The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fifth Lecture

[ 1 ] I will have a few additional remarks to make regarding the four lectures, which, dealing with freedom and necessity, form more or less a coherent whole. Let us once again consider one of the fundamental truths of the Spiritual Science—the truth about the composition of the human being, which has become so familiar to us: that we view the human being as a composite, interwoven whole consisting, first and foremost, of four members—the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. If we first focus on what is given to every human being in the physical world, we can say: in the ordinary, waking state, our physical body is what is given to us first. We know our physical body precisely because we can, of course, observe it externally with our senses; because everyone else who is with us in the physical world can observe it in the same way; and because they must agree with us in the judgment that this physical body exists. This physical body can therefore be observed from the outside in the physical world.

[ 2 ] As you can easily convince yourself by giving it a moment’s thought, what we usually call the etheric body cannot be observed. It already eludes ordinary physical observation. Likewise, the astral body eludes ordinary physical observation, and the “I” even more so, for what the “I” is—as we have often stated—cannot be observed from the outside to such an extent that not even the name for it can be given to a person from the outside. If someone were to call out the word “I” to you, it would never occur to you that they might be referring to your “I.” They can only mean their own “I.” Thus, from the outside, this “I” is no longer designated at all. Nevertheless, it is clear that a person knows something about this “I.” They designate it from within. So one can at least say: While the etheric body and the astral body are inaccessible to the physical plane, the “I” is not, at first glance, inaccessible to this physical plane. When we say “I,” we are speaking of this “I.” But the fact remains: just as the physical body or any other physical object cannot be seen, this “I” cannot be seen either. It cannot be perceived in any way by the senses.

[ 3 ] Now the question arises for us: What is the actual significance of the fact that we know something about this “I,” that we are even able to name it? Philosophers often say: The “I” is given to human beings through an immediate certainty. Human beings know immediately that the “I” exists. Yes, there are philosophers who dream of being able to know, through their philosophy alone, that this “I” is a simple being—that is, one that cannot be dissolved and cannot die. But anyone who thinks clearly will immediately object to this philosophical view: Well, even if you prove to us as convincingly as possible that this “I” cannot be dissolved—and thus cannot face decay—it would suffice for this “I” to remain after death, perhaps for all eternity, in the same state in which it exists, for example, from falling asleep until waking up. Then, of course, one could no longer speak of this “I.” The philosophers are mistaken in believing that there is something real present in the “I” of which they can speak. When one speaks of something that actually exists, one is speaking rather of something entirely different.

[ 4 ] From the moment one falls asleep until one wakes up, this “I” does not exist; one cannot say “I” to oneself. When they dream of their “I,” it sometimes even seems to them as if they were encountering themselves in the image—that is, they are looking at themselves. They do not address their “I” in the same way they do in ordinary daily life. When we wake up, it is truly as if our true “I” were coming into contact with the solidity of our physical body. We know, of course, that the process of waking up consists in our “I,” just as with our astral body—but for now we are primarily interested in the “I”—submerging into our physical body. We feel this immersion just as we feel it when we bump our hand against a solid object, and this immersion—which, as it were, gives us a counter-impact from the physical body—is what constitutes the consciousness of the “I.” And throughout the day, while we are awake, we do not actually have our “I”; rather, we have the mental image of our “I,” which arises like a reflection on the physical body. So what is usually understood by the “I” in philosophy is the mirror image of the “I.” Yes, do we have nothing but this mirror image of the “I”? Well, this mirror image ceases when we fall asleep—that is quite clear. The “I” is no longer reflected there. So after falling asleep, our “I” would truly disappear. But in the morning, when we wake up, it moves back into the physical body. So it was there all along.

[ 5 ] What, then, is this “I”? What do we have of this “I” as long as we operate solely on the physical plane? Upon closer examination, it turns out that, within the physical world, this “I” is nothing more than an act of will—will itself. We can do nothing other than will. The very fact that we are capable of willing makes us aware that we are a “self.” Sleep consists solely in the fact that we have subdued all willing—that, for reasons we have often discussed, we are simply unable to will during sleep. Thus, the act of willing is subdued, paralyzed. We do not will during sleep. What is expressed in the word “I,” then, is a genuine act of will, and the mental image we have of the “I” is a reflection that arises when the will strikes the body. This striking is just as if, looking into a mirror, we see our physical body. Thus we see our own “I”—will expressing itself—reflected back from our physical body. This gives us a mental image of the “I.” The “I” therefore lives on the physical plane as an act of will.

[ 6 ] Thus, we actually have duality on the physical plane: we have our physical body, and we have our “I.” We have our physical body because we can create a mental image of it externally in space; we have our “I” because we are capable of willing. Everything else that lies behind the physical body remains, for the time being, a mystery to us in our physical observation. We see the physical body as it has come into being, as it has been formed. How this formation must be described—through humanity’s passage through the Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth periods—remains a mystery when one considers only the physical body. Thus, what lies behind this physical body remains, for the time being, a mystery to the physical observation of the physical world.

[ 7 ] How the will sinks into our physical body on the other side—or into everything that we are—remains a mystery. For, isn’t it true, you can become conscious of the will, and Schopenhauer saw the will as the only reality precisely because he had come to the realization that it is in the will that one actually becomes conscious of oneself. But how this will sinks down—of that we know absolutely nothing on the physical plane. On the physical plane, you know, in essence, only that you can grasp the will within your “I.” I grasp this watch, but how this will passes through the etheric body down into the physical body and then actually becomes the act of grasping the watch—that remains a mystery even to the physical body itself. The will thus passes directly from the “I” into the physical body. Nothing remains in the “I” other than the inner sensing of the will, the inner experience of the will.

