The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Human Beings as Beings of Spirit and Soul

[ 1 ] To speak from the perspective of spiritual science about the eternal in the human soul—or, as one might also say, about the problem of immortality and the related enigma of the human soul’s freedom—is, after all, the purpose of the entire lecture series I intend to present here this winter. These are the two questions which, admittedly, the scientific worldview cannot even begin to address, and against which a purely philosophical view of the world will always come to naught, as I believe is evident from my book The Riddles of Philosophy and from an unbiased examination of the historical development of philosophy in general.

[ 2 ] Today I would like to examine one specific question as comprehensively as possible: the question of human beings as beings of the soul and beings of the spirit. Simply by uttering these words, one actually touches upon the question of the human soul in a way that is quite distant from the current worldview. The current worldview—if it even allows itself to consider anything other than what biology, physiology, and experimental psychology have to offer—speaks of a duality of the human being into body and soul. Today we shall show that this division of the human being merely into body and soul must lead to the most serious misunderstandings, which actually divert a truly scientific examination from the highest mysteries of humanity. It is believed today that the mystery of the spirit is already contained within the so-called mysteries of the soul, and by succumbing to this misunderstanding, one is likely to meet with the approval of many who view the world through the lens of the natural sciences, as well as many who study the soul. I would like to preface this by saying that the spiritual science referred to in these lectures stands in a unique relationship to both the natural scientific and the philosophical view of the world. Those among my esteemed audience who have been attending these lectures for years now know, as I have emphasized time and again, that the spiritual science I advocate is in no way at odds with modern scientific research; on the contrary, it stands firmly on the ground of this research in every respect, and precisely because it stands on scientific ground even more firmly than the scientific worldview itself, it finds itself compelled to rise from the mere observation of nature and its life to the observation of true spiritual life. The scientific worldview alone—which, after all, for a large portion of our contemporaries, has, we might well say, become second nature—which—and quite rightly so—carries the thoughts, ideas, and even the habitual ways of feeling and the drives for knowledge of the present—this worldview, even in its most distinguished representatives, behaves in such a way that spiritual science finds it extremely difficult to meet with any understanding among our contemporaries. It is precisely on this point that I would like to say a few introductory words here, because they will be necessary for our further consideration.

[ 3 ] One can observe today that, in certain fields, the scientific worldview—if the term is taken in its narrow sense—has, in a sense, reached a kind of ideally beautiful boundary within its domain. After all, we have works today in the field of the natural sciences that can be regarded as exemplary precisely in the way they delimit their task in addressing individual problems. Following, one might say, the one-sided Darwinian-Haeckelian romanticism of the last third of the nineteenth century, biology, for example, has led to the point where we now have such an exemplary work that meets the highest standards as that of the Berlin researcher Oscar Hertwig on The Development of Organisms: A Refutation of Darwin’s Theory of Chance. We also have methodologically outstanding achievements in fields that touch upon the boundaries of what is to be considered here, such as Theodor Ziehen’s Physiological Psychology. It may be said that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science represented here takes the side of such methodological research wherever the consideration of the actual field of natural science is at stake. I myself, in everything I wish to contribute to spiritual science, always oppose worldview constructs—sometimes well-intentioned, but nonetheless amateurish—that arise from inadequate efforts at understanding. Yet it is precisely this methodological, natural-scientific worldview that makes it difficult for spiritual science to find understanding among our contemporaries. Even in a book as exemplary as Oscar Hertwig’s Das Werden der Organismen (The Development of Organisms), published in 1916, we find, among other things, the assertion—presented, so to speak, as a scientific conviction—that natural science can deal only with the finite and must leave the infinite out of consideration. The finite, however, can be thoroughly investigated by the natural sciences from every angle. Hertwig quite rightly reiterates the view of Nägelis, the great botanist, in these words from his scientific standpoint, and Theodor Ziehen also states that he wishes to examine everything in human psychological life that has parallel phenomena in human physical life, so that physiology may provide information about these parallel phenomena. Everything else must be left to the science of knowledge, metaphysics, or the like. But then we also find in Ziehen’s Physiological Psychology—which, from my point of view, is exemplary— that what is presented by current physiological-psychological research—even though its details actually say nothing particularly significant about the great mysteries of the soul and mind—is more important than anything that has been attempted over the centuries with regard to questions about the supernatural in the life of the soul and the like. If we add to this the categorical statement made decades ago by the great physiologist Da Bois-Reymond—that true science should, in fact, concern itself only with the sensory world because, as he said, where the supernatural begins, science ends—then we find that —and we can multiply what has been said a hundred- and thousandfold—that by which the natural-scientific worldview seeks to pull the rug out from under all the humanities as well. We find it in the fact that, while on the one hand it is repeatedly stated quite benevolently: “All questions that go beyond sensory observation must be left to metaphysics or something similar,” on the other hand—and in such a way that this view has taken root among the widest circles of our contemporaries—it is asserted that true science can be practiced only in the realm of sensory observation.

