The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Seventh Lecture

[ 1 ] The most significant question in contemporary intellectual life—one that casts its shadow over the entire cultural landscape—is one that is, in fact, already present in the emotional life of every human being today, but which can only be resolved by following the path that leads from ordinary, concrete cognition through imagination and inspiration to intuition—the path to supersensible knowledge. Every soul must ask itself this most significant question—a soul that, with complete impartiality and a genuine, inwardly honest interest in the human being, finds itself confronted on the one hand with the contemporary conception of moral and ethical life, and on the other hand with the life that arises from the rightly recognized scientific worldview. The ethical and moral life therefore presents us with pressing questions today, because we live in an age in which the ethical is at the same time the social, and the social question can be felt by every human being as a pressing issue.

[ 2 ] Let us consider what, in accordance with contemporary thought, the study of nature reveals to us about existence. The quest for a true understanding of nature aims to grasp the things of the world in their necessity, in their causal relationships. And this causal connection, this necessity, should—according to a consistent worldview—be extended to everything that is part of the world order, including human beings. To the extent that we seek to understand human beings scientifically today, we extend to them, with a certain matter-of-factness, the very understanding we are accustomed to applying to natural phenomena outside of human beings, and we then attempt, through more or less bold hypotheses, to extend what emerges from our understanding of nature—as it initially presents itself to us and as we observe it—to the facts and beings of the world. We form hypotheses about the beginning and end of the Earth based on scientific concepts. With this scientific knowledge, we reach a point where—if we proceed consistently—we must tell ourselves: We must not stop short of human freedom. I have already alluded to this problem here.

[ 3 ] Anyone who, simply out of a certain thirst for consistency, seeks a formally uniform explanation of the world—and who must choose between accepting a freedom that is actually empirically present in immediate human experience and the all-pervading necessity of nature—will, based on the habits of thought and cognition instilled in humanity over the past centuries, opt for the necessity of nature. Despite the experience of freedom, they will declare it to be an illusion and extend the realm of absolute necessity into the innermost recesses of the human being, so that humanity is thus completely ensnared within the circle of scientific necessity. And one will act in the same way with regard to the hypothetical conceptual world concerning, for example, the beginning and end of the Earth. One takes the laws and relationships revealed by physics, chemistry, and so on, and from them one then formulates hypotheses such as the nebular hypothesis—that is, the Kant-Laplace theory of the Earth’s origin. From the second law of thermodynamics, one formulates hypotheses about the heat death into which the Earth will succumb.

[ 4 ] In this way, one can extend—all the way into the innermost depths of human existence and to the very limits of the universe—that which has proven, in recent times, to be of undeniable fruitfulness in explaining the natural phenomena that surround us in the world in which we wander between birth and death. But then, when we come to a certain self-reflection and ask ourselves: In what does true human dignity lie, and in what does true human value consist?—then we are led to turn our gaze also toward the moral world, toward that which serves as an ethical and moral impetus for our consciousness. We feel that only by following the moral ideals—which we imbue with religious feeling—can we attain a life that is fully worthy of a human being. We cannot, so to speak, call ourselves human in the full sense of the word unless we actively cultivate within ourselves those motives we call moral—motives that then flow out into social life and that we feel pulsing through us from what we call the divine in the order of the world. But if one today takes a completely honest stance from which to survey the mechanical-causal, necessary order of nature, then there is no bridge leading from this natural order—into which, out of a certain intellectual honesty, one must also include human beings—to the other order, which is the moral one, and with which human beings must conceive of their entire dignity and value as being connected.

[ 5 ] In recent times, however, certain sources of information have emerged to deceive us about this chasm that has opened up between two essential components of our humanity. It has been said: Only that which seeks to explain the world—including humanity, the beginning of the world, and its end—in terms of natural necessity is scientific in the true sense. — And from this standpoint, nothing is considered scientific unless it can be seamlessly woven into a conception of this natural order. Alongside this, however, a realm is established with an entirely different kind of certainty—a realm of faith. We look to that which shines within us as the moral light, and we say to ourselves: No scientific knowledge can in any way guarantee the significance of this moral realm, but human beings must find within themselves a certainty of faith; they must profess it from within their own subjectivity so that, in some way, they may be connected in their very being to that realm which is permeated by moral necessities.