[ 8 ] As I describe it here, this has actually only been true for the vast majority of humanity for a few centuries, and that’s something people usually overlook. For us, it may have already become second nature through the many reflections we have made. If we go back to the middle of the Middle Ages, it is pure fantasy to believe that humanity really lived exactly the same way back then as it does today. Humanity evolves, and the way in which human beings relate to the world differs from one epoch to another. If we go back beyond the 15th and 14th centuries, we find far more people than in the present who not only knew about the physical body but who truly knew that something lives within the physical body—what we today call the “etheric body”—and who truly perceived something auric in the physical body. Of course, in the Middle Ages, I would say, these were merely the last remnants, the last shreds of an ancient perception; but even in the 10th century, people did not look into a person’s eyes merely as we do today, by simply observing their physical eye. By looking at the physical eye, one could still perceive something of the auric, something of the ethereal. One could still, in a certain sense, distinguish between a sincere eye and a false eye—not merely through an external judgment, but by directly perceiving the auric that surrounded the eye. And so it was with other things as well.

[ 9 ] But just as this auric aspect was perceived in human beings, it was perceived to a much, much greater extent in animals, and also in plants. What today can only be brought about artificially—you are all familiar with this description from my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds—namely, that when one looks at a seed, one sees it radiate differently than another seed—was still a completely everyday, commonplace phenomenon for people in earlier centuries. So people did not first have to examine a seed under a microscope—which, in most cases, is no longer possible today—to determine which plant it came from; rather, they could still determine this from the light, from the light aura that surrounded the seed. And when it comes to minerals, you will still find descriptions of them in older writings that classified minerals in a specific way according to their value in the world. When the ancients looked at gold, everything they said about it was not based on their imagination, but because gold truly appeared to them in a different way than, for example, silver. When they associated gold with sunlight and silver with moonlight, this was truly based on observation. It was truly based on the fact that the observer never perceived anything else when he said: “Gold is pure sunlight, merely condensed; silver is moonlight,” and so on—just as people in the past could still perceive the elemental, the elemental auric, in the external world, which has been lost to people of modern times because modern humanity is precisely meant to undergo the development toward freedom, which can only be achieved by focusing entirely and exclusively on what is physically tangible today.

[ 10 ] So just as people lost the ability to see such auric phenomena, they also lost another ability. Today, one must have a sense of just how different it is when the ancients spoke of the will. They felt much more keenly how the will—which today lives only in the “I”—dives into the organic realm; how it, as we would say today, dives into the astral body. They still felt the continuation of the “I” into the astral body. This can be made clear in a very specific area.

[ 11 ] You see, the fact that painters no longer believe they can manage without a model stems from the fact that we have completely lost the ability to experience, in any way, the continuation of the “I” into the organism—this continuation into the astral body. Why, then, are old portraits so widely admired today? Because the old portrait wasn’t simply made the way today’s are—that is, by having a person and then painting from that person, relying entirely on reproducing everything that was there—but because people still knew: in someone who shapes the muscles around the eye in a certain way, what lives in the “I” flows into the astral body in a very specific manner, through which he brings forth this form of the muscles. If one were to go all the way back to ancient Greece, one would be completely mistaken if one were to believe, for example, that the ancient Greeks used a model for these wonderful forms they created. They had no model. Whoever had to create a specific arm shape knew how the will guides the “I” into the astral body, and from what he sensed, he then fashioned the forms. Since all feeling for the astral body has died out, it has only now become necessary to adhere so closely to the model, as has become customary in our time.

[ 12 ] So that is the essential point: that human beings have come to this stage, and that they have not been doing so for very long—seeing the world outwardly without any auric elements, as is the case today, and inwardly without any consciousness, so that the will trickles down into the astral body and permeates the entire organism. This has only recently come to be.

[ 13 ] When a long time has passed, a different era will dawn for humanity. By then, even more will have been taken away from the outer appearance on the physical plane, and even more will have been taken away from the inner realm as well. We know, of course, that today we have been in the fifth post-Atlantean period for only a few centuries, beginning in the 14th century— for we date the fourth post-Atlantean period roughly from the founding of Rome through the 15th century, and the fifth post-Atlantean period from the 15th century for just as long again—so that we are actually only in the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean period. But humanity is heading toward a completely different way of perceiving. It is heading toward a much greater desolation and emptiness in the outer world. Today, when a person looks out at nature, they still perceive it in such a way that they believe it to be green, or that they believe the vault of heaven to be blue. They look upon nature in such a way that they accept its colors as the result of a natural process. In the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, they will no longer be able to believe in its colors! Today, only physicists speak of the fact that, apart from us, only vibrations exist, and that these vibrations evoke the color red within us. What physicists dream of today will become reality. Today it is the dream of physicists; then it will become reality. People will no longer be able to properly distinguish between a face that is more or less flushed and one that is more or less pale. They will know that all of this is brought about by their own physical constitution. They will regard it as superstition to believe that colors exist outside and color objects. The outer world, one might say, will be gray upon gray, and people will be aware that they themselves bring the colors into the world. Just as people say today: “Oh, you crazy anthroposophists, you talk about there being an etheric body, but that’s not true—you’re just projecting that into things!” — so later, those who now see only external reality will say to the others, who still see colors in all their freshness: “Oh, you dreamers, do you believe that colors exist out there in nature? Don’t you know that you yourselves are merely dreaming these colors into nature from within yourselves?” — External nature will become increasingly mathematized and geometrized. Just as today we can only speak of the etheric body and are not believed in the external world that it exists, so in the future people will not believe that the ability to see colors has any objective significance in the external world, but will attribute only a subjective significance to it.

