The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Blood and Nerves

[ 1 ] In spiritual science, we regard everything material, everything physical, as a manifestation of the spiritual. However, the question is always how, in each specific case, this or that material thing is to be regarded as a revelation of the spiritual. For the general statement that all material things are a revelation of the spiritual says nothing at all—at most, it is a facile philosophy for those who take the easy way out. For those who earnestly strive for knowledge, the task is always to recognize, in each individual material phenomenon that appears in the world, how it is a revelation of the spiritual. Now we do know that an ancient, yet ever-new maxim describes the human being as a microcosm. The human being first appears to us as a material phenomenon here in the physical world, and if we take this statement seriously—that human beings are a microcosm, a material being that, just as it appears to us, contains the mysteries of the entire cosmos—then it must be of particular value to us to examine precisely this material being, as human beings first appear to us in the physical world, to determine to what extent it is a revelation of the spiritual. And when one considers the material aspect of the human being, it becomes evident to anyone who approaches it thoughtfully—and one must think, if one is striving for knowledge—that there are two entirely different kinds of matter present in the human material being. Even ordinary, thoughtful observation reveals that there are two different types of matter, for these two—let us say—types of matter in the human physical being appear fundamentally different: the blood substance, the blood matter, and the nerve matter. Certainly, you might say that there are all sorts of other substances from an external point of view: muscle matter, bone matter, and so on. But as you may know, these are all essentially formed from the blood. And when one examines them more closely, one comes to understand how they arise from the blood, and this does not contradict the fact that, in the human physical nature, we are dealing with the blood substance, the blood material, and the nerve material.

[ 2 ] You can already discern a difference between the blood substance and the nervous substance in your intellectual contemplation, insofar as you need only consider how everything that belongs to the blood participates, as it were, from within, in the material processes of the human organism. Blood is indeed produced by external influences, yet within the human body, and in turn continues to produce what is necessary for the human being’s physical existence. In contrast, the most important nerves appear to you as extensions of the senses. If you take the eye, for example, you will find, moving backward, the optic nerve—an extension of the eye—which then descends into the broader nervous tissue of the brain. And so, in essence, all nerves are, in a sense, extensions of the sense organs. The processes that take place within them occur more or less as a result of external influences—that is, what acts upon the human being from the outside. One could say: Just as we have the two magnetic poles in the external world, just as we have positive and negative electricity, so too do we truly have two poles of the human physical being in the blood substance and the nerve substance. And these two types of substance—blood substance and nervous substance—are internally very, very different. However, when one examines a human being on the dissection table using the methods of modern anatomy and physiology, one places side by side that which derives directly from the blood and that which derives its structure from the outside—the nervous substance—and it appears as one substance next to another. Yet they are fundamentally different from one another. And if one traces life as it develops step by step, the great, significant difference between the blood substance and the nerve substance becomes apparent, and we could cite many examples from the very latest anatomy and physiology if we wanted to substantiate this difference—this polar opposition—in greater detail. But we shall refrain from doing so for now. We want to focus more on the spiritual-scientific aspect of the question.

[ 3 ] Here, blood—I am speaking of human blood—appears to us as that which has entered the human organism through processes that are, in particular, earthly processes. Blood is entirely an earthly entity. As you know, long, long before the Earth existed, human beings were prepared through their existence on Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. Blood does not yet contain within itself all that was prepared during those stages. The blood, as it flows through our veins today as human blood, has been added through the Earth organization. In contrast, the structure, the entire formation and development of the nervous system, contains what has long, long been prepared through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon processes—through the preliminary processes of our Earth organization.

