The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Death in Humans, Animals, and Plants

[ 1 ] Tolstoy once expressed, in his writings, his astonishment— one might even say with disapproval, that while sifting through contemporary science, he had indeed found all manner of studies on the development of the insect world, on things in the organism or elsewhere in the world that seemed insignificant to him, but that he had found nothing within science itself regarding the important, the essential questions that move every heart. Above all, Tolstoy says, he found nothing whatsoever about the nature of death. From a certain perspective, one cannot entirely disagree with such an objection to the modern scientific spirit, raised from a significant angle. Nevertheless, from a certain other perspective, one may emphasize that, if such a statement is meant as a reproach, it is, in a sense, unfair to modern science for the very simple reason that modern science has long derived its greatness and significance precisely from that very field where one has, in essence, searched in vain for answers to questions concerning, for example, the nature of death. Indeed, if one stands on the ground of the worldview that is to be represented here, there is truly no need to indulge in one outburst after another against modern science. One can certainly admire to the highest degree the magnificent achievements and the highly significant contributions of this science, both within its own field and with regard to its application in practical life and human interaction; and it has been repeatedly stated here that spiritual science truly need not be inferior to any form of admiration directed in this vein. Yet the most significant achievements of modern science rest precisely on a foundation that precludes reaching those points of contact that must be addressed when questions of death, immortality, and the like are to be investigated. Modern science cannot do this from its starting points because it has set itself the task, first and foremost, of investigating material life as such. Yet wherever death intervenes in existence, we find—if we look more closely—the point of contact between the spiritual and the material. Indeed, when discussing these questions, one need not agree with certain cheap attacks on the efforts of modern science. Indeed, one may even say—and this, too, has often been emphasized—that when the great questions of conscience regarding existence are to be examined, one may feel more drawn, in terms of scientific responsibility and scientific conscience, even as a scholar of the humanities, to the way in which the external natural sciences proceed today—even if they cannot address the most important questions or life itself—rather than to certain hastily launched debates originating from dilettantish theosophical or other “humanistic” quarters, which often take the easy way out, particularly in methodological terms, when it comes to answering the questions that concern us today.

[ 2 ] In more recent times, however, people have begun to approach the question of the death of living beings from a scientific perspective. This has taken place in a unique way. And aside from various individual attempts that have been made—the discussion of which, however, would take us too far afield today—we may at least point to one researcher who has addressed the question of the nature of death in a significant book, and who has approached this question in a unique way—so unique, in fact, that we must once again say, as had to be said in a similar vein during the debates on the “origin of humankind”: As a scholar of the humanities, one feels so strangely at odds with contemporary natural science, for wherever facts are presented, one finds that it is precisely from the standpoint of the humanities that one can give these facts their full due and see in them rigorous evidence for what the humanities have to present. — Where, however, one is confronted with the theories and hypotheses currently put forward by proponents of worldviews in a more or less materialistic manner—or, as one feels obliged to say more elegantly, in a monistic manner—the situation is different. One feels that, however much one may agree with the facts that modern times have brought to light, one can often find it just as difficult to agree with the theories and hypotheses that those who believe they stand on the genuine ground of natural science feel compelled to construct on the basis of what emerges as scientific facts.

[ 3 ] The researcher who wrote about the nature of death pointed out, from his scientific perspective, a point that is particularly interesting from the standpoint of the spiritual sciences. He is the man who served for many years as director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris: Metchnikoff. He seeks to gain clarity, based on the available facts—as far as is possible today—regarding the factors that bring about the death of living beings. First of all, when addressing such a question, one must set aside what is known as the “violent death” of living beings. We may have the opportunity to touch briefly on this violent death, which is caused by external accidents or other factors. But when discussing the nature of death—as Mechnikoff also points out—one must view it within the context of natural existence; one must regard it, so to speak, as belonging to the phenomena of life, and one must be able to conceive of these phenomena in such a way that death is an integral part of them. Only then can one solve the mystery of death through so-called natural death, which is brought about as the end of life, just as other natural processes are brought about in the course of life. Since this is intended merely as an introduction to what should be said in light of the natural sciences, it is impossible to go into the interesting details of the explanations offered by the aforementioned researcher and thinker. But it should be noted that he points out how, when the natural scientist observes the facts of life—in the processes of life itself, in that through which life, so to speak, develops and evolves—nothing really presents itself that could serve as a reason for the annihilation of the being, for death to intervene in life. Using numerous examples, Mechnikoff seeks to demonstrate how anyone who observes life sees everywhere that death occurs without, for example, one being able to speak of what might easily be described in the course of life as it approaches death—namely, the emergence of what one might call the exhaustion of life in and of itself. This researcher draws attention to numerous facts that prove that the processes of life continue in a certain unimpeded manner, that there can be no question of an exhaustion of life in and of itself, and that yet death occurs at a specific point in time, so that this researcher finds himself—one must simply admit it—in an extraordinarily peculiar situation, in which he is essentially compelled to attribute every death, every cessation of life in the plant, animal, and human kingdoms to external influences—to the emergence of certain enemies of life that gain the upper hand in the course of life and ultimately act as fighters against life, like a poison against life, thereby ultimately destroying it. Thus, while the organism itself, in the view of this researcher, shows signs everywhere that it does not actually bring about its own demise through exhaustion, this individual believes that, as death approaches, such enemies of life appear in some form—manifesting as symptoms of poisoning—and bring life to an end. Thus, we have before us a scientific hypothesis—for that is all it is—which, in essence, attributes every natural death to external influences, to the occurrence of symptoms of poisoning caused by external living beings from the plant or animal kingdom, which act as enemies of life and, at certain moments, destroy the organism.

