The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Morality in the Light of Spiritual Research

[ 1 ] When Plato, the great Greek philosopher, sought to define or characterize the Divine, so to speak, he described it as the “Good.” And Schopenhauer, who in many respects followed in Plato’s footsteps, once stated in his writings that he could call his philosophical view an “ethics” far more than Spinoza was permitted to do, for the reason that he, Schopenhauer had, in fact, based his entire worldview on the primal force of the will, and had thus made something connected to the innermost moral impulses of the human soul the fundamental force of the universe; whereas Spinoza—according to Schopenhauer—had constructed his system in such a way that the highest principles of the universe did not yet contain the moral or the ethical as such.

[ 2 ] Schopenhauer, like Plato, wanted to suggest—and indeed many philosophical worldviews have done the same—that everything we call “moral” in the development of humanity is so intimately and so deeply rooted in this development of humanity that one cannot even conceive that the realm of the moral might not ultimately encompass all purely natural phenomena; the realm of the moral lies at the foundation of everything that human beings can fathom in the natural or spiritual world as the fundamental principle and the fundamental essences of things. Thus, in the view of such philosophers, the moral in human beings would be an incorporation and illumination of the divine-moral that permeates the entire world. And this would already establish that, naturally, every elevation—in the sense of a worldview—toward the primordial foundations of existence must also bring human beings ever closer and closer to the sources of the moral impulses of the world.

[ 3 ] Even if one need not agree entirely with such philosophical worldviews, one can still say that such worldviews lead precisely to the kind of opinion, to the kind of perspective, as described by Plato and Schopenhauer, precisely because they perceive the full dignity and significance of morality in human development and therefore do not wish to overlook the moral impulses at the very foundations of the world’s existence. Even if one does not fully agree with such worldviews in theory, one can nevertheless learn from them and find them well-founded in the sense that any worldview intended to intervene in human life and human action must, in a sense, appear justified before the judgment seat of morality—it must appear such that morality can say an unconditional “yes” to it. Therefore, the engagement of every worldview with the moral impulses of existence is a necessity. It is against this backdrop that the topic of today’s reflection has been chosen, which is intended to address the relationship between what is meant here by “spiritual science” and the moral principles and impulses of the human soul.

[ 4 ] Now, when approaching moral issues, a certain—one might say sacred—reverence for the territory one is entering is necessary from the outset in order to maintain a reasonably sensible perspective on things. For one is entering the very realm that gives rise to judgments which, in the most profound sense, seek to determine the worth and unworthiness of the human soul, and one immediately senses, upon entering this realm, that one is delving into the unfathomable depths of the human soul—depths so unfathomable that, precisely in this realm, one would not wish to be quick to pass any definitive judgment. In this regard, too, Schopenhauer made a significant, often-quoted statement: “It is easy to preach morality, but difficult to justify it.” What does Schopenhauer mean by this statement?

[ 5 ] One realizes right away that preaching morality is easy as soon as one takes even a brief look into human life. For there is hardly anything else preached as much in this human life as morality. Nothing is judged as much as the moral worth or worthlessness of the soul. And when one examines human life thoroughly, one must again say: How little are actual moral sermons actually capable of truly penetrating the soul, so that they might grasp these souls in such a way that the moral principles—which one person or another holds to—even if clearly understood, might also become genuine moral impulses within the soul! — Yes, how easily some people can preach morality to themselves, even though they find it utterly difficult to actually follow moral impulses. Schopenhauer believes that everything one can preach in the way of principles, moral formulas, or moral precepts is, in fact, meaningless. In his view, something is meaningful only if one can point to a spiritual force, a spiritual impulse within the human soul—one that is a reality within the soul itself and from which moral action springs. Then one could say that one has pointed to something in the human soul which, if left to its own devices, compels one toward moral action; then one has found the basis of moral action in the soul. Then one has established morality, because one has clarified the real impulse in the soul. Then one has not merely preached morality.

[ 6 ] It is precisely with a demand such as this—which is as justified as can be—that one realizes how difficult it is to penetrate those depths of the human soul where moral impulses truly lie dormant, where those impulses reside from which moral or immoral behavior springs. It is difficult to penetrate these depths with our judgment. Let us consider a specific case—one that can teach us how difficult it is for a conscientious soul to form a judgment about the moral value or lack thereof of a human action. Let us suppose that some prominent figure mounts a horse and rides out. Along the way, this prominent figure comes across a poor woman crouching by the roadside. This figure, galloping along on horseback, sees the woman, reaches into his pocket, takes out his full purse, and tosses it to her.

