The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] I will continue, in a more aphoristic form, to share further thoughts with you on the topic we have been exploring for weeks now—one that I have always described to you by saying: The great difficulty in questions of worldview lies now—and I always emphasize this “now”—in the fact that, from the perspective of contemporary views, it becomes difficult for people to build a bridge between what is called idealism and what can be described as a view of the natural order of things. When modern man attempts to build such a bridge—when he tries to clarify for himself how, for example, moral ideas—if we take one group out of the totality of ideas— —not externally, but in an inner, real sense—relate to the conceptions and ideas one develops regarding the course of the causal natural order, they fall into a kind of worldview dualism, as one might express it in the context of the human sciences. We have emphasized this time and again. People try to build such a bridge, but they do not succeed.

[ 2 ] It will be easier for us to focus precisely on what is relevant to this question if we compare this modern dualism with what existed in antiquity—I mean in the pre-Christian era, as we speak of the pre-Christian era—as something similar. What was similar to our modern dualism in ancient times was, for humanity, something that can be called fatalism. Up until the 2nd and 3rd centuries B.C., and even more so later on—though it became increasingly anachronistic—people were virtually compelled to fall into fatalism. And, fundamentally, fatalism also lies at the root of the Greek worldview. In more recent times, all fatalism is actually anachronistic; that is to say, it no longer belongs in the present. One might say that the people of ancient times were led astray into fatalism, while the people of more recent times—and especially those of the present—are led astray into dualism.

[ 3 ] Now let us try to understand why ancient people were so prone to fatalism. We know, of course, that the state of the human soul has changed radically in the course of evolution, and it is a superstition to assume, as conventional Darwinism does, a merely gradual development. A radical transformation has taken place in the state of the soul, and in this regard, history is, above all, a fable convenue. The mental constitution of ancient people was such that what is natural never actually presented itself to them in the same way it presents itself to people today; nor, conversely, did the spiritual present itself to them in such a conceptual or imaginative way as it does to people today. Everything that ancient people conceived of nature, they conceived in such a way that they imagined the natural intertwined with the spiritual; and in turn, they conceived the spiritual by drawing images from the course of nature for their imagination. The ancient religious teachings are, in fact, thoroughly imbued—as myths—with ideas drawn from sensory nature. When people spoke of nature, they did not speak as we do today—so dryly, so abstractly—but rather spoke of elemental spirituality, of beings that sustain and bring about natural phenomena.

[ 4 ] This was not due to a childlike simplicity of expression, but rather to a genuine perspective, to a genuine state of mind. The ancient person did not view nature as we do under the influence of modern science—even if we are not scientists; nor did he view his spiritual life as abstractly, as merely conceptual, as we are compelled to view it today. Through this intermingling of nature and spirit, human beings carried themselves into fatalism; for since, in the manner recently described, natural phenomena were imbued with spiritual acts for human beings, it went without saying that all life was intended in an external sense, just as human actions are intended. It was, admittedly, a metaphor, but ancient man had no other; and this inevitably leads to the delusion of fatalism.

[ 5 ] Over time, a different state of mind has emerged. We have already characterized this change in the state of mind from a wide variety of perspectives; today we want to examine it from a very specific perspective. Today we want to pose the following question—one that we can answer only on the basis of everything we have set before our souls in the previous lectures: What, in objective terms, does a person actually see when observing the order of nature, and what, in objective terms, does a person inwardly conceive when speaking of the spirit today? I am not speaking here of how we speak of the spirit in spiritual science, but rather of how the general consciousness of humanity today speaks of the spirit, with more or less subtle nuances.

[ 6 ] We know, of course, that even if a person is not a theorist—we will set theorists aside for now—when he or she seeks to grasp the natural order today, he or she instinctively turns to the interplay of substances and forces. I am not speaking here of the scientific theories of matter and forces, but rather of how the average person today conceives of nature: in their ideas about nature, they instinctively base their views on material and force-driven processes underlying natural phenomena. This leads people—when they examine things, when they truly examine things objectively, as we well know—into an illusion. For in reality, everything that can be said in such contexts about what matter and forces are is nothing but illusion. The foundation of today’s view of nature is illusion. This is not based solely on a flaw in thinking; it is simply based on the constitution of the soul today, on the current state of the soul. We no longer speak, as the Indian worldview does, of Maya or illusion, because we do not see through the reality of ordinary life. We do not see through this reality, so that when we imagine nature, we are actually always living in illusion. That is one thing.

