The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Psychosophy I

[ 1 ] In the course of these evening lectures, I will need to refer to various examples, which can best be drawn from individual works of poetry. And so that you may have before you, throughout these four lectures, some of the material that will serve as illustrations, there will be a brief recitation of certain poems on individual evenings, which will then give me the opportunity to use them to illustrate various points, just as I will have to illustrate or highlight minor details on the blackboard. Today, the lecture will be introduced in this spirit with a recitation by Miss Waller, who will present a youthful poem by Goethe—the young Goethe’s adaptation of the legend of the “Perpetual Jew”—and I ask you to bear in mind that I will have to say something for which the fact that this is a poem by the young Goethe will be significant. The illustrations accompanying these lectures—through what these recitations bring to our ears—will be of a thoroughly psychosophical nature.

The Perpetual Jew (Adapted for recitation)

Fragmentary

At midnight I shall begin,
Leaping from my bed like a madman;
Never has my heart been more full of soul,
To sing of the well-traveled man,
Who has seen wonders beyond number,
Which, in defiance of the mockery of blasphemous children,
In our incomprehensible God
Per omnia tempora in one point took place.

And even if I lack the gift
Of well-crafted, light rhymes,
I must not fail to do so;
For it is an urge, and thus a duty.

In Judea, the Holy Land,
There once lived a cobbler, well known
For his heartfelt piety
In those thoroughly corrupt days of the church,
He was half Essene, half Methodist,
Herrnhuter, more of a Separatist;
For he placed great stock in the cross and suffering,
Enough to say, he was an eccentric,
And out of eccentricity
He acted like other fools.

The priests of so many years ago
Were, as they always were
And as everyone eventually becomes,
Once they’ve been placed in office.

But the cobbler and his ilk
Demanded miracles and signs daily,
That someone should preach for money,
As if the Spirit had placed him there.
They shook their heads very doubtfully
Over the ailing Daughter of Zion,
That, alas! on the pulpit and the altar
There was no Moses and no Aaron,
So that the service proceeded,
As if it were a thing like any other thing,
Which, in the course of the world,
One day withers away in old age.
“O woe to great Babylon!
Lord, blot her from Your earth,
Let her be roasted in the pit,
And, Lord, then give us her throne!”
O sang the little group, huddled together,
Sharing both the flames of the Spirit and of love,
Gawking and now bored,
They could have done the same in the temple.
But the beauty of it was,
It was everyone’s turn,
And just as his brother spoke in French,
He, too, was allowed to speak in French one after another;
For in the church, the one who speaks first and last
Is the one who has been set up,
And believes in you and acts so grandly
And joins you and breaks away from you
And is a sinner like other people,
Alas! And not even half as wise!

The greatest person remains always a human child,
The greatest minds are only what others are,
But, take note, it is the other way around:
They do not wish to walk with other earthlings
Walk on their feet; they walk on their heads,
They scorn what everyone else honors;
And what outrages common sense,
That is honored by impartial sages.
The priests cried out far and wide:
It is so—the end times are coming,
Repent, sinful generation!
The Jew said: I am not afraid,
I have heard of Judgment Day for so long.

There were those who knew the Father as well.
Where are they now? Ah! They were burned.

O friend, man is but a fool,
When he imagines God to be his equal.

You do not feel how it pierces my very marrow and soul,
When a fearful heart pleads with me for salvation,
When I see the sinner with burning tears...

The Father sat upon his throne,
Then he called his beloved Son,
You have to shout two or three times.
Then the Son came, all out of breath
Stumbling over the stars
And asks: What are your orders?
The Father asks him where he’s been—
“I was in the star that gazes over there,
And there I helped a human
To accomplish such a feat,
For which he found himself too weak.”
The father was quite upset
And said: “You’ve been foolish to do that,”
“Look down upon the Earth.
It is indeed beautiful and all is well,
You have a philanthropic spirit
And gladly help those in distress;
------------------

As he now swung himself down
And saw the vast earth more closely
And seas and lands far and near:
He was overcome by the memory,
Which he had not felt for so long,
Of how they had played along with him down there.
He stands still upon the mountain,
Upon which, in his early days,
His friend Satan had placed him
And shown him the whole world
In all its splendor.

In the midst of his heavenly flight,
He feels the pull of the earthly atmosphere,
Feels how even the purest happiness in the world
Already holds a hint of sorrow.
He thinks of that moment,
When he cast his final dying glance
Down from the Hill of Sorrow,
And began to speak to himself:
Hail, Earth, a thousand times!
Blessed be all of you, my brothers!
For the first time, my heart pours out
Once more after three thousand years,
And tears of bliss flow
Down from my clouded eye.
O my lineage, how I long for you!
And you, with arms of heart and love
You plead to me from a deep longing!
I am coming; I will have mercy on you!
O world! Full of wondrous confusion,
Full of the spirit of order, sluggish delusion,
You chain of delight and woe,
You mother who gave birth to me only to the grave,
Whom I, though I was present at creation,
Yet do not particularly understand.
The dullness of your mind, in which you hovered,
From which you strained toward my day,
The serpentine desire in which you trembled,
From which you strove to free yourself
And then, freed, entwined yourself anew:
That is what called me here from my hall of stars,
That is what keeps me from resting at God’s bosom;
I now come to you for the second time,
I sowed then, and now I will reap.

