The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. Natural Science and Spiritual Research

[ 1 ] Among the accusations currently leveled against the science of the spirit and spiritual research, one of the most significant is surely the claim that this science of the spirit or spiritual research stands in opposition to the well-established findings of natural science—that very natural science which is rightly and justly called the pride of our present intellectual life, indeed, of our entire present cultural life. If this accusation were well-founded—that spiritual science and spiritual research intended to set themselves in opposition to these well-established findings of natural science—then—one can certainly say—the prospects for this spiritual research would indeed be bleak. Not only would its ability to find a way into the understanding and hearts of contemporary people be compromised, but its very legitimacy would also be in serious question. Therefore, in addition to everything that has been said in the previous lectures on the relationship between spiritual research and natural science, this particular episodic reflection on the relationship between spiritual research and natural science may well be added today, before we turn next time to a figure who, in the most eminent sense, is accessible only to spiritual science: the figure of Jakob Böhme.

[ 2 ] Spiritual research, as it is understood in these reflections, undoubtedly presents itself as something that, in many ways, appears new in contrast to the habits of thought and intellectual aspirations of our time—as something that falls outside these familiar modes of thought and the ways of conceiving things in contemporary intellectual life. And the question naturally arises: How is it that, precisely at a time when the educated person who is interested in spiritual matters at all places all hope in what natural science can offer—how is it that, at such a time, this spiritual science seeks to establish itself, placing itself right in the midst of the triumphant march of scientific thought?

[ 3 ] Perhaps the easiest way to answer this question is to take a brief look at intellectual life in the last third—or perhaps the second half—of the nineteenth century. This was, after all, the era in which not only did scientific research rise to its zenith, achieving one triumph after another, but it was also the time when hopes grew ever greater that all possible insights into the meaning of what we might call the spirit and spiritual life would have to come from the natural sciences. Anyone who fully experienced spiritual life in the last third of the nineteenth century—or, let us say, anyone who was in a position to allow the great hopes of this nineteenth-century spiritual life to take hold within them, for example in the 1880s, could observe at that time how questions were pouring in from all fields of scientific research—questions that seemed bound to place all human thought on a new foundation that broke with the old. Let us draw attention to just one point. In the 1870s and 1880s, anyone interested in intellectual life could become acquainted with what was more or less new in the field of the natural sciences at the time—for example, the mechanical theory of heat. Those immersed in scientific inquiry saw in something like the mechanical theory of heat an immense achievement of the human spirit. Perhaps, however, we are less interested in the perspective of such a person than in the perspective of someone whose primary concern was the question of spiritual knowledge. What did such a person see?

[ 4 ] Such a person might have noticed that, among the various sensory impressions that flood a person when using their senses, there is the sensation of what we call heat or, let us say, heat and cold. Just like color, light, and sound, heat is, after all, initially a sensory impression. Through his senses, a person feels how the world around him is in a certain state of warmth, and he initially perceives this warmth as an impression on his senses. At the time just mentioned, it was regarded as a fact proven by the research of that era that what humans call heat—which they believe, as it appears in their perception, to be spread out in outer space, permeating bodies, and affecting beings—is, objectively speaking, nothing other than the movement of the smallest particles of matter. So one could say to oneself: When you put your hand in lukewarm water and perceive a certain state of warmth, this sensation of warmth is merely an illusion. What appears to you as an immediate impression is only an illusion; it is merely an effect on your organism caused by something outside. It is merely a form of motion on a small scale; you do not perceive the motion itself. The tiniest particles of water are in motion, but you do not perceive that motion; rather, because the motion occurs so rapidly, you do not perceive it as such, but it gives you the impression of warmth. — When books such as *Heat, Considered as a Form of Motion* were published back then, this was regarded as a great achievement of the time, and we younger people at the time had to study how the smallest molecular particles move in a liquid or a gas, collide with the walls in their agitation, and collide with one another within the substance, and it was clear that this internal motion gives rise, in our perception, to the sensation of what we call heat. From that point on, a certain way of thinking emerged—a certain way of viewing natural phenomena— and I myself still remember how, back when I was a little boy, my school principal—enthusiastic about this scientific achievement of his time—regarded all natural forces as such, from gravity on down to heat and chemical and magnetic forces and so on, merely as an illusion, and saw the truth in those movements, in those subtle states of motion within bodies. Gravity, the force of falling, for example, was regarded by that school principal—his name was Heinrich Schramm—as nothing more than a movement of the tiniest particles of bodies. Within such a view of nature, there was indeed something that could lead one to say: So everything “real” is merely, shall we say, space extended to infinity, the matter located within this space and divided into the smallest particles, and the movements of this matter! And the hope could well arise that, just as one could explain, for example, heat, electricity, magnetism, and light as a subtle activity of the smallest particles of matter, so too one would one day be able to explain mental activity and the activity of the soul as a subtle activity of that matter which constitutes the human or animal body.

[ 5 ] There were then various phases in the development of scientific-theoretical thinking. While in the 1880s, for example, physicists were required to conceive of light and the entire world of colors as a kind of appearance and to study infinitely complex, subtle vibrations and movements within matter and the ether, it gradually became apparent during the course of the 1880s that these subtle vibrations were leading one astray, and one began to limit oneself more to observing the phenomena, the facts as they present themselves, to express them through calculation, to describe them, and not so much to speculate about what is supposedly imperceptible but merely underlies everything: the finer vibrations of matter and the ether. This was more in the realm of physics.