[ 7 ] The other question is: What about today’s view of the spirit? This contemporary view of the spirit is something that hovers very, very much in the realm of abstractions. You can best understand this by examining one philosophy or another. It really doesn’t matter which philosophy you choose. You can take a philosophy as half-confused and mired in verbal quibbling as Eucken’s; you can take one resting on somewhat more solid foundations, like Liebmann’s; you can engage with one that speaks more to popular consciousness, such as Schopenhauer’s, and so on: in contemporary philosophies and worldviews, there is talk of “spirit”; if the philosophies are not purely positivist, like Comte’s, which we recently examined, and if they are not materialist, then philosophers still speak of “spirit.” But what is it that these philosophies speak of, and what is called “spirit” from the perspective of today’s psychological constitution? Just as what human beings cast like a net through natural phenomena—by assuming a certain material and energetic order that turns the view of nature into an illusion—so, too, everything that is said today in common conceptions about the spirit is, at its core, a hallucination, and the prevailing philosophies are actually nothing more than a sum of unnoticed hallucinations. Essentially, human beings today are constituted in such a way that, when they look toward nature, their soul hovers between illusion, and when they look toward the spirit, between hallucination. What philosophers dream of regarding the spirit—by attempting to construct a certain conception of the spirit purely from concepts—is actually nothing more than a sum of subtle hallucinations; subtle, to be sure, but hallucinations nonetheless. These are constructs that arise from within the human being for reasons we do not wish to discuss today, and as such, they have nothing to do with reality proper.

[ 8 ] I have often drawn your attention to such phenomena in the real world that clearly show that everything people can imagine need not have much to do with reality. To substantiate this, I have pointed out that, for example, in their naivety, a number of philosophers today speak of human beings as being composed of body and soul. Even the world-famous philosophy of Wundt speaks of body and soul and claims to be free of prejudice. But in reality—as I have already pointed out—what is the entire philosophy of Wundt or similar philosophies? It is merely the elaboration of what the Eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople decreed in the year 869: that one must not speak—this is roughly how one could define the conciliar decree, which was, admittedly, couched in rather cryptic terms at the time—of body, soul, and spirit when speaking of human beings, but rather that the spiritual is merely a property of the soul, and that one may speak only of body and soul. And the trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit was, after all, a heretical view throughout the entire Middle Ages. Theological philosophers trembled when reality compelled them to even hint at the existence of body, soul, and spirit, for it was, after all, a heretical view. Philosophers still adhere to this view today. They merely carry out what that Council of Constantinople dogmatized back then, and they believe themselves to be free of prejudice; they believe they are expounding something that follows from their pure views and research, whereas in truth they are merely implementing a council decree. One must view things without illusion; one must look at reality. Our young students learn throughout their philosophy studies exactly what the Council of Constantinople decided in 869.

[ 9 ] Now, I am by no means claiming that what is taught today is a direct consequence or effect of that council’s decision; rather, what was dogmatized at the time at the Eighth Council of Constantinople was, as a dogma, merely the intellectual outflow of deeper events that lie hidden beneath the surface of things and that continue to this day. And everything that seeks to be dogmatized—whether it was done by the respectable philosophers of the Council of Constantinople or by the respectable professors of today’s universities— all these conceptual webs are, at their core, merely conceptual hallucinations that arise within the human being and are, I would say, too thin in terms of their connection to reality to truly grasp the reality that reigns beneath them. Because modern man, by the very constitution of his soul, oscillates, as it were, between the hallucinatory nature of his conceptual world and the illusory nature of his view of nature, he is therefore in danger of falling into dualism. And he will always be in danger of being able to carry everything he concocts as ideas or ideals only into the hallucinatory sphere of concepts, which falls short of reality; or else, they will be able to carry what they concoct about nature into the illusory sphere of their view of nature, which in turn has nothing to do with true reality—it is, in fact, an illusion. Human beings are simply never predisposed to find what they call truth—a word—immediately; I would say, to find it easily. He must start from something in life that can bring him conflict, doubt, and skepticism, and penetrate to the truth. In the current cycle of development, human beings are compelled to rise from oscillating between the hallucination of philosophy and the illusion of the view of nature to what is truly real, to what really is.

[ 10 ] Now one might raise the question—I am, of course, speaking more or less aphoristically; only the whole will then provide a context: What, then, can be cited as the next reason why the older generation has been more prone to fall into fatalism, while the newer generation has been more prone to fall into dualism in matters of worldview, or is prone to do so? One falls into such dangers when one abandons oneself to mere conceptual games—or, as one might say today, mere dialectics.