He looks around eagerly,
His eyes seem to deceive him:
To him, the world still seems to lie all around
In that very way,
As it lay at that hour,
When, in broad daylight,
The Spirit of Darkness, the Lord of the old world,
Appeared to him, shining in the sunshine,
And presumptuously claimed, without fear,
That he was lord of this house.

“Where,” cried the Savior, “is the light,
That blazed so brightly from my word!
Alas! And I do not see the thread,
That I spun so purely down from heaven.
Where have the witnesses turned,
Who sprang faithfully from my blood!
And, alas, where has the Spirit gone, whom I sent!
Its breath, I feel, has all but faded away.
Does it not creep with an eternal hunger,
with half-curled clawed hands,
cursed, withered loins
Does avarice, in its pursuit of treacherous gain,
Abuse the carefree joy
Of the neighbor in the rich fields
And stifle in barren entrails
The beloved life of nature?
Does the prince, with his slaves,
Not shut himself away in that marble house
And nurture within his bosom
The wolves themselves in his very bosom?
To satisfy his capricious cravings
The marrow of men is snatched away;
He feasts in repulsive excess
On the sustenance of thousands.
In my name, a poor man consecrates to the body
The bread of his children.

He was now weary of those lands,
Where there are so many crosses
And where, for the sake of crosses and Christians,
They forget him and his cross.
He entered a neighboring land,
Where he found himself merely a church banner,
But where otherwise no one took much notice,
As if a God were in the land.

Then a man spoke: “Here is the place,
A safe haven of peace for all desires;
Here is the land’s central throne,
Justice and religion.

They drew ever closer,
Yet the Lord still saw nothing of note in it.
His inner confidence was low,
Just as when he once went to the fig tree,
But he still wanted to go on a bit further
And look right beneath the branches.
So they came under the gate.
Christ seemed like a stranger to them,
With a noble face and simple garb.
They said: “This man has surely come from far away.”
Did the scribe ask him his name?
He humbly spoke these words:
“Children, I am the Son of Man,”
And walked away quite calmly.
His words have always held power,
The scribe stood there as if spellbound,
The guard was at a loss;
No one asked: “What business brings you here?”
He walked straight through and was gone.
Then they wondered among themselves,
As they prepared to report it:
What strange thing did that man say?
Was he mocking us to our faces?
He said he was the Son of Man!
They thought long and hard, but suddenly
A corporal, tipsy on brandy, spoke up:
Why are you racking your brains?
His father’s name was surely “Man”!

Christ then spoke to his escort:
“So lead me to the man of God,
Whom you know as such
And call him the senior pastor.”
It would make the pastor’s skin crawl,
He himself wasn’t quite so high on the ladder;
He’d have so much skin around his heart,
He wouldn’t feel who he was walking with,
Not even the size of a pea.

They arrived at the senior pastor’s house,
Which still stood intact from ancient times.
The Reformation had its feast
And took the pastor’s estate and house,
Only to plant new priests there again,
Who, when it comes to the heart of the matter,
Talk more and make fewer faces.
They knocked, they rang the bell,
I don’t know for sure what they did.
Enough said—the cook came out,
Dropped a head of cabbage from her apron
And said: “The lord is at the convent,
You cannot speak with him today.
‘Where, then, is the convent?’ said Christ.
‘What good would it do you, even if you knew!’
The cook retorted sharply,
‘Not everyone’s path leads there.’

[ 2 ] Last year—on the occasion of our General Assembly—I referred to a series of lectures as being on anthroposophy. This year, a series of lectures to be delivered from a similar perspective will be titled “Psychosophy.” And if the opportunity should arise, a series of lectures on Pneumatosophy will follow, so to speak, as a third chapter to the lectures on Anthroposophy and Psychosophy. In this way, these three lecture series will come together to form a bridge that can lead upward from the world in which we directly live to the worlds viewed from a higher perspective in theosophy.