[ 6 ] In the field of physics, there was no real way to break free from the habitual way of thinking that arose when one considered these subtle movements of matter in relation to something that was supposed to make it possible to grasp the spirit in its immediacy. Natural science, so to speak, held one back from viewing the spirit in the manner that has been advocated here in the recent lectures. Added to this were entirely different factors. Anyone involved in the development of the natural sciences at that time was confronted not only with what has just been described, but also with the repercussions of everything that had resulted, for example, from the great discoveries of Schleiden and Schwann in the first half of the nineteenth century, through which the smallest parts—the cells—had been identified within plant and animal organisms. Although this did not prove the reality of atoms and molecules, it did trace organic forms back to their smallest building blocks—the cells—whose forms were visible only under a microscope. Then there was the legacy associated with the name Darwin, and people remained under the influence of the great achievement of Ernst Haeckel, who, during the 1860s, had extended Darwin’s theory to include humans as well.

[ 7 ] Thus, one was faced with a scientific approach that began with the simplest forms in the plant and animal worlds and examined how, from the imperfect to the more perfect beings and all the way up to humans, the individual organs themselves became increasingly perfect in their form, so that one could, as it were, determine the development of the more complex organs from the simpler ones through comparison. An immense body of knowledge was gathered. The breadth and scope of this material were truly so vast that, for example, in the 1870s, one of the most eminent comparative anatomists of the time, Carl Gegenbaur, was able to state in his *Comparative Anatomy* (1878) that, particularly in the last few decades, a vast amount of individual knowledge had been gathered, demonstrating how closely related living beings are in terms of their organs, and that one would have to wait—as Gegenbaur believed—for the opportunity to elevate this knowledge to the level of “insights”; and he expected that the Darwinian method would make it possible to demonstrate that a comparison of the organs of the most highly developed organisms with those of less perfect beings would irrefutably show that there exists—in the physical sense—a descent of the perfect organisms from the imperfect ones. Thus, one could see, as it were, the chain closing in the evolution from imperfect living beings all the way to the more perfect ones—indeed, all the way up to humans, and one could say that through a kind of summation of those forces and activities that are already at work in the simplest organisms, indeed, even through a summation of the forces and activities in inanimate nature itself, the most complex being we know—the human physique—ultimately arises.

[ 8 ] Enormous hopes were pinned on this scientific ideal. Indeed, at that time, it was difficult to distinguish between what were scientific facts and what was merely imagined or speculated upon in addition to the facts, for anyone who thought deeply recognized that a distinction did indeed exist between facts and theories. The difference lay in the fact that one could say: If one went about one’s work as carefully and subtly as Darwin himself had done—especially in his earlier years—then one would find an immense body of material on mutual relationships and points of comparison between individual living beings, ranging from the imperfect forms of the animal and plant kingdoms all the way up to human beings. But there was still a difference—one could tell oneself—between what emerged as a fact of the similarity of external structure, and also as a fact of the similarity of internal processes, and what one could only conceive of: the hypothesis, the assumption of the descent of perfect living beings from imperfect ones, for this descent could not be traced based on the facts known up to that point. One had before one the totality of living beings, some more perfect and some less so. But for anyone capable of thorough thinking, descent as such remained, after all, merely a hypothesis if one wished to remain on the ground of natural science. Yet the evidence was impressive.

[ 9 ] The findings of scientific research penetrated deeply into people’s souls, sometimes shaking them to their core with the magnificence of the insights that could be gained. There were many other factors as well. In today’s introductory lecture, it is necessary to point out a number of specific details. For example, we must highlight the momentous discoveries made by Helmholtz in the field of light phenomena and the effects of light on the human eye, as well as those he made regarding sound phenomena and the effects of sound on the human ear, the human organ of hearing. Through this, people became acquainted with the process of vision, which had previously remained a mystery. They also came to understand, for example, what was happening inside the ear—what a complex, marvelous structure, one might say, a piano-like apparatus, is located there. In place of many things that had previously seemed merely hypothetical, there now arose a more precise understanding of the structure of the human organs. One could say to oneself: What is merely movement and activity on the outside is transformed—and such a transformation, as we have just seen, resulted quite fundamentally from the mechanical theory of heat—by what has now been elucidated as marvelous within the organs in relation to the perceptions that live in the soul. And the inner life of the soul ultimately builds itself up from what our organs shape out of the forces of matter and space.

[ 10 ] In many cases, one can actually describe the entire mental process that was taking place in people’s souls at that time by saying: Their souls were numbed by everything that was found there, both in the big picture and in the details. One had to admit to oneself: An earlier era knew nothing of all this. Many traditions concerning human soul life now seemed obsolete, now that people were just beginning to study the effect of matter and its movements on the human organism—to study it scientifically, in the true sense of the word.

