The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and the Major Civilizational Questions of Our Time

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! Anyone speaking on a topic such as the one we are discussing this evening—and the one I will address on the 27th of this month—must be acutely aware, particularly in light of contemporary spiritual life, that there are numerous souls today who yearn for a new direction, a renewal, and a metamorphosis of important aspects of our entire civilizational life—away from many things that today clearly bear the mark of leading humanity into the decline of civilization if they were to continue, and away from many things that have been the prevailing currents of civilization for one, two, or more centuries. We find this precisely in those souls who, in the present, are attempting to look deepest into their own innermost being. We can say: What can be said about the supersensible worlds can be addressed to every human soul at any time. It can be addressed—to give an extreme example—to the hermit who has withdrawn completely from the world and is interested only in his immediate surroundings; it can also be addressed to individuals who are fully immersed in life. For what is at stake here is, after all, a matter of universal human concern.

[ 2 ] But it is not solely from these perspectives, my esteemed audience, that I wish to speak to you today and on the 27th; rather, I wish to speak to you from the perspective that arises when one allows the most fundamental questions of contemporary civilization to take root in one’s soul. And it is precisely there that leading minds find much that shakes them to their very core, driving them deep within to yearn for a renewal of certain aspects of spiritual life.

[ 3 ] When we take stock of where we stand in the spiritual life of the present, we can trace it back to two main questions, I would say. One of these issues arises from scientific life—specifically, the form of scientific life that has been evident in the civilized world for the past three to four centuries. The other issue arises directly from practical life, but also from that practical life which has been profoundly influenced by modern science.

[ 4 ] Let us first look at what modern science has brought to light. I would like to say—precisely so as not to be misunderstood—that what I am presenting here as an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should in no way be set in opposition to the spirit of modern science. The great triumphs and significant achievements of this modern scientific approach should be fully acknowledged by the spiritual science I am referring to here. Yet precisely because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to penetrate the spirit of this science with an open mind, it must go beyond what has today become the subject of general human education through this scientific spirit. In its various disciplines, this science provides precise and conscientious information about many aspects of the human environment. But when the human soul inquires about its highest concerns—about what its deepest, eternal destiny is—it cannot find an answer within this scientific spirit, especially not when it consults within itself with complete honesty and impartiality. And that is why we find today numerous souls who, driven by more or less religious needs, yearn for a renewal of old worldviews.

[ 5 ] What is known as external science—in particular, anthropological science—already draws our attention in a certain way to how our ancestors centuries ago were unaware of what today divides and fractures the human soul: a certain disharmony between scientific knowledge and religious feeling, religious longing. If we look back to ancient times, it was the very same bearers of humanity who cultivated a form of science that certainly seems childlike to us today—but is only childlike in appearance—and who, at the same time, kindled the religious spirit in humanity through this very science. There was no conflict between these two spiritual currents.

[ 6 ] Many souls today long for something like this. Yet one cannot say that a revival—be it of ancient Chaldean wisdom, ancient Egyptian wisdom, ancient Indian wisdom, or any other wisdom teachings—would bring a special blessing to the present age. Anyone who believes this does not truly understand the actual spirit of human development. Human development is such that every age has its own distinct character, and that in every age, human souls seek fulfillment in something different. And what we need for our souls—simply by virtue of living in the 20th century and having received our education within the context of the 20th century—must be something different from what people of a distant past needed for their souls. Therefore, a revival of ancient worldviews cannot serve the present. But one can take as a guide what those old worldviews actually were. One will then see from what the satisfactions that human souls derived within those old worldviews actually sprang. Here one must say: This satisfaction sprang for human souls at that time from the fact that, fundamentally, they had a completely different relationship to scientific knowledge than we have today.

[ 7 ] I would like to draw your attention, ladies and gentlemen, to a certain phenomenon. If one points this out today, one is very easily accused of paradox or fantasy. Yet there are many things that must be said now that, perhaps just a few years ago, would have been highly dangerous to say given the general state of education. For the recent catastrophic years have, after all, brought about a shift in the life of thought and feeling. And today, more so than ten years ago, people’s minds are already prepared for the fact that the deepest truths may, at first, appear paradoxical or fantastical in light of our habitual ways of thinking and feeling.

[ 8 ] In ancient times, people spoke of something that today, in light of scientific knowledge, is hardly even considered a possibility, but which will likely be discussed again, probably even within general education, in a relatively short time: the Guardian of the Threshold—the threshold leading from the ordinary world in which we live our daily lives and engage with conventional science, to that higher world in which human beings can recognize how they themselves, through their supersensible, inner being, belong to a supersensible world. Between these two worlds—the world that human beings perceive with their senses, whose facts they can combine with their intellect to form natural laws, and the world to which human beings belong with their very essence—people in those ancient times saw an abyss. One first had to cross this abyss. Within the ancient civilizations, only those who had been intensively prepared for this by the leaders of the educational institutions of that time—which we now call mysteries—were permitted to cross this abyss. Today we have different views on preparation for science and for a life dedicated to scientific inquiry. In those ancient times, it was said: An unprepared person must not receive the higher insights into the nature of the human being at all. Why did they say this?