[ 4 ] Thus we see that everything psychological and spiritual is excluded from this science, and that the claim to scientific rigor is made solely and exclusively for what remains. In response to such efforts, I would like to emphasize that spiritual science, even when addressing the so-called “ancient life force,” stands firmly on the same ground as researchers such as Du Bois-Reymond, Hertwig, and others. For this life force, which haunted science until the middle, indeed until near the end, of the second third of the nineteenth century, is a product of speculation. Because it was believed that the phenomena observed in living organisms could not be explained by physical and chemical laws and forces, people speculated about an undefined “vital force,” to which they then attributed everything that could not be explained in the organism from a physical-chemical perspective. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, in his outstanding preface to his Investigations into Animal Electricity, Du Bois-Reymond stated—I believe with some justification—that advances in physiology actually made it necessary for someone to come along who—just as Gottsched once banished the buffoon from the stage—would banish this vital force from physiology. Even such a harsh condemnation of the life force, as it was understood in the old scientific sense, can be endorsed by the spiritual sciences. For it can fully appreciate all that is rightly raised from the physiological-biological perspective against such a hypothetical, speculative postulation of a life force, and it can regard what today reappears as so-called neovitalism only as a reaction brought about by the sporadic realization that: even that which is alive cannot simply be recognized by us in the same way as purely physical and chemical phenomena. But this reaction does, in fact, return more or less to the old speculation about an indeterminate life force.

[ 5 ] The spiritual science advocated here cannot align itself with this reaction against purely mechanistic natural science either. Instead, however—as I already pointed out here fourteen days ago—it must claim something entirely different. The powers of cognition and the possibilities of knowledge that lead precisely to the great, significant findings of natural science cannot, in any case, take us beyond the purely physical and chemical. Of course, living beings—up to and including human beings—are subject to physical and chemical laws by virtue of having physical bodies. These must, of course, be examined through the lens of physics and chemistry, and one must not speculate about some kind of life force within them. But the mere powers and possibilities of cognition—as they must rightly be applied in the natural sciences—are simply not sufficient to truly penetrate or understand the living or the soul, and one has only the choice of either remaining strictly within the realm of physical and chemical laws—and thereby forgoing any understanding of life, of the soul, and of the spiritual—or of appealing to powers of cognition entirely different from those by which the purely natural, namely the physical and chemical, can be examined.

[ 6 ] But this, in turn, brings us face to face with an incredibly widespread prejudice. The idea that the human soul, if it systematically sets out to do so, is capable of attaining entirely different possibilities and powers of cognition than those employed in pure natural science is still rejected in the widest circles today. Consequently, one is faced with only two possibilities: either to leave the soul and the spiritual realm incomprehensible, or to cross this Rubicon in order to become acquainted with what it actually means that the human soul can develop beyond the standpoint it—I might say—already occupies of its own accord in relation to the world order. Through this, it can attain powers of insight that reveal more to it than what mere natural science can reveal—especially when that science is as perfect as possible. One encounters a strong prejudice here. From the standpoint of spiritual science, one must say: Natural science actually relates to spiritual science in the same way that someone who can only describe letters printed on a page relates to someone who can read. If I may first express myself in comparative terms, I would say: What natural science can only describe, spiritual science seeks to read. What it has to say about the phenomena of the world, about its content, and about the meaning of events is to the description of the mere letters that make up the words as a text that has been read is to the mere description of the letters. Thus—to continue this comparison, which must at first be superficial but will later be elaborated upon—there is the possibility of truly penetrating into the living soul-spiritual realm by acquiring, from within the soul itself, the ability to read nature. This ability relates to the mere observation of nature in the same way that the free ability to read, flowing from the soul, relates to the mere description of letters.

