The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] When we consider the human soul, we find within it thinking, imagining, feeling, and willing. I have certainly spoken about these three soul activities here on several occasions. However, today I would like to say a few words about this threefold human soul in a specific context that fits into our lecture series.

[ 2 ] In the waking state, we actually live only within our thoughts. We are fully aware of what we think while awake. If you ask yourself: Are the feelings we experience in the waking state just as conscious as our thoughts? — you must answer no. Emotions remain, in a certain sense, obscure and indefinite to waking consciousness. And if you compare what you experience in your emotional world with what you experience when confronted with the diverse imagery of your dreams, you will find the same degree of consciousness in both the emotional world and the world of dreams. In the world of feelings, one merely dreams in a different way—but in the world of feelings, too, one merely dreams. It is easy to be misled about this nature of the emotional world by translating what is felt into mental images. One imagines one’s feelings. In doing so, one elevates the feelings into waking consciousness. But feelings as such are no more conscious than a dream.

[ 3 ] And in particular, a person’s volitional impulses remain unconscious—we might even say completely unconscious. Just imagine for a moment how much you know about what you call “will.” Suppose you reach out your hand to grasp something. First, you have the idea that you are going to reach out your hand. That is your intention. But how this intention flows down through your entire organism, how it communicates itself to the muscles and bones so that your hand can grasp the object—you know just as little about that as you do, in ordinary consciousness, about what happens to your “I” while you sleep. Only when you have grasped the object do you once again perceive the movement of grasping—that is, yet another mental image. What lies between this mental image, which constitutes the intention, and the mental image you have when you see the intention realized in outward action—what lies in between, what is taking place within your organism—you remain oblivious to even while you are awake. Willing is a form of sleep, feeling is a form of dreaming, and only imagining—that is, thinking—is true wakefulness.

[ 4 ] Even while awake, we have the threefold human soul: the waking soul, which imagines; the dreaming soul, which feels; and the willing soul, which sleeps—so that in ordinary consciousness, a person can never say what is actually going on down there in the states where the will weaves and lives.

[ 5 ] But when we use the methods of anthroposophical research to shine light into the region where the will pulsates, we first find the following: When we intend to carry out any act of will, it begins as a thought, a mental image. The moment this intention flows into the organism, a process arises within it that can be called an inner combustion process. Each time, a combustion process arises within the organism along the entire path that the volitional decision takes. Through the burning of metabolic products that you possess within yourself, everything that moves the arm to carry out a volitional decision is brought about, so that, in a physical sense, a person who is acting out of will is actually engaged in a combustion-like consumption of their metabolic products. In fact, we must constantly renew our metabolic byproducts because the will continuously consumes and burns them.

[ 6 ] This is different in the case of imagination. In imagination, there is a continuous deposition of salt-like constituents. Earthy, salt-like, and ash-like constituents are separated from the organism, so that, physically speaking, thinking and imagining are a process of salt deposition. Willing is a burning. And to the act of observing—spiritual observation—human life presents itself as a continuous deposition of salt from above and as a burning rising from below. This burning is what causes us—if I may put it this way—to be unable, in the fire of our own body and with ordinary consciousness, to perceive what the will actually is. This burning causes us to constantly sleep through the will, through all willing.

[ 7 ] But what becomes invisible to ordinary consciousness when we neglect our will? If one now shines the light of spiritual insight into this organic fire—which is continually kindled by the will—one perceives that within this fire live the effects of our moral conduct in our previous earthly life. Within it lives what one might call human destiny, human karma. It is truly the case that, when one looks at things correctly—for example, when a person meets another person in a certain year of their life—this fact appears quite differently when viewed spiritually and correctly than when viewed merely outwardly with sensory-intellectual consciousness.

