortable or uncomfortable: just as we have a faculty for perceiving outwardly with the eyes, so also do we have a faculty for perceiving inwardly. This faculty is directed toward the whole organism and is for that reason dark and dull; yet it is there all the same. We shall have more to say about this later. For the moment I want to anticipate this later discussion only by remarking that this sense of life is—if I may use a tautology—especially active in the vitality of the child up until the change of teeth.

Another inner sense that we must consider when we look within in this way is that which I would like to call the sense of movement. We must form a clear conception of this sense of movement. When we move our limbs, we are aware of this not only by viewing ourselves externally but also by means of an internal perception. Also when we walk: we are conscious that we are walking not only in that we see objects pass and our view of the external world changes but also in that we have an internal perception of the movements of the limbs, of changes within ourselves as we move. Normally we remain unaware of the inner experiences and perception that run parallel to the outer because of the strength of the external impressions, much as a dim light is “extinguished” by a bright one.

And a third inward-looking faculty is the sense of balance. The sense of balance is what enables us to locate ourselves within the world, to avoid falling, to perceive in a certain way how we can bring ourselves into harmony with the forces in our environment. We perceive this process of bringing ourselves into harmony with our environment inwardly. We thus can truly say that we bear within ourselves these three inner senses: the sense of life, the sense of movement, and the sense of balance. They are especially active in childhood up to the change of teeth. Around this time of the change of teeth their activity begins to wane, but observe to take but one example, the sense of balance—observe how at birth the child has as yet nothing enabling it to attain the position of balance it needs in later life. Consider how the child gradually gains control of itself, how it learns at first to crawl on all fours, how it gradually achieves through its sense of balance the ability to stand and to walk, how it finally is able to maintain its own balance.

If one considers the entire process of development from conception to the change of teeth, one sees therein the powerful activity of these three inner senses. And if one can attain a certain insight into what is happening there, one sees that there is at work in the sense of balance and the sense of movement nothing other than a living “mathematicizing” [ein lebendiges Mathematisieren]. In order for it to come to life, the sense of life is there to vitalize it. We thus see a kind of latent realm of mathematics active within man. This activity does not entirely cease at the change of teeth, but it does become at that time considerably less pronounced for the remainder of life. That which is inwardly active in the sense of balance, the sense of movement, and the sense of life becomes free. This latent mathematics becomes free, just as latent heat can become liberated heat. And we see how that which initially was woven through the organism as an element of soul becomes free. We see how this mathematics emerges as abstraction from a condition in which it was originally a concrete force shaping the human organism. And because as human beings we are suspended in the web of existence according to temporal and spatial relationships, we take this mathematics that has become free out into the world and seek to comprehend the external world by means of something that worked within us up until the change of teeth. You see, it is not a denial but rather an extension of natural science that results when one considers rightly what ought to live within spiritual science as attitude and will.
We thus carry what originates within ourselves beyond the frontier of sense perception. We observe man within a process of becoming. We do not simply observe mathematics on the one hand and sensory experience on the other but rather the emergence of mathematics within the developing human being. And now we come to that which truly leads over into spiritual science itself. You see, that which we call forth out of our own inner life, this “mathematicizing,” becomes in the end an abstraction. Yet our experience of it need not remain an abstraction. In our time there is, to be sure, little opportunity for us to experience mathematics in a true light. Yet at a certain point in the development of Western civilization there does come to light something of this sense of a special spirit in mathematics. This comes to light at the point where Novalis, the poet Novalis, who underwent a good mathematical training in his studies, writes about mathematics in his Fragments. He calls mathematics a grand poem, a wonderful, grand poem.

One really must have experienced at some time what it is that leads from an abstract understanding of the geometrical forms to a sense of wonder at the harmony that underlies this inner “mathematicizing.” One really must have had the opportunity to get beyond the cold, sober performance of mathematics, which many people even hate. One must have struggled through as Novalis had in order to stand in awe of the inner harmony and—if I may use an expression you have heard often in a completely different context—the “melody” [Melos] of mathematics.

Then something new enters into one's experience of mathematics. There enters into mathematics, which otherwise remains purely intellectual and, metaphorically speaking, interests only the head, something that engages the entire man. This something manifests itself in such youthful Spirits as Novalis in the feeling: that which you behold as mathematical harmony, that which you weave through all the phenomena of the universe, is actually the same loom that wove you during the first years of growth as a child here an earth. This is to feel concretely man's connection with the cosmos. And when one works one's way through to such an inner experience, which many hold to be mere fantasy because they have not actually attained it themselves, one has some idea what the spiritual scientist [Geistesforscher] experiences when he rises to a more extensive grasp of this “mathematicizing” by undergoing an inner development of which I have yet to speak and which you will find fully depicted in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.² For then the capacity of soul manifesting itself as this inner mathematics passes over into something far more comprehensive. It becomes something that remains just as exact as mathematical thought yet does not proceed solely from the intellect but from the whole man.

On this path of constant inner work—an inner work far more demanding than that performed in the laboratory or observatory or any other scientific institution—one comes to know what it is that underlies mathematics, that underlies this simple faculty of the human soul which can be expanded into something far more comprehensive. In this higher experience of mathematics one comes to know Inspiration. One comes to understand the differences between what lives in us as mathematics and what lives in us as outer-directed empiricism. In this outer-directed empiricism we have sense impressions that give content to our empty concepts. In Inspiration we have something inwardly spiritual, the activity of which manifests itself already in mathematics, if we know how to grasp mathematics properly—something spiritual which in our early years lives and weaves within us. This activity continues. In doing mathematics we experience this in part. We come to realize that the faculty for performing mathematics rests upon Inspiration, and we can come to experience Inspiration itself by evolving into spiritual scientists. Our representations and concepts then receive their content in a way other than through external experience. We can inspire ourselves with the spiritual force that works within us during childhood. For what works within us during our childhood is spirit. The spirit, however, resides in the human body and must be perceived there through the body, within man. It can be viewed in its pure, free form if one acquires through the faculty of Inspiration the capacity not only to think in mathematical concepts but to view that which exists as a real force in that it organizes us through and through up until the seventh year. And that which manifests itself partially in mathematics and reveals itself as a much more expansive realm through Inspiration can be inwardly viewed, if one employs certain spiritual scientific methods about which—as I have said—I plan yet to speak. One thereby gains not merely new results to add to those acquired through the old powers of cognition but rather an entirely new mode of apprehension. One acquires a new “Inspirative” cognition.

The course of human evolution has been such that these powers of Inspirative cognition have receded with the passage of time, after having been present earlier to a very high degree. One must come to understand how Inspiration arises within the inner being of man—that same Inspiration that survives in the West only in the diluted, intellectual experience of mathematics. The experience can be expanded, however, if only one comprehends fully the inner nature of that realm; only then does one begin to understand what lived in that earlier consciousness transmitted to us actually only from the East, from the Vedanta and the other Eastern philosophies that remain so cryptic to the Western mind. For what was it that actually lived within these Eastern philosophies? lt was something that arose through soul faculties of a mathematical nature. It was an Inspiration. It was not merely mathematics but rather something attained within the soul in a way similar to that in which one performs mathematics. Thus I would say that the mathematical atmosphere emanating from the Vedanta and similar ancient world views is something that can be understood from the perspective one attains in rising again to enter the realm of Inspiration. If one can raise to vivid inner life that which works unconsciously in mathematics and the mathematical sciences and can carry it over into another realm, one discovers the same mathematical element that Goethe viewed. Goethe modestly confessed that he did not have proficiency in mathematics in any conventional sense. Goethe has written on his relationship to mathematics in a very interesting series of essays, which you can find in his scientific writings under the heading “Relationship to Mathematics.” Extraordinarily interesting! For despite Goethe's modest confession that he had not acquired a proficiency in the handling of actual mathematical concepts and theories, he does require one thing: he calls for a phenomenalism such as he employed in his own scientific studies. He demands that within the secondary phenomena confronting us in the phenomenal world we seek the archetypal phenomenon [Urphänomen]. But just what kind of activity is this? He demands that we trace external phenomena back to the archetypal phenomenon, in just the same way that the mathematician traces the outward apprehension [äusseres Anschauen] of complex structures back to the axiom. Goethe's archetypal phenomena are empirical axioms, axioms that can be experienced.

Goethe thus demands, in a truly mathematical spirit, that one inwardly permeate phenomena with mathematics. He writes that we must see the archetypal phenomena in such a way that we are able at all times to justify our procedures according to the rigorous requirements of the mathematician. Thus what Goethe seeks is a modified, transformed mathematics, one that suffuses phenomena. He demands this as a scientific activity.

Goethe was able, therefore, to suffuse with light the one pole that otherwise remains so dark if we postulate only the concept of matter. We shall see how Goethe approached this pole; we modern must, however, approach the other, the pole of consciousness. We must investigate in the Same way how soul faculties manifest their activity in the human being, how they proceed from man's inner nature to manifest their activity externally. We shall have to investigate this. It shall become clear that we must complement the method of investigating the external world offered by Goethean phenomenology with a method of comprehending the realm of human consciousness. It must be a mode of comprehension justifiable in the sense in which Goethe's can be justified to the mathematician—a method such as I tried to employ in a modest way in my book, Philosophy of Freedom.³

At the pole of matter we thus encounter the results yielded by Goethean phenomenology and at the pole of consciousness those attained by pursuing the method that I sought to establish in a modest way in my Philosophy of Freedom.

Tomorrow we will want to pursue this further.

• 2. Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der hoheren Welten?, Berlin, 1909 (Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Anthroposophie Press, Spring Valley, N.Y., reprinted 1983).
• 3. Die Philosophie der Freiheit, Berlin, 1894 (The Philosophy of Freedom, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, N.Y., 1964). Earlier translations of this book (1922, 1938, and 1963) bore the title The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, following a suggestion given by Steiner himself. The English word “freedom” connotes a passive state; the German “Freiheit” (as is clean from the following lecture), an objective basis for moral action achieved through intense inner activity.

[My dear friends!]

As you know, my intention today is to discuss some of the experiences in Holland and England. As you know, the Dutch friends organized an Anthroposophical School of Spiritual Science this spring, which took place from April 7 to April 12. A large number of our lecturers were present. The topics were from a wide range of scientific fields. However, the main aim was to provide an insight into the extent to which the anthroposophical worldview is rooted in scientific life and the extent to which it must be taken seriously by today's scientific community. That was actually the task at hand. The fact was that although a large number of our Dutch anthroposophical friends were present at the lectures, we were essentially dealing with an audience that was still quite unfamiliar with anthroposophy, an audience recruited from the student body of the various Dutch colleges, and which, above all, mostly wanted to have something like a first acquaintance with anthroposophical ideas. This was particularly the case with this Dutch course, which is now the case with regard to anthroposophy in general: a large proportion of young people who are scientifically oriented regard anthroposophy as a matter of time. Of course, the circumstances of the present time are such that only very few of those who want to address this question muster the courage and inner strength to really get close enough to anthroposophy. But even if the effects in this direction are slight, it is still apparent on such occasions, when anthroposophy is seriously sought, as in this Dutch course, that a few individuals, especially among the younger contemporaries, are becoming aware that anthroposophy, in addition to the satisfaction it offers in religious and other respects, is thoroughly scientifically grounded. And we were also able to perceive this in Holland, that among the younger contemporaries who were present were those who, after completing the course, had the feeling that here we are dealing with a scientifically serious matter.

An extraordinarily lively discussion was provoked by the lecture by Dr. von Baravalle, who spoke in a very stimulating way about mathematics in the light of anthroposophy. The discussion that followed was interesting because one older lecturer and one younger student who took part in the discussion really did try to engage scientifically with what Dr. von Baravalle had presented, and in a very forceful way.

It is a satisfying fact that specific details, for example in thermodynamics in physics, can be discussed in an appropriate way based on anthroposophy. Of course, discussions also occur in other scientific fields; but the point of view that Dr. von Baravalle took is truly quite far removed from the points of view that are adopted in present-day thermodynamics; and one is accustomed that those who are firmly seated in their chairs and well established in the present as scientists, simply dismiss with a slight wave of the hand these things that are so far removed from what they are accustomed to thinking. That this can no longer be the case today, that one must at least consider the corrections of formulas that one is able to make to current science through the results of anthroposophy, is an extraordinarily satisfying result.

Unfortunately, with such short lecture courses as we still have to give, one is obliged, I would say, to pick out individual short chapters from large areas, and that therefore hardly anything else can be given through such courses but a very inadequate stimulus. But for the time being we have to be satisfied with that. It is not yet possible, given the circumstances of contemporary life, to give more than this.

My first task was to elucidate the position of anthroposophy in the spiritual life of the present day. I endeavored to show how the spiritual life of the present day has, after all, taken on a kind of scientific character in all directions. Even if this is denied, it is still found that scientific thinking asserts itself everywhere; only the peculiar phenomenon emerges that, on the one hand, scientific life is declared to be the only one with authority, while, on the other hand, one is forced to let certain other areas, such as art and religion, move away from science as far as possible. On the one hand, one wants scientific certainty. But with this scientific certainty, which one strives for, one cannot do anything in art; one cannot do anything with it in religious life. Therefore, one tries to base art, if possible, only on fantasy and entertainment, not on a deeper penetration into the secrets of the world and their reproduction, and to base religion not on knowledge but only on faith. It is therefore peculiar that on the one hand one seeks a panacea in science, and on the other hand, in order to save other areas of intellectual life, one tries to distance them from science as much as possible. This is something that must and does create deep divisions in the lives of serious people today. Today they remain unconscious in many ways, showing only their effects, but they are present and lead our civilized life into the abyss.

