The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. The Role of Anthroposophy in Relation to Science and Life

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Anthroposophy—of which, of course, I will be able to paint only a rough and inadequate picture in the context of a short lecture this evening—does not seek merely to discuss questions of worldview based on theoretical considerations or emotional impulses; rather, this Anthroposophy aims to permeate the most diverse branches of scientific and other aspects of life in a fruitful way. Anthroposophy is not merely a topic of discussion today; we already have a School of Spiritual Science in Dornach near Basel, where last fall and this spring a number of experts from a wide variety of scientific fields delivered lectures and lecture series. A therapeutic institute is being established in Stuttgart to gradually introduce into practice what aspects of anthroposophical spiritual science can enrich medicine. And I could cite many more examples of this kind that would show how anthroposophy does not stem from some kind of sectarian mindset or emotional whim, but rather seeks to establish itself as a fact of life. Because it is grounded in such principles, it feels, at every step, thoroughly imbued with the obligation to justify itself before the strictest demands that have gradually emerged in the scientific life of humanity. And it can certainly be said that anthroposophy seeks to pick up precisely where the most diverse branches of science are currently showing that they demand a continuation based on their own internal structure. I would like to address specific points right away.

[ 2 ] The great triumphs of modern science—which, as I have mentioned time and again, are fully recognized and appreciated by anthroposophy—these great triumphs of modern science are, in recent times, partly due to the fact that people have understood how to transform the mere observation of the external sensory world into systematic scientific experimentation. And it is not only through experimentation—through the methodology of the experiment and the experimental setup—that the results of modern science emerge; rather, it is in the experimental setup and the conduct of the experiment that what I would like to call the modern scientific mindset emerges at the same time—that which one must possess if one wishes to have any say in modern scientific life.

[ 3 ] Anthroposophy now seeks to fully meet the standards that modern research has gradually come to expect of this scientific mindset—standards that it aims to fulfill in a field other than that of established natural science.

[ 4 ] On what, then, does the certainty we gain from experimenting with the external world actually rest? It is based on the fact that we are able to devise the conditions of the experiment—based on our considerations and our insights—in such a way that we are able to have a clear overview of what now emerges as a series of facts from these conditions that we ourselves have established. What follows from this particular characteristic of the experiment has now found its full expression in the modern scientific worldview, in that—within a broad scope—a body of knowledge regarding certain conditions, namely the inorganic conditions of the external world, has indeed been attained; a body of knowledge that is by no means yet complete, but is, to a certain degree, satisfactory. The special esteem accorded to experimentation has, however, given rise to what might be called scientific materialism. Yet this scientific materialism is, in a certain sense, justified. For, insofar as one sets out to methodically understand the laws governing the course of material phenomena, the aim is truly to recognize what we encounter in material existence as objectively material, as factual, and to understand it in terms of its inherent laws as well. Indeed, great and tremendous progress has been made in this way.

[ 5 ] But we are confronted with another fact in recent scientific life—a fact that, incidentally, is not an isolated one, but which I would like to highlight as particularly symptomatic: It was in the first half of the 19th century, in the era when precisely that way of thinking was emerging—the one I have just briefly characterized; it was in the era when people ceased to speak of a certain force that had always been assumed in the past and without which one believed one could not do. What was abandoned was what earlier natural philosophers or natural scientists had called the “vital force.” In the 19th century, this vital force was already understood to be something very nebulous. Compounds of chemical elements—and chemical processes in general—were thought to take place within the organism under the influence of this “vital force” in a way about which people had only rather vague notions. And to the same extent that modern experimental science emerged, to that same extent people found no further satisfaction in speculating about such a “vital force.” For gradually, all talk of such a life force had become nothing but speculation. Thus, around the middle of the 19th century, this talk of a special life force disappeared from scientific discourse—and, as becomes clear when one is able to grasp things from a historical-scientific perspective, this was entirely justified.

[ 6 ] But in more recent times, we are once again confronted with a different reality. The certainty gained through experimental science, and the knowledge of material relationships acquired through it—it is gradually becoming apparent that this is not enough. The material relationships, insofar as they can be traced into organic life and even into psychological life, cannot be understood with what can be gained from experimental science as it has been practiced thus far. And even more than that: One gradually gets the feeling that it is impossible, with the concepts and ideas—the summaries of phenomena as natural laws—that we have gained, to come close to what manifests itself, for example, in the living organism—much less in the animated organism. And so what has emerged is what is called neo-vitalism, which in turn appeals to something similar to the old concept of vital force that has been discarded.

