The Rudolf Steiner Archive

14. The Legacy of the Nineteenth Century

[ 1 ] This winter’s lecture series sought to characterize, from various perspectives, the spiritual movement that aims to guide the human soul—through deepening its understanding of its own essence—toward the insights it must seek regarding the most fundamental mysteries of existence and life. An effort was made to show how, in a completely natural way, through the consideration of current spiritual currents or those emerging for the future, the spiritual science referred to here will prove to be the right instrument for guiding the human soul into the realm of spiritual knowledge—precisely in the spirit of our present and the near future— in a manner appropriate to the present and the near future, in accordance with the laws dictated by the development of the human spirit. Throughout these winter reflections, an underlying theme has been the effort to highlight the achievements and results that spiritual life and spiritual striving in the nineteenth century have brought to humanity. For one can truly say that, given the way in which the spiritual striving and spiritual life of the nineteenth century gripped humanity—and how it led humanity to the great triumph of material existence—it would seem a hopeless undertaking if this spiritual science, as understood here, were to present itself in defiance of or rejection of the legitimate demands of the natural sciences or, indeed, of the spiritual achievements of the nineteenth century.

[ 2 ] It may therefore seem appropriate to conclude this series of lectures by taking a look at what we might call the spiritual heritage of the nineteenth century, so that, through this examination of the nineteenth century’s spiritual heritage, we might be able to point out how naturally suited the spiritual science referred to here is to the current cycle of human development.

[ 3 ] What does this spiritual science seek to be for the soul? It seeks to provide the soul with an understanding of its origin in the spiritual realm; it seeks to provide an understanding of those worlds—those supersensible worlds—to which the soul, as a spiritual being, belongs, apart from the fact that this soul lives within the physical-sensory world through the tools and instruments of its body. It thus seeks to demonstrate that the soul is a citizen of the supersensible worlds. It seeks to show that the soul, when it applies to itself those methods of which we have often spoken here over the course of this winter, can attain a level of development through which powers of insight are awakened within the soul—powers that in the ordinary course of human life barely resonate as a undertone of that life, but which, when unfolded and developed, truly place this soul within the worlds to which it actually belongs by virtue of its higher being. By discovering these powers within itself, the soul comes to recognize itself as a being for whom birth and death—or, let us say, conception and death, represent boundaries in the same sense that the blue firmament of the heavens has represented boundaries for the soul that perceives through the scientific spirit since the dawn of modern natural science—roughly since the work of Giordano Bruno and those who shared his views. As the soul becomes aware of the powers slumbering within it, something similar takes place within it regarding the temporal-spiritual realm as occurred within it regarding the external knowledge of the spatial-material realm at the dawn of modern natural science—as, for example, Giordano Bruno pointed out that this blue vault of heaven, which for centuries upon centuries was regarded as a reality, is nothing more than a boundary that human knowledge imposes upon itself through a kind of incapacity—and one that it can transcend once it understands itself.

[ 4 ] Just as Giordano Bruno demonstrated that behind this blue vault of heaven lies the infinite sea of space, with the infinite worlds embedded within it, so spiritual science must demonstrate that the boundary set by birth and death—or by conception and death— exists only because, at first, the human soul’s capacity is limited in time just as it was once limited in space by the blue vault of the heavens; but that when, beyond birth and death, infinity can be extended to the perception of the spiritual realities into which the soul is woven, the soul recognizes itself as continuing through repeated earthly lives. Thus, the life of the soul flows, on the one hand, in the existence between birth and death, and, on the other hand, in the time from death to a new birth.

[ 5 ] When we cast our gaze out into the temporal and spiritual expanses, just as the natural sciences have ventured out into spatial expanses, then the human soul, as it enters the life between birth and death from the life it has lived between death and its last birth, recognizes itself both as a co-creator of the finer organization of its own body and as a creator of the fabric of its own destiny. Furthermore, it has been said—this may have been touched upon less this winter, though it was in earlier years, and it can be read about in the literature of spiritual science—that when the soul thus perceives itself in its deeper powers, it also traces itself back to those times when life in physical forms of existence first began; that it can trace itself back to those times when it was already present before our Earth took on its material form, before the Earth itself emerged as a material form from a purely spiritual primordial being in which the human soul was already present in its earliest form, even before the emergence of the natural kingdoms surrounding us—the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms. And once again, the prospect opens up of a future into which the human soul must enter once its earthly incarnations have been fulfilled, a future in which it will then pass into a purely spiritual world that will succeed the Earth; so that one can look forward to a future into which the human soul will enter in a purely spiritual form—and will do so in such a way that it must carry the fruits of earthly life forms into what it will once again attain as a spiritual realm, as if in a primordial state. But it will not reach this realm in the same form from which it set out, but rather with the sum total of all that can be acquired through earthly incarnations.

[ 6 ] When the soul grasps itself in such a way that it consolidates with the powers slumbering within it, it then recognizes itself in connection with worlds that are, in themselves, the primordial worlds in relation to our Earth; it recognizes itself as a citizen of the entire universe. From the successive earthly lives of the individual soul, spiritual science can take flight toward the successive lives of the planets—and indeed, even of the suns in the universe. The method, therefore, consists in the soul’s self-education toward its deepest powers. The result is the realization of the origin and direction of the soul’s life—the realization that the Spirit is primary, to which the soul belongs; that it is the Spirit that brings matter forth from itself and shapes it into forms; and that the most important form, which concerns us first and foremost in our earthly existence, is the form of the human body. This realization will therefore have to take root in the consciousness of humanity in the near future: that the Spirit is the first and highest, that the Spirit gives rise to matter from within itself, just as water gives rise to ice, that it is the Spirit that takes on its outer form in the human body, that the Spirit is connected to the spiritual forces, facts, and entities of the world, and that the human soul is a citizen of this world of spiritual facts and entities, which give rise to all external material existence, casting it into the corresponding forms that then constitute the visible, sensually perceptible universe around us. This is how I would briefly characterize what may be the method and the result of what is called here “spiritual science.”

[ 7 ] This spiritual science is still in its infancy in our present age. It has often been emphasized that it must seem entirely understandable that enemies and opponents of this spiritual science still arise from all sides today. This must seem understandable especially to those who themselves stand on the ground of this spiritual science and, so to speak, know its entire distinct character in contrast to the rest of contemporary cultural life. It is not surprising that this spiritual science finds enemies and opponents, that it is regarded as fantasy, as daydreaming, or perhaps at times as something even worse. It would, in fact, be more surprising if, given the distinctive nature of this spiritual science, there were already more voices of recognition and encouragement in the present than is actually the case. For it very much seems as though not only the findings of this spiritual science, but also the entire mode of thinking and imagining—as they must be practiced here—contradict all habits of thought and all modes of imagination that have emerged for humanity precisely through the legacy of the nineteenth century. But it only seems that way. And one might say that this appears most so to those who believe they must stand so firmly on the solid ground of this nineteenth-century heritage that they consider only a materialistic or materialistically colored way of viewing the world to be compatible with this nineteenth-century heritage.