My initial task was to show this and to show the truly scientific character of anthroposophy. But then I tried to show how, in particular in the visual arts, when it is understood that it reveals the secrets of the world, there is something that really does create out of the ethereal life of beings, and only through this does it acquire its true content, and how a natural path can be created through the anthroposophical worldview into art.

Then I had to speak about the anthroposophical research method and individual anthroposophical results. These are things that you know well, and that I therefore only need to discuss in terms of the topic. And then I had to speak about anthroposophy and agnosticism. It is a topic that I discussed quite extensively last summer at the Stuttgart University course, at the Stuttgart Congress, actually. But in The Hague I had a reason to approach the subject from a different point of view. In Stuttgart I had approached the subject, agnosticism, that is, the view that one has limits to one's knowledge, which necessarily prevent man from really penetrating into the very foundations of existence with knowledge, with reference to the damage it does to the whole of human feeling and willing, how it paralyzes the powers of will, how it paralyzes artistic development, how it paralyzes religious depth, and so on. I had characterized agnosticism in Stuttgart as the bringer of cultural damage.

I had not set myself this task in The Hague, but I had set myself the task of clearly explaining the significance of current scientific knowledge. It leads to not transcending the sensory world, and instead to constructing all kinds of crazy theories about atoms, which in the very latest times have even led to the fact that now, everywhere in the feature pages of newspapers, it is reported to the more popular audience that reads things that Rutherford has succeeded in splitting atoms by a kind of cannonade! One always wonders what people actually imagine when they are presented with such articles, especially as laymen. No one gets any idea from such articles of what actually happened in the laboratory. Because if he did get an idea of that, he would just see what a grandiose nonsense it is, which is even going around the world in a popular way.

The newer natural sciences have not grown through these fantasies of the atomic world, but rather by adhering to the phenomena, the appearances, the facts that can be observed by the senses. But in doing so, it has necessarily come to agnosticism, because one can indeed trace the fact back to its archetypal phenomena, but one cannot thereby advance to the archetypes of the world. But by being driven in a justified way through phenomenalism to agnosticism, one is precisely compelled to seek paths to the archetypes of existence in another field. Take an older form of knowledge: people still saw spiritual entities in every spring, in every bush, everywhere. There was still spirituality in the whole environment. When you find spirituality in the whole environment, you also find moral impulses in the environment at the same time. Because we have come to phenomenalism and thus to agnosticism, we are surrounded only by nature, and if we still want to seek a moral worldview, we must look for the basis for it in moral intuition, as I have explained in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

This means that agnosticism helps us to look first for purely spiritual impulses in the moral realm. Then, by first seeking the moral intuitions, we are driven further to those imaginations, inspirations and intuitions that otherwise arise for the world. And so agnosticism has this good side to it, that it deprives man of the possibility of finding the spirit outside through ordinary cognition. Thus, cognition must develop its own strength; it must become more active. We can no longer speak of some kind of given moral commandments. We must speak of moral intuitions. I have shown this in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. This is where the good side of agnosticism comes to the fore. And it is necessary to make it clear: a truly meaningful view of the world allows everything to appear from the most diverse points of view. One can just as well speak pro agnosticism as contra agnosticism. It is then always only a matter of what one says. And only by approaching the world from the most diverse points of view can one arrive at a real content of knowledge that is then useful for life.

Of course, it is an abomination for the philistines when one deals with agnosticism in its effect, in that it causes nothing but damage to civilization and culture, and then one looks at agnosticism from the other side, in that it - I would say - causes as a reaction that which is precisely the spiritual world view. For according to the commandments of philistinism, I don't know how many, one may have only one view of any given thing, and if one illuminates the different sides, if one does that at different times, then philistinism finds contradiction upon contradiction.

We can say that, according to the Dutch organizers, the lecture course in Holland, this university course, has nevertheless brought a satisfactory result for the anthroposophical movement. Of course, it is still difficult today to penetrate with anthroposophy, even to a very small extent, here or there. But we must be thoroughly satisfied with every small step that can be taken in this direction.

For me, the Dutch School of Spiritual Science was followed by a trip to England at the invitation of the “New Ideals in Education” committee, in order to give two lectures at the events that took place in Stratford for a week this year to mark Shakespeare's birthday.

The events in Stratford were a festival that was organized in honor of Shakespeare's birthday and in memory of Shakespeare. A wide range of speakers gave talks from Tuesday to Monday, and one could learn a lot from these lectures about what contemporary English intellectual life is like and what characterizes it.

It is not my job to speak critically about what has been organized during these days, I would just like to note that some things were quite remarkable. For example, an interesting lecture given by Miss Ashwell on Wednesday about drama and national life, in which she explained with great inner strength how difficult it is in England to muster enough enthusiasm to cultivate dramatic art in the right way. The dramatic arts are, to some extent, suffering from the fact that they have to be performed by individual troupes, which in turn have to take into account the tastes or lack of taste of the audience, so that real artistic development is extremely difficult. With a certain strong emotion, this was particularly expressed in Miss Hamilton's lecture on trends in modern drama next Thursday.

Now, that this already points to certain deeper things, is also evident from something else. Every evening we spent in Stratford, we went to the theater performance that was given in parallel by a special troupe. The first evening, which

“The Taming of the Shrew” showed the director on stage after the performance, and the director apologized for the lighting effects and other aspects of the production not being up to standard by saying: Yes, you just can't do everything the way you want to according to your artistic conscience, because we are actually in a movie theater. So one learned that the “Shakespeare Memorial Theater” had actually been converted into a movie theater in modern times, and only during these festivities had it been converted back into a theater!

We have read in the last few days that the Berlin State Opera has already started showing films, and we are well on the way to phasing out the dramatic arts in modern civilization and replacing them – how can one put it without offending people? – with cinematic inartistry. But even that will be taken amiss by some who are enthusiastic about the cinema. I believe that the cinema system shows just how many destructive elements there are in our present civilization.

Now, I had announced two lectures for this Stratford week, one lecture on drama in relation to education for Wednesday afternoon and one lecture on Shakespeare and the new ideals for Sunday afternoon. It is natural that when, as is the case in our college courses and as was also the case at this event, lectures follow one another in quick succession throughout the day, as in a timetable, it leads to difficulties when lectures like mine have to be translated and thus take up twice as much time. And so, of course, on Wednesday I could only say part of what I would have liked to say, since time was already up. I had the satisfaction of being given a kind of petition the next day, asking that I present what was missing on one of the following days in a subsequent lecture, and this lecture could then be given on Friday. Then I gave my lecture on Shakespeare and the new ideals on Sunday.

I organized the lectures for this Shakespeare event in such a way that they were thoroughly based on anthroposophy, although they were actually given in the style of a Shakespearean celebration. And so too in the examination of Shakespeare's drama, which has proved its mission in education in world history by simply showing itself to be historically pedagogical in the tremendous effect it has had on the education of Goethe. One need only recall that Goethe named the three personalities Linnaeus, the naturalist, Spinoza, the philosopher, and Shakespeare, the poet, as the ones who had the deepest influence on his life. But we must bear in mind how different these influences were. Linnaeus, despite having such a great influence on Goethe, actually only had the influence that Goethe opposed him, that he developed the opposite view. Spinoza only influenced Goethe to arrive at a certain mode of expression, but he never appropriated Spinoza's inner life. He only appropriated a kind of language through Spinoza, whereas through Shakespeare he really had a living impulse that continued to work in him. I then expanded on this in particular on Sunday in the lecture on Shakespeare and the new ideals, by pointing out what actually had such a strong effect on Goethe from Shakespeare. I characterized this in an objective way at first by saying: There are whole libraries about Shakespeare; if you put together the books that have been written about him, you could fill this wall with them just about “Hamlet” alone. But the influence of Shakespeare on Goethe can be explained by the fact that all that is written about Shakespeare in these books had no effect on Goethe; that something quite different had an effect that cannot be found in all these books; that one can leave all that out and must look for the matter in something quite different. Yes, I even said that one can take everything that Goethe himself said about Shakespeare – theoretically, intellectualized – and regard that as false; that not even what he himself said theoretically about Shakespeare is the actual impulse; he may have erred, and what he said about Hamlet can be refuted. What matters is something else. And actually the most significant expression that Goethe made in relation to Shakespeare is this: These are not poems, this is something like the omnipotent book of fate, open in front of you, where the storm winds of life turn the pages now and then. With this emotional thing that Goethe said about Shakespeare, the power with which Shakespeare worked in an educational way in Goethe is actually meant.

On the one hand, I was now able to take the path in the first two lectures to explain our educational principles, as you know them so well. On the other hand, however, I was also able to characterize the relationship to anthroposophy by linking Shakespeare to Goethe, Goethe to the Goetheanum, the Goetheanum to anthroposophy, and so it was a complete circle. So it was possible to bring to bear the spiritual life, as it develops as a Central European spiritual life on the one hand, as an anthroposophical spiritual life on the other, especially at such a Shakespeare festival.

It may also be said that it is fundamentally different what one feels when one has to represent anthroposophical being on the continent and when one has to represent it over in England. I had the two things in immediate succession: in Holland the School of Spiritual Science, in England something completely different. On the continent, there is now a strong and growing need to uncover the firm, secure scientific foundations of anthroposophy everywhere. As a result, the latest phase of our anthroposophical life has taken on a certain character, which can certainly lead to very popular presentations, as I am now doing in public lectures, but which must be adhered to in a certain sense. Such a need does not exist in England. On the other hand, there is a pronounced need there to be brought closer to the spiritual world in a more direct way. And so I tried to characterize, now from a deeper spiritual point of view, what it actually is that led to Goethe taking such an intense interest in Shakespeare, one that was meaningful for his entire life, and how Shakespeare was able to remain a driving impulse in Goethe until a very late age. For me, the decisive factor was that if you take Shakespeare's dramas, both tragedy and comedy, and really let them take effect on you, the figures all come to life. And if you now, equipped with imaginative and inspired knowledge, take what you experience with the living figures of Shakespeare's plays into the spiritual world, you experience something very peculiar: the figures continue to live. They do not do the same things that Shakespeare has them do on the physical plane; they do different things, but they live. So you can certainly take the characters out of a Shakespearean drama from the drama itself: on the astral plane, let us say, the characters do something different from what they do in “Othello” or in “The Taming of the Shrew” or the like. The whole thing can be transferred to the astral plane: the people do something completely different, but they act, they live, they are living beings over there.

With a Captain or the like – one has a hobbyhorse with Captain, the other with Sudermann, that is why I mention as many as possible and actually none at all – but with the others, who are less concerned with imagination than Shakespeare, who are more concerned with imitating something in life, it is quite different. You see, Shakespeare does not actually imitate life. You won't be able to point to real life when you have Shakespearean characters. He creates them. And how does he create them? By knowing that he is creating them for the stage. Shakespeare is a theater realist, he creates for the stage. He knows that the stage has only three sides. The newer playwrights, especially the naturalists, have always forgotten that the stage is open on one side, because they write their plays so that they would actually have to be closed on four sides. Otherwise – well, the audience could have a strange pleasure if the play were performed in a room closed on all sides. But Shakespeare knew that you can't bring characters imitated from life onto the stage. He knew it, just as a painter should know that he has to paint on a surface, not in space, and that he must therefore treat the colors so that the surface comes into consideration.

Shakespeare is not an imitator of life, Shakespeare is a creative spirit. But he reaches into what is available to him. That is how he created his living figures. That is how one can still look up to the astral plane, to the Devachan plane, into the whole spiritual world; the people there do something different than they do on the physical plane, but they live, they do something. If you take naturalistic poets into the spiritual world, the

figures become like wooden puppets. They are no longer alive, they cannot walk or stand, they cannot do anything, they are no longer alive.

What one experiences through spiritual contemplation, Goethe felt — this original life, this being brought forth from the spiritual world — in Shakespeare. And that is what makes Shakespeare's drama so significant for the age in which Shakespeare created it: it was indeed a continuation of the ancient mystery dramas, which I also spoke about in the lecture on Shakespeare and the new ideals on Sunday.

The entire lecture on Shakespeare and the new ideals had the following meaning. I said that one would expect me to now begin to enumerate these new ideals: first, second, third. One person enumerates three, another enumerates five, another seven. But I said: The world already has enough of that, because such new ideals are indeed being fabricated and developed everywhere. But it is not a matter of setting up such new ideals, as others also have them, or of developing others before the world today, but rather it is a matter of finding the real strength to achieve an ideal life. Many people today think up ideals, but the strength to live by ideals can only be found by becoming aware of how real spiritual life has worked, say, in older art, in the art that still emerged from the mysteries and that was ultimately effective in Shakespeare. Even if Shakespeare is still very much a theorist, we must recognize how this spiritual life has worked in the Shakespearean plays and how we can arrive at a new ideal by absorbing this impulse, by allowing meaning and understanding of the spiritual world to arise from our soul life. Whether or not we then formulate this in detail is up to us.

So in three lectures during this festival, I was able to develop just what can be said about anthroposophy, about Goethe, about Shakespeare and about education in this context.