[ 3 ] Psychosophy is said to be a contemplation of the human soul that begins with what this soul can experience here in the physical world, and then ascends to higher realms to show that what we encounter here in the physical world as the life of the soul—observable by everyone— nevertheless leads upward to perspectives from which the light of theosophy will, as it were, come to meet us. We will explore many topics during these evenings. Today we will begin with something that seems quite simple; we will let all those phenomena of soul life pass before us that can be described with the words “attention” and “memory,” then phenomena such as those we encounter in our passions and emotions, and finally phenomena that we already count among the realms of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. We will encounter phenomena that intervene in human life—either beneficially in terms of health or harmfully as illnesses. We will encounter the actual soul-related causes of disease symptoms. In doing so, we will have to closely examine the boundary where the soul descends into physical life, and we will have to study the interrelationships between the well-being and suffering of the body and the activities and workings within the soul’s inner life. Then we will have to rise to the high ideals of humanity and consider what these high ideals of humanity can mean for human soul life. We will have to consider phenomena that play a role in everyday life—such as, let us say, what makes time seem to pass more quickly for people—and we will see how this, in turn, affects the life of the soul and manifests itself within it through a remarkable chain of events. We will have to consider the very peculiar effect of boredom. And much more could be cited, which we will examine both in terms of its manifestation and in terms of the remedies and aids available to correct what presents itself to us as a pathological phenomenon of the soul life—such as poor thinking ability, a poor memory, or the like. You can also imagine that, in order to speak of the life of the soul, we must necessarily touch upon areas that border on other subjects. And the theosophist, in a certain sense, is familiar with these concepts when it comes to relating the human soul life to other aspects of existence.

[ 4 ] You are all familiar with the division of human nature into body, soul, and spirit as outlined by spiritual science. This alone will lead you to conclude that the human soul life must, on the one hand, be connected to the physical life, but on the other hand, turn upward toward the spiritual life. Just as we have dealt with the more physical aspects in anthroposophy, so we will have to deal with the life of the soul in psychosophy, and we will ascend to the spiritual life in pneumatosophy.

[ 5 ] What, then, is the life of the soul if we now wish to consider it in and of itself within the two boundaries we have just indicated? What we are accustomed to calling the external world—what we are accustomed to regarding, so to speak, as placed before us and around us in the world—we do not count as part of our life of the soul. A mineral, a plant, an animal, the air, the clouds, the mountains and rivers, and so on—all that surrounds us, regardless of what we ourselves might add from our own minds when we imagine them—we do not count all that which is around us and which we call the external world as part of our inner life. We do not count the rose we encounter as part of our spiritual life if we understand ourselves correctly on the physical plane. But when we come face to face with the rose and it delights us, when the sight of the rose causes something like pleasure to shine in our soul, then we certainly count this fact as part of our spiritual life. When we encounter a person and look at them, forming an impression of them—what kind of hair they have, what their face looks like, what their facial expression is, and so on—we do not count that as part of our spiritual life. But when we take an interest in them, when we find them likable or unlikable, when we think of them with love, then we count these experiences of sympathy or antipathy, of love, and of interest as part of our spiritual experience.

[ 6 ] You know I don’t like definitions; instead, I try to characterize things. That’s why I don’t want to give you a definition of spiritual life either. That wouldn’t accomplish much. I’d like to characterize the nature of the things that can be considered part of spiritual life.

[ 7 ] But let’s consider something else. Let’s suppose we see a person acting. We observe their action and find that we must say of this action: This is a good deed; this is an action that can be approved from a certain moral standpoint. —- Then we have a psychological experience that is expressed by our saying: “This action was a good one!”—In such an experience, we have something more than what has already been described. Above all, it is not so much a matter of describing how the act takes place or how to characterize the individual steps of which it consists; nor is it a matter of whether we love or hate what lies in this act—rather, higher interests are at play here. When we call this act good, we know that it should not depend on us at all whether we call this act good or not. Nevertheless, we must form this judgment within our soul if we wish to have an awareness of what this act is like. But nothing in the external world can tell us that the act is good. The judgment—“This act is good”—must arise within us; it must shine forth from our own experience. But if the judgment is to be justified, it must be independent of our own experience. In all such soul experiences—where something is at play that must be experienced inwardly in order to enter our consciousness, yet which has a meaning independent of our consciousness, so that it is something for which it does not matter whether we pass judgment or not—in all such processes, the spirit has a say in human soul life. And so we could already say: In these three cases—where we have considered how we regard something as the external world, how we regard something as a purely inner experience—our interest in a person, the pleasure we take in a rose, and, thirdly, the inner experience in which we form a judgment that must be independent of our soul life if it is to be valid— in these three cases we have characterized what we can call the soul’s relationship to the external world. The external world must make its presence known to the soul from the outside through the physical; the soul’s experience is a purely inner one; the spirit, however, makes its presence known within the soul, as we see in the examples we have just cited.

[ 8 ] So, then, the point is that we must firmly hold to the idea that this life of the soul ebbs and flows in inner realities, and our first task will be to find something that, in a sense, reveals to us the nature of the soul’s experience from within. So far, we have considered this psychological experience as it is, so to speak, bounded from the outside, and have shown where it borders on other phenomena. But now let us see how we can characterize this inner life from within. In other words: What concepts must we employ when we speak of the human soul, so that we clearly express through these concepts that we mean nothing other than what is psychological? — We must develop concepts that characterize the pure nature of the psychological as it manifests itself on the physical plane.

