The Rudolf Steiner Archive

112. The Essence of Anthroposophy

[ 1 ] Dark, beardless, with a spirited, sharply chiseled actor’s face; a head that was slightly too large set on a slender, almost delicate body—this was how Rudolf Steiner stepped before his congregation. And he began to speak, and thus he said to his people: Do not be misled by those who call themselves philosophers and imagine themselves to be above the world of their senses! I tell you, a man who speculates is like an animal on a barren heath, led in circles by an evil spirit. And all around him lies a beautiful green pasture. – Do not trust the mystics either! Just as the former overstep the boundaries set for human cognition in breadth, so do the latter overstep them in depth. Only the natural sciences show the path by which human beings can attain certain knowledge. Through their methods, through practice and experimentation, you shall make the light of your senses brighter; you shall increase the powers of your soul; you shall concentrate to such an extent that the entirety of your substance, like an eye that has become independent and detached from its body, will become a supersensory organ and reveal the supersensible to you. Then, in three stages, imaginative, inspirational, and intuitive knowledge will reveal to you the subjective “temporal organism” of your life body or etheric body, allowing your gaze to wander back to the ultimate infinities of your pre-worldly sense and unveiling to your vision the point where the web of the physical—woven from solar and lunar elements—is individualized within your “I” and interwoven with the cosmic. What—you do not see all this? Never mind: at least you sense it. So follow faithfully the one who has received the gift of seeing into all the expanses and depths of the world, who, like Copernicus and Galileo, has opened up a knowledge of the world to future centuries and millennia—a knowledge to whose heights the world around us as a whole is not yet able to rise. So follow me! And you can, you will, you must come to see—as I do. And if you are not willing, then I shall use force.”—And he began to cry out. And his cry rang out like the blare of a fanfare, as if he wished to startle the sluggish and the weary and to shatter every hesitant resistance acoustically with the power of his lungs. […].