The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Sixth Lecture

[ 1 ] You will have gathered from the preceding remarks that imaginative cognition bears a certain resemblance to the workings of memory in the human soul. Indeed, imaginative cognition can also be characterized by comparing it to the life of memory. One need only attempt to delve a little more deeply into this life of memory than is the case in the psychological studies commonly conducted today.

[ 2 ] Memory is very often presented as if thoughts were linked to the external perceptions we make through our senses, and as if, during perception—or perhaps even a little afterward—we had these thoughts about what we perceived, and then these thoughts somehow rolled down into the subconscious and, with the appropriate effort, emerged again from this subconscious as remembered images. One school of philosophy has suggested that such thoughts or ideas, so to speak, descend below the threshold of consciousness, only to rise back above that threshold at the appropriate moment. It is certainly a convenient way of thinking to imagine the process taking place in such a way that the mental images arising from perceptions are first evoked and then, when we no longer have them, wander or float around somewhere in the subconscious—which we don’t really give much thought to—and then resurface when we need them. For even a superficial examination of human psychological experiences can show that this is certainly not the case.

[ 3 ] At first glance, there is no significant difference between the emergence of a mental image through external perception and that which arises from memory. In one case, the external world stimulates our mental image. External perception is present, and the mental image follows. We are, however, aware of the external perception and then, with reflection, trace the process all the way to the arousal of the mental image. But that is not the essential point. It is true that when a mental image from memory arises, that which stimulates this image from within is not immediately present to our consciousness at first. But the essential point is not, as I have just indicated, that we are aware of the perception, but rather that a mental image is aroused from some source—sometimes from the outside, sometimes from the inside.

[ 4 ] In a sense—if one does not misuse the terms—one could say that in both cases it is an objective reality that compels us to form mental images. And if we continue to examine the process of perception and the associated mental image, we will have to regard as essential the fact that we engage in certain exercises when we want to commit something particularly firmly to memory—that is, when we strive not simply to let our experience of a fact fall prey to oblivion, but rather when we aim to retain it. One need only reflect on the strategies one employed in one’s youth to ensure a good retention of information, when such retention was necessary. What leads to remembering goes far beyond what leads merely to the formation of a mental image. If one studies memory itself, one will notice that, in the way in which the power of memory is sometimes diminished or even enhanced purely by physical dispositions, our entire organism plays a role in the formation of memories; that is to say, when we are engaged in the act of perceptual representation, we are performing an activity that is organic. This organic activity remains, at first, partially or entirely hidden from consciousness, but it is this activity that actually brings about the act of remembering. This is based on the fact that a mental image, when it is linked to a perception, does not simply “dance down” into the subconscious and then come back up again; rather, it is based on the fact that something else is linked to our perceptual imagination besides mere image formation. The mental image fades away. And once we have moved beyond the perceived perceptual process, the mental image has indeed faded; but something else has taken place within us, which, given the right opportunity, can evoke the mental image once again.

[ 5 ] Anyone who is capable of observing mental processes at all will find that a memory image, as an image, is indeed a new formation, that it is formed in a manner similar to how a perceptual image is formed; except that in one case the process proceeds from the outside in, and in the other from the inside out; that in one case the stimulus, as perception, clearly enters consciousness, while in the other it remains hidden from consciousness as an internal process linked to the organism. Let us set aside for the moment this fact, which I have been able to characterize only in outline, and return now to the consideration of imaginative cognition. I have described how imaginative insight is developed through exercises that enable a person to form inner images in the same way one forms them when recalling memories. I have described these exercises in my book *How Does One Attain Insights into the Higher Worlds?* and in my *Outline of Esoteric Science*. Through these exercises, one attains the capacity for imaginative experience. One comes to have such inner, image-like experiences with pictorial content that do not recall personally experienced facts, but which, by their very nature, bear the mark of being images of a reality that is initially hidden from ordinary consciousness—a reality we may call a spiritual reality.

[ 6 ] But if one approaches the act I have just described with this pictorial consciousness, it appears in a somewhat different light. One recognizes how representational perception and recalling imagination differ from the faculty of imagination. Above all, through the capacity for imaginative cognition, one gains a special inner experience of conceptualization—of thinking itself. If one reflects with ordinary consciousness, one does not get very far. One must already have undergone philosophical training to be able to grasp anything at all when one wishes to take conceptualization—thinking itself—as the object. Anyone who has not engaged in philosophical training will become impatient if asked to somehow think about thinking itself. Even Goethe considered himself fortunate that he had never thought about thinking. This can be explained very well precisely from Goethe’s nature. Goethe, who—as I have characterized him in these reflections—strived for concreteness, felt the same way a fish must feel when it is taken out of the water and into the air; when he, Goethe, moved from his concrete element into this element of pure thought, in which he could not breathe spiritually, because it was entirely contrary to his nature.

