The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Anthroposophy as the Science of the Human Being

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! As one progresses in the study of the development of modern science, one can make one’s way—starting from this or that branch of knowledge—to another, to which one is led by certain external or internal necessities. But all of this essentially takes place without the participation of the deeper human being. One must admit: this path is traversed with a certain inner indifference. Certainly, there are exam pressures, and these pressures can indeed lead to inner psychological crises. But these psychological crises—as those who have gone through them will be able to attest—are not actually connected to the substance of the subject one is approaching, be it mathematics, medicine, or biology. One can also feel inner joy when, as a researcher, one has discovered this or that. Yet, on the other hand, what constitutes an inner soul experience is, in an external sense, linked to the content of what has come before one’s soul in the process of cognition.

[ 2 ] Admittedly, this is a radical way of expressing a phenomenon that does not always unfold quite so radically; but when one contrasts it with the opposite that emerges from the study—that is, from the inner experience—of anthroposophical spiritual science, the validity of what has been said will become clear.

[ 3 ] When studying and inwardly experiencing anthroposophical spiritual science, one truly experiences inner events of destiny. One experiences psychological catastrophes and twists of fate. One experiences something that, on the one hand, is deeply and intensely connected to the content of what one is approaching with understanding, and one experiences something that, arising from this content, engages human nature in manifold ways, transforms it, leads it to other stages of the soul’s constitution, and so on. This fact, which at first glance might appear to be external, is nevertheless intrinsically and essentially connected to what anthroposophical spiritual science is meant to be; it is connected to the fact that, while one legitimately and objectively rises to a worldview from the spirit of modern science, one does not actually find the human being within that worldview. Certainly, one can construct a picture of the human being; but the human being who can be constructed from current evolutionary theory, who can be constructed from current biology or physiology, does not present himself in a picture that evokes inner stirrings and liberations in the soul; he presents himself in a picture that leaves the soul cold.

[ 4 ] But, my esteemed audience, does not the very essence of the human soul in everyday life ultimately consist in the fact that we go through inner upheavals, pain, suffering, joys, and satisfactions? Do we not go through catastrophes and twists of fate in our external lives? Can we therefore hope to grasp this inwardly changeable human being—who, in his changeability, is so close to us—through a science that, on the one hand, provides us with an image of the human being that must actually leave us indifferent, indeed, that must, in a certain sense, regard its perfection precisely in the fact that it leaves us indifferent? Whoever sees this fact in its proper light will, at first, be drawn emotionally to the essence of anthroposophical knowledge of the human being. This essence of anthroposophical knowledge of the human being—I have attempted to describe it in part, according to its method, in my work How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, I have tried to describe it specifically in my book Theosophy and then in Occult Science; I have tried to show how a quest for knowledge that aims to attain true anthroposophical knowledge of the human being must ascend through three stages of knowledge: imagination, inspiration, and intuition understood in its deeper sense. And I believe I have made it clear in my description of what a person can experience in an imaginative, inspired, and intuitive life that undergoing such a path of knowledge simultaneously entails a series of inner experiences of destiny for the person, so that it is not merely the content of knowledge—in an abstract sense—that approaches the human being, but rather the image of the human being approaches immediate human experience, that which lies within us as the lived essence of our human dignity.

[ 5 ] Imagination is the first stage of cognition in penetrating the essence of the world as well as the essence of humanity. I have described this imagination and how one rises to it through a kind of meditative life, by concentrating one’s powers of thought in a thoroughly healthy way—one that is the exact opposite of the pathological. Now I would like to draw attention to what actually takes place within a person when they strive for this imaginative level of insight. The fact is that through this meditative inner experience—which concentrates on thoughts and feelings and is methodically and thoroughly disciplined—the soul forces are, so to speak, brought together, so that they are permeated by consciousness more intensely than is otherwise the case. If we then observe what is actually growing when we meditate in this way, when we concentrate in this way, we find that what is growing is the very same thing—only in its continuation—that has brought us, in ordinary experience, to true self-consciousness, that has brought us to level-headedness, to a calm sense of personality, and that has led us—if I may use the expression—to the very essence of the human ego, to that in which a person must find themselves so that they can detach themselves from the world in a level-headed manner, so that they may arrive at self-awareness in the proper way.