[ 14 ] Humanity will experience something similar with regard to the relationship between the will within the “I” and the external world. People will come to feel only very faintly the impulses that find expression in the will. They will feel only very faintly what lies in those original personal experiences when one wants something from within one’s own “I.” What is willed from within the “I” will have a very weak effect on people. If everything continues as described—in terms of what nature provides to human beings—people will need either a long period of habituation or external compulsion in order to do anything at all. People will not get up of their own free will, but will first have to learn to get up, and it will have to become a habit. The mere decision to get up will make no impression at all. At present, this is a pathological condition, but the natural course of development tends toward this outcome. What we call inner ideals will find less and less credence. On the other hand, what is externally prescribed—what people are driven to do from the outside—will be necessary for the will to develop and for the impulses of the will to become active.

[ 15 ] That would be the natural course of events that unfolds, and anyone who knows that what comes later is prepared in what came before naturally knows that the sixth age is prepared in the fifth. And finally, one really does not even need to have one’s eyes fully open—only half-open—to see how a large part of humanity is striving toward those tendencies, is oriented toward those tendencies that I have just mentioned: how more and more effort is being directed toward ensuring that everything is indoctrinated or else commanded, and how this is perceived as the right thing to do. I said earlier that we are now roughly in the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—that is, the epoch in which, even though physicists already have the ideal of the sixth epoch, people still believe that colors exist out there, that, for example, the redness or pallor of a face has something to do with the person. We still hold this belief today. We may allow physicists or physiologists to convince us that we merely dream up colors, but in reality we do not truly believe this; rather, we believe that colors exist externally and color nature when we live naturally on the physical plane.

[ 16 ] We are in the first third. This fifth post-Atlantean epoch will, of course, consist of three thirds. In these three thirds, post-Atlantean humanity must go through various experiences. The first is that what I have just explained will fully enter human consciousness—that humanity will truly come to know, to know correctly, that by focusing on the physical body, it is essentially overlooking what lies behind that physical body, and indeed overlooking in all things what lies behind the physical. In the second third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—if Spiritual Science is fortunate—there will be more and more people who will know that what we see out there is indeed connected to something else, an etheric-spiritual reality. It will dawn on people that what has been lost was present in the clairvoyance of earlier times and has been lost in relation to humanity’s current relationship to the world; but it must be rediscovered in a different way than it previously appeared to human souls. We cannot see the aura again as it was seen in the past, but if people become aware that exercises such as those described in How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? , it may follow that they will also develop an awareness of how to learn once again—though now by a different path—that the auric surrounds human beings, that the auric also surrounds and permeates all other things in the world. Thus, people will once again gain an awareness of this.

[ 17 ] Furthermore, people will come to realize that it is possible to tap into their inner impulses once again. But they will have to grasp them more strongly than they do today, for the natural tendency is for the will to lose more and more of its impelling power. Therefore, this will must be grasped more strongly. This will is generated when people, above all, familiarize themselves with the deeper thinking necessary to grasp the truths of Spiritual Science. Those who grasp the truths of Spiritual Science will thereby infuse their will with greater strength and, as a result, will not gradually develop an increasingly paralyzed will, but rather an effective will that can act freely from the “I,” As humanity progresses, what can be attained through effort will counteract what seeks to establish itself in a natural way: on the one hand, by attempting to perform the spiritual exercises of Spiritual Science in order to regain awareness of the auric body, and on the other hand, by seeking to strengthen oneself through the impulses that Spiritual Science itself can provide, so that the will may once again become stronger and effective.

[ 18 ] You see, the matter is actually this: What needs to be brought about by Spiritual Science in the second third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch simply does not exist at present. How do people actually view the external world today? And how do scientists view the external world? It is very instructive to consider how modern science—this modern science, simply because it reflects humanity’s natural relationship to the environment—but especially how today’s scientists view the world. Modern science, and indeed the average person, when observing the external physical world—be it the mineral, plant, animal, or human kingdoms—lacks the power to truly penetrate what they are observing. The physicist conducts an experiment and describes it. But he does not dare to penetrate into what he describes. He does not dare to delve deeper into the processes revealed to him by the experiment as it unfolds. He remains stuck on the surface. In relation to the external world, he is in exactly the same state as you are in another place when you are dreaming. There you dream because your etheric body reflects back to you the experiences of the astral body. Anyone today who observes nature from the outside or who conducts an experiment is also observing what nature reflects back to him, what it gives him. He is merely dreaming of nature. He would wake up the moment he approached nature the way Spiritual Science approaches nature. They do not want that. Today, in the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, people are merely dreaming about nature. People must wake up! They are merely dreaming about nature. Only occasionally does someone awaken from the dream, and then they say to themselves: What is out there is not merely a dream, but something is alive within that dream.