[ 6 ] At first, a large number of people may well find reassurance in making a clear distinction, as it were, between what one can know and what one is supposed to believe; and one might imagine that this distinction could also provide a certain peace of mind and a certain sense of security in life. But if one delves deeply enough—not with one-sided thinking, but with everything that thinking can experience when it connects with the fully human powers of the soul and spirit—then one must arrive at the following conclusion. Then one must say to oneself: If the realm of natural necessity is as we have become accustomed to imagining it over the course of the last few centuries, then there is no possibility of saving the realm of morality in contrast to it. One must say this for the reason that this realm of morality simply shows no power anywhere to stand up against the realm of the natural order. One need only consider how, with a certain inner justification, the idea had to develop—I say explicitly: had to develop—that one day all our remaining earthly forces will have been transformed into heat, that this heat can no longer be transformed back into any other forces, and that the Earth as such will then be afflicted by what is called the heat death. For honest thinking, however—which, in accordance with the intellectual habits of recent times, wishes to hold fast to natural causality—there is no alternative but to conclude: This Earth, afflicted by heat death, represents a vast field of corpses not only for all human beings but also for all moral ideals; which would have vanished into nothingness if, in recognition of the sole validity of natural necessity, heat death had overtaken the Earth.

[ 7 ] This consideration gives rise to a feeling that, for a person who faces the world with an open mind, robs him of his certainty regarding the moral world order and thus leads him to view the world with ambivalence, to the extent that he can really only say to himself: Like bubbles of soap, the moral ideal rises from natural necessity; like bubbles of soap, moral impulses will vanish. For what is most intimately connected with human value and human dignity cannot be forced, as a given, into the recognition of mere natural necessity. — As I said: formally, one could draw a distinction between knowledge and belief, but even if one accepts this certainty of belief, it cannot provide any internal guarantee of the reality of the moral in the face of science, which must then be demanding.

[ 8 ] This does not merely affect a person’s theoretical concepts. For a person who is sincere about life, it must penetrate into the deepest realm of feeling, and there, through processes lying deep in the unconscious, it destructively undermines that which gives the person inner security—that which makes it possible for them not only to think of their relationship to the world as a stable one, but also to feel and will it as such. And anyone who has a sense of such connections will be able to say to themselves: What has surged up in such an eerie manner from the depths of human life in the 20th century as devastating waves ultimately arises, nevertheless, from the harmony—or one might also say, the disharmony—of everything that individual human beings experience within themselves. Our terrible, catastrophic age is, after all, born out of the innermost states of the human soul and heart. Such an inner conflict, as I have described it, does not merely play out on the surface of soul life as a theoretical worldview; it sinks down into the depths from which instinctive life and the life of conscience arise. And there this conflict then manifests as feelings that are at odds with the order of the earth, giving rise to disorder and antisocial behavior rather than to possible social organization.

[ 9 ] Certainly, for many people, what I have described does not yet carry its full weight today; but one can already foresee—if one follows with even a little open-mindedness the course of human spiritual development over the last few centuries, especially in recent times—what kind of moral consequences and what kind of social structure this inner conflict in human souls must lead to in the very near future. One will never receive an answer to the burning question: Why do we live in such a time of hardship?—unless one is willing to seek out the building blocks for what one needs in the depths of human life itself.

[ 10 ] In contrast to what I have described to you here is what anthroposophical spiritual science now strives to achieve in terms of knowledge of the world through the path from imagination and inspiration to intuition. We shall see how anthroposophical spiritual science is able to come to terms with the most pressing question of the present and the near future—as described today—by virtue of what it believes it can recognize on its path. I have described to you the path that spiritual science follows through imagination and inspiration. I have pointed out how those exercises—which I cannot describe in detail here but which you will find described in my books, which I have mentioned here on several occasions—how those exercises for imaginative knowledge bring the spiritual-soul aspects into conscious awareness in the same way that ordinary consciousness is permeated by a content when it lives in memory. Behind what arises as memories—whether voluntarily or involuntarily—lies our physical and etheric constitution. What takes place within this physical and etheric constitution then rises up into consciousness. What our physical-etheric constitution does in ordinary memory is achieved by purely soul-spiritual means through the detailed exercises described in my books; and through this, one arrives at mental images that are now purely formally similar to those of memory, but which point to an external, objective content rather than to a personally experienced one. In this way, however, we prepare ourselves through imagination for the recognition of a real, objective, supersensible world.

