The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Psychosophy II

[ 1 ] Yesterday we concluded our psychosophical discussion by pointing out, on the one hand, how this ebbing and flowing of human soul life can essentially be traced back, as it were, to two elements: judgments and the inner experiences of love and hate. We also pointed out that, in addition, the sensations conveyed to us through our senses emerge in our inner life, and that our inner life is essentially filled with these sensations—that, so to speak, these sensations are constantly ebbing and flowing within our inner life. We have also pointed out that within this emotional ebb and flow, something then arises that differs radically from everything else we experience in our daily life in the external world. We experience our sensations while we are, so to speak, living in the outer world, and they are transformed within us in such a way that they continue to live on within us. When we survey this ebb and flow of experiences, which is stimulated by the influences of our senses, a perception emerges within it that is of an entirely different nature than all other perceptions. All other perceptions that we initially have in ordinary life are triggered by external sensory stimuli and are then further processed within us. They have turned from perceptions into sensations and continue to live on in what the sensations leave behind within us. What lives within us as a sense of self, however, is quite different. It arises in the midst of the tumult of other experiences brought about by the external world; it is, so to speak, ever-present throughout our inner life, and it differs from all other experiences of the soul precisely in that it cannot be brought about from without. This creates, as it were, a kind of contrast within our inner life: the sense of self and all other inner experiences. What mysteries lie hidden behind this contrast, however, will only become apparent in the course of these lectures. But we should develop a sense of this from the very beginning of these lectures by allowing this contrast to truly come to the forefront of our souls.

[ 2 ] We are, as it were, dependent on the external world and all other experiences, and into all these other experiences we project our sense of self. That what surges and ebbs within our soul comes from two directions—this we can already begin to grasp from this, I would say, entirely abstract contrast. And it is important that we bring this human soul life—and this is what matters first and foremost, for we will only be able to cast a brief glance at other forms of soul life by starting with the human being—before our eyes, both in the small and abstract sense and in the concrete and large sense, and that we bring it before our eyes with a true sense of feeling. This human soul life is truly, from the very beginning, not a unity, but rather something like a dramatic battlefield on which opposites are constantly playing out. And anyone who listens to this life of the human soul, the human psyche, with a somewhat finer sensibility and a deeper feeling, will truly be unable to fail to recognize the dramatic character of this human soul life. Faced with the opposing forces within the human soul, a person actually feels something like a lack of mastery over it—a surrender to this opposition. The humblest person and the greatest genius alike are bound to this surrender to the duality of soul life—to, as we might say, these two natures within our soul life. And to evoke in you a sense of what surges as opposites within the human soul—even in the greatest genius—I placed a poem by Goethe at the beginning of yesterday’s lecture.

[ 3 ] If, for example, any of you picked up your copy of Goethe between yesterday and today and reread this poem, you would have arrived at a peculiar sensation—a sensation that would be good to have as the foundation for our entire lecture series. I would like to clarify this feeling for you a little; for we do not wish to describe the inner life in the abstract, but rather to try, so to speak, to breathe life into it and to enter into the vitality of this inner life.

