The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. The Natural Sciences and the Development of Humanity I

[ 1 ] In these lectures, I would like to explore some of the connections between the spiritual life of peoples and the historical destinies of those peoples. And since, for modern human beings—given the entire state of mind that dominates them today—the natural sciences are a particularly important element of civilization as a whole, I would like to highlight, among the various perspectives from which this topic can be approached, the scientific one in particular, and show to what extent humanity’s turn toward scientific views in recent times points to deeper foundations in the entire historical development of peoples.

[ 2 ] To that end, it will be necessary to provide an introduction today and then address the actual topic in the following lectures, building on what we have discussed today.

[ 3 ] When we turn our spiritual gaze to the historical developments of peoples—let us focus first on the historical aspects—we are struck not only by their external political and economic destinies but also by their spiritual gifts, spiritual achievements, and spiritual outcomes. And you know that at present, two schools of thought stand in sharp contrast to one another. I have already pointed out these opposing schools of thought in an earlier lecture I gave here in Stuttgart. First, there is the view that proceeds more from the ideal—as it understands it—and whose proponents believe that spiritual-essential forces, but only in the form of abstract ideas, govern the development of peoples. In their view, external events are brought about by such inner spiritual-essential forces. It is also said that ideas prevail in history, playing out from one epoch to the next; however, people are usually unclear about the elusive relationship between such a sequence of ideas—supposed to be active throughout history—and what is truly spiritual and essential.

[ 4 ] The other school of thought, which exerts a great influence today, holds that all intellectual phenomena—including customs, law, science, art, religion, and so on—are merely a consequence of material or, as a large part of humanity would say today, economic realities. The idea here is that certain obscure forces—which are not discussed in detail—have brought about this or that particular economic system, or this or that form of human cooperation, in successive historical epochs; and that through this cooperation—that is, through purely economic and material processes—what people recognize as ideas, and what they regard as customs, law, and so on, has come into being.

[ 5 ] If one is determined to do so, one can put forward—one might say—compelling reasons for both viewpoints. Both can be “proved” in the sense in which we often speak of proof today; and whether one opts for one way of thinking or the other depends on one’s general instincts, one’s place in the world, what one experiences of life through this place in the world, and so on.

[ 6 ] But the two assertions—one, that material life is a consequence of spiritual life (I will now use the most general formulation), and the other, that everything spiritual is a consequence of material-economic processes—these two assertions relate to each other like the following: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

[ 7 ] Throughout the entire realm of the initially given, sensory world, it is certainly the case that one cannot decide, based on any philosophical principles, whether the egg or the chicken came first; for in one sense, the former is certainly necessary as the first, while in the other sense, the latter is. If one looks first and foremost at the purely logical aspect, it is the case that one can juggle the two assertions I have made just as one can juggle the concepts of the egg and the hen. The decisive factor in such matters lies not at all in the realm from which the preconditions for questions of worldview are usually derived in modern times, but rather in the deeper foundations of cognition. Before one can address these, however, it is necessary to first clarify what we encounter in one sphere—the spiritual—throughout the successive epochs of human history.

