The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] Through what I have taken the liberty of characterizing as imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge, human beings are led to the results of supersensible research, which only then truly lead them to their own essence. However, it must be emphasized time and again that this is not a matter of attaining imagination, inspiration, and intuition themselves—in which one finds the means of research; I would say, in which one has for the supersensible world what one has in the scale and the measuring rod for the physical world. Rather, the point is that these means of investigation are developed within spiritual research in such a way that the starting point is taken from something that is already fully present in ordinary consciousness—in everyday consciousness, in the consciousness underlying ordinary science—if one only approaches this ordinary consciousness in the right way, with its capacity to grasp ideas that are truly free from the senses ideas graspable in the spirit. Simply a higher enlivening of that which is left unnoticed in ordinary consciousness is what leads into the supersensible worlds. And whoever wishes to become a researcher of the spirit through imagination, inspiration, and intuition must, above all, strive to bring into consciousness that which must already be present in genuine physical research in order for that physical research to lead to results that correspond to reality.

[ 2 ] What I have just said actually applies only to our time, for it is only this current epoch of human development since the 15th century—by rising to the level of true scientific research—that has, through the practice of this research, introduced into human consciousness concepts that can be developed and brought to life in the manner indicated. In earlier times, entirely different methods had to be employed. These were alluded to—at least in a general sense—through references to the yoga system and the like, but these older methods can no longer be our own. Just as what an adult accomplishes in life cannot be the same as what a child accomplishes, so too what civilized humanity in the 20th century employs as a means of spiritual research cannot be the same as what humanity in the ancient Eastern or ancient Greek cultures employed.

[ 3 ] We must start from senseless, pure thought, as I attempted to characterize it in my *Philosophy of Freedom*. This thinking free from sensibility, as paradoxical as it may sound, develops best and most intensely when one engages in the kind of scientific research I have also spoken of in these Evening Reflections. It was not without reason that I described—despite the errors in it, which I fully recognize and admit—Haeckelism, this particular way of immersing oneself in the evolution of animal and human life. If one wishes to apply, in the strict sense of the word, precisely what spiritual research must demand of the external sensory world—namely, the living interplay of pure perception and pure thought—then, with regard to the organic world as given by external sensory empiricism, one arrives at no other results than those to which Haeckelism has arrived. And if one wishes to illustrate what one arrives at by this path—the path of external sensory perception and the methodical thinking that interweaves this perception—one must proceed as follows. One cannot then, based on any abstract thinking, engage in all sorts of speculations about a life force, as Neovitalism does. One cannot construct speculations based on pure concepts—such as whether anything supersensible underlies what can be observed through external, sensory means—but must remain within the realm of facts, just as Haeckelism has done. Precisely because of the demands of spiritual science, one must limit external natural research to this field and in this sense; otherwise, speculating about external nature leads into nebulous mysticism. But this can easily invite the accusation of materialism. This accusation can then be turned around to say: “I once presented something from a materialistic standpoint, and then I deviated from it again.” — That cannot be the case. These are merely foolish objections that cling to words and simply cannot penetrate the entire spirit of spiritual scientific research. For precisely when, in the realm of pure natural science, one limits oneself to the phenomenal, when one is able to practice that inner resignation of thought that is necessary in order not to engage in nebulous mysticism but to pursue the world of facts in a phenomenological manner, then one comes to regard thought, in external research, only as I would say, a tool for work—not at all as something constitutive, as something that can say anything about the external sensory world other than that it orders the phenomena of this external sensory world so that the world itself reveals its secrets, as is entirely in the spirit of Goetheanism. But then, when one practices this resignation, one reaches a limit precisely in this field of research. And at this limit, one does not begin to speculate philosophically, to devise all sorts of ideas about the transcendent that is to be fathomed, but rather one begins to experience those inner struggles and triumphs which now do not stimulate thought to speculate, but rather, in a sense, infuse it with an elixir of life, so that this thinking is transformed into those intuitions that then arise in the imaginations, and so that it can approach the world—a world it can never reach through speculation, but only by metamorphosing into supersensible perception.