[ 7 ] Anyone who takes an unbiased look at everything that is being attempted in this field of “extraction”—or, as it is also called, the “overcoming” of the science that flourished in the second half of the 19th century—will see it as a hybrid, as something incomplete, and as such precisely because an attempt is being made to apply the same kind of thinking that was developed for external experimental science to penetrate—more or less hypothetically—the living organism. And by observing without prejudice everything that manifests itself in this regard as a kind of hybrid, one must actually come to ask oneself: Yes, is the very same mode of thinking that has been developed for conventional experimental science truly suited to penetrating the laws and the essential nature of that which lives in the organic, the animate, and the spiritual? Is it sufficient to renew the concept of life force if one wishes to grasp the organic, the animate, and the spiritual with the same thoughts that one is accustomed to rightly applying to external, sensory nature?

[ 8 ] The fundamental conviction of those who have truly understood the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here is that this is not enough. They maintain that it is entirely justified to assume: The phenomena of life, precisely when studied through the strictest scientific methods of the 19th and 20th centuries, demand that we go beyond this science; but at the same time, they require a transformation of knowledge itself, a transformation of the entire state of mind, and a transformation of the human observer’s entire relationship to what is to be observed. Therefore, the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here does not proceed from the same kind of knowledge that must rightly be taken as a starting point in the external natural sciences, but rather seeks to grasp that which clearly lies beyond the realm of the natural sciences through other powers of cognition. And these other powers of cognition—which, for her, is an entirely empirical fact, a fact of experience—are not initially present in ordinary life or in ordinary scientific research; they lie, as it were, dormant in the soul and must first be drawn out of it. And until one recognizes that any speculative attempt to resurrect something like the ancient life force is of no use, until one recognizes that only the transition to a particular kind of knowledge will bring us forward—the development of a particular kind of knowledge that lies dormant in the soul in ordinary life and in ordinary science— — one will not advance from an understanding of the inorganic to an understanding of the organic, the animate, and the spiritual.

[ 9 ] How, then, should one conceive of the development of such powers that lie dormant within the soul? — What I am now going to characterize in a few words in terms of principle—the path to supersensible knowledge—is described in detail in my book How Does One Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? and in the second part of my Esoteric Science, as well as in some of my other books. Here I will emphasize only the fundamental principles of the matter.

[ 10 ] There are two things to strive for initially. In a sense, the life of the human soul must be developed systematically and with full consciousness toward two poles if such higher knowledge is to emerge in human beings. One aspect is best understood by considering what constitutes the human capacity for memory. We need this capacity for memory in our everyday lives, and we need it as the foundation of scientific life. When a person’s capacity for memory—that is, their memory itself—is impaired, they lose their normal psychological health. You need only familiarize yourselves with what the pathologist tells you about people whose ability to recall the events of their lives is somehow disrupted, so that they can no longer survey the life they have lived. What makes us, inwardly and psychologically, whole human beings is, in fact, the power of memory. But this power of memory is also, in a certain sense, what must now be transcended for higher knowledge. One must build upon what emerges in memory. In memory, our mental images become, so to speak, something enduring. Again and again, memories can surface—whether voluntarily or involuntarily—from the stream of our experiences; this is precisely what constitutes our inner life. Now, what appears there—the process of making concepts permanent—can be, through the method I have called the “meditative method of knowledge” in the aforementioned books—I mean this in the technical sense, not in that nebulous, mystical sense in which it is often understood today— reproduced in a certain way, so that one forms something out of the power of memory that is now something entirely different from ordinary memory. One must then imitate, out of full and free will, that which occurs in memory—namely, the way certain ideas slip into consciousness. One must set before oneself such easily comprehensible images—which must not be reminiscences, nor may they themselves be memories—which one can therefore either have recommended by another, or which one must compose in such a way that they are entirely comprehensible, so that nothing from the subconscious can rise up and interfere; and these images must then be made to last through an act of will. One must, so to speak, be able to rest one’s entire inner life upon such images. What matters is not the specific content of these images, but rather this act of the soul. What matters is bringing one’s entire inner life together in the act of looking—the inner act of looking—at such images. In this way, one acts upon this inner life in a manner similar to how one acts upon, for example, a muscle that performs work and thereby becomes strengthened. It is this strengthening of the inner life that matters. Therefore, what I have just described very briefly is, in practice, a very extensive exercise—something to which one must devote oneself for a long time and in a very orderly manner. This then develops powers that otherwise simply cannot be drawn from the life of the soul. Under the influence of the modern scientific mindset, we are actually increasingly inclined not to summon such ideas into the realm of our consciousness and dwell upon them, but rather we have come to allow these ideas to arise within us through life experience or observation, so that this soul force—which I have specifically pointed out and which must be strengthened—has actually been little practiced in the modern scientific and life outlook. But this soul force is what matters.