[ 8 ] People today are quite inclined to conceive of two world epochs—which, from their perspective, are very far apart—as a single entity. First of all, people feel at home in their own time with their own views. They try, as much as possible, to shape their own views according to the general views of their human environment. In this regard, there is indeed a general, unconscious striving to standardize people’s views. What is supported by the general, externally recognized authorities is called “correct.” People say: “This or that is true”—and what they actually mean is that this or that is recognized as true by the prevailing authorities. One then perceives what is thus recognized as precisely what is worthy of an enlightened, truly civilized person. At most, one looks back on historical epochs that did not yet hold these views as childish preludes to what has today, to a certain degree, been perfected in scientific knowledge and the like. But people generally believe that the way one must think today is actually the way people throughout history should always have thought. They simply did not come upon it right away; they first had to work their way through all sorts of myths and so on to arrive at what is today known as rigorous scientific method. And then, linking this conception of human thought—which is seen as advancing in its development—to very primitive cultural states, in which people lived more like, I might say, higher animals, acting purely on instinct and so on. Little thought is given to how the transition from one state to the other actually took place. One wants to be clear about both states of human development. But when one then asks in detail how these two views—that of primitive man and that of the human being as we consider him today—fit together, doubts may well arise, for there really is a rather remarkable chasm between these two presupposed states of the human soul. For example, you can pick up a modern history of philosophy—one that has been published as part of a large collection—and read in its first chapter about the philosophy of primitive peoples, that is, those peoples who today do not belong to the civilized world, who are regarded as descendants of the very people about whom I just said that they are imagined to have been were something like higher, speaking, imaginative animals who led a predominantly instinctive existence. This chapter on the philosophy of primitive peoples—neatly organized according to the contemporary categories assumed in such works, namely logic, epistemology, natural philosophy, and ethics—was written by the well-known and famous Wundt. Then, after this chapter concludes and has just pointed to a kind of instinctive worldview of the most primitive sort, one turns the page, opens the following pages immediately, and finds a discussion of the philosophy of the Indians, of the philosophy of the Chinese, and sees there: There really is an abyss between this philosophy of primitive peoples and the philosophy of the Indians and the Chinese. There is nothing to bridge this chasm. We already see a highly developed worldview among the Indians, and indeed, some people today believe that much of this highly developed worldview could be adopted into our own time, because it is actually far more significant than what is being achieved today.

[ 9 ] Anyone who now reads the chapter Wilhelm Wundt wrote on the philosophy of primitive peoples will truly feel as if they have entered a strange realm, provided they are open-minded enough not to view things through the lens imposed upon their inner eye by the philosophical mindset of the present. One might get the feeling that everything in Wundt’s discussions is contrived. He offers a few insights into the way in which so-called uncivilized peoples today reveal their mode of thought through the expression of their language. He then pursues the hypothesis that the Earth’s original population was like these primitive peoples, who have preserved themselves in this earlier state—albeit perhaps somewhat decadent. One can see from the terms found there how they came into being. They are not derived from experience; rather, the person who formulated them imagines the concepts we have today regarding causality, knowledge, natural causes, and so on, and then ponders how these might appear in a more primitive state. Then he applies this constructed framework to indigenous peoples.

[ 10 ] After all, there is little opportunity today to gain insight into the inner workings of another person’s soul. And in fact, even in Wundt’s account, there is nothing among the topics discussed that would lead one to say that, just by looking at him, one could tell that these ideas arose in any way from an empathy with the psychological state of even today’s indigenous peoples! No, the famous Wundt merely revolves around his own ideas, which he simply simplifies somewhat and then attributes to the people he is studying.

[ 11 ] And because today there is really nothing substantial between these so-called “primitive peoples” who are said to have survived and the peoples with developed worldviews, we historically encounter these things juxtaposed without taking into account that it is, in fact, I might say, logically offensive to follow such a description of primitive humanity—as Wundt presents it in that book—with an immediate presentation of the highly developed worldview of the Indians or the Chinese, supported by marvelous concepts. What is entirely lacking today is this ability to empathize with other ways of thinking. One first goes back, let’s say, from what one has become accustomed to thinking in the 19th and 20th centuries, to the 15th and 16th centuries, and then to the Middle Ages. One does not feel a connection to that; one cannot understand it; so one says, that was a dark, gloomy time; human civilization had, in a certain sense, come to a standstill. Then one goes back to Greek civilization. But one has the feeling that one must come to terms with it by retaining the same concepts that one has acquired within today’s cultural community. At most, more sensitive people, such as Herman Grimm, speak differently. Herman Grimm emphasized that, in fact, one can only go back as far as the Romans using today’s concepts. The Romans, in general, can still be understood; one can comprehend what was happening among the Romans using today’s concepts. But if one wishes to go back to the Greeks, then one would already see: A figure like Pericles, Alcibiades, or even Socrates, Plato, Aeschylus, or Sophocles—they actually appear to modern understanding as shadows, as something alien when approached with modern concepts. They speak to us as if from another world. They speak as if history itself were already beginning to become a fairy-tale world in their time. Herman Grimm spoke out on these matters. One might add—if one were to take a different perspective than Herman Grimm’s—that of someone who has now fully, which is not the case with Herman Grimm, immersed himself in the modern scientific worldview: One can no longer mentally return to the Romans in such a way that they truly become tangible. Herman Grimm, who lacked a scientific education—who possessed only what, in essence, has lived on continuously from Roman times into the modern era—was still able to immerse himself in the Roman era, but no longer in the Greek one. And someone who knew nothing of our concepts of law and government—which are modeled on Roman ones—who knew nothing of that distinctive artistic sensibility that reemerged through the Renaissance, into which Herman Grimm had fully immersed himself, but who, apart from all this, in a purely scientific way of thinking—such a person could truly find their way into the Roman world no more than they could into the medieval one, just as Herman Grimm was unable to immerse himself in the Greek world. That is the first point that must be added. The other point is that Herman Grimm also failed to take the world of the East into account. His entire worldview extends only as far back as the Greeks. Consequently, he does not reach the conclusions he should have reached, given his premises, had he turned, say, to the Vedas or Vedanta philosophy. There he would have had to say: If the Greeks stand before us like shadows, then those people whose state of mind found expression in the Vedas and in Vedanta stand before us in such a way that we must perceive them not even as shadows anymore, but as voices from a completely different world—a world that is no longer even similar to our own, not even in its shadow-like images. — But this is true only if we have become so accustomed to the present way of thinking and state of mind that we can understand them alone as the content of our souls.