[ 9 ] Only those who, going beyond the usual understanding of history, gain insight into what the human soul has undergone in the course of human development can understand why this was so. After all, today’s understanding of history is, in essence, limited to the outward aspects of human development. People do not look at the state of the soul. For example, they do not look at the state of the souls of the people who were rooted in that ancient Eastern wisdom, of which only decadent forms survive today in the East. In essence, people have no idea at all how differently souls were situated in the world back then. People back then, just like us, perceived the nature surrounding them with their senses; in a certain way, they also combined what they saw of nature with their intellect. Yet they did not feel as separated from the nature surrounding them as people do today. They sensed a spiritual-soul aspect within themselves. They felt that this human physical organization was filled with a spiritual-soul aspect. But they also sensed a spiritual-soul aspect in lightning and thunder, in the passing clouds, in minerals, in plants, and in animals. They sensed what they suspected existed within themselves also outside in nature, throughout the entire universe. To them, the entire universe was permeated by the spiritual-soul aspect.

[ 10 ] However, they lacked something that we modern people possess within our inner nature: they did not have such a pronounced, intense sense of self as we do. Their sense of self was more subdued, more dreamlike than ours today. This was true even during the Greek era. In fact, one can only truly understand later Greek culture if one conceives of the souls of people during the Greek era as being in the same state as our own souls are today. In earlier Greek culture, there can be no question of a state of soul such as ours. Back then, there was still a rather dull sense of human existence within nature. I would like to say: Just as if my finger had a consciousness and felt at one with my entire organism—just as it could not conceive of itself as separate from my organism, without which it would indeed wither away—so did human beings feel themselves to be within the whole of nature, [inseparable] from it.

[ 11 ] And those ancient sages, who were the leaders of the schools I have spoken of, said to themselves: This is the moral aspect of human self-consciousness. But this self-consciousness must not view the world in such a way that it appears spiritless and soulless to it. If this state of mind were to confront a spiritless world—a world, if I may add, as we perceive it in our science and in our everyday life—the souls of human beings would be overcome by a spiritual powerlessness.

[ 12 ] The ancient sages saw this spiritual powerlessness looming in those people who were destined to arrive at a worldview such as the one we hold today. Indeed, can we even say that these ancient sages told themselves that souls should not arrive at the kind of worldview that we say we ourselves hold today? Yes, we can say that. And I would like to give you an example of this. One could cite many examples, but I want to highlight one in particular.

[ 13 ] Ladies and gentlemen, we are rightly satisfied today that we no longer perceive the external, spatial structure of the world solely on the basis of outward appearances, as was the case in the Middle Ages. We stand on the ground of the Copernican worldview, which is heliocentric. People in the Middle Ages believed that the Earth rested at the center of the planetary system—indeed, of the entire stellar system—and that the Sun, along with the other stars, revolved around the Earth. The heliocentric solar system brought about a complete reversal of all relationships, and today we hold fast to this reversal as something we already absorb in our ordinary school education, something that is at the very core of our entire education. We look back at the people of the Middle Ages; we look back at the people of antiquity, who, in their Ptolemaic world system, saw what I have just described—the geocentric model. But by no means did all people in those ancient times simply accept the geocentric world system. After all—as even external history shows us, and as spiritual science makes perfectly clear—one need only read in Plutarch what he says about the world system of an ancient Greek sage from the pre-Christian era, Aristarchus of Samos. This Aristarchus of Samos already places the Sun at the center of our planetary system; he has the Earth revolve around the Sun. And if we take—not in the details, of course, since modern science has made such great advances in that regard, but in its main features—the heliocentric system of Aristarchus of Samos, it essentially corresponds completely with the one we have today.

[ 14 ] What exactly are we dealing with here? Well, the cosmological system that Aristarchus of Samos merely let slip was the very one that had been taught in the ancient schools of wisdom. Outwardly, people were left with the cosmological system of appearances. Why was that the case? Why were they allowed to retain this worldview based on appearances? Well, it was said: Before a person can advance to this heliocentric world system, they must first cross the threshold into a world other than the one in which they live. In their ordinary life, they are protected by the invisible guardian of the threshold, whom these ancients imagined to be a very real, if supersensory, being. They are protected from suddenly having their eyes opened in such a way that they would see the world as soulless and devoid of spirit. For today we see the world as soulless and devoid of spirit; we look at it, form our view of nature regarding the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms—we see it as soulless and devoid of spirit. When we form concepts at the observatory—with the aid of the telescope and through calculations—about the paths and movements of the celestial bodies, we see the world as soulless and devoid of spirit. The ancient wisdom teachers of the mysteries knew that one could also see the world in this way. After the necessary preparation—and after guiding their students past the Keeper of the Threshold—they imparted these insights, but they prepared the students through rigorous discipline of the will. How was this discipline of the will instilled in the students? By subjecting the students to privations, but also by requiring them, over many long years, to follow in strict obedience a pure moral code prescribed to them by the wisdom teachers. The will was to be strictly disciplined, and this discipline of the will was intended to strengthen self-awareness. And once the students had moved beyond a dreamy, dull sense of self to a more intense sense of self, only then were they shown what lay beyond the threshold: the world that, in the heliocentric world system, lies in outer space; but they were also shown many other things that we today recognize as the content of our entirely ordinary worldview.

