The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. Anthroposophy and Cosmology

[ 1 ] Ladies and gentlemen! When one begins a discussion today with someone interested in such matters about the possibility of gaining insight into spiritual life in connection with the sensory-physical world, one generally encounters a willingness to engage, so that at least the question is raised: Can human beings, by any means, arrive at a kind of spiritual knowledge? — even if it often becomes apparent as the discussion progresses that people are willing to accept no more than a conception of a spiritual world expressed entirely in general terms and ideas, perhaps in some form of vague pantheism or even a view of life that resonates, to a greater or lesser extent, with the mystical. If, on the other hand, one goes as far as I have had to in my *Secret Science*—that is, attempting to describe a genuine cosmology, a science of the becoming and development of worlds in specific, concrete forms—then, for the most part, the discussion ceases when addressing the enlightened person of today, That anyone in our time could be capable, drawing on some underlying body of knowledge, of saying anything about a spiritual origin of the world, about spiritually active forces in the world’s evolution, or about the possibility that the world’s evolution might return to a spiritual form of existence, after it has passed through its sensory-physical phase—is, when it appears, for example, in my *The Secret Science* in specific, concrete descriptions, viewed more or less in such a way that, as an enlightened person, one no longer wishes to have much to do with anyone who asserts such things. For people tend to think: If someone sets out to speak in detail about such things, then he is probably, deep down, on the verge of losing his mind; at the very least, one cannot compromise oneself by entering into a discussion of such details.

[ 2 ] Of course, it cannot be the purpose of a single lecture to present any details of cosmology as it can be derived from the perspective of the worldview presented here. Instead, in today’s lecture I would like to attempt to show how one can arrive at such a spiritual-scientific cosmology—an understanding of the spiritual impulses that underlie the development of the world. Even today, people are still generally accused, when they undertake such an endeavor, of engaging in anthropomorphism—that is, of seeking out what takes place within human beings themselves, what is present in human soul life, and then projecting that—perhaps in accordance with their own desires or some other preconceptions and prejudices—out into the existence of the world. In fact, a closer look at the way in which the view of the world and of life presented here arrives at its cosmic conclusions should actually make it clear that this is by no means a matter of engaging in such anthropomorphism, but rather that it is a matter of truly seeking conclusions about the world and its development through spiritual knowledge in just as objective a manner as is done in the field of natural science.

[ 3 ] By now, my esteemed audience, you will have gathered from the lectures I have given here so far what the worldview represented here intends with regard to its research methods: that, on the one hand, it seeks to scrupulously uphold everything that humanity has acquired over the course of the last three to four centuries in terms of scientific rigor and a certain reliable, cautious method for seeking out truths. In particular, this worldview does not wish to transgress the boundaries of knowledge of nature—insofar as one can speak of legitimate knowledge of nature—and seeks to observe with the utmost care where the limits of mere knowledge of nature lie. That such limits exist is a subject of frequent discussion today and has been for a long time. And one can say that what those with a scientific education say in this field today builds upon what, for certain more philosophically inclined minds, stems from Kam#, and for those who prefer a more popular presentation, from Schopenhauer and so on. Much could be cited along these lines.

[ 4 ] Now, however, it can safely be said that Kant, Schopenhauer, and all those who follow in their intellectual tradition become dangerous to the proper assessment of the natural limits of knowledge because these thinkers have, in a—I would say—highly seductive manner, gone as far as a certain limit in their consideration of human cognitive faculties and the capacities of the human soul. They have reached a certain limit. And the way in which they have approached this limit is extraordinarily astute. Yet it must be said: The moment one becomes aware that one must regard the human being as a whole—that one must take into account everything that can arise from the physical, soul, and spiritual organization of the human being in terms of cognitive activity and inner experience—then one also realizes how a one-sided critique of cognitive capacity can, in fact, lead only to one-sidedness. If one wishes to examine the relationship between the human being and the world in order to determine whether there is a path to knowledge of the world from the human perspective, then one must accept the whole human being and consider this whole human being in its essence.