[ 4 ] If you’ve read the poem “The Eternal Jew” that was recited yesterday, you must have thought to yourself: “But it says something completely different in there!” What was read aloud was, in fact, different from what appears in Goethe’s works! — The fact is, something was done for the recitation that, from the perspective of what is called philological scholarship, might be considered a brutality, a tremendous act of barbarism: this poem about the “Eternal Jew” was specially adapted and was not read exactly as it appears in Goethe’s collected works. Certain things have been changed, others have been omitted, and what was presented has evoked an entirely different picture. Of course, one must not do this in front of philologists. But one may do it when one has a very specific intention—namely, to open up a deeper perspective on the drama of the human soul. For “The Eternal Jew” is a poem by Goethe that he wrote in his very early youth. And what was read to you yesterday is the part of this poem that, in terms of its content, could certainly have been presented to the mature Goethe—even in his advanced old age—and he would have said: Yes, this is something I myself wish to advocate. — On the other hand, he would have turned away from what was omitted or altered yesterday and might have said that he was a little ashamed to have written those things. Anyone who regards Goethe with such deep, boundless admiration as I do myself may perhaps also speak of Goethe in this way at times, as I am compelled to do today when I speak of the poem “The Eternal Jew.” This poem was written during Goethe’s earliest youth. And his youth is expressed in it to the extent that it is only natural for the time in which he wrote it, when he was still a real good-for-nothing, someone from whom one certainly cannot learn anything. Or is it perhaps not permissible to say that, with regard to certain things, one cannot learn anything from Goethe? One can say frankly and freely that back then he could not even spell correctly without making mistakes. So why shouldn’t one say that certain things in the poem “The Eternal Jew” are worthless? Of course, one cannot go along with that wretched contemporary taste that drags to light, if possible, all the works of every great artist in their earliest form. To do so is merely to reveal one’s own weakness. Yes, there is something in Goethe’s youthful poem that was not Goethe himself. Things and ideas rumbled within Goethe’s youthful soul that stemmed entirely from his own milieu. They are none of our business; they concern only him. Something comes together there that one might call a marriage between the temporal in Goethe’s soul and the eternal-divine in the Goethean soul. And what emerged there is something eternal for all of humanity. This has value for us, and it has value for all people who will follow us. These two things—one of which concerns only Goethe himself, the other which concerns us and all posterity—were separated. These two Goethes within the young Goethe, these two souls within his nature, were separated by a cut; and what was already present in the young Goethe—of all that continued to reign within him until the end of his life—was separated from what existed only in the young Goethe—what had died in the older Goethe—and was retained.

[ 5 ] This shows us how the forces toward which the genius will eventually strive, and those forces that arise from his surroundings, all play a role in shaping him. And when we look at Goethe’s soul in his youth, it truly appears to us as a battlefield where the struggle takes place between the hero Goethe—who accompanies him throughout his entire life and is the true bearer of his genius—and something else that he had to overcome within his soul. And had this struggle not existed, Goethe would not have become Goethe. Here we have something tangible before us that is at work in the soul: this polarity. The soul cannot be a uniform entity, for otherwise it would stand still and be unable to progress. It is important that we acquire, from the very beginning, a sense of polarity—of the opposition inherent in the life of the soul. If we lack this sense, we will not be able to properly appreciate everything that needs to be said specifically about the life of the soul. And precisely when we have a soul life as distinctive as Goethe’s, we regard such a soul life as a drama and seek to approach it with timid reverence, because within a single incarnation, in this struggle that unfolds as soul life, we perceive what constitutes the true content, the real destiny of the individual soul life.

[ 6 ] And there is one more aspect of this psychological drama that we should point out. Let us once again consider the contradictions within Goethe’s soul, as they appear before our mind’s eye precisely through yesterday’s recitation and the explanation I provided. What conclusions can we draw from this?

[ 7 ] When we survey Goethe’s inner life, we can see how, in his later years, he followed only that which we had, in yesterday’s recitation, drawn out of him—the ideas, feelings, and inner contents—and how he then, through the power of his own soul, cast them out of himself, as it were. Goethe, as a spiritual being, was devoted to these two forces throughout his entire life without any effort on his part. Thus, every human being, insofar as he or she is a soul, is a being who is not merely master of himself or herself, but is also devoted to something inner that exerts power over him or her—something that cannot be comprehended by his or her knowledge from the outset. For if, at the time he wrote “The Eternal Jew,” Goethe had encompassed in his soul everything that it was possible to encompass, this poem would have become more artistic—perhaps something like what we read aloud yesterday—but in any case, it would not have had the content as it appears in Goethe’s works.

[ 8 ] Human beings are immersed in their inner life. There is something at work there that, in essence, constitutes an external world for their inner life just as much as anything else in the external world. Just as we have no power, when faced with a red rose, to imagine it as not red—but rather, just as the rose compels us to keep the red color alive in our inner image of the red rose—so there exists something that, in a certain way, imposes upon us the necessity of living out the drama of the soul in a very specific manner. The external world reigns supreme over us in all our sensory perceptions. We must also acknowledge such a master in our inner spiritual life when we face the contradictions of this spiritual life and view it in such a way that we set it before us as it unfolds over time—day by day, year by year, from one epoch of life to the next—driven forward by an inner force and becoming ever richer and richer.