[ 11 ] For the scholar of the humanities, the whole matter was, shall we say, less important because of the details than because one had to admit: To enter into the broad perspectives that open up there into a world of pure fact, one needs something that one initially believes to be absent from the old contemplations of the life of the soul or the life of the spirit. In many souls who experienced all of this during the last third of the nineteenth century, a feeling of the following sort arose. These souls could say to themselves: Certainly, in times past people dared to ponder many things regarding the great questions—for example, the alternation of sleep and wakefulness, the question of the immortality of the human soul, the questions of life and death, the origin of existence, and so on. But if one compares the entire methodological approach to thinking, the entire way in which spiritual research was conducted in those ancient times—from which such traditions of soul research emerge—and compares it with the rigorous, conscientious approach of modern scientific research, then what has come down to us from those ancient times simply falls short of the rigorous and conscientious method of today’s scientific research. Even if the spiritual researcher was not influenced by the results of scientific research—even if he perhaps did not allow himself to be carried away by them at all—one thing had a powerful effect on him as well: the rigor of scientific thinking, its conscientiousness, and the immense sense of truth inherent in scientific thought.

[ 12 ] Faced with such a fact, anyone who wished to engage with science at all—whether the natural sciences or the humanities—could not help but develop an impulse that might be characterized as follows: Science, in the most serious sense of the word—the kind that can set the tone for contemporary intellectual life—can find its salvation only in that rigorous thinking and that truly conscientious inquiry that can be learned from the natural sciences. Such an impulse gradually transforms—and indeed had to transform even in the researcher of the humanities—into a kind of scientific conscience. One might say: Certainly, as in all ages, so too in modern times the soul has the urge and the impulse to come to know its own nature and essence—above all, to come to know the processes that extend beyond birth and death. But for those who look clearly and impartially, the only thing that can make an impression on the culture of our time is that which emerges in accordance with the model of scientific thinking. Certainly, one saw many things concerning all sorts of spiritual questions—one might already say today—appear on the spiritual marketplace. One saw much that was, and remains, truly far removed from a conscientious method of thinking shaped by the natural sciences; but one could say to oneself: Such things may, through the frivolity and complacency of contemporary thinking, sometimes make an impression here and there for a while; yet such an impression cannot be of any lasting nature, for even the most complacent will ultimately ask themselves: What can conscientious thinking, shaped by the natural sciences, say about what has supposedly been researched concerning the spiritual world?

[ 13 ] Thus, the need arose even among researchers of the mind to conduct their research entirely along the lines of the natural sciences. One might say that a kind of ideal model—one that was simply never completed—is the psychology, the theory of the mind, of Franz Brentano, whom we have already mentioned here, which was intended to span many volumes. Of all these volumes, however, only one was ever published—the first, in the spring of 1874. And although it had been promised that the next volume would appear as early as the fall of that same year, it has still not been published to this day.

[ 14 ] Brentano did not follow the approach of those psychologists mentioned last time, who completely ruled out the great questions—such as the nature of the alternation between sleep and wakefulness, the question of the immortality of the human soul, and the like—but rather sought to address all these questions strictly according to the rigorous scientific method. He failed. And why did he fail? Franz Brentano could never bring himself to take the path that has proven necessary for the present precisely because a mind such as Brentano’s failed after refusing to take it. This path has been characterized in the previous lectures and especially in the last one. It was shown how this path alone is capable of leading us into the higher realms, into the spiritual realms of existence—into that which extends even beyond birth and death. Franz Brentano could not bring himself to take this path. He has, in effect, negatively demonstrated that one must take this path if one wishes to reach an end, a goal—by the fact that his theory of the soul remained confined to the first volume, which has nothing yet to do with all the great questions just mentioned, and that he was not yet able to approach those great questions as he had intended.

[ 15 ] I have tried to give you a picture of the spiritual life of the 1880s, into which anyone who sought to enter the spiritual realms at that time was drawn. If one allowed everything that has just been mentioned to sink in, one could not simply accept the works of the burgeoning spiritual science that were emerging at that time—works that were, at first, sporadic. I would like to begin by pointing out how a work such as A. P. Sinnett’s *Esoteric Buddhism* found its way not only into the very heart of scientific research itself but also into the scientific education of the time.

[ 16 ] I do not wish to discuss the question posed in the title—namely, that Buddhism here has nothing to do with the Buddha or with Buddhism as a religious creed—but rather to note that this book, which became known in German-speaking regions in the 1880s, it initially provided an overview of world phenomena, the great course of cosmic events, and also the questions related to the nature of the human being, as well as to the connections to a life that extends beyond birth and death. What was conveyed in this book could initially seem striking. For anyone who turned their gaze toward spiritual matters could, as such, find themselves in a certain sense in agreement with much of what was written in Sinnett’s *Esoteric Buddhism*. Much of it did not at all contradict what one could and was permitted to think, even if one stood firmly on the ground of the natural sciences. But one thing contradicted the scientific education of the time; one thing meant that, while one could regard this book as an interesting phenomenon of its era, it was impossible to simply accept it without reservation: that this book, in its entire manner of presentation, in its synthesis of ideas, and in the way these ideas were, for example, drawn from their sources, it stood in no way justified in the face of rigorous scientific education and truthfulness, and that someone educated in the natural sciences, no matter how much he might agree with the individual findings and reports in this book, would nevertheless have to feel repelled by the entire manner of presentation,

[ 17 ] The same was true of many other works published in this field. This was even the case with the book by the—with some justification—famous A. P. Blavatsky, which was published in the late 1880s and early 1890s: *The Secret Doctrine*. Anyone who dealt with these matters could say to themselves: Profound knowledge and insight into spiritual matters can be found in this book, but the entire style of presentation is so chaotic, so intermingled with scientific dilettantism—which manifests itself particularly in the refutation of scientific theories and hypotheses—that someone educated in the natural sciences simply cannot follow this book.

