The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today, anthroposophy is for many people a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into a realm that serious science should not concern itself with through knowledge. And those who, among the many specialized subjects to which a scientist can currently devote himself, want to accept something similar to what anthroposophy talks about, find, or claim to find, that the way anthroposophy wants to recognize is the opposite of true science. It is still difficult for anthroposophy to seriously engage with contemporary science on a large scale. The representatives of science prefer to be able to categorize this dubious intellectual construct as a form of scientific enthusiasm or a philosophically decorated form of superstition.

But it cannot be said that minds disposed to enthusiasm and superstition find much joy in anthroposophy. Of course, some people of the kind who get an excited heart and nimble legs when there is talk of any kind of “Sophia”, or even of something “occult”, also believe they hear words in anthroposophy that they can think about in their own way. They fail to hear, out of politeness to themselves, that anthroposophy does not particularly value their thoughts. And those who talk about anthroposophy without any intention of engaging with it think they are being witty when they refer to their “hysterical, eye-rolling” followers. But for the real enthusiasts, the whole nature of anthroposophy is not sensational enough; it appears to them to be too much in the guise of thinking, which they prefer to avoid.

It is not easy to respond to this fluctuating image of anthroposophy with a brief description of its intentions. Not only do we have to talk about something that many consider recognizable and scientific, we also have to talk about the other differently.

Almost half a century ago, at the 45th Naturalists' Convention in Leipzig, one of the greatest naturalists of modern times, in his famous Ignorabimus speech, forbade the recognition of nature to enter the territory that Anthroposophy wants to speak about. It might therefore seem as if the spirit of modern natural science was to be renounced. This is not the case. Anthroposophy takes its place most earnestly on the ground of this natural science. It recognizes the blessings that have come from the scientific and intellectual treatment of observation and experiment. It seeks to work in no other spirit than that which is fostered by the modern scientific ethos. It seeks its true co-workers among those who can imbibe this ethos with understanding.

But she also sees the possibility of penetrating into a supersensible realm without having to deny the spirit of modern natural knowledge. The fate of many a thinker of the latest time makes a deep impression on her. I will mention here one of the most important, Franz Brentano, who, although little known to a wider public, has been of profound influence for a narrower circle of students. Brentano wanted to establish a modern psychology. The brilliant scientific results of the 1860s and 1870s, when he made his decision, had a suggestive effect on this excellent thinker. He wanted to work on the science of the soul in the spirit of natural science. One volume of this work appeared in the 1870s. There were to be four or five. However, he was unable to follow up the first one. A sigh in this first volume reveals the reason. Brentano soon found himself limited to dealing only with the everyday details of mental life by what he believed to be the true spirit of natural science. How the representation follows the perception, how attention works, how memory works, etc. – one could believe that one could elucidate these in the sense in which one observed and experimented on nature. And when he was writing his first volume, Brentano still thought he could continue in this spirit and still advance to the questions that seemed to him the essential ones for the science of the soul. What were all the individual investigations for, he exclaimed in despair, if they did not succeed in learning something about the questions that Plato and Aristotle had already considered essential: about the preservation of the spiritual and mental part of man after the decay of the physical body. Brentano was a thoroughly honest thinker. He wanted to continue in the spirit in which he had begun; and in no other way could he reach his highest goal of soul research. He could not do that. The natural scientific orientation of thought, if it honestly remained on its own ground, could not penetrate to these highest goals.

We must grasp this impossibility and, on the basis of this understanding, come to the other way of investigating the soul and spirit if we want to gather fruits equal to those of natural science. Anthroposophy comes to this understanding. It regards the thinking human being who conducts research about nature. He will best achieve his goal if he lets thinking only speak about the facts of nature. If he uses it only to bring these facts into such a context that they say everything about themselves, and he adds nothing of his own. It is right that science sees its ideal precisely in such a relationship to thinking. Goethe had this scientific ideal in mind in its fullest purity. Modern scientific thinking has not yet reached this purity. It leaves scientific ground when it advances beyond the world of phenomena and its forces to atomistic or energetic hypotheses.

But with such a kind of research one does not get to the soul-spiritual. For if you look at the world around you, everything you see must be a being of the senses. You come to nothing that could underlie it. And if you look inward, you see nothing but the external world as it is processed by the soul. This external world is, however, manifoldly transformed within. The impressions have passed through emotional experiences and will impulses. The imagination has transformed them. In this transformation they are incorporated into memory. The prudent person will still recognize what has been taken in from outside even in the transformation. He will not fall into the error of many a mystic, who mistakes for an inner revelation a completely different world, when it is only a reflection of the external world, transformed within.

False mysticism is one danger for anthroposophical spiritual research. It passes off memories that have been transformed as the knowledge of a supersensible being that manifests itself through the human being. From the clear insight into this fact, anthroposophy draws part of its means of knowledge. It does not stop at mere memory. It develops the soul in such a way that the faculty of memory itself is transformed. This is brought about by exercises that work as precisely in the inner activity of the soul as the physicist works externally when he makes his instruments to eavesdrop on nature's secrets. Certain ideas that are not brought in from memory are treated in the same way as remembered ideas. They have to be easily comprehensible ideas that one forms oneself or that one allows another to give one. It is important that nothing of the processes involved in ordinary remembering interfere with the mental activity to which one devotes oneself with such ideas. However, one does live completely in the activity that unfolds during remembering. It is now a matter of continuing such practice until one feels, so to speak, inwardly permeated by a being that makes the thinking power appear to be pulsating with life. In this way, thinking as a real process has been lifted out of the physical body. With ordinary thinking, one lives in the processes of the physical body. With the thinking that one has now attained, one lives in the etheric body. One has elevated into consciousness a process that otherwise takes place unconsciously through the physical body. One's own personal being has moved into the etheric body that has become conscious. We see the consequences. The past life since birth, which otherwise forms a subconscious stream from which the echoes of experiences emerge like waves in memory, either voluntarily or involuntarily, becomes in its entirety an immediate present experience. One feels oneself in it with one's I, as one otherwise feels oneself in one's physical body. Experiences that took place ten years ago are felt to be as much a part of oneself as the hand and the head. One experiences oneself in the etheric or formative body, but as if in a process. In this way one gets to know the ether, which forms spatially but is temporal in nature. One lives in images, but these are not static, they are mobile.

These images then merge with the physical being. One notices that one's consciousness has entered the realm of processes that work on the physical organs as the forces of nutrition, growth and reproduction. But one experiences all this in the same way as one experiences the activity of a sensory organ. One feels compelled to perceive the etheric being not as sharply distinguished from the external world, but as connected with the etheric external world, as one perceives the experience that occurs when the eye sees. Thus the etheric processes within will appear connected to etheric processes in the external world, as the perceptions within are connected to the external objects being looked at when seeing. The only difference is that in the ordinary process of seeing, fleeting thoughts arise for the inner being in the present moment, while in the etheric picture gazing it becomes clear how the etheric world actually works on the human organization inwardly.

