The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today, one often hears it said that the materialism of the second half of the nineteenth century has been overcome by newer schools of thought. They point out how many thinkers are again assuming an independent principle of life, whereas in the high tide of materialism belief prevailed that all life is only a complicated formation of those forces that work in inanimate nature. And similar things are cited to show that human thinking is turning to spiritual contemplation.

Such thoughts are often put forward precisely by those who describe the anthroposophical view as unacceptable. They cloak their aversion to it in the assertion that the justified movement towards the spiritual can be achieved without the turn that is sought through anthroposophy. What is the need for this, it is said, since materialism is only the legacy of a certain naturalistic radicalism, which is wreaking havoc among lay people, while it has been overcome for scientifically minded people.

It must be asserted in response to this claim that it is precisely this claim that fails to recognize the contemporary historical significance of materialism. And it is entirely possible for an anthroposophical consideration to appreciate this. It sees in materialism the one-sided transformation of a school of thought that is justified in its own field into a worldview. But it must admit the fruitfulness of the materialistic interpretation of certain phenomena based on its insights. And it does justice to an independent understanding of the spiritual by [...]

At first, one might have the feeling that the striving of spiritual science is contrived. The people who deal with it are idle people who are out of touch with reality and have a lot of time, which they spend in a way that those who are busy with their working lives could never think of.

This view can be justified by saying that man is born into the world, and the world needs his labor as a physical being. In the course of this life, the mysteriousness of this life emerges. Man feels that his nature cannot be exhausted by the performance of his physical labor. But then religion comes to meet him, through which he can be imbued with the eternity of his being; the gate of death becomes for him the gate of the immortal spiritual life.

This reasoning is contradicted by the more recent development of humanity. This development has created a form of life that presents questions and puzzles that did not exist centuries ago, but now impose themselves on people. Modern science is admirable in its progress. However, it does not answer questions about the soul, but raises them. These questions intrude into human life. They are taken up as we grow into this life from the stage of childhood. Not so long ago, people did not ask these questions because they did not grow into life as they do now. Those who turn to spiritual science feel the burden of these questions. If no one felt them, there would have to be very specific consequences for the future of humanity. We would gradually grow into a life that is completely incomprehensible. We would have to numb our souls in order not to feel this incomprehensibility. We would have to leave the noble powers of the human soul unused. We would have to have the feeling towards these powers as if we had our hands but they were just a useless appendage that we had to leave unused. This would gradually undermine the urge to actively engage with life. But this paralysis of the soul would also undermine the religious life of the human being. Indifference and dullness towards this life would take hold. Ultimately, it would disappear. And humanity would sink into unconsciousness of the spiritual and soul world. The forerunners of this are the attitudes that have developed from the belief that the questions that the world poses to man can be answered by natural science alone.

One example of this is Conrad Deubler.

What has been created by the newer life requires a continuation from the spiritual side. Just as in earlier times the religious man could find the spiritual world, which religion gave him, in the rising and setting of the sun; just as the year was not a meaningless cycle for him, but he fully experienced the reign of the spiritual world in the festivals, so the modern man must also be able to recognize the spiritual world in the revelations of natural science.

Reference to the scientific doctrine of the origin of the world from the nebula.

This science must end with the admission: Man is incomprehensible.

Spiritual science begins where natural science must leave off. Its research is directed precisely at the human being. It awakens abilities in the human soul that lead to the spiritual world. These abilities are needed only by the spiritual researcher himself. Once he has found them, their results can be applied by every person of sound mind. They are like tools, and the spiritual researcher is the toolmaker. The literature of spiritual science is of a different nature than the literature of natural science. It should radiate life.

These abilities lead to the insight that the visible human being is only one part of the whole complete human being. This visible human being is only the image of the invisible.

The invisible human being contains the etheric human being first of all. This belongs to the extra-terrestrial world. The etheric human being lives the same life that pours out from the periphery of the earth over the earth when the seeds of the plants are called into existence. The spiritual eye sees the spiritual plants growing out of the extra-terrestrial forces towards the physical plants, which the physical eye sees coming out of the earth.

What flows into the plant world can also be seen by the spiritual eye at work in the human being as he grows into life. This then gives a vivid picture of the infinitely rich life of the first seven years of human life. The fine development of the brain. The upright gait, the ability to speak, the acquisition of the power of memory.

At the end of the seventh year, the human being is physically a reflection of the extraterrestrial forces at work in his soul. When he enters life through birth, he is physically a reflection of the forces at work in earthly existence; at the end of the seventh year, he physically carries an extraterrestrial world of forces within him.

Now the supersensible part of the human being contains not only the etheric body but also a higher link. What it is called is irrelevant. It belongs to a spiritual-soul world. It acts on the etheric body. Its action is rhythmic. It strives to repeat the action of the etheric body. This repetition is counteracted by what has developed in the physical body during the first seven years of life. Thus, from the ages of seven to fourteen, it is not a repetition that arises in the physical body, but an image of the astral body. A spiritual-soul element takes hold of the person that is not present in the physical world, nor in the extra-terrestrial world. The 'I' now acts on the astral body again. The life of the will flows through the physical body. This 'I', as it is recognized by spiritual observation, intervenes in this earthly life with the subconscious experiences of previous earthly lives. The forces of the earth itself are recognized as having emerged from the whole cosmos. But in such a way that the previous state of the earth was still itself such that it, in a sense, constantly recreated itself in rhythm, just as the plant world only renews itself every year.

Natural science is not treated with hostility in spiritual science; it points to a world that is regarded by spiritual science just as truly as the vibrations of air are regarded by the person listening to music; however, listening is not achieved by looking at the air vibrations.

Religious life:

Article of faith
Theological Trinity
Temporal beginning of the world
Fall of Man
Redemption
Incarnation
Sacraments

Praeambula Fidei:
Existence of God as the world's
intelligent creator of the world
world-ordering creator of the world
sustainer of the world
ruler of the world
judge of the world

The earthly beginning of life
Science in relation to it
only apologetically.
So-called self-redemption

Spirituality and immortality of the human soul

Difference between good and evil

The foundations of ethics, politics and everything that is science, anthropology, aesthetics. —

In addition, the spiritual world under God, the human soul, which, in its essence, draws strength from one life on earth for the next.

The development of the scientific world view. Ed. v. Hartmann

Weber: “Now the extravagances of this genius have reached the ultimate (7th Symphony); Beethoven is now ripe for the madhouse.”

Abbé Stadler: with a throbbing 'e': “There is always the - e -, he just can't think of anything, the untalented fellow.”

[Beginning missing] Formation of thoughts receives, and what he draws out of himself when he forms thoughts.