[ 12 ] The situation is different when one resorts to the only means that is truly effective today. At present, we are trapped—particularly in scientific education—within a conceptual system that appears almost absolute. In this age, it is only possible to empathize with and immerse oneself in past historical epochs through the life of the spiritual sciences. And from the perspective of the spiritual sciences, the individual epochs of human development appear quite distinct from one another; indeed, it is only through the insights of the spiritual sciences that we gain the ability to empathize with what people of past epochs experienced as their spiritual disposition in the course of historical development. How is this possible?

[ 13 ] Well, this is possible in the following way. I have often explained in lectures that spiritual science is based on a certain training of the human soul’s capacity. The kind of cognition we apply in the natural sciences and in everyday life—which we have in recent times also extended to history and the social sciences, and indeed even to the study of religion—I have called “objective cognition” in my books. It is the kind of cognition familiar to every person who is part of modern civilization. One observes the external world through the senses and synthesizes sensory perceptions through the intellect. In doing so, one arrives either at useful rules for living and summaries of life or at laws of nature and so on. This is, in fact, what is called “objective cognition.” It is characteristic of this form of cognition that it involves a clear distinction between oneself and the external world. One knows—let us now set aside the various theories of knowledge and the various psychological and physiological hypotheses—that one stands as the “I” in relation to sensory perception. Through one’s intellect—in which one knows one is actively engaged—one obtains a kind of synthesis of sensory data. Through this, one distinguishes active intellectual activity from passive perception. One feels oneself as an “I” within the environment that reveals itself through sensory experience. In other words, as a thinking, feeling, and willing human being, one distinguishes oneself from the environment that communicates itself to the human being through sensory revelation. I have repeatedly pointed out that other modes of knowledge can be developed beyond this one; and I have also explained, for example, in my book *How Does One Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* and in my *Esoteric Science*, how one ascends to such modes of knowledge.

[ 14 ] The first stage of such knowledge—whether one calls it “higher” or by any other name, it does not matter—is imaginative knowledge. This differs fundamentally from concrete cognition in that it works not with abstract concepts but with images that are just as rich and vivid as the images of the imagination, but which have not yet been transformed into abstract thoughts. One’s relationship to these images is such that, as I have often emphasized, one produces and masters them in a manner similar to that of mathematical concepts.