[ 11 ] Now I would like to make a brief aside here, so to speak: Anyone who hears that such soul forces—which otherwise lie dormant in the soul—are being developed will, due to certain underlying assumptions in contemporary thinking, be inclined to say lightly: “Well, yes, a certain pathology of the soul is being developed there; hallucinations or illusions or other unfounded mental contents are being created.” — And those people who have not seriously engaged with what is actually meant here have presented their misunderstandings to the world in the most inaccurate way [for example, through their assertions] that such exercises, as it were, provoke pathological states of consciousness. For if one is a true observer of the soul and understands how autosuggestion, illusions, and hallucinations arise—I would, of course, have to give many lectures to describe this in more detail—if one is familiar with these pathological phenomena—for they are all pathological— if one is familiar with these pathological phenomena of the soul’s life and the forces that lead to them, then one also knows that what is cultivated in the soul’s life through anthroposophy and anthroposophical methodology points precisely in the opposite direction. Everything that leads to illusion or suggestion points toward the pathogenic side. What is cultivated in the soul through anthroposophical methodology points in the opposite direction. All the health-promoting and healing forces in the life of the soul—and thereby in organic life—are summoned precisely through the exercises referred to here.

[ 12 ] What I have described here leads to a certain emergence of soul forces that grow stronger; this leads to the first stage of supersensory knowledge, which I call the imaginative stage. Not because one is dealing with “imaginations” in the sense in which the word is often used, but because through such exercises one gradually arrives at images without being compelled to do so by external sensory perceptions—images that are purely soul-based, which cannot be compared to hallucinations but can only be compared to mental images derived from memory. One gradually arrives at such images, but in the experience of the image one knows at the same time that this image does not, like a memory, refer to anything we have experienced in life between birth and death; rather, as one gradually masters this process of image-forming, these images arise from indeterminate depths of the soul. These images do not arise from pathological underlying causes—for then one would be subject to an inner compulsion—but rather in a completely free form; yet they arise in such a way that one knows: they point to a spiritual reality. This is the essential point: that one rises to the realization: Just as our memories point to the ordinary experiences we have gone through in a healthy, level-headed way, so do these imaginations, these images, point to a spiritual world. A spiritual world makes its way into our consciousness as we draw this soul force up from its depths.

[ 13 ] The point is that one should not stop at such an exercise, but rather move on to deliberately suppress these images in the same way that one created them. I would like to say: Just as one develops within oneself a kind of higher, artificial form of memory, so too must one develop within oneself, in a higher way, the power that otherwise lies in forgetting. It is even more difficult to bring this power of forgetting into the realm of the will, but this must be practiced. Only then has one reached the point where, just as one otherwise relates an impression to an object through an external sense organ, one now learns to relate what one experiences in the imagination to a spiritual object. Only through this does one then attain the next higher stage of supersensible knowledge, even if only partially at first; one reaches the stage that I—please do not take offense at this term, for it is often misused; I use it only in the sense in which I have frequently characterized it—call “inspired”; “inspired” for the reason that one now comes to relate that which was previously only a subjective experience—mere subjective imagination—to an objective, spiritual external world.