Reality is revealed to man as material in the context of his sensory observation. He must form thoughts that are shaped in the sense of a scientific view if he adheres to this revelation. Anyone who, when faced with the revelation of nature, does not immediately imagine the force of gravity (or something similar in the realm of material events) when a stone falls to the ground, but thinks of a little demon who imagined that the stone was falling to the earth: this can just as well apply to a fantasist as to the person who believed that the hands of a clock were moved by little goblins hidden inside the clock, and not by the elasticity of the springs and the wheels. The formation of ideas must take place here in the sense of the scientifically minded. These conceptions are formed in a certain way because, through sensory observation, man comes into a certain relationship to reality, which can be pictorially represented by the relationship, for example, of a tree being photographed to the camera. Through scientifically-oriented conceptions, one obtains a view of reality, just as one obtains an image of the tree that shows its true form from a certain direction. A different relationship of extra-human reality to man gives rise to ideas that express the spiritual essence of reality. Anyone who rejects such ideas, if they are gained through genuine experience of spiritual existence, not through confused mysticism, because they seem to contradict the scientific way of thinking that he alone considers to be justified, does not see what is at stake. He believes that ideas that originate from the spiritual in reality come only from the personal (subjective) being of the thinker. He is like someone who knows the image of a tree and, when confronted with an image taken from a different direction, says that this image has nothing to do with the tree he knows; it contradicts it. This second image can therefore only have originated in the photographic apparatus itself. - (Here this characterization of human modes of perception in their relation to reality can only be presented in such a way that it must appear as a mere assertion to those who do not know its foundations. I hope that some of these foundations can be found in this writing. In a large part of my other writings, I have endeavored to express what justifies this view.)

[Beginning missing] The formation of thoughts receives, and what it brings out of itself when it forms thoughts. If I photograph a tree from a certain point, I get a picture that shows the tree from one side and is different from the picture taken from one point. The reasons for the difference between the pictures do not lie in the imaging apparatus, but in the position of the tree in relation to the apparatus; and this is just as outside the apparatus as the tree itself. And both pictures have their origin in the tree; the inner condition of the apparatus does not contribute to their difference. The relationship between extra-human reality and the human being is comparable to this. The material world is in the vicinity of the human being's sensory observation. It reveals itself to him in such a way that he must form ideas about it in terms of the context of natural law. Anyone who, when confronted with the revelations of nature, refuses to recognize the effect of gravity in the falling of a stone to the ground, or something similar in the material realm, and instead speaks of a little demon that makes the stone fall to the ground, would be considered as fanciful as someone who imagines that the hands of a clock are moved by little goblins hidden inside the clock, rather than by the hands themselves. The formation of ideas must be done here in the sense of the natural scientifically minded. But in this way one gets ideas that stem from a certain relationship of the extra-human world to man, like the image of a tree from its location to the apparatus. An illusion arises when one thinks that through the natural scientific way of thinking, one gets ideas that relate to reality differently than the image of the tree taken from one side to the other. Mystical conceptions present another relation of extra-human reality to man. The mystical character of the conceptions does not have its origin in man, but in the fact that certain essential traits of reality reveal themselves only when they are mystically experienced. However much offense some people may take at this, it must be said: He who, in his explanations of the ideas which arise in genuine mystical experiences, seeks their origin only in man, makes the same mistake that a person would make who sought an explanation for the position of the tree in relation to the camera in the construction of the camera itself. Thoughts that are scientifically oriented and mystical thoughts are rooted in the same reality. The real world is not encompassed by either scientific or mystical thought; it demands not one or the other thought, but both. And it demands many other types of thought as well. The reasons why people view the world scientifically, mystically, monistically, dualistically, [breaks off]

Someone might think that it is unjustified to regard Planck's thoughts as significant for the driving forces of the German Volkheit, since these thoughts have not been widely disseminated. Such an opinion fails to recognize what is important when talking about the effect of the people's being on the views of a nation's thinkers. What is effective here is the impersonal (often subconscious) forces of the people's being, which live in the activity of the people, in their achievements in the most diverse areas of existence, and which shape ideas in such a thinker. These forces were there before he appeared and are there after he has gone; they live even when no mention is made of them. And so they can also have a particularly strong effect on a native thinker who is grounded in his people and about whom no one talks, because these forces often radiate less into the opinions that people form about him than into his thoughts. Such a thinker will often stand alone, not only during his lifetime, but his thoughts can also stand alone for posterity. But once one has grasped the nature of these thoughts, one recognizes that what has become a personal entity in him remains resiliently effective in the folk mind, that it must appear again and again in ever new impulses. Regardless of the question of what he was able to achieve, the other question is what worked in him. One can try to recognize what led him to his achievements and what would lead to similar achievements (again and again).

I cannot think the same as those who dispute the value of mystical ideas, believing that they are doing the only scientifically correct thing. They are of the opinion: “What man does not know from the outset, observation of nature teaches; what observation of nature does not teach, experiment teaches; and what experiment does not teach, theory teaches, which adheres to observation and experiment; but what theory does not teach can never be the object of human knowledge.” Such is the judgment of the man who adheres purely to the scientific way of thinking, and his followers recognize nothing but his observation, his experiment, his theory. And now, of course, it is not he who is rejected by the other men, but he is not considered worthy of the name of a scientifically serious man who cannot certify that he has no relationship to any mystical thoughts. The fact that it is possible to live without the true mystical ideas proves no more than the fact that people lived without modern surgery until the fifteenth century.

How ridiculous someone who appreciates the blessings of today's surgery would find someone who might say, “Well, people lived in the times Hyrtl talks about, and they didn't have surgery in the modern sense.” It should be realized that people live without those who are in life pouring out or giving what is necessary for life from a thoroughly justified point of view. If one wanted to consider this properly, one would perhaps not consider those to be completely nonsensical who regard the talk of the dispensability of mystical ideas as a very questionable one for life. And /bricht ab]

For many people today, it is not only strange but also nonsensical to say that mystical ideas relate to those based on science in the same way that the image of a tree taken from one side relates to that taken from another. Such people will be inclined to say: apart from all other scientific objections to such a view, it should be dismissed because scientific knowledge is justified and demanded by real life, which cannot be said of mystical ideas. Those who speak in this way believe they know what is valuable for human life; but based on their assumptions, what they say is also understandable to those who, while acknowledging that the scientific way of thinking also has its full value for life, can nevertheless assess the true mystical ideas in terms of their significance for life. Only an unreasoning person could dispute the incalculable blessing that surgery has been for humanity. But read what the distinguished anatomist Joseph Hyrtl writes in his “Anatomy of Man” (9th ed. Vienna 1866):

We turn away in disgust from the scenes of horror that ancient surgery, in the belief that it was doing the best, inflicted on its patients: “What medicine does not cure, iron cures; what iron does not cure, fire cures; what fire does not cure cannot be cured in any way. Thus spoke the forefather of surgeons, and his blind admirers [in the Middle Ages] knew of nothing better to do than to cut out, tear out, burn out – and this was called surgery. No wonder, indeed, that in Germany these surgeons were considered dishonest until the fifteenth century, and that no craftsman would take an apprentice into his service unless he could certify that he was the child of honest parents and not related to a knacker, hangman or barber-surgeon (wound doctor).

How would someone who appreciates the blessings of modern surgery find it laughable if someone were to say: Well, human life existed in the times Hyrtl is talking about. And they didn't have surgery in the modern sense. One could also see this: that one can live without true mystical ideas proves no more than the fact that people until the fifteenth century - and longer - lived without the newer surgery [breaks off]

Anthroposophy is meant to be a challenge to the scientific way of thinking.

Science has expanded the realm of its way of thinking.

It also wants to embrace the science of the soul.

On the one hand, it has slipped over into physiology.

On the other hand, it has become experimental psychology.

Neither can lead to a true science of the soul.

In the past, nature was not thought of as separate from the life of the soul.