[ 15 ] Back then, students were first prepared—carefully prepared—before they were taught what, so to speak, every schoolboy and schoolgirl learns today. Times change, and civilizations change. One simply gets a false impression of the development of humanity if one knows only external history, and not this history of the human soul.

[ 16 ] What had the students of the ancient schools of wisdom brought with them as they approached the threshold of the supersensible world? They had brought with them an instinctive understanding of the world that, in a sense, arose from their instincts, from the drives of their bodies. Through these—what is called animism today—they saw everything external as animated and imbued with spirit. They felt the kinship between human beings and the world. They felt their spirit dwelling within the spirit of the world. But in order to see the world here as we learn to see it today, even in elementary school, these ancient people had to be prepared.

[ 17 ] Ladies and gentlemen, all sorts of literature that dabbles amateurishly in mysticism—even when it sometimes puts on a scholarly air—spouts all manner of things about the Keeper of the Threshold and the threshold into the spiritual world. And the more nebulous mysticism is poured over these matters, the more credence they often receive.

[ 18 ] What I have just described to you is precisely what presents itself to the unbiased spiritual researcher regarding what the ancients called the threshold to the spiritual world. It was not those nebulous things that some orders, sects, and the like speak of today that were sought beyond the threshold, but precisely what we today consider general education. Yet at the same time, we see from this that we face the world with a different sense of self-awareness. This was precisely what those ancient teachers of wisdom feared: that their students, if they had not first strengthened their self-awareness through self-discipline, would have become spiritually powerless if, for example, they had accepted the idea that the Earth does not stand still but orbits the Sun at great speed; that we orbit the Sun along with the Earth. This loss of solid ground beneath their feet—the people of old could not have endured it; it would have dampened their self-confidence to the point of powerlessness. We learn to endure this from childhood onward. We live, so to speak, within the world as our educational environment, into which the ancients had to enter only after careful preparation.

[ 19 ] Nevertheless, we must not yearn for the conditions of the ancient civilizations. They [no longer correspond to that] which nourishes our souls today. What I am presenting to you today as an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is neither a revival of ancient Gnostic teachings nor a revival of ancient Eastern wisdom—all of which could only be presented to human souls today as something decadent. It is something that can be discovered today through the creative power of the elements within the human soul, along the paths I will shortly describe to you. For now, however, I would like to point out that, in a certain sense, we can once again speak of a threshold into the supersensible world—or, indeed, into a world other than that of ordinary life and ordinary science.

[ 20 ] The ancients imagined a world beyond the threshold that was different from the one they experienced in everyday life. But what do we hear today from our conscientious natural scientists, from those who are most correct in their methods? We hear that the natural sciences confront us with the limits of knowledge. We hear of “Ignorabimus” and the like—and, it must be emphasized, quite rightly so within the natural sciences. While the ancients lacked the intense self-awareness we have today, we lack something else.

[ 21 ] How, then, did we come to possess this intense self-awareness in the first place? We acquired it through the emergence within humanity of that way of thinking and that perspective that began with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and so on. Through this, we have not only gained a body of knowledge, but modern humanity has also undergone a certain education of its inner life. Everything we have developed in recent times under the influence of the way of thinking of these great minds tends to cultivate, above all, the intellect and the powers of reason. Certainly, we conduct experiments in science today; we observe carefully and conscientiously. We use our instruments—telescopes, microscopes, X-rays, and spectroscopes—to study the phenomena around us, and we employ our reason, so to speak, solely to derive the laws of nature from these phenomena. Yet what are we doing, despite all this, even as we observe and experiment? We do so in such a way that, within this work of cognition, we allow only the intellect to speak in formulating the laws of nature. And it is a fact that, over the course of the last three, four, or five centuries, it is primarily the intellect that has been drawn upon in human development. The intellect, however, has the peculiarity of strengthening, hardening, and intensifying human self-consciousness.

[ 22 ] That is why we today can endure what even an ancient Greek could not have endured: the awareness that we, together with the Earth, are moving—as it were—around the Sun in the abyss. But on the other hand, precisely because of this heightened self-awareness—which reveals the world to us as soulless and spiritless—we are led to lack a kind of insight that souls must nevertheless yearn for: We see the world in its material appearances, its material facts, as the people of antiquity never saw it without the preparation provided by the mysteries. But we do not see—and this is precisely why conscientious natural scientists speak of *ignorabimus* and the limits of knowledge—we do not see the world of the spiritual around us.