[ 18 ] Thus, as it were, two things became apparent: For someone who had a heart and mind attuned to the existence of a spiritual world, there was, on the one hand, the scientific way of thinking—the entire scientific mode of conception. Through this, he could cultivate his scientific rigor; through this, he could free himself from all dilettantism, if he seriously engaged with it. Through it, however, he could also learn how to conduct rigorous research into reality, and how, through such research into reality, to arrive at reliable results that have a real impact on life—results that serve as a foundation not only for a theory but for the facts of life. On the other hand, however, such a person might say: Where one seeks to gain something from the natural sciences themselves for a spiritual interpretation of the phenomena of life—where the natural sciences attempt this precisely through their own means—little can be extracted from them for the spiritual realm, and all the less so the more rigorously they proceed in the realm of the factual. — Therefore, for someone who took this view, there was likely reason to look back a little at the history of human development. There he could discover that, even setting aside research in the spiritual sciences, something has been gathered in the various spiritual records of peoples and epochs—something that lies there purely as external documentation—which contains within itself a magnificent core of spiritual knowledge; something that, upon closer inspection, is not easily grasped; rather, the more one delves into this collected material, the more it reveals about spiritual life, even if one cannot fully comprehend the manner in which it is presented, or the manner in which it must have been discovered according to this mode of presentation.

[ 19 ] Only to those who approach the subject superficially can what is contained in ancient Egyptian or Chaldean wisdom, for example, appear to be nothing more than a collection of human fantasies. Those who delve deeper into it will not find mere fantasies, but will in fact perceive how illuminating insights into the nature of the spirit and its workings in these matters are contained in forms that may seem grotesque to modern eyes. And just as with Egyptian or Chaldean wisdom, this is particularly true of ancient Indian wisdom, insofar as it has been handed down. Of course, one must not view something like Indian wisdom—with the magnificent, profound impression it is bound to make on everyone—through the eyes of a modern philosopher, such as Deußen; rather, one must open one’s mind to the insights that arise from within regarding certain spiritual connections. But one thing stands out: from the very way the whole is presented, it becomes clear that spiritual knowledge of the kind we encounter here was not acquired in the same way or through the same methods as our modern research methods—by which the natural sciences march from triumph to triumph— If one has enough open-mindedness to, on the one hand, firmly acknowledge natural science and, on the other hand, to engage with the way in which a spiritual achievement and a spiritual influence from ancient times resonate, then one will be able to allow the overwhelming power of these illuminating insights into spiritual life to take effect, and at the same time will see how very different the methods must have been by which those spiritual-scientific insights were gained in ancient times.

[ 20 ] Now, spiritual research itself shows us once again how very differently that which we might, in the proper sense, call, for example, ancient Indian wisdom—which reveals to us insights that penetrate deep into the very essence of things—is actually attained. We find that this wisdom was not gained through external observation, nor through the kind of thinking we today call scientific, but rather through a form of spiritual self-knowledge similar to what we have characterized here for modern times. Yoga methods and methods of self-education for the soul were employed. These led the soul not merely to see, perceive, and recognize as one does in ordinary everyday life, but to feel higher powers of cognition arising within itself—powers capable of looking into the spiritual worlds that open up around us, provided we develop the inner organs for them. But for our existence within physical life, everything that presents itself to us as soul activity is, in a certain sense, bound to the instrument of the physical body. And now spiritual research shows us how ancient Indian research was itself bound to the instrument of the physical body in a different way than our research today, as is customary in the natural sciences. Natural science today conducts its research through the senses and through the intellect, which is bound to the instrument of the brain. What did the yoga method lead people to? What it led them to can only be briefly hinted at here, because we wish only to orient ourselves regarding the relationship between natural science and spiritual science.

[ 21 ] The yoga method led people to first shut down, to a certain degree, the brain’s cognitive faculties—even to the point of shutting down everything mediated by the rest of the higher nervous system. In the yoga methods, the very part of the human nervous system that today appears to us in the natural sciences as a subordinate component—but which is, in the strictest sense, bound to the functions of the human organism itself—was made into the instrument of that deeply inward contemplation: that which we refer to as the solar plexus and the sympathetic nervous system. Just as our modern scientific research is linked to the higher nervous system, so were those ancient methods of enlightenment linked to the very nervous system that we today even regard, in a certain sense, as inferior. But because this subordinate nervous system is linked to the forces of existence and the life forces, and is intimately connected to that through which the human being is immersed in divine-spiritual existence—because, in other words, it is connected to the sources of human existence—one recognized, with the aid of this instrument, not only the shining in of the spiritual into the human organism; but just as one looks into the worlds of light with the eye, so too did one look into the spiritual worlds with the instrument of the sympathetic nervous system, perceiving concrete facts and beings within them. Anyone who can understand how a person who penetrates so deeply into his own innermost being—even through the instrument—is able to relate to the universe will also understand how that ancient Eastern wisdom has come down to us. When we trace these ancient wisdoms, we find them revealed everywhere, coming to the surface of human thought through ancient methods of inquiry and ancient yoga practices. Among the most diverse peoples we find the most diverse forms of wisdom, and if we only engage with them, we penetrate ever deeper into their depths and recognize how people arrived at them in those times when they knew relatively little of today’s physical astronomy, anatomy, physiology, and so on. Ancient Indian wisdom did not know what the human physical body actually looks like, as we know it today; but they were able to attune themselves to the organism’s activity through the use of the deeper nervous system. And so it was with other peoples as well.

