The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] So far, we have attempted to characterize from an external perspective what a young person might have experienced at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by directing our spiritual gaze toward the particular form that human spiritual culture had taken. Today, in order to find a path toward genuine self-knowledge, we want to examine the human being from within.

[ 2 ] Just as one must look back to the first third of the fifteenth century for a more external view of the intellectual development of the West, so one must go back to the fourth century A.D. for a more internal view. If you want to identify a year that, in a sense, marks a turning point, it is the year 333 of our era. This year is, of course, only to be taken as an approximation; it is not meant in a strictly mathematical sense, but rather as a point of reference pointing to important events that occurred among a significant portion of the European population.

[ 3 ] Let us try to look into the soul of a person who, prior to this time, had become deeply immersed in the culture that existed at that time in southern Europe, and perhaps also in certain regions of northern Africa. These regions are, after all, the most relevant to consider when one wishes to grasp the truly defining spiritual life of that era. The souls of the people I am referring to here still had a thoroughly direct awareness at that time that human thoughts are not something worked out in the head, but rather something revealed—whether to the individual person, or, in the case of a person who was not capable of such revelation themselves, something they could receive indirectly from others through communication based on trust. The feeling that prevails today in the minds of both the educated and the uneducated—that thoughts are something one works out for oneself in one’s own head—did not exist back then. People were, in fact, standing right at a turning point. Over in the Near East, the most outstanding intellectual figures were grappling with the question of how thoughts came to human beings from a spiritual realm. In southern Europe and northern Africa, people were just beginning to doubt that human beings had the ability to receive these revelations of thought. It must, however, be firmly noted that these doubts were initially only very faint and that the prevailing sentiment was still: “If I have a thought, then a god has inspired it in me, even if indirectly; it may have been transmitted to me through human inheritance, through tradition, not through natural inheritance. A thought can enter earthly development only as a revealed one.”

[ 4 ] The first participants in Western intellectual life who harbored strong doubts about this direction were people who had come from the northern peoples into the southern cultures. They were of Germanic-Celtic descent and had traveled south from the north with the various waves of migration. Perhaps, by their very nature, they would have come to say: Thoughts are something we develop. But this feeling was dampened by everything they encountered in what was known as Greek-Latin or Eastern culture. These cultures remained in an extraordinary mixture well into the fourth century, with all manner of factors playing a role. But what was certainly felt strongly during the migration south was that one was brought up to believe: Thoughts can only be grasped by human beings when they are drawn from a supersensible world into the sensible one.

[ 5 ] After all, we have only an external history—no history of feelings or thoughts, no history of the soul. Consequently, we are not made aware of how the state of the soul has become entirely different among humanity over the successive centuries. It is astonishing how profound the shift in inner human sensibility was, particularly in the fourth century A.D. At that time, something emerged that, for the very first time, caused people to reflect on the origin of the world of thought, so that what had previously been taken for granted—that thoughts were revealed—gradually became something that required a theory to be understood. But the idea that human beings could develop the world of thought from within themselves was by no means a convincing fact for these souls.

[ 6 ] Consider what a great difference exists, particularly in this regard, between the souls of today and those of that time. I am speaking only of a certain number of souls. What I am describing to you, of course, existed in a wide variety of nuances. For one segment of humanity, it was as I am now describing it to you; while another group held an even more unshakably strong and intense belief that a spiritual-soul being took up residence within their organism and conveyed their thoughts. It was, so to speak, a kind of elite among humanity who, at that time, conceived of thoughts in such a way that the question could arise: Where do thoughts come from? — For the others, thoughts were something that was quite naturally instilled in them.

[ 7 ] Now consider those souls who were born after the year 333—as I said, approximately. These souls could no longer gain a self-evident understanding of the origin of thought through a natural sense. The period that followed was therefore marked by a struggle among theorists, philosophers, and philosophical theologians to determine what significance thoughts actually have in the world. There came a time when people debated nominalism and realism. In the Middle Ages, nominalists were those who said: Thoughts actually exist only within human individuality; they are merely a synthesis of what exists out there in the world and within individual beings. — Realists were those who, I might say, still had a strong memory of those ancient times when people regarded thoughts as something substantial, as something that reveals itself in a substantial way. They understood thoughts in such a way that they said to themselves: It is not I who think the thought; it is not I who summarize all dogs in the general concept “dog,” but rather there is, in reality, such a thought that reveals itself to human beings from a spiritual world, just as color or sound reveals itself to the senses. — But there was a struggle to understand in the right way the thought that had, so to speak, now taken root in the human soul as an independent entity. It is precisely from this perspective that it is extraordinarily interesting to delve into the intellectual history of the Middle Ages.