[ 8 ] Let’s suppose that, at some point in their life, a person has just met another person. People very often refer to this as a coincidence. And it certainly seems as though the other person had been led to them through the various random twists and turns of life, and that they had struck up an acquaintance with that person in that very moment. But that is not how it is. If one looks, using the methods of spiritual science, into the entire context of human life—into all that becomes invisible through the process of “combustion” I have alluded to—then one sees that an acquaintance made, for example, at the age of thirty-five has been longed for and strived for in a systematic way throughout one’s entire life. If you trace a person’s life from the age of thirty-five back to early childhood, and you uncover and reveal the paths they have taken to finally arrive at the point where they encountered that other person, you will see that this is a systematic striving within the subconscious. And sometimes, when one considers a person’s destiny in this way, it is quite marvelous to see the twists and turns a person takes to arrive at a specific place in a specific year and to meet another person there. Anyone who truly looks into human life cannot help but say: The person who experiences something has sought that experience throughout their entire earthly life, just as one can seek anything at all. — And why do we seek a specific experience? Because this seeking has been poured into our soul from earlier earthly lives. But the effects of these earlier earthly lives do not appear in the conscious thought in which we are awake; rather, they appear in the consciousness where a process of combustion continually lulls us into sleep. We strive unconsciously, but we strive toward the experiences of our earthly existence.

[ 9 ] Now, various objections may arise, thoughts may come to mind, when something like this is said. First, one might say: Yes, then our whole life is predetermined by fate and we have no freedom. — But do we lose freedom simply because we have blond hair and not black? That, too, is predetermined. We are still free, even though we have blond hair and not black, even if we might wish for black hair; we are still free, even if we cannot reach down and grab the moon, as we might have wanted to as children. We are still free, even if we seek certain experiences from the very beginning of our earthly life, for not all of human life consists of such fateful experiences; rather, free experiences are always interwoven with the fateful ones. And spiritual science finds these interwoven free experiences in another context.

[ 10 ] I often speak of the three stages of spiritual knowledge: imagination, where we first perceive a world of images; inspiration, where spiritual reality and essence enter into this world of images; and then intuition, where we stand within that spiritual reality and essence.

[ 11 ] When a person, as a researcher of the spirit, arrives at imagination and, as I have already indicated in my public lecture, sees the tableau of their life unfold before them, something else always becomes visible at the same time. One cannot have one without the other. One cannot have imagination—the true spiritual insight into one’s earthly life thus far—without those experiences that we have always had during sleep, from falling asleep to waking up, surfacing in a remarkable way, like a memory. I have told you what these experiences are like. When one gains imagination on the one hand, one gains—especially strongly when the inner silence of the soul also sets in—a vision of what the human being experiences in the state of sleep.

[ 12 ] I have already described to you many of the experiences a person has while asleep. But the experience that stands out above all others before the soul’s eye during sleep is the destiny that is taking shape anew. When we shine our light down into the sleep that lies within our will during wakefulness, we come to the karma that is at work from previous earthly lives. When we begin to look through the experiences between falling asleep and waking up, we see how the karma that will only be realized in the next earthly life is woven together from the free actions we are currently performing.

[ 13 ] Do not think that, when one looks into this life of sleep, the particularly unsettling thing is that one must now tell oneself: You have brought this karma upon yourself through your moral conduct in your present earthly life. — That is no more unsettling than knowing that today the sun rose, reached its zenith at noon, set again, and will follow the same path the next day. This lawfulness, which emerges from the depths of sleep, does not trouble one, because in the most varied ways, through freedom in the next earthly life, what one finds predisposed in the states of sleep of the present earthly life can come to bear. But one can certainly perceive the karma that takes effect in the subconscious states of volition, and one can perceive the karma that is being spun anew when one looks into what, even unconsciously during sleep, begins to weave itself for ordinary consciousness as an initial karma. And one also sees how the past is constantly interwoven within the human being with the future, how that which a person sleeps through during the day—the inner mysteries of their will—intertwines with that which they sleep through at night—the inner mysteries of their ego and astral body—once these have separated from the physical and etheric bodies and continue to weave the karma of the future.

