The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Findings from the Humanities on the Development of Humanity and Its Cultural Forms

[ 1 ] It is curious that history as a science emerged at a time that—upon closer inspection, one realizes—was actually the least suitable for establishing history as a science. That is why I find myself in a somewhat different position in today’s discussions than I was the day before yesterday, since I wanted to trace the connections from anthroposophy to the science of the soul. When modern scientific thinking made its way into human development, the science of the soul—psychology—was concerned with extending, so to speak, the realm of the scientific way of thinking to phenomena of the soul. The aim was to conquer the realm of psychological phenomena—which had been approached differently and conceived of differently in earlier times—through the scientific method. The reason for this was that in this modern era, many who were primarily dedicated to scientific work had justifiably come to believe that the spirit prevailing in scientific research was the only truly scientific one.

[ 2 ] Now it must be said that, by applying the scientific approach to the study of the soul, science has at least engaged with something that is a given. Even if true psychology, as we saw the day before yesterday, must resort to entirely different methods of research, the object of psychological inquiry is, in a sense, directly given in the human being even for the scientific method.

[ 3 ] The situation seems to be quite different when it comes to the study of history. And in attempting to draw attention to the—one might almost say—paradoxical facts under consideration here, one must point out something that is actually little known, or at least rarely considered: that what is called the science of history is not a very old discipline.

[ 4 ] In the 18th century, those who shaped and championed the concept of science by no means regarded history as a science. The discipline of history is, in essence, a creation of the 19th century. It thus actually emerged at a time when the methods of the natural sciences were experiencing a particular heyday and gaining widespread recognition. The 18th century did not yet share the attitude toward history that we have today. I would like to cite just one characteristic statement by the philosopher Wolff on history, dating from the 18th century—a statement to which many others could be added, all of which attest that, at that time, among scholars, history was regarded as a record of events, but not as anything that deserved the name “science.” Wolff said in the 18th century: “Since historical writings merely recount what has happened, it does not require much intellect or reflection to read them.” Explanatory methods—methods designed to bring coherence and order to the sequence of historical facts—did not actually become commonplace until the course of the 19th century,

[ 5 ] The view that history, by its very nature and essence, cannot be a science at all has, among those who have become increasingly accustomed to the scientific way of thinking, found its most radical expression in Fritz Mauthner, who has become well-known for his linguistic-critical studies and his major Dictionary of Philosophy, which he wrote in recent years. Anyone who reads the entry on “History” in this dictionary—which is clearly written with the conviction that “science” is possible only in the realm of natural knowledge “science” is possible; whoever reads this entry on “History” will find that the character of a science is radically denied to what is called history, and that it is even presented as paradoxical—given that the sciences of nature have been developed into such distinctly refined methods—to regard history as a science alongside them.

[ 6 ] One of the key factors by which the modern scientific thinker defines his concept of science does not apply to this scientific thinker when it comes to history: What does the natural scientist seek to achieve through his research? Today, his main aim is to arrange the conditions under which a natural phenomenon occurs in such a way that the phenomenon unfolds predictably, so that he can say: If similar or identical conditions occur again, then the same phenomena must also occur.

[ 7 ] Contemporary scientists place particular emphasis on this approach of focusing attention on the repeatability of phenomena. They require that a proper experiment be designed in such a way that, under certain given natural conditions, one can, to a certain extent, predict what must occur.

[ 8 ] Now, one might say, however: If one imposes these requirements on history as a science, it comes off rather poorly in a certain sense! I’ll just point out a few examples. In recent times, a peculiar view has gradually taken shape among people who sought to think historically—a view that has been refuted in a remarkable way, I would say, in a forceful way. Among people who believed they possessed a certain historically profound insight into the social and economic interrelationships within human development, the view emerged—one that was strongly asserted especially at the beginning of the current war—that under the present economic and social conditions, this war could in any case not last longer than four to six months at most. Well, it must be said that the facts have proven this view to be radically wrong! Many people considered this assertion to be thoroughly grounded in scientific research. How often, when people are confronted with current events that are important to human life and which they therefore wish to assess, do we hear: “History teaches us this or that about these events.” — People are confronted with these events, want to form a judgment on how they should behave, how they should think about the possible course of events; then one hears from those who have studied history: “History teaches this or that!” — How often do we hear today, in the face of the current shattering, tragic events that have befallen human development—how often do we hear people say today, when this or that occurs: “History teaches this or that.” — Well, if history teaches what those who predicted it was impossible for these events to last longer than four to six months meant it to teach, then one can say: This knowledge, drawn from history, is refuted by the facts in a remarkable way!

[ 9 ] I would like to cite another example that is perhaps no less telling. A truly significant figure took up a position as a history professor in 1789. It was a time when, I might say, the study of history was just beginning to emerge as a science. In 1789, Schiller took up his position as a professor of history in Jena. He delivered his now-famous inaugural address on the philosophical and the external, mechanistic treatment of historical events. In the course of this inaugural address, he uttered a remarkable sentence, which he believed he had derived from a philosophical perspective on human events—that is, on what is referred to as “history.” He believed he had formed a view on what one can “learn from history,” and he said: “European society of states seems to have been transformed into one large family; the members of this household may be hostile toward one another, but hopefully will no longer tear one another apart.” This was spoken in 1789 as a so-called historical judgment by a man who was by no means insignificant. This was followed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars! And if what one can learn from history had truly been learned from those events, then our present age, too, could still be cited as evidence of the truth of such a lesson: European states may indeed be hostile toward one another, but they no longer tear each other apart!

[ 10 ] Here, too, we find a curious refutation of what one intends when claiming that history, as it is understood, can serve as a lesson for forming a judgment when confronted with the facts of the present or the future. Countless examples could be cited to support what is implied here. That is one thing. The other, however, is to “scientifically penetrate” history—the course of historical events—from every possible perspective. Was the nineteenth century particularly successful in applying these methods? Precisely those who believed in applying rigorous scientific methods to history might be the least satisfied when it comes to asking whether anything truly special emerges from applying such methods—which are rightly standard in the natural sciences—to historical development, in order to view this historical development “in the light of a science.”

[ 11 ] One need only bear a few things in mind. Since I have entirely different intentions today—namely, not to criticize historical science as such—I am unable to go into all the details of the attempts that have been made to arrive at a historical method. There is the view that history is made by great men; then there is the view that great men themselves derive their character and their strengths from their so-called milieu. There is also the view that historical facts can only be understood by taking economic and cultural conditions as a basis—that is, by allowing what occurs in human development to emerge from economic and social foundations, and so on.

[ 12 ] Just a few examples—in which attempts were made to approach history using the mode of thinking that has proven so successful in the natural sciences—will suffice to show how the attempt, while I won’t say it failed, did in fact lead to unsatisfactory results. To take just one example—the Englishman Herbert Spencer attempted, as part of a comprehensive scientific endeavor, to address the historical evolution of humanity. He, who sought to penetrate the entire development of the world and all existence with scientific thinking, attempted to apply scientific concepts to history, to historical development. In doing so, he arrived at something very peculiar. He knows that the individual organism—for example, the human organism, but also the organism of higher animals—as it gradually grows out of the cell, develops from three layers of the cell: the ectoderm, the endoderm, and the mesoderm; these are the three parts, or layers, of a cell from which the organism develops.

[ 13 ] Now, Herbert Spencer also sees in historical development—in a sense, in the organism of evolving humanity—a process similar to that which takes place when a natural organism develops from a cell. And just as individual organ systems of the human organism develop, for example, from these cellular components I have mentioned, so too does Herbert Spencer assume this to be the case for the development of the historical organism of humanity. He says: Here, too, there is something akin to an ectoderm, an endoderm, and a mesoderm. — Indeed, Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher, develops the remarkable view that in the historical evolution of humanity, the warrior class—everything that is warlike in the world—develops from what might be called the ectoderm of the historical process; from the endoderm develops the peace-loving and working class; from the mesoderm, the merchant class; and from the interaction of these three classes arises what is called the “historical organism.” Thus, in the view of the philosopher Herbert Spencer, the most perfect social organism is the one that, in the course of history, develops most fully and most perfectly from the ectoderm; for in the human organism, it is precisely from the ectoderm that the nervous system develops. And since Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher, conceives of the warrior class—the military establishment of a state—as emerging from the ectoderm, that is, from what corresponds to the developmental basis for the human nervous system, the most perfect state, in Herbert Spencer’s view, is the one that possesses the most fully developed warrior class. Just as the brain is derived from the nervous system, which in turn originates from the ectoderm, so Herbert Spencer demands that, in the political community, those in power be drawn exclusively from the warrior class! I wish only to mention this curious point and, in light of the present times, refrain from making any further critical remarks regarding Herbert Spencer’s militaristic theory of the historical development of human society.