[ 6 ] That is, after all, the danger of this path: that, to begin with, human egotism must be intensified. The very thing that has led people to egotism must be carried forward. Therefore, fundamentally speaking, what is being sought here can only truly be achieved if it is preceded by appropriate preparation—that preparation which I have described truthfully in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?. There you will find described a certain method for attaining true inner humility—that inner humility which, perhaps, cannot always be openly displayed in outward life—precisely because of external circumstances—but which must deeply permeate the life of the soul. If this humility is not thoroughly cultivated as an inner force of soul experience, then there is indeed a danger of human megalomania on the path to imagination—not pathological megalomania, but psychological and moral megalomania. Anyone who correctly applies anthroposophical methods—because these methods run in a direction directly opposed to that which, based on human nature, can lead a person into pathological states—cannot actually fall into pathology through them; yet they may indeed find themselves psychologically confronted with dangers such as the megalomania referred to here. A person must possess a certain inner stability, rooted in unpretentiousness and modesty, if they wish to strive for that elevation and intensification of the ego that is necessary for attaining imaginative knowledge. In ordinary life and ordinary cognition, our concepts are too pale, our highest ideas downright too abstract, to arrive—out of their own full richness—at an inner experience of that which actually drives a person toward egoity. That which otherwise lives in the power that forms concepts and shapes ideas must be elevated; it must be intensified. Then, indeed, an experience arises, and it is precisely through the emergence of this experience that the one striving toward imagination can gauge the correctness of his striving—then an experience arises: One has performed exercises to heighten selfhood; one has performed such exercises that the pale concepts and ideas rise to the intensity one experiences when one has a sensory image before one’s eyes or ears. Through this, one has increased that force which, by its convergence, brings forth our self-awareness, our sense of personality—indeed, our ego—one has increased this force. The experience one has is that, from a certain point onward, egoity no longer increases; that from a certain point onward, precisely because of the increase in egoity—as it were, because egoity has reached a culmination point—this egoity actually dissolves. This is the significant point: that when our sense of self is intensified—properly intensified—it does not escalate into excess as a sense of self, but rather, fundamentally, it dissolves.

[ 7 ] From this alone we can see that the experience we have as human beings in our outer physical body, and which, through its own nature, carries us toward egohood—that this is necessary as a passage; that is, egohood must be attained in a healthy way in the physical world and through sensory perceptions before one can turn toward that elevation I am referring to here, which then leads, so to speak, to a dissolution of egohood—or rather, to an outflow of egohood.

[ 8 ] Where does our sense of self flow into at first? In everyday life, my dear friends, our sense of self is actually bound up in the present moment. Essentially, we can only say “I” to ourselves by sensing ourselves as beings experiencing the present moment. That which we already experienced yesterday—that which was intimately connected with our sense of self yesterday, that in which we were immersed yesterday—has now, in this very moment, become objective to us. And to a certain extent, we perceive what we experienced yesterday as something external to our sense of “I,” just as we regard any external experience as external. At one moment, an objective element rises from the depths of our own constitution into memory; at another, it approaches us by making itself known to us through the external senses.

[ 9 ] Certainly, we distinguish between the remembered experience and the external sensory experience; but at the same time, there is a distinct similarity between the two in the way they approach the “I,” the ego, which is fully—yet in reality only—grasped in the moment. In the effort to advance toward imagination, the “I” does indeed gradually transcend our physical earthly life spent between birth and death, and we learn to be as fully immersed in a past experience as we are in the experience of the present moment. We learn to feel ourselves as the “I” just as fully within that long-past experience as we otherwise do in the present moment. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that you have certainly already experienced this in a dream—which I certainly do not regard as any valid source of knowledge, but am using here merely for the sake of illustration— that you have certainly already experienced in a dream that you felt like a person from 20 years ago, like a person who is 20 years younger, that you imagined your image from 20 years ago and behaved in the dream exactly as if you were just that age from 20 years ago, that you did the same things you did 20 years ago. I would like to remind you that, in fact, you objectify yourself so completely through this dream image that, in that moment, you feel as though you are the age you were at a time long past.