[ 7 ] But one can—and indeed must—grasp thought itself; otherwise, one cannot arrive at a definitive philosophical perspective. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is certainly the philosopher’s task. Now, however, what one can grasp in ordinary consciousness as thinking, as imagination—which takes on an extraordinarily abstract, pale character, one that one does not wish to dwell on for long—becomes denser and more vivid for imaginative cognition; indeed, one might say that imagination and thinking, which previously appeared abstract and spiritual, are approaching material vividness.

[ 8 ] One should not misunderstand the full significance of such a statement; for it must, at first, actually come as a surprise that what is usually spoken of as having nothing to do with the material world becomes, precisely when viewed at the first stage of supersensory knowledge—in the imagination—all the more vivid and even takes on a form that, I would say, is already reminiscent of something material. Indeed, the image one gains of thinking—for it is images that one receives in imagination—is reminiscent of processes of dying, of self-destruction, of withering away. In fact, in the imaginative perception of the imagination and of thinking, one receives the image of the material world in the process of dying. I may even say that if one wishes to compare what I have just described with anything in the external sensory world, one can only compare it to that process which can be observed as the onset of physical death in a living being. Essentially, in the transition from ordinary cognition to the imaginative cognition of thought, one really experiences something in one’s perception similar to what one experiences when witnessing a death in the physical world.

[ 9 ] Insight becomes something more alive precisely because one approaches imagination and inspiration in a way that goes beyond the abstract form in which they exist in ordinary consciousness. That is why the ascent to supersensory insights is precisely linked to what I called yesterday “inner experiences of destiny.” One goes through the processes of ordinary consciousness with a certain inner detachment. We know, after all, how the rest of life leads upward toward pleasure and downward toward pain, how we rise and fall in the waves of sensation and emotion; yet, in comparison, what takes place in our cognitive thinking has something icy about it, something that leaves us cold, something that evokes few such waves in our minds.

[ 10 ] This does indeed change when one ascends to imaginative cognition. There, the processes of cognition—although they are entirely of a spiritual-soul nature and have nothing to do with the physical—become more similar to the processes of ordinary life. One becomes more intimately involved with these cognitive processes as they engage one with a heightened personal interest. And now, by undergoing this process of making thought and imagination more vivid, one actually comes to know a vivid process that is already approaching the material realm. If one truly brings this process to mind, one can use it to approach the inner process of remembering. In a sense, the human organism becomes transparent through having been imagined in this way. One has first experienced the thought process mentally and emotionally in an act of imagination. One experiences its material counterpart when one now studies the act of remembering; for what precedes the emergence of the memory image into consciousness is a kind of material process similar to that which arises as an image in perception when one approaches thinking in imagination as I have just described. One might say that here lies the possibility of gaining insight into the process of memory through imaginative cognition. And if one then continues one’s efforts at understanding along this path, one does indeed come to realize that imagination itself is, in a spiritual-psychic sense, a process similar to the physical-bodily process of memory—only, I would say, individualized within the human body, individualized for personal experiences. The process of imagination detaches itself from the human body and focuses on similar processes taking place outside the human body in the cosmos.

[ 11 ] A physical-bodily process of initial dying is at work in the organism; what appears in consciousness in connection with this are the images of memory. In imagination, a spiritual-psychic process is at work, and this corresponds in the external world to a real process—one that we must, however, first approach more closely, for it cannot yet be grasped through imagination alone, since the complete supersensory process of cognition consists of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But as you can see, there are things in human life—such as remembering, and indeed all physical-psychic processes—that cannot be understood through speculation or philosophical considerations, but only by approaching them through the cultivation of initially hidden psychic abilities. And the fact that one approaches them is also evident from what follows.

[ 12 ] When we live inwardly and spiritually within ordinary thinking or imagination, we are conscious of this thinking in the following way: it is we ourselves who string one idea after another; indeed, we have the clear awareness that if we could not deliberately string one idea after another with a certain inner arbitrariness, but if the ideas were to drive one another so that we were merely like the image of an automaton operating within us, then we would not, in reality, be human. This feeling we have toward our ordinary thinking is, as I believe I have shown in my *Philosophy of Freedom*, at the same time the very source from which our overall sense of freedom flows—a sense through which the phenomenon of freedom itself can be understood empirically in the first place.