[ 8 ] To the scholar of the spiritual sciences himself, what he must recognize as this very spiritual science does not at all appear to be in contradiction with the legacy of the nineteenth century. For even from the standpoint of this spiritual science, one may say that what the nineteenth century has bestowed upon humanity—so full of hope and already so fruitful—in the most diverse fields of evolution will, in a certain sense, stand out brilliantly for all future epochs of human development. It is, of course, impossible to exhaustively cover the entire world with regard to this question of the legacy of the nineteenth century. But even if one were to focus, for example, solely on what the structure of spiritual life in Central Europe or the West reveals, one would still have to say: A true grasp of the significance of what is presented there radiates a great deal of light. Yet there has also been an extraordinary—one might often say dizzying—variety and diversity in the intellectual development of the nineteenth century, so that the observer might sometimes be so fascinated by this or that aspect that he could easily be led to become one-sided and to overestimate this or that. Perhaps the only cure for such an overestimation is that the achievements of the nineteenth century and the shifting patterns of cultural development unfold in such a way that one image follows another, presenting a great diversity. Of course, we can only highlight a few aspects here, and we would like to draw attention to the following:

[ 9 ] Just how hopeful it is for what the human soul can blossom into from within, what it can become when it becomes aware of its powers and makes use of them—this is exemplified at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the great Western philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who wrote his famous treatise *The Destiny of Man* precisely at that time. If one traces the remarks he made on this subject to his closest friends and those close to him while working on this treatise, it becomes clear that he felt he had been granted a glimpse into the deepest mysteries of human cognition and religious feeling. When one then reads through this treatise, one cannot help but be fascinated by a kind of self-testimony in which the human soul seeks, for the sake of its own security and hope. Just as Fichte begins in the first chapter by positing that the knowledge gained through the external observation of nature and the physical world is, in essence, merely an outward appearance—barely what one might seriously call a dream—and just as he then seeks to demonstrate in the following chapters how the soul grasps itself, grasps itself in its will, and becomes certain of its own existence, one gains—even more so from the overall context in which this work is situated than from its individual arguments—an impression that can be characterized roughly as follows: This human soul has attempted to pose the question: Can I stand before myself even if I have no confidence in all the knowledge presented to me through my senses, or even through the contemplation of the external intellect? — In the style of his time, Fichte answered this question in the affirmative in a magnificent way. What is so striking about this work is precisely what it can become for the soul through the nature of its language, through the inwardly assured tone that is so confident despite the renunciation of outward, superficial knowledge.

[ 10 ] This work, however, stands at the very heart of a quest—one undertaken by Western intellectual life itself—for the sources of human confidence and human knowledge. It followed the era in which Fichte so powerfully set out to grasp the human soul—the golden age of philosophical endeavor, so to speak. What Fichte himself attempted, what Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer attempted—what was attempted in the realm of philosophy during the first third of the nineteenth century to penetrate the mysteries of the world with the power of human thought—all of this had an impact — however one may view the results of this intellectual upsurge today — had a magnificent effect on every feeling and sensitive human soul through the very way in which one felt and willed in this endeavor.

[ 11 ] If one allows oneself to be influenced by what Schelling—one might say—seeks to derive from a conception of the world that has been secured by the intellect but is nonetheless more imaginative, in order to arrive at a worldview capable of truly carrying him beyond all matter into the spiritual development of the world; if one then moves on to Hegel’s intellectual endeavor, which attributes to human beings the power to to penetrate the innermost essence of things through the power of thought alone—so that Hegel sought to make clear to the human soul that it has within the power of thought the sources into which all the forces of the world flow, and in which one has everything needed to grasp, so to speak, the eternal—then one beholds a powerful struggle of humanity. One need only hold fast to the hope and confidence that were linked to this powerful struggle.

[ 12 ] And again, when one looks back, one might notice something that can shed some light on the origins of this entire era—which is now being briefly discussed—for the more discerning observer. Thus, for the year 1784, the observer’s gaze falls upon a short, characteristic essay by Kant bearing the title: “What Is Enlightenment?” The almost pedantic style does not always reveal how deeply the at times quite rational thoughts in this essay are rooted in the entire struggle of the human soul in modern times. “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant asked himself this question—the very same Kant who was so moved by the often chaotic yet powerful striving of the human spirit, as exemplified by Rousseau, that when he became acquainted with Rousseau through his writings—which is more than just an anecdote—he could find no peace; instead, he disrupted his entire daily schedule and went for a walk in Königsberg at a completely irregular hour — Kant, by whose daily walk one could otherwise set one’s watch — went for a walk in Königsberg! But we know how Kant’s soul was shaken by the freedom movement of the eighteenth century. This strikes us, when we pick up this little treatise, in the sentences we read there—one might say in a truly monumental way. Enlightenment, Kant argues, is the human soul’s emergence from its self-imposed immaturity. — Have the courage to use your own reason! — This sentence appears in Kant’s 1784 treatise. One truly appreciates this sentence—“Have the courage to use your own reason!”—as well as the other, all the more so when one realizes that they truly express something akin to, in a certain sense, the human soul’s first coming into its own. Let us try, using a simple thought, to view these two Kantian sentences from his 1784 essay in their proper light.

[ 13 ] Descartes, who as a philosopher did not precede Kant’s work by very long—if one considers “not very long” in terms of the development of the world—traced his thought back to a striking, significant statement. He directed the human soul toward its own thinking, thereby once again doing what Augustine had already done in the early centuries of Christianity. The statement “I think, therefore I am” resonated as a fundamental tone of Descartes’s spiritual life, and in saying this, he expressed something that Augustine had already expressed in a similar way: One can doubt the entire world, but in doubting, one thinks; and in thinking, one is; and in thus apprehending oneself in thought, one has apprehended being within oneself.

[ 14 ] According to Descartes, it is impossible for a person of sound mind to recognize himself as a thinking soul and to doubt his own existence. “I think, therefore I am”—even though Augustine had already preceded him in formulating such a proposition, this was nonetheless something extraordinarily significant for Descartes’s century and for the intellectual legacy that followed in the eighteenth century. But if one now follows Descartes as he goes on to construct a worldview, looking beyond this proposition as a foundation, one sees that he draws upon everything that has been handed down through the centuries in the form of traditions and teachings. One sees how, with his thinking—with what seeks to well up from the human soul itself—he pauses before the traditions gathered over the centuries, pauses before the spiritual truths, before the questions concerning the fate of the human soul after death, and so on. Descartes pauses before the actual spiritual truths.