[ 7 ] Now, when something like this is said, a large number of our contemporaries will naturally think that it refers to all sorts of fantastical, visionary activities of the human soul. But that is by no means the case. Spiritual science is, rather, a discipline that must be developed just as methodically and proceeds in just as strict a manner as pure natural science. The reason spiritual science finds it so difficult to gain acceptance today is simply that for centuries now—I will elaborate on this in one of my upcoming lectures—basically all human worldviews have been based on the premise of more or less eliminating the spiritual from the soul, of viewing the soul as the entirety of a person’s inner life, and to conceive of it as more or less dependent on or even independent of the body, but not to seek such a relationship between the soul and the spirit as is sought, on the other hand, between the soul and the body. Anyone who, through purely soul experiences alone—even if, as is often assumed, these are mystically heightened soul experiences — experiences that are thus perceived purely inwardly through the soul, as one experiences them in everyday consciousness —, is like a person who, out of hunger and thirst, seeks to learn about the processes taking place within the human body, which form the basis for what the soul experiences in hunger and thirst. Everyone can easily see that hunger and thirst are the inner experience of something taking place within the body. The scientific view of the world states: When a person feels hunger and thirst, there is a chemical change in the blood or something similar; in other words, it indicates that something has taken place in the body, which finds expression in the soul as the experience of hunger and thirst. However, if one wishes to investigate what is happening in the body, one must look to the experiences of the soul. Of course, one cannot investigate in a living being that is not hungry how hunger is physically expressed, but one can never, by merely focusing on the inner experience of hunger or satiety, discover which physical processes are connected to this inner experience of hunger, thirst, or satiety. Nor can one—no matter how deeply one immerses oneself in mysticism, no matter how much one allows one’s inner soul experiences to unfold according to the pattern of certain mystics—gain any insight from this mere unfolding into what underlies the soul as a spiritual reality. Just as the natural sciences, through their methods, must move beyond the mere experience of hunger, thirst, or satiety to something that is not observed in ordinary soul life—for in ordinary soul life, a person knows nothing of the chemical processes taking place in his body while he suffers from hunger and thirst— so, too, in a genuine contemplation of the spirit, one must move beyond all that can be experienced in the soul through imagination, feeling, and volition to something spiritual.

[ 8 ] But how can this spiritual being be found? The sensible world presents itself to the senses when a person encounters nature; the spiritual world does not do so in the same way. The spiritual presents itself to the human being only when he awakens from within the capacities for knowledge and perception—which I have called “seeing” in my book The Riddle of Man—that are hidden in ordinary life, as it were, lying dormant. Now I do not wish to ramble on about abstractions, but would like to demonstrate immediately with a concrete example that just as it is possible for the natural scientist, through his method, to move from subjective hunger and thirst to bodily processes that are not conscious in ordinary experience, it is equally possible to move from mere psychological phenomena to spiritual phenomena, which are related to the psychological on one hand just as the physical is related to the psychological on the other. Even with such concrete questions, one immediately encounters resistance posed by the conventional view of psychological life. This view, in fact, seeks only—and must do so, since it is based on scientific methods—to observe the passive life of the soul. The active life of the soul, which by its very nature acts from within, cannot be observed scientifically, and is often lost sight of entirely. Today, when the natural sciences examine mental experience, they often focus only on the way in which ideas group together—how one idea, perhaps triggered by an external perception, evokes another that is stored in my memory, or even many others. One observes how ideas associate with one another, how they connect with emotional nuances, with impulses of the will, or the like. On this basis, one does not acquire methods that, in the realm of the spiritual, could be compared to the rigorous methods of the scientific view of the world. If you pick up Theodor Ziehen’s Physiological Psychology, you will see how everything ultimately boils down to the fact that our entire inner life is actually built upon such associations, insofar as it goes beyond mere sensory experience. But this very approach does not lead to a truly unbiased view of inner life.

[ 9 ] The following, for example, illustrates this: If one arrives at a true observation of the soul or self in the way I will describe later, one can see how, in ordinary life as human beings, our spiritual experiences are dependent on the ideas that life provides us. When a person leaves their inner life to its own devices in the present moment, the ideas that have entered their soul through impressions from the external world play out within it. In a certain sense, they are truly a kind of slave to their ideas. Theodor Ziehen says, in a limited sense but entirely correctly: “We cannot think as we wish, but must think as determined by the associations currently present,” because this or that impression has been made upon us, which in turn evokes another impression. Thus, according to Ziehen, we are at the mercy of the interplay of impressions. This is entirely correct in a limited sense. In ordinary life, we are not nearly as free in our thinking as we suppose. Nor, however, are we as dependent as Theodor Ziehen believes. Anyone who can delve into the observation of the soul knows that while there is indeed a strong dependence on the impressions we receive, it truly lasts only for a certain period of time. This is something that today’s official psychology does not give much thought to at all. An image evoked by an impression does, however, tyrannize us. When I have seen a friend, this image haunts me; it evokes other images of other friends, of shared experiences with these friends, and so on. One is dependent on these images, but only for a certain time. And this time can even—I would say—be determined through inner experimentation. This time lasts only two to three days. For two to three days, however, we are enslaved to an impression we have received. After this time, however, the force with which such an impression acts upon our soul changes. We then reach a state of inner spiritual readiness to respond to an impression in the same way that the impression previously responded to us. We were previously its slave; after two to three days, we become its master. One can do this, for example, in the following way. If one has a sense of inner spiritual life—and we will see how this sense is attained—one can ask oneself: What is the difference between being absorbed in inner spiritual life, which unfolds of its own accord over a certain period of time, and reading a book? When I read a book, I cannot allow myself to be carried from one idea to another. I would not make any progress in my reading if I allowed myself to be carried along by ideas that an impression has evoked in me; rather, I must surrender myself to the ideas that flow from the book. Then I come under the author’s control. It is the author who then governs the course of my thoughts. Similarly to what happens when my thoughts are governed by the ideas flowing from the book, I become one with my true self—in relation to a particular impression—once I have lived through that impression for two or three days. I will then not surrender to the association that this impression seeks to evoke, but rather I will have the inner strength to combine this impression with others. A complete transformation of a mental impression takes place in the human soul once this mental impression has lingered in the soul for two or three days.