[ 4 ] Such an inquiry is one that employs every means to arrive, within the material phenomena themselves, at a kind of understanding of the essence of death. When one embarks on such a path, one seeks as far as possible to rule out the possibility that the spiritual element itself might intervene in organic life as an active, effective force, and that this spiritual element, as such, might have something to do with death as it presents itself to us in the external world. Indeed, this would not be entirely inconceivable, even if it might at first seem absurd to those standing on more or less materialistic or monistic ground—that precisely those enemies which appear as poisonous forces in relation to the organism might, one might say, as necessary accompaniments to the spiritual forces that permeate, flow through, work through, and empower the organic beings as they approach death. It would not be inconceivable that the active spirit, while on the one hand being dependent on using the organism as its instrument in the physical world, on the other hand, as it were, through its own processes, creates the possibility that such hostile forces might intervene in the organism in order to destroy it. Now, however, when one allows a discussion such as the one just mentioned to sink in, one must not overlook the fact that contemporary natural science, through its focus on merely material phenomena, actually makes it easy for itself to investigate the death of organisms—though it really ought not to make it so easy. And this leads us to emphasize that it is certainly not so easy for spiritual science—which, from our present vantage point, must attempt to place itself within the spiritual development of humanity—to conduct investigations into certain questions in such a simplistic manner as is sometimes done by those worldviews that believe they can deduce something about the great mysteries of existence solely from external, material facts.

[ 5 ] It should be pointed out right from the start that, given the way in which the natural sciences view phenomena today, none of those who believe they stand on the solid ground of scientific facts make a clear distinction between death in the plant world, the animal world, and the human world. For what is called death in the plant world, death in the animal world, and death in the human world—what do they have in common other than the destruction of an external phenomenon? But in essence, this is also consistent with the destruction of an external machine: the cessation of the connection between its parts. If one looks only at external appearances, it is easy to speak of death insofar as one can speak of this death in a uniformly identical way with regard to plants, animals, and humans. We can see where this leads by considering a case that I have cited frequently before many of the listeners here today, but which remains interesting time and again when one considers the relationship of science to such a question. On such an occasion, I do not wish to refer to the usual popular writings that strive to convey to a wider audience what natural science is said to have discovered; rather, whenever the connection to natural science is to be established, I always wish to refer to the so-called best treatises of this kind. Here we always have the opportunity to point to a book on physiology that is both accessible and excellent, written by none other than the great English natural scientist Huxley, and translated into German by Professor I. Rosenthal of Erlangen. A work on physiology whose opening pages also discuss death in a very remarkable way, albeit in just a few words—and in which we immediately see how, when faced with such a question, it is not research itself that is fundamentally inadequate, but rather the thinking and judgment of contemporary science. In it, Huxley states, almost immediately on the first pages of his Principles of Physiology: Human life depends on three things, and when these are destroyed, death must ensue. If, first, the brain is destroyed; if, second, pulmonary respiration is suppressed; and if, third, cardiac activity is halted, then human death must occur. — Yet, curiously enough—though it is unclear whether this “curiously enough” is felt in wider circles today, since patterns of thought have been influenced by materialistic wisdom—Huxley says it cannot be stated with absolute certainty that the death of a human being must occur if the three aforementioned functions of the human organism are suppressed. Rather, one could imagine that the brain would cease to function; but if lung and heart activity could then be artificially sustained, life could continue for a while, even without the brain being active. — Whether this is perceived as “strange” is merely a matter of habitual thinking. For one should really say to oneself: A human life in which one cannot make use of the brain as a tool in the physical world cannot truly be described as a continuation of life. — One must admit that life is over for such a person when the physical existence for which the brain serves as an instrument can no longer occur. And if lung and heart functions can still be maintained in some way, that would be a kind of continued existence, perhaps akin to that of a plant, and one could, if one wishes to proceed entirely without prejudice, speak of the death that would then still have to occur when lung and heart activity cease as a “plant-like death” that is added to the first death.

[ 6 ] It is only possible to speak of human death without prejudice when one witnesses death occurring, because the human being can no longer make use of the most significant tool through which he lives his life in the physical world, in the facts of his consciousness. And the cessation of the facts of consciousness within the physical world—insofar as they are bound to the necessity of the brain—should be designated as death for human beings alone. But just how superficially such matters are viewed is amply demonstrated by the fact that Huxley himself, on those pages where he discusses death, points out that natural science has not yet succeeded in proceeding in the same way that, in his view, an ancient doctrine—as he sees it—had proceeded, namely, to trace the spiritual, essential realities of the soul through the process of reincarnation in the further course of existence once a person has passed through the gate of death. Not yet, Huxley argues, can modern science track what it is meant to track: the oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and so on, which make up the human organism and which disperse once a person has passed through the gate of death. This researcher believed that, in this way, science could contribute to the question of the meaning of death, if one could trace the paths taken by the substances that composed the human organism during life after a person’s death. And it is significant and interesting that, at the end of this first treatise on physiology by such a researcher, we are directed to words that we can understand when spoken by the gloomy, melancholic Danish prince Hamlet, but which we would not expect to find cited when the serious question of the nature of death is raised in the world. When we inquire into the nature of death in human beings, we are inevitably interested in the fate of that which constitutes the core of the human being, and we can never be satisfied with knowing how the individual substances—the individual materials—that composed the external physical body behave, as long as the human being’s spiritual-soul core made use of these external instruments. Hamlet, emerging from his gloomy melancholy, may say:

The great Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Seems to plug a hole against the harsh north wind.
Oh, that the earth, before which the world trembled,
Might form a wall against wind and weather.