Now, however, the ideal of natural science is to eliminate everything subjective from the natural. This can only lead to a presentation of nature that satisfies subjective soul needs. What is achieved for nature in this way is achieved by the soul simply by experiencing itself. The observer must first be sought for the soul.

The usual methods of knowledge only provide the questions. At the borderlands of knowledge. Experiencing the questions. Soul organs. Imagination. Inspiration. Intuition.

As long as one wants to interpret natural events, one is on the wrong track. The spiritual does not present itself as an interpretation of nature, but rises from natural experience like the content of what has been read by following the sequence of letters and words. Through natural experience, one becomes independent of it. The actual soul cannot be investigated experimentally: 1.) The observer can never determine the onset of observation. 2.) Attention is switched off. 3.) No observation can be repeated under the same circumstances. 4.) The conditions cannot be determined under different circumstances.

Special characteristics of mental perceptions:

1.) Non-reminiscence.

2.) They can only be grasped in the mind to the extent that preparatory concepts are present. Anything beyond that would lead to visions, etc.

3.) The more often a mental fact is perceived, the more difficult it is to grasp it clearly.

Ordinary mental facts can only be seen correctly if they are observed with the consciousness of vision. - Bergson connects the “I” with life.

What is united in the soul (thinking, feeling, willing) does not necessarily come from the same root. According to Bergson, the intellect pulverizes experiences. Memory is akin to the power of inheritance.

Abstract concepts are tied to the material body.

According to Bergson, the brain is a kind of telegraph center.

Why can't the mental facts be calculated? Because the result enters into ordinary consciousness, but not what leads to that result.

Benedikt:

The fact of consciousness through brain cell excitation is not essentially different from the fact of gravity bound to matter.

Wundt:

[Should the concept of matter therefore be reformulated to include the possibility of physical and mental events simultaneously, it would thereby expand into a more general concept of substance. It is clear that the question of the admissibility of such an extension can only be answered by empirical psychology at the end of its investigations. Until then, we must adhere to the premise directly required by experience, that psychic events are regularly accompanied by certain physical phenomena, and that lawful relationships consistently occur between these internal and external life processes.

Through imaginative knowledge, we obtain the formative forces of the body as mirrored in the life of ideas; through inspired knowledge, we obtain the soul, which actually lies outside the course of life; and through intuitive knowledge, we obtain the spiritual (I), which lies outside both the soul and the body. The spiritual (I) is united with the soul-generating forces.

These statements may be taken as the results of someone's work – not someone who negates natural science, but someone who has such a high opinion of this newer natural science that he ascribes to it the ability to produce a spiritual science – if it does not merely want to age, but wants to pass on its basic character in offspring.

The experimental psychologist has given up defining the soul. He takes as soul what ordinary experience calls soul. Metaphysically, it has become nothing less than a horror.

In the sensation, the emotional tone is already seen.

One would like to summarize as physiological sense substance: sense organ. nerve. place in the cerebral cortex. Skin sensation: Blix. Goldscheider. v. Frey paradoxical cold sensation (stimulus above 45 °C). pressure. warmth. cold. pain.

Taste sensations: Kiesow. Öhrwall: sweet, sour, bitter, salty. - Functional diversity of papillae.

Smell sensations: Olfactometer. Zwaardemaker: 9 groups of smells: Essential. Aromatic. Balsamic. Ambrosia / Amber-Musk. Leek-like. Allyl-Cacodyl. Fiery. Buck-like / Capryl. Repulsive. Disgusting.

Ear sense:

Otoliths (location); semicircular canals (passive movement of the body. Dizziness). Snail: (auditory sensations).

Perception. Apperception. Physiology of reading.

Imagination:

Külpe: centrally excited sensation. Memory images.

Koffka attempted to separate the life of imagination from the life of sensation through the experiment. - The terminating tendency. Theories.

2 spir. should fail: 1. that animals have imaginations. 2. that reproduction depends on the brain.

2. Physiological image theory (dismissed): 2. Traces

Theory (Hering)

R. Semon: Engram. Sum of engrams. Mneme.

Semon sees the essence of the mnemonic in the fact that repetitions occur when the earlier conditions are not perfectly recurring.

synchronous. temporary.

engrafisch. constantly transforming. maintaining effect.

Ekphorie.

When observing the soul:

1. The observer can never determine the onset of an observation; he can only wait for the observation to occur. 2. He must be able to switch off attention.

3. No observation can be repeated under the same circumstances.

4. The conditions under which a mental phenomenon occurs cannot be determined by varying the accompanying circumstances, because the altered conditions no longer apply to the same mental experience, but to one that has been altered by the preceding circumstances.

Observation of the mental:

1. The content of consciousness does not remain unchanged? You cannot observe a train if you are inside it.

2. In memory, illusion lives? You have to get to know the conditions of illusion as laws of mental perspective.

Strangely enough, when it comes to the soul, there is an immediate desire to have it different from how it is.

Ed. v. Hartmann: never apodictic certainty. (Hypotheses of causes. Hypotheses of laws.

Content and form of consciousness: Fortlage, Herbart,

Benecke – content becomes independent

Rehmke: form becomes independent.

Consciousness: product, not producer: but then it must not develop an opinion about itself. What is not produced by consciousness therefore does not remain unconscious.

Ed. v. Hartmann:

However, such an activity (which spans the experiences of consciousness as a unifying thread) does not occur in consciousness, nor does its carrier, [the individual of a higher order,] and therefore [psychology, which is limited to consciousness, can never explain the synthesis of several consciousnesses into one.

Feeling: passion, mood, ...

Memory: the ideas themselves cannot be remembered.

In a dream, it is not an X that is known by the lower parts of the brain, but the activity at the lower parts of the brain is known.

Ed. v. Hartmann: Pleasure: discharge of accumulated chemical tension.

Aversion: inhibition of the same. —

In Hartmann: feeling effect of wanting.

Aversion when unconscious wanting is hindered in the realization of its goal. —

Pleasure when this inhibition is removed. —

Representation when the volition is paralyzed in the realization of its

goal. —

Life when the paralysis is lifted.

Ed. v. Hartmann: Every volition is determined by a representation. But every representation is also determined by a volition. Volition: like child to man. Volition becomes representation. But representation gives birth to volition.

Hartmann: the unconsciousness of volition.

Wundt: the characteristic feature of a volitional process is “the apperception of a psychic content.” Ed. v. Hartmann: “The motif acts like the pressure of a finger on the button of a galvanic line, through the closure of which a hundred mines explode at once.

In anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, realistic concepts are important. In the purely scientific field, the unrealistic concept remains inadequate. In the legal, moral, and social fields, it becomes a real danger.

In more recent times, there has been an effort to permeate the moral and social spheres with natural science ideas.

Benedikt gave a lecture at the 48th meeting of natural scientists in 1875 (previously 1874) and said in the course of it that the results of natural science knowledge must become a gospel:

To achieve this, the world view must first have reached such breadth, depth and clarity as to create a catechism that dominates the spiritual and ethical life of the people.

And about psychology, he says:

Psychology, too, has become a natural science since it, like physics and chemistry, has thrown off the ballast of metaphysics and no longer chooses hypotheses that are unfathomable for our present-day organization as premises.

One can cite Benedict because he naively introduces reality into his ideas.