[ 10 ] Even without being a scholar of the humanities, one can convince oneself of the truth of what has just been said through ordinary, more intimate observation of inner life, albeit in a field that is nowadays considered only superficially—and, in particular, viewed through a distorted lens—because a certain contemporary school of thought, one that leans heavily toward the material, has taken control of this field: namely, so-called analytical psychology or psychoanalysis. But I do not wish to go into that here. I would, however, like to point out that anyone who can truly observe dream life knows that the involuntary emergence of dreams is always somehow connected to the impressions of the last few days—actually, only the last two or three days. But do not misunderstand me! Of course, events from long ago resurface in dreams as reminiscences. But it is something else that evokes these long-past events. If one can observe the dream closely, one will always see that there must be some triggering image from the last two to three days. It is this that first evokes long-past events. For two to three days, impressions from the outside world have the power to generate dreams. Everything else then takes shape around it. If such an idea—originating from the last two to three days—cannot generate the dream, then the dream cannot arise at all. Now, however, one must truly be able to observe what I have just indicated, for ordinary consciousness cannot observe it. It is precisely for this reason that it remains so unknown in the widest circles today—because it takes place in the unconscious. As a rule, people today do not acquire any knowledge of how their attitude differs toward an idea that has not yet been present in their soul for two to three days, compared to one that has been present for that long. All these things can really only be observed accurately and correctly by a researcher of the spiritual sciences. However, for true observation, the researcher of the spiritual sciences needs a certain strengthening, a fortification of ordinary soul life. For ordinary soul life, imagination essentially extends only to repeating and elaborating, in a certain way, what the senses perceive and grasp from the outside. This life of the soul can now—even though ordinary science knows little about it—be strengthened so that this pale, indefinite life of imagination in our everyday existence can arise in the soul in an entirely different way, so that it can arise as a powerful act of imagination, its power equaling that of an external, sensory perception. But this must occur if one truly wishes to conduct research in the spiritual realm. One cannot conduct this research with the ordinary powers of the soul. Now, in my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in Esoteric Science, I have described in detail the method by which one can elevate imagination—to use a technical term that can easily be misunderstood—and thereby transform it into imaginative cognition, into intuitive perception.

[ 11 ] Today, from the vast array of what the soul must undertake in order to draw strength for its life—so that imagination may become a vision of the spirit—I would like to highlight just a few things. I wish to refer to what I have recently emphasized quite particularly in my latest book, On the Mysteries of the Soul, the sequel to my book The Riddle of Man: that when a person applies their ordinary soul life to science, they encounter certain so-called limits of knowledge. These limits of knowledge can confront one precisely when one becomes acquainted with the worldviews of deeply contemplative minds. If I may cite something personal here, I must say that thirty to thirty-five years ago, what led me personally to the particular branch of spiritual science that I cultivate here were, in particular, the experiences I had with the worldviews of those people for whom knowledge is not an external profession, not something learned by rote, but something that constitutes the very core of their inner life, of all their longings and feelings. When, for example, one comes across words—in the case of a thinker who is no longer sufficiently appreciated today, Friedrich Theodor Vischer (though I could cite many others as well)—words that he draws forth from profound mysteries of knowledge that came to him as he reflected on the connection between the human body and soul, words such as these: “The human soul cannot be in the body, but neither can it be outside the body”—then, in a living connection with a primal, elemental thinker, one encounters the very limits that human spiritual life must inevitably reach if it is to engage in cognitive activity.

