The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. The Inner Life of Nature and the Nature of the Human Soul

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Yesterday I took the liberty of speaking in general terms about the mission of the Goetheanum in Dornach, and I believe that yesterday’s remarks made it clear how the spiritual scientific approach cultivated at this Goetheanum has nothing to do with any kind of sectarianism, nor does it have anything to do with, for example, an attempt to found a new religion or the like; rather, it is firmly grounded in a scientific worldview, a scientific worldview that seeks to take full account of the advances in modern scientific knowledge—one that, in a sense, continually seeks to hold itself to account internally, ensuring that its methods and the entire nature of its research are aligned with the direction toward which modern knowledge is striving, while at the same time, in a certain sense, drawing the ultimate necessary conclusions from this modern approach to research. This becomes particularly evident when one addresses specific questions concerning the human soul and our understanding of the world, and please allow me to address one such specific question today. However, since I am entering a very broad and extensive field with this very question, I will only be able to offer a few brief insights. Nevertheless, I will try to present these hints in such a way that, in a certain sense, they shed light precisely on what is connected—in both a broader and a narrower sense—to the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach.

[ 2 ] Today’s topic encompasses two ideas, two human impulses toward which the human soul must continually turn in such a way that, on the one hand, its most intense longings are awakened, and on the other hand, it is repeatedly confronted with mysteries and doubts: “The inner nature of the natural world and the essence of the human soul.”

[ 3 ] The Inner Nature of Nature: Through his knowledge, man feels, in a certain sense, to be outside of nature, for how could they be motivated at all to engage in the work of cognition if this work were not intended to go beyond what one experiences in ordinary life, if this work were not intended to delve deeper into that which, to the senses and the reasoning mind, presents itself on the outside as nature? It is, after all, an inner fact of spiritual life—one that becomes all the more apparent the more seriously one takes questions of knowledge—that one feels, in a certain sense, separated from nature, from the innermost essence of nature. And then there is the question—to which one person answers in one way according to his worldview, and another in another—whether one can penetrate sufficiently far into this inner realm of nature, far enough that a person derives a certain satisfaction from this penetration or not. One does indeed sense how, in a certain way, what one might be able to know about the inner nature of the natural world is connected to what one might call the essence of the human soul.

[ 4 ] But on the other hand, there is again this question of the nature of the human soul—one might say—as something ancient, predating human understanding. One need only recall the resonance of the Apollonian Greek maxim, “Know thyself.” It contains a challenge—a challenge that the conscientious seeker of knowledge in particular feels cannot be easily met.

[ 5 ] Perhaps—my esteemed audience—we will be able to gain some insight into what lies before the human soul in these directions, and what, in particular, constitutes the tasks of the present in this realm, by recalling the ideas that, in earlier times, seriously and conscientiously striving individuals associated, on the one hand, with the knowledge of the inner nature of the natural world, and on the other hand, with human self-knowledge; and I would like to point out such ideas today, even though they lie somewhat beyond the ordinary consciousness of the present. I would like to point out that in ancient times, people conceived of the goals of the knowledge of nature and self-knowledge with very special—one might almost say—awe-inspiring ideas.

[ 6 ] It has been assumed that a person cannot simply go about their ordinary life while striving toward this goal of knowledge; that they must face challenges, hardships, suffering, and pain; and that they will encounter uncertainties before they can in any way arrive at a satisfying certainty. Today, according to our customary ideas—even on the path to knowledge that we follow through our educational institutions—we are accustomed to seeing something that, in a sense, does not take us off the beaten track of everyday life, something that allows us to proceed in the usual way. And it must also be said: What we encounter in our laboratories, in our observatories, in our clinics—this cannot, so to speak, throw us off the track of ordinary life in the way that is often described in connection with the paths of knowledge that the seekers of wisdom in ancient times were compelled to follow.

[ 7 ] One could say that there was a kind of abyss between what a human being is in ordinary life—what a human being can experience in ordinary life—and what he becomes when he penetrates into the depths of world existence and into the knowledge of his own being, and what he encounters there. This abyss was described as something that, in a certain sense, pulls the ground out from under a person’s feet, so that they must venture—without feeling dizzy, and I mean this in an inner, spiritual sense—without feeling dizzy, into the realm of ultimate knowledge. And it was said that a person in ordinary life could not possibly endure setting out on this path toward higher knowledge without preparation; they need such serious, conscientious preparation, and only when they have it can they dare to leap across the abyss. In ordinary life, one is, so to speak, kept in a state of mind that leaves one ignorant of this abyss, that prevents one from seeing it. This is a blessing for them. They are, so to speak, enveloped in a kind of blindness. They are protected from suddenly plunging into the abyss that lies before the ultimate knowledge of things.