[ 23 ] We exist as human beings in this world. When we reflect on ourselves, we must tell ourselves: When we simply think about things, when we summarize our experiments and observations, it is the spirit that is at work within us. But is this spirit that hermit who stands there in a world of material phenomena? Is this spirit present only within our bodies? Is the world devoid of spirit and soul, as we must rightly conceive it from the perspective of the physical and biological sciences? This, then, is how we stand before our environment today. We have recently come to stand at a threshold. This has certainly not yet come to the awareness of the broadest circles of humanity. But what humanity does not bring fully into consciousness is not for that reason entirely extinguished in the soul. People do not reflect on these things, but inwardly these things reside as feelings of the soul. We have an unconscious soul life. For most people, it remains unconscious. But from this unconscious arises the longing to cross another threshold—to gain spiritual knowledge of the world through self-awareness.

[ 24 ] Well, whatever else one might call these things—which are usually perceived only vaguely—they are, in truth, from one perspective, the deepest mysteries of civilization; they are such that people feel a spiritual world around them must be rediscovered. The spirit- and soul-empty world of ordinary science cannot be the one with which the human soul forms a unity in its deepest essence. This is the first great civilizational question of the present: How do we rediscover a form of knowledge that at the same time deepens our religious sensibility? How do we find a form of knowledge that simultaneously satisfies the deepest needs for a sense of the eternal within the human soul?

[ 25 ] It is fair to say: This modern science has brought about great and mighty things, but for the open-minded person, it has not actually provided solutions—rather, one might say, the opposite of solutions. And we must be content and glad about that as well. What can we achieve through modern science? Can we solve the questions of the soul? No, but we can pose them in greater depth! Through modern science, we have before us the world of material facts in its purity, free from the spiritual and soul-related elements that human subjectivity introduces into the world. In a sense, we see the pure phenomena of the external material world. Through this, we come to know the questions of the soul more deeply. This is precisely the achievement of the modern scientific spirit: that it has brought us new mysteries—deeper mysteries. This is the first great civilizational question of our time: How do we confront these deeper mysteries? One cannot solve the great questions of the soul in the spirit of Haeckel, Huxley, or Spencer; yet, from within this spirit, one can perceive the great enigmas of humanity’s present existence more intensely than ever before.

[ 26 ] This is where spiritual science comes in. It seeks to guide humanity today, in accordance with its innate capacities, across the renewed threshold into a spiritual world. And the path by which modern human beings—unlike their ancestors—can cross this threshold is to be outlined here in broad strokes. I can only do so in brief. You will find a more detailed account of what I intend to explain here only in principle in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?*, in my *The Secret Science*, and in other writings.

[ 27 ] I would like to begin by drawing attention to the starting point that anyone who wishes to become a spiritual researcher must adopt today. They must begin precisely at a point that people today, given the spirit of the times, are least willing to confront. It is that aspect of the soul’s disposition that I would like to call intellectual humility. Although we as a humanity have developed our intellect to a remarkable degree over the last three to four centuries—to a level never before seen in human evolution—one must, as a spiritual researcher, strive precisely toward intellectual humility.

[ 28 ] I’d like to use an analogy to illustrate what I mean by this. Let’s take a five-year-old child and put a volume of Shakespeare in their hands—what would they do with it? They’ll play with it, flip through the pages, tear it up; they won’t treat it in the way that’s appropriate. But once the child has lived another ten or fifteen years, it will relate to the volume of Shakespeare quite differently—it will behave in a way that is appropriate for the volume. What has happened here? Well, abilities that were latent within the child have been developed through external human intervention—through upbringing and instruction. Psychologically, the child has become a different being over the course of those ten to fifteen years. Intellectual humility leads a person to say—even as an adult, after having assimilated the intellectual developments of modern science—that in a certain sense, one could relate to the whole of nature and the environment in a way that is comparable to how a five-year-old child relates to a volume of Shakespeare. There may still be potential within you that can be further developed, so that you become a different being in spirit and soul.

[ 29 ] People today are not very keen on adopting such a stance of intellectual humility. Our habits of thought and feeling regarding educational life are different. Those who have received a standard education today are then admitted to our institutions of higher education. There, one is no longer concerned with the development of the soul’s cognitive faculties, volitional capacities, or emotional capacities. Essentially, one remains within scientific research at the level determined by one’s heredity and ordinary education. Certainly, through experimentation and science, observation was expanded to an unprecedented degree, but the same cognitive powers were applied that are found in so-called modern intellectual life. No effort was made to develop the individual in order to advance these cognitive powers. One did not say to oneself: The person who possesses these powers of insight—whether in life or in science—could stand before nature as a five-year-old child stands before a volume of Shakespeare, and could develop within themselves powers and capacities for insight that would lead them to a completely different attitude toward nature. But this is precisely what the person who, in the spirit of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here, wishes to become a researcher in the supersensible worlds tells himself. This truly involves the cultivation of human faculties that are initially present only as potentials—albeit in every human being—but in order for them to be developed, one must go through many trials.

[ 30 ] I am not speaking, my esteemed audience, of any miraculous or even superstitious measures concerning the human soul, but rather of the development of abilities that every person is well acquainted with, abilities that play a major role in everyday life and in conventional science; which are applied there, but which are simply not pursued to their full potential—the potential available to human beings between birth and death.