[ 5 ] And from this perspective, I would like to begin today by raising the following question: Let us suppose for a moment that the limits of scientific knowledge—which, since Dr. Bois-Reymond, have also been discussed in a scientific sense, though they are viewed differently today than Du Bois-Reymond viewed them half a century ago—did not exist: how would human beings relate to the world? Let us assume that the theoretical capacity for knowledge—which manifests itself in human beings by linking their concepts to observations and the results of experiments in order to arrive at universal laws—could readily penetrate the realm of the organic as well; if it could penetrate as far as life itself, hardly need to stop at the further levels of existence—the psychological and the spiritual. Let us therefore assume that ordinary consciousness, which we apply in the sciences and with which we navigate our daily lives and work, were at all times capable not only of approaching, so to speak, the outer surface of the world, but also of penetrating beneath the surface of things, through to their inner essence—how would human nature have to be, if such a limit to knowledge did not exist? Well, he would relate to the world in such a way that, so to speak, his entire being—as he experiences it within himself—would constantly be immersed everywhere, as if with spiritual-soul-like antennae. Perhaps this will still seem paradoxical to some today, but an unbiased worldview and an understanding of humanity’s relationship to the world will be able to state: A being that in this way had no limits to its ordinary earthly consciousness would lack the capacity for love.

[ 6 ] And when we consider what the capacity for love means for our entire lives—what we are in life by virtue of being able to love—then we will also say to ourselves: Without love, we would not be human beings on this earth between birth and death in the sense that we simply must be. But love demands that we, as self-contained individuals, face other individuals—whatever realm of nature they may belong to—and that we do not submerge ourselves in the other individuality with our bright, clear thinking; rather, that precisely at the moment we unfold love, our being comes alive: that which does not dissolve into transparent, clear concepts. Love would cease at the very moment we could submerge ourselves in the other individuality with bright, clear concepts. Since human beings must be loving beings by virtue of their earthly mission, and since a human being’s entire being is constituted by a particular capacity, we must say: Human beings must be such that they have limits to their knowledge of the external world, so that they cannot sink below these limits of knowledge in order to fulfill their mission here on earth within their ordinary consciousness. What is inherent in a person, enabling them to be a loving being, manifests itself, on the other hand, in their ordinary cognition, which must come to a halt at the boundary that must be drawn for us so that we may be beings capable of love.

[ 7 ] This is something that—albeit only in outline form, but the outline can, of course, be further developed by each individual—leads to certain consequences, which can show how we must move beyond the starting points that, for example, Kantian philosophy had, by taking the whole human being into account—that is, insofar as the human being must stand within life as a living being. This has, for starters—and we will hear more about this later—what the worldview represented here has to say about the limits of scientific knowledge.

[ 8 ] This is the one guiding principle to which every worldview and philosophy of life that is to be taken seriously today must adhere. The other principle can be described—and attention has already been drawn to it in recent days—as follows: A worldview and philosophy of life that is to be taken seriously today must not lose itself in nebulous mysticism. It is certainly true that even noble minds of our time, seeing that natural science has its limits and cannot provide a path upward into the spiritual world, are turning to mysticism—especially to older forms of humanity’s mystical striving. However, in light of the other demands on human knowledge today, this can by no means be the right path. For mysticism seeks to reach the very foundations of existence by looking into the human inner being. But it is precisely with regard to this looking into the human inner being that limits are again imposed on human knowledge. Let us suppose that a person were able to look into their inner self without limit, to look all the way to where the deepest essence of human nature reveals itself, where the person is connected to the eternal sources of existence, where they link their own individual existence to the cosmic. What, then, could such a person not possess? Well, those who derive—often great—inner satisfaction from mysticism do indeed draw the most diverse things from within themselves. I have already pointed out that what is thus drawn from the human inner being, upon closer examination by a true connoisseur of the soul, ultimately turns out to be something based on some external observation, which has then sunk into the subconscious depths, been permeated by emotion, will, and organic processes, and then resurfaces in a transformed form. Anything we observe can undergo such a transformation, such a metamorphosis, that the mystic believes he is drawing up from the depths of his soul something that must reveal the very nature of the soul’s eternal foundations. Even such significant mystics as Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler cannot be fully exonerated from the error that arises when altered perceptions of ordinary consciousness are mistaken for independent revelations of the human soul.

[ 9 ] However, by observing this fact impartially, one is led to be able to answer the question: What might a person lack if he could look completely within himself at every moment, as ordinary consciousness allows? They could not possess what we need for the full, orderly constitution of our inner psychological being: a memory that functions according to internal laws.