[ 8 ] And people—call it personification or something similar, although it certainly referred to real experiences in those ancient schools of wisdom—said: In order to enter the realms of higher knowledge, a person must cross a certain threshold, and must have become fearless in the face of whatever is revealed to him at this threshold regarding his soul life—and in ordinary life, he is protected, protected by his general state of mind. That which protected them there can, in turn, be called—in personified terms—the Keeper of the Threshold. As I said, one can call it a personification; yet for those for whom soul experiences are a reality, these things are not a personification at all, but rather something that must be endured, something that must be overcome—overcome if the one state—as was believed in those ancient times —is to be overcome, and the state of luminous contemplation of spiritual reality and of standing within this spirit-filled reality is to be attained.

[ 9 ] Of course, for people today, terms such as “threshold” and “guardian of the threshold” must initially conjure up highly vague images. I would like to state right away: Humanity is certainly—as I have said in many lectures I have been allowed to give here on this very topic— humanity is certainly in a process of development; humanity progresses from one state to another, and in this process not only do external cultural conditions evolve, but the life of the soul also develops from stage to stage; and what in ancient times could be used to describe precisely the most intimate processes of this life of the soul cannot apply to humanity today. Therefore, when we wish to characterize—and we wish to do so in order to orient ourselves regarding these matters—when we wish to characterize what was understood in ancient times as the “threshold” and the “guardian of the threshold,” we will have to conceive of it differently than it applies to the processes that take place for modern human beings when they wish to advance from ordinary knowledge to the supersensible. And in order to characterize the latter, I would like—purely to make things a bit more understandable—to draw on the comparison with the ancient conceptions. And one can, in fact, more easily than some who view these things merely from a historical perspective without drawing on spiritual scientific inquiry, point to that which is actually—as I already said, one might almost call it terrifying—what was actually presented in the ancient schools of wisdom as something terrifying, something dreadful, something that the unprepared should initially avoid.

[ 10 ] Essentially, what was feared for the unprepared soul in those ancient times, and for what purpose did one initially seek to prepare the student in the School of Wisdom through a very specific discipline of the will—a will that was to become strong and energetic, and that was to learn to maintain its composure in difficult, dizzying situations of life? What, in fact, did they fear for the unprepared? Well, as strange as it may sound—my esteemed audience—anyone who surveys the course of human development can certainly see that what was essentially feared is precisely that state of the soul which present-day humanity has already attained to a certain degree through external culture. As strange as it sounds, what people wanted to avoid for the unprepared student of antiquity was that he might readily arrive at a state of mind such as is quite common within our culture today—namely, one that has become widespread through the scientific education of the last three to four centuries. I would like to illustrate this for you with a specific example.

[ 11 ] Isn’t it true that humanity today adheres to the so-called Copernican worldview? This worldview places the Sun at the center of our planetary system, with the other planets orbiting around it, including Earth as one of them. As humanity conceives it today, this has been the case since the time of Copernicus. Before that, the general consciousness held a different spatial view of our planetary system. People held a worldview that placed the Earth at the center of our system. They imagined the Sun and the stars moving around the Earth. People held—as one might say—a geocentric worldview, one that placed the Earth at the center of our planetary system. Copernicus replaced this with the heliocentric worldview. Humanity was, so to speak, placed in a position where it no longer had solid ground beneath its feet in the vastness of the universe, but was instead hurled through space at tremendous speed along with the Earth. And what meets the eye is said to be merely an illusion, caused by certain perspectives and other conditions arising from human perception.

[ 12 ] One need only read a certain passage in Plutarch—who tells us much about ancient beliefs and people of earlier times—to be convinced that what we today call the heliocentric worldview is by no means merely an achievement of our own era. I would like to read the passage in question to you in a literal translation. It refers to Aristarchus of Samos and the way he conceived of the world; and it transports us back to earlier Greek centuries—that is, to a time that lies centuries and centuries before the Middle Ages, before Copernicanism. According to Plutarch, Aristarchus of Samos said: “The world is much larger than has just been stated.”—For he had previously described what is apparent to the eye; for he, Aristarchus of Samos, assumes that the stars and the Sun are immovable, that the Earth moves around the Sun as its center, and that the sphere of the fixed stars—whose center also lies in the Sun—is so large that the circumference of the circles described by the Earth is to the distance of the fixed stars as the center of a sphere is to its surface.

[ 13 ] In ancient Greece, we find the heliocentric worldview; essentially—at least as far as the human soul’s relationship to the universe is concerned—we find essentially the same thing that humanity today believes about its place within the planetary system and the fixed-star sky. This heliocentric worldview was, however, in those ancient times, in a sense, the secret of a select few—namely, those who had been carefully prepared, who had been trained in such a way that they were granted a special discipline of the will, so that they had to become strong in will; only then was such knowledge passed down to them.

[ 14 ] This is something worth noting—it is very significant that in ancient times this was the wisdom of a select few, well-prepared individuals—the students of wisdom in particular—whereas today it is common knowledge, something that, in a certain sense, everyone talks about. And as I said, as strange as it may sound, what such a student of wisdom knew, for example, about the sun and its relationship to the Earth—it was imagined that this lay beyond the threshold for human beings; one had to first cross the threshold, and only then would one enter those realms where the soul relates to the universe differently than before. In other words, the ancients placed beyond a threshold—one that required thorough preparation to cross—the very things that everyone today is immersed in through general education. And why was this the case in those ancient times?