[ 31 ] There are many such abilities, but today I would like to focus on just two and describe their further development. You can find more details on this in the books mentioned. First, there is the ability to remember. This ability to remember is absolutely essential for everyday life. We know—and those who are particularly interested in such matters will know from the psychopathological literature—what it means for a healthy mental life that memory remains intact up to a fairly early point in childhood; that there is no period in life from which no memories emerge to bring back to our minds the experiences we have gone through. If memory itself is erased, then a person’s ego is destroyed; a serious mental illness has overtaken them. What memory gives us, then, is a resurgence of these experiences in faint or vivid images. It is precisely this ability, this power, that can be further developed. What, then, is its distinctive feature? Well, otherwise, experiences simply flit past us. Even the ideas we form about these experiences flit past our souls. Memory preserves them. I can speak of this memory only in broad strokes; in my writings, you will find a fully developed science devoted precisely to this capacity for memory.

[ 32 ] What memory does with the otherwise fleeting mental images is to give them permanence. This is what the method of the humanities first takes up and develops further; it develops them through what I call “meditation” and “concentration” in the books mentioned. It consists of either seeking guidance from someone experienced in these matters or drawing guidance from the literature oneself; it involves taking complexes of mental images that are easily grasped—such manageable complexes as geometric or mathematical figures, which one can fully take in and about which one knows: These are not memories from life surfacing from the subconscious, but rather everything one holds in consciousness is there by one’s own volition. One is not subject to autosuggestion or daydreaming; one maintains a clear overview of whatever one places at the center of one’s consciousness. Then, with complete inner calm, one remains focused on this image in consciousness for an extended period. Just as muscles develop when they perform a particular kind of work, so do certain soul forces develop when the soul devotes itself to this unfamiliar activity of dwelling on such ideas. It looks simple, and not only do some people believe that the spiritual scientist draws what he has to say from some external influences, but some also believe that what I am describing here—as methods that take place within one’s own inner, intimate spiritual life—is easy. No, even what I am telling you now requires a long time; some people find it easier to do, while others find it more difficult. The depth of the practice is much more important than the amount of time one spends on such meditation.

[ 33 ] But one must practice such exercises for years on end. And what one must accomplish within the soul is truly no easier than what one accomplishes in the laboratory, in the physics classroom, or at the observatory. External research is by no means more difficult to master than what is so carefully and conscientiously cultivated within the soul over many years. But then certain inner powers of the soul—which we otherwise know only as powers of memory—grow stronger, and through this, something arises within us as a power of the soul that we had not known at all before. Through this, we come to clearly recognize precisely what materialism otherwise says about the power of memory. Materialism tells us: This human power of memory is, after all, bound to the material body; if anything in the nervous system is not properly constituted, then the power of memory also declines, and it declines with age as well. In general, the spiritual powers depend on physical development. Spiritual science does not deny this for the life between birth and death. For anyone who develops their power of memory in the way I have just described knows through direct observation how the ordinary power of memory—which conjures up the images of our experiences before our soul—is indeed dependent on the human body. But what they are now developing becomes entirely independent of the human body. And the person experiences how one can live in a spiritual realm in such a way that one has supersensory experiences in this spiritual realm, just as one has sensory experiences in the physical body. I would like to explain to you in the following way what these supersensory experiences are like.

[ 34 ] You know that human life alternates rhythmically between waking and sleeping. The moments of falling asleep and waking up, and the intervening period of sleep, intrude into our waking life. What is happening there? For ordinary consciousness, the following occurs: As we fall asleep, consciousness is dampened—in most people, down to zero; dreams sometimes bubble up from this half-dampened state of consciousness. Yet the human being is alive during this time—otherwise they would have to perish and be reborn, though in a soul-spiritual sense—but their consciousness is subdued. This is because, from the moment of falling asleep until waking, the human being does not make use of their senses, nor do they make use of the impulses that constitute their organic volitional impulses.

[ 35 ] But the very same thing can be eliminated by someone who, through the power of memory, has developed the higher ability I have just spoken of. Such a researcher of the spirit is now able to do without seeing with the eyes, just as one does not see with the eyes during sleep; to do without hearing with the ears, just as one does not hear with the ears during sleep; even to do without sensing the warmth of the surroundings, and to do without the impulses of the will that act through the muscles and, in general, through the human organism. He can set aside everything physical. And yet his consciousness is not dulled as it is during sleep; rather, he is able to enter states in which a person is otherwise only found during sleep—but then unconsciously; the spiritual researcher, however, remains fully conscious. Just as the sleeping person is surrounded by a dark world that contains nothing for him, so the spiritual researcher is surrounded by a world that has nothing to do with our sensory world, but which is just as full and just as intense as our sensory world. We experience our sensory world through our senses; the spiritual researcher experiences the supersensory world when he is able to consciously free himself from the body, when he is in a state similar to that which a person otherwise experiences between falling asleep and waking up; but he is fully conscious in this state.