[ 4 ] But it is precisely by employing such means of knowledge that a person truly and fully comes to know himself. And since the researcher of the spirit takes this very thinking as his starting point and carries it with him everywhere, he must, in every instance, trace back what he perceives through imagination—what is revealed to him through inspiration—to the form of the pure idea. But with regard to what he then presents as ideas, anyone who reflects on ordinary consciousness in the right way can follow him. Therefore, the spiritual researcher is verifiable even in his highest findings, and it is only intellectual laziness that claims one must enter the spiritual world oneself in order to arrive at the correct findings. But as the results of the imagination come to light, what is brought before the human soul—as I have already explained in these lectures—is the entire course of one’s life since birth, encompassed as a continuous stream. The “I” expands beyond the present moment by sensing and experiencing itself within the entire stream of life since birth. And as the human being then ascends to inspiration, the world opens up to them in which they lived before birth—or rather, before conception—and in which they will live once they have passed through the gate of death. Thus, that which lives within the human being as their immortal self becomes, in this way, an object of knowledge. And in intuition, a view opens up across the repeated earthly lives of the past, so that what anthroposophical spiritual science speaks of can be characterized in such a way that the individual steps through which one arrives at these results are specified everywhere—steps which, as mentioned, are verifiable because they must be presented in thoughts accessible to everyone.

[ 5 ] But this first presents to people the purely human outcome of this anthroposophical spiritual science. Just as we begin to find our way back to ourselves when we learn to articulate in summary what we experience in our spirit, in the “I,” so do we come to our entire, unfolded self—which spans time and eternity—by making the results of spiritual science our own. Through this, the human being comes to himself, and this is, for the time being, the most significant result in a general human sense. At the same time, however, this grants the human being an expansion of his entire consciousness; for since the results of spiritual research arise from enlivened, transformed thinking, they in turn have an enlivening effect on human souls when they are received and examined by them. A new kind of insight into the world thus comes into being for human consciousness, and I would like to briefly characterize two of the fruits of this life that arise precisely through this expansion, through this intensification of consciousness.

[ 6 ] Today we are faced with a pressing social issue. What has shaped social life right up to the present day arose from humanity’s vague and subconscious instincts. People have established social relationships that emerged, as if by natural law, from all manner of instinctive conditions. Anyone capable of viewing social life with an open mind will recognize this. But we live in an age where these instinctive relationships within the social organism of humanity are no longer sufficient. To the same extent that the individual economy, the tribal economy, and then the national economy have evolved into the global economy, to that same extent economic thinking has had to become ever more conscious. And the need has arisen for people today to examine the possible relationships that arise between those engaged in economic activity—and indeed between all people who must coexist in social life. One must admit that these relationships are complex in nature. To the same extent that people have been compelled to bring these relationships from the realm of instinct into clear consciousness, they have attempted to do so from the very same perspective from which they have, in recent centuries, learned to think scientifically. I certainly do not need to praise this scientific method once again, which has established itself as the one capable of properly investigating the external mysteries of nature. For these external mysteries of nature, this method—which emerged from Copernicanism and Galileanism—is indeed a fruitful one. Over the course of recent centuries, humanity has become accustomed to this method; it has used this method to bring clarity to what it dimly perceives as nature through sensory observation.