[ 12 ] Ordinary thinking establishes limits to knowledge at such points in the life of the soul. Du Bois-Reymond spoke of the “Seven World Mysteries” that cannot be solved; yet one could cite hundreds and hundreds of such so-called limits to human spiritual life. If one does not simply resign oneself to such limits, but instead attempts to go through everything the soul must go through, telling oneself: “You must raise questions here; the natural external world cannot give you an answer, nor can that which wells up from your own soul,” — if one truly connects with these questions in the innermost life of one’s soul, if one has the patience to live with them not merely logically but in inner struggle, if one raises them again and again within one’s soul—not merely to understand what they say logically, but to experience what they trigger within the soul as a living reality—then something gradually sprouts from such questions within the soul. One experiences something in the soul that I will try to clarify through the following comparison: In many cases, the scientific worldview assumes that the lowest forms of life initially possess only an inner vital activity, which they develop through contact with the external world, thereby transforming their as yet undifferentiated organism so that it does not merely come into contact with the external world in an indeterminate way, but that this contact itself becomes differentiated into the sense of touch, and, according to the scientific view, the other senses are said to have developed gradually, phylogenetically, from the sense of touch. What is experienced by living matter in this regard can truly be compared to what the soul experiences when it encounters such limits. If one truly comes to know the soul’s experience in the face of such boundaries, one senses that this does not refer to anything having to do with the development of external sensory organs. If one has the patience to immerse oneself inwardly in such boundary mysteries, then something like a soulful groping develops out of the encounter, and from this emerges something like a differentiation of the soul’s life. This is something that, of course, is not believed in today by the vast majority of people. But people will come to believe in it more and more as they realize that true knowledge of the phenomena of the world—and especially of the mystery of the human being—can be gained only in this way. Gradually, it will then come about from within that the human being not only encounters boundary questions but also develops his soul life through them, just as a mere living being develops living substance; and thus those higher organs of perception arise, through which the soul gradually learns to penetrate into the spirit. This is just one of those exercises—or whatever one wishes to call them—that the soul must undergo in order to transform its undifferentiated soul life so that it can truly penetrate the spiritual world.

[ 13 ] I would have to cite much of what is written in the books mentioned if I were to explain how, in this way, imagination truly becomes something entirely different from what it is in ordinary life. There, imagination is passive, relying on sensory perceptions. Because the life of the soul is strengthened in the way it is, in principle, through the exercises I have described—though this must be achieved through many, many exercises—imagination becomes something entirely different. As a result, the act of visualizing itself becomes so active that, in a sense, a much more inner and concrete “I”—than the ordinary human “I”—asserts itself within the person, and the person learns to recognize how, with this heightened inner life, they can now truly observe the phenomena of the soul.

[ 14 ] Now that I have thus elaborated on the nature of true self-knowledge, when I return to what I have argued so far, I must say: What actually happens when the ideas of the state they experience for two or three days transition to the state they experience later—this can only truly be understood through such an intensified inner life. For then one learns to recognize that, in fact, when faced with the ideas—which reign subjectively for two or three days, as if bubbling up from within and tyrannically dictating one’s actions—a person becomes, after this time, as free inwardly as he is otherwise free from his ordinary body. One learns to recognize what one is within, what guides these images just as we guide our hand or our leg when we grasp or walk—through our ordinary “I.” A person comes to know the higher “I,” which otherwise remains unconscious and moves within the world of imagination just as the ordinary “I” moves in physical life; that is to say, after two or three days, we emerge from the subjective realm into the objective realm of soul life. We enter into that which is not dominated by external impressions, and which we then come to recognize as that which carries the external impressions throughout the entire life between birth and death. We come to recognize a second aspect within the human being, toward which we then feel as we do toward our physical body in ordinary life. We come to know what I called the human being’s “body of formative forces” in one of the recent issues of the journal Das Reich—a supersensible body that exists just as the ordinary physical body does. Yet it remains unconscious to ordinary soul life. Just as the hand of the physical body is moved by the ordinary “I,” so the human being learns to recognize how he or she acts within that which now sustains imagination, that which lives in imagination—and that is the Spirit. It is not imagination itself that is the Spirit, but that which lives within imagination just as the ordinary soul lives within the body. But since ordinary psychology, in essence, considers the entire life of the soul only as it actually unfolds over two or three days—counting from the impressions—it does not progress at all from the soul to the spirit; it excludes the spirit. For the ordinary life of the soul, the spirit is, in a certain sense, excluded.

[ 15 ] This, in turn, reveals a form of self-reflection that we can now discuss, having already hinted at its nature. You are all well aware that the so-called “I” reigns at the center of your inner life. But psychologists today are less clear on this point. It is interesting to consider, for example, what such an outstanding psychologist as Theodor Ziehen says specifically about the “I” in his book Physiological Psychology. Since this book is a collection of lectures, everything is presented in a lecture-style manner. There he says to his audience: “When you reflect on what the ‘I’ actually is, what do you actually come to?” If you really think about it, your body will first come to mind, then all your relationships with the outside world; then you’ll think of all your family ties and property relations; your name and title will come to mind—Theodor Ziehen omitted the orders of knighthood—your dominant ideas and your main inclinations; your past will come to mind. Admittedly, says Theodor Ziehen, reflective consciousness does indeed distinguish—apart from everything else that comes to mind—the “I” as that which reigns within, in contrast to what is outside, as that which moves and acts from within through imagination. But that is a fiction of epistemology or speculative psychology. Physiological psychology has nothing to do with this. — Yet another passage intended to undermine the very foundation of genuine spiritual-scientific inquiry. But can anyone with ordinary consciousness really afford to think of their “I” solely in terms of everything that Theodor Ziehen thinks of? Will he not at all sense the inner vitality of a central being in his inner life? Will he really think only of his kinship and property relationships, of his title and name, and so on? No, that is out of the question! Human beings are aware that something reigns within them. And yet, when it comes to characterizing the “I,” he actually gets nowhere. In a limited sense, modern scientific psychology is correct today when it has little to say about this “I.” How, then, does this “I” actually behave in ordinary consciousness? This, in turn, is revealed by self-observation, which I characterized in principle earlier.