But this experience is not like the ordinary life of memory. In the time when one is cognizing in this way, one lives only in pictures; and one sees this quite clearly. It would be an unhealthy element if one were to mistake the experiences for something other than pictures. One would then enter the region of illusion, hallucination, mediumistic imagination. This is a path that must not be taken. The reality that one erroneously senses in “dreaming”, in hallucination and the like, arises from the fact that the soul experience flows down into the physical, and from the physical it is given, as it were, the density of reality. For anthroposophical spiritual research, everything must remain in the realm of conscious life, and this knows that what it experiences is only images, as in memory images.

Reality must enter this world of images through further fully conscious exercises, not through unconscious physical processes. The next stage of practice lies in the development of an ability that one does not love in ordinary life. It is forgetting. First, you imitate memory by allowing images to be present in consciousness; you imitate forgetting by using full willpower to remove these images as if you had never had them. This makes you receptive to the perception of realities that are completely closed to ordinary consciousness. You take them into the etheric body like you absorb oxygen when breathing.

One can call the cognitive experience in images the imagination; the second stage, in which a spiritual-soul reality penetrates into the imagination, can then be called inspiration. Anyone who associates only what is described here with these names cannot possibly take offense at the fact that all kinds of evils have been attributed to the names of enthusiastic mystics.

Inspiration first leads to an understanding of the soul. In imagination, one lives in the soul, but one does not look at it. Only when one has freed oneself from imagination is one's own soul perceived by looking. Everything that lives in it as a thought is felt in the same way as hunger, as consuming one's own being; the will, on the other hand, is felt in the same way as satiety, as building up one's own being. The emotional experiences appear as the rhythmic back and forth between the two forms of feeling. In the will, a world comes to life that is not there for consciousness in ordinary life. If we want to understand it, we must reflect on our relationship to the will in our ordinary lives. We are familiar with the idea that this or that should be done. But we know nothing about the way in which the hand or leg is moved. We only see the movement, the unfolding of the will. What lies in between is as much immersed in darkness for consciousness as the processes from falling asleep to waking up. Into this darkness the spiritual shines. In the act of will, man, as it were, breathes in the spirit; in the activity of imagination, he breathes it out. The perception of being permeated with the spirit produces the feeling of satiation in the act of will; the activity of imagination is felt as a surrender of one's own being, as a consuming.

This opens up the possibility of educating oneself about sleeping and waking. During sleep, the soul sinks into the spirit. It then dwells precisely in the element that withdraws from its consciousness during will activity. It is in the world of the will, but outside the body. It is interwoven with the creative forces of the world. In wakefulness, it lives in the body, but the spirit that guides the will is not conscious of it. Its presence is limited to the sphere of the body. In inspiration, the will activity that is working in the body becomes visible. It is opposed in its nature to the external creative forces of the world. It consumes the body. Physically, there is a consumption, a breakdown of the body in the will. But these are felt precisely as saturation by the spirit. In the imagination, the body is created. Perception works in the same way as will; it destroys the physical. In the imagination that follows perception, the destruction is reversed. This is felt as an exhalation of the spirit.

From the experience of these inner processes of the soul, the path leads to an understanding of birth and death. Through birth, inspiration beholds the soul life that existed in the spiritual element before birth – or conception – as it will exist in the physical. The same applies to the soul life beyond death. In imagination, the personality is traced back to birth; in inspiration, it is pointed beyond. The life of the soul is thus recognized as an imagistic life during the time from birth to death. The external world can be reflected in the human being because he has suspended his soul life at the time of conception. It has poured itself out into the bodily life. New soul life is created in the experience of the external world.

Anthroposophy does not initially lead to life after death, but to life before birth – or conception. The consciousness of Western civilization has lost this focus on the prenatal life of the soul. Therefore, it denies the possibility of grasping immortality through knowledge at all. It would relegate the acceptance of immortality to the sphere of faith. It is right if it merely wants to develop an interest in life after death. But anthroposophy seeks knowledge in this area. It must develop interest in the other direction. Only when one has an overview of what part of the soul was present at the time of conception can one recognize how the soul shapes the body. In this knowledge, however, lies the other in relation to death. If the soul becomes a concrete reality for contemplation, then so does the transformation that the outer world undergoes in the soul through ordinary consciousness. One recognizes the lasting element in human life that has nothing to do with the body and that is led through death to the realm of the spirit.

What has been described as forgetting borders on the soul's capacity for love. It can therefore be brought to such an extent that what is conveyed through the body in love occurs as a pure spiritual experience. Then one perceives not only a uniting and separating of one's own being with the spirit, but a real standing within the spiritual reality. Inspiration becomes intuition. This level of knowledge can be given such a name because it has a similarity in a higher realm to what is called in ordinary life. Only there, intuition is an immediate awareness of a context that applies to the physical world, without logical mediation; intuition in the higher sense is the experience of the spiritual in such a way that what is imagined and inspired acquires objective validity, as if, by determining the weight of an object given to the eye in the image, it acquires objective validity.

In its own essence, the spirit is seen in the soul through intuition. And that is the one that returns in repeated earthly lives. Just as the soul exists only in the image during earthly life and has its reality in the prenatal, the spiritual does not even have an image in earthly life as I. It is only present there as a black circle within a white surface, or like the processes of sleep within life. What one addresses as “I” is a void for the ordinary consciousness. The real ego effects are the after-effects of previous earthly lives. The present ego can only develop its effects in the following earthly lives.

By living in the realization of the relationships between successive earthly lives, one arrives at an understanding of the relationship from spirit to spirit. The universe reveals itself as a spirit universe. The succession of earthly lives is a reflection of this spiritual universe. Therefore, intuition, which can see through this succession, can venture to penetrate to a certain degree into the spiritual essence of the world. In an act of will, the fulfillment of one's own nature with the spirit is seen. In an experience that is not indifferent to our will, but determines it in a fateful way, a spiritual emptiness appears, a longing. This is carried within us as a consequence of previous earthly lives. We build our lives out of such longings. Everything that is not done out of pure thought wells up out of this subconscious life-stream as fate. It is possible to will purely, because the etheric has come out of the etheric to the independent entity in man. As soon as one enters the realm of imagination, freedom is immediately lessened. There, everything proceeds consciously; one lives circumspectly. But one can only form images that lie within the laws of the etheric world. In the field of inspiration, one's soul is integrated into the general world of souls, just as one's physical soul is integrated into the breathing process. One experiences oneself as a part of the whole. And in intuition, everything in life that does not flow from mere thoughts is felt to be a fateful connection of repeated earthly lives. What is realized out of pure thoughts in freedom has only one reality in the one physical life on earth. For the following ones, it only has a meaning in that the person experiences inner satisfaction in accomplishing free actions. This consequence of freedom leaves inner traces that then show their effects in the following lives on earth.