[ 7 ] Now it became necessary to gain insight into what manifests itself in social life as human relationships. No wonder that people initially approached these human relationships with the understanding they had gained from observing external nature. And so our economic and socio-economic views arose—from those advocated only in academic circles to those that have captivated millions upon millions of people, all the way to Marxism. I have outlined this in my *Key Points of the Social Question*. People sought to understand how capital performs its functions, how labor operates within the social context, and how the circulation, production, and consumption of commodities function. All of this is intertwined in complex relationships; all of this presents itself to our minds as—I would say—living processes with infinite possibilities. For what presents itself there as such processes, even the best scientific method is insufficient; and because it has proved insufficient yet still sought to penetrate this social life, we find ourselves today, on the broadest scale, in the midst of global misery. Anyone who does not wish to remain on the surface but delves into the depths of our social hardships will see that these are connected to what I have just attempted to characterize. One cannot bring about social transformation with the kind of thinking that has proven itself in the natural sciences. In contrast, the kind of thinking that works its way toward imagination—that grasps an objective reality which manifests itself as something in motion, not as something at rest, but as a process with infinite possibilities, whether within a relatively small sphere or across a vast one—this kind of thinking penetrates into the dynamic life of capital, labor, the economy, and so on. It can grasp what people experience in the social order, and this is, after all, no wonder, for what people experience in this way ultimately springs from within the human being. The inner being of the human being is the spiritual-soul aspect, or is at least directed by the spiritual-soul aspect. Thus, when one encounters the social order, one encounters something spiritual. No wonder that spiritual methods are necessary to gain insight into social conditions.

[ 8 ] That, my esteemed audience—please forgive me if I now speak of this matter in a personal light—gave me the courage to write, from the same underlying principles from which I wrote *The Philosophy of Freedom*, my *Theosophy*, and my *Outline of Esoteric Science*—that is, from the same foundations from which I attempted to describe the spiritual-supernatural world—to also grasp the spirit where it manifests itself in immediate social human life. And that led me on the path to my *Key Points of the Social Question*. It is described only in the form of a personal nuance, but hidden within this personal nuance is what constitutes my objective conviction regarding the relationship of the human being to the understanding of the social order, which in the present age he must shape entirely consciously—that is, out of the spirit. That is one thing.

[ 9 ] But the other aspect—I am merely citing examples of the fruits of anthroposophical research; I could cite many more like these—the other aspect I wish to mention may present itself to us when we consider the human organism. We first have this before us in terms of its outer form. Let us set this aside for the moment. The covering of this outer form conceals the internal organs. We study these internal organs in physiology and biology in terms of their form and structure. We have no choice but to do so if we are initially operating on the basis of the natural science customary in the modern era. But in reality, the lungs, stomach, heart, liver, kidneys—all the organs of the human being—are not what they appear to be when we look at them in their enclosed form, with their—I would say—largely static structure, especially as perceived by human sensory observation. No, these organs merely appear to have this form, for in the living human being these individual organs are in a continuous, living movement. They are not at all organs with a static form; they are living processes, and we really ought not to speak of the lungs, heart, kidneys, or liver at all. We should speak of a heart process, of a sum of heart processes, of a sum of lung processes, of a sum of kidney processes; for what takes place there is a continuous metamorphosis that unfolds in such a closed-off manner that the whole can be regarded as a form—indeed, must be regarded as such by external observation. But to penetrate from the observation of this form—which actually reveals only the exterior—to what is a living process, to what, in essence, becomes something different at every moment within these organs, to that which actually constitutes the life process emanating from these organs—to penetrate to this, one cannot do so through sensory observation, but rather through active inner observation, which is present in imaginative cognition.

[ 10 ] If social processes are such that, in a sense, their complexity immediately eludes us when we approach them with scientific concepts, then the processes in the lungs, heart, liver, and kidneys are such that they actually conceal their inner nature from what we grasp through these ordinary scientific concepts. And it is through imagination that we gain access to these densely concentrated processes. On the one hand, imagination is capable—if I may put it simply—of keeping pace with the fleeting, complex social processes. On the other hand, it is capable of dissolving what appears to us as a static form in the human organs into the dynamic life of the organ processes, which, when directly observed, cannot be speculated upon or deduced. For when sensory research is at hand, thinking must come to a halt at what is present in the phenomena, and from there it must transform itself into living, supersensory intuition. Only then does it penetrate the actual processes that remain hidden from sensory perception, even within the individual processes of the human organs.