[ 22 ] Now, by letting our gaze wander, so to speak, over everything that was effective as such ancient wisdom up to the sixth century B.C., we can trace it back, for example, to ancient Greek times. There, setting aside everything else, we find an outstanding thinker—a thinker who has been misunderstood just as often for the good as for the bad: Aristotle, who was active only a few centuries before the founding of Christianity. He still strikes us as remarkable today. When we examine his work closely, we first find in him, in many fields, something of what we today call natural science. For in the ancient philosophies, natural science in the modern sense does not exist. Even in the nineteenth century, people who wished to stand firmly and exclusively on the ground of natural science spoke in the most laudatory terms about Aristotle’s contributions to the field. Thus, we find in Aristotle the starting points of what can still be called scientific research today. In addition, we find in him a fully developed doctrine of the human soul.

[ 23 ] We shall not go into the details of his theory of the soul, but merely draw attention to how Aristotle’s doctrine of the human soul relates to what has come down to us from earlier times regarding the human soul and its connection to the great spiritual worlds. One can only understand what Aristotle wrote about the soul if one realizes that all of this is presented by him as a tradition of ancient, very ancient thought, acquired in the manner just described. Aristotle is no longer familiar with the research methods of ancient times; they are foreign to him. But what he was able to say about the structure, about the division of the human soul, about the difference between that part of the human soul which is bound only to the physical body—and thus also to death—and that part which, after passing through death, participates in a spiritual life in eternity—what Aristotle is able to say about all this is like a legacy from ancient times, the content of which he knows, which he received in such a way that he could say: “It makes sense to my mind.” But he is now familiar only with the individual components—what he calls, for example, the vegetative soul, the spiritual soul, and so on. He no longer knows how the individual components are connected to the spiritual world. He can list the individual parts, describe and classify them intellectually, and even make them intelligible to the intellect, but he can no longer show how these parts of the human soul are connected to the spiritual world.

[ 24 ] Aristotle’s approach was then carried forward into later times. The natural sciences became increasingly sophisticated. Of course, there was the medieval low point and the new dawn of the natural sciences at the beginning of the modern era, but if one sets those aside, one can say that the natural sciences became more and more sophisticated.

[ 25 ] On what, then, is man’s relationship to the natural sciences and to the objects of the natural sciences based? Let us imagine: if human beings were left with their senses alone, if they could not open their senses—as it were—and connect them to the realms of nature that surround us, what would individual human life be without this integration into nature? Let us consider the matter in its most basic terms. If we could not connect our eyes with nature, we might perhaps close them and thereby experience something akin to a glimmer of inner light. But compare that meager inner life—the only one a human being could have within the entire physical world—to the rich life that opens up when a human being opens their eyes and the rest of their sensory organs to the realms of nature and their impressions. Compare it to the rich life that unfolds when a person opens their eyes and the other sense organs to the realms of nature and their impressions. We are human not merely by living within ourselves, but by opening our senses to the realms of nature that surround us and by interacting with these realms. If we knew only what the eye and the other sense organs can produce on their own, how poor in content we would be as human beings here in the physical world! This can be compared to what the life of the soul gradually became during the times when natural science was just emerging and marching from triumph to triumph.

[ 26 ] With regard to the life of the soul, what Aristotle had established was, so to speak, continued. The focus was solely on the observation of the phenomena of the soul themselves. But this is like allowing the senses to operate only within themselves—and up to the present day, this is how official psychology operates. To this day, the content of official psychology consists of nothing other than what can be compared to the mere internal activity of our sense organs or our brain, when the brain’s thoughts are not directed out into the vastness of the world. But we have already seen in the previous lectures how, through the methods of spiritual science—and this was also the case with ancient spiritual science—the soul is linked upward to spiritual realms that are just as concrete and internally structured as the realms around us in the physical world, to which the sense organs are linked.

[ 27 ] These spiritual realms—these very concrete spiritual realities and entities—were inaccessible for a certain period, a period that was precisely intended to allow external scientific research to mature; and so our understanding of the life of the soul became increasingly impoverished, because the spiritual perspective lacked concrete confirmation of the spiritual world. At best, the soul was still explored in its inner life, as Franz Brentano did in the 1870s, as you can see for yourself in his *Psychology*. But his investigation is akin to studying the eye solely in terms of what it can do on its own, and not in terms of what it is capable of when it is directed outward toward the facts of nature.

[ 28 ] Now one might say: It is precisely through this increasingly detailed examination of human physical processes that attention has been diverted from the spiritual worlds with which the soul is connected. — On the one hand, the soul is connected to these spiritual worlds, which it enters once it has passed through the gate of death, or when it enters another world through sleep. But the soul is connected to the physical world through its organs, through the entire nervous system, and through the entire circulatory system. As the methods of natural science have become increasingly significant, people’s attention has been drawn to that connection of the soul that arises between the soul and physical processes. The findings of natural science in this regard were so spectacular that people were completely captivated, for example, by how the soul manifests itself in its connections with the blood circulation and so on. Every new triumph of natural science was, in a certain sense, detrimental to directing the soul’s gaze toward its connection with the spiritual world.