[ 13 ] This feeling of inner arbitrariness initially disappears when one rises to the level of imagination. Imagination provides images which, although experienced purely in the mind and soul—as I said yesterday—have nothing to do with the visionary, the hallucinatory, or the like. Because these images are, in fact, rich in content, they show that, when it comes to synthesizing and analyzing them, they no longer allow us the same freedom that prevails when, in ordinary consciousness, we combine or separate ideas. We gradually develop a sense that, through imaginative cognition, we do not merely immerse ourselves in images—as we immerse ourselves in our ideas, which, strictly speaking, appear to us as individual ideas that we must connect— but we gradually gain the sense that the imaginations are actually only broken down into details by us, yet that they essentially form a whole, and that, in a sense, a continuous force operates through them. We experience something in the imaginative realm that we are able to bring into our consciousness only through this imaginative insight—something of which we actually have no inkling in ordinary consciousness.

[ 14 ] And again: when we study ordinary life—especially in the way Goethe did in his studies of metamorphosis, observing the development of the plant kingdom, the transition from one form to another, this metamorphosis that lives within itself— then we find that within this life of the plant realm there exists that of which what we now experience as a continuous unfolding of force in the world of the imagination is but an image. Thus we gradually come to realize that, through the use of the imagination, we have worked our way toward grasping that which is the force of growth. We come to realize that we must reject the speculated-about life force even more strongly than the mechanists have done, because that which lies within the realm of this life force can never yield to ordinary thought or ordinary philosophical speculation, but only to a higher mode of understanding that must be attained. We come to realize how only the inorganic yields to ordinary understanding, and how that which lives in growth must be grasped in an inner state of mind that we possess only once we have mastered the imagination. Thus does this life-force live within our organism. We gain insight into it by devoting ourselves to the life of the imagination.

[ 15 ] Here it is important to emphasize that, for those exercises that lead to imaginative cognition, the rules I have outlined in my books must truly be followed. For what is the purpose of all these rules? They aim to ensure that everything done by the person striving to develop a higher faculty of cognition is carried out with the same inner clarity one possesses when forming mathematical concepts. Consciousness must be in the same state as it is when engaging in geometry, immersing itself in all that is necessary to develop the imagination and also the subsequent stages of supersensible knowledge—inspiration and intuition. If you think of the pathological, visionary, hallucinatory life—or even the dream life, which at least casts a shadow of the pathological—you will be able to consider the enormous difference between all of that and a consciousness that lives with mathematical clarity. What is meant to lead to imagination must not be pursued with a subdued consciousness; for if one were to pursue that which must be sought purely in a soul-spiritual sense with mathematical clarity in a dreamlike, mystical, confused, or obscured manner, one could not ascend to higher powers of knowledge, but would instead sink down into powers one already possessed earlier—namely, the growth forces, the inner reproductive forces of the human organism. One would stimulate these to proliferate, and tendencies toward the visionary and the hallucinatory would arise instead of imaginative insight. One can already see how these things are connected when one truly holds this description of the path to imaginative insight before one’s mind.

[ 16 ] In this imaginative insight, one lives, as I have described, in a world of images, except that the images, by their very nature, bear the mark of being representations of realities. But one does not possess these realities; rather, one has the clearest awareness of living in an unreal world of images, and that is precisely what is healthy. The hallucinator, the visionary, takes his visions and hallucinations for reality. The person who imagines possesses not merely ordinary but heightened discernment precisely because he knows: everything he experiences in his imagination is an image—an image of a reality, but still an image. He cannot possibly confuse this world of images with reality. For what, so to speak, carries us across from the world of images into reality is inspiration.