[ 4 ] When the person who investigates this matter from a spiritual-scientific perspective turns his gaze, on the one hand, to the blood substance and, on the other hand, to the nervous substance, a tremendous difference between the two substances becomes apparent to him. The nervous substance is precisely that which is not earthly in the human being. The blood substance is, in every respect, that which is earthly in the human being. The nervous substance has its origin—its processual origin—entirely in events that predate the formation of the Earth. The blood substance, with all that surges and weaves within it, has its origin entirely in earthly processes. One could say that our nervous substance is such that it is actually not of this Earth at all; it is woven into us as something cosmic, something extraterrestrial; it is related to the cosmos. Blood, on the other hand, is entirely connected to the earthly realm. Yet our nervous substance has been transplanted into the earthly realm; it exists here on Earth, for we humans, as material beings, walk upon the physical Earth. We all carry within our nervous substance something that is actually of extraterrestrial origin and has been transplanted onto Earth. This is an extraordinarily important fact. For our nervous substance, as it lies within us, is actually dead. That is why you need only open any of the most common contemporary books on physiology or anatomy, and you will see that the nervous substance, as a substance, is the most durable part of the human being, the most unchanging, the part that—just like the blood—is least subject to immediate mechanical, external influences. It is subject to the influences of sensory perceptions, but not to direct mechanical influences. All of this stems from the fact that our nervous substance is, by its very origin, a living substance; but because we, as earthly human beings, carry it within us, it is dead. One could say—if this were not paradoxical, but it is, yet despite being paradoxical, it is true in a spiritual sense—that if one could take nervous substance and carry it up to where earthly forces no longer act, then nervous substance would be a wonderfully living, vibrating being! This nervous substance is, so to speak, destined for life in heaven, in all that is extraterrestrial, and it dies to the degree of lifelessness it exhibits within our organism simply by being brought into the sphere of the earthly. This is something most remarkable. We carry within us this nervous substance, which is actually cosmically alive and only earthly dead. As I said, if one were to take a small piece of nervous substance and carry it up to where the Earth no longer exerts its influence, one would have a wondrous, living, luminous substance that would immediately revert to that quiet, lifeless state in which it resides within us when brought into the Earth’s sphere. We are thus dealing in our nervous substance with something that is cosmically alive and earthly dead.

[ 5 ] We do, in fact, carry something extraterrestrial within our nervous system. This is also expressed very well symbolically. Perhaps some of you may still recall that I once gave a lecture here on anthroposophy in the narrower sense. In that lecture, I listed the human senses. Usually, only five senses are distinguished; at that time, we listed twelve. Human beings have twelve senses if one truly counts everything that can be called a sense. And the senses are, after all, nothing other than that to which the nerves lead—or, more accurately, from which the nerves emanate and extend inward—so that we essentially have twelve senses, and from these twelve senses the nerves extend inward like little trees. This is because, in our nervous system—insofar as it pertains to the external senses—a celestial phenomenon is expressed: the passage of the Sun through the twelve constellations. This relationship of the Sun’s passage through the twelve constellations is expressed symbolically—but as a real symbol—in the relationship of our entire nervous system to the twelve individual senses. From this you can see that what exists cosmically on the outside—in the sun’s passage through the twelve constellations—we truly carry within us spatially in the relationship of our entire nervous system to the twelve senses. And again, if you consider the nervous system that lies deeper within, which belongs to the spinal cord, we have rings stacked one upon another in the spine, and the nerve cord runs through them. These rings truly correspond to the months, to the Moon’s orbit around the Earth, so that in this arrangement as well, there is always something—corresponding to a day in the month—associated with each nerve and its opening in the ring of the spine. Yet another celestial correspondence! The relationship of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth is expressed in a real-symbolic way in what we carry within us as the relationship of our internal nerves to the spinal cord. Insofar as we are composed of nervous tissue, we are entirely built from the heavens, from the cosmos outside, and only those who can perceive in it a reflection of the entire starry sky truly understand this wondrous arrangement of nervous tissue within us. Human beings truly carry within themselves an image of the entire starry sky in the tree-like arrangement of their nervous tissue, and those forces that flow outward from star to star—which express themselves in the celestial cycle—truly flow, though in a dormant state and stored within us, through our nervous system. And just as we can see in so many things how, in essence, the entire universe is expressed in the human being, so too can we see this in the connection between the structure of the entire cosmos outside the Earth and the structure of our nervous system. If we can say that the nervous system is built for the heavens, then it is built alive for the heavens and has become dormant within us by virtue of being in the sphere of the Earth.

