The Rudolf Steiner Archive

9. Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy: The Spiritual Perspective

[ 1 ] When one considers spiritual life in our age—and one need only be open-minded enough to do so—one must see how the whole and the great of this age have increasingly lost their soul, especially since the second half of the 19th century. Our present-day civilization lacks a soul; and if the individual wishes to awaken his soul to inner life, he must necessarily do so not by participating in the grand features of our civilization, but in solitude.

[ 2 ] We have generally fallen out of the habit of truly observing the fundamental currents of our present-day life with an alert mind. From an external perspective—one that really took hold in the 19th century—there have been phenomena that should actually have called for intense attention to what is taking place in spiritual life. But such phenomena have passed by more or less without a trace. Indeed, one could say that in recent times such phenomena have not even been articulated in a way that would have allowed them to make a sufficiently profound and stirring impression on modern humanity.

[ 3 ] I would like to begin today’s discussion with a phenomenon that, judged by its outward appearance, may be met with a certain smile by some, recorded by others—from a historical perspective—as one of the many ideological aberrations of neutral significance, and opposed with some anger by still others. Above all, however, I would like to attempt simply to state the facts as I see them.

[ 4 ] Over the last two decades of the 19th century, I had often found myself wondering who, in fact, was the most intelligent person of the age. Of course, such matters can only ever be understood in a relative sense. So please do not take the points I am about to make in connection with this question too seriously; but with the necessary grain of salt with which one approaches such matters, I would ask that you view this as something I believe I am entitled to present as a characteristic of our age.

[ 5 ] Our age is the age of intellectualism. The intellect has reached a very special height. And so one must ask: On what does the human intellect actually depend during earthly existence? Certainly, the powers of the intellect—the active aspect of the intellect—depend on the human soul—and we will have to consider this soul aspect later—and depend on what the human being initially carries within themselves, unconsciously for earthly consciousness, as the etheric organism, the body of formative forces, the astral body, and the “I” organization.

[ 6 ] But in the current stage of Earth’s evolution, human beings simply have not progressed far enough to truly bring to life the activity of the intellect as it exists within these three aspects of human nature. If human beings did not have a physical body, the intellect would have to remain silent during their earthly existence. It would be like how a person feels when walking toward a wall: If they walk straight ahead without even paying attention to their arms and hands, they see nothing of themselves; but if the wall they are approaching is a mirror, then they see themselves. Just as a person who does not see himself, so would the human intellect be: it would not perceive itself if it did not have the physical body that mirrors its activity, that reflects its activity back. Thus, human beings owe the greatness of their intellect in the present age to the reflection of their inner soul activity through the physical body. However, while a person would never mistake their own reflection for themselves, this is precisely what happens with the intellect. Whatever exists solely in physical activity as the reflection of the intellect, the human being ultimately confuses with the intellect itself. They surrender to the reflection. But then the reflection will reign within them.

[ 7 ] In a sense, a person devotes his or her intellect entirely to the physical body. When a person succeeds in truly devoting his or her intellect entirely to the physical body, that intellect attains a high degree of perfection. When we allow our inner self to be active, we still stumble from time to time through all sorts of feelings and impulses we have, through prejudices, through sympathies and antipathies—and in this way we stumble into the intellect. In doing so, we render it imperfect. But if we become completely dry, sober, and cold in nature—if, to speak in Hamerling’s terms, we unite the masculine soullessness of the billionaire with the feminine soullessness of the mermaid, as Hamerling depicted such a union in his Homunkulus— and thereby gain the ability to think as we must think in accordance with our physical body, then a relative perfection of our intellectuality is precisely possible in this age. Then we learn to think in such a way that, in a sense, the intellect moves of its own accord within us, that the intellect, in a certain sense, becomes an automaton, functioning at a relatively highest level of perfection.

[ 8 ] I asked myself this back then, during the last two decades of the 19th century, and wondered: Who, in the sense that he has first brought the intellect to a relatively highest level of perfection, is the wisest person in contemporary civilization? Now, of course, you may smile, but I really could come up with nothing else but that the wisest person in contemporary civilization is Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious. This is by no means some reckless paradox, but rather something that emerged for me from a reflection—perhaps not entirely devoid of soul—on the last two decades of the 19th century.

