The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Threefold Constitution of the Human Being

[ 1 ] It may be difficult, from the perspective of today’s understanding of time, to characterize the specific nature of Spiritual Science; for it goes without saying that when something new presents itself, one initially judges it based on what one already possesses. Spiritual Science, as it is meant here, is of a different nature than what we are accustomed to calling science today; not, of course, because it seeks to establish entirely different content or ideas about things in every respect, but because it speaks to the whole human being in a certain different way. And it is precisely through this different character that Spiritual Science can become fruitful for the art of education. If I am to express myself on what this different character is like, I would like to say the following for the time being.

[ 2 ] When we hear about any kind of knowledge today, we imagine that we acquire certain mental images about this or that and then, if we have a more or less good memory, carry these mental images with us throughout our entire lives. We remember things, and that is how we know them. Spiritual Science is not actually intended for such practical use in life. Certainly, given the habits of modern life, Spiritual Science is often received in this way. But those who approach it as if it were, so to speak, a collection of notes do not view Spiritual Science in the proper sense; they regard something that is much closer to life than ordinary sensory and material knowledge in a way that is just as distant from life as the sensory-material approach. You see, if a person were to say, “I ate and drank yesterday; that happened once, so I no longer need that for the rest of my life,” you would naturally regard that as nonsense. For the connection between the human organism and that which this human organism must take in from the non-human natural world in order to live must always be renewed, and one cannot help but enter into this process of taking in and processing anew, again and again. So, in a certain sense, it is the same with Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science gives a person something that lives within them, something they are actually compelled to renew again and again so that it remains alive within them. And therefore, Spiritual Science is something that is actually much closer to the creative aspect of the human being than ordinary knowledge, and which can thus provide inspiration from many directions for working with this most valuable material—which only an artist can truly handle—for the developing human being.

[ 3 ] At first, it may not seem as though Spiritual Science in this direction is something immediately alive. But if you have the patience to view what must initially be presented in a more abstract form—based on the habits of contemporary life—in such a way that you notice how it gradually becomes real life, so that we gain not only knowledge from it but something that, at every moment, in every hour, is at the same time a school of love for life—then you will see, if you have patience, how Spiritual Science takes a completely different direction, and how those who do the most harm to Spiritual Science itself are those who have once become acquainted with it and then treat it like any other kind of knowledge, viewing it as a collection of notes about the world.

[ 4 ] I wanted to preface this because the very things I will be compelled to say today must first be viewed in this light. Yesterday I pointed out that, in order to gain a true understanding of human nature, one must view the human being from a wide variety of perspectives; yet these various perspectives lead precisely to a unified overview of the physical-bodily and the soul-spiritual aspects. Yesterday I said that in Spiritual Science we speak of the physical human being, the etheric human being, the astral human being, and the I-being. Each of these members of human nature is, in turn, threefold in a certain sense. The physical body is threefold; all other aspects of the human being are also threefold, so that a wide variety of intersecting perspectives come into play. Today I will attempt to shed light on human nature from a completely different angle, and you will see that these various perspectives will ultimately result in a vivid characterization of the human being.

[ 5 ] We can, in fact, consider human beings from three different perspectives—in a way entirely different from how we did yesterday: from the physical perspective, the psychological perspective, and the spiritual perspective. I want to emphasize explicitly that what I am saying today is being said from a completely different perspective and will only later come together with what was mentioned yesterday. We can view the human being, I said, from the physical perspective. From this perspective, he immediately appears to us as a threefold being. Again, from the psychological perspective, they appear to us as a threefold being, and from the spiritual perspective, they likewise appear to us as a threefold being.

[ 6 ] Let us first consider the human being from a physical perspective. In this regard, today’s physiological and scientific approach often falls short and fails to provide a truly vivid understanding of the essence of the human being. I have pointed out these things—I may say, based on thirty years of study of this subject—in my book *On the Mysteries of the Soul*, published two or three years ago. At the beginning, I pointed out this naturally given threefold division of the human being from a physical perspective. I will first present these points in a descriptive manner, and then, over the course of the lecture, gradually provide the specific evidence for this matter.