[ 7 ] Now we have an action before us. The question is: How should we judge such an action in the light of morality? Herman Grimm, whom I have mentioned before, says the following about this action, which actually occurred once in the life of a world-famous figure. Let us assume that the woman were superstitious, and that the situation were such that she had just planned to commit a theft in the near future for the sake of her children, who are in the most dire straits. By the fact that this man’s wallet happened to fly into her hands, she was spared from committing the theft and from bringing even greater misery upon her family’s already dire situation. But she is superstitious, says Herman Grimm. Why, then, should the woman not say: Through this man, an angel from the higher worlds has appeared to me, and through this I have been saved from the abyss.

[ 8 ] Here, through these things—which could very well be taking place in this woman’s soul—we have a kind of moral treatment. But let’s suppose, Herman Grimm continues, that this person, who tossed that woman’s full purse to her, later finds herself in a gathering of various people. The first person to hear from this person herself that she had done this thinks: Well, I’ve always heard that this person is extraordinarily stingy; now I see how insignificant such judgments are everywhere!” — And such a person might then go out of their way to defend this man — says Herman Grimm — and could, as it were, help correct the rumor about that distinguished person’s stinginess everywhere by spreading the word about this person’s “generosity.” But let’s suppose—says Herman Grimm—that a second person heard the same story and was moved by it in a very peculiar way; for this person, let’s assume, had recently wanted to borrow from that man a sum much smaller than what was in his wallet, and the man had refused to lend it to her. Wouldn’t this person form a completely different judgment? Or a third person—says Herman Grimm—might be present who, the moment they hear this, is prompted to say: “Yes, I’m in a bind; can’t I get something myself?”—Such a person might then arrive at a judgment that would be quite different from both that of the woman and that of the other individuals. A fourth person might perhaps know, when this incident is recounted, that the man in question was deeply in debt at precisely that moment, and this person will now view the action in a completely different moral light. She might say that it is a great injustice to casually throw away the wallet when one is obligated to pay off debts for which creditors are waiting everywhere. Another personality might know—according to Herman Grimm—that the wallet did not belong to that man at all, but to his wife, and that the man had carelessly thrown his wife’s wallet away; the wife might therefore complain about her husband’s carelessness. And various other points of view would be possible.

[ 9 ] Thus we see how people who start from different points of view could judge such an action quite differently and might not at all arrive at what lived in the soul as the true impulse. Herman Grimm dwells on this case in particular because he wants to demonstrate how moral judgments must be viewed with a certain degree of reserve when they are presented to us—for example, in memoirs—regarding such a significant figure. After all, we might encounter all such judgments in memoirs, for the entire matter I have presented here actually took place in a similar situation—namely, with the great poet Lord Byron. And in his discussion of one of Byron’s biographers, who was acquainted with Byron, Herman Grimm brings up this case. It is worth citing this here because it so vividly illustrates the array of life judgments—which we have formed in very different ways—that lie at the foundation when we set out to judge any moral act of a person. Indeed, one must say that while it is generally difficult, in Schopenhauer’s sense, to justify morality, it becomes downright impossible in individual cases to approach a person’s inner life with a definitive moral judgment in such a way that this judgment would truly capture the facts of the matter. However, one should not draw from these premises the conclusion that one must be indifferent to morality. On the contrary! Anyone who grasps life in its entirety will nevertheless regard morality as the holiest aspect of human life and thereby come to the conclusion that the holiest aspect of human life must also be approached with a sacred reverence. For in many respects it is presumptuous to confront another human being with a moral judgment, given how much separates one soul from another. Having established these premises, let us now consider what has been presented here in these various lectures regarding the nature of spiritual science. On the one hand, spiritual science leads us deeper into the spiritual foundations of things. But at the same time, we have seen how it is able to do this: it is possible because we uncover the deeper forces of our soul life, so that we grasp the spiritual foundations of the world only by bringing to the surface the forces slumbering in the depths of the human soul. Thus, it is precisely through the methods of spiritual research that we approach the deeper foundations of human soul life—those foundations from which moral impulses often well up in such a mysterious way. And the question must be: What happens when, in the depths of the soul, those investigations that seek to bring these depths to the surface encounter the moral impulses? After all, in ordinary everyday life in the physical world, it is the case that moral impulses can emerge with great certainty from the depths even into the simplest human soul, into the most uneducated human soul. And even many highly educated people—even many who perhaps count themselves among the philosophers or are scientists—can be put to shame in the moral realm by a simple person who possesses little knowledge of their own, yet who, from the depths of their soul, is capable of performing the most self-sacrificing acts of genuine human love even in the most difficult situations. Ordinary knowledge—external, physical understanding—certainly need not lead down into the depths from which moral impulses spring, the impulses upon which morality is to be founded.