[ 11 ] Now, of course, you will object: Given their sense of reality, people today are not at all inclined to succumb to mere conceptual games. — You are very much mistaken! Future generations, who will assess our own era more objectively, will come to realize that never before in human history have such inclinations to theorize and play with mere concepts existed as they do in the present. People today are all too willing to abandon reality and turn to mere conceptual games. But when one abandons reality and begins to twist, turn, combine, and separate one’s concepts—the very moment one strays from reality—the danger of either fatalism or dualism is already present. What really matters—and what people today must cultivate above all else—is precisely that sense of reality that has been emphasized here so often from a wide variety of perspectives.

[ 12 ] Now, when it comes to spiritual matters in particular, it is not entirely easy to cultivate a sense of reality, for it is precisely in relation to spiritual matters that one is, more than one realizes, caught up in mere conceptual games, in a playful dialectic. And that which appears as an external illusion, as soon as it enters into people’s moral and spiritual lives, is highly conducive to fostering this illusory nature. People always try to theorize about certain things. They try to theorize about good and evil, about freedom or necessity; one might say that when it comes to the most important questions of life, people are actually terribly inclined to theorize—that is, to indulge in mere conceptual games. And what one encounters today here and there in discussions of worldviews generally takes place only within the realm of conceptual dialectics. People, however, are even mistaken about this, in that they believe they possess concepts, when in reality they cannot possess concepts at all; rather, alongside the concept, they also have sympathies and antipathies toward certain concepts and against certain concepts, and based on these sympathies and antipathies, a person then forms this or that conceptual framework and the like. But I do not wish to dwell on that. In the vast majority of discussions of worldviews—which, after all, constitute a play on concepts regarding various questions—there is a disregard for reality.

[ 13 ] To clarify what I actually mean here, let’s start with a fact that often occurs in life: hatred, the existence of hatred. One seeks to explain something like the existence of hatred in human nature. Very often, people try to explain such things—and similar ones—through mere wordplay. Hatred exists as a phenomenon of the soul, as a psychological reality. But anyone who delves into these matters soon discovers that one cannot truly capture the full nature of the phenomenon of hatred with the concepts one forms about it. Things like hatred can only be understood by attempting to move from the world of illusion to the world of true reality. Hatred is something that flows into the human soul from a deeper world of reality. One must now ask: Is this hatred, in the world of reality, the same as it appears to be in the human soul? If it is something different in the world of reality than it appears to be in the human soul, then we will soon realize how obvious it is that one cannot arrive at any spiritual insight by merely studying hatred within the human soul. If one seeks out hatred in the cosmos using spiritual scientific methods—not in the individual human being, for hatred plays a role in the individual human soul—if one seeks it out in the cosmos, it is something entirely different there. One finds the same thing that manifests as hatred in the human soul also out there in the cosmos. One must simply not fall into the trap of seeking only those natural forces that today’s scientific illusion seeks, but one must look into the reality that lies behind nature; then one will find the counterpart to hatred right there in the cosmos. But in the cosmos, this hatred is something fundamentally different from what it is in the human soul. In the cosmos, hatred is a force without which individualization could never occur. Distinct beings could never come into existence—not even the distinct human being—if the force of hatred did not exist in the cosmos. I am not speaking of the illusory repulsion of atoms, but of something real. Hatred arises in the cosmos, but in the cosmos, hatred must not be judged morally in the same way as when it enters the human soul. In the cosmos, hatred is a force that underlies all individualization. The entire world would blur into one great unity, just as the nebulous pantheists would like it to be; no being would emerge, nor would there be any structure, were it not for the force that reigns throughout the cosmos—a force that humans do not initially perceive in the cosmos, but which enters the human soul and takes on the specific form known there as hatred.