[ 6 ] We must say something quite different about our blood. It is entirely earthly, and the processes that take place in the blood—given the inner nature of the entire circulatory system—should, in fact, be nothing but earthly processes. The peculiarity of earthly processes, however, is that they are precisely not alive. The mineral kingdom, as we know, is what has come into being on Earth—the lifeless kingdom. And the element of blood within us corresponds entirely to this lifeless kingdom. True, this blood lives as long as it is within us, but it is not destined for life by virtue of its inner earthly nature—that is the peculiarity—but rather, it receives its life through its connection to that which is extraterrestrial within the human being. While the nervous system is actually destined for life in the cosmos outside us—extraterrestrially—and is dead within us, the blood is destined to be dead within us and receives life from outside. The nervous system, so to speak, transfers its life to the blood, and thus the nervous system is relatively dead, while the blood is relatively alive. Just as the nervous system possesses cosmic life and earthly death, so too does the blood, conversely, possess earthly death and a borrowed, imposed cosmic life. Life does not originate from our Earth at all. Therefore, the nervous system must, in a sense, take on death so that it can become earthly, and the blood must become alive so that the human being, insofar as he is earthly substance, can turn toward the extraterrestrial world.

[ 7 ] But here, I would say, what we have always had to take in through spiritual science becomes quite serious. For in fact we must say: We carry the nervous substance within us; it is destined for life by its very nature, but it is dead. Why is it dead? Because it has been transferred to Earth. Death—you need only look it up in a series of lectures I once gave in Munich—is actually the realm of Ahriman. Thus, in our nervous system, because it has been killed by the earthly sphere, we carry the Ahrimanic within us. And in the blood—which is made alive even though by its very nature it is destined for death, that is, for mere chemical and physical processes—we carry the Luciferic within us. Because the nervous system is dead, Ahriman can be within us; because the blood is alive, Lucifer can be within us. You can now see how significantly these two substances contrast with one another, how they relate to each other in a polar manner, like the North and South Poles.

[ 8 ] Now let us cast our minds outward into the extraterrestrial realm and transform what we recognize through spiritual science not into an abstract theory, but into something living that can touch our feelings and our sensibilities. Then let us look up into outer space, into the cosmos, and say to ourselves: Out there is the spirit that could actually dwell in our nervous system if our nervous system had not descended to Earth. Out there is the spirit—we sense it—filling the universe, the spirit that belongs to our nervous system. And again, as we turn our thoughts to our blood, we say to ourselves: We carry this blood within us; by its very nature, it is actually destined for mere physical and chemical processes, merely to be transformed by oxygen in the way you can find described in anatomy and physiology. But because it lives within us, it shares in the life of the universe. Yet it is, first and foremost, Luciferic life.

[ 9 ] And now, my dear friends, let us recall quite deeply—and with great emotional depth and sensitivity—various things that have run like a common thread through many of our reflections. If we recall everything we have said about the descent of the Christ from the spheres of the worlds into our earthly sphere, we will be able to connect what may thus arise in our memory with the thoughts that have just been expressed. We do, after all, originate from this cosmos, from this universe. Once, in the Lemurian epoch—or indeed, in the course of Earth’s evolution—we descended and linked our evolution to that of the Earth. But by entrusting our nervous system to the Earth’s evolution, we entrusted it to the process of becoming dead, and we left its life behind in the higher realms. This life that we left behind is the very same life that later came forth in the Christ Being. The life of our nerves—which we do not carry within us, which we could not carry within us from the very beginning of our earthly existence—came forth in the Christ Being. And what did it have to take hold of in earthly existence? It had to take hold of the blood! Hence the many references to the mystery of blood. That which is separated within us—in that the nervous system lost its cosmic life and the blood gained a cosmic life, so that life became death and death became life—achieved a new connection through the fact that that which does not live in our earthly nervous system descended to us from the cosmos, became human, entered into the blood, while the blood united with the Earth, as I have explained in earlier lectures. And we, as human beings, can balance the polar opposition between our nervous system and our blood system through participation in the Christ Mystery.

[ 10 ] You see, people carry this contradiction within themselves, and this contradiction manifests itself in a wide variety of ways. For example, there is an external science that has now, in a sense, found its culmination and its purpose in the natural sciences. Natural science speaks of the world as being composed of atoms. These atoms, of which natural science speaks, are pure fantasy. They do not exist anywhere out there. But why, then, does humanity speak of atoms? Because within themselves, they have constructed their nervous system out of tiny spheres, and they project this outward. The atomistic world out there is nothing other than the nervous system projected outward. Human beings themselves project themselves outward into the world, conceiving it as composed of atoms, and their own nervous system as composed of individual ganglion spheres. That is why science will always strive to be atomistic, for it arises from the nervous substance. Opposed to science is everything that constitutes mysticism, religion, and so on—that which arises from the blood. This does not seek atomism; it seeks to see unity everywhere. These two opposites are in conflict in the world. One can only truly understand this conflict when one realizes that it is the inner conflict within human nature between nervous substance and blood substance. There would be no conflict in the world between science and religion if there were not a conflict within human nature between nervous substance and blood substance.