[ 29 ] In fact, something else applies here. Anyone who wants to understand a clock will fail to grasp its entire mechanism if they say: “I see the hands of the clock moving forward; perhaps there is a little demon inside that moves the hands forward.” — Even if a person who says such a thing feels superior to someone who merely studies the clock’s mechanism,

[ 30 ] People would laugh at him, because only those who truly study the clock’s mechanism can come to understand it. And yet it is quite another matter to understand, alongside the clock’s mechanism, the intellectual life of the clockmaker or of the person who invented the clock. One can take both paths: examining the mechanical operation of the clockwork and learning about the human thought process that led to the invention of the clock. It would be nonsensical, however, for anyone to conclude that some kind of demons set the entire clockwork in motion.

[ 31 ] This was gradually lost to humanity in the study of humankind—which, in the case of a clock, would correspond to tracing the spiritual mechanism all the way back to the inventor’s thoughts. For it would be fitting for the human soul to trace these thoughts all the way to the beings of the spiritual world. Instead, in the natural sciences, it marched triumphantly from fact to fact—that is, toward what corresponds to the “clockwork.” And an interesting observation can be made: namely, the insights handed down from ancient times are usually lost to humanity precisely during those epochs in which a given insight can be examined rigorously through the natural sciences. It is curious: at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, we see that the philosopher Descartes still had a certain conception that something spirit-like in human beings acts from the heart to the head. Descartes still speaks of certain life spirits that are not of a physical nature, but whose forces operate between the heart and the head. Then we see how such an insight gradually disappears from the spiritual life of humanity.

[ 32 ] Anyone wondering why this is so may find the following answer. We see that, historically, the disappearance of knowledge about mental processes related to the heart coincided with the emergence of knowledge about the physical structure of the heart and the circulation of blood. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, we first see the English physician Harvey publish his discovery of blood circulation, and Marcello Malpighi in Bologna, working as an anatomist, demonstrate for the first time—using the blood circulation of a frog—just how intricate the entire circulatory system is. Thus, attention was directed toward sensory processes. Knowledge of spiritual realities was, so to speak, pushed aside by the precise understanding of sensory processes. While it represents a triumph for the natural sciences that Francesco Redi, born in 1624, formulated the principle—which contradicted many earlier assertions—that “all living things come from living things,” and while this principle is indeed a triumph, we can say: As humanity came to trace the organic as such back to the germ—to the physically indeterminate nature of the organic germ—it lost sight of how the spiritual itself, independently of the organic germ, intervenes in development. Humanity lost its understanding of the spiritual germ. This is how it happened, step by step. The more natural science advanced triumphantly, the more the view of the spiritual world was lost.

[ 33 ] Such things are not mere coincidences, nor are they something to be condemned or criticized; rather, they are necessary developmental processes in the formation of all humanity. That is how it must be. Often, while one aspect rises and develops toward greater heights, another declines. What we admire today in the natural sciences—indeed, what we recognize as necessary—appears to us, if we are true connoisseurs of the development of the natural sciences, in such a way that we say: Spiritual science has not the slightest reason to oppose the natural sciences in any way, provided they remain within their proper bounds, nor does it have any reason to complain about the one-sidedness of the natural sciences. For it is precisely because all manner of speculation has not been mixed into scientific research—but rather because attention has been calmly directed toward physical and sensory processes—that the great achievements of the natural sciences have come about to this day. Indeed, it is precisely in the dawn of modern intellectual life that one can trace how, only through resistance to Aristotelianism—even against the substantively valid aspects of Aristotelianism—minds such as Galileo or Giordano Bruno achieved their successes by refusing to introduce anything into their research other than what lay before their senses and was instructive enough.

[ 34 ] Today, the researcher in the humanities must approach the natural scientist in such a way that he says: The more natural scientific research itself is kept free from all speculation and philosophizing—the more one focuses purely on the facts and does not invent all sorts of intellectual essences, but takes only what can actually be investigated—the better it is for the natural sciences. It is precisely the researcher in the humanities who wishes to advocate for keeping scientific facts free from all speculative discourse, whether derived from the natural sciences or the humanities. That is why it is possible today to be a researcher in the humanities on the one hand, and on the other hand to advocate for the authenticity and validity of scientific research. And it is merely a prejudice to believe that the humanities scholar must turn against the natural sciences.

[ 35 ] The situation is different when it comes to numerous theories—which already border on the humanities—that one seeks to derive from theories in the natural sciences. In such cases, the natural scientist himself enters the realm of the humanities, a realm with which he is, in most cases, only very slightly familiar. But one thing does remain, even for the humanities and humanities research, from scientific knowledge: that is the conscientious method characterized earlier, the conscientious sense of truth that we have often discussed and characterized in past lectures—the commitment to the facts.

[ 36 ] How do these facts arise? We have seen that it is through the unfolding of certain powers within the human soul, which, just as the senses establish a connection with the physical world, also establish a connection with the higher worlds. Just as the senses are meant to explore the facts of the physical world and to leave them as they are—without distorting them through speculation—so, too, the aim is not to philosophize or speculate about the results of clairvoyant observation, but rather to adopt the rigorous standpoint of facts in this context as well. Then one stands firmly on the ground of spiritual science, yet just as securely within its domain as one stands firmly on the ground of natural science with regard to that field. This is the kind of spiritual science as it is represented here.