[ 14 ] Now, however, the question arises: What is the relationship between the human and the cosmic? I have already hinted at this from a certain perspective; today we will add a few aphoristic remarks. As discerning philologists—today, philology has, first of all, become overly abstract, and second, rather philistine—but when the more discerning philologists studied the languages that had been found among the so-called “savage” peoples of America, when the “civilized” ones, I say this in quotation marks, had invaded America—when, that is, these “civilized” people had discovered the “savage” Americans—the more discerning philologists found it remarkable just how logically transparent and well-structured the languages of these “savage” people were! A great many such languages were found there, in which—as philologists can attest and as is indeed true—the subtleties of Spanish and Italian in terms of linguistic structure and organization are combined. Such features were found among the “savage” natives of Greenland. Now there is no doubt about it: those savages did not possess that intellect of which modern man is so proud. Nor would this modern intellect get very far if it were to venture into language formation and language creation; for one can see ample evidence in many places of what the modern intellect accomplishes when it attempts to be creative in language. Indeed, objective reason reigned in the human soul—a soul that was still wild, that did not yet possess the present-day intellect—that very objective reason which I recently demonstrated to you as active in humanity’s language-creating process. Reason reigned there. This reason that reigned did not encounter human beings as strongly individualized as today’s world reason encounters them; it encountered them even less individualized, less separate, and acted within them even more as cosmic reason. And this is indeed how the development of humanity has unfolded. In those ancient times, human beings were not the wild creatures that today’s anthropology conjures up in its illusory conceptions, but rather they were a part of a total organism—though this is, of course, spoken figuratively—and they gradually became more individualized. Thus, they were a part of that organism and expressed cosmic reason even more fully; or one could also say that cosmic reason was expressed more fully within them.

[ 15 ] Here you have a concrete indication of how the cosmic forces at work there influence the human soul. And now you can also apply this to a specific phenomenon such as cosmic hatred, which finds its way into the human soul. And we know, of course, that in the spiritual realm—just as in the natural realm—we must speak of certain polarities. How did that which is cosmic reason find its way into language? Today, humanity is no longer capable of creating language; it once was. What appears in languages today are merely residues. How did that cosmic reason penetrate the human soul, and how did it become individual? If we seek to answer this question, we arrive at all that we call the Ahrimanic. And how does something like the phenomenon of hatred penetrate from the cosmic into the human soul? Here we come to the Luciferic, which is the polar opposite of the Ahrimanic. People today are ashamed to speak of Ahriman and Lucifer, while they are not ashamed to speak of positive or negative electricity or positive or negative magnetism. But the fact that they are ashamed is based solely on a modern superstition.

[ 16 ] Even though we are aware of the fact that true spiritual entities—spiritual beings—enter into the world, on the one hand as Luciferic forces in such manifestations as hatred, or as Ahrimanic forces in such things as language or even thought, we must also, on the other hand, become clear about how these things are significant within the entire context of the world, and how they fit into that context. When I view hatred in such a way that I say the great primordial facts are based upon it—namely, that it can individualize and separate itself, so that not everything merges into one another in a general primordial mass—I am pointing to the phenomenon, to the fact of hatred in the most ancient past, in that past in which human beings did not yet exist in their present form; I am pointing to a very, very distant past. I am thus, in a sense, giving you a conception of hatred that corresponds to a distant, distant past—that past in which humanity had not yet distinguished itself from the rest of the world order. We can speak of the various kingdoms of nature, about which we know—you need only read my *Outline of Esoteric Science*—how they have developed as the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms. We can speak of these kingdoms of nature. When we speak of them in their entirety—not in terms of their illusory nature, but in terms of their reality—the power of hatred lives within all of them, but hatred as I have illustrated it to you as cosmic hatred.

[ 17 ] There comes a point in evolution when what is otherwise a general cosmic fact begins to play a role in the human soul; it enters the human soul through Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces: now it is within the human soul; now it has been drawn out of the cosmic, just as this cosmic has developed from the past up to the present.

[ 18 ] Now we know—if we schematically map out the cosmic history from the past up to the present (purple)—after having spoken so much about the so-called law of the conservation of energy or matter, which, of course, does not exist! —that, in a sense, what is purely naturally real in the present ceases to exist, down to the material level. We know: That which today exists only as a spiritually perceptible presence is also the seed for the material reality of the future (red). — When we view things spiritually, we must say: Everything that now belongs to the order of the past has flowed forth from the spiritual. What has flowed forth will come to an end. What belongs to the order of the future is only just beginning to flow forth from the spiritual. It could never become established as part of the natural order if there were such a thing as the conservation of energy and matter. But the belief that there is a conservation of matter and energy is the strongest of all superstitions that have ever existed. The spiritual realm, which today announces itself in mere thoughts, is just as much the seed for the natural order of the future as the tiny plant seed that first announces itself in this year’s plant—that seed is for next year’s plant.