But in general, the leap that is made from scientific ideas to “world views” is disastrous, because one takes those ideas that one has a good command of from a certain field and transfers them to other things that one does not know. As a rule, world views therefore contain an idealized world content that people express about things they know nothing about.

This has been particularly evident in recent times in the field of sociological ideas.

It is not possible to come to terms with the most essential impulses. At the center stands the concept of freedom. The natural scientist cannot do anything with it. Within the conceptual world that he has developed for the time being, only determinism makes sense.

In the area touched on here, analytical psychology plays its role. It has come to an area that is likely to open up the deepest insights. It also relates to an area that is connected to a non-utopian sociological view. However, it shies away from the idea of the spirit. And it operates with the inadequate concept of the “unconscious mind”.

First we must understand the human being. The threefold nature of his bodily life opens up a view into the real world of the spirit.

A degenerating natural life extends into the nervous life. The human being dies into his nervous life. The natural process that takes place here is a interrupted process of reproduction and growth. The process of cell division does not extend into the nerve cells and the red blood corpuscles. At the bottom of this process of degeneration, the soul life arises. What appears here is a living soul that has as little to do with physical life as a child has with its parents. And when you carry something within yourself that is so detached from the determining factors, you are a free being in this.

Note 1761, undated, around 1917

The content of the spiritual world actually lives in social communities. The impulses of imaginative, inspired and intuitive consciousness are there.

In the legal sphere, the content of intuitive consciousness is effective. (Dr. Roman Boos: The Collective Labor Agreement) The impulses in this area cannot be grasped with the ideas of ordinary consciousness. With these concepts, one can only understand what is developed in the subhuman life as penal impulses. When one “punishes” animals. The legal life remains soul-instinctive. Jurisprudence experiments with the legal life and does not come any closer to it.

Benedict:

Organic concepts have been applied to the state structures. For example, Wilson's. But also Spencer's and Comte's.

All social and state impulses must arise from the realm of experience in which the imaginations originate. Moral science is the result of inspired experience. Jurisprudence is connected with the intuitive realm.

Thoughts always remain somewhat alien to sensory reality; they can only be understood if one recognizes their origin in a spiritual realm. With thoughts, one is already in the spirit. A person who wants clarity about the spiritual must not flee from the experience in the thought. They must be able to live in the thought. There is no support, no point of rest, as there is when one simply deals in the realm of imagination with what is communicated by natural processes and human life. Thinking can spin out of itself nothing but empty thoughts; but in the experience of thinking, this does not remain empty.

In the continuous life, with appropriate attention, one can see how living forces are at work in thoughts and how what we call conscious thinking is only the soul illuminating objective thinking.

Comparison with traces of footsteps.

Impossibility of finding the spirit in matter.

The thinking self-awareness is not in the material processes.

The origin of sensory perceptions.

Knowledge first mediated by matter; waking up and spiritual awakening. Then perception (looking) in the being that has made the body a mirror of the whole physical course of life. Looking at life against the background of death.

In sensory perception, partial death lies behind the perception - which is always compensated for when the senses are at rest.

In the perception of the human life cycle, behind the gaze lies death and behind this lies the supersensible world, which gives us the supersensible consciousness from the forces that also reveal themselves in the material world.

In general, people lack the calm and inner strength to experience the spiritual. He has the most vivid desire to know something about the spiritual, but he likes to avoid bringing about the situation through which he might learn something about it. His thinking tool has been wrested from the context of the spiritual, while the rest of the human being remains in contact with it. Therefore, when the spiritual comes into consideration, he likes to rely on feeling.

The spiritual can only be experienced. The insight needed here arises when man realizes that the idea - the thinking - is as little conditioned in the body as the footprints found on a path are from the earth on which they are found. But here one cannot gain the right insight by examining the ground, but by knowing the being that left the footprints.

In the material world, man only notices what he can perceive, not what is effective in perception; in the spiritual, he loses himself in activity and does not come to perceive this activity.

For the one who has awakened to intuitive knowledge, matter ceases to be matter; it becomes flowing activity - which is no longer as foreign to one's own being as the perceived matter. But the imagination ceases to be the activity that is enthroned above things, looking down on them: it is immersed in a powerful reality. One must experience how the spirit works in matter. One must experience that in developing one's inner life, one does not become estranged from the world, but connects with it. However, this connection is not possible with the perceived material, but with that which works in this material.

When a person remembers an event that he has experienced, something that was separated from him but is stored in his body is before his soul; in the material world, something that was separated from him but is stored outside his body is before his soul.

To bring thinking so far that one has handed it over to the world process and can watch its fate there.

There is a being within man that unconsciously confesses to the ordinary consciousness the truths that spiritual science expresses; if this being were not in man, he would have to abstain from thinking and willing.

By observing nature, one can only gain knowledge of nature, that is, of material processes. It is different with that which the soul develops within itself by allowing knowledge of nature to take effect on it. Then the processes behind the material reveal themselves to it, with which it itself is related, but not to its sensual capacity for knowledge. Therefore, one should not interpret and allegorize on the basis of natural phenomena – but rather allow the soul to develop through knowledge acquired through these phenomena. The naturalist is reluctant to progress from thinking about nature to experiencing knowledge of nature.

In religious experience, the soul is directed towards the spiritual world – but there it attains only consciousness of the spiritual, not knowledge of this spiritual – the situation is different with that which the religious consciousness desires in the soul when it becomes strong and powerful – it then produces desire for spiritual science. The representative of religion is often averse to letting religious consciousness become so strong that it demands knowledge.

Spirit and matter confront each other in the human experience of existence. To recognize how they relate to each other is the endeavor of every person who awakens from the dull life that asks no world riddles. And there is a feeling in the soul that, having attained such knowledge, one will face the events of the world differently than by merely accepting them from the point of view of: this happened today, that happened yesterday. And yesterday's happened to me like that; today's happens to me like that. One need not say with Schopenhauer: Life is an unfortunate thing; I have decided to endure it by reflecting on it. But one can admit to oneself: Life is full of riddles; I want to find myself and myself in it by taking it so seriously that its riddles are an incentive for me to deal with them.

If a person delves into the phenomena of the material world, he can gain rich insights; but these insights remain silent when the soul asks about its own nature.

When man awakens a true consciousness of his own inner being, he can feel the strengthening power of the spirituality living in him; but this consciousness must also ask: Why is it transferred into the material world, whose nature thereby becomes so important for its own nature?

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science arises in the human soul when, on the one hand, the reason why knowledge of the material world remains so mute is understood; and when, on the other hand, the self-sufficiency of a consciousness in the spirit becomes the endeavor to penetrate from the spirit to its manifestation in the material world.

In order to experience the material world as his own, man must be so interwoven with it that he is matter himself with a part of his being. He is this with his senses and the thinking body that is connected to the sense life. While he is awake and devoted to them, his spiritual being lies outside the circle of his attention. What takes place in the senses is itself of a material nature. Through his senses, man plunges into the essence of matter. If the whole essence of man were given in this way, he could never have a consciousness of himself. He would be a sum of processes that matter settles with itself.

Self-awareness is acquired outside of matter. But as soon as the processes of matter cease in ordinary life, self-awareness also ceases. This is the case in sleep. Man knows of his self through matter; but in the self he experiences spirit. He brings himself, what he is, to consciousness through matter. In the ordinary waking up, it is true that man's knowledge is awakened, but not his essence. That this essence can also awaken can only be proved through experience, through direct realization. It can be proved. Man can awaken to life in the spirit, not merely to life in matter.

