The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. The Natural Sciences and the Development of Humanity IV

[ 1 ] It would seem that, based on our observations, the 4th century A.D. emerged as a particularly significant turning point in human development, and I would like to return briefly to what actually took place in that 4th century.

[ 2 ] Augustine is, after all, a defining figure of the 4th century, and when we consider Augustine, we truly have before us a representative of that era. Augustine, in a sense, points quite clearly back to classical education with a part of his being that he lived out primarily in his youth and early years. And then there is a rather abrupt transition in his life that led him to absolute submission to the Roman Catholic Church, so that Augustine became the one who, in a certain sense, set knowledge, insight for himself and, subjectively and practically, took the concepts of faith completely seriously, by professing the opinion, the view, that although he did not understand what the actual foundation of the truth he was to acknowledge was, he professed the truth he had ultimately decided upon solely because the Catholic Church prescribes belief in it. Augustine arrived at this view through arduous life struggles. For a certain time, he adhered to the doctrine known as Manichaeism, the Eastern-influenced teaching of Mani. This doctrine belongs to those that I have already characterized from a certain perspective here in these evening reflections. I said: Time and again, from the eras we have come to regard as the Indian, Persian, and Chaldean-Egyptian periods—from these ancient times—worldviews emerge as a kind of reaction against what arises from the development of humanity’s primarily intellectual capacity. The Manichaean doctrine was one such example. It is simply the case that—even back then, in the times when Augustine first became acquainted with the Manichaean doctrine in his African homeland—such views actually arose in a somewhat dubious manner. Augustine was, after all, initially completely captivated by the Manichaean doctrine. But then he came into contact with a Manichaean bishop, Faustus, and the very manner in which this man represented Manichaeism then repelled Augustine. Nevertheless, one must look beyond much of what Augustinus encountered—which was certainly not merely shallow dialectics but perhaps rather rhetorical posturing—to discern something essential in this Manichaean doctrine, and this essential core can only be truly understood if one approaches Manichaean doctrine from the perspectives that have been put forward here in these reflections.

[ 3 ] In fact, not much has survived of the authentic records of such teachings from modern times; all that remains is what the Christian teachers of the first centuries quoted and what they subsequently opposed. Thus, the most important aspects of those ancient times have actually been passed down to later generations only through the quotations of their opponents. But perhaps those who can empathize with such matters will, precisely through Augustine’s particular attitude toward Manichaean doctrine, also sense something of the essence of that doctrine itself. Augustine turned away from Manichaean doctrine because, as he says, he had sought the truth—sought it in the sun, in the stars, the clouds, the rivers, the springs, the mountains, in plants and animals—in short, in everything visible that presented itself to him. He did not find it there, for all of that would have offered him only external, material things, whereas he was seeking the spiritual. Augustine then turned from Manichaeism to Neoplatonism, which I have already characterized for you from a certain perspective. Neoplatonism turned away from the sensory external world. It paid little attention to it and sought, within itself, to unite with the One through a kind of mystical abstraction. This is what ultimately attracted Augustine in his later years, and what he puts forward against Manichaean doctrine already contains what he had cultivated through his immersion in Neoplatonism—in the non-concrete, immaterial, non-sensory, abstract world. In contrast to the world into which he now immersed himself, what Manichaeism had to offer him seemed, in a sense, merely like a cataloging of external, material things that were then passed off as the divine.

