The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Preliminary remark: A question was asked about the field of electrical forces. The stenographer did not note down the wording of the question.

Rudolf Steiner: This is a question about which one should actually give not just one lecture but a whole series — quite apart from the fact that the question is not related to the topic of this evening.

What was presented yesterday [in Mr. Stockmeyer's lecture] tried to point out how we have to distinguish, so to speak, in the field of the imponderable - in contrast to the field of the ponderable: a field of light, a chemical field and a field of life. Descending from the imponderable to the ponderable, we come to the region of heat, which to some extent is common to both, then to the region of air, then to the region of liquid and solid bodies. Within these regions, nothing can be found, especially for those who are able to consider things phenomenologically, that belongs to the region of electrical forces. The question here was only about electrical forces. And to arrive at an answer to this question, which, I would like to say, is not in any way lay, is only possible if one relates the whole field of phenomena, the whole field of what is empirically given to man in his environment, to man himself. I do not want to say that there cannot also be a way of looking at it that, as it were, disregards the human being and only considers what, in natural phenomena, well, to put it bluntly, is not the concern of human beings. But one comes to an understanding from different points of view, and one of the points of view should be characterized here, at least in terms of its significance.

If you consider everything that belongs to the realm of the ponderable, that is, everything solid, liquid, expandable, expandable, gaseous, you will find, starting from this realm, such effects that also have more or less material parallels in the human organism. But the closer you approach the realm of the imponderable, the more you will find that the parallel phenomena, at least initially given for consciousness, can be attributed to the soul. Those who are not satisfied with all kinds of word definitions or coinages, but who want to get to the bottom of things, will find that even the explanation and experience of warmth rises into the soul.

When we then come to the area of light effects, we have first given the light area as our light field, as something that lies in the area of sensory eye perceptions, and with that these take on a character of the soul. Allow me the expression: we have filtered the scope of eye perceptions into a certain sum of ideas.

If we now proceed to the field of the so-called chemical effects, it might seem doubtful or debatable, according to the usual discussions of today's chemistry, to say that we are also dealing with an ascent to the soul when we speak of the effect of the chemical field on the human being. However, one need only look at what the physiological-psychological study of the visual process has already provided today, and one will find that much of the kind that relates to chemical effects is already mixed into it. It has indeed become necessary, and rightly so, to speak of a kind of chemism if one wants to describe the processes that take place inside the eye during the visual process.

Of course, experiments in this area are thoroughly tainted by current material conceptions; but at this point even contemporary science is to a certain extent, I might say, brought to see, at least in a certain area, the very first, most elementary beginnings of the right way. And when we speak of chemistry in our external life, in so far as it relates to our consciousness of ideas through the process of seeing, we actually speak in a similar way to how we speak when we simply look at the shaped body, that is, the mere surface structure and what we make of the surface structure as an inner image of some solid body. Anyone who, as a proper psychologist, can analyze the relationships between the idea of a shaped, solid body and the exterior that gives rise to this idea will find that this analysis must be fairly parallel to that which relates to what goes on below the surface, so to speak, below the shaped surface of the outer body, as a chemical process, and what is then, through the process of seeing, the inner, soul-like property of the human being.

Something very similar applies to the phenomena of life. Thus, advancing from the ponderable to the imponderable, we come to the conclusion that, in the case of parallel experiences within the human being, we have to assume processes of consciousness that are strongly reminiscent of the imaginative. We can therefore say: if we ascend – if we remember yesterday's scheme [of Mr. Stockmeyer] – from the solid to the liquid, to the gaseous, to the heat-loving, light-loving, to the chemical element – if we ascend here, we come to areas that have their correlate in the human being through the imaginative.

[We ascend] from the ponderable to the imponderable in nature and from the processes that take place in the organism inside the human being - which certainly also underlie consciousness, but which do not enter into consciousness as such - up to the conceptual. Now, however, psychology does not yet have an appropriate method for, I would say, really presenting this whole range of a person's inner experience to human attention in an orderly way.

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Today, people tend to avoid talking about the actual affects of the soul, about imagination, feeling, will, and so on. Psychology, too, has suffered from the materialistic world view, and it has suffered from this materialistic world view in that it is unable to find any proper ideas about the soul-related. Anyone who wants to find such proper ideas about the soul-related must, of course, completely abandon the ideas of Wundt or the like, which are still regarded as very scientific by so many today. All this talk is basically nothing that even remotely touches the matter. Anyone who studies Wundt's many books will find that it has indeed had a very strong influence, because Wundt came from materialistic physiology into the field of psychology and then even into the field of philosophy. One will find that there is absolutely no possibility of arriving at an appropriate view of the nature of representation and the nature of will. I could mention many other names, not only Wundt's, about whom the same could be said. If one can arrive at such an objective view of the nature of representations, one sees that just as one must raise the correlate of the ponderable to the correlate of the imponderable – see the following diagram – and thereby find the representational in man, so one must go below the correlate of the ponderable in man in order to advance. And there we come to the correlate of something which I would initially like to describe as X. Let us look for it in the human being itself. We find it in the will element of the human being. To deal with what lies between the two and how it lies between the two would be taking things too far today.

We come to the will element of the human being and must then ask: What is the relationship between this will element of the human being and its relationship to external nature? What is this X? What is the correlate of the will, just as the perceptions are the given of the affects in the imponderable? Then one must say to oneself, in spiritual scientific terms: this correlate in nature is the electrical and also the magnetic phenomena – processes, I could say better. And just as in the subjective-objective there is a relationship between the conceptual and the realm of the imponderable, as I called it yesterday, so there is a relationship between the volitional element in man and the electrical, electromagnetic and magnetic realm in non-human nature. If today, when, I would like to say, empiricism is subjugating the reluctant materialistic minds, if today you are again looking for something that can lead you to, well, I would like to say at least make the first step of materialism towards these things, you will find that physics has been forced in recent years to abandon the old concept of matter and to recognize in the electron and ion theory a certain identity between what, if I may express myself trivially, flies through space as free electricity space and what flies through space as electricity bound to so-called matter; in any case, it has been forced to recognize that which flies through space as electricity and represents a certain speed in flying through space. This speed, when expressed in mathematical formulas, now shows exactly the same properties as matter itself. As a result, the concept of matter merged with the concept of electrical effects.

If you consider this, you will say to yourself: There is no reason to speak of an electromagnetic or other light theory, but what is present is that when we look at the outside world, where we do not perceive the electrical directly through the senses, we must somehow suspect it in what is now usually called the material. It lies further from us than what is perceptible through the senses; and this more distant element expresses itself precisely by being related to what lies further from the subjective consciousness of the human being than his world of ideas, namely his world of will. When you descend into the region of the human being that I have designated as the middle region, and then descend further, you will find this descent to be very much the same as descending into the nature of the will. You only need to see how man, although he lives with his soul in the world of his ideas, does not have the actual entity of the will present in his consciousness, but rather deeply buried in the unconscious.

In spiritual scientific terms, this would have to be expressed as follows: In the life of ideas we are actually only awake, in the life of the will we sleep, even when we are awake. We only have perceptions in our life of will. But what this element of the will itself is like, when I just stretch out a hand, eludes ordinary consciousness. It eludes us inwardly as a correlate, just as the electrical eludes us outwardly in the material, in the direct perception that one has of it, for example, in relation to color or to what is visible at all.

And so, if we are looking for a path for the fields of luminosity, chemism and so on, we come from the ponderable into the imponderable by moving upwards. But then, by moving downwards, we come to the realm that lies below the ponderable, as it were. And we will then penetrate into the realm of electrical and magnetic phenomena. Anyone who wants to see with open eyes how, for example, the earth itself has a magnetic effect, how the earth as such is the carrier of electrical effects, will see a fruitful path opened up in this observation, which is of course nothing more than a continuation of phenomenology, in order to really penetrate not only the field of [extra-terrestrial] electrical phenomena, but also, let us say, the electrical phenomena bound to the earth's planets. And an immensely fruitful field is opening up for the study of telluric and extratelluric electrical phenomena, so that one can almost, or not only almost, say in all fields: If we do not close the door to the essential nature of things by stating from the outset what may be thought about these phenomena of the external world and their connection with man - for example, what can be expressed mathematically - but if we have the will to enter into the real phenomena, then the phenomena actually begin to speak their own language.

And it is simply a misunderstood Kantianism, which is also a misunderstanding of the world view, when it is constantly being said that one cannot penetrate from the outside world of phenomena into the essence of things. Whoever can somehow logically approach such thoughts, whoever has logic, has knowledge in his soul, so that he can approach such things, he realizes that this talk of phenomena and of what stands behind it as the “thing in itself” means no more than if I say: here I have written down S and O, I do not see the other, I cannot get from the $S and O to the thing in itself, that tells me nothing, that is a theory-appearance. But if I don't just look at the $ and O, but if I am able to read further and to read the phenomena, but here in this case the letters, not just look at them in such a way that I say: there I have the phenomenon; I cannot get behind this phenomenon, I do not enter into the “thing in itself,” but when I look at the phenomena, as they mutually illuminate each other, just as darkness is illuminated, then the reading of the phenomena becomes speech and expresses that which is alive in the essence of things. It is mere verbiage to speak of the opposition of phenomena and of the essence of things; it is like philosophizing about the letter-logic in Goethe's “Faust” and the meaning of Goethe's “Faust”: if one has successively let all the letters that belong to “Faust” speak, then the essence of “Faust” is revealed. In a real phenomenology, phenomena are not such that they are of the same kind or stand side by side; they relate to one another, mutually elucidate one another, and the like. The one who practices real phenomenology comes to the essence of things precisely by practicing real phenomenology.

It would really be a matter of the Kantian inert mind of philosophy finally breaking free from the inertia of accumulating the “opposites in themselves” and the “thing in itself”, which have now confused minds and spirits long enough to really be able to look at the tremendous progress that has also been made in the epistemological relationship through Goetheanism.

This is precisely what is so important for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that attention is drawn to such things and that they can indeed be used to fertilize what in turn leads to an inner relationship between the human being and the spiritual substance in the world - while one has artificially put on, let's say, a suede skin, these forms of all kinds of criticism-of-practical-and-theoretical-reason-blinkers, through which one cannot see through. These are the things that are at stake today.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should certainly not be somehow sectarian; it should certainly not consist merely of explaining to people in some closed circles over tea that the human being consists is composed of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. This, of course, is the kind of stuff that is taught in seance circles over a cup of tea, and it is easy to make fun of those who gain some outer, but also misunderstood, knowledge from such quackery. But spiritual science – one can feel this when one really familiarizes oneself with it – spiritual science is actually capable of stimulating many things anew that really need to be stimulated if we want to make progress. The decadence, the destruction and the social chaos that we are experiencing today have not arisen merely from the sphere of the outer life of our time, but also from the inner human powers of destruction; and these inner human powers of destruction have truly not come from the least of what people have thought through long periods of time.

In this time it is not at all surprising that people arise who find it appropriate to compare Goethe's memories of an old mystic, which he expresses in his saying:

If the eye were not sunlike
How could we behold the light?
If the power of God does not live in us,
How can we be delighted with the divine?

to encounter with the saying: “If the eye were not ink-like, how could we see the writing...”

Indeed, esteemed attendees, I could talk at length about the application of Goethe's saying today, but that would take until tomorrow. So, in conclusion, I would like to summarize what I said about Goetheanism and the present time in something similar to a saying that ties in with what I just mentioned. It is indeed true that the present time, with all that is chaotic in it, could not be as it is if the views of people like Ostwald and similar ones did not haunt it.

If the present world were not so Ostwald-like, how could it see all the external effects of nature so wrongly? If there were not so much of Ostwald's power in present-day people, how could they achieve so much in all kinds of materialistic-physical and similar things, which now truly do not work to a high degree for the true progress of science, but rather against it.

Roman Boos: How can the principle of establishing legal norms through codification develop in the future? How can the legal effect be exercised from the parliamentary centers without the codification principle being paralyzed or dying, as is the case today?

Rudolf Steiner: The vitalization of the legal life, of which Dr. Boos spoke, will, it seems to me, be brought about in a very natural way in the threefold social organism. How should we think of this formation of the threefold social organism in concrete terms? Truly in a similar way - it is not intended to express a mere analogy - truly in a similar way as one has to think of the organic threefoldness in the natural human organism.

The view, which Dr. Boos also criticized today, that the heart is a kind of pump that drives blood to all possible parts of the organism, this view must be overcome for physiology. It must be recognized that the activity of the heart is the result of the balanced interaction of the other two activities of the human organism: metabolic activity and nerve-sense activity. If a physiologist who is grounded in reality now wants to describe this human organism and its functioning, then in general it is only necessary to describe the metabolic activity on the one hand and the nerve-sense activity on the other in a truly objective way, for it is through their polar interaction and interpenetration that the balancing rhythmic activity arises; this is already formally present. This is something that must be taken into account if we want to imagine life in the threefolded social organism. This life in the threefolded social organism can only be truly imagined if one still has a sense of the practice of life.

When I had published a few things and spoken about threefolding in a variety of ways, I was met with the objection that it is indeed difficult to imagine how the law can acquire content when it is to be separated in life from the spiritual part of the social organism on the one hand and the economic part on the other. Especially people like Stammler, for example, who has been mentioned often today, they understand the law in such a way that they only recognize a kind of formalism on the one hand. On the other hand, they believe that this [formal system] acquires its material content from the economic needs of the social organism. On the basis of such views, I was told that law cannot be separated from economic life for the simple reason that the forces of economic life must produce the legal statutes by themselves. When one includes something in one's concepts, one constantly thinks of something inanimate, of something that just amounts to making statements, for example, from economic forces, which are then codified and can be used as a guide. One mainly thinks of the fact that such codified statements exist and that one can look them up.

In the natural, living threefold organism, we are dealing, I might say, with two polar opposites: on the one hand, with spiritual life and, on the other, with economic life. Spiritual life, which arises when people are born and develop into existence through their own actions, represents a reality through its own content. The fruitful side of intellectual life will develop if no restrictions are imposed by any standards that limit what one can do. The fruitful side will develop quite naturally simply because it is in the interest of people that those who can do more and have greater abilities can also achieve more. It will be a matter of course that, let us say, a person is taken on as a teacher for a number of children, and those who are looking for a teacher can be sure that he can achieve the desired results in his sphere. If intellectual life is truly free, the whole structure of intellectual life arises out of the nature of the matter itself; the people who are part of it work in this intellectual life. On the other hand, we have the economic part of the threefold social organism. Here the structure of economic life arises out of the needs of consumption and the possibilities of production, out of the various interrelations, out of the relationships that arise. Of course, I can only briefly hint at this in this answer to the question. But the various relationships that can play between people and people or between groups of people and individuals or between different groups of people also play a role. All of this will move economic life. And in these two areas, what is called “law” is actually out of the question, insofar as these two areas take care of their own affairs. If we think in real terms – of course people today do not think in real terms but in theoretical terms, proceeding from what already exists, and so they confuse the legal ideas that the spiritual realm already has with the legal ideas of the economic realm – if we think in real, practical terms, then in the free spiritual life we do not consider legal impulses at all, but we consider impulses of trust, impulses of ability. It is simply absurd to speak in the free spiritual life of the fact that someone who is able has a right to work. There can be no question of speaking of such a right, but one must speak of the fact that one needs him, that he should work. The one who can teach children will naturally be taught, and there will be no question of whether or not there is an entitlement; it is not somehow a question of right as such. It is the same in economic life. Written or oral contracts will play a part, and confidence in the observance of contracts will have to play a part. If economic life is left to its own devices, the fact that contracts are being observed will be seen in the simple fact that economic life cannot function if contracts are not observed.

I am well aware that when such practical matters are discussed today, they are considered by some to be highly impractical because they bring in highly impractical matters from all sides and then believe that what they have brought in and what is supposed to have an effect is practical, whereas what has been described here is impractical. But now we must bear in mind that in these two spheres, in these organs, in the economic sphere and in the spiritual sphere of the threefolded social organism, these things live side by side. If we now honestly consider how this coexistence can be organized democratically, with people living side by side in the two areas - in the economic structure and in the spiritual structure - then the necessity arises for the relationships to be defined from person to person. Here the living necessity simply arises that the one who, let us say, stands at some post of spiritual life, has to establish his relationship to many other personalities and so on. These living relationships must arise between all mature people, and the relationships between mature people and non-mature people arise precisely from the relationship of trust in the field of spiritual life. But all the relationships that arise from the living forces on the one hand of economic life and on the other of spiritual life, all these relationships require that, to a certain extent, people who have come of age begin to define their relationships in their spheres of life among themselves. And this gives rise to a living interaction, which will, however, have the peculiarity that these determinations - because life is alive and cannot be constrained by norms - must be flexible.

An absolutely codified law would appear to be something that contradicts development. If you had a rigidly codified law, it would be basically the same as having a seven-year-old child whose organic life forces you would now determine and, when the child has reached the age of forty, would demand that it still live by them. The same applies to the social organism, which is indeed a living organism and will not be the same in 1940 as it was in 1920. For example, in the case of land, it is not a matter of laying down such codified law, but rather it is a living interrelationship between the soil and the personalities who stand in the other two characterized areas - the spiritual and the economic - and work in such a way that everything can be kept in flux, in order to be able to also change and metamorphose the true democratic soil on which all people live their present relationships. This is what needs to be said with regard to the establishment of public legal relationships. Criminal relationships arise only as a secondary matter when individual personalities act in an anti-social way against what has been established as the right relationship between people who have come of age. However, when considering criminal law in the context of the threefold social organism, it becomes clear that it is necessary to take a closer look at the justification of punishment in a more practical and realistic way. I must say that the much-vaunted legal science has not even managed to develop a clear legal concept in this area. There is a now rather old work, “Das Recht in der Strafe” (The Right to Punish) by Ludwig Laistner. In it, the introduction presents a history of all theories about the right to punish: deterrence impulses, educational impulses, and all the rest. Laistner shows, above all, that these theories are actually quite fragile, and then he comes to his own theory, which consists in the fact that one can only derive a right to punish from the fact that the criminal has entered the sphere of the other person through his own free will. Let us assume, then, that one person has created some circle of life for himself, and that is also hypothetical; the other person enters this circle of life by entering his house or his thoughts, for example, and robbing him. Now Ludwig Laistner says: “He has entered my sphere of life, and that is why I have power over him; just as I have power over my money or my own thoughts, so I now also have power over the criminal because he has entered my sphere. This power over him is conceded to me by the criminal himself by entering my sphere. I can now realize this power by punishing him. The punishment is only the equivalent for him entering my circle. That is the only thing that can be found in legal thinking about the justification of punishing a criminal. Whether this happens directly or in a figurative sense, by having it carried out by the state, are secondary questions. But why are these things actually unclear? Why is there something that constantly prevents us from having really clear-cut concepts? Because these concepts are taken out of social conditions that are already full of ambiguities. It presupposes that there is an organism present and that through the organism there is living movement and thus circulation – just as the heart presupposes that other organs are present in order for it to function. The legal institution is, in a sense, the heart of the social organism and presupposes that other things will unfold; it presupposes that other forces are already present. And if there is any lack of clarity in these other circumstances, then it is also quite natural that there can be no clearly defined legal system. But a clearly defined legal system will come about precisely because the other forces that are inherent to the other members of the social organism are allowed to develop in this three-part social organism. Only in this way can the foundations be laid for the development of a true legal system.

Above all, we have not even clearly raised the question today: What is the actual content of the legal system? Yes, you see, in a certain sense, a legal science must be very similar to mathematics, to a living mathematics. But what would we do with all our mathematics if we could not realize it in life? We must be able to apply it. If mathematics were not a living thing and we could not apply it in reality, then all our mathematics would be no science at all. Mathematics as such is, first of all, a formal science. In a certain sense, a properly elaborated jurisprudence would also be a formal science first of all. But this formal science must be such that the object of its application is encountered in reality. And this object of its application in reality is the relationships of people who have come of age and live side by side, who not only seek a balance between their spheres of life here, but are also still within the spiritual and economic links of the social organism.

Thus, only this threefold structure of the social organism will really make it possible for public thought to be formed, and a right that is not publicly thought is not a naturally established right. This would make it possible for such legal concepts to be formed publicly, which would then be flexible, as has rightly been demanded today. Therefore, I believe that it was a good thing that Dr. Boos called for the reform of legal life precisely from the realization of the threefold social organism.

Roman Boos: Dear attendees! The aim of these lectures was to attempt to show, from the perspective of specialized science, how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science could lead to the fertilization and further development of the individual specialized scientific fields. The visitors will have had the thoroughly consistent impression throughout the whole event that something is not being hatched in a narrow circle, but that from a central point a real spiritual fertilization into the individual subject areas can take place. Even if not everyone was able to recognize this at the very beginning of their efforts, surely everyone who looked, as it were, at the driving forces present here, who looked at the fertilizing forces that radiate out and not on the value of the first formulated formulations, could be convinced that here is something in relation to our spiritual life, which deserves attention and, as far as possible, also cooperation and goodwill from wide circles – especially here in Switzerland. This is so because it is precisely here that a spiritual force is struggling to the light that can actually claim to have a spiritually fertilizing effect on the social community.

There will be an opportunity for discussion following Dr. Steiner's lecture on “Hygiene as a Social Question.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! That the social question is one of the most pressing issues of our time is not doubted in the broadest circles. And wherever there is even a modicum of concern for the issues arising from the development of human history in the present day, wherever there are threatening or unresolved impulses for the future, all of this can be summarized under the heading of the social question. But we must admit that the consideration and treatment of this social question in the present suffers from the fundamental defect that afflicts so much of our intellectual and moral life, and indeed of our whole civilized life, namely, the intellectualism of our time. It suffers from the fact that its problems are so often viewed only from the standpoint of an intellectualistic consideration. The social question is discussed more from the point of view of the right or the left. The intellectualism of these discussions is shown by the fact that they start from certain theories, from the assumption that this or that must be so or so, that this or that must be abolished. In doing so, little consideration is given to the human being himself. One treats people as if there were something general like “the human being”, as if there were not something that is individually developed in a particular way in each person. One does not turn one's attention to the uniqueness and peculiarity of the individual human being. Therefore, our whole consideration of the social question also takes on something abstract, something that today so rarely translates into social feelings, into the attitudes that play between person and person. The defect in our social thinking is most clearly seen when we focus on a specific area, one that is perhaps more suitable than many others for social reflection, for example, the area of hygiene, insofar as hygiene is a public matter that concerns not the individual but the human community.

Of course, we are not lacking in hygienic instructions, treatises and writings on health care as a public matter. But one must ask: how do these instructions, these considerations of hygiene, fit into social life? And here one must say: they are so introduced that individual discussions about proper health care are published as the result of medical, physiological, and scientific knowledge, whereby the trust that one has in a field whose inner essence one is not able to test is supposed to form the basis for the acceptance of such rules. On the basis of authority alone, the broadest sections of the population can accept the rules on hygiene that emerge from the study chambers and examination rooms, the medical laboratories, and are then made public.

If one is convinced, however, that in the course of modern history, in the course of the last four centuries, a yearning for a democratic order in all matters has arisen in humanity, then, even if it seems grotesque to many today, one is confronted with the undemocratic nature of the pure belief in authority that is demanded in the field of hygiene. The undemocratic nature of this blind faith in authority is juxtaposed with the yearning for democracy, as it has often - albeit, one might say, in a very paradoxical way - culminated in the present day.

I know very well that the sentence I have just uttered is perceived by many as paradoxical, because one simply does not combine the way someone receives health care-related information with the democratic demand that the community of emancipated people should judge public affairs that concern every emancipated person, whether directly or through their representatives. Of course it must be said that something like a hygienic view, a hygienic cultivation of public life, cannot be fully realized in a democratic way, because it depends on the judgment of the person seeking knowledge in a particular field. But on the other hand, the question must arise: should we not be striving for a greater democratization in such a field as this, which concerns every single person and thus the human community as closely, as infinitely closely as public health care does? Today, we are certainly told a great deal about the way in which man should live in terms of air and light, in terms of nutrition, in terms of the disposal of waste products produced either by man himself or by his environment, and so on and so forth. But the rules governing these things that are thrown upon humanity are mostly unworkable for the people to whom they are supposed to apply.

Now I do not wish to be misunderstood; I do not wish to be misunderstood as taking a particular stand on anything in this lecture, which is supposed to be dedicated to the topic “Hygiene as a social issue”. I do not wish to deal one-sidedly with what today tends to be treated one-sidedly from the point of view of a party or of a certain scientific conviction. I would like – perhaps you will permit this small apparent departure from the role in the introduction – I would like neither to take any party for the old superstition that devils and demons go around and move in and out of people as diseases, nor would I like to take sides for the modern superstition that the bacilli and bacteria move in and out of people and cause the diseases. Whether one is dealing with a spiritualist, spiritual superstition of old or with a materialistic superstition, that may concern us less today. But I would like to touch on something that permeates our entire education, especially insofar as this education depends on the fundamental scientific beliefs of our time.

Even if it is asserted from many sides today that scientifically materialism, as it asserted itself in the middle and still in the last third of the 19th century, has been overcome, this assertion cannot apply to the one who really sees through the essence of materialism and its opposite , because this materialism has been overcome at most for some people who see that today's scientific facts no longer allow us to declare in a sweeping way that everything that exists is just some mechanical, physical or chemical process taking place in the material world. It is not enough that, forced by the power of facts, some people have come to this conviction. For in the face of this conviction stands the other fact that now, despite this conviction, those who have it - and the others even more so - when it comes to explaining something specifically, to forming an opinion about something specific, then they do include the materialistic direction in their way of thinking. It is also said that atoms and molecules are harmless accounting coins, of which one does not want to claim anything other than that they are thought-things. But the consideration has therefore remained an atomistic, a molecularistic one. We explain the phenomena of the world in terms of the behavior and the mutual relationship of atoms or molecular processes, and it does not matter whether we now imagine that any thought, feeling or other process is only related to the material processes of atoms and molecules, but rather it depends on the direction of our entire state of mind, the direction of our spirit, when it takes as a basis for its explanations only what is thought in terms of atoms, what emerges from the smallest, the contrived smallest. What matters is not whether one has the conviction, literally or mentally, that there is something other than atomistic effects, than material atomic effects, but what matters is whether one has the possibility of making other explanations of the world the guiding principle of one's mind than deriving phenomena from the atomic. It is not what we believe, but how we explain, how we behave in our souls, that matters. And here, at this point, it must be stated with conviction that only genuine spiritual science, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, can help us to overcome the evil that can be characterized in this way, as I have just done.

I would like to prove that this can now be the case in concrete terms. There is hardly anything that confronts us with more confusion than the differences that are often asserted today between the human body and the human soul or the human spirit, between what are physical illnesses and what are so-called mental or spiritual illnesses. It is precisely the appropriate distinction and the appropriate interrelationship of such facts of human life as those of the sick body or the seemingly sick soul that suffer in terms of understanding under the materialistic-atomistic way of thinking. For what, then, is actually the essence of the materialism that has gradually emerged as the newer world view of many people and that has by no means been overcome, but is in fact in its heyday today? What is its essence? The essence of materialism is not that one looks at material processes, that one looks at the material processes that take place in the human body and that one devotedly studies the miracle-working and miracle-working of the human nervous system and the other human organs or the nervous system of animals or the organs of other living beings; it is not that studying these things makes one a materialist, but it is abandoning the spirit in the study of material processes that makes one a materialist, that one looks into the world of matter and sees only matter and material processes.

But this is what spiritual science must assert - today I can only speak about this point in summary - that wherever material processes appear to us externally for the senses, those processes which today's science alone wants to accept as observable and exact, that wherever these material processes are only the external appearance, the external manifestation of spiritual forces and powers at work behind and within them. It is not the hallmark of spiritual science to look at a person and say: Oh, there is the body; this body is a sum of material processes, but within it the person cannot exist alone, he has his immortal soul independently of it ; and the fact that one is now beginning to develop all kinds of abstract theories and views about this immortal soul, which is independent of the body, in a rather mystical way, does not characterize a spiritual worldview at all. One can certainly say: Man has, in addition to his body, which consists of material processes, an immortal soul that is taken to some spiritual realm after death. One is therefore not yet a spiritual scientist in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

One is only a spiritual scientist when one realizes that this material body with its material processes is a creature of the soul, when one understands in detail how the soul, which was there before birth or, let us say, before conception of the human being, works, how this soul forms, how it sculpts the structure, indeed the substantiation of the human body. If we can truly see the direct unity of this body and the soul everywhere, and if we can see how the soul's activity in the body wears out this body as such, how this body partially dies every minute, and how then, in the moment of death, I would say, the radical realization of what what happens to the body every moment through the influence of the soul and spirit, if one sees through this living interplay, this constant working of the soul in the body, in the individual concrete case, if one strives to say: the soul breaks down into very concrete processes, then it passes over into the processes of liver activity, then it passes over into the processes of breathing, then into the processes of heart activity, then into the processes of brain activity – in short, if one is able to present the physical body as the result of a spiritual one when describing the material in the human being, then one is a spiritual scientist. Spiritual science comes to a true appreciation of the material precisely because it does not see only what today's science sees in the individual concrete material process, what the eye ascertains or what is then recorded as the result of external observation in abstract terms. Rather, spiritual science is spiritual science solely because it shows everywhere how the spirit works in the material, how it looks devotedly at the material effects of the spirit.

That is the one thing that matters. On the other hand, it is important that one is thereby saved from all the abstract, chatty talk about a soul independent of the [physical] human being, about which, as far as life between birth and death is concerned, one can only fantasize. For between birth and death, with the exception of sleep, the soul and spirit are so devoted to the bodily effects that they live in them, through them, and present themselves in them. One must come to the point of being able to study the soul and spirit outside of the human life cycle and to accept the human life cycle between birth and death as a result of the soul and spirit. Then one looks at the real, concrete unity of the spiritual-soul with the physical-bodily. Then one does anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, because then one has the prospect that this human being, with all his individual structures, stands before one as a result of the spiritual-soul, also for knowledge. The mystical theosophical view, which puts forward beautiful theories about all kinds of body-free spiritualities, cannot serve the concrete sciences of life, it cannot serve life at all, it can only serve intellectualistic or soul-based lust, which wants to get rid of life, of the outer life, as quickly as possible and then, in order to have an inner satisfaction, to be able to indulge in an inner lust, weaves all kinds of fantasies about the spiritual and soul.

Here in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement, it is a matter of working very seriously, of cultivating a spiritual science that is able to enliven physics, mathematics, chemistry, physiology, biology and anthropology, so that it is not a matter of stating religiously or philosophically on the one hand that the human being an immortal soul, and then to pursue anthropology, biology, physics and chemistry as if one were only dealing with material processes, but rather it is a matter here of applying what can be gained in knowledge about the soul and spirit to the details of life, of looking into the miracle of the body itself. It may well be said, even if it sounds paradoxical to some: there are those who want to be good mystics or good theosophists and want to talk about everything under the sun, how the human being consists of a physical body, etheric body, astral body, I and so on, but they don't even have a clue about what expression of the soul it is when you sneeze, for example. It depends on seeing matter, not as matter, but as the manifestation of the spirit. Then one also receives sound, content-filled views about the spirit, but then one also receives a spiritual science that can be fruitful for the science of life.

But something else is also achieved with this. It achieves the ability to overcome what, in recent times, precisely because of the materialization of scientific knowledge, has driven us into specialization. I certainly do not want to deliver a diatribe against specialization, because I am well aware of its justification. I know that certain things today must be practiced by specialists simply because a specialized technique is needed for them. But the point is that if someone clings to the material, he can never become a specialist and gain a world view that can be applied in life, because material processes are an infinite field. They are an infinite field out in nature, and they are an infinite field within the human being. If you just study the human nervous system based on what is currently known, you can spend a long time on it, at least as much time as specialists are usually willing to spend on their studies. But if one has only what the material processes are in what happens in the nervous system, only what is expressed in the abstract terms that are the subject of science today, then nothing leads one to anything universal that can become the basis of a worldview. The moment you begin to observe spiritually, let us say, the human nervous system, you cannot observe this nervous system without what you find active in it as spirit leading you immediately to what underlies the muscular system, the bone system, the sense of the nervous system as something spiritual, because the spiritual is not something that can be broken down into individual parts like the material. Rather, the spiritual is something that – and this is only the most basic way of characterizing it – spreads out like a limb or an organism. And just as I cannot look at a person by merely looking at his five fingers and otherwise covering him, so too in spiritual science I cannot look at a single detail without what I perceive in this detail as spiritual-soul leading me to a totality. If we are led to such a totality — even if it is perhaps only a specialist in brain or nerve research — then we will be able to get an overall picture of the human being from the observation of this individual link in the human organism; then we will be led into the position to arrive at something truly universal for a world view, and then the peculiar thing is that we can begin to speak of something that can be understood by all people who have common sense and sound understanding.

That is the great difference between how spiritual science can speak about man and how specialized, materialistic science must speak about man. You see, let us take the simple case of how specialized, materialistic science is presented to you in any of the textbooks in use today. If you, as an ordinary person who has not learned much about the nervous system, take a manual about the nervous system in your hand – well, you will probably soon stop reading or, in any case, you will not gain very much that can give you a basis for looking at the human being as a real human being in his value, in his dignity. But if we listen to what spiritual science has to say about the human nervous system, then what leads to the whole human being follows everywhere. It provides such enlightenment about the whole human being that the idea that arises in one's mind presents something of the value, essence and dignity of the human being with whom one is dealing. And this applies even more when we look at the human being not just in terms of one of his or her many parts, but it applies especially when we look at the sick person, this sick person with his or her many deviations from the so-called normal, especially when we are able to look at the whole person, when he or she is under the influence of this or that disease. What nature presents to our soul in the sick person is apt to lead us deep into the world's interconnections, to show us how this person is organized and how, because of his organization, the atmospheric and even extraterrestrial influences can affect this person, how this human organization is connected to these or those substances of nature, which then turn out to be healing agents, and so on.

We are led into broad contexts, and it may be said that if we supplement what can be recognized in this way about the healthy human being with what can be recognized through the sick human being, then a deep insight into the whole context and the deeper meaning of life will open up. But everything that comes to light in this way is the basis for a knowledge of human nature, and can be expressed in such a way that it can be spoken to all people. Of course, we have not yet reached this point, because spiritual science, in the sense in which it is meant here, has only been working for a short time. Therefore, as Dr. Boos said in his introductory words just now, the lectures given here can often only be seen as a beginning. But the tendency of this spiritual science is to work out what is present in the individual sciences in such a way that what every human being should know about the human being can actually be brought to every human being.

And now imagine if spiritual science first has such a transforming effect on science and if spiritual science then succeeds in developing forms of knowledge for the healthy and sick human being that can be made accessible to general human consciousness If this succeeds, how different human beings will be in social life, how differently understanding one person will be confronted with another than today, when everyone passes by the other and has no understanding for the special individuality of this other person. The social question will only be taken out of its intellectualism when it will emerge from the most diverse areas of life based on factual knowledge, when it is based on the concrete experiences of life. This is particularly evident in the field of health care. Just imagine the social impact of fostering an understanding of what is healthy and what is sick in other people; just imagine what it means when health care is taken into the hands of all of humanity with understanding. Of course, the aim is not to cultivate scientific or medical dilettantism – that must be avoided – but imagine, it simply awakens sympathy, not just feeling, but understanding for the healthy and the sick in our fellow human beings, understanding based on an insight into the human being. Imagine the social effect of such a thing, and you will have to say to yourself: There you can see that social reform, the social reconstruction, must arise out of specialized knowledge in the individual fields, not out of general theories, whether they be Marxist, be they Oppenheim theories, be they theories of any kind that look beyond the human being and want to shape the world out of abstract concepts. Salvation cannot come from this, but from the dedicated study of the individual fields. And health care, hygiene, is such a very special field, because it leads us, I would say, closest to everything that our fellow human being experiences in terms of joy through his healthy, normal way of life or in terms of pain and suffering, of restrictions due to what lies within him as more or less sick.

This is something that immediately points us to the special social way in which spiritual science can achieve results in the field of hygiene. For if in such a way the cultivator of the knowledge of humanity, the cultivator of the knowledge of the healthy and the sick human being, is also the one who specializes as a doctor, with such knowledge in human society, then he will be able to create enlightenment within this human society, because he will be understood. And not only will the doctor develop a relationship with the community in which, if they are not a friend or relative, they will send for the doctor when they have a pain or have broken a leg, but the relationship with the doctor will develop in such a way that the doctor is the constant teacher and instructor of prophylactic health care, that in fact a constant intervention of the doctor is available not only to heal the person when the illness goes so far that he notices it, but also to keep people healthy as far as possible. A lively social activity will take place between the physician and all the rest of humanity. But then health itself will radiate from such knowledge, for it is precisely because materialism has extended to the medical view of life that we have truly come up against strange conceptions.