[ 15 ] When one considers this, it becomes clear what it means that, right in the midst of the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, Kant’s maxims resounded: Enlightenment is the emergence of the human soul from its self-imposed immaturity—and: Have the courage to use your own reason! —That is to say, people have now dared to pursue the intention—and the Kantian maxim described above is proof of this—of trusting the human soul to have the power to reach the sources of its existence, the sources of its powers, through its own strength, through its own greatness.

[ 16 ] It was from there that everything contained in the bold statements of Fichte’s cited work originated; it was from there that the bold intellectual endeavor arose that stands so magnificently in the philosophy of the West from the first third of the nineteenth century. When one then considers this surge of the human spirit—which we do not wish to evaluate today in terms of the truth or falsity of its content, but rather in terms of the inner confidence and assured hope that the human soul hoped to gain from it—and when one turns one’s gaze further into the middle of the nineteenth century, one may well be moved with a sense of melancholy by a remark from a man such as Karl Rosenkranz—a historian of philosophy, an independent philosopher in his own right, but above all Hegel’s biographer. In his preface to *The Life of Hegel* (1844), he writes: “It is not without a sense of melancholy that I part with this work; after all, must we not at some point allow becoming to attain existence as well? For does it not seem as though we, the people of today, are merely the gravediggers and monument-erectors for the philosophers whom the second half of the previous (eighteenth) century brought forth, only to die in the first half of the present one?” Perhaps such a statement conveys more clearly than other accounts how, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the full splendor of philosophical endeavor—which had shone from the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century and throughout the first third of the nineteenth century—had rapidly faded.

[ 17 ] But a different kind of radiance immediately emerges. As the radiance of philosophical intellectual life rapidly faded in the 1830s and 1840s, a new sense of confidence arose—one might even say a new sense of hopeful bliss. This had already been paved the way by the broad scientific perspectives of a physiologist like Johannes Müller and by everything that people like Alexander Humboldt and others had accomplished. But then came such significant achievements as the discovery of the cell and its function in the living organism by Schleiden and Schwann. This ushered in a new era of brilliance in scientific knowledge. And now, looking back at what has been accomplished, we see that everything that will indeed shine immortal in the evolution of the nineteenth century follows from this. We see how the great achievements of physics follow on from this: as late as the 1840s, the discovery of the law of conservation of energy and the conversion of heat by Julius Robert Mayer and Helmholtz. Anyone familiar with modern physics knows that it was only through this discovery that physics in its modern conception became possible. We see how physics is led from triumph to triumph; how, through the discovery of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen, our gaze is directed away from the material conditions on Earth toward the contemplation of the material conditions of the heavens, as we come to recognize how the same substances manifest themselves throughout the entire cosmos. We see how physics comes to combine its theoretical foundations with the practical application of its principles, how it succeeds in penetrating technology, and how it transforms the culture of the Earth. We see fields of nature such as electricity and magnetism, when linked to technology, emerge as something truly great. We see the most promising prospects for the future arising from the study of the living and the organic, as pioneered by Darwin and further developed by Haeckel.

[ 18 ] We see all of this becoming integrated into the spiritual life of humanity. We see how modern geology, which attempts to provide a picture of the course of Earth’s history in a material sense, builds upon Lyell’s research from the early nineteenth century. We see how, even there, grandiose attempts are being made to integrate human evolution into Earth’s history through purely material laws, to link the biological with the geological. All of this—which has now taken the place that, in the first third of the nineteenth century, was occupied by confidence in the power of thought—has had a profound impact not only on theoretical worldviews. For if that had been the case, one could say: all of this took place, at first, as it were, on a kind of higher horizon of spiritual development; but beneath that lies the horizon of the rest of the population, who do not concern themselves with it. — No, there is nothing in human development into which human instincts have not driven us, which has now been sketched out in fleeting strokes. We see it extending everywhere into the mysterious formations of this intellectual journey of humanity.

[ 19 ] The human soul itself, in its innermost essence and being, has by no means remained untouched by what has taken place there. One could summarize what has taken place—as it were, characterizing the legacy that the nineteenth century has left us—in, for example, a soul that was still able to listen to what came from Fichte’s lips, as contained, for instance, in his work *The Destiny of Man*. Such a soul would have had certain sensations and feelings regarding its own nature, regarding the way in which it can experience itself. This inner structure, in relation to the experience of the self at the beginning of the nineteenth century, would present itself quite differently if we consider a soul that—I do not mean to say adheres to a materialist creed—but rather devotes itself with open senses and interest to all that rightfully flows from the legacy of the nineteenth century. This human soul has not remained untouched, even in its innermost being, by the expansion of metropolitan centers unfolding around it; it has not remained untouched by the cultural achievements that stand as an embodiment of the new spiritual life—that spiritual life gained through the perception of the new laws of the mechanical world order. One soul remained free from these views—which, so to speak, tend to regard the universe and its laws as similar to the laws that also govern machines and locomotives—a soul that was able to devote itself wholeheartedly to a work such as Fichte’s *The Destiny of Man*. It has rightly been emphasized that this human soul had to undergo its transformation under the influence of everything that inevitably arose as a material cultural outcome of the thought, feeling, and sensibility of the nineteenth century, which were being transformed in the sense described above.

[ 20 ] Let us try, by looking at individual symptoms, to grasp the full extent of what has come about as a result of nineteenth-century scientific thinking. Think of how the painter of earlier times stood before the canvas, how he mixed his colors, how he knew they would last—for he knew exactly what he was mixing in. The nineteenth century, with its great achievements and technological advances, instructs the painter to simply buy his paints. He no longer knows what his senses are perceiving; he does not know how long the brilliance he creates on the canvas—how long that impression—will last. Indeed, it is only through the influence of technology—which has emerged from scientific achievements—that what we today call public journalism exists, along with our modern newspaper industry and everything that ultimately makes an impression on the human soul—especially the very pace of the human soul, which has changed the forms of thought, the entire influence on emotions, and thus also the structure of emotions. It is not only necessary to recall the speed with which things reach people today through the achievements of modern technology, but it must also be pointed out how quickly what the human spirit achieves reaches other human spirits through journalism, and what a wealth of information reaches the human spirit.

[ 21 ] Now compare what people today learn through the media about what is happening in the world—including what the human mind is exploring—with the way they were able to learn about all these events at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Let’s take a mind like Goethe’s! We can observe him precisely because, thanks to the meticulous way his correspondence has been preserved, we know almost exactly what he was doing hour by hour, and can know what he discussed and undertook with this or that scholar. Through this, the achievements of human intellectual life slowly converge in his solitary Weimar study. But Goethe’s central role was necessary for this to come to pass—something that everyone today can experience through journalism. Yet this transforms the entire human soul, the entire relationship of the human soul to its surroundings.

[ 22 ] Let’s turn to something else. Today, we write books or read books. Anyone who writes a book today knows that, if it is printed on the kind of paper that is the result of great technological advances, it will no longer be readable in about sixty years, because it will have disintegrated by then. So, if one does not delude oneself, one realizes just how much what people used to do pales in comparison to what is available today.