In such an awakening, one does not merely experience a kind of repetition of material perceptions, but a spiritual world. One experiences the essence of the human being, which not only produces the processes that lead to sensory phenomena, but the essence that makes the body a mirror for the psychological phenomena that take place between birth and death. Against the background of death, life reveals itself. But death does not merely show its surface, but its deeper content: the supersensible world, which has ceased to function when the soul enters physical life, and with the onset of death, just as the living and constructive powers of the body enter into action, as opposed to the activities through which sensory perceptions arise. Death, as it were, becomes transparent on its surface and shows its interior, which is the creative spirituality. If the body did not carry within itself the forces that cause death, life could not be brought to self-awareness. Just as the painter's brushstrokes would never produce a painting if they did not meet on the canvas.

But the soul itself is not contained in the body - not in material processes. It is merely effective in them. And what it has achieved is not exhausted in the traces that arise in the material; it lives on in the soul itself - will impress itself on the soul like memory of past activity. The memory that remains on the surface of the soul is a reflection of the memory that is rooted in the deeper layers of the soul and carries the experiences of the soul through death.

Plato believes that “a life without research is not worth living”.

K. Rosenkranz finds the thought “devastating”: “what would happen if this world did not exist”. The anthroposophically oriented spiritual science sets itself tasks in such a way that it takes into account the progressive development of humanity. The forces with which man tries to solve the great riddles of the world are different in the successive ages.

In the present age, we are particularly aware of the world riddle that is encapsulated in the opposition of “spirit and matter”.

We will start from two images:

G. Th. Fechner, who approaches what he calls the “night view”.

K. Rosenkranz, who trembles at the thought: “What would become of me if this whole world did not exist?”

Personalities such as these turn to the insights of an age to give people the strength to face life with understanding. For behind the intellectual riddles of the world stand those of the soul. Contemplation of the joys and sorrows of life, its changing destinies. It would be a sad state of affairs if man were to seek and accept only those ideas that correspond to his desires. But underlying all such striving is the endeavor to recognize the truth, even if it is painful, for it is a better support in life than illusion.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science first draws attention to the essence of thought. It recognizes the spiritual nature of thought. And at the same time it recognizes the reality of thought. This is all something that can be understood with ordinary consciousness.

But when one has recognized the reality of the world of thought, then one gains the possibility of actively engaging in it. This, however, leads continuously to the experience of the spiritual world.

Man, who makes use of material processes, is now placed in the spiritual world.

The spiritual researcher can be understood; for if the one who listens to him properly has the right idea, then he also has the matter.

It is recognized: the soul causes the material process in the bodily tool. When this causing has passed, consciousness first arises. Behind this are processes of dissolution.

In spiritual knowledge, the soul is grasped in its processing of the material bodily processes. —

From there it arrives at the knowledge of the continuous production of physical life between birth and death. Against the background of death, [life] appears. But death does not now represent its surface, but its interior.

Manuscript, undated, c. 1917

Anyone who wants to talk about the immortality of the soul in the age of the scientific worldview must take a perspective that can satisfy the prevailing type of thinking in the field of scientific research. His approach must not be less rigorous than that of serious science. That is to say, he must adduce proofs that can be conclusive in the forum of natural science. It must be borne in mind, however, that these proofs may still meet with the most violent opposition in our time. This is only natural. For many a person has formed certain ideas about how a proof must look at present, believing that he knows how physics, chemistry, biology, etc. prove their findings. He then finds that spiritual science, as it is meant here, has no scientific proofs to offer, but only a belief that is peculiar to religions. Such an opinion is perfectly understandable to someone who is himself familiar with this spiritual science; and he will find nothing strange or surprising in it if his explanations are currently still criticized as subjective beliefs.

Only the future will bring a more general understanding of how things stand in this field. For this understanding, it is necessary to learn to imagine how differently the field of the spirit must be investigated than that of nature. It will have to be recognized that the evidence for any fact to be cognized spiritually, e.g. for the independent life of the soul after the death of the body, must take quite different forms from those for a physical fact. Precisely because that evidence is to be as rigorous in its field as this is in its own, it must take different forms. It is not a matter of adducing proofs for the immortality of the soul, as they are justified in chemistry, but solely of how such proofs of immortality must be shaped for the cognitive need of a person who is able to properly appreciate the scope and significance of chemical or biological research. For those who do not want to admit this, even the insights into the soul that are held to be true spiritual science will be mere belief. And yet, in no sense is it intended to speak here from the point of view of belief, but from the standpoint of a science, which is this for the spiritual realm as natural science is for nature.

Now, many phenomena in present-day spiritual life can give the impression that many people, even those who stand on the ground of the strictest science, have lost the old prejudice that only natural science is a true science. Strict researchers and serious thinkers are beginning to investigate the continuation of the soul's life after death. Societies have been founded for such research, which aims to transfer the question of immortality from the realm of faith to that of strict science. There are already enough people of insight today who no longer consider anyone who devotes themselves to a scientific examination of such questions to be backward.

But these very researches usually show in the clearest way that one does not consider how different spiritual-scientific evidence must be from natural-scientific evidence if they both arise from the same scientific way of thinking. Such thinkers, who have formed their opinions about science through natural science, try to approach the spiritual world in the same way that one approaches nature. They want to conduct experiments in the field, as they do in the laboratory. I do not want to talk here about the attempts of the so-called spiritualists. People should not come into consideration who do not want a sufficient judgment about a scientific control in investigations. But at present, personalities may be mentioned in this field who have the will and seriousness for scientific research. Of course, the experiments and observations of Gurney, Myers, Podmore, Hodgson, Oliver Lodge, James, Wallace and many others may be considered prejudiced, perhaps even childish; but only someone who is thoroughly prejudiced can deny these men scientific spirit.

However, the experiments made in this direction clearly show how little understanding there still is today for developing the scientific way of thinking in such a way that it can seriously be considered for the spiritual realm. The natural scientist is accustomed to his field of research unfolding outside of his own soul. He must endeavor to accept as knowledge only what this field of research reveals, while keeping out of his own soul everything that comes from its own experience. He can only recognize as natural laws what is justified by facts independent of himself and his thoughts, and what exists independently of human ideas. Therefore, he also only wants the results of revelations in the spiritual realm that do not come from ordinary human consciousness. He believes, for example, that he can only learn something about the soul that may exist after death if it manifests itself within the world of facts in the same way that a physical force manifests itself. This leads him to his experiments with so-called mediums. These are persons in whom ordinary human consciousness is eliminated through certain events. The physical body of such persons behaves like that of a sleeping person, except that they develop an activity in response to questions or other stimuli, in which their own conscious soul life is uninvolved. It is then as if a foreign spirit were speaking through such persons, or, as in automatic writing, were using their hand to make itself known. If one could recognize in such manifestations that they must come from the soul of a deceased person, then this would be a kind of proof of the continuation of the soul that the scientifically minded person would want to accept as objective. Efforts are indeed being made to obtain evidence of the continuation of the soul in this way.

