The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] Anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to ascend from sensory perception to spiritual perception, and it seeks to rise from the use of the intellect—as it must be in ordinary life and in conventional science—to other kinds of soul activities through which knowledge can be guided into realms that, while they manifest themselves in the ordinary sensory world, are not directly recognizable as such through the senses or through intellectual cognition. And such inner activities of the soul are found in what I have referred to in my writings as imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

[ 2 ] When we speak of imagination, we should not initially think of something nebulous and mystical—something that arises when we replace clear, level-headed intellectual insight with something obscure yet vibrant within the soul—but rather we should think of something that arises from a complete and comprehensive use of level-headed intellectual insight, but which is further developed by bringing forth powers hidden within the soul, leading to an activity of the soul that does not yet exist in ordinary concepts, but initially takes the form of imagery—which, however, must, in the further course of its activity, find expression in concepts just as clear as intellectual insight itself. In my books, I have described what a person must accomplish as inner exercises in order to develop these powers—which remain hidden in the soul from ordinary life and ordinary science—and thus to arrive at imaginative knowledge. Today I would like to characterize this imaginative knowledge, as it arises in the manner described in those books, in a few broad strokes.

[ 3 ] This imaginative insight does not exist in the abstract concepts to which we are accustomed in ordinary logical thinking, but one should not think that this insight is merely a figment of the imagination. If one wishes, at first, to characterize what is at hand in more external terms, one must reflect on that form of experience a person has when they draw up memories from the depths of their psyche, or when these memories, stimulated by this or that, emerge from those depths as if of their own accord. Let us therefore grasp precisely in the eye of the soul what a memory image is, and we will thereby have grasped the manner in which imaginations also live in the soul. They live with the same intensity—indeed, often with a far greater intensity—than memory images. But just as memories, through their very appearance and content, reveal what an experience was like—one that a person may have had years ago and of which they are an image—so these imaginations, when summoned into the soul, reveal that they do not initially connect to a personal experience when they appear as true imaginative insights, but rather that they refer, —even though they appear with exactly the same character as memory images—to a world that is not sensory but is nonetheless thoroughly objective, a world that lives and weaves within the sensory world but does not reveal itself through the organs of sensory perception.

[ 4 ] This is how one might initially characterize, in a positive sense, the more external aspect of the imaginative insights. In a negative sense, we must state what these imaginative insights are not. They are not in any way similar to a vision, a hallucination, or the like. On the contrary, they lead the human soul in the opposite direction from that in which it moves when it succumbs to visions, hallucinations, and the like. Imaginations of knowledge are healthy soul experiences in the same sense that visions, hallucinations, and the like are unhealthy soul experiences. What, with regard to the human being himself, is the defining characteristic of a visionary or hallucinatory life? One of the characteristics is a diminished sense of self, a diminished sense of self-awareness. By surrendering ourselves to our healthy sensory state and our healthy experience of external sensory reality, we possess precisely what we might call a sense of self-awareness. At every moment when we view the external world in a healthy way, when we position ourselves within the external world in a healthy way, we must be able to distinguish ourselves to a certain degree from that which constitutes the content of our self. If what constitutes the content of our consciousness—of our self—overwhelms us to the point that the necessary self-reflection is paralyzed, then unhealthy states set in, and these are precisely the states of visionary and hallucinatory life. Anyone who develops an unbiased judgment in these matters knows that a certain degree of the self-control described above is present when we live within a healthy sensory experience, and knows that beneath this healthy sensory experience lies the visionary and hallucinatory life. Such a person will not be tempted in the least to accept these states of lowered consciousness as revelations of a world that is more valuable than the sensory world.

[ 5 ] One can simply regard a person’s attitude toward these matters as a kind of criterion for determining whether or not they understand true anthroposophical spiritual science. If someone believes that they learn something more valuable about the world through visions and hallucinations than through sensory perception, then they actually lack a sufficient understanding of anthroposophical spiritual science. Sensory perception brings us into a relationship with the external world. A life of visions and hallucinations reduces this relationship to a lower level of clarity by transferring what is already a purer, objective world in sensory perception into the subjective sphere—into that realm of experience where content develops in an unhealthy way from within the organism itself and, at the very least, permeates our sensory perception, and in cases of illness, drives it away entirely and replaces it with pathological content. If one strictly adheres to what I have just stated, then one will, under all circumstances, demand of the imaginative acts of cognition that through them the relationship we have in the sensory world to the objective external world be not dampened or stifled, but rather elevated and stimulated by a strong life.