[ 9 ] What is the fundamental trait, the fundamental character, of psychological experience? This fundamental character of psychological experience can initially be described in two ways. We can arrive at two concepts that apply exclusively to mental experience—and, to be precise, only to human mental experience and nothing else—when we speak specifically in relation to the physical conditions of the human being. My task, therefore, will be to precisely characterize the inner phenomena, the inner manifestations of mental life, right up to the very limit of where this mental life extends—how it surges within—and to describe its defining features.

[ 10 ] There are two concepts of what inner psychological experience, so to speak, represents. Do not be put off by the fact that today we will be dealing with the compilation of dry concepts. Over the next few days, you will see that this precise grasp of concepts will be of great help to us in learning to understand phenomena that are familiar to us all, and in gaining insights into our inner life that are of great importance in everyday life—for both healthy and unhealthy souls—

[ 11 ] One concept through which we can characterize what is purely psychological is judgment. Judgment is the one activity of the psychological life. And the sum of the other experiences of the psychological life is exhausted in what one might call the inner experiences of love and hate. When these concepts are understood in the proper sense, they encompass, internally and to their very limits, the entire inner life of the soul. And we will see how fruitful a closer examination of these two concepts—judgment and the manifestations of love and hate—will be for us. Everything psychological is either a judgment or a life lived in love and hate: fundamentally, it is only within these two concepts that what is purely psychological exists; everything else denotes something that already introduces something else into the psychological realm—either from the external through the physical, or, for a reason we will yet come to know, from the so-called inner realm, from the spiritual. Judgment on the one hand, and love and hatred on the other, are—whether we call them this or that—forces or, if you will, activities that belong entirely to the life of the soul.

[ 12 ] If we now wish to understand properly the role that these two activities play, we must first form a clear conception of judgment, and then we must see what significance both judgment and love and hate have within the life of the soul. I am not referring to anything logical here; a logical consideration would be something entirely different. I am not speaking of the nature of judgment, nor of the laws of judgment; I am speaking not from a logical but from a psychosophical standpoint—the standpoint that focuses on the inner psychological activity of judging, the psychological process of judgment. Thus, everything you can learn about judgment through logic is, for the time being, excluded. I am not speaking of judgment, but of judging—of the activity of judging. That is a verb: judging.

[ 13 ] If you are prompted—and let us not concern ourselves too much at this point with the nature of that prompt—to admit to yourself, “The rose is red,” then you have made a judgment. This constitutes the act of judging. “The rose is red,” “Man is good,” “The Sistine Madonna is beautiful,” “The church tower is tall”: when you carry out these acts as activities within your inner life, that is judgment.

[ 14 ] Now let us consider the experiences of love and hate. Anyone who makes a little effort to turn their gaze inward will find that they do not simply pass by the outside world, that their soul remains, so to speak, untouched by most phenomena. Imagine you are driving through a landscape. You do not merely see the green of the mountains, their peaks covered by clouds; you do not merely see the rivers flowing through the valleys—but you experience, in your soul, a sense of delight at the landscape. What underlies this is nothing other than the fact that you love the experience in question. Whatever delight or revulsion is present in these experiences is love and hate. And even if this is sometimes hidden in your inner experiences, it is nonetheless something that accompanies human beings in their conscious, waking life from morning to night in relation to almost everything. If you see someone on the street committing a terrible act that repels you, this is, so to speak, merely a concealed, hidden manifestation of the inner soul experience of hatred. If you come across a flower in a field that smells bad and turn away from it, this is merely a slightly altered experience of hatred that does not immediately come to light. Love and hatred constantly accompany the life of the soul. Judging is likewise something that continually accompanies the life of the soul in one particular direction. You are constantly judging as long as you live a spiritual life; you constantly have experiences of love and hate.

[ 15 ] One can gain an even deeper understanding of the phenomena of inner soul life by focusing on an aspect of judgment that is essential to the act of judging. For in the life of the soul, every judgment has an effect; and what matters for understanding the life of the soul is that judgment has an effect. When you form the judgment, “The rose is red,” or when you see a person perform a good deed and form the judgment, “The person is good,” you carry a result forward within your soul. In both cases, this result can be characterized in the following way. One can say: When you have formed the judgment “The rose is red,” “That person is good,” then something accompanies you through the rest of your inner life as a mental image: the red rose, the good person. — The judgment “The rose is red” transforms in the further course of inner life into the mental image of the red rose, and with this mental image you now continue to live as a spiritual being. Every judgment crystallizes into an image in the soul’s experience. Thus, judging is, as it were, something that is brought together, converging from two tendencies: “The rose” is one, “red” is the other; then these two become one: “The red rose.” This converges into an idea, and you carry this one idea with you through the rest of your soul life. If we want to depict the two experiences—“red” and “rose”—as two currents, we must say: They ultimately flow together, and what we have as judgment always culminates in an idea.