[ 23 ] In a lecture from this series, I sought to characterize a spirit who, although connected to the entire spirit of the first half of the nineteenth century, is nonetheless a spirit of the second half of that century: Herman Grimm. We have seen that he presents himself as a guardian of the legacy of the first half of the nineteenth century into the second half. But anyone who reads Herman Grimm’s essays on art with deep understanding will notice, among other things, two distinct aspects. Throughout his work—especially in his most valuable essays—there resonates a certain school of thought that he underwent, a school that can be heard echoing through every essay. This is the school of thought he could have undergone only because, at a relatively early age—through what is commonly called chance—he came under the influence of a great mind, that of Emerson, a great preacher and writer who was a preacher and author of philosophical works not in the sense of earlier times, but in the most modern sense. Try to form an impression of Emerson, try to delve into him, and you will find: a spirit of the nineteenth century stands before us in him. Try to sense the pulse of his thoughts, which appear with the color and nuance of the nineteenth century even when they refer to Plato, the philosopher, or to Swedenborg, the mystic. No matter how free of prejudice they may be, they are nineteenth-century thoughts—thoughts that could only have been conceived in a century destined to make the telegraph the world’s means of communication. In Emerson, in particular, one finds a mind that, while deeply rooted in Western culture, elevates this Western culture to what it has become in the most eminent sense; in him, in particular, one finds a mind that embodies the acceleration of thought. Try comparing a page of Emerson with a page of Goethe—no matter where in Goethe’s works you might open the book. Then try—though one will, of course, find this natural in Goethe’s case—to compare the image of Goethe, still moving at a leisurely pace in step with the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the rapidly hurrying nature of the nineteenth-century man, which resonates in the train of thought of Herman Grimm. That is one thing.

[ 24 ] But then we saw how Herman Grimm, in his wonderful historical novel *Unüberwindliche Mächte* (*Invincible Forces*), even alluded to the existence of the human etheric body or life body, and how he pointed to many things that have only found their full realization in spiritual science. But one can also see how Herman Grimm approaches all things artistic in a thoroughly personal, fascinating, and outstanding way; how he is able to juxtapose distant eras artistically; and how he is able to offer an interesting, subtle appreciation of art. For anyone capable of observing such things, it is impossible to imagine that the ideas forming the most beautiful essays by Herman Grimm could have been written in any other age than the one in which it was possible for Herman Grimm to travel from Berlin to Florence or South Tyrol by nothing other than the express train. For this is the very prerequisite that allowed many aspects of his work to take shape. Imagine if someone like Herman Grimm could have said in earlier centuries: “I always wrote the most important sections of my book on Homer in Gries near Bolzano during the weeks of spring, because that is where I feel the effect of spring!”—For something like this to become part of a person’s life is possible only within the overall atmosphere of the nineteenth century. There we sense the convergence of what wells up in Herman Grimm like a wondrous contemplation of art—which proves to penetrate the very soul of the entire cultural movement of the nineteenth century—with that which emanates from technology and flows back into it again, from the triumphs of the nineteenth century.

[ 25 ] It is impossible to understand any of the most profound aspects of the nineteenth century unless one is able to relate them to what constitutes the most important legacy of that century: the scientific ideas with which the nineteenth century sought to comprehend the world. Today we cannot help but admit that something lives within our soul as one of its most important instruments—something that would not exist at all without the structure of scientific thought, as we have inherited it from the nineteenth century. That is one side of the matter—the side that presents itself to us in what the human soul has made of itself after undertaking what Kant so monumentally characterized when he said: “Enlightenment is the emergence of the human soul from its self-imposed immaturity,” and: “Have the courage to use your own reason!” — Through the philosophical upsurge and into the age of the natural sciences, this tendency of the Enlightenment—that is, the use of the human soul’s means of inquiry, just as this human soul happens to be—continued. But how did this come about as a whole? From a spiritual-scientific perspective, we must consider a broader context if we are to understand what was actually expressed here, if we are to understand the configuration and structure of our soul—into which, on the one hand, we see the will to enlightenment coming into play, and on the other, everything that scientific culture has contributed. To do so, we must juxtapose at least three successive cultural epochs of human development. These cultural cycles have already been referred to in connection with these lectures in the context of that perspective which arises from an understanding of human spiritual life—one that seeks to fathom how the human soul returns through the ages in successive earthly lives and carries over from earlier ages into later ones not only its own guilt, in order to atone for them in accordance with a great law of destiny, but also carries over what it has inwardly experienced in terms of cultural achievements. In light of this spiritual insight, we first distinguish three epochs. Other epochs precede these three. However, there is not enough time today to go into them.

[ 26 ] The era that is of primary importance to us may be called the Egyptian-Chaldean era, which came to an end around the eighth century B.C. If one were to characterize it, one might say, for example: During this era, the human soul lived in such a way that it still sensed something of its connection to the entire universe, to the entire cosmos. It still felt, in its destiny on Earth, dependent on the movements of the stars and on the events of the vast cosmos. Reflections on the dependence of human life on the worlds of the stars, on the vast cosmos, filled this era of earlier millennia, right up to about the eighth century B.C. In a wondrous way, the soul felt moved when it immersed itself in ancient Egyptian or ancient Chaldean wisdom, when it saw how everything was directed toward sensing the soul’s connection with the cosmos beyond the narrow confines of human existence. Something that was important for sensing this connection between the soul and the cosmos in that cultural epoch was, for example, the appearance of Sirius. And important in relation to what human beings did for the culture of the soul—what they assimilated for the soul or accomplished themselves—was the observation of the laws of the heavens. Human beings felt themselves born out of the entire universe; they felt their connection to the extraterrestrial just as much as to the earthly; they felt, as it were, as though they had been sent down from spiritual worlds into the earthly world. This feeling was a final echo of the ancient clairvoyance from which the human soul originated, and which has been mentioned here on several occasions. This ancient clairvoyance existed in primeval times, and humanity lost it in the course of evolution so that it could view the world in its present form. Back then, in the Egyptian-Chaldean era, an echo of the ancient clairvoyance still existed. Humanity could still grasp—and sought to grasp—the spiritual interconnection of soul-spiritual laws in all natural existence. In a certain sense, the human soul was not alone with itself. By feeling at home on Earth, it was connected and intertwined with the forces that flowed from the cosmos into the Earth.