[ 9 ] You can imagine that one came to have great respect for the person whom one considered the wisest man of the age. That is why I dedicated what I wanted to express at that time in epistemological terms to Eduard von Hartmann in my little book Truth and Science. So I am not speaking out of disrespect; I am speaking out of deep respect. The background to Eduard von Hartmann’s philosophy is, of course, that he was actually trained as an officer. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant, but then suffered a knee injury and subsequently transformed the intellectual capacity that had originally been intended for modern militarism into philosophy. It is interesting that this very circumstance led to what I can only describe as follows: Eduard von Hartmann was the most intelligent man of the last third of the 19th century.

[ 10 ] He therefore clearly saw what can be clearly seen with the intellect of the last third of the 19th century. He saw through human consciousness as it is bound to the earth—but bound to the physical human body. Since he was intelligent, he did not deny the spirit. But he placed it in the sphere of the unconscious—that which can never inhabit a body, that which can never enter into an intimate connection with the physical, and which, since it must always be extra-physical, that is, spiritual, can only be unconscious.

[ 11 ] One can only be conscious—so Eduard von Hartmann told himself—within the body. But if the body is not the only thing that exists—if there is a spirit—then the spirit cannot be conscious, but only unconscious. Thus, says Hartmann, when a person passes through the gate of death, he should not expect to force his way into another state of consciousness, for beyond this earthly consciousness there is only the unconscious. A person descends into the sphere of the unconscious spirit. The unconscious spirit is present wherever human consciousness is absent.

[ 12 ] Eduard von Hartmann’s philosophy is thus a philosophy of the spirit, but a philosophy of the unconscious spirit. Thus, consciousness exists nowhere except in the human body; although the spirit is everywhere, it is a spirit that knows nothing of itself, of the world, or of anything at all—an unconscious spirit.

[ 13 ] Isn’t it absolutely clear that this unconscious spirit can never in any way penetrate anything outside itself except through the physical human body? That is clear from the outset. But this statement conveys something very significant. It implies that this intellect, which thus elevates itself to the level of the unconscious, lacks love.

[ 14 ] I am not saying that Eduard von Hartmann lacked love, but his intellect—in which his significance lay—lacked any love whatsoever. It is impossible for a loveless intellect to build a bridge to anywhere. Therefore, it remains only within itself, but as a result, it cannot attain consciousness. It remains in the sphere of the unconscious. One could also say that it remains in the sphere of lovelessness.

[ 15 ] This already suggests that this is also the realm of soullessness, for where love cannot arise, the very essence of the soul gradually fades away. And so we must, I would say, sense the atmosphere of lovelessness emanating from the whole and grandeur of the civilization of the second half of the 19th century, upon whose shoulders our civilization stands.

[ 16 ] It is indeed most curious to see where Eduard von Hartmann’s indulgence in the unconscious mind, combined with a lack of compassion, has led him.

[ 17 ] He looked upon this world of earthly life, which gives human beings consciousness. But if we, as earthly human beings, could not live within our bodies—if we could not immerse ourselves in our bodies with every awakening and connect with them completely—what would lie ahead for us?

[ 18 ] When we wake up as earthly human beings, the “I” and the astral body—which have separated during sleep—return to the physical body and the etheric body. There, the “I” and the astral body unite most intimately with the etheric body and the physical body; there, this “I” and the astral body become one with the etheric body and the physical body

[ 19 ] one. And as long as we, as earthly human beings, are awake, we must speak of an intimate unity of the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. But if one separates the spiritual-soul aspect from the physical-bodily aspect in the way that Eduard von Hartmann does intellectually, then this would correspond to the following reality: a reality that would arise if, upon waking, we were to enter our physical and etheric bodies but not merge with them, instead merely dwelling within them without merging with them. According to Eduard von Hartmann, the unconscious spirit dwells in the body and thereby becomes conscious in physical earthly life. He is thus conceiving of something that, if it were to occur in reality, would be as if, upon waking, we were to enter our physical and etheric bodies but not merge with them—instead, we would dwell within them, look around as we look around inside a house, see everything inside everywhere—that is, we would be separate within. But what would happen then?