On the one hand, we have physical illnesses. They are studied by finding degenerations of the organs or whatever else is supposed to be physically perceptible or physically imagined within the human body's skin, and attention is drawn to the fact that any damage found can be repaired. In this direction, thoughts now turn quite materialistically to the physical body of the human being in its normal and abnormal states. Alongside this, the so-called soul or spiritual illnesses arise. These soul or spiritual illnesses have now been reduced, on the one hand, to mere brain illnesses or to illnesses of the nervous system because of materialistic thinking, and the foundations for this have also been sought in the other organ systems of the human being. But because they did not develop any kind of conception about the way in which spirit and soul work in the human body, they could not gain any conception of the relationship between mental illnesses, the so-called mental illnesses, and what the human being otherwise is. And so, I would like to say, mental illnesses stand on one side, even today they are grasped by a strange hybrid science, psychoanalysis, which thinks in a materialistic way but does not understand the materialistic at all; they stand there, these mental and soul illnesses, without being able to be brought together in any reasonable way with what actually happens in the human organism.

Spiritual science can now show – and I have drawn attention to this – that what I am saying here is not just a program, but that it is being pursued in detail – precisely on the occasion of the course for physicians that has been taking place here during these weeks. Spiritual science can indeed show in detail how all so-called mental and soul diseases are based on organ disorders, on organ degeneration, organ enlargement, organ reduction in the human organism. Somewhere in the heart, in the liver, in the lungs, something is not right if at the same time or later something occurs that is a so-called mental illness. A spiritual science that penetrates to recognize the spirit in the normal heart in its effectiveness is also capable of - and need not be ashamed of - seeking a cause for the so-called sick mind or soul in the degeneration of the heart, in the failings of the heart.

The main mistake of materialism is not that it denies the spirit - in which case religion could still ensure that the spirit is recognized - the main mistake of materialism is that it does not recognize matter, because it only observes its exterior. This is precisely the defect of materialism, that it gains no insight into matter, for example in the purely psychoanalytic treatment, in the mere observation of something that has taken place in the soul, which psychoanalysis calls islands of the soul, and thus an abstraction. Rather, one must follow how certain impressions of the soul, which a person receives at this or that time in his life and which are normally bound to the normal organism, impinge on defective organs - instead of, for example, on a healthy liver, on a diseased one; such an impingement may perhaps show itself at a completely different time than when the defect has become organically noticeable.

Spiritual science need not shy away from showing how so-called mental or psychological illnesses are always connected with something in the human body. Spiritual science must strictly point out that if one merely studies the soul, the psychological complex, the deviations of the soul from the so-called normal psychological life, one has at most a one-sided diagnosis. Therefore, psychoanalysis can never be anything more than diagnostic; it can never lead to real therapy in this field. For this reason, because therapy for mental illnesses must begin with the physical examination, we must know the ramifications of the spiritual in matter down to the individual parts if we want to know where to start in the material body – which is, however, spiritualized – to cure that which only shows symptoms in abnormal mental conditions. Spiritual science must most decidedly emphasize that the so-called mental and soul diseases must be traced back to the organology of the human being. However, one can only see into the abnormal organology of the human being if one can follow the spirit into the smallest parts of matter.

And the other way around: what appear to be merely soul phenomena or phenomena that act in the soul, let us say what emerges in the temperaments and in the activity of the human temperaments , in the whole way in which a person plays as a small child, how he walks, what he does, all this, which today is only understood in a mental-spiritual sense, also has its physical side. And a failure in relation to some aspects of a child's education can appear later in a very ordinary physical illness. Indeed, in certain cases, when one is dealing with mental illnesses, one is led to look at the physical aspects in order to explore what is important, and in the case of physical illnesses, to look at the spiritual aspects and explore what is important. For that is the essential thing in spiritual science, that it does not speak in abstractions of a nebulous spiritual, as mystics and one-sided theosophists do, but that it follows the spirit into its material effects, that it nowhere grasps the material as as it is grasped by today's external science, but everywhere, in the contemplation of the material, it penetrates to the spirit and can thus also observe where an abnormal soul life must express itself in that an abnormal bodily life is present, even if it is perhaps hidden externally.

In the broadest circles today, people have completely false ideas about seriously anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – perhaps sometimes rightly so, when one hears those who do not truly want to go into what it is actually about, and only talk about abstract theories, that man consists of this and that, and that there are repeated earth lives and so on. These things are, of course, extremely important and very nice. But when it comes to working very seriously in this spiritual-scientific movement, then the individual chapters, the individual areas of this life, must be dealt with. And in the broadest sense, this in turn leads to a socially minded gathering of people. For when one sees how the soul, appearing sick, radiates its impulses into the organism, when one can feel this connection between the organism and the soul that appears to be sick - feel with understanding - and when, on the other hand, one knows how the institutions of life also affect the physical human being's physical health, how the spiritual, which apparently only exists externally in social institutions, has an effect on the physical health of the human being, if one has an overview of all this, then one is involved in human society in a completely different way. You begin to gain a real understanding of people, and you treat others quite differently; you pursue their character quite differently. You know that certain qualities are connected to this or that, you know how to behave towards these qualities, you know how to place people's temperaments in human society in the right way, and especially how to develop them in the right way, especially when you have associated tasks with them.

One social area in particular will need to be intensively influenced in terms of hygiene by a knowledge of human nature gained in this way: the area of education. Without really knowing people very well, it is impossible to appreciate what it means when children sit in school with stooped backs, causing their breathing to become irregular, or when they are not encouraged to speak loudly and distinctly, clearly vocalizing and clearly consonanting. The whole of later life depends essentially on whether the child breathes correctly at school and whether he is encouraged to speak loudly and distinctly and with articulation.

In such matters – I am only giving examples here, as the same could be said for other areas – the specialization of overall hygiene in the school system is evident, and this in particular shows the full social significance of hygiene. It also shows, however, how life demands that we do not further specialize, but that we bring together the specialized into an overall view. We need not only the knowledge that enables a teacher to educate a child in a particular way according to certain pedagogical norms, but we also need the knowledge that enables a teacher to judge what it means when he or that sentence of the child's clearly articulated utterances or when he lets the child, after saying half a sentence, lets out another breath and so on and does not ensure that the air is used up while the sentence is being spoken. Of course, there are many clues and rules about this too, but the right way of mutual recognition and the right application of these things only enter our hearts when we grasp the full significance for human life and for social health, for only then does the matter become a social impulse.

These considerations were the basis for the pedagogical-didactic course I gave to the teachers at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, which was the starting point for the founding of the school. Teachers are needed who can work from the full depth of a humanistic worldview for the education and teaching of children. Everything that has been incorporated into the sentences that have been expressed as a pedagogical-didactic art strives to turn the children who are being educated and taught into people who, later on, by being encouraged to perform the functions of life in the right way as a child, will have lungs and liver and heart and stomach in order because the soul has been worked on in the right way.

This world view will never interpret the old saying, “A healthy soul lives in a healthy body,” in a materialistic way.

A materialistic interpretation would say that if you have a healthy body, if you have made it healthy with all possible physical means, then it will automatically become the bearer of a healthy soul. That is nonsense. It makes sense if you proceed in the following way, that is, if you say to yourself: “There is a healthy body in front of me, which shows me that the power of a healthy soul has built it up, shaped it, and made it healthy.” I recognize from this body that an autonomous healthy soul has worked in it. That is the meaning of the saying. But only in this way can this saying also be the basis for healthy hygiene. In other words, we do not need a school doctor who visits the school once a fortnight, if that, and doesn't know what to do with himself, in addition to teachers who only work from an abstract pedagogical science. No, we need a living connection between medical science and the art of teaching. We need a pedagogical art that educates and teaches children in a hygienically correct way in all its measures. That is what makes hygiene a social issue, because the social issue is essentially an educational issue, and the educational issue is essentially a medical issue, but only a question of that medicine that is spiritually fruitful, of a hygiene that is spiritually fruitful.

These things then point to something else that is extraordinarily significant, especially with regard to the topic of “hygiene as a social question”. Because, my dear attendees, when spiritual science is cultivated and when spiritual science is something concrete for the human being, then he knows that in what he receives in spiritual science there is something that differs from what he receives in mere intellectualism and in the natural science of the present, too, is mere intellectualism. He knows that what he has in mere intellectualism or in the merely intellectualistically developed natural science or in the merely intellectualistically developed history or jurisprudence of today is different from what he has in mere intellectualism. All of today's sciences are intellectualistic; if they claim to be empirical sciences, it is only because they interpret the empirically observed results of experience in an intellectualistic way. What is given in the humanities differs quite essentially from these natural science or other results interpreted in an intellectualistic way. It would even be quite sad if that which lives in our intellectualistic culture were not merely an image, but a real power that has a deeper effect on people. Anything intellectualistic remains only on the surface of the human being. This sentence is meant to be very comprehensive.

Those who pursue spiritual science only intellectually, that is, who only make notes: there is a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, an ego, repeated earthly lives, karma, and so on and who notes these down in the same way as in natural science or in today's social science, is not seriously engaged in spiritual science, for he merely transfers the way of thinking he otherwise has to what confronts him in spiritual science. But the essential thing about spiritual science is that it must be thought in a different way, felt in a different way, and experienced in a very different way than the intellectualistic way. Therefore spiritual science is something that, through its very nature, maintains a living relationship to the healthy and the sick person, albeit in a somewhat different way than one might often dream of. People will surely have become sufficiently convinced of how powerless one is with what one, whether as admonishment or as encouragement, begins in the purely intellectualistic culture in relation to the so-called mentally ill. The mentally ill person claims that voices are speaking to him; you tell him all kinds of things that you find based on your intellectual reason – in vain, because he has all kinds of objections for you. This alone could indicate that we are not dealing with an illness of the conscious or even the subconscious soul life, but with an illness of the organism. Spiritual science teaches us to recognize that one cannot, however, use such methods, which are supposed to be so-called spiritual ones, in which, for example, one resorts to hypnosis and suggestion, to treat so-called mental or soul diseases, but that one must treat them in so-called physical ways, that is, by healing the organs, for which, however, one really needs spiritual knowledge of the human being. Spiritual knowledge knows that it should not actually intervene at all in the field of so-called mental illnesses with mere spiritual or psychological procedures, because the mental illness consists precisely in the fact that the spiritual element of the human being is suppressed, as it is otherwise only in sleep, and is weak in this suppression, but that one must cure the organ so that it in turn takes back the soul and the spirit in a healthy way. On the other hand, that which does not arise from the intellect, from the head, but from the whole human being as a spiritual-scientific result, when it appears as imagination, inspiration, intuition, and when it is taken up by the human being, engages the whole organism. It really engages the physical organization of the human being in a healing way, which is what spiritual science really is.

On the other hand, there is no proof that some spiritual scientists feel ill within spiritual science or show the opposite of what I have just said. There are so many who are not spiritual scientists, but who are intellectualistic collectors of notes on spiritual-scientific results. But to spread spiritual science in its true substance is itself a social hygiene, for it affects the whole human being, it normalizes his organology when it threatens to develop this or that tendency towards deviation into the abnormal after dreams or after another side. This is the tremendous difference between what is given in spiritual science and what occurs in mere intellectual science: that the concepts emerging in the field of intellectualism are much too weak because they are merely pictorial to intervene in the human being, to be able to have a healing effect on him. The concepts of spiritual science, on the other hand, are such that they are drawn from the whole human being. In the formation of spiritual-scientific concepts, it is truly not only the brain that has been involved, but also the lungs and liver and heart and the whole human being. And if one imbues oneself with these spiritual-scientific concepts, if one assimilates them through healthy human understanding, they in turn have a hygienic effect on the whole human being. This is what, starting from spiritual science, can intervene in a directive way in hygiene as a social matter.

But in many other ways too — I can only give a few examples — spiritual science will intervene in a guiding way in the whole of humanity's health life, when this spiritual science really takes root among humanity in its full seriousness. I will point out just one example. The relationship between the awake human being and the sleeping human being is one of the chapters that must be studied again and again through spiritual science. The same applies to the enormous difference that exists between the human organization in waking and in sleeping. How spirit and soul behave when we are awake, when the physical and spiritual and soul aspects of the human being interpenetrate each other, and how they behave when they are temporarily separated from each other, as in sleep – this is carefully studied through spiritual science.

Now I can only give a certain sentence, but it is a very certain result of spiritual science. We see so-called epidemic diseases occur in life, diseases that affect whole crowds of people, which are therefore also a social matter at the same time. Ordinary materialistic science studies them in terms of the human physical organism. It knows nothing of the tremendous significance for epidemics and for the predispositions for epidemic diseases that lies in the abnormal behavior of humans in terms of waking and sleeping. What happens in the human organism during sleep is something that, when it happens in abundance, for example, predisposes to a high degree for so-called epidemic diseases. People who, by sleeping too long, set processes in motion in the human organism that should not be there because sleep should not interrupt waking life for so long are predisposed to epidemic diseases in a completely different way and they also engage with epidemics in a completely different way.

Now you can see for yourself what it means to educate people about the correct distribution of sleep and wakefulness. You cannot do that by means of regulations. At best you can order people not to send their children to school when they have scarlet fever; you cannot give lectures when there is an outbreak of influenza: people do not respond to that - because today man tends towards freedom, I mean, because the sense of authority is not as great as in former times - people do not respond to that. I am not saying that they are not right to do so, I am not saying anything against what happens in this way, but you cannot possibly tell people in the same way: you must sleep seven hours. Nevertheless, it is more important than the other rules that people who need it sleep seven hours, the others who do not need it may sleep much shorter and so on. But such things, which are so intimately connected with the most personal aspects of a person's life, have a social effect in a magnificent way. It actually depends on the most intimate aspects of a person how the social effects occur, whether, for example, a larger or smaller number of people are withdrawn from this or that occupation or not, which may have an effect in a completely different place under certain circumstances. Hygiene really does have a tremendous impact on social life. Quite apart from what one thinks about contagion or non-contagion, this element intervenes in social life during epidemics. You cannot work through external regulations, you can only work if you bring a lay audience into human society, but one that has an understanding of people that stands in contrast to the physician's educational prophylaxis, wherever a lively interaction between the expert physician and the layman can occur to maintain health.

If we take all these things into consideration, we can say: Here we have described one side of hygiene as a social question, which in the most eminent sense depends on our having a free spiritual life, on our actually having a spiritual life in which, within the spiritual realm, those who are engaged in the cultivation of the spiritual life, including its practical aspects such as hygiene, are completely independent of everything else that does not give pure knowledge, that does not cultivate the spiritual life itself. What each individual can do for the good of his fellow human beings must arise entirely from his abilities. There must be no state standards for this, nor must there be any dependence on economic powers. This must be placed in the personal sphere of dependence of the individual human being and must continue to be placed in the understanding trust that others who need the application of his abilities can place in the capable person.

What is needed is a spiritual life that is completely independent of all authority, of the state and of the economy, and that works purely from within its own spiritual forces in an expert manner.

If you think about what hygiene can really achieve, which is closely connected with insightful human knowledge and insightful social behavior, and if you look at the individual branch of hygiene with expert insight , then you will come to the conclusion - and this is precisely what the individual, concrete subject area demands, and it could be demonstrated for other areas as well as for hygiene - that the spirit must be taken into administration by those who are involved in its cultivation. No matter what abstract theories may say against the independent position of intellectual life, the individual concrete subject demands that the administrators of intellectual life are not merely experts who work for the ministries, but that those who are active in intellectual life must also be the administrators of that intellectual life, and indeed the sole administrators of that intellectual life. Then, when social insight arising out of a free spiritual life has created a hygiene that really exists as a social institution, it will be possible to work economically for this hygiene in a completely different way, precisely in an independent economic life, in an economic life that is structured as I have described in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, as it has been repeatedly described in the journals that serve this idea of the threefold social organism, for example in the Swiss “Social Future”, which is published by Dr. Boos.

If the forces for the cultivation of hygiene that lie dormant in the bosom of human society are received by society with understanding, if this is accepted with human understanding by society, if this becomes general order, then everything that can be carried out of this independent economic life, without regard to any dependence on impulses of gain or state impulses, everything that can be worked out of this independent economic life purely, can be carried into economic life, into independent economic life, everything that can work purely out of this independent economic life, without any consideration of any dependence on profit impulses or on state impulses, can be carried into economic life, and that which must be cultivated in the service of genuine, true hygiene. But then, and only then, will it be possible for that high spirit to enter into economic life, which is necessary in order for hygiene to be cultivated in human life. If the mere acquisitiveness of our economic life is dominant, which has an ever-increasing tendency to be incorporated into the unified state, and if the general opinion is that one must produce that which earns the most, then the self-contained impulses of a free spiritual life cultivated in this field of hygiene cannot assert themselves; then this spiritual life becomes dependent on the extra-spiritual, on the state or economic, then the economic becomes master over the spiritual. The economic must not become master over the spiritual. This is best seen when one is to produce what is required by the spirit in economic life, when one is to serve a genuine, true hygiene.

The forces of economic life, of free economic life, will be added in the threefold social organism to the insight that becomes a public matter and to the understanding of the human being that becomes a public matter. And when, on the one hand, people are immersed in a free spiritual life in which a hygiene truly based on objective ground can be cultivated, and when, on the other hand, people develop that high spirit through which everyone in economic life will in turn approach production with understanding – but with such understanding does not arise merely from the sense of acquisition, but from the insights that arise in free spiritual activity - then, once this insightful social understanding of people will be there, then people will be able to come together democratically in parliaments or otherwise, because then the insight into the necessity of hygiene as a social phenomenon will be shaped from the free spiritual life. And what is necessary for the maintenance of hygiene will be shaped by the economic life, which is based on practical and professional considerations, through the high spirit that will be developed in it. Then people, having come of age, will be able to negotiate on the basis of the legal system, on the one hand from their insight and understanding of human nature, and on the other hand from their relations with the economic system that serves hygiene. Then people will be able to negotiate as equals on the basis of state or legal life about the measures that can be taken with regard to hygiene and public health care. Then, of course, it will not be laymen, dilettantes, who will be healing, but the person who has come of age will face the expert as an equal with understanding when the expert tells him this or that. But the layman's understanding of human nature makes it possible for him, in the context of what is cultivated together with the physician in social life, to approach specialized knowledge with understanding in such a way that he can say “yes” in a democratically conceived parliament not merely on the basis of authority but on the basis of a certain understanding. If we take a close look at such a specialized field and see how the three members of the social organism interact, then, my dear audience, we find the full justification of this idea of the threefold social organism. One can only fight this idea of the threefold social organism if one has first grasped it only in the abstract.

Today, I could not give you more than a sketchy indication of what follows from the threefold social order in a specific area, the area of hygiene, if one thinks correctly about it. But if the paths I have only been able to hint at today are pursued further, it will be seen that although those who approach the impulse of the threefold social organism with a few abstract concepts may, to a certain extent, oppose it – as a rule, they present reasons that one has long since accepted as objections oneself. But anyone who approaches the individual areas of life with full inner understanding and the living out of these individual areas with all that they bring into human life - that is what social life is about - anyone who really understands something in a specific area of life, who makes an effort to understand something of true life practice in any field, will be led more and more into the direction indicated by the idea of the threefold social organism.

This idea did not arise out of a reverie, out of abstract idealism; it arose as a social demand of the present and the near future precisely from the concrete, appropriate consideration of the individual areas of life. And again, when one penetrates these individual areas of life with what emerges from the impulse of the threefold social organism, then one finds for all these areas that which, it seems to me, is needed for them today. And I just wanted to give you a few brief indications this evening of how the field in which blind submission to authority is still accepted today, can be enriched by the spiritual science that follows from the threefold social organism. For this reason it may be said here: Through this enrichment, which the field of hygiene can receive from a spiritually expanded medicine, hygiene can become a social, a truly social matter, and it can also be cultivated in the most genuine sense in a highly democratic way as a general matter of the people.

Following his lecture, Rudolf Steiner answers a series of questions submitted in writing.

Dear attendees! With regard to the matters discussed today, it is important to first address the whole spirit of what has been said. It is sometimes difficult to answer questions that are formulated from the present way of thinking and feeling without reformulating them or at least without explaining them properly. This first question, which probably seems terribly simple to you or many of you, so that it could be answered in a few sentences or with one sentence, is:

How do you get rid of sleeping too long?

Well, to answer this question, I would have to give an even longer lecture than the one I have already given, because I would first have to gather the various elements in order to answer this question properly. But perhaps the following can be said: Today, there is an intellectualistic state of mind in almost all people. Those who believe that they judge or live from their feelings, or who believe that they are not intellectualistic because of some other reason, are intellectualistic all the more. Now the basic character of intellectualistic soul life is that our instincts are ruined by it. Man's right instincts are ruined. It is actually the case that if you want to point to instincts that have not been completely ruined, you either have to point to primitive man or even to the animal kingdom.

For you see, on another occasion these days I was able to point to an example that says a great deal. There are birds that, out of their greed, eat insects, for example, cross spiders. But they fall into convulsions, into spasms, from eating these cross spiders, which are poisonous to them; they must die miserably very soon after swallowing the cross spider. But if henbane is nearby, the bird flies to it, sucks out the healing juice and saves its life with it. Now think about how something has developed that in us humans has shrunk to the few reflex instincts we have. For example, when a fly lands on our nose, we make a movement to get rid of it without first pondering the situation. A defensive instinct takes effect on the insult stimulus. In the bird that eats the cross spider, the effect that the cross spider has on its organism is followed by such an instinctive defense that it drives it to do something quite reasonable. We can still find such instincts in people who lived in the dim and distant past, if we understand their history correctly. But in our time, we have different experiences. I have always found it extremely painful when I came to someone who sat down at the lunch table and had a scale next to their plate. A scale, you really do experience something like that – I was otherwise accustomed to knife and fork and similar implements lying next to the plate – a scale, and with that he weighed the piece of meat, because only then did he know how much meat he should eat according to his organism, when he had weighed it. Just imagine how far removed from all real, original instincts a humanity has now become, to which something like this has to be prescribed.

It is therefore important not to stop at intellectualism, but to ascend to spiritual-scientific knowledge. You will now believe that I speak pro domo, even if it is pro domo of this great house, but I do not speak pro domo, but I actually express what I believe to have recognized as truth, quite apart from the fact that I myself represent this truth. One can see that if one penetrates not only into the merely intellectual, but into that which is to be grasped spiritually, and which therefore comes before humanity more in a pictorial sense, one you realize that by grasping such knowledge, which is not accessible to the mere intellect, you are led back to healthy instincts, not in individual cases, but more in the things that lie in the depths of life. He who spends at least some time, even if it be ever so little, on developing the quite different frame of mind that is needed to really understand spiritual science, will be led back to sound instincts in such matters as, for instance, the need for sleep. The animal does not sleep too much in normal living conditions. Primitive man did not sleep too much either. One need only educate oneself to healthy instincts, which are being unlearned in today's so intellectualized culture, so that one can say: A really effective way to get rid of sleeping too long is to be able to absorb spiritual truths without falling asleep in the process. If you fall asleep at once when you hear spiritual truths, then you will indeed not be able to get rid of sleeping too long. But if you succeed in really taking an inner human interest in the spiritual truths you are learning, then this inner human interest is activated in such a way that you can actually find out what bedtime is for your organism.

On the other hand, it is extremely difficult to give intellectualized rules, for example, to say that a person who has this or that about his liver or kidneys, which does not exactly make him ill in the usual sense, but which is there nonetheless, must sleep for such and such a length of time. As a rule, this does not lead to anything special. And artificially inducing sleep is not the same as when the body, out of its need for sleep, only denies the mind entry for as long as it needs to. So one can say: Proper hygiene, which follows directly from spiritual science, will also lead people to measure their sleep in the right way. Therefore, the other question that has been asked here cannot be answered so easily:

How can you know how much sleep you need?

I would like to say that you don't need to know this through discursive thought, it's not necessary at all, but you do need to acquire such instincts, which you acquire not by collecting notes from the humanities, but by the way you understand humanities when you take it in with full participation. Once you have developed this instinct, you can then measure the right amount of sleep for you individually. That is what is usually said about it. As I said, I can only give you a guide to answering this question, not what is perhaps expected. But what is expected is not always the right thing.

Is sleeping with the window open healthy?

It is not always possible to give a general answer to such questions. It is quite possible that for one person sleeping with the window open is very healthy, depending on the particular structure of their respiratory organs, but that for another person, for example, a room that is well ventilated before sleeping but then has the windows closed while they sleep is better. It is actually a matter of gaining an understanding of the relationship between the human being and the extra-human environment, in order to be able to judge in individual cases on the basis of this understanding.

How do you explain the occurrence of mental disorders caused by crimes committed from a spiritual point of view, that is, how can the physical illness that underlies the mental disorders be recognized here?

Well, here it would be necessary to go into the whole criminal and, basically, psychiatric anthropology if the question is to be dealt with exhaustively. I would just like to say the following: Firstly, when considering such things, it is important to assume that there are abnormalities among the organ dispositions of a person who becomes a criminal. You only have to follow the studies of Moriz Benedikt, the first important criminal anthropologist, who was really quite objective in his research in this direction, and you will see how, through pathological examination, the forms of individual human organs can indeed be linked to a disposition to commit crimes. So there is an abnormality inherent in it, although, of course, materialistic thinkers like Moriz Benedikt draw false conclusions from it, because someone who shows such signs in this direction is by no means a born criminal from the outset. The point is that one can work on the existing defects in the organism - these are organ defects, not the already existing mental illness - precisely through education and later through appropriate spiritual means, that is, in a spiritual-mental way, if only the facts are examined in a spiritual-scientific way. So the conclusions that Benedikt draws from the pathological investigations are not correct. One can indeed point to such organ defects, but then one must be clear about the fact that in ordinary human life, those things that are not intellectual but are emotional or affective do have an effect. These have an effect, to be sure, first on the glandular activity or the like, on the secretory activity, but in turn also on the organs. In this regard, I advise you to read, for example, an interesting booklet written by a Danish physician about the mechanics of emotional movements. There are many useful things in it in this regard. And now imagine the bodily disposition that can be traced in every person who comes into question as a criminal, and add to this everything that follows for the caught criminal in terms of emotional upheaval and what as a continuation of these mental shocks now in turn affects the organs, then you have the way to look for the defective organs for what produced a mental illness as a consequence, which can occur when a crime is committed. In this way, one must gain an understanding of such connections.

How does Theosophy relate to Anthroposophy? Is the former Theosophy no longer fully recognized here?

In answer to this I would simply say: Nothing but anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has ever been advocated here, and what is advocated here today has always been advocated here, and if this has been identified with what is advocated on many sides as so-called Theosophy, then that is simply due to a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding will also remain a misunderstanding because anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has, within certain limits, been within the framework of the Theosophical Society for some time; but even within the framework of this Theosophical Society, the representatives of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science at that time advocated nothing other than what I advocate here today. They just watched for a long time, as long as it didn't look too heretical. But when they realized that anthroposophy is something quite different from the abstract mysticism that often claims to be theosophy, they threw out the anthroposophists. This procedure has been adopted from the other side, while what is represented here has never had any other form than the one it has today.

Of course, those who deal with things only superficially or who have gained their knowledge only from those members of the Society who themselves have only dealt with it superficially – for one does not always have to stand outside in order to have a superficial understanding of anthroposophy or to confuse anthroposophy with theosophy, one can also stand inside with it in society - those who only acquire knowledge in the way of such superficially grasped activity come to such confusions. But here that is represented, which I have today characterized for a particular area, and never has anything else been represented here, even if, of course, work is constantly being done and certain things today can be characterized more precisely, more fully, more intensely than they could have been fifteen, ten or five years ago. That is precisely the nature of the work: that one progresses, that one progresses in particular in the formulation of making oneself understood in something as difficult as spiritual science. One really need not concern oneself with those people who, out of ill will, have twisted the fact that what was previously expressed in an imperfect way is later expressed more perfectly, and who derive all kinds of transformations of world views from it. For spiritual science, as it is meant here, is something living and not something dead, and the one who believes that it cannot progress, who wants to nail it down to where it once stood, in a way that often happens, does not believe in the living, but wants to make it into something dead.

Would you please explain how an epidemic like the flu or scarlet fever comes about if not through the transmission of germs. For many diseases, the pathogen has been scientifically identified. What is your position on this?

Well, if I were to discuss this question, which I have indicated that I do not want to take sides on, then I would have to give a whole lecture. However, I would like to draw attention to the following. The person who, through his knowledge, is compelled to point out that for illnesses accompanied by the appearance of bacilli or bacteria, there are deeper causes as primary causes than just the appearance of the bacilli, does not yet claim that the bacilli are not there. It is quite another thing to claim that the bacilli are there and that they appear in the wake of the illness than to look for the primary cause in the bacilli. What needs to be said in this regard has just been developed in detail in this course for physicians, which is now being held. But it takes time. This also applies to certain elements that need to be dealt with first. This cannot be quickly settled in a question and answer session. Nevertheless, I would like to point out the following. The human constitution is not as simple as one often imagines. Man is a many-sided being. In my book 'Riddles of the Soul' I show at the beginning that man is a threefold being, a being that can be called, firstly, the nerve-sense human being, secondly, the rhythmic human being, and thirdly, the metabolic human being. That is what man is. And these three aspects of human nature interact with each other; and if the human being is to be healthy, they must not interact in any other way than that there is a certain degree of separation between the areas. For example, the nerve-sense human being, who is more than what today's physiology imagines, cannot simply transfer his effects on the metabolic human being in a different way than that these effects are mediated by the rhythmic movements of the circulation and breathing processes, which extend to the outermost periphery of the organism. But this interaction can be interrupted in a certain way.

Now, this interaction brings about something very specific. For example, when such questions are asked, you will forgive me for having to answer them appropriately. I will be as discreet as possible, but it is necessary to say some words that have to be heard appropriately. For example, it is quite true that processes take place in the human abdomen that are integrated into the whole organism. If they are integrated into the whole organism, then they work in the right way. If they are either directly increased in the abdomen, so that they become more active there, or if the corresponding processes in the human head or in the human lungs become less intense, then something very peculiar occurs. Then it becomes apparent that the human organism, in order to live normally, must develop processes within itself that are only allowed to develop to a certain extent so that they take up the whole person. If the process is increased, then it localizes itself, and then, for example, a process occurs in the human abdomen whereby what takes place in the human head or in the lungs and what corresponds to certain processes in the abdomen is not properly separated. The processes always correspond in such a way that they run parallel to each other. But as a result, what may only be present in man to a certain extent in order to maintain his vitality, the vitality carried by spirit and soul, is, so to speak, raised above a certain level. Then, I would say, it becomes the atmosphere for all kinds of lower organisms, for all kinds of small organisms, and these small organisms can then develop there. That which is the creative element of the small organisms is always present in the human being, it is only extended throughout the whole organism. When it is concentrated, it provides a breeding ground for small organisms, microbes; they find a home in it. But the reason why they can thrive there is to be found in extremely fine processes in the organism, which then turn out to be the primary ones.

I am not speaking out of antipathy to the germ theory; I fully understand the reasons that people have for believing in germs. Believe me, if I did not have to speak as I am speaking now for factual reasons, I would recognize these reasons, but here it is the realization that necessarily leads to the recognition of something else and that then forces one to say it. [For example, I can say:] I see a certain landscape, there are many extraordinarily beautiful cattle, well cared for. I now ask: Why are these living conditions in the area? They come from the beautiful cattle. I explain the living conditions of this area by explaining that beautiful cattle have moved in from somewhere; they have spread there. I will not do that, but I will examine the primary causes, the diligence and understanding of the people, and that will explain to me why these beautiful cattle are developing on this land. But I would be making a superficial explanation if I just said: It's beautiful here, life is good here because beautiful cattle have moved in.

The same logic basically applies if I find the typhoid bacillus and then declare that one has typhoid fever because the typhoid bacillus has moved in. Much more is needed to explain typhoid fever than simply to refer to the typhoid bacillus. But one is misled in a completely different way if one succumbs to such false logic. Certainly, the primary processes, which provide the typhoid bacillus with the basis for its existence, are in turn the basis for all kinds of other things that are not primary. And it is very easy to either completely confuse or conflate what is secondary with the actual original clinical picture. These are the things that lead to the right point here, or show how what is justified in a certain sense can be shown to have its limits.

Perhaps you can see from the way I have given this answer – although I can only sketch it out and am therefore easily misunderstood – that this is really not about the all-too-popular ranting against the germ theory, but that it is really about examining things very seriously.

Could you give us some examples of how physical organic disorders can cause mental and spiritual suffering?

Well, if it were to be answered in detail, that too would, of course, be taking us much too far today. But I would like to point out just one thing. You see, the development of medical thought in the history of medicine is not as it is presented today, with Hippocrates as the beginning of medicine and Hippocraticism as its further development. As far as we can trace it, we know that Hippocrates was much more the last outpost of an old instinct-based medicine than merely the beginning of today's intellectual medicine. But we find something else as well. You see, in this old instinctive medicine, as long as it was still in force, people did not speak, for example, of a certain kind of mental depression, which is a very abstract way of expressing it, but rather of hypochondria - abdominal cartilaginousness. So they knew that hypochondria is a disorder of the abdomen, a hardening of the abdomen. We cannot say that the ancients were more mystical than we are.

Likewise, it is easy to show how certain chronic lung defects are definitely connected with what could be called a false mystical sense in people. And so we could point out all sorts of things, quite apart from the fact that – again, in line with a correct instinct – the ancients definitely pointed to something organic when it came to the temperaments. They derived the choleric temperament from bile, from white bile, the melancholic from black bile and all that black bile causes in the abdomen. They then derived the sanguine temperament from blood and the phlegmatic temperament from what they called mucus. But then, when they saw degenerations of the temperaments, they were absolutely things that indicated the degenerations of the organic matter concerned. How this was done in instinctive medicine and in instinctive hygiene can certainly be taken up in a strictly scientific way into the state of mind and, from the point of view of our present knowledge, cultivated.

Here is a question that could lead to further misunderstanding: Do you recognize eye diagnosis? Do you accept it as a science?

Now, it is generally true that in the case of an organism, and especially in the case of the complicated human organism, if you look at it in the right way, you can draw conclusions about the whole from all the possible individual parts. And again, the way these individual parts are arranged in the human organism has a great significance. In a sense, what the eye diagnostician examines in the iris is, on the one hand, so very isolated from the rest of the human organism, and on the other hand, it is so peculiarly integrated into the rest of the organism that it is indeed an expressive organ. But precisely with such things, one must not schematize; and the mistake with such things is that one does just that. For example, it is quite true that people of a different mental and physical constitution show different characteristics in their irises than other people. If one wants to apply something like this, one needs such intimate knowledge of what happens in the human organism that, if one has this intimate knowledge, one actually no longer needs to search from a single organ. And if you are instructed to adhere to some intellectualized rules and to do such things schematically, then not much of value will come of it.

What relation do diseases have to the progress of world history, especially the newly emerging diseases?

A chapter of an entire cultural history! Well, I will just note the following. When studying history, one must have a sense for practicing symptomatology, that is, to understand much of what is taken as history today only as a symptom for much that lies much deeper behind it, which is really the spiritual current that only carries these symptoms. And so that which is in the depths of human development does indeed appear symptomatically in these or those diseases of the time. It is interesting to study the relationships between what prevails in the depths of human development and what takes place in the symptoms of this or that disease. One can also conclude from the presence of certain diseases that impulses are at work in historical development that cannot escape a symptomatology of this kind. But the question could then also point to something else that is not insignificant when pursuing the historical development of humanity. This is this: Diseases, whether they occur in individual human beings or take the form of an epidemic in human society, are often also reactions to other degenerations, which may be regarded as less serious from a health point of view, but which must nevertheless be regarded as very serious from a moral or spiritual point of view. What is said here must not be applied to medicine or hygiene – that would be quite wrong. Diseases must be cured. In hygiene, one must work to benefit people. One cannot say, “First I will check whether it is perhaps your karma to have this illness; then I will let you have it, if not, I can cure you.” These views do not apply when it comes to healing. But what does not apply to us humans in our intervention in nature does, therefore, objectively apply in the outside world. And there one must say that, for example, many things that exist as a predisposition to moral excesses are so deeply ingrained in the human organization that reactions occur which then appear in certain illnesses, and that the illness is the suppression of a moral excess.

In the case of the individual, it is not even of such great importance to follow these things, because they should be left to one's individual destiny and one should not interfere in them any more than one interferes with the secrecy of other people's letters - unless one is guided by the view that is so prevalent at the moment: “opened by the authorities under the laws of war”. Just as little as one should interfere with a person's letter secrets, so little should one interfere with his individual karma. But in world history, that is again something else. There it is important because in world history, the individual human being plays only a, I would say statistical role in its laws. It must always be pointed out that statistics provide a good basis for life insurance companies to assess mortality rates, on which their premiums are based. The matter is quite accurate and the calculation is quite correct, it is all quite scientific. But now – one does not have to die at the very moment that has been calculated by the life insurance statistics, nor does one have to live as long as has been calculated. When the individual comes into consideration, other things occur. But when groups of people or even the whole development of humanity comes into consideration, then it may very well be that one is not a superstitious person, but very much a scientific person, when one examines the extent to which symptoms of illness, illnesses that occur are corrective of other excesses, so that one can indeed see a certain reaction of the disease or at least a disease caused by something that, if the disease had not come, would have developed in a completely different form. These are just a few points on how what is touched upon by this question can be considered.