Intuition offers the possibility of penetrating into the spiritual foundations of the universe. One experiences there, for example, the difference between the sun and the moon. One experiences this through observing their effect on human beings. Just as the outer world of the senses lives on in the human being as content for thinking and feeling, etc., so the sun and moon live on in growth and reproduction. The effect of the sun is seen in everything related to growth and will; the effect of the moon in decomposition and thinking. The effect of the sun in the human inner being conditions the ability to remember by exciting the inner being, whereby the outer sensory impressions are reflected. The effect of the moon conditions all devotion and love. It paralyzes and deadens the inner being. In this way, the human being is able to relive the outer world within himself.

Once one has been enabled in this way to recognize the deeper basis of the sun and moon effects, one's view can sharpen for what is sun- and moon-like in the earthly environment. For example, we see in plants both a tendency to break down and to build up. We see the moon-like quality in the solidifying of the substance, and the sun-like quality in the blossoming and sprouting. And we then recognize the relationship to the human organism. A plant that carries a certain salt is recognized for its healing effect on a pathological process in the human organism. Of course, today's medicine will reject such findings. It simply knows nothing of what can be recognized with such inner clarity through supersensible vision, as it is also present in mathematical thinking. For this vision, the human organism is different from that for physical research. And the beings of external nature are also different. One no longer perceives limited organs in the organism. Not lungs, liver, etc., but processes: the lung process, the liver process. And in the same way, one perceives not the plant but its formative process. This also makes it possible to judge the interaction of the one and the other process when they flow into each other through the administration of medication. One penetrates into the intimate relationships of the human being with his natural environment.

Life is brought to the historical assessment of human development through the means of knowledge of anthroposophy. One has tried to recreate the view of the historical process of becoming according to a beautiful scientific idea. This idea is known: that the human germ, before birth, passes through the forms in a shortened development, which are realized in stages in the animal series. Accordingly, it has been thought that a people at a later stage of culture can also be understood as representing a later age of the individual human being, so to speak. One looks at the ancient oriental peoples and sees humanity at the childhood stage in them. In the Greeks and Romans, one sees the youth stage captured. The more recently civilized peoples would then have entered into manhood. This view presents only a vague analogy. Through real observation, something quite different is found. When one reaches a certain age, one's intuitive perception is awakened to intimate soul processes that are, as it were, held back from unfolding in the physical body. It is like the human germ, which passes through the animal series in a rudimentary way, but is prevented from realizing the corresponding form at a certain stage. The body points to earlier stages of development as it grows; the soul does this at the end of life. In the older stages of human development, what is currently shown in the soul's rudiments was actually present in the human body. People were organized differently. At present, a clear parallelism between the physical and the soul-spiritual can be seen in the child and adolescent stages of life. One need only think of sexual maturity with its accompanying psychological phenomena. For a more subtle observation, such a parallelism is also still noticeable up to the end of the twenties. But then the physical processes become, so to speak, too firm to have such mental side effects. The mental and spiritual life emancipates itself from them and continues in dependence on education and the life experiences aroused by the outside world. This was different in earlier epochs of human development. In those times, the human being also developed spiritually and mentally simply by developing physically. The significance of this fact can be seen from the fact that, as a result, the human being not only participated in the ascending physical development with all his or her mental activity, as is the case now, but also in the descending one. Today, at most, he or she participates in the descending physical development only through what arises from it as mental decline. But if we are able to correctly assess the mental and spiritual rudiments just described, we come to the insight that in older epochs, especially in old age, people have attained a state of mind that meant a spiritualization of their entire being. That is why the views about a spiritual foundation of the world all come from older times. But this leads to a historical view according to which humanity records the culture that arises from physical development at ever younger stages. While the Greeks were still able to draw the strength for their spiritual culture from the development of their physical bodies in the first thirty years of their lives, the present-day civilized nations only manage to make use of their physicality until the end of their twenties. But this brings about an understanding of historical life that shows man his place in historical evolution. Great human tasks become apparent from history. One sees the necessity for humanity to deepen spiritually. For the time that began around the fifteenth century only developed what is possible in accordance with the development of the body until the end of the 1920s. These were the great achievements of the Galilean-Copernican age. Humanity would have to become rigid in them if completely different guiding forces of existence did not set in. Scientific life must be fertilized by the study of the supersensible. What man can experience through imagination, inspiration and intuition must be given to an existence that can no longer draw from the development of the physical. From the sense of human development, the emergence of an anthroposophical spiritual science appears as a necessity of the present epoch.

[Concept for the above text, from notebook 496, 1920/1921)

1.) Anthroposophy is seen as a fantastic attempt at knowledge. Taken as superstition.

2.) The enthusiasts take no pleasure in anthroposophy.

3.) It is difficult to speak of its essence in a nutshell.

4.) Du Bois-Reymond forbade to penetrate into the realm of the supersensible in a scientific way.

5.) Not opposed to science.

6.) The usual scientific method cannot penetrate into the life of the soul. Example Franz Brentano.

7.) Impossibility to go beyond the phenomena through external research. Hence the contempt for Oken-Schelling's natural philosophy. The ideas lose their content.

8.) But with such research, one also cannot approach the soul and spirit. The wrong path of false mysticism sees into the interior. But it only finds the reflection of the sensory outside world.

9.) In anthroposophical research, the ability to remember is transformed. Thoughts are absorbed into the etheric world. One detaches oneself from the body. 10.) One then lives in images. With full composure, one expands one's personality through one's experiences since birth. One has thereby become entirely a sensory organ.

11.) One must consciously remain in the soul realm. Slipping back into the body realm gives rise to dreams, hallucinations, etc. One then mistakes the pictorial-experiential for reality.

12.) One notices that one has entered the realm of body formation. One has taken the forces of growth up into consciousness.

13) One must now progress to supersensible perception. This happens through the process of imitation of forgetting.

14) One transforms the imagination into an inner power, which one then perceives just as little as the eye. But this power, which has flowed back into the inner being, opens up the vision of the soul's outer world. The astral aspect comes to the fore. The moments of waking up and falling asleep become representational. An interrelationship becomes visible that can be compared to breathing. Oriental wisdom therefore consciously transformed the breathing process.

15) In a further step, that which sends no impressions into consciousness during sleep is recognized as that which connects with the physical at birth (conception). This also passes through death.

16) You have thus come to an understanding of the interrelationship of your own human being with the outside world, but you have not yet grasped the spiritual outside world itself.