[ 7 ] That is what the melancholic might say, and we understand it in its dramatic context. But when the naturalist points out that the molecules and atoms that once were part of Caesar’s body could continue to live on in some other being—for example, as Huxley suggests, in a Black person, a dog, or a hole in a wall— then the person who takes things completely seriously feels, from the depths of his thought, how impossible it is for such thinking to even begin to address the great questions concerning the mysteries of the universe. Nor is this an objection to natural science, which is precisely tasked with accomplishing its great feats in the material realm. It is merely meant to illustrate how, on the one hand, natural science must recognize and respect its limits and answer questions regarding material processes and the fate of matter, and how, on the other hand, those who hold worldviews—who seek to build a worldview based on what can be learned through conscientious research into the fate of matter, regarding something such as death—essentially overstep the boundaries of which they ought to be aware if they wish to remain grounded in external material facts. Spiritual science, it has been said, does not have it so easy. For it must, from its own perspective, examine separately the phenomena of what must be called death in plants, what is called death in animals, and, separately from these, what death specifically is in the human realm.

[ 8 ] One cannot gain an understanding of the nature of death in the plant world by viewing plants as they are so often viewed—that is, by regarding each individual plant as a being in its own right. Of course, it would take us far too far afield today to go into detail once again about what has already been alluded to in the previous lectures—namely, that spiritual science must regard the Earth itself as a great living being, whose life process has, admittedly, changed in the course of its evolution. If we were to examine the Earth’s life process in ancient times, we would find that in the distant past the Earth was a completely different being; that it has, so to speak, undergone a process that has led to the suppression of the Earth’s overall life and its transfer to the individual kingdoms of life—the plant, animal, and human kingdoms. But even in our present time, spiritual science cannot conceive of the Earth as merely this physical aggregation of external substances, as is the view held on the basis of modern physics, geology, and mineralogy. Rather, spiritual science must see in what is given as the mineral soil of our existence—upon which we walk—something that has been set apart as a solid element from the entire Earth organism, just as the solid skeletal framework is set apart from the soft tissues of the human organism. Just as the solid skeletal framework in the human being tends toward a kind of purely physical system, toward a purely physical interconnection of organs, so too must we regard that which appears to us as physically and chemically active in the great Earth organism as a kind of skeletal framework of the Earth. This has merely been separated from the totality of life, and everything that happens on Earth—everything that takes place in the Earth’s processes—must be regarded as a unity in the sense of spiritual science. Thus, when we consider the individual plant, we are just as wrong to view it in isolation with the possibility of an individual existence as we would be if we were to view a single human hair or a fingernail in isolation and attempt to study it as an individual entity. The hair or the nail have meaning and significance—and one can only recognize their inner laws—if one views them not as individual entities in and of themselves, but in connection with the organism on which the hair or the nail is located. In this sense, the individual plant—indeed, everything that is plant-based on Earth—belongs to the Earth organism.

[ 9 ] I must note in this regard: What spiritual science has to offer as its assertions is recognized through the paths already indicated in these lectures, so that these are not conclusions drawn by human beings themselves about what unfolds in the external world. — For when it is said that spiritual science presents the processes taking place within the human being by way of analogy, it may indeed be necessary for the presentation to resort to such analogies—by illustrating and symbolizing what spiritual scientific research perceives in the world through the human organism—because the human organism initially represents the connection between the physical and the spiritual, and the concept is best understood when illustrated through the human-spiritual realm. However, the fact that what is a plant is embedded in the great organism of the Earth and belongs to it, just as hair and nails belong to the human organism, is not something deduced by analogy in spiritual science; for spiritual science, it is not at all something arrived at through reasoning, but rather it follows from the fact that the spiritual researcher undergoes the processes described or indicated here, and which can be followed in detail in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?. The essence of such a path of research is that the human being thereby expands his or her own consciousness; that he or she ceases to live solely within oneself; that he or she no longer merely perceives what presents itself to external physical observation; that he or she no longer allows only that which the senses can perceive and which the intellect—bound to the instrument of the brain—can comprehend to affect him or her. Rather, the result of such a path of research is that a person detaches themselves from their physical instrument, becomes a participant in a spiritual world, and then has within their sphere and horizon not only what presents itself to the external senses and to the intellect, but also spiritual beings and spiritual forces. Thus, for the spiritual-scientific path of research, what one might call the “soul of the Earth”—as a soul that animates the entire Earth—is just as present as the soul of the human being is present as that which animates the human organism. The spiritual researcher expands his consciousness to a horizon on which the soul that animates the entire Earth comes directly into his perception. And then, for him, the plant world is no longer merely the sum of individual plants; rather, he knows that what one might call the Earth’s soul is connected to everything that grows and lives as a plant on Earth.