[ 10 ] What appears in a dream in a semi-pathological way can be attained by a person in a state of sobriety through imaginative insight; it can be developed in full consciousness. Then the human being experiences everything he has ever experienced in this earthly life—he does not experience it merely as an ordinary memory set against the experience of the present moment; rather, he experiences it in such a way that his “I,” his ego, fills the entire stream of his experience in this earthly life. He steps out of the moment and enters the stream of his experience of time. The “I” does not flow out in a nebulous way; the “I” flows out into the stream of the real experiences of this earthly life. But in this flowing out, one grasps something different than in ordinary momentary consciousness, which, based on ordinary logic, must fill itself with abstractions derived from intellectual images. In this “I” poured out over the stream of life, one perceives images—images of the vitality of sensory life. That which otherwise stands, as it were, before the soul as a memory of life becomes inwardly saturated and intense; one learns from one’s own experience the essence of imaginative cognition. At the same time, one penetrates into the very essence of the human being as one advances in this understanding. But from this moment on, one knows that one has plunged with the “I” not into a stream of abstract memories, but into a stream of real life forces—the very same life forces that, from our birth, or let us say from our conception, are the forces that constitute our organism, that shape our organs, that work within us in growth, nutrition, and reproduction.

[ 11 ] We are now immersing ourselves in the flow of those forces that are otherwise concerned only with providing our sustenance, that make us grow, and that enable our reproduction. And now, by immersing ourselves—not in something abstract, but with our full conscious thought—in something concrete, namely the etheric body, we experience what it is; we experience how our physical body—in which we otherwise dwell in ordinary life—is underpinned by a body that is an inner configuration of forces and that can only be perceived through such imaginative insight. One immerses oneself in that which physical and biological science has sought time and again through hypotheses over the past decades—and whose very existence is even denied by others today—one immerses oneself in the real etheric world as opposed to the ponderable physical world and learns to recognize how that which underlies our physical human form is truly such an etheric human being. But as one grasps oneself as such an etheric human being, the dissolution of the “I”-earth human becomes apparent in an even higher sense. One cannot grasp this etheric human being without seeing and perceiving, in all its individual limbs and parts at once, that which is the cosmos, that which is the world. At the same time, one is led out of oneself by perceiving oneself as an etheric human being, for that which acts within us as an organizing force—the etheric human being—projects its rays in currents out into the cosmos; this establishes a connection between this or that internal organ, between this or that limb of our physical organism and the cosmos.

[ 12 ] What is experienced there does not appear in the form of abstract concepts, but in the rich form of imagery, of imagination. But by surrendering, in a certain sense, our egoity in the act of cognition—as I have described—we simultaneously grasp that which now exists ethereally outside of us in the world. Through our own etheric body, we penetrate into the ethereal realm of the great world, from which we were, after all, ultimately born as human beings.

[ 13 ] But this, in turn, gives rise to a new task. The world we now experience is quite different [from the physical world]; it lacks certain things that we rightly regard as defining our physical world. At first, it appears to us in a pictorial form, whereas we perceive our physical world in its true objectivity only when we strip away the pictorial aspect. But when we now rise from the perception of our own etheric body to the etheric nature of the world, we notice that precisely those senses which otherwise convey the external world to us in the most beautiful way fall short in their effectiveness. We owe what we experience of the physical external world to the eye, the ear, and so on. These senses, so to speak, initially recede into the background, and as one becomes attuned to the etheric world, precisely those senses that are not usually taken into account in ordinary physical life come to the fore in human experience: the sense of balance, the sense of movement, and the sense of life. These come to the fore. The sense of heaviness, as it were, falls away from us. An experience of a balance inherent in the world, into which we find our way, sets in. The movements observed externally through the eyes, or those recorded by instruments, cease. But what can be experienced inwardly in the movement—when the human being is within that movement—is experienced in the imagination by the person at rest, as the movement initially intensifies. This is a living penetration into the etheric world. And here I would like to draw your attention, my esteemed audience, to the fact that it is truly as I characterized it in my opening remarks today, when I said that the path of anthroposophical knowledge involves a series of inner, soulful experiences of destiny. For what occurs there—in a sense, as a dampening of the higher senses and, at the same time, as a spiritualization and strengthening of the senses usually regarded as lower—is connected with such an experience of destiny. And, although I know what one exposes oneself to with such a description, I would like to illustrate what I wish to say here with an example: I was once engaged in an inner, intellectual exploration of what a person actually experiences when they commit themselves, with their soul, to this or that worldview—whether they become a materialist, an idealist, a realist, a spiritualist, a positivist, a skeptic, and so on. If one truly strives to understand these things from within the human being, they cannot be fully grasped through what ordinary life and contemporary science have to offer on the subject. Ordinary life and contemporary science, in fact, are limited to the idealist railing against the realist, criticizing him, and thoroughly dismantling the realist’s arguments; the spiritualist becomes arrogant, and even though he is often a complete layman in matters that can only be understood in the material world, he indulges in the most disparaging criticisms of materialism, which was nonetheless a cosmic byproduct of our modern, rightly celebrated scientific approach. These reasons—why the human mind tends toward materialism on the one hand, and toward spiritualism or idealism, for example, on the other—run deeper than is generally supposed.