[ 10 ] However, it immediately becomes apparent that if spiritual science is to ascend to the spiritual sources of existence, the human soul—if it is to become a spiritual researcher—must develop three aspects. These three aspects have, in fact, been presented in the course of these winter lectures as the three stages of supersensible knowledge. First, we have discussed what we call imaginative knowledge—that is, the kind of knowledge that arises before the human soul when it has completely freed itself from all sensory observation and all intellectual activity bound to the instrument of the brain. Once the soul has reached the point where it feels a world of images welling up from its depths, these images will, as the spiritual researcher continues to develop, become images of the actual spiritual realities that exist behind the outer sensory world. Imaginative insight is the first stage. — These stages of supersensible insight are also explained in detail in the book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*

[ 11 ] The second thing the human soul must come to—one can only express such things more or less figuratively, and all of this has already been discussed, but to avoid misunderstandings, it should be briefly mentioned today—is that what first appeared as an image, yet cannot be compared to the images of any single sense, emerges, as it were, from within itself through a “language of the worlds” as inspired knowledge. This means that, once the spiritual researcher’s capacity for inspiration has awakened, the spiritual beings and realities that lie beyond the sensory world speak to him.

[ 12 ] The third stage, through which the spiritual researcher truly penetrates the essence of spiritual facts and beings, is called intuition. This does not refer to the kind of intuition that is sometimes described by this word in everyday language, but rather to something that is a genuine crossing over of one’s own soul life into another being, through which a person, by connecting their own being with that of another, becomes capable of penetrating the innermost being of spiritual beings existing outside themselves. Thus, on other levels of cognition, imagination, inspiration, and intuition stand in contrast to what constitutes sensory and intellectual cognition.

[ 13 ] Through these three stages of knowledge, the human soul penetrates into the spiritual world. The powers of imagination—that is, the ability to see images from the supersensible world—as well as the powers of inspiration—that is, the ability to perceive what the spiritual facts and beings of the supersensible world have to reveal to us—and the powers of intuition lie dormant in every human soul. They are brought to the surface through the methods described here. The human soul must therefore, as a researcher of the spiritual realm, penetrate into its depths in order to reach the very foundations of existence.

[ 14 ] It has already been pointed out—particularly when discussing the “Errors of Spiritual Research”—how important the starting point is from which the soul reaches those stages of its existence where it can look into the spiritual world. It has been particularly emphasized that a kind of powerlessness with regard to the knowledge of the spiritual world sets in for the soul that does not take moral integrity and a moral disposition as its starting point. Such a soul will exhibit a certain numbness toward the higher worlds and will be able to reveal from these higher worlds only that which is seen as through a kind of numbness—that is, which is distorted. Thus, the connection has already been pointed out between the moral disposition of the soul at the outset and what the soul can attain when it truly enters the spiritual worlds through imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But we can characterize the significance of the moral disposition of the soul for the higher levels of knowledge even more precisely.

[ 15 ] For the spiritual researcher, the imagination manifests itself in such a way that images emerge, as it were, on the horizon of his consciousness—first from his own inner life, then from the essence of the general spiritual life. These images, which emerge in this way—and whose significance we have already described—must vary depending on whether the person starts from this or that state of mind that they already possess here in the physical world. A soul that develops a sense for the correct, true connection between facts here in the physical world will, when it ascends to imagination through the methods described, carry with it into the higher worlds the inner disposition for the true connection between things. Therefore, we can say that a soul that truly knows how to live within the facts of the physical, sensory world carries its truthfulness up into the spiritual worlds. A soul, however, that is characterized by imprecision—and, as has already been indicated, this imprecision can extend to error, indeed, it is only a small step to falsehood—which is characterized here by untruthfulness in relation to the sensory facts of the physical world—such a soul carries the inner disposition of untruthfulness with it into the world where the imaginations, the images of the spiritual world, are to emerge. And the consequence of this is that, out of its insincerity—which, after all, does not correspond to the world but springs solely from its own inner being—such a world of images is constructed, which is itself merely an outflow of the personality in question.