[ 27 ] Then came the Greco-Latin period, which—in terms of its essential character and the extent of its aftereffects—we can roughly date from the eighth century B.C. to the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries A.D., for the aftereffects of this cultural epoch lasted that long. When one considers this era, particularly in its early stages, one finds that what is distinctive about it is that the human soul, in a higher sense, freed itself from the universe—freed itself in its knowledge, in its faith, and in its recognition of the forces at work within it. This can be seen particularly clearly when one considers the Greeks: the healthy human being, as he unfolded in his soul, also felt—even as he stood upon the earth—connected to his natural, physical being. This is what the Greek soul felt and experienced during the second of the periods we are now considering. It is actually difficult today to characterize exactly what is meant by this. We attempted to bring this closer to our understanding in our reflections on Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. The Greeks lived quite differently in regard to the spiritual-soul aspect. This was particularly true, for example, of the Greek artist. Today, people are not even willing to fully acknowledge what was unique about the feeling and perception of the Greek soul. The idea that a sculptor, who depicted the human form in the true sense, could have before him what we today call a model—that he shaped the human form after the model—is inconceivable to the Greeks. It was not like that. The relationship of today’s artist to his model would have been unthinkable in Greece. For the Greeks knew: My spiritual and soul life lives throughout my entire body. He sensed how the forces of this spiritual and soul life flowed into the shaping of the arm, into the formation of the muscles, into the formation of the entire human figure.— And he knew that just as these forces flowed into the human figure, so too must he express them in his sculptural works. In accordance with his inner understanding of the nature of the body, he knew how to recreate what he himself could feel in the outer material world. Thus he could say to himself, for example: I am weak, but if I developed my will, I could allow this will to work into the formation of my muscles and the formation of my arm, and thereby become stronger. — What he experienced in this way, he poured into his figures. For him, the observation of external forms was not the essential point; rather, it was the feeling of humanity’s embeddedness in earthly culture within one’s own physical-soul nature and the recreation of what was experienced in the external world.

[ 28 ] But this was also how the whole personality was experienced in ancient Greece. It is quite impossible to think of a Pericles or any other statesman in much the same way as we think of modern statesmen. Today we see a modern statesman advocating, based on general principles, what he thinks and wants. When Pericles steps before the people in ancient Athens and carries out a course of action, it is not because he tells himself: “Since I see the reason for it, it must be carried out.”—That is not the case. Rather, when Pericles steps before the people and asserts what he wants, it is his personal will. And if it is carried out, it happens because the Greek possesses the insight that Pericles can will what is right, since he feels it as a personality. Here the Greek is a self-contained being; he lives his own life, thinking in a self-contained way. He can do this because he no longer feels, as did the people of the Egyptian-Chaldean era, a connection with the gods and so on. That connection exists only as an echo now. But what he experiences directly is that his physical body feels connected to the spiritual and soul-life. Thus, while in this way he stands more on his own with his soul than the human being of the Egyptian-Chaldean era, he is still connected to the rest of nature because his body has given him this sense of connectedness. One must feel this: the soul in the Greco-Latin era, already freer from the general universe than in the preceding period, must nevertheless still feel connected to everything that exists in the natural realms all around it. For the soul felt connected to that which is an extract from these natural realms—the physical body. This feeling is what must be regarded as the defining characteristic of this Greco-Latin period, into which the Mystery of Golgotha then entered.

[ 29 ] Now we see emerging—and we stand right in the midst of it with our thoughts and feelings—the third historical period that we are to consider. How does it differ from the Greco-Latin period? Once again, the human soul is much more on its own, for the Greek felt connected to nature through what he was in his body. Let us imagine the possibility that the Greek, had he been able to observe the tiniest living beings through a modern microscope, would have had to conceive of cell theory. Impossible for the Greek soul! For, once their initial curiosity had subsided, they would have felt, in the face of these microscopic observations: “This is completely unnatural and contrary to nature—to devise instruments through which one sees things differently than they appear to the natural eye of the body!” — The Greeks felt so connected to nature that it would have seemed unnatural to them to see things differently than they appear to the eye. And making the things of the world visible through a telescope would have seemed just as unnatural to them. In this respect, the ancient Greek way of thinking resembles in many ways the sentiment of a person who was inspired by this way of thinking and who uttered the beautiful saying: What are all the instruments of physics compared to the human eye, which is, after all, the most marvelous apparatus! — That is to say, the Greek worldview was the most natural one one can attain by arming the senses as little as possible with instruments and thus altering things from how they are perceived when a person directly perceives nature, just as they are situated within the environment.

[ 30 ] Our time is quite different! In our time, it was entirely natural—and increasingly so, as a result of the intellectual development that had taken place since the period just described—to completely separate what was sought as an objective, scientific worldview from what lives within the human soul. Only in this way could the view arise that the truth about the human organism is only discovered when one directs the “armed eye” toward things—when one examines living beings with a microscope and applies a telescope to celestial phenomena—when one uses an instrument that compensates for the eye’s imprecision. But when one takes in the whole spirit expressed in this view, one must say that human beings now completely separate from their worldview that which lives within them, that which is connected to their “I.” The human “I,” the human self, is even more isolated and alone than it was in Greek times. If we try to compare the Greek worldview with our own, as shaped by the natural sciences, we must say: Even in practice, efforts have been made to make this worldview independent of what takes place in the deepest recesses of the human soul—what lives, weaves, and exists within the human “I.” — Thus, in ancient Egyptian-Chaldean times, the human soul and the world were one in human perception. In the Greek era, the human soul and the human body were one, but through the human body, the human being was still connected to his or her worldview. Now, however, the spiritual-soul aspect has become increasingly detached—completely detached—from what it considers to be the legitimate content of the worldview. The human soul is lonely and self-contained.

[ 31 ] Let us now consider the remarkable polarity that becomes apparent as we move from the Egyptian-Chaldean period through the Greek-Latin period to our own. What human beings strive for above all else in our era, in contrast to the earlier Greek epoch, is to gain a scientific worldview independent of their soul. What emerged as a necessary consequence of this was to detach the human soul from that with which it had been connected in earlier times, to set the soul on its own, and to push it entirely back into its own consciousness. In the Egyptian-Chaldean era, the human soul still directed its spiritual and soul-life gaze out into the vastness of the cosmos and drew inspiration from it, allowing what existed in that vastness to flow into itself. Even in the Greek era, human beings still took in what emerged from their worldview and imprinted it upon art. In more recent times, the worldview stands on its own, separated from human soul experience. And yet we must say: In modern times, when the human soul has cast itself out of the objective worldview—where it no longer finds itself spiritually in what flows mechanically and objectively outside—when it has severed its connection with external worldly existence, it still seeks within itself the power of knowledge, as a worldview, for its entire being. It would have been inconceivable to a Greek if someone had said to him: “Dare to make use of your reason!” or: “Enlightenment is the human soul’s emergence from its self-imposed immaturity.” — One could have spoken Socratic words in Greece, but not these words, for the Greek would not have understood them. He would have felt: What do I want from my reason? At most, to gain an image of the world. But this image of the world lives continuously within me, as the world flows into my powers and my spiritual-soul life. It would be unnatural, in relation to what flows into me, to make use of my reason. — And a person from the Egyptian-Chaldean era would have found the call to make use of one’s reason even more strange and unnatural. To the statement, “Dare to make use of your reason!” he would have replied: “Then I would miss out on the best intuitions and inspirations that flow to me from the universe. Why should I make use only of my reason—which would impoverish my experience if I did so—in the face of what flows into me from the universe?”