[ 19 ] Schopenhauer’s philosophy was like waking up but not quite knowing what to do with it. This caused offense among those who philosophize with acumen in the modern sense, such as the distinguished philosopher Bolzano in Bohemia during the first half of the 19th century. If you pick up your copy of Schopenhauer, you’ll see how he wrote in the margin: “Pure madness!” Of course, it must have seemed like pure madness to him, because it really is stated as if from a kind of delirium: There is something like a will out there in nature. — And where modern natural science remains entirely true to itself, where it draws its conclusions, so to speak, where will it end up? Well, it will end up merely dreaming about the physical body. It has no inkling that there is something behind this physical body; otherwise, it would have to speak of an etheric body, an astral body, or an “I.” But it does not want to grasp the real; it wants only to grasp what presents itself. Today’s physicist or physiologist really feels like a sleepwalker. He dreams, and if you shout at him—and the shouting occurs in this case when you tell him about Spiritual Science—then he plops down like the sleepwalker who plops down when you shout at him. He stumbles and thinks: Now I am in the nothingness within! — At first he cannot do otherwise; he must remain in his dream. Precisely when he believes himself to be most awake in relation to external nature, he remains most deeply immersed in his dream. What will come of this? What will result is that he will gradually lose any possibility of finding anything in the external world other than the mental image he has of it. He gradually loses the ability to imagine anything even beyond the mental image he has of the external world. What, then, is left for him if he leaves the human body to the natural scientist? He has the human being before him. He sees it very clearly, or he lets the natural scientist or the medical staff tell him what changes occur when this or that does not function normally in life. He dissects this physical body very precisely. But he stops there, and he has no idea at all that there is something beyond it. There is absolutely nothing of the “I,” of the will, inside this physical body.

[ 20 ] What, then, would this natural scientist actually have to do? He would have to completely deny the will and the “I.” He would have to say: There is no will; there is nothing present in human beings, for this will cannot be found. — The will is hidden deep within the organism. It is only grasped, as we have said, felt, and experienced within the “I.” So, above all, the will would have to be demonstrated. That is to say, we would have to witness a natural scientist—who today is merely dreaming—telling his audience, if he were entirely sincere: “Yes, when we speak of human beings, we are actually speaking of the will.” To us natural scientists, that is an absurdity. The will is nothing at all. It is a completely empty hypothesis. It does not exist.—That is what he would have to say. That would be entirely consistent. Such a natural scientist would be dreaming about external processes. He would deny the will.

[ 21 ] What I am telling you is not something I am simply presenting here on my own. It is a logical necessity of today’s scientific worldview. You can see that a natural scientist, when he draws the ultimate conclusion from his way of thinking, arrives at what I am telling you. This is not something I have simply made up. For example, I have brought with me a Guide to Physiological Psychology in Fifteen Lectures, written by the well-known Professor Dr. Ziehen in Jena. He attempts to describe the psychological and physical phenomena that manifest in human beings. In the individual lectures, he goes through everything, discussing sensation, stimuli, and the senses of smell, taste, hearing, and sight, and so on. I do not wish to bore you with all of this, but only to discuss a few passages found in the fifteenth lecture on “Will.” There you will find, for example, statements such as the following: “We have traced cortical excitations back to the countless material stimuli of the external world, to which sensations corresponded in the psychological realm. We then traced the cortical excitation through the association fibers in the cerebral cortex all the way to the motor zone: from there, the material excitation was relayed back peripherally to the musculature and triggered muscle contractions. Psychologically, this transcortical process corresponded to the interplay of idea association, and we designated the resulting movement psychologically as an action. We were able to derive the latter from sensation and from the mental images of past sensations—the ideas—in a fully satisfactory manner according to the laws of idea association, and had thus traced the psychological process to its final link. “At this point, however,” Ziehen continues, “we encounter a hypothesis that psychology has almost without exception taught in the past, and to which common sense seems to arrive unconsciously at all times: I mean the assumption of a special will as the cause of our actions.”

[ 22 ] Ziehen now shows how it makes no sense to speak of such a will, just as the physiologist finds nothing that in any way corresponds to the word “will.” He also demonstrates, based on his specific interpretation of force-effect relationships—which one might describe as a degeneration of the will—that even in such cases we are not dealing with a will, but with something entirely different, so that one cannot speak of a will at all.

[ 23 ] You see, this is entirely consistent. If one stops at dreaming of the external physical world, one cannot arrive at the will. One cannot find the will at all. One can only, when forming a worldview, deny the will as such; one can say: Well then, there is no will. Today’s so-called monists do this to no end. They deny the will. They say that the will does not exist at all as such; it is merely a mythological construct. Ziehen expresses himself somewhat more cautiously, but he nonetheless arrives at strange conclusions—conclusions that he will likely be wary of taking entirely at face value. I’d like to read you a few sentences from his latest lecture, from which you’ll see that he’s already drawing the conclusion, though he’s still playing around a bit with this idea that will doesn’t exist. For there he says: “What about the concept of responsibility?”

[ 24 ] So he does not find the will. Now, addressing the question of the concept of responsibility, he says: “This does indeed contradict the findings of physiological psychology. It teaches that our actions are strictly necessitated”—that is, absolutely necessary in the physical sense—“the necessary product of our sensations and mental images. One could therefore attribute a bad action to a person just as little as one could attribute ugliness to a flower. The action therefore remains—even psychologically—bad, but it is not, at first, a matter of guilt. The concept of guilt and responsibility is—to briefly describe the contrast—a religious or social one. We can therefore disregard it here. Psychology, to reiterate, does not deny absolute aesthetic and ethical laws, provided they are demonstrated to it from another source; psychology itself, within its empirical limitations, can only discover empirical laws.”