[ 11 ] And here lies the path to enriching our external medicine—which is fully recognized by spiritual science—through what spiritual research can contribute to this external medicine. Spiritual research does not seek to align itself with quackery or with mysticism in the therapeutic field. Spiritual research seeks to rely, in this field as well, on genuine, true research and on genuine, true sensory perception, but to carry these forward to those mysteries of existence that we must also investigate if we are to penetrate into life as a whole—so that this penetration, in turn, yields fruits for immediate life, whether in the healthy or sick individual or in human society. This leads to a view of the fruits of life that arise from supersensible anthroposophical knowledge.

[ 12 ] All of this then comes together to form something I would like to characterize as follows. People often believe they can overcome materialism by leaving the entire world of matter—I would say, out there in the world—behind, bidding it farewell in spirit, and then elevating themselves into a spiritual, abstract realm, into a pipe dream, where they muddle about, behaving in such a way that they regard material life as something base from which one must rise above. Then, indeed, one elevates oneself to a spirit in which one can live comfortably—a sort of humane Sunday pastime in the spirit, alongside the rough work of the weekdays, to which one devotes oneself within the very realm of matter, within which one must, after all, live. True anthroposophical knowledge cannot stand on this ground. It seeks to grasp the spirit in such a way that, once it has grasped it in its work, in its creative activity, it can trace it all the way to the outermost tendrils of material life. Thus, for this spiritual science—which is what is meant here—it is not merely a matter of stating that, alongside the human body, which consists of the brain, lungs, liver, and so on, there is also a soul and a spirit within the human being. This leads to little more than empty talk, for it results in abstractions regarding the world in which we find ourselves between birth and death. What spiritual science strives for is to now immerse itself everywhere with the spirit that has permeated it, to describe how spiritual nature and spiritual essence live within every single organ of the human being, how the essence of the lungs, liver, heart, stomach, and so on, is spiritually understood; how do spirit and soul permeate the entire human organism, shining the light of the spirit into even the smallest cells, so that nothing remains that is not illuminated by the light of the spirit. Then one no longer has matter on the one hand and abstract spirit on the other; then what is spirit in abstraction on the one hand and matter in abstraction on the other has grown together into a unity. And the same applies to social life.

[ 13 ] But then, when one allows the spirit to immerse itself in reality in this way—and immerses oneself along with it—the human soul deepens to such an extent that those cords and threads I have spoken of on these evenings—which lead from the innermost being of the human being out into the innermost being of the world—that these threads, these cords—this spiritual connection between the human being and the world—enter the human consciousness in such a way that a living current arises—I would say, an inhalation and exhalation of the world. What is otherwise grasped in theoretical, abstract concepts becomes, in free spirituality itself, a living experience as transparent as ideas can be, and yet as alive—on the other hand—as life itself, and as free as the freest action can be; yet it is thoroughly objective, even if the objective must in this case be grasped within free spirituality. That is why it is necessary to enliven, through this spiritual research and this spiritual insight, those faculties that otherwise struggle unconsciously to the surface in human beings.

[ 14 ] When it comes to conventional, external science, artists are rightly somewhat wary. And modern aesthetics, which has emerged from the modern way of thinking—to which we have become accustomed through the natural sciences—is something that artists avoid, and rightly so, for it is something abstract, something that leads away from art rather than into it. What spiritual science is does not lead to such abstract concepts; rather, it brings to life that which is at first merely a concept or an idea, and this in turn enlivens the other human faculties. Through this, it is possible that from the very soil from which this spiritual science springs, something truly artistic grows forth in a natural way at the same time. In the art cultivated in Dornach—of which I will also present some examples in pictures tomorrow—and in something like eurythmy, which is drawn from the same soil as spiritual science, one is never dealing with the translation of arbitrary ideas into artistic vision. No, the soil is simply the same; it is the soil of the living creativity of the fully developed human being. At one time it shapes ideas into one branch; at another time, from the same root, the other branch—the artistic one—springs forth. That is why I have always found it extremely distasteful when allegorical or symbolic elements have emerged within the anthroposophical movement. What is artistic must indeed stem from the same source as anthroposophy, but it is not anthroposophy translated into art. Thus, a certain fruit of life is brought forth in the artistic realm, just as it is in the social or medical realms.