[ 14 ] When we think during ordinary wakefulness, we usually think about external things. These external things that we think about remain in our memory through the ordinary content of our soul life. But that is only the surface of the soul life. Behind this level of thinking lies a much deeper inner life. What we experience as our thinking during the waking day, we experience in the etheric body, the body of formative forces. What takes place behind this in the astral body and in the “I” can only be experienced by consciously penetrating the events that the “I” and the astral body undergo when they are separated from the physical body and the etheric body during sleep. That is where future karma takes shape. This is veiled from us during the day by the external thoughts present in the etheric body. But in the depths of the soul, even during the day, it weaves itself together with what lies in the unconscious, sleeping will—as the karma that carries over from the past. And in this way, one can point very precisely to this karma within a human being.

[ 15 ] But here we encounter the following peculiarity. The period of a person’s very earliest childhood is particularly interesting for the observation of karma. The child’s decisions seem entirely arbitrary to us, yet they are not arbitrary. Oh, it is true that these volitional decisions of the child imitate what is happening in the child’s surroundings. And I have hinted at this in a public lecture: how the child is entirely a sensory organ, how it internally experiences every gesture, every movement of the people around it. But the child experiences every gesture, every movement, with its moral significance, so that when faced with a quick-tempered father, the child perceives the immorality that may be associated with that quick temper. And the child perceives, in the subtlest movements that people make in its surroundings, the thoughts that those people have. We should therefore never allow ourselves to have impure, immoral thoughts, for example, in the presence of a child, and say: “We can allow ourselves this in our thoughts; after all, the child knows nothing of it.” — That is not true. When we think, at least our inner nerve strands are always moving in some way. The child perceives these as well, especially in the very earliest years. The child is a keen observer and imitator of its surroundings. But what is remarkable—and, I would say, interesting in a sublime sense—is that the child does not imitate everything, but rather makes a choice. And this choice actually takes place in a very complex way.

[ 16 ] So imagine, for the sake of argument, that in the child’s environment there is a thoughtless, quick-tempered father who does all sorts of things that aren’t really right. Because the child is entirely a sensory being, it must take in all these things—just as the eye cannot defend itself, it must accept whatever is in its environment. But the child takes in what it absorbs only while awake. Now the child begins to sleep. Children sleep a lot. And during sleep, the child makes a choice. What it wishes to take in, it sends down from its soul into its body. What it does not wish to take in, it pushes out into the etheric world during sleep, so that the child absorbs into its physical being only that which is predestined for it by its karma, by its fate. The workings of fate can be seen particularly vividly in the very earliest years of childhood.

[ 17 ] If you’re an intellectual, you often feel that you’re incredibly smart and that your child is incredibly stupid. As one gradually learns to see into the world, one no longer holds that judgment; instead, one comes to realize just how foolish one has actually become since childhood. The only difference is that the intelligence one has acquired is a conscious intelligence, unlike that of childhood. But the wisdom with which the child, in the manner described, makes the choice between what it wishes to assimilate—and must assimilate according to its destiny from previous earthly lives—and what it repels into the general etheric world, is far, far greater than the wisdom we possess in later life. And what a person carries over from their previous earthly life into their present earthly life, they carry over first and foremost during the very early years of childhood, when the question of freedom does not even come into consideration at all. By the time the awareness of freedom emerges, we have in fact already brought in the vast majority—by far the greatest part—of what we are meant to carry over from previous earthly lives into this one. And when a person has a very specific experience at the age of thirty-five, he has already paved the way for that experience in the very earliest years of childhood. The first steps of life are the most important and essential for what is predestined.