[ 14 ] When one seriously engages with these things, one undertakes an inner spiritual process that is connected to the realm of thought in a healthy yet comprehensive sense. At the same time, one experiences something through thinking. Through abstract thinking, one experiences nothing; but by experiencing what ultimately becomes an experience for every human being—whether materialist or spiritualist, realist or idealist—one is, in a sense, led into the immediate existence of the human soul. This human-spiritual realm is grasped in a completely different way by such thinking—which I would describe as deeply rooted within—than is the case in the ordinary sciences.

[ 15 ] What one can experience, my esteemed audience, in such thinking—which must necessarily be meditative, concentrated thinking—leads one further; it unleashes certain powers of the imagination; it leads to a point where, for individual concrete things, instead of merely experiencing them as thoughts, but with the full character of that mental experience, an inner image experience arises—one that is not a dreamlike or fancied image, but is connected to the cosmic, supersensible facts underlying external phenomena.

[ 16 ] And so, back then, after I had gone through this concentration, this meditation on what I have just described to you, I immersed myself in the world of imagination in such a way that the whole human being who appeared in my imagination became something that suddenly stood before my inner eye as a concrete fact of the world. From what is grasped as the essence of the human being—as an image of the cosmic—the zodiac took shape; but not in the abstract way one usually conceives of it, but rather in such a way that the individual constellations of the zodiac truly became essential entities, so that the spiritual emerged from this zodiac and itself revealed how it now reconnected with the individual aspects of human nature: The world as an image, within a certain sphere as an image, the outward expression of inner thoughts, striving toward cosmic imagery.

[ 17 ] The “I” does not merely flow out into this stream of one’s own personal experiences in this earthly life; the “I” flows out into the cosmos. One learns to recognize what truly exists in the undulating, surging ether of the cosmos. One cannot enter into this undulating, surging life of the cosmos except by increasing one’s sense of self to the point where it reaches its culmination, then transcends itself in the act of comprehending the world, and pours itself out into objective worldly existence.

[ 18 ] What I am describing to you is, in essence, the nature of the etheric world. To experience oneself in this etheric world—you will now understand why I call it an experience of destiny. An experience of insight is at the same time an experience of destiny. In this etheric world, one can experience what cannot be described in any other way than as I have described it in my Occult Science. It is the experience of the etheric world that has been able to find expression in this Occult Science.

[ 19 ] But at the same time, one’s inner destiny takes such a turn that one feels the sense of self—into which one is placed in ordinary life between birth and death—expanding continuously, so to speak. The point, then, is that through the continuation of such exercises—as I have described them in How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Esoteric Science—through the continuation of such exercises, the “I,” which one has in a certain sense psychologically lost, is rediscovered.