[ 16 ] When the soul ascends to the realm of imagination, insincerity will therefore cause such a soul to reveal from the spiritual worlds nothing other than what is merely the reflection of its own insincerity. Therefore, in all training for ascending into the spiritual world, it is essential that the soul, before entering the world of imagination, must first strengthen itself here in the physical world—as preparation for imaginative knowledge—through what may be called a sense of reality, a sense for the facts. And it must be emphasized—strongly emphasized—that anything that distracts from this sense of fact cannot provide proper preparation for contemplating the spiritual world. It will be good preparation for anyone who wishes to become a spiritual researcher if they refrain as much as possible from all merely personal and subjective criticism, from judging things solely “from their own standpoint,” and from asserting: “I think that’s right,” “I think that’s wrong.” — Rather, a good preparation for spiritual knowledge is to try, as best one can and as much as possible, to set aside here in the physical world all judgment based solely on one’s personal standpoint, all assertion of one’s personal, subjective standpoint; to strive, when faced with the facts of life, to let only those facts speak for themselves as much as possible. Therefore, we will find that those who are on the right path toward the spiritual world will strive, in everything they recount or describe, not to present their own judgments about things, but to let the things speak for themselves, by endeavoring to simply compile the facts.

[ 17 ] So when we encounter someone who says at every opportunity: “This or that has happened here and there, and I find it distasteful; something has happened here or there, and I don’t think it’s good; something has happened here or there, and I find it ugly, or I find it beautiful”—and whatever the nuances may be—such a person is not on the right path to ascending into the spiritual worlds. Rather, they are on the right path when they strive to suppress such judgments and simply state the facts, when they look at the facts and let them speak for themselves, and make it their guiding principle: If I impose my judgment on someone, it is simply my judgment—then they are not only required to believe me that what I say is true, but also that I have formed a judgment. But if I set out to tell people what I have observed here and there, they can form their own judgment. The more one forces oneself to adopt the latter approach to observing the world and recounting things, the more one develops a sense of the facts and prepares oneself for imaginative insight. Anyone who wishes to prepare for imaginative insight should, above all in their way of thinking, break the habit of saying with every experience: “I find things to be this way or that way.” — One should consider one’s own opinions about things to be irrelevant and should strive to be merely the instrument through which things or facts speak.

[ 18 ] When one considers this, it becomes clear that a very essential virtue—truthfulness—is, from the very outset, one of the proper preparatory means for a methodical training in the knowledge of the higher worlds. One cannot possibly be in any doubt that proper training for the knowledge of higher worlds is—or at least must be—morally uplifting. Indeed, one can even present the matter from another perspective. Suppose someone does not prepare for the higher worlds through the truthfulness just described. Then, if they simply undergo the appropriate soul training and exercises, the dormant powers of their soul can indeed be awakened, and they will ultimately be led into an imaginative world. But what is this world then? It is nothing other than the mirror image of their own being. And because at the moment one turns away from the sensory world—and also from the intellect bound to the brain—one has this imaginative world before oneself as something real, regardless of whether it expresses something real or is merely the reflection of the inner being of the one who experiences it, anyone who is not properly prepared through truthfulness will likewise have an “imaginative world” before them, because it deceives them into believing it is a real one, when in fact it is only the reflection of their own soul, of their own inner self. This world is then a constant tempter toward untruthfulness. Therefore, it can be said that someone who enters the spiritual world without having been prepared through the practice of truthfulness places themselves in a situation where, whenever they perceive the supersensible world, the temptations toward untruthfulness and lies are constantly present in their surroundings. From this, the conclusion must follow of its own accord that any ascent into the supersensible world must be connected with the cultivation of the virtue of truthfulness—and, above all, with the cultivation of a sense of facts. For only when we possess a sense of facts—a sense of the interrelationship of facts in the physical world that exist outside of us—can we train ourselves in truthfulness.

[ 19 ] In a similar way, the same principle applies to inspiration, only in this realm it becomes even more vivid, even more significant. Through inspiration, the things that are spiritually present in our surroundings begin, as it were, to speak to us; they reveal and disclose their essence to us. We do not hear them through voices and sounds similar to those in the external world, but we hear them spiritually.