17) This happens through the further development of the method of forgetting. The power is trained in the soul, which otherwise works in dependence on the body as love. One thereby transfers one's own experience into that of another. The spirit reveals itself in its reality. The repeated lives on earth are recognized.

18) Intuition offers the possibility of seeing the inner world without false mysticism. And the outer world in its spiritual background. Just as ordinary soul experiences are an abstract reflection of the sensory outer world, so the material inside of a person is an effect of the spiritual content of the outer world.

19) This makes it possible to deepen medical knowledge. The natures of the natural kingdoms are seen through and their relationship to the organ processes of the human being is revealed.

20) The effects of the sun and moon are recognized. Their relationship to the inner processes of the human organization.

21.) Life is brought into the historical development of humanity.

22.) The artistic experience becomes conscious perception. This opens up a source for the artistic. Goethe spoke with a sense of what is entering the realm of experience. The unconscious is not affected. For one does not symbolize; one does not allegorize. One lives one's way towards artistic perception with insight. Dornacher Bau. Its forms arise from the same source as anthroposophy. — Eurythmy.

23.) Education is stimulated. A real knowledge of human nature is developed. From this arises the art of forming human beings.

24) Social conditions can be understood with a thinking based on anthroposophy. Natural science works with sharply defined contours towards a goal. Such ideas are not suitable for grasping the essence of capital, labor, money, etc. Such ideas can only be thought. They have no inner life. Anthroposophical ideas are alive. They connect with life. They become social sympathies and antipathies; they take hold of feeling and pulsate through will. They are absorbed into social life just as life forces are absorbed into the human organism. But that needs the present.

25) It was intellectualism that made natural science great. It will be supersensible vision that penetrates into life.

1. Anthroposophy aims to provide an understanding of the human being; it begins with its results where science ends, which alone is accepted as such in the broadest circles today - but it also begins with its research methods where this science ends.

2. Nevertheless, it is not opposed to this science. It must, however, see how it is fought by it. But it believes that this science is becoming quite unscientific in this very struggle.

3. This science is based on observation, experiment and rational consideration. In its pursuit, limits are reached in relation to the external world and to human beings. Natural science does not penetrate behind the sensory world. Here, speculation with the mind takes place. But one speculates in the void. Self-knowledge does not penetrate beyond memory. There one mystifies into the soul nebula. - False mysticism.

4. Science would have to have the courage to phenomenalism in nature and materialism in relation to man.

5. If one wants to recognize something different, one must become aware of other forces in the human being, and also consciously apply them.

6. You have to start at the end of science. With the ability to remember. Forming images – strengthening the power of imagination – manageable images. – You know that you are still working from the physical. But you only stick to what the body can form, not to what it forms through external impressions.

7. One must completely free oneself from the body. This is achieved by suppressing the images with willpower. The power of meditation now proves to be a real power - and consciousness takes on a spiritual content: the creative aspect of the individual being comes into consciousness. - The etheric body as the shaper of the physical. Because one sees how the soul and spirit are formed. One must come to shape one's organs. The brain, so to speak, remains elastic.

8. But you can also suppress this individuality. Then you experience yourself in the existence before birth - in a spiritual-soul world. You have to learn to regulate your emotions - this is how you learn to see how the soul is placed into the organism from the spiritual-soul world. The strength that one develops intervenes in the rhythm of the soul organism. One comes to distinguish the soul rhythm from the bodily rhythm. Like the breath, so the interplay of the prenatal and the experiences of life. One sees that which passes through death. One only comes to shape the soul.

9. Complete self-education. This makes a person an unbiased observer of themselves. You become the judge of yourself. You do not change your life – otherwise it would be pathological – but you recognize the results of previous lives in this one. Freedom is completely compatible with this. Just as you do not feel limited in your freedom by yesterday, even though you depend on it. Free action comes from thought.

10. One sees the dependence of the metabolism on the will. A decision – pulling oneself together – action: strength is drawn from the organization – physical strength is transformed into spiritual strength; but now, through this counteraction, one shapes one's subsequent life. One sees the creative aspect in the doing.

11. Through imagination, the organic interior is revealed. This is the stimulus for medicine. - The relationship to the environment. And on the other hand for art.

12. Through inspiration, stimulus for social life.

13. For religious life.

14. [breaks off]

Franz Hartmann comes from Bavaria, studied medicine, undertook extensive travels through America, which introduced him to the customs and traditions, especially the so-called magical arts of primitive peoples. He then met H. P. Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, who from 1875 onwards tried to spread mystical and occult teachings by founding the Theosophical Society. He went to India with them and spent a long time there in the central place of the Theosophical Society. In addition to the “Theosophy” propagated by H. P. Blavatsky, H. was also interested in other mystical teachings of the Orient, especially [Shankaracharya], whose late Vedanta system he then propagated in several writings (partly translations, which he probably did not prepare according to the original texts) for Germans. He also published the Bhagavad-Gita in a German translation and tried to spread the underlying philosophical system. After his return to Germany, he met a primitive German mystic (a former craftsman) in whom he saw a follower of the Rosicrucian teachings and insights. By combining what he had learned from the teachings of this mystic with the teachings of Blavatsky, H. then developed the views that he sought to imbue with the results of his Paracelsus studies and which he presented in numerous writings in a popular, down-to-earth tone. The most important of these are his “Black and White Magic” and “Occult Signs and Symbols”. He also published a magazine called “Lotus Flowers”, in which he presented his views. H. died in 1911 (August?) –

A penetrating examination of all modern scientific thinking, as was already the case with “The History of Idealism”: One must find that Catholicism preserves an ancient wisdom. Insofar as one accepts that the Church is the embodiment of this wisdom, and insofar as one accepts that this is present in the Church and nothing of it can be rediscovered, the individual must feel secure with all his life, his knowledge, etc. as a member of the positive ecclesiastical organism that embodies the inviolable spiritual heritage.

In addition, scholasticism, in so far as it was realism, recognized the reality of ideas in things, and thus points to the spiritual world with this knowledge. All newer “knowledge” has lost this insight.

Thus Willmann is quite consistent: inviolable teaching material, embodied in the church; the most far-reaching insight in ecclesiastical philosophy.

He is just not able to see how time progresses by not just making a sensual institution the carrier of the spiritual on earth, but by bringing the spiritual world itself into the earthly. This spiritual world is not just “reason”, which, because of its abstractness, cannot in fact be the basis of a catholicity, which Willmann quite rightly sees – this spiritual world is a living thing. It all comes down to humanity absorbing an understanding of the real spiritual world and not getting stuck at the formal, as if the human spirit were just a kind of summary naming of sensory perceptions.