[ 15 ] This way of rising to imaginative cognition has a very specific effect on the state of the human soul. I expressly mention that this effect is present only while the person is engaged in imaginative cognition. For when the spiritual researcher is engaged in ordinary life, he makes use, like others, of ordinary cognition—objective cognition. He is then in the same state of mind as any other person who is not a spiritual researcher. During spiritual research—that is, within the state through which one looks into the spiritual world—the spiritual researcher is in his world of imaginations. However, these imaginations are not dreams; rather, they are imbued with the same clarity of thought as mathematical concepts. Thus, with regard to this clarity of thought, the state of the soul remains unchanged at first; yet, in terms of how the world is experienced during imaginative experience, it is different from how it is experienced during ordinary experience. During imaginative experience, it is such that the person first feels at one with everything that unfolds as their own soul life—namely, in time—so that space is not taken into account, but only time. I have therefore said before that, upon entering into imaginative visualization, one’s previous experiences—initially from birth or from a specific point in time after birth onward—appear before the observer like a tableau arranged chronologically but perceptible all at once, like a temporal painting. However, this is difficult to conceive for ordinary imagination precisely because one is dealing with a “painting” that is not spatial, that is conceived entirely in terms of time, and yet in which simultaneity is inherent in a certain sense. In the consciousness of everyday life, one is always dealing with a single moment. From that moment, one looks back into the past. During this moment, one perceives the world around oneself in space, and one distinguishes oneself from this environment as existing at a specific point in time. This changes in imaginative perception. There, it makes no sense to say, “I live at this specific moment of the ‘now’”; rather, when I first gaze upon the panorama of life, I flow together with my life. I am just as much present at the moment ten or twenty years ago as I am in the present. The process of becoming that is surveyed there absorbs the “I,” so to speak; one grows together with one’s temporal perception, together with the process of becoming. It is as if the “I”—which is otherwise grasped and experienced only in the present moment—were to extend into the past. This is, of course, as you can imagine, linked to a change in one’s entire state of mind during the moments in which one experiences it this way. One is dealing with a world of images in which one lives. One feels, as it were, like an image within an image. Anyone who grasps this with good will will no longer prattle on about the idea that the researcher of the spiritual realm might somehow be subject to suggestion or hypnosis, for he is absolutely clear about the pictorial nature of his experience—clear because he himself becomes an image among images. But precisely because they are that, they also know that, while they initially have images in their consciousness, these images—just like ordinary mental representations—are reflections of a reality that they do not yet perceive as reality, but whose images they intuitively perceive.

[ 16 ] One is in a state of suggestion or hypnosis only when one has images and believes that these images are realities just like the external reality perceivable through the senses. As soon as one is clear about the nature of what one experiences in one’s consciousness, it can be nothing other than the possession of such ideas as one also has in mathematical thinking. But the essential point I wish to emphasize today is this merging into the temporal-objective, into becoming—this becoming one with becoming—so that one no longer, I might say, clings constantly to the “now,” but feels oneself to be within the stream of events itself.

[ 17 ] The next stage, which is attained through exercises that I have also described in the books mentioned, is the stage of inspiration. This differs from the previous imaginative stage in that the visual images one has before one’s eyes during imaginative visualization more or less cease. One must first have it if one wishes to arrive at genuine spiritual-scientific perceptions, but one must also be able to erase it from consciousness; one must be able to let it go at will. Then, however, one must be able to retain something, and what remains is precisely that which reveals itself from a spiritual world. In the aforementioned writings, I speak of the inspired visualization of a spiritual world. Through this, one is still not, in one’s own experience, within a spiritual world. Before, one had images; now, in a sense, one has the revelation of the spiritual world—but one stands independently before this revealed reality and recognizes it in its reality by standing outside of it.

[ 18 ] Today I would like to focus in particular on the state of mind one enters when one arbitrarily evokes such inspiration within oneself. One then comes to a letting go of the ordinary, concrete world. One then knows what it means to experience the spiritual world in its manifestations outside one’s body—in other words, one now merges not only with the temporal, but with all that is spiritually objective outside of the human being. One no longer feels the difference between worldly existence and self-existence in the way one feels it in concrete cognition, but rather experiences the self and, within the self, the world—albeit in its concrete diversity and multiplicity. Essentially, at this level of insight, it makes no difference whether I say, “I am in the world,” or “the world is in me.” The language of ordinary descriptions of the world ceases to be valid. Prepositions such as “in” or “outside” can only be used if one is aware that one must attach a different meaning to them. One feels poured out into the whole world—not only into becoming, but into everything that has newly entered consciousness as spiritual being. One no longer feels this “outside of you” and “inside of you.” This is the state of soul that seizes a person during inspiration. It is not as if one’s “I” had perished, nor as if an outflow of the “I” were identical with a suppression of the “I,” but rather the “I” itself, in all its activity, feels itself to have become one with the concrete, manifold, and diverse world it is now experiencing.