[ 14 ] Well, my esteemed audience, something is taking shape here that is a new inner experience. What is taking shape is that a judgment—whether approval or rejection of any set of facts experienced in this way in the spiritual realm—takes on the form of an inner reality. One now knows: One no longer lives in the kind of abstract inner soul life to which one was accustomed—and which is necessary for the outer world, which must merely be represented and cannot be experienced—but one now lives in an inner world of facts, which is, however, a purely soul-spiritual world of facts. One experiences agreement with a judgment in such a way that what is otherwise primitively called the power of sympathy in one’s soul life clearly emerges, and one experiences rejection as antipathy; except that these experiences are not now something that occurs as subjectively in relation to objects as in ordinary life, but rather as something that is an integration into that spiritual world which one is now beginning to experience.

[ 15 ] In addition to the exercises I have described, there are others—which can be described in principle as part of human inner self-discipline (the details can be found in the books mentioned)—that must now be added. In our ordinary existence, we surrender ourselves to external life. As children, we surrender ourselves to our educators; we surrender ourselves to the expression of our inherited traits; and in later life, we surrender ourselves, to a greater or lesser extent, to life itself. One need only be honest with oneself and ask how much inner self-discipline actually exists for a person in ordinary life. This self-discipline is precisely what the spiritual researcher must undertake in a systematic, methodical way. I can only highlight a few examples; in my books I have described many such exercises, all of which must be practiced to a greater or lesser extent if one wishes to attain a certain degree of the insights I am referring to here.

[ 16 ] The point is, for example, to clearly and calmly explore what a particular characteristic of one’s own self is, what a habit is that has developed, and so on. Now, driven purely by an inner impulse, one sets out to master this habit completely—that is, not to let it, as it were, lead one, or to be under its compulsion, but rather to be able to decide: I will follow this habit, or I will not follow it. One can perform all sorts of exercises that, in turn, are thoroughly healing in nature—not least because they introduce a person to a certain sphere of freedom, to the possibility of moving freely in life and also in relation to oneself. One can carry out such exercises in such a way that, for example, if one is a slave to one’s handwriting, one decides once in a lifetime to thoroughly change one’s handwriting. This, too, is a change in a habit. Here, one truly, as I would say, takes one’s inner self into one’s own hands. When such exercises are carried out systematically—but not as in the exercises described earlier, where the life of the soul is reshaped more toward the intellectual side, but now more toward the volitional side—then what happens is that it becomes much more difficult for us inwardly, let’s say, to come to a decision or to refrain from something than is otherwise the case in life. Otherwise, in life, the impulses of the will lie in the depths of our nature; we follow them immediately; we are guided by them. The spiritual researcher must, for those times when he wishes to devote himself to spiritual research—naturally, only for these times—be able to detach his soul life from this compulsion.

[ 17 ] And if I were to describe the entire process, I would ultimately come to say: The spiritual researcher comes to make a precise distinction, with regard to his life of the will, between rest and the transition from rest to activity. One comes to recognize this: this summoning of oneself to activity, this fully conscious surrender to the will—which can no longer be guided by instinct, which stands completely apart from organic life, which becomes independent—such an effort of willing as is otherwise found only in external action, where the muscles must be strained, this strengthening of the inner life of the will by lifting it out of the physical realm and into the soul. And once we come to know this, the possibility arises to fully develop the inspired insight I spoke of earlier—that is, to truly gain the ability to relate our imaginations to spiritual facts and spiritual beings, just as we otherwise relate our external sensory impressions to external physical objects or physical facts. And we then learn to recognize the essence of the spiritual; we stand face to face with it when, in this way, we also cultivate an inner life through the will.

[ 18 ] I have described to you so far, my esteemed audience, what emerges—more on a spiritual level—in human experience as a result of performing such exercises. But one need not stop there. And as paradoxical as it may still seem to some today, it is true, and it is simply a fact of the soul life that takes shape empirically—a life that can be systematically developed into supersensible research.

[ 19 ] What we achieve by transforming the intellectual realm more deeply, as I have described, is that we not only work our way into an actual experience of the soul, but that we also come to now also to find the transition—not through external observation, but through inner experience—to what we have now grasped purely in the spirit. For we have gone through imagination, inspiration, and intuition and have grasped the spiritual. And we come to be able to trace what we truly grasp imaginatively—when we add the other forms of knowledge to it—in relation to the physical processes that take place in the human organism through this soul-spiritual life. In short, through actual research, through observation—or, if I am not misunderstood, I can also put it this way: through inner experimentation—we are now able to see in reality what psychologists and experts in the study of the soul strive to attain today through speculation. The question is always asked: How does the external world affect the human organism? Does it act indirectly through observation and thought? Conversely, how does the human being, through the will, influence the organism’s activity and mobility, and so on? —