[ 10 ] But the question remains: How are we to conceive of the way plants come into being and perish? How are we to conceive, so to speak, of the birth or death of plants? — We shall soon see that these words, when applied to the plant kingdom, have just as little real meaning as it would have if one were to say that when someone loses their hair, the hair, so to speak, dies. As soon as one allows oneself to entertain the thought that the Earth is an animated organism, one must gain an entirely new perspective on the processes of emergence and decay in the plant world. Even to those who do not merely observe the individual plant from seed to seed in a purely external sense, but who take in the totality of plant life on Earth, it becomes clear that something else is at work here besides what we might call growth and decay in the animal or human kingdoms. We see that, with the exception of those plants we classify as perennials, the interplay of the elements over the course of a year is intimately connected with the growth and decay of plants—in a way quite different from how this is the case, for example, with animals. Rarely do we find death in animals so closely bound to the experience of external phenomena as we see the withering of plants bound to certain phenomena of the entire natural world, for example as autumn approaches. In fact, one views the life of plants abstractly, separated from its embeddedness in the whole of earthly existence, when one considers only the individual plant and does not look at the rhythmically undulating, ebbing and flowing annual cycle that, at a certain time, drives the sprouting and budding plants forth from within, and then, at a certain time, brings these plants to a certain maturity and, in turn, to withering. When we look at this entire process, even an observation that is outwardly meaningful but does not yet penetrate the essence of spiritual science can lead us to say: Here we are dealing not merely with the arising and passing away of the individual plant, but with the entire earthly process, with something that lives and weaves within the total existence of the Earth. But where do we find anything about which we can say that, through what it reveals in its own manifestations, it makes it understandable to us how the invisible spiritual realm—which we must conceive of as animating the Earth—interacts with the sprouting of the plant and again with its withering? Where can we find anything that presents itself to our inner eye in such a way that it can make this external process comprehensible to us?

[ 11 ] Here it becomes clear to the spiritual researcher that he possesses within himself something that relates to this weaving and living in the plant world—something that, if viewed in the right light, reveals itself in our own human nature, and that alone can tell us how things stand with regard to the arising and passing away in the plant world. Within human nature we find what we call our ordinary phenomena of consciousness. But we know very well that these can only be experienced by human beings during waking daily life, from the moment of waking until falling asleep. The process of falling asleep and the process of waking up are remarkable occurrences in human life. For what do we perceive? As we fall asleep, we perceive our entire inner soul processes sinking into an indeterminate darkness; we perceive our thoughts and ideas, our feelings, and our impulses of will fading into the darkness of the sleeping state. And as we wake up, we perceive the reemergence of this entire inner life of the soul. Human beings are aware of this. Now, it would undoubtedly be absurd to think that sleep has nothing to do with what is present in the human organism as a whole. We know how important an orderly, proper state of sleep is for our physical life—insofar as spirit and soul must also find expression within it. We know what we owe to orderly sleep. One need only be reminded time and again of what is amply perceived by those who, for example, require a well-trained memory or who have to memorize things. It is said that if one does not want to overtax one’s memory to the point of rendering it useless—if one wants to manage one’s memory at all—one must let things settle overnight time and again. When one has to memorize something lengthy, one realizes quite clearly how much of one’s memory’s overall effectiveness is owed to the state of orderly sleep. But beyond that, it seems quite natural that what we experience as the result of our waking life—in the form of fatigue or exhaustion—is caused by our conscious life. By allowing our mental processes—our life of imagination, emotion, and will—to unfold, we intervene in the finer organization of our organism; through our volitional processes, we even affect its coarser parts. Even a very superficial observation can show that it is only through the intervention of our conscious thoughts, feelings, and expressions of will in our organism that fatigue of the nerves, muscles, and other organs is brought about. It is well known that when one indulges in the ordinary daydreams of the day, where one thought follows another, one becomes less fatigued than when one must make one’s thoughts work under the compulsion of a method or a doctrine. We also know that the heart muscle and the lung muscles work throughout our entire lives without needing sleep or rest, because in this case fatigue does not set in; the organism only initiates those activities in the unconscious or subconscious that are appropriate for it. Only when we intervene from the level of consciousness do we cause fatigue. Therefore, we can say: We see our soul processes intervening in physical life; we see how what is at work in the soul manifests itself in our physical life. What is brought about by what we might call the body’s natural processes—heart activity, lung activity, and the continuous processes of life? Neither exhaustion nor fatigue sets in. When conscious processes intervene, fatigue sets in. We perceive a wearing down, a destruction of the organism through the intervention of consciousness in our organism.

[ 12 ] Here we have reached the point where we can understand the significance and function of sleep. Whatever is worn down in the organism during the day, whatever is destroyed by conscious activities, must—with conscious activities suspended—be restored during sleep. The organism must be left to its own devices and allowed to follow the processes that are inherent and innate to it. Here we have reached the point where we can say: Remarkably, spiritual science once again converges with what the facts of natural science tell us—including in the form presented by the Russian researcher and long-time director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, whom we characterized at the beginning. — Can we not now say: that consciousness itself—the spiritual life of the human being—in order to exist, in order to be there at all, actually brings about the exhaustion and fatigue of the organism? And so, to shed a little light on this researcher’s hypothesis, one might answer the question—why do the “enemies of life” he described enter our organism? by saying: because, fundamentally, the process of consciousness always stands in opposition to the merely organic life in human beings, much like a kind of poisoning process. We could not attain our higher spiritual life at all if we did not destroy the organism. It is precisely in the processes that are hostile to the organic that the very possibility of our consciousness lies. When speaking of a toxic effect in relation to organic activity, one must say: What we must regard as the blessing, as the great salvation of our lives—that we can be conscious beings in a physical body, that we can develop conscious activity—we owe to the fact that, through our conscious life, we intervene in our organism in a destructive, toxic manner. However, for ordinary conscious life, this process of poisoning and destruction is, so to speak, not irreversible; rather, the intervention in the organism occurs in such a way that, once the destructive process has reached a certain point, the conscious spiritual life withdraws and leaves the organism to its own devices. Thus sleep sets in, during which the organism is left to its own devices, and in which that which is destroyed precisely by the conscious phenomena of the soul life is restored. The spiritual scientist is well aware of all the ingenious, more or less significant hypotheses that have been put forward regarding sleep and fatigue, and it would take a long time to discuss all of these hypotheses in detail. However, the point here is not to analyze these purely materialistic hypotheses, but to highlight the fact that consciousness, with its contents, must itself have a destructive effect on the organism—which serves as the external instrument for consciousness—and that the state of sleep is a balancing of the corresponding destructive processes, which are thus truly healed by it. Therefore, one can say: Sleep is the healer of those conditions that consciousness, like pathological processes, must induce in the organism.