[ 20 ] Now, if our spiritual-soul aspect were not fused with our physical body but lived separate from it, this would mean an utterly indescribable, unbearable pain for our soul; for every pain arises simply from the fact that an organ is not functioning properly, that an organ is diseased, that we are driven out of a part of our physical body. If we were completely driven out—if, so to speak, we were “separate” from our physical body—we would have to experience an indescribable pain. Every morning when we wake up, this pain threatens us, so to speak. We overcome it by immersing ourselves in our physical and etheric bodies and uniting with them.

[ 21 ] Now, certainly, Eduard von Hartmann was not an initiate; he was merely an intellectualist—the greatest intellectualist of the second half of the 19th century. He merely conceived in thought what I have now depicted for you as a reality. He imagined the world as if our ego and our astral body were not connected to the physical and etheric bodies. He conceived of the relationship between the human being and his body just as I have just described it in terms of reality.

[ 22 ] This led him to the following conclusion: He arrived at a position of utter pessimism. Of course, such pessimism would be experienced if, upon waking, we were separated from our physical bodies. Eduard von Hartmann conceived of it. And what does he present as the result of his thinking? The world is the worst conceivable one. The world contains the greatest amount of evil and suffering, and the true cultural development of humanity can consist only in gradually eradicating and destroying the world. And at the end of the Philosophy of the Unconscious, an ideal does indeed emerge.

[ 23 ] Eduard von Hartmann lived in an era when technology was advancing more and more, when people were acquiring more and more machines to perform this or that task. Anyone who takes a closer look at all that is possible with machinery will be fascinated by the possibilities it holds. If one expands the possibilities that the perfection of machinery can bring to the world, it creates an immense sense of wonder.

[ 24 ] Eduard von Hartmann has embraced this idea. And he believes that humanity—which, having just attained the intellect, must gradually become more and more intelligent—must also come to realize more and more that the right thing for this world is to destroy it; that humanity will one day develop a machine capable of drilling all the way to the center of the Earth and then setting the machine in motion to hurl this entire, wretched Earth—along with everything that physically lives on it—into the vastness of the cosmos in a single blow.

[ 25 ] One can only say that the foundations for such a way of thinking are actually present in everyone else as well—people who may not be as intelligent as Eduard von Hartmann, but who are nonetheless very intelligent—yet they have not had the courage to think through the ultimate consequences in this sense. And one might say that if one is truly able to grasp what the intellect can accomplish when detached from the rest of the world, then—given this one-sided development of the intellect—the ideal that Eduard von Hartmann presents even appears, in a certain sense, to be necessary.

[ 26 ] I said that people were unable to properly articulate certain phenomena of the times that were, after all, present. But one should certainly strive to formulate as concisely as possible the ideas of the philosopher of the unconscious, who presented this perspective to humanity in 1869. And in this regard, Eduard von Hartmann was actually far more astute than the others, for he accomplished that very feat I have often recounted after he had presented this ideal to the world. In the very same book in which he sets forth this ideal, he speaks of the spirit—albeit the unconscious spirit—but he does speak of the spirit. It was a terrible sin, for science had progressed to the point where one was not permitted to speak of the spirit in a scientific context, not even in the harmless sense of regarding it as entirely unconscious.

[ 27 ] And so the other intellectuals regarded this “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” which had made quite a splash in literary circles, as dilettantism. That’s when Eduard von Hartmann played a trick on them. A refutation of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” by an unknown author was published. And in it, this philosophy of the spirit was thoroughly refuted. The work was titled “The Unconscious from the standpoint of Physiology and the Theory of Descent.” In this anonymous work, so strongly—yes, I must now say, the “un-spirit”—since I am not allowed to say “spirit” in this case—the “un-spirit” of the other “wise men” had Hartmann feign that the most eminent natural scientists of the time—Oskar Schmidt, Ernst Haeckel, and a host of others—wrote the most laudatory reviews of this anonymous book, saying: “At last, someone has thoroughly put that dilettante Eduard von Hartmann in his place!” It’s a shame that we don’t know who this anonymous author is. Let him reveal himself to us, and we’ll consider him one of our own.

[ 28 ] It goes without saying that, after such a fanfare, the anonymous author’s work was soon sold out and required a second edition. It was published as: “The Unconscious from the standpoint of physiology and the theory of descent, second edition, by Eduard von Hartmann.”