[ 15 ] Ladies and gentlemen, one could—as I have just discussed using the example of the astronomical worldview— one could certainly discuss it in the same way for other areas of human knowledge, and everywhere it would become apparent that, fundamentally speaking, the development of civilization in recent times has simply carried all of humanity across what was called in those ancient times the “threshold to higher knowledge.” It is from the feelings—the feelings one had toward that state of the soul into which it enters when it gains such knowledge—that what has remained has led the various denominations that preserve tradition to simply reject what has been brought about in this way by civilization. For example, when the Catholic Church did not recognize the Copernican doctrine until the year 1822, the reason for this non-recognition was what had been preserved from those ancient times regarding the basis—the believed basis—of this rejection. It was considered something that would plunge people into uncertainty if they were not sufficiently prepared.

[ 16 ] Now—my esteemed audience—no power on earth can resist progress in the long run. But such matters must be discussed seriously among people, for what might be called the threshold to the spiritual world must indeed be conceived of today in a completely different way than it was in ancient times. Simply from this example, which I am discussing in the manner I have just described, those who do not wish to characterize anthroposophical spiritual science on the basis of hastily concocted slanders, but who truly wish to engage with it, could recognize that this spiritual science has nothing to do with reviving some old Gnostic or similar ideas, but rather that it is thoroughly grounded in modern scientific thought.

[ 17 ] Why—I ask—did people in those ancient times feel a certain fear, a sense of dread, at delving into those insights that are now very much part of humanity’s common knowledge? Well—my esteemed audience—I have pointed out this fact regarding human development in my book *The Riddles of Philosophy*, in which I have shown how, in fact, the spiritual constitution of humanity has changed quite significantly from ancient Greek times to the present day. What was quite distinctive for the Greeks was that they did not yet possess a self-consciousness completely detached from the external world. When they thought about the world, they were, in a sense, intertwined with it in much the same way as we are today when we perceive the world solely through our senses. For the Greeks, thought was, in a certain sense, also a sensory perception.

[ 18 ] Just as we draw red, blue, G, and C-sharp from our sensory perceptions, but actively engage our thoughts internally so that it is we ourselves who are at work in thought, so for the Greeks this inner, active work did not yet exist. Just as we derive from sensory perceptions—just as we derive red and green, G and C-sharp from sensory perception—so, too, did he derive his perceptions from the external world. For him, the perception of thought had not yet detached itself from the external world. He did not yet possess that independence in grasping the human self which only emerged in the course of human development in the form generally known today. Self-consciousness has essentially been strengthened over the course of time. Through this, human beings have, in a certain sense, detached themselves from the surrounding natural world. Human beings have come to look within themselves and to perceive themselves inwardly as something self-active. Through this, however, they have set themselves in opposition to nature, so to speak, stepping out of nature in order to then regard the inner nature of the world as something lying outside themselves.

[ 19 ] This view of the inner nature of the natural world as something that lies outside the human soul only emerged over the course of time. In ancient Greece, human beings still felt, with their entire life of thought, that they were within the inner nature of the natural world. They still felt that the fabric of the human soul was interwoven with the inner nature of the natural world. As development progressed, things turned out differently. It is precisely through this detachment of thought from external, objective life that human beings have come to grasp their own selves. And this detachment of thought from external, objective life is, in turn, connected to the emergence of the feeling of freedom, the sense of freedom, which is essentially also a result of the more recent centuries.

[ 20 ] If one were to view history from a more inner perspective—rather than, as has increasingly been the case in recent times, focusing solely on its outward aspects—and were to examine history from within, as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does, one would see that what we experience inwardly today, when we speak of freedom, was not felt by the Greeks in the same sense; indeed, it did not even arise—as anyone who studies these matters truly impartially knows—it did not even arise in contexts where we translate the corresponding word as “freedom,” such as among the Stoics or similar philosophers.

[ 21 ] In my *Philosophy of Freedom*, published in the early 1890s, I emphasized how the experience of freedom is connected to the grasping of pure thought—that is, thought that operates independently within itself. I have said that everything a person perceives as belonging to the experience of freedom is, in their view, connected to what I have called pure thinking—that thinking which is entirely detached from inner organic life, that thinking which, if the expression is not misunderstood, is already a kind of elevated cognition even in ordinary life. For when we imbue our pure thinking with moral ideas and impulses—ideas and impulses that are not connected to desires, not connected to sympathies and antipathies, but are connected only to the pure, loving devotion to the deed to be performed—when we thus allow the impulse toward a deed, toward an action, to arise in our soul—then the deed, the action that arises from such an impulse, is truly free. Therefore, one cannot raise the question of freedom in the sense in which it has so often been raised: Is the human being free, or is the human being unfree? Rather, one can only say: Human beings are on the path to freedom through their self-development, through their self-knowledge, through their inner liberation from their ordinary state of mind toward that state of mind in which they rise to grasp the pure thought that is filled with the moral ideal. Through this, they become freer and freer.