[ 9 ] Even from these simple, concrete examples—in which we have remained entirely on the physical plane—you can see that, through our sensory perceptions, we must acknowledge an external force, a master with regard to external life, and an inner master within us. No matter where we stand, at any point in space, the external world is master of our sensory perceptions. And we would fall into fantasy if we did not acknowledge this master with regard to our sensory perceptions. As we now proceed inward within ourselves, we must look toward the dramatic contrast in our inner life, and there we must recognize that, just as in the external world, we have an equally real master within us who, for example, causes us to have a different inner life at the age of seven than at twenty or thirty or later. Let this be said for now by way of illustration for many things that will come to light.

[ 10 ] This drama of the soul, which we have so concretely illustrated using Goethe as an example, is ultimately composed only of the two elements of the life of the soul: judgments and the phenomena of love and hate. Now, it was said yesterday: Judgments lead to concepts; love and hate arise from desire. You might now easily see in what has been said a contradiction with regard to the immediate facts, the immediate experience of the external world, for you might say: If you claim that judgments lead to concepts, then you are contradicting the very simple fact that concepts arise through sensory perceptions, through the fact that these impose themselves from the external world. When we stand before a rose and have the impression “red,” the concept “red” arises without any judgment underlying it. — And you might go on to say: So it is not judgment that leads to concepts, but rather the opposite—the concept must be there first, and only then can a person judge on the basis of that concept! — Let us take a moment to consider this apparent contradiction. It is, in fact, not so easy to fathom; its nature is not so easy to grasp. We will have to gather various insights from what we can gain through the observation of the life of the soul, so that we may obtain a key to overcoming this apparent contradiction.

[ 11 ] Above all, you must focus your attention on the fact that ideas are something that actually lead a separate existence, a life of their own, within the human soul. I ask that you not take this statement lightly, but rather grasp its full gravity: ideas are something that, like parasites or inner living beings, lead a life of their own within the soul. And on the other hand, desire also leads a life of its own in the life of the soul. Our soul life is, in fact, confronted by ideas and desires in such a way that both appear as independent entities to which we, as soul beings, are subject. You can easily convince yourselves that ideas are something that leads a life of its own within our soul: You need only consider that you do not possess, within the powers of your own soul life, the ability to readily recall a concept you have absorbed. A concept we may have formed only yesterday sometimes resists quite strongly returning to our soul life. In everyday life, we then say: We have forgotten what it is about. It does not want to come to the surface; at first, it resists. A struggle is taking place between what indisputably exists within us as a soul force—which seeks to draw the image forth—and something else that is present in our soul. This is a struggle within our soul involving the image. Yet nothing need happen in the external world, and we can still recall the image. So it was within us, but it refused to surrender itself to us immediately in its existence. You also know, however, that among the most diverse human individualities, this struggle is a very different one—one waged within the human soul between one’s own soul forces and the ideas to be brought back, which, though they live in the soul, present themselves, so to speak, as opponents of the immediate soul forces. And the difference between these two is so great that we even find their extreme opposites to be quite alarmingly far apart. At one end, you find those human individuals who, fundamentally speaking, are never at a loss to recall whatever has ever lived in their soul when they need it—who always easily remember their entire store of ideas and knowledge. And on the other hand, we have people who suffer from such severe forgetfulness that they are completely powerless in the face of the ideas that live within them, unable to truly bring them back up into conscious life. For the true connoisseur of the soul, it is now something extraordinarily important [to observe] how quickly a person remembers, how quickly the ideas a person has experienced yield to the forces that seek to bring them back up. For a connoisseur of the soul, this is a measure of something much deeper within the human being. It points out to him that this detachment from one’s own ideas is an expression of inner health or illness. And since health and illness merge into one another in their nuances at the extremes, one can say: Even in these intimate details, we have provided the soul expert with a profound indication—extending into the physical realm—regarding a person’s constitution. From the way a soul struggles with its ideas in order to recall them, the connoisseur of the soul will even be able to deduce where, so to speak, the person in question is lacking. We look, as it were, through the soul onto something that is still something other than the soul itself when we recognize this soul experience of the struggle with one’s own world of ideas.