[ 8 ] The closer we get to the fifteenth century, the more we see how intensely people struggle to come to terms with what is revealed in human nature through thought. Before the year 333, people had the feeling that it was as if a divine force were weaving around the Earth, just as the atmosphere surrounds the Earth in the physical realm, and in this process, essences—thoughts—remain within human beings as revelations. In a sense, these are the traces of the divine world surrounding the Earth that are imprinted within human beings as thoughts. — Whereas the souls who thought in this way before the year 333 experienced a sense of connection with the spiritual world precisely through the world of thought, we see the Middle Ages permeated by tragedy because people were still trying, in some way, to link their thoughts to the divine-spiritual.

[ 9 ] Why, then, did those souls who, well into the fifteenth century—if I may put it that way—reflected upon thoughts, exhibit such a vigorous striving to connect their thoughts to something divine and spiritual in the universe? It was because these souls all felt an inner impulse within themselves that they could not express in clear terms, but which was a very distinct spiritual experience for them. This impulse stemmed from the fact that all souls who had been born as leading souls of humanity from the fourth through the fourteenth century were reincarnated souls from a time that lay relatively more or less far behind the year 333, and that those who had been contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha were engaged in a lively debate over whether such concepts were real or merely nominalistic.

[ 10 ] The Mystery of Golgotha did indeed take place in a certain isolation over in the Near East; but what took place in the Near East is only the outward aspect of an event that actually unfolded in the physical world as a spiritual event. Something took place within the souls that had attained a certain maturity. But when we consider the actual advocates of the reality or unreality of thoughts, they were souls who had reincarnated from the first three centuries after Christ. Essentially, however, civilized humanity at that time consisted of souls who had been incarnated before the Mystery of Golgotha. From the connection between the human soul and the divine-spiritual world that certainly existed at that time—a connection expressed by the fact that thoughts were accepted quite naturally as revealed—and from this experience that the souls living in the Middle Ages had had many centuries earlier in a previous earthly life, the impulse arose to debate the reality or unreality of the world of thought.

[ 11 ] What, exactly, is it that we refer to as “high scholasticism” at the dawn of the modern era—in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries? What was it that truly inspired these high scholastics? It was the fact that a decisive turning point in human development had occurred—one that was not articulated but was sensed by these outstanding souls of the era just described. It seemed to them as if the gods had left the realm of human thought, as if human beings were left with nothing but strained, forced thoughts. And when we look into the souls who lived from the fifteenth century onward, we see that they were souls who, in their previous earthly lives, had not lived long after the year 333; and up through the eighth and ninth centuries A.D., at least among the scholarly classes, there was still a distinct sense that human thought was a gift from God. But those people who, in their previous earthly lives, already felt the world of thought to be entirely something forsaken by God—and of course this is again only a part of humanity—were destined to be born at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If, therefore, we look not merely at the outer destiny but also at the inner destiny of the human soul, then we must take into account what, from our childhood onward, seeks to rise up from the depths, from the underworld of the human soul. We must look back to the time when those souls were incarnated who could no longer hear from teachers that thoughts are beings permeated and interwoven by God. This gave rise to an inner feeling as if one had to flee from thoughts, as if one needed something much warmer, much more imbued with substance than thoughts. This feeling arose because, as early as in the previous incarnation, the divine character of thoughts had become highly doubtful or had been lost entirely. What shines through from the previous earthly life into the present one was experienced as a tragedy, most intensely around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The ability to receive thoughts from the divine-spiritual world had already been lost to humanity since the first third of the fifteenth century. Because one could no longer receive thoughts from the divine-spiritual world, thoughts were drawn from external observation. This, along with the art of experimentation, reached such a high level because gathering information from the external sensory world had replaced inner conception. But in the course of world history, that which is not dependent on external circumstances does not immediately come to light. For even though people had already lost the ability since the fifteenth century to conceive thoughts from within, to receive thoughts revealed from the divine-spiritual world, the souls who could have felt the full tragedy of this abandonment of thought-revelation had not yet come into being. Among the souls who lived their previous earthly lives before the sixth or seventh century A.D.—and especially before the fourth century A.D.—there still lived within their feelings something that could be expressed as follows: We must admit that we receive thoughts from the external world; yet our soul tells us that even the thoughts we receive from the external world are God-given. We no longer know how to experience them as such, but our inner being tells us that they are God-given.