During the event, a strangely interesting fact came to my attention. There was an exhibition that interested a large number of people very much: an exhibition of remarkable works of art that a Viennese professor - yes, how should I put it - produces in children from the ages of 8, 9, 10 up to sexual maturity. These children really paint in such a way that one is extraordinarily captivated when looking at the things with the understanding that many people today have for art. Individual scenes are painted with great perfection, street scenes with types of people – some say “criminal types”, such as are often found on the streets today – painted with great perfection. The children paint these pictures. They paint them, and then, when they reach puberty, in their 14th, 15th, 16th year, they lose their ability to paint. After that, they can no longer paint anything. And the professor — I can only say: He makes them able to do it! Today, one marvels at such a thing. What is it really? It is pedagogical nonsense of the worst kind.

Of course there are all kinds of subconscious and subconsciously acting forces that can be used to influence children in such a way that they arrive at such demonic paintings from the rhythmic system of their being, for there the lung and heart demon paints in the children. And one would actually only need to understand what I just said about human development in my Christmas course on education here last Christmas, then it would be a completely understandable phenomenon that such nonsense can be achieved; but one would also see that it is completely harmful.

Once again, we are dealing with only a single phenomenon. But these phenomena are very numerous today, and they can only be understood with an unbiased approach, if we really look at our pedagogy and didactics. Because then you realize that, as you know, the head system prevails in the child until the second dentition changes, and the rhythmic system prevails from the second dentition change until sexual maturity; but that the demonic, which possesses the child, has an effect in this rhythm – and that it is precisely in the child that what is called for here should be fought. And then people are amazed when the child reaches sexual maturity and can no longer draw anything. It is quite understandable that it can no longer draw anything if you do not teach it to draw itself, but if you cause the ahrimanic demon to draw!

How important it is to address the damage of our present civilization in an anthroposophical way is shown by such a heartbreaking example, which sensationally produces this admirable result of such a false education and does not even see what is important.

I am saying these things, of course, only because it is necessary to form a sound judgment within anthroposophical circles about what is present in our present-day civilization. I can say that I am extremely grateful to the committee “New Ideals in Education” for giving me the opportunity to speak about anthroposophy, Goetheanism, education and Shakespeare, and to say what I have tried to say in these three lectures. And I would like to say: It is indeed a guarantee that if we as human beings all over the world were to cultivate anthroposophy in the appropriate way, we could achieve many things that are very necessary for the reconstruction of our culture.

What has been achieved by the “New Ideals in Education” committee is connected to what has been achieved before and after by the activities of our anthroposophical friends in London. After the Dutch course ended on Wednesday, April 12, I gave my first lecture on Friday to anthroposophists and an invited audience in London on Knowledge and Initiation; then on Saturday the second lecture on the anthroposophical path to the knowledge of Christ, and a more intimate lecture on Sunday morning. In these lectures I tried to say what can be said in the present phase of our anthroposophical life, taking into account the way in which such things can be understood in England in particular.

On Sunday afternoon we were in the school in the London area, at the Kings Langley boarding school, which is run by the lady — Miss Cross — who was also here for the pedagogical Christmas course, and were able to see how a number of children are educated and taught in such a boarding school. It is extraordinarily interesting to see how, in this boarding school in particular, children are actually brought closer to life in a certain way, based on certain ideals of the present day. The forty to forty-five children who live in the boarding school have to do absolutely everything; there are no servants there. The children have to get up early, take care of the whole institution themselves, and also clean their boots and clothes. They have to make sure that the necessary eggs are available by raising the chickens, which they also take care of, and many other things that you can imagine. They clean everything themselves, they cook everything themselves, they take care of the garden. The vegetables that are served are first grown, harvested and cooked by them, and then they eat them. And so the child is really introduced to life in a very comprehensive way and learns a whole range of things.

The intention has now arisen here during the Christmas course at Miss Cross's to set up this boarding school in the sense of a Waldorf School, and this is considered to be a very serious plan. Mrs. Mackenzie, who was one of the main driving forces behind my invitation to this Shakespeare festival, is very much in favor of our school movement, based on anthroposophy, gaining a certain foothold in England, and the aim now is to form a committee to set up this school based on anthroposophy in line with our education.

This will be a very significant and important step forward. And with the kind of determination that characterizes these individuals, especially Miss Cross and Professor Mackenzie, it can be assumed that something like this can be achieved after overcoming many obstacles.

We all hope that the course I will be able to give in Oxford in August of this year will contribute to the further development of this plan, in which the few suggestions I was able to give in Stratford this time can be expanded in all directions.

In this way, eurythmy will also be shown to advantage, which could not be included this time, at least not in an official way. So it is hoped that all this will now be able to contribute well to the anthroposophical school movement in England.

Monday was the day we went to the Shakespeare festival. On Sunday I had the last lecture on Shakespeare there, and we returned to London on April 24, where I gave a lecture for our members in London that evening. That was essentially all there was to do and experience in England.

Thus, without doubt, a further step has been taken in the development of our anthroposophical life, which is particularly important because it has made it possible to carry anthroposophy across the borders that have unfortunately been created during the war catastrophe.

I would like to emphasize once more that I am extremely grateful, above all to our Dutch friends, who, after many weeks of selfless work, have brought about the Dutch School of Spiritual Science, which, with regard to everything concerning the organization of the course and also the arrangement of the details, meant an enormous amount of work on the part of the organizers. And I would like to emphasize that I am deeply grateful to our English friends for what they did on the one hand for my participation in the Stratford Week, and on the other hand for what I was able to do for Anthroposophy in London. And I am also grateful for what they have done for the inauguration of an anthroposophical school movement in England, which I believe has done something extraordinarily important for the anthroposophical movement.

Die Raetsel des geschichtlichen Lebens der Menschheit nach Ergebnissen der Geisteswissenschaft. (The Historical Evolution of Humanity and the Science of Spirit. Lecture given at Stuttgart, Germany, April 25, 1918)

No person with real inner sensitivity would find it any longer necessary to have to speak about a mystery when dealing with human soul life, than he would have to speak about the presence of hunger when dealing with the life of the body.

In the way it functions the life process must be so regulated that it induces hunger. It is possible to disregard hunger by the use of certain drugs and to believe that we can get away from it for a time, but in the long run this cannot be done without injury to the body. Similarly, any attempt to conceal the fact that there is a mystery in human life is bound to lead to injury in the soul. Those who disregard the mystery of the human being, either because of their condition in life or a lack of interest, very easily fall prey to a kind of soul hunger and to what happens as a result of this—a sort of atrophy in the life of the soul, an uncertainty and powerlessness, an inability to find one's way in the world.

Although no really sensitive person would find it necessary to have to speak about a human mystery in general, he would probably find more reason to consider that the great questions of life take on a new character in each succeeding period of time. As our time is so short, it is not possible to do more than indicate this fact. We can see how the outer conditions of life change from epoch to epoch, how new needs, new questions arise about the way we live. This also happens within the soul, which in its search for a solution to the mystery of man, changes its own finer qualities from epoch to epoch in order to make it possible for man to find such a solution. In this age that has been with us for three or four centuries, and particularly in the 19th century and our own day, which has culminated in the controlling of the world by means of steam, electricity, modern economic and social conditions, in this age there are also questions about the world in which the human being is placed that are of a different kind from those of earlier times. The science of spirit or anthroposophy seeks to approach the solution of the mystery of man out of the needs of modern times.

It is a mistake to regard the science of spirit, or anthroposophy, as a renewal of the views of the old mystics. Those who level this sort of criticism, from whatever viewpoint it happens to come, usually construct their own picture of the science of spirit and then criticize this picture, which actually has very little to do with what the science of spirit really is. It is only a caricature of the science of spirit that is criticized.

It is of course not possible within the framework of an evening's lecture to mention everything that would be necessary even to provide an outline of the science of spirit. Only a few further points can be added to what I have been saying about this for many years now, even in this city. It is particularly important to remember that the science of spirit does not take its origin from religion or mystical movements—although we should not conclude that it is necessarily opposed to these, as we shall see later—but it arises out of the life of the modern scientific outlook, out of a scientific approach to the world, connected with what is happening in the evolution of present-day natural science.

I do not think that anyone who despises the modern scientific outlook can penetrate the mysteries of the world as is done in the science of spirit, even if it is not the results of science that matter so much as the method of approach in conscientiously applying one's thinking to the phenomena of the world. The science of spirit must be well versed in the ways natural science investigates and thinks, and in the way in which it disciplines the inner life of the soul in the art of acquiring knowledge. The science of spirit must absorb this and reckon with it, if it is to keep abreast of the times.

It is just in connection with such an approach that the question arises: How is it at all possible for modern science and the outlook which results from it, to arrive at a view of the mysteries of the human being that really satisfies us deep down? If we are really positive thinkers we cannot permit ourselves an answer derived from preconceived opinions, or from one form of belief or another, but only from the facts of present-day scientific development and its method of thought. And so you will allow me to start with the course of scientific thought and research in more recent times. This will be regarded very much from the viewpoint of an admirer of the enormous progress made by the scientific approach in the 19th century, a viewpoint which enables one to realize that the hopes placed in natural science, particularly in the 19th century, for a solution to the great mysteries of man were absolutely honest and genuine.

To take one aspect of this, let us look at the rise of the physical and chemical sciences, along with the hopes and aspirations which came with it. We see how people steeped in the scientific outlook began to believe (around the middle of the 19th century) that the inmost being of man can be explained in terms of the physical body just as the working of the forces and forms of nature can be explained in terms of the wonderfully advanced laws of physics and chemistry. The great progress made by physics and chemistry no doubt justified such hopes for a while, and this progress led to the formulation of particular ideas about the world of the smallest particles: atoms and molecules. Even if people think differently about such matters today, nevertheless what I have to say about the atom and the molecule holds good for the whole of the scientific development. The idea was to investigate them and to explain how the substances and physical forces worked in terms of the constitution of the material molecules and atoms, and of the forces and mutual relationships brought about by this constitution. It was thought that if it was possible to explain a process in terms of the smallest particles, it would not be long before the way would be found to understand even the most complicated process, which was seen as a natural process: the process of human thinking and feeling.

Now let us examine where this approach with its great hopes has led. Anyone having studied the achievements of physics and chemistry during the past decades can only be filled with admiration for what has been achieved. I cannot go into details, but I will mention the views of a representative scientist, who sought his views in physics and chemistry in investigating the nature of the smallest physical particle, the atom,—Adolf Roland, who specialized in spectral analysis. He formulated his views on the basis of everything that is possible to know about the smallest particles that can be imagined as effective in the material world.—And how remarkable his views are! And how justified they are must be recognized by anyone who has some understanding of the subject. Adolf Roland says: According to everything that can be known today, an atom of iron must be imagined as being more complicated than a Steinway piano.

Now this is a significant statement, coming from one so familiar with the methods of modern science. Years ago it was believed that one could investigate the tiniest lifeless beings, or at least produce provisional hypotheses about them, in order to find out something about the world that constitutes the immediate surroundings of our ordinary consciousness. And what, in fact, does one find out? The scientist has to admit that having penetrated this smallest of worlds, he finds nothing that is any more explicable than a Steinway piano. So it becomes quite clear that however far we are able to go by this process of division into the very smallest particles, the world becomes no more explicable than it already is to our ordinary, everyday consciousness.—This is one of the ways of approach, with its great hopes. We see as it were, these great hopes disappearing into the world of the smallest particles. And honest scientific progress will show more and more by penetrating into the smallest particles of space that we can add nothing toward answering the great human mystery to what can be known to our ordinary consciousness.

In another sphere there have been just as great hopes, and understandably so, in view of the condition of the times. Just think of the great hopes people had with the advent of the Darwinian theory, with its materialistic bias! People thought they could survey the whole range of living beings, of plants and animals, right up to man. It was thought possible to understand man through having seen how he arose out of the species below him. And in following the transformation of the different species, from the simplest living being right up to man, it was thought possible to find material which would help solve the mystery of man.

Once again, anyone initiated into the ways of modern research can only be filled with admiration for the wonderful work that has been done on this subject even to this day. It was thought that we would find the single egg cell, out of which man had evolved, in the appropriate simplest living being, and would then be able to explain the origin of man out of this egg cell, which would be similar to what would be discovered as the simplest animal form in the world. Once again the path was taken to the smallest, this time the smallest living beings. And what has been found there? It is interesting to hear what a conscientious and important scientist of the 80's, Naegeli, had to say. He expressed his view, which has become famous, in the following way: Exact research on the individual species of plants and animals shows that even the tiniest cells of each single species have the most varied differentiation. The egg cell of a hen is just as fully differentiated from that of a frog as a hen itself is different from a frog.—In descending to the simplest living cells, by means of which it was hoped to explain the complications facing our normal consciousness, we do not arrive at anything simpler—as for instance when we study the iron atom—and in the end have to admit that it is just as complicated as a Steinway piano. Thus we have to imagine that the difference between the individual egg cells is as great as is the difference between the various species we see in nature with our ordinary consciousness.

Naegeli therefore proves by means of his own scientific conscientiousness that the approach of Darwinism with its materialistic bias is of no value.

But now there is another interesting fact. We could, of course, think that Naegeli, the great botanist, was really a one-sided personality, and in any case what he said was spoken in the 80's and that science has progressed and that his views are out of date. But we can also study the very latest developments on this subject, which have been well summed up by a most significant person, one of the most eminent pupils of Ernst Haeckel:—Oskar Hertwig. In the last week or two there has been published his summing up of what he has to offer as a result of his research on—as he calls his book,—Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufalls theorie.