[ 6 ] Once one realizes that it is the focus on one’s own self—on the “I”—that elevates sensory perceptions above mere visionary, hallucinatory, and dreamlike experiences, then one will also understand why the spiritual researcher presents it as a necessity that, for the sake of imaginative insights, one perform exercises that do not initially diminish the inner intensity of the sense of self, but rather increase and heighten it. But this brings me to something that is absolutely essential for the attainment of supersensible knowledge, as well as to something that—if not carried out in accordance with all the laws I have indicated in my work *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* and in my *An Outline of Esoteric Science*, may—in a certain sense—not pose a danger to the organism, but certainly, at first, to the human being’s psychological, and specifically moral, constitution. The sense of self must be heightened, and self-awareness must become more vigorous. Consequently, in people who do not simultaneously take the precautions I have often described—to endure such a strengthened sense of self without moral or psychological detriment—a form of psychological—not pathological—megalomania is already generated.

[ 7 ] This is something one can easily notice—if you’ll pardon the expression—in “Übern” when it comes to supersensible knowledge, because they tend to gloss over the necessary precautions, so that rather than becoming more modest, they actually fall into a kind of megalomania. One must state this plainly so that no one comes to believe that someone who stands within genuine anthroposophical knowledge would fail to recognize that such megalomania often truly rages among those who, perhaps for one reason or another, now profess to be anthroposophists. The peculiar phenomenon that arises when self-esteem is heightened in this way is as follows: One can heighten this self-esteem; one can bring it to the point where the “I” has, to a very considerable degree, a stronger sense of existence than in ordinary life. How does this heightening initially occur?

[ 8 ] In everyday life, and also in everyday science, there is something I would like to call “momentary consciousness.” One need only be clear about what this momentary consciousness actually is. It becomes clear when one distinguishes between how one experiences an event in which one is immediately immersed in the present—an event one perceives with the senses, grasps with the intellect, and thus forms mental images of in the present, and with which one may also be connected in the present through volitional impulses. Let us cast a critical eye on the inner life of the soul when it is in the situation described, and then compare it with what this inner life is like when one gives oneself over to a complex of memories; let us look at that for which the images of memory serve as representations. What one experienced, say, ten years ago as something in the present is experienced in the present moment—albeit with weaker intensity—as a present-moment experience. It is also experienced as something objective in relation to momentary consciousness. Momentary consciousness looks through the memory image toward what was experienced ten years ago. And compare the degree of experience one has in relation to the present experience with that which one has in relation to a past experience. How little, in comparison to the present experience, is one fully engaged with one’s whole personality in that which is currently present in consciousness only as images of memory!

[ 9 ] This changes when one ascends to cognitive imagination, in such a way that one can control the experience at will and is not overwhelmed by it. What happens is that the sense of “I” gradually intensifies to such an extent that one experiences one’s entire past life—which one would otherwise merely recall—as a sense of “I,” as if one were truly living within those past events as if they were immediately present. Momentary consciousness is expanded into a consciousness flowing within the stream of time. This is the first stage for experiencing imaginative insight. One allows one’s “I,” so to speak, to flow out into the experiences one has had in this earthly life since birth. When I say that one is not overwhelmed by these intensified experiences, I mean that whoever ascends to such a stage of cognition in the proper way is able to bring about this outflow of the “I” into the past at will. One can fully determine the beginning and end of the process, while otherwise remaining the same person—as level-headed in the realm of everyday consciousness—as one was before. Nothing must take the form of an overwhelming experience; rather, what the person acquires as the capacity for a different kind of insight must be entirely subject to their will, just as the use of any complex of judgments in ordinary life is subject to the will of the person making the judgments; otherwise, these things are not on a sound foundation. However, there is a considerable intensification of the “I” when that which otherwise lives in the moment extends the strength of its experience across the entire stream of life.