Thus Willmann's book is a great force as an advance for Catholicism - for it is superior to all schools of thought of the present day, except for the one, the anthroposophical, which is still struggling for the very first seed of an understanding of its true nature. —

This weekly journal has often pointed out the profound conflict between the world views of the Occident and the Orient. How understanding between the two cultural areas will come about depends on whether there is real insight into this contrast. And this understanding is necessary for the further development of humanity on earth. Economic cooperation can only develop on the basis of spiritual understanding. For this understanding, it is not necessary for one area of the world to adopt the spiritual character traits of the other. Only fanaticism could demand that. Understanding can only be achieved by having an unprejudiced view of the other and working together with him, without underestimating his peculiarities or wanting to suppress them.

The contrast is evident in a wide variety of fields. It is particularly pronounced in the views that people on both sides have of the human soul. The Orient has a culture that is based entirely on the inner experience of the soul. In the soul, the world reveals itself in its truthfulness and reality. Wisdom is not knowledge of anything. It is essence. It is life. And its life speaks from the depths of the human soul. The outer nature has only a value as the womb of the soul. Western culture has developed an eye for the intrinsic value of nature. The soul gives itself its value by penetrating the laws and secrets of nature. Wisdom is the reflection of these laws and secrets.

But all this is only the surface of the soul life. The soul does not reveal its essence through ideas, but through the emotional experiences that arise from its depths. There are undercurrents of the soul. The consciousness has no clear ideas about them, only more or less dark moods. But these form the basic coloration of the human being. The person feels them as his or her state of mind. He experiences them in their effect on the conscious soul life.

From this point of view, both the will and the thought are different for the Oriental than for the Occidental. For the feelings of the Oriental, something similar to the air we breathe is contained in the thought. The senses are [breaks off]

The Secret Doctrine is based on the experience that behind the world of sense is a spiritual world. Man can rise to the spiritual world by developing his spiritual essence. Thus man belongs to a twofold world: the manifest and the hidden.

The visible and the now hidden go back to an originally unified one. From this, man has developed. He carries the visible around with him because his senses reveal it to him. The hidden is veiled to him.

In visible nature, that part of the original unity is overcome by spiritual powers. Man as he is today has only become possible through this overcoming.

The fight against the dragon is the fight that man must also wage within himself. In nature, the fight is an older one; in man it is repeated. The gods are the older brothers of man; they have passed the fight: man has yet to pass it. In the fire, the bound power of God.

In the air, the victorious power of God. The air gods have wrestled themselves free.

Man has to undergo a development that has already taken place in the world around him. He has been what the older brothers, the gods, originally were. He will be what they are today. But the original form of the gods no longer exists today. Only the part that was overcome has found expression in visible nature. What lies behind this visible nature is the part of their being that was expelled by the gods.

The dragon and the snake have remained at the original stage.

A brief sketch of the introduction of our Vademecum, written for van Leer.

I. What is the aim of our new medical method?

The new medical method that is being announced here differs from the old one in that it is based on a different understanding of the human being. The old method, which has developed from the scientific views of modern times, seeks to gain all knowledge of the human being by breaking down the physical organization and rebuilding it in thought.

But man is not merely a physical organization. He is equally a superphysical one. This is revealed in his soul and spiritual experiences and activities. Just as the physical organization is the foundation of the soul and spiritual ones, so these are the formers and quickeners of the physical ones.

Without insight into this fact, no real knowledge of either the healthy or the sick human organism can be acquired.

Therefore, the new medical method adds the superphysical to the physical knowledge of the human being. Its essential point is that it comes to the realization that processes which, when they develop as spiritual processes in relative isolation from the physical processes in the human organism, represent the true nature of the human being, immediately become harmful when they come into the wrong connection with these physical processes.

The physical organization of the human being develops in such a way that it is able to be the carrier of the soul or spiritual. However, it must not enter into a connection with the soul and spiritual that goes beyond a certain measure. If it does, the person becomes ill.

The fact that a person is exposed to illness can be attributed to the same reason why he can be a spiritual and soulful being.

Only by observing the spiritual in the physical can one gain an understanding of the nature of illness. In the physical organization, the abnormal processes are recognized only as changes that are subject to natural laws in the same way as the normal ones. They can only be recognized in their characteristic nature as disease processes if one can pass from the physical to the superphysical. Because, as paradoxical as it sounds, a person falls ill when something in his physical organization develops too strongly towards the spiritual.

And only from such an understanding of illness can a real therapy arise. For all extra-human substances and processes stand in a certain relationship to the human being. If one introduces such an extra-human substance or extra-human process into the human being, then everything in the human being that has a physical effect outside the human being has a superphysical effect inside the human being. This is counterbalanced by the fact that everything that has a physical effect inside the human being also has a superphysical effect in the extra-human world.

In the case of a true knowledge of man in his relationship to the external world, one can always find a substance or a process in the extra-human world that transforms an incorrect relationship between the superphysical and physical in man into a correct one. But such knowledge is only possible through insight into the superphysical of man.

Therapy without knowledge of the superphysical in human nature is an illusion. The fact that this is so is the reason for the dissatisfaction with conventional medical methods, which only want to build on the physical human being.

Physical science is only beneficial as the basis of inanimate technique; therapy needs a science that goes to the spiritual. The medical method recommended here aims to provide such a science. The essence of it is that it provides remedies based on physical and spiritual knowledge of the human being. And only through this can one recognize the healing power of substances and processes.

In testing these remedies, we will see how the sick human organism changes under their influence and thereby gain confidence in them.

II. Pathology and therapy in the new (anthroposophical) method.

The nature of the new remedies

The processes that take place in the human organism are not the same as those in the rest of nature.¹ Therefore, we cannot learn about them in the same way as we learn about the human organism. Only when a human being has become a corpse do the same processes take place in him that can be recognized through sensory observation and the intellectual operations based on them. As long as a person is alive, feeling and thinking, he continually wrestles his organism from mere natural processes. Processes take place in him that cannot be grasped by external knowledge of nature.

To regard the external knowledge of nature as the only possible knowledge is to renounce insight into the human being. But this external knowledge of nature can be contrasted with another. It is based on a spiritual view to be developed in the human soul. The abilities for this view are just as dormant in the everyday human nature as the soul powers that arise in later life are in the very young child.

A first ability that can be developed is the ability to think and the power of memory. These can be increased purely spiritually through exercise, just as muscular strength can be increased through exercise. This is achieved by repeatedly concentrating on very clear thoughts. In this way, one supplies one's thinking with strength from the depths of one's being. But one must direct all attention to the inner thinking activity itself. One must have thoughts, not to depict a thing or a process of the external world, but only to live with all one's inner strength in the thought. You then experience that thought, by virtue of your inner human nature, draws to itself a power that it had previously allowed to sink into the depths of the subconscious, so as to have nothing within itself and thus be able to absorb the impressions of external nature.