[ 32 ] Thus we see how human souls, coming over from earlier epochs, encounter a different age each time. Thus they are—to use Lessing’s expression—educated: in the Egyptian-Chaldean era, in which the soul feels at one with the world; then in the Greek-Latin era, in which the soul feels at one with its own physicality; and now the souls are going through a time in which they must find themselves within themselves, because they have withdrawn from their objective worldview.

[ 33 ] Thus, we find it entirely fitting that this age should produce a thinker like Fichte with his book *The Destiny of Man*, and that he should raise the question: What if this worldview were perhaps only an illusion, a deception, merely a dream? How, then, can the “I”—which now feels impoverished—a feeling that arises from the times—find inner confidence? How can it find itself?

[ 34 ] Thus, we view Fichte’s doctrine of the “I” as a necessary outcome of the entire evolutionary process. We see how, precisely in the nineteenth century—due to the scientific worldview, just as in Fichte’s era when the power of thought was still in full bloom—the “I” seeks to attain clarity through itself. And we can characterize the attempts by Schelling and Hegel that followed Fichte only in this way: we see in them the endeavor to establish, through thought, a connection with the world for the “I” that has been emancipated from the worldview. But we see how, in the third of these characterized periods, the scientific worldview gradually strips the “I” of, so to speak, all echoes of the old worldviews, thereby impoverishing it. Such things are generally not sufficiently observed in our time.

[ 35 ] If we look back at one of those individuals who, in a truly eminent sense, contributed to our scientific worldview—namely, Kepler, who accomplished so much that continues to influence our scientific perspective to this day—we find a remarkable idea in his *Harmony of the Worlds*. He lifts his gaze from the harmony of the worlds to the entire Earth. But for Kepler, this Earth is a giant organism that lives, much like a whale. At least, when he searches among living beings for an organism that bears a resemblance to the Earth’s organism, he finds the whale, and he says: This giant creature upon which we walk—it breathes, not like a human, but in cycles determined by the sun’s course, and the rising and falling of the ocean is the sign of the Earth’s organism inhaling and exhaling. — Kepler finds the human perspective too limited to comprehend how this process takes place.

[ 36 ] When considering Kepler—and especially when, in the interest of a one-sided view of the world, one emphasizes his connection to Giordano Bruno—one should not forget that Giordano Bruno, too, pointed out time and again that the Earth is a giant organism that breathes in and out with the ebb and flow of the ocean. And we don’t have to go back very far to find the same idea in more recent times. There is a beautiful statement by Goethe to Eckermann, in which he says something like: “I imagine the Earth as a giant animal that breathes in and out through the rising and falling of the air currents and the ebb and flow of the sea.” — That is to say, the perspective that conceives of the Earth as modern geology does so did not emerge until quite gradually, while another perspective faded away—one we can still sense lingering in Goethe, and which still confronts us quite vividly in Kepler and Giordano Bruno. What Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Goethe thought and felt—people experienced this quite vividly in those ancient times when the soul felt at one with the world. But the fact that this sense of oneness with the world faded over the course of time was the natural course of development.

[ 37 ] If we wish to characterize what is presented here in terms of spiritual science, we arrive at the following description. Further justification for this can be found in *Outlines of Esoteric Science*.

[ 38 ] When we consider the human soul—not in the chaotic manner often adopted by modern science, but through the lens of spiritual science—we find that it is divided into three parts. First, there is the lowest member of the human soul, which, one might say, in many respects still embodies only the chaotic depths of the human soul—a realm into which the higher parts of human nature do not fully extend: the sensitive soul. This is the source of the drives, emotions, passions, and all the indeterminate feelings that reign within the soul. Then we have a higher level of the human soul: the intellectual or emotional soul. This is the soul that already lives more consciously within itself, that grasps itself, that does not merely experience itself in the surges it feels welling up from the depths as instincts, desires, and passions, but which, above all, feels compassion and joy, and develops within itself what we call intellectual concepts and so on. And then we have that aspect of the soul that we can call the soul of consciousness, through which the human soul truly experiences its self within itself.

[ 39 ] In the course of human evolution, these various aspects have developed successively. If we go back to the Egyptian-Chaldean era, this was primarily the education of the feeling soul that people underwent at that time. For the connections from the great cosmos could speak to the feeling soul, imbuing themselves into human souls without the person being aware of it. The Egyptian-Chaldean wisdom was therefore attained unconsciously. If we turn to the Greek-Latin era, we find in it the specific development of the intellectual or emotional soul, where through intellect and emotion—we can see from this that this soul component has two parts—inner life expresses itself, a life that is already more permeated by consciousness. And in our own time we now have—and this follows directly from what has been described—that culture of the human soul through which this human soul is to attain full consciousness within itself, that is, to develop the conscious soul. This is what reached its highest point, its zenith, in the nineteenth century: the objective worldview, which leaves the soul to itself so that it can grasp its self, its “I,” through its conscious soul. Precisely in order to grasp the innermost essence of the human being through its inner illumination, it was necessary that the soul not relate to the world in the semi-unconscious manner of the Egyptian worldview or in the way we have described for the Greco-Latin worldview, but rather that it break away from that worldview, in order to develop within itself that which had to become strongest within it: the “I,” the soul of consciousness. Thus, in the successive earthly lives, the favorable opportunity has gradually presented itself for human beings to develop, within the successive earthly cultures, the soul of feeling, the soul of understanding or the emotional soul, and the soul of consciousness.

[ 40 ] But now let us consider this legacy of the nineteenth century, this “conscious soul”: it has struggled—we can essentially trace this, particularly in the nineteenth century—it has struggled within the philosophy of Fichte, in the subsequent philosophical treatises, and has even struggled within the more materialistic philosophies, such as that of Feuerbach, who articulated the following statement: “The concept of God is nothing but a self-representation of human beings projected out into space.”

[ 41 ] Human beings conceived the idea of God from within themselves because they needed a source of stability in their soul, which had become lonely. And if one traces the most radical philosophers—from Feuerbach and others up to Nietzsche—one sees everywhere the human soul attaining power and inner security after it has broken away from the worldview that had become objective. We see the human soul developing quite systematically through this process; we see the unfolding of what reached its peak in the nineteenth century: the emancipation of the conscious soul and the conscious soul’s grasping of itself through its own power.

[ 42 ] Whatever is to set the tone in a future age is always already being prepared in an earlier one. It can be demonstrated quite precisely how the development of the intellectual or emotional soul already plays a role in certain cultural manifestations of the Egyptian-Chaldean period; and one can see in the Greco-Latin period—especially in its post-Christian phase, for example in Augustine—how humanity struggles to prepare the consciousness soul. Therefore, we must say: our human soul truly understands itself only when, in the midst of the age of the consciousness soul, it prepares what is to unfold after the consciousness soul. What must be developed there?