[ 19 ] Just as one is otherwise aware of a distinction between one’s ideas, one’s desires, and one’s feelings, even though these are all within oneself, so too does one perceive the world as such, in all its diversity, through inspiration, even though one knows that one has actually merged with this world.

[ 20 ] Now, at the present stage of human development, the states of consciousness described must be brought about through exercises such as those I have described in my book *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?* and in the second part of my *Secret Science*. Human beings must consciously ascend to them. But we can distinguish between what we consciously evoke as content and what constitutes the soul’s feeling in these states. One can distinguish, in what one works out there—what one ultimately recognizes—the nature of how one feels during the process of imagination and when one is inspired.

[ 21 ] Now, I do not wish to allude to this state of mind through abstract characterizations, but rather I would like to describe it based on concrete examples. You see, after Goethe met Herder, the two of them immersed themselves together in the works of Spinoza, and those of you who are familiar with Herder’s biography know just how immensely enthusiastic Herder was about Spinoza. But when one reads a work such as Herder’s *God*, for example—in which he elaborates on his own feelings toward Spinoza’s works—one must say that Herder speaks about Spinozism and from within Spinozism in a manner quite different from Spinoza the philosopher himself. But there is one thing Herder has in common with Spinoza: the state of mind from which he reads Spinoza. Herder’s state of mind bears a striking resemblance to the state of mind from which Spinoza’s *Ethics*, for example, was written. This state of mind, this disposition of the soul, is in fact something that was passed on to Herder, and which, in a certain sense, was also passed on to Goethe, as he, together with Herder, immersed himself in the study of Spinoza. But while Herder finds a certain satisfaction in this state of mind, Goethe does not. Goethe deeply felt this merging with objects, this flowing over of the self into the external world—which is so magnificently expressed in Spinoza when, one might say, in his utterly dispassionate contemplation, he speaks as if the universe itself were speaking, as if he were losing himself and his words were merely the means through which the universe itself speaks. Goethe, too, was fully capable of reliving what a human being can experience in terms of objectivity, and in this regard he felt exactly the same as Herder did at first; but he was not satisfied; he felt a longing for something else, and despite all the depth of feeling he had thereby acquired, Spinozism still seemed to him like something that could by no means fulfill the whole human being. Essentially, what Goethe felt this way toward Spinoza is merely another, deeper nuance of what he felt toward the entire sensibility of the more Nordic world. He did not feel satisfied by what the civilization initially accessible to him through Weimar could offer. And you know, of course, how this mood in Goethe eventually crystallized into what drove him down south, what drew him to Italy. And in Italy, at first he sees only what the Italians had created on the basis of Greek art. But something like a reconstruction of the Greek artistic movement and the Greek artistic style takes shape in his soul, and one can deeply empathize with Goethe’s entire distinctive character of that time when reading the words he wrote to his friends in Weimar while standing before those works of art that conjured the artistic creation of the Greeks before his soul: “There is necessity; there is God.” “I suspect,” he writes, “that the Greeks followed the same laws in the creation of their works of art as nature itself follows, and which I am on the trail of. There is necessity; there is God.” This is an allusion to Herder’s work *God*, which drew on Spinoza.

[ 22 ] Thus, with regard to what might have appealed to him in Spinoza, Goethe did not feel the sense of necessity he wished to feel; he felt it, rather, toward what stood before his soul during his Italian journey as a renewal of Greek artistic creation. From what took shape there, the possibility then arose within him to develop his particular way of perceiving nature. We know how he had expressed his longing for the knowledge of nature in abstract, lyrical words, in a prose hymn, before he went south; and one can see how what had poured forth in abstractly lyrical currents into this prose hymn, “Nature,” becomes concrete perception in Italy—how, for example, the essence of plants stands before his soul in supersensory-sensory images, how he now finds the primordial plant among the manifold forms of vegetation. This is an ideal-real form that can be perceived only in the spirit, but which, in this spiritual form, is a real form underlying all individual plants. And one sees how, from this point on, it becomes the object of his quest to bring these archetypes—which are at once one and many—before his soul for the sake of all of nature. One sees that his understanding is directed toward how the individual plant, in the succession of its leaves, up to the flowers and on to the fruit, becomes a sequence of stages of transforming images. He seeks to capture the process of becoming in images. From Spinoza’s *Ethics*, which he read alongside Herder, something flowed to Goethe that was, as it were, abstract yet resonated from another world—a world into which one can transport oneself with one’s state of mind when one reaches a state of dispassionate contemplation. But it was not vivid in Spinoza. Yet the longing for vividness lived in his soul, and it was fulfilled in a certain way when he allowed himself to be inspired by those images that emerged like the resurgent Greek art. And it was also fulfilled when he was able to conjure up before his soul the primordial forms of nature as they took on visual form.

