The Rudolf Steiner Archive

16. Practical Training in Thinking

[ 1 ] It might seem strange that anthroposophy, of all things, should feel called upon to speak about the practical training of the mind, for outsiders very often hold the view that anthroposophy is, in the most eminent sense, something impractical—that it has nothing to do with life. Such a view can only exist if one looks at things from the outside, superficially. In truth, however, what is under consideration here is meant to be a guide for the most everyday aspects of life; it should be able to transform itself into sensation and feeling at any moment and enable us to face life with confidence and stand firm within it.

[ 2 ] People who call themselves “practical” imagine that they are acting according to the most practical of principles. But if one examines the matter more closely, one will find that so-called “practical thinking” is often not thinking at all, but rather a muddling through based on ingrained judgments and habits of thought. If you observe the thinking of practical people with absolute objectivity and examine what is commonly called “practical thinking,” you will find that, in some cases, there is very little real practice behind it; rather, what is called practice consists of having learned: How did the teacher think? How did the person who previously devised this or that think? And how does one conform to that? - And anyone who thinks differently is considered impractical; for their thinking does not correspond to what they have been taught.

[ 3 ] But whenever something practical was actually invented, it was by no means created by a practitioner in the first place. Let’s consider, for example, today’s postage stamp. It would seem most natural to assume that it was invented by someone working in the postal service. But that is not the case. At the beginning of the last century, mailing a letter was still a very cumbersome process. If someone wanted to send a letter, they had to go to the appropriate office where letters could be mailed, look up various records in different ledgers, and deal with all sorts of complications. It has been barely more than sixty years since we were able to have a uniform postage rate, as we are accustomed to today. And today’s postage stamp, which makes this possible, was not invented by a postal worker, but by someone who had no connection to the postal service—the Englishman Hill.

[ 4 ] And when the postage stamp was invented, the minister in charge of postal affairs in the English Parliament at the time said: “First, one cannot assume that this simplification will actually increase traffic to the immense extent that this impractical Hill imagines; and second, even if that were the case, the post office building in London would not be large enough to handle such traffic.” - Yet it never even remotely occurred to this great “practitioner” that the post office building must adapt to the volume of mail, rather than the volume of mail adapting to the post office building. Now, in what is, relatively speaking, a remarkably short time, what once had to be fought for by a “non-practical thinker” against a “practical thinker” has become the norm: today, it is taken for granted that a letter bearing a postage stamp is delivered.

[ 5 ] The situation is similar with the railroad. When, in 1835, plans were made to build Germany’s first railroad from Nuremberg to Fürth, the Bavarian Medical Council—which had been consulted on the matter—issued an expert opinion stating that it was not advisable to build railroads; but if it were to be pursued nonetheless, a high wooden wall would have to be erected on both sides of the railroad to prevent passersby from suffering nervous or brain shocks.

[ 6 ] When the Potsdam-Berlin railroad line was to be built, Postmaster General Nagler said: “I send two mail cars to Potsdam every day, and they’re empty; if people want to throw their money out the window, they should just do it right away.” - The real facts of life simply go over the heads of the “practical people”—those who believe themselves to be practical. One must distinguish between true thinking and so-called “practical thinking,” which is merely judgment based on ingrained habits of thought.

[ 7 ] I’d like to share with you a small experience I had myself and make it the starting point for our discussion today: During my college days, a young classmate once came up to me, brimming with the kind of joy you see in people who’ve just had a really clever idea, and said: “I have to go see Professor Radinger right now—who was the mechanical engineering professor at the university at the time—because I’ve made a brilliant invention: I’ve figured out how to use a machine to perform an enormous amount of work by converting a very small amount of steam power—which is expended just once.” —That was all he could tell me; he was in a great hurry to get to the professor. But he didn’t find the professor in question, so he came back and explained the whole thing to me. The story had immediately struck me as something of a perpetual motion machine—but, really, why shouldn’t something like that eventually be possible?—Yet after he had explained everything to me, I had to tell him: “Yes, look, the idea is certainly quite ingenious, but in practical terms, it’s comparable to someone standing inside a train car, pushing it with all their might, and thinking the car will then move forward. That’s the logic behind your invention. — He then saw my point and didn’t go back to the professor.