[ 10 ] In those moments of insight when imaginative knowledge is to become a capacity, one becomes, in a certain sense, a different person—not merely by living in the present with a certain sense of “I,” but by living in time, by having fully incorporated time into one’s experience, whereas in ordinary experience only the present moment is subjective, but the rest of the course of time—including one’s own experience since birth—is in fact objective. One can see that such a systematic development of inner cognitive faculties involves an immersion in objectivity; indeed, it is the first kind of immersion in objectivity, which consists in immersing oneself in the passage of time in the area indicated.

[ 11 ] As the “I” elevates itself in this way, it reaches a kind of culmination. The fact is that the ego must first intensify itself through practice, but that, as it intensifies, it reaches a point where the intensification ceases due to the inherent laws of the matter, in that from a certain point onward the ego begins to weaken of its own accord. The ego can intensify itself through self-awareness with regard to its inner life only up to a certain point; then it comes to the point where it experiences this sense of self once again in a downward curve of attenuation. This occurs because the “I” then moves beyond its own experience—which was initially present in the experience of the flow of time—into an experience that is no longer confined to its own flow of time, but rather into an experience of cosmic world existence. This experience is one that does not initially arise in abstract intellectual concepts, but in something that may be called imagination because it appears in pictorial form. Although this experience is, in its nature, precisely what I have described as the grasping of freedom in my *Philosophy of Freedom*, the content of this experience is such that the imagery entering into consciousness does not now possess its own content, but rather a world-content, just as one has a world-content in sensory perception.

[ 12 ] Spiritual research can describe in a very systematic way every single step—indeed, every tiny step—through which it moves from ordinary intellectual cognition to the emergence of imaginative cognition. When this imaginative cognition arises, it is indeed—and one may well say this—an inner experience of destiny. And this brings me to a point where a distinction must be made between the course of the supersensible quest for knowledge and that of the ordinary quest for knowledge, which people today would like to regard as the only objective one. In most cases, this ordinary quest for knowledge is undertaken without any catastrophes or dramatic twists and turns. For what is experienced during the ordinary pursuit of knowledge—with regard to the whole human being, not the intellectual—is, after all, merely external to the actual process of knowledge. As a researcher, one can certainly experience a certain joy and satisfaction when one has found something new, but what one feels as joy in that moment—regarding the event, the invention, or the discovery—is, at most, only very remotely connected to the methodology of the discovery itself. Finally, the other inner experiences—resembling catastrophes or plot twists—which must be described as “exam anxiety” and the like, have nothing to do with the course of cognition itself. One may have such experiences in the ordinary process of cognition, but they have nothing to do with the process of cognition as such. In contrast, what actually leads one from ordinary intellectual cognition into imaginative cognition is something that permeates the whole, complete human being with experiences—something that constitutes an inner destiny.

[ 13 ] One experiences such an inner destiny especially when, with regard to some point in this development of insight, the following occurs: after initially having had more inner experiences still connected with the human being, these experiences extend outward into the penetration of the mysteries of the cosmos. If I were to give an example that, figuratively speaking, also offers a glimpse into the laboratory of the spiritual researcher, I would say the following. It has been quite some time now, but I once went through an inner process of reflection and judgment that dealt specifically with the following question: What is the nature of the soul experience in the person who is compelled by his or her life impulses to become a materialist, and what is it in the person who is compelled by his or her life impulses to become an idealist or spiritualist—I now use the word “spiritual” in the sense of German philosophical usage—or how do such states of mind, acquired through experience in the world, relate to one another at all? I tried to place myself objectively within the inner experience that fills the materialist and the naturalist, and likewise within the inner experience that fills the idealist and the spiritualist; I tried, so to speak, to slip into the states of mind that can take hold of a person in this way. Only in this way can one truly come to understand the inner world of the soul—by voluntarily, if only tentatively, becoming a materialist alongside the materialist, and, on the other hand, by tentatively becoming an idealist or spiritualist in the very same sense. Through this, one gains a new perspective on the way in which a person logically synthesizes what then becomes the content of their worldview.