[ 7 ] When we first consider human beings from a physical perspective, we are focusing on what a human being is by virtue of being a being that perceives the external world through the senses. But you also know that these senses, which are, so to speak, located at the periphery of the human organism, extend inward toward the inner human being through the nerves. Anyone who simply conflates the sensory and nervous systems with the rest of the human organism does not view the human being in a way that would allow his essence to become transparent. There is a high degree of autonomy, of individualization, in what I would like to call the “nervous-sensory human being.” And precisely because today we tend to view the whole human being as a nebulous unity solely from a scientific perspective, we fail to grasp this fundamental autonomy of the nervous-sensory human being. We will understand each other even better in a moment when I elaborate further on this point.

[ 8 ] A second, independent component of the human physical being is everything that is integrated into our organism as—I call it—the rhythmic, rhythm-giving organism of the human being; that is, the respiratory system, which is rhythmic; the circulatory system, which is a rhythmic system; and the lymphatic system, which is rhythmic. Everything that is involved in rhythmic activity within the human being constitutes a second system of the entire human being and possesses a relative independence from the nervous-sensory human being. It is as if these two systems were simply connected to one another as independent entities and merely communicated with one another. There is no such unity within the human being as modern natural science asserts on the basis of unclear concepts.

[ 9 ] And the third is again something that is relatively independent in relation to the whole human being; this is what I would like to call the metabolic organism. If, in terms of activity, you simply consider the threefold human being—the nervous-sensory human being, the human being who lives in certain rhythmic activities, and the human being who lives in metabolism—then you have everything that exists in human nature, insofar as it is an active organism. And at the same time, you have pointed to three independent systems within the human organism.

[ 10 ] You see, modern science has a completely mistaken understanding of these three independent systems when it simply states: “Spiritual life is linked to nervous activity.” We can see everywhere—as a habit that has become established over time, one might say, roughly since the end of the 18th century—that the life of the soul is placed in a certain connection solely with the nervous system. In order to give some meaning to what I have just outlined as the threefold structure of the human body, let us examine the relationship of the human soul life to this threefold human being.

[ 11 ] Now we must say: Everything that is concentrated in the human metabolic body—that is, everything that constitutes the activity of the metabolic body—is directly connected to human volition. That which constitutes the circulatory system is directly connected to human feeling, and that which constitutes the nervous-sensory system is connected to human mental images. You see, this is precisely where modern natural science falls into completely erroneous concepts. It claims that human soul life is connected to nervous life in general—at most, therefore, to nervous-sensory life. Thinking, feeling, and willing are directly connected to nervous activity, and it is only through the nerves that the activity of the soul is indirectly transmitted to the circulatory human, the rhythmic human, and the metabolic human. This introduces a great deal of confusion into our understanding of the human being. We are moving away from human nature instead of drawing closer to it. Nothing other than a mental image is directly connected to the nervous-sensory life. In contrast, just as the life of a mental image is linked to the nervous-sensory life, the human emotional life is just as directly connected to the human rhythmic system. Emotional life, as a form of soul life, pulsates simultaneously in respiration, blood circulation, and lymph circulation, and is just as directly connected to this system as the system of imagination is to the nervous system. And the system of will is directly connected to the metabolic system. Something is always happening in human metabolism whenever an act of will or a combination of wills is present. The nervous system does not have the relationship to the will that is usually attributed to it; rather, the will has a direct relationship to metabolism, and the thinking human being perceives this relationship to metabolism, in turn, through the nervous system. That is the true relationship. The nervous system has no other task than to create a mental image. Whether an external object is created as a mental image, or whether what occurs through the will in connection with metabolism is created as a mental image, the nerve always has the same task. Modern science distinguishes between sensory nerves, which are said to exist to carry, as it were, impressions of the external world from the body’s periphery to the central nervous system; and motor nerves, which are said to carry what emanates from the central nervous system as a volitional impulse to the body’s periphery. People have devised—and I will speak of this in greater detail—very ingenious theories—ingenious they certainly are—to demonstrate how, by severing nerves and so on, one could prove that such a distinction exists between sensory and motor nerves. But in reality, it does not exist. And far more significant than all the ingenious theories devised over time regarding the difference between motor and sensory nerves is the fact that one can indeed sever the so-called motor nerve, join its end to the end of a sensory nerve that has likewise been severed, and that this then results in a nerve of a single type. This is far more telling than anything else that has been devised, demonstrating that no difference in actual function can be found between motor and sensory nerves. Nor can such a difference be found in anatomical or physiological terms. The so-called motor nerves are not what carry the volitional impulse from the central organ to the periphery of the human body; rather, these motor nerves are in reality also sensory nerves. Their purpose is—let’s say, for example, when I move a finger—to establish a direct connection between the volitional decision and the metabolism of the finger, so that the direct influence exerted by the will affects the metabolism of the finger. This metabolic change, this metabolic process, is perceived by the so-called motor nerve. And if I do not perceive the metabolic process, then no volitional decision takes place either, because human beings depend on perceiving what is happening within them just as much as they depend on perceiving anything in the external world—if they are to know anything about it or participate in it.