[ 8 ] In a sense, this is how one can become isolated within one’s own thinking. This isolation is particularly evident in very specific, rare cases; but in everyday life, many people isolate themselves in this way, and it is not always as conspicuous as in our example. But anyone who can observe the matter more closely knows that a great many human thought processes unfold in this way: they often see how people, so to speak, stand inside the cart and push from within, believing that they are the ones propelling the cart forward. Much of what happens in life would unfold quite differently if people were not like these pushers standing inside the cart.

[ 9 ] True practice of thinking requires that one develop the right attitude and the right feeling toward thinking. How can one develop the right attitude toward thinking? No one can have the right feeling toward thinking who believes that thinking is something that takes place only within a person, in their head or in their soul. Anyone who holds this view will be constantly distracted by a false sense of the need to seek a proper practice of thinking and to impose the necessary demands on their thinking. Anyone who wishes to attain the right attitude toward thinking must tell themselves: If I can reflect on things, if I can gain insight into things through thought, then those thoughts must first be contained within the things themselves. Things must be structured according to those thoughts; only then can I extract the thoughts from the things.

[ 10 ] One must imagine that things out in the world are like a clock. The comparison of the human organism to a clock is used very frequently; but in doing so, people usually forget the most important thing—that there is also a clockmaker. One must be clear about the fact that the gears did not come together on their own and assemble themselves to make the clock run, but that there was once a clockmaker who put this clock together. One must not forget the clockmaker. The clock came into being through thoughts; the thoughts, as it were, flowed into the clock, into the object. One must also conceive of all works of nature and natural phenomena in this way. In the case of human creations, this can be illustrated quickly; in the case of works of nature, however, it is not so easy for humans to perceive, and yet they, too, are spiritual activities, and behind them stand spiritual beings. And when a person thinks about things, they are thinking only about what was first placed within them. The belief that the world was brought into being through thought—and continues to bring itself into being in this way—is what truly makes the actual inner practice of thinking fruitful.

[ 11 ] It is always disbelief in the spiritual realm that, even on scientific grounds, gives rise to the worst kind of intellectual negligence. For example, when someone says: “Our planetary system came into being in such a way that there was first a primordial nebula, which began to rotate, condensed into a central body, from which rings and spheres split off, and thus the entire planetary system arose mechanically”—the person who says this is making a major error in reasoning. This is taught to people today in a rather cute way. In a cute little experiment, this is demonstrated in every school today: A drop of oil is added to a glass of water, a needle is pushed through this drop of oil, and the whole thing is set in rotation. Small droplets then break off from the large drop, and one has a miniature planetary system, and—so they believe—the student is vividly shown how this can form purely mechanically. Only impractical thinking can draw such conclusions from this cute experiment, for the person who applies this to the vast solar system usually forgets something that might otherwise be quite good to forget: he forgets himself; he forgets that he himself set the whole thing in motion. If he had not been there and had not carried out the entire process, the division of the fat drop into droplets would never have occurred. Only if a person observed this and applied it to the planetary system would complete thinking be employed. Such errors in thinking play an enormously significant role today, especially in what is now called science. These things are much more important than is generally thought.

[ 12 ] If one wants to speak of genuine thinking, one must realize that thoughts can only be drawn from a world that already contains thoughts. Just as one can only draw water from a glass that actually contains water, so too can one only draw thoughts from things that contain them. The world is structured according to thoughts; that is the only reason one can extract thoughts from it. If that were not the case, then no practice of thinking could take place at all. But once a person fully grasps what has been stated here, he will easily be able to move beyond all abstract thinking. If a person has complete confidence that thoughts underlie things, that the real facts of life are governed by thoughts—if he has this conviction—then he will readily turn to a practice of thinking built upon reality.

[ 13 ] We shall now outline some aspects of that practice of thinking which is particularly important for those who stand on anthroposophical ground. Anyone who is deeply convinced that the world of facts unfolds in thought will recognize the importance of training oneself to think correctly. Let us now suppose that someone says to themselves: “I want to enrich my thinking so that it can truly find its way in life”—then they must adhere to what is about to be said. And what is now outlined should be understood as practical principles; if one strives again and again to align one’s thinking with them, it will have certain effects—namely, that thinking becomes practical, even if it may not appear so at first. Indeed, entirely different experiences arise for thinking when one puts such principles into practice.