[ 13 ] When the spiritual researcher has progressed to the point of not only seeing what normal external consciousness perceives—namely, that as one falls asleep, conscious perceptions and so on sink into an indeterminate darkness—but when he reaches the stage where, even as this normal, ordinary consciousness fades, he can truly observe what is happening within him, then he also comes to be able to follow the process of falling asleep and waking up. Self-knowledge in the broadest sense is what one acquires through spiritual research. Then one arrives at a true understanding of those processes that take place when one falls asleep—processes that involve the building up and sprouting forth of life. Through spiritual research and through all feeling and thinking that is in the spirit of spiritual scientific research, one actually experiences, with every falling asleep, something of life sprouting forth in the mere organism; but because this takes place in the purely organic realm, it has only the value of plant life. What one can experience in this way every evening as one falls asleep can be characterized as follows: You see your own organism with your entire soul life; you see what filled your consciousness during the day sinking away. In its place, however, you see sprouting upward within your own organism processes that are constructive, not destructive—processes that, within you, are akin to the sprouting of a plant. — Thus, during sleep, one experiences something like a process of self-vegetation within one’s own organism. The experience of falling asleep, with the fading of conscious images, is something like an experience of spring, in which we see what is purely plant-like emerging from the unconscious within our organism. In this sense, the moment of falling asleep can be viewed as completely parallel to the emergence of the sprouting, budding plant world of spring.

[ 14 ] When one views plant life in this way, one ceases to compare the sprouting of plants in spring to a human birth—or indeed to anything that can be called birth in humans or animals—but rather comes to realize that the great Earth Mother is a single organism and, in spring, in that part of the Earth where spring is then in season, experiences within herself what humans, for their part, experience when they fall asleep. The mistake most often made in such comparisons usually lies in the fact that things are not viewed in their reality, but are considered in terms of external circumstances. It may seem plausible to some, based on their imagination, that the sprouting of plants in spring can be compared to something in human beings that repeats periodically—something that does not actually represent death and birth—but if one were to follow mere imagination, one might be tempted to compare the plant world sprouting in spring to the moment of waking in human beings. That is wrong! Spring is not to be compared with waking up—the re-emergence of the soul’s content—but rather with falling asleep, with the disappearance of inner spiritual life and soul realities, and the sprouting of the purely organic, the purely plant-like aspect within the human being.

[ 15 ] And when a person, through clairvoyant consciousness, can consciously follow the moment of waking—how their thoughts and everything they remember emerge from an indeterminate darkness—then there arises once again the necessity to destroy the entire inner vegetation that has sprouted. It is indeed as if, with the emergence of our thoughts upon waking in the morning, the element of autumn were to sweep over everything that the night had caused to sprout—an inner process comparable, for the entire Earth, to the withering of plants as autumn approaches. However, in the case of the Earth, this does not present itself to us as it does with human beings and their two states of consciousness—waking and sleeping—but rather, while one half of the Earth is always asleep, the other is always awake, so that sleep moves with the course of the sun from one half of the Earth to the other. Thus, in the case of the Earth, we are dealing with a great organism that lives its life of sleep from spring to fall—a fact revealed to us in its external organs, in what sprouts and grows in the plant kingdom—and which then, with the coming of fall, withdraws into its spiritual realm, into what is the soul of the Earth; for the life of the Earth is what unfolds from fall to spring. Therefore, when it comes to plants, we cannot speak of a real death or a real birth at all, but only of the sleeping and waking of the entire Earth organism. Just as sleeping and waking repeat rhythmically in humans over the course of twenty-four hours, and just as we do not speak of the death and birth of our world of thought, so too, if we wish to speak truly, we should not speak of the life and death of plants, but rather take the entire Earth organism into view and, as part of that whole, regard the plant process as the Earth’s waking and falling asleep. When we take the greatest delight in what sprouts forth from the earth, when we recall how, so to speak, the people of earlier times set out to celebrate the Feast of St. John out of joy for sprouting life, then we have, specifically for the earth, the time that, in relation to the human organism and its outer physicality, occurs at midnight. But when people prepare to celebrate Christmas, when outer life has died away, we are dealing with the Earth’s spiritual processes; it is at this time that human beings best find their connection to the Earth’s entire spiritual life—a connection they have intuitively indicated by the fact that humanity’s spiritual festivals are held during the winter season. I know what external natural science may object to this, but external natural science does not observe the true instincts of human beings.