But now our time is so far advanced that we too will now follow the others who have already left in such large numbers.

Preliminary remark: Paula Matthes' lecture was not written down. The question she or one of the audience members asked about the relationship between imagination, inspiration and intuition and ordinary consciousness was also not recorded by the stenographer.

Rudolf Steiner: The best way to solve this, as I understand it, is to think of the scale of imagination, inspiration and intuition not being built in such a way that they stand above one another; rather, it must actually be built in such a way:

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And if we were to imagine our ordinary consciousness wandering around there, if we develop in this way, then we have imagination, inspiration and intuition. We then have an ascent to intuition, but when we rise to this height, which really takes place in the spiritual world, we also have a kind of projection of it into our ordinary life - for those abilities of ordinary consciousness that play into the ethical realm. In the ethical realm, the ordinary consciousness is, I would say, instinctively intuitive. This is also what causes the word “intuition” to be used in a popular sense. Today, the word “inspiration” is sharply rejected because inspiration, in a certain sense, goes back a little further, but the word “intuition” is accepted because the moral consciousness that arises in ordinary consciousness already has something akin to intuition, but precisely because it is instinctive. Thus the word intuition occurs very frequently and is sometimes used with some justification. And so, if one proceeds in a straightforward way, as I have done in “The Philosophy of Freedom”, from thinking to enter the realm of living morality, if one wants to speak of intuition by skipping imagination and inspiration, one can have a point of reference in ordinary moral consciousness.

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I may then perhaps add a few words at this point - not, of course, to say anything about the lecture by Miss Matthes, which was completely self-contained and very beautiful in itself. She presented a thoroughly self-contained picture that is likely to shed light on the relationship - which would be desirable today - between the general consciousness of the times and what one could get from philosophy. Now, of course, it is a matter of the most diverse circumstances interacting to produce the present situation, which Miss Matthes has so aptly characterized.

You see, it is quite true that in recent years, brought about by the tragic world situation in our Europe, something has emerged that is an increased interest in philosophy among young people. But perhaps we will only be able to fully assess this interest psychologically if we follow how, over time, throughout the entire 19th century and also at the beginning of the 20th century, where there was an opportunity, the interest of young people in philosophy did flare up after all. I would like to cite a few facts in support of this. For example, in Vienna in the 1860s and 1870s, the generally prevailing philosophical view was that of the Herbartian school. The main representative of this Herbartian school in Vienna at the time was Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had a very strange situation in his lectureship when he taught practical philosophy, which was even a compulsory course. In the first two or three lectures, he usually had one of the largest audiences of the University of Vienna; it was all full, overcrowded. But then the audience decreased very quickly, and there were usually only seven or eight who stuck with the course, out of the several hundred who had actually remained. Robert Zimmermann himself, who spoke very beautifully and measuredly, often said of his lectures on practical philosophy: at the beginning the whole lecture hall is full, a large class, then it becomes a thinner thread, and finally, when the test comes, when people need the signatures, then they all come again. - This was not only due to the students and their lack of interest. In 1874 Franz Brentano was called to Vienna, who had an extraordinarily loyal audience. Brentano's lectures in Vienna, as in Würzburg, were very well attended. It cannot be said that this was due to the students only for the reason that it was also a compulsory course, but the lectures were still well attended even when Brentano, who had first been appointed as a full professor in Vienna, became a private lecturer again because of his private circumstances – he had married as a former Catholic priest and therefore had to resign the Vienna professorship. He always hoped that he would be called again, but that could not happen, even though his lecture hall was always overcrowded and the lectures of the other professors, who then had to take the exam, were just as empty as Zimmermann's. Brentano was repeatedly proposed by his colleagues for the full professorship in the first places, but there was always the obstacle that he was excommunicated as a clergyman because he had married, and a Jewish woman at that; the church claims to have authority over those whom it has excommunicated. And when the then emperor, to whom the matter was repeatedly brought, heard that Brentano, as a former clergyman, had married a Jewish woman, he said to the Minister for Education and Worship, who had brought the matter before him and who himself had advocated that Brentano should again have a full professorship: “Is she at least clean, the Jewish woman?” And when they couldn't say that with a clear conscience – she was, incidentally, the daughter of Professor von Lieben in Vienna – the Emperor said, “No, it's no use.” And this went on until Brentano left the professorship as a private lecturer in the 1890s.

So you could see that when really stimulating things were discussed, the students were interested. Brentano had also had a full college in Würzburg in the Auditorium maximum, where, when he first entered it, the students' verdict on his predecessor was written: “sulfur hut”! It had been completely empty before that. The same Auditorium maximum on which the students had written “sulfur hut” was filled by Brentano because he was, after all, a very stimulating personality, regardless of what one thinks of his philosophy.

It is the case that the intellectual development of the 19th and early 20th century actually increasingly suppressed the active pursuit of intellectual life, which emerged from ideas and the like. This suppression of actual intellectual production became more and more pronounced. And of course the spread of the natural sciences is entirely to blame for this. Now a kind of impossible situation has actually arisen from all this. And from this impossible situation, in turn, individual directions have emerged that have at least tried to become philosophically active again.

Now, Miss Matthes has presented the German schools in an excellent way here. For Switzerland, I have the feeling that these four German schools initially have less significance. Here, in broader circles, the Bergsonian school has gained a certain influence. And only to a lesser extent have these four German schools penetrated into the philosophical life of Switzerland. In Switzerland, too, it is probably not possible to perceive the same thing as is said to have been the case at German universities in recent years. In a sense, the emptiness that arose in the souls was already there before the war, where someone like Eucken in Jena, to whom the students trotted, was stimulating, albeit in a, I would say, more talkative way. Eucken's lectures were not very strong, but they were at least attended. And then came the war, with its devastating effects, also in the moral life, in the whole way of life, which nevertheless led to a certain longing in people to somehow hear something about that which is now the determining factor in life, that which holds it together.

Now, these four directions, which have been characterized by Miss Matthes, they all actually already existed before the war, and it is precisely in them that perhaps the bleakness of the intellectual substance of our present can be seen so clearly. The Marburg School has been rightly mentioned, which is based primarily on the very astute thinking of Cohen. Cohen has probably had the most significant influence in the Marburg School, and a great deal can be traced back to his astute thinking. One could also say that at a time when perhaps only Otto Liebmann was a truly astute thinker in German philosophy, except for the Marburg thinker, that the Marburg School actually had a disciplining effect and was educational for the development of a certain astute thinking. This Marburg School is actually quite dependent on a certain one-sided training of Kantianism. One would like to say that it was precisely through Cohen that the Marburg School came to the conclusion that thinking as such should not be regarded merely in its passivity, but that it must be taken in its activity. And of course the age was not at all suited to perceive the inner validity of thinking as something extra-human, as Fichte did, for example, but rather thinking has been thought of, or I should say worked out, more or less as subjective by the moderns, too, albeit with the claim of objective validity, as subjective at least. And it is this active aspect of thinking that was discovered. This was at a time when it was impossible to understand the objective structure of the world process, when it was almost impossible to look at anything other than this activity of thinking.

I would like to ask all philosophers who think along the lines of the Marburg School — and I am only saying a few aphoristic remarks here — how they can see a real being in thinking when the thinking subject, that is, the human being, has this activity of thinking interrupted every time from falling asleep to waking up? This is a crucial question that should be posed to the entire Marburg School. The point is that the Marburg School is basically a consistent elaboration of Descartes's phrase “I think, therefore I am,” but this is only based on a particular judgment about thinking in the present. For there is no denying that we are also then, when we are not thinking in our ordinary consciousness between falling asleep and waking up. And when we think backwards, our retrospective is divided into those currents in which we think and those currents in which we do not think, then think again and so on, and in the meantime we are without thinking. This is the cardinal problem, and it is the source of failure not only for the Marburg School but also for Bergson and certain American schools, which are noteworthy in their own way. First of all, we must overcome the influence of Descartes' “I think, therefore I am”.

It is therefore necessary to get into the scope of human consciousness what encompasses, on the one hand, the activity of thinking and, on the other, the discontinuity of thinking. This is what must be raised as a problem in relation to this school, and it is a problem that has not even been touched upon by this Marburg school. There is not even an awareness that this problem exists, just as little as, for example, in Bergson and in the current epistemological direction; I do not mean James – he develops pragmatism – but I mean some other American directions. The problem is actually not touched upon, and when it is raised, there is no awareness of how to deal with it, not even epistemologically.

Then, of course, there is the direction of Husserl, but it is not given much consideration. My feeling is that he is a disciple of Franz Brentano. In Franz Brentano, the fact that he is a sharply trained Aristotelian and a sharply trained Thomist is evident everywhere, a good, thorough connoisseur of Thomism, so that some of both Aristotelianism and Thomism has been transferred to Husserl. Of course, a modern philosopher like Husserl cannot readily admit this, but it can be seen in his psychology and in everything that comes to light in him.

Now, I don't know what Miss Matthes thinks about this – I must confess that when I wrote my “Riddles of Philosophy” in the new edition and tried to incorporate some of these newer directions, I was repeatedly faced with the question: What should one actually do with Husserl? No matter how hard you try to get at it, to somehow get hold of it, to grasp it, you can't do it; nothing special comes of it. It struck me so strongly how Husserl basically rummages in words, how, despite all his insight into the essence of things and so on, he is completely dependent on the secondary content of words and how he cannot come to a real insight into even the simplest facts of consciousness. It seems, for example, to be impossible for Husserl to grasp the difference between the image of Cologne Cathedral that I have only in my memory, but noted in my consciousness down to the last detail, and the image that I have before me when I actually stand in front of Cologne Cathedral and really look at it. I don't see how, in the whole structure of Husserl's philosophy, a difference between these two images could be found as essentially real. And if I am not mistaken, Husserl himself once used this image of Cologne Cathedral in these two relationships, I believe for the sake of illustration. One does not actually come out of his confusion through all possible discussions to something tangible.

I also have this feeling when I consider Scheler's sometimes quite beautiful treatises. Scheler is a talented person, but I always ask myself why Scheler – who, for example, has written beautiful treatises on the direct perception of feeling, that is, on the direct experience of compassion – why he does not manage to somehow really gain an independent worldview? Why does he so terribly proselytize? Why does he seek the support of old Catholicism? This is something that shows me that these philosophers are disciples of Brentano.

Brentano has only [...] gap in the stenographer's notes] of his philosophy because he could not merge into a real spiritual science. He did not want to, nor could he. And it is not true, for Brentano was so strong that he did not turn to Catholicism, but his students are terribly Catholic in their efforts to find a connection for their world view.

As for the people of Baden – Windelband, Rickert and some others – it seems to me that the whole matter rests on an appalling one-sidedness in their conception of reality. It is not true that these people no longer know what to do with philosophy and want to save themselves by even excluding the value problem. They separate it out in such a way that they then have no need to make any kind of statements about the relationship of value to themselves. They crystallize the value problem out of the scope of the world problems, so to speak, and refer to John Mackay without feeling any obligation to somehow integrate value into the currents of being. This will also be completely impossible as long as we do not overcome the law of the conservation of energy and matter in the near future. For one must realize that with value something is given that is germinal for future values, that is there when the present has decayed. One must therefore come to think of matter and force as transitory and to see the fruits, the germs that they have in them, as values. Only then will one be able to gain a further insight into these problems, into value problems. Today, there is a lack of courage for that. Of course, people completely lack the courage to somehow attack the law of the conservation of energy and matter. There are a few tentative attempts – Drews occasionally points out, after all, that the law of the conservation of matter and energy is only a kind of empirical problem and the like – but one will hardly find any far-reaching insight in this field.

With regard to Nelson and his direction, one should perhaps not overlook the fact that the people started from Hegel and the Fries, which he regarded as the “father of all shallowness”, because the people were all Friesians at first, weren't they? It was a Fries School at first. And now we must not forget that what I have emphasized time and again comes into play here: you can be an extraordinarily astute logician – there is no doubt about that in Nelson's case – but for real life problems, it is not enough. I must say that when he spoke at the Bologna Congress in 1911, among all the various illustrious philosophers, including Bergson, he was actually the very best in terms of dialectical power and solid craftsmanship in the use of thought. But then, especially when I saw Nelson again recently in Bern, I got the feeling that it is not at all sufficient for real life problems, that it leads to an abstractness - which is actually quite dreadful, but which was excellently characterized by Ms. Matthes - in that he tries to gain an ethic in three volumes from an abstract sentence. You see, you can be an excellent dialectician without having the slightest sense of reality. This can also be seen from the way Nelson treats the problem of knowledge. It is ultimately all the same to him whether the problem of knowledge is treated in the way of the many neo-Kantians who actually start from quite secondary things.

You see, it was perhaps in 1888 that I once sat in Berlin with Eduard von Hartmann, and the conversation revolved almost entirely around the fundamental questions of epistemology. Well, Eduard von Hartmann really could not be approached in this direction. So I expressed the opinion that when one speaks of the idea, one can initially say, for my sake, that the idea is something subjective, but that it is not possible to stick to it when one moves on to considerations. I recently compared it to this: if someone takes a letter, E or something else, they cannot raise the abstract question of what this individual letter means in itself. But if you have letters that then combine into words and the words combine into sentences, then the whole thing comes together. And so you can say: Certainly, if you just take a small thing from phenomenology, the problem of how this individual thing relates to the thing in itself and so on becomes a kind of life problem again and again. But if you connect the phenomena with each other, a certain structure arises, and you can no longer think the same about a certain sphere of phenomena in relation to reality as you can about an individual. Non-epistemologists like Nelson completely ignore such things. It really does not matter whether, on the one hand, it is said against epistemology, as Hegel said: you can't recognize without recognizing, because that would be the same as wanting to learn to swim without getting into the water - or whether on the other hand you say: in order to pose a problem of recognition, there would have to be a recognition already. - What is really at issue here is to realize that the problem of recognition could still be a completely valid problem, even though it presupposes a certain recognition. One could practise recognition first, and then afterwards one could observe it, and afterwards one could critically determine - or whatever you want to call it - whether the recognition is valid or not. So an epistemology could never be eliminated by Nelson's arguments.

So these things are there. Other images could be given, some noteworthy philosophical directions could be mentioned. I will only mention that, for example, pragmatism also has a great many followers in Germany, and that neo-Thomism also has a certain significance in the present, especially among Catholic philosophers, even if it is not noticed because of the divisions that exist and because people do not care what some produce when they live in the circle of others.

But all these schools of thought are actually faced with the necessity of finding a transition to a reality, of getting out of the mere formal. When one hears or reads Eucken – every book by Eucken says roughly the same thing – it really is as if someone were not standing on the ground, but were constantly floating in the air, pulling himself up by his hair. It is a lot of beating about the bush for no reason. This is especially striking in Eucken's work. And one must say, when one looks at what is there and what cannot be connected to reality, one can understand that young people, who really have the tendency to absorb something about the world, cannot get their rights and must ultimately be truly disappointed and must become desolate. It is really quite sad when one sees how little that which has been brought to the surface from the last moments of development is inclined to meet this longing of youth. Not true, the students might like to hear something, but what they can hear is really not worth listening to. And what happens next is basically terrible.

At a German university, they tried to interest a man who is actually well-intentioned but who came from the old system in the GDR in the threefold order. At the time, he had resolved, in order to get to know the threefold order, to give a student who wanted to take his exam with him a dissertation on the threefold order, because this would save him from having to read the “key points” himself. He then corrected the dissertation and believed that by becoming acquainted with the ideas of the “key points” in the course of his official duties, he was in this way getting to know the threefold order; because otherwise, directly, he does not do it. This reminds me vividly of how a student once asked his professor about Soloviev at a university. Well, the professor hardly knew the name, but he said to himself: There is the best opportunity for me to get to know him too. [And to the student he said:] Do a dissertation on it. — So it is at a German university when a dissertation is to be done on Soloviev. At the moment he gave the dissertation, the professor had no idea about Soloviev – nor did he later, he didn't know more than what he had taken from the dissertation itself.

It is almost impossible to describe the state we gradually entered into. And the subordination of the spiritual realm to the state structure is closely related to these conditions. And the only thing that can help is a truly emancipated, free spiritual life. Only on the basis of a free spiritual life can anything of what the students are actually looking for succeed today, when the need is so great. Here in Switzerland, people do not know; they do not know the hardship. It is really much more difficult, much worse than one thinks. And that is what I always try to explain to our friends, also in my anthroposophical reflections: that it is much worse than one thinks. If we could somehow manage to reach a sufficiently large number of people with ideas from spiritual science, on the one hand, and with the ideas of the threefold social order, on the other, which are necessary for the public introduction of spiritual science, we would be able to take a significant step forward.

What Ms. Matthes presented today can also fully prove to you that a completely new approach is necessary, that we cannot continue to muddle through in what has developed. We need a new approach in our public life; without it, we will not get anywhere.

The break [in spiritual life] actually happened relatively early on. You see, it may perhaps be pointed out after all that the great philosophers have no longer found great disciples. Take all of Hegel's disciples – the Hennings and Marheinekes and so on, Michelet is the name of one of them – take them all, they can be found first among those who published the Hegelian estate, and then take what actually emerged, the reactionary course of these sages, or take Immanuel Hermann Fichte, and then in philosophy take all those who were philosophers like Carriere and so on, even Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who was a daredevil in many respects, one must still say: there was a major break in intellectual life as such in the mid-19th century. And instead of there being, in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Germany, where it would have been natural for there to be a real deepening of intellectual life, there was, in particular, a flood in German philosophy of everything that was less than German philosophy. There was actually a spirit; what was missing was a sense of reality.

You see, I knew a philosopher who actually didn't play a role at all, but who was truly smarter than many who did play a role. His name was Gregor Itelson. As a dialectician, he actually outwitted everyone, and you can be sure that he would easily outwit Nelson in a discussion as well. Gregor Itelson, if he wanted to, could brilliantly refute someone who spoke in such a way as Father Wasman, for example. When he had appeared in Berlin – it was on the occasion of this Life-Jesus movement, in 1905 or so, at the beginning of the 20th century in any case – Gregor Itelson gave a brilliant speech against the Jesuit Father Wasman. But just recently I have again heard it said that Gregor Itelson, when a monist was defending his world view, did everything in the most brilliant way to bring the monist in question to his knees. But I never heard Gregor Itelson put forward any of his own positive thoughts. A brilliant dialectician – but no positive thoughts whatsoever! I once had a discussion with him, perhaps in 1901 or 1902. I said something like: What you said again today is nice, but why have you never said anything that is your own view? Yes, he said, that's what I'm working on; I've been working on a revision of logic since my youth, but I'm not finished yet. If you listen to people talking today, everywhere, whether they are natural scientists or theologians and so on – he was right, you can prove logical errors everywhere. And he said: We don't need a revolution in logic, we just need a revision of logic. Then he said, as we talked a little further: But this revision of logic, it is actually not that difficult, you can write it on two quart pages. I said: Yes, why don't you finally write these two quart pages? Why does it have to be two quart pages? But he still hasn't written them, at least I haven't seen them in front of me.

It is not a lack of logic or dialectics. During the time I knew Itelson, he got up at 10 o'clock in the morning, then went to the coffeehouse, read his newspapers; then he went to lunch, then he went back to the coffeehouse, and if you came to the coffeehouse after some lecture, you would meet him there as well. He was a dawdler, but he could still be extraordinarily stimulating, even at midnight, for example, talking about the impossibility of Maeterlinck's ideas. And a person like Nelson differs from dialecticians like Itelson only in that he is more brazen, that he relies more on his legs, is more brazen in his appearance, is not a drifter, is a hard-working person, an intellectual giant. Nelson has a brutal, not very wide-meshed [way of thinking], not the slightest finesse in his thinking. It is actually sad, basically, that a whole number of young people today let themselves be taken in tow by Nelson.

These also include people like Mühlestein, who appeared in Basel in the discussion after a lecture and said that threefolding was not possible after all, that everything had to be united into one unit. I replied that the right also has its place in the life of the spirit and in economic life; I said: Yes, the unit is, for example, a farming family, which includes the farmer, the farmer's wife, the children, the farmhands and also the cows. If the cows give plenty of milk, the whole family will have milk. Therefore, it is not necessary to demand that all members of the family give milk. And so it is in the social threefold order: if only the political state provides the law, then economic life and spiritual life will also have the law. Just as the farmer's wife or the farmer himself do not have to provide milk for the family to be supplied with milk, economic life and spiritual life do not have to produce law. Thoughts such as these, when they are examined with a sense of reality, are very easy to unhinge. And so it is with Nelson, especially in his ethical and political views.

What all such considerations point to, however, is that today, above all, we need the courage to leap the river and really penetrate into spiritual science. Then, as Miss Matthes quite rightly said, philosophy too will be able to become something very fruitful again. Without spiritual science, philosophy will always remain something that cannot be put into practice in life and that cannot prove that it has a solid foundation. Today, philosophy without spiritual science only leads to an empty formalism, not to content.

That is what I might add to what Miss Matthes said. We can certainly be very grateful to Miss Matthes for raising this topic in such an excellent and vivid way before us today.

Public lecture given to students at the Technical University

Dear students, If I attempt to present to you today something from the field of what for a number of years I have called anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I do so in the knowledge that this evening, in what is effectively my first lecture, I will be able to give nothing more than a few suggestions, and that I am under no illusion that such a presentation will instantly create any kind of conviction. But perhaps it will be possible, after the general description that I will give, to satisfy specific wishes and address specific questions in the discussion that follows.

In order not to take up too much of our time, I would like to address the most important point first, and that is to give a characteristic of what spiritual science in an anthroposophically oriented sense actually wants to be. It differs from what is usually called science in the method of its research. And it is convinced that, in the latest period of time, a serious and honest striving in science, if consistently pursued, must ultimately lead to its method. I would like to speak to you in a thoroughly scientific sense, since I myself truly did not start from any theological point of view, nor from any world-view questions or philosophies in the sense in which they are usually cultivated, but rather I myself started from technical studies. And out of technical studies themselves, this spiritual science presented itself to me as a necessity of our historical period of development. Therefore, I am particularly pleased to be able to speak to you this evening.

When we do natural science, in the sense of today's thinking, we first have something in front of us that extends around us as the world of sensual facts. And we then use our thinking, we use in particular our methodically trained thinking, to find laws from a corresponding pursuit of these sensual facts. We look for what we are accustomed to calling natural laws, historical laws and so on. This way of relating to the world is not something that the humanities reject, but they want to stand on the firm ground of this research. But it does its research, standing on this firm ground, I might say, by starting from the point of view of human life itself. It comes, precisely because it wants to do serious scientific research, simply to the limit of scientific knowledge, which is fully admitted by level-headed natural scientists. And with regard to what natural science can be, it is firmly grounded in the view of those who say: In summarizing external facts, we advance to a certain level with scientific methodology, but we cannot go beyond a certain limit if we remain on the ground of this natural scientific research itself.

But then, when what is sought in ordinary life and in ordinary natural science is achieved, only then does the goal of spiritual science as it is meant here begin. By thinking about and understanding the facts around us, we arrive at certain boundary concepts. I am mentioning here only such limiting concepts, whether they are conceived as mere functions or as realities, limiting concepts such as atom, matter and so on. We operate at least with them, even if we do not seek demonic entities behind them. These limiting concepts, limiting ideas, which confront us particularly when we follow the scientific branches that are fundamental to technology, stand there as it were like pillars. And if you want to stop at the limits of ordinary science, you will remain standing right in front of these boundary pillars.

But for the spiritual researcher, as I mean him here, the actual work begins only at these border pillars. There it is a matter of the spiritual researcher, in what I call meditation - please do not take offense at this, it is a technical term like others - entering into a certain inner struggle, an inner struggling of life with these concepts, more or less with all the border concepts of natural science. And this inner struggle does not remain unfruitful for him.

In this context, I must mention a man who taught here in this city, at this university, in the second half of the last century, and who repeatedly emphasized this struggle that man enters into when he comes to the limits of ordinary science. It is Friedrich Theodor Vischer who knew something of what the human being can experience when he arrives at the concepts of matter, atom, natural law, force, and so on. What I mean here does not consist in brooding, but in consulting everything in the depths of our soul that has led to these concepts, in trying to live with these concepts in meditation.

What does that actually mean? It means establishing the inner discipline within oneself to be able to look, just as one otherwise looks at external objects, at what one finally has in one's soul when one arrives at such a borderline concept; I could name many others to you besides those I have just mentioned. Then, when one tries to concentrate the whole range of the soul on such concepts, abstracting from all other experiences, one makes an inward discovery. And this inner discovery is a shattering one. It shows us that from a certain point in life, in our inner life, our concepts become something that grows in our soul through itself, that is different after such inner meditative work than it is when we take it only as the result of external observation. Just as we observe in the growing child how certain organs, which first appear more undifferentiated, become more differentiated, how we perceive how organs grow, so in such meditative devotion to the results of scientific experience we feel how an inner growth of the soul takes place. And then comes the shocking realization that it is not through speculation, not through speculative philosophy that one goes beyond what is called the limit of natural knowledge, but through direct experience, that is, by transforming what one has gained through thinking into inner experience of beholding.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the first step that is taken. It can be clearly felt how the method becomes quite different and how, therefore, something completely new occurs in comparison to the usual scientific method, which can be objectively recognized more than by anyone else, but also by me, in that mere thinking, mere comprehension, passes over into inner experience. And then, through consistent, patient, persistent experience in this direction, something occurs that cannot be called anything other than an experience of spiritual existence. One cannot speak about the experience of the spiritual world in any other way from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Because this experience of the spiritual world is not something that is innate in man. It is something that must be achieved by man. When one has reached a certain level of this experience, one realizes that our thinking, which we otherwise use to grasp our environment, is in a different relationship to our entire physical being than one is forced to assume from mere knowledge of nature.

From the mere knowledge of nature, one notices how the physical changes and transformations, with youth, with old age and so on, also change the states of the soul. With scientific thinking, one can go further physiologically. It can be shown how the nervous system and the brain actually express the structure and configuration of our thinking. And if you follow the matter consistently from one side, you can say: Yes, something emerges from something else, which today could only be stated hypothetically, that which is thinking, that which is life in thought.

The person who has experienced this inwardly, which I have characterized as being able to be experienced, speaks differently, saying: When one walks, for my part over a soggy road, or when a car drives over a soggy road, then one has the impression of furrows, of footsteps. It would obviously be quite wrong to put forward the theory that it must have been an extraterrestrial being that created these footsteps, these furrows, just because one does not know, or to hypothesize that there are certain forces below the earth's surface that work in such a way as to have caused these footsteps, these furrows.

Thus one says – and I say expressly, with a certain right – from a scientific point of view: That which is the physiological formation of the brain is what, in the end, is expressed in the function of thinking. The person who has experienced what I have characterized does not say it that way; they say: Just as these grooves and furrows are not raised from within by the earth's inner forces, but rather as if something has passed over them, so the physical brain has been placed in its furrows by the body-free thinking. And that which, in a certain way, when we entered physical existence through birth, changes these furrows, that is also what, descending from spiritual worlds, does the work of shaping these furrows in the first place.

In this way, it is established that the soul is absolutely the active principle, that it is the soul that gives form to the body. I know, esteemed readers, that, of course, hundreds of objections can be raised against what I am saying, if one starts only from the intellectual-theoretical point of view. But spiritual science must point to the experience. It must point out that until this experience takes place, one is justified in believing that thought arises from the physical brain as a function, whereas when one experiences this thought life oneself, one knows how it is active in itself, how it is substantial and in motion in itself, and how it is actually active in relation to the passivity of the physical body.

So what is presented as a first initial experience is not something that is gained through a straightforward continuation of ordinary scientific methods, but only through a metamorphosis, only through a transformation of the ordinary scientific method into a method that can only be experienced, which consists not in speculation but in an inner experience.

That is one side of it. The other side of this inner experience relates more to the inner development of the human will. By looking at our lives, we can see the transformations we have undergone in life. We think back to how we were in our inner soul and outer bodily state one, five, ten years ago, and we say to ourselves: we have undergone changes, transformations. These changes, these transformations that we undergo, how do we undergo them? We passively surrender to the outside world in a certain way. We just need to say: hand on heart, how active are we in what we have initially become through the outside world? The outside world, heredity, upbringing and so on, shapes us; and what shapes us in it continues to have an effect. As a rule, we are actually the passive ones. If we now transform this into activity, if we form out of it what might be called in the most eminent sense self-discipline, and in the way I will characterize it in a moment, then the second element is added to what we have characterized as the first element in the path of spiritual research. If one can bring it to that, and that can only be achieved through methodical schooling in the sense described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in other books, if one can bring it to say to oneself: I will plan, even if only a small part of what what is to arise in me, I will resolve that this or that quality shall become mine; and if I can bring it to produce such a quality in me by a strong arousal of the will, perhaps only after years, when I make out of myself what I would otherwise only passively encounter in life , if I take my will, if I may express it somewhat paradoxically, into my own hands and take full control of my development – in a certain part one can of course only do so – then what otherwise is merely memory, in a certain way, also comes together to form a real area. You get a kind of overview of your life, as if you were looking at a series of things, and you then come to know the will in its true character.

While one gets to know thinking as something that actually detaches itself from the physical the more one delves into life, one comes to recognize one's will in such a way that it actually encompasses the physical more and more, permeates us more and more, flows through us, and that basically death is nothing more than a struggle of the will with the bodily functions have reached a certain limit when we pass through an earlier or later death, and that then that which can no longer work our body in this way, the will, is completely absorbed in what the body does, that this will detaches itself and that an element of the soul now actually enters a real, spiritual world when we pass away.

So it is a matter of the fact that what is usually called the idea of immortality is not pursued by any speculation of the spiritual science meant here, that basically this spiritual science completely breaks with the way the world usually approaches this idea. The point is that spiritual science, as a continuation of natural science through the training of thought and will, actually manages to grasp what we carry within us, thinking and willing, in such a way that we can also grasp it when this soul, which lives in thinking and willing, lives in a disembodied way that cannot be reached by the senses.

Of course, what I have briefly explained here will be regarded by the widest circles of our present time as something fantastic and visionary. But how could it be otherwise? Everything that comes into the world as something new and seemingly contradicts what was already there is initially regarded as something fantastic and visionary. But I do not believe that it will remain so for all time, that people will not recognize that what has been described here as the method of spiritual science, at least in two of its characteristic elements, is only a continuation, but a lively continuation, of what natural science actually achieves, but with which natural science comes up against a certain limit.

Today, when one speaks of the spirit in general, it is no longer entirely taken amiss. This was still the case in the last third of the 19th century, when a certain materialistic way of forming a world view out of scientific knowledge was used to draw the only logical conclusion of scientific thinking itself. Today it is again permitted to speak of the spirit, at least in a speculative way. But one is still very much taken aback when one speaks of the spirit in the way I have just done, because that has a certain consequence.

When one has acquired what I have called the “seeing consciousness” in my book “The Human Council,” when one has acquired what arises from such developed thinking and willing, then one knows oneself in a spiritual world through this seeing consciousness — just as one knows oneself through one's eyes and ears in a world of color and sound. In a sense, the world around is permeated with spirit. Just as the world around a person who was born blind undergoes a transformation when, after an operation, he begins to see colors at a certain point in his life, and the world that was previously around him is now filled with something different, so it is when this seeing consciousness occurs. The world that one was previously accustomed to seeing as the world of the senses and of the combining mind is filled with spirituality. And the spirit becomes something concrete. The spirit becomes something that one can also follow in its concrete form. One no longer speaks of the spirit in general. When someone speaks of the spirit in general, it is as if a person were walking across a meadow with flowers. If you ask him, “What kind of flower is that and what kind is that?” He will say, “They are all plants, plants, plants.” So today people are also allowed to say: Behind the sensory world is a spiritual world. But spiritual science cannot stop there. Rather, it must examine the spiritual facts in the concrete — because the spiritual world is around us just as the colored or the sounding world is — in the same way as one otherwise examines the colored and sounding world with the senses and the combining intellect. And there one acquires, before everything else, a quite definite way of relating to the world. It is also the case that if one is born blind and suddenly gains sight, one acquires a different relationship to the world. One must first find one's bearings; one knows nothing about spatial perspective, one must first learn it. So, of course, one must also acquire a certain relationship, a certain position to the world when one passes over into the consciousness of observation. Then many things appear in a peculiar way. That is why the spiritual researcher is still misunderstood by his contemporaries.

You see, the spiritual researcher never says that what has been gained through the method of strict natural science, or what has been drawn from the consequences of these results of strict natural science, is in any way logically incorrectly followed or anything of the sort, but he is compelled to add something from his spiritual insight, which is then not merely added on, but which in many respects completely changes the results of natural science.

Take geology, for example. I will pick out one example. It is better to talk about specific questions than to use general phrases. I understand completely and have followed this method myself: if, from what is happening around us today in the formations of rock, in the deposits of rivers and water and so on, we examine the geological layers that lie on top of each other and then calculate – even if it is not always a real calculation, but only something approximate, if you calculate how long these respective rock layers have existed, then you get the known figures. And then, as you all know, we arrive at the beginning of the earth's development, where the earth - as is hypothetically assumed - formed out of something, out of a kind of primeval nebula or something similar. I do not need to go into this in more detail. You are familiar with all this.

But for the spiritual researcher it is so, simply because he has experienced such things as I have described to you - though only in outline, to stimulate interest, not to convince - for the spiritual researcher it is so that he must say to himself: I assume that someone is examining the changes in a human organism, say the changes in the heart every five years. I follow how the human heart or another organ changes over the course of five or ten years, what happens there. And now I calculate what I have seen, if I simply consistently deduce from what I have calculated what it was like three hundred years ago. I get a certain result, albeit purely arithmetical, as to what this human heart was like three hundred years ago. The only objection to this is that this heart did not even exist at that time. Just as correct as the geological approach would be to conclude from the small changes in the human heart what that heart was like three hundred years ago – only it was not even there at that time. Equally correct – for I fully recognize that what geology reveals has at least a relative correctness – is also everything that is deduced from the geological facts for the development of the earth. But then we transpose what presents itself to us as a consequence of our calculations into times when the earth did not yet exist in its present form. Or we transpose what arises from our observations, which were made over a limited period of time, into an epoch that lies millions of years ahead, by calculating an end state and speaking of entropy or the like. For the spiritual researcher, this is the same as if he were to calculate what the nature of the human heart will be after three hundred years.

That is what you arrive at when you convert the ordinary scientific method into something that can be experienced. Because, you see, man is actually like an extract of the whole cosmos. In man you find - somehow changed, somehow extracted, compensated or the like - what is present in the cosmos as a law. You will ask me: Yes, how can you enthusiast claim that the earth has not yet existed in its present form? You must show us a way to claim something like that.

I will, however only sketchily, characterize how one comes to such assertions as I have put forward. One discovers, by experiencing the volition, the thinking, as I have described to you, that man really is a kind of microcosm. I do not say this as a phrase, as the nebulous mystics say, but in the awareness that it has become as clear to me as any solution to a differential equation, out of complete logical clarity. Man is inwardly a compendium of the whole world. And just as in our ordinary life we do not know only what is sensually surrounding us at the moment, just as we, by looking beyond what is sensually surrounding us at this moment, look at the image of something we have experienced about ten or fifteen years ago , how it emerges before us as something that no longer exists – but something of it is present in us, which enables us to reconstruct what was present back then – it is the same with the expanded consciousness that arises from the transformation of ordinary thinking and willing. In that man was actually connected with all that is past, only in a more comprehensive sense, in a completely different sense, in a more spiritual sense, was connected with what is past than he was connected with experiences ten or fifteen years ago, which he can bring up again from his inner being, so it is possible, when consciousness is broadened, we simply find out, as from a cosmic memory, that which we were part of, which simply does not live on in us for ordinary consciousness, but which lives on for the consciousness that has arisen through the metamorphosis that I have described.

It is therefore nothing more than an expansion, an increase of that power which is otherwise our power of remembrance, whereby man inwardly, simply from his own nature, which is a summary of the macrocosm, constructively resurrects that which actually was on our earth in a certain period of time. Man then looks at a state of the earth when it was not yet material. And while he otherwise has to construct something from the present-day experiences of geology that is supposed to have existed at that time, he now looks at a point in time when the earth was not yet there, when it was in a much more spiritual form. He sees, by constructively recreating what lives in him, that which actually underlies the formation of our earth.

And it is the same with what can emerge in us from a future state of the earth as something constructive in a certain way. I know how unsatisfactory such a sketchy description must be, but you can see from it that what I characterize as spiritual science is not drawn from thin air or from fantasy. It is, of course, something unusual. But once you have undergone the metamorphosis of consciousness, what you constructively represent inwardly is as clear to your consciousness as what you conjure up in mathematics or geometry, which is also constructed from within the human being.

And when someone comes and says, “Yes, but you have to assert something that all people can understand,” I say, “Yes, that is also the case, but the first thing to be considered is that the person who wants to understand something must first go through everything that is necessary to do so – just as someone who wants to solve a differential equation must first go through what will enable him to solve it.