[ 20 ] Now, another form of preparation is necessary so that a person does not merely perceive what his own nature reveals to him, but so that he may come to know an objective, real world. This requires the cultivation of a very special virtue of the soul. Such things can, after all, only be ascertained through experience. Anyone who wishes to attain inspiration must cultivate within themselves—to a greater degree than is necessary in the ordinary world—the virtues of moral courage, steadfastness, and fortitude. For only those who possess moral courage—who do not shrink from anything that might endanger their own personality under certain circumstances—will be able to withstand what speaks to them through inspiration from the spiritual realms. And anyone who has developed too little fortitude and moral courage before entering the spiritual worlds will very soon notice—or rather, they will not notice it so easily, but others who understand the matter will notice it—that while certain things from the spiritual world do speak to them, everything that speaks to them in this way is merely an echo of their own being. Because his soul is not strong enough, because it does not have full stability within itself, it cannot retain within itself what it is, but radiates it out, and what returns to him is what he himself is. A soul that is not prepared for inspiration through moral courage will very soon present itself as one that hears something like “spiritual voices,” but these spiritual voices will be nothing other than what it carries within itself—which is merely an echo of its own being. When such a soul then comes to realize that this is the case, it will be all the more overwhelmed by what reaches it from the spiritual world. Thus we see that yet another essential quality of the soul—a quality that cannot be denied a moral character—must be strengthened and consolidated if this soul is to penetrate into the supersensible world: moral courage, or fortitude. This is necessary as preparation for true inspiration. From this it can easily be deduced that, above all, it is necessary to strengthen one’s moral courage already in the physical world before one wishes to become a spiritual researcher, so that the soul can truly perceive the revelations of that which is given through imaginations, as well as through inspirations.

[ 21 ] Many who did not understand the matter thoroughly enough believed they could rely on the moral courage of this or that soul; they then provided the soul with the means to ascend into the supersensible world, and were able to meet the soul after some time—only to find that it revealed nothing other than its own nature, which it interpreted as “sounds” and “words.”

[ 22 ] Spiritual training is thus intimately connected with the enhancement of moral strength, and therefore any properly conveyed spiritual training will, above all, work toward strengthening and consolidating moral strength. Consequently, wherever you find a description of the methods by which one penetrates into the higher worlds—for example, in my treatise *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*—you will also find references to the necessity of strengthening moral strength. For moral strength must not remain merely as it is in ordinary life in the physical world; rather, it must be elevated and fortified.

[ 23 ] What is particularly evident to us in this regard, however, is what is necessary when we turn to intuition—through which the soul that has become a spiritual researcher is able to truly put itself in the inner world of another spiritual being or another spiritual reality. There we will find that it becomes virtually impossible, after spiritual training, to truly empathize with other beings if one has not already ensured here in the physical world that what might be called an open interest in everything that surrounds us—a free, open interest—is cultivated. All narrow-minded closedness of the soul, all withdrawal of the soul into itself, everything that refuses to direct the soul’s attention toward the sorrows and joys of fellow creatures and of all that already surrounds us in the sensory world—all of this prevents the soul, once it has ascended into the spiritual world, from attaining true intuition and true insights into higher beings. And here we find ourselves in the realm where our reflections touch upon what Schopenhauer calls his “Justification of Morality.”

[ 24 ] Schopenhauer was by no means a scholar of the humanities in the sense in which the term is used here. Therefore, for him as well, the soul, as it descends into its depths, does not unfold in such a way that it develops a trinity of powers corresponding to the three stages of cognition—imagination, inspiration, and intuition—but rather, for him, everything merges into one. The “soul” is a nebula of all the powers dwelling in its depths. Thus, Schopenhauer, too, cannot distinguish the moral virtues whose cultivation must serve as preparation for spiritual training: a sense of reality as the foundation of the virtue of truthfulness for imagination; fortitude as the foundation for that which leads to inspiration; and the third—which Schopenhauer discusses at length—that which slumbers in the depths of the soul and which can generally be called an interest in one’s surroundings and the world around us. But Schopenhauer draws attention to something else, and here he is, in a certain sense, profoundly ingenious. He draws attention to what indeed belongs to the few qualities and impulses of the soul that already reveal, even in the physical world, how an “underground” connection, as it were, exists directly between soul and soul. Schopenhauer draws attention to pity—or, one might better say, to compassion. One need only mention the words “compassion” or “empathy”—which Schopenhauer says must be present in every soul that can be called moral—to feel, first of all, that this empathy touches upon something that is in fact connected to the innermost moral impulse, to that which can truly ground morality. On the other hand, one will feel that with the word “empathy” one has touched upon something that is an intuition already present in the physical world—a transposition of one’s own soul into another soul. Proof that a subphysical connection exists between soul and soul, proof that the spirit, with its powers, is present between soul and soul—this proof is evident to anyone who can observe the world with insight in what can be described by the word “compassion.”