[ 11 ] In order to rise to inspiration, we must not only practice, in a spiritual-soul manner, the creation of such images that are similar to the remembered ones, but we must also work toward practicing, in a spiritual-soul sense, a kind of forgetting—that is, bringing such imaginations out of the consciousness we have now attained. We must train ourselves not to have these—admittedly unreal—imaginations anymore, but to remove them arbitrarily from our consciousness, so that we then possess this consciousness, if I may put it that way, with a certain emptiness. If we achieve this, then we will have the opportunity, with the “I” strengthened through all these exercises, to find our way into the revelations of the objective, supersensible world. Instead of the previous subjective imaginations, objective imaginations shine forth in our consciousness, and the shining forth of such objective imaginations—which now do not come from ourselves but from spiritual objectivity—is precisely what we call inspiration. We reach, so to speak, the very limits of the supersensible, which reveals itself to us externally through these imaginations. In exactly the same way that we convince ourselves of the reality of the objective external world underlying our sensory world of perception—if only we allow the whole human being to be active within this sensory world of perception—so too do the imaginations we have now attained reveal to us, with full persuasive power, the supersensible world of which they are an expression.

[ 12 ] The first task, then, is to continue along this path of knowledge to the next level. We achieve this not merely by pushing the process of forgetting to the point where we create imaginings out of ourselves, but by going one step further. For when one enters the imaginative world, one’s own life unfolds before one’s eyes in its entirety. One does not merely live in the present moment with one’s consciousness; one lives within the entire stream of life, stretching back almost to birth. If one is then able to advance to the stage of inspiration, the overview one previously had of life since birth expands to include the perception of a supersensible world from which one entered the sensory-physical world through birth or conception. The spiritual field of vision expands to include those worlds we have lived through before birth or conception and those we will live through once we have passed through the gate of death. The view of the supersensible world to which we belong arises through inspired insight.

[ 13 ] If we now strive further not only to dispel those imaginations that contain details within the horizon of the imaginative world, but if we, so to speak, forget the imagination of our entire being as human beings, that is, to set it aside—if we gain the power to eradicate that which is summed up in our “I” from the experiences since our birth, and which is further added to as the horizon expands into a spiritual world—then we succeed not in weakening the “I,” but rather, precisely because it forgets itself, in strengthening it all the more. And through this we gradually enter into the reality of the spiritual, the supersensible world. We live in harmony with the reality of this spiritual world. We come to recognize the vision of our previous, repeated earthly lives as something our “I” reveals to us at various stages. Then, when we have acquired the ability to forget this “I” at its present stage—that is, to set aside its imaginative content—we come to behold the eternal “I.”

[ 14 ] The things that anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of are such that they are not derived from some vague, hazy mysticism, but rather that one can outline the path to each individual insight step by step. The path is not merely an external one; it is an inner one throughout its entire course—but one that leads to the grasping of a real, objective, yet supersensory reality. But it is precisely by rising in this way to truly intuitive knowledge that one actually arrives at a genuine, true insight into what our thinking and our imagination—which we use in everyday life to interpret our perceptions—actually are. One arrives at the full, complete reality of that which one can, to a certain degree, form a concept of—an empirical concept—in the manner I have attempted to describe in my *Philosophy of Freedom*. There I attempted to point to pure thinking—that thinking which can live within us even before we have brought this very aspect of thinking into full reality through any external perception. I pointed out that this pure thinking itself can be perceived as an inner content of the soul; but what it is in its essence can only be recognized when true intuition arises in the soul along the higher path of knowledge. Then, in a sense, one sees through this own thinking; only now does one live oneself into this own thinking through intuition, for intuition consists precisely in living oneself into the supersensible with one’s own being, in immersing oneself in this supersensible.

[ 15 ] And so one learns to recognize something whose experience, as I have just hinted, is in turn a kind of destiny of cognition. One experiences something truly immense when one intuitively immerses oneself in the nature of cognition. One then knows how one, as a human being, is materially organized. One knows how far this material organization extends; but one also realizes through intuition that it extends only as far as what serves as a foundation—a sort of ground, so to speak—on which thinking can develop, but that the material processes must be broken down within themselves where true thinking emerges. To the same extent that the material processes are dismantled, space can be made within us for that which now takes the place of the destruction of the material: thinking, imagining.