And if someone objects on the other hand: Yes, mathematical geometry only presents something to our consciousness that we apply when we follow the reality of the external world – then I say: Yes, that is so, but if we constructively present this to ourselves, then we arrive at the conviction that it is a mere formality. If you are aware of what has been characterized, you know that it is a reality. And if someone says that this is perhaps self-suggestion, then I say: everything that gives us the possibility of saying that something is real is only a result of experience. And when some people object that someone could be mistaken, that someone could, for example, have the vivid thought of citric acid when drinking something and if they are sensitive, they could even have the taste of lemon – I say: that is possible. But just as in ordinary life one can distinguish the mere thought of heat from the heat that comes from actually touching a hot iron, so too, through inner experience, if one has the seeing consciousness, one can distinguish between what is mere imagination, what is mere suggestion, and what is reality, because the grasping of all reality is an inner experience. And it is necessary to follow things through to the end, not to stop somewhere. Anyone who stops short of where the path should actually lead may succumb to suggestion. I therefore say: It is indeed possible, if someone is sensitive and gives themselves over to autosuggestion, to say: I have the thought of lemonade, I even feel the taste – but the thought of lemonade will not quench one's thirst. What matters is that one passes from the sensation of taste to quenching one's thirst, that one follows the path consistently. The experience must be pursued consistently, then the fact that one designates something as reality in the spiritual sense is also entirely the result of the experience. The designation of a sensual reality or reality cannot be theoretically established, but is a result of experience.

Now, dear attendees, I have characterized the spiritual science that comes to a modern, natural scientific person when they go through what life offers today. This life has truly changed extraordinarily in the last thirty to fifty years, especially through the advances in technology. When I think back to the time when the first chair of technology was established in Vienna in the early 1880s, and consider all that has happened since then, I get some idea of how much this modern man has changed as a result of everything that has been drawn into our cognitive, our moral, but especially our social life. Those who have honestly gone through this, who do not say out of some prejudice: Oh well, science can't give us anything! but who takes the view that natural science can give us a great deal, who is completely absorbed in the triumphs of modern natural science, can come to the realization that the spiritual foundations of the world must be grasped in the way I have tried to present to you today.

Then one looks back to earlier times in the development of humanity and says to oneself: In these earlier times of human development, people hardly spoke of the spirit at all. And the way in which they spoke of the spirit has been preserved traditionally in various religious denominations, which, if one is completely honest and does not want to keep double accounts of life, one truly cannot reconcile with the results of ordinary natural science today. These spiritual experiences, it must be said, arise from a completely different state of consciousness in people. What we have learned through the three to four centuries in which scientific methods have been developed, what we have become as a state of mind through the Copernican and Galilean way of thinking, through Kepler, we have gone through everything that has subtracted the technical laws from the laws of nature in more recent times, through Kepler, through the Copernican and Galilean way of thinking, through Kepler, The entire configuration of the soul has changed, not by becoming more theoretical, but by becoming more conscious. Through the development of humanity, we have necessarily left certain instinctive states of earlier ages. And we look back at what earlier ages sensed as spirituality, which has been preserved in religious traditions, and we say to ourselves: What was there then as spirituality was grasped by human instinct. One could not say that this was dependent on such a heightening of consciousness through the methods of natural science, through the methods of social experience in modern times. People spoke in such a way that, when they saw natural phenomena, these natural phenomena, as it were, endowed them with the spirit of what they were speaking about. How did an ancient civilized Egyptian relate to the world? He looked up, followed the course of the stars, the configuration of the starry sky. He did not just see what Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler saw in this starry sky, but he saw something that at the same time revealed a spiritual reality to him. Just as, when I move my arm, a soul-active underlies this hand movement, so the person of earlier epochs felt in what happened externally that which underlies this external event as a spiritual, but instinctively.

Then came the more recent period, the time of natural science. I would like to say that we look back on a long period of human development that did not actually reach its conclusion until around the middle of the 15th century, a long period in which people could not help but see what was around them with their senses as something spiritual at the same time. When we speak of physical states today, of solid, liquid, gaseous forms, we speak in such a way that we consider the material. Ancient man, when he spoke of what are for us today the physical states, saw them as elements, but these elements were not merely material; they were the spiritual that manifested itself in them. What surrounded man as the material world was for him just as much the external physical-spiritual expression of the spiritual-soul as the physical organism is for us an expression of the spiritual-soul - but all instinctively. This path has necessarily been abandoned in the last three to four centuries, when humanity passed over to something quite different, which then became guiding in civilization. Mankind moved on to what distinguished the observation of nature from mere observation, which is always connected with the instinctive, with the spiritual observation of nature, which is still hidden in the name 'contemplation'. Man moved on from mere observation of nature to what could be called experimental comprehension of nature.

Since Bacon and others have been working, the mere observation of nature has been replaced by the experimental comprehension of nature. We do the experiment in the laboratory, in the physics cabinet, which we then extend to the technical work. In that which we ourselves bring about as a condition for some natural event, we survey these very conditions. Through the experiment, we are in a different position than in mere observation of nature. In nature, I cannot know whether what is revealed to me, be it for my mind or for my imagination, whether that is also some totality or whether I have to delve into it, much, much deeper than the thing initially presents itself to me. In short, despite all exact observation, what I observe in nature remains before me as an unknown. When I have an experiment before me, I establish the conditions myself; I follow how one thing is evoked out of another, and what is then still unknown is basically what is actually of interest. When you design an experiment and then observe what can be observed, you are actually looking at the result of what follows from the conditions that are manageable for you. In the experiment, everything is transparent in a completely different way than what I observe in nature.

And so, little by little, people have become accustomed to regarding themselves as interpreters of nature in the manageable context of the experiment, to some extent to tracing the law of nature where they themselves can trace the conditions of its manifestation. However, this experimental method is still linked to a certain inner yearning that used to underpin knowledge through and through. In those ancient times, when there was as yet no technology and no natural science in our sense, what was regarded as science arose above all out of the desire for knowledge, out of the desire to recognize, to explore, “what holds the world together in its inmost being,” if I may express it in this way. Now that the experimental method has emerged, it is not only the desire for knowledge that drives us, but also the desire to recreate what forms nature. But the old desire for knowledge still lives on. We recreate what we want to see in the experiment in order to unravel nature itself through what we can see. In recent times, technology has emerged from this experimental method with a certain degree of implicitness, and with technology we have entered a new phase.

We can therefore say that in the history of human development, we first have research determined by the desire for knowledge, then the experimental method, which, however, still combines the yearning of the old quest for knowledge with the recreation of nature. But when we pass over - one need only follow what has actually happened - from what can be experienced with the experiment to what then happens out of the experiment with the recognized laws of nature through the technical designs, which intervenes so deeply in human and social life, we must say to ourselves: there is a third element present that passes over from what we still have in recreating nature to what is now creative in man himself. This creative power – I do not believe that I am speaking to completely insensitive souls when I say the following about this creative power: the person who, with that peculiar characteristic style, with that peculiar state of soul constitution is undergoing a technical training, feels differently in this training than someone who is undergoing, for example, a theological training, which is a reproduction of the oldest methods of knowledge, or an already experimental scientific training. Those who undergo an experimental scientific training apply the mathematical, the geometrical, the theoretical-mechanical, the photometric, and so on, to what they observe there. He, as it were, recalculates nature.

One stands on a completely different level of consciousness when one first has before one what is, as it were, completely inwardly transparent: the mathematical, the geometrical —, and when one applies this not only in experiment, thus in imitating nature, but when one applies it in completely free designing machines, when you see that what you have experienced as mathematics, as theoretical-mechanistic chemistry, penetrates into the design of a technical structure, you experience the world in a completely different way than the mere naturalist or the theorizing technician.

What is the actual difference? One often fails to consider this. Imagine that in our ordinary, trivial lives we describe everything as “real”, even that which is not real in a higher sense. We call a rose “real”. But is a rose real in a higher sense? If I have it here in front of me, torn from the rose stem, it cannot live. It can only be shaped as it is when it grows on the rose stem, when it grows out of the rose root. By cutting it off, I actually have a real abstraction in front of me, something that cannot exist as I have it in front of me. But this is the case with every natural structure to a certain extent. When I look at a natural formation, even at a crystal, which is the least likely to exist, I cannot understand it just by looking at it, because it basically cannot exist by itself any more than the rose can. So I would have to say: this crystal is only possible in the whole environment, perhaps having grown out of a geode in the mountain formation.

But when I have before me something that I myself have formed as a technical structure, I feel differently about it. You can feel that, even feel it as something radically significant in the experience of the modern human being, who looks at what technology has become in modern life from the perspective of his or her technical education. When I have a technical structure that I have constructed from mathematics, from theoretical mechanics, I have something in front of me that is self-contained. And if I live in what is basically the scope of all technical creation, then I have before me not just a reflection of the laws of nature, but in what has become technical entities out of the laws of nature, there is actually something new before me. It is something different that underlies the laws of the technical entities than that which also underlies inorganic nature. It is not just that the laws of inorganic nature are simply transferred, but that the whole meaning of the structure in relation to the cosmos becomes different, in that I, as a freely creative human being, transfer what I otherwise experience from the design of physical or chemical investigations into the technical structure.

But with that, one can say: in that modern humanity has come to extract the technical from the whole scope of the natural, in that we had to learn in modern times to live in the realm of the technical in such a way that we we stand with human consciousness in a completely different relationship to the technical than to that which is produced in nature, we say to ourselves: Now it is for the first time that we stand before a world that is now, so to speak, spiritually transparent. The world of nature research is in a certain way spiritually opaque; one does not see to the bottom of it. The world of technology is like a transparent crystal - spiritually understood, of course. With this, a new stage in the spiritual development of humanity has truly been reached, precisely with modern technology. Something else has entered into the developmental history of humanity. That is why modern philosophers have not known how to deal with what has emerged in this modern consciousness precisely through the triumphs of technology. Perhaps I may point out how little the purely philosophical, speculative way of thinking could do with what has seized modern human consciousness, precisely from the point of view of technology. Today we are much more seized by what emanates from the leading currents of human development than we realize. What is now general consciousness was not yet there when there were no newspapers, when the only spiritual communication was that people heard the pastor speak from the pulpit on Sundays. What is now general education flows through certain channels from the leading currents into the broad masses, without people being aware of it. And so, basically, what came through technical consciousness has, in the course of a very short time, shaped the forms of thought of the broadest masses; it lives in the broadest masses without them being aware of it.

And so we can say that something completely new has moved in. And where a consciousness has become one-sided — which, fortunately, we have not yet achieved in Europe — where a consciousness has become one-sided, almost obsessed with this abstraction, a strange philosophical trend emerged: the so-called pragmatism of William James and others, which says: truth, ideas that merely want to be truth, that is something unreal at all. In truth, only that which we see can be realized is truth. — We as human beings form certain goals; we then shape reality according to them. And when we say to ourselves: this or that is real according to a natural law —, we form a corresponding structure out of it. If we can realize in the machine, in mechanics, what we imagine, then it is proved to us by the application in life that this is true. But there is no other proof than that of application in life. And so only that which we can realize in life is true. The so-called pragmatism, which denies all logical internal pursuit of truth and actually only accepts the truth of truth through what is carried out externally, is presented today in the broadest circles as American philosophy. And that is something that some people in Europe have also been grasping at for decades, even before the war.

All those philosophers who still want to think in the old ways know of no other way to proceed with what has emerged as a newer technique, as the awareness of newer techniques, than to set the concept of truth aside altogether. By stepping out of the instinctive grasping of nature, out of the experimental recreation of nature, into the free shaping of nature, nothing remains for them but free external shaping. The inner experience of truth, that spiritual experience of the soul that can permeate the soul as a spiritual being, is actually denied by this, and only that which can be realized in the external functional forms is considered truth. That is to say, the concept of truth that is inherent in the human soul is actually set aside.

Now, another development is also possible; it is possible that we will experience how something is emerging in the actual substance of technical structures from that which is natural, which now contains nothing that we can intuit, but only that which we can comprehend. For if we cannot grasp it, we cannot shape it. By experiencing this, by thoroughly permeating ourselves with what can be experienced in it, a certain need must awaken in us all the more. This new external world presents itself to us without the inner realization of the ideas, it presents itself to us without the inner experience of the ideas. Therefore, through this new experience, we are prepared for the pure experience of what spirituality is, of what man, subtracted from all external observation, must experience within, as I tried to sketch out for you at the beginning of my reflections today.

And so I believe that, because we have advanced in the developmental history of humanity to a view of that reality that we can survey externally, where we can no longer see any demoniacal, ghostly aspect in externality, because we have finally arrived at the point where we can no longer interpret the external sensual as being opaque to us, behind which we can assume something spiritual. We must seek the forces for the spirit within us through the development of the soul.

It has always seemed to me that a truly honest experience of the consciousness that comes to us precisely from technology calls upon us - because otherwise what is intimately connected with our human nature would almost have to be lost - to experience that what spirituality is, to experience it inwardly, in order to add to the one pole of transparent mechanics, of transparent chemistry, that which can now be attained through spiritual insight, which can be presented to people in the spirit. It seems to me that it is necessary in our time for the spiritual vision of anthroposophy to reveal itself, for the reason that we have indeed reached a certain stage of development in human history.

And another thing, honored attendees, is added: with this newer technology, a new social life has emerged at the same time. I do not need to describe how modern technology has created modern industrialism, how this modern technology has produced the modern proletariat in the way it is today. But it seems to me that if we only want to take the standpoint of the earlier scientific method, the standpoint of that which emerges from observation, then our thoughts fall short. We cannot grasp what is truly revealed in social life. In order to grasp what emerges in social life from the human, it is necessary that we come to truths that reveal themselves only through human nature itself. And so I believe that Marxism and other similar quackery, which today put people in such turmoil, can only be overcome if one finds special methods that are necessary as a counterbalance to technology, applied to the social life of human beings, and if, through this, it becomes possible to bring spirituality into the outer life, into the broad masses, because one has found this spirituality through inner experience.

Therefore it is no mere accident that out of the same soil out of which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science arose for me, there also grew, truly unsought, what I tried to present in my book 'The Core of the Social Question'. I simply tried to draw the consequences for social life from spiritual-scientific knowledge. And what I presented in this book emerged quite naturally.

I do not believe that without spiritual science one can find the methods that grasp how man stands to man in social life. And I believe that, because we have not yet been able to recognize social life, this life will not allow itself to be conquered by us and that we will therefore initially be plunged into chaos at the moment when, after the terrible catastrophe of war, people are faced with the necessity of rebuilding it. It is necessary to carry out what is to be carried out on the basis of spiritual laws, not on the basis of the law that a misconceived understanding believes can be based on natural laws, as is the case in Marxism and other radical formulations of social science.

So, dear attendees, I was able to give a reason for something that is actually quite personal to me, right here in front of you. And I may say: Speaking to you now, I feel transported back to an earlier time, to the 1880s, when we in Central Europe were living in a time that was felt by everyone as a time of ascent. We – those people who, like me, have grown old – have now arrived at a point in time where the hopes of spring that emerged back then stand before our spiritual eyes in a certain, quite tragic form. Those who look back on what seemed like an invincible ascent at the time now look back on something that reveals to many people that it was, after all, a mistake in many respects.

In speaking to you, I am speaking to fellow students who are in a different situation. Many of you are probably the same age as I was when I experienced that springtime hope; now you are experiencing something that is very different from the fantasies that arose from the springtime hopes of that time in the human soul. But someone who is as filled with the possibility and necessity of spiritual knowledge as the one speaking to you can never be pessimistic about the power of human nature; he can only be optimistic. And that is why it does not appear to me as something that I do not present as a possibility before my soul, that once you have reached the age at which I am speaking to you today, you have gone through the opposite path – that opposite path that now leads upwards again from the power of the human soul, above all from the spiritual power of the human soul. And because I believe in man out of spiritual knowledge, I believe that one cannot speak, as Spengler does, of a downfall, of a death of Western civilization. But because I believe in the power of the soul that lives in you, I believe that we must come to an ascent again. Because this ascent is not caused by an empty phantom, but by human will. And I believe so strongly in the truth of the spiritual science described to you that I am convinced: This will of men can be carried, can cause a new ascent, can cause a new dawn. And so, my honored audience, I would like to close with the words that first fell on my ears as a young student when the new rector for mechanics and mechanical engineering in Vienna delivered his inaugural address. At that time, for people who also believed in a new ascent, and rightly believed in it, even if only a technical ascent came later, not a social, not a political ascent. But now we are in a period in which, if we do not want to despair, we can and must think only of an ascent. That is why I say what that man said to us young people back then: “Fellow students, I conclude by saying that anyone who feels honestly about the development of humanity in the face of what is to arise from all science and all technology can only say: Always forward!”

Pronunciation

Question: What entitles us to go beyond the limits of thinking, to leave the unity of thinking and to move from thinking to meditation?

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It seems to me that this question is about something very significant, which, however, can only be fully understood through thorough epistemological and epistemological reflection. But I will try to point out a few things that come into consideration when answering this question.

Perhaps I may draw attention to the last chapter that I added to the second edition of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, in which I described the development of philosophy itself and in which I then tried to show how, at the present moment in human development has arrived at the point where philosophy, so to speak, demands of itself this going beyond of thinking about the point of view of thinking that arises precisely when one has reached the limits of the knowledge of nature. I tried to show the following at the time:

People can, if they study the methods of knowledge acquisition in detail, as the great physiologist Du Bois-Reymond did, arrive at the point of view that Du Bois-Reymond expressed in his lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” at the famous natural science conference in Leipzig in the 1870s and also repeated in his lecture on “The Seven World Riddles”. I will only briefly point out that at that time Du Bois-Reymond spoke of the fact that with the application of what has been called “unified thinking” here, one comes to develop the so-called Laplacian mind, that is, to develop such thinking about matter as is possible when one seeks to grasp the course of the planets of a solar system using astronomical-mathematical methods.

If we now turn our attention, through a certain inner vision, to what is taking place within ourselves, if we try to make the subject into the object, then it turns out that this thinking, which we develop, cannot be defined as being there to depict some external world or to combine the facts of an external world. In what is thought about thinking, I must still see a last remnant of that old teleology, that old doctrine of purpose, which everywhere asks not why but for what purpose, which does not ask how it comes that the whole organization of man or any other organism or an organ like the hand is formed in a certain way, but which asks how this hand would have to be formed for a certain purpose. This is extended, even if one is no longer aware of it today or is not yet aware of it, to the consideration of thinking. One asks: What is thinking actually for? One does not always realize this, but unconsciously one asks. One thinks that thinking, and cognition in general, is there to enable one to draw an external world into oneself, so that what is outside is within, even if only in the form of an image. But now, one can follow realistically, but of course spiritually and realistically, what thinking actually is. Then one notices that thinking is a real power that shapes us.

You see, the spiritual science I am talking about here is not an abstract theory, not something that just wants to be a world view in ideas. Among other things, I have recently given a pedagogical course here in which I tried to apply spiritual science to pedagogy. It was a course for teachers before the Waldorf School was founded. In addition to this pedagogical course, I also gave a course that tried to take the therapeutic aspect of medicine from spiritual science and show how spiritual research can shed light on something that can never be fully understood if one only uses today's methods of physiology and biology for research. Now, I do not want to tell you something specifically therapeutic, but there is one thing I would like to mention to characterize the method. That is that today in conventional philosophy there is actually only speculation about the connection between the spiritual-mental and the physical-corporeal. There are all kinds of theories about interactions, about parallelism and so on, all kinds of materialistic interpretations of the soul processes. But actually, in a certain abstraction, we always have on the one hand 'observation of the spiritual-soul' and on the other hand 'observation of the physical body', and then we speculate how these two can come into a relationship with each other. Spiritual science really studies methodically - but precisely with the thinking that is awakened there - how the soul-spiritual works in the physical body. And even if I expose myself to some misunderstanding, that what I say is taken as paradoxical, I want to emphasize one thing:

When we observe a child as it grows up until the change of teeth around the seventh year, we notice that not only does the change of teeth take place, but that the configuration of the soul and spirit also undergoes a significant change. If you now think back over your own life, even if you are not yet conducting methodical research, you will find that the sharply contoured thoughts that then solidify into memories and reproduce themselves in the course of life, that these sharply can only be formed out of the power of thought at the time when the organism drives out what are called second teeth - it is something that comes from the whole organism, not just from the jaw. If one pursues this methodically, one comes to say to oneself: Just as, for example, in physical processes, some kind of force, such as mechanical force, can be transformed into heat and one then says: heat is released, heat appears, so in the human course of life one has to observe what is released in the organism – we have completely lost the expression for this – in the change of teeth, and what is then released when the change of teeth gradually takes place, what then passes from the latent state to the free state, what initially only worked internally. The second teeth have appeared; a certain connection of forces is at work, a system of forces within, until these second teeth emerge. Then this interrelatedness of forces is released, and in its release it appears as that spiritual-soul element which then gives the sharply contoured thoughts of memory.

With this example I only want to show how this spiritual science is actually applied to areas that one does not think of today. It is a continuation of the natural sciences. It is exactly the same form of thinking that is applied when one speaks of the release of warmth. The same form, which has only just emerged, is then applied to human development, and one says to oneself: that which appears as memory, as thinking power, that pushes the second teeth out - if I may express myself trivially.

In this case, one is not speculating about the connection between body and soul, but rather one is pursuing, in a completely empirical way, as one is accustomed to doing as a natural scientist, only with more highly developed methods of thought, that which can be observed. Only the whole of what one has around one is also observed spiritually. And so one comes to speak no longer in an abstract, nebulous way about the interaction of body and soul and spirit, but one states how at a certain age a force works physically, which then emancipates itself as a spiritual-soul force at a different age. And one comes to enter with the spirit into the material, to understand the material spiritually. That is the peculiar thing, that materialism has not understood the material, that it actually stands before matter in such a way that it remains incomprehensible to it. Materialism has not understood matter. Spiritual science, which is meant here, advances to the understanding of the material through its spiritual method. And it was indeed extremely interesting for the doctors and medical students who were listening [to the course for medical professionals] that they were able to be shown how one can really arrive at an effective representation of the spiritual and soul in the physical, how one can, for example, show how the heart, in its function, can be understood in a completely different way from the methods of today's physiology or biology, based on spiritual science.

So it is a matter of developing thinking not just through some kind of fanciful elaboration, but through a real continuation, which must simply pass through a borderline or critical state. In this passage through the borderline state, thinking becomes something else. You must not say that the unity of thinking is somehow destroyed by this. For example, the power that works in ice does not become something that should no longer be when the ice melts and turns into water. And the power that works in water does not become something else when the water passes through the boiling point and through vaporization. So it is a matter of the fact that at the point that I have characterized as a point of development for thinking, this thinking power passes through such a borderline state and then indeed appears in a different form, so that the experience differs from the earlier experience like steam from water. But this leads one to understand the thinking power itself, thinking – I could also prove the same for willing – as something that works realistically in man. In the thinking power that one has later in life, one then sees what has been working in the body during childhood. So everything becomes a unity in a remarkable way.

I readily admit that spiritual science can err in some individual questions. It is in its early stages. But that is not the point. The point is the direction of the striving. And so one can say: an attempt is made to observe that which reveals itself in thinking, in its formation of the human being, to observe it as a real force that forms and develops the human organism. Thought is observed in its reality. Therefore, one says to oneself in the end: Those who still look at thought in a critical way, asking only one question: Why is thought such that it combines external sense perceptions? – they are succumbing to a certain error, an error that I would like to characterize for you now.

Let us assume that the grain of wheat or the ear of wheat grows out of the root tip through the stalk; the plant-forming power manifests itself and can shape a new plant out of the seed, which in turn grows into a seed and so on. We see that the formative power at work in the plant is continuously effective in the plant itself, from formation to formation, as Goethe says: from metamorphosis to metamorphosis. In spiritual science, we try to follow thinking, which expresses itself in human beings, as a formative force, and we come to the conclusion that, in that thinking is a formative force in human beings, a side effect also comes about, and this side effect is actually only ordinary cognition. But if I want to characterize thinking in its essence according to this side effect, then I am doing exactly the same as if I say: What interests me is what shoots up through the root, the stalks into the ear as a formative force in the plant; that does not interest me; I start from the chemistry of nutrition and examine what appears in the wheat grain as a nutritional substance. Of course, this is also a legitimate way of looking at the wheat grain. You can look at it that way. But if I do, then I disregard what actually flows continuously in plant formation. And so it is with cognition. In what is usually thought by epistemologists, by philosophers and by those who want to ground natural science with some kind of observation, there are the same effects that occur when thinking, which actually wants to shape us, expresses itself outwardly in a side effect. It is as if what grows in the wheat plant is only thought of as the basis for the nutrition of another being. But it is wrong to examine the wheat only in terms of this. This has nothing to do with the nature of the wheat grain. I am introducing a different point of view.

Thus, philosophy today is on the wrong track when it examines cognition only in terms of the apprehension of the external world. For the essential thing is that cognition is a formative force in man, and the other thing appears as a mere side effect. And the way of looking at it, which wants to leave thinking only in the state in which it abstracts natural laws, collects perceptions, is in the same position as someone who would claim that one should not do plant biology to learn about the nature of the plant, but nutritional chemistry.

These are things that are not thought of today, but they play a major role in the further development of the scientific future, that scientific future that is at the same time also the future for such a social organization through which man, in grasping social life through the spirit, can truly intervene in this social organization. Because that seems to me to be precisely what led to the catastrophe: that we no longer master life because we have entered a state of human development in which life must be mastered by the spirit, by that spirit that is recognized from within and thereby also recognizes what confronts us in the external world.

Yes, my dear audience, with such things one is considered an eccentric in the broadest circles today, a dreamer, and in any case one does not expect such a person to really see through the outside world realistically. But I believe that I am not mistaken when I say: the application of spiritual science to the entire external world can be compared to the following. If someone lays down a horseshoe-shaped iron, a farmer comes and says: I will shoe my horse with that. Another, who knows what kind of object it is, says to him: That is not a horseshoe, it is a magnet, it serves a completely different purpose. But the farmer says: What do I care, I will shoe my horse with it. This is how it seems today: a scientific attitude that refuses to admit that the spiritual lives everywhere in the material. Those who deny the spiritual in the material are like the man who says, “What do I care about the magnet? I'll shoe my horse with the iron.” I do believe, however, that we must come to the realization that in all material things we have to recognize not only an abstract spiritual essence, but also a concrete spiritual essence, and that we must then be willing to study this concrete spiritual essence in the same way as we do the material, and that this will mean progress in cognitive and social terms for the future.

But it is easier to express speculative results and all kinds of philosophies about what the spirit is, it is easier to be a pantheist or the like out of speculation than to follow the example of strict natural science, only with the experiential method, as I have described it, to continue the scientific research and then to come to it, [to find the spiritual in the material] - just as one brings warmth to light, even if it does not express itself, by showing under which circumstances that which is latent reveals itself. If we apply this method, which is usually applied externally, and continue it internally, but especially to the whole human being, then we will understand the spiritual in the material from the inside out. And above all, that which has actually been resonating to us from ancient times and yet, for human beings, is a profound necessity, that which still resonates from the Apollonian temple at Delphi to the ears of the spirit: 'Man, know thyself!' And just as philosophers and theologians have spoken of this “know thyself”, so too has the naturalist Ernst Haeckel, who was more or less inclined towards materialism. This “know thyself” is deeply rooted in human nature, and the modern age has now reached a point where this “know thyself” must be approached in a concrete way.

With these suggestions, I believe I have shown that it is not a matter of sinning against the unity of thought, but of continuing thought beyond a boundary point. Just as it is not impossible to bring the forces in water to a completely different manifestation after passing through the boiling point, so too, there is no sin against what is experienced in the combining thinking with the perception when this thinking is taken beyond the boundary point. It is quite natural that a metamorphosis of thinking is then achieved. But by no means has a uniformity of thinking been violated. You will not find at all that spiritual science leads to the rejection of natural science, but rather to a deeper penetration of it. One arrives precisely at what I consider to be particularly important for the development of humanity: the introduction of scientific knowledge into the whole conception of the world, which fertilizes life, but which can only be achieved by our ascending from the spiritual observation of nature to the pure experience of the spiritual, which can then also pour into our will and become a living force in us. Because it can do this, because living knowledge makes us not only wise but also skillful, I believe in a future for humanity, in human progress, if in the future more attention is paid to the spiritual in the material than has been the case so far, if the spiritual is sought in the material, and this can then be transferred to the social, so that in the future the solution of the social question will appear to us as the spiritualization of social life, as spiritualization with that spirit which we can gain precisely as a continuation of scientific research.

Professor Dr. Th. Meyer: I am in complete agreement with Dr. Steiner that the limiting concepts of scientific knowledge are not the limiting concepts of existence and reality. I have also heard him speak with warm and moved heart of the hopes that the German people may cherish for the future despite their collapse. But I do have some doubts as to whether spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy will precisely possess the ability to lead to a new height to which Germany should strive. And I think the concern lies in the following: Dr. Steiner has repeatedly emphasized that the path to the higher worlds, of which he has spoken, is achieved through vision, through a seeing consciousness, through an experience, and that this path is absolutely scientific, not imaginative. This inner vision naturally has the same status as something that is evident in logic. That is to say, what I have seen with my outer or inner eyes cannot be disputed. I see a tree and do not need to prove that the tree must be there. There is no metaphysical proof for it, it is evident that the tree is there. Dr. Steiner now claims this evidence for his inner vision. That means he sees the higher world and sees the connections of the higher world, and because he sees them, precisely for that reason this higher world is there; it is indisputable. I do not want to dispute that the higher world is evident to him who beholds it. The only question is whether it is evident to everyone, and here I have a reservation. Ever since I have known anthroposophy, it has been based on the fact that this inner vision, this seeing consciousness, is ancient, that there have long been people who rise to the height of this seeing consciousness, have long since risen to it in India. That is why anthroposophy also adopts a whole series of expressions from the Indian language. It needs Indian expressions for the various spiritual insights it imparts. But the fact of the matter is that Dr. Steiner claims that he is bringing something new. However, there were a number of Theosophical Societies in Germany and England before Dr. Steiner came on the scene. Dr. Steiner originally belonged to these Theosophical Societies, but then came into conflict with them and resigned from these associations. Because he came into inner conflict with them, he no longer referred to his view of things as theosophy, but rather, because his inner vision differs from the inner vision of the other 'theosophists', he called it anthroposophy.

Now I would like to say: If the earlier seeing consciousness was mistaken, if Dr. Steiner was the first to bring the right thing, who guarantees me that another will not come and say: This higher seeing consciousness that Dr. Steiner brought has not reached the ultimate goal. Another can come to a completely different goal. In that case Steiner's vision becomes subjective. It is the vision of an individual. It is doubtful whether one can rely on it.

This is my concern, which arises in relation to the supersensible of the whole movement, that there is a different inner vision. There should be no discord between the different visionaries. But I do not want to conclude without expressing my sincere and warm thanks to Dr. Steiner for the many fine suggestions he has given in his speech tonight.

Rudolf Steiner: Ladies and Gentlemen, I do not need to keep you any longer, for I only wish to point out that the esteemed gentleman who spoke before me has made a few errors in the most important point that he has raised.

First of all, I would like to start from the end and correct a few errors. The fact is not that what I have presented to you here was preceded by the teachings of other theosophical societies to which I belonged. It is not like that. Rather, I began to write my interpretations of Goethe's world view in the 1880s. At the time, they were published as an introduction to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's “Deutsche National-Literatur” in Stuttgart. Anyone who follows them will find that the germ of everything I have presented to you today is to be found in those introductions. You will then find that in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, in the first edition of 1894, I tried to show how man gradually develops his thinking to a certain level, and how this is followed by what then leads discursive thinking into intuitive thinking.

Then it came about, in Berlin around 1902, that I was once asked to present what I had to say about the spirit in a circle that called itself a theosophical one. At that time I had become acquainted with various Theosophists, but what they had to say did not really prompt me to follow with any attention the Theosophical literature that was common in this Theosophical Society. And so, at that time, I simply presented what had emerged from my own intuitive research. As a result, people in England who had read my book Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life very soon translated these lectures into English and published them in an English newspaper. I was then invited to give lectures to a number of people in the society that called itself the Theosophical Society. I have never hesitated to speak to those who called upon me, whether they called themselves by this or that name, about what I had to say. But I have never advocated anything but what I myself had arrived at through my own research. During the time that I belonged to the Theosophical Society I advocated nothing but what I myself arrived at through my own research.

That I called what I presented “Anthroposophy” even then may be gathered from the fact that during the same period - not only later, when I had come to a different view from that of the Theosophical Society - I also presented to a different circle of people in Berlin, and I did not present a single iota of what I had to present from my research. And I announced my lectures there – so that people could not possibly be in error – as anthroposophical observations on the development of humanity. So for as long as any human being can bring me into contact with Theosophy, I have called my world view “Anthroposophy”. There has never been a break. That is what I would like to say about it now, so as not to keep you waiting too long.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, some people say that if you study the history of philosophy, you find that philosophers - let's start with Thales and go up to Eucken or others - have put forward all sorts of views and that they have often contradicted each other; how can you arrive at a certainty of knowledge? — That is precisely what I set out to do in my “Riddles of Philosophy”: to show that the matter is not so, but that what appear to be deviations in the various philosophies worthy of the name only ever come from the fact that the one looks at the world from one point of view, [the other from a different point of view]. If you photograph a tree from one side, what you see in the picture is only from a certain side. If you photograph the tree from a different side, you get a completely different picture - and yet it is the same tree. If you now come to the conclusion that many truly truthful philosophies do not differ from one another in that one deviates from the other, but that they simply look at one and the same thing from different points of view, because you cannot come to a single truth at all, then you realize that it is a prejudice to say that the philosophies contradict each other.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, I have shown that it is a prejudice to say that philosophers contradict each other. There are indeed some who contradict each other to a certain extent, but these are the ones who have simply made a mistake. If two children in a class solve a problem differently, one cannot say that it is therefore not certain which of them has found the right solution. If one understands the right solution, one already knows what the right thing is. So it cannot be deduced from the fact that things are different that they are wrong. That could only be deduced from the inner course of the matter itself. One would have to look at the inner course of the matter itself. And it is an external consideration to say that Steiner resigned from the Theosophical Society. First of all, I did not resign. After I was first dragged in with all my strength to present my own world view, nothing else at all, I was thrown out, and I may perhaps use the sometimes frowned-upon expression before you, ladies and gentlemen, for the following reason: dear attendees, because the “other kind of truth,” namely, the madness of those theosophists who finally managed to present an Indian boy who was said to be the newly appeared Christ; he was brought to Europe and in him the re-embodied Christ had appeared. Because I, of course, characterized this folly as folly and because at that time this folly found thousands of followers all over the world, these followers took the opportunity to expel me. I did not care. At any rate, I did not believe that what one had gained through inner research seemed uncertain simply because a society that calls itself theosophical expelled me, a society that claims that the Christ is embodied in the Indian boy.

Such things should not be considered superficially, simply overlooking the specifics and saying, “Well, there are different views.” One must take a closer look at what is occurring. And so I would like to leave it to you, when you have time - but you would have a lot to do with it - to compare all the quackery that has appeared in the so-called theosophical societies with what I have always tried to bring out of good science. I say this not out of immodesty, but out of a recognition of the reality of the matter and out of spiritual struggle. And bear in mind that I myself said today: “Some details may be wrong, but the important thing is to show a new direction.” It does not have to be the case that the absolutely correct thing is stated in all the details. So someone could well say that he is looking at a right-angled triangle and getting all sorts of things out of it. Then someone comes along and says: The square of the hypotenuse [of a right-angled triangle] is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. You can't be sure whether it could be universally true just because he is the only one saying it. No, if it has become clear to you through an intuitive insight that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, then a million people may say that it is not so, but you know it to be so and contradict a million people. For the truth does not merely have an external justification for its agreement, but above all it also has a justification in its inner substantiality.

Of course, anyone can check this. And I have never claimed anything other than that anyone who wants to can learn about the spiritual scientific method just as easily as they can learn about the methods of chemistry. But once the things have been researched, they can be verified by any thinking person. And so, too, can what I say or write and have written from the perspective of spiritual science be verified by any thinking person. There are bound to be various errors in it, of course, but that is the same as with other research. It is not about these errors in particular, but about the basic character of the whole.

Have I used a single Indian expression to you today? And if something is sometimes referred to by using some old expression, then that is just a technical term used because there is no such expression in current usage. Even if I can prove the Pythagorean theorem on the blackboard, or something else, can I be criticized for the fact that it was already there centuries ago? For me, it is not a matter of putting forward ancient Indian or similar ideas, but of putting forward what arises from the subject itself. Just as today, anyone who grasps and understands the Pythagorean theorem grasps it from the subject itself, even though it can be found at a certain point in time as the first to emerge, so of course some things must, but only seemingly, agree with what was already there. But it is precisely this that I have always most vigorously opposed: that what is being attempted here from the present point in the development of human consciousness has anything to do with some ancient Indian mysticism or the like. There are, of course, echoes, because instinctive knowledge found much in ancient times that must resurface today. But what I mean is not drawn from ancient traditions. It is really the case that what is true, what is true for me, is what I wrote down when I wrote the first edition of my book “Theosophy” in 1904: I want to communicate nothing other than what I have recognized through spiritual scientific research, just as any other scientific truth is recognized through external observation and deductive reasoning, and which I myself can personally vouch for. There may well be those who disagree, but I am presenting only that which I can personally vouch for. I say this not out of immodesty, but because I want to appear as a person who does not want to present a new spiritual science out of a different spirit than out of the spirit of modern science and also of newer technology, and because I think that one can only understand this new consciousness in terms of its scientific and technical nature, when one is driven by both to the contemplation of the spirit.