[ 19 ] As a result, human beings themselves occupy an ambivalent position within the world order. And one is drawn to the human being in all his ambivalence if one wishes to understand the entire context—and above all, if one wishes to find a transition from cosmic hatred to the individual, soul-based hatred that arises in human nature. You know, when we look at the human being as he stands before us today, we can say: thinking, feeling, and willing constitute his essence. To us, human beings are structured as beings of thought, feeling, and will, which form a unity. But all the beautiful things philosophy says about this amount to nothing if, on the other hand, one cannot also clearly and precisely distinguish between these elements. Now even the somewhat pedantic psychologists of our time are becoming aware that we actually know nothing proper about the will. I have, of course, explained the nature of volition to you; today it suffices to point out that even contemporary psychology must admit that we know nothing of substance about volition. After all, even in waking human life, volition is, in its essence, overlooked. One could also say that human beings do not reach down with their souls to the level of volition. They believe—as I explained using a concrete example in my discussion of Augustine—that they are standing within the essence itself through their imagination; but they cannot say this with regard to volition. For just as any volitional intention is linked even to the complex mechanical apparatus of hand movement or the walking of the legs, human beings know just as little about this in waking life as they do about their body when they sleep, or about their surroundings when they sleep. Willing is, in fact, overlooked by modern human beings. If one now proceeds, through the method of spiritual science, from mere imagination to volition, one learns from the facts—albeit from spiritual facts—to understand how it comes about that human beings today sleep through their volition.

[ 20 ] As human beings, with our thinking and our intellect, we would actually be in a very bad way if it weren’t for the other circumstance I mentioned—and which I will elaborate on shortly. With our thinking, we would actually be in a very bad way, because our thinking, when it comes down to it, always remains childlike in relation to our human nature. In the course of our lives, between birth and death, our thinking acquires some knowledge about the immediate present of the world; it acquires nothing about the past or the future—or at most something in the form of hypotheses, which, however, crumble immediately if one really takes them seriously. This thinking is precisely a seed of the future. And just as the seed in a plant today is not yet something that has any significance in the reality of the plant world—but will, at best, only have it next year—so, too, does today’s thinking not yet have any real value. It stands in relation to what it can be in terms of its real value just as a small child stands in relation to an adult. Thinking is actually entirely oriented toward the future; but only what ultimately emerges from it—just as the plant emerges from the seed—will have real significance in the future. The actual content, the substance of thought, has only an embryonic value today. But if we descend into the realm of willing through spiritual science and attempt to recognize the subject of willing—for willing is, after all, merely an activity—if we attempt to recognize the subject of our own willing, then willing is something that carries within itself the consciousness of the most distant past, the cosmic past. You can never understand anything about the evolution of the world with the intellect alone, without placing yourself within volition through imagination, inspiration, and intuition; for only in human volition—which at the same time builds up the entire human organism—does there lie a subject that possesses, just as you have memory in relation to your ordinary life, a memory of the cosmic past.

[ 21 ] The difference between the human intellect and human will is that the human intellect develops, at most, a memory of one’s personal, individual life, whereas the will—which the human being cannot reach with his intellect—possesses the memory of the cosmic past. Human beings carry within themselves the memory of the cosmic past, but at first, without spiritual scientific research, they cannot access it with their intellect. So one can say that, on the one hand, human beings stand there as willing beings, carrying within themselves—if I may call it that—the memory of the cosmic past (though this is only a figure of speech). They stand there as intelligent beings, carrying within themselves, as intelligent beings, only the present, because the intellect is merely a seed for the future, not yet something of the present. Just as the plant seed—I must say this again and again—is not yet something of the present but something of the future, so the intellect in relation to volition is exactly like the tiny plant seed in relation to the whole plant. However, insofar as we are beings of will, we stand—as cosmic human beings through our individuality—on the ground of the entire past; insofar as we are intelligent human beings, we stand in the present and prepare ourselves to grow into the future.

[ 22 ] In fact, our will in relation to our intellect can be compared, one might say, to an old man and a child. Just as the old man relates to the child, so does our willing self relate to our thinking self—of course, on a correspondingly larger scale of time.

[ 23 ] How is this balance achieved? Well, what I have just referred to—and have often called the Ahrimanic—namely, cosmic reason, is at work within us thinking human beings. If we were dependent solely on ourselves as human beings, without the influence of Ahriman, the state of our intellect today would be quite different. The Roman Catholic Church could be terribly satisfied with a humanity that possessed only the measure of intellect that arises from human nature today. For this intellect is, in relation to what human beings are predisposed to achieve in the entire cosmos, childlike, just as our will is senile.