[ 29 ] So, as you can see, Eduard von Hartmann proved that he was the smartest of all—first, because he could be as smart as he was, and second, because he could also be as smart as the others, his opponents.

[ 30 ] If I had to say yesterday that psychoanalysis is amateurism squared, one would actually have to say—since psychological traits always multiply—that Eduard von Hartmann’s cleverness was cleverness squared, multiplied by itself.

[ 31 ] One really shouldn’t pass by such a phenomenon of our age in such a deep slumber as one does. One should articulate it and hold it before one’s soul; then one would truly have the absurdities of our age right before one’s eyes. And why was Eduard von Hartmann so wise? He was so intelligent because he truly examined, with a penetrating gaze, everything that was worth taking note of in his time. He became, so to speak, the naturalist of philosophy. It is, of course, roughly the same as saying: the dessert of the soup. But he simply became the naturalist of philosophy.

[ 32 ] The point now is to use precisely such a phenomenon to clarify, in a purely empirical way, where one must end up if one does not want to fall into these abysses. If one wants to find one’s way out of the confusion into which this civilization leads, one must look precisely at what human beings truly carry within themselves.

[ 33 ] But if one gradually moves from the physical body of the human being into the spiritual realm, approaching the soul, one encounters—as we discussed again yesterday—the etheric body, or the body of formative forces.

[ 34 ] Eduard von

spoke of such an etheric body or body of formative forces

[ 35 ] Hartmann, in accordance with what was known in his time, knew nothing at all. He did not rise from the contemplation of what is outwardly natural and physical to the next level, which is adjacent to the physical—the etheric body or body of formative forces.

[ 36 ] We know that when a person falls asleep, their ego and astral body separate from the physical body and the etheric body. The etheric body remains within the physical body. In fact, a person can never truly know—using only earthly consciousness—what the nature of this etheric body is. For when he is awake, he immerses himself in the etheric body along with his astral body and his “I.” Then he is inside it. Then he experiences whatever he himself has brought into it with his “I” and his astral body. A much more highly organized being would have to immerse itself in this etheric body during human sleep, while the “I” and the astral body are outside. Such a being, which could truly and objectively discern the true nature of this etheric body, would find what the human being actually leaves behind as his etheric body—along with the physical body—when he falls asleep. If one were to examine what the human being leaves behind, one would find that this etheric body—or body of formative forces—is truly, in an earthly sense and in an even higher sense, the very embodiment of all wisdom.

[ 37 ] For true understanding, it cannot be denied: When we have left our physical and etheric bodies behind at night, the two we have left behind are far wiser together than we are when we are inside them. For in our “I” and our astral body, we are children of the Earth and children of the Moon’s evolution. The etheric body, however, traces back to the Sun’s evolution, and the physical body even to Saturn’s evolution. They stand on a much higher level of perfection. Today, we cannot measure ourselves—in our “I” and our astral body—against what has accumulated over time as wisdom in our etheric body from the epoch of solar evolution. One could say: This etheric body is concentrated wisdom. But when we humans carry our wisdom—through our astral body and our “I”—into this etheric body, we need a support, just as we need the support of a mirror if we want to see our reflection. We need the physical body as a support. Just as we could not stand if we did not have physical ground beneath us, so we could not live in our etheric body unless the etheric body bordered on the physical body and abutted against the physical body everywhere, finding support in the physical body. With its inner life, the etheric body would be like a person floating freely in the air without a foundation. Thus, for our ordinary earthly existence, we have only a soul life that, while living in the etheric body, requires the physical body as its foundation.

[ 38 ] With this state of mind, we can only approach the mineral world. We can only perceive the inanimate with it. If we want to approach the plant world, we need the ability to use the etheric body without the physical body.