[ 12 ] But there is another way you can get a sense of how ideas actually take on a life of their own within our souls. The ideas we hold at any stage of life constitute a whole over which we do not have complete control—a whole to which we are devoted. And certain experiences can convince us that this is indeed the case. Whether, for example, we understand a person speaking to us or not depends on us, on our inner life. You will understand me when I speak to you in my various lectures. But if you were to bring someone who knows nothing of this—no matter how well-educated they might be in today’s sense of education—to these lectures, they might not understand a thing. Why is that? Because you have, perhaps over the course of years, acquired different ideas! What resonates with the ideas flowing from today’s talk are precisely those ideas you have acquired over the years. So it is your concepts within the soul that correspond to the new concepts. Here you even have an example of how little power a person has over the arbitrariness of their inner life. It does no good at all to want to understand something if you do not possess within yourself the body of concepts that makes this understanding possible. Here, one concept corresponds to another. And if you listen closely to your inner life, you will even notice that your “I” plays an extremely minor role in it. For at the very moment when you are listening to something that captivates you, you have the best opportunity to forget your “I,” and the more you listen, the more opportunity you have to forget your “I.” Just try looking back on such a moment—when you were so completely absorbed in what you understood—and you will have to admit to yourself: There was something within me in which my “I” did not play a significant role, in which my “I” was completely forgotten. —“One was completely absorbed, lost in the moment”—is what one says then. And a person is always lost in the moment when they understand something particularly well. In that moment, you even shut off your ego and set the store of ideas you possess against the other store of ideas that is to enter your soul. And there is something like a battle—namely, ideas against ideas—and you yourself provide the stage for this battle between ideas that are already there and ideas that do not yet exist but wish to enter anew.

[ 13 ] Now, in the life of the soul, something very significant depends on whether we have the concepts necessary to understand something, or whether we do not have them. Imagine we are listening to something without having the concepts necessary to understand it. We listen, as they say in everyday life, unprepared. Then something very strange happens. At the very moment when we listen unprepared and cannot understand—due to the nature of our inner life, as I have just described it—something approaches us as if from behind, approaches us like a demon. What is this? It is the “I” that lives within the life of the soul. It manifests itself by, as it were, overwhelming us from behind. As long as we can be absorbed, lost in ourselves, it does not make itself known. But it makes itself known the moment we cannot understand, cannot keep up. And how does it make itself known then?

[ 14 ] Anyone who listens to the inner life of the soul will soon notice that what is at work there is something that will cause them unease. Their own soul becomes filled with something that makes them uneasy. If we keep this in mind, we may say: This unease shows us, after all, that our inner life is such that the ideas we already hold influence new ideas that seek to penetrate us; yet these new ideas do not act indifferently, but rather in such a way that they, as it were, bring our own inner life into a state of contentment—an inner sense of self-satisfaction—or, conversely, into a state of unease. Here we see once again how deeply human beings are devoted to their ideas. And for the connoisseur of the soul, there is once again something extraordinarily important at work here, even if it does not immediately manifest itself in a stark way in life. This unease that forms in the soul in response to what is not understood is a force that continues to work in the life of the soul in such a way that it extends beyond the soul itself and affects something that lies even deeper in human nature. What arises in this way from a lack of understanding—from this unease—can have a damaging effect even on the physical body. And it would be of great importance, particularly when it comes to the subtle nuances of a person’s health or illness that extend into their inner life, to consider whether they are frequently forced in their life to confront things they do not understand, or whether they lead their inner life in such a way that they can follow everything with understanding. These are matters far more significant than they are generally regarded in everyday life. But let us move on.

[ 15 ] It has been said that the ideas within us have a life of their own; they are like beings within us. You can see this for yourself if you hold something else before your soul. Recall those moments in your inner life when the external world was such that, even though you wanted to receive stimuli from it or wanted some kind of impression in order to have experiences, the external world gave you nothing. It simply gave you nothing. It passed you by without your receiving any impressions from it. Then you experience something in your soul again—namely, what is commonly called boredom. With boredom, the situation in the life of the soul is that the soul develops a longing, craves impressions, and is wholly absorbed in this longing. But this longing is not fulfilled; it remains unsatisfied. Where, then, does boredom come from?

[ 16 ] If you are a truly keen observer of the natural world, you will be able to make an observation that, while often overlooked, is nonetheless obvious: namely, that, fundamentally, only humans can get bored. Animals never get bored. And anyone who believes that animals get bored is a poor observer. You can even perceive something curious about the way humans get bored. If you observe people with a simple, primitive inner life, they are, in fact, much less likely to get bored than people with a more complicated inner life in the more educated classes and social strata. Anyone who travels the world and knows how to make observations will see how much less people get bored in the countryside than in the city. That is to say, of course, you should not focus on how city dwellers get bored in the countryside, but rather on how country dwellers get bored in the countryside. You would have to look at their inner lives as they are shaped by the more complex nature of their education. So even among people, there is a difference in terms of whether they get bored or not.