[ 11 ] Balance is achieved by uniting in the right way with that which, as the Christ Being, has been pulsing through the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha. Every feeling, every experience we can have in connection with this Mystery of Golgotha contributes to this balance. People today have not yet progressed very far in terms of this balancing, but our striving must be directed toward it. Even within our own circle, we very often observe how the described contrast manifests itself in one direction or the other. There are many among us who listen to the teachings of anthroposophy and regard them as an external science, so that in the minds of many, anthroposophy is, in a sense, no different from external science. But anthroposophy is only truly understood when it is not merely grasped with the head, but when it inspires enthusiasm in us in every one of its expressions, when it lives within us in such a way that it makes the transition from the nervous system to the circulatory system. Only when we can warm to the truths contained in anthroposophy do we truly understand them. As long as we grasp them merely in the abstract—by studying them, as it were, like multiplication tables, an arithmetic book, a set of regulations, or a cookbook—we do not understand them. Nor do we understand them if we study anthroposophy as we would chemistry or botany. We understand them only when they warm our hearts, when they fill us with the life that reigns within them. Christ once said, “I am with you until the end of the age.” And he is not merely a dead man; he is among us as a living being, and he reveals himself constantly. And only those who are so short-sighted that they fear these revelations say we should stick to what has always been accepted. But those who are not cowards know that Christ is always revealing Himself. That is why we may receive what He reveals as anthroposophy as a true revelation of Christ. — Often, my dear friends, I am asked by our members: How do I connect with the Christ? — It is a naive question! For everything we can strive for, every line we read from our anthroposophical science, is a way of entering into a relationship with the Christ. In a sense, we do nothing else at all. And anyone who, on top of that, seeks a special way of connecting with Christ is merely expressing, in a naive way, that they would actually like to avoid the somewhat uncomfortable path of studying or reading something.

[ 12 ] But there is something else you can see from this line of thought. This line of thought began, I would say, in a purely external, scientific way—in an anatomical and physiological sense. We began with a materialistic view of the human being, and now we find the transition to the highest knowledge that can be offered to human beings on earth: to Christology. No other science can provide you with this transition. Spiritual science shows you how our nervous substance has lost something by becoming earthly substance. But where is that which our nervous substance has lost? When Jesus of Nazareth was thirty years old, Christ entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth and went through the Mystery of Golgotha! Just try for a moment to truly let this thought sink in. That which is lacking in our nervous system—because we are earthly human beings—and which is filled only by Ahrimanic forces, confronts us there in the Mystery of Golgotha; and our human task is to absorb it into our blood, to “Christianize” the Luciferic within our blood, and to shape our enthusiasm so that it lives within us. For everything we can conceive in abstract thought is bound to nervous substance; everything that lives within us as feeling, as mood, as enthusiasm, as a state of mind, is bound to the blood. Just as the relationship between nervous substance and blood substance exists in the organism, so too does the relationship in the soul between thinking—which proceeds in abstractions, in “cold thoughts,” as one says— and the enthusiasm into which we can be transported when things do not remain mere cold thoughts for us, when we can be warmed by the spirit—something we must, of course, first train ourselves to do in life.

[ 13 ] And now, you see, I would like to look—spiritually and physiologically—into what took place with the Mystery of Golgotha. What humanity left behind has followed it, and it is to permeate its soul once more, because it was not meant to permeate its body at the beginning of its earthly existence. Had it permeated him at the beginning of earthly existence, it would have embodied him, and he would have become an automaton of the spirit. But as it is, he first completed his development for a time in the course of earthly existence, and only then was he to be permeated by what was not meant to embody him from the very beginning. This is the great, wondrous connection that reveals to us, right down into the material realm, the active power of the spiritual—not merely that general spirituality of which vague pantheism so readily speaks, but the concrete spirituality that we see unfolding through the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what I meant when I said that the general truth: All matter is a revelation of the spirit — nothing particularly special is being said. We gain true understanding only when we know, in specific terms, how the spiritual can reveal itself in individual material existence. You see, when we take what external science offers today, it contains a whole wealth of things that lie there as material, waiting to be permeated by spiritual understanding. They can be so deeply permeated by spiritual understanding that even the most material of sciences will become connected with Christology. But we are living in an age in which it is difficult for people to find the path that, so to speak, connects the nervous system and the circulatory system.