[ 20 ] These things—whether one calls them interaction or parallelism or whatever terms are used, which remain mere words—these things that one seeks speculatively, but for which one can never reach a conclusion through speculation alone, one simply grasps through inner contemplation once one has attained the level of imagination. Then one recognizes that this imagination is nothing other than a higher stage of development of what I called “pure thinking” in my Philosophy of Freedom, the first edition of which appeared in the early 1890s—that pure thinking which I at that time took as the foundation for the concept of human freedom. This pure thinking, in which pure will actually also lives, is the very thinking from which the impulse for free action must arise. In ordinary life, it often goes unnoticed when it occurs, and it occurs when there is freedom in some part of our otherwise determined action. We cannot ask whether we are free or not; we are always free only in part, but freedom lives in our actions. The further development of this thinking into a true reality—one that is now of a spiritual nature—makes it possible to perceive, through inner contemplation, the relationship of thinking not only to the soul, as I have just described, but also to the physical organism. As I said, as paradoxical as this may seem to people today, it is nevertheless true that anyone who experiences thinking in this way knows that in the unfolding of thought there lies something which, in the human organism—it is quite different in the animal realm—represents, in a sense, a process of consolidation of the material, a process that is essentially a nervous process, which, in its connection with thought, can be observed right down into its physical aspect. It is a process that can be compared to a consolidation of matter, to what occurs when any substance dissolved in another settles out. This material consolidation, this thickening of the material, this separation of the material from a medium—that is what is actually experienced.

[ 21 ] The other aspect—the development of the will—is experienced differently when the experience is extended into the physical-organic realm. One then experiences that every true act of will—everything that corresponds to the will—has an effect in the organic realm such that it represents something comparable to a kind of dissolution or dispersion of the material. One could also say: It is something that plays itself out in a kind of material process that begins with heating and flows into a process that starts with heating and then gradually flows into that which, even in ordinary life, more or less consciously represents the unfolding of our will. Whereas in ordinary life, full consciousness is linked to very subtle internal consolidations of matter taking place, dissolutions of the material occur when more or less unconscious acts of will unfold in ordinary life; — this is not the case in spiritual life, where they unfold transparently.

[ 22 ] Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as referred to here, does not concern those nebulous matters discussed in ordinary mysticism; rather, it involves the equally rigorous development of an inner state of mind, such as occurs, for example, in the cultivation of mathematical methodology. The point is to learn, for the sake of supersensible research, to refrain from beating around the bush or indulging in mysticism—if I may use that expression; the point is to proceed with strict inner systematic rigor in regard to the development of the soul, just as one has become accustomed to doing out of scientific conscience and scientific discipline in modern times. Therefore, in spiritual science, those who have first truly acquired scientific conscience and scientific discipline through external research will be the ones called upon, above all, to speak on these matters.

[ 23 ] So that I am not misunderstood, I must add the following: What I am describing to you here are states of the soul that the spiritual researcher attains, but which are by no means his ordinary states. No, the spiritual researcher must, precisely in everyday life, remain fully grounded in all prudence, all reason, and all inclination toward ordinary scientific thinking and research. And what I have described to you as a higher power of cognition arises, so to speak, only at the moment when the spiritual researcher surrenders himself to these higher insights. It is not something that takes hold of him or turns him into a mystical dreamer who always lives outside of life; rather, it is something he can manage, something he consciously approaches—just as one approaches an external scientific experiment—and then returns to ordinary life, where one is a reasonable person with all the sobriety that is necessary in this life. Precisely those who, in ordinary life, are prone to pathological states of mind—those who, in ordinary life, cannot engage their full personality like any other person—cannot be spiritual researchers in the true sense of the word.

[ 24 ] But now, when one considers this rigorous internal methodology, what good is it? Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I can only hint at what the next steps in this research will be.