[ 23 ] What was it that Goethe experienced one after another? It was the mood of the soul—not the content of the soul, not that which is explored, but the mood of the soul—on the one hand in inspiration, and on the other hand in imagination. Neither Goethe nor Herder had, in their time, the opportunity to look into the spiritual world as spiritual science is intended to do today; but as a foreshadowing of this spiritual science, they possessed the mood that arises with particular strength and intensity during inspiration and imagination. Herder and Goethe felt themselves in a mood of inspiration while reading Spinoza, and Goethe felt himself in a mood of imagination as he worked his way through Italian works of art toward a view of nature. Out of the mood of inspiration characteristic of Spinozism, Goethe felt a longing for the mood of imagination; and what Goethe found as archetypes of plants and animals was not yet true imagination. Goethe did not possess the method for acquiring true imagination. But what he did have was the mood one experiences when imagining. He was able to kindle this mood within himself, not by advancing to true, pure, freely created inner imaginations, but by drawing upon what plants, animals, and the world of clouds reveal, thereby experiencing sensuous-super-sensuous images within himself. He was able to enter the mood that accompanies imagination, just as he had entered the mood of being inspired while reading Spinoza. He knew the state of mind in which a person experiences what he utters in such a way that he uses words merely as a medium, so to speak, to allow the mysteries of the universe to be spoken by the world itself.

[ 24 ] Anyone who has ever truly experienced that transition that can occur in the soul when one begins by reading Spinoza’s *Ethics* as if it were a mathematical treatise, and then finds one’s way into the concepts as if they were mathematical concepts, only to ascend ever further toward *Scientia intuitiva*, who speaks of Spinoza in this way—consciously speaking as if he stood in the world such that it expressed itself through him as through its mouthpiece—that person feels what Goethe and Herder felt in Spinoza; that person feels, just as they did—one more self-satisfied like Herder, the other more filled with longing—that they lived in a mood of inspiration. And one might say that a certain mood of the soul emanates from the methods offered today by research in the humanities in an effort to attain imagination and inspiration. But one can also trace historically how, for example, Goethe, without yet possessing inspiration or imagination, strove toward these moods. And now let us go further; let us take a closer look at Spinoza. If one truly engages in historical inquiry regarding Spinoza—not as is often done today by historians of philosophy—one is led from Spinoza to those who inspired him. These were the late adherents of Arabism, the Arab-Semitic worldview, living in southwestern Europe. Those who understand such things will be able to relive what flowed from the Kabbalah into Spinoza’s ideas. One is then led further back, via Arabism, to the Orient, and comes to recognize how what appears in Spinoza is the conceptualized worldview of antiquity. In the world of the ancient Orient, the same phenomenon occurs as in Spinoza, only not in intellectualistic forms, but as ancient Oriental inspiration. Yet this inspiration was not acquired in the same way as ours is today; rather, it existed as a natural gift among certain Oriental peoples, then migrated to Egypt, where it underwent a particularly profound development. If we go back to the Egypt from which Moses drew his views, to the sources from which the Greeks drew theirs, we find there—already developed to a high degree—that which had come over to Egypt from the Asian East. We find what lived as inspiration—not as conscious inspiration, but as unconscious, atavistic inspiration—as something that existed like a gift of nature. Instinctively, the Egyptians before the 8th century B.C. lived in such a way within their environment that they felt at one with it, experiencing inwardly and contemplatively what they perceived from that environment.

