The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Third Lecture

[ 1 ] Today, in order to lay the groundwork for some of the things I would like to share with you over the next few days, I will have to speak about the spirit in the most concrete sense possible. I would first like to appeal to you, from a certain perspective, to develop at least a deep sense of what is meant by “spirit” here.

[ 2 ] What, then, is actually taken into account about a person today? Essentially, only what they can consciously experience from the moment they wake up in the morning until they fall asleep at night. Only what is experienced while awake is taken into account today and counted as part of the world. Now, if you listen to the voice of the immediate present and get used to feeling in accordance with that voice, you might ask: Hasn’t it always been this way? Did people in the past include anything other than their waking experiences in what they understood as reality?

[ 3 ] I certainly do not mean to say that we should return to earlier cultural eras of humanity. That is far from my intention. It is a matter of moving forward, not of moving backward. But we can, at least to get our bearings, take a step back and look back a bit beyond the point in time that lies in the fifteenth century and that preceded what I so emphatically pointed out yesterday. There we must say: In everything that people said about the world back then, there was something contained that is regarded today as fantasy and is not counted among the facts. You need only familiarize yourselves in a very superficial way with what is available in literature—though that is the very least of it—regarding such earlier times, and you will see: when there is talk of things we today refer to by the names “salt,” “mercury,” “phosphorus,” and so on—a great deal is implied that people today anxiously rule out when they speak of phosphorus, mercury, and salt. Today we say: Back then, people let their imaginations run wild when they spoke of salt, mercury, and phosphorus.

[ 4 ] We will not argue here about why this is now anxiously ruled out. But we must be clear that in the past, people not only saw what they observed, for example, in phosphorus, but also sensed it in addition to the phosphorus perceived by the senses—just as people today see color. It was surrounded by a spiritual-etheric aura, just as the whole of nature at that time was suffused with spiritual-etheric elements for people, even though this had faded considerably since the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. But at any rate, it was still there for people; it did not spring from their imagination, any more than the color red springs from our imagination; they saw it.

[ 5 ] Why did they see it? They saw it because, for them, something still radiated from what a person experienced between falling asleep and waking up. While awake, people of that time could not experience salt, sulfur, or phosphorus any more than a person today can. But when people woke up back then, their sleep had not been spiritually barren; the effects of sleep still carried over into the day, and people perceived more richly and experienced everything outside themselves in a more intense way. Without taking this into account, one cannot understand those earlier times at all.

[ 6 ] Later, what the ancients experienced—for example, with phosphorus and sulfur—became a name, an abstraction. As an abstraction, the concept traditionally persisted until, by the end of the nineteenth century, people could no longer associate any meaning with it—or at least could no longer feel anything in connection with it. Now, for external culture—which claims to have advanced so tremendously far—it is, of course, absolutely essential that human beings engage with it through their waking consciousness. Naturally, they will construct machines based on their waking consciousness. But he can do little with it when it comes to himself. If we had to be awake all the time, we would very soon—by the end of our twenties at the latest—be old people, far more ghastly old people than those of today. We cannot always be awake, because the forces we need to work internally on our organism are experienced only between falling asleep and waking up. It is indeed the case that human beings can very well work on external culture in their waking consciousness; they can work on themselves only in their sleeping consciousness. And in the past, much flowed from this sleeping consciousness into the waking state.

[ 7 ] This is the great turning point in the middle of the fifteenth century: the gradual seepage of sleep consciousness into waking consciousness came to an end. If I were to put it figuratively, I might say something like this: Even in the tenth and eleventh centuries of Western culture, people woke up feeling that divine-spiritual powers had been at work within them between falling asleep and waking up. They sensed something of the presence of divine-spiritual powers, just as they sense, in waking consciousness, the influx of soothing sunlight. And before falling asleep, there was in every person something of—I would say—an elemental, nature-powered mood of prayer. People drifted off to sleep—or, if they were people of insight, at least sought to do so—in such a way that they surrendered themselves, so to speak, with their souls to the divine-spiritual powers.

[ 8 ] The education of those who were to be drawn into an intellectual life at that time was such that the mindset I have just described was truly cultivated. By the end of the nineteenth century, this had long since been replaced by something else. At that time, people who considered themselves the most spiritual used to prepare for sleep in a different way. I have often seen and heard how people prepared for sleep: “I need my proper measure of beer so that I have the proper heaviness to fall asleep.” — That’s what they said. It sounds grotesque. But it is entirely historical when one points out that looking into the spiritual world through the state of sleep was a thoroughly conscious endeavor among people of past cultural epochs, not to mention that in earlier times, those to be initiated—that is, the students of that era—were prepared in a truly sacred manner for that temple sleep, during which they were to be made aware of humanity’s communion with a spiritual world.