[ 14 ] Another attempt to penetrate historical development using concepts derived from the scientific worldview can be found—I am mentioning only the pinnacles of intellectual development—in the work of Auguste Comte. Here, once again, an attempt is made to apply the laws of mechanics, statics, and dynamics to what occurs among human beings in the course of historical development: The relationships among the individual components of the state, which is in a state of historical development, are treated in terms of “social statics” and “historical statics”; that which changes, moves, and progresses is regarded as “historical dynamics.”

[ 15 ] And so one could cite many, many examples. If one were to take a critical look at these attempts—and at many others—it would become clear how little success there is in deriving anything satisfactory from applying scientific concepts, which are rigorously established in their own fields, to the study of historical development.

[ 16 ] In a different way, people who, so to speak, stood at the dawn of history—at the very inception of history as a science—in turn attempted to introduce something like explanatory principles into the historical process. One need only recall one of the most magnificent attempts made during the formative period of a historical worldview, undertaken by Lessing in his famous little work, which he wrote at the height of his intellectual development: The Education of the Human Race. This attempt is particularly interesting precisely because it seeks not to approach the historical process from the outside using a natural-scientific mode of thought, but rather to apply the concept of education—that is, something in which the spiritual is, after all, interwoven—to the historical process. Lessing posits that the successive events of historical development can only be understood by conceiving of humanity’s journey through history as an “Education of the Human Race,” guided by certain historical forces that operate behind the scenes of external events.

[ 17 ] And it is interesting to see how Lessing establishes a connection within the ongoing course of historical events. Precisely because he establishes this connection in a certain way—as it happens—people have said: Well, Lessing was indeed a great man, but he wrote his treatise on the “Education of the Human Race” precisely when he was no longer at the height of his powers—because he attempted to transform the course of historical events into an inner experience in a truly spiritual way, at least hypothetically at first. That is when he came up with the idea of the human soul’s repeated earthly lives. He looked back at the various epochs and said: The people living today have lived many times before; in their souls they carry over into this epoch what they have absorbed in earlier epochs. Therein lies what runs as an impulse through historical development—that which lies within the souls themselves.

[ 18 ] One could—even if one wishes to regard this initially only as a hypothesis—at least point out how an infinite number of things that would otherwise seem mysterious in the history of human development can be clarified, even if only hypothetically, by assuming that human souls themselves are the bearers of historical impulses from one epoch to the next. This suddenly transforms the otherwise disjointed fabric of historical development into a coherent whole. Only in this way can one hope that the individual facts of historical development no longer stand side by side, but truly emerge from one another, because what brings them forth is present.

[ 19 ] The view that Lessing put forward in this short work, The Education of the Human Race, did not really find any continuation, for the reason that the age of natural science was then approaching its zenith, and this age, for reasons that will become clear in the next lecture, was initially averse to the idea—the scientific way of thinking, within its own sphere, is entirely justified in its aversion to the assumption of repeated earthly lives.

[ 20 ] And so it came to pass that, over the course of the 19th century, all manner of attempts were made. One need only recall Hegel’s attempt to conceive the entire development of world history as a progression of human consciousness of freedom, and so on. Hundreds upon hundreds of such attempts could be cited, demonstrating how, time and again, efforts were made to introduce explanatory principles into the historical process and thereby transform history into a science.

[ 21 ] However, there have also always been thinkers—such as Schopenhauer—who held the view that nothing repeats itself in history and that, therefore, there can be no such thing as the science of history, because history can only recount what happens as a succession of facts, but cannot identify any impulses that govern history as explanatory principles, just as the laws of nature govern natural phenomena.

[ 22 ] And we still have fresh in our memory the powerful protest that Friedrich Nietzsche raised against history as such, in which he sought to show that by appropriating not history in its ideas, but the historical way of thinking—by appropriating that way of thinking which insists on “what history yields,” and seeks to process it further in the soul—that through this, the human soul, which is meant to be productive and active in the present and to respond fruitfully to the events that approach it, is, as Nietzsche says, “drained dry” by “historicism.” Thus, for Nietzsche, anyone who feels only historical impulses within himself was a person resembling a being that would have to constantly refrain from sleep, and thereby could never absorb life-giving forces into his development, but would always have to allow himself to be consumed by that which acts upon man in a consuming and destructive manner—just as life does in historicism. This essay by Nietzsche on “The Use and Abuse of History for Life” is one of the most significant works to emerge from Nietzsche’s entire body of thought.

[ 23 ] These introductory remarks are intended solely to highlight the fact that history as a science is highly controversial today from a wide variety of perspectives—far more so than, for example, the science of the soul or psychology. The question that must arise from all this is: Where does this come from? — Based on the premises underlying anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, the answer must be: Because, to begin with, attention in this field has not been directed toward the great, fundamental question: What aspect of the human being are we actually dealing with when we speak of historical development? What aspect of the human being is involved in this historical development? What is at work within the human being when he or she is entwined and woven into the fabric of historical development? — To answer this question, however, one must gain certain spiritual-scientific insights into the nature of the human being, insofar as this nature extends far beyond the reach of ordinary consciousness.

[ 24 ] To clarify what I have to say here and now, and to establish a starting point for a historical reflection, I would like to begin — you will see shortly why I am doing this — to a consideration of the human soul life, insofar as this human soul life rhythmically emerges again and again from what is called the ordinary state of consciousness. After all, in life we must alternate the ordinary state of consciousness with the state of sleep. Viewing nature from the standpoint of spiritual science, we will have to discuss this topic in even greater detail next time; today I merely wish to mention what can serve as a foundation for a historical perspective.

[ 25 ] When sleep enters our inner life, consciousness is dimmed to such an extent that we can almost speak of unconsciousness, although for those who can observe closely, sleep is by no means a state of complete unconsciousness. What in ordinary daily life constitutes the content of our world of perception, the content of our world of feeling and willing, ceases to exist and descends into the darkness of an unconscious or subconscious existence. Between these two states—the waking state and the sleeping state—lies the “dream state.”

[ 26 ] This dream state is something most peculiar. In the 19th century, philosophy itself attempted—using concepts that had been shaped by its more natural-scientific ideas—to penetrate the nature of this enigmatic dream world, which arises from the unconscious state of sleep and is so unlike the external experience of ordinary consciousness. But even there, something quite peculiar occurred. The philosopher Johannes Volkelt, for example, who took the trouble in the 1870s to write a book on dream fantasy, left the matter alone like a glowing coal that someone touches and immediately throws away. Critics who subsequently wrote about this book, Die Traum-Phantasie (The Dream Imagination), were accused of spiritualism simply because they had even bothered to take the subject seriously. The things people are accused of these days!

[ 27 ] What, then, is this enigmatic world of dreams that rises from the depths of sleep? What are the images that ebb and flow in a dream? This question, however, can only be discussed in terms of that consciousness I spoke of here the day before yesterday—the contemplative consciousness. Only the one who ascends from ordinary consciousness to what I discussed here the day before yesterday—imaginative perception, inspirational perception, and intuitive perception—that is, the one who ascends with his soul separated from the body, as I have explained, truly to live in the spiritual world—only such a person can arrive at an insight into what actually takes place in the human soul when it lives in dream images. Of course, today I can only offer some suggestions and cite a few findings from spiritual science; you will have to follow the further elaborations in my books.