[ 37 ] This is precisely what any spiritual research that feels a responsibility toward the spiritual needs of our time must be concerned with. And this becomes immediately apparent even in rigorous scientific research when it comes to the facts available to spiritual science, once science—in its own understanding—reaches its limits.

[ 38 ] Once again, purely based on the facts, this leads to some very curious results. I would just like to recall what emerges when we consider the views of the great naturalist Du Bois-Reymond, as he expressed them in his speeches. Perhaps the most significant speech was the one on the “Limits of the Knowledge of Nature,” which he delivered at the forty-fifth meeting of German Naturalists and Physicians in Leipzig on August 14, 1872. In it there is a passage—and I still remember the deep impression this passage made on me as a very young man when I first heard this speech—a passage that says something like this: When we have a human being before us in his waking life, natural science can say nothing about how sensation, imagination, desire, passion, or emotion arise from the activity of the smallest parts of his brain. “What conceivable connection exists between, on the one hand, certain movements of certain atoms in my brain and, on the other hand, the facts that are original to me, that cannot be further defined, and that cannot be denied: ‘Ah, I feel pain, I feel pleasure; I taste sweetness, I smell the scent of roses, I hear the sound of an organ, I see a rooster,’ and the certainty that flows just as immediately from this: ‘Therefore, I am?’” — It is simply and forever incomprehensible that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc., atoms should not be indifferent to how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, and how they will lie and move.”

[ 39 ] Du Bois-Reymond considered it impossible to understand the inner life of a human being in the waking state from a scientific perspective. Therefore, he said: When we have before us a sleeping person, in whom the life of sensations, ideas, desires, emotions, and passions has been extinguished, then we can explain the sleeping person scientifically; then we have before us something we can call a state of activity, an inner organic activity. But as soon as life—sensation, desire, imagination, and so on—enters this organism upon waking, the situation changes. Then this life, this content of the soul, cannot be explained scientifically on the basis of what the natural scientist can perceive. The sleeping human being, Du Bois-Reymond argues, is scientifically comprehensible; the waking one is not.

[ 40 ] That, on the one hand. On the other hand, read the more recent treatises on the nature of sleep: you will find it acknowledged everywhere that natural science, so to speak, has nothing to say about the causes of sleep, that it has nothing to say about the sleeping human being, who, according to Du Bois-Reymond, should nevertheless be fathomable. On the one hand, we see evidence of the brilliant progress of natural science, which, however, then admits its limitations by acknowledging that the waking human being, with his inner life, cannot be fully understood through the lens of natural science. On the other hand, however, we have—as we do today—the admission that human sleep remains inexplicable to this day. Why is that? It is because sleep belongs to those realms where the spirit intervenes in ordinary life; we cannot explain sleep if we cannot explain wakefulness.

[ 41 ] In one of the first lectures of this winter semester, I pointed out how one might, at most from a scientific standpoint, conceive of a mechanism that, on its own and automatically after a certain amount of time, triggers the urge to shut down consciousness and sensory activity in order to relieve fatigue. But as I said, if one wishes to limit oneself to the idea that sleep is brought about by a kind of independent process within the organism that proceeds automatically, then one has no explanation for the reindeer that has not worked and yet takes its afternoon nap, nor do we have an explanation for sleep in the small child, who sleeps the most. In contrast, I have pointed out that sleep can only be explained if we assume that, in the case of a sleeping person, only the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed, and that, upon falling asleep, a truly spiritual aspect—namely, the astral body and the “I”—moves out of the human being’s essence. What happens as a result of the fact that, during sleep, the truly soul-like aspect of the human being is, so to speak, outside the physical body and the etheric body? We will speak about these things in greater detail later. Today, I will merely hint at the following:

[ 42 ] As the true soul departs from the physical body and its animator, something is brought about that is opposed to the soul’s waking activity. In waking activity, the soul is active. No limb moves without the soul’s knowledge. Above all, no mental images arise without the soul making use of the brain as its instrument. The soul must be active in the waking state. The opposite is true during sleep. There we can say: The soul enjoys its own physicality in the life of sleep. If we proceed according to spiritual research, we find, based on this distinction, soul activity and soul enjoyment in the waking and sleeping states, and we understand the interrelationship between soul work and activity and soul enjoyment, which must flow into the soul’s activity if the latter is to continue in an appropriate manner. Now we are no longer contradicted by the reindeer that takes its afternoon nap even though it is not at all tired; rather, we know that the soul, when it delights in its body, can overdo it, and that one can sleep even when one is not at all tired. We understand this when we know how, in certain constitutions, the enjoyment of the physical can be experienced to an excessive degree.

[ 43 ] All of this can be understood if one knows how to explain sleep from the perspective of the humanities. That is to say, there is a realm where the natural sciences believe they reign supreme, and where the humanities have a say only to the extent that the spirit permeates everything, including natural processes. But then there begins a realm where what natural science can investigate no longer applies—a realm where facts do exist, but facts that can only be perceived when perception is not sensory but supersensory. If spiritual science proceeds with the same conscientiousness and accustoms itself to thinking as rigorously within its own domain as natural science does within its own, it cannot possibly come into conflict with natural science. But this places spiritual science on a foundation that in many respects contradicts what has gradually emerged in the course of humanity’s spiritual life.