[ 18 ] I once tried to hint at how wise a child is, and how, as life goes on, we actually become less and less wise. One becomes more conscious, and then one values conscious rationality, while failing to appreciate the unconscious wisdom of the child. One actually comes to appreciate that wisdom only through the science of initiation. I once drew attention to this. However, this was severely criticized by official philosophical circles. I pointed this out in my little book *The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and of Humanity*, right in the first chapter. It is therefore important that we be able to view this very earliest childhood in this way. Once people come to understand this, they will also develop a healthier judgment regarding something that is mentioned over and over again today but is not understood at all: inherited traits. In literature and science today, there is a tendency to attribute everything to inherited traits—to the traits inherited from one’s parents. Once people come to understand how the child, through karmic forces from previous earthly lives, brings with it what it even selects in a very wise manner, they will find the proper balance between what lies in the determination of destiny and what constitutes external heredity and its outward expression. For this heredity is merely an outer garment. And the fact that it exists comes as no surprise to those who correctly understand what I have also said here in these lectures—namely, that at a certain point between death and a new birth, we turn our attention to the succession of generations. We do, after all, turn our gaze down from the beyond into this life in order to foresee long in advance what kind of parents we will have. From the beyond, we help determine the characteristics that our parents will possess; no wonder, then, that we inherit them. But within what we inherit, we then make our own selection in the manner described. In general, observing a human being during the first years of childhood is something particularly sublime and fascinating. I must use this expression again and again. I have drawn your attention to what is learned from the child during the first years of life: walking—which encompasses so much, as we mentioned yesterday—speaking, and thinking. The child acquires these skills. Anyone who can now observe correctly how the child takes its first steps—how it sets its little foot down firmly or gently, how it strides forward bravely or timidly, how it bends the knee more or less, how it uses the index finger more than the little finger— whoever truly looks into all that has to do with walking—indeed, with the balance of life into which the human being finds their way in the three spatial directions—whoever looks deeply into all that is connected with it, sees precisely there how karma is vividly expressed in this process of learning to walk. One sees how a child, from the very beginning when learning to walk, plants its little feet firmly on the ground. Looking back, one sees how this is connected to a previous earthly life. One finds that the child behaved valiantly and bravely in certain situations during previous earthly lives. The courage and bravery of those previous earthly lives are vividly and sensually expressed in the way the child places its little feet. And it is precisely in the process of learning to walk that one can observe a wonderful reflection of human karma in the child. Individual karma—this personal karma that each person possesses—is expressed particularly in this process of learning to walk.

[ 19 ] Second, we learn language. We imitate what is spoken around us. Every child does this in their own unique way, but all people who learn their native language within a linguistic region imitate a language. In the way a child finds its way into imitating sounds, one can see how the destiny of a people plays out within the human being. In a person’s learning to walk: an individual destiny; in learning to speak: the destiny of a people; and in learning to think: the destiny of all humanity at a certain point in time across the globe. Three kinds of destinies are, in fact, interwoven within the human being.

[ 20 ] Although we express our thoughts in different languages, when one penetrates through language to the thoughts themselves, we claim that these thoughts can be understood by every person in the world. There is a Chinese language and a Norwegian language, but there is no difference between Chinese thoughts and Norwegian thoughts other than that which is individual. But thoughts as such—their truth or falsity—are no different. The fact that thinking takes on a different hue stems from the fact that people live within the individuality of language; but as far as the content of thoughts is concerned—not their form—it is the same for all people.

[ 21 ] By integrating itself into the life of thought in the third stage, the child becomes part of a specific moment in time for all of humanity; through language, it becomes part of the destiny of the people; and through its immersion in three concepts of space, through learning to walk, learning to grasp, and so on, it becomes part of its own personal, individual destiny.