[ 28 ] If one explores the life of dreams using the methods discussed here the day before yesterday, one comes to realize that the realm in which, so to speak, the soul’s activity unfolds during sleep—from falling asleep to waking up—is in fact separate from physical-bodily life. It is precisely through the methods of spiritual science that one learns to recognize this separation from physical life. One learns to recognize the state in which the soul finds itself when it is separated from the body. Therefore, one can also compare life within the dream images to this scientifically investigable separation from the body. And one then discovers that the dream is actually a much more complex phenomenon than is commonly believed.

[ 29 ] What lives in the soul as the soul dreams is, in fact, something that has to do not only with our present moment—just as waking daily life has to do with the present moment—but it is that which, in fact, develops within our organism, within our entire human being, like the tiny seed in a growing plant. What develops as a seed in the growing plant is the physical cause of the next plant. What emerges in the human soul—if I may use the expression—wrapped in dream images from the dullness of sleep is not yet physical; it is, in a spiritual-soul aspect, the foundation for that which passes through the gate of death, enters the spiritual world, and undergoes the life between death and a new birth, only to reappear.

[ 30 ] But it is a weak spiritual-soul seed; it is such a weak spiritual-soul seed that it cannot, through its own inherent powers, give rise to a soul content. Therefore, it can only give rise to content that is woven from reminiscences, from echoes of the world experienced—whether in the present or in the past. The one who studies dreams from a spiritual-scientific perspective tells himself: As in so many things, the intuitive yet superstitious belief that the future can often be revealed in dreams contains, on the one hand, a sensed truth, but on the other hand, a dangerous superstition; the latter for the reason that in what lives in the dream—I would say substantially, truly—the soul, as it develops into the future, is present; truly, the eternal aspect of our soul is present. One can already sense that what dreams does not contain within itself a concept, but rather the living potential for humanity’s future. The content of the dream is drawn from chaotically interwoven reminiscences and the like. While it is therefore superstition to want to interpret the content of a dream in any way other than in the spiritual-scientific sense, it must be said that what dreams is in fact connected to the eternal essence of the human soul, so that it is only the content of the dream life that lulls people into illusions.

[ 31 ] When one moves from ordinary consciousness to what I described the day before yesterday as “contemplative consciousness,” one arrives, as I have said, at imaginations and inspirations. And with this content of contemplative consciousness, one is immersed in a spiritual world. One is thus also within that world in which the soul lives when it is outside the body and dreaming. But then, I would say, in a childlike way, in a still imperfect way, it is within that world just as the plant seed is within the plant—which is, after all, merely the germ of the next plant. In imagination and inspiration, the world in which the dreaming soul also resides reveals itself.

[ 32 ] It is commonly believed that humans dream only when they sleep. This, too, is a fallacy—one that inevitably arises when one derives one’s concepts solely from the external world. But it is precisely a fallacy; it is an illusion. And deeper thinkers—Kant among them, but also many others—have already sensed that what pervades the soul in sleep and in dreams is by no means present only in sleep or only in dreams, but rather that it permeates the whole of life. When we wake up, however, a part of our inner life is transferred into the world—the world of external sensory observations, the world of those concepts that are linked to these external sensory observations. We are completely absorbed by these contents of consciousness; we are wholly devoted to them; we regard them—because they, as it were, outshine all the weaker contents living in our soul like a bright light—as, in a sense, the sole content of our waking daytime consciousness. But this is a mistake! For while we are filled with the contents of this waking daytime consciousness, contents that are exactly like the dreams that emerge from sleep at night continue to exist subconsciously in the depths of our soul. We continue to dream while awake; we simply do not become aware of the dreaming! And as paradoxical as it sounds, the opposite is also true: we do not merely continue dreaming; we continue sleeping. Thus, our consciousness is always threefold in the waking state: on top, on the surface, so to speak, is waking daytime consciousness; below, in the subconscious, is an undercurrent of continuous dreaming; and deeper still is a state of continued sleep.

[ 33 ] And we can also specify what we dream about, what we sleep about! For we dream about everything that does not surface in our soul as ideas or concepts that can be made clear, but rather as feelings that well up within us. Feelings do not arise within us from some fully conscious, waking state; they arise from a world within us that is merely dreamed. It is incorrect to assume, as some of Herbart’s philosophers do, that feelings result from the interaction of ideas. No, on the contrary, ideas are permeated by that which arises from a deeper inner life consisting of a state of dreaming while awake. Even the passions and emotions arise from a life of waking dreaming, which is merely drowned out by the fully conscious inner life. And our impulses of will—they remain, I would say, so enigmatic in their welling up from the life of the soul, because they arise from the depths of the soul, where we remain asleep even in the waking state.

[ 34 ] So that our fully conscious ideas develop on the surface in waking consciousness, our feelings surge up like waves from a subconscious state, from a dream-like waking life, and the impulses of the will even surge up from a state of sleep. What significance this has for the formation of social, legal, and ethical concepts, and what significance it has for the question of free will—we will discuss these matters in the final lecture.

[ 35 ] Today, however, we should focus our attention on something else. A few perceptive minds have already noted that one can never explain passions, for example, without addressing the nature of the dream world, because passions—even the noblest ones— noblest ones—because human beings dream while awake, and what is dreamed does not emerge in the manner of waking consciousness, but rather surges into this waking consciousness from the realm where dreaming takes place.

[ 36 ] Now, another finding from the spiritual sciences emerges—one that people are still almost reluctant to voice today because it contradicts all familiar concepts so strongly; but much of what has found its way into science in the course of human development was, at first, a paradox. It eventually gained acceptance, however. After all, from a certain spiritual perspective, the Copernican worldview was not regarded as a legitimate worldview until 1822. Why should what appears as spiritual science or anthroposophy not also have to wait perhaps just as long until it is recognized—not by that particular school of thought, but by modern science?

[ 37 ] What truly unfolds when one considers the flow of human life is not something experienced through the concepts processed in waking consciousness, but rather what exists for history—what drives and shapes history—does not live at all in human waking consciousness, as paradoxical as that may sound; rather, the impulses that reign and surge through history are merely dreamed by humanity. What drives the course of history forward permeates the human soul no more clearly and no differently than a dream. To speak of the dream of becoming is entirely scientific. This becomes evident precisely when one recognizes that insight into what historical impulses actually are can be gained only through the contemplative consciousness, when one penetrates these historical impulses with the imaginative, with the inspired life of research, Insofar as human beings belong to history—insofar as they intervene in this history—they are not dealing with anything that can be observed in such a way as to be reduced to concepts of the kind with which the natural sciences deal; rather, human beings are dealing with concepts that ordinary consciousness actually knows only through the dream.

[ 38 ] One could easily object to spiritual science by saying: So spiritual science is something fanciful, because it traces important impulses back to pure products of the imagination, even to products of dreams. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that may well be true, but if reality is such that it must exist within the human soul as a dream, then this reality must be grasped precisely where it can be perceived!

[ 39 ] From the perspective of scientific thinking in particular, it has been argued against history as a science that history deals only with individual facts, but one can never determine what a historical fact actually is; one cannot perceive it as clearly and distinctly as one perceives a scientific fact, a fact of nature.

[ 40 ] From the perspective of the humanities, this is certainly correct; but from that perspective, the matter must be explored in much greater depth. The scholar of the humanities therefore says first of all: If you look at what historical impulses actually are, they are not present at all when you direct your ordinary intellect—which deals with external facts—toward them; in that case, the historical facts are not present at all. Historical facts are only present when one directs the imaginative and inspired consciousness toward supersensible impulses that do not lie within the external facts at all.

[ 41 ] What spiritual science brings to the surface of human thought has not, however, been drawn entirely out of thin air in modern times. Rather, those who have wrestled with problems of knowledge—who have gone through inner crises of understanding—have already, even if only as isolated flashes of insight, occasionally had to turn their attention to precisely what spiritual science now presents in a systematic order. And here I could again cite many examples of how, in a sense through divine inspiration, one or another person—someone who was struggling for knowledge—arrived at various insights that are now brought to clarity through spiritual science. Here is one such example, which I have also cited in my book that will be published shortly: On the Mysteries of the Soul.