[ 10 ] For how does this faculty of memory present itself, particularly in relation to mystical claims? I could present what I am now outlining in a few general strokes in a very scientific form as well. But all that is needed is a common understanding, and that can also be conveyed in a popular form. By observing the external world and transforming inwardly what we initially experience as whole human beings in such a way that it can later reemerge within us as mental images, we actually encounter, within ourselves, something like an inner mirror through the psychological result of our external observation. It is a comparison, but at the same time it is more than a comparison. The impressions that affect us from the outside must not stimulate us to such an extent that we are completely submerged in our deepest inner self by these impressions. It must be possible for what stirs us from the outside to be reflected back. Our organism, our human being, must function like a reflecting apparatus. And should we pierce through this reflecting apparatus to reach what lies behind the mirror?

[ 11 ] This is actually what the mystic strives for, without realizing it. But we need our regular, orderly memory. If it is interrupted in any way—even back to the point where we recall our childhood—then we fall into psychologically pathological states. Human beings must be constituted in such a way that they can hold back what they experience from the outside. They cannot, therefore, be constituted in such a way that they immediately plunge into their deepest inner self. If we undertake the mystical attempt to plunge into our deepest inner self with ordinary consciousness, we will only reach as far as the reflective apparatus. And it is right—for the sake of humanity—that the ideas we have absorbed from the outside world should be reflected there. Once again, we must consider the whole human being—as a being capable of memory—if we are to understand clearly that mysticism, as it is sought, is not possible within ordinary consciousness.

[ 12 ] It is precisely from a clear understanding of these two boundaries imposed on ordinary consciousness—a natural limit to knowledge regarding the external world of the physical and sensory, and a boundary regarding mystical striving— that striving springs forth which has been appropriately characterized here as a modern search for the spiritual world—that striving to awaken dormant powers of cognition from within the soul, so that, through the attainment of a different form of consciousness, one may look into the spiritual world.

[ 13 ] And if, with the insights I have spoken about here in recent days, we look at human beings from the perspective in which they are, and only in which they are, beings capable of love and beings capable of memory, then we recognize that ordinary consciousness—which operates on the basis of the senses, the intellect, and the power of thought, must stop short of the external world, because it is only by using itself as a means to organize the external world that it finds the possibility of developing further and forming that animated thinking of which I have spoken in the previous lectures.

[ 14 ] But then, when we use this animated thinking to observe what is going on within us, when we face nature, we find that precisely at the moment when we have developed our thinking capacity to such an extent that it serves as a means of organizing external phenomena, our ordinary consciousness dies away, ceases, in the act of cognition. I would like to say: No matter how clear our consciousness may be during any process of understanding nature up to a certain limit—at this limit, it partially passes into a kind of waking sleep, into the unconscious. Why? Because that is when the capacity to act must begin—a capacity that pours more than abstract thought into the surrounding world, carrying our being out into the surrounding world. i

[ 15 ] For when we love, we are not in a relationship of cognition with the world around us, but in a relationship of reality—a relationship of true being. And only when we develop living thought are we once again able to live our way into the reality of things: There, we pour out our animated thoughts, so to speak, pursuing what lies outside as the beginning of spiritual life—at first as a spiritual-soul rhythm of the world, as an appearance—and we penetrate further and further, by appropriating the empty consciousness, as I have described it, into the spiritual world that is connected to the sensory-physical world. Then, in such a supersensible act of cognition, we feel as if we have awakened from ordinary consciousness. We listen in, as it were, to our own being as it becomes a living being.

[ 16 ] This is, in fact, something that can make a more profound impression on the spiritually discerning mind than anything that can come to him through reliving even the experiences of the deepest mystics. More profound than this so-called immersion into one’s own inner self is the moment when one feels how, at a certain moment of higher insight, a person must pour out their self—as a being—into the external world, how the act of insight becomes something that transforms mere insight into real life, into a real coexistence with the external world.

[ 17 ] But this is initially connected with a significant strengthening of the sense of self. One feels something like this: When one is engaged in ordinary perception of the external world, one approaches the natural boundary with one’s sense of self. There, the sense of self is repelled. One feels, everywhere, as if—I might say—surrounded by spiritual walls. This, in turn, has an effect on the sense of self. The sense of self possesses a certain strength, and it acquires its proper nuance precisely through the blending of that devotion to the world and its beings—which arises from love—with what one carries within as a limited feeling. In this supersensory kind of cognition, the “I” is even strengthened, and one can say: there is a danger that what otherwise rightly lives as love in earthly life will be transformed into a certain selfish immersion in things, that it will, as it were, thrust itself into them, allow itself to flow into them. Through this, the self is expanded.