[ 14 ] That is why I have shown you, through a series of reflections, how far our age is removed from such a spiritual conception of the world. Just last time, I showed you, using a specific example, how even someone who has strived for the spiritual, Hermann Bahr, has only now—after turning fifty—managed to achieve the most elementary approach to the spiritual, while grotesque phenomena, so to speak, dominate our spiritual life, such as that philosophy professor in Czernowitz, from whom I read you a quote. So that we do not lose sight of it, I will read this quote to you once more: “We have no more philosophy than an animal, and only our frantic attempts to arrive at a philosophy, and our ultimate resignation to ignorance, distinguish us from animals.” — That is the quintessence of this philosophy, but one cannot really call it philosophy, for “man has no more philosophy than an animal,” according to the statement of this professor of philosophy. This means that we have reached a point today where there are fully tenured professors of philosophy who make it their mission to portray philosophy as ridiculous nonsense. Here you notice it when someone goes that far. Most other philosophers do it too, of course, but they don’t make it so obvious. And the truth applies not only to philosophers; it also applies to other people who understand as little about their task as this philosopher does about his philosophy—so that they ruin as much of what they are hired to do as this philosopher ruins philosophy. But otherwise, you don’t really notice it unless someone presents it to people as cynically as this philosopher—Richard Wahle, a philosopher employed as a professor of philosophy to destroy philosophy—does.

[ 15 ] That is why it is necessary—and to understand this necessity, you need only recall a lecture I gave here a few weeks ago—to draw a little on the era of European spiritual life, when people attempted, albeit not yet with today’s methods of spiritual science, to draw close to the spirit. For this reason, especially in these difficult times, I have given the lectures from past winters and have now compiled them into a book that will soon be completed, The Riddle of Man, which brings together the thinking, insight, and reflection of a number of 19th-century thinkers who were still striving toward the spiritual, even if not yet with the methods of today’s spiritual science. But in this book I have tried to show how these thinkers strove toward the Spirit, even if they could not yet reach it. It remains to be seen whether this very book, The Riddle of Man—which compiles the lectures from the past few winters—will, despite being written as simply as possible, prove too difficult for some, causing them to stop at the point of purchase, which is the less important matter. The more important thing is reading it! Time will tell whether this book, which was truly written to serve our times, will have an impact—whether it will find its way into people’s souls. It is a book that anyone can use, in a sense, to provide those outside our circle with proof that spiritual science stands as a demand of the finest minds of the recent past—that it is not something arising merely from a certain arbitrariness, but is truly a demand of the finest minds.

[ 16 ] And so I would like to suggest that we read some of the great and significant works that were so beautifully and intellectually brought to light by the minds of the West over the course of the 19th century. But it is quite strange how all these endeavors turn out. Among the greatest—I have pointed this out in another context; in this book it was not necessary to return to it again—are Schiller’s philosophical writings, for example, the letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man.” One can say that whoever has read these with inner engagement has done an extraordinary amount for the life of their soul. Various people have, in fact, made an effort to draw people’s attention to Schiller’s philosophical writings. Deinhardt was one such person—Heinrich Deinhardt, who lived in Vienna. He wrote a beautiful, extraordinarily insightful little book about Schiller’s worldview in the 1860s. I don’t think you can find it anywhere; it was pulped long ago—at most, there might be a stray, secondhand copy somewhere—because no one has read what Deinhardt wrote about Schiller, which is among the best that has ever been written about Schiller! But the man was a forgotten teacher in Vienna who had the misfortune of breaking his leg once, and, even though he was carefully tended to, he could not recover because he was so poorly nourished. The man wrote one of the best books on Schiller—a book that is certainly better than all the numerous nonsense writings that were later written about Schiller—but he had to starve to death. That’s just how it goes.