[ 16 ] Now let us not attempt to explore what we might call “death” in the animal kingdom through analogical judgments, but rather let us express what spiritual science has to offer through a process within the human being. We must note that, when we examine it closely, our soul life does indeed follow a different course than that which consists in the nurturing and fertilization of our soul life through the alternation of waking and sleeping. It should be pointed out right away that from that moment in childhood until the point at which one later consciously recalls it, a human being undergoes a kind of maturation process throughout their entire life. A human being becomes more and more mature through what they are able to absorb from life experience. This maturation process takes place in a peculiar way. We remember—and it is only through this that it is possible at all to speak of a “self” within us—up to a certain point in our youth, everything we have experienced, but we remember only the conceptual, the mental aspects. This is something very remarkable, but everyone can explore it for themselves. If you recall a painful or pleasurable event that you experienced perhaps thirty years ago, you will say to yourself: I can trace all the details quite well—the mental images I experienced—so that I can reconstruct them in my imagination; yet the pain or pleasure associated with that event at the time cannot stand before my soul as vividly as is usually the case with mental constructs. They have faded, have become separated from the mental image, and have descended into an indeterminate darkness. — One might say: We can always bring these mental images back up from the deep recesses of our soul, but we must leave behind—with a few exceptions that are irrelevant here—our memories of the feelings, emotions, and passions we experienced. What we experienced emotionally remains down below, detaching itself from the mere mental images. — Is it lost? Does it dissolve into nothingness? That is not the case. It may seem that way to someone who does not truly examine human life conscientiously and thoroughly. But a conscientious and comprehensive observer finds the following: When we examine a human existence at a particular moment in life—for example, at the age of forty—we find it in a certain state: a state of the soul, but also a state of physical health or illness. The person presents themselves to us as either gloomy and melancholic, slightly downcast, or cheerful, or as having a phlegmatic or other temperament—easily engaging with the realities of the world, readily embracing whatever brings them pleasure and joy, and so on. One should not always separate one’s state of mind from one’s physical condition, for the state of mind with which a person presents themselves depends on how the body’s functions operate. If one examines a person’s mental state and overall constitution at any stage of life in this way, one will soon discover where the emotional experiences have gone—those that have become separated from our concepts and which we later recall only as ideas. One will find that whatever has become detached as emotional states has become connected to our deeper constitution; it cannot be recalled in our inner life, but it expresses itself within our inner life, extending even into health and illness. Where have these emotional states gone, since we do not remember them? They lie deep within our physical-psychic life and constitute a specific state within the totality of a person’s life. Thus it becomes clear to us how we need memory for the overall course of our conscious life, and just as memory always plunges into an indeterminate darkness during sleep, so our emotional experiences plunge down into the darkness of our inner being and work upon our overall constitution.

[ 17 ] Thus, we have a second element at work within the human being. And when we now shift our gaze from human beings to the entire Earth organism—which we regard as an animated being—we certainly do not view it as if the soul-spiritual forces active within the Earth organism were organized in the same way as the human soul is organized. For spiritual science shows us that many beings such as human beings live in the soul sphere of the Earth, so that the soul nature of the Earth represents a multiplicity, whereas that of the human being is a unity. However, one can certainly compare the soul nature of the Earth in this regard—as it is now characterized—with the soul experiences within the human being itself. When we observe how our emotional states sink down into our own physical constitution, work upon our body, and find expression in our overall physical condition, we find a parallel process to this in what constitutes the overall process on Earth—namely, in everything that finds expression in the emergence of the animal life form. Within ourselves, a physical-psychic process is triggered only by what is pushed down into the darkness of our physical constitution through our emotional experiences. For the Earth, the corresponding psychic-spiritual experiences are, as it were, crystallized in the emergence and passing away of animal beings. I am well aware that in a discussion such as the one currently taking place, those who believe they can construct a worldview from hypotheses—one that appears to stand firmly on the ground of natural science—may feel their stomachs turn, and I can empathize with such a person. But it will become clear that the direction of human thought and judgment—which is intended to shed light on the processes of death and creation on Earth—will, in the next stage of spiritual development, take the course indicated here, for everything we observe as fact within natural science itself points to this being the case. Just as a person sees his or her moods—which are brought about by his or her physical constitution—manifested within his or her bodily organization, so too does he or she see, in a corresponding way, the process of the emergence of the animal world manifested externally within the Earth’s organization.

[ 18 ] But then we encounter yet another process in human beings. We see how, from the overall organization of the soul, the so-called higher feelings and emotions emerge once again. What is the nature of these? Anyone who approaches this without prejudice, but also without a false ascetic attitude, without false hypocrisy and piety, will say to themselves: What we can describe as the higher moral feelings and as those states of mind in human beings that arise from enthusiasm for all that is good, beautiful, and true, and for everything that advances the world—this lives within us only because we can, in our state of mind, rise above everything that is originally instinctively inherent in us, so that in our spiritual feelings and in our spiritual enthusiasm we rise above what only our physical organization can bring forth within us. — This can go so far that the person whose enthusiasm lies in the spiritual life becomes wholly devoted to the object of his enthusiasm, so that it even becomes easy for him to sacrifice his physical life so that what has set his higher moral and aesthetic feelings ablaze may live on. Here we see that which lives as the spiritual within enthusiasm rising—with the suppression of our merely organic nature—in a state of mind that initially has nothing to do with the course of organic life. Thus, too, an element within the human being—that element which he sends down into the depths of his being, and which down there constructs his organic processes—follows this course. But from the depths of his being, his moral and spiritual feelings also rise up into his state of mind; through ever-advancing development, they triumph over that which belongs solely to the human being’s organic, physically instinctive constitution.