[ 43 ] The inner development of the human soul strives toward that which must be developed, but also toward the so-called objective worldview itself. Let us consider, in conclusion, several symptoms. What, after all, did the nineteenth century, with its brilliant culture, achieve? There we see one of the most brilliant natural scientists of the nineteenth century, Ds Bois-Reymond, with his objective worldview. He wants to preserve—one need only read his lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge”—for the human soul what he deems necessary for its inner security, and he seeks to come to terms with the idea of the “world soul,” because this soul of consciousness—which has become isolated and torn away from the objective worldview—is inexplicable to him. But the objective worldview stands in his way. Wherever the human soul appears with its experiences, it manifests itself effectively in the brain, in the nerve pathways, and in the other instruments of the body. Now Du Bois-Reymond stands at the crossroads of scientific knowledge. What does he demand if he is to acknowledge a world soul? He demands that one show him, even in the universe, an instrument of the kind that exists in human beings when the human soul thinks, feels, and wills. He says, for example: Show me, embedded in the neuroglia and supplied with warm arterial blood at the proper pressure, a cluster of ganglion spheres and nerve fibers corresponding to the heightened capacity of such a world soul. — He does not find this. The same Du Bois-Reymond makes this demand, the same man who, incidentally, stated in the same speech: “If one observes a sleeping person, from falling asleep to waking up, this may be explainable in terms of the natural sciences; but if one observes a person from waking up to falling asleep—all the drives, desires, and passions, all the ideas, feelings, and impulses of the will that ebb and flow within them—then this can never be explained by the scientific way of thinking.”

[ 44 ] He’s right! But let’s examine where the legacy of the nineteenth century has led us. Du Bois-Reymond says: When I examine the sleeping human body from a scientific perspective, I can find nothing that explains the interplay of those forces that are at work in ideas, feelings, impulses of the will, and so on. — For it is simply illogical to seek an explanation for the inner nature of mental phenomena in bodily processes, just as it would be nonsensical to seek an explanation for the organ of the lung in the inner nature of air.

[ 45 ] The legacy of the nineteenth century will be that the natural sciences will demonstrate: even when they remain strictly within their own domain, they cannot explain the interplay of the spiritual and soul aspects within the human being based on the phenomena available to them. Rather, it must be said: When this human body awakens from sleep, the spiritual-soul aspect is something it inhales, just as the lungs inhale oxygen or air; and when it falls asleep, the spiritual-soul aspect is something it exhales, as it were. In the state of sleep, the spiritual-soul aspect exists as an independent entity, apart from the human body.

[ 46 ] The legacy of the nineteenth century will be that the natural sciences will become fully united with the spiritual sciences, which state: Human beings have an “I” and an astral body; with these, they leave their physical body and etheric body during sleep, dwell in a purely spiritual world with their “I” and astral body while asleep, and leave their physical and etheric bodies to their own laws. —Thus, natural science itself will demarcate its own domain, and through what it must acknowledge, it will demonstrate how spiritual science must be added as a complement to it. And when natural science itself correctly recognizes what, for example, belongs to its greatest achievements— the natural development of organisms from the most imperfect states to the more perfect ones—it will realize that precisely in this natural development, in the sense of Darwin’s theory, there lies something in which the evolution of the human soul is not included, but which must first be grasped by the spiritual-soul aspect if the merely earthly is to be organized into the human. Properly understood natural science, in particular, will be a fine legacy of the nineteenth century, in that it will show how spiritual science becomes necessary to complement natural science. Then, as a necessary consequence, the full harmony of the two will emerge. And the human soul will come to understand itself by awakening the powers slumbering within it and recognizing itself. How?

[ 47 ] During the Egyptian-Chaldean period, people were still connected to the cosmos. The cosmos revealed its spiritual background to humankind. In the Greco-Latin era, human beings were still indirectly connected to the cosmos through the body. They could still sense the cosmos because they felt the unity between the spiritual-soul and the physical. Now, however, the objective worldview has become merely a sum of external processes. Through spiritual science, however, the soul—by finding itself in its own deep spiritual powers—will recognize a new kind of connection with the universe. The soul will be able to say: When I look down, I feel connected to all living things, to all the realms of nature that surround me. But now, having passed through the culture of the feeling soul of the Egyptian-Chaldean era, through the culture of the intellectual or emotional soul of the Greco-Latin era, and having now embraced the culture of the conscious soul—in which the ego’s gaze was directed toward material culture—I feel connected to a series of spiritual realms: downward to the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms, when I look outward at the material world; upward to spiritual realms, to the realms of the spiritual hierarchies, to which the soul belongs just as much as it is otherwise accustomed to looking downward toward the natural kingdoms. A perspective of the future lies before it, one that fully connects with the perspectives of the past. Humanity has worked its way out of the spiritual contexts of the past; in the future, it will work its way into the spiritual realms. The soul will feel connected to the natural realms through its spiritual-soul forces, and it will feel connected to the spiritual realms above through the spiritual self. For just as our time is characterized as the era of the development of the conscious soul, so too is the development of the spiritual self—which will gradually mature—being prepared in our time for the future of human spiritual culture.

[ 48 ] When we view this development from a spiritual-scientific perspective, we see—as a matter of organic necessity—how this legacy of the nineteenth century most characteristically expresses a task that existed at that time: the task of turning the soul back upon itself, casting it out of the natural realm in order to compel it to develop its own soul-spiritual powers. And this will be the greatest legacy of the nineteenth century: when the soul sees itself torn away from everything, yet feels all the more inspired to unfold its own powers. Just as the Age of Enlightenment sought to make use of its own reason, so must the coming age draw forth the even deeper forces from their slumber in the depths of the soul, thereby enabling the soul to look out into a spiritual world, as it must in the future.

[ 49 ] Thus, the future will one day be grateful to the nineteenth century for having enabled the soul to develop, from within itself, the higher powers of objective science. This, too, is a legacy of the nineteenth century. When one considers the inner development of the human soul, it must proceed from the unfolding of the feeling soul through that of the intellectual or emotional soul and that of the conscious soul into the development of the spiritual self. But human beings can find the spiritual self only when they are first torn away from the entire external world through the scientific observation that is the legacy of the nineteenth century, If one considers the legacy of the nineteenth century in this way and then delves further into the details, one will already see: the very best aspect of the positive results of the nineteenth century’s scientific legacy is the strengthening of the soul, because it then finds itself in what this science cannot give it. The soul will one day stand and feel with Du Bois-Reymond: Yes, the laws of physiology can explain the sleeping human body, but not what is inhaled from it as spiritual and soul-related. The soul will feel that it must raise to consciousness, through the methods of spiritual science, that which is unconscious during sleep, in order to gain a view into the spiritual worlds. — And then a future Du Bois-Reymond, when contemplating the human body, will no longer stand before it so perplexed when seeking to explain it scientifically, for he will say to himself: The human soul is not even inside there, in the neuroglia and the ganglion spheres; so why, then, should I seek to prove the existence of neuroglia and ganglion spheres in the gigantic World Soul?