[ 16 ] I am aware of every possible objection that could be raised against the statements I am making at this moment, but intuitive insight leads one to realize, with regard to the material world, that where thought develops, nothing of the material world can be perceived. It leads one to say: By thinking, I do not exist—if I accept material being, which is otherwise recognized as the determining factor, as the only form of being. First, matter must withdraw within the organism and make way for thinking and imagination; only then does this thinking, this imagination, perceive the possibility of its unfolding within the human being. Thus, where we perceive thinking in its reality, we perceive the dissolution and annihilation of material existence. We witness how matter passes into nothingness.

[ 17 ] This is where we stand at the limits of the law of conservation of matter and energy. One must recognize the scope of this law of matter and energy in order to find the courage to contradict it when necessary. No one who recognizes the law of conservation of matter as absolute—and who does not realize that it applies to the realm of what we can observe externally in the physical, in the chemical realm, and so on, but that it does not apply where our thinking takes place within the realm of our own human organization. If it were not necessary, for certain underlying reasons, to present this insight to the world today, one would not expose oneself to all the mockery and all the objections that, quite understandably, must come from those who, based on the familiar premises, regard the law of conservation of matter and energy as absolute, as applying without exception.

[ 18 ] But just as we come to understand through intuition the relationship between thinking and the ordinary matter that otherwise surrounds us in the physical world, so too do we come to recognize through intuition the relationship between inspiration—the inspiration that reigns in the spirit—and human emotional and rhythmic life. Physical matter is transformed within the nervous-sensory system. That is why the nervous-sensory system can serve as the foundation for imagination and for thinking. The second system of the human being is the rhythmic system. The life of feeling is connected to it in a spiritual sense, just as the life of thinking is connected to the nervous-sensory system. The relationship between the objective world outside of humanity—which we approach through inspiration—and the human being shows us that, through inspiration, we become aware of a world entity that plays a role within us, just as the sensory world plays a role through imagination. This inspired world acts within us specifically through the process of breathing, which extends its rhythm even into the brain’s processes and the rest of the organism.

[ 19 ] One now learns to recognize that which lives as a rhythm within the human being. Although matter is not “killed” in the same way as in the thought process, life is slowed down, so that it must constantly rekindle itself. And underlying the ordinary, purely mechanical breathing rhythm is this enlivening and dampening of an inner rhythm, which, in a sense, splits dualistically into the physical process of breathing and the soul’s emotional process. We perceive the unity of this soul-emotional process and the physical rhythms of breathing as an inspiration, as an entity that lives objectively in inspirations and can be perceived through intuition. In short, we learn to recognize the entire connection between the world of feeling and the rhythmic human being in this way; we learn to recognize that here—unlike in the nervous-sensory system—there is not a complete suspension of the material, but rather a dampening of the material. We thus gradually learn to see through the human being. And so we look at the human emotional life and see in it that which can only exist because, in rhythmic processes, life is always dampened and must rekindle itself.

[ 20 ] In this way, by discerning the interplay of animation and relaxation in this manner, we perceive a second important aspect of the human being. We see the significance of the entire rhythmic nature within the human being and how it is connected to the human being’s overall physical and soul nature. And as we survey this second element in the human being, it becomes clear to us that the human being carries within themselves a real force that stands in a rhythmic interplay with an external force—one that, however, belongs to the supersensible realm. We see, as it were, this back-and-forth oscillation between an inner and an outer force. And in a similar way, we can also gain an overview of the human being through the metabolic-limb system. By rising to the levels of inspiration, intuition, and imagination, we perceive—in a spiritual-psychic way—that which otherwise acts unconsciously within the human being as real forces. Our ordinary, objective knowledge provides us only with formal information; through it, we are, so to speak, merely spectators of a world. But what we attain through imagination, intuition, and inspiration we initially possess as a free, inner product of the soul; yet, through supersensory knowledge, we relate it to something that is objectively present in the human being, and can finally discern how the human will actually operates in ethical action. Once one has first recognized that pure thinking is a breakdown of matter—and is connected, in general, to the destructive processes that act as a regression—one comes to understand how everything that arises in the soul and will is connected to the processes of building up and growth. The processes of growth and building up, the processes of organization and reproduction within us, dampen our ordinary consciousness of the depths of the human organism, and the will rises from such depths of the human being, to which ordinary consciousness does not reach. Just as thinking dwells in that which destroys, so does the volitional dwell in that which grows, flourishes, and bears fruit.