[ 22 ] Freedom is something one continually approaches. Therefore, there is no “either/or” here, but only an approaching, a “both/and.” One is both free and unfree: unfree insofar as we are still governed by our desires, by that which, so to speak, wells up from our organism, from our instinctive life; free insofar as we have become independent of that instinctive life, in that we can bring to life the pure love of action, which we perceive in pure thought.

[ 23 ] Now—my esteemed audience—what is described here as the state of experiencing freedom on the one hand, and as the state of thought, of pure thought, to which one can devote oneself, is of course still very much an ideal for people today, but an ideal that hovers within the soul, one that is inextricably linked to human dignity, and without the pursuit of which true human dignity is, in fact, inconceivable today.

[ 24 ] In modern times, however, humankind is nevertheless on the path toward such an ideal, and it has embarked on this path precisely through the development of the natural sciences in modern times. Anyone who considers this scientific development—whose findings already dominate the widest spheres of life and will continue to do so more and more, and which is increasingly becoming the foundation of general human education—anyone who considers this scientific education of modern times knows that, whether in the realm of the inanimate—from physics to astronomy—or in the realm of the organic, the living, must think in such a way that, even while relying on experience and experiment, the thought that is internally developed by the human being comes to the fore more and more. And as human beings work in this way—working precisely as is the case in the modern scientific worldview—what develops is what might be called their heightened self-awareness; their detachment from the inner essence of nature develops through this process.

[ 25 ] This, in turn—ladies and gentlemen—can be seen in the example of astronomy. By transforming the data provided by observation into a mathematical model—for that is essentially what Copernicus did—one arrived at a world system that is, in a sense, completely detached from human beings themselves. No ancient world system was like that; ancient world systems were always connected to human beings, humanity experienced itself as standing at the very center of the world—so that humanity is, in a sense, merely a minor factor, hurled through space along with the planet Earth, and a worldview that reveals the structure of the universe, entirely separate from humanity, without allowing what lives within the human being to interfere.

[ 26 ] This, however, fills the human being with a thought content, through which he detaches himself from himself in a certain way. Of course, he thinks his own thoughts. In thinking, they are still connected to it as human beings, but they think it in such a way that what arises from their organism—what comes from their instinctive life—is not connected to it; rather, they must think in such a way that, although the thought remains connected to them, this thought detaches itself from the human-personal, so that they become, as it were, entirely objective within this thought. It is precisely through this that human beings attain their self-consciousness, their strong self-consciousness. The efforts that must be undertaken—whether in modern astronomy to arrive at an insight, whether in modern physics or modern chemistry to arrive at an insight, or simply [to truly think through the results of this insight clearly], or even in the field of biology, the study of life—through everything that must be endured there—human beings must strengthen their self-consciousness through thought.

[ 27 ] People in ancient times were not raised to develop this growing sense of self-awareness, and that is the enormous difference between our time and the earlier cultural eras of human civilization. In earlier cultural eras—at least among the broadest segments of society, with the exception of those educated in the schools of wisdom and thus well-prepared through the discipline of the will—people were essentially educated to base their worldview on whatever presented itself to their eyes. Hence the Ptolemaic worldview, which was essentially a reflection of what was perceived by the external senses. Human beings were, so to speak, not thrust so far out of themselves as they are by the modern scientific worldview. And because this did not happen, their self-consciousness did not strengthen in those ancient times either. They remained, so to speak, bound within their bodies. Their self-consciousness depended on their instincts, depended on their inner sense of vitality. This life within the body has, nevertheless, been overcome—even though we have sailed into materialism through the thinking of more recent times. Self-awareness has grown stronger, and precisely because we have drifted into materialism—because, in a sense, we have lost the spiritual in sensory things—that which was developed through inner thought has grown stronger. In those ancient times, it was feared that if a person were led to such a concept unprepared—as is necessary when considering, for example, the heliocentric system or its equivalent—he would, so to speak, fall into a state of spiritual helplessness because his self-awareness was not strong enough.

[ 28 ] This is precisely what people feared: that a person might lose their self-awareness if they were led to such knowledge. For this reason, great importance was placed on the discipline of the will—on that which made the will strong and energetic; for it is through the will that self-awareness is strengthened and empowered. It was precisely through this roundabout path of the will that one sought to prepare the student of wisdom to endure, once beyond the threshold, that view of the world for which a strong sense of self is necessary.

[ 29 ] So what were people afraid of in those ancient times when they led the student into the innermost essence of things, into the innermost essence of nature? They feared that the student’s soul might be harmed, that he might, so to speak, fall into a state of soul-spiritual powerlessness, into soul-spiritual ignorance and darkness—a state, taken in a soul-spiritual sense, that can be compared to physical fainting. It was this state that they sought to avoid through the discipline of the will. Thus one can say: The people of those ancient times believed that a person’s self-awareness would suffer harm if they were given a worldview that required intense thinking. Therefore, they first had to be carefully prepared. And ordinary life was viewed in such a way that the human being stood on this side of the realm containing the insights that endangered him; that a guardian kept him [away from] the sphere into which he did not belong; that a guardian protected him from falling into a state of psychological and spiritual helplessness. And what the student had to go through when he was to cross the threshold and pass by the guardian of the threshold was described in a way that corresponded entirely to inner soul experiences.