Just imagine, we are confronted by the fact that one of the great pupils of Haeckel, the most radical exponent of materialistic Darwinism, has in the course of his life come to refute this materialistic Darwinism in the most thorough and complete way. I myself often heard from Haeckel's own lips that Oskar Hertwig was the one from whom he expected the most, and whom he expected to be his successor. And now we find today that it is Oskar Hertwig who refutes what he had absorbed as scientific Darwinism from his teacher, Haeckel! And he does it thoroughly, for his work—if I may use the expression—has a certain completeness.

This is what I wanted to say, to start with. I shall come back to the question later. I would only like to add that Oskar Hertwig makes use of everything that even the most recent research has brought to light in order to prove that what Naegeli said was absolutely true, so that one can say that the present-day position of biological research shows that a study of the smallest living entities does not tell us any more than does a study of the various species that we can perceive quite normally. For these smallest living entities, the cells, are, according to Naegeli and Hertwig, just as different as are the species themselves. A study of them only teaches us that nothing can be discovered in this way that cannot also be discovered by our normal perception in looking at the ordinary world.

Nor is it much different when—I can only mention this briefly—instead of looking at the very small, we look at the very large, the world of astronomy. For here too there has been the most wonderful progress in more recent times, for instance, in the study of the way the heavenly bodies move, which surprised everyone so much in 1859, and which has had such tremendous consequences in astronomy and especially in astrophysics.—And what has been the result? A thing one hears frequently from those who are at home in this subject is: Wherever we look in the world, whether we discover one or the other substance, this is not the main thing, for we find exactly the same substances with exactly the same forces in the universe, in the relatively large, as we find working here on the earth, so that when instead of looking into the very small, we examine the very large we only find what we know from our ordinary experience of space and time in everyday life. It is just in deepening what can be achieved by natural science and in particular in feeling deep admiration for what natural science has achieved that the way for a modern science of spirit or anthroposophy is prepared. But the latter is also well aware that however admirable these achievements of natural science are, however significant they may be for particular purposes, however necessary they may be for sound human progress, they can never penetrate the real mystery of man. This they themselves have proved until now.

The science of spirit or anthroposophy therefore takes its cue from natural science and tries to go quite a different way, and this way is not connected with trying to explain what we experience with our normal consciousness by means of a study of the very small or the very large, nor with methods using microscopes, telescopes or anything that can be attained by our senses or instruments which help them, nor by any scientific methods used in the sense world, nor by studying anything other than what we experience in our normal consciousness, but the science of spirit seeks to approach a solution to the mystery of man by a quite different kind of perception, as far as it is possible for human beings to do this.

In giving an outline of how one can imagine this other way of looking at the things that surround us, and at the events that happen around us in the world, I will make use of a comparison which will help to make the matter clearer.

In ordinary life we are familiar with two states of consciousness, the state of our normal consciousness which we have from the time we awaken in the morning to the time we go to sleep in the evening—this is our normal day consciousness. We are also familiar with the state of our so-called dream consciousness, in which pictures rise chaotically out of depths of the organism that are not accessible to human consciousness, and these pictures appear to be completely without any form of order. It is our experience that makes us aware of the difference between this chaotic dream consciousness and our orderly day consciousness which is encompassed by the real world.

The science of spirit or anthroposophy shows us that just as we awaken out of the chaotic dream consciousness into our ordinary day consciousness there is also a further awakening out of our day consciousness to—as I have called it in my book, Riddles of Man—a perceptive consciousness. The science of spirit does not deal with a reversion into a world of dreams, visions or hallucinations, but with something that can enter into human consciousness, into ordinary day consciousness in the same way that this day consciousness replaces our dream consciousness when we awaken. The science of spirit or anthroposophy is therefore concerned with a perceptive consciousness, with a real awakening out of our ordinary day consciousness, with a higher consciousness, if I may use such an expression. And its content is derived from the results of this perceptive, higher consciousness.—Just as the human being awakens from his dream world, where pictures move chaotically to and fro, into the world of the senses, so now as a scientist of spirit he awakens from the normal day consciousness into a perceptive consciousness, where he becomes a part of a real, spiritual world.

Now, first of all, I must give an idea of what this perceptive consciousness is. It is not acquired by means of any particular fantastic, arbitrary act or fantastic arbitrary decision, but it is acquired by a person working as a scientist of spirit, work which takes a long time, that is no less toilsome than work in the laboratory or observatory, which is pieced together out of the smallest fragments, perhaps even with only small results, but which are necessary for the progress of science as a whole. But everything that the scientist of spirit has to do is not done as in the laboratory or observatory with ordinary methods and appliances, but is done with the only apparatus that is of any use to the science of spirit, the human soul. It consists of inner processes of the human soul, which, as we shall now see, have nothing to do with vague or chaotic mysticism, but which demand systematic and methodical work on the human soul.

How does one acquire the wish to pursue such spiritual work, such an inner development, such a higher self training? It is possible to do it by taking our ordinary conscious life as a starting point, and gradually coming to a particular kind of conviction that becomes more compelling as one immerses one's mind in the modern scientific outlook. For several hundred years already there have been some personalities with this attitude of mind, and today this is increasingly the case. I cannot mention individual names now, but this inner experience, which gradually emerges under the influence of the scientific way of thinking as a distinct and necessary inner outlook and attitude, will affect increasingly wider circles of people and will become a common conviction with all the consequences that such a conviction is bound to entail.

There are two things that we are concerned with here. The first is that we have to acquire a certain view of the human ego, or what we call our self, by means of true and intimate observation, carried out willingly and with discipline. We address this self, we express it in one word, when after a certain point in our childhood development, we begin to use the word “I.” In our honest self-observation based on self-training we ask: What is this ego really like? Where is it to be found in us? Is it possible to find it or, if we are honest and conscientious, do we not have to admit as the great thinker Hume did, who did not arrive at his convictions arbitrarily, but by honest, self-observation, that however much I look into myself, I find feelings, ideas, joy and sorrow, I find what I have experienced in the world, but I do not find an ego anywhere? And how can I in any case—as he quite rightly says—find this ego? If it could be found so easily it would also have to be present when I sleep. But when I sleep, I know nothing about this ego. Can I assume that it is extinguished in the evening and revives again in the morning? Without actually being grasped by the mind, it must be present even when the mind is not working in sleep.

This is absolutely clear. And all those who are familiar with present-day literature on this subject will increasingly find this clear and obvious, that this will become more and more the case.

How are we to understand this? I would have to speak for hours if I were to go into details to prove what I am now saying.—I can only just mention the one fact that the ego of which we are speaking is present in the same way in our day consciousness as it is in the deepest, dreamless sleep. The ego always sleeps. It sleeps when we are asleep, and it sleeps when we are awake, and we know only about a sleeping ego when we are awake, about what lives, even as far as our waking consciousness is concerned, in a hardly conscious sphere of our soul life. Even when we are wide awake in our ordinary consciousness the ego is still only present as it is when we sleep. The reason we cannot imagine anything like an ego in us is because the rest of our soul life is present and, like the black spot in our eyes, cannot see.—The ego is made dark in our souls in a way, and can only be perceived as something we cannot imagine. The ego is always asleep and there is no difference between the way the ego should be imagined in sleep and when we are awake.

It is the same when we consider our minds; for if we train our self-observation properly we realize that our mental images have exactly the same existence in our waking day life as they do in the night in the chaotic mental images of our dreams. In our minds we dream, even when we are awake.

These truths that our ego sleeps and that we dream in our minds and imagination, even when we are awake—these truths, it is true, are washed away by our active life in the day. But for anyone able to observe the human soul they prove to be great and shattering truths which stand at the start of every spiritually scientific investigation.

And if we were then to ask, to ask one's self-observation: This is all very well, but how do we actually distinguish our ordinary waking life of the day from our dream life and our sleeping life? What happens at the moment when we wake up?—As I have said, I cannot go into details—you can find all the details necessary to understand more completely what I am now saying in outline in my book Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.—The question arises: What actually happens when we wake up, if our ego really remains asleep and our ideas and images, even in waking life, are like dream pictures? What is the difference between the waking and the sleeping human being?

Trained self-observation provides the answer: It is solely the penetration of the will into the soul life which differentiates waking life from sleeping and dreaming. The fact that we are awake and do not dream is due solely to the will pouring into us. It is because of this that we do not have dream pictures rising up without any direction of will, that we unite ourselves to the outer world with our will and with our will become a part of the outer world. It is what awakens the dream pictures to the substance of real-ness that they are images of an outer world, that brings it about that after waking up we are able to incorporate ourselves into the world through our will.

However paradoxical this may sound to many people today, it will have to become a basic conviction of a future outlook and will indeed become so, because it is bound to follow from a science based on true self-observation.

It is the flashing of the will into our minds that gives us our real connection with the outer world, which we experience with our ordinary consciousness. It is this that provides us with real self-observation in our ordinary consciousness. But we cannot remain in this consciousness if we really wish to fathom the actual nature of the things that surround us and the connection of human beings with the world. There has to be a similar transformation in our soul life, in the ordinary soul life we have in the day, in relation to the transformation that happens in our sleeping and dreaming life when we wake up. And a transformation can come about by working arduously towards a change, firstly in the life of our minds, and secondly, in the life of our will.

And I would like to point out at the start that what we call the science of spirit or anthroposophy is not based on anything metaphysical, spiritualistic or anything vaguely mystical, but that it is a true continuation of the well-founded and human scientific way of thinking. And so we can, for instance, link on to the sound beginnings that are to be found in the Goethean outlook upon nature and the world.

Allow me this personal remark, because it has something to do with what I have to say. That I am linking on to this Goethean outlook upon nature and the world is due to the fact that my destiny led me to immerse myself in it and to take from it what leads, as we shall see, to real perception into the spiritual world that surrounds us, surrounds us in the same way that the sense world does. What is so noteworthy with Goethe—and which is still not appreciated today—is that for instance he is able to bring physical phenomena that normally are only considered quite apart from the soul being, right into the life of the human soul. It is really quite wonderful to see how Goethe treats the physical aspects in his Theory of Color, which is still looked down upon by most people today, how he starts with the physical and physiological aspects and leads from them to what he expresses so beautifully in the section, “The Physical and Moral Effect of Color.” Naturally, one compromises oneself in many respects if one speaks about Goethe's Theory of Color. It cannot be spoken about as a matter of course because in its present form physics does not allow for any possibilities of discussing a justification of Goethe's theory. But the time will come when Goethe's Theory of Color will be vindicated by a more advanced kind of physics.

I can refer to what I have said about the artistic side of this in my book Goethe's Conception of the World, and in my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings. (Published in English as Goethe the Scientist—Ed.) Today, however, I am not concerned with vindicating Goethe's Theory of Color, but only wish to deal with method, with how Goethe manages to evolve beyond purely physical considerations in the chapter “The Physical and Moral Effect of Colors.” Here he describes so beautifully what the human soul experiences when it perceives the color blue. Blue, says Goethe, pours into the soul the experience of coldness because it reminds us of shadow. Blue rooms bestow a feeling of sadness on all the objects in the rooms.—Or let us take what Goethe says about the experience of the color red. Red, says Goethe, produces an experience purely according to its own nature. It can produce the experience of seriousness and worthiness, or of devotion and grace—of seriousness and worthiness in its darker and thicker shades, of devotion and grace in its lighter and thinner shades.—So we see that Goethe does not only deal with the immediate physical nature of color, but he brings the soul into it, the experiences of sympathy and antipathy, as immediate experiences of the soul, as we have in life when we feel joy and sorrow. It may be that the intensity with which Goethe studied the colors is hardly noticeable, but nevertheless he goes through all the colors in a way that one can do if one allows one's soul life to pervade them,—that is, Goethe does not separate the physical from the soul experience. In doing this he laid the foundation for a kind of observation which even today is naturally only in its beginnings, but which will find a serious and worthy further development in the science of spirit. For the human being's relationship to color is exactly the same as exists with the rest of his senses. He is so fully taken up with the perception of something physical, with what works through his eyes and ears, that he does not perceive what radiates through and permeates the physical percept as an element of soul; he does not experience its full power and significance in his inner life. It is like not being able to see a weak light against a strong one. For it is above all the physical object that our eye normally perceives so strongly.

Now it is possible to take what is to be found in Goethe in its first beginnings—albeit instinctively with him because of his naturally sound outlook—a stage further. And it can also be looked at from another viewpoint. Goethe never deals with colors only as they exist in the world, but he also deals with the reaction they stimulate, their effect on the organism. How wonderful, even compared with the latest experiments in physics done by Hertwig, Hume and others, are the things that Goethe brought to light about the reaction of the eye, how the colors are not only perceived as long as one looks at them, but then they only gradually fade away. In all this there are in our ordinary perceptions weak beginnings which can be applied much more to the inner life of our mental images and can undergo further development. For in the conscientious and careful development of particular aspects of our cognitive and imaginative life there is to be found an aspect of science that belongs to the science of spirit or anthroposophy. Goethe's attitude to color has to be applied by those who wish to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of the science of spirit to the content of our minds, which for our normal consciousness is really only a world of dream pictures permeated by the will. The scientist of spirit also approaches the outer world in exactly the same way as our ordinary consciousness approaches the pictures in our minds, concepts and ideas. A sound thinking person does not become any different from anyone else. But if he is to receive a revelation of the spiritual world he has to effect a particular kind of perceptive consciousness. And he does this by inducing a certain metamorphosis in the life of his mind.

The details of what has to be done you can find in the book already mentioned. I only want to put before you now the main principles.