[ 16 ] When this “I” gathers strength, when it becomes something different through the exercises I have described, then one also realizes what the “I” actually is prior to ordinary consciousness. Today, based on outward appearances, we distinguish between two states in human life: sleeping and waking, and we think they alternate between day and night. People do not realize that a genuine observation of the soul reveals something entirely different. For we do not sleep only at night, when our consciousness is completely clouded, but a part of our being also sleeps during the day—it sleeps continuously. The strengthening of the “I” is actually, in a certain sense, an awakening—a bringing of oneself to awakening in relation to that part of the “I” that sleeps continuously. We know nothing of the content of our sleep; we know only that it interrupts our ordinary life. When we look back over the course of our lives from birth to death, we actually always look back only on our daytime experiences; the nighttime experiences are nothing. They are always something black, as it were, when we depict in color or in white what we experience during the day. When we look at our lives in this way, the part of us that is asleep is, in a sense, as if it were not there. We see it as excluded from our field of observation. But this is also the case with the “I” in ordinary soul life. Fundamentally, it is not present for imaginative or other forms of contemplation; the real “I” eludes ordinary soul life because, at his present stage of development, the human being sleeps with regard to the “I” even during the day. In essence, for ordinary consciousness, we know of our “I” only in a negative sense; we know of it in the same way that the eye perceives the dark spot within itself. We know that there is nothing there. We know of the “I” in the same way as we know of a black spot on a colored surface. Even though no color phenomena emanate from it, we still see a black spot. Thus we see that a nothingness is surrounded by our ordinary experiences, and thus we have the awareness of the sleeping “I.” It is awakened by the soul forces being heightened in the way I have described, Only then does what is actually the core of a person’s being gradually come to light within them, and one learns to recognize the connections of the soul life as it relates to the spirit—just as one first learns from the natural sciences, when we are hungry and thirsty, that there is a body in which chemical changes in the blood are taking place, which are expressed in the soul life as hunger and thirst. Just as the body is connected to the life of the soul through certain processes of which a person is initially unaware in ordinary life, so, on the other hand, one learns to recognize that the soul is connected to the spirit. While the body is perceived from the outside, the spirit is perceived by becoming aware of the sleeping “I.”

[ 17 ] As if condensed into a single point of the “I,” the human being is recognized as a spirit by ordinary consciousness. If one strengthens the inner power of the soul—as I have described in detail in my books How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, Occult Science, and The Riddle of Man—one will find that this “I” truly acquires substance, just as one arrives at an understanding of the physical body through methodical scientific research into purely inner sensations. One arrives at a genuine exploration of the spirit, just as one learns about the chemical changes taking place in the blood or elsewhere in the body when a person is hungry, thirsty, or feels satiated. In this way, one learns to recognize how an idea that lives within us—and is at first merely an idea—is now filled with a pictorial content that is not as abstract as the ideas that prevail in ordinary consciousness—a content that the spiritual researcher brings into consciousness, so that the idea becomes like a perception of this pictorial, imaginative content. Imaginative processes appear before the spiritual researcher’s inner eye, and they undergo a transformation. When, for example, an idea becomes more vivid—which, in ordinary consciousness, reflects everything taking place in the subconscious—the idea becomes something entirely different. It then becomes something that is no longer merely an idea of knowledge, insight, or perception, but an idea that motivates the will. This is a very significant step forward for the spiritual researcher when he is able to rise to such an insight through which he realizes how the concept of knowledge—under whose influence we do nothing but merely know something about the world—is transformed, through a change in its imaginative content, into a concept of the will, which then becomes or can become that which acts within us. Here we see how the spiritual lies behind the psychological and is in a state of constant, real transformation. Just as we can describe chemical and physical processes in the body, so too can we describe, in spiritual terms, how changes lie behind the life of imagination, feeling, and will—changes that move from the imaginative to the inspired and to the intuitive. And just as hunger and thirst arise subjectively from the chemical changes in the body, so, conversely, the spiritual appears subjectively—either as a perceptual image or as an emotional image—which then transforms into a volitional image. In this way, one enters quite concretely into the possibility of truly describing that which lives and weaves behind the soul as a spiritual entity, just as the physical lives and weaves behind the soul on the other side. One then comes to the point where what can arise in this way before the activated soul life truly becomes tangible within the human being, so that what I previously called the “body of formative forces” is experienced by us in the same way that the physical body is otherwise experienced. Then one also learns to recognize, in a very concrete way, that which lives out in the world beyond the sensory realm as the supersensible.