[ 25 ] Schopenhauer is therefore right—as are many others who have delved into these matters—to call compassion and empathy the true mystery of the human soul, one that can already be observed here in the physical world. For there is something infinitely profound when a soul, enclosed within a body, feels something that brings joy to another soul, or through which another soul suffers, so that in the flow of forces from one soul to another, there truly exists a kind of spiritual mystery even here in the physical world. That is why Schopenhauer says: No matter how much one may preach morality: morality is grounded in this life of one soul within another soul; morality is grounded, after all, only in compassion or sympathy. — Therefore, one can actually say quite rightly that, in Schopenhauer’s sense, there is as much morality in the world as there is compassion. Schopenhauer rightly pointed out that it would be unbearable to hear the statement: “This person is virtuous, but he feels no compassion.” Schopenhauer argues that everyone would sense the impossibility of such a statement—that virtue and a lack of compassion could coexist in a single soul. Thus, Schopenhauer maintains that it is unbearable to hear the statement: “He is an unjust and malicious person, yet he is very compassionate,” although one can certainly say that the inner workings of the human soul are sometimes so convoluted that one may even witness how someone can, without a doubt, commit truly terrible, immoral acts and yet develop a certain feeling of compassion, for example, toward pigeons and similar animals. On the whole, however, one can say that Schopenhauer touches here upon the depths of the justification of morality when he speaks of compassion.

[ 26 ] When speaking in the context of spiritual science, one must expand the principle of compassion somewhat further, and what then emerges before our soul is what can be described as sympathetic interest—that is, sympathetic attention to everything that happens in the world around us. For a person who cannot share in a joy being experienced does not have true, inner interest in that joy, and a person who cannot feel that suffering within themselves does not have true, deep interest in the suffering of another being. In many respects, compassion, empathy, and interest coincide. To have genuine, true interest is to have love. For one cannot have interest without love in the true sense of the word, without compassion.

[ 27 ] Once again, the proper preparation for intuitive insight here in the physical world is that which aims, as far as possible, to strengthen and invigorate the soul by helping it become accustomed to taking an interest in everything that lives, breathes, and exists—and to being able to pay attention to everything that surrounds the soul. The deeper our interest can be, the better we prepare ourselves, as spiritual researchers, for intuition of the higher worlds. Therefore, one can say: Especially for spiritual science, the emergence of compassion in the physical world appears as a reflection of the fact that those deep forces of the soul that lead to intuition can only develop truly and properly if the soul prepares itself for this through a genuine interest in its surroundings—that is, through love and compassion.

[ 28 ] Thus, wherever the right path to spiritual training is discussed, we see that this right path is inseparable from what is at the same time humanity’s most significant moral virtue. For in selfless love, in the attentive observation of all suffering and all joy, of all existence in general, in the soul’s steadfastness of character, and in truthfulness lie, so to speak, the most significant—indeed, the most fundamental—moral virtues. Anyone who wishes to understand any virtue—for example, a virtue such as fidelity, which it undoubtedly is—will easily recognize it as a particular manifestation of steadfastness. The person who is steadfast will also know how to remain faithful in the corresponding manner. All virtues—one might say the entire scope of virtues—can, in a certain fundamental sense, be traced back to these three qualities of the soul.

[ 29 ] Now, when describing the relationship between spiritual science and morality, one must also point out how, when a person truly arrives at a contemplation of the spiritual world—whether through spiritual training or simply by accepting with an open mind what spiritual research offers—they step into a world that places very special demands on them, demands that will certainly encompass what the soul needs in terms of confidence, hope, strength, and so on. But the human being also reaches the point where he faces himself, where, in full self-knowledge, he has, so to speak, stepped out of his personal self, where he has entered a world that no longer contains solely his personal interests and intentions. On the path to spiritual research, our soul reaches that point where it stands face to face with its own personality, where it stands face to face with the being it has been up to that point. It has already been pointed out that this confrontation with the being one has been up to that point is described in spiritual research as the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold—that threshold which separates the supersensible world from the ordinary physical world. It is only in the presence of this Keeper of the Threshold that one realizes what one is—what one has hitherto called one’s personality and interests, what one has willed, and what one has felt as something associated with sympathy or antipathy. All of this confronts one like a foreign being; it steps out of one. One looks at it as a foreign being and learns to say: “You have spoken all of this up to now.” Now you have it before you, and it appears to you as another being; you are outside yourself. The same is true of a person’s feelings and will at the moment of encountering the Guardian of the Threshold. When one experiences this, one also realizes how powerful all the magnetic forces are that draw one back to the personality one once was—and which one must actually leave behind.