[ 12 ] Johannes Kepler was a truly brilliant mind with such a disposition of soul. Kepler was as much a natural scientist of earlier times as he was of later ones. He derived his ideas from external observation, yet in his inner experience he still had the distinct feeling that divine beings are present when a person receives these ideas from nature. Kepler, after all, felt at heart like a half-initiate, and the structure of the universe, which he grasped in abstraction, was artistically felt by him as a matter of course.

[ 13 ] From a scientific perspective, it is extraordinarily valuable to delve into the progress in human thought brought about by Kepler; however, one is moved even more deeply on a human level when one delves into Kepler’s inner life. In later times, no natural scientist—and certainly no influential teacher of the greater part of humanity—possessed such an inner life with that same intensity and depth. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sense that thought establishes a connection between the human soul and the divine-spiritual realm was completely lost.

[ 14 ] To those who do not merely study the sequence of eras in a crude and clumsy manner by absorbing their content, but who are able to feel something in that sequence, something quite remarkable is revealed. I do not even wish to speak of the fact that the particular way of thinking about nature that existed in Goethe initially became an impossibility for the science of the following era. I mean for the external science of the following era, because that science did not even know what the difference between Goethe and itself was based on. But I do not wish to speak of that at all. You need only pick up scientific books from the first third of the nineteenth century that, in a certain sense, set the tone for the foundation of the later school of thought—such as Henle’s or Burdach’s works on physiology—the latter certainly still belongs to the first third of the nineteenth century, even if his work was written somewhat later— and you will see that a different style still prevails in all of this. There is still something of the spirit there that springs directly from the soul, for example, when discussing embryos or the structure of the human brain. There is still something there that has been completely lost in the later works.

[ 15 ] Here it is of extraordinary significance to recall a figure who was still active in the last third of the nineteenth century, but who had already succumbed to the expulsion of spiritual life from science—yet in whose soul this spiritual life was still present—I am referring to the anatomist Hyrtl, who belonged only to a very small extent to the last third, and mainly to the second third, of the nineteenth century. Try, for once, to let Hyrtl’s anatomy books sink in. They are already written in the style of later anatomists, but one can see that this is difficult for Hyrtl. He writes chapter after chapter and must constantly refrain from allowing anything of a spiritual nature to flow into his sentences. Sometimes, however, this peeks out a little from the style, and sometimes even from the content of the sentences. But it is as if there were an ironclad necessity to eradicate the spiritual-soul elements rising from within the human being whenever one writes about any natural phenomenon. It is difficult to imagine today what one might experience when, for example, one goes back from a contemporary anatomy textbook to Hyrtl or Burdach. Compared to the meager degree of warmth developed in the scientific sensibility of the first and, especially, the second third of the nineteenth century, one feels as if something were being stoked there. Certainly, science was not at its peak then. That is a trivial truth that need not be elaborated upon further. But I am speaking of what a person experiences in science. And here one can say: From the inner path taken by the souls of the scientists, one can see what spiritual science reveals to us—namely, that by the end of the nineteenth century, more and more souls were emerging who, in fact, no longer possessed the impulse from their previous earthly lives to perceive thought as something divine and spiritual—not even an echo of it. The sense of one’s individual past earthly life had, of course, long since been lost, but an echo of it had nevertheless persisted for a long time.