[ 17 ] With this book of mine, I wish to make another attempt to bring figures such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Troxler, Planck, Preuß, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, and a few others to life in our present day. What they contain is a completely different kind of nourishment for the soul than what so many people today are seeking—people who are searching quite honestly, but are misguided. How it pained one’s heart to see, time and again, how people searching in good faith turned to this or that in order to find nourishment for their souls, to find a path into the spiritual world. Had they turned to writings such as Schelling’s Clara or Bruno, they could have gained infinite nourishment for the soul—admittedly with some effort, but that does one good! A certain naïve spiritual quest had indeed become more and more vibrant in recent times, but the highest level people managed to reach in wider circles was something like Ralph Waldo Trine’s “soul sauce” or the like, or that spiritual “soul sauce” that arises when one dresses up some form of Buddhism, Brahmanism, or the like with a sauce. That’s where one could have the strangest experiences. I knew a very dear person—he died recently here in Berlin—who, when I first published the writings I had devoted to the interpretation of Goethe, was enthusiastic about those writings at the time. Then he grew older and—from which you can see that his enthusiasm was just a flash in the pan—has, especially in recent times, translated a whole host of such “spiritual sauce” works from American and British English into German—not exactly Ralph Waldo Trine, but others. After all, for a long time here in Europe, we needed American and British spiritual nourishment.

[ 18 ] Let us simply feel what needs to be done in order to live up to this very feeling. In these writings, and also in the short text that is already here, “The Task of Spiritual Science,” I attempted to show what can be offered even to those who stand outside our circle. Of course, this very text, “The Task of Spiritual Science,” can be given to people outside our circle, and it remains to be seen whether there is an understanding of the task that falls specifically to those who grasp the necessity of incorporating spiritual scientific truths into our present time. Indeed, over the course of time, I have not merely uttered this or that disparaging remark—which I have addressed to you especially during these difficult times—but I have substantiated the points, explained them in detail, and provided evidence for this or that. I have not merely told you that philosophers are homunculi; rather, just last time I cited a particularly characteristic statement—and many others besides—to give you an idea of how things stand, and how, in this first third of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, everything tends toward homunculism and seeks to develop in the direction of spiritual emptiness. We must increasingly see through what you will find discussed in the new book: the difference between a merely correct, logically correct concept and a concept that corresponds to reality. A logically correct concept need not necessarily correspond to reality. And I tried in particular to bring out what thinking in accordance with reality is. So much of the misery in our spiritual life stems from the fact that people believe that if they can think something logically, then it is already in accordance with reality. But thinking in accordance with reality is something other than merely correct thinking. If you see a tree trunk lying here: it is an external reality. When you think of it—this tree trunk—it is not a reality, for it cannot exist as such. It must contain within itself the shoots that develop into branches, leaves, and blossoms. It is a real lie; it is a “real unreality,” this tree trunk, because the image it presents to you cannot be there. Only the person who feels—by thinking of a tree trunk—that he is thinking of something unreal thinks in accordance with reality. And so most of today’s sciences consist of thoughts about unrealities. Geology today conceives of the Earth as purely mineral. But this “mineral nature” of the Earth does not exist at all; it does not exist in and of itself, any more than a tree trunk exists in and of itself; for the mineral kingdom of the Earth already contains plants, animals, and humans within itself, and only when one conceives of the latter in conjunction with the mineral does one conceive of reality. Geology is a completely unreal science.

[ 19 ] One distinctive feature of this book is that I attempted to elaborate on the concept of reality. The other distinctive feature is that I wanted to provide, at least, the initial perspectives of an imaginative way of thinking toward which people will have to evolve. You will find all sorts of comparisons in the book that is about to be published, in that it does not proceed through abstract logical conceptualizations, but rather states: If, for example, someone conceives of the atomistic, natural-scientific worldview, it is as if they were demanding that what natural science conceives of be real—as if, when painting a person, they believed that the painted person could then walk around. — It is precisely this book that has sought to proceed using such figurative representations. And we shall see whether this distinctive style is noticed. A start has been made with a particular mode of presentation that is not easily found elsewhere at the present time.