[ 44 ] Thus we see how those who can be regarded as precursors of genuine spiritual research—Goethe, for example—had to struggle against the forces that opposed such spiritual research. We see this most clearly when we look at how Goethe once defended himself against Kant. It was Kant, after all, who initially sought to establish how the knowledge that had developed in modern times is bound to the instrument of the brain, must be limited to external experience, and cannot penetrate into the depths of the world with which our spiritual and soul life is connected. Hence Kant’s strict distinction between “science” and what he calls “faith”; and for Kant, higher realms are accessible only through faith. Hence, in place of knowledge about a world of eternity or the divine-spiritual, he substitutes a faith that is to be based on the “categorical imperative.” Thus, he decrees that what is supposed to be knowledge in the science of the spirit is merely faith. But Goethe says in his beautiful essay on “Intuitive Judgment,” with reference to Kant: If one can already, in an intuitive sense, empathize with a spiritual realm in which the divine-spiritual is rooted and from which morality springs, why should the human spirit, when it rises into this spiritual realm, not also truly undertake the adventure of reason? — For Kant called it a “daring adventure of reason” when human beings seek to penetrate into realms in which—according to Kant—knowledge cannot exist. For Western thought, the question is: How does one move from the natural sciences to the humanities? — That one need not oppose the natural sciences, but rather fully acknowledge them—indeed, be a faithful admirer of its achievements—even while, following the very model of scientific research, one extends human knowledge into those realms with which the soul, in its spiritual depths, is connected through the impulses that give it life, even after it has left the physical body and is preparing to take on a new form of corporeality.

[ 45 ] The task of true spiritual research will be to move further and further away from the unwarranted mockery or attempts to refute the legitimate claims of modern natural science. This will, of course, depend on spiritual science being recognized as legitimate only if it is familiar with the current state of scientific research and therefore does not, in an amateurish manner, act contrary to what can legitimately be expected from a contemporary scientific education. Just as the natural scientist cannot limit himself to investigating only the inner nature of the eye, the ear, the sense of warmth, and so on, but just as human beings must direct what the senses are capable of experiencing inwardly toward the rich, concrete physical environment, so too must the soul be understood by the soul, through self-education — through a new kind of yoga training, as described last time, but a new kind that differs fundamentally from all previous forms — unites itself with that with which it is connected in the spiritual realm, a realm that begins only where scientific research reaches its limits.

[ 46 ] Here we have precisely that relationship—the relationship between the natural sciences and the humanities—but we also have the possibility of genuine coexistence, peace, and mutual understanding between research in the natural sciences and the humanities. If what has already been said in this regard in the previous lectures is considered together with what I was able to outline again today regarding the relationship between research in the natural sciences and the humanities, then one will also be able to gain an understanding of the legitimacy of research in the humanities, as well as an understanding of the possibility for humanities research to stand on equal footing with the natural sciences in our present time. And one may hope that the legitimate objections and reservations that still exist today on the part of natural scientists will gradually fade away when natural scientists see that it is not merely all sorts of confused nonsense, nor arbitrary assertions and superstition, that appear in the field of spiritual research, but how spiritual research is well acquainted with what contemporary scientific education demands.

[ 47 ] If this happens, then spiritual research will appear increasingly justified in the eyes of today’s scientific conscience, and one will then also be able to gradually understand, from what emerges within the facts of spiritual life, that spiritual research is truly possible and truly justified, and that the objections to spiritual research actually belong to a realm about which one can say something similar to what Goethe once said in reference to another realm—namely, in reference to rising above all ignorance and all illogicality.

[ 48 ] In summarizing the relationship between the spiritual researcher and those who present themselves as enemies of spiritual scientific research, I would like to conclude by briefly recalling something Goethe once said in reference to an entirely different matter. Goethe recalled an ancient Greek doctrine and exposition on motion—one that, however, still frequently influenced modern philosophy—a doctrine that states: when any object is in motion, one can nevertheless observe it at any given moment, and at every moment, even the briefest instant, it is at rest. It is at rest, even if only for an instant. Thus, there could be no “motion” at all, for at every point in time a moving body is at rest and therefore has no motion. Such is the Zenoan paradox of motion, and thus the legacy of Greek thought haunted thought right up to modern times.

[ 49 ] Goethe found this objection to the movement quite strange, and he once said these beautiful words:

You may spot something hostile,
Stay calm, stay silent;
And if they deny you the freedom to move,
Go right around them.

[ 50 ] I must remember this saying whenever, in more recent times, certain ideas arise that claim: “Mind”—what you call ‘mind’—is the result of purely material activity, physical processes, and movements; the mind arises from matter. Just as motion—in the sense just described—arises only from rest and is not something real, so too the spirit is not something real apart from matter.

[ 51 ] If, in the sense that we are attempting here in these reflections to penetrate the spiritual world, one seeks to gain insight into the spiritual and thus truly immerses oneself in the essence of what the spiritual is, then one may well describe what spiritual scientific research brings to light about the spirit in its relationship to the opponents and enemies of spiritual science, with a slight modification of the words of Goethe just cited—and with this I would like to summarize today what I have to say about the relationship between natural science and spiritual science—that the proper attitude of the true spiritual researcher toward his enemies can be characterized as follows:

Hostile things may happen,
But you, stay calm, stay cheerful!
And even if they deny the Spirit,
Don’t dwell on it any further,
And in the end, even agree with them:
Their spirit is simply in a bad way!