[ 12 ] It is, I would say, precisely this distinction between sensory nerves and motor nerves that serves as materialism’s most convenient tool—though a tool that has only been able to gain a foothold in materialist science because a convenient analogy has been found in recent times, namely that of the telegraph. One sends a telegram from one station to another, and then sends one back again. Based on this image of telegraphy, people today roughly have a mental image of the processes occurring from the periphery to the central organ and back again via sensory and motor nerves. Of course, this entire image is only possible in an age in which telegraphy plays such a role as it did in the 19th century. If telegraphy did not exist, this image would not have been conceived, and one might have arrived at a more natural conception of the corresponding processes.

[ 13 ] You see, it looks as if, out of—I would say—a certain radicalism, out of a spirit of criticism, one might want to trample into the ground that which so many people have put so much serious effort into. But don’t think that’s easy. Don’t think it will be easy for you. As a very young man, I began to study neuroscience, and it was a shocking realization for me to see how this very neuroscience is the poor servant of materialism, because what is an immediate psychological influence of the will on metabolism is thereby reduced to a material process by creating a mental image of the material nerve tract carrying the impulse of the will from the central organ to the periphery of the human body—that is, to the muscle, the organ of movement. In this way, material processes are projected into the organism.

[ 14 ] In truth, in an act of will, there is initially a direct connection between the mental impulse of will and some metabolic process. The nerve is there simply to convey the perception of this process. Likewise, the nerve is there only to convey the perception that must exist for a person when a relationship arises between their feeling and some such process that manifests itself in circulation. This is always the case when we feel. There is not, at first, any nervous process underlying this, but rather a modification of our circulatory system. Any feeling is always accompanied by a process—not in metabolism, but in the rhythmic course of the circulatory processes. And what takes place—what occurs in the blood, in lymph formation, in oxygen exchange—which is not, however, a true metabolic process—oxygen exchange is indeed a metabolic process, but insofar as it belongs to the mediators of the will—but insofar as we are dealing with a rhythmic process of respiration, this belongs to feeling. All feeling is directly linked to the rhythmic processes. And again, the nerves are there solely to perceive what is taking place directly between the soul’s feeling and the rhythmic processes in the organism. So, once again, the nerves are merely organs of perception. So that, I would say, it is only in this investigation of Spiritual Science that we begin to see what it actually means when, time and again, we have had to find in textbooks of physiology or even psychology: Yes, one must hypothetically assume, based on theory, that human beings have sensory and motor nerves; but anatomically, the two differ at most slightly in their thickness, and in any case not by anything else. As for the speculations regarding tabes and the like that have been made—I will return to those later. Today I simply wanted to suggest, as a starting point, that an unbiased observation of the human organism reveals it to us as a threefold entity: the nervous-sensory organism, which is associated with the imaginative life of the soul; then the organism that lives in rhythms, associated with the emotional life of the soul; and the organism that lives in metabolism, in the broadest sense, associated directly with the volitional aspect of the soul’s life.

[ 15 ] Now, to illustrate this point, let’s consider life—say, in the realm of music. This life in music is the very best proof—initially one of many; we will come to know others, but perhaps one of the best proofs—of the special connection between emotional life and the rhythmic life of the organism. This rhythmic life, in its connection with emotional life, is perceived by the imaginative life, which is bound to the nervous-sensory organism. When we hear something musical—indeed, when we immerse ourselves in a sound image in any way—it does, at first glance, seem to be perceived by the senses. But those physiologists who are able to observe more closely notice how deeply breathing is involved in following a sound image, and how our breathing truly has something to do with what we experience within ourselves—that which causes the sound image to appear to us as something to be judged aesthetically, something that belongs to the realm of art.