[ 24 ] The Ahrimanic force influences our thinking—and this thinking, after all, is inconceivable in the course of evolution without the contribution, for example, of the linguistic element. The Luciferic force influences our will. The Ahrimanic force permeates us by elevating our intellect—which, in the overall course of evolution, is still weaker today, more childlike—to a certain solar height. But this also gives rise to the flip side: we have an intellect that does not actually grow out of ourselves; we have an intellect that could be compared not to a plant that grows out of the ground and then has a seed, but to a plant onto which another plant has been placed—one that does not bear a seed, but bears another plant, and indeed a far more perfect plant.

[ 25 ] Our intellect is structured in an Ahrimanic way, organized according to Ahrimanic principles. As a result, our intellect has a blinding effect on human beings. Of course, as spiritual scientists, we do not take the position that we should not use this intellect simply because it is Ahrimanic; rather, one must simply view things free from illusion, one must simply be clear about the fact that the human intellect is a light that shines strongly, shining more strongly than what already flows from human nature as intellect today. The intellectual principle has something blinding about it for human nature, something that pushes things back into a certain sphere where one is dazzled. Just as a strong, intensely blinding light would fall upon things, so it is when a person illuminates things with their own intellect. In doing so, they essentially turn them into an illusion.

[ 26 ] Just as the Ahrimanic principle influences our intellect, so does the Luciferic principle influence our will—so that it falls asleep, so that it truly falls asleep. Just as the Ahrimanic principle illuminates our nascent intellect, so the Luciferic principle lulls to sleep our will—which actually carries within itself the memory of the entire past—so that human beings know nothing of this past.

[ 27 ] This delves somewhat more deeply into the foundation of dualism in human beings—this dualism that must be bridged, but which cannot be bridged by turning merely to theories; rather, it can only be bridged by turning to the facts themselves, to the facts of spiritual life, when one realizes that our intellect arises in the world differently than our will. The situation with our intellect and our will is like placing a child and an old man side by side and artificially deceiving oneself by positing the abstract concept of “human being”—which is, after all, merely an abstraction—and saying: “The child is a human being, and the old man is a human being.” — Such concepts are indeed prevalent among people today, as they confuse everything. Similarly, people today put forward the claim of a unified soul and believe that the soul, as such, originates in the same way through intellectual thought as through loving will, whereas—as I have just indicated—one must make this distinction if one truly wishes to understand human beings. What we conceive as a worldview through mere intellect can therefore never come close to reality; it remains a hallucination because it arises from our intellect being permeated by a spiritual entity that does not belong to this world: an Ahrimanic spiritual entity that does not belong to the world order we behold with our eyes. The same is true, on the other hand, with regard to the will, which is permeated by Luciferic essence.

[ 28 ] People have always sensed these things, and in one way or another they have expressed them. For example, few people realize that even the Old Testament has at least a hint of this polar opposition between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. I say this is rarely noticed because people read the Bible so neatly, chapter by chapter in sequence, and do not distinguish even there; they do not discern such a contrast as exists between the Book of Job and the Books of Moses. But in this contrast between the Books of Moses and the Book of Job there is already a hint of that polar opposition between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, which one must grasp. Moses poses the question of the evil in human nature—that is, of something like—if I may characterize it thus—the cosmic hatred, the human hatred that plays its part within human beings. Moses poses the question of evil. And he then presents the Fall in a magnificent image. We know that hidden behind this Fall is what we call the entry of the Luciferic into human nature. This leads to a certain conclusion, a certain consequence of Moses’s view: that all misfortune—and indeed death—actually stems from this human sin—or, if you prefer, pre-human sin. So one can say that Moses’s view is this: misfortune and death are the consequences of sin.

[ 29 ] The radically opposite view is that presented in the Book of Job. There, first of all, you do not have a serpent, but a purely spiritual being, an Ahrimanic being, which approaches the divine being itself. And in the case of Job, we are not dealing with a human being like Adam, who can fall into sin, but rather with one who is supposed to be “righteous.” And how does this being, which approaches God, intend to make Job sin? By bringing misfortune upon him! It is exactly the opposite: this being wants to bring misfortune upon Job so that he may sin. The misfortune is already there, and sin is to arise from the misfortune. In the Book of Moses, misfortune is to arise from sin; in the Book of Job, sin from misfortune: this contrast is felt. Even there, a certain sensed dualism comes into play. There is a radical contrast in perspective between the more pagan Book of Job and the thoroughly Jewish Book of Moses. But as I said, these texts are read one after the other without one always paying attention to this.