[ 25 ] And now let us turn to that which Goethe longed for once he had experienced the mood of inspiration: the imaginative. He first perceived it, so to speak, as a significant source of inspiration in Greek art. There, in his perceptions, he sensed what Herder had sensed in the world of concepts and ideas, as it appeared contemplatively in Spinoza. And what Goethe sensed there, he deepened into a perception of nature to such an extent that he was later able to utter these profound words from the depths of his spirit: “To whom nature begins to reveal her manifest secret, there arises an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” Through art, Goethe looked into the depths of the imagination, and, drawing upon the process of nature’s becoming, he sought that state of mind which a person experiences when they become one with becoming. This overcoming of the self while still preserving it within the imagination was revealed to Goethe through the art of the Greeks, but he did not seek it merely in art; he sought it as the foundation for the contemplation of nature. And if we trace this particular element, which Goethe shaped in this way, to its further consequences, we arrive quite consciously at imaginative contemplation. So if we try to trace the Goethean perspective back to its origins, just as we have traced Spinozism, we are led to the Greeks and from there on to the Orient. From the Greek world, we cross over to the worldview of the so-called Chaldeans, which is rooted in becoming; they, in turn, drew upon the Persian world and the entire Asian world. Just as we, I might say, look through Spinoza’s spiritual disposition toward ancient Egypt, so do we look through Goethe’s Greek conception of art toward the view of becoming that was alive in ancient Chaldea. Down to the finest details, one can trace this contrast between Chaldean and Egyptian thought in Goethe and Spinoza.

[ 26 ] One can thus return to earlier eras through feeling, provided one does not become entangled in what one regards today as absolutely correct and the only accurate view, but rather tries to ascend to other modes of perception—to imagination and inspiration. If one recognizes the states of mind associated with imagination and inspiration, then one can return to earlier times through understanding. Anyone who reads Spinoza today with the notion that we have come so wonderfully far and that everything that came before is, in essence, merely childish, fails to perceive—from the fullness of humanity—how what was creative, instinctive, and productive as the highest flowering of ancient Egyptian cultural life lives on as a mood in Spinozism. Nor does such a person sense how the spiritual mood of the ancient Chaldeans lived on in what inspired Goethe when he uttered the words: “There is necessity; there is God,” or: “To whom nature begins to reveal her manifest secret, there arises an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.” Anyone who bases their understanding solely on today’s abstract concepts cannot return to earlier historical epochs. Hence, they too encounter the abyss to which I referred at the beginning of my reflections today. Only those who can immerse themselves in this fundamental mood—as it appeared in Spinoza and Goethe—can return to the ancient epochs of humanity. No Egyptian myth—especially not the Osiris-Isis myth—can truly be experienced in its essence unless one takes this mood as the foundation. People may be as intelligent as they like, and offer as many allegorical or symbolic interpretations as they wish. That is not what matters; what matters is that one, as a whole human being, feels what was felt in ancient times. Then, regarding the ancient conceptions, one may think this or that, choose wise or unwise symbolism—this choice is not what matters, but rather the experience of the underlying mood. Through this, one enters into what was alive in an earlier epoch of humanity. Nor can one discover what was alive in ancient Chaldea through modern methods of research, but only by truly immersing oneself in the mood of imagination that emerged among the Chaldeans—in a sense, as an instinctive worldview that lived in a process of becoming. And only when one attains these states of mind does one grasp the contrast that existed, for example, between the peoples living as contemporaries—the Chaldeans and the Egyptians. Trade relations extended from Egypt to Chaldea and from Chaldea to Egypt. Their cultural conditions were such that they were able to write letters to one another. Everything that constituted external life existed in a regular interplay. Their inner spiritual dispositions, however, were quite different. Among the Chaldeans, an imaginative element prevailed; among the Egyptians, an inspired one. Among the Chaldeans, external perception prevailed, as it reappeared in an elevated form in Goethe; among the Egyptians, there was something that arose entirely from the inner, spiritual realm, just as it later emerged at a high level from the innermost depths of Spinoza’s soul. This can be traced down to the finest details. I will cite one such detail, and one will see how such details can only be understood on the basis of such general moods.

