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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 4111 through 4120 of 6548

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61. Good Fortune 07 Dec 1911, Berlin
Translated by R. H. Bruce

However, after the friendship had lasted some time, and when the poor girl, who had been earning her living under most difficult conditions, was able to think that at last some good fortune was coming her way, it transpired that her lover was of the Jewish persuasion and for this reason the marriage could not take place.
When such a man says this, he has already begun to understand that in fact all that approaches us from outside is attracted from within, and that the attraction is caused through our own evolution.
All that in the outer world at first appeared to me as my ill-fortune, as the evil destiny of my life, becomes explicable to my spiritual understanding through my relation to the universal cosmos in which I am placed. No commonplace consolation can help us to overcome what in our own conception is a real misfortune.
61. The Origin of the Animal World in the Light of Spiritual Science 18 Jan 1912, Berlin
Translator Unknown

Because really important progress in natural science in various regions is connected with this personality, we should truly not pass by so lightly the theories of such a thinker as it is generally done today. Gustav Theodor Fechner cannot understand that the living ever could have developed out of the lifeless. It is much more obvious to Fechner to imagine that the lifeless can go forth out of the living through processes of isolation, because we see indeed that the inner life process of the living beings excretes the materials which, after having served a certain time in the life process, pass over to the rest of nature and belong then, as it were, to lifeless, to inorganic processes.
If today we put aside plants, we must imagine that under the influence of those substances which separated gradually as lifeless ones from the living one (and which grouped themselves in various ways)—earth differentiated, grouped itself so that we designate firm earth, liquid water, air, and so on.
Contemplating the origins of the animal world it becomes clear to us that in truth the entire earthly existence reveals itself in such a way that we can understand it only along the lines of Goethe, who has said, but only by way of a hint, in such a way that results concerning the origin of man and animal, have reality for the spiritual researcher.
61. Death in Man, Animal, and Plant 29 Feb 1912, Berlin
Translated by R. H. Bruce

But wherever death intervenes in existence, we find, when we look more closely, the point of contact which draws the spiritual and the material together. Certainly, when these subjects are under discussion, there is no need to agree with the many cheap attacks on the efforts of modern science.
Here, then, with reference to this question, we have always the opportunity to point to a distinguished book which is at the same time easy to understand; namely, the “Physiology” of no less a writer than the great English scientist, Huxley, translated into German by Professor J.
Thus we see that man must destroy his organism; we realize the necessity of real death for man. Just as we understand the necessity of sleep for the life of ideas, so we now understand the necessity of death for the life of the will.
61. The Nature of Eternity 21 Mar 1912, Berlin
Translator Unknown

If, then, it is not a reality, what is it? Well, there is only one way of understanding it—by assuming it to be an image, a picture, but one outside the world of our experience and comprehensible only by comparing it to someone confronted by his own reflection.
Once we have consciously experienced that in the ripe content of our life we have stored up forces which at first cannot be used but are tested to their utmost when we pass through the gate of death, then it should not be difficult to understand that these forces, brought about by the activity of the ego independently of the body, can never be annihilated.
When, however, Spiritual Science goes on to speak in more detail about life between death and rebirth, this naturally causes laughter among those who believe they are standing on the firm ground of ordinary science. This can well be understood by the spiritual scientist, for he knows that neither their laughter nor what they say depends upon reason and evidence but upon the way they think, which makes it impossible for them to acquiesce in what the spiritual scientist, as a result of his researches, is able to say about life after death.
61. The Relation of the Human Being to the Supersensible Worlds 19 Oct 1911, Berlin

Indeed, one has to admit that recently within our cultural life the need has grown up to turn the sight to the supersensible worlds to receive sense and understanding of the whole human life from this knowledge of the supersensible world to gain power in our so complex life for the demands of the outer world.
Nevertheless, someone who deals with spiritual science understands Parmenides when he speaks of it so that it makes your blood freeze in your veins due to these dried up abstractions and if he shows that even in the most marvellous edifice of ideas something is contained that appears sober to us.
This was used where one tormented people whom one wanted to give an understanding of the sources of existence, so that the pain became so strong that it changed over to the opposite.
61. Death and Immortality 26 Oct 1911, Berlin

Since if we abstain from the longing for a life which exceeds the bodily if we abstain from that what is to be understood possibly in the sense of concepts like fear of death and the like, we have the question of the nature of our whole human individuality in it as something that remains for the human knowledge regarding death and immortality.
For one can hope that one will succeed, finally, in the laboratory in producing life under outer material conditions. Compared to all such matters I would like to remind you of one thing.
R., 1818–1896) pronounced the thought that one can understand the sleeping human being from the standpoint of natural sciences, but not the waking one in whom impulses, instincts, passions and so on surge up and down.
61. From Paracelsus to Goethe 16 Nov 1911, Berlin

Those are educated in soft clothes and in women's rooms, and we who grew up in pine cones do not understand each other well. This is why someone can even be considered as rude who believes to be subtle and gracious.
There, for example, the others talked in Latin that he understood rather well, then he shouted back towards them in German what he regarded as proofs, they regarded, as follies.
How does he present him? Although he shows that Faust found a deep understanding of nature, also a kind of feeling related with nature, it is different than it was with Paracelsus.
61. The Origin of the Human Being 04 Jan 1912, Berlin

But if one imagines that strange living being from which the human beings and the mammals should be descended, one must say to himself, under the present conditions such a living being is still quite impossible, it cannot exist at all today.
While you work in the first childhood unconsciously on your outer configuration, you notice now that the spiritual-mental essence is so strong that you create an organ now consciously, while you work on your cerebral organisation, so that you can understand what you could not understand before. The communicability of spiritual science is based on that.
There we have a matter that is still far from the today's consciousness for which an understanding will be there in relatively short time if civilisation has been fertilised by spiritual science.
61. Human History, Present, and Future in the Light of Spiritual Science 01 Feb 1912, Berlin

Everything that happens in the life of the animal realm makes us aware of this reasonableness. We see that insects live under certain conditions that make it to them impossible to get to know the circumstances under which their descendants have to develop in the first time of their existence.
I have given this as an example what one can aim at by self-education of the present consciousness as a kind of Imaginative knowledge that can lead us to the undergrounds of the things. If we compare such a knowledge to myths and legends, we have found that it is important to recognise these clairvoyant experiences that the human beings had in the undergrounds of natural existence.
Someone who can realise why Plato, Socrates and others were possible only in Greece, and why at that time the ego-consciousness emerged in a determining point, also understands why the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place just in the Greek-Roman culture as the main focus of the whole human development.
61. Copernicus and His Time in the Light of Spiritual Science 15 Feb 1912, Berlin

The Middle Ages had, so to speak, only for that more talent which one can see with the senses and understand with the intellect. Copernicus was that man who now turned the glance to the world in such a way that he understood the world coherence in space, as this could be understood with the mere outer reason at first that summarised by logic and mathematics what spread out in space.
Since it is not possible today that spiritual science can bring the human beings to an understanding of our age unless one tries to understand the lawfulness of humanity and of the evolution generally.
One of his friends believed due to the no longer understood Aristotle that Aristotle had taught that the nerves of the human being originate from the heart.

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