[ 14 ] Let’s suppose someone tries the following: Today, he carefully observes a phenomenon in the world that is accessible to him and that he can observe as accurately as possible—let’s say, for example, the weather. They observe the cloud formations in the evening, the way the sun set, and so on, and they now form a precise mental image of what they have observed. They try to hold onto this image in all its details for a while; they retain as much of this mental image as possible and try to preserve it until tomorrow. Tomorrow, at roughly the same time—or perhaps at a different time—he observes the weather conditions again and tries once more to form a precise picture of those conditions.

[ 15 ] When he forms precise mental images of successive states in this way, it will become extraordinarily clear to him how he gradually enriches and intensifies his thinking from within, for what makes thinking impractical is that people are usually too inclined to omit the details in the successive events of the world and to retain only very general, vague notions. What is valuable, what is essential, and what nourishes thought is precisely the act of forming precise mental images of successive events and then saying to oneself: “Yesterday it was like this; today it is like that”—and in doing so, bringing the two images, which are separate in the real world, as vividly as possible before one’s mind.

[ 16 ] At first, this is nothing more than a specific expression of trust in the ideas of reality. One should not immediately draw any conclusions or infer from what one observed today what the weather will be like tomorrow. That would corrupt one’s thinking. Rather, one should have confidence that out there in reality, things are interconnected—that tomorrow is somehow connected to today. One should not speculate about this, but rather, regarding events that follow one another in time, first reflect on them within oneself using mental images as precise as possible, and then allow these images to stand side by side and merge into one another. This is a very specific principle of thinking that must be applied if one truly wishes to develop proper thinking. It is good to apply this principle especially to those things one does not yet understand, where one has not yet penetrated the inner connections. Therefore, precisely with such phenomena that one does not yet understand—such as the weather—one should have confidence that, just as they are interconnected in the external world, they also create connections within us; and this should be done by refraining from thinking, using only images. One must tell oneself: I do not yet know the connection, but I will allow these things to live within me, and they will have an effect within me if I practice refraining from speculation. You will easily be able to believe that when a person, refraining from thinking, forms as precise mental images as possible of successive processes, something can take place in the invisible members of the human being.

[ 17 ] Human beings have an astral body that serves as the vehicle for their imaginative life. As long as a person engages in speculation, this astral body is the slave of the “I.” But it is not absorbed in this conscious activity; it also stands in a certain relationship to the entire cosmos.

[ 18 ] To the same extent that we refrain from allowing our arbitrary thinking to take effect—that is, to the extent that we form, with complete restraint, merely mental images of successive events—to that same extent do the inner thoughts of the world work within us and imprint themselves on our astral body without our knowing it. To the extent that we align ourselves with the course of the world by observing the processes in the world and taking in the images as clearly as possible into our thoughts and allowing them to work within us, to that same extent we become increasingly wise in the faculties that are hidden from our consciousness. Once we are able, in the case of such processes that are interconnected, to allow one new image to flow into another—just as this transition has taken place in nature—we will see after some time that our thinking has acquired something like a certain suppleness.

[ 19 ] This is how we should proceed with things we do not yet understand; but when it comes to things we do understand—for example, events in our daily lives that unfold around us—we should behave somewhat differently. Suppose, for example, that someone—perhaps a neighbor—has done this or that. We reflect: Why did he do that?—We imagine that perhaps he did it today in preparation for something he intends to do tomorrow. Now we say nothing more, but we picture exactly what he has done and try to form a mental image of what he will do tomorrow. We imagine: “That is what he will do tomorrow”—and wait to see what he will actually do. It may be that tomorrow we notice he is indeed doing what we imagined. It may also be that he does something else. We will see what happens and try to refine our thoughts accordingly.

[ 20 ] So we look for events in the present that we can mentally project into the future, and wait to see what happens. We can do this with what people do, and with other things. Whenever we understand something, we try to form a picture of what we think will happen. If what we expected comes to pass, then our thinking was correct; and that is good. If something other than what we expected happens, then we try to reflect on where we went wrong, and in this way attempt to correct our mistaken thoughts through calm observation and examination of where the error lay and what caused things to turn out this way. If we were correct, however, we must be especially careful not to boast about our prophecy: “Yes, I already knew yesterday that this would happen!”