[ 18 ] It is precisely for this reason that my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* places such great emphasis on the preparatory exercises. And in these preparatory exercises, you will find instructions on how to cultivate self-discipline with regard to self-awareness—namely, that one must first strongly develop the necessary capacity for love in ordinary life and before ordinary consciousness before attempting to enter the supersensible world through higher knowledge. One must first be a person who is mentally, physically, and spiritually healthy in this regard before one can embark on entering the spiritual world in a healthy way. But then one must not raise the ordinary—yet more or less philistine—objection that there is something uncomfortable about eavesdropping on oneself in this way regarding one’s capacity for love. This eavesdropping does, however, make a profound impression. One sees oneself as one never does in ordinary consciousness. But if you recall that what one attains through higher knowledge does not become part of one’s memory—so that one does not then go through life gazing at one’s own capacity for love and strutting about, which would lead to human incapacity—then one will also understand how to properly appreciate what comes from this side as demands for supersensible knowledge.

[ 19 ] This, then, characterizes this supersensible insight in relation to the capacity for love from the intellectual perspective. But what does one come to recognize through it?

[ 20 ] Well, it is already clear from the remarks I have made that, in a sense, one projects one’s strengthened self into the environment, allowing it to flow into the environment. In this way, it penetrates all the way to the spiritual, so that one is confronted with the remarkable truth that, precisely by making oneself capable of penetrating ever further and further into the external world, one actually comes to a recognition of one’s own soul and spirit.

[ 21 ] I would say that, out of a healthy instinct, Goethe rejected the kind of self-knowledge that arises from brooding over one’s inner self. He had harsh words for such self-knowledge in the mystical sense. A person can attain true self-knowledge only when, by strengthening their otherwise dormant powers of cognition, they acquire the ability to immerse themselves—along with their self—in the external world. It is in the world outside that a person finds their true self-knowledge! One must get used to arriving at a true understanding of the world—in the modern sense of the word—by having to reverse certain concepts almost to their opposites. And so it is with the concept of self-knowledge: Look into the world, seek ever more deeply in its vastness, while strengthening your “I’s” ability to immerse itself in this vastness through the development of cognitive powers; then you will find your true self. So that one can say: The cosmos allows us to penetrate into it for supersensible knowledge and, as a result of this penetration, returns to us precisely our self-knowledge.

[ 22 ] Let us look at the other side, which is sometimes sought along the wrong mystical path. I have spoken of how the human will can be developed, and of how it is possible to awaken dormant powers on this other side. This will can be developed to such an extent that the whole human being becomes a kind of sensory organ—that is, a spiritual organ—which is as transparent inwardly, in a spiritual-soul sense, as the human eye otherwise is. We need only consider that the human eye must be selfless in the material sense of the word in order to be the organ of sight. If the eye were to fill itself with self-assertive materiality, our field of vision would immediately darken. This is how our entire human being must become in a spiritual-soul sense. Our entire being must become spiritually and psychically transparent. Then, with what lives in our will, we enter the spiritual and psychic world even during our earthly existence. Then, however, what I already hinted at yesterday comes to pass: that we gain the ability to perceive the spiritual and psychic world, but thereby judge our very inner selves. And yesterday I explained the following: When we, as physical-sensory beings, face the external world, we immerse ourselves in the sensory-physical facts of the external world with our whole being; we then carry within us the soul-images of these facts. Indeed, our soul consists of these soul-images. One can therefore say that what is outwardly physical and sensory is perceived inwardly as something pictorial. — Conversely, I say: When we gain the ability to look into the external world—as a spiritual world filled with spiritual beings and spiritual events—through ourselves as spiritual organs, we thereby gain insight into our own physical inner being. Through this, we learn to recognize the essence of our lungs, our heart, and our other organs. The spiritual nature of the external world is reflected within us through our physical nature, just as the physical external world is reflected within us through our abstract spiritual-soul nature.

[ 23 ] This path, however—which opens up to us here, allowing us to learn to know ourselves by observing the external world—proves to be a very concrete one as it unfolds. One comes to understand the role that the individual human organs play in the human being as a whole. One gradually comes to grasp the harmony among the individual processes of these organs.