[ 16 ] We must be clear about just how complex a process is actually constantly taking place within us. Consider our organism, for example. This nervous-sensory organism, which is centralized in the human brain—it is so centralized, in fact, that only a very small part of the brain is actually in a certain fixed state; the entire brain floats in cerebrospinal fluid. I will try to clarify the underlying principle as follows: If our brain did not actually float in cerebrospinal fluid, it would constantly press against the blood vessels located at the base of the skull and continuously crush them. In fact, because it floats in cerebrospinal fluid, our brain experiences a constant buoyant force—what is known as buoyancy according to Archimedes’ principle, as you know from physics—so that of the brain, which weighs a good 1,300 to 1,500 grams, at most 20 grams actually press against the base of the skull. Thus, because the brain experiences a powerful buoyant force, very little pressure is exerted on the base of the skull. But this cerebrospinal fluid plays no less a role in our entire human experience than, say, the solid matter of the brain itself. This cerebrospinal fluid is, in fact, in a constant up-and-down motion. The cerebrospinal fluid moves rhythmically up and down from the brain through the spinal canal, then radiates into the abdominal cavity; upon inhalation, it is pushed back into the cranial cavity, expelled again, and upon exhalation, it flows back down. This cerebrospinal fluid is in constant up-and-down motion—that is, it extends into the rest of the organism—so that a continuous vibrating movement takes place, which essentially permeates the entire human being and is connected to breathing.

[ 17 ] When we encounter any sequence of sounds, we encounter it as breathing human beings. The water is constantly being driven up and down. And as we listen, the rhythm of the rising and falling water resonates internally with what is taking shape within us—as a sensory perception—through the sounds in our auditory organ, and a continuous interplay takes place between the inner vibrational music of our breathing and what strikes our ear as a perceptual process. This is actually what the musical experience consists of: this balance between auditory perception and the rhythmic process of breathing. And anyone who, for example, seeks to relate musical perception—which is, after all, essentially permeated by feeling throughout—directly to nervous processes is describing it entirely incorrectly. In musical perception, these processes are actually only there to help us connect what is actually happening more deeply with our sense of self, so that we perceive it properly and translate it into a mental image.

[ 18 ] I tried in every possible way to explore these matters. It was a time when people in Europe were still taking a more direct interest in such questions. As you know, there was a lively debate at the time between the conception of musical beauty held by Richard Wagner and his followers and that of the Viennese critic Hanslick. The problem of musical perception was being discussed from every angle. In this context, attention was also drawn to the experiments one could conduct to get to the root of musical perception. And it is precisely in the case of musical perception that one is compelled to seek the direct relationship between circulatory processes and what constitutes actual human feeling, while at the same time there is a direct relationship between the nervous system and a mental image. But this direct relationship is not to be found between the nervous system and feeling, nor between the nervous system and volition.

[ 19 ] I am convinced that the false hypothesis regarding the sensory and motor nerves—which has found its way into science as the servant of materialism—has already taken hold of people’s way of thinking far more than one might think, and will become a way of life in the next generation or the one after that. Yes, I am convinced that this materialistic theory of nerves has already become a mindset among humanity, and that what we recite today as theory in physiology or psychology is already present in our mindsets—and that these mindsets are actually what divide people. When one has the feeling—and people already have this feeling today—that another person actually stands opposite us in such a way that we ourselves make a sensory impression on them, and they on us, and that they have their own emotional life within themselves, separate from us, which is to be conveyed only through the nerves, then we erect a barrier between one person and another. It is indeed true that these barriers have led to strange views, when one hears people say today: “Yes, when I look at another person, I see that they have a nose in the middle of their face, that they have two eyes in the same place where I know I also have two eyes.” They have a face shaped just like mine; by seeing all this, I draw the unconscious conclusion: There is an ‘I’ inside that organism just like the one inside me. — There are already people today who advocate this theory and view the relationship between human beings so superficially that they believe an unconscious inference must first be drawn from a person’s appearance in order to conclude that the other person has a “self” identical to one’s own. The view that brings together only nervous activity with imaginative life, while bringing circulatory and respiratory activity together with emotional life, and the entire metabolic life together with volitional life—this view, when it becomes a mindset, when it becomes a genuine experience, will bring people together again. For now, I can only use an image to illustrate this bringing together.