[ 21 ] This, in turn, was a principle stemming from the belief that there is an inner necessity inherent in things and events themselves, that there is something in the facts themselves that drives things forward. And what is at work there, from one day to the next, are the forces of thought. If we immerse ourselves in things, we become aware of these forces of thought. We bring these forces of thought into our consciousness through such exercises, and we are then in harmony with them when what we have foreseen comes to pass; then, through our thinking, we are in an inner connection with the actual thing. In this way, we accustom ourselves to thinking not arbitrarily, but out of an inner necessity, arising from the nature of things.

[ 22 ] But we can also train our thinking in another direction. Any event that happens today is also related to what happened yesterday—for example, a boy has been misbehaving; what might the causes be? We trace events back from today to yesterday; we construct the causes that we do not know. We say to ourselves: I believe that because this is happening today, it was set in motion yesterday or the day before by this or that.

[ 23 ] One then learns what really happened and thereby realizes whether one’s thinking was correct. If you have identified the correct cause, that is good; if you have formed a false impression, try to clarify the errors and determine how the thought process unfolded and how the matter actually unfolded.

[ 24 ] The important thing in putting these principles into practice is that we truly find the time to view things as if our thinking were right inside them—that we immerse ourselves in things, in their inner mental activity. When we do this, we gradually realize how we literally grow together with things, how we no longer have the feeling that things are outside and we are inside thinking about them, but rather get the feeling that our thinking is moving within the things themselves. When a person has achieved this to a high degree, many things can become clear to them.

[ 25 ] A person who had achieved to a high degree what can be achieved in this way—such a thinker, whose thoughts were always immersed in things—that was Goethe. In 1822, the psychologist Heinroth stated in his Textbook of Anthropology that Goethe’s thinking was concrete thinking. Goethe himself was pleased with this remark. It was meant to imply that such thinking does not separate itself from things; it remains within them, moving within the necessity of things. Goethe’s thinking was at the same time a form of contemplation, and his contemplation was at the same time a form of thinking.

[ 26 ] Goethe had gone very far in this kind of advanced thinking. It happened more than once: Goethe would have something in mind, go to the window, and say to whoever happened to be there, “It will rain in three hours”—and that is exactly what happened. From the small patch of sky he saw through the window, he could predict what the weather conditions would be like in the coming hours. His faithful, steadfast way of thinking had enabled him to sense what was brewing—the later event emerging from what had come before.

[ 27 ] One can truly achieve much more through practical thinking than is commonly believed. — If one possesses the principles of thinking described above, one will notice that thinking truly becomes practical, that one’s perspective broadens, and that one grasps the things of the world in a completely different way than without them. Gradually, a person will come to relate to things—and to other people—in an entirely different way. It is a genuine process taking place within them that transforms their entire behavior. It can be of immense importance for a person to actually try to become one with things through their thinking; for engaging in such exercises is, in the most eminent sense, a practical principle of thinking.