[ 17 ] Imagination first provides a picture of supersensible reality; inspiration points us toward it. We attain this inspiration by using an inner technique—just as we bring about the possibility of imagination through meditation and concentration—to develop another ability that, in ordinary life, is rightly not particularly valued. One must observe in such a way as to attain a reasonably clear awareness of what it means to forget, to cast a mental image out of consciousness. One must practice, through meditation, the art of forgetting—the sifting out of images—and thereby cultivate the ability to reject and ultimately erase the imaginative life, the life in images, that one has acquired. Anyone who has only managed to have imaginations cannot yet penetrate a spiritual reality; only the one who has managed to erase these imaginations—which, I would say, initially appear merely as a realization of the imaginative faculty—can do so, for these imaginations are, in fact, more or less self-created. The point is to, as it were, completely empty one’s consciousness, to apply the act of forgetting at will to this imaginative life, so that one learns what it means to live in a fully alert consciousness—one that does not imagine, but which has derived its inner energy from prior imagining and has now shed its content—what it means to live in such a powerful consciousness. One must learn to know this; then one ascends from imagination to knowledge through inspiration, and then one also knows that one is touched by a spiritual reality that reveals itself to one in a soul-spiritual process that can be compared to inhaling and exhaling—indeed, to the rhythmic process of breathing itself. Just as the rhythmic process of breathing consists of our taking in the external air, processing it internally, and then expelling it again in a different form, after having, in a certain sense, made ourselves one with it—so, too, do we come to know a spiritual-psychic process that consists in our being able to feel the inner power of consciousness that we have gained, to inhale it, so to speak, spiritually and psychically into this consciousness strengthened through imagination. Through this, however, objective imagination shines forth in this invigorated consciousness. We breathe in the spiritual world; we take it into ourselves; we identify with it; we live out of ourselves; a rhythmic interaction with the spiritual world takes place.

[ 18 ] In ancient India, there were instinctive efforts to attain a higher level of knowledge. These instinctive aspirations, which were embodied in yoga, utilized—as you may know—the breathing process to arrive, so to speak, through physical means, at the point of experiencing this breathing process itself as a spiritual-soul process. In the Eastern yoga practice, by regulating the breathing—inhaling, holding the breath, exhaling—in a certain way and surrendering to this breathing process, one, so to speak, extracts the spiritual-psychic element from this breathing process. One separates the breathing process from consciousness precisely by drawing it inward, and what remains is the spiritual-psychic aspect. We cannot replicate this process, which has been undergone in yoga practice, given the organization of our present-day culture; nor should we attempt to do so. It would drag us down into the physical realm. In a sense, our soul life no longer resides in the same realm as that of the Indian. The Indian’s soul life was oriented more toward sensibility; ours is oriented toward intellectuality. And in the sphere of intellectuality, yogic breathing would put a person in danger of destroying their physical constitution. When living in the intellectual realm, one is compelled to practice exercises such as those I have described in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*. These exercises remain purely within the spiritual-soul realm. At most, they may hint at—though rarely, or not at all in most cases—something of the physical breathing process. The essential part of our exercises for attaining imagination, however, takes place purely in the spiritual-soul realm—in the sphere that a person experiences when engaging in geometry and mathematics. What must be done to attain inspiration also takes place in this sphere.

[ 19 ] Through inspiration, the possibility arises of gaining an awareness of a spiritual-soul outer world, a spiritual-soul objectivity. This, however, is connected to the fact that the life of consciousness itself now undergoes an inner metamorphosis. As a physical being, a person must accept that, in the course of childhood, youth, middle age, and old age, they undergo external metamorphoses of growth. With regard to consciousness itself, a person feels a slight fear, a reluctance, to undergo such metamorphoses—such a living process—within the very innermost content of the soul. But this must be endured if one wishes to attain supersensible knowledge. What Goethe developed to a particular degree of perfection—the contemplation of metamorphosis—can find a particularly natural home in the realm of imaginative life, for the reason that everything subject to the imagination presents itself as living, transforming forms. A certain form appears before consciousness. It transforms—perhaps with transitions or perhaps without—into a completely different form, yet one can, in a sense, carry over the outline of the first form into the outline of the second. There is a possibility of forming one from the other without making a fundamental leap. This ceases when one approaches that essence of the world which must be grasped through inspiration: it ceases as soon as one approaches the animal organization.