[ 36 ] In this way, one comes to recognize that a supersensible world constantly surrounds us, just as the sensible world otherwise surrounds us. However, there is one significant difference: In the sensible world, we perceive facts through our senses, and within those facts, we also perceive entities. The facts predominate; the beings appear within the course of these facts. In the supersensible world that we thus open up to ourselves, we first encounter the beings. It is actual entities that surround us when we open the eye of the mind to behold the supersensible world. And at first, we find ourselves in a world of very concrete, real, supersensible entities—not yet a world of facts; we must gain access to those through something else entirely.

[ 37 ] This, then, is the achievement of modern anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: that human beings once again cross a threshold and learn to enter a world other than the one that otherwise surrounds them. And when a person learns to recognize how independent they are of the body in this way, they finally come to say to themselves: It is not only when the soul falls asleep that it, as it were, lifts itself out of the body and returns to the body upon waking; it returns through the longing for the body lying in bed. Through such supersensible insight, one also comes to truly know the essence of the soul as it returns to the body upon waking through this longing. But if one acquires such real concepts of falling asleep and waking up, these concepts eventually expand to the point where one learns to recognize the human soul in its essence, as it was before it descended from the spiritual worlds through birth or conception into a physical body given to it by heredity.

[ 38 ] Once one has grasped and learned to follow the soul outside the body between falling asleep and waking up—once one learns to recognize the lesser forces that draw the soul back toward the body lying in bed—one learns to recognize how the soul lives, freed from the body, after it has passed through the gate of death. Specifically, one takes in the following insights: One learns to recognize why, during sleep, the human soul possesses only a dulled consciousness. It is because the longing for the body lives within it. This longing for the body dampens consciousness to the point of unconsciousness between falling asleep and waking up. When a person passes through the gate of death, this longing no longer exists. And as one comes to know the soul through the developed power of memory, one comes to know it precisely in the state in which it develops after passing through the gate of death—how it can then possess consciousness because it is no longer bound to a physical body, because it no longer has any desire for one. This freedom from desire makes consciousness possible.

[ 39 ] As a person passes through the gate of death, he attains a different kind of consciousness than that which was given to him through the instrument of the body. Through this, one also comes to recognize the forces within the soul that drew it to a physical body while it was in the spiritual world—though to a physical body that appeared to it only in general terms as a physical body, not a specific one. One learns to recognize the soul as it embraces the desire to descend once more into physical life on earth. In other words, one first comes to know the eternal nature of the human soul in its true meaning.

[ 40 ] And that, my esteemed audience, is the one thing one comes to know in this way. But one comes to know something else as well through this process. By learning to recognize—through images, which I call “imaginations” in my books—the eternal in the human soul that passes through births and deaths, one comes to realize that this human soul belongs to a supersensible world; that the soul belongs to a supersensible world just as the body belongs to the sensible world. And just as one can describe this sensory world through the body, so can one describe the supersensible world through its spiritual nature. One learns to recognize a supersensible world in addition to the sensory world.

[ 41 ] One must, however, be willing to further develop a second faculty of the soul beyond what it is in ordinary life—a faculty of the soul at the mere mention of which as a cognitive faculty today’s scientists recoil. One can fully appreciate the reasons why they do so; yet what I have to tell you about the further development of this human soul capacity is nonetheless true.

[ 42 ] The first faculty that had to be developed was the capacity for memory, which becomes a force acting of its own accord. The second faculty is the power of human love. In ordinary life between birth and death, love acts through the physical organism; it is intimately connected with the instincts and drives of human nature. And only in the most sublime moments does a part of this love detach itself from physicality. Then the human being experiences that uplifting moment when he becomes free from himself—which is the state of true freedom—where he does not surrender to his drives, but rather forgets himself, directing his actions according to external facts and the necessity of those facts. Because love is intrinsically linked to freedom, I dared to say as early as 1893 in my *Philosophy of Freedom*—through which I sought to establish, philosophically speaking, a sociology for the present—that true love does not blind a person, but rather makes them see clearly, that is, free. It leads him beyond that which would otherwise blind him when he is dependent on what is within him. Love allows us to be devoted to the external world, and thereby frees us from that from which we must be freed if we are to act freely.

[ 43 ] But this love, which shines into our ordinary lives only through truly free actions, is precisely what the modern spiritual researcher must cultivate. Love must gradually become spiritualized, just as the capacity for memory must become spiritualized; it must become a force that is purely spiritual, one that makes him, as a spiritual being, completely independent of the body, so that he can love without the body—through its blood and its entire constitution—providing the reasons for this love. Through this, one becomes immersed in the external world, in human beings; through this, one becomes one with the external world.