[ 16 ] One cannot understand the inner life of the soul, nor can one fully grasp the relationship between the inner life of the soul and the higher worlds—which we will be examining in the coming days—unless one keeps in mind that, in fact, judgment always culminates in imagination.

[ 17 ] We must ask a different question when it comes to the phenomena, the manifestations of love and hate. In this case, we cannot ask: “Where do they lead?”—but rather, we must pose a different question: “Where do they come from? What is their origin?” — When judging, what matters is the direction: “Where is it heading?” — But with the phenomena of love and hate, what matters is: “Where do they come from?” — And we will always find something within the life of the soul itself that is the source of love and hate—namely, something that, as it were, bursts into the life of the soul from the other side. All loving and hating ultimately leads back—when viewed as experiences of the soul—to what, within this inner life, can be called desire, a longing. So let us place desire on the other side of the inner life. Desire [the drawing is continued], then we can say: Behind what appears in our soul as love and hate, desire is always present and radiates into our inner life. So that we can say: We have, as it were, one side of our inner life—which we will yet come to know—from which desire flows in. —- And when we now look into our soul, what becomes of desire there? Love or hatred! Then let us look further into our soul, find the activity of judgment, and ask ourselves: Where does this activity lead on the other side? And we find: Judgment leads to the imagination.

[ 18 ] Desire is something that you can easily recognize as always having to be viewed as if it were arising from the inner life of the soul. You cannot speak of a desire as if it were somehow caused by this or that external stimulus; for you may not even be aware of that external stimulus. But you know for certain that, no matter where it comes from, it arises within the life of the soul, and you can observe how, as soon as the desire has arisen, love and hatred emerge within the life of the soul as a result. Likewise, you can tell yourself: You must make a judgment in your soul: “The rose is red.” But once you have formed that judgment, refined into a mental image: “The red rose,” then this concept—“The red rose”—must, if it is to have any value for you, possess an external validity, an external meaning. Thus, for reasons known to the researcher of the spirit—and, we may say, for reasons as yet unknown to us today—desire arises in the soul and manifests itself in the phenomena of love and hate. Thus the soul feels compelled within itself to let the activity of judgment flow from the spring of its own being and refines these judgments into concepts with the awareness that, when judgment is carried out in a certain way, the concept can be a valid one.

[ 19 ] It may seem strange to you that I am explaining these elementary concepts of the life of the soul—not just in a few words, but perhaps at great length—and you might easily think that one could gloss over such matters more briefly. What I am saying now is, so to speak, a comment between the lines. One could perhaps gloss over these things more briefly. But because they are ignored—simply ignored, even within the broadest circles of our scientific life today—mistake after mistake is made in relation to them. And, as it were, as a footnote, I would like to point out one such fundamental error, because those who make it do not form a clear conception of what we have now learned and will yet learn, and because those who make this error draw far-reaching conclusions regarding a certain fact that is completely misunderstood.

[ 20 ] You can read about this in many physiology textbooks: Whenever we move our hand or leg in any way, this is because within our organism we have not only nerves that, for example, run from the sense organs to the brain and, as it were, convey the messages from the sense organs to the brain or even to the spinal cord, but, everywhere the matter is presented as if these nerves were opposed by others—of course, they are opposed to them on the physical plane—which, in contrast to the sensory or perceptual nerves, are called the motor nerves. And it is said: When I see an object, the message from that object is carried by the nerve leading from the sense organ to the brain—that is, first to this central organ—and then the stimulus exerted there is, as it were, transmitted to another nerve, which in turn goes from the brain to the muscle, and this nerve then prompts the muscle to begin moving. This is how sensory nerves and motor nerves are distinguished.

[ 21 ] Now, from the perspective of spiritual science, this is not the case at all. What is called the motor nerve does indeed exist as a physical structure, but not to initiate movement, rather to perceive the movement itself, to control the movement, and to be aware of one’s own movement. Just as we have nerves that allow us to perceive external color impressions, we also have nerves that enable us to control what we do in order to convey it to consciousness. This scientific error in reasoning is a fundamental mistake that is rampant today on a vast scale and has corrupted the entire field of physiology, as it is practiced today, as well as the entire field of psychology. Please take this as a footnote.