[ 24 ] First, however, the following becomes clear: What the mystic, fishing in the nebulous, is seeking are, in essence, transformed mental images of memory; but often something from the results of organic activity mingles with these transformed mental images of memory. Only he does not know this. He believes he is piercing the inner mirror that underlies memory. He does not pierce it. Like waves, the processes of our organic being strike this mirror from the other side. He does not realize what is actually happening there; he only notices the change in the reflected memories. Without thereby being guilty of philistinism, one must distort many beautiful, poetic, and mystical things into the prosaic and say: Much of what this or that mystic has drawn forth in this way from his inner life is not in any way an expression of spiritual existence, but is merely—in the manner I have described—a result of the surging of inner organic processes. Marvelous mystical depictions from both past and present—which can make an extraordinarily poetic impression on those who take pleasure in them—are, at their core, for anyone capable of seeing through things with an open mind, nothing other than the expression of inner processes within human nature itself. It seems philistine to have to say: Something mystical appears here; it strikes one as poetic; and yet, for those who can see through it, it is merely the influence of certain life processes on the images of memory. For those who sincerely wish to understand, this does not render the matter worthless. For something is not a truth simply because it is presented in a pleasing manner to a biased mind, but rather because one gradually attempts to truly get to the bottom of things.

[ 25 ] But the one who does not remain at the level of ordinary consciousness—which is what the vague mystic does—but, after first ensuring his mental health through preparatory exercises—by placing importance on developing a sound memory—and then piercing through this mirror of memory to truly see into his inner self, sees everywhere within this inner world the results of far-reaching processes that are rooted in the spiritual outer world and are taking place in the spiritual world. And in this way one comes to know the human being. In this way one learns to say to oneself: What the abstract idealist perhaps refers to as the base aspect of the human being—because he views it only from the physiological or anatomical exterior—is, in fact, the inner organization of the human being, which is precisely a marvelous result of the entire cosmos.

[ 26 ] And if we truly come to understand this inner organization of the human being, the following soon becomes clear: When we look into the depths of our soul and reflect on certain memories of what we have experienced in life, we can conjure up these experiences before our mind’s eye—albeit in a veiled form—from what we allow to arise within us at a suitable moment. From the visual content we have absorbed into our soul from the external world, we can in turn conjure up this external world before our soul in a way that satisfies us. If we likewise come to know our comprehensive inner being, if we come to understand the way in which our organism, in its individual parts, emerges spiritually from the cosmos, then our entire human being—which we now perceive through and through—presents itself as recorded memories from the cosmos. We no longer look within ourselves through the eyes of the vague mystic; rather, we gaze into our innermost being with the awakened eye of the soul, perceiving what our lungs, our heart, and our entire organism are—spiritually, soulfully, and inwardly. And this presents itself to us as the memory of the world, recorded within the human being just as our own memory is otherwise recorded in the soul for the life between birth and the present moment. And what arises within us is what might be called: the recognition of the human being as the memory of the world, as a reflection of the world’s evolution, as a reflection of what takes place in the cosmos.

[ 27 ] Ladies and gentlemen, First, one must familiarize oneself with all the details that must be worked through before a person can arrive at such self-knowledge—not the brooding self-knowledge of so-called ordinary introspection, but the self-knowledge that perceives in each of our internal organs something like a concentrated spiritual essence arising from certain spiritual processes in the cosmos. Then, once one has grasped what a human being is in this regard, one will no longer say that one is projecting what one has in the soul out into the world in an anthropomorphic way in order to obtain a spiritual explanation; rather, one will say to oneself: One first seeks to penetrate the human being inwardly through careful and earnest striving; then, within this human interior, the cosmos reveals itself just as the sum of personal experiences reveals itself when one looks upon one’s memories.

[ 28 ] Even if such things still seem somewhat paradoxical to today’s sense of time, that very sense of time is well on its way to grasping them. There is a definite desire within people to pursue certain lines of thought that are already present. Then, when a certain kind of practice is added, the thoughts that lie along this path become more and more vivid. And when a developed will is added to this, one will enter more and more deeply into such self-knowledge, and one will see that, while on the one hand, moving ever further and further with the “I” into the external world leads precisely to self-knowledge, delving into the depths of human nature leads from within the human being outward to knowledge of the world.