[ 25 ] On the one hand, I said, one gains the opportunity to see the connection between thought—which is initially grasped as something purely spiritual—and material existence. One comes to see how thought unfolds within the material inner life. This is the fundamental fact from which one proceeds, the axiom of experience which, when pursued further, now reveals—as imaginative and inspired cognition develops further and further—what our soul life is like in a spiritual-soul world before birth or, more precisely, before conception. What lives within us in a spiritual-soul world—that which connects with what is passed on to the human being through hereditary material from ancestors—one now learns to recognize in its context as a further continuation of the fundamental connection between thinking and the material processes within one’s own inner being. One learns, so to speak, to experiment inwardly. One learns—albeit through a higher, transformed art of experimentation—to penetrate into the living realm of experimentation. Just as we create the conditions under which results develop in an experiment, so do we come to know, through voluntary thought processes, their consequences in our inner material life. And by learning to cultivate this ability, one comes to recognize how the spiritual-soul aspect—the supersensible aspect of the human being that passes from life to life—lived in a spiritual-soul world before birth, or rather, before the conception of the present life. This cannot be achieved through mere speculation, nor through obscure mysticism, but can only be attained through a systematic process of inner development of initially latent soul forces, as I have described it.

[ 26 ] And the other side: One learns how the will works, how the will, so to speak, leads to the dissociation of matter, how the will initiates a thermal process that then transforms into something else. From this one learns to recognize how the spiritual breaks free from the material, how the spiritual, as that which is governed by the will, breaks free from the material. And this, in turn, is comparable to the process we encounter when a human being dies, when the will-like spiritual breaks free from the physical body. One learns to recognize this complete process of passing through death, of the immortal aspect of the human being crossing over into a spiritual world.

[ 27 ] You see that the whole point is to pursue a spiritual science in such a way that one does not seek to ascend into the abstract, into the nebulous spiritual realm, and merely talk about it, but rather that one specifically traces the living activity and creation of this spiritual realm—the transition of the spiritual into material life, the struggle of the spiritual to break free from the material. This is what a spiritual science looks like—one that does not ramble on about some abstract spiritual concept, but rather grasps the living spirit, which indeed finds its way to act in the material world. This is why true spiritual science is by no means an enemy of materialism, for it recognizes matter as that which fits into the general spiritual order. It allows materialism to remain in its own domain, as I have already said, and it learns to recognize its legitimacy. This will at the same time give you the opportunity to see—if I may hint at this even briefly—how, by learning to observe the soul-spiritual functions as they play out in the details of the entire human organism, it becomes possible to trace the effect of the material itself within this human organism. I would like to say: Whoever knows how thought and will work within the human organism thereby also learns to recognize how any substance or remedy acts within the whole human being—who consists of body, soul, and spirit—what it stirs up, and what forces come into play. One learns to see through, to see through the human organism from within. But this forms the gateway to an anthroposophically oriented therapy, to a truly rational therapy that is based on a knowledge of human nature attained by seeing through the whole human being.

[ 28 ] This could also be demonstrated for the other sciences, just as it has at least been hinted at—by various experts from our circle—to those who participated in this course with regard to the individual sciences.

[ 29 ] This is what I would like to begin by touching upon—albeit only briefly and inadequately—namely, how anthroposophy can have a fruitful influence even within the individual scientific disciplines. But please note what actually emerges in the kind of understanding that develops in this way. I want to present just one characteristic of this kind of understanding to you.

[ 30 ] First of all, when we have risen to the level of imagination and gain an imaginative insight into something—when we perceive a realm of facts, a realm of beings in the spiritual world, just as one surveys a genus or species of plants, animals, or crystals in the sensory world—then we are faced with a genuine perception of external spiritual reality with which the human being is connected; when one comprehends something in the external sensory world, one also knows how the whole human being is integrated into this external world. But by immersing oneself in this external spiritual reality, one comes to comprehend the interrelationships of the worlds as such. And here I would like to hint at something. It is meant only as an example.

[ 31 ] The science I described at the beginning leads us to what is known as “heat death,” the state into which the events on Earth will eventually culminate. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we can certainly acknowledge a certain validity in everything that external science can tell us about this heat death. But this external science lacks that which the human being himself brings into the events that external science describes to us. And as we come to recognize how human will acts within the realm of heat—I have described how it intervenes in a thermal process—we can intuit, and this intuition becomes a certainty through spiritual science, that into this process leading toward entropy can be interwoven that which emanates from human morality, from human idealism, and from human impulses of will; we can intuit that this then plays an essential role when viewed in connection with its effects in the outer physical world. And one then comes to say to oneself: Just as the individual human being rises as a soul from his physical body and enters a spiritual world, so the totality of human souls and human spirits will, beyond heat death—indeed, beyond the end of the Earth itself—survive into other cosmic states; it will experience what is no longer earthly, but rather what belongs to a metamorphosis of Earth’s development itself. All these things result from a certain transformation, a metamorphosis of our very cognition. And here is a striking fact that I must now address.