[ 9 ] Especially today, people often view the course of cultural development not by simply asking: “How has humanity’s educational development unfolded?” — because they do not consider the whole human being at all, but always focus only on a part of the human being. Today, it makes a peculiar impression on anyone who looks a little further than the nearest intellectual horizon when people believe that we have now reached the point where we know the truth about certain things, whereas people in the past were actually quite childlike. Just read how the history of physics is written today! It is as if childish notions had prevailed until recently and we have now finally arrived at insights that can be lasting. With regard to certain things, this is precisely how people imagine it. A sharp distinction is drawn between what has been achieved today and the notions about nature that people formed during their “childish” era. No one thinks to ask how what is accepted scientifically today affects people in terms of world history and education.

[ 10 ] If we set aside all educational considerations and examine an older science book from today’s perspective, it seems childish to us. But let us set this perspective, this point of view, aside and ask: How did a book from that time educate people, and how does a book from today educate them? — Today’s book may be very clever, while the one from back then may be quite fantastical. But if we ask about educational value in the broader sense, we must admit: When people back then had the opportunity to read books—it wasn’t so easy to read books; it was something somewhat solemn—a book would draw something out from the depths of their souls. Truly, reading a book was something like growing: productive forces were unleashed within the human organism. One felt these productive forces. One felt that there was something real there. Today, everything is logical and formal. One takes everything in formally and intellectualistically, but without will, with the head. But because it is taken in merely with the head and depends solely on the physical organization of the head, it remains barren for true humanity.

[ 11 ] Today, people are fighting against materialism. My dear friends, it would almost be wiser not to fight against materialism at all. For what does materialism claim? It claims that thought is a product of the brain. Today’s thinking is a product of the brain! That is precisely the secret: that today’s thinking is a product of the brain. With regard to modern thinking, materialism is entirely correct. It is not correct, however, when it comes to thinking prior to the mid-fifteenth century. Back then, people thought not only with the brain, but with what lived within the brain. They had living concepts. Because they were alive, the concepts of that time actually gave the impression of looking at an anthill. Today’s concepts are dead. Thinking today is clever, but terribly convenient. One does not actually feel one’s thinking, and the less one feels it, the more one loves it. In the past, thinking caused a tingling sensation because it was a reality of the soul. Today, people want to make humanity believe that thinking has always been the way it is today. But today’s thinking is a product of the brain; earlier thinking was not a product of the brain.

[ 12 ] We should be grateful to the materialists for pointing out that contemporary thought is dependent on the brain. For that is indeed the case; the matter is much more serious than one might think. Materialism is often regarded as a false worldview. That is not at all correct. It is a product of the world’s development, but a dead one—a product that characterizes life in a state where it has already died.

[ 13 ] The way of thinking that has developed primarily in Western cultures since the fifteenth century—while Eastern culture, though decadent, has at least preserved the old way of thinking—has very specific characteristics. The further one goes west, the more this way of thinking—which Easterners regard as inferior—gains the upper hand. Easterners are not at all impressed by this way of thinking; they despise it. Yet they, too, have nothing new to offer, only the ancient foundations upon which it is built. Europeans, and even more so Americans, however, feel uncomfortable when asked to immerse themselves in the way of thinking that underlies the Vedas. It makes their brains tingle—and they love that dead way of thinking where you don’t even realize you’re thinking. After all, it’s especially popular today not to realize that you’re thinking. Today people say—not only when someone is talking nonsense, but also when someone speaks to them about something alive—that a millwheel is turning in their head. They simply do not want what is alive; they always want to pick up only what is dead.

[ 14 ] Here is an example—I cite it solely out of cultural-historical interest, not as a polemic: I once described how it is once again possible to perceive how the mineral, the plant, and the animal realms are enveloped by an aura of color. The way I had to describe this in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? was such that it required living thought, not dead thought. Recently, a certain contemporary university professor—one who supposedly represents philosophy—has taken issue with this account. For him, entering into living thought is out of the question. He is incapable of it, and therefore it does not exist for him. Now there is supposed to be a color aura around the stone, a color aura around the plant, and a color aura around the animal. But he has only seen colors in the solar spectrum, and so he believes that I, too, could have seen them only in the solar spectrum and transferred them from there into the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. And he cannot understand a single word of my way of describing things. That is why he calls it a torrent of words. To him, it is a torrent of words! He cannot understand any of it. For a large number of university professors, it may be like this: a millwheel is turning in their heads. Well, turn your head away quickly! Then, of course, nothing can come out of it.