[ 18 ] It is in the nature of lectures such as the ones I am giving here that I anticipate in an earlier lecture some points that will be elaborated on in greater detail in later lectures. This will also be the case with what I am about to say next. But I would like to draw your attention to it already today. The plant, which is a living being, is not composed solely of what physics and chemistry—or biology and physiology, which are in turn composed of them—can investigate; rather, it contains something entirely different. Once we have developed ourselves to the point where we feel ourselves in a body of formative forces, just as our ordinary “I” usually feels itself in a physical body, then—just as we use our eyes and ears in the physical body for sensory perceptions—we can, through this body of formative forces, which we have differentiated out of the soul’s sense of touch, perceive what is supersensible in the rest of the world—that which, as the supersensible, permeates and interweaves nature. Then we see in all plant life, all animal life, and also in the physical human being outside of ourselves the spiritual, which is not, in a trivial sense, something visionary, but stands before the soul endowed with spiritual power just as the content of sensory perceptions stands before the soul lacking such power. We must, however, be able to replace spatial concepts with temporal concepts everywhere. How, in fact, do we perceive what is supersensible in the plant? By perceiving our own supersensible aspect in the body of formative forces as it stirs and weaves; through this we now also perceive the supersensible in the plant world, much as one tone in a musical context would perceive another. The perception of the supersensible in the plant world rests entirely on the fact that our own formative body, in its life and weaving, proceeds at a much slower “tempo” than the life and weaving of the plant’s formative body. I have elaborated on this in more detail in a short treatise titled Human Life from the Perspective of Spiritual Science. There one will find how everything depends on this difference in pace between the human and plant formative-force bodies. Because our formative-force body can interact—like a higher, formative organ—with the much faster-moving life of the plant, we truly perceive this other kind of life in the plant kingdom. As a result, something entirely different will present itself to our soul than the old, speculative concept of life force ever was. In other words, we truly perceive the supersensible within the sensible.

[ 19 ] It is, after all, difficult to speak so impartially about these things today. One does so only if, in a certain sense, one feels committed to the pursuit of truth. For it is, of course, widely believed that such things, as they have now been expressed, are not based on a truly scientific spirit, but on some form of fantasy or daydreaming. Only slowly and gradually will humanity learn that this is not a flight of fancy, but rather a methodical investigation of the spiritual realm—albeit one that follows a different path than that of natural science. Just as humanity has come to recognize the Copernican worldview—which was once regarded as a flight of fancy—as truth, so too will it learn this. Admittedly, it took certain denominations until the year 1822 to accept this Copernican worldview as truth. Hopefully, it will not take as long to recognize these spiritual truths—also for social reasons that cannot be cited here today but will be addressed in the lecture I will give in this series on the historical life of humanity.

[ 20 ] Today, however, there are the most paradoxical prejudices regarding both the whole and the details of this spiritual insight—prejudices that seem self-evident and must necessarily be numerous. I will mention just one of them. I mentioned fourteen days ago that Pastor Rittelmeyer recently wrote a beautiful essay in Die christliche Welt—from a religious perspective—on what spiritual science aims to achieve and what it can also become as a truly deeper foundation of religious life. From a perspective that enjoys widespread recognition in many circles, objections have now been raised—among many others I will not mention here—against Pastor Rittelmeyer’s remarks: Even if the human soul is to rise to a spiritual world, this must not in any way occur through the human being arbitrarily carrying his or her soul life into the spiritual world by means of exercises; rather, it must come of its own accord. From the standpoint of spiritual science, one could say nothing more incomprehensible than this. For precisely when this entering into the spiritual world happens of its own accord—when it occurs without the human being doing anything to bring it about—the human being does not enter the true spiritual world, but only falls into the delusion of certain notions that are not spiritual, because the human being behaves passively rather than actively in this process. They arrive at a state of being that is, in turn, dependent on the body—on various organic processes within the body—and in that case it is pathological; or dependent on purely psychological processes, and in that case it is a delusion, autosuggestion, or the like. The true entry into the spiritual world rests precisely on the realization that this can be achieved only through activity, through the exercise of one’s own innermost human will. It is this alone that carries us into the true spiritual world. Anyone who says, therefore, that it is questionable to require exercises through which a person is to achieve, by his own will, what can only be given to him as a gift of grace, understands nothing of the very essence, of the true significance of this spiritual science; nor does he know anything of the true spirit, but only of that imagined spirit that lives in the human soul as a form of autosuggestion. But quite a few people today know nothing of the true spirit. Therefore, they cannot arrive at a true contemplation of the eternal, the immortal, and the free in the human soul.