[ 21 ] One then perceives once again, through intuition—just as, in metabolism, through the will, which now, however, draws its motives from pure thought—how the substance in the human organism is directed to the place where it is to be broken down. Thinking as such breaks down; the will builds up. It builds up, however, in such a way that, throughout life until death, this building-up remains latent within the human organism. But a process of building-up is present. We therefore live—by bringing our moral motives, in the sense of my *Philosophy of Freedom*, to truly free, moral intuitions—a human life in which, from within its own organization, the will purposefully places transformed matter precisely where matter has been destroyed. Human beings become creatively active within, constructively active within. In other words: Within the cosmos, we see in the human organism the void filled with new formation in a wholly material sense. This means nothing other than that, insofar as one consistently follows the path of anthroposophical knowledge, one arrives at a point where, within the human being, purely moral ideals emerge as world-forming forces extending down to the material realm.

[ 22 ] In this way, we have, so to speak, discovered where the moral world itself becomes creative, where something arises that guarantees its own reality out of human morality—because it carries this reality within itself, because it creates it itself. And when we come to know the external world through this intuition, the mineral kingdom first presents itself to us as caught up in a process of decay, a process of passing away, which we have come to know well through the material processes corresponding to our own thinking. And accordingly, we also come to recognize how this process of decay draws plant and animal life into its wake. We then do not look at the heat death, which is valid within certain limits but is one-sided; rather, we look at the disappearance of the entire world, which is permeated by minerality and surrounds us. Thus, we perceive the world that we recognize as causally necessary in its transience, and we recognize the world that we build from pure moral ideals as the one that is now arising on the foundation of the other, dying world. In other words: We now recognize how the moral world order is connected to the physical-causal world order. In the morally pure will within the human being, we have something that overcomes causality itself—in the human being and, through this, for the entire world.

[ 23 ] Anyone who honestly considers the causal explanation of nature will find, within its own realm, no place in the world where it does not apply. And because it applies, there must be a power that nullifies its validity. This power is the moral world. The moral world, as recognized from the total nature of the human being, contains within itself the power to break through natural causality itself—not, however, through miraculous interventions, but through a process of development. For that which, within the individual human being, stands as a force that negates causality, only gains significance in future worlds. But we see the reality of the human will, which enters into a covenant with pure thinking. Through this, however—and this is the most beautiful fruit of anthroposophical science—we gain insight into the value of the human being within the cosmos; through this, too, we gain a sense of human dignity within the cosmos.

[ 24 ] Things in the world are not merely connected in the way we often imagine them to be in our abstract concepts; no, they are connected as realities, and one important reality is the following: Certainly, not everyone can already rise to the level of imagination, inspiration, and intuition today. But what we, as researchers of the spirit, bring with us into all these levels of knowledge is thinking that develops one thought from another with inner necessity. Every person who is willing to surrender to it without prejudice can experience this kind of thinking. And that is why all findings in spiritual science, once they have been discovered, can always be verified through pure thinking, because the spiritual researcher incorporates this pure thinking into all his elements of imagination.

[ 25 ] But in light of the entire exposition I have presented, what is initially perceived merely as a profession of faith in anthroposophical spiritual science is followed by something quite special in the human soul. The other ideas that a person forms are derived from external perceptions or are based on external perceptions. These external perceptions serve as a foundation for this life of imagination. And today, in fact, given the habits of thought and worldview prevalent in recent times, there are many people who simply refuse to accept that anything should be allowed to approach the human being that does not, in this respect, find its foundation in external perception. But one then finds oneself in an impossible situation if one refuses to accept that human beings can also understand the essential nature of things when they simply surrender to their pure, self-organizing thought that grows concretely out of themselves, and that they can then take in the concepts from spiritual science that are attained through imagination, inspiration, and intuition—concepts of which the rigid philistine says: “They are fantasies, for they do not represent reality.”—He is too lazy to use his thinking to enter into the very reality that the spiritual researcher uncovers through imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But this reality is intimately connected with the human being. And with the feeling, with the inner state of soul, with which we bring ourselves to accept spiritual scientific concepts—which have no counterpart in the outer sensory world and which we must experience freely in the spirit—we permeate our entire being with a new essence.