However, the large amount of work that has been devoted to such investigations cannot satisfy the judgment of the strictly thinking person. The objections that can be made are all too easy to come by, even when only the most serious works are considered. First of all, the communications that one would like to relate to the deceased are of little value in terms of content. Souls whose carriers were astute in life express themselves after death in a manner that is not very astute, often childish, petty, etc. Also, their messages are of such a nature that one cannot gain the slightest insight into a world in which one might suspect them after death. One may admit that they speak about things that take place far away from the place where the experiments are being done, or that they deal with things that neither the medium nor the people involved know anything about: the things themselves are insignificant. It is not possible to refute the objection: Why do only revelations come to light in this way that are so uninteresting to a more sophisticated human intelligence? Why are they so different from those that could be of interest to a deeper spiritual mind?

Another objection also carries a great deal of weight. Why should forces not be at play in such experiments that may indeed lie outside the field of ordinary nature, but which have nothing to do with souls that continue to exist after death? Let us assume that a dead person speaks through a medium about a personality who lives in a distant place, or who has herself died long ago, about whom neither the medium nor any of the observing persons knows anything. It will certainly be a seductive fact if it turns out that the stated fact and the person to whom it refers are known only to the supposedly dead person.

But why should there not be forces that have nothing to do with the soul after death, and which carry knowledge of facts into the soul of the living medium through channels unknown to the ordinary consciousness? If one has no other proofs of the continued existence of the dead than those characterized, then it is truly more befitting for human thought to conclude on unknown mediators between facts and souls on earth than on mediators in a questionable hereafter.

Another objection that has been raised – and with some justification – is that the messages from alleged deceased persons who inspire confidence stop relatively soon after their death. Indeed, the longer the time that has passed since the death of the persons making themselves known through mediums, the more questionable the revelations become. Well-meaning people who want to attach importance to the facts of these observations will therefore have no choice but to admit that these facts actually only speak for a short afterlife of the soul's expressions, so to speak an after-swinging, not for a true immortality.

On deeper reflection, one will not be able to agree with those who say that these investigations have only been carried out in a truly scientific way for a few decades: one must hope that the currently still unsatisfactory results will later lead to satisfaction. Rather, this deeper reflection shows that through these investigations one seeks a way into the realm of the spiritual that cannot promise success.

Just as one should not expect ghosts to enter a house in their true form if one makes other entry points instead of doors and windows, so one should not believe that spiritual beings reveal themselves through human bodies or through other entities of the physical world. It should be obvious that manifestations of spiritual beings can only take place in the spirit of man himself. But then one must seek these manifestations nowhere else than in the activities of one's own soul. Even the true essence of the soul of another person can only be revealed to the soul of the observer.

On the basis of this insight, another kind of spiritual research seeks its results precisely where the natural scientist does not want to look if he does not want to modify the meaning of research in line with the spiritual realm. This other spiritual science asks whether the human soul can find the spiritual realm through its inner life, how it finds the memories of past experiences through this inner life. The way in which these memories emerge from the hidden depths of the soul into consciousness is a purely inward one. Is it not possible for a spiritual world, if there is one, to enter the soul through inner experience? Is it impossible for a purely spiritual, disembodied being to speak directly to the soul, as a thought emerging in memory speaks to it?

Even the possibility of such a state of affairs initially repels the human being. He is, after all, of the opinion that everything that comes into his consciousness in this way can only be thoughts. He cannot imagine that thoughts can come into his soul that do not depend on being justified by something other than himself. When he becomes aware of something that merely speaks to his inner being, he will demand that it speak to him in some other way as well, so that he does not have to consider it merely a thought. But what if, of all that man can experience, the idea, the thought, the inner experience, is the only thing in which a disembodied spiritual world can make itself known?

Now the ordinary inner experience, the ordinary thought, is certainly not of that kind. The spiritual science referred to here does not dispute this. But it cannot find in any other human experience a suitable means for exploring the spiritual. So then it must ask: Is not the inner experience capable of development? Does it not carry within itself the possibility of unfolding in such a way that it can express the /Text breaks off]

Notes 5456-5461, undated, circa 1917.

Life itself creates the human riddle. – The soul decays without spiritual nourishment. While self-deception is possible, actual death is not. – The animal is incorporated into the evolution of the world; but not the human being. – He must incorporate himself.

There is progress in modern science that was hoped to help solve the riddles of existence.

The advances in physics and chemistry. The path led to the atom. It was hoped that the facts of the external world could be understood from the way atoms fit together.

Where did we end up: “that an iron atom must be more complicated than a Steinway grand piano” - A. Rowland based on spectral-analytical observations. (Kolbe calls van 't Hoff's stereometric formulas “hallucinations”.)

And in biology: Nägeli:

The ovum contains all the essential characteristics of the species just as much as the developed organism does, and as ovums the organisms differ from each other no less than in the developed state. The hen's egg contains the species just as completely as the hen does, and the hen's egg is just as different from the frog's egg as the hen is from the frog.

Thus, we encounter the same world in miniature. Therefore, we will not be able to answer the questions that arise in the context of the world of ordinary observation by looking at the world of the microscopic.

Likewise, we encounter nothing in the astronomically or geologically large that is not also present in the terrestrial world.

People who receive a feeling from this fact arrive at philosophy. This seeks to arrive at a solution to the human riddle from the concepts developed in the ordinary world. But these concepts only lead to the insight that they are powerless to answer the questions that man must ask.

Anthroposophy is therefore based on what is developed in man through an awakening with the help of the invigoration of thinking. In the physical, the spiritual becomes spiritually perceptible. Thinking, which is otherwise only produced in the physical world as a dead thing, is thereby truly connected with the soul life. Together with the soul, it interacts differently with the outside world. Anthroposophy thus comes to experience the etheric body.

Instinctively, Troxler's “Riddle of Man” p. 94 and I. H. Fichte ibid. p. 82ff.

Secondly, anthroposophy comes to recognize that this being can also be observed. The ether body is found when the thought process is detached from external perception. The soul body is found when the will is detached from the drives, affects, etc. In connection with these, it is blind; when it is detached from them, it sees spiritually. There is an “inner man.” Ed. v. Hartmann pointed to him as a hypothesis.

The fate of his philosophy.

The “inner man” can be found in a more recent philosophy as the “subconscious” (subliminal consciousness).

James calls this “the discovery made for the first time in 1886”.

Anthroposophy seeks the means to make use of this consciousness.

G. Tyrrel (translated into German in 1909 by E. Wolff. Between Scylla and Charybdis) speaks of a “sphere of dark knowledge and darkly knowable objects”.

Just as in the physical world, past experiences are brought into the present consciousness through memory, so the experiences of the subconscious person are brought into the realm of ordinary consciousness. (Otherwise they only come up in the form of dark impulses).

What a philosophy like Hartmann's instinctively postulated comes about: ordinary consciousness participates in the interaction of the “inner man” with the “spiritual world”.

Insight into the details of the spiritual world is not sought; it arises as a consequence. (Example of how some want the one without the other.) (Verification is absurdly demanded by those who do not understand.)

In the experience of thinking, the world is experienced - that which is sought through knowledge. However, the questions are not put aside. One does not have to enter into another world; one is constantly in it. One must develop a spiritual eye for this other world.

One must not step out of the spirit, but experience the rhythm of the world in the spirit. (Comparison with a person traveling in a train. The inner experiences in different ages.)