This submerged power is rediscovered in inner experience. Thinking becomes something that fills the human being like muscular strength. One feels a second person within oneself.

Once one has experienced this “second person” within oneself, one has also experienced a “second world” in the whole world. Here it is called the etheric world.

In this ethereal world, the human being, with his ethereal organization, is present in the same way that he is present in the physical world with his physical organization. However, this ethereal world has completely different laws than the physical world.

The substances that man takes in through nutrition are on their way to becoming purely physical in nature, or they are purely physical substances from the outset, e.g. table salt. But even that which man takes in from the plant or animal kingdom is on the way to becoming purely physical. After all, it is subjected to purely physical processes by dissolving, cooking, etc.

This purely physical aspect must begin the process of revitalization in man. This happens by incorporating it into the work of the etheric organization.

In the etheric organization, purely physical effects cease. Growth, nutrition, etc. are superphysical processes that are carried out by the etheric organization.

If the organism is strong enough to take care of the transformation of physical forces in its etheric part to a sufficient extent, then it is healthy. If this is not the case, if the etheric organization is too weak, then it becomes ill. It then contains substances or processes that are justified in extra-human nature, but which represent something alien within the human being.

The pathological part of medicine consists of the recognition of this foreignness in man.

If the organism cannot carry out the necessary transformation by itself, then it must be supported by external means.

An example will serve to illustrate how this may be the case. Suppose that the etheric organization proves to be too weak to give certain substances the consistency they need to fit into the bone structure in such a way that the bones are in the right proportion to the whole life process. The bones then withdraw too much into their own being. They withdraw their life from the organism. If this is observed in the right way, introducing lead into the organism in very small amounts has the same effect as if the etheric organism had just been strengthened in the direction in which it had previously been deficient.

The therapeutic part of medicine consists in the knowledge of how the alien within man can be overcome so that the transformation of the physical can take place in the appropriate way.

However, man has not yet been fully understood if only the etheric organization has been grasped apart from his physical organization.

It is possible to develop other powers of the soul, besides thinking, to a spiritual contemplation.

When one has experienced the strengthened thinking that leads to the etheric world, one can suppress it through the inner power of the soul. In the normal process of life, sleep must occur through such an inner process. However, one can also train oneself not to let the soul fall asleep when suppressing the intensified thinking. The consciousness then remains awake, even though no more impressions come from outside. A real spiritual world then reveals itself to this consciousness. A spiritual world is added to the ordinary world. In this spiritual world one recognizes a third human organization, a kind of “third person”. One can call it the astral organization.

We now recognize that in our conscious or semi-conscious life, the sensations of our organs, our dark sense of life, our vague sensing of the organism in general, all these emanate from this astral organization. Hunger and thirst, satiety, fatigue, etc. also emanate from it.

Furthermore, it can be seen that this astral organism is not only the carrier of these conscious or semi-conscious states, but that this is only one side of its activity, the one that is inclined towards the consciousness of the soul. The other side extends down into the subconscious organic processes. The same astral body, for example, brings fatigue to consciousness; the same lives in the organs that produce fatigue.

However, the right balance must now prevail between these two sides of astral activity. This can only be the case if the etheric organization is placed in the right way between the activity of the astral and that of the physical organization. If the etheric organization is too weak, it is unable to keep the astral sufficiently far from the physical; the astral then intervenes too strongly in the physical.

For the normal life of the human being, it is necessary that the astral is kept sufficiently far from the physical and only functions as soul. For if the soul element encroaches too strongly upon the physical, the processes in the physical approach extra-human processes. The human organs themselves become foreign bodies, which then act like something alien that penetrates the human being and that cannot be transformed by the weak etheric organization.

Man owes the lower part of his mental abilities to the astral organization; but through it he is also exposed to illness in that this organization is not sufficiently separated from the physical organization in certain cases and thus something alien is incorporated into this organization in the wrong way.

We must know the extra-human substance or process that drives the astral out of the physical. And we will have a remedy for this substance or process.

All healing is therefore based on understanding the connections between the physical and the superphysical in the human organization, and then, when these connections take on an abnormal character, to find the means in the extra-human nature to counteract the abnormality.

There is a polar contrast between the purely physical and etherically oriented processes in the organism and those on which consciousness depends. The stronger the former are, the more the latter must recede. A physical-organic process that is effective in and of itself, according to its own forces and laws, suppresses consciousness.

The physical processes, which are the carriers of consciousness, cannot continue in their own way and according to their own laws if consciousness is to arise. They must be regressed, paralyzed, even destroyed in their very nature. What one recognizes in spiritual contemplation as the astral organization paralyzes the etheric organization. In order to shape the indeterminate, half-conscious and subconscious experiences, the life processes dependent on the etheric organization must be paralyzed.

But this does not give the whole human organization. Spiritual vision, which encompasses the astral organization, can go further. Then a fourth organization, a “fourth human being”, the ego organization, comes to the fore.

This ego organization counteracts the physical organization in the same way as the astral organization counteracts the one that depends on the ether organism. In the human being, physical substance must continually form itself in a living way. This corresponds to the activity of the physical and etheric organism. The latter carries out its processes by simultaneously dissolving in the liquid element that which wants to form into solid forms. The astral organization paralyzes the life-giving activity. This happens by simultaneously converting the liquid into the air-like. An example of this activity is the breathing process. It carries the living liquid of the organism into the air-like of the inhaled air and thus paralyzes it to such an extent that it can be the carrier of semi-conscious or subconscious soul processes.

The ego organization participates in these processes. But it takes everything that happens even further. It immerses all the processes taking place in the solid, liquid and gaseous forms in the organism's thermal differentiations. In the manifold heat processes of the organism, the ego organization continually transforms all the substance and all the processes of the organism in such a way that the organism can become the carrier of self-conscious soul life. If the force with which this transformation occurs is too strong or too weak, illness occurs. The task is then to recognize through diagnosis where the deficiency lies in the intervention of the ego organization. It may, for example, lie in an overall weakness of the ego organization, so that it does not process enough warmth in the body; it may lie in the fact that one organ system receives too much or too little influence from the ego organization at the expense of another, etc.

In all these cases, it is possible to bring the ego organization to its proper level. If one is familiar with the processes of destruction in the natural world, one can always find a substance or a process that, when introduced into the body, will help the ego organization. For example, it can be diagnostically determined that too little warmth is supplied to some organ. A substance that releases oxygen is introduced into the organism, which releases oxygen because it has been previously subjected to a process that gives it this ability. This can compensate for the damage.