I ask that my words not be taken as if I had wanted to avoid what the honorable previous speaker said. No, I am grateful that I was given the opportunity to correct some factual errors that have become very widespread. But much, very much even, of what is being spread today about what I have been presenting in Stuttgart for decades is based on errors. And it seemed necessary to me, as the previous speaker has commendably done, to address what has been presented, because it is not just a matter of correcting what affects me personally, but also something that the previous speaker brought together with the substantive of the question, by correcting the historical.

Question: If Dr. Steiner proves just one point of spiritual science to me in the same way that the Pythagorean theorem can be proved, then I will gladly follow him, then it is science.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved attendees, who can really prove the Pythagorean theorem? The Pythagorean theorem cannot be proved by drawing a right-angled triangle on the blackboard and then using one of the usual methods to prove it. That is only one illustration of the proof. The point is that anyone who wants to prove the Pythagorean theorem is forced to have what can be constructed mathematically in their inner vision - even if only in the inner vision of the geometric spatial vision. So imagine a consciousness that did not have this spatial vision. He would not have before him the substantial element of that Pythagorean proposition, and it would be quite senseless to prove the Pythagorean theorem. We can only prove the Pythagorean theorem by having before us the substantial element of the conception and shaping of space. The moment we ascend to another form of consciousness, something else is added to the ordinary view of space. [...] The point, then, when it comes to the Pythagorean theorem, if it is to be proved, is that this view of space must underlie it. But for this it is first necessary to find one's way, as it were, into this new configuration of consciousness. But as long as one has no conception of the configuration of space, one cannot arrive at the observation that leads to the proof of the Pythagorean theorem. And one believes that the results of spiritual scientific research cannot be proved in the same way only as long as one has not yet made the transition from ordinary consciousness to the experiencing consciousness that I have described.

I have assumed that the experiencing consciousness is there first. And just as someone who does not have a spatial view cannot talk about the Pythagorean theorem, so one cannot talk about the proof of any proposition of spiritual science if one does not admit the whole view. But this view is something that must be achieved. It is not there by itself. But our time demands that one resolves to do something completely new if one wants to proceed to this progress of science. And I do believe that there is still a great deal to be overcome before spiritual science is advocated in broader circles in the way that Copernicus's world view was advocated over all earlier ideas of the infinity of space. In the past, people imagined space as a blue sphere. Now we imagine: there are limits to the knowledge of nature that cannot be overcome, or: we cannot go beyond ordinary thinking. Such things are well known to anyone who follows the history of human development. And I can only say: either what I have tried to present is a path to the truth – not the finished truth – in which case it will be trodden, or else it is a path to error, in which case it will be avoided. But that does no harm. What must not be extinguished in us, not be swept away by hasty criticism, is the everlasting striving upwards and onwards. And it is only this striving that really animates what I have tried to characterize today as the path that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take.

Question: We must have the firm belief that the effort we expend will also be worthwhile. Is it at all possible to recognize spiritual life in and of itself? Dr. Steiner says it is possible to recognize the spirit of the world, the spirit of all life and of all nature, and to come into contact with it. Is that possible with our spirit, with our thinking? I doubt it. Thinking consists of images. I think in pictures.

Rudolf Steiner: If I were to answer the question, I would have to take up a great deal of your time. I do not want to do that and I will not do it. I only regret that this question was not asked earlier, then I could have answered it more thoroughly.

You can find in my writings everywhere those things that I hypothetically object to and that are also discussed there, so that you can find a remedy for your doubts in the literature. Here, however, I would just like to say the following: It is the case with certain people that they make it virtually impossible for themselves to get ahead of the phenomenon through preconceived notions. They point to the phenomena and then say: What lies behind them, we do not recognize. The whole of Kantianism is basically based on this error. And my whole striving began with the attempt to combat this error. I would like to make clear to you, by means of a comparison, how one can gradually come to a resolution of these doubts.

When someone looks at a single letter, they can say: This single letter indicates nothing other than its own form, and I cannot relate this form to anything else; it tells me nothing more. And when I look at, say, an electrical phenomenon, it is just the same as looking at a letter that tells me nothing. But it is different when I look at many letters in succession and have a word, so that I am led from looking to reading. I also have nothing else in front of me than what is being looked at, but I advance to the meaning. There I am led to something completely different. And so it is also true that as long as one only grasps individual natural phenomena and individual natural elements — elements in the sense of mathematical elements — one can rightly say that one does not penetrate to the inner core. But if one tries to enliven them all in context, to set them in motion with a new activity, then, as in the transition from the mere individual letter to the reading of the word, something quite different will come about. That is why that which wants to be spiritual science is nothing other than phenomenology, but phenomenology that does not stop at putting the individual phenomena together, but at reading them in the context of the phenomena. It is phenomenology, and there is no sin in speculating beyond the phenomena; rather, one asks them whether they have something to say about a certain inner activity, not only in terms of details but also in context.

It is understandable that if one only looks at the individual phenomena, one can stand on the point of view that Haller stood on when he said:

No created spirit penetrates into the innermost part of nature,
happy he to whom it only shows the outer shell.

But one also understands when someone grasps the phenomenology as did Goethe – and spiritual science is only advanced Goetheanism – that Goethe, in view of Haller's words, says:

“Into the innermost recesses of nature –”
Oh, you philistine!
“No created spirit can penetrate,
Happy the one to whom she shows only
the outer shell."

I have heard this repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly;
Nature has neither core
nor shell,
She is all at once everything.
Only you, most of all, test her,
Whether you are core or shell.

When, some three years ago, at the request of a group of friends who were disturbed by the social aftermath of the Great War, I published my book The Threefold Commonwealth, the immediate result, from my point of view, was the profound misunderstanding it met with on every side. This was because it was promptly classed among the writings that have attempted, in a more or less Utopian manner, to advocate institutions which their creators envisaged as a sort of nostrum against the chaotic social conditions thrown up in the course of man's recent development. My book was intended not as a call for reflection about possible institutions, but as a direct appeal to human nature. It could not have been otherwise, given the fundamentals of spiritual science, as will be apparent from the whole tone of my lectures so far.

In many cases, for example, what I included solely to illustrate the central argument was taken to be my main point. In order to demonstrate how mankind could achieve social thinking and feeling and a social will, I gave as an example the way the circulation of capital might be transformed so that it would no longer be felt by many people to be oppressive, as frequently happens at present. I had to say one or two things about the price mechanism, the value of labour, and so on. All this solely by way of illustration. Anyone who seeks to influence human life as a whole must surely hearken to it first, in order to derive from it the human remedies for its aberrations, instead of extolling a few stereotyped formulae and recommending their indiscriminate application.

For anyone who has reacted to the social life of Europe in the last thirty or forty years, not with some preconceived attitude or other but with an open mind, it is clear above all that what is needed in the social sphere today is already prefigured in the unconscious will of mankind in Europe. Everywhere we find these unconscious tendencies. They exist already in men's souls, and all that is needed is to put them into words.

That is what made me give in to my friends and write the book I have mentioned. My purpose was to attempt, out of the sense of reality which—in all modesty we can say this—spiritual science instils in man, to observe what has been going on in Europe in recent years, beneath the surface of events and institutions, among all ranks and classes of society. What I wanted to say was not: I think that this or that is correct, but rather: This or that is secretly desired by the unconscious, and all that is required is for us to become conscious of the direction in which mankind is really trying to go. The reason for many of our social abuses today is precisely that this unconscious movement contradicts in part what mankind has worked out intellectually and embodied in institutions. Our institutions, in fact, run counter to what men today desire in the depths of their hearts.

There is another reason why I do not believe there is any real point today in simply advocating some particular Utopian institution. In the historical development of mankind in the civilized world we have entered a phase where any judgment about relationships among and between men, however shrewd, can be of no significance unless men accept it—unless it is something towards which they are themselves impelled, though for the most part unconsciously.

If we wish to reflect at all upon these things at the present time, therefore, I believe we must reckon with the democratic mood which has emerged in the course of man's history, and which now exists in the depths of men's souls—the democratic feeling that something is really valuable in the social sphere only if it aims, not at saying democratic things, but at enabling men to express their own opinions and put them over. My main concern was thus to answer the question: Under what conditions are men really in a position to give expression to their opinions and their will in social matters?

When we consider the world around us from a social standpoint, we cannot help concluding that, although it would be easy to point to a great deal that should be different, the obstacles to change are legion, so that what we may know perfectly well and be perfectly willing to put into practice, cannot be realized! There are differences of rank and class, and the gulfs between classes. These gulfs cannot be bridged simply by having a theory of how to bridge them; they result from the fact that—as I stressed so much yesterday—the will, which is the true centre of man's nature, is involved in the way we have grown into our rank or class or any other social grouping. And again, if you look for the obstacles which, in recent times, with their complicated economic conditions, have ranged themselves alongside the prejudices, feelings and impulses of class consciousness, you will find them in economic institutions themselves. We are born into particular economic institutions and cannot escape from them. And there also exists, I would say, a third kind of obstacle to true social co-operation among men; for those who might perhaps, as leaders, be in a position to exert that profound influence of which I have been speaking, have other limitations—limitations that derive from certain dogmatic teachings and feelings about life. While many men cannot escape from economic limitations and limitations of class, many others cannot rise above their conceptual and intellectual limitations. All this is already widespread in life and results in a great deal of confusion.

If, however, we now attempt to reach a clear understanding of everything which, through these obstacles and gulfs, has affected the unconscious depths of men's souls in recent decades, we become aware that in fact the essentials of the social problem are not by any means located where they are usually looked for. They reside in the fact that there has arisen in the recent development of civilized man, alongside the technology which is so complicating life, a faith in the supreme power of the monolithic state. This faith became stronger and stronger as the nineteenth century wore on. It became so strong and so fixed that it has never been shaken even in the face of the many shattering verdicts on the organization of society that multitudes of people have reached.

With this dogmatic faith that thus takes hold of men, something else is associated. Through their faith, people seek to cling to the proposition that the object of their faith represents a kind of sovereign remedy, enabling them to decide which is the best political system, and also—I will not say to conjure up paradise, but at least to believe that they are creating the best institutions conceivable.

This attitude, however, leaves out of account something that obtrudes itself particularly on those who observe life realistically, as it has been observed here in the last few days. Anyone who, just because he is compelled to mould his ideas to the spiritual world, acquires a true sense of reality, will discover that the best institutions that can be devised for a particular period never remain valid beyond that period and that what is true of man's natural organism is also true of the social organism.

I am not going to play the boring game of analogies, but by way of illustration I should like to indicate what can be discovered about society from a study of the human organism. We can never say that the human organism—or, for that matter, the animal or plant—will display only an upward development. If organisms are to flourish and to develop their powers from within themselves, they must also be capable of ageing and of dying off. Anyone who studies the human organism in detail finds that this atrophying is going on at every moment. Forces of ascent, growth and maturation are present continuously; but so too are the forces of decomposition. And man owes a great deal to them. To overcome materialism completely, he must direct his attention to just these forces of decomposition in the human organism. He must seek, everywhere in the human organ, ism, the points at which matter is disintegrating as a result of the process of organization. And he will find that the development of man's spiritual life is closely linked to the disintegration of matter. We can only understand the human organism by perceiving, side by side with the forces of ascent, growth and maturation, the continuous process of decay.

I have given this simply by way of illustration, but it really does illustrate what the impartial observer will discover in the social organism too. It is true that the social organism does not die, and to this extent it differs from the human organism; but it changes, and forces of advancement and decline are inherent in it. You can only comprehend the social organism when you know that, even if you put into practice the wisest designs and establish, in a given area of social life, something that has been learnt from conditions as they really are, it will after a time reveal moribund forces, forces of decline, because men with their individual personalities are active in it. What is correct for a given year will have changed so greatly, twenty years later, that it will already contain the seeds of its own decline. This sort of thing, it is true, is often appreciated, in an abstract way. But in this age of intellectualism, people do not go beyond abstractions, however much they may fancy themselves as practical thinkers. People in general, we thus discover, may admit that the social organism contains forces of dissolution and decline, that it must always be in process of transformation, and that forces of decline must always operate alongside the constructive ones. Yet at the point where these people affect the social order through their intentions and volition, they do not recognize in practice what they have admitted in theory.

Thus, in the social order that existed before the Great War, you could see that, whenever capitalism formed part of an upward development, it resulted in a certain satisfaction even for the masses. When in any branch of life capitalism was expanding, wages rose. As the process advanced further and further, therefore, and capitalism was able to operate with increasing freedom, you could see that wages and opportunities for the employment of labour rose steadily. But it was less noticed that this upward movement contained at the same time other social factors, which move in a parallel direction and involve the appearance of forces of decline. Thus with rising wages, for instance, conditions of life would be such that the rising wages themselves would gradually create a situation in which the standard of life was in fact raised relatively little. Such things were, of course, noticed, but not with any lively and practical awareness of the social currents involved.

Hence today, when we stand at a milestone in history, it is the fundamentals, not the surface phenomena of social life that we must consider. And so we are led to the distinct branches that go to make up our social life.

One of these is the spiritual life of mankind. This spiritual life—though we cannot, of course, consider it in isolation from the rest of social life—has its own determinants, which are connected with human personalities. The spiritual life draws its nourishment from the human individuals active in any period, and all the rest of social life depends on this. Consider the changes that have occurred in many social spheres simply because someone or other has made some invention or discovery. But when you ask: How did this invention or discovery come about? then you have to look into the depths of men's souls. You see how they have undergone a certain development and have been led to find, in the stillness of their rooms, so to speak, something that afterwards transformed broad areas of social life. Ask yourselves what is the significance, for social life as a whole, of the fact that the differential and integral calculus was discovered by Leibniz. If from this standpoint you consider realistically the influence of spiritual life on social life, you will come to see that, because spiritual life has its own determinants, it represents a distinctive branch of social life as a whole.

If asked to define its special quality, we would say: Everything that is really to flourish in the spiritual life of mankind must spring from man's innermost productive power. And we inevitably find that the elements that develop freely in the depths of the human soul are what is most favourable for social life as a whole.

We are, however, also affected by another factor, one that has become increasingly apparent in recent decades. It is the impulse—subsequently absorbed into a faith in the omnipotence of political life—for civilized humanity, out of the depths of its being, to become more and more democratic. In other words, aspirations are present in the masses of humanity for every human being to have a voice in determining human institutions. This democratic trend may be sympathetic or unsympathetic to us—that is not a matter of primary importance. What matters is that the trend has shown itself to be a real force in the history of modern man. But in looking at this democratic trend, we are particularly struck, if our thinking is realistic, by the way in which, out of an inner pressure, out of the spiritual life of Middle Europe ideas evolved, in the noblest minds, about the political community of men.

I do not mean to suggest that today we must still attach any special value to the “closed commercial state” put forward by one of the noblest of Germans. We need pay attention less to the content of Fichte's thought than to his noble purpose. I should, however, like to emphasize the emergence in a very popular form, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, of what we may call the search for concepts of natural law. At that time, certain eminent and high-minded men devoted themselves to the question: What is the relation of man to man? And what in general is man's innermost essence, socially speaking? They believed that, by a right understanding of man, they would also be able to find what is the law for men. They called this “the law of reason” or “natural law.” They believed that they could work out rationally which are the best legal institutions, the ones under which men can best prosper. You need only look at Rotteck's work to see how the idea of natural law still operated for many writers in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In opposition to this, however, there emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe the historical school of law. This was inspired by the conviction that you cannot determine the law among men by a process of reason.

Yet this historical school of law failed to notice what it is that really makes any excogitation of a rational law unfruitful; they failed to see that, under the influence of the age of intellectualism, a certain sterility had invaded the spiritual life of mankind. Instead, the opponents of natural law concluded that men are not competent to discover, from within their souls, anything about law, and that therefore law must be studied historically. You must look, they said, at man's historical development, and see how, from customs and instinctive relationships, systems of law have resulted.

The historical study of law? Against such a study Nietzsche's independent spirit rebelled in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. He believed that, if we are always looking solely at what has exercised mankind historically, we cannot be productive and evolve fruitful ideas for the present; the elemental forces that live in man must revolt against the historical sense, in order that, from these forces, there may develop a constitution of social relationships.

Among leading personalities there developed in the nineteenth century, at the height of intellectualism, a battle over the real foundations of law. And this also involved a battle over the foundations of the state. At least, it was generally assumed so at the time. For the state is, ultimately, no more than the sum total of the individual institutions in which the forces of law reside. The fact that the ability to detect the foundations of law had been lost also meant, therefore, that it was no longer possible to attain clarity about the real nature of the state. That is why we find—not simply in theory, but in real life as well—that, during the nineteenth century, the essence of the state became, for countless people, including the masses, a problem that they had to solve.

Yet this applied more particularly, I would say, to the upper and more conscious reaches of civilized humanity. From underground, the democratic attitude I have described was tunnelling its way towards the surface. Its appearance, if properly understood, leads us to conceive the problem of the nature of law in a way that is much deeper and much closer to reality than is usual today. There are many people today who think it self-evident that, from within the individual, you can somehow arrive at what is actually the law in a given sphere. Modern jurists, it is true, soon lose sight of the ground when they attempt to do so; and what they find, when they philosophize in this way or indeed think they are reflecting in a practical way upon life, is that law loses its content for them and becomes an empty form. And then they say: This empty form must be given a content; the economic element must be decanted into it.

On the one hand, then, there exists a definite sense of man's powerlessness to reach a concept or feeling of law from within himself. On the other hand, we do continually attempt to derive the nature of law from man himself. And yet the democratic attitude jibs at any such attempt. What it says is that there is no such thing as a general abstract determination of law; there is only the possibility that the members of a particular community may reach an understanding and say to one another: “You want this from me, I want that from you,” and that they will then come to some agreement about their resulting relations. Here, law springs exclusively from the reality of what men desire from one another. There cannot therefore be any such thing as a law of reason; and the “historical law” that has come into being can always do so again if only we find the right foundation for it. On this foundation, men can enter into a relationship in which, through mutual understanding, they can evolve a realistic law. “I want to have my say when law is being made”—so speaks the democratic attitude. Anyone, then, who wishes to write theoretically about the nature of law cannot spin it out of himself; he just has to look at the law that appears among men, and record it. In natural science too, our view of the phenomenal world does not allow us to fashion the laws of nature out of our head; we allow things to speak to us and shape natural laws accordingly. We assume that what we try to encompass in the laws of nature is already created, but that what exists in the legal sphere has to be created among men. This is a different stage of life. In this realm, man stands in the position of creator—but as a social being, alongside other men—so that a life may come about that shall infuse the meaning of human evolution into the social order. This is precisely the democratic spirit.

The third thing that presents itself to people today and calls for social reorganization is the complicated economic pattern which has developed in recent times, and which I need not describe, since it has been accurately described by many people. We can only say: This economic pattern certainly results from factors quite different from those controlling the other two fields of the social organism—spiritual life, where all that is fruitful in the social order must spring from the individual human personality (only the creativity of the individual can make the right contribution here to the social order as a whole), and the sphere of law, where law, and with it the body politic, can only derive from an understanding between men. Both factors—the one applicable to spiritual life and the other to political and legal life—are absent from economic life.

In economic life, what may come about cannot be determined by the individual. In the nineteenth century, when intellectualism enjoyed such a vogue among men, we can see how various important people—I do not say this ironically—people in the most varied walks of life, gave their opinion about one thing and another—people who were well placed in economic life, and whose judgment one would have expected to trust. When they came to express an opinion about something outside their own speciality, something that affected legislation, you often found that what they said, about the practical effect of the gold standard for example, was significant and sensible. If you follow what went on in the various economic associations during the period when certain countries were going over to the gold standard, you will be astonished at the amount of common sense that was generated. But when you go further and examine how the things that had been prophesied then developed, you will see, for instance, that some very important person or other considered that, under the influence of the gold standard, customs barriers would disappear! The exact opposite occurred!

The fact is that, in the economic sphere, common sense, which can help one a very great deal in the spiritual sphere, is not always a safe guide. You gradually discover that, as far as economic life is concerned, the individual cannot reach valid judgments at all. Judgments here can only be arrived at collectively, through the co-operation of many people in very different walks of life. It is not just theory, but something that will have to become practical wisdom, that truly valid judgments here can arise only from the consonance of many voices.

The whole of social life thus falls into three distinct fields. In that of spiritual life, it is for the individual to speak. In the democratic sphere of law, it is for all men to speak, since what matters here is the relationship of man to man on a basis of simple humanity—where any human being can express a view. In the sphere of economic life, neither the judgment of the individual, nor that which flows from the un-sifted judgments of all men, is possible. In this sphere, the individual contributes, to the whole, expert knowledge and experience in his own particular field; and then, from associations, a collective judgment can emerge in the proper manner. It can do so only if the legitimate judgments of individuals can rub shoulders with one another. For this, however, the associations must be so constituted as to contain views that can rub shoulders and then produce a collective judgment.—The whole of social life, therefore, falls into these three regions. This is not deduced from some Utopian notion, but from a realistic observation of life.

At the same time, however—and this must be emphasized over and over again—the social organism, whether small or large, contains within itself, together with constructive forces, also the forces of decline. Thus everything that we feed into social life also contains its own destructive forces. A constant curative process is needed in the social organism.

When we look at spiritual life from this standpoint, we can even say, on the lines of the observations put forward here in the last few days: in Oriental society, the life of the spirit was universally predominant. All individual phenomena—even those in political and in economic life—derived from the impulses of spiritual life, in the way I have been describing. If now you consider the functioning of society, you find that for a given period—every period is different—there flow forth from the life of the spirit impulses that inform the social structures; economic associations come into being on the basis of ideas from spiritual life, and the state founds institutions out of spiritual life. But you can also see that spiritual life has a constant tendency to develop forces of decline, or forces from which such forces of decline can arise. If we could see spiritual life in its all-powerful ramifications, we should perceive how it constantly impels men to separate into ranks and classes. And if you study the reasons for the powerful hold of the caste system in the Orient, you will find that it is regarded as a necessary concomitant of the fact that society sprang from spiritual impulses. Thus we see that Plato still stresses how, in the ideal state, humanity must be divided into the producer class, the scholar class and the warrior class—must be divided, that is, into classes. If you analyse the reasons for this, you will find that differences of rank and class follow from the gradation which is implicit in the supreme power of spiritual life. Within the classes, there then appears once more the sense of human personality, which experiences them as prejudicial to the social system. There thus always exist, within spiritual life, opportunities for the appearance of gulfs between classes, ranks, even castes.

We now turn to the field of politics, and it is here especially that we must look for what I have been calling the subjection of labour, in the course of man's development, to the unitary social organism. It is precisely because theocracy, coming from Asia, developed into a political system that is now dominated by concepts of law, that the problem of labour arises. In so far as each individual was to attain his rights, there developed a demand for labour to be properly integrated into society. Yet as law cast off its links with religion and moved further and further towards democracy, there insinuated itself more and more into men's lives a certain formalized element of social thinking.

Law developed in fact from what one individual has to say to another. It cannot be spun out of a man's own reasoning faculty. Yet from the mutual intercourse of men's reasoning faculties—if I may so put it—a true life of law arises. Law is inclined, therefore, towards logic and formalized thought. But humanity, on its way down the ages, goes through phases of one-sided development. It went through the one-sided phase we call theocracy, and similarly, later on, it goes through the one we call the state. When it does so, the logical element of social life is cultivated—the element of excogitation. Just think how much human ratiocination has been expended on law in the course of history!

In consequence of this, however, mankind also proceeds towards the capacity for abstraction. You can sense how human thinking, under the influence of the principle of law, becomes increasingly abstract. What mankind acquires in one sphere, however, is extended at certain periods to the whole of human life. In this way, I would say, even religion was, as I have indicated earlier, absorbed into the juridical current. The God of the Orient, universal legislator and giver of Grace to men, became a God of judgment. Universal law in the cosmos became universal justice. We see this especially in the Middle Ages. As a result, however, there was imported into men's habits of thought and feeling a kind of abstraction. People tried increasingly to run their lives by means of abstractions.

In this way, abstraction came to extend to religion and spiritual life, on the one hand, and economic life, on the other. Men began to trust more and more in the omnipotence of the state, with its abstract administrative and constitutional activity. Increasingly, men regarded it as progressive for spiritual life, in the shape of education, to be absorbed completely into the sphere of the state. Here, however, it could not avoid being caught up in abstract relationships, such as are associated with the law. Economic activity, too, was absorbed into something that was felt to be appropriate when the state is in control. And at the time when the modern concept of the economy was formed, it was the general opinion that the state should be the power above all which determined the proper organization of economic activity. In this way, however, we subject the other branches of life to the rule of abstraction. This statement itself may sound abstract, but in fact it is realistic. Let me demonstrate this with regard to education.

In our age, where common sense is so commonplace, men can come together in a committee, in order to work out the best pedagogic procedures. When they meet together in this way and work out how education should be organized and just what should be covered by this class or the other in the timetable, they will—and I say this without irony—work out first-rate things. I am convinced that, so long as they are fairly sensible—and most people are nowadays—they will draw up ideal programmes. We live—or did live at least, for some attempt is being made to escape—in the age of planning. There is certainly no shortage of programmes, of guiding principles in any given area of life! Society after society is founded and draws up its programme: a thing is to be done in this way or that. I have no objection to these programmes, and indeed I am convinced that no one who criticizes them could draw up better ones. But that is not the point. What we work out, we can impose on reality; only reality will not then be suitable for men to live in. And that is what really matters.

And so we have reached a kind of dead end in the matter of programmes. We have seen recently how, with the best and noblest of intentions for the development of mankind, a man drew up one of these programmes for the entire civilized world, in fourteen admirable points. It was shattered immediately it came into contact with reality. From the fate of Wilson's fourteen abstract points—which were the product of shrewd intellects, but were not in accordance with reality, not quarried from life itself—an enormous amount can be learnt.

In education and teaching, it is not programmes that matter, for they after all are only a product of politics and law. You can, with the best of intentions, issue a directive that this or that must be done; in reality, however, we are dealing with a staff composed of teachers with a particular set of capacities. You have to take these capacities into account in a vital way. You cannot realize a programme. Only what springs from the individual personalities of the teachers can be realized. You must have a feeling for these personalities. You will need to decide afresh, each day, out of the immediate life of the individual, what is to happen. You will not be able to set up a comprehensive programme: this remains an abstraction. Only out of life itself can something be created. Let us imagine an extreme case: In some subject or other, there are available only teachers of mediocre ability. If, at a time when they were free of teaching and had nothing to do but think, these teachers were to work out pedagogic aims and issue regulations, even they would no doubt come up with something extremely sensible. But the actual business of teaching is another thing altogether; all that matters there is their capabilities as whole men. It is one thing to reckon with what derives solely from the intellect, and quite another to reckon with life itself. For the intellect has the property of overreaching; fundamentally, it is always seeking to encompass the boundless nature of the world. In real life, it should remain a tool in a specific concrete activity.

Now if we reflect particularly on the fact that what takes place between human beings, when they confront each other as equals, can turn into law—then we must say: The things humanity develops are all right when they are the outcome of contemporary abstraction; for that is how men do feel. Men establish legal relations with one another, based on certain abstract concepts of man, and they arrive at these legal relations through the circumstance that they stand together on democratic ground. Yet it will never be possible in this way to create for the whole of humanity something that springs directly from the life of the individual; but only what is common to the whole of humanity. In other words: to be quite honest, there cannot well up, from a democratic foundation, what ought to spring from the individuality of man within spiritual life.

We must, of course, realize that a belief in the predominance of law and politics was a historical phenomenon, and that it was historically legitimate for modern states, at the time when they came into being, to take over responsibility for the schools, since they had to take them away from other authorities who were no longer administering them properly. You should not try to correct history retrospectively. Yet we must also perceive clearly that in recent years there has developed a movement to shape the life of the spirit once again as something independent, so that it contains within itself its own social structure and its own administration; and also that what takes place in individual classes can stem from the vital life of the teacher and not from adherence to some regulation or other. Despite the fact that it has been regarded as a step forward to hand over spiritual life, and with it schools, to the state, we must make up our minds to reverse this trend. Only then will it be possible for the free human personality to achieve expression within spiritual life, including the sphere of education. Nor need anyone be afraid that authority would suffer in consequence! Where a productive influence is exercised by the human personality, the individuals concerned yearn for a natural authority. We can see this at work in the Waldorf School. Everyone there is pleased when one person or the other can be his authority, because he needs what the individual talents of that person have to offer.

It then remains possible for politics and law to function on a democratic basis.

Here again, however, the fact is that, simply through its tendency to abstractness, the state contains within itself the germ of what are later to become forces of decline. Anyone who studies how, by virtue of the existence of this tendency, what men do in the political and legal sphere cannot help becoming increasingly cut off from any concrete interest in a particular aspect of life, will also realize that it is precisely political life which provides the basis for the abstractness that has become increasingly apparent in connection with the circulation of capital. The formation of capital nowadays is much criticized by the masses. But the campaign against it, as conducted at present, reveals an ignorance of the true situation. Anyone who wanted to abolish capital or capitalism would have to abolish modern economic and social life as a whole, because this social life cannot survive without the division of labour, and this in turn implies the formation of capital. In recent times, this has been demonstrated particularly by the fact that a large part of capital is represented by the means of production. The essential point, however, is that in the first place capitalism is a necessary feature of modern life, while on the other hand, precisely when it becomes nationalized, it leads to the divorce of money from specific concrete activities. In the nineteenth century, this was carried so far that now what actually circulates in social life is as completely divorced from specific concrete activities, as the bloodless ideas of a thinker who lives only in abstractions are divorced from real life. The economic element that is thus divorced from specific activities is money. When I have a certain sum in my pocket, this sum can represent any given object in the economy or even in spiritual life. This element stands in the same relation to specific concrete activities as a wholly general concept does to specific experiences. That is why crises must inevitably arise within the social order.

These crises have been extensively studied. A theory of crises is prominent in Marxism, for example. The mistake lies in attributing the crises to a single chain of causes, whereas in fact they are due to two underlying trends. There may be too much capital, in which case the excess that is circulating gives rise to crises. It may also happen, however, that too little capital is available, and this also leads to crises. These are two different types of crisis. Such things are not examined objectively, even by political economists today. The fact is that, in the real world, a single phenomenon may have very varied causes.

We can see, therefore, that, just as spiritual life tends to develop forces of decline arising from differences of class, rank and caste, so too the life that is moving towards abstractions—and rightly so—includes a tendency, on the one hand to develop the constructive forces that are part of a legitimate formation of capital, but on the other hand to give rise to crises because capitalism results in abstract economic activity, in which a capital sum can be used indifferently for one purpose or another.

When people realize this, they become social reformers and work out something that is designed to produce a cure. But now you come up against the fact that, although the individual does shape economic life by contributing his experiences through the appropriate associations, he cannot as a single individual determine the shape of economic life. That is why, when we go beyond the political and legal and the spiritual spheres, I have posited the association as a necessity of economic life.

In this connection, I was struck by the fact that, when I was speaking in Germany to a fairly small group of working-men about associations, they said to me: We have heard of very many things, but we don't really know what associations are; we haven't really heard anything about them. An association is not an organization and not a combination. It comes into being through the conflux of the individuals within the economy. The individual does not have to adopt something handed out from a central body, but is able to contribute the knowledge and ability he has in his own field. From a collaboration in which each gives of his best, and where what is done springs from the agreement of many—only from such associations does economic life in general derive.

Associations of this kind will come into being. They are certain to arise, I have no doubt of that. To anyone who tells me this is Utopian, my reply is: I know that these associations spring only from subconscious forces in man. We can, however, foster them by the reason and make them arise more quickly, or we can wait until they arise from necessity. They will link together those engaged in production and commerce, and the consumers. Only production, distribution and consumption will have any part in them. Labour will come more and more under the aegis of law. On the question of labour, men must reach an understanding in a democratic manner. In consequence, labour will be insulated from the only force which can be effective in economic life—that which is the resultant of a collective judgment in associations linking producers and consumers, together with distributors.

In the sphere of economic life, therefore—in the associations—goods alone will have a part to play. This will, in turn, have an important consequence: we shall cease entirely to have any fixed notions of the price and value of an article. Instead, we shall say: the price and value of an article is something that changes with the surrounding circumstances. Price and value will be set by the collective judgment of the associations. I cannot go into this at length here; but you can follow it up in my book The Threefold Commonwealth.

I have been trying to outline how, from our observation, we become aware that social life falls into three regions, shaped by quite distinct and different factors: spiritual life, legal and political life, and economic life. Within the recent development of civilization, these three have been achieving some degree of independence. To understand this independence, and gradually to allocate to each field what belongs to it, so that they may collaborate in an appropriate manner, is the important task today.

Men have reflected in very different ways on this tripartite articulation of the social organism. And, as my Threefold Commonwealth began to attract attention here and there, people pointed out various things in it that were already foreshadowed by earlier writers. Now I do not wish to raise the question of priority at all. What matters is not whether it was a particular individual who discovered something, but how it can become established in life. If a lot of people were to hit on it, one would be only too pleased. One point must be noted, however: when Montesquieu in France outlines a sort of tripartite division of the social organism, it is merely a division. He points out that the three sections have quite different determinants, and that we must therefore keep them separate. This is not the tenor of my book. I do not try to distinguish spiritual life, legal life and economic life, in the way that you would distinguish in man the nervous system, the respiratory system and the metabolic system, if at the same time you wanted to insist that they are three systems, each separate from the other. In itself, such a division leads nowhere; you can advance only by seeing how these three different systems function together, and how they best combine into a single whole by each operating on its own terms. The same is true of the social organism. When we know how to establish spiritual life, political and legal life, and economic life on the terms that are native to each, and how to let them run off their native sources of power, then the unity of the social organism will also follow. And then you will find that certain forces of decline are released within each of these fields, but that they are countered through collaboration with other fields. This suggests, not a tripartite division of the social organism, as in Montesquieu, but a threefold articulation of it, which yet comes together in the unity of the social organism as a whole, by virtue of the fact that, after all, every individual belongs to all three regions. The human personality—and that is what is all-important—inhabits this triform social organism in such a way as to unite the three parts.

Especially in the light of what I have been saying, then, we find that what we must aim at is not a division but an articulation of the social organism, in order that a satisfying unity may be attained. And in a more superficial way, you can also see that, for over a century, mankind in Europe has tended to seek such an articulation. It will come about, even if men do not consciously desire it; unconsciously, they will so conduct themselves, in the economic, spiritual, and political and legal spheres, that it will come about. It is demanded by the actual evolution of humanity.

And we can also point to the fact that the impulses which correspond to these three different aspects of life entered European civilization at a particular moment in the shape of three quintessential ideals, three maxims for social life. At the end of the eighteenth century in Western Europe, a demand spread abroad for liberty, equality and fraternity. Is there anyone who bears with the development that has taken place in modern times, who would deny that these maxims contain three quintessential human ideals? Yet on the other hand it must be admitted that there were many people in the nineteenth century who argued ingeniously against the view that a unified social organism or state can exist if it has to realize these three ideals all together. Several persuasive books were written to demonstrate that liberty, equality and fraternity cannot be completely and simultaneously combined within the state. And one must admit that these ingenious arguments do evoke a certain scepticism. In consequence, people once again found themselves face to face with a contradiction imposed by life itself.

Yet it is not the nature of life to avoid contradictions; life is contradictory at every point. It involves the repeated reconciliation of the contradictions that are thrown up. It is in the propagation and reconciliation of contradictions that life consists. It is, therefore, absolutely right that the three great ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity should have been put forward. Because it was believed in the nineteenth century, however, and right down to our own times, that everything must be centrally organized, people went off the rails. They failed to perceive that it is of no importance to argue about the way in which the means of production be employed, capitalism developed, etc. What matters is to enable men to arrange their social system to accord with the innermost impulses of their being. And in this connection we must say: We need to comprehend, in a vital way, how liberty should function in spiritual life, as the free and productive development of the personality; how equality should function in the political and legal sphere, where all, jointly and in a democratic manner, must evolve what is due to each individual; and how fraternity should function in the associations, as we have called them. Only by viewing life in this way do we see it in its true perspective.