[ 14 ] However, I mention this now only from a methodological perspective. Anyone who goes through something like what I have just described in an honest and genuinely sincere way experiences fateful events even in these particular states of mind, for one then comes to understand in a completely different way why people can be driven toward materialism or spiritualism. One ceases to be provoked by criticism in the ordinary sense—to rebuke others solely from one’s own point of view. This elevates the soul’s experience to a different level; it is transformed. If one goes through this for a longer period of time, one realizes that in such meditations—which, however, take hold of the soul’s life—there lies something that constitutes a real soul process and that moves precisely toward the development of the faculties for objective imaginative insight. For by the fact that my soul had, so to speak, prepared itself in the way I have described, the soul was transformed in such a way that it suddenly gained the understanding to experience, through contemplation, how the course of the sun through the zodiac—which is otherwise viewed only in a sensory-mechanistic way—contains a living, cosmically organic process. What can otherwise be perceived only as a cosmically-mechanical image became rich in imaginative content. I saw something new in the cosmos. It is precisely in such an expansion of consciousness toward the cosmos that one experiences, as if by fate, what it means to have first strengthened one’s “I” by carrying out certain intellectual operations with greater vigor, and then, from a certain culmination onward, to feel this “I” now flowing out into the world, so that one now stands within the world with this “I.” This is an experience that reveals something fateful in the process of cognition itself—a process that in fact grips the whole human being; and this connection to the whole human being, whereas the ordinary process of cognition is actually connected only to the intellectual aspect of the person—that is the distinguishing feature. In this way, I simply wanted to draw attention to the fact that what leads to imaginative insights should not be presented in terms of some vague mysticism, but rather that this process can be described with the same precision as the solution to any mathematical problem. And the abilities for imaginative cognition acquired through such paths are present in the soul just as mathematical and geometric structures are present there with the utmost clarity and transparency. One does not possess a content of the soul to which one merely surrenders in a nebulous, hidden, inner experience, but rather one that is as transparent and linked to the maintenance of its own reality as is the case with the mathematical content of the soul.

[ 15 ] I have thus begun by describing, in a somewhat external way, how the imaginative life takes root in the soul, which then leads to insights into the supersensible world in a manner that will also be described in greater detail. However, I never wish to lose sight of the point that the attainment of—and the striving for—such forms of supersensible knowledge is not something that arbitrarily imposes itself upon the cultural and civilizational development of humanity in our present age, but rather something that follows with a certain necessity from the course of this age itself. What today can only be attained in full consciousness—as I have described it—as imaginative knowledge, and what can then also be expressed in concepts once it has taken the detour through the realm of imagery, was sought in earlier epochs of human development in a more instinctive manner. The course of human development was such that in earlier times, insights were not gained through those logical-empirical considerations that we have recognized since the mid-15th century as our proper path, but rather that in earlier times there existed a kind of instinctive striving toward imaginations and also an attainment of such imaginations.

[ 16 ] At the time of this instinctive spiritual insight, it was not yet possible to articulate these imaginings in concepts. The ability to express oneself in concepts—as we are accustomed to doing today in science through our conceptual analysis of the inorganic world—is only a result of the age of Galileo and Copernicus. In earlier times, people were not able to express themselves in concepts in this way. Greek concepts were something fundamentally different. People expressed themselves in images—images created through lines or, indeed, through combinations of colors. I would just like to mention in passing that in earlier epochs of human development, insights were not treated as generally, I would say, as democratically as knowledge and insight are treated today; rather, those who possessed such knowledge withdrew into smaller groups, which we have come to call secret societies and the like—traces of which still exist today, albeit only as misleading traces, in all manner of orders and similar groups. Those who sought knowledge isolated themselves in small groups. The people they admitted into these groups were carefully prepared so that they could safely, without endangering their moral lives, arrive at these insights, which were considered necessary. And what could be experienced in instinctive imaginings was taught through certain—let us say—symbolic, pictorial representations. Such images constituted the content of the teachings in the ancient schools of wisdom, just as our books constitute the content of our teachings today; but these teaching aids consisted entirely of images drawn from within the human being.