[ 20 ] I would like to illustrate what one must approach when considering animal organization with the following example. When one studies human thought—whether as a psychologist or a logician—to the point of arriving at a definition of thought, one can establish a certain concept of thought, and it will be the pride of logicians, epistemologists, and psychologists to arrive at such a clear, transparent, and distinct concept of thought. They will be happy when they have such a concept, when they can say: “Thinking is…”—and now come the predicates. But let us suppose that someone had been entirely successful in establishing such a concept of thinking, and he would then find himself in the same situation I was in when I wrote my *Philosophy of Freedom*: he would have to trace thinking from the form in which it exists when it is linked to external, concrete perception, all the way to the form in which it exists in free spiritual life within the human personality as an impulse of the will, as an impulse to act. There, thinking presents itself in such a way that we still recognize it as pure, purified thinking. We can move from the thought we have studied in connection with the perception to which it is linked to those thoughts that serve as motives for our actions when we act as free human beings. But when we turn to this kind of thinking, it is indeed real thinking, yet it no longer corresponds to the definition we have formed of thinking based on perception. We can no longer make use of this definition, for this thinking—which underlies action as a motive, even though it is a form of thinking—no longer resembles thinking; rather, it is, through and through, will. It has, one might say, metamorphosed into its opposite, into will; it has become will; it is, through and through—if I may use the expression—substantial will. You can also see from this how one must remain mentally flexible in the use of concepts. Anyone who gets into the habit of forming a concept and applying it can very easily find themselves in a situation where reality renders their use of the concept meaningless.

[ 21 ] Well, let’s assume—and this is, after all, the case with regard to external reality—that we have formed a concept of Josef Müller in his seventh year. When we meet him again in his fiftieth year, that concept does not help us to understand him adequately. We must expect a metamorphosis; something has changed. The definition of the young Müller at age seven will not help us when we have the fifty-year-old Müller before us. Life mocks definitions, those sharply defined, meaningful concepts. This is precisely what constitutes the problem in many of life’s discussions and debates: that we are actually debating beyond reality, while reality mocks rigid definitions and rigid descriptions. And so it is also true that we must gain an insight into how thought becomes will and will becomes thought.

[ 22 ] If this is initially a case that applies to human beings, it is already largely the case when we simply seek to understand animal organization through inspiration. Here we cannot merely speak of the kind of metamorphoses that Goethe described for the plant kingdom—where, so to speak, we can still transform one form into another—but rather we must speak of inner transitions—or, if I may use the term Dr. Unger and I employed yesterday— one must make use of “inversions”—not merely geometric ones, but qualitative inversions—in order to move from one to the other. In short, one must be prepared to accept that the inner state of the soul itself undergoes a metamorphosis, that one, so to speak, experiences a maturing of the content of one’s inner experiences and insights.

[ 23 ] Thus it happens that, as we ascend from imagination to inspiration, we cannot use the same concepts that are all too real and legitimately employed in ordinary consciousness—concepts that, of course, must always serve as points of reference, but which must be modified when knowledge descends into the true inner core, that is, the spiritual essence of things. And so the logical distinction between “right” and “wrong” is lifted out of its abstractness when one ascends from imagination to inspiration. One can no longer relate to the world—which one now recognizes as a spiritual external world—by using the terms “right” or “wrong” in the same way one has rightly learned to use them at a previous stage of knowledge. These terms transform into something much more concrete, namely, what one now experiences in the illuminating imaginations. One cannot apply the terms “right” and “wrong” to these in the same way as one does to the concepts of intellectual life; rather, it is precisely in this spiritual-psychic realm that more concrete concepts emerge: one is “healthy,” the other is “sick”; one promotes life, the other destroys it. The abstract concept of “right” transforms into a more concrete concept, so that what we are tempted to call “right” intervenes in the spiritual world as something healing and life-giving, while what we are tempted to call “wrong” intervenes in the spiritual world in a way that is sickening, deadly, and paralyzing.

[ 24 ] Views, then, that we have become accustomed to applying in physical life take on a new form once we have crossed the threshold into the spiritual world; but it is precisely then that we experience the content of these concepts in a spiritual-soulful way. Therefore, you will find—as is indeed the case with those who can honestly engage with the insights of the supersensible worlds—that different characterizations come into play; that they no longer juggle with the terms “right” or “wrong,” but rather, quite naturally, begin to use expressions such as “healthy” and “unhealthy” and the like. With this, however, I have first attempted to describe—and I will return to these matters in much greater depth in the next lectures—how one can ascend from ordinary cognition to imagination and inspiration, and how one thereby methodically enters into the true essence, that is, into the spiritual-supersensory essence of the world.