[ 42 ] In the psychology lectures he delivered in 1869, the psychologist Fortlage included a very curious passage on human consciousness and its connection to the phenomenon of death. He says: “When we call ourselves living beings—and thus ascribe to ourselves a characteristic that we share with animals and plants—we necessarily understand the living state to be something that never leaves us and that persists within us at all times, both in sleep and in wakefulness. This is the vegetative life of our organism’s nourishment, an unconscious life, a life of sleep. The brain constitutes an exception here in that this life of nourishment, this life of sleep, is superseded in it—during the intervals of wakefulness—by the life of consumption. During these intervals, the brain is subjected to predominant consumption and consequently enters a state which, were it to extend to the other organs, would bring about the absolute exhaustion of the body or death.”

[ 43 ] This is a magnificent ray of hope, for Fortlage is saying nothing less than this: If the processes that affect the human brain were to take hold of the rest of the body while one is fully awake, they would destroy it; so in truth we are dealing with processes of decay in human beings when we are dealing with the conditions of ordinary consciousness. It was a profound insight on Fortlage’s part when he continued: “Consciousness is a small and partial death; death is a great and total consciousness, an awakening of the entire being in its innermost depths.”

[ 44 ] This connection between death and consciousness is brought out here in a prescient and magnificent way. Fortlage knows: if one breaks down what happens when death overtakes us—as it were—into “atoms,” now into “atoms of time,” then these “atoms” constitute the continuous events of our waking consciousness. As we unfold our waking consciousness, we undergo an atomistic dying, and death is, so to speak, taken to a grand scale, simply what we experience in every moment of waking consciousness as it passes through our brain; so that death, even for Fortlage, is nothing other than the sudden awakening of consciousness to the spiritual world, whereas continuous consciousness continually kills us off on a small scale, as we need it for ordinary waking consciousness. So when we stand before a human being, we can say—and what Fortlage intuited has been fully confirmed by spiritual science—that what lives in this person as the soul-spiritual is actually a consuming, destructive force; and that which lives within them as vegetative life merely delays this destruction until death occurs. When death occurs, what takes place on a grand scale is simply what develops slowly—I would say atomistically—during conscious life. We carry death within us constantly, except that alongside death we also carry within us the life that fights against it, and this fighting life is precisely permeated by the soul.

[ 45 ] This is the case when we consider the individual living human being who stands before us with his body—a body that, as we will discuss in more detail in the third lecture, is a result of the life of the soul. There we have death, which—as long as the life forces are active—is continually prevented from entering; death, I might say, lurks behind appearances and is, in fact, an essential aspect of life, because the appearance of life would be mere plant life if death did not continually put an end to this life, thereby bringing about consciousness precisely through the physical body.

[ 46 ] Only when one comes to understand this peculiar relationship between death and human physical life does the observing consciousness become enlightened enough to form a judgment indeed, a sense of what is actually present in the course of historical events—those events that ordinary historical narratives present, which occur externally and can be recounted in the way history is usually told.

[ 47 ] What lies at the heart of these external events, of these successive facts? Once again, something extraordinarily paradoxical must be said: The external historical facts do not relate to their spiritual content—which is merely dreamed of by human beings in the course of historical development—like a body that carries death within it, but rather like a body that is already dead, from which the soul has already departed. That is to say, the soul is never present within the “historical facts”! Whereas in human life death occurs when bodily life has run its course—that is, after the soul has passed through bodily life and the body is then left alone, without the soul— the entire organism of historical facts is merely a dead body, an outer, dead body in contrast to that which surges and lives inwardly as historical impulses from age to age—and which can only be grasped when one directs one’s gaze not toward the outer facts, but toward that which lives, which lives in such a way that it cannot arise from the outer facts.

[ 48 ] I would like to clarify this further by drawing an analogy. Let us suppose that someone believes—and many people do believe this—that all one needs to do is grasp the facts of history as clearly as one grasps scientific facts; then, one should truly be able to construct a science of history from the sequence of these historical interpretations. Anyone who believes this would be believing the same thing—truly, as paradoxical as it may sound—as someone who holds the view that, if he were faced with a dead, deceased human body, he would somehow be able to extract the spiritual life from it. It is not there! Just as little is what constitutes the soul of history contained within the historical facts. We perceive historical facts with the intellect that is bound to external perception and develops from what is bound to external perception; but with this intellect we see only what is dead in the historical process. With ordinary consciousness, a person can penetrate the historical process only as a dreamer; he can only penetrate this historical becoming—which is actually the spiritual life within history—with imaginative, inspired consciousness. That is why, of what exists as historical fact, only narratives and enumerations can ever be provided; and why it is truly true what the great Jacob Burckhardt said: Philosophy is non-history, for philosophy places one individual fact beneath another, and history is non-philosophy—Jacob Burckhardt used this term—because it deals only with the coordination, with the juxtaposition of facts.

[ 49 ] This, however, gives rise to a very specific approach to historical thinking, one that is based on what has just been discussed: if one truly wishes to think historically, one must—through intuitive, spiritual-scientific consciousness—clearly arrive at what cannot be experienced at all in the ordinary course of history, what is contained within the process of becoming but does not manifest itself in external facts, just as the soul does not manifest itself in a dead human body.

[ 50 ] The question arises: Is it really possible to perceive, through imaginative and inspired insight, that which actually animates historical development? Well, having already spoken of so many paradoxes, I do not wish to hold back from drawing attention to some concrete aspects as well—such as this perception, which I characterized the day before yesterday—and even more precisely in my books—how this contemplative, this imaginative, this intuitive, inspired consciousness arrives at a certain insight into human development, to which, however, external facts relate only as the dead human body relates to the soul. I want to speak as concretely as possible, since I am, after all, citing an example.

[ 51 ] Anyone who attempts to penetrate into that of which ordinary consciousness merely dreams will find it necessary, first and foremost, to delineate the course of historical development, so that at certain points they find the most fundamental—I might say, pivotal—points of historical life, just as we find specific sections within the individual human organism. Around the age of seven, a child gets new teeth; around the age of fourteen, it reaches sexual maturity. We observe such turning points in the life of the individual human being when we consider it from a physiological perspective. For spiritual science, these milestones signify much more than they do for ordinary physiological science, which, after all, does not complete its observations. The spiritual-scientific examination of historical development arrives at similar insights. And there it becomes apparent—now quite apart from external facts, solely by observing what takes place spiritually—that a period is delineated in European, and indeed in the historical development of humanity, which begins approximately in the 8th century B.C. and ends in the 135th century A.D. What is enclosed between these two points in time constitutes, in a certain sense, a whole akin to the life of a child from the age of seven—when it gets its second set of teeth—until sexual maturity. Just as one can form a whole in such a way that a turning point occurs which has a more significant impact on the human organism than the events in between, so one must say that such turning points occurred in the 8th century B.C. and around the 15th century A.D., after the Christian era had begun. This era appears, with its distinctive character and particular characteristics regarding the spiritual reality underlying historical facts, to spiritual-historical observation as a whole, as a coherent entity.

[ 52 ] Of course, I can only mention a few specific points. By characterizing such things from a humanities perspective, one can delve into all sorts of details; one can arrive at such concrete details just as one arrives at concrete details of perception when studying the classification of plants in botany and the like. I’d just like to mention a few general points.

[ 53 ] In that age, human beings as a whole lived in such a way—but to recognize this, one must look at them from within, from the perspective of the soul, setting aside the facts—that their intellect functioned in a far more instinctive manner than it does in our age. Whatever human beings did through their intellect, through their consciousness, was at the same time even more intimately an act of the body; it was even more closely linked to the body. The intellect was still more instinctive. If you study the individual observations in my books, you will come to see that human soul experience is divided—if I may use the scholarly term from spiritual science—into the life of the “sensitive soul,” the most dulled soul, one that still lives almost in the unconscious; the “intellectual or emotional soul,” which, however, still functions in such a way that what lives within it does not develop fully consciously but retains an instinctive character; and finally the “conscious soul,” which experiences the “I” in full self-consciousness, emancipating the “I” from bodily life, where the intellect no longer acts instinctively but confronts things in a detached, critical manner. Of these soul components—if one may call them that—it was the intellectual or emotional soul that was active in the human beings of this era, which I have characterized within its boundaries—that is, in the human beings of the Greek period and, in particular, in those of the Roman era. It was this soul that was at work. And whatever ebbed and flowed in human soul life—leading to social, historical, scientific, and artistic forms, as well as to religious ways of life—all of this took the form it did precisely because the soul possessed this distinctive characteristic: that the intellect still functioned instinctively.