[ 19 ] This process, which we find divided into two elements in human beings, is also present in the animal kingdom. When we allow our emotional state to sink down into our physical life and let our moods influence our health or illness, we see, in contrast, what the sinking of the emotional state of the entire Earth is, in that which plays itself out in the animal kingdom. What exists as feeling and passion within the entire Earth organism finds its expression in the animal kingdom, just as our passions and emotions find their expression within our own overall organism. When we look at the animal world, we see in every single form the result of the emotional state of our Earth. And when we observe how the Earth, as it were, extends over the life of the animal world and binds it most closely to the outer physical body, we see in this nothing other than the victory of the spiritual—that which we call the group soul in animals—the supersensible, which finds its representative only in the external form and which triumphs over the external, just as in human beings spiritual feelings triumph over the merely instinctive. The fact that the external processes of the Earth’s organization repeatedly bring death upon the individual animal is nothing other than the spiritual, as such, continually triumphing within us over that which is connected solely with the organic. If we view the spiritual in the “animal” in this way, then we cannot regard the animal’s coming into being and passing away as though we could apply the terms “birth” and “death” to it, as we do with human beings. It is, however, a comprehensive process of the Earth within the animals, one that manifests itself in a more individualized form than in the plant world. Yet when we consider the individual species souls and group souls assigned to animal species or genera, we must observe how, with every death that befalls an individual animal, the outer physical form perishes, yet how that which is the generic soul—the spiritual aspect within the animal—always triumphs over the outer form, just as in human beings the spiritual triumphs over the merely instinctive, which is represented not in the separate form but in the organism.

[ 20 ] Thus we see, as it were, a great living entity consisting of the individual species souls of the animals, and we see the birth and death of animal beings unfolding in such a way that what underlies the individual animal in the spiritual realm must continually fight to achieve victory over the particular. We have thus described death in animals as that which, as the group soul, moves beyond the withering and decay of the individual animal form. We could speak of a true death in animals only if we did not take into account what remains after the animal’s death—a spiritual element similar to that in human beings, which triumphs over both the state of mind and that which is doomed to wither away by rising above itself.

[ 21 ] Once Darwinism has transcended itself, it will see how, throughout the animal kingdom, amid the apparent births and deaths, a thread of evolution winds its way from the earliest times into the distant future, so that the overall evolution of the animal kingdom will ultimately lead to the victory of that which, by overcoming the lower, the individual animal form, emerges from the entire spiritual world, leaving behind the lower nature that lives within individual animals, and will one day triumph over the instinctive that manifests itself throughout the animal kingdom.

[ 22 ] When we now turn to what we call the nature of the human will—that is, when we do not merely speak of the fact that a person experiences ideas that can be recalled again and again, and do not merely consider the state of mind that permeates the deeper organization in the manner described—but when we look at the impulses of the will, we will say: At first glance, they appear to be the most enigmatic aspect of human nature. — How a person is shaped in terms of volitional impulsivity depends on what life has brought them in the form of experiences. When we look back on life from any given point, we find a continuous sequence in which one soul event follows another. But we find that what we have experienced essentially flows into our will in such a way that we can say: When we look at ourselves in this way, we have actually become richer in ideas, yet more mature with regard to our volitional impulsivity. — Indeed, we undergo a particular maturation with regard to our will. Anyone who looks back on their life in this way in any manner experiences this. We do something in life. We only truly realize how we should have done something once we have done it. And everyone knows how rarely they have the opportunity to find themselves in the same situation again later on, to be able to apply in a subsequent instance what they have acquired as maturity of life—what they have gained, perhaps through mistakes and hardships they have experienced. But one thing they do know: that everything they experience comes together within the totality of their volitional disposition into what we might call the wisdom of their will, and that this constitutes the maturity we gradually attain. It is our life of the will that becomes ever more mature. All our feelings, ideas, and so on converge within it to make our will ever more mature, even with regard to external actions. For the fact that we become more mature in our thinking through life experiences is merely a maturing of the will, which expresses itself in the linking of one thought to another. Thus we see how, as it were, our entire soul life—when we look back upon it—leads us toward the center of our being, which lies behind the impulses of the will and in which this process of becoming ever more mature is expressed. When we consider this, we have the third element of human development—the one of which we can say: We cultivate it within ourselves during our life in the physical body. It is precisely in this element that we grow, and in this element we grow beyond what we were when we entered this existence through birth. — Since we are clothed in a physical body in this life, and since the physical body is the instrument we must use for our soul—as the soul requires the intellect and the brain—our soul being acquires maturity and life experience, which crystallize, as it were, in the overall disposition of the will, in the maturity of the will.

[ 23 ] But as a rule, in this life we are not able to bring to fruition or carry out what now lives within our impulses of will. This is what poses the question to us: What is the nature of these impulses of the will, which we cultivate as our most intimate spiritual treasure, which we may have acquired precisely through our imperfection, and which we can nevertheless never express? — As we have seen in the second part of our consideration, whatever we send down into the depths of our being as the content of our emotional experiences leads to our entire physical and psychological constitution—to our state of mind, to what life has done to us in terms of health and illness, whether we are more melancholic or express cheerfulness, and so on. But what we have made of ourselves in terms of our volitional disposition—that is our innermost being. That is what we have become. Through this, however, we have also outgrown what we once were. And we notice this when, in the second half of our lives, things begin to go downhill, as our body fails to live out what we have become through the impulsiveness of our will. In short, we see how, by standing within life through knowing, feeling, and willing, we become something that stands in contradiction to what we already are—something that clashes with what we already are. Through our life maturity, we feel inwardly, in our soul, how we clash with what we have become through our elements, through our physical dispositions, and through our soul life. We feel inwardly the clash between the totality of our volitional disposition and life maturity and the overall constitution of our organism; but fundamentally, we also feel this clash with every single volitional impulse that leads to action. For it is true that our thoughts are transparent to a certain degree, as are our feelings; but how the will becomes deed and action is impenetrable to the outside world. The will, so to speak, collides with external life and becomes conscious of itself only through this collision with external life. And here we can trace, in the whole of life—including in the physical organization—what is already evident in the life of the soul: What a person has become, what the predispositions for their abilities have given them—the will, which is only coming into being in this life, must be able to break down and destroy this, for otherwise this will would never be able to assert itself.