[ 20 ] If one develops this ability—and every person can do so—one develops the power to carry thoughts into the experience of images; and if one practices carrying this power of thought into the etheric experience of images long enough—for one person it is one length of time, for another a different length of time— if one practices this long enough—if one practices it, so to speak, until it has the necessary strength to combat the persistent tendency to lose one’s thoughts in the images—and if one maintains, so to speak, the upper hand through one’s composure and by saturating the etheric visual experiences with the power of thought, then the experience of the “I” reemerges. But it now emerges in a completely transformed form; it now appears before the fully composed soul—the soul that is as composed as one can only be when solving a mathematical problem. The experience of the “I” emerges from the ethereal world of images, but it emerges in such a way that we do not, so to speak, perceive it as something inherent in our physical body, but rather as emerging from the cosmic etheric world, to the contemplation of which we have elevated ourselves. One might say: Whereas ordinarily, when our “I” emerges, it is experienced and perceived as if it were coming from the physical body—as if, in other words, it were emerging from a human center—we now experience it as if, I might say, our “I” were radiating down from the indefinite periphery of the universe, as if it were striving to converge at a center rather than diverge. And we realize: Of the world into which we are now transported—with full inner composure, with full inner power of insight—we actually dream of this world in ordinary life between birth and death only when we apply a power that cannot initially be a power of insight, when we apply the power of feeling.

[ 21 ] What we experience emotionally in ordinary human life is not, after all, permeated by the power of thought to the same extent as our life of imagination. In reality—as I have often explained—it is permeated by the power of thought only to the same extent that our dreams are permeated by the power of thought. What we thus experience, so to speak, in the “shadow world” of personal feeling, we now experience in its true form: the “I” as it descends from the periphery of the world, from the world’s etheric realm, and as it, instead of dissolving into the indeterminate, pushes its way toward the center of its own being. And in this perception—which transforms the ordinary emotional experience into a genuine experience of thought, and thus also into a genuine experience of insight—in this experience we grasp what is called the astral body in anthroposophical understanding of the human being, the astral body that appears to us as given to us by the world when we look out from our center. We discover how, as it were, what constitutes our astral body trickles out of the arrangements of etheric forces. It is as if we were suddenly no longer living within ourselves, but were living in the air we breathe in—as if our body were standing there objectively and we were not within this body, but within the air we breathe in—and it is as if we felt that our external physicality were merely this very air body that penetrates into the human interior, it is as if we were looking into the human organs, as if we were only just approaching the human form in its outward appearance.

[ 22 ] Building upon this experience of breathing, Indian yoga philosophy in particular has sought to attain the very experience that I have just described to you as the experience of the astral world. We in the West—due to our constitution—must not imitate this yogic experience of the East. But everything we can initially experience by perceiving ourselves in this way as existing outside our physical body presents itself in the same way as the world soul does within the etheric world body. In concrete knowledge, we never actually have a physical world-body before us; rather, in true knowledge, we attain only an etheric world-body in the manner described, and within this etheric world-body we experience the World Soul in its various configurations, one of which is our own soul, our own astral body—if I may put it that way.

[ 23 ] Just as I have described in my Secret Science the world of the ether—its undulations and essence in all their concreteness—one can likewise describe the becoming and weaving of the cosmos in a soulful way. It may well fall to me—should it come to pass in this lifetime—to describe what is, in a sense, portrayed externally as the etheric world in my Secret Science as the astral world as well. It will become clear that this will require speaking from an entirely different spirit, and that the descriptions in this Secret Science must give way to something that, in its depiction and characterizations, will appear quite different from the descriptions and characterizations found in Secret Science. And I say to those who approach my writings in this way today—who, instead of having the will to delve into the matters at hand, nitpick at words and fish for contradictions— I predict to them that, in the book that arises in this way through the description of the astral in contrast to the ethereal, they will find an even greater abundance of what they, in their own way, will regard as contradictions. These are the contradictions of life, and anyone who wishes to penetrate life objectively must familiarize themselves with these contradictions in a living way, not through abstract logic.

[ 24 ] But when that which we come to know as our own astral body, as our own soul, approaches us in this world, we actually feel ourselves to be cosmic human beings, and we perceive our own astral body, our own soul, merely as a part of the cosmos. But we now perceive it as a part not of the etheric cosmos, but of the soul-cosmos, and we now know: the cosmos has a soul. And because we are able to present the astral body to our soul as something different from what appears to us solely through our outer physical body and through the etheric, a life that preceded our birth or conception—a life accomplished in the spirit, in the world of the soul—is set before our soul, and a life into which we enter as a spiritual-soul being when we pass through the gate of death. What is called immortality—and also that which our civilization has lost and which one would have to call “pre-birth”—becomes a reality, for we come to know ourselves from within the entire world that endures beyond the individual human life. One grasps not only that part of the human being that is embodied in the physical body between birth and death, but one grasps that human being which precedes birth and follows death; one grasps oneself as a member of the enduring spiritual world.