The scientist of spirit gradually manages to free his mental images from their normal task by a particular kind of methodical approach to the content of his mind. The normal function of our mental images is that they enable us to have pictures of the outer world. These pictures are the end result. But for the scientist of spirit they are a beginning, for whatever their significance, whatever kind of picture of the world they give, he immerses himself in its inner life, the inner effects of the picture, the image. And he does this in such a way that he does not look to its content, but to the forces that develop in it, and he does this when his consciousness has been completely brought to rest and becomes alive in the activity of his imagination and thinking.

Normally, a scientist starts with nature as it is in the world and ends up with his ideas. The scientist of spirit has to start with the inner activity of his ideas, with a kind of meditative activity, but which is not at all the same as the kind of meditation normally described and which is nothing more than brooding on something that is on one's mind—no, what we are concerned with here is that the soul is brought to rest, its activity is stilled, so that the life of the soul approaches certain ideas that can be grasped and surveyed like a calm sea. They should then become active in the life of the soul, active solely in the life of the mind. After a great amount of meditative work which is certainly not less than work done in the laboratory or observatory, we arrive at a stage where we perceive remarkable things happening, affecting the life of the soul in this inner life of the mind. One of the most important and significant faculties of the soul that we develop in our normal consciousness is our memory, our ability to remember. What is it that our memory, our ability to remember brings about? It enables us to call up at a later time mental images that we have formed at an earlier time. First of all, we have an experience and this is taken into the mind. The resulting image is like a shadow of the original experience. The experience disappears, but the fact of its existence continues.—We carry the image of the experience in us. Years later, or whenever it might be, we can recall it. What we recall out of the total organism of our spirit, soul and body as a memory image is a shadow-like copy of what was imprinted on the memory in the first place.

If we pursue the methods actively and energetically that are given and described in my books for the cultivation of the mind, we acquire a much stronger kind of activity in the soul working in the memory. However paradoxical it may appear, I have to describe it, because I do not want to speak about the generalities of the science of spirit, but to deal with the positive and concrete aspect of it, upon which it is based. The scientist of spirit experiences that a mental image is brought alive, and by bringing the peace of his consciousness constantly to bear upon this image he gets to the point where he knows: Now you have exercised the powers of your thinking to such an extent that you can continue no further.—Then something shattering happens. The moment arrives when we know that we cannot continue to use our thinking in the same controlled way, but have to let it go, just as we let an idea or image go that then sinks into forgetfulness and that later can be recalled out of this by our memory. But when an image that we have as a result of an energetic meditative life is let go, it enters into much greater depths of our life than an image that is taken into our memory. The scientist of spirit then experiences—this is only one example, other experiences have to be linked to this, but now I only wish to give a few examples—that he has strengthened an image by the powers of his thinking to such an extent that he can allow it to sink into his being so that it is no longer present. But then it appears later, according to the images we have—this has all to be regulated—these images remain present. We acquire views in the course of time in which these images have to remain present, deep down in the unconscious. Some images remain for a longer period in the subconscious, others a shorter period and we acquire the power to recall them again and again. We do not do this by exerting ourselves in trying to remember an image. Images are recalled by peaceful immersion in ourselves; It is not like the way our ordinary memory works, for here we are dependent upon a mood of expectancy that we bring about at the right moment. We become aware of this mood of expectancy by other things which cannot be described here. We have a mood or feeling of expectancy; we do not do anything to bring about an image or an experience. We simply have this peaceful expectancy, this purely selfless immersion in ourselves and only after hours, weeks or even only after years does there come back what we have perceived in the very depths of our being, as if in a kind of abyss. And then the opposite happens from what takes place in our normal consciousness.

With our normal consciousness the experience comes first in all its vividness and then the shadowlike image is produced. Here something quite different happens. We start with something which leads at the same time to self-discipline and self-education, and this is an image which we put before our souls and let it be present in the soul for weeks or months until the moment comes when it can be completely immersed. Then it emerges again—but how it emerges is the surprising thing, for it is not anything as shadowlike as the normal image.

This experience is brought about by working on the image in a certain way and we know full well, if we are familiar with things that lead to such results as these, that we are dealing here with something sound and not morbidly introspective. These are not the same forces that lead to hallucinations or visions, or that produce morbid or unsound states of any kind, but they are the forces that produce precisely the opposite and, in fact, have the effect of banishing everything in the nature of hallucinations and visions.—It is the opposite process. The soul, in undergoing this, is not as it is in everyday life with its normal, healthy understanding, but it has to be much healthier and sounder if the exercises which belong to this whole development and which have to be done regularly are to overcome everything that would lead one astray. What this leads up to is something we have not known before—something spiritual, something super-sensible, that we now perceive in ourselves. What is it that perceives? It is what Goethe called the eye or the ear of the spirit, of which he had an instinctive presentiment.

From the moment onward when we have had an experience such as I have just described, we know that we do not have only a physical body, but that we have a finer, more inward body that is in no way made up of physical substance. However paradoxical it may appear to many people today when in the science of spirit or anthroposophy we speak of a fine etheric body, a soul body, it is nevertheless a truth—but a truth that can really be investigated only in this way I have described. We now know that we have something in ourselves in which spiritual perception can arise, just as perception can arise in the physical organism in the physical eye. We know that the eye or the ear of the spirit, as Goethe called it, becomes something from which there springs something out of the etheric world, out of the super-sensible body. We cannot use this super-sensible body like a physical body, but we know that it exists and we know that there has to be a science of spirit for us to find it. It does not come into being by means of any arbitrary act of the will, but it comes into being with the help of the most recent philosophical thought.

Let me cite a few facts that are especially important in this connection for the formation of a judgment about anthroposophy. The philosophers of more recent times who inherited the work of their predecessors done around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century and in the first half of the 19th century, pointed out, albeit instinctively and not as a result of method, that man does not have only a physical body, which provides the basis for his being, but he also has what one can call an etheric, a soul body. Only the terminology for this fine body was different, a body which exists as a fact for the science of spirit.

This kind of assumption led Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797-1879) to his conception of the process of death, which he expressed in the following way: “For we hardly have to ask how the human being acts in regard to himself” when “going through death ... With this concept of the continuing existence of the soul we are not therefore bypassing our experience and laying hold of an unknown sphere of merely illusory existence, but we find ourselves in the midst of a comprehensible reality accessible to our thinking.” And now Fichte says—and this is what is important—this consciousness points to something beyond itself. “... Anthroposophy produces results founded on the most varied evidence that according to the nature of his being as also in the real source of his consciousness man belongs to a super-sensible world. Our ordinary consciousness, however, which is based on our senses and on the picture of the world that arises through the use of sight, and which includes the whole life of the sense world, including the human sense world, all this is really only a place where the super-sensible life of the spirit is carried out in bringing the otherworldly spiritual content of ideas into the sense world by a conscious free act ... This fundamental conception of man's being raises `Anthropology' in its final result into `Anthroposophy'.”

Into an “anthroposophy!” He uses the expression, anthroposophy. We can see from this the longing for the science that today has to become a reality.

To cite another example—owing to lack of time I can only quote a few examples—I would like to bring in the important German thinker, Vital Troxler (1780-1866), who also did some important teaching in Switzerland. He speaks out of the same approach, but still instinctively, because the science of spirit or anthroposophy did not exist at that time: “Even in earlier times philosophers distinguished a fine, noble, soul body from the coarse body ... a soul, which contained within it a picture of the body which they called a model and which for them was the inner higher man ... More recently even Kant in his Dreams of a Spiritual Seer dreams seriously as a joke about a wholly inward soul man, that bears within its spirit-body all the limbs normally to be found outside ...”

And now Troxler says: “It is most gratifying that the most recent philosophy, which ... must be manifest ... in anthroposophy, climbs to greater heights, and it must be remembered that this idea cannot be the fruit of mere speculation ...”

I do not need to quote the rest. He means that there must be a science which leads to the super-sensible, to the qualities of this super-sensible body, just as anthropology leads to the physical qualities and forces of the physical human body.

I have dealt with characteristic thinkers on this subject in my book, The Riddles of Man. They did not work out these things as the present-day science of spirit can do, but they spoke out of instinctive longing for a future science of spirit that has now to become a reality through this present science of spirit. Thus also the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the important philosopher, Immanuel Herman Fichte.

In his Anthropology, the second edition of which appeared in 1860, Fichte says that there can be nothing that persists in matter: “In the elements of matter it is not possible to find the unifying form principle of the body that is active during our whole life. We are therefore directed to a second, essentially different cause in the body. Insofar as this contains what persists in the digestion it is the true, inner, invisible body that is present in all visible matter. The outer manifestation of this, formed out of the never-ceasing digestion may henceforth be called `body' which neither persists nor is a unity and which is the mere effect or image of the inner bodily nature, which casts it into the changing world of substance in the same way that an apparent solid body is made out of the particles of iron filings by a magnetic force, but which is again reduced to dust as soon as the binding force is taken away.”

Thus we see that Immanuel Hermann Fichte instinctively finds himself in the position of having to accept a force-body which holds the material components together in a material body in a certain formal structure like a magnetic force.

You notice, too, that Fichte also longs for an anthroposophy when he deals with the super-sensible in man and draws our attention to it.

Anthroposophy does not appear at a particular time without reason, but it is something that has long been anticipated by the really deep core of our soul life. This can be seen quite clearly in the examples I have given.

Now I must turn to the other aspect of the development of our soul life, the development of the will. What I have said so far was concerned with the development of the mind. The will, too, can be led beyond the condition it has in our normal consciousness. If you imagine that someone—I only want to mention the most important things, the rest can be read in my books—that someone were to look at his inner life in the same way that we look at our ordinary life between human beings under normal conditions, the life of the human community, we can notice our reaction when a desire or impulse awakens when we say: Conditions allow this impulse, this desire to take its course; another time the conditions do not allow us, or we do not allow it. We see that we evolve a certain responsibility toward outer life that is rooted in our conscience. We develop quite definite feelings, a particular configuration of our soul life in our conscience, concerning what we do or do not do. Our normal consciousness is subject to our soul life in developing such inner demands or standards—we obey logic, but when it comes to thinking or not thinking, to whether thinking is clear or restricted, how cool and logical our relationship is to this as compared to our relationship to outer life! We accept the one because we can, as it were, grasp it in spirit, as a mental image; we reject the other. But one cannot experience the intensive life that we feel in our human responsibility when it comes to our purely logical and scientific thinking.

The second kind of exercise consists in pouring out a certain kind of inner responsibility over our thinking, over our mind, so that we reach the point of not only saying: This opinion is valid, this opinion is properly conceived, I can give it my assent and so on, but also that we manage to preserve a mental image in the same duty-bound consciousness as we have when we do not go through with the one or the other action. Morality—though quite a different kind of morality from the one we have in normal life—is poured out over our mind, over our mental images. Inner responsibility poured out over the life of our mental images results in attitudes where in dealing in certain experiences we allow ourselves some mental images and reject others, in the one case accepting them, in the other rejecting them by a justified but temperate antipathy. From this new aspect, sympathy and antipathy activate our inner life. This again has to be practiced for a long time. I will give an example of how this can be supported by accustoming ourselves to allowing a mental image to be present in our souls in as manifold a way as possible.

In ordinary life one person may be a monist, another a dualist, the third a materialist, the fourth a spiritualist and so on. If we learn to immerse ourselves in the life of our mental images our concepts take on a different aspect in the living inner experience of the world of our mental images so that we come to recognize: Of course, there are concepts of materialism, they can be used for a particular province, for a particular sphere of the world. In fact, they must be available, for one can only get something out of immersing oneself in a particular sphere of the world if one has grasped materialism in all its many aspects. For another sphere of the world spiritualistic concepts are needed, for a third, monistic, for a fourth, the concept of idealism and so on. Monistic, dualistic concepts—they enrich the life of our minds and we know that such concepts mean no more than do different photographs of a tree taken from different points. We learn now to immerse ourselves in an inner element, an inner tolerance, that once again is an outpouring of moral substances over our inner life. It is just like someone receiving a picture of a tree that he has actually seen, who would never say, if he received a picture of the tree taken from a different angle, that it was not the same tree. Just as we can have four or even eight pictures which all portray the same tree, so we learn to look at all sorts of ideas, which singly would represent a one sided picture of reality, and to learn about them, to look into them with great care and immerse ourselves in their manifoldness. This is normally underrated when it comes to doing the exercises which have now to be undertaken. This is something that is not much understood today, even by the best, but it does lead to the further development of the will in a way similar to the development of the mind that I have described. We then experience that the will liberates itself from being bound to the body.

Just as oxygen can be extracted from water, so the will is released by means of the energetic pursuit of these various exercises that are described, and it becomes freer and freer, and more and more spiritual. By these means we awaken a real, higher man in ourselves that is not just an image of an ideal nor something thought out. We make the discovery which is still a paradox to most people today, but which is quite real for the science of spirit, that a second, more subtle man lives in us, having a quite different consciousness from our normal consciousness. And this consciousness that we can awaken in this way shows us that it is a much more real man than the one that we live in the physical body and move around in. This man in us can make use of the eye of the spirit, as I called it earlier, in the etheric body, in the way I have described.

The acceptance of such another consciousness of another more all-embracing man—this has a far more intimate connection with nature and its beings and to the spiritual world than our normal consciousness.—The acceptance of this also was instinctively foreseen by the more penetrating scientists of the 19th century. Here, too, the science of spirit brings about a fulfillment. I would only like to point out how Eduard von Hartmann worked in this direction, though I do not wish to advocate his philosophy in detail in any way. In his really controvertible work, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, Hartmann referred to the fact that an unknown soul quality is to be found behind the normal consciousness of the human being that—as Eduard von Hartmann describes it—comes to expression painfully in a way, and which has a kind of underground telephone connection with the unconscious spiritual nature of the outer world, and which can work its way up, and does work its way up, through the astral nature and pours out of the unconscious or subconscious into our normal, everyday consciousness.