[ 30 ] It was said: At first, as a person approaches the threshold, they feel a sense of uncertainty. But if they are sufficiently prepared through self-discipline, they remain in that sphere that would otherwise cause them to feel dizzy. They pass by the guardian of the threshold—who would otherwise veil the spiritual world from them—and enter this spiritual world through the inner strength of their soul life. But then he must also remain fully conscious within this spiritual world. For if he were to lose this spiritual world again, what he experienced within it—as something that calls upon human strength, not weakness—would assert itself within his constitution as something that shatters him, and he would suffer even greater harm to his soul’s condition.

[ 31 ] Well, the peculiar fact is that the development of humanity has brought us—my esteemed audience—what these ancient schools of wisdom initially sought to carefully prepare their students for; that, in a sense, with regard to what the ancients thought beyond the threshold, we are already standing beyond that threshold, and that what was once only introduced to people after careful preparation is now simply common knowledge. And just as it was said back then: “If a person is driven into this realm unprepared, their sense of self will suffer,” so today we must certainly say: What was to be avoided in ancient times—precisely because one wanted people to be in a certain state of mind—one wanted them, as they felt their inner being, to feel the inner being of nature shining forth within that inner being—one wanted them to feel connected to what was the inner being of nature when they experienced their own soul. And because it was believed that, if unprepared, they would sink into a kind of spiritual powerlessness, it was said that they could penetrate to this inner essence of nature only if they were prepared—or by losing themselves.

[ 32 ] Well, then—my esteemed audience—in our present age, however, everyone is venturing into this field completely unprepared, just as in those ancient times; and it must be said that what is being experienced there today is precisely what the ancients sought to avoid. Today, human beings acquire knowledge of nature. Human beings acquire the self-awareness that sustains them, even though the conventional knowledge of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and so on is imparted to them. They acquire all of this. But they also live in a way—with regard to their souls—that the ancients did not want for humanity. We need only point out that, because human development has brought us the idea, the sense of freedom, and thus the strong self-awareness, we certainly do not lose our sense of self when we delve into the findings that scientific knowledge provides today.

[ 33 ] But we need only point to very familiar phenomena to see that we do indeed lose something—indeed, that this loss is, in fact, a general state of the human soul today. People simply indulge in illusions about these things. They are quite unwilling to free themselves from certain daydreams regarding these matters. Indeed, in these lectures that I have been privileged to deliver here over the years, I have repeatedly pointed out how our understanding of nature leads conscientious people, in particular, to recognize the limits of scientific knowledge—limits that we cannot cross without leading our cognitive faculties into unauthorized, impossible realms. A prominent, deeply insightful natural scientist of recent times spoke of “Ignorabimus”—“We cannot know.” Thus, in such an “Ignorabimus” lies the admission: No matter how far we extend this knowledge, which we gain from sensory observation and from the combining intellect, we still do not penetrate into the innermost depths of nature. Herein lies a conflict that had already been sensed when this modern understanding of nature had advanced to a certain stage.

[ 34 ] Haller coined the phrase: “No created mind can penetrate the innermost depths of nature; blessed is he to whom she reveals only her outer shell.” Goethe, who heard these words repeated time and again by those who stood before nature in the manner of Albrecht von Haller—that human knowledge cannot penetrate into the innermost depths of nature—objected to what lies at the heart of his famous poem addressed to the “Philistines,” for to him, those who cling to the words: “No created spirit penetrates the innermost depths of nature”—for him, they were certainly to be counted among the Philistines, those people who do not wish to stir the innermost depths of their souls sufficiently to illuminate, through the light thus kindled within, what is otherwise the innermost essence of nature, and thus to project the human soul into the innermost depths of nature. Goethe, after all, expresses this in truly powerful verses when he quotes: “No creative spirit penetrates the innermost depths of nature.”

“Into the Heart of Nature
O, you philistine!
“No creative spirit penetrates.”
As for me and my brothers and sisters
May you never
Even recall such words;
I think: place by place
We are within.
“Blessed is he to whom she
Shows only the outer shell!”

[ 35 ] Goethe, in turn, quotes this and says:

I’ve heard that repeated for sixty years.
And I curse it, but secretly;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times,
She gives everything abundantly and gladly;
Nature has neither core
Nor shell,
She is everything at once;
Just examine yourself most closely,
Whether you yourself are core or shell.