[ 54 ] What I am presenting here in general principles can, however, be traced down to concrete details. One can describe, almost inwardly and spiritually, how the difference must have arisen: how, in Greece, the instinctive life of the intellect developed more toward the physical side; how the Greeks thereby conceived of the body as animated by the soul; how they also placed themselves within social life as a human body animated by the soul; and how one then moves on to the Roman era, where the impulse toward the Roman bourgeoisie arose from this particular constitution of the soul, and so on. Then, when one experiences this inwardly through the imagination, one perceives that significant turning point that clearly occurred in the 15th century. Of course, things happen in such a way that they develop gradually. The impulses emerge only little by little. But the turning point is precisely marked in the 15th century. There, a kind of revolution in human nature truly takes place. Only those who view things in this way realize this; the others always believe that everything proceeds gradually, whereas in fact great leaps forward occur in the course of historical development. There, the intellect is positioned in a completely different way within human nature. It emancipates itself; it becomes more integrated into self-consciousness. When thinking becomes more materialistic and sensual, it is only because the intellect is no longer connected to the subconscious. Human beings strive for such political contexts, for such structures of communal life, for such relations among states, and such a realization of the remaining cultural conditions as arise from this peculiar detachment of rational life from instinctive life—a detachment of which ordinary human consciousness is not aware but only dreams—and from the intellect’s becoming independent of instinctive life.

[ 55 ] I will mention only a few general points. And so, in the study of the humanities, one can go back beyond the 8th century B.C. One then arrives at another period that extends back to the 3rd millennium BCE, in which one again finds distinctive, characteristic features, and details can be uncovered.

[ 56 ] Thus, one gradually discovers, behind the facts, something that can be observed only in the imagination, only in inspired, contemplative consciousness. And then, once one has grasped this—which no facts as such can provide, and which is otherwise merely dreamed of by human beings in their observations of facts and in the intellect associated with the observation of external facts—one has the process of becoming in history. For this process of becoming lives in the dream-consciousness of humanity and is illuminated only by imaginative and inspired consciousness. Only when one has grasped this do the facts receive their proper illumination.

[ 57 ] Just as, when we stand before a dead body, we must say of that dead body: it had its significance when the soul was still within it—just as the soul, so to speak, casts its light upon the dead body—so it is that we alone, by grasping the spiritual with our perceiving consciousness, live in the light that now illuminates the facts. The individual fact is explained when we illuminate it from what we gain in this way.

[ 58 ] Thus, history as a science cannot emerge without a perceptive consciousness. Anyone who believes that history can arise without a contemplative consciousness is like a person who shines a light on an object, then uses some kind of rotating mechanism to direct the light onto a second object, then uses the rotating mechanism again to direct the light onto a third object, and then says: “The second object is illuminated; that is the result of the first object’s illumination. The third object is illuminated; that is the result of the second object’s illumination.” — That is not true! Each object is illuminated by the light itself.

[ 59 ] Such is the historical fact. Anyone who attempts to explain the facts by—as Jacob Burckhardt quite rightly says—coordinating them and placing them side by side is like someone who derives the light on his second object from the light on the first, whereas he ought to derive it from the common light that falls first on the first object, then on the second, and then on the third. That which explains the historical fact lies in the spiritual world, and we must illuminate the facts from within the spiritual world; otherwise, they remain lifeless, just as objects do not shine if we do not illuminate them with the light they share.

[ 60 ] What is called for is indeed a radical shift in the way we view history, but this is hardly surprising. History emerged precisely in an age that, in the realm of the natural sciences, rightly rejected everything that belonged solely to the subjective. And at first, people applied the methods of the natural sciences to this—one might say—ill-timed emergence of history—though “ill-timed” is, of course, not quite the right word—while history itself can flourish only when the natural sciences are complemented by the humanities.

[ 61 ] But then, of course, one will no longer search for abstract ideas in history in an ethical manner or in the way that many others have done. Ideas cannot bring about anything; ideas are something entirely passive. One will search for the truly real spiritual entities and forces that lie behind historical development and that can be explored only through imaginative consciousness.

[ 62 ] Now this is very curious: for once one has this guiding principle, light is indeed shed on what can be intuited in the sequence of facts—something that, however, cannot lead to explanations for those who merely consider the facts side by side. Historical development becomes a science—as if struck by lightning from above—when spiritual science makes its impact. It will increasingly be recounted in an unscientific manner if spiritual science cannot make its impact.

[ 63 ] It is interesting: Jacob Burckhardt points out that roughly during the era in which the humanities must place the beginning of the period I have spoken of today—though, of course, just as sexual maturity, for example, also extends over several years, these dates do not coincide exactly—he notes that in the period from the 6th to the 7th centuries B.C., a common phenomenon can be observed spreading from China through the Near East all the way to Europe, namely, a general religious movement. External history records the facts: Because such a transformation took place, these events occurred! The light falls upon them. And regarding what happens after the 15th century, Jacob Burckhardt again points—most curiously—to the religious movement associated with the name of Luther. Once again, such a upheaval occurs, one that is noticeable in Europe, but also at the same time in India. How that which is perceived in the spiritual realm creates a reflection in external events, how it illuminates those events—this is revealed through spiritual science. History is transformed from a mere enumeration of facts into a true science.

[ 64 ] It must be said: in this area, too, many people’s longing for what is right has gone astray. Herman Grimm, who attempted to spiritualize history but did not progress to the point where imaginative consciousness looks into the spiritual world, tried by every means to find something—as historical impulses—that takes place behind the ordinary facts. In doing so, as if groping in the dark, he arrived at a curious division that he repeatedly mentioned in his lectures. He said he had to divide the course of history up to that point into a first millennium—roughly beginning at the point in time I have indicated for the epoch I just described—then into a second millennium and a third millennium. Herman Grimm is, in fact, groping in the dark. He summarizes as the “first two millennia” what I have identified as the Greek-Latin period—which, after all, spans from the 8th century B.C. to the 15th century A.D. And the present age, in which we are living, which will continue for many centuries to come and is an equally coherent whole that can be perceived imaginatively, with facts emerging from within it—Herman Grimm regards this age as the “third millennium.” And he attempts—at least, I would say—to have a surrogate for what is spiritually perceived, in that he seeks to understand history as the “work of the imagination of the peoples.” Because he cannot grasp spiritual reality—that which acts within historical development—he interprets what lies behind external appearances as the “work of the imagination.” In doing so, he turns it into an illusion, but he reminds us that, in fact, the real historical impulses are merely dreamt through by people of ordinary consciousness.

[ 65 ] Therefore, of all that can be grasped externally by the intellect regarding historical development, only the lifeless can truly be grasped. And again, it is interesting that it is precisely historians who work so thoroughly with reason—those who, I would say, still apply this reason instinctively, who do not, like Herbert Spencer, apply it by introducing all sorts of artificial scientific concepts, but rather, like the historian Gibbon, those who, while applying the same reason used in the natural sciences, but still apply it instinctively—that they come to—which was a strange enigma to Herman Grimm—particularly well observe and describe the periods of decline in human historical development, where there is little of the spiritual. Thus, Gibbon describes a period—one in which there is in fact much that is spiritual, becoming spiritual, and growing in spirituality—namely, the period from the beginning of Christianity through Roman development—as what he calls “decline,” or decay. Because he directs his intellect toward outward phenomena, he describes this entire process of becoming in the early Christian centuries as a decline. This is quite natural, because when the intellect operates as it must in relation to nature, it can see only decay in the course of outward phenomena. Gibbon cannot see what is taking place during the time when one thing is decaying and another is growing and flourishing—what is finding its way into history through Christian impulses. But how this works is not immediately apparent from the external facts; it becomes evident only when illuminated by the light that comes through spiritual science.