When we do so, however, we perceive that the theoretical belief that it is possible to accommodate all three ideals uniformly in the monolithic state has led to a contradiction within life. The three ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity can be understood in a vital way only when we realize that liberty has to prevail in spiritual life, equality in the political and legal sphere, and fraternity in the economic sphere. And this not in a sentimental manner, but in a way that leads to social systems within which men can experience their human dignity and their human worth. If we understand that the unified organism can come into being only when out of liberty spirit develops in a productive way, when equality functions in the political and legal sphere and fraternity in the economic one, in the associations, then we shall rise above the worst social dilemmas of the present.

For man gains a spiritual life that is rooted in truth only out of what can freely spring from him as an individual; and this truth can only make its appearance if it flows directly from men's hearts. The democratic tendency will not rest easy until it has established equality in the political and legal sphere. This can be achieved by rational processes; if not, we expose ourselves to revolutions. And in the economic field, fraternity must exist in the associations.

When this happens, the law—which is founded on a human relationship in which like meets like—will be a vital law. Any other kind of law turns into convention. True law must spring from the meeting of men, otherwise it becomes convention.

And true fraternity can found a way of life only if this derives from economic conditions themselves, through the medium of the associations; otherwise, the collaboration of men within groups will establish not a way of life, but a routine existence, such as is almost invariably the case at the present time.

Only when we have learnt to perceive the chaotic nature of social conditions that spring from the predominance of catchwords instead of truth in the spiritual sphere, convention instead of law in the political and legal sphere, and routine instead of a way of life in the economic sphere, shall we be seeing the problem clearly. And we shall then be following the only path that affords a correct approach to the social problem.

People will be rather shocked, perhaps, to find that I am not going to approach the social problem in the way many people think it ought to be approached. What I am saying now, however, is based solely on what can be learnt from reality itself with the aid of spiritual science, which is everywhere orientated towards reality. And it turns out that the fundamental questions of social life today are these:

How can we, by a correct articulation of the social organism, move from the all too prevalent catch-word (which is thrown up by the human personality when its creative spirit is subordinated to another) to truth, from convention to law, and from a routine existence to a real way of life?

Only when we realize that a threefold social organism is necessary for the creation of liberty, equality and fraternity, shall we understand the social problem aright. We shall then be able to link up the present time properly with the eighteenth century. And Middle Europe will then be able, out of its spiritual life, to reply, to the Western European demand for liberty, equality, fraternity: Liberty in spiritual life, equality in political and legal life, and fraternity in economic life.

This will mean much for the solution of the social problem, and we shall be able to form some idea of how the three spheres in the social organism can collaborate, through liberty, equality and fraternity, in our recovery from the chaotic situation—spiritual, legal, and economic—which we are in today.

The End.

First, in case it should mislead, a word about the English title. The German original bears the formidable superscription: Westliche und östliche Weltgegensätzlichkeit; and the modest little English word “tension” signifies very much more than the diplomatic and political strain, which is more or less chronic now between the Western democracies on the one hand and Russia and the Communist countries on the other. At the same time the book which follows is far from irrelevant to that strain, of which it is in a measure prophetic.

“The spectre of Eastern Europe,” we read on page page 115 (and these words were spoken in 1922), “gazes threateningly across to the West.” But it is only at surface level, and when something specific is amiss, that a “tension” betokens an unnatural strain, or one that threatens disaster unless it is relaxed. Thus both modern psychology, and modern theology, often speak of “holding in tension” as a normal and healthy activity. The clash of two opposites—such for instance as individual freedom and responsibility—will always create a tension. Whether the tension snaps in a neurosis or a war, or whether it is “held” in health and strength and peace, will often depend on whether the clash is merely encountered as a bewildering contradiction, or is understood in depth as a necessary and life-engendering polarity.

Since the end of the nineteenth century the world has been moving steadily in the direction of a single closed economy; and now willy-nilly it seems on the way to becoming a single social unit also. The only question is: of what kind is that unity to be? A living unity, as distinct from the monolithic unity of mere spatial cohesion, always (as Coleridge among others has pointed out) springs from a polarity; and polarity involves, not only the two opposite extremes or poles, but also, as its tertium quid, the vibrant tension in the midst between them. It is a principal object of this book to furnish an understanding in depth of what most unites the habitable globe, historically and culturally, into an organic whole, and this necessarily involves an understanding of the abiding tension between East and West.

To understand anything in depth involves some knowledge of how it came into being, and here the attempt is made to view the relation between typically Eastern and typically Western modes of consciousness in the light of the whole process of the evolution of human consciousness. In this Rudolf Steiner was up against the difficulty that the very existence of such a process was then—and it is still today—not generally recognized. That this is surprising “in an age permeated with evolutionary concepts” has recently been pointed out by Mr. Charles Davy, in his book Towards a Third Culture, in the course of which he defines the evolution of consciousness as “a constant-direction change in the normal experience of the perceived world.” It is the more surprising because it would seem that, without such a concept, little can be accomplished in the way of understanding man and his problems. Examples of this abound in the ensuing pages. Thus, just as the concept of biological evolution is necessary before we can distinguish whether the resemblance of one living form to another is due to a superficial analogy or to a true homology rooted in their nature and growth, so does the concept of evolution of consciousness enable us to discern the purely superficial nature of the resemblance between “division of labour” in oriental antiquity and in modern times. Or again, in the same lecture (8) in which the above example occurs, compare with the usual chatter about “escapism” Steiner's treatment of the old conflict between the image of the artist as a “committed” human being and the image of “art for art's sake.”

In his book, The Yogi and the Commissar, which appeared in 1945, Arthur Koestler began by placing his Yogi and Commissar at the opposite poles of a “spectrum” of human nature or social behaviour—an ultra-violet and an infra-red pole, between which all human types subsist. The Yogi, he said, accepts the inner spirit as the source of energy; he attempts to produce change from within. The Commissar does not believe in any “within;” he attempts to change the behaviour of man by manipulation from without. Koestler defines his Commissar as “the human type which has completely severed relations with the subconscious.” And there is more to the same effect. But this promising introduction is never developed; nor does Koestler so much as notice the paradox implicit in his own striking choice of labels—redolent, as they are, of a polarity between East and West, and yet with the “Yogi” corresponding, not to the Eastern (as one would expect), but to the anti-communist Western pole.

Let the reader contrast with this brilliant but inadequate aperçu the counter concepts of “maya” and “ideology” which Steiner builds up in Lecture 4 on the historical foundations (including a careful appraisal of actual yoga) which he has laid in the first three lectures. They are the fruit of understanding in depth, because they are rooted in a deep grasp of the whole history of man and of his place on earth and in the cosmos.

In the threefold nature of man, as Steiner expounded it, the rest is as it were implicit. Past, present and future; religion, art and science; the slow shift of the earth's cultural centre of gravity from orient to Occident, and with that the transition from an ancient instinctual wisdom to our modern self-consciousness, subsisting in free but lifeless thoughts—all this (such is the message of the following pages) can really only be contemplated and understood in understanding and contemplating threefold man. In his head, taken alone, the human being, qua thinker, does really reach a “commissar's” inner emptiness. He also experiences “the terror of that emptiness,” as Steiner points out on page 104 and as the Existentialists have since so heavily stressed. But there is a way, of which Existentialism knows nothing as yet, by which humanity can fill its experienced emptiness with spiritual substance. If a man is willing to follow that way and to develop his dormant powers, if he will learn how to hold his conscious but empty thinking in tension with the opposite pole of his being, his unconscious but substantial will, then not only his nerves and senses but the whole man can become a sense-organ, capable of re-experiencing in freedom the instinctual wisdom by which mankind was formerly nourished—but also controlled. He finds (we are told on page 94) “the cosmos stored up as recollection inside him.”

Thus the problem of the relation between East and West leads quickly into an exposition of both the philosophical basis and what may be called the “methodology” of that spiritual science, or anthroposophy, with which the name of Rudolf Steiner is principally associated. This is, of course, the original feature that marks our book off from any other on the same subject. It may also be, for many, a stumbling-block in the way of according to the thoughts it contains the candid attention which their intrinsic quality would otherwise command. For, if the method is presented as open to all—as indeed it is—the actual development of the dormant powers referred to depends on certain qualities, of character and otherwise, which few human beings have as yet brought with them into the world. Among those few, though he never expressly makes the claim, Steiner himself was pre-eminent. Readers who become aware, or who already know, how much the findings of anthroposophy, including this very concept of the evolution of consciousness, depend on Steiner's own raids on that stored up cosmic memory (elsewhere more technically referred to by him as the “Akashic Record”) and who are perhaps inclined to dismiss for that reason their claim to attention, will find here a reasoned justification of the method of spiritual science, which asks no more than to be fairly considered on its merits.

For this reason among others “the Vienna Course,” as it is often called, seemed a good choice to make, out of the voluminous material available, for a special book to lay before the English public, under a well-known imprint, shortly after the centenary of Steiner's birth in 1961, when through public lectures, a broadcast talk and other avenues, the attention of many was no doubt drawn for the first time to his work and its practical results.

Another reason for the choice is, that the relation between spiritual science and natural science is here clearly and fully stated at the outset. The reader will be left in no doubt of Steiner's immense respect for the science of the West, as it has actually developed since the scientific revolution; perhaps also in little doubt of his thorough acquaintance with the natural science of his own day. That can in any event in fact be demonstrated from other sources. To the present writer the most significant ground for the claim of spiritual science to be a science, and to merit careful investigation alongside the deferential attention paid as a matter of course to the established sciences, is the one which is glanced at on page 56, and more fully stated on pages 69, 70. It is a ground which has broadened a good deal during the forty years that have elapsed since these lectures were delivered, and it is this. If we look aside for a moment from their proven efficacy in the field of straightforward physical manipulation and consider rather their claim (abandoned now altogether in some quarters) to furnish us with knowledge about the nature of man and the world, it must be admitted that the matter dealt with by the established sciences is coming to be composed less and less of actual observations, more and more of such things as pointer-readings on dials, the same pointer-readings arranged by electronic computers, inferences from inferences, higher mathematical formulae and other recondite abstractions. Yet modern science began with a turning away from abstract cerebration to objective observation! And this is the very step which spiritual science claims to be taking again today. Once grant the possibility that observations other than those made with the passive and untrained senses are possible, and you have to admit that the method of cognition which Steiner describes is more scientific, because more empirical, than the method of the schools.

In addition to the twenty or so books which he wrote, most of which are translated into English, Rudolf Steiner delivered several thousands of lectures, many of them in courses or cycles, in different parts of Europe. His followers saw to it that most of these were taken down in shorthand and afterwards transcribed for the use of the Movement. Later the transcriptions, unrevised by the lecturer, were in many cases made available as printed books; and this is the case here. Audiences varied widely in size, nationality, educational background and other respects, and Steiner was wont to vary his style accordingly. The reader may like to know that these particular lectures were given during a “West-East Congress” of the Anthroposophical Movement in Vienna in June 1922. They provided each evening a sort of temporary culmination of the various themes which had been studied during the day, and the usual number in the audience was about two thousand.

Steiner remarked afterwards, in a written report, that public conferences of this magnitude represented a new departure from his normal practice of approaching only those who were in a manner predisposed to listen sympathetically to what he had to say. Surely it was no small achievement to shepherd an audience of two thousand, not all of them sympathetic, through such unfamiliar and subtle catenations of thought as the reader will find in Lecture 2! Some of those who are familiar with the literature of anthroposophy have detected in this particular cycle a special note—a touch of almost apologetic urbanity—which is found nowhere else. Perhaps this also makes them a suitable choice for the purpose mentioned above.

Rudolf Steiner died in 1925. The years that have passed since then have been crowded and fateful ones, changing the face of the world and the colour of its thought. It would be surprising if there were nothing here that “dated.” For instance, a contempt for Western technological achievement, as something philistine and unspiritual, can no longer be regarded as the characteristic oriental reaction it was in 1922, when he was speaking. Indeed the whole difference between the spiritual—or unspiritual—life of Orient and Occident daily becomes increasingly blurred. But is not this a symptom of the very trend to which Steiner was drawing attention? The elimination of a tension-holding middle between the two extremes leads here, as elsewhere, to their chaotic and sinister interaction. Even in 1922 the typically Western materialism of the German Karl Marx was streaming back to Germany and the West from Eastern Europe. Since then, we have seen the rise and fall of a largely Westernized Japan, the succumbing of China to the crudest materialism of all, the incipient industrialization of India. Almost as these lines were being written the elimination of anything that could be called Middle Europe was carried to its absurdly logical conclusion, and the interval between East and West reduced, in Berlin, to the thickness of a wall.

An Austrian subject, born in a part of Europe which is now just behind the iron curtain, Steiner was himself a child of that vanishing Middle Europe. Nowhere perhaps could the disappearance after 1914 of the old order, rich in ancient hierarchy and symbol, rotten in so much else, be experienced as vividly as in Austria-Hungary. Nowhere was the need so apparent, and (for a short time after the first World War) the opportunity so promising for the construction of a new social order, which might unite in a single organism the impulse of humanity towards the future with the wisdom it inherited from the past. It was this fleeting opportunity which he had been seeking to exploit during the brief period in 1919 and the early twenties when the Threefold Commonwealth Movement was founded and vigorously propagated, and when for a time his name was well known in Central Europe.

The opportunity passed that might have brought quick returns from a lightning campaign. But few of the problems have been solved. That “faith in the supreme power of the State” (page 166) which he noted as accompanying the growth of technology, has only gone on increasing; and everywhere within it, between class and class, between one State and another, and between East and West, antagonisms swell and proliferate. Koestler's Yogi had his emotional energies fixed on “the relation between the individual and the universe,” his Commissar on “the relation between individual and society.” In the second half of this book an attempt is made to show how the two relations coalesce in the threefold nature of man. A reconstruction of society is, no less than is a rebirth of individual psychology, implicit in the findings of spiritual science and would follow naturally and inevitably from a wider understanding of these. Whereas a society “planned” on abstract principles must inevitably strangle all progress, if only because (as F. A. Hayek has recently argued on purely empirical grounds) the unpredictable, free individual spirit is your only source of novelty and change.

Once again all turns on the basic fact of the evolution of human consciousness. On the one hand such an evolution necessarily involves changes in the social structure, but on the other hand that structure, and the changes which it demands, cannot be understood except in the light of that evolution. In the long run the views on diet of a man who had never heard of bread would be about as practical as the views on social reform of a man who is unaware that humanity is evolving from a typically oriental condition, in which the existence of the individual is latent in society, to a typically occidental one, in which the existence of society is latent in the individual. “What is needed,” says Steiner, on page 164, “is prefigured in the unconscious will of mankind in Europe.”

In Europe and, as he elsewhere makes clear, in America. Perhaps few passages in this book could be more immediately fruitful in removing perilous misunderstandings than the closing pages of Lecture 9, where much, over there, of what we on this side of the Atlantic are apt to despise as emotionally crude or intellectually superficial, is related to a certain un-European conception of the human will; and it is emphasized that this very conception, primitive as the terms in which it is expressed may be, nevertheless “carries within itself striking potentialities for the future.”

But it is time the reader was left to make his own acquaintance with the ideas which follow in the form in which Steiner himself expressed them. He will be disappointed if he seeks in them a schematic diagram of the nature or history of humanity or a panacea for its personal and social ills. But it may be otherwise if with an open mind he travels through these pages expecting only what he will find: a patient examination into the way in which we form our ideas and the historical and geographical factors by which that way is conditioned, and, along with that, a preliminary contribution towards the unfreezing of certain hidden reserves of energy, imagination and wit, which would seem to be essential if human civilization is to be rescued from decline.

London,
February 1962.

Owen Barfield

Any one who speaks today about super-sensible worlds lays himself open at once to the quite understandable criticism that he is violating one of the most important demands of the age. This is the demand that the most important questions of existence shall be seriously discussed from a scientific point of view only in such a way that science recognizes its own limitations, has a clear insight into the fact that it must restrict itself to the sensible world of the earthly existence and would become the victim of a certain fantastic blunder if it should attempt to go beyond these limits. Now, precisely that type of spiritual-scientific conception in accordance with which I spoke at the last Vienna Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement, [West and East: Contrasting Worlds.] and shall speak again today, affirms with regard to itself not only that it is free from hostility toward scientific thinking and the scientific sense of responsibility of our times, but also that it does its work in complete harmony with what may be proposed as objectives by the most conscientious scientific demands of those very persons who take their stand on the platform of the most rigid scientific research. It is possible, however, to speak from various points of view in regard to the scientific demands of the times, imposed upon us by the splendid theoretical and practical results in the evolution of humanity which have come about in the course of the last three or four centuries, but especially during the nineteenth century. I shall speak, therefore, today in regard to super-sensible knowledge to the extent that this tends to fulfill precisely this demand, and I wish to speak in the next lecture about the super-sensible knowledge of the human being as a demand of the human heart, of human feeling, during the present age.

We can observe the magnificent contribution which has been bestowed upon us even up to the most recent time through scientific research—the magnificent contribution in the findings about interrelationships throughout the external world. But it is possible to speak also in a different sense regarding the achievements which have come about precisely in connection with this current of human evolution. For instance, we may call attention to the fact that, in connection with the conscientious earnest observation of the laws and facts of the external world of the senses, as this is afforded by natural science, very special human capacities have been developed, and that just such observation and experimentation have thrown a light also upon human capacities themselves. But I should like to say that many persons holding positions deserving of the greatest respect in the sphere of scientific research are willing to give very little attention to this light which has been reflected upon man himself through his own researches. If we only give a little thought to what this light has illuminated, we see that human thinking, through the very fact that it has been able to investigate in accordance with basic principles both narrowly restricted and also broadly expanded interrelationships—the microscopic and the telescopic—has gained immeasurably in itself, has gained in the capacity of discrimination, in power of penetration, the ability so to associate the things in the world that their secrets are unveiled, the capacity to determine the laws underlying cosmic relationships, and so forth. As this thinking is developed, we see it confronted with a demand—with which it is faced, indeed, by the most earnest research scientists: the demand that this thinking must develop as selflessly as possible in the observation of external nature and in experimentation in the laboratory, in the clinic, etc. And the human being has achieved tremendous power in this respect. He has succeeded in setting up more and more rules of such a character as to prevent anything of the nature of inner wishes of the heart, of opinions, perhaps even of fantasies regarding one's own being, such as arise in the course of thinking, from being carried over into what he is to establish by means of the microscope and the telescope, the measuring rule and the scales, regarding the interrelationships of life and existence.

Under these influences a type of thinking has gradually developed of which one must say that it has worked out its passive role with a certain inner diligence. Thinking in connection with observation, with experiment, has nowadays become completely abstract—so abstract that it does not trust itself to call forth anything of the nature of knowledge or of truth out of its own inner being.

It is this gradually developed characteristic of thinking which demands before everything else—so it appears at first—the rejection of all that the human being is in himself by reason of his inner nature. For what he himself thus is must be set forth in activity; this can really never exist wholly apart from the impulse of his will. Thus we have arrived at the point—and we have rightly reached this point in the field of external research—of actually rejecting the activity of thinking, although we became aware in this activity of what we ourselves signify as human beings in the universe, in the totality of cosmic relationships. In a certain sense, the human being has eliminated himself in connection with his research; he prohibits his own inner activity. We shall see immediately that what is rightly prohibited in connection with this external research must be especially cultivated in relationship to man's own self if he wishes to gain enlightenment regarding the spiritual, regarding the super-sensible, element of his own being.

But a second element in the nature of man has been obliged to manifest its special aspect, which is alien to humanity even though friendly to the world, in modern research: that is, the human life of sentiment, the human life of feeling. In this modern research, human feeling is not permitted to participate; the human being must remain cold and matter-of-fact. Yet one might ask whether it may not be possible to acquire within this human feeling forces useful in gaining knowledge of the world. If it must be said, on the one hand, that inner human willfulness plays a role in feelings, human subjectivity, and that feeling is the source of fantasy, it must be answered on the other hand that, although human feeling can certainly play no important role as it exists at first in every-day life or in science, yet, if we recall—as science itself has to present the matter to us—that the human senses have not always in the course of human evolution been such as they are today, but have developed from a relatively imperfect stage up to their contemporary state, that they certainly did not express themselves in earlier periods so objectively about things as they do today, an inkling may then come to birth within us that there may exist even within the life of subjective feeling something that might be evolved there-from, just like the human senses themselves, and which might be led over from an experience of man's own being to a grasp upon cosmic interrelationships in a higher sense. Precisely as we observe the withdrawal of human feeling in connection with contemporary research must the question be put as to whether some sort of higher sense might unfold within feeling itself if this were specially developed.

But very obviously do we find in connection with a third element of the being of man how we are driven by the altogether praiseworthy scientific view to something different. This is the will aspect of the life of the soul. Whoever is at home in scientific thinking knows how impossible it is for such thinking to proceed otherwise in grasping the inter-relationships of the world than in accordance with causal necessity. We connect in the most rigid manner phenomena existing side by side in space; we associate in the strictest sense phenomena occurring in succession in time. That is, we relate cause and effect according to their inflexible laws. Whoever speaks, not as a dilettante, but as one thoroughly at home in science knows what a tremendous power is exerted by the mere consideration of the realms of scientific fact in this manner. He knows how he is captivated by this idea of a universal causality and how he cannot then do otherwise than to subject everything that he confronts in his thinking to this idea of causality.

But there is human will, this human will which says to us in every moment of our waking life of day: “What you undertake in a certain sense by reason of yourself, by reason of your will, is not causally determined in the same sense applying to any sort of external phenomena of nature.” For this reason, even a person who simply feels in a natural way about himself, who looks into himself in observation free from preconception, can scarcely do otherwise than also to ascribe to himself, on the basis of immediate experience, freedom of will. But when he directs his glance to scientific thinking, he cannot admit this freedom of will. This is one of the conflicts into which we are brought by the condition of the present age. In the course of these two lectures we shall learn much more about these conflicts. But for one who is able to feel this conflict in its full intensity, who can feel it through and through—because he must be honest on the one side as regards scientific research, and on the other side as regards his self-observation—the conflict is something utterly confounding, so confounding that it may drive him to doubt whether life affords anywhere a firm basis from which one may search for truth.

We must deal with such conflicts in their right human aspect. We must be able to say to ourselves that research drives us to the point where we are actually unable to admit what we are every day aware of; that something else must somehow exist which offers other means of access to the world than what is offered to us in irrefutable manner in the order of external nature. Through the very fact that we are so forcibly driven by the order of nature itself into such conflicts, it becomes for us human beings of the present time a necessity to admit that it is impossible to speak about the super-sensible worlds as they have been spoken about up to a relatively recent time. We need to go back only to the first half of the nineteenth century to discover that personalities who, by reason of a consciousness in harmony with the period, were thoroughly serious in their scientific work called attention, nevertheless, to the super-sensible aspect of human life, to that aspect which opens up to the human being a view of the divine, of his own immortality; and that in this connection they always called attention to what we may at present designate as the “night aspects” of human life. Men deserving of the highest regard have called attention to that wonderful but very problematical world into which the human being is transferred every night: to the dream world. They called attention to many mysterious relationships which exist between this chaotic picture world of dreams, nevertheless, and the world of actuality. They called attention to the fact that the inner nature of the human organization, especially in illness, reflects itself, nevertheless, in the fantastic pictures of dreams, and how healthy human life enters into the chaotic experiences of dreams in the forms of signs and symbols. They pointed out that much which cannot be surveyed by the human being with his waking senses finds its place in the half-awake state of the soul, and out of such things conclusions were drawn. These things border upon what is the subject of study also today for many persons, the “subconscious” states of the life of the human soul, which manifest themselves in a similar way.

But everything which appears before the human being in this form, which could still give a certain satisfaction to an earlier humanity, is no longer valid for us. It is no longer valid for us for the reason that our way of looking into external nature has become something different. Here we have to look back to the times when there still existed only a mystically colored astrology. Man then looked into the world of the senses in such a way that his perception was far removed from the exactness which we demand of science today. For this reason, because he did not demand of himself in his sense life that complete clarity which we possess today, he could discover in a mystical, half-conscious state something from which he could draw inferences. This we cannot do today. Just as little as we are able to derive today from what science gives us anything else than questions in regard to the true nature of man, just so little can we afford to remain at a standstill at the point reached by science and expect to satisfy our super-sensible needs in a manner similar to that of earlier times.

That form of super-sensible knowledge of which I shall speak here has an insight into this demand of our times. It observes the form that has been taken on by thinking, feeling, and willing in man precisely by reason of natural science, and it asks on the other side whether it may be possible by reason of the very thing which has been achieved by contemporary humanity in thinking, feeling, and willing to penetrate further into the super-sensible realm with the same clarity which holds sway in the scientific realm. This cannot be achieved by means of inferential reasoning, by means of logic; for natural science justly points out its limitations with reference to its own nature. But something else can occur: that the inner human capacities may evolve further, beyond the point at which they stand when we are in the realm of ordinary scientific research, so that we now apply to the development of our own spiritual capacities the same exactness to which we are accustomed in connection with research in the laboratory and the clinic. I shall discuss this first in connection with thinking itself.

Thinking, which has become more and more conscious of its passive role in connection with external research, and is not willing to disavow this, is capable of energizing itself inwardly to activity. It may energize itself in such a way that, although not exact in the sense in which we apply this term to measuring and weighing in external research, it is exact in relationship to its own development in the sense in which the external scientist, the mathematician for example, is accustomed to follow with full consciousness every step in his research. But this occurs when that mode of super-sensible cognition of which I am here speaking substitutes a truly exact development of this thinking in place of the ancient vague meditation, the ancient indistinct immersion of oneself in thinking. It is possible here to indicate only in general principles what I have said in regard to such an exact development of thinking in my books Occult Science: An Outline and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and other books. The human being should really compel himself, for the length of time which is necessary for him—and this is determined by the varying innate capacities of people—to exchange the role of passive surrender to the external world, which he otherwise rightly assumes in his thinking, for that different role: that of introducing into this thinking his whole inner activity of soul. This he should do by taking into his mind day by day, even though at times only for a brief period, some particular thought—the content of which is not the important matter—and, while withdrawing his inner nature from the external world, directing all the powers of his soul in inner concentration upon this thought. By means of this process something comes about in the development of those capacities of soul that may be compared with the results which follow when any particular muscles of the human body—for instance, the muscles of the arms—are to be developed. The muscles are made stronger, more powerful through use, through exercise. Thus, likewise, do the capacities of the soul become inwardly stronger, more powerful by being directed upon a definite thought. This exercise must be so directed that we proceed in a really exact way, that we survey every step taken in our thinking just as a mathematician surveys his operations when he undertakes to solve a geometrical or arithmetical problem. This can be done in the greatest variety of ways. It may seem trivial when I say that something should be selected for this content of concentration that one finds in any sort of book—even some worthless old volume that we know quite certainly we have never previously seen. The important point is, not what the content of truth in the thing is, but the fact that we survey such a thought content completely. This cannot be done if we take a thought content out of our own memory; for very much is associated with such a thought in the most indeterminate way, very much that plays a role in the subconscious or the unconscious, and it is not possible to be exact if one concentrates upon such a thing. What one fixes, therefore, in the very center of one's consciousness is something entirely new, something that one confronts only with respect to its actual content, which is not associated with any experience of the soul. The matter of importance is the concentration of the forces of the soul and the strengthening which results from this. Likewise, if one goes to a person who has made some progress in this field and requests him to provide one with such a thought content, it is not well to entertain any prejudice against this. The content is in that case entirely new to the person concerned, and he can survey it. Many persons fear that they may become dependent in this way upon some one else who provides them with such a content. But this is not the case; in reality, they become less dependent than if they take such a thought content out of their own memories and experiences, in which case it is bound up with all sorts of subconscious experiences. Moreover, it is well for a person who has had some practice in scientific work to use the findings of scientific research as material for concentration; these prove to be, indeed, the most fruitful of all for this purpose.

If this is continued for a relatively long time, even for years perhaps—and this must be accompanied by patience and endurance, since it requires a few weeks or months in some cases before success is achieved, and in some cases years—it is possible to arrive at a point where this method for the inner molding of one's thoughts can be applied as exactly as the physicist or the chemist applies the methods of measuring and weighing for the purpose of discovering the secrets of nature. What one has then learned is applied to the further development of one's own thinking. At a certain point of time, the person then has a significant inner experience. This consists in the fact that he feels himself to be involved not only in picture-thinking, which depicts the external events and facts and which is true to reality in inverse proportion to the force it possesses in itself, in proportion as it is a mere picture; but one arrives now at the point of adding to this kind of thinking the inner experience of a thinking in which one lives, a thinking filled with inner power. This is a significant experience. Thinking thus becomes, as it were, something which one begins to experience just as one experiences the power of one's own muscles when one grasps an object or strikes against something. A reality such as one experiences otherwise only in connection with the process of breathing or the activity of a muscle,—this inner active something now enters into thinking. And, since one has investigated precisely every step upon this way, so does one experience oneself in full clarity and sober-mindedness of consciousness in this strengthened, active thinking. If the objection is raised, let us say, that knowledge can result only from observation and logic, this is no real objection; for what is now experienced we experience with complete inner clarity, and yet in such a way that this thinking becomes at the same time a kind of “touching with the soul.” In the process of forming a thought, it is as if we were stretching out a feeler—not, in this case, as when the snail stretches a feeler into the physical world, but as if a feeler were stretched out into a spiritual world, which is as yet present only for our feelings if we have succeeded to this stage, but which we are justified in expecting. For one has the feeling: “Your thinking has been transformed into a spiritual touching; if this can become more and more the case, you may expect that this thinking will come into contact with what constitutes a spiritual reality, just as your finger here in the physical world comes into contact with what is physically real.”

Only when one has lived for a time in this inwardly strengthened thinking does complete self-knowledge become possible. For we know then that the soul element has become by means of this concentration an experiential reality.

It is possible then for the person concerned to go forward in his exercises and to arrive at the point where he can, in turn, eliminate this soul content, put it away, in a certain sense render his consciousness void of what he himself has brought into this consciousness, this thought content upon which he has concentrated, and which has enabled him to possess a real thinking constituting a sense of touch for the soul. It is rather easy in ordinary life to acquire an empty consciousness; we need only to fall asleep. But it requires an intense application of force, after we have become accustomed to concentrating upon a definite thought content, to put away such a content of thought in connection with this very strengthened thinking, thinking which has become a reality. But we succeed in putting aside this content of thinking in exactly the same way in which we acquired at first the powerful force needed for concentration. But, when we have succeeded in this, something appears before the soul which has been possible previously only in the form of pictures of episodes in one's memory: the whole inner life of the person appears in a new way before the eyes of his soul, as he has passed through this life in his earthly existence since birth, or since the earliest point of time to which one's memory can return, at which one entered consciously into this earthly existence. Ordinarily, the only thing we know in regard to this earthly existence is that which we can call up in memory; we have pictures of our experiences. But what is now experienced by means of this strengthened thinking is not of the same kind. It appears as if in a tremendous tableau so that we do not recollect merely in a dim picture what we passed through ten years ago, for instance, but we have the inner experience that in spirit we are retracing the course of time. If some one carries out such an exercise in his fiftieth year, let us say, and arrives at the result indicated, what then happens is that time permits him to go back as if along a “time-path” all the way, for instance, to the experiences of his thirty-fifth year. We travel back through time. We do not have only a dim memory of what we passed through fifteen years earlier, but we feel ourselves to be in the midst of this in its living reality, as if in an experience of the present moment. We travel through time; space loses its significance, and time affords us a mighty tableau of memory. A precise picture of the life of the person is now created out of that which appears in an episodic manner, even according to scientific thinkers, when anyone is exposed to great terror, a severe shock, at the moment of drowning, for instance, when for some moments he is confronted by something of his entire earthly life in pictures appearing before his soul—to which he looks back later with a certain shuddering fascination. In other words, what appears before the soul in such cases as through a natural convulsion now actually appears before the soul at the moment indicated, when the entire earthly life confronts one as in a mighty tableau of the spirit, only in a time order. Only now does one know oneself; only now does one possess real self-observation.

It is quite possible to differentiate this picture of man's inner being from that which constitutes a mere “memory” picture. It is clear in the mere memory picture that we have something in which persons, natural occurrences, or works of art come upon us as if from without; in this memory picture what we have is the manner in which the world comes into contact with us. But in the super-sensible memory tableau which appears before a person, what confronts him is, rather, that which has proceeded from himself. If, for instance, at a certain definite point of time in his life he began a friendship with a beloved personality, the mere memory picture shows him how this person came to him at a certain point of time, spoke to him, what he owes to the person, etc. But, in this life tableau what confronts him is the manner in which he himself longed for this person, and how he took every step at last in such a way that he was inevitably led to that being regarding whom he had the knowledge that this being was suited to himself.

That which has taken place through the unfolding of the forces of the soul comes to meet one with exact clarity in this life tableau. Many people do not like this precise clarity, because it brings them enlightenment in regard to much that they would prefer to see in a different light from the light of truth. But one must endure the fact that one is able to look upon one's own inner being in utter freedom from preconceptions, even though this being of oneself confronts the searching eye with reproach.

This stage of cognition I have called imaginative knowledge, or imagination.

But one can progress beyond this stage. In that which we come to know through this memory tableau, we are confronted by those forces which have really formed us as human beings. While confronting this tableau of life, we know: “Within you those forces evolve which mold the substances of your physical body.” Within you, especially during childhood, those forces have evolved which have plastically modeled approximately up to the seventh year the nerve masses of the brain, which did not yet exist in well ordered form after your birth. We then cease at last to ascribe what works formatively upon the human being within to those forces which inhere in material substances. We cease to do this when we have this memory tableau before us, when we see how there stream into all the forces of nutrition and of breathing and into the whole circulation of the blood the contents of this memory tableau—which are forces in themselves, forces without which no single wave of the blood circulates and no single process of breathing occurs. We now learn to understand that man himself in his inner being consists of spirit and soul.

What now dawns upon one can best be described by a comparison. Imagine that you have walked for a certain distance over ground which has been softened by rain, and that you have noticed all the way tracks or ruts made by human feet or wagon wheels. Now suppose that a being should come from the moon and see this condition of the ground, but should see no human being. He would probably come to the conclusion that there must be all sorts of forces underneath the earth which have thrust up these traces and given this form to the surface of the ground. Such a being might seek within the earth for the forces which have produced the tracks. But one who sees into the thing knows that the condition was not caused by the earth but by human feet or wagon wheels.

Now, any one who possesses a view of things such as I have just described does not by any means for this reason look with less reverence, for example, upon the convolutions of the human brain. But, just as he knows that those tracks on the surface of the earth do not derive from forces within the earth, he now knows that these convolutions of the brain do not derive from forces within the substance of the brain, but that the spiritual-psychic entity of man is there, which he himself has now beheld, and that this works in such a way as to cause our brain to have these convolutions. This is the essential thing—to be driven to this view, so that we arrive at a conception of our own spirit-soul nature, that the eye of the soul is really directed to the spirit-soul element and to its manifestation in the external life.

But it is possible to progress still further. After having first strengthened our inner being through concentrating upon a definite content of thought, and then having emptied our consciousness, so that, instead of the images we ourselves have formed, the content of our life now appears before us, we can now put this memory tableau out of our consciousness, in turn, just as we previously eliminated a single concept, so that our consciousness was void of this. We can now learn to apply the powerful force so as to blot out from our consciousness that which we have come to know through a heightened self-observation as a spirit-soul being. In doing this, we blot out nothing less than the inner being of our own soul life. We learned first in concentration to blot out what is external, and we then learned to direct the look of our soul to our own spirit-soul entity, and this completely occupied the whole tableau of memory. If we now succeed in blotting out this memory tableau itself, there comes about what I wish to designate as the truly empty consciousness. We have previously lived in the memory tableau or in what we ourselves have set up before our minds, but now something entirely different appears. That which lived within us we have now suppressed, and we confront the world with an empty consciousness. This signifies something extraordinary in the experience of the soul. Fundamentally speaking, I can describe at first only by means of a comparison what now appears to the soul, when the content of our own soul is blotted out by means of the powerful inner force we apply. We need only to think of the fact that, when the impressions of the external senses gradually die away, when there is a cessation of seeing, hearing, perhaps even of a distinct sense of touch, we sink into a state closely resembling the state of sleep. In the present case, however, when we blot out the content of our own souls, although we do come to an “empty” state of consciousness, this is not a state of sleep. We reach what I might call the state of being merely awake—that is, being awake with an empty consciousness.

We may, perhaps, be enabled to conceive this empty consciousness in the following way. Imagine a modern city with all its noise and din. We may withdraw from the city, and everything becomes more and more quiet around us, but we finally enter, perhaps, a forest. Here we find the absolute opposite of the noises of the city. We live in complete inner stillness, in soundless quiet. If, now, I undertake to describe what follows, I must resort to a trivial comparison. We must raise the question whether this quiet, this stillness, can be changed still further into something else. We may designate this stillness as the zero point in our perception of the external world. But, if we possess a certain amount of property and we subtract from this property, it is diminished; as we take away still more, it is further diminished, and we finally arrive at zero and have nothing left. Can we then proceed still further? It may, perhaps, be undesirable to most persons, but the fact is that many do this: they still decrease their possessions by incurring debt. One then has less than zero, and one can still diminish what one has. In precisely the same way, we may at least imagine that the stillness, which is like the zero point of being awake, may be pushed beyond this zero into a sort of negative state. A super-stillness, a super-quietness may augment the quietness. This is what is experienced by one who blots out his own soul content: he enters into a state of quietness of soul which lies below the zero point. An inner stillness of soul in the most intensified degree comes about, during the state of wakefulness.