[ 15 ] But a living person also craves living thought, and this craving for living thought is bubbling in their blood. You must come to terms with this. You must regain the strength of mind necessary to be able to tolerate not only logical, abstract thought, but also living thought. You don’t have to get a headache right away just because you’re supposed to think in a living way. Dead thinking was characteristic of the purely materialistic education of the West, and of those for whom the purely intellectual was the norm. If one pursues this line of thought, a rather troubling perspective is revealed.

[ 16 ] In the past, one was able to carry one’s thinking into sleep. There, one was still something in sleep. One was a being among other beings. One was something in sleep because one had carried one’s living thinking into sleep. One brought it out upon waking and took it back in again upon falling asleep. Today’s thinking is bound to the brain. But that cannot help us while we sleep. So today, according to the current scientific trend, we may be the most intelligent and most learned people, but we are so only during the day. We cease to be so at night, in relation to that world through which we can work on ourselves. That is why people have grown out of the habit of working on themselves. With the concepts we develop from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, we can only achieve something from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep. But we cannot achieve anything within a person. A person must work from the forces through which they constitute themselves. During the time when a person needs to build themselves up the most—as a small child—they must sleep the most. For if one were to find a method to teach infants things in the same way as one teaches seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds, you would soon see what the infants would look like. It is quite good that infants are still cared for within their mother’s womb and not at a lectern. Human beings must simply draw from sleep that which enables them to be active within themselves.

[ 17 ] But we cannot bring any of the concepts we develop through science, through external observation, through external experimentation—merely by mastering the experiment—into our sleep, nor can we transfer anything we develop in sleep into these concepts of the material world. The spiritual and the intellectual are incompatible unless they unite in the fully conscious world. In the past, this was done in a more unconscious way. Today it must happen in a fully conscious way, yet people are unwilling to embrace this approach.

[ 18 ] What happened when a person from earlier ages of the world drifted off to sleep with their soul? At that time, they were still something, for they possessed that which hovers around things—what people today call a figment of the imagination. They carried that with them into sleep. Back then, a person could still assert themselves when they were in the spiritual world outside their physical body during sleep. In the past, they were something in the spiritual world between falling asleep and waking up. Today, they are much less so. They are almost absorbed by the spirituality of nature when they leave their body upon falling asleep. When one truly observes the world, this immediately presents itself to the soul. You need only see it, and you will be able to see it if you truly cultivate the ability to perceive these things. And humanity must cultivate the ability to perceive these things, for we live in an age where it can no longer be claimed that one cannot speak of the spirit in the same way as one speaks of stones and animals. Then you will gain the ability to see that even though Caesar was not very corpulent in his physical life, when his soul left his body in sleep, it nevertheless possessed a considerable size—not a spatial size, but a size in terms of sensation. His soul was stately. Today, a person may be one of the fattest bankers; but when his soul wanders out during sleep and dwells in the spirituality of nature, you should only see what a horribly gaunt frame he becomes. He becomes something quite frail. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, humanity has indeed been suffering from spiritual malnutrition. The intellect does not nourish the spirit. It merely inflates it. Consequently, a person takes nothing of the spiritual realm with them into sleep, and they are almost absorbed when, between falling asleep and waking up, they project into the spiritual realm as a very thin skeletal frame of the soul.

[ 19 ] Therefore, the question of materialism today is truly not a theoretical one. Nothing is less important than the theoretical dispute between materialism, spiritualism, and idealism. These are completely meaningless matters today, for refuting materialism accomplishes absolutely nothing. No matter how often we refute materialism today, it amounts to absolutely nothing. For, after all, the arguments used to refute materialism are just as materialistic as those used for or against idealism. Theoretical refutations today accomplish nothing in either direction; what matters is that we once again have spirit in the very way we view the world. Through this, our concepts regain their nourishing power for human beings. To make this perfectly clear to you, I would like to add the following:

[ 20 ] I actually don’t see such a marked difference between people who often call themselves materialists and those who, in certain small sectarian circles, call themselves, say, theosophists. For the way in which the former prove materialism and the latter prove theosophy does not differ all that significantly. For if one seeks to prove theosophy with a mode of thinking that depends entirely on the brain, then theosophy itself is materialistic. What matters is not what words one utters, but whether one expresses the Spirit. When I compare some of this theosophical drivel with Haeckelism, I find that the Spirit is present in Haeckel, whereas the Theosophists speak of the Spirit as if it were matter—albeit in a diluted form. It is not a matter of talking about the spirit, but of speaking with the spirit. One can also speak spiritually about the material world—that is, one can speak about the material world using flexible concepts. That is still far more spiritual than speaking mindlessly about the spirit.