[ 30 ] Today, it is absolutely essential for humanity that people not be led astray by that nonsensical “self-knowledge”—which is often defined as something desirable—but rather that they truly learn to know themselves, that they learn to distinguish between intellect and will just as objectively as they learn to distinguish between hydrogen and oxygen; otherwise, they can only seemingly transcend a certain dualism.

[ 31 ] But what happens in any given age is always long in the making. And, after all, one can really only study what stands out as particularly significant in a particular age. In our efforts to thoroughly bridge the dualism of the present, we wish above all to take another look, on the one hand, at the hallucinatory nature of the intellect—which is connected to everything I have described—and, on the other hand, at the illusory nature of natural phenomena, which in turn is connected to what I have described. This leads the human being into a kind of inner conflict in life. What the human being must strive to make a single, unified current is instead at work within him, I would say, as two separate currents. And one of these currents is particularly seductive today: the current that arises from the relationship the human being, through his soul, has with the natural order. Modern people, who see in this a uniform reality for all things—the “anatomist,” to choose an obvious example, or the physiologist—examine the human body today and distinguish the individual parts of this body only externally, not internally. He places, I might say, the heart next to the liver and examines both purely from the outside, without taking into account the temporal perspective I spoke of recently; whereas in fact one can only gain a proper understanding of the nature of both the heart and the liver by taking this temporal perspective into account—for example, by approaching embryology in a truly spiritual-scientific manner, so that one learns to distinguish, over time, the embryonic formation of the heart, and furthermore, that one does not simply regard them as existing side by side and consisting of cells—which is correct on the one hand and nonsense on the other. For, as we know, something can be both correct and nonsense at the same time.

[ 32 ] In its attempt to explain the order of nature, today’s scientific movement, so to speak, pays no heed to what is temporally separated; it places these elements side by side and thereby arrives at its abstraction. The temptation is particularly strong to simply place one thing next to another: cause, effect; cause, effect; cause, effect—an abstract, illusory causal order! We know from the presentations I gave you here last year and again this year that nature cannot be viewed in this way, that nature can only be explained if we regard it first and foremost as a reflection of the spiritual. This leads us to the true theory of metamorphosis; this leads us to genuine Goetheanism. There, the human head appears as a formation that reflects a primeval past; there, the organism of the extremities appears as that which points to a distant future. But what stands there in its particular form is not merely a juxtaposition of causes; rather, it is imagination, an image of that which lies behind it. We do not understand the human head if we conceive of it merely as if it were growing out of the rest of the human organism, whereas in truth it is formed out of the entire cosmos—and in a different way from the cosmos than, for example, the organism of the extremities. In physics, everyone would find it ridiculous to claim that a magnetic needle always points north because it possesses an internal force that causes it to do so; rather, we explain it in terms of the north pole and the south pole by the fact that the cosmos—that is, the Earth’s magnetism—determines the direction of the magnetic needle. Yet when it comes to human beings—or any other organism—everything is supposed to grow straight out from within itself! Just as the magnetic needle points north on one side and south on the other for cosmic reasons, so too—now for temporal-cosmic reasons—does the human being point with his head backward into the distant past, even into times when the Earth itself underwent metamorphosis, and he points with his limb system toward the distant future. He is oriented temporally and cosmically. And this will be the development of the doctrine of metamorphosis; this is true Goetheanism: the ascent from the mere illusory causal order to the perception of nature through imagination. By recognizing what one has before one as an image of something else, one rises above mere illusion.

[ 33 ] “But one must not stop at nature. One then needs a correlate; one needs a complement. Anyone who speaks of nature in this way would, in turn, become a fantasist if he were to conceive of nature solely in this way, and if he did not also explain, on the other hand: Even what modern philosophy contrasts with the spirit of nature is a hallucination; one must not stop there either. As that which lives today has developed slowly, humanity has passed through the most diverse stages in order to gradually advance—through practice, I might say—toward the human soul’s attainment of spiritual understanding. And here one can distinguish three stages. Just as one can say that the conception of nature today still has something quite confused about it and is striving toward the stages of knowledge described in my book *How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* namely imagination, inspiration, and intuition; so one can say that the human soul has gradually developed intellectually through three stages to a true standing in the spirit, to a true grasping in the spirit.