[ 25 ] Now I would like to recall how, in my *Philosophy of Freedom*, in order to describe human action and to understand the phenomenon of freedom, I was compelled, on the one hand, to sharply delineate the concept of pure perception, with which thought is connected. On the other hand, I pointed out at the time that moral impulses are drawn as intuitions from a spiritual world. Thus, in attempting to establish a real ethics, I was compelled, on the one hand, to sharply characterize the perception of the external sensory world—which must be permeated by thought—at one pole, and moral intuition at the other pole of human existence; objective observation or cognition on the one hand, and intuitive cognition on the other. If one wishes to understand human beings as they live in this physical world—in terms of the way they perceive through the senses and the way they develop their impulses to act from the deepest core of their being—then one is compelled, on the one hand, to draw attention to perception permeated by thinking, which represents reality, and, on the other hand, to seek—from pure spiritual empiricism—a reality at the opposite pole, one rooted in an intuitive experience of moral impulses.

[ 26 ] In these reflections, it is my task to present to you the various stages of cognition that lead into the spiritual world—which is nothing other than the world that, together with our sensory world, constitutes the full reality. We must begin with concrete cognition, which I placed at one pole in *The Philosophy of Freedom*, and we must ascend to imaginative and inspired cognition. There we are touched by spiritual reality. Then we ascend to intuition, and in intuition—I will have to describe this in the next lectures—we are not only touched by spiritual-super-sensory reality, but we live ourselves into it; we become one with it.

[ 27 ] We live in intuition when we are at one with spiritual reality; this means nothing other than this: at one pole of the human being, as he stands today in this period of the world, lies objective cognition; at the other pole, intuitive cognition. Between the two lie imagination and inspiration. But if one wishes to describe the human being in ordinary life—that is, if one conceives of him as an agent, as a morally active being—then, for this narrowly defined realm of moral motives, one must, for the sake of a philosophy of freedom, find moral intuition. One then finds—when one extends to the entire cosmos what one has developed through such a philosophy of freedom as the foundation of human action—that intuition realized across the entire cosmos, whereas otherwise it is found only within the limited realm of human action. But while, as a moral person, one simply adds moral intuition to the concrete knowledge of everyday life here in the physical world through one’s ordinary natural faculties, if one wishes to attain true knowledge of the world—and, I would say, arrive at cosmic intuition—which corresponds in the cosmos to moral intuition regarding the inner life of the human being—then one must pass through the two stages of imagination and inspiration. In other words: when describing the human being, one can do so through a philosophy of freedom. There, one is compelled only to enter the limited realm of intuitive experience regarding human action. If one seeks a cosmic worldview corresponding to this philosophy of freedom, then one must expand upon what one has done in that limited realm by developing the stages of knowledge: concrete cognition, imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

[ 28 ] In principle, then, there is already a distinction between the first half of my *Philosophy of Freedom*—in which I elaborate on the reality of object-oriented cognition—and the second part of the *Philosophy of Freedom*, where, in the chapter “The Moral Imagination,” lies what constitutes imagination and inspiration. At the time when the *Philosophy of Freedom* was being written, this could only be hinted at. It was hinted at when I wrote in *The Philosophy of Freedom*: “The individual human being is not actually separated from the world. It is a part of the world, and there is a connection with the whole cosmos in reality, which is interrupted only for our perception. For the time being, we see this part as an entity existing in and of itself, because we do not see the straps and ropes through which the movement of our wheel of life is brought about by the fundamental forces of the cosmos.” If we wish only to recognize the human being for this world, we do not know the direct transition from objective knowledge to moral intuition.

[ 29 ] What can only be alluded to in such a consideration—where, of course, the straps and ropes are meant figuratively—is that human beings possess something within themselves that binds their essence to the entire cosmos; this would need to be elaborated upon further. It would have to be shown how human beings, just as they can move from objective perceptual cognition to moral intuition through a form of empiricism capable of bypassing the two intermediate links, can also move from their human perceptual experience to cosmic intuition; for they are connected to the cosmos in their humanity by straps and ropes—that is, by spiritual essences. But he can only grasp how he is connected when he now fills in what, for ordinary observation, may remain unfilled between objective cognition and intuition—that is, when he ascends from objective cognition, through imagination and inspiration, to cosmic intuition.

[ 30 ] This is the connection between all developed anthroposophical science and what was laid down as a seed in *The Philosophy of Freedom*; but one must, of course, understand that anthroposophy is a living entity, and that it therefore had to appear first as a seed before it could develop further into leaves and something more. For it is precisely in this vitality that the characteristic difference between anthroposophical knowledge and that which is lifeless lies—a difference that many already sense in the very wisdom that still seeks to reject anthroposophy today, partly because they cannot understand it, and partly because they do not want to understand it.