[ 21 ] Even if so many people today come forward and defend the spiritual worldview with all sorts of logical arguments, it doesn’t help us at all—not one bit. For we remain just as barren in the night: whether we spend the day merely thinking about hydrogen, chlorine, bromine, iodine, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, silicon, potassium, sodium, and so on, and form our theories there, or whether we think about how human beings consist of a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body. All of that is completely irrelevant to the living. If someone speaks vividly about potassium and calcium—that is, practices living chemistry—that is far more valuable than if, for example, someone practices a dead, intellectualistic theosophy. For even theosophy can be practiced in a dead and intellectualistic way. What matters is not that we speak in an intellectual or materialistic way, but that our speech is imbued with spirit. It must permeate us as living beings. But because people today no longer understand this at all, they find it so unpleasant when someone actually takes it seriously.

[ 22 ] In one of my recent lectures at Oxford, I got serious for a moment and said, to be perfectly clear: I couldn’t care less whether people today talk about spiritualism, realism, idealism, materialism, and so on. When it comes to using language to characterize an external phenomenon, I use materialistic language. One can do this in such a way that the spirit lives within it as well. One speaks from the realm of the spirit; then it becomes spiritual, even when speaking in materialistic terms. That is the difference between what is practiced here as anthroposophy and what is practiced elsewhere under similar names. Books opposing anthroposophy are already appearing every few weeks. They offer descriptions intended to target what I say. But to me, what they attack is always something entirely new; for usually I haven’t said that at all. They concoct all sorts of things and then write big books about them. What people are fighting against usually has nothing at all to do with what I’m talking about. My concern is not at all to combat materialism, but rather to ensure that the concepts are drawn from the spiritual world itself, that they are experienced, that they are concepts full of life. Thus, what is represented and embraced here as anthroposophy is truly something quite different from what the world says about it today.

[ 23 ] People today argue against—and sometimes even in favor of—anthroposophy in a rather materialistic way, that is, without any sense of the spiritual, whereas the point is to take the experience of the spirit seriously. That’s when people start to completely lose their bearings, because if someone begins to speak of spiritual beings as if they were plants and animals in the sensory world, they consider him a fool. I can understand that quite well, because there is indeed a small detail today—only this detail is overlooked. It consists in the fact that this “foolishness” is the true reality—namely, the reality that is actually alive for human beings. The other reality is good for machines, but not for human beings.

[ 24 ] So let me make this very clear, my dear friends: what I mean here—and what I have always meant—is not to speak of the Spirit, but to speak from the Spirit, to unfold the Spirit in the very act of speaking. That is the Spirit that can truly strike an educational blow into our dead cultural life. That must be the lightning bolt that strikes our dead cultural life in order to rekindle it to life. Therefore, do not think that you will find here a defense of these schematic concepts, such as “physical body,” “etheric body,” “astral body”—concepts that are so neatly hung up in theosophical circles and pointed out with a pointer, just as potassium, sodium, and so on are pointed out in a lecture hall along with their atomic weights. It makes no difference at all whether one points to potassium with its atomic weights according to today’s schema, or points to the etheric body. It makes no difference at all. That is not the point. In this sense, it is even the case that this kind of theosophy—or anthroposophy, if you wish to call it that—is not something new, but rather the final product of the old.

[ 25 ] In this regard, one has indeed encountered the most unbelievable things precisely in those places where people suddenly decide to represent the Spirit. I am not citing these things to criticize them, but rather as a symptom. I would like to tell you two stories. The first is this: I once attended a gathering in Western Europe where people were discussing theosophy. When the lectures were over, I got into a conversation with a certain person about the value of those lectures. Then this person, who was a staunch supporter of what had been presented there as a theosophical sect, summed up the impression she had gained in these words: “There are such wonderful vibrations in this hall right now.” The sense of well-being was expressed in terms of “vibrations”—that is, in materialistic terms.