[ 36 ] Goethe, in a sense, could not bear—out of a conscious-unconscious, instinctive feeling—this separation of the essence of the human soul from the innermost core of nature. It was clear to him that anyone who brings the human soul to consciousness in a healthy way—in its very essence—must also experience and live as one who stands within the heart of nature. That is why Goethe never embraced Kantianism. And those who claim that Goethe himself was at any time in his life close to Kantianism are very much mistaken. Contrary to what Kant recognized as human cognitive faculty, Goethe emphasized what he called “contemplative judgment”; and he believed that through this, one does not merely develop within oneself the kind of judgment that moves from concept to concept in an abstract sense, but rather that one applies inwardly to the contemplation of thought that which otherwise exists only externally in sensory perception. Goethe says he never thought about thinking, but he ceaselessly sought to contemplate that which lives as a living entity within thought. Through this contemplation of thought, Goethe sought to achieve something whereby the essence of the human soul would once again connect with the inner essence of nature.

[ 37 ] And it is along this path—my esteemed audience—that what is known as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science intends to proceed. It seeks to develop this “contemplative power of judgment” described by Goethe—which, as Goethe presents it, was still in its infancy—into what is described in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, which is intended to bring to the fore those human faculties of knowledge that otherwise lie only latent, hidden within the human being in ordinary life and in ordinary science, and which then lead him to see—so that, just as he sees the colors and the light and dark around him with his physical eye, so too he truly beholds the spiritual. I mentioned yesterday that by means of certain inner spiritual practices, a person can develop from within what otherwise remains deeply hidden in the soul in ordinary life and in science—just as what a child later needs for orientation in life is developed from within the child—and that through this, a person can ascend to a higher level of knowledge —which I will mention only by name, as I have often expounded upon it from this very place—so that a person can rise to imaginative knowledge, to inspired knowledge, to truly intuitive knowledge, and thereby immerse their soul being in external nature. Today I would like to draw attention once more to this development of knowledge from a particular perspective.

[ 38 ] You see—my esteemed audience—in ordinary human life, as is quite obvious, a distinction is made between the various states through which human life must alternate if a person is to remain mentally and physically healthy. A person must alternate between the waking life of the day—from waking up until falling asleep—in which what they experience inwardly and spiritually is interwoven with thoughts or images, where these thoughts take on a certain hue through the life of feeling, and where, from indeterminate depths but guided by thoughts, the life of the will wells up from within the person and accomplishes deeds; and between this state of human soul life and the state in which a person lies motionless, where thoughts are plunged into darkness, where feelings drift, and where the will is not active. Thus, ordinary, normal human life alternates between the waking state and the sleeping state. This is how one views this normal human life.

[ 39 ] But this is not a complete view of the human being, and one cannot arrive at a sufficient understanding of the nature of the human soul if one views what is before us only in this way. According to common understanding, we are awake between waking and falling asleep. But this state of wakefulness by no means pertains to our entire being, and this is usually overlooked. That is why we still have no proper study of the soul today, no real psychology, because this is not taken into account. For when we compare—in an unbiased inner experience—what arises in our feelings, it is by no means permeated by the same inner clarity of consciousness as imagination. There is a vast, tremendous difference between the distinction in consciousness between thoughts, images, and that which, more dimly and hazily, pervades this life of imagination as a nuance of feeling. Admittedly, this emotional life is just as real—and perhaps even more real in another respect—for our human sense of self and our human experience as the life of thought. But only the life of thought can be imbued with luminous clarity. The emotional life remains spread out in the soul with a certain vagueness.

[ 40 ] And when we ask ourselves: How can we come to understand how this emotional life is present in the soul? Then we must compare one state of the soul with other states of the soul, and little by little we come to realize—I have already spoken about this here in more detail; today I merely want to bring these things up and, so to speak, share them— one comes to compare what pulsates in the emotional life with what occurs in the dream life. Anyone who truly studies this, anyone who truly knows in detail how it presents itself to consciousness, how it wells up from the indeterminate depths of the human being, how it appears in images, yet in an indeterminate, twilight-like manner, so that at first one does not really know how it relates to any external truth.

[ 41 ] So it is with emotional life. Emotions are certainly something different from dream images; but if we compare the degree of consciousness regarding emotions with the degree of consciousness regarding dream images, this degree is quite the same, or at least similar. And we can say: Emotional life is waking dreaming; in a sense, what appears as images in dreams is pushed down into the general realm of organic life. It is experienced differently, but it is present in the soul in the same way as the dream realm, so that we can say: In reality, we are awake only in relation to our imaginative life; we also dream while awake with regard to our emotional life. Anyone who truly looks into all that human life entails and asks themselves what role emotions play—particularly over a longer period of human experience—will be able to say to themselves that what otherwise appears to them in dream images is so closely connected to the ordinary vicissitudes of their life, to what they have experienced, that what has otherwise been experienced in life lives on in a corresponding way within the dream images. But in exactly the same way, what otherwise manifests itself as fate in life is expressed in the feelings that nuance our thoughts and provide a certain foundation for them. A careful examination of the life of the soul will already reveal this connection between the life of feeling and the life of dreams.