But this cannot be attained unless it is accompanied by something else. This can be obtained only when we feel that a certain state associated with the picture concepts of our own self passes over into another state. One who senses the first stage of the super-sensible within himself, who views this, is in a certain state of well-being, that well-being and inner blissfulness to which the various religious creeds refer when they call attention to the super-sensible and at the same time remind the human being that the super-sensible brings to him the experience of a certain blissfulness in his inner being. Indeed, up to the point where we exclude our own inner self, there was a certain sense of well-being, an intensified feeling of blissfulness. At that moment, however, where the stillness of soul comes about, this inner well-being is replaced completely by inner pain, inner deprivation, such as we have never previously known—the sense that one is separated from all to which one is united in the earthly life, far removed not only from the feeling of one's own body but from the feeling of one's own experiences since birth. And this signifies a deprivation which reaches the degree of tremendous pain of soul. Many shrink back from this stage, lacking the courage to make the transition from a certain lower clairvoyance and, after eliminating their own content of soul, to enter into that state of consciousness where resides that inner stillness. But, if we pass into this stage in full consciousness, there begins to enter, in place of imagination, that which I have called in the books previously mentioned inspiration—I trust you will not take offense at these terms—the experience of a real spiritual world. After one has previously eliminated the world of the senses and has substituted an empty consciousness, accompanied by inexpressible pain of soul, then does the external spiritual world come to meet us. In the state of inspiration we become aware of the fact that the human being is surrounded by a spiritual world just as the sense world exists for his external senses.

And the first thing, in turn, that we behold in this spiritual world is our own pre-earthly existence. Just as we are otherwise conscious of earthly experiences by means of our ordinary memory, so does a cosmic memory now dawn for us: we look back into pre-earthly experiences, beholding what we were as spirit-soul beings in a purely spiritual world before we descended through birth to this earthly existence, when as spiritual beings we participated in the molding of our own bodies. So do we look back upon the spiritual, the eternal, in the nature of man, to that which reveals itself to us as the pre-earthly existence, regarding which we now know that it is not dependent upon the birth and death of the physical body, for it is that which existed before birth and before conception, which made of this physical body derived from matter and heredity a human being. Now for the first time does one reach a true concept also of physical heredity, since one sees what super-sensible forces play into this—forces which we acquire out of a purely spiritual world, with which we now feel united just as we feel united with the physical world in the earthly life. Moreover, we now become aware that, in spite of the great advances registered in the evolution of humanity, much has been lost which belonged inherently to more ancient instinctive conceptions such as we can no longer use. The instinctive super-sensible vision of the humanity of earlier ages was confronted by this pre-earthly life as well as human immortality, regarding which we shall speak a little later. For eternity was conceived in ancient times in such a way that one grasped both its aspects. We speak nowadays of the deathlessness of the human soul—indeed, our language itself possesses only this word—but people once spoke, and the more ancient languages still continue to show such words, of birthlessness as the other aspect of the eternity of the human soul. Now, however, the times have somewhat changed. People are interested in the question what becomes of the human soul after death, because this is something still to come; but as to the other question, what existed before birth, before conception, there is less interest because that has “passed,” and yet we are here. But a true knowledge of human immortality can arise only when we consider eternity in both its aspects: that of deathlessness and that of birthlessness.

But, for the very purpose of maintaining a connection with the latter, and especially in an exact clairvoyance, still a third thing is necessary. We sense ourselves truly as human beings when we no longer permit our feelings to be completely absorbed within the earthly life. For that which we now come to know as our pre-earthly life penetrates into us in pictures and is added to what we previously sensed as our humanity, making us for the first time completely human. Our feelings are then, as it were, shot through with inner light, and we know that we have now developed our feeling into a sense organ for the spiritual. But we must go further and must be able to make our will element into an organ of knowledge for the spiritual.

For this purpose, something must begin to play a role in human knowledge which, very rightly, is not otherwise considered as a means of knowledge by those who desire to be taken seriously in the realm of cognition. We first become aware that this is a means of knowledge when we enter the super-sensible realms. This is the force of love. Only, we must begin to develop this force of love in a higher sense than that in which nature has bestowed love upon us, with all its significance for the life of nature and of man. What I shall have to describe as the first steps in the unfolding of a higher love in the life of man may seem paradoxical.

When you undertake, with complete sober-mindedness as to each step, to sense the world otherwise than is customary, you then come upon this higher form of love. Suppose you undertake in the evening, before you go to sleep, to bring your day's life so into your consciousness that you begin with the last occurrence of the evening, visualizing it as precisely as possible, then visualizing the next preceding in the same way, then the third from the last, thus moving backward to the morning in this survey of the life of the day, this is a process in which much more importance attaches to the inner energy expended than to the question whether one visualizes each individual occurrence more or less precisely. What is important is this reversal of the order of visualization. Ordinarily we view events in such a way that we first consider the earlier and then the subsequent in a progressive chain. Through such an exercise as I have just given you, we reverse the whole life: we think and feel in a direction opposite to the course of the day. We can practice this on the experiences of our day, as I have suggested, and this requires only a few minutes. But we can do this also in a different way. Undertake to visualize the course of a drama in such a way that you begin with the fifth act and picture it successively through the fourth, third, toward the beginning. Or we may represent a melody to ourselves in the reverse succession of tones. If we pass through more and more such inner experiences of the soul in this way, we shall discover that the inner experience is freed from the external course of nature, and that we actually become more and more self-directing. But, even though we become in this way more and more individualized and achieve an ever increasing power of self-direction, yet we learn also to give attention to the external life in more complete consciousness. For only now do we become aware that, the more powerfully we develop through practice this fully conscious absorption in another being, the higher becomes the degree of our selflessness, and the greater must our love become in compensation. In this way we feel how this experience of not living in oneself but living in another being, this passing over from one's own being to another, becomes more and more powerful. We then reach the stage where, to Imagination and Inspiration, which we have already developed, we can now unite the true intuitive entrance into the other being: we arrive at Intuition, so that we no longer experience only our self, but also learn—in complete individualization yet also in complete selflessness—to experience the other being.

Here love becomes something which gradually makes it possible for us to look back even further than into the pre-earthly spiritual life. As we learn in our present life to look back upon contemporary events, we learn through such an elevation of love to look back upon former earth lives, and to recognize the entire life of a human being as a succession of earthly lives. The fact that these lives once had a beginning and must likewise have an end will be touched upon in the next lecture. But we learn to know the human life as a succession of lives on earth, between which there always intervene purely spiritual lives, coming between a death and the next birth. For this elevated form of love, lifted to the spiritual sphere and transformed into a force of knowledge, teaches us also the true significance of death. When we have advanced so far, as I have explained in connection with Imagination and Inspiration, as to render these intensified inner forces capable of spiritual love, we actually learn in immediate exact clairvoyance to know that inner experience which we describe by saying that one experiences oneself spiritually, without a body, outside the body. This passing outside the body becomes in this way, if I may thus express it, actually a matter of objective experience for the soul. If we have once experienced in actual knowledge outside the body—”clairvoyantly,” I mean—this spiritual element in existence, we know the significance of the event of laying aside the physical body in death, of passing through the portal of death to a new, spiritual life. We thus learn, at the third stage of an exact clairvoyance, the significance of death, and thus also the significance of immortality, for man.

I have desired to make it transparently clear through the manner of my explanation that the mode of super-sensible cognition about which I am speaking seeks to bring into the very cognitional capacities of the human being something which works effectually, step by step, as it is thus introduced. The natural scientist applies his exactness to the external experiment, to the external observation; he wishes to see the objects in such juxtaposition that they reveal their secrets with exactitude in the process of measuring, enumerating, weighing. The spiritual-scientist, about whom I am here speaking, applies his exactness to the evolution of the forces of his own soul. That which he makes out of himself for the purpose of causing a spiritual world and, with this, the eternal being of man, the nature of human immortality, to appear before his soul, he makes with precision, if I may use an expression of Goethe. At every step which the spiritual-scientist thus takes, in order that the spiritual world may at last lie outspread before the eyes of the soul, he feels obligated to be just as conscientious in regard to his knowledge as a mathematician must be at every step he takes. For just as the mathematician must see clearly into everything that he writes on the paper, so must the spiritual-scientist see with complete exactitude into everything that he makes out of his powers of cognition. He then knows that he has formed an “eye of the soul” out of the soul itself with the same inner necessity with which nature has formed the corporeal eye out of bodily substance. And he knows that he can speak of spiritual worlds with the same justification with which he speaks of a physical-sensible world in relationship to the physical eye. In this sense the spiritual research with which we are here concerned satisfies the demands of our age imposed upon us by the magnificent achievements of natural science—which spiritual science in no wise opposes but, rather, seeks further to supplement.

I am well aware that every one who undertakes to represent anything before the world, no matter what his motive may be, attributes a certain importance to himself by describing this as a “demand of the times.” I have no such purpose, neither shall I have such a purpose in my next lecture; [The second lecture in this brochure.] on the contrary, I should like to show that the demands of the times already exist, and the very endeavor of spiritual science at every step it takes is to satisfy these demands of the times. We may say, then, that the spiritual-scientist whom it is our purpose to discuss here does not propose to be a person who views nature in a dilettante or amateur fashion. On the contrary, he proposes to advance further in true harmony with natural science and with the same genuine conscientiousness. He desires truly exact clairvoyance for the description of a spiritual world. But it is clear to him at the same time that, when we undertake to investigate a human corpse in a laboratory for the purpose of explaining the life which has disappeared from it, or, when we look out into cosmic space with a telescope, we then develop capacities which tend to adapt themselves at first solely to the microscope or telescope, but which possess an inner life and which misrepresent themselves in their existent form. When we dissect a human corpse, we know that it was not nature that made the human being into this bodily form, but that the human soul, which has now vanished, made it. [That is, nature did not create the wonderful human body; it was created by the soul.] We interpret the human soul from what we have here as its physical product, and any one would be irrational who should assume that this molding of the human physical forces and forms had not arisen out of that which preceded the present state of this human being. But everything that we hold in the background while we investigate dead nature with those forces in connection with which we rightly deny our inner activity creates the potentiality, through this very act of holding in reserve, for a further development of the soul forces of the human being. Just as the seed of the plant lies out of sight under the earth when we have laid it in the soil, and yet will become a plant, so do we plant a seed in the soul in the very action of conscientious scientific research. He who is a serious scientist in this sense has within himself the germ of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. He needs only to develop the germ. He will then know that, just as natural science is a demand of the times, so is super-sensible research likewise. What I mean to say is that every one who speaks in the spirit of natural science speaks also in the spirit of super-sensible research, only he does not know this. And that which constitutes an unconscious longing in the innermost depths of many persons today—as will be manifest in the next public lecture—is the impulse of super-sensible research to unfold out of its germ.

To those very persons, therefore, who oppose this spiritual research from a supposedly scientific standpoint, one would like to say, though not with any bad intention, that this brings to mind an utterance in Goethe's Faust all too well known, but which would be applied in a different sense:

The little man would not sense the Devil
Even if he held him by the throat.

Now, I do not care to go into that. But what is contained in this expression confronts us in a different application in that which exists today as a demand of the times: that those who speak rightly today about nature are really giving expression, though unconsciously, to the spirit. One would like to say that there are many who do not wish to notice the “spirit” when it speaks, although they are constantly giving expression to the spirit in their own words!

The seed of super-sensible perception is really far more widespread today than is supposed, but it must be developed. The fact that it must be developed is really a lesson we may learn from the seriousness of the times as regards external experiences. As I have already said, I should like to go into the details next time; but we may still add in conclusion that the elements of a fearful catastrophe really speak to the whole of humanity today through various indications in the outside world, and that it is possible to realize that tasks at which humanity in the immediate future will have to work with the greatest intensity will struggle to birth out of this great seriousness of the times. This external seriousness with which the world confronts us today, especially the world of humanity, indicates the necessity of an inner seriousness. And it is about this inner seriousness in the guidance of the human heart and mind toward man's own spiritual powers, which constitute the powers of his essential being, that I have wished to speak to you today. For, if it is true that man must apply his most powerful external forces in meeting the serious events awaiting him over the whole world, he will need likewise a powerful inner courage. But such forces and such courage can come into existence only if the human being is able to feel and also to will himself in full consciousness in his innermost being, not merely theoretically conceiving himself but practically knowing himself. This is possible for him only when he comes to know this being of his as coming out of that source from which it does truly come, from the source of the spirit, only when in ever increasing measure, not only theoretically but practically, he learns to know in actual experience that man is spirit, and can find his true satisfaction only in the spirit; that his highest powers and his highest courage can come to him only out of the spirit, out of the super-sensible.

On last Wednesday I had the opportunity to explain to you how a super-sensible knowledge may come into existence out of the further development of those capacities of the human soul which belong to our every-day life, and which are recognized also in science when methodically applied. I undertook to show how a systematic further development of these capacities of the soul actually brings about for the human being a form of perception whereby he can become aware of a super-sensible world just as he becomes aware of the physical sensible world environing him by means of his physical senses. Through such vision we penetrate upward not only to an abstract sort of conviction that, in addition to the world of the senses, there exists also a world of the spirit, but to acquisition of real knowledge, to a real experience, of spiritual beings, which constitute the environment of man himself to the extent that he lifts himself up into a condition of spirituality, just as plants and animals constitute his environment in the physical world.

Such a super-sensible knowledge is something different in its entire nature from that which we designate as knowledge in ordinary life and for our every-day consciousness, as well as in ordinary science.

In this ordinary knowledge we come into possession, in a certain sense, of ideas—for example such ideas as embrace the laws of nature. But this possession of ideas does not really penetrate into the soul in such a way as to become an immediate power of the soul, comparable as a spiritual power to muscular force as this passes over into activity. Thoughts remain rather shadowy, and every one knows through immediate experiences how indifferent, in a certain sense, is the reaction of the human heart to thoughts when we are dealing with matters which affect the human heart in the profoundest degree.

Now, I think I have shown already in the first lecture that, when a human being actually penetrates into the spiritual world by means of such a perception as we have in mind here, he then becomes aware of his super-sensible being as it was before it descended to the earthly existence. And the fact that he achieves for himself something of this kind as regards his own self in its relationship to the spiritual world, does not leave his heart, the needs of his profoundest sensibilities, to the same extent unaffected, as in the case of abstract forms of knowledge. It is certainly true that one who has himself led a life devoted to the acquisition of knowledge does not undervalue all the inner drama of the soul associated with the struggle for knowledge even in the ordinarily recognized sense, yet the knowledge that we thus acquire remains, nevertheless, mere pictures of the external world. Indeed, if we are scientifically educated at the present time, we are generally proud of the fact that these pictures merely reflect, in a certain sense, quite objectively the external world and do not dart with such inner force through the life of the soul as, in the case of the physical body, the circulating blood drives its pulsing waves through man's being. The fact is that what is here meant by super-sensible knowledge is something which acts upon the human being in a manner entirely unlike that of ordinary knowledge. And, in order that I may make myself perfectly clear precisely in reference to this point, I should like to begin with a comparison—which is, however, something more than a comparison, something that fits the matter completely in its reality.

I should like to begin with the fact that the human being, even in ordinary life, lives in two states of consciousness—we might say three states, but let us consider sleeping and dreaming as constituting a single state of consciousness—that he is separated completely from the external world during sleep, and that a world existent only within him, reveals its effects in dreams in a grotesque and often chaotic manner. Even though we are in the same space with many other persons, our dream world belongs to us alone; we do not share it with the other persons. And a profounder reflection upon the world of dreams is the very thing that may show us that what we have to consider as our own inner human nature is connected with this dream world. Even the corporeal nature of man is reflected in a remarkable way in dreams: it is mirrored in fantastic pictures. One condition or another affecting an organ, a condition of illness or of excitation, may emerge in a special symbol during a dream; or some noise occurring near us may appear in a dream in a very dramatic symbolism. The dream creates pictures out of our own inner nature and out of the external world. But all of this is intimately connected, in turn, with the whole course of our life upon earth. From the most remote epochs of this life the dream draws the shadows of experiences into its chaotic but always dramatic course. And, the more deeply we penetrate into all this, the more are we led to the conclusion that the innermost being of man is connected, even though in an instinctive and unconscious manner, with that which flows and weaves in dreams.

One who has the capacity, for example, for observing the moment of waking and, from this point on, fixing the eye of the mind upon the ordinary daily life, not in the superficial way in which this usually occurs, but in a deeper fashion, will come to see that this waking life of day is characterized by the fact that what we experience in a wholly isolated manner during sleep and during dreams, in a manner that we can share with other persons at most only in special instances,—that this soul-spiritual element sinks down into our corporeal being, inserts itself in a way into the will, and thereby also into the forces of thought and the sense forces permeated by the will, and thus enters indirectly, through the body, into a relationship with the external world. Thus does the act of waking constitute a transition to an entirely different state of consciousness from that which we have in dreams. We are inserted into the external course of events through the fact that we participate, with our soul element, in the occurrences of our own organisms, which are connected, in turn, with external occurrences. Evidences of the fact that I am really describing the process in a wholly objective way can, naturally, not be obtained by the manner of abstract calculation, nor in an experimental way; but they are revealed to one who is able to observe in this field—particularly one who is able to observe how there is something like a “dreaming while awake,” a subconscious imagining, a living in pictures, which is always in process at the bottom of the dry, matter-of-fact life of the soul, of the intellect. The situation is such that, just as we may dive down from the surface of a stream of water into its profounder depths, so may we penetrate from our intellectual life into the deeper regions of the soul. There we enter into something which concerns us more intimately than the intellectual life, even though its connection with the external world is less exact. There we come also upon everything which stimulates the intellectual life to its independent, inventive power, which stimulates this life of the intellect when it passes over into artistic creation, which stimulates this intellectual life even—as I shall have to show later—when the human heart turns away from the ordinary reflections about the universe and surrenders itself to a reverent and religious veneration for the spiritual essence of the world.

In the act of waking in the ordinary life the situation is really such that, through the insertion of our soul being into the organs of our body, we enter into such a connection with the external world that we can entrust, not to the dream, but only to the waking life of day, responsibility for the judgment which is to be passed upon the nature of the dream, upon its rightness and wrongness, its truth and untruth. It would be psychopathic for any one to suppose that, in the chaotic, though dramatic, processes of the dream something “higher” is to be seen than that which his waking experience defines as the significance of this life of dreams.

In this waking experience do we remain also—at about the same level of experience—when we devote ourselves to the intellectual life, to the ordinary life of science, to every-day knowledge. By means of that absorption, immersion, and I might say strengthening of the soul about which I spoke on the previous occasion, the human being exercises consciously at a higher level for the life of his soul something similar to what he exercises unconsciously through his bodily organization for the ordinary act of waking. And the immersion in a super-sensible form of knowledge is a higher awaking. Just as we relate any sort of dream picture to our waking life of day, through the help of our memory and other forces of our soul, in order to connect this dream picture, let us say, with some bodily excitation or external experience, and thus to fit it into the course of reality, so do we arrive by means of such a super-sensible cognition as I have described at the point where we may rightly fit what we have in our ordinary sensible environment, what we fix by means of observation and experiment, into a higher world, into a spiritual world in which we ourselves are made participants by means of those exercises of which I spoke, just as we have been made participants in the corporeal world in the ordinary waking by means of our own organism. Thus super-sensible knowledge really constitutes the dawn of a new world, a real awaking to a new world, an awaking at a higher level. And this awaking compels him who has awaked to judge the whole sensible-physical world, in turn, from the point of view of this experience, just as he judges the dream life from the point of view of the waking life. What I do here during my earthly life, what appears to me by means of my physical knowledge, I then learn to relate to the processes through which I have passed as a spirit-soul being in a purely spiritual world before my descent into the earthly world, just as I connect the dream with the waking life. I learn to relate everything that exists in physical nature, not “in general” to a fantastic world of spirit, but to a concrete spiritual world, to a spiritual world which is complete in its content, which becomes a visible environment of the human being by reason of the powers of knowledge I have described as Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition.

But, just as a person feels himself in ordinary life to be in different states of soul when awake and when dreaming, so does the whole state of soul become different when one arrives at this higher awaking. For this reason, in describing super-sensible knowledge in the manner that I have employed here, we do not describe merely the formal taking of pictures of the super-sensible world, but the transition of a person from one state of consciousness into another, from one condition of soul into another. In this process, however, even those contents of the soul in which one is absorbed in ordinary life become something entirely different. Just as one becomes a different person in ordinary life through awaking, so does one become, in a certain sense, a different human being through this super-sensible knowledge. The concepts and ideas that we have had in ordinary consciousness are transformed. There occurs not only a conceptual revolution in a person consisting in the fact that he understands more, but also a revolution in his life. This penetrates into the profoundest human conceptions. It is precisely in the profoundest human conceptions, I wish to say, in the very roots of the soul being, that a person is transformed through the fact that he is able to enter into the sphere of this super-sensible knowledge—something which happens, of course, only for momentary periods in one's life.

Here I must call your attention to two conceptions that play the greatest imaginable role in every-day life. These are conceptions completely and profoundly valid in ordinary life which take on an utterly different form the moment one ascends into the super-sensible world. These are the two concepts on the basis of which we form our judgments in the world: the concepts true and false, right and wrong. I beg you not to imagine that in this explanation I intend, through a frivolous handling of the problem of knowledge, to undermine the validity of the concepts true and false, right and wrong. To undermine something which is wholesome in ordinary life is by no means in keeping with a genuine super-sensible knowledge. This higher knowledge enables us to acquire something in addition for ordinary life, but never subtracts from it. Those persons who—whether really or in sentimentality—become untrue in their ordinary lives, unpractically mystical for this aspect of life, are also unsuited for a genuine super-sensible knowledge. A genuine super-sensible knowledge is not born out of fantastic persons, dreamers, but out of those very persons who are able to take their places in their full humanity in the earthly existence, as persons capable in real life. In other words, it is not our purpose to undermine what we experience in our every-day lives, and what is bound up in its very depths with the concepts true and false, right and wrong; on the contrary, truthfulness in this sphere, I should like to emphasize, is strengthened in one's feelings by that very thing which now comes about in connection with a higher knowledge by reason of a metamorphosis, a transformation of the concepts true and false, right and wrong.

When we have really entered into this higher, super-sensible world, we do not any longer say in such an abstract way that a thing is true or false, that it is right or wrong, but the concept of the true and the right passes over into a concept with which we are familiar in ordinary life, though in a more instinctive way; only, this concept belonging to the ordinary life is transmuted into a spiritual form. True and right pass over into the concept healthy; false and wrong pass over into the concept diseased. In other words, when we reflect about something in ordinary life—feel, sense, or will something—we say: “This is right, that is wrong.” But, when we are in the realm of super-sensible knowledge, we do not arrive at this impression of right or wrong but we actually reach the impression that something is healthy, something else is diseased.

You will say that healthy and ill are concepts to which a certain indefiniteness is attached. But this is attached to them only in the ordinary life or the ordinary state of consciousness.

The indefiniteness ceases when the higher knowledge is sought for in so exact a manner as I have explained in the first lecture. Precision then enters also into what we experience in this realm of higher knowledge. Healthy and ill,—these are the terms we apply to what we experience in association with the beings of the super-sensible world of whom we become aware through such a form of knowledge.

Just think how deeply that which becomes an object of super-sensible knowledge may affect us: it affects us as intimately as health and illness of the body. In regard to one thing that is experienced in the super-sensible, we may say: “I enter livingly into it. It benefits and stimulates my life; it elevates my life. I become through it in a certain way more ‘real.’ It is healthful.” In regard to something else I say: “It paralyzes—indeed, it kills—my own life. Thereby do I recognize that it is something diseased.” And just as we help ourselves onward in the ordinary world through right and wrong, just as we place our own human nature in the moral and the social life, so do we place ourselves rightly in the super-sensible world through healthy and ill. But we are thus fitted into this super-sensible world with our whole being in a manner far more real than that in which we are fitted into the sense world. In the sense world we separate ourselves from things in this element of the right or the wrong. I mean to say that right does not benefit us very intensely and wrong does not cause us much distress—especially in the case of many persons. In the super-sensible world it is by no means possible that experiences shall touch us in this way. There our whole existence, our whole reality, enters into the manner in which we experience this super-sensible world. For this realm, therefore, all conflict of opinion ceases as to whether things are reality or mere phenomena; whether they manifest to us merely the effects produced upon our own sense organs; and the like—questions about which I do not wish to speak here because the time would not suffice. But everything about which people can argue in this way in relation to the physical reality,—to carry on such discussion with reference to the spiritual world really has no significance whatever for the spiritual, super-sensible world. For we test its reality or unreality through the fact that we can say: “One thing affects me wholesomely, another thing in an ill way—causing injury,” I mean to say, taking the word in its full meaning and weight. The moment a person ascends to the super-sensible world, he observes at once that what was previously knowledge void of power becomes an inner power of the human soul itself. We permeate the soul with this super-sensible knowledge as we permeate our bodies with blood. Thus we learn also in such knowledge the whole relationship of the soul and the spirit to the human body; we learn to see how the spirit-soul being of man descends out of a super-sensible prenatal existence and unites with the inherited body. In order to see into this, it is necessary first to learn to know the spirit-soul element so truly that through this reality, as healthy or diseased, we experience the actuality in our own—I cannot say body here, but in our own soul.

Supersensible knowledge, therefore—although we make such a statement reluctantly, because one seems at once to fall into sentimentality—is really not a mere understanding but an ensouling of the human being. It is soul itself, soul content, which enters into us when we penetrate to this super-sensible knowledge. We become aware of our eternity, our immortality, by no means through the solution of a philosophical problem; we become aware of them through immediate experience, just as we become aware of external things in immediate experience through our senses.

What I have thus described is exposed, of course, to the objection: “To be sure, one may speak in this way, perhaps, who participates in such super-sensible knowledge; but what shall any one say to these things who is himself not as yet a participant in this super-sensible knowledge?” Now, one of the most beautiful ways in which human beings can live together is that in which one person develops through contact with the other, when one goes through the process of becoming, in his soul nature, through the help of the other. This is precisely the way in which the human community is most wonderfully established. Thus we may say that, just as it is not possible for all persons to become astronomers or botanists and yet the results of astronomy and botany may possess importance and significance for all persons—at least, their primary results—and can be taken in by means of the insight possessed by a sound human intellect, it is likewise possible that a sound human mind and heart can directly grasp and assimilate what is presented by a spiritual-scientist who is able to penetrate into the super-sensible world. For the human being is born, not for untruth, but for truth! And what the spiritual-scientist has to say will always be clothed, of course, in such words and combinations of words that it diverges, even in its formulation, from what we are accustomed to receive as pictures out of the sensible-physical world. Therefore, as the spiritual-scientist lays open what he has beheld, this may work in such a way upon the whole human being, upon the simple, wholesome human mind, that this wholesome human mind is awakened—so awakened that it actually discovers itself to be in that state of waking of which I have spoken today. I must repeat again and again, therefore, that, although I have certainly undertaken to explain in such books as Occult Science—an Outline, and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, and in other volumes, how it is possible to arrive through systematic exercises at what I must designate as “looking into the spiritual world,” so that every one possesses the possibility today, up to a certain degree, of becoming a spiritual-scientist, yet it is not necessary to do this. For a sound human constitution of soul is such that what the spiritual-scientist has to say can be received when it comes into contact with the human soul—provided only that the soul is sufficiently unprejudiced—as something long known. For this is precisely the peculiar characteristic of this spiritual research, this super-sensible knowledge to which we are referring: that it brings nothing which is not subconsciously present already in every human being. Thus every one can feel: “I already knew that; it is within me. If only I had not permitted myself to be rendered unreceptive through the authoritarian and other preconceptions of natural science, I should already have grasped, through one experience or another, some part of what this spiritual research is able to present as a connected whole.”

But the fact of such a thing as this transformation of the concepts true and false into the healthy and the diseased renders the inner experience of the soul more and more intense. At a higher level man places himself more intensely within a reality than he places himself in the physical reality through the ordinary waking of the daily life. In this way, feelings, sentiments, experiences of the soul are generated in relationship to these items of knowledge, which are altogether exact, just as they are generated through our being confronted by external things. That which the super-sensible knowledge can bestow lays hold upon the whole human being whereas it is really only the head that is laid hold of by what the knowledge of the senses can bestow. I trust you will permit me to visualize this relationship of super-sensible knowledge to the complete human being by referring to something personal, although the personal in this realm is also factual, for the facts are intensely bound up with the personal.

In order to render it clear that super-sensible knowledge cannot really be a mere head-knowledge, but lays hold upon the human being in a vastly more living and intense way than head-knowledge, I should like to mention the following. Whoever is accustomed to a living participation in ordinary knowledge—as every true super-sensible knower should really be—knows that the head participates in this ordinary knowledge. If he then ascends, especially if he has been active through his entire life in the ordinary knowledge, to super-sensible knowledge, the situation becomes such that he must exert all his powers in order to keep firm hold upon this super-sensible knowledge which comes upon him, which manifests itself to him. He observes that the power by means of which one holds fast to an idea about nature, to a law of nature, to the course of an experiment or of a clinical observation, is very slight in comparison with the inner force of soul which must be unfolded in order to hold fast to the perception of a super-sensible being. And here I have always found it necessary not only, so to speak, to employ the head in order to hold firmly to these items of super-sensible knowledge, but to support the force which the head can employ by means of other organs—for example by means of the hand. If we sketch in a few strokes something that we have reached through super-sensible research, if we fix it in brief characteristic sentences or even in mere words, then this thing—which we have brought into existence not merely by means of a force evoked through the nerve system applied in ordinary cognition, but have brought into existence by means of a force drawing upon a wide expanse of the organism as a support for our cognition,—this thing becomes something which produces the result that we possess these items of super-sensible knowledge not as something momentary, that they do not fall away from us like dreams, but that we are able to retain them. I may disclose to you, therefore, that I really find it necessary to work in general always in this way, and that I have thus produced wagon-loads of notebooks in my lifetime which I have never again looked into. For the necessary thing here lies in the activity; and the result of the activity is that one retains in spirit what has sought to manifest itself, not that one must read these notes again. Obviously, this writing or sketching is nothing automatic, mediumistic, but just as conscious as that which one employs in connection with scientific work or any other kind of work. And its only reason for existence lies in the fact that what presses upon us in the form of super-sensible knowledge must be grasped with one's whole being. But the result of this is that it affects, in turn, the whole human being, grasps the whole person, is not limited to an impression upon the head, goes further to produce impressions upon the whole human life in heart and mind. What we experience otherwise while the earthly life passes by us, the joy we have experienced in connection with one thing or another, joy in all its inner living quality, the pain we have experienced in lesser or deeper measure, what we have experienced through the external world of the senses, through association with other persons, in connection with the falling and rising tides of life,—all this appears again at a higher level, at a soul-spiritual level, when we ascend into those regions of the super-sensible where we can no longer speak of the true and the false but must speak of the healthy and the diseased.

Especially when we have passed through all that I described the last time, especially that feeling of intense pain at a certain level on the way to the super-sensible, do we then progress to a level of experience where we pass through this inner living dramatic crisis as super-sensible experiences and items of knowledge confront us: where knowledge can bestow upon us joy and pleasure as these are possible otherwise only in the physical life; or where knowledge may cause the profoundest pain; where we have the whole life of the soul renewed, as it were, at a higher level with all the inner coloring, with all the inner nuances of color, with all the intimate inwardness of the life of the soul and the mind that one enjoys through being rooted together with the corporeal organization in every-day existence. And it is here that the higher knowledge, the super-sensible experience comes into contact with that which plays its role in the ordinary life as the moral existence of the human being; this moral existence of the human being with everything connected with it, with the religious sentiment, with the consciousness of freedom.

At the moment when we ascend to a direct experience of the health-giving or the disease-bringing spiritual life, we come into contact with the very roots of the moral life of man, the roots of the whole moral existence. We come into contact with these roots of the moral existence only when we have reached the perception that the physical life of the senses and that which flows out of the human being is really, from the point of view of a higher life, a kind of dream, related to this higher life as the dream is related to the ordinary life. And that which we sense out of the indefinite depths of our human nature as conscience, which enables us to conduct our ordinary life, which determines whether we are helpful or harmful for our fellow men, that which shines upward from the very bottom of our human nature, stimulating us morally or immorally, becomes luminous; it is linked up in a reality just as the dream is linked up in a reality when we wake. We learn to recognize the conscience as something existing in man as a dimly mirrored gleam of the sense and significance of the spiritual world—of that super-sensible world to which we human beings belong, after all, in the depths of our nature. We now understand why it is necessary to take what the knowledge of the sense world can offer us as a point of departure and to proceed from this to a super-sensible knowledge, when we are considering the moral order of the world and desire to arrive at the reality of this moral world order.

This is what I endeavored to set forth thirty years ago as an ethical problem, merely as a moral world riddle, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Without taking into account super-sensible knowledge, I sought by simply following out the moral impulses of the human being to establish the fact that the ethical arises in every instance, not out of the kind of thinking which simply absorbs external things, external occurrences or the occurrences of one's own body, but out of that thinking life of the soul which lays hold upon the heart and the will and yet in its very foundation is, none the less, a thinking soul life, resting upon its own foundations, rooted in the spiritual nature of the world. I was compelled to seek at that time in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for a life of the soul independent of the corporeal being of man, a life that seems, indeed, a shadowy unreality in comparison with the solid reality of the external world of the senses, but which is rooted in its true nature in the very spiritual foundations of the universe. And the fact that the ethical impulses proceed from this kind of thinking, purified from the external world of the senses but wholly alive within man, gives to the human being his ethical character. When we learn to see now through super-sensible knowledge that what is rooted in us as our conscience is, in its essence, the mirroring within our inner being of the real spiritual world which weaves and breathes throughout the world of the senses, we then learn to recognize the moral nature of man as that which forever unites us without our knowing this, even when we sense it only as a still small voice within us, with that spiritual world which can be laid open to us through super-sensible knowledge.

But let no one say that this super-sensible knowledge is meaningless, therefore, for our moral life for the very reason that we have the voice of conscience, for the reason that we possess the practical intentions of life for its individual situations. Especially will one who sees that the ancient spiritual traditions, super-sensible knowledge handed down from primeval times and continuing until now, have faded away and continue their existence today as pale religious creeds, will be able to see that man stands in need of a new stimulus in this very sphere. Indeed, many persons are the victims of a great delusion in this field. We can see that scientific knowledge, which is considered by many today as the only valid knowledge—that the form which this scientific knowledge has taken on, with its Ignorabimus, “We cannot know”—has caused many persons to doubt all knowledge, in that they say that moral impulses, religious intentions, cannot be gained out of any knowledge whatever, but that these ethical-religious impulses in the conduct of life must be developed out of special endowments belonging to man, independent of all knowledge. This has gone so far, indeed, that knowledge is declared not to possess any capacity for setting in motion in the human being such impulses as to enrich him in his moral-religious existence through the fact that he takes in his own spiritual being—for this is really what he does take in with super-sensible knowledge. It has gone so far that people doubt this possibility! On the other hand, however, especially if one is not such a practical person as the so-called practical persons of our present-day life, who merely follow a routine, if one takes the whole world into account, on the contrary, as a genuinely practical person—the world consisting of body, soul, and spirit—one will certainly see that, in the individual life situations for which we may be permeated in actual existence with moral-religious content, more is needed than the faded traditions, which cannot really any longer inspire the human being in a completely moral sense. One recognizes something of this sort.

Permit me to introduce here a special example.

Out of everything that fails to satisfy us in that which confronts us today also in the educational life, what concerned us when the Waldorf School was to be founded in Stuttgart on the initiative of Emil Molt was to answer the question how a human being ought really to be educated. In approaching this task, we addressed this question to the super-sensible world of which I am here speaking. I will mention only briefly what sort of purposes had then to be made basic.