[ 34 ] These are the three stages: the intuitive experience of the spirit—which is, of course, somewhat hallucinatory, because one perceives the spirit in the present without realizing that it is a seed for the future—the intuitive experience, the dreamlike, intuitive experience of the spirit. The second stage is the prophetic vision, where—much like the ancient Hebrew prophets—the future is truly experienced in visions, so that something of the Spirit’s potential as a seed for the future is already present within it. And the third stage, which is still little understood but nevertheless possesses a profound depth, is the apocalyptic contemplation of the world. But all of these are preliminary stages for the spiritual-scientific contemplation, which, on the other hand, must be connected—because otherwise it would float in the air, figuratively speaking—with the pictorial contemplation of nature. Pictorial contemplation of nature lifts one beyond the illusory nature of natural science. A genuine attitude toward that which is experienced through a foreboding of the future, through a visionary gaze into the future—prophetic, visionary, and apocalyptic vision—lifts us beyond the hallucinatory nature of spiritual life.

[ 35 ] We must absolutely not—and this is humanity’s task at the present time—conceive of the spirit in the way that modern philosophies do. We must not conceive of nature in the way that a naive view of nature or even contemporary theoretical natural science does. Rather, we must, so to speak, cast off the delusion we have about nature and recognize how nature is merely an image of something else, and we must recognize how the spirit, as it presents itself to philosophy today, is merely a shadow image. Then a bridge will be built between the ordinary conception of the spirit and the ordinary conception of nature.

[ 36 ] And a third will exist. One can never overcome something like dualism through mere discussion, but only by facing the facts—the complete facts—and finding a third element to complement the duality. Therefore, the symbol that expresses this must express a trinity. Of course, we realize today that concepts, in turn, express only something that floats on the surface. But one must have concepts; if one does not overestimate them, they do no harm. We are speaking here of the normal human, the Luciferic, and the Ahrimanic, and we also depict them: this is to be the central representation of our building. Auguste Comte, too, sensed that a worldview structured as a trinity must exist when he established that trinity of which I spoke to you recently. This true trinity, which will encompass both spiritual and natural perspectives and thereby truly overcome dualism, must be inherent in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Therefore, one cannot arrive at true anthroposophical spiritual science without seriously engaging with all the positive and negative aspects of contemporary natural science and contemporary spiritual research. One must take these matters seriously. Merely throwing things together and formulating theories about what has been thrown together will do nothing to address the seriousness of our times.

[ 37 ] Life does not unfold in a primordial chaos, but rather in a differentiated and individualized manner. Whatever one strives for in the future must be pursued in a differentiated manner from the very beginning. Even today, the bad habit of treating everything—if I may put it trivially—with a one-size-fits-all approach is still widespread. If someone today has a political theory, they shape everything else—worldviews and so on—roughly according to that political theory. If someone today has philosophical views, they also apply them to politics and so on, treating everything the same, specifically using the very standard that the person in question favors as their favorite. That is how it is in our time. Life unfolds in a differentiated manner. The only person free of illusions is the one who knows how life unfolds in a differentiated way. The future does not strive for a primordial mishmash of life, but rather for a strong structure: for intellectual life as science; for a certain inner life, of which we still have little conception today, and which, according to the customs of olden times, can be called a religious life; and for political life. If one confuses these things, if one tries to regulate one thing after another, then one falls into errors such as those I once described to you here last year, or even two years ago. For these things follow separate currents: on the one hand, social life according to socialism; on the other hand, religious life according to freedom of thought; and scientific life according to pneumatology, that is, the knowledge of the spirit. Only through the living interplay of these three will the future possess a certain healing power for human development—not a paradise on earth, for that does not exist, but a certain healing power. But it would be entirely wrong, for example, to conceive of external life in pneumatological terms, to seek to found religious sects, to infuse them with pneumatological life—in other words, to engage in politics from the standpoint of pneumatology. That would amount to nothing. Likewise, it would amount to nothing if one were to engage in politics within religious communities in the old sense. Just as the hands cannot do what the human head can do, and just as the legs cannot do it, so too can pneumatology not accomplish what socialism is supposed to accomplish, nor can religion accomplish what socialism is supposed to accomplish, or what pneumatology is supposed to accomplish. What matters is the differentiation of certain things—but not merely in theory, rather the differentiation of certain things in life. And that is the point with which I wish to conclude these reflections today and continue them tomorrow. As I said, they are meant to be merely aphoristic, intended to contribute something new to the fundamental questions that currently occupy us.

[ 38 ] [For remarks following the lecture, see the “Notes” at the end of the volume on p. 326]