[ 29 ] However, in order to become increasingly unbiased in these matters, it is necessary not to view human nature in the way that is commonly done today. Today, people dissect the human being in terms of his skeletal system, his muscular system, and his nervous system, and then define the physical human being as the sum of these parts. One then views the human being as if he were a being composed of solid, material elements. But everyone knows today that human beings do not essentially consist of solid components, that for the most part—about ninety percent—they are actually a column of water. Everyone knows today that what I have just inhaled as air was previously out in the world, that the air I now have inside me and which is working within me will eventually be outside again and belong to the world. And finally, everyone can imagine how the human being undergoes a continuous exchange of heat within his or her organism. And when we look at the human being in this way, he or she ceases to appear as a static entity to us; we gradually free ourselves from the illusion—which we know to be just that, yet which we still hold up before our souls—as if the human being could be viewed exactly as we depict him or her in anatomy. We come to regard the fluid within the human being as equally legitimate a part of their essence—that which vibrates, undulates, and takes shape within the fluid human being. We come to realize that something is also taking place within the human being’s air form that belongs to this human essence. And finally, we may come to understand that the air that vibrates, undulates, and surges up and down within us—pouring into our blood streams and so on—works internally and is permeated in the most manifold ways by places that are warmed and places that are cooled.

[ 30 ] If, on the one hand, we have the spiritual-soul aspect as we carry it within ourselves today in this more or less abstract form, then this spiritual-soul aspect is imbued with a strong pictorial character that we can, as we say, only contemplate inwardly. And we must remain at this stage of inner contemplation when we consider what physiology and anatomy reveal to us about the human being. When we allow all the magnificent findings of conventional science to take effect upon us, we find before us something like a solid formation within a multifaceted structure—but something that is, in its very nature, fundamentally different from what we observe within ourselves when we bring to mind the forms of thinking, feeling, and willing, and we cannot find a bridge connecting the two. We see how psychologists struggle to find a connection between what they perceive on the one hand—in its abstractness, its imagery, in a way that can only be contemplated inwardly—and what exists externally. These are so far apart that one cannot readily build a bridge connecting them with ordinary consciousness. But if we proceed with an open mind—if we do not focus on the illusion of the solid human being, but rather on how the human being is a fluid being, an airy being, a being of warmth—then, through self-reflection, we come to perceive the ebb and flow of warmth and cold in the currents of our respiratory system, provided we cultivate an inner disposition for it.

[ 31 ] And we acquire them through the path of higher knowledge, as I have tried to describe in recent days. When we learn to sense inwardly the air vibrating within us, we are still, to a greater or lesser extent, in the physical realm; but when we sense it and then carry over the animated thinking—which inwardly perceives something of reality—the bridge is established for us. And when we look deeply into the human being, down to the subtleties of his thermal differentiations, and condense the soul aspect until it steps out of its abstractness and into reality, then we find the bridge.

[ 32 ] The inner life condensed in this way can, if I may say so, combine with our diluted physical experience. When we begin to delve so deeply within ourselves that we perceive how the animated thought surges upon our—if I may put it this way— “air-people”—which is differentiated in various ways by warmth and cold—we gradually come to understand how, in fact, the differentiations of thought can also take effect in our human constitution, how a thought accompanied by sympathy—one that, for example, passes the judgment: “Yes, that’s right, the tree is green”—truly triggers a state of warmth, just as a thought interwoven with antipathy—one that, for example, makes a negative judgment—has a cooling effect on our air-warmth-materiality.

[ 33 ] We see how the spiritual continues to vibrate and move forward, taking a detour through the finer forms of matter into the denser forms of matter. We find the possibility of shaping our path of knowledge—even within human organization—in such a way that we begin with the spiritual and delve into the material.

[ 34 ] But then the possibility opens up for us to advance more and more toward what I have just described: the inner understanding of the human organism. For until we can trace the various levels of materiality—water, air, fire—in the individual organs, the soul will not reveal itself to us. We must first condense the soul, and only then do we arrive at the physical nature of the human being; but then again, by penetrating through this, we arrive at what, in a spiritual-soul aspect, initially underlies our physical organization. There we then find: just as, when we delve deep within ourselves with our power of memory, we find the stored experiences of our personal earthly existence, so too, by immersing ourselves in the whole human being in this way, we find the spiritual-soul aspect that has descended from the spiritual world through conception, embryonic development, and so on. As this spiritual-soul aspect within us has enveloped itself with what comes to it from the Earth, it becomes the world memory. In a sense, we find the cosmos stored within us as memory. And we then find the possibility—just as we otherwise recall individual experiences of our personal existence in ordinary consciousness—to survey the cosmos through inner contemplation.