[ 17 ] Boredom is not something that simply arises from our inner life. What causes us to be bored? The very life of our ideas! What yearns for new impressions are our old ideas. They want to be revitalized; they want new impressions. That is why people have so little control over boredom: it is the ideas we have absorbed in our past lives—ideas that have developed a life of their own within the soul—that crave new stimuli. They give rise to desires. And if these desires are not satisfied, the unsatisfied longing—that is, a quality we must study within our own inner life—expresses itself in the soul as boredom. That is why the dull-witted person, who has few ideas, also has fewer desire-filled ideas, and the less he is able to develop desires for new impressions, the less he gets bored. However, you must not conclude from this that it is a sign of a highly developed person if they are perpetually bored. Nor are the people who are perpetually yawning those who have attained the highest level of development in their inner life, although they have reached a higher level than those who cannot become bored at all because they have few inner ideas. For there is, in fact, a kind of cure for boredom, and as the soul continues to develop, boredom once again becomes impossible.

[ 18 ] Why doesn’t the animal get bored? When it has opened the gates of its senses to the environment, it constantly receives impressions from the outside world. And now imagine these impressions: the inner life of the soul flows along and receives stimuli. What flows externally as a continuous process of the world and what flows within the animal actually flows simultaneously; it maintains the same sense of time. The animal is done with one impression when a new one arrives, and then it is once again absorbed in that one. There is a sense of regularity here. This is the advantage humans have over animals: that they can introduce a different sense of time within themselves. In the succession of images of his inner life, he can maintain a different temporal rhythm than that which unfolds externally in the world process. Therefore, it can happen with human beings that they have before them something that has often made an impression on them, something they have often passed by; yet then they shut themselves off from that impression. They shut out, as it were, the external course of events, the passage of time; they do not follow it. Yet time also passes within them. But because it now lacks external impressions, it remains unfilled. As long as a person holds the images of their past life within themselves, these images continue to influence the time they leave empty, and thus continue to work within the soul for the time being. And so the following can now occur.

[ 19 ] Imagine once again the inner experience of the animal, which runs parallel to the external passage of time [as illustrated]. The animal’s inner life unfolds in such a way that it is attuned to the external passage of time or to the perceptions of its own body. For even when animals are digesting, for example, the images that arise from within provide an inner stimulus. And that is something extraordinarily interesting for the animal. For the animal, the external passage of time acts in such a way that it offers a continuous stimulus to the inner life. One could say: For the animal, every moment in its life is interesting. — Not so with human beings. External objects may cease to be of interest to him; things no longer interest him. But the passage of external time continues nonetheless! So imagine the inner life of the human soul alongside the passage of external time: external impressions reach the human soul; the human being has experienced them countless times, and therefore they no longer interest him. Then the inner life of the soul comes to a halt, and since time also flows on with the life of the soul, time remains empty and the human being becomes bored. It is because of this unfilled time, then, that a human being can become bored. But what does influence this unfilled time? The earlier ideas, which now have a desire but receive nothing. So while animals constantly receive stimuli in one direction, humans have a yearning for new impressions as time moves from the past into the future, because the ideas themselves demand new content and new enrichment. This is what sets humans apart from animals: that their past ideas live on and develop a life of their own into the future. I will point out some aspects that might be misleading in this regard.

[ 20 ] There is, however, a remedy for boredom, which consists roughly of the following. In the images that flow by, there is not only a desire but also a content, so that they live on in the soul not only as desires but also as a content. Therefore, we ourselves can carry images from the past into the future. And this, in turn, is the higher development of the soul—when the images themselves carry something from the past into our lives. And there is a great difference between whether a person has something in their images that can interest them and fill their future spiritual life, or whether they have nothing within themselves. Thus, from a certain stage onward, a person can become bored. But if they fill themselves with meaningful ideas, these can in turn have an effect on the future. This is what distinguishes those who are capable of curing their own boredom from those who are not. This points to an independent life of our ideas within us—a life over which, as has become clear, we have no control, but to which we are surrendered. If we do not ensure that our ideas are meaningful, we are bound to be bored. Only through meaningful ideas can we protect ourselves from boredom.