[ 32 ] Once one has come to see certain things in the outer spiritual world, one realizes what this actually means: one has transformed one’s own capacity for memory; one has reshaped it into something else. For the peculiar thing is that, at first, these spiritual observations do not enter into ordinary memory. If one wishes to recognize again what one has once beheld in the spiritual world, one cannot recall it in the ordinary sense. This precisely demonstrates that it is an observation, not a concept grasped in the ordinary way or a figment of the imagination. If one wishes to return to what one has observed—and of which one has only an image—one must once again take the same spiritual path. One can only recall the path by which one brought about this spiritual observation, but one cannot return to the immediate spiritual observation itself. This is what surprises beginners who devote themselves to spiritual science: they arrive at a vision and then forget what they have seen, because they cannot recall it—since it is an observation, not a mere concept. One must recall all the details through which one brought about the vision; then, if one has the necessary strength and if the meditative practice has been sufficient, one can bring it about again. As a result, however, one is compelled, as a spiritual researcher, to make the ascent into the spiritual world anew, again and again, at every moment. What we perceive in the spiritual world does not become part of one’s memory; it can, if I may put it this way, only serve as the impetus to repeatedly bring about the same processes through which one has risen to spiritual perception. I would also like to mention: One can even—and this is not the worst aspect of this spiritual science, for it protects against illusions—one can, even after having achieved a great deal in this regard, come to a state of skepticism and may be compelled time and again to overcome this skepticism. One must work inwardly again and again, with inner alertness. And this inner alertness also flows from what is communicated and written down by the spiritual researcher, and from what another person can accept based on their common sense. For spiritual science can be grasped by any layperson with common sense—without needing to be a spiritual scientist—just as astronomical truths can be grasped by the layperson who understands them, even without being an astronomer. However, what is developed in spiritual science as a concept, an idea, or a mental image—which extends to the whole human being—imparts an inner vitality to the person. In other words, what is imparted to the human being is that element one might call a present-minded contemplation of the world. This presence of mind, this grasping of the concrete, this setting aside of the merely abstract—that is what is particularly cultivated in spiritual science. Through this, however, one is prepared for life in living knowledge.

[ 33 ] It must be said again and again: In modern times, it is difficult for human beings to arrive at the kind of social life I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom—which I have already mentioned—from a place of inner individuality, because this process must begin with the contemplation of the spiritual, even if in a primitive way, but nonetheless with the contemplation of the spiritual itself. But when one finds one’s way into it through the study of spiritual science, through immersing oneself in spiritual science, one is then led to the concrete. And this concrete reality—one must grasp it if one wishes to understand this life, which we can call social life today in the sense of modern times. One need only look back a few centuries to recognize the change that has taken place in civilized humanity with regard to social life. In earlier times, social associations and social bonds arose from certain instinctive foundations that were alive within people, and from these social bonds, one might say, from what one person experienced in another, that particular degree of love also arose—a love that is, of course, no longer relevant today, but which in earlier centuries, even in those we do not wish to evoke, was indeed lived from person to person. This degree of love must be understood in terms of the instinctive relationships between people.