[ 66 ] Another point is also interesting, for example. It is truly only through the emerging science of the humanities that it becomes possible to make history a science. But of course, what has been gained through the science of the humanities has always come to light in flashes of insight for enlightened minds possessing the capacity for discernment. And one phenomenon is particularly interesting: In his historical-sociological lectures, which he delivered at the University of Basel in the 1860s, Jacob Burckhardt repeatedly draws attention to a historian and historical philosopher of the first half of the 19th century who—even though Burckhardt often polemicized against him—must have made a strong impression on him. This is evident from the entirety of Jacob Burckhardt’s line of thought. This is the philosopher Ernst von Lasaulx. He has remained largely unknown. Lasaulx wrote a remarkable book—precisely the one to which Burckhardt repeatedly refers in his lectures: A New Attempt at an Ancient Philosophy of History Based on the Truth of Facts. Now, certainly, Lasaulx—who was endowed with a certain intuitive insight into what people otherwise merely dream about as historical impulses—Lasaulx, of course, looked in the age of natural science at what I would like to call the interpretation of facts. And because he applied a mind trained in the natural sciences, he focused primarily on the “decline” of the 19th century, on that which was in decline. Of course, there are also things on the rise in the nineteenth century. But these can only be perceived with an inspired and imaginative consciousness. That such a thing exists—it only emerges, as if in a premonition, at the very end of Lasaulx’s book. But what he sets forth in this book—oh, it is immeasurably—forgive the strange expression—“immeasurably interesting!” He traces European history from its beginnings right into the 19th century. Everywhere, because of the particular focus I just described—he had trained himself in the natural sciences—he describes what is decaying, what is in decline, the forces that are actually leading toward death. Now there are chapters in this book—when one reads them, they are exactly like a description of trends of decline that someone prophetically made in the 1850s regarding the forces that were bound to lead to the mutual devouring of the European nations of the present. One might say that nowhere else is there a more poignant, more magnificent foreshadowing—because the mind is focused on what is in decline—of that which has now emerged as the very result of that decline.

[ 67 ] This is such direct evidence that, when one moves—as it were—from contemplating or envisioning the true historical impulses to considering only the specific external facts, it is as if one were to fall asleep from a state of waking consciousness and no longer see what pulses through history as that which is growing and flourishing—that which truly propels humanity forward. Through the recognition of this growth and flourishing, however, history is also elevated above all mere natural causality. By viewing it from the perspective of spiritual science, history is elevated to the status of a science, so that one could say: What Lessing intuited in his Education of the Human Race—what he expressed, forgive the expression, clumsily, inaccurately, and even illusorily—is only now placed on a secure foundation; whereas the external facts reveal no such connection. That in which the human soul lives—lives in a dreamlike state—becomes a continuous organic-spiritual life; but I mean a spiritual life when it is viewed from the perspective of spiritual science as the content of history.

[ 68 ] And then, of course, one also realizes how the ordinary observer is misled by viewing this historical development as if it were an organism. Because one views it as an organism, one often ends up comparing it to the development of an individual human life. In my youth, I myself had a teacher who very much liked to compare the individual, successive historical periods with the life of a single human being: Persian history and Chaldean history with the life of a young man; the later years of youth with Greek life; and the awakening of manhood with Roman life. And so the unfolding of history is often presented by analogy with the human being. This is the source of a powerful historical illusion. For even if, in the way I have indicated, we come to view the development of the human soul within the course of historical becoming in all of humanity, we can never—precisely when we immerse ourselves in the spiritual reality of historical becoming—perceive it in the same way we perceive the development of the human soul from childhood through youth or maidenhood, on through manhood and womanhood, and so on into old age. This spiritual life lying behind historical facts does not develop in this way, but rather in a different way. This, in turn, gives rise to a paradox. When presented in this way, it does indeed appear paradoxical, even though it is deeply grounded in the genuine spiritual-scientific perspective to which I refer in these lectures.

[ 69 ] One can indeed compare what lives and can be observed within such a period—which presents itself as a whole—to the stages of human life. But strangely enough—as peculiar as it may sound—one must not compare the course of historical development to the development of a human being from infant through child and adolescent to adult, but rather the reverse. One must conceive of historical life as proceeding in reverse! If, for example, one compares the overall spiritual disposition of the period from the 8th century B.C. to the 1st century A.D. with a segment of an individual’s life, one can compare it to the thirties of a person’s life. One could say: in a person’s thirties—albeit with a different constitution and a different attitude toward the human being—that which lives in the soul is bound to the body just as it was in this Greco-Roman period right up into the 1st century A.D. ; and what follows thereafter cannot be compared to what follows the thirties, but rather to what precedes them. Indeed, when compared to an individual human life, historical life is in decline!

[ 70 ] As the intellect emancipates itself in our age, it does indeed assume a relationship to physical life that can be compared to the relationship of the intellect to physical life in the late twenties of an individual’s life. A subsequent historical period relates to the earlier one in such a way that one may venture the comparison: Just as a child, who is still young, learns from an older person—who may have processed within themselves, even more instinctively, that which the child will later take in—we do, after all, always learn from those who themselves learned in childhood—so it is also in successive eras during the transition of consciousness from one era to another; and this course of history itself becomes a manifestation of consciousness, one that, however, unfolds in the “life of dreams.” We are not dealing, in Lessing’s sense, with an education of the human race that proceeds as follows: from childhood through youth and adulthood to old age; rather, we are dealing, on the contrary, with a regressive education of the human race. And it is precisely through this regressive education that what can be described as progress enters into the historical process. Because human beings, as souls, approach such things in later ages, as it were, with a greater sense of youthfulness than in earlier ages, they also develop a greater degree of freedom, a greater degree of unconsciousness and childlikeness toward their fellow human beings, through which everything that is usually called progress enters into the development of the world.

[ 71 ] In closing, I would like to draw attention to just one phenomenon among the many that could be cited today as evidence for what I have explained: this peculiar, significantly evolving relationship that arises as Christianity passes from the peoples of the Roman Empire—who first embraced it—to the young Germanic peoples. Here a peculiar phenomenon occurs. How can this be explained? It can only be explained by the fact that, in the overall course of historical development, Greco-Roman life—which was first seized by the great impulses of Christianity—was at a later stage of experience and therefore shaped Christianity in the way we find it expressed in Gnosticism and in other dogmatic formations. As Christianity then approaches a later stage of experience—that is, as it transitions from an earlier to a later stage—in full accordance with the phenomenon of consciousness in historical development that I have described—it takes on different forms; it becomes more inward; religious consciousness, as it were, emancipates itself from instinctive understanding; religion, as the Christian religion, becomes more independent; and later, religious and scientific consciousness separate completely.

[ 72 ] The entire process can be explained by viewing the matter as a phenomenon of consciousness, such that the consciousness of the Germanic peoples—rooted in a different spiritual constitution—adopts Christianity—I would say, like a child from an elder—from their Roman predecessors, not from just any ancestors, but from their Roman predecessors.

[ 73 ] All of this is, of course, merely a series of individual suggestions, and I am certainly just as aware as anyone who finds these individual suggestions highly questionable of just how many objections can be raised against them. But only those who are truly and seriously engaged with the development of spiritual science, and at the same time with all the enigmas and sphinx-like questions raised by the young science of history, will gradually come to understand what is meant by these ideas today. And a supplement for practical life, for external social life, for engagement in social life, for understanding the facts that touch us so deeply from this immediate life that they constitute our suffering and our joy—the events that now, in this tragic time, come so particularly close to our souls — the implications for such matters arising from this historical perspective will then come to light in the fourth lecture next Wednesday.