[ 21 ] This is once again something of extraordinary significance for the connoisseur of the soul. For normal human life requires that a certain balance be maintained between the fulfillment of the inner life and external life in general. And a soul devoid of content that nevertheless continues to live on in time—for time, after all, waits for no one—that is, a bored soul, is, in a certain sense, a poison even for the physical body. Experiencing a great deal of boredom in life is a real cause of illness. Strictly speaking, it is not at all an inaccurate description to speak of “deadly” boredom, even if one does not die from it immediately. But boredom is something that actually acts as a psychological poison. And its effects extend far beyond the realm of spiritual life.

[ 22 ] So today you have already had to take in all sorts of things, some of which you may feel were still almost pedantic explanations. But through them we will nevertheless delve ever deeper into the true life of the soul. Subtle distinctions are necessary if we are to come to know this wonderful drama within the soul, with the hero at its center—the “I.” For hidden within all of us is a “someone” who is, in essence, wiser than we ourselves usually are in life. And if this “someone” in our inner life were not wiser than we ourselves are, then human life would actually be a terrible thing.

[ 23 ] As for how the individual lives his life, it is indeed the case that he indulges in the most curious notions about what the soul is, what the spirit is, what the body is, and the like. These things are jumbled together in the most haphazard way. And the following is particularly interesting. Whereas in ancient times, when even external science was still based more on clairvoyance, a clear distinction was made regarding the extent to which human beings are situated within a physical, a soul, and a spiritual life, a church council at a relatively early date felt compelled to abolish the spirit, and thus the dogma was established once and for all: Human beings consist of body and soul. — Yes, the spirit was truly abolished. And if you were to familiarize yourself with the dogmatics of the Christian Church, you would gain insight into what transpired as a result of the abolition of the spirit. Of course, some people realized that there must be something else that one must refer to as the “spirit.” But they were considered the most formidable heretics. Where one felt that body and soul were insufficient and introduced the spirit as a third element, one was deemed a formidable heretic. This stems solely from an uncertainty regarding the absolute legitimacy of speaking of body, soul, and spirit. And the moment one stops speaking of body, soul, and spirit, one throws everything into confusion. But people are such that they throw everything into confusion. And when one no longer really knows what spirit is and what soul is, then something else can disappear behind it. Thus, in fact, a clear view of spiritual life has disappeared.

[ 24 ] But even though people repeatedly fall into the trap of failing to distinguish properly, we can still say that something like a good spirit watches over them, and that people do have a very vague sense of the truth. People can have such a vague sense of the truth because something like the spirit of language is at work in their environment. Language is truly wiser than people. People do ruin much of language, but not everything can be ruined. Language is more accurate and more reasonable than the individual human being. That is why language, in the stimuli and impressions it exerts on the human soul, sometimes has a quite correct effect, whereas human beings, when they interject their judgments, make mistakes. And now I would like to show you, using an example, how human beings, when they are devoted to language, do indeed feel and sense what is right.

[ 25 ] Imagine that you are facing, first, a tree; second, a bell; and third, a human being. And based on what the outside world tells you—that is, based on your immediate sensory impressions—you now begin to judge; in other words, you set your inner life in motion. Judgment is something that takes place in the soul. So you judge the tree, then the bell, and then the person. Look at the tree: it is green. You express the judgment that arises from this, in accordance with the genius of language, by saying: “The tree is green.” — Let’s suppose you now want to express something about the bell that follows from your sensory impressions—namely, that the bell rings, that it produces a sound. At the very moment the bell rings, you will express your perception with the linguistic judgment: “The bell rings.” — Thus you have expressed the greenness of the tree by saying: “The tree is green”—and you express what you experience regarding the bell by saying: “The bell is ringing.” — Now let’s turn to the human being: the human being speaks. You express this by putting your external perception into words: “The human being is speaking.” — Now let’s consider the three judgments that have been made, and what has arisen in these three ways: The tree is green — The bell rings — The person speaks. — In all three cases, you are dealing, if I may say so, with sensory impressions. But you will sense that in all three cases, when I compare the sensory impressions with the linguistic judgment, they turn out to be something quite different. So when you consider the first judgment: “The tree is green”—you must ask yourself: What am I actually expressing with this? Essentially, I am expressing something that, by the very form of the judgment, must relate to space. When I say, “The tree is green,” I am expressing something that must relate to space—something that is this way now, will be this way again in three hours, in six hours, and so on. It is something enduring. Take the other judgment: “The bell is ringing.”—Are you also expressing something that exists within space here? No. Here you are expressing something that does not exist within space at all, but rather something that unfolds in time, something that is a process of becoming, something that is in flux. That is why—because the genius of language is very clever—you can never speak in the same way about something that is situated in space as you do about something that unfolds over time. For what pertains to the judgment—insofar as the tree is situated in space—language does not allow you to use a proper verb directly. You must resort to an auxiliary verb, something that helps you live linguistically in time, and say: The tree is green. — But you may use a verb for a very similar fact; namely, if you have something else in mind, you might say something like: The tree is turning green. — But I ask you to consider whether you are not, in that very instance, appealing to time? Where the genius of language allows you to move into time, you must move into that which unfolds in time, into that which is becoming, into the emergence of greenness. There is indeed a genius at work in language, a marvelous genius. Although many things in it have been corrupted by humans, the fact remains that language does not allow us to apply a verb directly to that which is situated in space.