[ 24 ] Just as a human being can become conscious only through confrontation with reality, so too can he experience himself as an ongoing process only by destroying his entire physical life through the will, just as the brain is destroyed by the life of the imagination. But while the latter can be restored through sleep, a renewal of the will cannot be repaired; rather, a continuous process of destruction must indeed take place in every life through the impulsiveness of the will. Here we see that human beings must destroy their own organism, and thus we recognize for the first time the necessity of true death for human beings. Just as we recognize the necessity of sleep for the life of the imagination, so we now recognize the necessity of death for the life of the will. For it is only because the human being’s physical organization stands in opposition to his will that the will recognizes itself within itself, strengthens itself within itself, and then passes through the gate of death into a life in the spiritual world, where it acquires the powers to build up in a future incarnation that which it did not achieve in this physical existence. Whatever a person was only able to become aware of—that which was ripe for the next stage, which provided the predispositions for something further, but which was not fully lived out in this life—will be lived out in a future earthly life, where the human being will also shape his or her new destiny, his or her new earthly life, in a corresponding manner.

[ 25 ] While, in the plant kingdom, we could speak of death only in terms of the entire earthly nature waking up and falling asleep, and while, in the animal kingdom, we could compare death only to the ebb and flow and subduing of our lower instinctual life, it is only with human death that we encounter that which, through the destruction of this one life, points us toward the ever-recurring lives. Because it is only through the destruction of this one life that we can gain what emerges in the new earthly life—and which thereby leads to the true perfection of the entire human life—it is also the case that the human will, in order to become conscious of its own total constitution, requires the passing away of the physical body, and that, fundamentally speaking, the experience necessary for the correct impulse of the will is present only when we pass through the gate of death, when the will witnesses the gradual decline and passing away of the outer organism. For it is through the resistance it feels in the outer body that the will grows, becoming stronger and stronger, and prepares itself to become that which lives for eternity. Therefore—apart from everything you will find expounded in spiritual science regarding an unnatural death—it is understandable that a death brought about by an external accident, suicide, or the like is, under all circumstances, something different from a natural death, which offers the assurance of the dawning of a new life. Unnatural death in any form can, of course, also be something that signifies progress in the overall destiny of a human being. But what the will, in its overall constitution, would have had to experience in the victory over physicality remains, in a certain sense, as an inner force and must take a different path when a person passes through the gate of death in an unnatural way than when he lives out his life in a natural manner.

[ 26 ] Thus we see that we can truly speak of death only when we speak of what we might call the formation of a new kind of will for a new life, and that we therefore cannot speak of true death in the case of other beings. In the case of human beings, however, we must speak in such a way that not only is Goethe’s saying true: “Nature invented death in order to have much life,” but we must also say: If death did not exist, one would wish that it did, for it provides the opportunity for the will to grow ever more and more—through the resistance and withering of the outer organism—for the new life. — And this makes it possible for development to ascend through the various incarnations, so that life takes on an ever higher and higher form, even if the next lives do not do so immediately, even if setbacks occur. In the overall course, however, one will still recognize an ascent through the repeated earthly lives.

[ 27 ] Thus, death is the great strengthener of the life of the will for spiritual life. And we see, as has already been hinted at, that modern natural science—albeit tentatively—converges with spiritual science by suggesting that death represents a kind of poisoning process. Indeed, all spiritual development that follows its own independent course is a desolation, a destruction of external physical life. What the world of imagination devastates within the human being is repaired again through sleep. What is destroyed by the human being’s instinctual nature is repaired again through higher moral and aesthetic feelings and sensibilities. What we see as destruction of the physical organism through the activity of the will element is repaired again in the totality of human life through that maturity of the will life which passes through death and is capable of building a new life. Thus death acquires its meaning—that meaning through which human beings are able not only to conceive of immortality but to truly experience it within themselves. Whoever views death in this way sees it approaching as the power that leads outer physical life toward decline, but sees also—precisely in the resistance to this decline—the dawn of a new human soul life, which the human being lives through from incarnation to incarnation, from embodiment to embodiment, throughout the ages. Only when one understands the meaning of death for human eternity has one grasped the meaning of death for nature as a whole. Then, however, one must also abandon the widespread foolish view that speaks of “death” even in the case of animals and plants; then one must realize that one can truly speak of “real death” only when considering the destinies that the spirit experiences as it passes through physical existence, and when one looks at the tasks the spirit must accomplish within physicality in order to ever more and more elevate its own perfection. The spirit must surrender the body to death so that it, the spirit, can itself ascend to ever greater and greater levels of perfection. When we consider this perspective, then our soul may speak to us, looking at death in the human realm—how through it the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being can attain a higher perfection—but also looking at death in the animal and plant kingdoms, how the Spirit shines through at the root of all phenomena. It may offer us a confession that is not only comforting but also inspires all hopes for life:

All existence has sprung from the Spirit,
All life is rooted in the Spirit,
All beings are drawn to the Spirit.