[ 16 ] Thus, the souls who now truly possessed a living warmth within themselves—who had not been dried up by the prejudice that one must be objective in science in the sense that science tends to define it—for what is sought in spiritual science is, after all, even more objective, though not in the sense that they mean it—asked: What within us is still connected to the divine-spiritual, from which we were already severed in our previous earthly incarnation? — Of course, they did not ask themselves this consciously, but subconsciously. It was truly already a surfacing into consciousness of the feeling that human beings have lost their connection to the divine-spiritual world. But on the other hand, it is precisely the case that human beings must not lose this connection, because without an awareness of it—however dim it may be—they cannot truly live spiritually. This is why there arose such a strong inclination toward that vague longing for the Spirit, and at the same time, the inability to reach this Spirit.

[ 17 ] What characterizes the generation coming of age at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century—and also at the beginning of the twentieth century—is that, in a sense, it posed the following question to the older generations: Is it even possible to discover anything spiritual in what we encounter as our surroundings during our earthly existence? — And the leaders, who were in fact unconsciously being asked by the youth: How do we find the spiritual in nature, how do we find it in human life itself? These leaders rejected the idea of introducing the spiritual into the observation of nature and even into the observation of human life as unscientific.

[ 18 ] In the second half of the nineteenth century, something truly monstrous happened: the catchphrase “psychology, the study of the soul without a soul” came into use. I do not attach great importance to the fact that individual philosophers have said we need a study of the soul without a soul. What philosophers say does not have much impact, but it is a symptom of what is widely felt in the broadest circles and according to which young people in the world are treated. Certainly, only a few philosophers have explicitly stated: “We need a psychology without a soul.” — But the entire age says: “We older people want to teach you mineralogy, zoology, botany, biology, anthropology, and even a history that presents itself to you as if, at most, there were only psychological experiences, but not a human soul.”—Thus, the whole world, insofar as it was viewed scientifically, had to be perceived as soulless. And the souls who were the first to bring with them from their previous earthly life this tragedy of the feeling of soullessness were the ones who most urgently had to ask: Where, then, can we find a fulfillment of the soul through the spirit? — Yet in that which was most highly valued by the age—and, in another sense, rightly so—they found the least guidance.

[ 19 ] The people who, in the last third of the nineteenth century, wrote books in such a way that one can glean something about their inner lives from them are, of course, a vanishingly small minority even within the nineteenth century, and I can assure you: on the whole, those who have written books are not exactly the very brightest. Among those who did not write books, there are far more intelligent people than those who actually get around to writing them. But if one looks—as is possible through methods of the humanities—into the lives of those who, in the last third of the nineteenth century, lived as deeper souls among the superficial souls who were content with spiritless science, one finds a certain struggle with profound problems. But those who possessed this inner life were, so to speak, no longer heard. They no longer had the opportunity to become “leaders” in any way through their inner lives.

[ 20 ] There were many who foresaw what the microscope would increasingly bring about in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such souls were found precisely among those who participated in intellectual life but did not truly penetrate it, because they could not come to terms with that soulless intellectual life. They therefore fell silent, even in their thoughts, in the face of scientific insights. Yet they felt deeply the question: How can one connect microscopic development with macrocosmic development? — More and more, they found themselves confronted with this emotional dilemma.

[ 21 ] Then there were people who, due to their upbringing, went along with the increasingly spiritless scientific tradition, hoping for ever greater scientific achievements through further advances in microscopy. But there were also many souls of a deeper disposition who viewed the ongoing development of the microscope—and especially the views that arose from it—with unease. The hopes of some culminated in the belief that, by looking ever deeper into the small, one would also be able to see living things ever more clearly, while others perceived this whole endeavor as if the world itself were actually sinking away from them. Indeed, there were certainly people who experienced microscopy as a kind of draining of the soul. You will not expect me to sing a satirical song about microscopy in a mystical or fanciful way; that would never occur to me. Of course, I am well aware of the merits of the microscope, and I have no intention of wanting to set science back in any way. What I am describing, however, are facts of the inner life.

[ 22 ] These isolated thinkers became increasingly rare. Fortlage was one of them, a professor at the University of Jena who lived toward the end of the nineteenth century. He said something to the effect: “One can always look more closely through the microscope and discover ever smaller things; but in that smallness, the truly substantial truth is lost.” If you truly wish to see what one seeks when looking through a microscope, turn your gaze outward into the infinite expanse of space. In truth, that which you seek there in the small speaks down to you from the stars. You even speak of a mystery of life and seek it in the small and the smallest. But in the smallest things, life is lost—not in reality, of course, but in our understanding of it. You can rediscover it if you know how to read it in the stars.