[ 22 ] The point now is for us to clarify: What role do the two elements we have found within the soul—judgment and the phenomena of love and hate—actually play in the life of the soul? They play an immensely important role. For nothing less than the entire life of the soul is composed of various combinations of these two elements. However, one would misjudge this life of the soul if one failed to take into account that, everywhere at its boundaries, something else—which, strictly speaking, does not initially belong to the life of the soul—is constantly coming into play. What first comes to mind, of course, is what can be found, so to speak, everywhere in our everyday inner life, and which we already discussed last year in the lectures on anthroposophy: that our inner life is built upon what we call sensory perceptions—the various experiences, for example, of the organ of hearing in sounds, the organ of sight in colors, the organ of taste, the organ of smell, and so on. What we experience in external things through our sense organs, we take into our soul in a certain way, and it continues to live on in our soul. When we consider what we take into our soul in this way, we can say that this inner life actually reaches a boundary—namely, the boundary of the sense organs. We have, as it were, posted sentinels in our sense organs, and what these sentinels report to us from the external world, we then take into our inner life and carry forward. So how, then, does what our sensory experiences provide us with actually relate to our inner life? What does it represent within our inner life—what we perceive through the ear as sound, through the eye as color, through the sense of taste as flavor, and so on, and then carry within us? What does this represent for our inner life?

[ 23 ] Now you see, these sensory experiences are usually considered in a rather one-sided way, and people fail to realize that what we encounter at the boundary of our inner life is composed of two factors, two elements. One of these is what we must directly experience from the external world: this is perception. You can only have an impression of color or sound if you expose the corresponding sense organs to the external world, if you face the external world. And you retain the impression of color or sound as long as you remain in contact with the external object. The impression from the outside—the interaction between the external and the internal—ceases immediately when you turn your eyes away from the object, or when you move your ears far enough away that you can no longer hear the object. What does this fact prove to you?

[ 24 ] If you consider this fact of immediate perception together with the other fact—that you have taken something with you from these experiences of the external world, something you carry forward, something you know afterward—you know what kind of sound you heard, what kind of color you saw, even when you no longer see the color or hear the sound—what does this actually entail? What remains is something that has entered completely into your inner life, something that belongs entirely to your soul life, something that must take place entirely within; for if it belonged to the external world, you could not carry it with you. You can carry the sensation of a color impression—which you received by directing your gaze at the color—into your soul only if it is within the soul, if it is an inner experience of the soul, so that it remains in the soul. So you must distinguish between what has taken place between the soul and the external world as sensory perception, and what you detach from the interaction with the external world and carry forward within the soul. You must make a strict distinction between these two things, and it is good to make such distinctions in these areas. Do not take what I am saying as pedantry; the aim is to lay a foundation for what follows. What you experience as long as you have the object before you can be precisely distinguished for further use from that which must be distinguished from it—if you call what you experience in relation to the object “sensory perception” and what you carry on within the soul “feeling”—so that you thus distinguish between color perception and color feeling. You must let go of the color perception when you turn away; you carry the color sensation forward with you. In everyday life, people do not make such strict distinctions, nor is it necessary. But for our four lectures, we must develop such concepts that can then help us further.

[ 25 ] So we carry these sensations around within our souls. Are these sensations, which we derive from external objects, perhaps a completely new element of inner life, distinct from judgment and the phenomena of love and hate? If that were the case, you would have to say: Yes, you have failed to mention something that is also part of inner life: the sensations of the senses, the sensations derived through the senses. - But that is not the case. These sensations are not a distinct element of inner life. For you must distinguish, within the sensation itself, its content—such as the color in the case of color perception, if, for example, you have perceived “red”—from something else. If “red” were an inner experience of the soul, your entire perception of the color red would be of no help to you. The content—the color—is by no means an inner experience of the soul. What stood before you—the object—is red; this quality, this property of “red,” did not spring from your soul. Something entirely different sprang from your soul, namely, what you did in order to be able to participate in it—an activity you performed while the red stood before you. And this activity that took place there is an inner soul experience and is, in reality, nothing other than a synthesis of those elements of soul life that I have named today as the two basic elements. But we must go into this in detail: What happens when we face a color—for example, red—and then carry the impression of red forward into our inner soul experience?

[ 26 ] If what I have told you is true—that there are two elements in our inner life: love and hate, which can be traced back to a desire, and judgment, which culminates in ideas, then even when we confront a sensory experience and wish to identify sensory perceptions, we must consider only that which is psychological, that which is connected to these two elements of psychological life. Imagine you are standing before a color impression and have a sensory experience of the color. What kind of activity can arise from your psychological experience when you face this sensory experience—when, for example, you have red before you? Love or hate; and, on the other hand, judgment will also arise from the soul here.

[ 27 ] Let us illustrate this graphically [see Figure $. 123]. Suppose this is the boundary between the soul and the external world. The horizontal line separates the realm of the soul—the lower realm—from the realm of the external world—the upper realm. If what I have said is true, then when—at the boundary between the soul and the external world—a thing makes an impression on a sense organ—let us assume that a color impression occurs at c—judgments and the phenomena of love and hate must arise from within the soul. For nothing else can flow out of the soul except these phenomena. Thus, when we stand before the color red, nothing other than what is within the soul can flow toward this sensory experience: judgments and the phenomena of love and hate.