[ 28 ] Another thing is an exercise that should be done especially by those people who usually can’t come up with the right thing to say at the right moment. What such people should do is, above all, try not to simply let their thoughts drift, so that at every moment they surrender to whatever the course of the world brings, whatever things bring. It is, after all, all too common that when a person is able to lie down for half an hour to rest, he then lets his thoughts run wild. Then those thoughts spiral out into a hundred or a thousand different directions. Or perhaps this or that worry in life preoccupies him—it has quickly crept into his consciousness, and he is completely absorbed by it. If a person does this, he will never be able to have the right idea at the right moment. If they want to achieve this, they must act as follows. If they have half an hour to rest, they must tell themselves: Whenever I have time, I want to think about something I choose for myself—something I bring into my consciousness solely by my own will. For example, I will now think about something I may have experienced in the past—perhaps during a walk two years ago; I will bring those experiences into my thoughts entirely of my own volition and reflect on them—even if only for five minutes. Everything else—away with it for these five minutes! I myself choose what I want to think about. The choice doesn’t even have to be as difficult as I just described. What matters at first is not that one influences one’s thought process through difficult exercises, but that one breaks free from what life draws one into. It just has to be something that stands apart from the ordinary course of the day into which one is drawn. And if you’re struggling with a lack of inspiration—if nothing else comes to mind at the moment—you can help yourself by opening a book and reflecting on what you’re reading at first glance. Or you can say to yourself: Today I’m going to think about what I saw when I went to the store at a certain time this morning—something I would otherwise have overlooked. It simply has to be something that falls outside the ordinary course of the day, something you otherwise wouldn’t have thought about. If you do such exercises systematically, over and over again, then what happens is that you’ll have flashes of inspiration at the right time—that what you need to think of will come to mind at the right moment. This will make your thinking more agile, and that is immensely significant for people in practical life. Another exercise is particularly well-suited to improving memory. First, one tries to recall some event—let’s say from yesterday—in the rough way one usually remembers things. People’s memories are usually rather vague; as a rule, one is satisfied if one can just recall the name of the person one met yesterday. But we must not be satisfied with that if we want to train our memory. We must make this clear to ourselves. We must systematically do the following; we must tell ourselves: I want to remember very precisely the person I saw yesterday, including the corner of the building where I saw him, and what else was around him. I want to visualize the scene in detail; I want to picture his coat and his vest with exact clarity. - At this point, most people will realize that they cannot do this at all, that it is simply not possible for them. They will realize how much is missing in order to form a truly vivid mental image of what they encountered yesterday and what they experienced yesterday.

[ 29 ] We must now begin by considering the vast majority of cases in which people are unable to recall what they experienced yesterday. Human observation is truly extremely imprecise. - An experiment conducted by a university professor with his students showed that, out of thirty people present, only two had observed the event correctly, while the other twenty-eight had observed it incorrectly. - A good memory, however, is the result of faithful observation. The development of memory therefore depends precisely on observing accurately. A good memory is achieved through careful observation; through a certain psychological process, a reliable memory is born as the result of careful observation.

[ 30 ] But if you can’t do that—if you can’t first recall exactly what you experienced yesterday—what do you do? First, try to remember as accurately as possible, and where you can’t remember, actually try to imagine something incorrect—but it must be a complete picture. Let’s say you’ve completely forgotten whether someone you met was wearing a brown or a black coat; in that case, you might imagine that he was wearing a brown coat and brown pants; that they had such-and-such buttons on their vest, the necktie was yellow—and there was that situation: the wall was yellow, a tall person walked by on the left, a short one on the right, and so on.

[ 31 ] You incorporate into the image what you can remember; only what you cannot remember do you fill in, in order to form a complete picture in your mind. The image is, of course, incorrect at first, but by striving to form a complete picture, you are guided to observe more closely from now on. And you continue to do these exercises. And once you’ve done this fifty times, the fifty-first time you’ll know exactly what the person you encountered looked like and what they were wearing; you’ll remember everything exactly, right down to the buttons on their vest. You’ll no longer overlook anything, and every detail will be etched in your memory. In this way, you’ve first sharpened your powers of observation through the exercises and then improved the accuracy of your memory as the natural result of those powers of observation.

[ 32 ] It is particularly important to focus not merely on retaining names and individual main features of what one wishes to remember, but to try as much as possible to form vivid mental images that encompass all the details; and if one cannot recall something, one should first try to complete the image, to construct it into a whole. - Then we will soon see—however circuitous it may seem—that our memory gradually becomes more reliable.

[ 33 ] Thus we see how one can actually—step by step—outline the very means by which a person can make their thinking more and more practical. The following point is particularly important: When a person is thinking something through, they have a certain longing to arrive at a result. They consider how to do this or that, and they arrive at this or that result. This is a very understandable impulse. But that is not what leads to practical thinking. Any haste in thinking does not move one forward; rather, it sets one back. One must have patience in these matters.

[ 34 ] For example, suppose you are to do this or that: You can do it one way or another; there are various possibilities. Now, have the patience to try to imagine what the result would be if you did it one way, and also try to imagine how it would look if you did it another way. Of course, there will always be reasons why you might prefer one option over the other, but refrain from making a decision right away; instead, try to visualize both possibilities and then tell yourself: “Okay, that’s enough—I’m going to stop thinking about this now.”