First of all, the question had to be raised: “How is a child educated so that he becomes a real human being, bearing his whole being within himself but also manifesting his whole being in the ethical-religious conduct of life?” A genuine knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit was necessary for this. But such a knowledge of man in body, soul, and spirit is entirely impossible today on the basis of what is considered valid—most of all such a knowledge as may become actually practical so that it enables one to lay hold upon the manifold duties of life. In connection with this let me discuss the question by pointing out to you very briefly that what we so generally feel today to be a just ground for our pride—external science, dealing through observation and experimentation with material substance—is not qualified to penetrate into the secrets of the material itself. What I shall introduce here now will be stated very briefly, but we can find it set forth with all necessary proofs in my writings, especially in the volume Riddles of the Soul [Von Seelenratseln—not yet translated.] When we pay attention nowadays to ordinary science, we receive the conception, for example, that the human heart is a kind of pump, which drives the blood through the organs like a pumping machine. Spirit-science, such as we have in mind, which introduces us to a view of what constitutes not only the physical body of the human being, but his spirit-soul nature, shows us how this spirit-soul nature permeates the corporeal nature, how the blood is driven through the human being, not as if by the action of the “heart pumping machine,” but through the direct action of the spirit-soul nature itself; how this spirit-soul nature so lays hold upon the circulation of the blood that it is this spirit-soul element which constitutes the force that causes the blood to pulse through our organism. But the heart is then looked upon as something like a sense organ. As I consciously perceive the external world with my eyes, and through my concepts make this something of my own, thus do I likewise perceive through this inner sense organ of the heart—again, in an unconscious way—that which I develop unconsciously through my spirit-soul forces as the pulsation in my blood. The heart is no pump; the heart is the inner sense organ through which we perceive what the spirit-soul nature develops inwardly in connection with our blood, just as we perceive through the external senses the external world. The moment that we pass over from an intellectual analysis of the human organism to a vision of the whole human being, the heart reveals itself in its true essence, in its true significance—as an inner sense organ. In the heart the effects of the circulation of human blood, with its life impulses, are manifest; the heart is not the instrument causing this pulsation.

This is an example of the tragic fact that the very science bearing a materialistic coloring is not able to penetrate into the secrets of the material life; an example of the fact that we do not penetrate into the secrets of the material life until we do this by observing the spirit in its true work, in its creative work upon matter.

When we become aware through such super-sensible knowledge, on the one hand, of the creative spirit in the very course of material occurrences, we become aware on the other hand of the power-filled spirit—not merely of the abstractly thinking spirit—of the real spirit in its essence. Then only does there result a genuine knowledge of man, such a knowledge as is needed if we wish to develop in the growing child that which can live and breathe in the human being until death, full of power, suited to life, corresponding with reality. Such an intensive vitalizing of the knowledge of man causes the educator to see the child as something fundamentally different from what he is to the merely external observer. In a fundamental sense, from the very first moment of the earthly life, the growing child is the most wonderful earthly phenomenon. The emergence out of the profoundest inner nature, at first mysteriously indeterminate, of something that renders the indeterminate features more and more determinate, changing the countenance, at first so expressionless, into an expressive physiognomy, the manner in which the vague, unskillful movements of the limbs come to correspond to purpose and objective,—all this is something wonderful to behold. And a great sense of responsibility is necessary in bringing this to development. If we stand in the presence of the developing human being in such a way that we say, with all the inner fervor associated with super-sensible knowledge: “In this child there is manifest that which lived as spirit and soul in the pre-earthly existence in super-sensible beauty, that which has left behind, in a certain sense, its super-sensible beauty, has submerged itself in the particular body that could be given to it in the course of physical heredity; but you, as a teacher, must release that which rests in the human body as a gift of the gods, in order that it may lay hold year by year, month by month, week by week upon the physical body, may permeate this, may be able to mold it plastically into a likeness of the soul, you have to awaken still further in the human being that which is manifest in him,”—if we stand thus before the child, we then confront the task of educating the child, not with intellectual principles, but with our whole human nature, with the fullness of our human heart and mind, with a comprehensive sense of human responsibility in confronting the problem of education. We then gradually come to know that we do not have to observe only the child if we wish to know what we must do with him at any particular time, but that we must survey the whole human being. This observation is not convenient. But it is true that what is manifest in a person under certain circumstances in the period of tenderest childhood, let us say, first becomes manifest in a special form as either health-giving or disease-bringing only in high old age after it has long remained hidden in the inner being. As educators, we hold in our hands not only the immediate age of childhood but the whole earthly life of the human being. Persons who frequently say from a superficial pedagogical point of view that we must present to the child only what it can already understand make a very serious mistake. Such persons live in the moment, and not in the observation of the whole human life. For there is a period of childhood, from the change of teeth until adolescence, when it is exceedingly beneficial to a child to receive something that it does not yet understand, something that cannot yet be made clear to it, on the authority of a beloved teacher—to the greatest blessing for this human life, because, when the child sees in the self-evident authority of a teacher and educator the embodiment of truth, beauty, and goodness, in a certain sense, when it sees the world embodied in the teacher, the effect of this is the awaking of the forces of life. This is not something which contradicts human freedom; it is something which appeals to self-evident authority, which in its further development becomes a fountainhead of strength for the whole life. If, at the age of 35 years, we bring something into our heart and mind which is suited by its nature only now to be understood by us as mature persons, but which we took into our hearts upon the authority of a beloved teacher personality even in our eighth year,—if we bring that up into consciousness which we have already possessed, which lived in us because of love and now for the first time at a mature age is understood by us, this understanding of what was present in us in germ is the fountain for an inner enrichment of life. This inner enrichment of life is taken away from the human being when, in a manner reducing things to trivialities, only that is introduced to the child which it can already understand. We view the mode of a child's experience in the right way only when we are able to enter into the whole human being and, most of all, into that which enters as yet primarily into the human heart.

For example, we become acquainted with persons who radiate a blessing when they enter the company of other persons. Their influence is quieting, bestowing peace even upon excited persons whose tempers clash with one another. When we are really able to look back—as I said, this is not convenient—and see how such persons, apart from their innate qualities, have developed such a quality also through education, we often go back into a very tender age of the life where certain teacher personalities have stood very close to these children in their inner heart life, so that they learned to look up with reverence to these personalities. This looking up, this capacity for reverence, is like a mountain brook which flows into a crevice in the rock and only later appears again on the surface. What the soul acquired then in childhood exerts its influence below in its depths, manifesting itself only in high old age, when it becomes a power that radiates blessing.

What I have just introduced to you might be indicated in a picture if we say that, in relationship to the universe as well, the human being may be so educated that he may transmute into forces of blessing in high old age the forces of reverence of his tender childhood. Permit me to indicate in a picture what I mean. No one will be able to open his hands in blessing in old age who has not learned in tender childhood to fold his hands in reverent prayer.

This may indicate to us that in such a special case a life task, education, may lead to an ethical-religious attitude of mind; may indicate how that which our hearts and minds, and our wills, become as a result of entering livingly into spirit-knowledge may enter with vital reality into our conduct of life, so that what we develop otherwise, perhaps, only in an external and technical way shall become a component part of our moral-religious conduct of life. The fact, however, that instruction and education in the Stuttgart Waldorf School, and in the other schools which have arisen as its offshoots, have been brought into such an atmosphere does not by any means result in a lack of attention to the factual, the purely pedagogical; on the contrary, these are given full consideration. But the task of education has really become something here which, together with all its technique of teaching, its practice of instruction and everything methodical, at the same time radiates an ethical-religious atmosphere over the child. Educational acts become ethical-religious acts, because what is done springs from the profoundest moral impulses. Since the practice of teaching flows from a teacher-conscience, since the God-given soul nature is seen in the developing human being, educational action becomes religious in its nature. And this does not necessarily have any sentimental meaning but the meaning may be precisely what is especially necessary for our life, which has become so prosaic: that life may become in a wholly unsentimental sense a form of divine service to the world, as in the single example we have given of education, by reason of the fact that spiritual science becomes a light illuminating the actions of our life, the whole conduct of life. Since super-sensible knowledge leads us, not to abstractions, but to human powers, when these forms of knowledge gained through super-sensible cognition simply become immediate forces of life, they can flow over, therefore, into our whole conduct of life, permeating this with that which lifts the human being above his own level—out of the sensible into the super-sensible—elevating him to the level of a moral being. They may bring him to the stage where he becomes in consecrated love one with the Spirit of the World, thus arriving at truly religious piety.

Indeed, this is especially manifest also in education. If we observe the child up to his seventh year, we see that he is wholly given over, in a physical sense, to his environment. He is an imitator, an imitative being even in his speech. And when we observe this physical devotion, when we observe what constitutes a natural environment of the child, and remains such a natural environment because the soul is not yet awake, then we feel inclined to say that what confronts us in a natural way in the child is the natural form of the state of religious consecration to the world. The reason why the child learns so much is that it is consecrated to the world in a natural-religious way. Then the human being separates himself from the world; and, from the seventh year on, it is his educational environment which gives a different, dimly sensed guidance to his soul. At the period of adolescence he arrives at the stage of independent judgment; then does he become a being who determines his own direction and goal from within himself. Blessed is he if now, when freed from his sensuous organism, he can follow the guidance of thought, of the spirit, and grow into the spiritual just as he lived in a natural way while a child in the world,—if he can return as an adult in relationship to the spirit to the naturalness of the child's feeling for the world! If our spirit can live in the spirit of the world at the period of adolescence as the body of a child lives in the world of nature, then do we enter into the spirit of the world in true religious devotion to the innermost depths of our human nature: we become religious human beings.

We must willingly accept the necessity of transforming ordinary concepts into living forces if we wish to grasp the real nature, the central nerve, of super-sensible knowledge. So is it, likewise, when we view the human being by means of what I described the last time as super-sensible knowledge in Imagination. When we become aware that what lives in him is not only this physical body which we study in physiology, which we dissect in the medical laboratory and thereby develop the science of physiology, when we see that a super-sensible being lives in him which is beheld in the manner I have described, we then come to know that this super-sensible being is a sculptor that works upon the physical body itself. But it is necessary then to possess the capacity of going over from the ordinary abstract concepts which afford us only the laws of nature to an artistic conception of the human being. The system of laws under which we ordinarily conceive the human physical form must be changed into molded contents; science must pass over into art. The super-sensible human being can not be grasped by means of abstract science. We gain a knowledge of the super-sensible being only by means of a perception which leads scientific knowledge wholly over into an artistic experience. It must not be said that science must remain something logical, experimental. Of course, such a demand can be set up; but what does the world care about what we set up as “demands!” If we wish to gain a grasp of the world, our process must be determined in accordance with the world, not in accordance with our demands or even with our logical thoughts; for the world might itself pass over from mere logical thoughts into that which is artistic. And it actually does this. For this reason, only he arrives at a true conception of life who—by means of “perceptive power of thought” to use the expression so beautifully coined by Goethe—can guide that which confronts us in the form of logically conceived laws of nature into plastically molded laws of nature. We then ascend through art—in Schiller's expression “through the morning glow of the beautiful”—upwards into the land of knowledge, but also the land of reverent devotion, the land of the religious.

We then learn to know—permit me to say this in conclusion—what a state of things we really have with all the doubts that come over a human being when he says that knowledge can never bestow upon us religious and ethical impulses, but that these require special forces far removed from those of knowledge. I, likewise, shall never maintain, on the basis of super-sensible knowledge, that any kind of knowledge as such can guide a human being into a moral and religious conduct of life. But that which really brings the human being into a moral and religious conduct of life does not belong in the realm of the senses: it can be investigated only in the realm of the super-sensible. For this reason a true knowledge of human freedom can be gained only when we penetrate into the super-sensible. So likewise do we gain real knowledge of the human conscience only when we advance to the sphere of the super-sensible. For we arrive in this way at that spiritual element which does not compel the human being as he is compelled by natural laws, but permits him to work as a free being, and yet at the same time permeates him and streams through him with those impulses which are manifest in the conscience. Thus, however, is manifested to man that which he vaguely senses as the divine element in the world, in his innocent faith as a naive human being imbued with religious piety.

It is certainly true that one does not stand in immediate need of knowledge such as I have described in order to be a religious and pious person; it is possible to be such a person in complete naiveté. But that is not the state of the case, as history proves. One who asserts that the religious and ethical life of man must come to flower out of a different root from that of knowledge does not realize on the basis of historical evolution that all religious movements of liberation—naturally, the religious aptitudes always exist in the human being—have had their source in the sphere of knowledge as super-sensible sources of knowledge existed in the prehistorical epochs. There is no such thing as a content of morality or religion that has not grown out of the roots of knowledge. At the present time the roots of knowledge have given birth to scientific thinking, which is incapable, however, of reaching to the spirit. As regards the religious conduct of life, many people cling instead to traditions, believing that what exists in traditions is a revelation coming out of something like a “religious genius.” As a matter of fact, these are the atavistic, inherited traditions. But they are at the present time so faded out that we need a new impulse of knowledge, not working abstractly, but constituting a force for knowledge, in order that what exists in knowledge may give to the human being the impulse to enter even into the conduct of the practical life with ethical-religious motives in all their primal quality.

This we need. And, if it is maintained on the one hand—assuredly, with a certain measure of justification—that the human being does not need knowledge as such in order to develop an ethical-religious conduct of life, yet it must be maintained, on the other hand, as history teaches in this respect also, that knowledge need not confuse the human being in his religious and his ethical thinking. It must be possible for him to gain the loftiest stages of knowledge, and with this knowledge—such, naturally, as it is possible for him to attain, for there will always remain very much beyond this—to arrive at the home in which he dwelt by the will of God and under the guidance of God before he had attained to knowledge. That which existed as a dim premonition, and which had its justification as premonition, must be found again even when our striving is toward the loftiest light of knowledge. It will be possible then for knowledge to be something whose influence does not work destructively upon the moral conduct of life; it may be only the influence which kindles and permeates the whole moral-religious conduct of life. Through such knowledge, however, the human being will become aware of the profounder meaning of life—about which it is permissible, after all, to speak: he will become aware that, through the dispensation of the mysteries of the universe, of the whole cosmic guidance, he is a being willed by the Spirit, as he deeply senses; that he can develop further as a being willed by the Spirit; that, whereas external knowledge brings him only to what is indefinite, where he is led into doubt and where the unity which lived within him while he possessed only naive intimations is torn apart, he returns to what is God-given and permeated of spirit within himself if he awakens out of the ordinary knowledge to super-sensible knowledge.

Only thus can that which is so greatly needed by our sorely tested time really be furthered—a new impulse in the ethical-religious conduct of life: in that, just as knowledge has advanced up to the present time from the knowledge of vague premonition and dream to the wakeful clarity of our times, we shall advance from this wakeful clarity to a higher form of waking, to a state of union with the super-sensible world. Thus, likewise, will that impulse be bestowed upon the human being which he so imperatively requires especially for the renewal of his social existence at this time of bitter testing for humanity in all parts of the world—indeed, we may say, for all social thinking of the present time. As the very root of an ethical-religious conduct of life understanding must awaken for the fact that the human being must pass from the ordinary knowledge to an artistic and super-sensible awaking and enter into a religious-ethical conduct of life, into a true piety, free from all sentimentality, in which service to life becomes, so to speak, service to the spirit. He must enter there in that his knowledge strives for the light of the super-sensible, so that this light of the super-sensible causes him to awaken in a super-sensible world wherein alone he may feel himself to be a free soul in relationship to the laws of nature, wherein alone he may dwell in a true piety and a genuine inwardness and true religiousness as a spirit man in the spirit world.

In my last lectures I have been dealing with the nature of man's being in a way which I think our visitors who are giving us the pleasure of attending the Teachers' Course here will have had no difficulty in following. To link up with my last lecture I will briefly recapitulate the main points.

In speaking about man's external observations and sense-perceptions and about the way in which the intellect, possibly assisted by experiments, is able to arrange and co-ordinate them, I pointed out that in all these functions it is, to begin with, only man's physical body that is in active manifestation

This physical body is permeated by what may be called the etheric body or the body of formative forces a finer organisation of the human being, a Second Man within man, so to speak. How can one have actual perception of this Second Man? It must again and again be emphasised that it is by no means so very difficult to gain a true perception of this Second Man, a perception as clear and authentic as anything perceived by the senses or conceived by the reasoning intellect. One thing however, is necessary, because in our own time man does not live with such intensity in the element of thought itself as he did in earlier epochs of evolution, but adopts a more passive attitude to thought and is content to let impressions simply come to him from the world of the senses. For this reason it is necessary to strengthen thinking by means of exercises. Of course man has thoughts today, but he can hardly have real insight into the nature and activity of thinking because by force of habit he allows the external sense-impressions to stream into his thoughts the moment he wakes from sleep, because he sets store only by these external sense-impressions. True, this fills his thoughts with a content derived from external sense-perceptions but he does not actually feel or experience his own activity of thinking. Modern man can achieve this, however, with the help of such exercises as I have indicated, for instance, in my book, “Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.”

Such exercises require man as it were to throw himself with the whole of his being into the activity of thinking, to give himself up to this thinking with all inner intensity and, with complete indifference to what the outer senses present to him, to live consciously and exclusively in this activity of thinking.

It can be of great assistance in these meditative exercises if one has had some practice in mathematics, especially in geometry. As regards the activity of thinking that has to be applied in geometry, one need only take a resolute plunge, as it were, into one's own inmost being, to experience the nature of this thinking in its independence, in its plasticity, in its inner weaving life, and one has an experience of the activity of thinking when drawing, say, a triangle.

Of course you can draw a triangle on the blackboard. But is that a triangle, in reality? What you have on the blackboard is not a triangle but a vast number of tiny particles of chalk which stick to the board and could actually be counted if one had a sufficiently powerful microscope. That is no triangle! To think that the triangle is there on the blackboard is nonsense. You can have the triangle only in your mind, in the thought you form with the aid of these bits of chalk on the blackboard. But without the use of chalk and blackboard, when simply sitting or standing quietly without even moving a finger, when you have merely the idea, the thought of the triangle fixed in your mind, then you can picture to yourself—but always only in your thoughts—how you begin to draw a line here, then a second, then a third. Then you can live in this inner activity without doing anything externally. You can do more and more exercises of this kind, especially more complicated ones. For instance (it is being drawn on the blackboard): you have here a patch of red chalk and here one of green chalk. I draw it once again, and now you can, for instance, do the following.—What you have pictured before you in these two figures you are to do inwardly; now, as previously you drew the triangle in your mind, quickly imagine this: the red stretches over into the green as far as this, and the green pushes through beneath the red, so that this figure grows out of that, and that out of this, entirely in thought. There you have the red in the centre, the green around it. Now picture the red expanding, the green contracting, and then you get a green circle in the centre and surrounding it the red wheel; then reversed: the red moves inwards, the green expands, and you keep changing from one to the other in rhythmic sequence, an inner circle, an outer wheel: red, green; green, red; red, green; green, red ... You picture this to yourself without it being necessary to do anything outwardly. And you will gradually become aware that to think means doing something inwardly, just as one uses one's hands or arms outwardly. When you use your arm, you are aware of it. So now you must learn to be aware of the forces of thought. When aware of exercising your arms you experience your physical body. When you begin to exercise your thoughts in this way, you experience the Second Man within you, your etheric body, your body of formative forces. As soon as you have reached the point where you need only give yourself a mental push in order to transfer your awareness of arm-and-leg movements to an awareness of your inner forces of thought, you experience this Second Man within you, your etheric body, your body of formative forces. But you experience this Second Man as being woven entirely of thoughts. And at that moment the whole of your earthly life spreads out before you as if present. In a single panoramic survey, you behold your earthly life right back to your earliest childhood.

What is here experienced as the Second Man is not a space-body, but a time-body. And, as I have already said in the course of these lectures, when drawing a sketch of the physical body, one can insert into it a sketch of this time-body. But this represents only a momentary phase, as if you were catching a glimpse of a flash of lightning. This body of formative forces does not live in space except for one fleeting moment. The next moment it has already changed. It is always in a state of flux, ever-changing. And this changing is experienced as the life-tableau.

But simultaneously with this experience one feels oneself part of the whole universe, one no longer feels enclosed within one's skin, but one feels that one is actually in this condition of flux within the universe. One is really only a ripple in the etheric cosmos.—And one experiences other aspects of this Second Man.

One perceives that this Second Man is perpetually trying to dissolve the physical substance of the body into nothingness. In another connection I said to some of you the other day: physical matter, physical substance presses; the etheric forces suck, draw out of space the content which fills it, suck up everything. And throughout our earthly life we live in this interplay of forces. For our nourishment we take physical matter into ourselves. Through the process of nourishment this physical matter streams into our body, setting in action all kinds of processes in accordance with its own nature. When we eat pickled cabbage it enters our system, where its action is conditioned by its own chemical and physical properties. When we drink milk, its action proceeds according to the nature of milk. But very soon a stop is put to this action of milk and cabbage. The etheric body begins to assail the milk-and-cabbage-properties in order to effect their extinction. So that within our system a perpetual battle is in progress between the action of the cabbage-and-milk-properties on the one hand, and, on the other, the counter-action which aims at their extinction. This battle takes place and its effect becomes manifest in what man excretes and in that which, as formative forces, as man's super-sensible organisation, moves in the direction of the head. In exact proportion to the amount of matter we excrete through the various secretory organs, an equal amount changes, in the other direction, into negative matter, into negative substance which lives as the principle of suction in our nervous system, especially in our brain.

Nobody can understand the human being by looking at the physical body only, for then we see, merely from the periphery, no more than part of the processes operating within the human organism. A certain amount of knowledge is gained about the processes working within the alimentary track and about what is excreted through sweating and so on. But for all excretion, that is to say, all that is passing into the grossly material condition, there is the other pole, representing what is drawn into the nervous system as the etheric element. For everything we excrete as material substance, an etheric equivalent flows into us. This etheric element whirls and surges and weaves in our etheric body or body of formative forces which permeates us in the way I have described.

And one also learns to know oneself as this Second Man by observing how the power of memory, the ability to remember, can change. In ordinary life we become aware of external impressions. These continue inwards, entering our thoughts, our mental pictures, and then come to a standstill. We can call them forth again, but the inner force by means of which we recall them does not extend beyond the nerve-endings.

Take for example, the eye. What happens when we perceive something outside is that we push through the optic nerve-endings which are spread out in the eye right into the blood-circulation of the eye. That is how perception is brought about. When we only remember, however, we penetrate no further than where the optic nerve comes to an end in the eye. With our etheric body or body of formative forces we do not reach through the nerve-endings into the blood stream.

When we now intensify thinking, it is not as if we merely experience the san з rebound as in the ordinary functioning of memory, when external perceptions are transformed into mental pictures which are then held and thrust back. If, as it were in reverse, we also perceive what is etheric in the world, we thrust just as far into our organism with this etheric thought-content of the world as with our ordinary memory-pictures which, however, are only reminiscences of life. And then we develop a consciousness of the etheric working in the cosmos; we live within the etheric formative forces of the world.

How a man experiences himself when living consciously within the weaving of the etheric cosmic forces can be sketched in this way. (The drawing cannot here be reproduced.) Here we have the play of the etheric forces in their manifold manifestation. This must be taken configuratively. Everything lives and weaves within it. And then man experiences himself in this etheric weaving. It makes a strange picture, but that is how it is and how it must be imagined. The feet and legs are hardly noticeable. One has the feeling that at one point, as it were, one is growing out of this play of the etheric forces. One experiences their action as far as one's nerve-endings. It runs through the back and on to the nerve-endings in the front of the body, and that is the extreme limit to which the etheric world extends in us. That is man's position in the present etheric cosmos. The way in which one experiences the etheric world when finding oneself edged, as it were, into some extreme corner of the etheric cosmos is that it reaches only with its fringe into one's organism, where the etheric action then comes to a halt. In short, that is the way in which one learns to live in the etheric world.

And indeed this would by no means be so difficult an achievement, if only nowadays people would take the trouble to practise such mental activity as I have described. The easiest way to become an adept in this way of thinking is to absorb in the right manner and really live through what is contained in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.”

There is, for instance, the section which deals with this awareness of the activity of thinking in relation to the ethical and moral principle in the world. What I have described there is the same from the qualitative aspect. And when one studies the “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” in the right way, one begins to understand what the nature of this life in the Etheric, what this experience of the formative forces, really is.

The Inner Aspect of the Activity of Speaking

Our next experience after that of the activity of thinking, can be awareness of the activity of speaking. And a beginning can well be made with the activity of speech in ordinary, everyday life. Only it is necessary to become as well trained in governing speech as in governing thought. Control of the latter must be achieved to the extent that the senses are silent, that one lives only in active thinking, that sense-impressions are eliminated. As regards speech, it is necessary to reach the point of having a great deal to say—for one must have a command of words and not be inarticulate—but at the same time to be able at will to check the impulse for a time and to practise absolute silence.

I know that in the case of some people this is asking a great deal; but in order to gain knowledge of the Third Man, this is absolutely necessary. One must have a clear idea of what it means to be eager to deliver a carefully-prepared speech, to have the words on the tip of the tongue, and yet to keep silent. That is how one learns to practise active silence. To practise passive silence—as one might in an empty room (not an airless room, of course, but with no other people present), when there is nobody to speak to—to remain passively silent is useless? one must learn to be actively silent.

Now you can say: A dull fellow indeed, going about practising silence in people's company, walking up to them and, instead of talking to them, just looking at them and remaining wrapped in silence. Well, I admit, my dear friends, that socially this would certainly be anything but pleasant; it could, however, actually prove exceedingly fruitful for spiritual advancement, and beneficial results could ensue if, for instance, one attended a party at which people, including oneself, were by no means silent as a rule, and if one now began to practise silence. One says nothing although one knows a great deal and, in giving freely of one's store of knowledge, has formerly always been a great talker. I say that one could do this, but one need not do it outwardly and, although it could be fruitful, it would not be so very helpful when aiming high; the idea is that the entire exercise, as I have described it, is carried out inwardly, that one is fully prepared to speak but has the ability to suppress the impulse inwardly.

You will understand better what I mean when I tell you, for instance, that in ordinary, everyday life one does not think in the true sense of the word. One does think in the field of mathematics if, for instance, one makes a mental picture of a triangle in the way I have described. One does some real thinking particularly when the mind is occupied with unusual things of a kind for which the language has no words. But when completely absorbed in the things which nowadays make up the content of current popular interest, one does not really do any actual thinking, for in this mental process the organs of speech constantly co-vibrate, albeit so quietly that one does not hear it. The mental activity of modern man, who so dislikes thinking about anything that is not to be found in the external world of the senses, is not real thinking. The mind is merely weaving in shadow-pictures of words..

You can test it yourself and you will find this weaving of the soul in the shadow-pictures of words to be a fact. When one can really bring the larynx inwardly into a state of complete rest while still maintaining that inner activity of the soul which normally animates the movements of the larynx, so that the escape from the spoken word remains an entirely inward exercise—if, in other words, one does with the activity of speech what one has previously done with the activity of thinking that is a transformed faculty of memory (where one pushes only as far as the nerve-endings, while now one exercises the activity of speech only as far as the larynx, just to the point where the latter is about to break into speech)—then gradually there will develop what in recent lectures I have called “the deep silence of the human soul,” because checking and preventing speech inwardly means developing the deep silence of the soul.

To get an idea of what this deep silence in the soul means, imagine yourself in a town, not Basle, perhaps, but in London or in a city even noisier still. You are right within this noise and turmoil. Now you leave the town and the noise gradually fades as you get further away. Presently you find yourself in the stillness and solitude of a wood. You say: All is quiet within and without. There comes a point when the stillness reaches the degree ‘nought.’ First the noise, then it grows quieter, then absolute stillness at point ‘nought.’

But now this can go further. And indeed this process of not only experiencing the quietness of a silent outer world and the soul at rest, but of passing into the deep silence, can be the direct result of abstaining from the use of words while maintaining that full inner activity which normally is bent on becoming vocal. One merely refrains from making use of the physical body. (I have described the various meditative exercises in my book “Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.”) Then one realises that there is something beyond the point ‘nought’ of stillness. In public lectures I have made use of a commonplace comparison. I said: Supposing someone with a certain amount of capital spends some of it and reduces his means; then continues to spend until finally there is nothing left; he has reached point ‘nought.’ But he goes on spending and runs into debt. Now he has less than nought; and so it goes on. Here the mathematicians have introduced the negative numbers: -6, -4, -2, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. In a similar way you can also imagine how in the realm of sound the stillness at point ‘nought’ passes over into the negative, into a state that is stiller than stillness, quieter than quietness. You can establish the same conditions in the depths of your soul.

But then, when the outer world is now not only silent but has passed beyond mere silence, when the soul's reaction extends beyond the stillness at point ‘nought’ into the negative sphere of all external sound, then the spirit begins to speak out of the depths of the soul's stillness and we become aware of our Third Man, the astral man, as we say. Expressions do not matter, they are terminology; another name could serve as well.

Of this Third, astral Man, we become aware when we reach the deep silence of the soul, and from out of this profound silence the Spiritual sounds forth, a sounding which is the opposite of physical sound.

This astral body, as you will see, takes us in every respect further than the etheric body alone could have done. To make this clear, let me deal with it from a cosmic point of view.

What is the modern physicist or astronomer, in fact the modern scientist, trying to do? He studies the laws of nature. Through observation or experiment he establishes them. These laws of nature constitute his science. They present him with what is inherent in things. With that he ought to rest content. But instead, he begins to be proud of his laws of nature, he begins to be arrogant. And he now asserts what he cannot by any means substantiate, that these laws apply to the whole of the universe. He says: Discoveries I make in my laboratory on the earth would, if tested under similar conditions, prove equally valid on the most distant stars of the universe, stars from which the light takes so many light-years to reach the earth—people pretend that these things make sense—so that, given similar conditions the same laws of nature must prevail there, because their validity is absolute.

Yes, but it is not like that. At its source the light shines brightly into its immediate surroundings; further away from the source its strength decreases and the further we go the weaker it becomes, it grows faint. The power of light diminishes at a ratio equal to the square of the distance. So it is with light. And curiously enough, so it is also on earth with the laws of nature.

The validity of what you establish on the earth as laws of nature becomes less and less the further you get away from the earth. To be sure it seems dreadful to say such a thing, and in the eyes of a staunch student of natural science anyone with such ideas must necessarily appear as the perfect idiot. That one can well understand, because when this happens, and one looks at it from the modern scientist's point of view, one can very easily put oneself in his place. Only the reverse does not happen: the modern scientist cannot put himself in the place of the spiritual investigator. The latter knows perfectly well how the student of natural science arrives at his facts. Such understanding is lacking when the case is reversed. Therefore most criticisms levelled at spiritual science from that quarter are, from their point of view, quite justified. But they merely show that the student of natural science cannot honestly find any real meaning in what the spiritual investigator has to say. That one must grant him, because it is a fact. It is simply beyond him. He must himself become a spiritual investigator before one can enter into polemics with him. For that reason the futility of polemics with a man who, firmly entrenched in natural science, has no mind for the findings of spiritual science, is obvious.

Well, with what has been said about the light, the student of natural science will agree, as he has discovered it himself, but as far as the laws of nature are concerned, he will disagree. However, with regard to light, the spiritual investigator must make a reservation. Natural science says: As the light radiates, its strength diminishes with distance, until at last it fades to the extent that its strength is identical with the degree ‘nought.’ But such a statement is just as clever as if someone were to say: Here I have an elastic rubber ball; now I press it. Naturally the ball tends to bulge out on the other side. The elasticity pushes the surface this way and that way. Now someone says: That cannot be; if I press elastic substance the process must go on and on, only it becomes so weak at last that it is no longer perceptible.—It is, however, not like that: elasticity rebounds.

And this also applies to the light. The light does not radiate in a way that one could say: Far out there it is so weak that it will soon approach the point of darkness, yet it continues to spread further and further. That is not true. Its radiation extends only to a certain point, to the periphery of a given sphere; then it rebounds. And as it comes back it is visible only to the spiritual investigator, not to the natural scientist. Because when the radiation of light has exhausted its elasticity and rebounds, it returns as spirit, as the super-sensible. Then the natural scientist cannot perceive it. There is no light that shines and does not come to a certain boundary from which it is thrown back to return as spirit. What I am now telling you about the light applies equally to the laws of nature. The validity of these laws diminishes the further you get away into space. But this continues only as far as the outer shell of a given sphere; thus everything comes back. The laws of nature, however, then return as thoughts that are wisdom-inwoven. And that is the cosmic ether.

The cosmic ether does not radiate in an outward direction with regard to the earth, it radiates with a centripetal movement from all sides. But what lives in all these incoming forces that radiate to the earth are creative, wisdom-filled thoughts. The cosmic ether is at the same time a thought-world of formative forces. There is, however, a difference: When here on earth I form the kind of thoughts which lead to the laws of nature, such thoughts are, figuratively speaking, neatly aligned, so that one can say: there exists a certain constancy of matter, a constancy of energy. We have exponents of the law of light, and so on. The formulations of what lives in matter are made by means of thoughts.

But when the thoughts come back, when one experiences how they live in the cosmic ether, they are not thoughts born of logic, not thoughts with such sharply defined outlines; they are experienced as pictorial thoughts, pictures, Imaginations.

When such questions arise one meets with strange things in modern cultural life. To some of you present here I said a few days ago: During the last 40 to 50 years, theories without number or, if you like, hypotheses, have been advanced about the cosmic ether. Some have conceived it as a rigid body, some as a liquid body, others as cosmic gas, as something in a state of whirling motion or the like, and so on. But what is happening when such hypotheses are advanced? They are simply the logical outcome of a mental approach that clings to the kind of thinking that has become habitual in dealing with the visible beings and processes of nature. But what comes back to us from the cosmos has long since become incapable of being grasped within the framework of thoughts in which the laws of nature are formulated. What is coming back can be apprehended only when one begins to think in pictures, to think imaginatively.

One could say: the validity of all that is contained in and governs the formulation of the laws of nature diminishes at the ratio of the square of the distance measured up to the periphery of a given sphere. There the laws of nature have altogether ceased to exist as such. They have become fused, they blend, to return, now, as pictures; they come back in figurations, in images.

And now, when one has achieved the stage of vision I have described, one perceives the world etherically, that is to say, in the form of pictures, and one has to acknowledge that now, while living in the etheric realm one does not only see nothing of one's physical body, but also one's power of thought that is employed in the ordinary world has ebbed away.. Instead, it is as if the universe were radiating back pictures, Imaginations, from all directions. So that in order to understand the ether, one begins to change ordinary thinking into thinking that is plastic, pictorial. It follows then, as a matter of course, that the ether could never be understood by means of any of these misconceived hypotheses. For at the boundaries of etheric radiation, all those calculations and theories concerned with physical phenomena in nature have lost their meaning. At that point the outstreaming has ceased and we have incoming radiation which no longer responds to the range of thought that depends on the ordinary consciousness, but demands a fundamentally artistic approach, inspired by thoughts springing from the realm of art, from the realm of art in the earthly sense.

What I have to tell you now will sound paradoxical, but it is the simple truth for one who sees the world in its true light. Supposing I carve a figure in wood, mould it into the shape of a human being and really succeed in creating a good likeness of the outward appearance of a man. But there is one thing a sculptor cannot do, namely, to let the space be ‘sucked out.’ All I can do as a sculptor is to master the physical material. If I were also able to make the laws governing the cosmic ether operate within the space occupied by my wooden figure, that is to say. if that deep silence were to reign externally, if the negative stillness, not only the stillness at point ‘nought,’ were to take possession, leaving not only space but something space-less, then my wooden sculpture would not, it is true, become a human being, but something like a plant. The wooden figure remains a sculpture only, as it has only physical properties and is merely a replica of an external form, because space-suction, which should really be the supplementary element in the form, does not also come into operation. As it is, that cannot happen, otherwise my wooden sculpture would be a growing organism.

You must realise that with ordinary artistic thinking, with ordinary artistic feeling, you cannot reach the etheric world because, to do so, one has not only to project mental images into space, but one must really lay hold of space, so that the ether empties it. Then one experiences life, the living, in this sucked-out space, or rather in the process of this suction. Thus a very different kind of thinking is needed to reach these higher worlds.—And when one has also had the other experience I described as the deep silence of the soul, then something else happens. One experiences how, coming out of cosmic space, etheric forms approach one, and in these forms one feels the presence of sentient, spiritual being. Not only etheric formations but actual spiritual beings of the so-called higher Hierarchies approach one. One lives as spirit among spirits; one experiences a real spiritual world. It approaches with the inflow of this back-streaming radiation. Wherever the etheric forms approach us the spiritual world is revealed. The physical has departed and returns in etheric forms. But now, together with these returning etheric forms, spiritual beings can approach us. Only, if you were to ask yourselves: Where do they come from?—the ‘where’ has no longer any spatial meaning. Their relation to space is that, converging from the periphery of the universe, they are coming in from all sides of the universe, because they let themselves be borne in on the cosmic ether. The cosmic ether gives them a spatial ‘where,’ but this ‘where’ connotes a gravitating from without.

These two ‘substantialities’ which I discover in this way in the world, the one which, working in the formative forces, approaches me in etheric forms and suffuses me, and the other, which lives and has its being in the spiritual world—these two substantialities the human being acquires as he descends from his pre-earthly to his earthly life, filling his whole being with a content held together by a part of the infinite world of formative forces—infinite only in a relative sense, namely, only as far as the boundaries of the universe; and itself filled with the astral body, with what is borne in on the ether and has a ‘where’ only through the ether.

We bear within us the physical body consisting of physical ingredients of the earth; we bear within us the etheric body which we receive from out of cosmic space; and within the etheric body we bear the astral body which is spirit from cosmic spirit. We confine within the limits of our own being what appears without contour and without limit in the universe.

And when we now proceed to do still more advanced exercises in which we do not only reach the deep silence of the soul but, penetrating this deep silence, we awake in the activity of our own will, as we normally awake only in the activity of thinking and conceiving, then we experience our fourth member, our ‘I.’—About this experience of the ‘I’ it is my intention to speak to you tomorrow.