[ 22 ] If one wishes to truly understand human beings in their entirety, such matters must be examined from every angle. I would like to illustrate how this applies to human life as a whole using another example. Let us return once more to the state of sleep, to the experiences a person undergoes from the moment of falling asleep until waking up. There, the person enters the spiritual world with their “I” and their astral body—in fact, returning to the starting point of life. But the “I” and the astral body weave the destiny of the future. When the “I” and the astral body return once more to the physical body, a new piece of destiny has been woven each night. But in ordinary consciousness, a person still understands nothing of this destiny. They return once more to their etheric body and their physical body. The thoughts have remained behind in the etheric body; they did not accompany the person into the state of nighttime sleep. People merely believe that when they are in bed, they are not thinking. They are thinking continuously; they are simply unaware of it because, with their “I” and their astral body, they are outside the realm of thinking. For thinking consists of an activity of the etheric body. You can actually observe this very easily in everyday life when something makes a strong impression on you. Just think, for example, of the first time you attended a symphony that particularly inspired you. If you have a particular predisposition for it, you may often wake up during the night, and you always wake up to the sounds of that symphony, because your etheric body continues to vibrate with that symphony all night long. It does not cease within you. It is not at all necessary for you to be present for the symphony to play out within you. When you are present, you perceive it only through the vibrations in your etheric body. And so it is with all thoughts as well. You think all night long in bed, but your “I” is not present, so you do not know what you are thinking.

[ 23 ] I can tell you this: it is through the “I” that we very often even spoil our thoughts. In fact, we usually think much more clearly when we are not present at night. Believe it or not, that is how it is. Most people have a much healthier judgment about the things of life at night than during the day. When the etheric body—which is in harmony with the laws of the cosmos—can think on its own, when the person does not spoil their thoughts, then they usually think more clearly than when they muddle their thoughts with their “I.” And that is something they do very often during the day.

[ 24 ] When we are outside the physical body and the etheric body with the “I” and the astral body, that is when we weave our future karma. That which weaves and lives there as the “I” and the astral body—from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up—must pass through the gate of death and enter the supersensible world. Even though the astral body later merges with the “I,” and the “I” then undergoes this process alone with a different substance, nevertheless: that which weaves outside the physical and etheric bodies during sleep must pass through the gate of death and traverse the path between death and a new birth through all the states I have described to you in recent days. And you know from this description that the “I” passes through the work it performs with the other beings of the higher hierarchies in order to prepare, in the future, a new physical human body—now in the form of a spiritual seed. This requires immersing oneself in a profound wisdom between death and a new birth—a wisdom in which one can live only by engaging in spiritual activity together with the beings of the higher hierarchies.

[ 25 ] Much still needs to be woven into the karma that is being formed between falling asleep and waking up, so that it may connect in the proper way with a physical body in the future. For just think of the journey that must be undertaken. It is within the “I” and the astral body that this karma is woven; it must descend into that region which we will then have in our next earthly life as the unconscious region of the will. It must descend. It must thoroughly unite with all of the human being’s physicality. When the “I” and the astral body are in the ordinary state of sleep, they still have little of this to assimilate during the passage between death and a new birth.

[ 26 ] And then the “I” and the astral body must return to the physical body, and upon waking they do not quite understand what to make of this physical body. Yet they have carried it over from their previous life. The “I” and the astral body do not know how to behave properly during this immersion. This is why—since it is only in the next earthly life, starting in childhood, that the astral body and the “I” can shape the physical body and the etheric body through the first seven years and the second seven years—because only then is everything present within the “I” and the astral body that can work properly on a physical body— that is why, now when falling asleep—when the “I” has only just taken on the moral behavior of the human being and is only beginning to weave karma—it does not actually understand upon waking: what is all this within the physical body?

[ 27 ] Well, it can only enter the physical body in a completely unconscious way. It must, in turn, re-enter the unconscious. But when it becomes conscious, when it passes through the realm of imagination, the confused images of the dream emerge. What do these mean? Why are they so often out of step with life? Because the “I” and the astral body are only just trying to submerge themselves into the physical and etheric bodies—they cannot quite manage it. This lack of harmony between what the “I” cannot yet do and what it ought to be able to do according to the wise structures of the physical and etheric bodies is expressed in the confusion of waking dreams. In the waking dream, we see an image of how the “I” attempts to bring what it is not yet into a certain harmony with the physical and etheric bodies. And only when it suppresses consciousness in favor of the will and submerges into the subconscious realm—that is, when it does not rely on its own wisdom—does it re-enter the physical body without giving rise to confused perceptions.