[ 26 ] And in the case of the second judgment—where we are referring to a process, a becoming—we cannot at all use “is” to express something that is becoming. At most, you could rephrase it: “The bell is ringing—,” thereby turning the verb itself into something that completely reverses the meaning. If you paraphrase it that way, you corrupt the language.

[ 27 ] Now for the third judgment: The person speaks. — Here you express sensory perception using the verb “speaks.” But consider for a moment what a difference there is between uttering the judgment “The bell rings” and “The person speaks.” — In the first sentence, this conveys something essential, because the sound is what matters. But when I say, “The man speaks,” this conveys something that is not at all essential; rather, what matters is what is not at all expressed in the verb “speaks”—namely, what he is saying. It is not the sensory stimulus—which is expressed by the verb—that matters at all, but rather the content, which is expressed through the verb. Yet you stop short of the content with your language! Why don’t you stop there in the case of the statement: “The bell rings”—and why do you stop short of the content with your language in the other case? Why do you, as it were, stop short of what really matters? Because in the latter case you want to confront the living soul directly! You do not address the content with the word that the genius of language allows you; that is, you characterize what stands before you as something external. You incorporate the inner essence of the bell into the word; there you have the metallic interior in the word “ring.” But when you stand before a living human being with his or her spiritual inner life, you are already careful, through language itself, not to incorporate that inner life into the word.

[ 28 ] Here, in the genius of language, you can tangibly perceive the difference between what relates to place—to space—and what relates to a process—to becoming—and between that which relates to the inner spiritual realm. When we describe this from the outside, we pause in language—as if in shy reverence—before the inner realm, before what truly matters. Thus, by speaking, we acknowledge the inner life of the soul. And we will now see, in the course of the subsequent lectures, that it is indeed important to rise once more to a certain sense of perception, so that we understand the soul as something that delimits itself all around, as something that surges outward from within to its very limits and bursts forth at those limits. And when we describe it from the outside, we are compelled by the genius of language to pause, in a certain sense, before inner life itself. It is important that you—one might say—learn to recognize the soul in its true essence as a kind of inner structure, as an inner formation, and realize that what must come from the outside strikes against something that defends itself from within. Therefore, we must imagine the soul as a circle, approached from all sides by sensory experiences, while the inner life of the soul surges and swells within. But this has become clear to us today: that this inner life is not independent in itself, but that it experiences, within itself, the life of its own ideas, of its mass of ideas. The ideas drawn into the inner life exist within time.

[ 29 ] In the coming days, we will see how this life of ideas—which is distinct from the external world within the soul—is the cause of our greatest bliss and our deepest pain, insofar as they originate in the soul. And we will see how the spirit is the great healer for the pain and suffering that ideas cause in our soul. But we may also say: Just as it is in our external physical life that hunger must be satisfied, and just as the satisfaction of hunger is healing, so it is also in our inner spiritual life: ideas, in a certain sense, require inner nourishment through other ideas. — But if we overload ourselves, if we eat beyond our hunger, this leads to the undermining of our health. And thus the fate of the soul unfolds in such a way that newly arising ideas can have both a healing and a sickening effect. And we will see how the spirit can not only have a healing effect on the hunger for ideas, but can also act as the healer against an overload of ideas.