[ 27 ] The Chaldeans essentially had a highly developed system of astronomy. They developed it through well-designed tools, but above all through a very specific kind of perception—one that was, in fact, an instinctive imagination. This led them to divide the passage of time into day and night in such a way that they counted both as twelve hours each. But how did they divide them? They divided the long day in summer into twelve hours, and the short night in summer into twelve hours as well. In winter, they divided the short day into twelve hours as well, and the long night into twelve hours as well, so that the hours of winter were short during the day, while the hours of summer were long. Thus, in the different seasons, the hours had very different durations for the Chaldeans; that is to say, the Chaldeans lived within the perception of becoming in such a way that they carried this becoming into time itself. Where they lived in the outer world as one lives in summer, they could not let the hours pass as they did in winter. The hour of the day was long in summer, short in winter, and at night the hour was long in winter and short in summer. Thus, they incorporated becoming into the passage of time. In summer, the passage of time—becoming itself—appeared to them as if stretched out. Becoming was internally fluid, not internally rigid as it is in our time; rather, time was elastic for them—the hours were sometimes long and sometimes short during the day.

[ 28 ] How did the Egyptians handle this? The Egyptians assumed that a year consisted of 365 days. As a result, they were forced to insert extra days at specific times; but they could not bring themselves to deviate in any way from these 365 days. In reality, the year is longer than 365 days. The Egyptians had 365 days for each year. This length of the year remained fixed among them until the 3rd century B.C., and as a result, the tangible external world became too much for them to handle. Consequently, the festivals changed. For example, a festival that used to take place in late fall had shifted to early fall, and so on. Thus, the Egyptians adapted to the passage of time in such a way that they developed a conception of time which, in its full scope, was not at all applicable to what is outwardly perceptible. This is a significant contrast. The Chaldeans, on the other hand, adapted so closely to what is outwardly perceptible that they made the timing of summer and winter flexible. The Egyptians made time so rigid; they experienced what can be experienced subjectively, entirely from within, in such a way that they did not even correct it with leap days so that the annual festivals would coincide with the seasons, but rather they allowed the external festivals— that is, let us say, what spring was, to fall on entirely different dates within the months, as the entire external world became fluctuating. They did not find their way into the external world; they remained within their inner world. This is the mood of inspiration that one must also possess if one wishes to attain true knowledge. The Egyptians possessed it as instinctive inspiration.

[ 29 ] As a person who perceives the higher world, one must truly be able to be as flexible as the Chaldeans were on the one hand, and on the other hand, one must be able to delve as deeply into one’s inner self as the Egyptians did by basing their entire lives—even their social and historical lives—on a rigid system of time. This contrast between the naive mood of inspiration and that of imagination is thus revealed in the course of world history.

[ 30 ] And Goethe, as a complete human being, was the first to relive Spinoza’s inner experience—I would say as a continuation of Orientalism and Egyptianism. And out of this inner feeling, where everything is abstract, where one looks out into the world and does not recognize things because one is guided by what the inner self provides—so that things grow beyond one’s comprehension—Goethe experienced his longing for complete adaptation to the external world. By sensing the Egyptian mood, he wanted to experience the Chaldean mood within himself as the opposite pole. When such a person recreates historical moods from within his own nature, one sees the threads stretching from modern times back to ancient times, and one begins to allow the various historical epochs to come alive through such contemplation.

[ 31 ] And this is what matters: that one not only determines from the documents what happened during one period or another, but as a whole person learns to put oneself in the shoes of those various periods—to understand what people and nations felt and experienced inwardly during those times, and what state of mind they were in. Their external fates then emerged from this inner experience, from this particular state of mind.

[ 32 ] That will be the path that can lead us past questions such as: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”—and into the deeper realms of reality. This will be the path that also shows us how, every time we contemplate reality, we must go beyond what is given in external, objective knowledge.

[ 33 ] And while it is often emphasized that we should learn from history to guide our actions in the present and future, it is essential today to place strong emphasis on the way in which we should truly learn. We must learn in such a way that what people experienced with their souls in bygone eras comes alive. Through this contemplation, the abyss of which I have spoken is filled. Through it, we will be able to look back upon the metamorphosis of people’s states of mind across different historical epochs. And then both fire and prudence will be poured into our present state of mind, so that we may find the necessary prudence to develop the ideas required for the healing of today’s social conditions. But the necessary passion will also be cultivated—the passion required to possess the strength to attain, with full composure, the imagination and inspiration that once could be developed instinctively, and to express them through ideas.

[ 34 ] The following discussion will attempt to present this line of thought.