[ 42 ] And another—my dear friends here present—is the life of the will. This life of the will—one does not usually reflect on it, but does the impulse of the will not well up from within us without our having a clear awareness of its true source in our soul? We have a thought. From this thought arises the impulse of the will. We then see ourselves—as we act, my dear friends—we observe ourselves, as it were, as the agents themselves, yet we have a thought about our actions. But we have no awareness of what lies in between—how that which springs up within me as thought-impulses for the will enters into my muscular power, how the nerve perceives the movement of the arm and hand muscles, how that which originates from the thought then descends into, I would say, into the depths of the human being, only to resurface again when we find ourselves as agents. This actually lives within us in the same way that only what we experience in deep sleep lives. Just as we have, in a sense, lost our own being in sleep—just as we do not experience in wakefulness what we undergo in our bodies while asleep—so too do we not experience what takes place within our human being when the will allows its impulses to emerge. We do not merely dream while awake in our emotional life; we sleep in our waking life through our willing, so that dreaming and sleeping are constantly at play within us. But rising up from these unknown depths—from those depths from which the will arises—comes also that which we ultimately summarize in our self-consciousness. We recognize our full humanity only when, in ordinary life, we know ourselves as thinking or imagining, feeling, or willing beings.

[ 43 ] But we bring unconscious states into this ordinary life. We would not arrive at a sense of freedom if we could not separate from our being something that, in a sense, stands out from our entire organic being at first. It is precisely by setting itself apart that the life of imagination develops what I have previously characterized as the foundation of the experience of freedom. In a certain sense, we separate ourselves from ourselves through this. While awake, we live only in one part of ourselves—namely, in that which our imaginative life represents to us. In a sense, we live unconsciously in relation to another part of ourselves, just as we live unconsciously in relation to the inner world of nature. This is where anthroposophically oriented spiritual science comes in, by developing methods for higher knowledge. It is not based on anything even remotely related to the most dreamy and obscure mystics; it is not based on anything that could be achieved through external experimentation or convoluted spiritualism; rather, it is based entirely on that which can be brought forth from within the human being with as much luminous clarity as the purest material concepts. In a state of full consciousness, that which is to be incorporated into the methods of spiritual scientific research is drawn forth from within the human being.

[ 44 ] But that which otherwise exists in the ordinary human state of mind, such as the life of dreams—namely, the world of feelings—is permeated by the same light that permeates the imagination, which, like certain philosophies or theologies of feeling, draws its inspiration from feeling.

[ 45 ] Spiritual science—and only through its exercises, as described in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*—permeates the emotional life with the light that otherwise reigns only in the life of the imagination, so that the region which otherwise remains dreamlike now lives in the human soul as imaginative consciousness. It is not a dream that is present, nor is it the dreamlike emotional life that is present at the moment one surrenders to this imaginative consciousness; rather, what is present is that which otherwise remains just below the threshold of ordinary consciousness. One thinks images, but images of which one knows they are not dreamed, but rather correspond to realities.

[ 46 ] And this method I have described—as set forth in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science—goes even further in inspired consciousness. There, what is otherwise the will is actually attained. Yesterday I described how what is otherwise abstract, theoretical cognition is transformed into something comparable to the artistic contemplation of the human form. But in this way, one also looks upon the will. Gradually, one arrives at a point where—and this expression should not be misunderstood—one truly gains a clairvoyant insight into how the entire human organism functions as the will pulses through it. One observes what is truly happening within the muscle by recognizing what surges into it as the impulse of the will takes effect, and this is then inspired insight. Here, the human being delves into his or her own inner being. In doing so, however, he or she attains an insight into himself or herself that is otherwise veiled. One comes to recognize not only that which stands complete between birth and death, but one also comes to this by means of what lives in one’s feeling and will—which are now permeated by the very same light of consciousness that otherwise characterizes only the life of imagination— one comes to recognize not merely the created in its essence, but the creative, the creative force—that which does not merely awaken and re-enter the already formed body, as is the case when a human being wakes up, but which descends from spiritual worlds as the human being passes through birth or conception and organizes the body for itself, there, through this higher level of knowledge, a person comes to recognize their eternal self—that which lives on beyond birth and death. Through direct insight, they come to recognize the eternal aspect of the spiritual within themselves. They arrive at an insight into the essence of the human soul; but they also attain this by delving into their own being—where they would otherwise perceive only the natural—and by finding the spirit within themselves; they come to realize that, simply by having descended into themselves, they no longer stand merely within themselves, but now stand within the very heart of nature, recognizing the spirit of nature in the spirit of their own nature.

[ 47 ] And now what is significant is revealed to him—you see, it is indeed the case that, in a sense, we stand beyond the threshold, so to speak, with our understanding of nature. The ancients believed they would lose their self-awareness in this realm if they were not prepared in an appropriate manner. Modern man does not lose his self-awareness, but he loses the world—the ability to perceive it with that bright clarity that self-awareness affords us; after all, this has only developed in modern times. This self-awareness—that is what we must cultivate. While the ancients focused particularly on the discipline of the will, we must, as I have already emphasized in my *Philosophy of Freedom*, advance toward pure thinking. We must cultivate thinking in particular so that, as it develops further, it may lead to imagination, inspiration, and intuition.