[ 39 ] How can we do that? How can we use our etheric body without our physical body? We can do this if, through inner exercises, we gradually transform ourselves from people who live primarily through their physical bodies in the element of heaviness into people who live through the light in the element of lightness—people who, through the light, no longer feel connected to the Earth at all, but rather to the vastness of the cosmos; when our gaze toward the stars, the sun and moon, and the vastness of the universe gradually becomes as familiar to us as when we look upon the plants that cover the meadows. When we are mere children of the earth, we look down upon the plants that cover the meadows. We take delight in them, but we do not understand them, because we are earthlings bound to heaviness. But if, just as we learn to stand as earthlings bound to heaviness, we can also bind ourselves to the vastness of the universe, to the meadow of the heavens, strewn with stars — which is now not the ground but the ceiling —, and can we feel a kinship with it, just as we do with the earth’s surface, then we begin—by transforming our earthly consciousness into a cosmic consciousness—to use our etheric body within us just as we otherwise use our physical body. Only then are we capable of approaching the plant world with our intellect as well. For plants are not brought forth from the earth upward, but are drawn out of the earth through the heavens.

[ 40 ] You see, Goethe was filled with this longing as he developed his Metamorphosis of Plants. And he said many things that are as if he, rather than the earth, a person drawn to the sun rather than to the earth—someone who sensed how the sun draws the power of plant growth out of the earth right at the root, how the sun, through its forces and in conjunction with the influence of the air, gradually develops the leaf, and how the sun finally, in the flowering and fruiting processes, gradually transforms what it has drawn out of the earth.

[ 41 ] One need only read this wonderful little work by Goethe, published in 1790: “An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants,” and one will find the seeds of such a description throughout. Goethe was driven by a longing to penetrate the world of plants. But he repeatedly stumbled in his attempt to truly develop ethereal perception instead of physical perception. This is the impulse that was already present in Goethe—and it is what anyone who truly draws inspiration from Goethe, who does not wish to take the “dead” Goethe but rather the Goethe whose influence continues to live on, must further develop.

[ 42 ] For when one comes to realize that the human soul is capable of such a thing—if only it becomes truly conscious of its etheric body—it is able to sense its heavenly origin, its independence from the Earth, and its being placed upon the Earth. The human soul can say to itself: You are of cosmic origin; you have been placed on Earth through the physical human body, but you are of cosmic origin. And when you can take joy in the plant world here, that which rejoices within you is a child of heaven who delights in what the heavens, in turn, draw out of the Earth into the plant world. The human being spiritually detaches himself from the Earth by truly grasping his etheric body—or body of formative forces—in reality.

[ 43 ] When one does this—that is, when one reaches that point—and what can lead one there is a genuine love for the plant world— to live in the etheric body just as one otherwise lives in the physical body, then not only is one’s own etheric body raised into consciousness, but just as physical nature is raised into our consciousness through our physical body via our senses, so too is the etheric world brought into our consciousness through the etheric body.

[ 44 ] And what do we perceive, then, when we look out, as it were, through our etheric body into the etheric world—just as we look out with our physical body into the physical world—what do we see there? There we see, in place of what is spread out before our physical eyes, the real past from which this physical world has emerged. There we see in our minds the images of what was, so that the present can be.

[ 45 ] Therefore, even in the earliest times of humanity, the first initiation given to humankind was the initiation into the cosmos. In the earliest schools of humanity, people worked toward this initiation into the cosmos. The teachers of the first mysteries were the initiators who taught how to read the ether of the cosmos—which can also be called reading the chaos, reading the Akashic Records, or Akashic reading—that is, reading what has passed and has conjured the present before our eyes. And it was, in essence, the first stage of initiation that humanity attained during its earthly existence—this initiation through the cosmos.

[ 46 ] A second thing that can be achieved is this: When we wake up, we allow the astral body and the “I” to sink down into the physical body and the etheric body. We animate the etheric and physical bodies; we connect with them. But we can grasp only as much of the infinite wisdom of the etheric body as we bring into it. Yet it continually inspires us. Whenever we have a good idea, it is the etheric body—because it is intimately connected with the ether of the cosmos—that inspires us to have that idea. Everything that a person develops in terms of ideas and genius while awake comes from the etheric body and thus, indirectly, from the cosmos. Genius communicates with the cosmos through the astral body being stimulated by the etheric body.

[ 47 ] However, the person who does not realize this still lives within it, and the essence of his soul lies in the fact that, while awake, he immerses his astral body and his “I” into his physical body and etheric body.

[ 48 ] When we become at home among the stars just as we are in the meadows, we gain—by making the vastness of the worlds, so to speak, the upper realm of our being—the ability to experience the ethereal. Human beings always experience it; it is only in their understanding that they do not reach it without initiation; but in reality, every human being experiences it. If we seek a corresponding foundation for our astral body as well, this foundation is always there; it is simply a matter of spiritual science drawing our attention to what is present in every human being.