[ 28 ] But now you’ll notice an important distinction that can exist between judgments and judgments, and between desires and desires. Suppose, for example, that while you are dreaming or sitting somewhere—perhaps waiting boredly for a train or something similar—the memory of an unpleasant experience you’ve had surfaces in your inner life. And alongside this fact, something else arises in your inner life: all the adversity that has befallen you as a result of this fact over the course of many years. You can, so to speak, sense how these two images that arise now combine into an intense impression of the unpleasant event. A judgment takes place here, and it remains purely within the realm of inner experience. Nothing from the outside world has been added to this process. But love and hatred have also played a part, in that the image has risen from the soul, and love and hatred have, as it were, attached themselves to it from the inner life of the soul. And again, nothing of this reaches the outside world. While you sit there quietly and all of this has taken place within your inner life, someone could be standing right there, and in everything that the other person can see, there is nothing of what is playing out in your soul. The entire surroundings are irrelevant; the entire external world has no significance for what is being experienced in the soul—love, hatred, and judgment.

[ 29 ] When we experience an inner reality such as the one I have just described—where love and hate give rise to judgments—we remain, as it were, immersed in the sea of the soul’s life. We can briefly illustrate this in the following way [see drawing]. Within the boundaries of the soul, let a be the first idea that arises, and b the second; both combine to form a new idea, x—the judgment—and in the process, love and hate come into play in some way. But this does not extend to the very limits of the soul; it remains purely within the realm of psychological experience.

[ 30 ] The situation is quite different, however, when it comes to a sensory experience. When a sensory experience arises, we must go to the very boundary of the soul; we must approach the external world. It is as if the currents of our inner life were flowing toward that boundary and were immediately held back by the external world. What is held back there? Desire—or, we might also say, love and hate—flows to the boundary, and the power of judgment flows there as well. Both are inhibited at the boundary, and the consequence of this is that desire must come to a standstill, and judgment must come to a standstill. Judgment is already there, as is desire, but the soul does not perceive them. Yet as desire and judgment flow to the boundary of the soul’s life and are inhibited there, sensory perception arises. Sensory perception is nothing other than something that has coalesced from an inner, unconscious judgment and unconscious phenomena of love and hate that strive outward but are inhibited and held back from reaching the outside world. What is truly carried forward in the soul as a sensory perception arises in this way. Therefore, we can say—and we will, of course, examine all these things in detail over the next few days until they become evident and make them even clearer: what may be described as love and hatred, and as judgments, surges within the sea of soul life—one might say, substantially, in a soul-substantial sense. When judging intensifies within the life of the soul itself into a concept, then the life of the soul perceives this intensification—the entire activity of judging—and ultimately sees the concept as the result. But if the soul allows this same current to flow all the way to the boundary, so that it breaks against the boundary, then it is compelled to bring the current of desire and the current of judgment to a standstill, and the whole—this confluence of desire and judgment—manifests itself in sensation. Sensation is, in the strictest sense, the confluence of judgments and desires within the life of the soul.

[ 31 ] When we consider the everyday scope of our inner life and, in particular, focus on what gives this inner life its rich content, it is precisely these sensory experiences. For you will easily be able to convince yourself through inner self-observation that what you experience inwardly is, in essence, in the vast majority of cases, what you have taken in from sensory experiences. And if you wish to form ideas about something higher—ideas about what cannot be experienced through the senses—you will notice that it is also quite beneficial to your inner life when you try to “sensualize” what is not sensory, that is, to imagine it figuratively through certain things that—however faint they may be—are sensations of color or sound. Language itself could teach you to what extent the need arises again and again from within the soul to express the higher in this way—that is, by making it tangible through sensory perceptions. Usually, people are completely unaware that this is the case, because in the processes of sensualization—which are often those of everyday life—the nature of the images and their symbolic character is very shadowy and nebulous. And people believe they have combined something other than images of sensory perceptions, but that is not the case. Try, for once, to imagine a triangle in a non-sensory way—a triangle that has no colors either, and thus is in no way connected to any sensory perception whatsoever! You will see how difficult this is and how most people are simply incapable, for example, of forming a non-sensory image of a triangle when they want to imagine one. You can only do this if you conceptualize the object. If you want to imagine a triangle, you must always make it sensory; you must link a sensory image to the concept of the triangle. This is already fully embedded in our language. You can notice how, on every occasion, language necessarily compels us to make things sensory. For example, I just said: “A sensory image must be linked to the concept of the triangle.” “Link”—what kind of sensory image is that? To tie something together! It is already inherent in the words themselves that sensory imagery is involved everywhere. Thus, we can say: To the greatest extent, human soul life consists of what is gained as sensory perceptions from the external world.