[ 17 ] So as not to speak to you in vague terms, I would like to remind you of something very specific, a single image: There was always an image that was used to help people imaginatively understand the process of cognition in human beings themselves. The process of cognition was not described in the same way as it is today by epistemologists. It was viewed through a kind of instinctive clairvoyance, and what was observed there was characterized by drawing the image of a snake biting its own tail. An essential characteristic of cognition was seen in this image. But this image, as I have just described it to you, is actually only what has more or less found its way into popular depictions. The true symbolic images were carefully kept secret within the groups by those who possessed knowledge—out of a certain desire for power—so that they alone could be the knowers, while others were to remain the ignorant. The image actually intended by the exoteric symbol of the snake biting its tail is one in which the snake is depicted not merely biting its tail, but, in a sense, devouring its own tail. To the extent that this end of the tail enters the mouth, it becomes spiritualized. And then something appears that, if one were to depict the snake with a denser color, one would have to add with a lighter color—like a kind of aura surrounding the snake. This results in a complex formation which, however, if one wishes to characterize it in simple terms, must be characterized with the words Dr. Unger used this morning in his lecture, in which he continually apologized, as it were, for using this word. One really does have to, in a sense, apologize for many things that are entirely justified today when expressed from the perspective of spiritual science. Unger used the word “invert” several times. Imagine you have an elastic sphere and you drill into it at a single point at the top, so that you invert the sphere in on itself, with the result that what initially protruded upward is now pressed downward, so that one ends up with a sort of little bowl or plate formed from the sphere; and now imagine that one does not merely turn it inside out down to the bottom of the sphere, but goes beyond it, piercing through it, as it were, so that on the other side the substance of the sphere emerges in a different consistency—so that the sphere, after it has been pierced, appears from the outside as if rimmed with light—light that has, however, arisen from the inverted part itself. This is a figure that cannot be easily depicted, but which conveys in a simpler way what was meant to be symbolically indicated by the images used in such secret societies to illustrate the process of knowledge, in order to stimulate an understanding of this process among those who were to learn through this visualization.

[ 18 ] As mentioned, these figures were kept very secret out of a certain sense of power. One could only obtain them if one experienced, within oneself, a vision of a cosmic process. There was no other way to gain a sense of the inner experience and understanding of such figures. If I may use an expression that is somewhat trivial in light of the process, I must say: Through the rise of inner spiritual contents, one obtained something for which, as with something more self-evident, one sought such a symbolic expression. These were fixed, instinctive imaginations.

[ 19 ] It was then that those more recent scientific studies began to emerge which, in a certain sense, found a synthesizer in Haeckel. Haeckel reflected on the very subject of his research in a certain synthesizing—one might even say magnificent—sense. And, for reasons I outlined yesterday, he felt a need to illustrate what he was investigating in animal life, namely, that which is connected with the development of the entire animal organism. If you open Haeckel’s writings and look at the drawings—others have made them as well, but Haeckel, I would say, made them the very core of his entire thinking— the ones Haeckel made about the earliest stages of embryonic life—the stages through which he sought to demonstrate how the ontogeny of a being is a condensed version of phylogeny—then you will find drawings that, if you were familiar with what the ancient sages recorded as instinctive imaginations, would remind you of those imaginations.

[ 20 ] Haeckel studied the initial stage of embryonic development, known as gastrulation—the formation of the blastocoel—during which the arrangement of cells actually occurs as if one were turning a sphere inside out; and he constructed in his imagination the Gasträa, a hypothetical organism that once had such a form in phylogenetic development, which is repeated in this early stage of embryonic development, the gastrula stage. In other words: what Haeckel drew there was intended to be—even though it was derived solely from the sensory external world—a faithful representation, at most somewhat embellished by the imagination and clothed in hypothesis, of processes taking place in the world that we can perceive with our senses.