[ 49 ] Suppose you could not see the physical floor but were nevertheless standing on it; you would still be standing on it. If someone were then to use science to discover that the floor is there and tell you so, you would still be standing on the floor. In the same way, someone who has mastered spiritual science can tell you that you are rising to the higher plane, to the stellar plane; but you are nevertheless truly rising. And so the human being stands within another world with his astral body, in the world of living spiritual beings, which we have described as the world of the higher hierarchies.

[ 50 ] Just as, when we enter the physical world, we experience this very physical world as the real one—with minerals, plants, and animals existing within it, and the earth from which humankind ultimately emerges in the course of human evolution—so too does the human being, with his astral body, exist in the world of beings of the higher hierarchies. When a person lives in this world, their astral body finds its corresponding counterpart there. Yet they always carry within themselves that which they can only come to know through spiritual science. And they carry it within themselves as the capacity for feeling.

[ 51 ] Everything we make our own in the world through our feelings—through this most intimate life of the soul—consists in the rippling and weaving of the spirits of the higher hierarchies within our own astral body. When we become aware of our feelings, this awareness of feeling is what the human being possesses first and foremost; yet within this feeling lives the weaving and working of the spirits of the higher hierarchies through the human being. We cannot truly grasp the soul if we do not perceive it as immersed in the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies. And just as the past is revealed to us for the sensory present through etheric vision—when what was developed in the early Earth mysteries as the initiation of the cosmos is recreated in a modern way—so, too, can the soul be deepened to the point where it gains an awareness of what is actually taking place within the astral body.

[ 52 ] This requires a loving immersion into what was experienced as a connection with the spiritual worlds in the great mysteries. If we allow ourselves to be taught by the cosmos under the guidance of the wisdom of initiation, we will reach the first stage of the soul in its reality. If we can penetrate into what actually took place in the Mysteries—if, so to speak, we can read in the Akashic Records not only the past of the stars, the past of the animals, and the past of physical humanity, but also what was lived in the souls of the great Mystery teachers—then we can truly bring to life within ourselves, for example, I attempted to describe—in a way that can be presented to people today—in my Christianity as a Mystical Fact; if we can bring to life what the Mystery teachers developed within themselves through their contact with the spiritual beings themselves, then we approach that initiation which, in later earthly ages, joined the cosmic initiation—and which I would like to call the initiation of the sages.

[ 53 ] Thus, one can speak of two stages of initiation: initiation through the cosmos and initiation through the sages. What the sages had taught as cosmic knowledge constituted the content of cosmic initiation. Looking into the souls of those who have gone before us in the life of the soul leads into the second stage of the soul’s being. Human beings can already begin to engage with all of this within the context of external history. When one grasps with inner vitality that which still shines through from ancient times—say, in the wondrous wisdom of the Vedanta and in other wisdom traditions of earlier eras—one’s own inner vitality, in turn, takes hold of one, and one is brought closer to the initiation of the cosmos. And when one immerses oneself with deep love in such matters as I described in my book Christianity as a Mystical Fact, in which an attempt was made to present the content of the ancient mysteries in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, then one comes close to initiation through the sages.

[ 54 ] And so, in the present, it is necessary to look honestly into one’s own inner self and, with an open mind, to get to know that inner self—one’s own spirit, which then illuminates the soul from within. But I will speak in even greater detail about this—as the third stage of the initiation necessary today—next time. It is the initiation of self-knowledge.

[ 55 ] But when spiritual science speaks of the soul today, it must speak from the spirit of these three stages of initiation: initiation through the cosmos, initiation through the sages, and initiation through self-knowledge. In this way, one traverses the various boundaries of soul life. It is impossible to take even the first steps on this path without love. And I had to tell you that the intellect of the present age, precisely when it emerges at its highest level, forgets love—it loses love. But through this, something very special takes place.

[ 56 ] Truly lovingly engaging with what is described as the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I

[ 57 ] One can do so—and indeed, one does—when one hears something from the voice of the genius who dominates our age, when one has the good will to listen to the voice of the genius of our time. But can people today take what is meant by the phrase “the genius of our age” with the deep seriousness it deserves? Doesn’t it remain an abstract concept for most people when we speak of the genius of our age? Consider how far people are from grasping a truly spiritually living force that works, weaves, and lives in our time when we speak of the genius of our age.