[ 44 ] This developed power of love now brings us a second thing; it places us essentially within the spiritual world, which we enter through our developed capacity for memory. And we now come to know spiritual beings, come to know spiritual realities, and learn to describe the world in such a way that we do not merely say how our present planetary system once arose from some ancient, misty world—a system that will in turn one day disintegrate or fall into the sun. We do not look upon such a nature alien to the spirit, as if something else stood in opposition to it. And if a person is honest, they must sense how the world viewed through the lens of natural science stands in direct contrast to the very most valuable aspect of the human being. We have come to know the troubled souls in modern spiritual life who tell us time and again: Natural science tells us of a world of purely natural necessity, that our world originated from worlds that were nebular worlds, which coalesced into the four kingdoms of nature—the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, and finally humanity. But within the human being, something now arises in the deepest innermost part of his being, to which he must attach the greatest value: his moral, his religious world. This stands before his soul; it is what actually makes him human in the first place. But if he is honest with himself regarding the purely scientific worldview, he must admit: This Earth, upon which you stand like a hermit of the cosmos with your moral ideals, will disintegrate, will fall back into the sun, will become slag. A vast graveyard will remain, and the ideals will be buried.

[ 45 ] This is where spiritual science now comes in. It confronts this view not merely out of faith and hope, but out of real knowledge—developed in the way I have indicated—and says: No, the purely scientific worldview offers an abstraction from the world. This world is imbued with spirit; this world is permeated by supersensible beings. And if we look back to prehistoric times, we see that what is material on Earth has emerged from the spiritual; and what is material now will become spiritual in the future. Just as a human being sheds his body and enters a spiritual world with his consciousness, so what is material on Earth will fall away like a corpse, and what is spiritual and soul-related on Earth—what is spiritual and soul-related in human beings—will rise up in the future, even after the Earth has perished. One could say that, with a certain variation, the Christian saying comes true here: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” A person can say: Everything my eyes see will perish, just as the human body perishes in relation to human individuality. But from what is perishing, that which lives within a person as morality will rise. A person senses a spiritual world around them; they live their way into a spiritual world.

[ 46 ] Because anthroposophically oriented spiritual science deepens our knowledge in this way toward the spiritual realm, it addresses the civilizational needs of the present in a different way than external science can. It can, in turn, deepen knowledge and insight into religious fervor and higher consciousness. It gives human beings a spiritual self-awareness.

[ 47 ] This is, in essence, the first major civilizational question of our time. If a person lacks the proper inner stability, if they feel as though they are floating in a void as a mere material entity, then they cannot develop a strong inner being, nor can they act as a strong being in social life. Human beings must create the external institutions; human beings must create the external social conditions. There is something significant in these external institutions and external social conditions with regard to the great civilizational questions of the present and the future, and this civilizational question leads us back to the search for the great, true consciousness of humanity. For only people who possess such inner stability—which can give them peace of mind—will be able to engage properly in social life. That is the first question: How can a person with inner stability and a sense of security in life engage with our social conditions? The second is what we might call the encounter of human being with human being—human interaction. And here we enter a realm where, no less than in the realm of knowledge, modern civilization has brought humanity not new solutions but new riddles. Just consider the vast scope that the achievements of modern natural science have opened up for technology and technical life. Technical life, commercial life, and transportation life—as they surround us hour by hour today—are the achievements of this magnificent modern view of nature. But what we have not found within modern technology, what has been set before us as a new question of life, is this: How should people live in this complex technical, commercial, and transportation-oriented life?

[ 48 ] This question has been raised by modern civilization itself. The fact that it has not yet been resolved is demonstrated by those terrible movements, which appear all the more dire the further east we go, all the way into Asia, where human instincts do not give rise to anything uplifting, but—because the great questions of civilization remain unresolved—give rise to destruction. Undoubtedly, the very things emerging in the East would bring the entire modern civilization to ruin. What lurks there, ready to bring about its decline, is far more terrible than people in the West can imagine

[ 49 ] to introduce them to modern civilization. But it also demonstrates how necessary it is to find a different approach to solving the civilizational issues of the present.

[ 50 ] Not only must we work within the framework of modern technology, which has emerged from the modern view of nature, but we must also find another way: Human beings have become alienated from the old nature; they have been placed, practically speaking, through their actions and their entire way of life, into a soulless, spiritless, mechanistic world; they have been led from interacting with nature to interacting with soulless machines and soulless transportation systems; and we must find ways to give human beings back something they can experience as a gift from nature, just as they did in the past. This must be a worldview that speaks powerfully to the human soul and tells us that human beings are something more than what they experience here; that they belong to a spiritual-soul world, a supersensible world that surrounds them, which can be explored through a science just as exact as the external science that leads to technology. But only such a science will also be able to reestablish the proper relationship between human beings. Such a science will enable us to encounter in the human being a being who appears to us not merely as he stands before us, as he appears between birth and death, but in such a way that we learn to honor forever the eternal, the imperishable, and the connection to a supersensible world. Through this, the feeling from person to person must change as a result of such deepened knowledge.

[ 51 ] And there is a third factor that matters as well. What matters is that human beings learn once again that their lives are not limited to the period between birth and death—as the modern proletarian believes based on his ideology, or worldview—but that what we do here at every moment has not only an earthly but also a cosmic significance. For indeed, when the Earth has perished, what we bring from our souls into our daily work—based on moral, spiritual, and soulful foundations—will merge into another world; it will participate in the spiritualization through metamorphosis.