[ 35 ] Ladies and gentlemen, you may ask: Yes, but when we access very early stages of Earth’s history through this “world memory,” how can we avoid the danger of indulging in a general spiritual description rather than a concrete recollection of the world? — Well, here again, you need only draw on ordinary memory for comparison. Because our memory is organized, when we feel a particular experience surfacing—even if that experience took place ten years ago—we do not relate it to events that have only just occurred. The content of the memory image itself points us to the correct place in time. It is the same when we understand the organism correctly: every single part of it does in fact point to the time that is relevant at some point in the world’s development. Fundamentally, there is no other way to properly supplement what natural science provides us—by mentally extending its present-day observations into earlier states—than this. Human self-reflection, which becomes a true remembrance of the world, a world memory. Otherwise, we will always fall into very peculiar errors when we hypothetically construct ideas about the development of the world.

[ 36 ] One need only say the following, even if it sounds trivial: The so-called Kant-Laplace theory—which has, however, been modified today—is very frequently cited; this is the theory explaining how the individual bodies of the solar system broke away from a gaseous cosmic nebula— is often illustrated by taking a drop of oil, threading it through a circular sheet of paper, attaching a pin to it, and using the pin to set the drop of oil spinning. Then the individual droplets separate and continue to circle around the main drop. A miniature solar system forms, and one can say, from the perspective of the ordinary scientist: “That is exactly how it happened on a grand scale out there.” Yet it is still true what can be said against this: Anyone who demonstrates something like this to illustrate the formation of our solar system would have to take all the individual factors into account, and if that were the case, they would also have to take into account the teacher standing there and setting the drop of oil in rotation. And he would have to place a gigantic teacher out into outer space, who would then rotate the cosmic nebula. But this has been overlooked in the experiment described above. It is, of course, very beautiful to forget oneself in everyday life, but in an experiment—when illustrating important and serious questions—one must not forget such things; in this case, oneself. Now, the view of the world and of life presented here does not forget these things. It acknowledges the validity of the natural sciences but adds what can be perceived in the spirit. There, however, one does not find a gigantic individuality, but rather a spiritual-soul world that must be integrated into material development. And there one permeates what is perhaps rightly described as the Kant-Laplacean primordial nebula with the spiritual-soul beings and spiritual-soul forces at work within this nebula. And one penetrates what becomes of the Earth during the so-called “heat death” of which modern science speaks, with spiritual-soul entities and spiritual-soul forces that then, at the time of the heat death, carry the spiritual-soul aspect out into other worlds, just as the spiritual-soul aspect of the human being is carried out into other worlds when the body disintegrates into earthly elements. Through this, however, something of the utmost importance for our time is achieved.

[ 37 ] Just consider that today I have shown you how that which is otherwise grasped only through abstract cognition—the spiritual-psychic realm, which cannot be brought into contact with the material world—is spiritually infinitely far removed from this material world. But what has this revealed about our entire cultural life? Because, as described, we are unable to bring the spiritual-psychic realm into contact with the material realm within our ordinary consciousness, we have a purely material view of world events: we form certain conceptions of purely physical world events, with a beginning conceived purely in physical terms according to the laws of mechanics, and an end conceived, according to the theory of heat, as the heat death of the Earth. In doing so, we perceive ourselves as human beings, standing within these events and evolving out of them in a way that is, admittedly, inexplicable to modern natural science. But if we are honest, we can never reconcile what we experience in our spiritual life with what is happening out there in the material realm. And within this deepest realm of the soul, moral impulses and religious forces are interwoven with our thinking, feeling, and willing. They live within us, in the spiritual-soul realm, which we cannot bring into contact with the material world.

[ 38 ] And so perhaps today, human beings, with their consciousness, stand there and say to themselves: Well, natural science leads us only to material phenomena; that alone is exact science; one must have beliefs regarding moral impulses and religious forces.