[ 25 ] It is also quite natural: if one dreams only of the external world, then on the one hand we encounter a person who bestows favors, and on the other, another who beats people for no reason at all. Just as one flower is beautiful by the laws of nature and another is ugly, so one person is a “good person,” as they say. But “good” should not be interpreted any differently than it means something like the beauty of a flower, and “ugly” should mean nothing other than the ugliness of a flower. So, to be entirely consistent: “One could therefore hold a person accountable for a bad action just as little as one could hold a flower accountable for its ugliness. The action therefore remains—psychologically speaking—bad, but it is not, at first, a matter of guilt. The concept of guilt and responsibility is—to briefly describe the contrast—a religious or social one.” In other words, not a concept based on any kind of cognition, but a religious or social one. — “We can therefore disregard it here. Psychology, to reiterate, does not deny absolute aesthetic and ethical laws, provided they are demonstrated to it from another source; psychology itself, within its empirical limitations, can only discover empirical laws.”

[ 26 ] Ziehen, for his part, still expresses himself cautiously by not immediately constructing a worldview. But if one constructs a worldview, then any possibility of holding people accountable for their actions disappears when one stands on the ground occupied here by the author of this book and the presenter of these lectures. This is because these people are dreaming about the external world. They would wake up the moment they accepted what Spiritual Science says about the external world. But now consider this: these people have a science that leads them to the very admission that they know nothing about all that leads from the external body into the human “I.” — But the following must live within the “I”: first, the aesthetic laws; second, the ethical laws; and if we look more closely, even the logical laws. All of this must live within the “I.” In general, whatever leads to the will must live within the “I.” There is nothing in this science that could in any way live as a real impulse within the will. There is absolutely nothing of the sort in this science. Therefore, something else is necessary.

[ 27 ] Imagine if, today, only this science existed in the world; people would say: Well, I find an ugly flower, I find a beautiful flower—that is simply the way nature is. I find a person who murders others, I find a person who does good deeds for others—that is simply the way nature is. Everything that in any way speaks to the will would naturally have to fall away. Why, then, does it not fall away? Well, if one no longer considers the “I”—if one no longer regards it as belonging to the realm of what can be reached through contemplation of the world—then one must arrive at it in some other way. If one still wishes to accept “social or religious laws”—as Ziehen does—then one must somehow instill them in people in a different way. That is to say, when one dreams in relation to the external world, in relation to what is seen, one must stimulate the will in some way. And that can only be the opposite of the dream: intoxication. What lives in the will must become so ingrained in that will that the person under no circumstances comes to realize that they do not fully recognize it as a volitional impulse. This means that in such an age, it must be desired that a person not try to see clearly what they take in as their impulses of will, but rather that it must work within them—we can already use this image—just as wine works when a person is drunk. Just as one who is intoxicated does not have full consciousness, so must that which is not brought to full consciousness act as an impulse. This means we live in an age in which one must refuse to truly examine the impulses of the will down to their very core. Religious creeds aim to provide impulses, but these are not meant to be examined in any way. They do not want the concepts through which they stimulate the will to be subjected to any kind of objective scrutiny. All of this is meant to enter into people through a state of intoxication.

[ 28 ] We can indeed demonstrate this once again in the present. Try, for once, to listen truly—but without preconceptions—to the way people speak today about religious impulses. People feel most at ease when they are not told why this or that impulse should be stirred up, but rather when they are spoken to in such a way that they are set ablaze, that they are taught concepts they cannot fully grasp, concepts that are shrouded in a haze. And the speaker in this field will be considered the most outstanding who brings fire, fire, fire into people’s souls, who pays as little attention as possible to whether each individual is truly imbued with clear thinking. The dreamers therefore come and say: We examine the Gospels. There we find no evidence that, even if we concede the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, any truly otherworldly being actually lived within him. We need only recall how many of these dreamers simply deny the existence of Christ because it cannot be proven on the outer physical plane. On the other hand, there are theologians who, while unable to prove it either, speak of Christ in such a way as to use terms that are as vague as possible—terms that appeal as much as possible to feeling, to drives, and to instincts.

[ 29 ] This played out in a curious way in the outer world just a very short time ago. On the one hand, there were the dreamers—it began with Eduard von Hartmann in the realm of philosophy, and Drews then turned it into a full-scale campaign—these dreamers came along, and I would say they sought to deny the entire doctrine of the Testament by demonstrating that the Mystery of Golgotha is not a historical event. Nor can it be proven in the realm of external history; rather, one must enter into the spiritual realm. Opposing the dreamers were those who took a stand against them. Read the entire body of literature and you will see: nowhere is there anything level-headed or scientific to be found, but everywhere there are words that can be described as intoxicating and intoxicating words. Nowhere is there any thoroughness! Everywhere, the discourse is aimed at stirring up unmotivated instincts. This is how it is within our inner life: on the one hand, the dream—the dream that is supposed to emerge as a worldview based on natural science; on the other hand, the intoxication that is supposed to arise from what stems from religious belief.