In this way, a truly rational therapy is established with the help of insights into the superphysical in human nature. One arrives at an exact understanding of the effect of the remedies in the human organism as a whole. In such a medical way of thinking, all mere trial and error with remedies is overcome. This is how the remedies recommended by the pharmaceutical laboratory at the Goetheanum came about. They are the result of a rational and exact medical way of thinking. Some are similar to what has already been used. Here, the new way of thinking provides the necessary insight into why the remedy works. But by far the majority are new remedies because their healing effect only arises from the new medical knowledge of the nature of the human being outlined here. —

• 1. This essay is concerned only with humans. One can certainly learn a great deal about the human organism by observing animal organisms, but this essay will not take such observations into account for the time being.

[Handwriting Ita Wegman: How is the coming karma related to the heart?]

ad. I.) The rhythmic human being is the mediator between the nervous-sensory and metabolic-limb human beings.

The nervous-sensory human being of this incarnation is the result of the metamorphosis of the metabolic-limb human being of the previous incarnation.

The rhythmic human being is the result of the supersensible forces that are effective between death and rebirth. These forces change in such a way that they form the middle-ground human being on earth. They are integrated into the outer forces of the air circle, while between death and rebirth they are integrated into the outer forces of the planetary cycles.

Karma is now formed in this way: in the metabolism-limb-organism there is complete unconsciousness during life on earth. Man is (for ordinary consciousness) in a continuous dreamless sleep. Into this sleeping part of the soul, a judgment about the value or lack of value of human actions is recorded by the elemental forces (archai) that permeate this part of the soul. This judgment undergoes a metamorphosis during the time between death and rebirth of the metabolic-limb organism into the nerve-sense human being of the next earthly life. But the metamorphosed impulse (that is, the judgment of the value or worthlessness of the deeds, transformed into the will to be balanced by other deeds) does not consciously enter the human being, but rather into the angelic being that belongs to him. For this reason, karma remains unconscious to the human being (the ordinary consciousness).

The heart is only involved in the formation of karma to the extent that it belongs to the metabolism-limb-organism. Not as an organ of the rhythmic human being.

[Handwriting Ita Wegman: How does the blood process in the lungs relate to that in the heart?] ad II.) Blood process in the lungs and heart.

The lungs absorb cosmic forces with the inhaled air. World thoughts flow into these forces. These are, after all, the same forces that work in the human being as forces of growth and formation. When they enter the organism through the lungs, the world thought forces metamorphose by bifurcating at the same time. That is, one part goes (essentially upwards) into the nerve-sense organization and becomes the physical support of human thoughts; another part goes (essentially downwards, to the heart) into the metabolic-limb organism and is woven into the limbs of the human organization, which are connected in the broadest sense with the forces of the earth.

To see this point clearly, we must consider the following. Through his metabolic-limb system, the human being places himself in the workings of the earth. Observe how the human being walks: He puts his leg in front, that is, he brings it into a very specific position in relation to the earth's gravity. And so the human being moves within the dynamics of the earth. Metabolism proceeds in earthly chemistry. These earthly dynamics and this earthly chemistry cease beyond the rhythmic system. It is a complete illusion to believe that earthly things have an effect on the nerve-sense human being.

It can be seen from this that something extraterrestrial is absorbed into the lungs with breathing. This is then transferred into earthly things. The breathing current is the refined repetition of the descent of the human being from the spiritual into the physical world through birth. Only in this descent into the physical and etheric organization are the forces sent, while in breathing the forces flow in that correspond to the physical and etheric correlate of the astral body and the I.

In breathing, the cosmos forms and shapes the human being. It is different with blood circulation. This comes from what is integrated into the dynamics and chemistry of the earth. But as blood flows from the sphere of earth dynamics and earth chemistry into the heart, it takes up the impulses of the human astral body and the I. And so, in the blood of the heart, the spirit and soul of the human being strive out of the individual being towards the cosmic being. Blood in the heart striving towards the breath in the lungs is the human being's striving towards the cosmos. The air we breathe in our lungs striving towards the blood of the heart is the human being's being blessed by the cosmos. Blood striving towards the heart is the refined process of dying.

Blood as a carrier of carbonic acid from the human body represents the refined process of dying.

In this way, the human being continuously flows into the cosmos through the bloodstream, a process that takes place radically after death, in that it takes hold of the whole physical human being through the blood.

Starting from these considerations, we then find the bridge to the question extension with regard to Christ Jesus and the mysteries. It is true that the southern mysteries were more concerned with the secrets of the bloodstream - the heart - (of man) and the northern mysteries more with those of breathing - the lungs - (of the cosmos).

The Christ Mystery is the unveiling of the great miracle that takes place between the heart and the lungs: the cosmos becomes human; the human being becomes cosmos. The sun carries the human being from the cosmos to the earth; the moon carries the human being from the earth into the cosmos. Transposed into the great: what flows from the lungs to the heart is the human correlate of Christ's descent to earth; what flows from the heart to the lungs is the human correlate of the guiding of the human being after death through the Christ impulse into the spiritual world.

In this respect, the mystery of Golgotha lives in a human, organic way between the heart and lungs.

[Typescript, question from Mrs. Margarete Bockholt: If I imagine that the formative forces of the trunk without the present head are left to the forces of the cosmos without the influence of the earth, then a rounding must occur. If I try this on myself, I bend the spine, the upper end of which meets the symphysis, thus becoming the occiput. The present diaphragm then arises as a partition between the nasal and frontal sinus cavities. The sacrum is pushed forward and becomes the bridge of the nose; if the legs are drawn up, they clearly represent the lower jaw; the arms with the shoulder girdle represent the upper jaw and ear. The internal organs should be transformed in such a way that the kidneys become the eyes and the adrenal glands the lacrimal glands. (The shape of the adrenal glands corresponds to the exhalations from the nostrils, as Dr. Wachsmuth describes it as crescent-shaped and triangular. This is perhaps connected to the transformation of the lacrimal glands.) The lungs would become the lateral lobes of the brain. How the spleen and liver relate to the formation of the brain is not clear to me; the heart would be in the position of the epiphysis, the genital organs in that of the pituitary gland. Perhaps the 20 milk teeth could also be related to the 10 fingers and 10 toes each.

ad III.) Yes, this is based on good plastic representations. But it is best to include the plasticizing forces latent in the organism in the representation in this way:

The head is influenced by the cosmic formative forces; the earthly forces are atrophied in it (how the two relate to each other will be clear when the book we are working on with Wegman is published).

The metabolism-limbs-human being is influenced by the earthly formative forces; the cosmic ones are atrophied in it.

If we now imagine the atrophied earthly powers at the back of the head becoming developed, the back of the head metamorphoses into a metabolic-limb system; the reverse applies to the metabolic-limb system.

The middle organism (associated with rhythm) contains the organs pointing in both directions. This middle part is the head, which strives towards the limb system, and the limb system, which strives towards the head.