[ 39 ] But this cannot stand up to a serious spiritual life. And it does indeed live on in the unconscious of serious people today, even if they do not admit it to themselves: the Earth sprang from purely material substances. From this material substance, something emerges like a foam-like formation. From it rise cloud-like formations—indeed, formations thinner than clouds, which are merely illusions. Within these live the most valuable contents we as human beings can absorb: all cultural contents. Then we live on, and eventually the Earth’s transition to heat death occurs—a process that can be ascertained through external scientific methods. And then all life on Earth will be buried, as it were, in a vast cemetery. What has risen as the most valuable from our human lives—our most beautiful, most worthy ideals—will be buried along with what was the material essence of the Earth. — One might say one does not believe this. But anyone who takes seriously the way people often think about these matters today—by rejecting independent spiritual inquiry—would actually have to arrive at that inner conflict, that pessimism, which arises in response to the question: What will become of our spiritual and soul-centered creative work if we view the world solely in material terms, as we are accustomed to doing in so-called exact science? — That is why there is such a wide gulf in our time between religious and moral life and the natural view of things.

[ 40 ] It seems to me, however, that true clairvoyance—precise clairvoyance, as befits modern man—is called upon to do just this: to bridge the gap between the spiritual and the material by giving the spiritual a reality and stripping the material of its—I would say—crudeness.

[ 41 ] But this becomes particularly evident to our soul when we view things as we have viewed them today, as we have seen the spiritual-soul aspect within human beings gradually merge into what are, in human beings, differentiations of warmth and air. By descending in this way into the coarser material realm and seeing how the finer aspects flow into animated thinking, we will be able to think our way into the cosmos. We are placed in a position to rightly conceive of something like the heat death of the Earth, because we know how our own human warmth is permeated by its differentiation from animated thinking, and we can look out from the world memory that arises within us toward what is expressed spiritually and psychologically in the material processes of the world. In this way, we arrive at a genuine, real reconciliation of what presents itself to us spiritually with what presents itself to us materially.

[ 42 ] However, even today, much within our hearts still speaks against such a reconciliation. For in recent centuries, we have become accustomed to accepting truths as exact only when they rest on the firm foundation of sensory observation, in which we passively surrender ourselves to the external world. What has been observed on such a firm foundation is then built upon to form the laws of nature and natural ideas, and only those ideas are accepted that, so to speak, stand on such a firm foundation of sensory observation.

[ 43 ] Anyone who accepts only such insights is like a person who would accept only ordinary gravity as valid in outer space—who would say: The Earth has its own gravity; therefore, objects must fall toward the Earth and have a point of support because they cannot float freely in space. This is true as long as we stand on Earth and consider Earth’s gravity in relation to its immediate surroundings. But when we look out into outer space, we know that we cannot say, “Celestial bodies must be supported”; rather, we must say, “They support one another.” We must also adopt this perspective in a spiritually appropriate way for our inner world of knowledge.

[ 44 ] We must be able to formulate truths that do not require the support of sensory perception, but rather support one another, just as celestial bodies support one another in the vast expanse of space. This is, in fact, a prerequisite for the attainment of a true cosmology—a cosmology that is not merely one of material processes, but one in which the material is imbued with soul and spirit. And modern humanity needs just such a cosmology. We shall see how he even needs it for the social tasks ahead. But only when one comes to realize how the truths of true cosmic significance sustain one another will one understand how to work one’s way toward such a cosmology.

[ 45 ] Such a cosmology arises when one accepts how true self-knowledge is to be attained. We do not attain it in an anthropomorphic way, nor by projecting our sense of self out into the vastness of the world. By immersing ourselves in the outer world, we come to understand more and more what our “I” is; through this we gain self-knowledge. But when we immerse ourselves in our inner world, our inner world becomes the memory of the universe, and we learn knowledge of the world. Many people already sense what the secret of knowledge of the world must actually consist of. I would like to express in two sentences what these people sense: Self-knowledge and knowledge of the world must be truths that mutually support one another. And such truths—I would say, truths that move back and forth like the swing of a pendulum—are those gained through the view of the world and of life described here: as self-knowledge and as knowledge of the world. The two sentences in which I would like to summarize this are: If you wish to know yourself, seek yourself in the vastness of the world; if you wish to know the world, delve into your own depths. Your own depths will reveal to you, as in a cosmic memory, the mysteries of the cosmos.