[ 26 ] It will become apparent, once spiritual science enters our cultural life, that—because, as I have indicated, what is perceived through imagination, inspiration, and intuition corresponds to a living being within the human being himself—the living human being is thereby directly grasped by this spiritual science, and that through this absorption, the human being can undergo an inner metamorphosis and transformation. He becomes inwardly richer. One can feel how he becomes richer by being permeated by an element that cannot be kindled by external physical reality. With this element, which then flows through and permeates the whole human being, one approaches one’s fellow human beings. Through this, however, one acquires an understanding of humanity that one did not have before, and above all, one acquires love for humanity. What is kindled within us by the insights of anthroposophical spiritual science, which aim toward the supersensible, is love for humanity—a love that teaches us about human worth and enables us to feel human dignity.

[ 27 ] Recognizing human worth, sensing human dignity, and acting out of love for humanity—these are the most beautiful fruits of life that develop within a person through the experience of the findings of spiritual science.

[ 28 ] In this way, however, this spiritual science acts upon the will so that it can rise to what I have described in my *Philosophy of Freedom* as moral intuitions. And what enters human life with such power is that these moral ideals, these moral intuitions, are permeated by what is otherwise called love—so that we can become freely acting human beings out of love for our individuality. In this way, spiritual science approaches an ideal that also originates from Goethe’s time; only Goethe’s friend Schiller expressed it most clearly. As Schiller immersed himself in Kantian philosophy, he absorbed much of Kant’s theoretical and philosophical thought. However, when it came to Kant’s moral philosophy, he could not go along with Kant. In this Kantian moral philosophy, Schiller found a rigid concept of duty, which Kant presents in such a way that it stands as a force of nature in itself, as something that exerts a compelling influence on human beings. Schiller felt a deep sense of human worth and dignity and would not accept that, in order to be moral, a person must be subject to a spiritual compulsion. Schiller, after all, uttered these beautiful words: “I gladly serve my friends, but alas, I do so out of affection, and so it often gnaws at me that I am not virtuous.” For in the Kantian sense, Schiller argues, one must actually first try to suppress all affection for one’s friend and then do what one does for him based on that rigid concept of duty.

[ 29 ] Schiller, to the extent that it could be articulated in his time, argued in his letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” that human behavior toward morality must differ from this Kantian conception; there he sought to show how duty must descend so that it becomes inclination, and how inclination must rise so that one comes to find sympathy for that which is the content of duty. Duty must descend, and natural instinct must rise in the free human being who, out of inclination, does what benefits all of humanity. And by seeking where moral intuitions are rooted in the human being, by seeking what the actual driving, moral motive is within these moral intuitions, one discovers love purified to the highest degree into the spiritual. Where this love becomes spiritual, there it absorbs the moral intuitions; and one is a moral person because one loves duty, because it is something that emerges directly and powerfully from human individuality itself.

[ 30 ] That was what prompted me to set forth in *The Philosophy of Freedom* a decisive antithesis to Kant’s conception of morality, now also from the perspective of anthroposophy. The Kantian thesis, after all, reads: “Duty! You sublime, great name, which contains nothing pleasing or ingratiating, but demands submission...,” which “establishes a law... before which all inclinations fall silent, even when they work against it.”

[ 31 ] Such a concept of duty can never elevate a human being to a higher spiritual level, so that, in his innermost being, he is the free author of his moral actions. Based on these attempts to gain insight into the human being through genuine anthroposophical knowledge of humanity, I countered this rigid concept in Kantianism in *The Philosophy of Freedom* with what you will find in *The Philosophy of Freedom*: “Freedom! You friendly, human name, who embody all that is morally desirable and most cherished by my humanity, and who make me no one’s servant; you who not only establish a law, but wait to see what my moral love itself will recognize as law, because it feels unfree in the face of any law that is merely imposed.”

[ 32 ] Thus, in *The Philosophy of Freedom*, I felt compelled to speak of how morality appears to be truly worthy of humanity to the fullest extent when it is one with human freedom and when it is rooted in genuine love for humanity. Through anthroposophy, however, it can be shown how this love of duty, in the broader sense, becomes love for humanity and thus becomes what we shall now consider further: the very leaven of social life. The immense, burning social issue that stands before us today can only be understood if one strives to recognize the connection between freedom, love, the human being, spirit, and natural necessity.