[ 15 ] And when one considers the manner in which the human being, with his eternal, immortal self, is united with those forces that actually shape him as a human being out of the spiritual world, then one will also come to understand how what the human being gains through anthroposophy—in the form of lived insight and insightful experience—is connected to religious deepening. In our age, which has become so indifferent to religion, we once again need fundamental religious forces. We need paths leading into those realms of spiritual experience from which human morality, human artistic creation, and everything that constitutes human value and dignity can be nourished as if from a divine center. Anthroposophy is slandered when sectarian aspirations are attributed to it that it has absolutely no intention of pursuing. It is slandered when people believe that it aims to be a new religious movement. No, it does not seek to be that, simply because it strives to understand the course of human development in its true form. Here one must say: The divine powers that have shaped the world and guided human evolution were understood in earlier times according to the understanding of earlier peoples. We must advance toward other metamorphoses of knowledge and motives for action; we must bring close to our souls that which is eternal in the sense of the present age. Certainly, spiritual science will speak of no other Christ than the Christ who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha; but spiritual science must speak of stages of that knowledge which it considers necessary in the 20th century, even in relation to the Christ event. To those who, standing on the ground of some existing creed, believe they must fear that their foundation will be undermined by anthroposophy, it must always be said again: Is the one who fears at every opportunity that the truths of Christianity might be compromised truly a genuine believer in Christianity? Or is it the one who knows—no matter how many millions of insights may arise on the physical, soul, or spiritual planes—that the true truths of Christianity will thereby be able to stand out all the more brilliantly before the human soul? No one will ask why there is no mention of America in the Bible, and anyone who might have wanted to oppose the discovery of America from the standpoint of the Bible would be like someone who today wants to oppose the views of anthroposophical spiritual science from the standpoint of the Bible.

[ 16 ] These matters must be examined and considered with complete honesty. Otherwise, what is contained in the creeds will always remain a stumbling block to genuine research, whereas such research—when it penetrates to the spirit in the manner intended by anthroposophical spiritual science—will indeed bear the fruit of life, which consists in a revitalization of the religious being of the human soul. We must bring what we investigate in the various worlds into harmony with what shapes our religious sensibility and feeling. And nothing is taken away from the religions when one attempts to bring their truths into harmony—into a justified harmony, into a harmony grounded in knowledge—with what emerges as the insights of various epochs. Thus, our age in particular will also bear this fruit of anthroposophical research, which consists in a deepening of religious life that has become indifferent. When this fruit ripens, then from this source will come that warmth, that enthusiasm, which we as Christians need if we are to move forward in our time of decline. And whatever else we may recognize in social life, in human organization, or whatever we may produce artistically: humanity can develop all of this further only if it is sustained by the warmth of the innermost human being and creative power. This, however, is contained in the true religious feelings of humanity.

[ 17 ] What, however, stands in particularly strong opposition to these very types of research in the humanities in our time is deeply connected to the fact that we have gradually lost touch with reality: on the one hand, we look at a de-spiritualized nature, which modern science can therefore perceive not in its true form but only in its outer, sensory form; and on the other hand, by looking toward the spiritual world—perhaps only with a certainty born of feeling, as I spoke about yesterday—yet ultimately failing to move beyond abstractions. All of this together has its root precisely in the fact that we have gradually become too complacent to want to grasp the spiritual through spiritual freedom, through free spiritual experience, and through inner activity, so that we can trace it all the way into the recesses of material events. Because scientific truths are discovered in the closest connection to external events, because they are formed everywhere through observation and experimentation, and because people no longer undertake to think anything beyond what random experiments and random observations yield, they have become accustomed to replacing the former dogma of revelation — as I expressed it in my very first writings — with the dogma of experience, namely, external sensory experience. As a result, people have become dissatisfied in their inner state of mind. People have lost the habit of experiencing what the soul can experience as something objective—not by relying on an external source, but through free inner experience. This free inner experience is what we must seek above all else if we wish to arrive at genuine spiritual research. And this is what people now resist the most.