[ 28 ] If, upon waking, the “I” were to fully immerse itself in the physical body—whether consciously or semi-consciously, as in a dream—then the most terrifying dreams would arise from the human being’s entire physical body. Only the fact that we submerge ourselves into the unconscious will at the right moment dampens the faint, fleeting, pictorial dreams and allows us to submerge once again—as proper “I”s and proper astral bodies—into the realm of the unconscious will. This is so clear to anyone who views these things impartially that every dream can show a person the disharmony that exists in their present life between the “I” and the astral body—in relation to what they have acquired in this present life—and the fully developed physical and etheric bodies. First, what has been woven together morally must unite with the spiritual seed of the physical body during the transition between death and a new birth. Then what we weave in this present life between falling asleep and waking up becomes so powerful that in the next childhood life—in that dreamlike, half-asleep childhood life—it can truly permeate the physical and etheric bodies throughout the years of childhood and use them as instruments for earthly life.

[ 29 ] Thus, when one considers the whole human being, one becomes increasingly aware of how within this person lies that which was woven during the nightly rest and darkness of previous earthly lives, and how, between death and a new birth, the wondrous fabric of the physical body has been added—and then, one might say, in the very last moment of life between death and a new birth, the etheric body. But we carry within us the result of our previous earthly lives. However, what we carry within us as the forces of our previous earthly lives—down within the organism, within the will-organism—is continually being burned away, because the physical substances and products are consumed, and this inner fire within us constantly covers and burns them away. And even as it is being burned away, it still exerts its influence. We walk our path through the world guided by our karma. There is a specific path for each individual experience. So while from childhood onward we select what we imitate from our surroundings—thereby turning even our first steps into an event that we may not reach until our fiftieth year—and while we exert our will directly on the path toward this experience, what constitutes physical matter is constantly being burned away within us.

[ 30 ] Because fire renders us unconscious with regard to this path of life, what is in fact a continuous path of destiny is constantly transformed for our inner perception, so that it appears to us as momentary desires, instincts, drives, temperaments, and so on. Down below lies the path of destiny. The fires are always flaring up. We see only the surface of the fires. And on the surface of the fire—on the blazing flames, so to speak—that which we carry within our souls as our passions, drives, and instincts plays itself out. This is merely the outward appearance, the outward manifestation of what lies in the depths as human destiny. People observe the individual passions, the individual expressions of instinct, the individual drives—what one likes or dislikes in the moment, what one does or refrains from doing in the moment out of sympathy or antipathy. But this is just like when we have something in front of us, and I say: g-o-d-g-o-v-e-n-s-t-i-r-s-t-h-e-w-o-r-l-d. I can only spell it out. Someone else comes along and says: What you just said are letters, which means: God governs the world. So it is with the difference between ordinary psychology and spiritual science. Ordinary psychology can only spell things out. It looks at a person’s life, finds this or that childish instinct or impulse in childhood, records them—just as someone who can only spell out letters does—and so it goes throughout the entire course of life. The one who understands spiritual science reads; he sees through the surface of the flames to what lies beneath and observes the paths of human life as determined by destiny.

[ 31 ] The difference between conventional psychology—which is still officially the norm today—and a true understanding of human inner life is like the difference between spelling and reading. But the reason people find it so hard to understand is that you can’t tell the other person that what they’re saying is wrong. To someone who’s merely spelling out: d-e-r-g-o-t-t—you can’t very well say, “What you’re reading there is wrong.” — It’s perfectly correct. Just because he doesn’t yet know that one can also read it, he says: “You’re a crazy guy; I only see d-e-r and so on.” Summarizing it is foolish. — He cannot understand that one can also read it there.