[ 30 ] Dreams and intoxication are what primarily dominate people today. And just as a dream can only be dispelled by awakening people, so intoxication can only be dispelled by looking at inner impulses with complete clarity—that is, by giving people Spiritual Science, which cannot intoxicate but which truly permeates the soul with what spiritual impulses are. Yet again, people today are still reluctant to go along with this. As I’ve already said, if you were to present Spiritual Science today to someone who wants to establish monism solely on a natural-scientific basis—someone who is such a die-hard Haeckelian monist—he would, figuratively speaking, collapse; of course he would collapse. This is entirely natural for him, for he immediately feels himself in nothingness; his consciousness ceases, ceases entirely. Take an ordinary person who today wants to construct a worldview based solely on natural science, and talk to him about what follows from the Spiritual Science—it means nothing to him; he cannot understand any of it. If he is honest, he will say: “Well, that’s where it starts; it’s going round and round in my head like a millwheel.” — That is to say: he falls flat,

[ 31 ] When one approaches intoxication, it is, of course, natural for those who allow themselves to sober up properly that a true, purified inner religious life will take hold within them, and they will be able to deepen their faith through concrete concepts by familiarizing themselves with the impulses that come from Spiritual Science. But if you approach someone who does not want this—who does not wish to let the ideal of Spiritual Science penetrate his soul—if you present him with this ideal of Spiritual Science and expect him to embrace it; in other words, if you present Spiritual Science to someone who is completely immersed in the realm of contemporary theological practice, he will be sobered up in a peculiar way, just as those who have been intoxicated but have not yet fully freed themselves from the physical aftereffects are sobered up. He, in fact, enters a state of hangover. One can really notice this. If you observe theologians today—now that Spiritual Science is better known but not yet fully assimilated; we can see this particularly in the area around Dornach, where theologians are more engaged with it—if you observe what these theologians say, you will find: that, fundamentally, it is all a kind of hangover for them, into which they are plunged by the fact that they are now supposed to acquire concepts, ideas, and content for that which they wish only to experience as intoxication and which they wish to introduce, without motivation, into the spiritual structure of the human soul. They recoil from the sobering up they cannot bear, because they know that it will not bring them clarity, but—forgive the trivial expression—a foggy head.

[ 32 ] We must certainly consider these things in terms of their—I would say—historical necessity. If it can come to pass that Spiritual Science, on the one hand, brings to people at least the basic principles of how to see once again—in a new way—that which has been lost, and how to rekindle impulses within the will, then, out of freedom, humanity will attain that which nature will never give to human beings. Thus you can also see that our program has taken shape out of a certain necessity. When you hear a lecture such as the one I gave last Friday—and as I have given many times before—in which I seek, on the one hand, to draw attention to the development of thought and, on the other hand, to the development of the will, and to highlight how, on the one hand, thinking continues until one discovers the will within thought—until one steps outside oneself through thinking—and, on the other hand, encounters the other observer—then, by pushing thinking so far that it can step outside itself, one gives the human being the possibility of not stumbling when called upon and awakened. They stumble because they cannot grasp external events and have no support to hold onto when they are merely dreaming and are suddenly awakened. What one must hold onto is what one can attain through the development of thinking—so that one does not fall into an internally disorganized, chaotic state known as a hangover. This is achieved when the inner observer I spoke of can truly emerge in purity from within the human being. Thus, what must above all be communicated to humanity is intimately connected with the true inner laws of human progress.

[ 33 ] If you simply reflect on what has been said today—and often here—and consider its implications, then you will not fall into certain errors that you would otherwise fall into time and again. Of course, it will be extremely difficult to avoid certain errors. Today I want to draw your attention to just one of these mistakes. You see, time and again there are individuals among us who say: Well, for example, there are the adherents of this or that denomination; let’s say, for instance, that one lives among a more or less Catholic population with a Catholic priest. Our friends very often believe that if they make it clear to this priest that we do indeed represent Christ, that we speak correctly about the Mystery of Golgotha, and that we do not deny Christ, then we will be able to win this priest’s friendship. This line of thinking is completely mistaken. It is never possible to win these people over by showing them that one does not deny what they are bound to uphold. It is completely impossible. One would even get along better with these people if one were in a position to say that one denies Christ. Then they would say: “Well, then, these are the kind of people who deny Christ. They do not belong to us.” We remain with our congregation, which allows us to teach them about Christ through the path of intoxication. — They don’t say it outright, but that’s what they do. But when people appear who affirm Christ alongside them—who even claim to know something positive about Christ—then these people are led down their own paths; then they become those who want to affirm Christ in a different way than they do, and then they become much stronger enemies than they would be if our friends were to deny Christ. For they regard representing Christ as their privilege, and that is precisely the mistake—that others represent Christ in a different way.

[ 34 ] So you will provoke certain theologians against our Spiritual Science, specifically by telling them: “Yes, we stand for Christ.” You would provoke them far less if you could tell them—which, of course, you cannot—that “We deny Christ.” — What angers them most is that Christ is referred to in a different context. Out of the best of intentions, our friends will very easily say: “Yes, but what do you want? We stand entirely on the ground of Christianity.” — That is the worst thing you can do—to say that to people—because it is what rubs them the wrong way the most.