Anthroposophy has a different starting point from the mystical endeavors of the past, with which it is often confused. These were based on religious experiences. They therefore led to sectarianism. Because they have subjective content. Followers gained only through authority. Anthroposophy is based on scientific experiences. Also from scientific needs. It leads to religious experience. Therefore, it has a different effect than modern natural philosophy and philosophy. One will understand theology again. He does not really love Christianity who believes it endangered by knowledge. “On the Riddle of Man” $. 273.

J. Böhme:

All this is Babel, which clashes with each other and argues about the letter; for these all stand in one root, the Spirit of God. Who judges the birds in the forest, who praise the Lord with many a voice, each in its own way? All their sounds proceed from God's power, and before him they play. Therefore men, who quarrel and despise each other about science and about the will of God, are more foolish than the birds of the forest and more useless than the meadow flowers, which nevertheless keep silent to the Spirit of God and let him reveal his wisdom and power through them. What should they quarrel about for long around that in which they live and whose essence they themselves are?

Arrhenius:

Sometimes we hear it said that we live in the “best of all possible worlds”; it is difficult to say anything well-founded about that, but we - at least the natural scientists - can say with complete certainty that we live in the best of times. We can say, with the great connoisseur of nature and man, Goethe, in the firm hope that the future will only get better:

It is a great delight
to place oneself in the spirit of the times.
To see how a wise man thought before us,
And how we have then ultimately come so gloriously far.

But Faust (alone):

How can I not despair when I think
Of all the empty stuff I know,
How I dig for treasure with my greedy hand,
And am glad when I find earthworms!

It is a great experience
to rise to the spirit of the times
to hear how so many a true sage speaks:
Only by striving do we reach the light!

Kolbe: van 't Hoff had “mounted Pegasus (apparently borrowed from the veterinary school)” to announce: “how the atoms in space appeared to him on the chemical Parnass he had scaled by bold flight.”

Goethe:

Man in himself, insofar as he uses his healthy senses, is the greatest and most accurate physical apparatus that can exist, and that is precisely the greatest misfortune of modern physics, that one has separated the experiments, as it were, from man, and recognize nature only in what artificial instruments show, yes, what it can achieve, thereby limiting and wanting to prove.

But

But man stands so high that the otherwise unrepresentable is represented in him. What is a string and all its mechanical divisions compared to the musician's ear? Yes, one can say what the elementary phenomena of nature themselves are compared to man, who has to tame and modify them all in order to assimilate them to some extent.

O. Hertwig:

The principle of utility, the conviction of the necessity of unrestricted commercial and social competition, and materialistic schools of philosophy are forces that played a major role in the [modern] development of humans even without Darwin. Those who were already under their influence welcomed Darwinism as a scientific confirmation of ideas already familiar and dear to them from other sources. They could now see themselves, as it were, in the mirror of science.

The interpretation of Darwin's theory, with its imprecisions and ambiguities, also allowed for a wide range of applications in other areas of economic, social and political life. From it, everyone could, as from a Delphic oracle,

depending on what he wanted, draw his conclusions about social, political, hygienic, medical and other issues and, to support his assertions, invoke the science of biology, reworked in a Darwinian way, with its unalterable laws of nature. But if these supposed laws are not such, should there not also be social dangers when they are applied in other areas? One should not believe that human society can use phrases such as “relentless struggle for existence” [1], “selection of the suitable” [2], “the useful” [3], “the expedient” [4], improvement by natural selection [5] etc. in their transfer to the various fields, like daily bread, without being influenced more deeply and lastingly in the whole direction of their idea formation!

1. unrelenting struggle for existence: fruitful harmony of souls
2. Selection of the suitable: Cultivation of every justified aspiration
3. of the useful: Recognition of the usefulness of the spiritual
4. of the expedient: of that which elevates life
5. Perfection through breeding selection: Perfection through the mutual complementation of people

Anthroposophy conducts its research in a field that is not presented to humanity by fanciful arbitrariness of enthusiastic personalities, but that stands questioning before every healthy human feeling, so that man can indeed close himself off from these questions by numbing his soul: But the impulses of the inner being will awaken again and again from the stupor and bear witness to the fact that dealing with these questions is a necessity of life. The feeling of being closed in then appears as an illness, and the healthy person strives for its cure as for the cure of physical illnesses.

Nevertheless, in the age of scientific thinking, this field was only illuminated by a few isolated flashes of light: for example,

Fortlage: (Eight psychological lectures Jena 1869):

When we call ourselves living beings and thus ascribe to ourselves a property that we share with animals and plants, we necessarily understand the living state to mean something that never leaves us and that always persists in us, both when we are sleeping and when we are awake. This is the vegetative life of nourishment of our organism, an unconscious life, a life of sleep. The brain is an exception here in that this life of nutrition, this sleep life, is dominated in it by the life of consumption during the breaks in waking. During these breaks, the brain is exposed to a great deal of consumption, and [consequently] enters into a state which, if it extended to the other organs, would bring about the absolute enfeeblement of the body or death. [...] Consciousness is a small and partial death; death is a great and total consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths.

Fortlage wrote a lot: such flashes of thought remain isolated in his writings. And Ed. v. Hartmann criticized him for having them. They come from the fact that flames of insight shine up from the depths of the soul, which would otherwise be over-illuminated. Anthroposophy consciously wants to steer towards the light and turn it into a science about a field that cannot become a science in any other way.

It must come to powers of knowledge that appear to ordinary life as powers of imagination, as dream powers. But in the depths of the human being, a “second man” works. And if he can only be dreamt of, then what otherwise remains in dreams must be raised to luminous knowledge, otherwise this second man remains something that is overslept throughout life. In order to become complete in its own field, natural science must develop those insights that only extend to the fields where access to the spiritual world opens up. One consciously comes to these fields when one lives with natural science. When one consciously develops inner life at its borderline places. Then a state unfolds that can be compared to what one has to imagine in the case of lower organisms that develop sensory organs from within. One arrives at the process of forming spiritual organs of touch. This life at the border areas can be observed again in energetic cognitive natures.

Vischer:

No spirit where there is no nerve center, where there is no brain, say the opponents. No nerve center, no brain, we say, if it were not prepared from below on countless levels; it is easy to mockingly talk about the spirit's churning in granite and limestone, no more difficult than it would be for us to mockingly ask how the egg white in the brain soars to ideas. The measurement of the differences in levels is fading from human knowledge. It will remain a mystery how it comes about that nature, under which the spirit must slumber after all, stands as such a perfect counterpoint to the spirit that we bump into bumps on it; it is a direction of such an appearance of absoluteness that with Hegel's otherness and being beside oneself, however witty the formula, it says next to nothing, and simply covers up the crudity of the apparent dividing wall. The correct recognition of the cutting edge and the thrust in this counterblow can be found in Fichte, but no explanation for it.

Inner experience must come to the fact that with such thoughts the soul lives at the border of knowledge. Here it can become aware of its life independent of the body, the life that is otherwise overslept. But a twofold insight must open up here. One must recognize the nature of thinking that is gained from the sensual world.