[ 52 ] Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science thus approaches the questions of the present in three ways. It leads people to spiritual self-awareness. It leads people to see their fellow human beings—their neighbors—as spiritual beings once again. It leads people to attribute a cosmic, universal, spiritual significance to their work and their earthly activities, no matter how material they may be.

[ 53 ] Regarding what can be developed in this way, spiritual science today already has not only theoretical insights but has also begun to apply them to practical life. In Stuttgart, we have the Waldorf School, which was founded by Emil Molt, which I have the privilege of directing, and where a pedagogy and a didactics are developed based on the understanding of the human being that can be gained through spiritual science, as it is understood here. We also have the Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel, a School of Spiritual Science, the construction of which I will show you through photographs in a few days. This Goetheanum in Dornach is not yet complete, but we were able to hold a large number of courses in the unfinished building last fall. I have also had the opportunity to speak about spiritual science here in the Netherlands in the past. At that time, I could only speak of spiritual science as existing as a field of research, a tendency toward research, and as something that lived within individual people.

[ 54 ] Since that time, this spiritual science has taken on a different form. It has begun to establish its own School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. Last spring, I myself demonstrated how what I have today presented to you only in outline form—as the beginnings of spiritual scientific research—can be applied in practice to all sciences. At that time, I showed doctors and medical students how what can be derived from this spiritual science through a strictly exact method can influence medicine and therapy. Those questions in medicine—the borderline questions—as opposed to the health issues facing humanity, those practical questions of medicine—will be felt by every conscientious physician who perceives them as a cultural reality; these are the questions that remain enigmas today because modern science does not wish to rise from the sensory to the spiritual-super-sensory.

[ 55 ] Experts from all fields—including jurisprudence, mathematics, history, sociology, biology, physics, chemistry, and education—sought to demonstrate how medicine, and indeed all sciences, can be enriched by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Then there were also figures from the world of art and artistic creation who illustrated how spiritual science can enrich artistic creation. There were also representatives from practical life—from the commercial and industrial spheres—who showed how their lives, guided by spiritual science, are no longer merely stuck in the old routines that led us into catastrophe, but how this guidance actually brings people into practical life in a higher sense. This was precisely what these courses were intended to demonstrate: how spiritual science does not seek to cultivate some form of dilettantism or nebulous mysticism, but rather how it can fruitfully engage with the individual sciences. But in doing so, it simultaneously elevates what is contained within these sciences to a spiritual-super-sensory holistic understanding of the human being.

[ 56 ] I will, of course, have more to say here about the practical aspects; then I will discuss issues of teaching and education, as well as the social question. Then you will see how the spiritual science referred to here—the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science—does not seek some nebulous mysticism in a sphere alien to life, but rather seeks to grasp the spirit for other reasons: first, because human beings must become aware of their connection to the true spiritual origin; second, because the spirit seeks to intervene precisely in material, practical life, drawing a line between a spiritless practical life and a spirit conceived in alienation from life—a spirit that most certainly does not grasp the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, nor, for that matter, what is most necessary for the present.

[ 57 ] Ladies and gentlemen, we have found people who understood what the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach is intended to accomplish for human development in the manner just described, and how necessary it is—in light of the great civilizational questions of our time—that this work be carried out. The difficult circumstances have greatly slowed down construction. We are not yet finished, and completion will depend largely on whether people who have a heart and a mind for all the human progress that is necessary today will continue to come to our aid. Even in its unfinished state, we gathered more than a thousand people for the opening of our courses. Those who come to Dornach—this will also become apparent at the next lecture — will see that, at the same time, this spiritual science seeks to emerge from the fullness of humanity: that it does not wish to speak only to the human mind, that it does not seek only to gain what can be presented through experimentation and observation, but that it simultaneously strives for truly artistic expression without falling into hollow symbolism or abstract, pedantic allegories. For this reason, not just any architectural style could be used in Dornach—as the slide presentation will show—but the architectural style also had to draw from the very same sources from which this spiritual science itself flows. It is not a science in such a one-sided way as today’s sciences, which adhere strictly to experimentation and observation, but rather it seeks to draw from the whole human being. Although it is as precise as any science can be, it nevertheless seeks to speak to the full, whole human being.

[ 58 ] I will therefore have more to say about the practical details later, but today I felt it necessary to begin by explaining what actually leads to these matters in the realm of spiritual research—precisely so that I can then demonstrate, in the practical spheres, how essential it is for our time to have what this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks, based specifically on an observation of the history of our era. It seeks to supplement the conscientious and methodical exploration of the material world—which it acknowledges more than any other spiritual movement—with the science of the spirit, which in turn can lead to religious deepening and artistic creativity, just as the ancient instinctive science, which we can no longer revive, led to art and religion in the mysteries.

[ 59 ] That this spiritual science is not opposed to religion and Christianity is something I will yet have to demonstrate as I continue to elaborate on its practical aspects. It strives for that which every true, religious deepening must strive for; it strives for the Spirit. Therefore, we have hope: all those people who are still resistant to this spiritual science today will eventually come to embrace it, for this spiritual science strives for something universally human: it strives for the Spirit, and humanity needs the Spirit.