[ 32 ] Human beings have only a single concept that, so to speak, accompanies them in such a way that it appears again and again among their inner psychological experiences—experiences that they cannot directly place under the category of external sensory experiences, even though they must continually link them to those external sensory experiences. And this single idea is the one that has often been mentioned here: the idea of the “I.” If we consider the pure fact, the psychological fact, we can say: Human beings actually live, for the most part, in a world of sensory perceptions, and within this world of sensory perceptions the idea of the “I” emerges, now and then, pushing itself to the fore again and again. Behind this lies a certain awareness, but—don’t you agree—if you examine your inner life, you will easily come to realize that this “I” is not always present as a concept. You do not constantly conceive only of the “I,” but also of other things: red, green, blue—linking them together and dissolving them, and so on—but not constantly the “I.” Nevertheless, you know that in the “I” you conceive of something that must, so to speak, be present in every sensory experience; for you know that you set it against sensory perceptions in your desires and in your judgments. And what we might call psychological experience is, in a certain sense, also an experience of the “I.” The experience of sound and color is, in a certain sense, also an experience of the “I.” But the concept of the “I” can never be kindled solely by the external world. It always arises among the concepts you have derived from sensory experiences. But it cannot enter from the external world like red or green, like this or that tone. It rises from the sea of the soul’s life and joins, as it were, all the other ideas as an idea in its own right. From this sea of the soul’s life, however, all the other ideas also emerge—those brought about by external impressions—but only when external impressions are present. The “I”-concept, however, emerges without the necessity of an external impression. This fact constitutes, for the time being, the only difference between the “I”-concept—or “I”-sensation, as we might also say—and the concepts and sensations linked to sensory experiences.

[ 33 ] So now we can say: We are confronted with the significant fact that, in the midst of our inner life, a perception arises that joins the perceptions initially triggered by external factors. A remarkable, significant fact. How are we to explain it?

[ 34 ] Well, you see, there are already quite a few among today’s philosophers and psychologists—even outside the humanities movement—who point out the importance of the concept of the “I,” a point to which Dr. Unger repeatedly and emphatically draws our attention in his epistemological reflections. But the strange thing is that these individuals, even when they mean well, go terribly overboard. I’ll take the French philosopher Bergson as an example; in his writings, you can read about the concept of the “I” in countless places, and you’ll find that he consistently emphasizes one thing. Such people are struck by what is most significant and distinctive about the concept of the self. And from this they conclude that, because the concept of the self emerges as if from unknown depths of the soul—not through an external cause—it represents something enduring or points to something enduring; and they justify this, as Bergson does, for example, by saying: The “I” differs from all sensory experiences and all other mental experiences in that it is, as it were, embedded within its own experience—that is, it is actually within itself—and therefore experiences its true form. But if the “I” experiences its true form in its own conception, then something enduring is thereby given, not merely something transient. - This is something you can find today—prompted by the significance of the concept of the “I”—as a result of various philosophical and psychological traditions, even outside the field of spiritual science.

[ 35 ] But underlying this, I would say, is something quite fatal. And the fact that must be held up against such arguments is truly fatal for a conclusion such as the one Bergson draws. Let us assume that the concept of the “I” yields something in which the true human being is to be found—that is, something in which the soul is within this self. Let us assume that the concept of the “I” yields this. Then the legitimate question could and must be raised: What happens at night, during sleep? There, the person is not within the “I”-concept; there, this “I”-concept ceases entirely!—Thus, all concepts one forms regarding being within the “I”—based on the “I”-concept—apply only to waking life, for the “I”-concept ceases upon falling asleep. Then it is gone, and in the morning it reappears anew. It is therefore by no means something permanent! If the sense of self were to prove anything about the permanence of the self, it would have to remain as a sense of self after falling asleep. But it does not. It is therefore impossible to derive any evidence for the permanence or immortality of the self from the mere sense of self alone. Since it is not present at night, one could quite rightly conclude: Therefore, it will not be present after death either! — It can be absent. It is by no means something imperishable, for it passes away every day. Thus, on the one hand, we must acknowledge the profoundly significant nature of the “I” concept—which is not caused by anything external, in which the “I” truly feels itself to be present—but which, at the same time, in a certain other sense, proves nothing regarding the permanence of the “I,” because this concept is not present at night.

[ 36 ] So today, we have, so to speak, reached a conclusion upon which we intend to build further starting tomorrow: that within the ebb and flow of our inner life there exist judgments and the phenomena of love and hate, of which inner life is fundamentally composed; that at the boundary between the soul and the external world, sensory perceptions arise as a convergence of desires and judgments of which we are not conscious; that sensory experiences are incorporated into our inner life, and that within these sensory experiences—not caused by external stimuli—the sense of self emerges; that this sense of self, however, shares a common fate with all sensory experiences insofar as they become psychological experiences: for impressions of sound and color and the other sensory experiences sink into the darkness of the unconscious at night just as the sense of self does. We must now ask ourselves: Where, then, does the distinctive character of the sense of self come from? And how does the sense of self relate to what we have called the elements of the soul, to judgment, and to the phenomena of love and hate?

[ 37 ] I would like to conclude today with this question regarding the relationship between the concept of the “I”—the very center of the soul—and the rest of the soul’s life. We will pick up where we left off tomorrow.