[ 50 ] In the work of a truly outstanding thinker of the nineteenth century—one who sought to draw only upon what the nineteenth century could offer him in terms of insight into the sources of existence—namely Otto Liebmann, who taught philosophy for many years in Jena, we find this idea articulated: Why should it be impossible to assume that our planets, moons, and fixed stars are the atoms—or even the molecules—of a gigantic brain that extends throughout the universe in a macrocosmic manner? — However, he believes that human intelligence will always be unable to penetrate this gigantic brain, and that it will therefore also be unable to gain any insight whatsoever into a spiritual world soul. Spiritual science, however, shows that Otto Liebmann was absolutely correct. For the intelligence of which he speaks is incapable of satisfying any human longings in this realm. Since this intelligence first became great by emancipating itself from the objective worldview, it is not surprising—but rather self-evident—that a philosophy built upon this objective worldview cannot discover a world soul. If the natural scientist, in the sense of Du Bois-Reymond, cannot find the human soul in the ganglion spheres and neuroglia of the sleeping human body, why should one then be able to find anything about the nature of the world soul in the giant ganglion spheres of a giant brain? No wonder the physiologist must despair of this!

[ 51 ] But these foundations are the greatest legacy of the nineteenth century. They show that the human soul is now left to its own devices and must seek and find its connection to the spiritual worlds not through contemplation, but through the development of its inner powers. When the human spirit contemplates the worldview it knows as the Darwinian theory of evolution, it will find that its greatness is based precisely on the fact that it has removed itself from that worldview. Humanity would not have reached the stage of development it has now attained if it had not removed itself from that worldview. But once it understands this, it will realize that it cannot find within this theory of evolution what it first had to remove itself from. If one understands the Darwinian theory of evolution correctly, one will see that it is not contradictory to believe the spiritual researcher when he says that, looking back beyond sensory phenomena, he beholds a spirit in which the human soul is rooted as spirit.

[ 52 ] Thus, this concluding lecture was intended to show that, in truth, there is not the slightest contradiction between what is meant here by “spiritual science” and the true, genuine achievements of natural science, and that, if one delves deeply enough into what the natural-scientific worldview—according to the course of human development as correctly understood by spiritual science—was bound to become, one realizes precisely how it cannot be otherwise, and how the scientific worldview—precisely because it has developed in this way—is the most beautiful means of educating the human soul toward what it is meant to become: a being that strives from the soul of consciousness toward the spiritual self.

[ 53 ] This also demonstrates that spiritual science is an integral part of the culture of our time. What was prepared during the Egyptian-Chaldean period through the culture of the sensory soul, and what was further developed during the Greco-Latin period through the culture of the intellectual or emotional soul, has found its further unfolding in our time in the culture of the conscious soul. But everything that comes later is already prepared in advance. Just as a culture of the conscious soul—which will endure long into our time—was already present in the time of Socrates and Aristotle, so too must the source of a true teaching about the spiritual self already be found here, within our own age. Thus does the human soul grasp itself in connection with those worlds in which it, as spirit within spirit, is rooted.

[ 54 ] In addition to all its other aspects, nineteenth-century natural science serves as a means of education—and indeed, the best means of education specifically for the humanities. Perhaps it will become clear from the Winter Lectures that the views on the humanities presented here regarding the legacy of the nineteenth century will provide a secure foundation for the humanities—a foundation that ensures they do not become a conglomeration and chaos of arbitrary elements, but rather something that stands on a foundation just as secure as the admirable natural sciences themselves. If one believes that there must necessarily be a rupture between what the natural sciences are and have achieved, and what the humanities are, then one might be led astray by these humanities. But if one sees how the natural sciences had to become exactly what they have become so that the human soul might find its way to the spirit in the new way—as it must find it—then one will recognize them as that which must necessarily be part of the course of development, containing the seeds for the era that will follow ours just as ours follows the preceding ones. Then the apparent contradictions between the worldview of natural science and that of spiritual science will be reconciled.

[ 55 ] Of course, I do not in the least believe that, in the brief time of this lecture—which has lasted so long—I have been able to cover even the tiniest fraction of what spiritual science reveals regarding the enduring significance of the nineteenth-century scientific approach in all its forms. But perhaps, by expanding upon what has been said in the minds of my esteemed listeners, and by further exploring what was intended to be stimulated today, especially by comparing the findings of spiritual science with the correctly understood findings of natural science, it may become clear how, through a spiritual contemplation of human evolution, the necessity for spiritual science to enter into the further course of human development is established. These lectures were structured around this awareness of an inner necessity for development, and this has always been their underlying tone. This lecture in particular was intended to evoke a sense of how justified it may seem that the mere confidence that thinkers such as Fichte and others sought to derive from the conscious soul—cannot, however, be derived from the conscious soul that is self-contained and lives enclosed within its own thoughts, but rather when the soul realizes and recognizes that it finds within itself something entirely different from its mere intelligence and reason: when it finds within itself the powers that lead it to imagination, inspiration, and intuition—that is, to life in the spiritual world itself—and when it realizes that, based on a truly inner certainty, it is permissible to speak of this again even in the first third of the twentieth century—in light of the correctly understood legacy of the nineteenth century.

[ 56 ] When Hegel, boldly building upon what he believed he had grasped in the soul of pure consciousness, once spoke significant words during his lectures on the history of philosophy, we may—paraphrasing his words— perhaps use them here at the end to characterize—not by summarizing conceptually, but by expressing a feeling that, like an elixir of life, arises from reflections on the humanities. With some modification, let us use Hegel’s words to express what the soul can feel regarding the security of life—the necessary sources and foundations for existence and for all life’s work—and what it can feel in relation to the great enigmatic questions of existence, concerning fate and immortality. All of this is such that the soul is met with the true light of the world when it — but now not from some indeterminate and abstract aspect of the conscious soul, but from the realization that powers of knowledge lie dormant within the soul, making it a citizen of spiritual worlds — when it becomes completely imbued with a feeling, so that this feeling becomes the immediate expression of the spiritual science in thought, making the soul secure and full of hope:

[ 57 ] The human spirit may and should believe in its greatness and power; for it is spirit born of Spirit. And with this faith, nothing in the cosmos, in the universe—no matter how hard or unyielding it may seem—can remain hidden from it so that, in time, it would not reveal itself to the spirit, insofar as the spirit needs it. What is initially hidden in the universe must, as the seeking soul’s understanding deepens, become more and more apparent to it and yield to it, so that it may develop it into inner strength, inner security, and the inner value of existence and life!