[ 30 ] This is the significant experience—described here earlier in harrowing terms—in which one realizes: Yes, one must detach oneself from one’s former self, but this being that one once was, that one now faces, does not want to let one go; it draws one toward itself with a hundred and a hundred more forces. — And if one succumbs to these forces, one cannot free oneself from what one has hitherto called “oneself,” and thus one cannot enter the spiritual world. By getting to know oneself, one comes to understand the connection between the higher world, the higher powers of cognition that always lie dormant within the human being, and what one is in the physical world. Expressed in theoretical terms, this detachment from oneself might seem easy. When this experience is lived through—not merely through spiritual training, but through what a person can come to recognize through spiritual training—it becomes clear that these forces, which act almost like magnets, cannot be overcome so easily by mere judgment; rather, as one detaches from the “self,” the strength of the binding forces also grows, so that one feels: Everything that seeks to pull one back becomes stronger the more one detaches from oneself. One becomes increasingly aware of what draws one back to the ordinary personality, and one also becomes increasingly aware of how necessary it is to have first gained the strength to resist these magnetic forces. This means that one must actually precede one’s actual entry into the spiritual world with such a strengthening of the soul’s powers in goodness and morality, and such an inclination toward what the spirit demands of us, that one can resist the temptations of the lower personality with a strength greater than is necessary in the physical world.

[ 31 ] It is only when one is confronted with the harrowing events described that one realizes how every approach to the spirit is at the same time an approach to moral demands. Thus, experience once again provides evidence that justifies Plato, the great Greek philosopher, when he calls the divine “the Good.” When one confronts natural phenomena, one will form a judgment about them that is all the more accurate the more one refrains from applying moral judgment to them. Who, for example, would wish to pass moral judgment on a salt crystal or a plant that has stunted in its development? In the ordinary physical world, the natural and moral orders of the world intertwine, so that one senses the depth of the moral order only when one realizes that one is truly admitted into the spiritual world only through moral strength. Therefore, it is considered a principle of the spiritual world—and this, too, is an experience: Anyone can reach the Guardian of the Threshold; only those who pass him by through their moral strength can go beyond him. But whoever reaches only as far as the Keeper of the Threshold and must then turn back finds before them a spiritual world that is merely the reflection of their own inner world. Thus, someone may believe that they have an entire spiritual world before them and may even present to others what they believe to be the spiritual world before them. And others may believe that this is a spiritual world that corresponds to the truth. — If they have not been able to pass the Guardian of the Threshold through their moral strength and their moral state of mind, then their spiritual world is not permeated by truth or objectivity. Therefore, it will follow of its own accord that any true knowledge of the spiritual world will provide a depiction of spiritual conditions which, by the very nature of its presentation in the soul, not only preaches morality but also establishes it.

[ 32 ] This becomes particularly evident when one considers what has often been presented here—from a wide variety of perspectives—as a fundamental insight of spiritual science: the life of the human soul through repeated earthly lives. Everything we are in one life forms the causes for the qualities we possess in the next. And just as we are in one life, so too are the qualities we carry within us the effects of previous earthly lives. A soul that fails to develop a sense of reality will, through this lack of a sense of reality, lay the groundwork for causes that, in the next earthly life, will form the predispositions for a soul that exhibits a predisposition toward untruthfulness from the very beginning. Untruthfulness, so to speak, cultivated through such a soul life, generates predispositions toward untruthfulness for a subsequent earthly life. Truthfulness alone, practiced in a soul’s life, creates—already in the predisposition, in the outward talent—truthfulness for the next earthly life, so that when one points to truthfulness as a necessary preparation for spiritual training, one is at the same time pointing to something that, beyond death, shapes the soul for the next earthly life in a more moral way than it was before.

[ 33 ] If, instead of fortitude and moral courage, a certain inner indifference develops in the soul—a certain inner lightness, a certain shying away from being exposed in the soul, from carrying out what one has recognized as true and right—then, because this affects inspiration, such a life of the soul, in which this training in fortitude is neglected, thereby, as it were, lay the seeds of causes that carry over into the next life as a source of inspiration and there turn the soul into a self-centered individual, an egoist. Egoism in one life is, as it were, inspired by the previous life through the fact that moral courage did not prevail in the soul during that latter life. And indifference toward the entire external world, a lack of interest, inattention, and a selfish, withdrawn nature have the effect of—as it were, like an intuition—carrying this present being over into the next incarnation, into the next earthly life, and intuiting it in such a way that this next life also bears the fruits of it; that is to say, it then already generates, in its predispositions, an alienation from the environment, a lack of connection with the environment.