[ 58 ] But it must be said that even if people deny the Spirit, they cannot rid themselves of it. The Spirit is inextricably linked to humanity. Only when people reject the genius of an age does the demon of that age approach them. And when, at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century, the intellect had reached the point where it followed entirely and solely the mechanisms of the physical body—even automatically— became mechanical, and thus reached its highest stage—so that it became as clever as it is in itself, and as clever as others are—when this intellect advanced to the image that summoned the mechanical and the material into existence within the intellect, the intellect behaved just as a human being behaves when he renounces the genius. “Then the demon of the age seizes him. The intellect had separated itself from the soul. The intellect became mechanical, soulless, and in this state it founded a philosophy. It lacked love and could not love wisdom. Its philosophy could only become the intellectual reflection of earthly demonology—that demonology which conceives the ideal of a machine drilled into the center of the Earth and blasting the Earth out into the cosmos.

[ 59 ] This is what the demon of the age said to the intellect of the age. The demon of the age will make itself heard often if one refuses to recognize the spiritual realm. Then it will appear to this intellect just as a human being would actually experience it if, upon waking, they were to sink into their physical and etheric bodies and not unite with them, but remain inwardly separated from them. For this intellect is alien to the human being; it emancipates itself from the human being. The intellect that is connected to the human being struggles its way up from earthly consciousness to other states of consciousness. For the intellect that binds itself only to the earth but then separates from it—and thus possesses only the reflection of the intellect—all other states of consciousness become the infinite sea of the unconscious. The human soul ceases to become aware of its heavenly origin and of its independence from earthly life.

[ 60 ] But the essence of the human soul lies in the fact that human beings, in their very nature, oscillate between the physical and the spiritual. This oscillation between the physical and the spiritual constitutes the life of the soul. If a person, in all honesty, believes only in the body—and, because he cannot entirely set aside the spirit, the spirit thereby becomes merely unconscious—then the spiritual aspect is denied.

[ 61 ] While Hartmann contemplated the downfall of the Earth in such a demonic way as only a person could conceive—one who was asleep in the physical body but then became clairvoyant while still in that body—and while Hartmann thereby arrived at an intellectual conception of the Earth’s suffering, a man who was a friend of his, who exchanged many letters with him, writhing on his sickbed in real pain—a man in whom it had come to pass that many organs would not allow his spiritual-soul aspect to enter the physical—a man who actually experienced, rather than merely conceived of, earthly suffering—could only address the soullessness of his age in a satirical manner. This is Robert Hamerling, who wrote his Homunkulus in the 1880s, as the prospect of his era’s soullessness dawned on him—that person who strives only outwardly, who amasses more and more in the external world, who ultimately becomes a trillionaire—this dreadful prospect of the soulless age stood before Hamerling’s inner eye. And Hamerling has the soulless billionaire—the homunculus, who is brought into the world not through the participation of the soul but solely in a mechanical manner, through mechanical procreation—marry the soulless elemental spirit, the water nymph, the Lorelei.

[ 62 ] Thus, Robert Hamerling saw before his inner eye the prospect of a soulless age—arising from humanity’s pursuit, in its purely material existence, of a spiritless intellectuality that, while present in nature spirits, awakens in human beings all forces of destruction, culminating in a demonic lust for destruction that seeks to blast the entire Earth out into outer space. Robert Hamerling could address this problem of the soulless age only through satire.

[ 63 ] But modern civilization and culture must once again be imbued with a soul. This soul can only be imparted if human earthly experiences are illuminated by the light of spiritual knowledge.

[ 64 ] And so one must say that what the wisest man of our age has portrayed in a truly terrifying, one might say, deterrent manner—and what the man who most tragically felt the cleverness of our age, writhing in pain, has satirically presented as a perspective—must be transformed for humanity, through spiritual knowledge, into the spiritual perspective toward which we must strive as the second perspective.

[ 65 ] Yesterday we discussed the physical perspective. Today we wanted to discuss the emotional perspective, and tomorrow we will discuss the spiritual perspective.