[ 21 ] There are two ways to escape from that which, in the human soul, is either purely inner life or dependent on the body. One cannot escape it by the path attempted, for example, by Theodor Ziehen’s “Physiological Psychology.” When Ziehen says that we cannot think what we want, but must think as determined by associations—how ideas relate to one another—he demonstrates precisely that, at its core, his entire conception of the mind is a distraction. One might say that Ziehen’s view of human mental life is what it is solely because Ziehen overlooks the true mental impulses of the human soul. Hence, Ziehen can claim that the main law of human mental life is that one idea connects with another either according to their inner similarity or according to their temporal sequence. If I have seen a friend in a certain place and later see that friend again, then the place that was temporally connected to him may once again become associated with him. If the life of the soul proceeds in this way, governed solely by these laws of association, then it proceeds in the manner in which the body allows this spiritual life to unfold. It is precisely the spirit that is asleep. The spirit submerges itself into the life of the soul, which is dependent solely on the body. Contemporary psychology forces the entire life of the soul down into the physical realm; it considers only that aspect of the soul’s life into which the spirit has submerged itself to such an extent that it is no longer truly present within it. For what is truly spiritual begins wherever we free ourselves from associations through inner activity. The truly spiritual begins wherever the urge to speak ceases, and where all psychology that today seeks to base itself on the natural sciences ceases to speak.

[ 22 ] Today, there are two paths out of the realm of mere soul life. On the one hand, we can transcend it and ascend to the spirit by becoming conscious of our true self—by sensing the body of formative forces just as we otherwise sense the physical body—and thereby perceiving the supersensible in the outer world. But then we arrive at an even higher conception of our “I”; then we come to the realization of why this “I” remains hidden from ordinary consciousness: Fundamentally, this “I” springs from ordinary soul life just as little as the air we breathe comes from the lungs. Anyone who believes that the true “I” is somehow produced within the body holds the same view in this realm as one who believes that breath is somehow produced by the lungs. No, our true “I” is within the world that we take in through imagination. There we find the “I” on the one hand by awakening it, by raising it beyond mere sensory perception to the supersensible. In this “I,” we find one aspect of the Eternal—that aspect which reveals to us the seed of all that we will become when we pass through the gate of death and enter the spiritual world, only to return to subsequent earthly lives.

[ 23 ] On the other hand, we find the “I” once again. It is the same. In ordinary life, a person overlooks the true nature of their “I,” but they also overlook the true nature of their will. When they become aware of the body of formative forces, what lives in the will awakens in a certain sense. What does a person in ordinary life know about what lives in the will? When they raise their hand, they know it comes from their imagination. But how this works, how it passes into the physical body—this a person completely overlooks in ordinary waking consciousness. This, too, awakens little by little, though not in the body of formative forces. We then experience the real, deeper impulses from which our actions emerge into the world; we experience, behind our willing, a supersensible realm of which ordinary consciousness knows nothing. On the other hand, as we go beyond our ordinary soul life toward the Spirit, we experience the Spirit in our willing—that Spirit which has already carried and woven us together before we entered physical existence through birth or conception, through which we have come from the spiritual world into physical existence. Thus, by methodically stepping beyond ordinary soul life in both directions, the spiritual researcher experiences his Eternal Self.

[ 24 ] This will be elaborated upon in the next lectures. How is this eternal element contained within the content of contemplative consciousness? How is this eternal element truly found through our ability to contemplate together that which we arrive at on the one hand by extending our imagination beyond mere sensory perception into the supersensory realm, and that which we reach, on the other hand, by extending our volition beyond the merely soul-and-body realm into the spiritual.

[ 25 ] With that, I have outlined, at the conclusion of today’s lecture, some of the topics for the upcoming lectures. I hope that spiritual science will rise above that categorical statement by Du Bois-Reymond, with which he sought to pull the rug out from under all spiritual research by asserting the principle that only that which comes from the senses can truly be science, and that where supernaturalism begins, science ends. No, our view of the world, as presented in these lectures, is intended to show precisely that in the future a human conviction will be possible, one based on the fact that wherever true supernaturalism—true penetration into the spiritual world—ceases, science must also come to an end even in relation to the mere observation of nature. Thus we also see how natural science itself contains more and more dead, moribund concepts, for what is alive can come only from the spirit. The spirit is the creator of what is alive, and when recognized, it can be nothing other than the creator of genuine, life-filled, scientific concepts.