Eduard von Hartmann really pointed instinctively to what the science of spirit teaches as a fact. Only he believed that this other consciousness of the human being could only be arrived at by theoretical hypotheses, analytical concepts and inferences. This was what he was lacking because he never wanted to take the path which is appropriate to his time: not just to formulate the life of the soul theoretically, but to take it actively into training in the two ways that have been described.

It has been possible to see from this that the acceptance of this spiritual nature in everything is much more helped by the solution of the mystery of the human being—even from a philosophical viewpoint, if it really remains philosophical—than all that can be done by the rest of science in the ways described above. And this can be proved by what has happened. Just in these matters Eduard von Hartmann proves a remarkable figure.

In 1869 he published his Philosophy of the Unconscious. Here he discussed how the spiritual that lives in the soul, hidden, as it were, in the spiritual soul, also lives in nature, and how the materialist today has only a one-sided idea of how the spiritual that lives in the soul also permeates and invades nature. In was 1869 that The Philosophy of the Unconscious was first published. It was the time when people had the greatest hopes of gaining a new view of the world on the basis of the new Darwinian approach, the laws of natural selection and the struggle for existence. Hartmann energetically opposed everything connected with this approach from a spiritual viewpoint, and naturally enough the scientists who were full of materialistic interpretation of Darwinism reacted to what Hartmann said. They said: Well, of course, only a philosopher can speak like that who is not at home in real scientific research and who does not know how conscientiously science works!—And many works were published by various scientists attacking Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. They all wrote basically the same thing—Hartmann was a dilettante and one should not bother to listen to him any further. One only had to protect the layman who always fell for such things; that is why Hartmann's position should be exposed.

Among the many works that appeared there was also one which was anonymous. From start to finish everything was brilliantly refuted. It was shown how from the viewpoint which a scientist had to have, he understood nothing about how science works in its approach to the great mystery of the world!—The scientists were tremendously enthusiastic and were in full agreement with what the anonymous author had written, and it was soon necessary to reprint this ingenious, scientific work. Oskar Schmidt and Ernst Haeckel themselves were full of praise and said: It is a pity that this colleague of ours, this significant scientific thinker, does not say who he is. If he will only say who he is we will regard him as one of ourselves.—In fact, Ernst Haeckel even said: I myself could have said nothing better than what this anonymous author has marshaled from the scientific viewpoint against Hartmann.

And lo and behold, a second edition was needed just as the scientists had wished, But now in the second edition the author revealed himself. It was Eduard von Hartmann himself who had written the work! This was a lesson that could not have been executed more brilliantly for people who constantly believe that those who do not adopt their own attitude could not possibly understand anything about their learning and knowledge. It is a lesson from which we can still learn today, and particularly those could learn who, when it comes to opposing what the science of spirit teaches, approach it with a similar attitude.

The scientist of spirit or anthroposophist knows quite well the sort of things that can be leveled against anthroposophy, however well it may be presented. He is fully aware of what can be said against it, just as Eduard von Hartmann was able to present what the scientists found to be excellent and to their liking. Such lessons, it is true, are soon forgotten, and the old habits soon return. But we can recall them, and we should learn from them. It is not only with Eduard von Hartmann but also with others that an instinctive feeling has arisen that quite a different kind of consciousness is at work in the depths of the human soul.

I would remind you of Myers, the English scientist and editor of the reports of psychic experiments which were published in many volumes and which set out to show how there is something hidden in the human soul that exists alongside our ordinary experience,—what James, the American, called the year of the discovery of one of the most significant facts, namely the discovery of the unconscious in 1886. Today scientists on the whole know very little about such things. They know nothing of Eduard von Hartmann's arguments, nothing about James, nothing about 1886 when Myers discovered the unconscious, the part of us that is of a spirit-soul nature and is connected with the spirit-soul nature of the world, and that rises into and awakens our normal consciousness. It is the same as I have described as awakening as if out of our everyday consciousness, out of a dreaming state, and makes our ordinary consciousness into a perceptive consciousness.—But in Myers and James it is to be found in a chaotic and immature state, rather like a hope or promise.—It becomes a real fact for the first time with the science of spirit or anthroposophy.

And so we see—however paradoxical it may appear today—that the development of the inner powers of the soul emerges on two fronts. I can only indicate how what I have described in its first beginnings, when systematically carried out, eventually leads to our being increasingly able to learn to use the spiritual eye in the etheric body by means of the other man that lives in us, and we discover this world of inner processes in ourselves and are able to feel ourselves as belonging to it. How we then learn not only to overcome our conception of space, but also of time. We come to look at time in quite a different way. And, as I have said, we become able not only to carry ourselves back in our memories into the past, but also to gain experience of ourselves at earlier points of time and also to carry ourselves back beyond the time that we normally remember.

You all know that we can remember back only to a certain point in our childhood. This is as far as we can think back to. What we experienced in the first years of our childhood we can only be reminded of from outside. But now we can carry ourselves back to the time in our earliest childhood when as human beings we were not yet able to recognize or perceive our powers, to the time when the forces we need for our ordinary consciousness were needed for the initial growth of the body. That is to say, we learn to perceive not with the ego of our earliest childhood, but the ego that has brought our spiritual nature out of the spiritual world and united itself with what has been inherited in the way of physical forces and substances from our father, mother and ancestors. We go back to this spiritual human being. From the present moment we look back with an awakened consciousness and see through the sense world into the spiritual; we have a spiritual world before us. Similarly, when we carry ourselves back in time we then have a qualitative experience of the life that we live in the body and that comes to an end with death. On the one hand, our ordinary perception cuts us off in our normal consciousness from spiritual reality; on the other, our bodily experience cuts us off in our normal consciousness from what exists beyond the gate of death. The moment we reach the time which we can remember back to, we see on the other hand life bordered by death, and we see what death makes of us. What is beyond death is revealed, together with what is beyond birth, only divided, kept apart by our life in the body. The spiritual man, the eternal in us, is experienced in that we see our physical life as a river; the one bank is birth and the other bank is death. Death, however, is revealed together with what exists before birth.

We also see maturing in us what leads from this life to a further life on earth. For if we have gone through the gate of death we then see what lives in us. Just as we can say that there is something that lives in the plant which, having gone through the dark and cold time of year, develops into a new plant, so we see how our spirit-soul nature that is within us in this life goes through the spiritual world between death and birth and appears again in a new life on earth. All this becomes accessible to our perception when we develop the powers of the soul in the way that it has been described. Just as we grow accustomed to a physical world through our open eyes and open ears, so we accustom ourselves to a spiritual world, really become concretely aware of a spiritual world that exists around us. We live together with spiritual beings, spiritual forces. Just as we recognize our life, our body, as the expression of our spiritual being which begins at birth, or rather at conception, so we also come to know our physical life on the earth, our physical earth, as a further condition or state of something that has been preceded in planetary existence.

We come to see our earth as a metamorphosis, a transformation of an earlier planet, in which we existed as human beings at an earlier stage, not yet with the present-day physical body, but in a spiritual state and with the nature we have today in a spiritual form. The animals have undergone a downward evolution, the human being has evolved in such a way that the point at which man and animal meet is to be found in the spiritual and not in the physical. Man's evolution on the earth is a continuation of the life on an earlier planet, which has been transformed into the present earth, and which will similarly be transformed into the next stage and will enable the human being to take into himself an ego that today is still slumbering in him, but which will become more and more awake in the further course of evolution. The whole world will be spiritualized.

When we speak about nature we do not content ourselves with referring to a vague pantheism existing in the outer world, but in looking at the being of the earth we speak of rising stages that we get to know. Nor do we enter into a spiritual world with a vague pantheism, but as a concrete individual and real human being.

Today one is forgiven least of all for saying such a thing as this. Nevertheless it is true that a real, concretely spiritual world is opened up to us, the spiritual world that we belong to with our spiritual man, just as with our physical man we belong to ordinary physical reality.

And so in bringing about a methodical awakening of inner life the science of spirit or anthroposophy adds knowledge of spirit to natural knowledge and introduces a different picture of the world from the one we have in our ordinary consciousness. In this connection the science of spirit will gradually have to be taken into the hearts of those who are longing for it, but who for the most part do not know that this longing exists in their hidden feelings. But it is there, and it will come to be more and more recognized.

It is remarkable how even the most eminent thinkers of our time and of the immediate past have not yet been able to grasp the details of the kind of experience I have been describing. I wanted to cite the great philosopher Eduard von Hartmann who had an idea of what it was about, but who was only interested in reaching another consciousness in the human being theoretically, and who was unable to discover that one cannot find one's way into the spiritual by theories or hypotheses, but only by experience, by working upon one's thoughts in such a way that they are sent out as messengers into an unknown world, from which they return as experience, and that leads one into the spiritual world, as I have described. But the experience of it must be based on accepting the existence of a world of ideas and images as real.

Forgive me if I say something personal once more, but it is very much connected with this whole subject. I do not particularly wish to do so, but you will see why I refer to it.

In 1894 I attempted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to provide the world with just such a philosophical approach as a preparation for the science of spirit, where the individual human viewpoints, which sometimes have such remarkable names, could be understood, not as a choice of mutually exclusive views, but that they could be seen like photographs or different pictures of the same object and that these concepts could be allowed to speak for themselves so that one has a many-sided picture.

Eduard von Hartmann studied this Philosophy of Spiritual Activity in 1894, and he sent me his copy in which he had made notes. I would like to read a passage from the letter he sent me. It contains singular, philosophical expressions but what he means is quite clear even without going into what these expressions mean.

In the first place he says, for instance: “The title should be `Monism based on the theory of knowledge—ethical individualism,' and not `Philosophy of Spiritual Activity'.”

But he has an instinctive feeling for the fact that these two aspects are supposed to throw light on one and the same thing. He thinks, however, that they cannot be brought together. They are in fact brought together in the life of the soul and not by means of empty theories. This is what he meant. And similarly in other points.

Eduard von Hartmann therefore says: “In this book neither Hume's absolute phenomenalism nor Berkeley's phenomenalism based on God are reconciled, nor this more immanent or subjective, phenomenalism and the transcendental panlogism of Hegel, nor Hegel's panlogism and Goethean individualism. Between these two aspects there yawns an unbridgeable abyss.”

Because all these views exist in such a living way, they all testify to the same thing, they characterize one and the same thing from varying viewpoints!

Hartmann has an inkling of this, a feeling for it, but he does not see that what is important is not a hypothetical and theoretical way of putting them together in thought, but a living way of experiencing them as a unity.

He therefore goes on to say: “Above all, the fact is ignored that phenomenalism leads with absolute inevitability to soliphism [this may be a coined word, a `typo,' or the translator really meant solipsism - e.Ed] (that is, to a doctrine of being one, a doctrine of the ego), to illusionism and to agnosticism, and nothing is done to prevent this plunge into the abyss of un-philosophy, because the danger is not even recognized.”

This danger certainly has been recognized! And Eduard von Hartmann once again instinctively uses the right expression: “plunge into the abyss of un-philosophy.”

This is precisely what I have described today! Of course, this plunge into the abyss is not prevented by un-philosophy or by any hypotheses setting out to be philosophical, but only by our real life being led into the other existence, by the unconscious being made conscious, so that what is experienced objectively and independently in the soul can be guided back again into the conscious.

You can see here how the science of spirit or anthroposophy has gradually to get to grips with the longings and hopes for such a science, that exist at the present time, but which in themselves cannot get as far as what has to be achieved in the science of spirit, because for this to happen it is imperative to see that intimate work on the soul has to be done which does not remain mystically subjective, but is just as objective as ordinary science and knowledge.

What then has been done about this up to now? I have cited Oskar Hertwig to you. Oskar Hertwig is one of those who felt the significance of Eduard von Hartmann!

Ernst Haeckel is one of those who mocked most at what Eduard von Hartmann published in his Philosophy of the Unconscious.

Oskar Hertwig still cites Eduard von Hartmann continuously and does so in full agreement with what he says, even where Eduard von Hartmann says that the way in which the idea of natural selection is treated as a modern superstition is like a childhood disease, a scientific childhood disease of our times. This is cited by Oskar Hertwig, himself a pupil of Haeckel, as an appropriate statement about natural science by Eduard von Hartmann. And there is much more like this. It all adds up to a clear statement as to what science is unable to recognize and what it would really have to recognize. But what has happened is that the pupils of the great teachers of science of the 19th century have already started to refute everything that existed earlier in the nature of the hopes I have been talking about.

Oskar Hertwig is extraordinarily interesting because he shows that science today cannot have any objection to such a philosophy as Eduard von Hartmann's.

If the scientists find their way to Eduard von Hartmann, they will also find their way to the science of spirit. But then the general consciousness of humanity too will be able to find its way.

The science of spirit will encounter opposition enough from other directions as well. To conclude, I would like to mention briefly the objections that are constantly brought by the adherents of various religious organizations against the science of spirit. It is remarkable how it is just from the religious viewpoint that the science of spirit is attacked. It is said, for instance, that what the science of spirit has to say contradicts things in the Bible or that are held according to tradition.—But is this really what we should be concerned about? Could we think of not wanting to discover America because it cannot be found in the Bible or in Christian tradition?