[ 35 ] Once again, we have come up against something where—in a very special way, I would say—freedom and necessity confront us. The main point is this: I want to make it clear time and again that one should not accept these concepts lightly. Freedom and necessity are among the most fundamental human concepts, and one must always be clear that a great deal must be brought together in order to arrive at a reasonably accurate understanding of the concepts of freedom and necessity. Where, then, would it lead if humanity today were to follow purely natural necessity? That would, of course, lead to people dreaming more and more, and ultimately to people being left with nothing but that dreary gray-on-gray, to the point where they would truly be able to want less and less, and would truly arrive at a paralysis of the will. That is necessity. Of course, this must be counteracted through the freedom of Spiritual Science, for we now stand at the starting point of an era in which people must attain—out of inner necessity, out of a recognized necessity—that which they are to win for their freedom. Of course, we could all say: We don’t care about what is to come. Then what has just been described would come to pass. That things can be different is a necessity—but a necessity that can be grasped only through insight. A free necessity, one might say; a true, pure necessity.

[ 36 ] Once again, the concepts of freedom and necessity clash intimately here. It might sometimes seem as if I had merely been playing with the words “dream” and “intoxication.” I truly have not merely been playing. One can demonstrate in detail—and I could cite many, many examples—how people today truly speak of external reality as if in a kind of dream, and speak of reality in general, not merely of external reality. For example, a certain objection is often raised against what we have to present in our field of anthroposophy, the Spiritual Science. A very popular remark is then: “Well, how can you prove that?” That is to say, people demand that what is put forward be proven by comparison with external reality. They assume that a concept is valid only if one can point to external reality to support it, and that the proof would consist in pointing to external reality. This is such an infinitely obvious idea that anyone who says, “Well, of course it depends on being able to prove that a concept corresponds to an external reality in the external world,” will consider themselves a great logician.

[ 37 ] It is very easy to point out that this is not high logic, but rather the logic of a dream. I usually respond when such things are said: You cannot prove reality even in the realm of the external sensory world, because if someone has never seen a whale in their life, you could never prove from logic alone that a whale exists, could you? Demonstrating reality is something entirely different from what one could prove. That could only apply in dream logic. I can put it even more clearly. Suppose I paint a portrait of a living person, and someone makes the judgment of reality: this portrait is very lifelike. And now he wants to explain to me why. So he says: Yes, the portrait is lifelike for the reason that, when I compare the portrait and the person, one looks exactly like the other. The correspondence with reality is what makes it a likeness. — The correspondence with external reality is what makes it a likeness? Why does he say: “The picture is a likeness”? Because it corresponds to external reality. External reality is the truth. Now let’s imagine that the person depicted dies, and thirty years later we look at the portrait. Is it no longer similar after thirty years simply because it no longer corresponds to external reality? The person is no longer there. Let’s assume he was cremated long ago. Does similarity depend on whether external reality exists? Not if we think clearly. As for dream thinking, one could say that it boils down to proving something by demonstrating external reality. This is true only for dream thinking, for dream logic. For in truth, the fact that a person passes from existence into nonexistence does not cause an image made of him to shift from resemblance to dissimilarity.

[ 38 ] You see that many things can become a necessity if one first wants to set logic straight, especially since one finds everywhere in logical writings today that the truth of a concept consists in—or can be proven by—demonstrating its external reality in the physical world. But this definition of truth is in itself nonsense, and the nonsense becomes apparent simply by making such a comparison with a portrait, for example. For when one opens so-called scientific works today—not those concerned with pure science—they merely describe; and if one remains within the description, well, what harm is there in remaining in a mere dream? Anyone who merely wants to describe the outer dream of life and makes no claim to forming a worldview may do so. But anyone who builds a worldview on this is presenting a dream-worldview. And you can see this: wherever this transition is made today, you will mostly find dream philosophy. It is quite grotesque how people cannot think—that is, cannot think in such a way that their thinking is immersed in that which it is supposed to be immersed in. So I copied a sentence from page 208 of these lectures by Prof. Ziehen, in which he specifically wants to draw attention to the fact that one cannot arrive at the will that underlies an action. He says: “Thinking consists of a series of representations, and the psychological”—that is, the soul— “in an action there is also a series of representations, which has the particular characteristic that its final link is a representation of movement.”

[ 39 ] So there’s the clock. The will is switched off, isn’t it? I see the clock. That is now a mental image. The will is not present; I see the clock. This clock affects me in some way by setting the cerebral cortex in motion and, from the cerebral cortex, passing into some motor zone, as physiology explains. So that’s what it comes down to. That is the mental image of movement. First I have a mental image of the clock, and this is followed by the act of imagining the movement—not through an act of the will, but solely through the mental image of movement, the mental image of the movement itself. “I have only a series of mental images,” says Ziehen. “Thinking consists of a series of mental images, and the psychological aspect of an action is also a series of mental images. The will is unquestionably excluded. It is not involved at all; rather, I first observe the clock and then observe the movement of my hand. That is all there is to it.”

[ 40 ] You can discover the logic behind this by translating this sentence into another. You can, in fact, say the following: Thinking consists of a series of representations. So, I’m still fully present here. And the mental image involved in observing a machine is simply a series of mental images, with the sole distinction that its final link is the mental image of a moving machine. — There you have exactly the same thing. You’ve merely eliminated the machine’s driving force. You’ve simply appended the mental image of the moving machine to what you were thinking before.