[ 20 ] But we must be absolutely clear about just how far removed the present, in essence, is from an unbiased acceptance of these things. The present—as I have often said—is as prone to blindly trusting authority as anything else. It fails to look at what, let’s say, lies behind those authorities. Today, authorities are judged by the titles and offices they hold, but what lies behind them—that is what really matters. I’d like to give you a nice example, one that was recounted recently, of just how far homunculism has already advanced in our time, and how far thinking has progressed into pure superficiality. A man—quite nice and well-meaning, by the way; he is against homunculism, even if he doesn’t know what to put in its place—cites an interesting example of what the homunculi of our time consider to be truly great and significant. There are already many today who worship technology as their god; I cited specific examples here a few weeks ago. But as evidence of just how powerful the conviction in the divinity of technology already was, let the following monstrosity be cited: the monstrous statement of a serious man of mature age, a physician and family man, who—as we are told—excels or specializes in nothing, and who therefore possesses all the qualifications to render a judgment grounded in sound common sense. When the world of newspapers was thrown into deep amazement before the war by the daring flight of the French aviator Pégoud, that man—who thus offered a judgment entirely in the spirit of the times, for he is a “doctor, a family man, and outstanding in nothing,” and therefore possesses all the qualifications for sound, common-sense judgment—spoke very seriously and with firm pathos about the cultural value of the flying machine: “A single screw from Pégoud’s flying machine is more important than all the philosophy of Kant and Schiller, and, if you will, than all the philosophies of all time.” Do not think that this is such a rare statement! This is precisely the mindset that dominates many people today, and one that is increasingly taking shape as a prevailing attitude.

[ 21 ] People had, of course, been making observations in this field for quite some time. It has now been more than twenty years since I gave a series of public lectures; at that time, a lady invited me to give lectures on Goethe in her salon. I did so at the time, for she had gathered a very large audience from her circle. There I spoke about Goethe’s Faust and several other of Goethe’s plays. The women were receptive enough, but the men mostly said: “That’s not drama—Faust is a science!” — They meant, in fact, that in the theater one should see Blumenthal and not Goethe’s Faust. — Yes, it’s true that in the present day we’re heading toward things that ultimately culminate in a judgment such as the one just read to you. You see, things are moving quickly these days. For example, these memoirs—not written by the author himself, but transcribed by someone else, so one can’t really call them memoirs—have been published by a recently deceased, world-renowned scholar of natural history. It is certainly interesting to reflect on one of the sayings of this world-famous man—I don’t even want to mention his name; you’d be amazed at just how world-famous he is. So this man was, as I said, one of the most famous people of our time, a giant in his field, and of course his greatness is in no way to be disputed. But one of his sayings is: “Philosophy is none of my business. It makes no difference to me whether the sun revolves around the earth or the earth around the sun. That would only interest me if I were involved in astronomy.” — Here is a man who has given the world a medical preparation that everyone is talking about, who has concerned himself with nothing but this narrowest of fields, and who calmly admits that it does not interest him in the least whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or the Sun revolves around the Earth; he would only concern himself with that if he were an astronomer. It is the same man—and I truly have no intention of slandering or disparaging anyone, for he is undoubtedly a man of well-deserved fame in his field—who had someone play the piano for him in the evenings, but viewed the music in such a way that it “carries you away” and thus allows one to concentrate better on one’s thoughts, so that one actually hears nothing of it. So every evening he had his wife play music for him on the piano. He didn’t understand a thing about it; he simply enjoyed being carried away in this way. Only on Saturdays did he not have her play for him, for on those days he was waiting for something more important. That was when the very thing he was eagerly awaiting always arrived: a detective novel, a truly spine-chilling one, in a dreadful cover. And he read it with particular delight. He liked that even better than the piano playing, which is why he didn’t have her play for him on Saturdays. A detective novel, you know, the kind that comes through door-to-door salesmen—they usually come up the other side of the staircase, not through the front entrance! As I said, this isn’t mentioned to criticize anyone, but to show what our times are like. And we must bear in mind: these authorities stand behind laboratory tables, behind dissection tables; ultimately, it is this spirit that animates what may, of course, be outwardly commendable, but which must lead to the gradual transformation of our entire culture—not just our intellectual culture, but our entire culture—into technicism, that is, into homunculism. We must recognize this danger, and based on this recognition, we must try to find the paths through which the spirit can reach people. The things that have been said here over the course of this winter—and which I believe would do well to penetrate some souls—have been said not out of subjective bias in favor of spiritual science, but out of an awareness of its necessary significance for the present.

[ 22 ] We'll probably still be here together next Tuesday, since the book will likely take another eight days to finish.