If anyone believes that the power of the greatest thing in the world—Christianity—could be endangered because of some discovery, he cannot have much faith in it!

When I hear of how objections can be made by Christians, I recall a theologian, this time not Protestant, but Catholic, a teacher of Christian philosophy, member of a Catholic faculty of theology, who gave his inaugural lecture on Galileo—and we know how the church dealt with Galileo. This really genuinely Christian and Catholic priest, who up to the time of his death never denied that he was a true son of the church, said in his lecture on Galileo: It is with injustice that a really perceptive Christianity turns against the progress of natural science as brought about by such people as Galileo. It is with injustice that Christianity declares certain ideas which are falsely said to be derived from Christianity, to be irreconcilable with natural science. For modern science, thinks this priest and professor of theology, only appears to be irreconcilable with the more limited view of the world held by the ancient peoples, but not with the Christian view, for this Christian view, properly understood, is bound to confirm the discoveries of more and more wonders in the world, and is bound to confirm the glory of the Godhead and the glory of the Christian view; it is bound to confirm the wonders that divine grace has instituted upon the earth.

We can say the same about the science of spirit, for there is no contradiction between it and Christianity, properly understood. But contradiction exists only between it and a false teaching that unjustly purports to originate from Christianity. The only thing that the science of spirit cannot be reconciled with is a narrowly conceived scientific view of the world and not with a broadly based Christian view. And the discoveries of the science of spirit, the wonders that it finds in the spiritual world, will not mean an end to the wonders that Christianity teaches us about, but on the contrary will confirm them.

Laurenz Mueller, also a genuinely Christian theologian and professor, speaks in a similar vein: Christianity does not contradict and is not intended to contradict a doctrine of evolution properly understood, as long as it does not set out to be a purely causal evolution of the world and to place man only within the framework of a physical causality.

The science of spirit does not clash with Christianity, because it does not lead to the deadening of religious life and vision, but, on the contrary, it encourages and fires religious life and vision.

And those today who still believe that their Christianity would be endangered by the science of spirit will gradually have to realize that whereas wrongly understood science has driven away more and more souls, both outwardly and inwardly, anthroposophy or the science of spirit, because it kindles religious life, will bring even educated people back to the great mysteries, not only of Christian teaching, but also of Christian deeds and ceremonial services. This will largely be the work of the future, in fact, of the relatively near future.

Just in this connection one could wish that things would be better understood and that above all there were more willingness to understand the matter, that one would not formulate a picture without really going into it and then setting up this picture as something contradictory to Christianity.

I can only mention this very briefly. I would have to speak for a long time if I had to go into everything in detail—but this could be done—to show that Christianity has not the slightest grounds for turning against such ideas as repeated lives on earth.

To finish with, allow me to say a few words about the teachings of natural science.

Today natural science has arrived at the point of realizing what it cannot attain. Oskar Hertwig—to keep to our former example—hits upon something in a remarkable way in his book Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie.

In a remarkable way he comes to the conclusion that it is not any objective research, nor analytical research into scientific facts, that has led to the materialistic philosophy of Darwinism, but it arises from the fact that the people of this age have borne this materialistic outlook in themselves, have borne the belief in the unspiritual nature of the outer world in themselves, and have applied this to nature.

And here it is very interesting to feel the weight of Oskar Hertwig's own words to show the real nature of the situation.

Hertwig says: “The principle of utility, the conviction of the necessity of unrestricted commercial and social competition, materialistic tendencies in philosophy, are forces that would have played an important part, even without Darwin. Those who were already under their influence greeted Darwinism as a scientific confirmation of the ideas they already cherished. They could now look at themselves, as it were, in the mirror of science.”

“The interpretation of Darwin's teaching,” Oskar Hertwig continues, “which is so ambiguous in its uncertainties, also allows for a varied application in the other spheres of economic, social and political life. Each person can get what he wants from it, just as from the Delphic oracle, and can draw his own conclusions concerning social, hygienic, medical and other questions, and can call on the scientific learning of the new Darwinian biology with its unalterable laws of nature, to confirm his own views. If however these laws of nature are not what they are made out to be”—and Oskar Hertwig sets out to prove, and does prove, that they are not really laws of nature, “could there not also be social dangers when they are applied in various ways to other spheres? We surely do not believe that human society can use for fifty years such phrases as bitter struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, of the most useful, the most expedient, perfection by selection etc., without being deeply and substantially influenced in the whole direction of this kind of ideas.”

This is what a scientist is already saying today. He is not just saying that these materialistically formulated ideas of Darwinism are wrong, but that they are injurious, that they inevitably lead to difficulties in the soul life, and to social and political harm. Only the restricted and one-sided views of certain scientists could maintain otherwise. And sometimes this works out in the most terrible way.

A great scientist of the present day for whom I have great respect—and it is just because I have respect for him that I cite him now—hints in a remarkable way at how the scientist does not perhaps wish to be understood, but at how he must be understood on the basis of his attitude toward what can be expected of a purely naturalistic view of nature. The scientist, for whom I have the greatest respect, says at the end of a significant book—and these are now his own words that I am quoting: “We live today in the best period of time”—this is what he maintains, it cannot be proved with full validity, but he asserts: “we live today in the best period of time, at least we scientists, and we can even hope for better,” he says, “for in comparing the science of today with the achievements of earlier scientists we can say with Goethe who knew so much about nature and the world:

The pleasure ... is great, to cast

The mind into the spirit of the past,

And scan the former notions of the wise,

And see what marvelous heights we've reached at last.”

—Thus speaks a first class scientist at the end of an important book!

I do not know whether many people notice and think about the person whom Goethe makes say this. Is it really Goethe, the one who knew so much about the world and nature, who says this? No, he puts it into the mouth of Wagner

And Faust replies to Wagner:

“How strange, that he who cleaves to shallow things

Can keep his hopes alive on empty terms

And dig with greed for precious plunderings,

And find his happiness unearthing worms!”

This is the real view of the one who knew so much about the world and nature!

And if scientists today do not yet realize what can be built on the basis of the sound foundations to be found in a view of the world, such as also shone through Goethe, one can understand what Oskar Hertwig so rightly says: The materialistic conception of the world and Darwinism with its materialistic bias have arisen out of the general materialistic attitude of the times, their naturalistic methods, their materialistic impulses and feelings, and which have then been applied to nature. But the facts disprove this.

The scientist of spirit replies to this out of what he believes to be a deeper knowledge of the world and of man: No, it is not such a narrow view like the one prevalent around the middle of the 19th century that should affect our study of nature, but our views should be formulated according to the highest possible content that spirit and soul can attain, and they should then be applied to nature to see if nature really confirms them. We can then expect that the resultant view will not be anything like Darwinism. This latter believed the world to exist according to certain laws and, as we have seen, nature herself has disproved this belief.

The science of spirit strives to study the human soul in its depths, and to draw out of these depths the spirit that exists in the broadest and most embracing sense as the foundation of existence in spiritual beings and forces. It is not a one-sided but a many-sided path that it takes, for there is not only one path it follows, but it follows all the paths on which the human soul is led, from out of its own rich inner life. The science of spirit may be allowed to hope that the questions, the mysteries, which nature has put to it will not be refuted by nature, but that the spirit in nature will affirm them because the spirit that lives in nature also lives in man, and not, as in the other case, to deny what the science of spirit or anthroposophy envisages the real nature of the human mystery to be.

Two-part report in: Das Goetheanum, vol. 1, no. 39 and 40

Rudolf Steiner

I. In Holland

From April 7th to 12th we held an “anthroposophical-scientific” course in The Hague. The following people were among those who organized the course (F.W. Zeylmans van Emmichoven, physician, H. Droogleever Fortuyn, P.J. de Haan, G. Schubert Knobel, litt. stud. Leiden, M.H. Ekker, techn. stud. Delft, M. van Deventer, med. cand. Utrecht, M.L. Stiebe, jur. cand. Leiden, F.C.J. Los, litt. stud. Amsterdam) a number of teachers from the Stuttgart Waldorf School, other representatives of the anthroposophical worldview from Stuttgart, Dr. E. Vreede from Dornach and myself.

This course had a specific task. It was to show students at the Dutch universities how the anthroposophical method of research is based on a fully-fledged scientific foundation, how it can have a fruitful effect on the most diverse fields of knowledge and life, and how the insights it can provide really meet the demands of those who are serious about contemporary civilization.

Of course, it is only possible for me to describe the impressions I have received from my personal point of view as a co-lecturer. And I ask the reader to accept the following as a sum of subjective perceptions.

The first lecture was held by Dr. W. Stein on “Goethe's significance in the development of humanity as a whole”, after a warm welcome by G. Schubert Knobel, for which we all had to be grateful. Dr. Stein has grown into an inner affinity with the anthroposophical way of thinking and research from an early age as a matter of course, through an inner disposition. He is a keen thinker and courageously presents anthroposophy as well as the self-revelation of his own personality. His comprehensive overview of the anthroposophical results already available today helps him to gather evidence, justifications and explanations from the most diverse corners for the topic he is discussing. And so there is something about his lecture that I believe should have a stimulating effect on many serious listeners. They should come to the conviction that anthroposophy is a conscientiously reasoned matter of knowledge and life.

Dr. Stein then sat with me before he gave his further lecture: “The Connection of Epistemology with Organic Science”. He felt the need to talk to me about many things before this lecture. I said to him: “As a young man, you naturally grew into anthroposophy; in the future you will face difficult personal tasks of knowledge precisely because you have mastered so much and work so flexibly in your thinking. But you can use it to give your audience the most beautiful thing in addition to your many other gifts: your whole, unique humanity.

Dr. Karl Heyer offered a completely different nuance with his lectures. He shows that he comes from the world of contemporary science. He has thoroughly absorbed the contemporary character of jurisprudence and history. Of course, this is not really any of the public's business. But this foundation runs through all of Heyer's statements like a thread. He shows: this is what science is like now; and because it is like this, it must lead to anthroposophical research. Dr. Stein speaks, Dr. Heyer lectures; but it is necessary that there is also lecturing within our ranks. Dr. Heyer can be convincing precisely because he lectures his way from the recognized into the anthroposophical, and thus brilliantly guides his listeners from the known into the unknown.

Ernst Uehli comes across quite differently from the two of them. He has given two lectures on completely different subjects. One was about the “Threefold Social Organism” and the other about the “Egyptian Sphinx as a phylogenetic development problem”. But even when he talks about such diverse subjects, a unifying impulse prevails in his heart. Uehli has an artistic view of the world. He also allows the artistic to prevail in him when he observes social life. But the artistic in him is transformed into a cognitive impulse by the seriousness of his soul mood and by a sense of reality that seems to come from his heart. That is why warmth of soul flows through his arguments, and a noble emotion pulses through his assertions in a certain even tone. Uehli has humor, but it is stronger in his inner being than in the revelation of speech. A humor that sometimes dries on the lips. All this ultimately gives a distinct personality, carried by enthusiasm for anthroposophy.

Dr. H. von Baravalle is an important mathematical mind. In his doctoral dissertation, published by Kommenden-Tag-Verlag, he has delivered a fundamental work on certain mathematical-physical concepts and on spatial forms. He is able to bring a thinking rooted in natural reality into mathematical-physical formulas. One is tempted to say: Usually the formula arises as something that embraces the natural process from the outside; Dr. Baravalle makes it something that lives in the process. This was particularly noticeable during his Hague discussions. The most stimulating discussions were related to these discussions. Dead formulas, borne by the accustomed scientific way of thinking, rubbed interestingly against the lively but still unfamiliar Baravalles.

Dr. E. Vreede is tireless in her efforts to introduce anthroposophy into the field of mathematical natural science. Her Hague lecture was on astronomy. The task is difficult. In everything Dr. Vreede does in this direction, she must first point out a necessary methodological reorientation. She succeeds in doing this with anyone who first wants to be made aware of the essentials. This is because she combines thorough anthroposophical insight with an excellent clarity about how anthroposophy is to be introduced into the individual sciences.

Dr. von Heydebrand had to speak in The Hague about education. She is a born educator. The educational mission lives in each of her sentences, as it lives in her actions at the Stuttgart Waldorf School. Its foundation is anthroposophical knowledge of the human being, its effective impulse is insight-based love for people and especially for children. You can also hear from her lectures that the children must love her. It seems to me that sensible listeners must have the thought with her: I would like to have my children educated and taught by this woman.

Personalities such as Dr. med. He spoke in The Hague about biological and chemical problems and also about “Free spiritual life through Anthroposophy”. In Kolisko, scientific phenomenalism has a champion who develops this side of Anthroposophical thinking objectively and from unbiased factual knowledge. In Kolisko's work, one never has the feeling that he brings anthroposophy into his world knowledge from the outset, but rather that he gains the anthroposophical view from the concrete problems in an appropriate but intimate way of thinking. In the process, he is intimately entwined with his problems as a personality, so that, in my opinion, he comes across as a thoroughly scientifically convincing personality. When I hear him speak, as he did this time about “free spiritual life”, I have the feeling that he speaks truthfully to the heart; and in this truth he lives out completely.

Dr. Herbert Hahn is in the process of comprehensively and internally penetrating the linguistic results of the recent past and present in order to perfect them into an anthroposophically oriented science. His fresh and vigorous approach to his tasks, and his loving devotion as a teacher and researcher, have led him to valuable results as a scientist and to fruitful effectiveness as a teacher. His lecture in The Hague on 'Consciousness Change in the Mirror of Linguistic History' was likely to have a surprising effect due to the research results gathered from all possible sides and due to the emphasis placed on the linguistic phenomena that emerge in the life of nations in order to understand the moral-inner life that expresses itself in the linguistic-external of the life of nations. One would hope that Hahn's approach would find many followers among people trained in philology, linguistics and history, for his life's work requires the collaboration of many.