[ 25 ] And one can go even further with this inner concentration, this inner meditation, provided one ensures that the power one has attained—the power to permeate the world of images with thoughts—and the power of prudence are fully preserved. One can advance even further in this process of imbuing imagination with thought content and inspiration with thought content; one can continually strengthen that which constitutes a sober experience of thought in imagination and inspiration, and then one comes to experience the true form of the central human “I.” Then one penetrates through the human astral body, which actually presents itself as developing from the periphery of the world toward our human center, and which presents itself as a limb of the entire astral cosmos. From there one reaches the actual true “I”—of which one has only a shadow in ordinary life, to which one says “I”—and one arrives at that which one now views objectively as the “I,” just as one otherwise views external things objectively. For what one experiences on the path of knowledge has brought one out of one’s own physicality, and what now returns to one’s own physicality is not the “I” one has in ordinary life; it is a real “I.”

[ 26 ] This real “I” initially has nothing to do with much of what shapes us as human organisms from the cosmos—that which acts within us and lives on from the world we experienced in the spiritual-soul realm before birth or before conception. This “I” presents itself as something objective, as that which, in a sense, represents the sum of all the “I”s we have lived through in our past earthly lives.

[ 27 ] This is achieved on the level of the intuitive, the truly intuitive. There, what can be described in anthroposophical knowledge of the human being as repeated earthly lives becomes a form of wisdom. Just as anthroposophical knowledge does not consist in deriving abstract insights—which are merely images of the facts—from existing facts, but rather consists in gradually immersing oneself in the essential nature of the human being. What one learns about this human being—by first, in etheric knowledge, having poured out one’s “I,” one’s ego, into the stream of life between birth and death—now stands as the subject facing those “I’s” that have become objective on the path from our previous earthly life to our present one. It is from such a path of knowledge that one speaks—based on inner insight, not on theory—about the existence of repeated human earthly lives. This insight into repeated human earthly lives is precisely not a theory, but rather something that arises as a realization simultaneously with the insight into the true “I,” which we essentially have before us in ordinary life just as we have our soul life before us between falling asleep and waking up. Just as, between falling asleep and waking up, we are in a state into which we do not look—a state that is, so to speak, given to us only negatively as an empty segment of our stream of experience—just as we must, so to speak, leave out of our life’s stream that which we experienced while asleep, just as, when we look back and let our life unfold before us, how, for ordinary consciousness, we actually always have only those stretches of life that run from waking to falling asleep, how these are always interrupted by empty stretches of the stream, segments of the stream—so in ordinary life we look down into our “I,” into our organization. As we experience the undulating, weaving life of the soul, we see, so to speak, an empty space that we sleep through, just as we sleep through our state of sleep; and to this empty space we say “I,” not to something that is truly filled. Anthroposophical knowledge of the human being, my esteemed audience, can explain how it arrives at its content; it can describe, step by step, how it advances inwardly to grasp that which it must present to the world as a teaching. And because true anthroposophical knowledge of the human being carries thought into every aspect of it—for you have seen that I had to place particular emphasis on this in my description of this anthroposophical method of understanding the human being: that in imagination and inspiration, the experience of thought has been carried in with the utmost clarity, and that this experience of thought ultimately also appears in the intuitive experience; you have seen that I had to place special emphasis on this—and because the experience of thought is present throughout, because what the human being possesses in the abstract experience of thought—which he employs in ordinary science—is present everywhere in all that into which the spiritual researcher directs his soul, his spirit, and his “I,” therefore everything the spiritual researcher presents to the world must be relived and verified through the mere thought experience itself. People need only have the opportunity to follow the spiritual researcher all the way to the thought experience. He must simply not lose that experience of thought immediately upon leaving the sphere of sensory experience. He must have the strength to develop that inner capacity for growth and reproduction which the self-generating thought still possesses even when the thought stimulated by the external sensory phenomenon ceases to bear its true character. This intense inner experience can first be acquired; then one will find that the spiritual researcher describes things he has essentially experienced by carrying the thought into imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