One looks for illness in disruptions of the organism, which are caused by all kinds of effects on it, and to which it cannot adapt through its own activity. It is said that in this way, reduced life processes arise and the activities of the body parts are reduced.

As long as one only aims to get to know the phenomena that occur in the human physical body during the course of an illness, such a judgment will suffice. However, this is no longer the case if one wants to proceed to healing the disease. This is because there is nothing analogous to a healing process in the interaction of one physical substance with another. In the physical world, the effect of one substance on the other takes place. A change can then occur in the latter; the concept of healing is completely inapplicable to this.

This is due to the fact that even in a healthy organism, the substantial composition, form and mode of action of the whole and of the individual organs is not exhausted by the effect of the physical.

We can observe the physical body with the means available to us. But we cannot understand it through this. We can only understand it if we see the expression of spiritual processes in physical ones. What can be perceived by the senses through a physical organ is the manifestation of something behind it that can only be grasped spiritually.

A healthy organ is one in which the physical can be the perfect expression of what is behind it spiritually. If physical processes take place in the organ that are not the expression of the spiritual, or if the spiritual in it develops too strongly, so that the physical cannot follow, then illness occurs.

The sick organism must therefore be understood in the same way as the healthy one, in terms of the human spirit. This is not done in today's conventional medicine. Now, however, a medical method is coming to the public's attention that seeks to understand both the healthy and the sick organism in terms of the spiritual. Only in this way can a real understanding of the connection between illness and healing arise.

The prerequisite for this is to be willing to really recognize the spiritual in the human being. This does not mean the “spiritual” that is experienced in the soul. This has a relatively great independence from the body. Its laws are moral, aesthetic and logical. When it comes to these, one does not ask what is going on in the body, but one treats the soul as independent of the body.

But everything physical, human and non-human, is based on something spiritual. The fact that this is either not admitted at all for the physical nature, or that the spiritual in the physical is not considered appropriate for scientific treatment, stems only from the fact that at present scientific knowledge is taken almost exclusively from inanimate (inorganic) nature. And one also stops at this when considering the living, the sentient, the conscious. One simply seeks to recognize how the processes observable in the inorganic continue to work in the plant, animal, and human organism.

This leads to scientific illusions. It is true that in an inorganic substance one cannot initially discover a spiritual element. The inorganic substance alone has come into being. And if one looks in spirit at its origin, one also finds the spirit at work.

Take arsenic, for example. As it is found, it shows no spiritual element. It exists in itself in grape-like and kidney-shaped forms. As it appears there, it proves to be the result of processes that are the expression of a spiritual. This spiritual has been at work in the past in the formation of the earth. Only the physical form of the arsenic remains from this effect. It stands there like the memory of a past spiritual effect.

In the human organism, this spiritual effect is still present as a present one. It is as if the premature arsenic effect had been stored by the earth formation in this organism.

Certain organs, which take shape in the organism with certain outlines, develop out of the liquid and gaseous parts of the organism, in which they do not have fixed outlines. The power by which this happens is the same as that which was at work in the formation of the arsenic. These human organs are on the way to becoming what occurs in the inorganic world as the lifeless arsenic. They do not become such only because they are in the organism and thus do not complete the process of becoming arsenic.

Two things can now happen. On its way to becoming arsenic, an organ can lose its connection with the spiritual part of the organism. It then progresses too far in this process of becoming arsenic. If, under certain conditions, the organism is supplied with substances containing protein, for example, the connection between the physical process in the organ and the spiritual part of the organism can be restored. The protein-containing substance proves to be a remedy.

Or the spiritual can have too strong an effect on the organ. Then the organ does not progress far enough in its processes with regard to becoming arsenic. If arsenic is then introduced into the organism, this supports the becoming arsenic. It is deposited in the organ, so to speak, in a supportive way. The physical process that has been left behind is continued to the extent necessary for the organism. Arsenic proves to be a healing agent again. It pushes the spiritual away from the organ.

Without insights of the kind described above, it is impossible to arrive at an understanding of the disease process, much less at the choice of a remedy. Present-day natural science, which is entirely oriented towards the inorganic, can serve as a basis for technical work, but it cannot be such a basis for the healing of diseases. For the essence of being ill lies where the connection between the spiritual and the physical is. If one wants to claim that science, as the only possible science, cannot approach the spiritual because of its limitations, then one must also declare that there can be no real medicine. The inner courage that expands the passive powers of knowledge through the active ones is part of the knowledge of the spiritual. Present-day natural science has lost this courage because it searches everywhere for the sensory-perceptible foundations on which valid insights are to be developed. It cannot be the science on which medicine is based. Therefore, a medical method is developed here on the basis of an insight into the spiritual existence.

The point is to correctly experience the essence of nature: then we will express knowledge of nature in archetypal phenomena instead of in abstract laws.

In cytology, we have an image of what is experienced in the realm of ideas. Those who are familiar with the real processes in the life of ideas sense that cytology is a related field. Concepts gained through the senses are not applicable here. One feels that they do not encompass the phenomena. Only inspired concepts can penetrate into this sphere. Ed. v. Hartmann remarks:

The preliminary stages of the development of a cell, up to the point where it becomes sexually mature, if such a thing exists, will always remain shrouded in mystery for us, partly because any representatives of

it have long since died out, and partly because they occur at submicroscopic dimensions.

But in the life of the imagination, its macroscopic archetype is given. Imagination is based on a trans-sensual process that is interrupted before the transition into the sensually perceptible, insofar as it remains a life process. If it is continued into the sensual, then it becomes a process of consciousness.

Description of mitotic cell division: It starts from the central corpuscle, seizes the nucleus

and the entire filamentous structure, splits all parts lengthwise, moves them and rearranges them so that instead of a centralized cell content, there are ultimately two, which separate from each other.

Through anesthesia, the life process is prevented from transitioning into cell life by means of paralysis. The supersensible part of a perception has a paralyzing effect; the sensory part occurs as a result of the paralysis.

Just as one is in the sphere of the life of the imagination when dealing with the disputes of the cell physiologist before he proceeds to the fertilization process, so too one is in the sphere of feeling when reading the explanations of this physiologist when he describes division, conjugation, etc. Imagined perceptions serve as orientation here.

As soon as the egg leaves the mother, we run into difficulties of comprehension. We can only get by assuming a process external to the mother for the formation of the egg and conceiving of the full development of this process as impossible under present-day conditions. Then the mother only provides the protective shell through which the process is removed from the conditions that are impossible for the egg under present-day conditions. But all this remains hypothetical if it is not corroborated by the fact that such a process is perceived. But it is perceived in the emotional life. In this, one recognizes an existence within the conditions that are not fulfilled in the physical environment. But this perception is never a presence. Ed. v. Hartmann puts in the place of perception: the principle of minimal effort and the principle of lawful development.