[ 21 ] I am thereby hinting at something that may be of the utmost indifference to some people today, but which anyone who is sincerely engaged in the pursuit of knowledge must regard as an outstanding cultural phenomenon in the most eminent sense. Haeckel depicts the external world and arrives at the origins of those symbolic figures that, in a certain bygone era, were considered the most esoteric; although they are preserved here and there today, they are kept very well hidden. It is regarded as nothing short of treason within certain power-hungry groups when anyone speaks of them. These figures were once drawn from inner experiences; they were the recorded instinctive imaginations. This means nothing less than this: Through natural science—as it advances toward an understanding of the processes within the animal organism—we have reached a point where natural science must depict external processes just as one once depicted them from the imaginative life that arose freely within the soul, a life that, through an intensification of the inner world, gained cosmic insights. Inner experience was cast into symbols that—and quite different ones will be found in the course of further natural science—resemble entirely those that are now gained through the depiction of the external world. A cultural-historical fact of the very highest order!

[ 22 ] Thus, in the development of humanity with regard to knowledge, we have now reached a point where empirical observation of the animal world from the outside compels us to recognize what was once found in the innermost depths of the soul. Exotericism today provides content that once belonged to the deepest esotericism. Haeckel arrived at these ideas in a very naive way. The process is even more interesting when we observe it in someone who approached it with less naivety—someone who, as I characterized him yesterday, passed through the stages of his cognitive experience with a certain level-headedness—when we observe it in Goethe. In the 1890s, Goethe sketched his “primordial plant”—a symbolic plant—for Schiller. With just a few strokes, he sketched what he believed could represent the plant that manifests itself metamorphically in all plant forms. Schiller said, “That is not empiricism; that is an idea.”—Goethe replied, “Then I see my ideas with my eyes.” — Goethe was aware that he had sketched something objective, something he had observed in the plant world. Why was Goethe able to do this? I have frequently described in my writings on Goethe the inner process that drove him to view plant life in such a way that he arrived at his conception of metamorphosis. Since then—likely drawing on what has been presented there as Goethe’s path to knowledge—a dissertation on Swedenborg’s influence on Goethe was published many years ago in Berlin by a younger man who used to visit me frequently at the time. This dissertation ranks among the most outstanding literary works of recent times. Such works are easily lost in the flood of dissertations that otherwise appear and go unread. This dissertation on Goethe’s philosophy of nature in relation to Swedenborg shows how Goethe, precisely by immersing himself in Swedenborg’s state of mind as a young man, arrived at certain conceptual forms that then, more or less unconsciously, guided him toward his morphological imaginings about the plant world. It is highly interesting to consider Goethe’s relationship to Swedenborg from this perspective.

[ 23 ] As far as Swedenborg is concerned, the fact is that he was certainly a scientific figure at the forefront of his time. By the age of forty, he had developed conceptual frameworks that allowed him—in accordance with the scientific perspective of his time and in a truly scientific sense—to proceed in such a way that his scientific manuscripts, which have not yet been published, are now being issued by a scholarly society as works of the highest value. Until the age of forty, Swedenborg was a leading, representative natural scientist of his time. He was so because he possessed synthesizing ideas that enabled him to identify broader patterns in natural phenomena. Then he fell ill in a certain sense, and the conceptual frameworks he had previously developed for understanding nature poured into his ailing organism. What certain mystical minds revere in Swedenborg is his former scientific state of mind in the metamorphosis brought about by his illness.

[ 24 ] Just as Swedenborg does, sound spiritual perception cannot see the spiritual worlds—not in these personifications, in these images drawn entirely from one’s own constitution, which, with a few changes, actually resemble earthly life exactly, if one only removes a certain heaviness from it. I do not wish to delve further into the root cause of Swedenborg’s illness, but—so as not to be misunderstood—I wish to point out that what Swedenborg accomplished as a seer can nonetheless be of the utmost interest, because something has poured into it that originated from a great, comprehensive, scientifically minded soul. Goethe was inspired in the highest sense, even as a young man, by what emerged in Swedenborg in this kind of conceptual synthesis, and he developed in a healthy way for his morphology—for the characteristic, scientific penetration of the nature of plants—what Swedenborg had developed as a pathological vision.