[ 28 ] The thoughts he brings into this—one can follow them; one can examine them. For the thoughts he forms in his imaginative, inspired, and intuitive life—one can, when one considers them, verify their correctness based on their own nature and essence. One must simply not cling to the human prejudice—which has become all too prevalent in recent times—that a verified thought is only one for which one can have an external, sensory fact as proof. One must recognize that the thought itself—the very same thought that is used in external science—has an inner life, that it can shape its own inner organization. If one experiences this inner self-formation of the power of thought—experiences it in a way that Hegel, in his time, was not yet able to experience (hence his philosophy consisted only of unraveling abstract ideas)—if one experiences this living movement of thought, which I first attempted to depict in its form in my Philosophy of Freedom, then one can truly examine every single thought expressed by the researcher of the spirit. Those who do not undertake this examination will usually do so because they feel compelled, out of a lack of will, to say: “I do not follow what you are thinking there, for what I know so far gives me no reason to do so.”

[ 29 ] It is simply impossible to discuss anthroposophy—and especially anthroposophical understanding of the human being—with anyone who holds this view. It is not necessary to rise to the levels of imagination, inspiration, or intuition oneself; it is only necessary to bring the life of thought—which one already develops in ordinary science—vividly into one’s entire inner soul life, and from this living grasp of thought to follow what the spiritual researcher brings forth through imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But this, my esteemed audience, must be taken as a resolution to break away from that dead thinking which merely strings concepts together one after another, just as the external sensory world unfolds. This dead thinking proceeds in such a way that I form this concept from one aspect of the external sensory world, then I attach it to the concept I derive from another aspect of the sensory world, and so on. Only those who cling to this method of piecing together a conceptual system will say that, from the standpoint of ordinary thinking, they cannot verify what is presented in anthroposophy. But anyone who grasps that human beings truly carry within themselves—and experience within themselves—thinking as a living organism—it is merely overshadowed, merely overshadowed by an illusion—anyone who grasps this thinking that stands within living life can, from within this thinking, verify everything that the spiritual researcher presents about humanity and the world.

[ 30 ] Thus, from the overall meaning of what I have taken the liberty of presenting to you, you can see that when the spiritual researcher attempts to advance toward an understanding of humanity, the pursuit of this understanding of humanity simultaneously yields an understanding of the world. Knowledge of the true human nature leads us beyond ourselves and into the objective world. True knowledge of the real objective world reveals to us, within its very content, the human being—the human being who is truly alive both outwardly and inwardly—who can feel at home in the world he discovers in this way. And so it may be said: Just as one can already intuit that the world and the human being must, at their very core, belong together—as I have already emphasized in my Philosophy of Freedom— it is precisely spiritual science that presents to the world the insight that knowledge of the world must be attained through knowledge of the human being, because the essence of the world can be experienced in the innermost essence of the human being; that the essence of the human being can be understood through knowledge of the world, because the human being, with his innermost essence, originates from the objective, true world; that knowledge of the world must be attained through knowledge of the human being [and knowledge of the human being through knowledge of the world].

[ 31 ] Here, in turn, a contradiction or even a paradox can be found, for one might ask: Where, then, should we begin? Should we start with knowledge of the world in order to gain knowledge of humanity from that knowledge of the world, as the pantheist or any philosophical or materialistic thinker does, or should we, as the mystic often does, soar from knowledge of humanity to knowledge of the world?

[ 32 ] But that is dead; it is not conceived in a living way. Knowledge of humanity and knowledge of the world do not belong together like two dead limbs of an organism, so that one can begin with one and move on to the other; rather, knowledge of humanity and knowledge of the world belong together like the living limbs of a being itself. And just as one cannot say that the head lives through the limbs, or that the limbs live through the head, so too one cannot say that one can begin with knowledge of the world in order to arrive at knowledge of the human being, or begin with knowledge of the human being in order to arrive at knowledge of the world; rather, one must say: both must emerge in living unity; both must illuminate one another in living unity. And in this sense—in the sense of living knowledge—an understanding of the world derived from spiritual research must emerge through true knowledge of the human being, and a true knowledge of the human being must emerge through true understanding of the world, in response to the great questions of our time.