[ 74 ] I would like to conclude today’s discussion by pointing out how prophetically gifted individuals—individuals who, even though spiritual science did not yet exist in their time, instinctively possessed this spiritual-scientific way of thinking within themselves—how such individuals also instinctively hit the mark when they looked back on the history of humanity. I am thinking here of Goethe, who, though he had dealt with historical problems only sporadically—for example, in his Theory of Colors—nevertheless possessed a deep understanding of history. As he looked upon history with an intuitive sensibility, he did not yet formulate what presented itself to him in the way it has been formulated here today. But because humanity actually merely dreams through historical development with ordinary consciousness—that is, experiences it in the realms from which feelings, emotions, passions, and stirrings of the soul arise—Goethe, by intuiting what has been said today, was able to approach history in the right way. He knew that whatever concepts history may bring forth that resemble those of the natural sciences actually yield nothing fruitful for human life; for these concepts spring from the same region of the soul’s life in which waking consciousness dwells. This waking consciousness, however, exists only for natural existence; human beings experience historical events in the realms of the dream, from which passions, emotions, and stirrings of the soul arise. Therefore, before a person immerses themselves in imaginative, inspired consciousness—as long as they remain within the historical process with ordinary consciousness—their soul and their mind can be moved only by what emerges from the dream-consciousness as an experience of history. Human beings cannot be moved by abstract concepts or ideas that originate from the very same intellect that dwells upon the facts of nature. All of that remains fruitless. Only that which emerges from and acts within the very same realms from which it is drawn out of history becomes fruitful. That is the best thing about history. Because history is dreamed—Goethe does not conclude this, he senses it—what comes from history can also only take effect in the dream realm of enthusiasm and emotional stirrings. And Goethe says: The best thing history can give us is the enthusiasm it arouses. — With this, however, we have been given—in a meaningful way—not a formulation of historical science, but a vivid grasp, born of a poetic spirit, of that which must be elevated to insight through the science of the spirit. As long as we approach history with ordinary consciousness, we are not truly participating in it. To the extent that our enthusiasm is invested in it and we relate to its phenomena in the way that enthusiasm can, we participate in historical life itself.

[ 75 ] Just as we learn from nature, however, we can only learn from history if we view historical development with an imaginative, inspired consciousness. Extending these reflections to nature and to social life will be the task of the next lectures.

Question and Answer

[ 76 ] Question: What about the materialist conception of history—Marx, for example?

[ 77 ] Well, on such an occasion, I must point out that spiritual science—precisely on the basis of its spiritual-scientific foundations—takes, and must take, completely seriously what I said in the previous lecture regarding the position that the soul gradually assumes in relation to what are called concepts in their relationship to reality. I said: in ordinary consciousness, one is satisfied when one has a concept, so to speak, as a reflection of reality; in contemplative consciousness, one must always strive for a whole series of concepts that relate to one another like photographs taken from different angles. What is expressed in concepts can never represent reality in an exhaustive way in relation to the spiritual world, but only ever one aspect of reality. The same is true of the highest philosophical concepts: in ordinary consciousness, one is either a pantheist or a monadist, to mention just these two opposites. One perceives a divine essence that permeates and animates everything; one is a pantheist; or, like the Leibnizians, one perceives individual real monads that, in their interaction, constitute the whole of the world.

[ 78 ] The scholar of the humanities can be neither a pantheist nor a monadist, because in pantheism he simply has a collection of concepts, and in monadism a collection of concepts, both of which illuminate reality from different angles, so that, if I may venture a comparison, I would like to say: whoever is a pantheist sees only the exhalation; whoever is a monadist sees only the inhalation. Just as the process of life cannot be sustained by inhalation alone or by exhalation alone, but only by both inhalation and exhalation, so spiritual reality can only be grasped by becoming alive in one’s conceptual life and knowing how to illuminate reality from both pantheistic and monadistic perspectives. If one is a mere monadist like Leibniz, this is as detrimental to the scholar of the humanities as suffocating from too much inhaled air. One suffocates. If one is a mere pantheist, this is as detrimental to the scholar of the humanities as trying to breathe in a vacuum. Thus, as a scholar of the humanities, one develops a living relationship with conceptual life. One must conceive of this living relationship as vividly as possible. For when this living relationship to conceptual life is established, one lives—in a real, concrete way—within the mutual struggle and harmonization of concepts that are immersed in spiritual reality; whereas with ordinary consciousness, one lives in one’s concepts in an abstract manner. Even the simplest concepts are thereby transformed in their relationship to reality.

[ 79 ] Let me give an example. Today, students learn in school that bodies are impenetrable. And this is given as a definition: impenetrability consists in the fact that in the space occupied by one body, another cannot exist. — A scholar of the humanities cannot phrase the statement that way. A scholar of the humanities can never start from a conceptual definition, but only from a conceptual characterization. In this case, he says: That which behaves in such a way that it fills a space so that no other entity can be present within that space is a material body. — That is to say, he turns the matter on its head; he proceeds from the premise of applying his concept only within the limits in which it is to be applied, because he has a living grasp of it. He does not treat concepts as absolute. This becomes evident in the simplest of thought processes when one truly takes the leap I would like to call: the leap across the threshold of the spiritual world. One really must take this very seriously. People today still like to talk in abstract terms when the spiritual world is mentioned. But one’s entire soul constitution, one’s entire way of thinking, changes when one enters into reality. The concepts are experienced in such a way that one lives through their reality. You see: for a person who thinks abstractly, a rose placed in a vase of water in a room is, of course, a reality. But that is not reality at all. For in real life, a rose cannot exist without being on the rosebush and arising in its entire context with the rosebush. The scholar of the spiritual sciences is therefore always aware that, wherever something belongs together with something else, he must think of it in context. He knows: the concept of a rose as a cut rose is an unreal concept.

[ 80 ] If you extend this to the entire process of formation, to the entire structure of thought, you will gain an understanding of the profound transformation that occurs once the threshold to the spiritual world has been crossed. That is when you truly grasp reality. There one gains an inner, experiential understanding of the scope of concepts. For when one operates in the realm of the abstract—as the natural sciences must—one does not even realize how one arrives at unreal concepts. On such an occasion, I like to recall a lecture that Professor Dewar gave in London at the beginning of the century—a very insightful lecture from the standpoint of scientific thinking. From the standpoint of this scientific, physical way of thinking, Professor Dewar constructs a final state of Earth’s existence that the Earth will have reached once so many millions of years have passed, the temperature has gradually changed, and so on. If one examines certain facts as they stand today, one can quite easily—by drawing the necessary conclusions—arrive at such a depiction of a final state. Professor Dewar describes very wittily how certain substances that do not glow today will glow then; if the walls are coated with certain substances, the walls will glow so brightly that one will be able to read newspapers by their light. — Admittedly, it will be so cold that one won’t know who will print the newspapers. That’s where the problem lies in reality. But Dewar uses this image. What breaks today if you hang even a small weight on it will have such strong cohesion that loads of a hundred kilograms can be hung from it, and so on. The whole concept is very well thought out, and if one explores it, one can construct a final state of the Earth and represent everything with physical precision. The lecture naturally made a great impression because a physicist, deeply familiar with physical concepts, painted a vivid—I would almost say tangibly vivid—picture of the Earth’s final state.

[ 81 ] The humanities scholar experiences something in such a description; for he is immediately led to concepts viewed in a different light. For what Professor Dewar is doing here—by describing this final state of the Earth that will occur after millions of years—is derived in the same way as if you were to take into account the successive states of a person’s stomach and heart at the age of thirteen, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth years—as they change so slowly—and then consistently infer what the whole system—the heart, the stomach, and so on—will look like after two or three hundred years. All of this may be quite correct, considered in the scientific sense, considered abstractly. But by then, the person will have long since died, and the stomach will no longer be there! When this sense of reality is set alongside the other, very spiritual perspective, one lives in living concepts and can come to realize that what Professor Dewar describes as the final state of the Earth in a few million years is indeed quite correct—except that by then the Earth will have died and will no longer exist. But it is exactly the same when one counts backward—thirteen, twelve, eleven years, and so on—to see how things were 150 years ago. Humanity had not yet come into existence! This is precisely what the Kant-Laplace theory does: it constructs the initial state—based on physical data—in a very refined and ingenious way as a nebular state and so on, from which everything emerges—only that, at the very moment one must set this as the starting point, none of that existed yet!