Gideon Spicker: (Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin Friar):

Whatever philosophy one professes – dogmatic or skeptical, empirical or transcendental, critical or eclectic – all, without exception, start from an unproven and unprovable proposition, namely, the necessity of thinking. No examination, however deep, can ever get behind this necessity. It must be accepted unconditionally and cannot be justified by anything; every attempt to prove its correctness always presupposes it. Below it yawns a bottomless abyss, a dreadful darkness illuminated by no ray of light. So we do not know where it comes from or where it leads. Whether a gracious God or an evil demon has placed it in reason, both is uncertain.

Philosophy as a science of the supernatural has often believed that it could solve the human essence riddle in thinking itself. But such an attempt to overstretch thinking leads to a kind of malnutrition of the soul. Only the realization that so-called metaphysics is a hunger for knowledge can save us.

A second insight, which is particularly important in more recent times, is that sensual knowledge can only lead to satiety of the soul. Here it is important to come to the realization that the spirit is the creator of the body; the latter is neither the tool of the body nor a parallel phenomenon associated with the body. What can be observed sensually in the body has its laws in the past workings of the spirit. In the present workings of the spirit, the germ of future bodily activity is present. It is not knowledge as such that man strives for in knowing, but the shaping of future life. Remembrance is brought about by a process that still has a relationship to the processes that represent growth, in which heredity has an effect. But in the process of waking imagination, there is also a mental side process that prepares the germ from which the spiritual entity that passes through death is formed.

One must be content to gain knowledge of the immortal human being through imagination. For in this, everything mortal is eradicated for perception. And only the immortal is retained in them.

Only with such imaginations can the soul live in the supersensible realm. It can know in this way that what it does and thinks in a later period of time represents a coexistence of itself with the spirit in an earlier one. It becomes familiar with a world in which it recognizes spiritual realms just as one recognizes material realms in the natural realm.

We just have to gain a correct understanding of the soul's relationship to the body. The wonderful ramification of the nervous system contains the element into which the human being is constantly dying. Death resides in the nerves. The breakdown of organic processes resides there.

I would like to call what I have in mind anthroposophy, preferably Goetheanism. In Goethe, the concepts gained from nature are still such that they can be digested by the soul. He himself has only come to a conception interwoven with nature. But anyone who penetrates his way of thinking will undergo a metamorphosis of soul phenomena: will, feeling, thinking. Psychologists have at best arrived at a classification. Feeling is will transformed; but this is done by the body. Thinking is transformed from will and feeling. If you discover feeling in thinking, then you are dealing with supersensible beings. With those who have been involved before one has gone through birth to sensual existence; if one discovers the will, then the previous earth life. The will of which one is aware in ordinary life, which moves limbs, etc., the will that one finds in the supersensible nature of the ideas, comes from previous earth lives.

Just one thing should be mentioned regarding the practical fruitfulness of anthroposophy. In 1914, financiers expressed the conviction that the war would only last a few months because economic resources would not last longer. A respected teacher of international law hopes that they were not mistaken regarding reconstruction. But there will only be no helplessness if reality is grasped. And reality includes the spirit. For economics touches the area where nature reaches its limits: in hunger, in education, etc., man must see essential things that he cannot conquer with the ideas gained from nature. A weak beginning has already been made with the insight into spiritual impulses.

Oskar Hertwig: (The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance):

The interpretation of Darwin's theory, which is so ambiguous with its vagueness, also allowed for a wide range of applications in other areas of economic, social and political life. From it, everyone could, as from a Delphic oracle, draw their own conclusions about social, political, hygienic, medical and other issues, as they wished, and refer to the science of Darwinian biology with its unalterable laws of nature to support their assertions. But if these supposed laws are not such, should there not also be social dangers in their versatile application to other areas? Do they really believe that human society can use phrases such as “relentless struggle for existence”, “selection of the suitable, the useful, the expedient”, “perfection through breeding” etc. in their transfer to the most diverse areas, such as daily bread, for half a century without being influenced more deeply and lastingly in the whole direction of their idea formation! The proof of this assertion would not be difficult to obtain from many phenomena of modern times. Precisely for this reason, the decision about the truth or error of Darwinism also reaches far beyond the scope of the biological sciences.

Goetheanism has a view of nature that leaves room for the peaceful harmonizing influence of the spirit in the natural struggle for existence; the development of what is most suitable instead of the selection of what happens to be suitable; of what is ethically valuable and transcends mere utility; of what is spiritually willed in what is merely functional; of the perfection of the spirit in addition to that achieved through natural selection. But all this cannot be recognized by conveniently transferring the laws of nature to the spiritual realm. It must be investigated in the spiritual realm, as the laws of nature are investigated in the natural realm.

Why do people resist this? Between the natural and spiritual realms lies a field that must be worked through. If one wants to know immortality, one must go through the knowledge of death. When one is no longer afraid to overcome the fear of knowing death, one will be able to partake of the satisfaction that comes from life in immortality.

1. Introduction: On the spiritual necessity of anthroposophy.
2. It has always been there as flashes of inspiration from individuals. Continued.
3. What cognitive powers are necessary. Science cannot develop them.
4. The development of cognitive powers at the “places of knowledge” - Vischer.
5. The inability of mere thinking: G. Spicker. 6. The inability of sensory experience. 7. What the body – the nervous system – is. 8. Why only in imaginations. 9. The ramification of the nervous system and death. 10. Goetheanism. 11. Metamorphosis of soul life.
12. A practical perspective.
13. Why does one not want anthroposophy.

Anthroposophy is fully aware of its changeability over time.

Anthroposophy is linked to natural science, to being its complement and completion. It is not a doctrine of faith alongside other doctrines of faith, but the science of the spirit. Its origin in this way must be taken into account.

Thus its connecting power is not sectarian either. Yet such a connection is necessary because of the “secret”. But it must not be in the sense of the old mystery cults. In the “borderland” illusions must be distinguished from reality. “Inner opponents”.

Anthroposophy must grasp the meaning of the concepts differently than external science and also religion. It characterizes through the concepts. The so-called reality and the ideals.

In this way, anthroposophy comes to recognize the phenomena of the human spirit. Thomism. It stands in contrast to the most diverse recent attempts at creating religion. It recognizes how the forces that create religion are limited. The scientific disciplines that focus on the external world have repeatedly made such attempts at creating religion. Strauß. Ed. v. Hartmann.

For anthroposophy, sensual reality is an image of the spiritual. For this very reason, it leads the mind back to religious need. In this, too, it points man to something other than mere natural science: Mach.

The natural science direction always comes to treat religion like a prejudice. “Fear and adversity are the mothers of religion.” “Churches fill up and pilgrimages increase in times of war and devastating epidemics.” Attempts to make morality independent. - In 1873: cities, rural communities, the church faithful, one third of the French people. Albert Sorel: Histoire diplomatique de la guerre franco-allemande. W. James. Subliminal self.

Conflicts arise not from the essence of religion but from the former state of connectedness and non-separation. As late as 1822 the decrees against Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler were only repealed. Pater Secchi. In this subject, anthroposophy and religion will meet; in the soul experience they go different but parallel paths, each with equal right. Again and again I am confronted with the objection that Anthroposophy is not in harmony with the aims of certain schools of thought that strive for an internalization and deepening of Christian experience.

Bishop Ireland: “Religion needs new forms and ways of understanding in order to get in touch with modern times. We need apostles of thought and action.

The criticism is that the impulse for altruism is missing. Fate and repeated lives on earth. People say: an impersonal concept of God.