For many years, Dr. Carl Unger has been the most enthusiastic and dedicated co-worker in the anthroposophical movement. In The Hague, he spoke as a technician and as a philosopher about “The Social Tasks of Technology and Technicians” and “On the Philosophical Foundations of Anthroposophy”. Dr. Unger saw early on that anthroposophy requires, above all, a rigorous epistemological foundation. With deep understanding, he took up what I myself was able to give many years ago in my writings “Epistemology”, “Truth and Science” and “Philosophy of Freedom”. He independently developed the suggestions further. His keen intellectual powers were directed towards understanding the nature of the human cognitive process in a clear and illuminating analysis and synthesizing this understanding into a true picture of cognition. Unger is not a dialectician but an observer of the empirical facts of knowledge. And that is why he has been able to provide particularly valuable work over the years in the sense that the process of knowledge of ordinary consciousness drives the impulses for anthroposophical research out of itself everywhere. Unger's thinking is trained on the technical problems, is thereby free of any subjective fuzziness, and therefore his scientific contribution to anthroposophy is the most meaningful conceivable. He has grown steadily over the years in his thinking, research and technical as well as anthroposophical work. In his two Hague lectures, he offered ripe fruits of this growth. In his first lecture, he showed how the technician in particular is challenged to develop social understanding in the present; in the second, he showed how philosophy, from its own historical development, must flow into anthroposophy in the present.

Dr. Friedrich Husemann spoke about the medical field. His topic was “New Paths to Rational Therapy.” The suggestions that can come from anthroposophy for the healing arts require, in order to be accepted by science, the closest connection to existing medical schools of thought. One could prove to them that they only understand themselves and take themselves to their logical conclusions if they look for anthroposophical supplementation. To work in this direction is not difficult under the present circumstances. It is also not as difficult in medicine as it is in education, for example. For the teachings that one receives from illness cannot be so easily had from the development of a more or less healthy person. Illness speaks a clear language. One needs only scant suggestions from the side of intuitive insight in order to conscientiously work through the clearly speaking symptom complexes to the point where pathology and therapy converge into a rational medical art. Exploitation of solid scientific education, prudence in the observation of patients will lead to the goal. So far, I only hear the problems from public lectures in this field. Here too, it must be emphasized that anthroposophy is not a theory, but a practice of life. A single case, properly characterized from beginning to end, would speak louder than any theoretical discussion. Theory is of no use in and of itself, except insofar as it allows us to believe in the coherence of phenomena. This can be learned from Goethe. I have described the individual voices that came together in a chorus in The Hague to form a whole. I myself had the task, in six evening lectures, of characterizing the significance of anthroposophy in contemporary spiritual life, its scientific character, its particular research methods, research results, and its relationship to art and to the scientific agnosticism of the present day. My aim is to present the anthroposophical results from ever new angles, so that one can see how they mutually support each other. However, anyone who fails to recognize that the moment the sciences flow into anthroposophy, one must come to this mutual support and bearing of truths, will not find the path to genuine knowledge. The heavy things on earth must lie on the ground so as not to fall; the world bodies support each other. The empirical sciences rest on sense perception; anthroposophical knowledge must be mutually supportive. To demand of it the same conditions as for the usual foundation of science is like demanding a support for the earth in space. It does not fall without support, and neither does anthroposophy, even if it is founded differently than the usual science.

I will not be asked to speak about the impressions that the audience has received. Others must judge about that. But I may say that we, the participants, must all feel a heartfelt thank you towards the organizers, whose devotion to the matter was evident from every action and every word they spoke.

After the course in The Hague ended, I went to England. I had lectures in London and at the Shakespeare festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. In Holland, my experience was working with colleagues and friends. In their work I lived with them. In England I was given tasks that had a different outward character. But these tasks came from the same source. How I understood them, how I tried to solve them, and how I was helped by understanding helpers, is what I will talk about in the next issue of this journal.

II. In England

My journey to England grew out of the course I gave at Christmas on educating and teaching on the basis of anthroposophical knowledge of the human being. This course was inspired by Prof. M. Mackenzie, who attended the last summer course at the Goetheanum with her husband, Prof. Mackenzie. In the summer, the workers at the Goetheanum got to know two personalities in Prof. and Mrs. Mackenzie, whose visit had to fill all of these workers with deep satisfaction from the point of view of the anthroposophical movement. Prof. Mackenzie is a personality who expresses a significant note in English philosophical life. His constructive philosophy is not only independent in outlook and content from other contemporary trends in this field, but, above all, it is so independent that it seizes with the certainty of an intuitive grasp of reality on a field that brings the true philosophical sense of the human being into activity. I would like to say: Mackenzie's constructive philosophy begins where it needs to begin if the metaphysical, psychological and epistemological fields, which are fluctuating all around, are to be given a firm foundation again. In doing so, his literary and philosophical work covers many fields of cultural history, social and educational issues. His books on humanism and on social life bear witness to this.

Prof. Mackenzie, who was herself also a university teacher (Prof. of Education, University College, Cardiff), presented me with her extremely interesting book, 'Hegels educational Theory and Practice', during her summer stay here in Dornach. This book reveals the comprehensive work of this spirited and practical woman in literary form. Hegel is easily misunderstood. In his books, he seems abstract. But the peculiar thing about him is that behind his abstractions stands a man who grasped reality with a firm hand. His thoughts are basically the life-awakening, only seemingly abstract expression of a passionate life practice. Mrs. Mackenzie has seen this as clearly as possible: “I believe that these two philosophers (Plato and Hegel) were constantly striving not only to see the truth, as other philosophers did, but also to fathom how it can be achieved and appropriated by a mind that is far removed from its essence; and both believed that this could be done through the dialectical method.” Thus she says in the preface to her book, and it is now her aim to show how this philosophical self-education thinks about the education of the child and the young person. With regard to Hegel, she comes to the view: “I dare to claim that Hegel, more than any other educator (more than Herbart, because his educational ideas are grounded in a deeper philosophy), offers us precisely those things that we need most today and also in our country.”

What can be seen in her relationship to Hegel, and what is fully confirmed when one gets to know Prof. Mackenzie better, is that she is a person of great intellectual depth, combining philosophical insight with a wide range of interests in educational and social issues of humanity.

It is thanks to this personality that the pedagogical Christmas course described by Albert Steffen in this weekly magazine has come about. Prof. Mackenzie invited teachers from England to this course. Among those who attended was Miss Cross, headmistress of Kings Langley Priory, a school and boarding school near London. Even then, the idea arose among the English visitors to bring the spirit into this school, from which I held my Christmas course.

Thanks to a few of the participants in that course, after some time I received an invitation from the “New Ideals in Education” committee to participate in the festivities they organized around Shakespeare's birthday (from April 17 to 24) by giving lectures. This invitation was followed by another from friends of the anthroposophical worldview (including Mrs. Drury-Lavin and Mr. Collison) to give a few lectures in London for those interested in anthroposophical endeavors.

So I was able to give two lectures in London on April 14 and 15. The first was on “Cognition and Initiation”. My aim was to show how knowledge of the supersensible world can be attained through the development of abilities that are not used in ordinary life and ordinary science. I called the supersensible vision that comes about in this way “exact clairvoyance” because it is my conviction that the processes of the soul life through which man comes to this vision are experienced with the same clarity of consciousness as the solution of a problem in exact science. If science is exact in its treatment of the objective world, then anthroposophy is exact in the development of supersensible cognitive abilities, through which the vision of the spiritual world then arises, through which man grasps the eternal nature of his being. Our time, which everywhere shows the strong need of thinking people to ascend from the sensual to the supersensible, can demand such “exact clairvoyance”, not a nebulous mysticism or an unscientific occultism.

I only want to give my subjective impressions in all modesty here. And that is how it should be meant when I say: the sight of my audience in London gave me deep satisfaction. For I felt I could sense that the need I mentioned was also present here.

On the following day, it was my turn to describe the mystery of the Christ-life on the basis of anthroposophical knowledge. Anthroposophy certainly does not want to found a sect or even a new religious community. It only wants to say what arises from “exact clairvoyance” about the mystery of Golgotha. This is what the modern human being demands. Through centuries of development in the field of external knowledge of nature, he has been brought into a state of soul that must progress from mere belief to the cognitive grasp of religious content. Religious belief is not touched by this, but rather deepened and strengthened. Again, in all modesty, I would like to say that after my second lecture in London, I had the impression that this need to consolidate religious mysteries is an international one. On such occasions, one can gain the conviction that in the search for the supersensible, the peoples of the civilized world can come together in harmony out of discord.

After these two lectures, I had to give another one in the narrower circle of personalities who have been in the anthroposophical movement for many years. On the same day, I was able to accept an invitation from Miss Cross to show us her school in Kings Langley. Again, the idea arose to adapt this school to the spirit in which I must think I have developed the art of education. Among those with whom I was able to discuss this matter was Prof. Mackenzie.

I may mention here that a group of people around Prof. Mackenzie and Miss Cross has set itself the goal of helping to make this idea a reality in England. This opens up the prospect that the educational basis, which was held in the spirit of the Dornach Goetheanum and on which the Waldorf School in Stuttgart is based, will be understood and cultivated in England.

On April 18, the Shakespeare festivities began in Stratford-upon-Avon. A long line of personalities expressed their reverence for the poetic creations, which are among the greatest of humanity, by offering what they have to say about art, poetry and education. One was presented with an impressive cross-section of contemporary English intellectual life. Powerful speeches on artistic contemporary interests, such as those offered by Lena Ashwell in a lecture on “Drama and National Life” and Cicely Hamilton in her remarks on “Tendencies of Modern Drama,” alternated with charmingly and ingeniously expressed longings for the permeation of education with the artistic spirit. John Masefield spoke about playwriting from the point of view of an artist who feels he is part of the lively world of art and artistic endeavor and who wants to say what art needs if it is to fulfill its task.

It is not my intention here to criticize certain aspects with which I cannot agree, especially in the area of the cultivation of art in schools. But more important at this moment in time is that one can only look with satisfaction at the basic tendency of the whole event. Shakespeare's figure was to some extent only in the background. From the glance up to him, the impulse went out to discuss the question of education from all sides. The education of children, of the people, of humanity in general; these were the questions that turned the interest of speakers and listeners alike. And so the most important thing for the present day was placed at the center of the intellectual work of these festivities. It was clear from the attitude of this assembly that it had a sense of these civilizational hardships. Miss Ashwell's words on the decline of the dramatic and theatrical arts and on the necessity of providing the forces for an ascent were essential. A personality full of fire, but also full of inner understanding for the matter, stood on the podium in Miss Ashwell. And in beautiful addition to this was what Miss Hamilton said about the decline and the necessity of raising artistic taste.

In this context, I was able to present my anthroposophical views on Shakespeare, on education and on the demands of spiritual life for the present day. The educational power of Shakespeare's art stands in the developmental history of humanity through the influence it had on Goethe. One must ask oneself: on what is this tremendous influence based? Asking myself this question, a fact of supersensible experience presents itself to me.

Those who are able to immerse themselves in a Shakespearean drama and then carry the experience over into the world that is spread out before 'exact clairvoyance' can find that Shakespeare's figures present themselves in the supersensible realm as more alive to the soul, while the newer naturalistic dramas either transform themselves completely into puppets or freeze during this process. The Shakespearean figures live on in the imagination. They do not perform the same actions as in the drama, but they act in transformed situations and with a different course of events. I believe that through this fact the deep rootedness of Shakespeare's characters in the spiritual world can be found; and that Goethe unconsciously experienced this rootedness in his devotion to Shakespeare's plays. He felt as if he himself had been seized by facts of the spiritual world when he turned to Shakespeare.

I had this experience in the background when I was able to speak in Stratford about Shakespeare, Goethe and education in three lectures. In particular, the conviction that arose from this lived in my heart when I had to speak about “Shakespeare and the New Ideals” on April 23, the actual Shakespeare Day.

The events of the committee for “New Ideals in Education” were accompanied by performances of Shakespearean plays in the Shakespeare Memorial Theater. We were able to see: “Othello”, “Julius Caesar”, “The Taming of the Shrew”, “The Twelfth Night”, “All's Well That Ends Well”, “Much Ado About Nothing”. I found the performances of the comedies satisfying for my feelings. But I imagine the right way to present the tragedies differently.

On April 24, I was able to give a lecture in London to the English friends of the anthroposophical movement. It was intended to show how anthroposophy relates to the spiritual development of humanity in general and to the Christ impulse in particular. I tried to show how a figure such as Cardinal Newman, out of his perception of the religious needs of the time, sought a basis for knowledge of the supersensible, but how this can be found not on the paths he took, but only on the anthroposophical path.

Special thanks are due to George Kaufmann, who took on the difficult task of translating all my lectures for the audience after merely listening to them in sections.

On April 25, I left England, filled with the thought that there are people in England who see the cultivation and representation of the anthroposophical cause as part of their life's work and work energetically in this direction. I have to think of them when I feel gratitude in my soul when I find people who intervene helpfully for this cause. That I was able to find this help in this day and age as a German in London and Stratford, I may well express as a satisfying final thought of this subjective travelogue.