[ 82 ] This is the transition from abstract thinking to real thinking. And having characterized this in general terms, I may now say that something like the materialist conception of history, with its concepts, has emerged with a certain inevitability—namely, that what happens historically is actually based solely on class struggles, on the assertion of material interests. The concept of materialism in the materialist conception of history does not, of course, have the same meaning as the concept of materialism in the natural sciences. It arose through the formation of certain entirely plausible concepts. But one must maintain the following perspective: How much of historical development can be encompassed by these concepts? One is, in fact, encompassing a trend—a trend that did not even emerge until the 16th century!

[ 83 ] People today do not blindly believe in authority—of course not! For people have outgrown that blind belief in authority! But, yes—“science” is, at the very least, a powerful authority. And if one swears by a certain number of dogmas, then everything else is folly, nonsense, and wretchedness. Years ago, for many years, I gave lectures in workers’ circles—many lectures, including historical ones—in which I tried to characterize history as it presents itself to undogmatic thinking. But after I had gained a fairly loyal audience that kept growing—I can say this without vanity— certain Social Democratic leaders took notice of the fact that orthodox Marxism and the orthodox materialist conception of history were not being taught there, that the strange view was even being held that the concepts encompassed by the materialist conception of history only became applicable starting in the 16th century, that their application was not even possible before that, that they gain applicability precisely from the depths of history, because, as I have shown, reason emancipates itself there; because it is only there that human beings begin to emancipate themselves from a certain instinctive way of life, and so on; and because material interests provide the counterargument for this, so that one arrives at the materialist conception of history—even if only as one of its historical ingredients—and can at least shed light on this or that phenomenon from its perspective. But if one takes this materialist conception of history as the sole foundation, one does not thereby obtain history; one simply omits the other elements present in other impulses; thus, one must also regard the concepts that Marxism has introduced as something that is, in turn, an aspect—one that provides a photograph of reality from a certain angle—which must be supplemented by aspects from other angles. And these Social Democratic leaders then put an end to these lectures! This is precisely what is distinctive about the science of the spirit: that it can do justice to the intrinsically valid impulses that arise in this or that spiritual realm, that it can recognize their relative validity, but also show how error immediately arises when one absolutizes a one-sided aspect and makes it a general explanatory principle. That is what matters.

[ 84 ] Life, of course, unfolds in such a way that people become fixated on a concept. People generally prefer to live in concepts rather than in reality, to live in abstractions rather than in reality. One is much more satisfied when one has a few concepts into which all sorts of things can be crammed. But reality isn’t like that. Just as—I have to keep using this comparison—you only get a tree when you photograph it from one angle to capture one aspect, and from another angle to capture another aspect, so it is with reality as a whole when it wants to be grasped as reality.

[ 85 ] It must be said that, since material interests have played such a powerful role in historical development over the course of the last three to four centuries, it is only natural that a materialist conception of history should have emerged—a view that the external course of history can be grasped using the crudest concepts, suitable only for natural existence. But in doing so, one grasps only the dead, only the lifeless. I will return to such matters in the fourth lecture, where I will delve more deeply into ethical and social life. And the unreality of this approach would become immediately apparent if reality were indeed described solely in such terms. One would then see how this reality would be stifled by such concepts, were they to take root; whereas, if viewed as a mere aspect, they can become fruitful.

[ 86 ] That is what I would like to say in response to this question. Of course, I could go on talking about this for hours.

[ 87 ] Dr. Steiner is asked to shed light once again on the process underlying memory, which he described in his first lecture.

[ 88 ] Well, since I will be addressing such matters again in my next lecture anyway, I will be able to keep my answer to this question somewhat brief. We only have a few minutes left. Above all, I would like to say that it is a misconception to believe that what I have as a present representation—which I derive from a perception—let’s say, for example, that I look at an object and simultaneously represent it in my mind—remains intact. What I gain there, what I still experience as an aftereffect when I take my eyes off the object, is merely a reflection; it is not something that can reappear; it is something that is there and then truly passes away, just as the reflection has passed away when I walk past the mirror and step out of its field of view. So it is a mistaken notion to imagine a reservoir of the soul into which ideas might enter, only to be retrieved from this reservoir later. Ideas do not linger; ideas do not remain! Rather, while I am forming an idea, a subconscious process is taking place at the same time—one that can, however, be observed imaginatively—that is, a process that is subconscious to ordinary consciousness; and this subconscious process brings about within the organism that which is then repeated through new stimuli when the memory is recalled. When I form a representation of an object by the object acting upon my senses, then the representation arises; when I have a representation that I gain as a memory representation, it is exactly the same, except that it is not the external material object that makes an impression on me, and I form the representation on the basis of the external object, but rather I look, as it were, into my inner self, at what has been unconsciously absorbed, and form the representation accordingly. If I want to express this schematically: I now form a representation of “ten”; after some time, the representation of “ten” reappears; but it is not true that the representation of “ten” is the same one—that it has passed and is then there again. What remains is an unconscious engram—this unconscious engram, which formed as a parallel process while I had the mental image, remains; and I perceive it when I form the mental image again. So when “ten” appears, it appears as the result of an external stimulus; when “ten” reappears, it appears as the result of an internal stimulus, and I perceive from within what I remember. This is the process that can be observed very clearly from a spiritual-scientific perspective, that can be put to good use in education, and that can also be observed by an attentive educator, provided he has directed his capacity for attention in an appropriate manner.

[ 89 ] Just think for a moment about how things are memorized. Observe this closely. There you can see it firsthand: all the things people do to ensure that the parallel process takes place! The mental image is absorbed, but the goal is to let the parallel process unfold in such a way that it is, so to speak, crammed into something that remains in the subconscious. You can observe this during the cramming process: the mental images do not simply lead to memory, but rather a process that must arise as a supporting process for mere imagination and truly lies in the subconscious. And this work in the subconscious—just look at what all is called upon when someone memorizes a poem!—the humanities scholar observes it directly. And with the insight gained, one sees. Some people who are cramming even resort to all sorts of aids—tapping their foreheads and so on—which has absolutely nothing to do with the experience of the mental image! If you examine the process more closely, you will see that this touches on an important boundary area between psychology and physiology. Next time, we will also see how a physiology grounded in the spiritual sciences can arrive at certain insights here.

[ 90 ] Thus, I would like to define it in accordance with this approach: Representation arises initially—as primary representation—under the influence of external perception, stimulated by the external object; or as memory, stimulated from within; so that in one case I “read” outward, so to speak, and in the other case I “read” inward. If I read a book twice in a row, the knowledge is acquired from the same book, but these are successive acquisitions.

[ 91 ] So that is what might serve as a defining characteristic. I will elaborate on this further when I discuss human beings as natural beings in the third lecture.

[ 92 ] Question: Won't the higher states of consciousness differ from person to person?

[ 93 ] As I said last time, it is quite obvious that one might arrive at this view: that one person, in developing these states of consciousness, arrives at different forms than another; but this must by no means deter us from pursuing what I have called the “drama of knowledge”; for individualism is merely an intermediate stage. One does indeed go through a strong individualistic period, but one is aware of it, so that one overcomes it. Then one enters into the objective inner realm. And it is only because one looks at things imprecisely that one comes to believe: one person asserts this, another that. That is not the case. The differences are no greater than, ultimately, the differences that exist when two travelers describe one and the same region: one directs his gaze to this, the other to that; the descriptions do not resemble one another at all; yet they describe the same region; and it would be nonsense to believe that one would therefore not be led to objectivity through their descriptions, or that they themselves had not faced objectivity. That is why I have said: Certainly, it is natural to think of the individualistic expression of the experience of higher states of consciousness; but that is merely an intermediate stage. In truth, just as one overcomes the subjective in the contemplation of nature and moves beyond objective nature, so too does one arrive at the objective spirit when one is able to set aside the subjective in the imagination. And if you read in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? and in An Outline of Esoteric Science how this subjective element is eliminated as one ascends into the other states of consciousness, you will see that one arrives inwardly at an objective spiritual realm just as one arrives outwardly at an objective natural realm. The subjective is truly eliminated externally in the natural sciences, and the subjective is eliminated in the direction of the spiritual in the spiritual sciences.