[ 26 ] On another occasion, people pestered me with a discovery that had suddenly been made in the spiritual realm. It was claimed that repeated earthly lives—which, in fact, can only appear before the soul through a truly spiritual perspective—must “also appear before the eye in earthly form; one must also be able to fit them into the framework of materialistic thinking.” People suddenly began to speak of the “permanent atom” that passes through all earthly lives. They said: If I am now living an earthly life and return after centuries, the atoms will have been scattered to the four winds. But a single atom passes over into the next earthly life. They called it the “permanent atom.” Now, fortunately, the most materialistic concept of all had been introduced into the cycle of repeated earthly lives—into that which can be grasped only by the spirit. As if a single human being could benefit in any way if a single atom from, say, the fourth or fifth century were floating around in his brain! That matters just as little to me as it would if, for example, a surgeon in the afterlife were somehow able to enhance my current earthly life by preserving my stomach from back then and reinserting it now. In principle, there is no difference between the two.

[ 27 ] I am not telling you this to make fun of it, but as an interesting indication that people who want to talk about the spirit speak of the pleasant sensation of spiritual vibrations, and that people who have absorbed, through mere imitation of thoughts, what others know about repeated earthly lives, then frame this in such a way that they speak of the permanent atom. Theosophists have even written all sorts of books about this permanent atom, including some with curious drawings depicting the arrangement of hydrogen, oxygen, and chlorine atoms, and so on. When one looks at these stories, they are no less grotesque than the drawings that materialists have devised to represent atoms. It does not matter whether one claims that something is spiritual or that something is material; what matters is that one realizes one must enter into the living Spirit. Again, I am not saying this in a polemical sense, but to make the matter clear to you.

[ 28 ] In this sense, the following phenomenon is exceptionally characteristic: There is today a very witty Benedictine priest named Mager, one of the sharpest minds in that order—and the Benedictine Order, after all, is home to the very best minds. This Mager has written an exceedingly interesting little book on “Transformation in the Presence of God,” a little book that, however, belongs to the era when Benedict founded the Benedictine Order; that is to say, if it had been written back then, it would have been entirely in keeping with the times. Still, when someone writes a little book about the transformation of the human being in the presence of God, one can still admire it to a certain extent; and I do. Now, this same Father has also weighed in on anthroposophy. And now he becomes a die-hard materialist. What he has claimed there is truly terribly difficult to characterize for someone who first has to put themselves into such a rigid way of thinking. What he criticizes most is that perception in imaginative cognition—which I assert first and foremost—when it comes to content, consists, for Father Mager, simply of images. He gets no further than that. And now he says—surrendering himself entirely to his scientific conscience in the process—that he must state that anthroposophy actually materializes the world. He strongly criticizes the fact that anthroposophy materializes the world—that is, that anthroposophy does not remain at the level of formless, abstract concepts, as Father Mager prefers; for there, one loves the most abstract concepts of all. Just read through a Catholic philosophy text once. You will find there: Being, Becoming, Existence, Beauty, and so on—in short, the most extreme abstractions. Not a single touch of the world! Now the Father realizes that anthroposophy grasps living concepts that can truly descend to real things, to the real world. This is abhorrent to him; it is terribly abhorrent to him!

[ 29 ] One would have to say to this priest: Yes, if knowledge is to be anything real, it must in fact retrace the path that God has taken with the world. For God has always moved from the spiritual toward the material! The world was spiritual at first and then became more and more material, so that true knowledge must follow this path. One does not seek it in anthroposophy, but one arrives at it. The image captures a glimpse of reality, and the priest criticizes this. Yet this is precisely what he himself must believe in if he wants to give his faith a rational basis. But in our context, he calls this the “materialization of knowledge.”

[ 30 ] Of course, it’s impossible to please those people who insist so strongly: “Under no circumstances should we have living concepts!” — Because those concepts intrude into reality. But then one must keep one’s concepts quite far removed from it, and ends up with concepts only for waking consciousness—and no concepts at all that can work on the human being from within the spiritual world itself. But that is what we need. We need a living human development and a living human education. The deeply feeling person perceives contemporary culture as dry and icy. It must regain life and inner vitality. It must become such that it fills people, fills them with life. And that is the very thing that prevents us from having to admit to ourselves that we should actually stop speaking of the spirit altogether, but rather to allow good will to flow into us, so that we may develop within ourselves a disposition not toward abstract talk, but toward inner action in the spirit; not toward a dark, nebulous mysticism, but toward a courageous, energetic permeation of our own human being with spirituality. Then, from this state of being permeated by spirituality, we can speak of matter, and we will not be led astray when we discuss important material discoveries, because we are able to speak about them in a spiritual way. Then we will be able to shape what we sense dimly within ourselves—as an urge to move forward—into a real, human-educating force within ourselves. We will continue this discussion tomorrow.