[ 34 ] But what does it mean, really, to be “alienated from the environment” in the human soul? Oh, it means a great deal. For those who are alienated from their environment—those who are not attuned to it—the environment has such an effect on them that it constantly makes them ill, and this affects not only the soul but also penetrates into the body. Pathological, unhealthy predispositions are carried over—like an intuition from a previous earthly life—into a subsequent life simply because this soul goes through life without interest or attention. Whatever is more of a spiritual nature in one incarnation—a lack of interest, a lack of compassion for the world around us—penetrates more deeply into the next incarnation, right down into the physical being, and manifests as ill health.

[ 35 ] Thus, when we consider the moral foundations of the human soul from a spiritual-scientific perspective, we see that we are in fact touching upon what is active within this human soul—the impulses present within it—as the soul passes from one life into the next and builds the new life upon the causes it has brought with it from the previous one. In this way, morality becomes a formative force that carries over from one life into the next, and we are then not merely preaching morality, but demonstrating what morality does—how it acts as a force within the human soul—and this effectively dispels all those objections that are sometimes raised against spiritual science with apparent justification. It is often said that when spiritual science speaks of repeated earthly lives in the sense that karma in a subsequent life would balance out what a person has experienced in terms of joy or suffering, this justifies a certain egoism. But if we do not quibble over words but look at what really matters, if we wish to speak not merely of preaching morality but of justifying it, then it must be said: In order to become ever more moral, the soul must become ever more perfect; that is to say, the inner impulses leading to its perfection must be revealed. It must therefore be shown how moral impulses are related to the perfection or imperfection of the soul. When it comes, then, to describing the relationship between spiritual science and morality, we can say: This spiritual science is most certainly justified in the face of morality’s legitimate demands, for it must incorporate moral demands into its most significant tenets. Indeed, in a certain sense, it justifies those impulses that were at work in a thinker such as Plato, for example, who described the divine-spiritual as the “Good,” by showing how the spiritual can tolerate only the Good—that is, must be intimately related to the Good.

[ 36 ] Thus, spiritual science may be regarded as something that already contains within itself—not in an external way, but in an inner way—the principles upon which morality is founded. And in addition to many other things we will discuss in the next lecture—namely, what spiritual science is meant to give human beings for the inner stability of their souls, for the health of their souls, for all the strength one needs for work, for the security required to maintain one’s footing in external life and to persevere toward one’s calling—to all of this, spiritual science can offer us something more: an important addition to our understanding of human life, intended to satisfy the human soul. After all, at the beginning of this lecture we drew attention to how morality and moral judgment point to those depths of the human soul where the soul stands still with sacred reverence before another soul, because it is aware of the difficulty of penetrating to where the moral impulses lie within the soul. We have thus seen that whoever speaks of moral principles in life touches upon those unknown depths of the human soul before which we must stand with the utmost respect—so much so that we must tell ourselves that any unjustified interference with this human soul is in itself immoral—; morality places us before each of our fellow human beings in such a way that we immediately sense: We stand there with our moral judgment before the depths of their soul—and spiritual science shows us that these depths of the human soul, when they are strengthened, when they are invigorated and fortified, do indeed lead upward into the objective spiritual world, and only then do they make the soul a fellow citizen of the spiritual worlds.

[ 37 ] That which we regard with sacred awe in our moral judgment thus reveals itself to us as the only thing that truly possesses the “pass” to cross the threshold beyond which the spirit reigns with its mysteries. This, however, draws our attention to the nature of the human soul, to the kinship of the human soul—where it touches itself in its depths—with the good spirit. And this is something that makes life comprehensible to us in that profound sense, so that we must ultimately say to ourselves—even where we cannot agree with the moral conduct of a human soul that confronts us, indeed even where we must harshly condemn its conduct—that we may say to ourselves, as we look upon the human soul’s passage through repeated lives: Yes, even in the depths of the human soul—which we may even, justifiably, have to condemn morally—there lives something that makes it kindred to the spiritual world, if only it is willing to penetrate into its own depths and become aware of the sources of morality lying there!

[ 38 ] Thus, the spiritual-scientific view of morality reconciles us with what we might call the true value of the human soul. It puts words in our mouths that allow us, in the face of so much that we need—the power of joy and abundance, the power of the spirit and the soul, and solace for life’s many sufferings—to accept that in every state of the human soul, even if that soul is not conscious of this or that, there is much where the soul may say of itself: No matter how deeply hidden it may be, there is something within me that professes the good! And this contributes most of all when the soul needs strength to sustain itself; it contributes most of all to the strength of life and the strength to work, when the human soul, despite many moral missteps, may nevertheless say to itself—and it may say this to itself when it comes to know itself through spiritual science—what Theone says in the play *Helena* by the Greek poet Euripides:

I want what is good by nature, and I love it,
because I must respect myself!