[ 20 ] You see, we would indeed be very much separated from one another spiritually and emotionally as human beings if we were to relate to one another in such a way that we actually developed all our feelings and desires through our nerves within ourselves, and the whole human being had to be conceived as enclosed within his own skin. This would leave the soul very isolated. And I would say: This is how people feel today, and a true reflection of this feeling is the antisocial—and increasingly antisocial—state of Europe.

[ 21 ] But there is also another possibility. We are all sitting here together in this hall; we breathe the same air, so we cannot say that each of us can seal off our own airspace around us. We breathe the same air. Anyone who ties the entire life of the soul to the nervous system isolates people. Anyone who, for example, returns the life of the soul to the respiratory life, in turn, makes the life of the soul something communal as well. Just as this air is shared by all of us, so too is the life of the soul—and will become—shared by all of us when we return it to the rhythmic organism. And even if, in our social order today, some people can still afford to buy slightly better things while others must settle for something inferior, the rich person cannot—in order to avoid eating the same food as the poor—obtain their food from the moon or from some entirely different celestial body. In terms of metabolism, we share a common life. But in this way, our life of the will also becomes a shared one when we come to understand these original, immediate, and primary connections between the life of the will and the life of metabolism. You will see how infinitely far-reaching it is to recognize this connection between the life of feeling and everything that is rhythmic in human nature—and that rhythmically unites human beings with the external world—and, on the other hand, to come to know the life of the will in its connection with the life of metabolism. Here, too, it becomes evident once again how Spiritual Science is particularly suited to truly understanding matter and its processes. Materialism, after all, is doomed to understand nothing of matter itself.

[ 22 ] I have thus given you a preliminary introduction—we will go into all these things in greater detail—to the threefold division of human physical life into a nervous-sensory life, a life of the rhythmic organism, and a life of the metabolic organism. With regard to the life of the soul, we have actually already discussed this threefold division in connection with the life of the body. We can simply regard the trivial division—which is usually taken as a basis—into thinking, feeling, and willing as the structure of the life of the soul. But one gains only a limited understanding of the life of the soul if one places this division—which is certainly valid—in the foreground. As you know, the division of human soul life into mental images, thinking, feeling, and willing recurs frequently in psychological theories. But the fact that this does not actually provide a true understanding of the life of the soul must become increasingly clear to anyone who observes human nature with an open mind.

[ 23 ] Now, there is actually a phenomenon—or let’s say a complex of phenomena—that is far more characteristic of the life of the soul than the abstraction of thinking, feeling, and willing. The abstraction of thinking, feeling, and willing is, as I said, useful, but to gain a vivid understanding of the life of the soul, one is better off not starting immediately with thinking, feeling, and willing, but rather by first focusing on something that actually runs throughout the life of the soul as a much more primary manifestation of it—namely, that this life of the soul is always oscillating between sympathies and antipathies, between love and hate. We simply do not usually notice how the life of the soul oscillates back and forth between love and hate, between sympathies and antipathies. We do not notice this because we do not assess certain processes of the life of the soul in the correct way.

[ 24 ] You see, human beings make judgments. A judgment is either affirmative or negative. I say: “The tree is green.” I connect the two mental images—tree and green—and I connect them in a positive way. I say: “You weren’t with me yesterday.” I connect two mental images—or rather, two complexes of mental images—in a negative way. Ultimately, even such judgments are based, in the life of the soul, on something akin to sympathy and antipathy. The affirmative judgment is always experienced with sympathy; the negative judgment is always experienced with antipathy. Not that the correctness of the judgment is based on sympathy and antipathy, but the correctness of the judgment is experienced through sympathy and antipathy. And we can say: A third option between the two—between sympathy and antipathy—is clearly present as well. This is when a person must make a decision between sympathy and antipathy. After all, we do not merely experience sympathy and antipathy in the life of the soul; we clearly experience a skeptical oscillation between the two, which is also a positive state. Thus, we do not find them as distinctly separated here as we do in the body, because we are dealing with a process and not with distinguishable parts; yet the life of the soul is also structured into sympathies and antipathies and what lies between them.