[ 18 ] I would like to cite an example of this, not because I intend to use this essay—which was published recently—in these lectures to, so to speak, settle the score with any objections raised against spiritual science from an anthroposophical perspective. No, in these lectures I do not wish to engage directly with any opponent, least of all with what is written in the essay I am referring to here. For the person speaking in this essay is talking about something entirely different from anthroposophical spiritual science, which he does not know at all and which he judges—admittedly, after glancing at perhaps a single book and hearing certain reports— one might almost say—admittedly, after glancing perhaps at a single book and hearing certain reports—is attempting to characterize it—albeit, it must be said, in a fundamentally honest way, as best he can. I do not wish to go into here what is set forth there in opposition to spiritual science. I would simply like to consider the matter from the perspective of cultural history and contemporary history. This highly respected author speaks of those exercises which he has heard I describe, so that a person can truly walk the path upward into the spiritual world with his or her inner life. And he has evidently also heard or read that in the initial, very elementary exercises, one is to engage in thinking about an indifferent object for five minutes, so that one can truly hold onto the thought in inner freedom—not because anything compels one, but simply by following one’s own will. That is why I said, to indicate what is important: One can use a pin or a pencil; for it makes no difference what one thinks about. What matters is not that one becomes bound by the thought, but that the thought is held steadfastly for five minutes in inner freedom, so that thinking is transferred into the sphere of free activity. In everyday life, people are not accustomed to maintaining thought in this way within the sphere of free activity. When one directs one’s thinking toward an object, one wants to be bound by that object; one thinks about it as long as the object holds one captive. As a result, one never enters into spiritual research; on the contrary, one drifts further and further away from supersensible research and perception. Therefore, it is characteristic of a person who stubbornly wishes to remain entirely immersed in the decline that is currently unfolding when they say: “I wouldn’t be able to manage that at all right now; and I fear—I fear—that no matter how much I push myself, I will never learn it.” On the other hand, I have already had to endure the reproach that, when it comes to a subject that interests me, … I can be so absorbed in it for more than five minutes that I am no longer present at all for the rest of the world.” That is precisely the opposite approach. If a subject captivates you to the point that you are no longer present for the rest of the world, then you surrender yourself to the subject; then you surrender your freedom to the subject. That is what matters: that the object does not captivate you, that you choose an object that does not captivate you, and that, out of your own inner, free will, you maintain your focus on the object for five minutes. That is why it is so telling when it is said here: “I’d rather leave this ability to people whose real human lives do not hold anything of such serious interest that it can hold their attention for five minutes.”

[ 19 ] For this man here, who is a famous figure of our time, there is so much that binds him and robs him of his freedom—again and again, for five minutes and probably longer—that he simply cannot, to his credit, manage to hold onto a complex of inner thoughts for five minutes out of a sense of inner freedom. He wants to leave that to those people who are not as bound by the external world as he himself is, and this also reveals how completely he is attached to what has taken shape in the modern way of perceiving, thinking, and feeling, as characterized this evening. This is far removed from what spiritual science must promote: the ability to immerse oneself in the sphere of free thinking.

[ 20 ] Another example I give to help a person enter such a sphere of free thinking is the one I describe in the second part of my *The Secret Science* as the contemplation of the Rose Cross. You can read there how this exercise is performed. The author in question says the following: “The cross often appears before my soul unbidden”—that is, not through a free inner calling, but rather it comes unbidden—“But it is not a black cross, say, made of polished ebony, but a very ordinary, crude gallows of a dirty-gray color. And hanging from this cross is not a wreath of seven red, radiant roses, but a pale, bloodied human being in the throes of death—indeed, in the torments of hell.”