[ 41 ] This is the nature of this dream logic. Of course, when it comes to the external world, a person who operates according to dream logic still accepts that there are certain impulses at work. But when it comes to the inner world, they no longer accept this, because they want to shut down the will. Thus, the entire book is permeated by this kind of dream logic. It is permeated throughout by what can be characterized as follows: it shuts down the will. But then it also shuts down the ego, and that is interesting. For the ego is, in fact, nothing other than a series of ideas. This is discussed explicitly in a specific passage, explaining how the ego is merely a series of ideas.

[ 42 ] Here’s something interesting that can happen to you. Please forgive me for telling you—I might say—about the most intimate secrets of preparing for a lecture like today’s. After all, I had to give today’s lecture. I didn’t want to simply present what I’ve been explaining to you from a broad perspective; rather, I wanted to draw your attention to a specific case. To do that, of course, I had to take up this book and study it thoroughly once again. By then, I had finished studying it. Naturally, I cannot read the entire book to you, but must limit myself to individual passages that I will bring up. Now, I wanted to show you how the current, dreamlike scientific worldview cannot account for the will—how the will is truly absent. I have shown you this using this book and its author. Then I wanted to draw your attention in particular to what the author in question has said about the will—that is, what he says against the will. Now I’ll look in the back of the book: “Will”—ah, page 205 ff. So you take that, go back again, and see what the author says there about the will. But I’ve also told you today that the will within the “I” can initially only be perceived in relation to the physical world, so that when we speak of the true “I,” we must actually speak of the “willing I.” So I would also have to show you how someone who has merely a dreamlike view of nature based on the natural sciences speaks of the “I” on his own initiative. I’ve already read you a passage showing that he simply denies the will: the concept of movement—the will is excluded. Now I’d also like to quickly read you something else he says about the “I.” I’ll turn to the index again: I — “I” doesn’t appear at all! That is, of course, entirely consistent. So we naturally have a book on physiological psychology—that is, a book on the study of the soul—but the “I” doesn’t appear in it! There is no reference to it in the index at all, and if you go through the book, you will also see that while the mental image of the “I” does appear—which is, of course, a mental image—he does acknowledge mental images; to him, they are merely another word for mechanical processes of the brain. But the “I” as such does not appear at all; it is excluded.

[ 43 ] It is, then, indeed an ideal to eliminate the “I.” But if humanity leaves itself to the mercy of nature, the “I” will in fact be eliminated altogether during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch; for when the impulses of will that arise from the center of one’s own being are absent, there will be little talk of an “I.” In the fifth epoch, human beings had to rise to the level of an “I.” But this “I” could be lost to them again if they do not truly seek it through inner effort. Anyone who knows anything at all about such matters in the world can tell you how many people, unfortunately, one already encounters today who speak of feeling a weakening of their “I.” How many people today already do not know what to do with themselves because they do not know how to fill the nature of their soul with spiritual content in a concrete way. This is a chapter we face as one of unspeakable inner soul anguish, which, for example, is more prevalent in our present time than is commonly believed. For the number of people is growing ever larger who face the world at a loss precisely because they cannot find within themselves the impulses to carry this “I” through the world of appearances.

[ 44 ] This, in turn, is connected to what I have already explained here on several occasions: that in earlier times it was necessary for people to first develop a mental image of the “I,” and we are now in an era where people are just beginning to develop a proper mental image of the “I.” As you know, Latin, as the language of the fourth epoch, only rarely referred to the “ego.” People did not yet speak of the “I”; rather, it was still contained within the verb. The more world development—including in languages—approached the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the more the “I” became distinct. Through the Christ impulse, this “I” is to be found in an appropriate way. And the fact that within Central Europe this “I” connects most purely with the Christ impulse is linguistically expressed by the fact that in our “I,” through an inner spiritual necessity of progressive development, the initials of Christ are expressed: I-C-H, Jesus Christ.

[ 45 ] This may seem like a dream to those who wish to remain stagnant in the field of dream science today. But for those who awaken from this dream-like worldview, it is a great and significant truth. “I” expresses the human being’s connection with Jesus Christ. But human beings must preserve this “I” by filling it with the content of Spiritual Science. They will be able to fill it only by making freedom a necessity through Spiritual Science. Indeed, how could one have said in earlier times that recollection of past earthly lives would have been the norm for human beings? For future earthly lives, it will be the norm.

[ 46 ] As people within the fifth post-Atlantean epoch come to grasp and bring to life their “I,” it will become the norm that, as time goes on, more and more people will have recollections of their past earthly lives. One might just as well say: Spiritual Science is the proper preparation for recalling past earthly lives in the right way. But those who shy away from Spiritual Science will live with this recollection in such a way that they simply cannot bring it up into their souls. Something will be missing within them. That is to say, people will be divided into two classes. Some will know: When I turn to the innermost part of my soul, it leads me back to past lives on Earth. The others will feel an inner impulse that expresses itself as a longing. And something will refuse to surface; throughout the entire incarnation, something will refuse to surface, remaining like a concept one seeks but cannot find. This will be the result of a lack of preparation for recalling past lives on Earth.

[ 47 ] When we speak of these things, we are speaking of the real—indeed, of the real. One must first truly grasp the “I” through Spiritual Science if one is to remember it in later earthly lives. Can one really remember something else that one has never even formed a mental image of? Is it any wonder, then, that people cannot yet remember the “I,” since they have not yet created a mental image of it in earlier lifetimes? Everything can be understood through true logic. But of course, the dream-like logic of so-called monism in our time will always resist what must emerge from the true logic of Spiritual Science.