[ 35 ] There will be people who get restless in the process; and it’s difficult to overcome that restlessness, but it’s incredibly helpful to overcome it and tell yourself: It’s like this, and it’s like that, and now I’m not going to think about it for a while. If you can, postpone the matter—the decision—until the next day, and then consider the two options again; you’ll find that things have changed in the meantime, that the next day we’ll decide differently—or at least more thoroughly—than we would have the day before. Things possess an inner necessity, and if we do not act impatiently or arbitrarily, but rather allow this inner necessity to work within us—and it will work within us—then it will enrich our thinking the next day and enable us to make a more sound decision. That is incredibly useful!

[ 36 ] For example, you might be asked for advice on this or that, or you might have to make a decision about something. In such cases, you should have the patience not to jump right in with your decisions, but rather to first consider various possibilities and not make a decision for yourself right away; instead, let the possibilities play out calmly. As the saying goes, one must “sleep on it” before making a decision. But simply sleeping on it isn’t enough. It is necessary to consider two—or better yet, several—possibilities, which then continue to work their way through one’s mind even when one’s conscious self is not actively engaged, and then to return to the matter later. You will see that in this way you stimulate your inner powers of thought, and your thinking thereby becomes increasingly objective and practical.

[ 37 ] And whatever a person’s role in the world may be—whether he stands at a vise or behind a plow, or whether he belongs to one of the so-called privileged professional classes—he will become a practical thinker regarding the most everyday things if he practices them. Through such practice, he comes to view the things of the world in an entirely different light. And however inward-looking these exercises may seem at first, they are precisely suited to the external world; they hold the greatest possible significance for the external world; they have important consequences.

[ 38 ] I want to use an example to show you how necessary it is to think about things in a truly practical way: Someone climbed a ladder up a tree and did something up there; he falls down, hits the ground, and is dead. Well, isn’t it obvious to think that he killed himself by falling? People will say that the fall was the cause and death was the effect. Cause and effect seem to be connected here. But there can be terrible misunderstandings in this regard. - He may have suffered a heart attack up there, causing him to fall as a result of the heart attack. Exactly the same thing happened as if he had fallen while still alive; he went through the same events that could very well have been the actual cause of his death. - Thus, one can completely confuse cause and effect. Here in this example, it is obvious; but often it is not so obvious what one has missed. Such errors in reasoning occur with tremendous frequency; indeed, it must be said that in science today, such judgments are made day in and day out, where cause and effect are truly confused in this way. People simply do not realize this because they do not consider all the possible lines of thought.

[ 39 ] Let me give you one more example that will clearly illustrate how such errors in reasoning arise, and that will show you that they will no longer happen to someone who has done the exercises described today. Suppose the following: A scholar tells himself that human beings, as they are today, are descended from apes; in other words: what I come to know in the ape—the powers within the ape—become perfected, and from this, the human being emerges. - Now, to illustrate the conceptual significance of this, let us make the following assumption: Let us imagine that the person who is to draw this conclusion were, by some circumstance, transported to Earth all by himself. Aside from him, there would be only those monkeys from which, according to his theory, human beings can arise. He now studies these monkeys very closely, forming a concept—down to the finest details—of what is present in the monkeys. Now he is to attempt to derive the concept of “human” from the concept of “monkey,” even though he has never seen a human being. He will find that he can never accomplish this: his concept of “monkey” never transforms into the concept of “human.”

[ 40 ] If he had proper habits of thought, he would have to say to himself: Well, my concept does not transform within me in such a way that the concept of the ape becomes the concept of man; therefore, what I see in the ape cannot become a human being, for otherwise my concept would also have to undergo a transformation. So something else must be added that I cannot see. — This person, then, would have to see something supersensual behind the sensory monkey—something he cannot perceive—which could then, and only then, transform into a human.

[ 41 ] We do not wish to discuss the impossibility of the matter, but only to point out the error in reasoning that underlies that theory. If a person were to think correctly, he would be led to the conclusion that he must not think that way unless he wishes to assume the existence of something supernatural. If you reflect on the matter, you will see that a whole series of people have made a glaring error in reasoning here. Such errors will no longer be made by those who train their thinking in the manner described.