[ 34 ] The modern era, with its advances in the natural sciences, with the justified applications of the natural sciences in the field of technology, with what technology in turn has demanded in terms of global communication and the global economy—in everything we might call the modern technology of life, and in everything into which human beings find themselves drawn in this modern life— —all of this has brought about, simultaneously with humanity’s immersion in the modern scientific spirit. This modern scientific spirit, however, tends initially toward theory. Spiritual science, as it can appear today in an anthroposophical orientation, moves away from theory; it turns to observation, to the concrete, to the grasping of what is given in the moment. Through this, however, spiritual science will not only be able to render services to science—of which I have been able to offer only tentative hints—but it will also be able to render essential services to modern life. This modern life has, after all, taken on forms that clearly show how forces of decline and destruction have entered the modern world. One need only study them in their extreme form of destructive fury in the East. People in the center and the West study far too little the destructive forces that have entered humanity. How did these forces enter humanity? We shall see how it was not science itself—which has its full justification—but rather what has asserted itself as a scientific way of thinking that sought to extend itself to thinking about social life. Observe how such people—such as the leaders of the radical socialist parties, the Leninists, and the Trotskyists—claim that what they now sought to implement in social life was derived from a scientific mindset. — Theories applied to social life — that is what we see emerging today as something far more destructive than what has already been at work: this desire to introduce theories into life, to theorize about life, and to spin all manner of utopias out of life. But what is given to us in social human life are, everywhere, living human beings. And it springs solely from an illusion—a sociological illusion—when one fails to see how, today, human beings, out of a certain inclination toward the theoretical, also tend to shape reality theoretically. Even when they want to be practical people, they shape things according to theoretical prejudices. Today, even the most ardent practitioners—that is, those who consider themselves such—do this; their practice becomes routine. One can see how humanity is in danger of growing into a social machine, into a mechanism. What is well-suited to the external art of experimentation cannot be transferred to the way people live together. By asserting himself today, human beings seek precisely to be individuals. This is what drives the fierce struggles of the present, which one need only understand. One can understand them as a human rebellion against what seeks to ensnare humanity—as if it were something objective and non-human, as if it were a social madhouse. This is where human beings stir. It is human beings who matter. But the human being on whom it all depends is the one who acts through the impulses of his will—and who can only be understood if one proceeds from a love and a feeling inspired by spiritual knowledge. For it is the spirit, after all, that works through human beings in social life. What is at work in social life cannot be grasped through anthropology, but only through anthroposophy, because anthropology focuses on the general, whereas anthroposophy focuses precisely on viewing the human being in his or her individual freedom; because anthroposophy knows how to look into everything, right down to the individual human being, [and sees] how this human being, as he or she truly is, places himself or herself within social life. In this sense, anthroposophical spiritual science also seeks to serve the most practical aspects of life. Out of this tendency arose what, for example, was first attempted to be presented in my Philosophy of Freedom as a foundation of the subjective in the human being for a form of social coexistence suited to the present historical period of humanity, which was then in turn attempted to be presented in my Key Points of the Social Question—not as a utopia, but as a product of the fullest practical experience of life, of empirical observation of life, albeit one that is sustained by the spirit.

[ 35 ] What flows into life—that which takes the human being fully into account, that which has an understanding of the individual, that which shows how the individual human being cannot be forced into a general human mold, how populations are simply populations, how other small communities are small communities with their own peculiarities—all of this flows from the spirit. And only an education that springs from the ideas and concepts of true anthroposophy can look into social human life in such a way that a living, life-affirming, enduring, and inwardly fruitful sociology can emerge—one that can then also shape social organizations. An attempt has been made to develop such a sociology, free from all utopianism, in my “Key Points.”

[ 36 ] And at the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and directed by me, an attempt has been made to extend this anthroposophical understanding of the human being to the development of the child—that is, to truly regard the child, in body, soul, and spirit, as a complete human being, and to let the child dictate what the curriculum and teaching methods should be. I can only briefly mention that knowledge—because it itself becomes something that lives—must be attained again and again; that if it is to be higher knowledge, it must even be attained anew at every moment—just as one must eat anew every day: even though one ate yesterday, one must do so again today—while one recalls what one has acquired through ordinary, abstract, or natural science. What one recalls is transformed into an image; it becomes unreal. What is attained through spiritual science is truly alive; therefore, it must be attained anew again and again. Hence, inner alertness and the work of the human soul are necessary. Hence, what is attained through spiritual science is related not only to knowledge but also to life.

[ 37 ] And on the basis of such foundations, this anthroposophical spiritual science may believe that it can work in the direction indicated in today’s lecture; in the sense that it can be fruitful—not by speaking of a worldview based on theoretical or emotional considerations—but by having a fertilizing effect, on the one hand, on science, which is, after all, increasingly the foundation of our lives, and, on the other hand, on life itself, particularly in its social form; that, therefore, anthroposophical spiritual science can create not merely knowledge, but an actual spiritual-psychic reality that is fruitful for science and for life.