[ 23 ] Some have indeed said: Life is carried from the cosmos to Earth, but they sought a material medium, such as meteorites flying through space that once carried the seeds from other worlds to Earth. However, if one looks out from Earth into “infinite” space, that space is not infinite at all. From a mechanical-mathematical perspective, Giordano Bruno removed the firmament, but from an inner perspective, it is there again in the sense that one cannot simply draw a radius from Earth into infinity and on and on. In reality, the radius has an end, and up to that point—where it ends—life, not death, can be found everywhere on the inner periphery of the universe. From this periphery, life radiates inward from every direction.

[ 24 ] With such examples, I merely wish to give you a sense of the inner emotional problems the soul faced at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It was truly the case that, arising from the deepest, most profound feelings of the soul, the question was posed: Where, then, can we find the spiritual again?

[ 25 ] You see, this is what must become the prevailing mood if any phase of what is called the youth movement is to take on real substance—the question of feeling: Where do I find the spiritual, and how does one experience the spiritual?—The real issue here is that, alongside all the longing and anticipation, there are also individual ideals among young people that call for inner spiritual work. I would like to introduce what I will have to say to you tomorrow on this subject with the following remarks today.

[ 26 ] In what I call anthroposophical spiritual science—as I already mentioned in my preface to The Philosophy of Freedom—you encounter something that you cannot grasp if you simply indulge in that passive thinking that is so popular today, that God-forsaken thinking to which most people surrender, and which was already God-forsaken in their previous lives; but you can grasp it only if you freely develop the inner impulse to bring activity into your thinking. You simply cannot keep up with what lives in spiritual science unless that spark, that flash, strikes within you, through which thinking becomes full of activity. Through this activity, we must also reclaim the divinity of thinking.

[ 27 ] There is anthroposophical literature, which asserts that one should think actively. Most people can only think passively and believe that active thinking is not possible. In this process, one can neither sleep nor engage in intellectual daydreaming. One must go along with it; one must set thinking in motion; the moment one does so, one goes along with it. Then what I would like to call modern clairvoyance ceases to be something wondrous. The fact that it still appears to be something particularly wondrous stems from the fact that people are not yet willing to develop the energy to bring activity into their thinking. It is often enough to drive one to despair in this regard. Sometimes, when one makes this demand for activity in thinking, one feels that the person in question is like a man lying in a ditch, not moving his hands or legs, not even opening his eyelids, who was asked by a passerby: “Why are you so sad?” — He replied: “Because I don’t want to do anything.” — The questioner was astonished by this, for the man lying there had apparently been doing nothing for a long time. But he wanted to “do nothing” even more! Then the questioner said: “Yes, you really aren’t doing anything!” — To which he received the reply: “I have to go along with the Earth’s rotation, and I don’t even want to do that.”

[ 28 ] This is how those who have no desire whatsoever to bring activity into their thinking appear—the very force that, arising solely from within the human being, can restore a connection between the human soul and the divine-spiritual content of the world. Many of you have learned to despise thinking because you have encountered it only as passive thinking. But this applies only to intellectual thinking, in which the human heart is not involved. Try active thinking, however, and you will see how the heart becomes engaged in the process. People of our era enter the spiritual world most intensely when they succeed in developing active thinking. For through active thinking, we come to possess heartfelt powers within our thoughts once again.

[ 29 ] If you do not seek the Spirit along the path of thought—which must be walked wholeheartedly, even though it is difficult—if you do not seek along this path the spiritual life that has flowed through humanity from the very beginning, then you are like an infant who believes it can nourish itself from within rather than from its mother’s breast. You will attain a meaningful inner movement only when you discover the secret of developing such activity within yourself that it enables you to draw from the existence of the world, in turn, true spiritual nourishment, true spiritual sustenance. But this is, first and foremost, a matter of will—a matter of will that must be experienced emotionally. An enormous amount depends today on good will, on energetic will, and no theoretical approach will solve what we are seeking today; rather, only and exclusively courageous will, strong will, will bring the solution.

[ 30 ] Let's take some time over the next few days to explore how we can find that good will, that strong will.