[ 25 ] This distinction becomes even clearer, however, when we consider the spiritual aspect of the human being, which modern psychology consistently conflates with the psychological aspect. But we shall see that one can gain a truly vivid insight into the nature of the human being only when one is able to distinguish between these three aspects of human existence: the physical, which consists of the nervous-sensory processes, the circulatory processes, and the metabolic processes; the soul, which consists of the experiences of antipathy and sympathy and the oscillation between the two; and the spiritual, which also presents itself to us quite distinctly as threefold. The spiritual aspect of the human being also presents itself to us as threefold, namely in three states clearly distinct from one another. In human spiritual experience, we must clearly distinguish between waking experience—which we all know as a state of our spiritual life that is our own from the moment we wake until we fall asleep—and another state of our spiritual life that extends from falling asleep until we wake, namely, the life of sleep. And we have the third state between the two, which we experience at the moment of waking: the life of dreaming. Waking, dreaming, sleeping—these are the three aspects of spiritual life. Waking, dreaming, sleeping. However, to gain a true understanding of spiritual life, one must not merely associate the trivial mental images with waking, dreaming, and sleeping; rather, one must be clear that one must cultivate a sense of observation regarding the way in which the sleeping state of mind initially manifests itself. We see, of course, that sleep first presents itself to us in that a person becomes motionless, becomes insensitive to sensory impressions, and so on; but if we try, to begin with, to adopt a different perspective—we could adopt many other perspectives—we can also approach what sleep is for our lives in the following way.

[ 26 ] It is commonly believed that when we look back on our lives, we are looking at a continuous stream. We do, in fact, piece together our memories as if they were a continuous stream; however, this is a mistake. You recall what you have experienced today since waking up. Before that lies the time when your consciousness was asleep; there, the stream of memory is interrupted for the entire duration of sleep. Then comes daily life again, followed once more by sleep. So what we perceive in our consciousness as a continuous stream flowing backward is, in fact, constantly interrupted by states of sleep. And you see, this has a certain significance. It has a certain significance even for consciousness itself. One could even say: We are sometimes predisposed—indeed, attuned—to perceive what is missing just as much as what is present; we just don’t always realize it. If I were to draw a white area on the board here, leaving out the black dots, you would look at the white area, but actually pay less attention to the white area than to where there is nothing—where the black dots are that I’ve simply left out, where I haven’t drawn anything. We see, for example, that when we have a bottle of seltzer water, we also perceive, in a sense, the water—which is the denser substance—rather than the small bubbles, the air bubbles inside, the carbon dioxide bubbles. So we see what is not there, within the water itself. And so, by perceiving in reverse, we do not actually perceive our experiences; we certainly take an overview of them, just as we take an overview of the white space here; but what we perceive directly is something else. And what we perceive directly requires that we inform ourselves about it quite precisely. One can only arrive at this by truly attempting to perceive what our sense of self is actually based on. Gradually—and I will carefully enumerate the phenomena that lead to this in the following lectures—one comes to realize that this perception of the omitted states of sleep actually conveys our sense of self, and that we destroy our sense of self by not sleeping properly. This is already a consequence of the fact that this interruption by sleep must be interspersed in our recollection so that we can arrive at an orderly sense of self. And study—as I said, I will mention specific examples later—study in context those disturbances that arise in the sense of self due to a disordered sleep life; then you will be able, I might say, to grasp it with your own hands that the sense of self rests on these omissions in consciousness, on these gaps that occur within the sense of self. I am not saying the concept of the “I”; I am saying: in the sense of self.