[ 48 ] This, however, opens up a new threshold into the spiritual world for us—the very threshold that now lies before us. We tell ourselves that we must not remain stuck in that world which offers us only the expansive sensory perception that leaves what is inner in nature beyond its boundaries. We must not remain there; we must cross another threshold—the one that leads us into our own inner being, into the essence of the soul—and that no longer allows us to fantasize about all manner of atoms and atomism and all manner of molecules that are supposed to lie behind what we perceive as color, sound, the sensation of warmth, and so on. Instead, by recognizing our own spirit and standing within that spirit, we learn to perceive by standing within the spirit of nature; we come to know nature itself as spiritual. Where people seek to lose sight of the world by placing—one might say—a second, grossly material nature behind nature in an atomistic world, there the one who crosses the [threshold] in the newer sense finds the spirit, and this is what we must develop as a fundamental feeling toward the inner life of nature and the essence of the human soul—distinct from what the ancients had.

[ 49 ] We must feel: Yes, we are living right in the midst of the circumstances that our ancestors wanted to avoid without being prepared for them. We do not, admittedly, face the danger of losing our sense of self—the world of thought is too highly developed for that in modern education—but if we continue to develop this world of thought even further, then we will also be unable to lose that which is now in danger of being lost to us. Our ancestors faced the threat of losing their sense of self—a kind of spiritual powerlessness; we face the loss of the world, dissolving into purely mathematical worldviews and atomistic concepts, so that we are no longer connected to the abundance of the world that surrounds us. We face the danger that, while we may not lose our sense of self, we will lose the world in relation to our ego-consciousness. And in order to rediscover the world—that is, to find the spirit within the world—we must cross what modern humanity must call the threshold. And we can say, in a certain sense: While the ancients feared the guardian of the threshold and had to be well prepared to pass him by, modern humanity must actively long for this guardian. He must long for the opportunity to become acquainted with that which otherwise presented itself to him only as external sensory perception combined with the results of the reasoning mind and experimentation, in order to attain it through the knowledge of the Spirit.

[ 50 ] Spiritual knowledge must thus be brought into every sphere—into the laboratory, the observatory, the clinic; wherever sensory research is conducted and combined with intellectual reasoning, spiritual knowledge must be brought in. For otherwise, what is achieved in these institutions of learning is attained beyond the threshold, and human beings are thereby cut off from the world in a fateful way; they feel confronted by an inner aspect of nature that they can never reach through external means, but only when they first awaken themselves, when they first penetrate to the immortal, eternal essence of the human soul. And when they penetrate to this, they stand within the spirit of nature. They cross this threshold, which lies within themselves, and advance into the spiritual realm of nature.

[ 51 ] This is the task that falls to anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in contrast to what the other sciences cannot provide. That is why anthroposophically oriented spiritual science may call itself “Goetheanism,” for Goethe spoke out against those who say:

“No created spirit
Can penetrate the innermost depths of nature.”
Nature has neither a core
Nor a shell;
She is all at once;
Examine yourself above all else,
To see whether you yourself are the core or the shell.

[ 52 ] One is a shell as long as one remains confined to the realm of mere imagination. But in doing so, one cuts oneself off from nature. Only the one who has first made nature itself into a shell—the one who has become a shell—can speak of the innermost essence of nature. But the one who penetrates to his own core—who knows himself by experiencing himself in the essential core of his human soul—knows that he stands within the very heart of nature; he experiences this innermost core of nature.

[ 53 ] This—my esteemed audience—is the impetus that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to impart not only to human life in general—and above all to that—but also to the individual sciences. Then it is faced with the ideal that all the individual sciences will gradually cease to remain merely the specialized fields they have been up to now, but that from each individual science something will well up that contributes to that toward which human beings must strive unceasingly if they wish to be fully conscious of their human dignity—namely, the eternal aspect of the human being.

[ 54 ] What the individual sciences can offer remains external to the inner essence of nature unless it is supplemented in this way by inner paths of knowledge, which add these inner paths to the external ones, thereby transforming individual knowledge into a comprehensive understanding of humanity—an understanding that then also empowers people, as demonstrated in my *Key Points of the Social Question* with regard to the social conception of life and to participation in social life—a conception that will be capable of steering the social demands and questions of the future into a suitable, wholesome course that serves human progress. This should be the task of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

[ 55 ] Ceaselessly—my esteemed audience—because it believes it can discern this from the present nature of human civilization, ceaselessly stands in a completely honest, sincere striving for true knowledge of the human being, for a deepening of the human essence, for an expansion of human activity and human energy—ceaselessly — let me say this in summary at the end — ceaselessly stands before the one who seeks anthroposophical spiritual science from its inner core; ceaselessly stands before him the connection between the nature of the human soul and the inner essence of nature, such that, indeed, what the specialized sciences give us casts a darkness over the world that, when you get right down to it, ought to be feared just as the ancients feared what lies beyond the threshold. But it is possible—my esteemed audience—to kindle a light so that, by looking into these darknesses, into the darknesses of the inner life of nature, human beings may find their way. And this light can only be that which is kindled through an inner, spiritually and psychologically deepened insight within the human soul itself.