[ 32 ] So one must always say to those who invoke today’s accepted psychology: “You are absolutely right.” — As an anthroposophist, one says to the natural scientist and the psychologist: “You are absolutely right.” — We do not refute them; we agree with them. But he says: “If you speak of instincts, drives, and passions as if they were letters you can read, then you’re just a crazy guy.” — That is the difficulty. The anthroposophist gets along quite well with others; he doesn’t need to refute them either. Nor does he engage in polemics against external science at all. Only when this science begins to call him a crazy fellow does he, of course, have to assert that this is not true—and, in particular, that he also accepts what others wish to accept. However, he cannot accept the principle that anything does not exist simply because someone does not see it. For that is by no means a criterion of truth—that what one person does not see does not exist. He must first convince himself that the other person actually sees it.

[ 33 ] It is certainly true that anyone who stands on anthroposophical ground must also understand this difficult relationship between anthroposophy and other worldviews. At most, one can sometimes pass judgment—just as one might say to someone who is willing to accept only “d-e-r-g-o-t-t”—as one might say, “You’re half illiterate”—so, under certain circumstances, one might say to someone who cannot at all break free from merely spelling out instincts, drives, and passions, temperaments, and so on: “You’re a half-baked philistine, you’re a half-baked boor; you just can’t rise above it.” — But one would not say that he is wrong.

[ 34 ] The relationship between anthroposophy and the external worldview is such that understanding is possible only when the reader shows the goodwill to learn to read. Otherwise, mutual understanding is simply not possible at first. That is why the usual debates are so fruitless, and why opponents cannot see things from another perspective. Very few of those who oppose anthroposophy realize this. And because I believe it is right to do so, I must speak to you about this fact here as well.

[ 35 ] The opponents of anthroposophy are now, I would say, growing in number with each passing month. But because they can’t really find a foothold anywhere—since anthroposophy always proves them right, yet they refuse to acknowledge that anthroposophy is right—they can’t actually attack what the anthroposophist says. Therefore, they attack the person, slander, and lie about the person. Unfortunately, this is the form that the polemic is increasingly taking. This is something one must see through if one stands on anthroposophical ground. It is so extraordinarily important to see through this.

[ 36 ] There are already some very strange books written by opponents today. Many of you will have read anthroposophical literature and will find that, in the relevant passages of my own books, I always state the very objections that could be raised against something. I always engage in polemics myself in order to then show how the arguments I put forward can be refuted, so that the counterarguments against anthroposophy can already be found in my own books. Now there are opponents today who are busy copying the arguments I myself have presented against anthroposophy in my books and distributing them as anti-anthroposophical writings. So today you can find anti-anthroposophical writings that are plagiarized from my books, where they simply copy down what I say. It is precisely this circumstance—that the anthroposophist himself must assert the very arguments that can be raised against him—that actually makes the opponents’ work terribly easy today.

[ 37 ] Well, I didn’t say all this to find fault with my opponents, but simply to illustrate how one must ascend in order to move from “spelling out” life—in terms of the impulses of the will—to “reading” life. “Spelling out” reveals that which wells up as instinct—or, one might say, as animalistic life in the form of wishes, desires, and passions—and is valid for the moment. If one knows how to treat all of this as letters and to read them together, then one penetrates to human destiny, to the destiny of the individual human being. This human destiny reigns at the very foundation of life, and through this destiny, the human being fits into the ongoing course of the entire development of humanity. And only when one can comprehend the entire life of the individual in this way can one also comprehend human history—which we now intend to consider over the next few days—as the life of humanity on Earth in its destiny before and after the Mystery of Golgotha, and the intervention of the Mystery of Golgotha in the development of humanity on Earth. But I had to lay a foundation and show you what is at work within the human being, so that it can be demonstrated correctly how the gods and how the Mystery of Golgotha are at work within the human being and in the destiny of humanity as a whole.

[ 38 ] We'll talk more about that tomorrow.