[ 27 ] Well, what lives within a human being is not only what we might call the content of waking consciousness; the life of sleep also plays a direct role in what lives within a human being—in fact, it plays an even greater role. Anyone who can truly observe human subjectivity will find—if they bring the waking state properly to consciousness—that this waking state is in fact actually present only in the mental image. We cannot possibly seek the same degree of wakefulness in human feeling. Human feeling is by no means present in our consciousness in the same way as a mental image. Rather, feeling has no other relationship to our consciousness than does the life of dreams. As strange as this may sound, anyone who is truly capable of grasping the difference between a mental image and feeling purely as phenomena of consciousness must conclude that the same kind of experience is present when we perceive dreams that are in consciousness as when we feel. We will discuss this in greater detail later; for now, let us simply outline the matter.

[ 28 ] But then the very same kind of experience that is present in the unconscious state of sleep—in dreamless sleep—is actually present in the act of willing. Just think about it for a moment: You raise your hand, you raise your arm, and you achieve a result of your will. You perceive the result of your will. The volitional impulse—the immediate mental impulse—is connected to metabolism. Strictly speaking, you understand the entire inner process that takes place between the volitional impulse and metabolism just as little as you consciously experience what is happening to you when you are in unconscious, dreamless sleep. The conscious experiences of actual volitional processes and those of dreamless sleep are entirely equivalent. The processes of emotional life and those of dreaming are similar. For true waking life actually consists solely of the life of the imagination. Thus, we are not merely asleep when we are in that state between falling asleep and waking up, but we are also partially asleep even when we are awake; for we are awake only in relation to our life of the imagination, we dream in relation to our emotional life, and we sleep in relation to our volitional life.

[ 29 ] Don’t say that the life of the will must remain unconscious. No, it does not remain unconscious. If I had a white surface here with four black circles cut out of it, I would perceive something in the empty spaces—where nothing is, where the circles have been cut out—just as I perceive in my consciousness the omitted contents, the contents of the will, which are actually overlooked in waking daily life.

[ 30 ] And now consider this: if one looks at a human being in a three-dimensional way, one actually sees within them an interplay of clearly distinct states—three states of mind. The waking mind is active in their mental image; the dreaming mind is active in their feeling; the sleeping mind is active in their willing. We must not only learn to distinguish between waking and sleeping in their alternating states of day and night, but we must also learn to distinguish between waking and sleeping within the waking human being, as they interact with one another. This has a very practical significance, especially for education—a very, very practical significance. We must ask: How do I actually come to understand the interplay of will and mental image, and how do I best learn from this how to deal with a child from the age of six or seven onward—when I must pay particular attention to this interplay of will and mental image? The answer is: by observing the interplay of will and mental image in another phenomenon where it occurs in a tangible, obvious way—namely, in waking and sleeping. If I study waking and sleeping, I have something with which I can compare will and mental image.

[ 31 ] This must be mentioned at the beginning of this course because it is only through Spiritual Science that our psychology acquires a truly real content. If you pick up psychology textbooks today, you will find definitions of volition, definitions of thinking—but these remain, more or less, mere verbal definitions. One must come to know these things in reality. But one can only truly come to know these things if one can relate them to one another in the real world—if, for example, one can study the relationship between waking and sleeping, as we will do, and if, at the same time, one sheds essential light on the relationship between mental images and volition. Then one penetrates into the real world. That is precisely what Spiritual Science aims to do. It does not merely view spiritual life out of some subjective need—because that is something pleasant for some people who otherwise have little to do, who, instead of seeking their usual coffee-clatter topics, might for once seek the substance of such clatter: the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an “I.” In many people’s minds, this is, after all, merely a topic for coffee-table chatter. But the point is that this must not get stuck in the sectarianism of coffee-table chatter; rather, what is achieved through Spiritual Science in the knowledge of the spirit is, in truth, called upon to shine back into human life in such a way that we learn to deal with this human life according to its practical reality—even though we have forgotten how to deal with it in this way. And the result of this forgetting is, after all, the chaos in Europe—the absurd events of the last five to six years. There is a connection between the forgetting of the world’s true, real content and the plight of our civilization. Those who believe one can remain with the old mindset are very much mistaken. Especially in the field of education—where one must think most deeply about the future of humanity because one is dealing with the human beings of the future—one should first consider the forces that enable us to pass on to the next generation something different from what this generation received, the very generation that has now brought about these terrible conditions in our civilization.

[ 32 ] Here, a view opens up—I would say, from the enclosed school grounds, which are in fact sacred to the development of humanity, out into the vast whole of human development.