[ 42 ] A large part of all our literature today—especially that in the natural sciences—becomes, for those who are truly capable of thinking correctly, a source of effects—even physical pain—due to such twisted, inverted thoughts when they are forced to read through them. - This is by no means meant to detract from the immense body of observations that has been gained through the natural sciences and their objective methods. Now we come to a topic related to the short-sightedness of thought. It is indeed true that people generally do not realize that their thinking is not very objective, but is for the most part merely a consequence of habitual patterns of thought. Thus, the judgments of someone who truly understands the world and life will take a very different form than those of someone who does not understand them, or understands them only a little—for example, a materialist thinker. - Convincing such a person through reasoning, no matter how sound or well-founded the arguments may be, is no easy task. Attempting to convince someone who knows little about life through reasoning is often a futile effort, because such a person does not even grasp the reasons on which this or that claim can be based. If he has become accustomed to seeing, for example, only matter in everything, then he is simply bound by this habit of thinking.

[ 43 ] Today, it is generally not the reasons themselves that lead a person to make assertions, but rather, behind those reasons, it is the habits of thought that he has acquired and that influence his entire range of feelings and sensations. When a person puts forward reasons, it is merely the mask of habitual thinking that is superimposed over his feelings and perceptions. Thus, it is often not just that desire is the father of thought, but rather that all feelings and habits of thought are the parents of thought. Anyone who knows life understands how little logical reasoning can actually convince a person in life. Decisions are made by something much deeper in the soul than logical reasons.

[ 44 ] When we consider, for example, our anthroposophical movement, there are certainly good reasons why we have it and why it operates through its various branches. Anyone who has been involved in the movement for a while realizes that they have acquired a different way of thinking, feeling, and perceiving. For through working in the various branches, one is not merely concerned with finding logical reasons for something, but acquires a more comprehensive way of feeling and perceiving.

[ 45 ] Just as someone who heard a lecture on the spiritual sciences for the first time a few years ago might have scoffed at the time, so today many things are now perfectly clear and transparent to him that he might have considered utterly absurd not long ago! By participating in the anthroposophical movement, we do not merely transform our thoughts; we learn to place our entire soul within a broader perspective. We must be clear that the coloring of our thoughts arises from much deeper sources than is usually supposed. There are certain sensations, certain feelings, that impose an opinion on a person. Logical reasons are often merely a veneer, merely masks for feelings, sensations, and habits of thought.

[ 46 ] To reach the point where logical reasons mean something to you requires learning to love logic itself. Only when you learn to love objectivity and what is appropriate will logical reasons become decisive. One gradually learns to think objectively, so to speak, independently of a preference for this or that idea, and then one’s perspective broadens, and one becomes practical—not so practical that one can only continue to judge along well-worn paths, but rather in such a way that one learns to think from the things themselves.

[ 47 ] True practice is the offspring of proper thinking—of thinking that flows from things themselves. We only learn to let things inspire us when we engage in such exercises; and these exercises must be done with wholesome things. These are things in which human culture has as little a hand as possible, things that are least distorted: natural objects. And practicing with natural objects as we have described today—that is what makes us practical thinkers. That is truly practical. Even the most mundane daily activities will be approached practically if we train the fundamental element: thinking. By training the human soul in the manner described, a practical orientation toward thinking develops.

[ 48 ] The spiritual science movement must bear fruit by truly producing people who can put its teachings into practice. It is not so important that a person be able to hold this or that to be true, but rather that they be able to gain a correct overview of things. Far more important is the way in which anthroposophy penetrates our soul, guides us toward the activity of our soul, and broadens our perspective, than merely theorizing beyond sensory things and into the spiritual realm. In this sense, anthroposophy is something truly practical.

[ 49 ] An important mission of the anthroposophical movement is to set human thinking in motion and to train people to think that the spirit lies behind things. If the anthroposophical movement kindles this attitude, it will establish a culture from which such thinking will never arise—that people want to push the cart from the inside. This flows quite naturally into the soul. Once the soul has learned to think about the great facts of life, it will also think correctly about the soup spoon. And it is not only in matters concerning the soup spoon that people will become more practical; they will also learn to hammer in a nail more practically and to hang a picture more practically than they would otherwise have done. It is of great importance that we learn to view spiritual and soul life as a whole and that, through such a perspective, we learn to shape everything in an increasingly practical way.