[ 25 ] This relationship between Goethe and Swedenborg is extremely interesting because here a path was taken in which one moved in the direction of illness, while the other moved in the direction of health in the most intense sense. And the conceptual formulations that Goethe arrived at regarding the three-dimensional perception of the plant world are already on the path toward such drawings—or, I would say, such “paintings,” taking the concept of painting in a broad sense—which Haeckel was later compelled to apply to the organic world of animals. Goethe proceeds more prudently. He is, after all, so prudent that he embraces Swedenborgianism only to the extent that it is sound. But Goethe, too, ventures into the representation of the external world through such images that, in earlier times—when human knowledge had taken more inward paths—had risen from within or been drawn up from within. Even in Goethe’s time, at least for Goethe and those who understood him, the development of the life of knowledge had progressed so far that one was compelled to seek in the external world the very same imagery that had previously been found in an instinctive life of imagination.

[ 26 ] On the basis of the instinctive life of the imagination, one cannot stand still in the face of the progress of human development. The life of the imagination must be sought as consciously as I described at the beginning of today’s reflection. But then the following becomes apparent. We reach a point with our intellectual understanding where we can comprehend and describe the inorganic external world in terms of measure, number, and weight, and arrive at constructive concepts of this world, which exists in terms of measure, number, and weight. When we ascend into the plant realm, into the animal realm, we find—precisely because the scientific view of nature has reached a certain level of advancement in our age—that these intellectual considerations are no longer sufficient. We need a different kind of representation, and when a person has inorganic nature before them, they turn to their comprehending intellect and internalize this inanimate nature, arriving at a knowledge, at an understanding of this nature that exists in measure, number, and weight.

[ 27 ] But when human beings now perceive the plant and animal worlds as they already perceive inorganic nature today—and as earlier ages, with their instinctive imagination, did not perceive them—then they are compelled no longer grasp the nature of plants and animals through an inner, soul-based comprehension that exists solely as an intellectual concept; rather, it becomes apparent that Goethe—more consciously—and Haeckel—quite naively and unconsciously—delve into descriptions that recall earlier instinctive imaginations. This, however, points to the fact that precisely because we have gradually advanced so far in our observation of nature—when we move from minerals to plants, from animals to humans, and toward an understanding of the world as a whole—we must apply higher levels of cognition; that is, we must move from ordinary conceptual understanding to imagination, inspiration, and intuition. The rest will become clear from the following reflections. This, however, will show that there are entirely different, sound fields of study besides those often cited in order to establish a relationship with modern natural science—a field treated by Haeckel with a certain bias. This relationship must be a living one. One must address this very field of natural research in order to show how its own development gives rise to the necessity of arriving at an imaginative life in full consciousness. And in what follows, it will become evident simply through the objective presentation of the sources of knowledge in anthroposophy that, in the development of this anthroposophical worldview at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, my aim was truly to show how one must progress from what Haeckel quite naively presented merely as an indication of external nature to a genuine spiritual insight.

[ 28 ] At that time, the situation was such that Haeckel developed a view of nature in which, in reality, only the illustrations he drew had any significance. In these illustrations, he developed all sorts of concepts. He drew these concepts from his own era. I often said this when I gave lectures on Haeckel back then: Take even the much-maligned book *The Riddles of the World*—specifically the first few pages, where what lives in the animal world is presented in a positive, constructive light—and tear out the polemics from the last few pages, which make up the bulk of the book; what remains is still a valuable book for anyone who wishes to familiarize themselves with the way we must view organic nature today. But the concepts that Haeckel now extracts from all of this—and which appear precisely in the part of the book that I said should be torn out—these concepts are borrowed from the general conceptual framework of modern times. Yet these concepts have gradually become obsolete in the realm of organic nature.

[ 29 ] Haeckel worked with vivid illustrations, but with dead concepts. I often noticed this during lectures on Haeckelism, and so I wrote my treatise “Haeckel and His Opponents.” It arose from the feeling that, while Haeckel indeed used dead concepts—ones that are of no use—to support his views, his opponents, in turn, combated his views with their own dead concepts. Therefore, even back then, the issue could be nothing other than what it must be today for spiritual science in relation to natural science: the humanities, with an anthroposophical orientation, should not approach natural science critically with dead concepts, but should take the views it has gained through the progress of scientific methods and develop them into living concepts; one should not combat what arises in natural science with the dead spirit, but carry it forward into the living spirit.