[ 21 ] So, an exercise is given for the purpose of inner liberation of thought, and the person in question can think of nothing other than what comes to mind under the coercive forces of his entire upbringing and all his life habits, and he even regards this as self-evident, as the right thing. With such a mindset, one can never approach what spiritual research can truly offer. For that same person would not need to describe what I depict in my *Secret Science* as a cross that one shapes for oneself in a spirit of freedom; rather, he might, for example, hear someone else speak of a window cross and have it described to him. Then he would also say: You have no right to speak of a window cross, for what comes to my mind is not a window cross painted reddish, but always a black cross as a common, crude gallows—and so on. And if one were to try to explain to this man how one works with the cross—namely, with the x-axis and y-axis—in analytical geometry, he would forbid it. And if Einstein were to sketch the x-axis or y-axis for him, the crude gallows would be the only thing that would come to his mind. One need only look at these things in their true context, and then one will see what forces are at work in our time, leading us precisely in the opposite direction from what—as my esteemed audience may have gathered—is so extraordinarily necessary for our time in social, religious, and scientific terms.

[ 22 ] No wonder that the author in question goes on to say something else that is highly peculiar. I have described what I have called the Akashic Records as the means by which human beings attempt to shape their thoughts in such a way that they can grasp the unfolding of the world through inner activity. I had to expect precisely this: that in describing such a thing, one actively maintains one’s inner state of mind and elevates this state of mind in free spirituality into the supersensible and visible realm. This man, however, says the following: “And—believe it or not—this renunciation is not even that difficult for me. If Dr. Steiner were to present me with the Akashic Records in a lavish, illustrated edition—I wouldn’t even read it.” Well, this man thus thinks it might happen to him that he would be presented with the Akashic Records in a lavish, illustrated edition, so that he can passively surrender to it, so that no account is taken, in any way, of his inner soul activity.

[ 23 ] In our time, it is absolutely necessary that anyone who wishes to work with the forces of ascent view such phenomena—all the forces of ascent and all the forces of decline—without hatred or antipathy, but exactly as they are. Many people stand there and cannot even perceive that they have these transitional forces within themselves, and countless others—thousands upon thousands of people—are rushing after them. They rush after such passive religious natures because they want to remain passive, because they do not want what is so necessary: objectivity, objective reality—that is, to grasp the supersensible in free spirituality. This requires precisely an active inner state of mind, a free inner state of mind.

[ 24 ] This is what I would like to say in summary at the end: Anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to cultivate supersensible knowledge—knowledge that leads to the kinds of results I have summarized over the past few days and today. This anthroposophical spiritual science does not seek to lead to dead concepts that speak only of a dead, external reality. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not wish to limit science and knowledge to those results that are gleaned from external sensory reality by the abstract intellect—like withered leaves—and which, when transplanted into the human soul as withered leaves, wither away and, through their own withering, sap the inner strength of the human being.

[ 25 ] Anthroposophical spiritual science seeks rather to bear, in its results, true fruits of life—not withered leaves—fruits of life that can become spiritual nourishment for the living soul, just as blood, in its circulation, provides nourishment for the body. But for this to be possible, spiritual science requires the air of freedom. Knowledge itself must be placed within the spiritual atmosphere of freedom—that freedom which can awaken the deepest depths of the human soul to knowledge, but which can also awaken it to truly free action, to action that can establish harmony, social harmony, among human beings. For whatever is to take place in the social organism—necessarily moving from the present into the near future—must ultimately spring from what the fully conscious human being attains through free knowledge, can experience in the innermost depths of the soul as the free fruit of this knowledge, and can in turn carry forth as social action into the whole of human society, into the whole of human development, so that it may lead humanity from the present into the near future—not through forces of decline, but through forces of ascent—toward something new that is human, healing, and creative.