[ 4 ] But anyone who turns to spiritual science today will first have to learn to see these things in the right way. Let us consider, from the standpoint of modern spiritual science, what might actually be involved here. As I have already described to you: When one ascends to imaginative, inspired cognition, one gradually comes to know the inner organs of the human being—to know them concretely—and what emerges is not that mystical world of mist of which so many false mystics dream, but rather a clear, objective understanding of the inner organic structure of the human being. Precisely by understanding this inner organic structure of the human being as a product of the spirit—by being able to perceive it spiritually—one comes to know it as something material. Let me give you an example of this. Suppose a person who thinks more abstractly encounters a so-called hypochondriac. A person who thinks abstractly will easily say of a hypochondriac: “There’s actually nothing physically wrong with him; he’s just mentally ill.” He constantly immerses himself too deeply in his own inner world; he lives, as it were, entirely in self-contemplation, and as a result misjudges the things of the external world, often perceiving them as if they were persecuting him or something of the sort. In any case, this leads them to develop a distorted relationship with the outside world. — And so the abstract thinker is quick to say: “The hypochondriac isn’t actually physically ill; they’re just mentally ill.” — Such an abstraction arises precisely because one has not yet gained insight into the actual inner structure of the human organism. This inner structure of the human organism is such that the human being is a threefold being. There is the head organization, which, as I have often explained, extends throughout the entire organism, but whose primary seat is in the head and is therefore named after it; then there is the rhythmic organization of the chest organs, which encompasses respiration and blood circulation; and finally, there is everything that constitutes the metabolic organism and the associated limb organism.

[ 5 ] The fact is that, in the head organization, the individual organs are oriented toward the external world and are therefore external sense organs. But even in the other parts of the human organism, we find that the organs—in addition to being digestive organs—are also, in a certain sense, sensory organs, and we find a kind of correspondence, a kind of polarity, between the organs of the head and the organs of metabolism. The organs of metabolism are also sense organs; they are simply sense organs that are not directed outward, but toward the processes taking place within the human body. And so we find, for example, that in the human head, which is directed outward, there is the organ of smell; with it, a person smells what is in their external surroundings. Among the digestive organs, the liver corresponds to this organ of smell. The liver, so to speak, “smells” what is inside the human being, in its internal environment. Is it not true that we must speak quite objectively about these things if we are to rise to true understanding at all?

[ 6 ] Well, you see, you must therefore direct your attention to the fact that what is, so to speak, the relationship of the olfactory organ to the outside world corresponds to the relationship of the liver to the internal human processes. Now, in a hypochondriac, the liver is always out of order—quite simply, if you will, the physical organ is out of order. This is precisely what occurs in spiritual science: it does not merely lead one up into some nebulous spiritual realm, but through the application of its methods, it also recognizes the material in its very essence—that is, it can look into the functions of the material. And because liver ailments are usually associated with very little or no pain at all, this does not manifest as a physically perceptible illness, but rather as a psychological experience when the liver is not functioning properly and therefore emits an unpleasant odor inwardly. To those who truly see through things, the hypochondriac is none other than someone whose liver is not functioning properly and who therefore perceives internally—not in the normal way, but in an overly sensitive manner—what he very easily senses as a rather unpleasant odor emanating from his diseased liver. He constantly “smells” within himself, and this “smelling” is what actually underlies the hypochondriacal disposition. You see, spiritual science cannot be characterized as nebulous mysticism, for it leads to a truly objective understanding of the material realm as well. Materialism, in particular, fails to grasp these things because it constantly views them only in abstract forms. Imaginative and inspired insight actually always explains so-called mental illnesses from their physical foundations. From the standpoint of spiritual science, there is even more reason to explain so-called physical illnesses from a spiritual perspective than there is for so-called mental illnesses. Mental illnesses are, as a rule, the most physical of all; that is to say, they are generally rooted in the most physical of causes. And so one must be clear that whoever penetrates the spiritual nature of the world also comes to recognize the workings of the spiritual in the material. He does not view the liver merely as what it appears to be to the anatomist who dissects corpses, but rather as an organ formed from within, which, while differing in its external form from the olfactory organ, nevertheless represents a metamorphosis of that olfactory organ. And so, in many cases, what the spiritual researcher has to say about the material world—because he I might say, traces back to its spiritual causes—be taken to mean that he is pointing specifically to the manifestations of the material world, because one recognizes the spiritual far more through the manifestation of the material than through all manner of mystical ramblings and so-called mystical, nebulous “immersions into the inner self.” After all, they all stem, when it comes down to it, merely from a certain aversion to engaging with true knowledge and, instead, brooding inwardly—which, of course, arises from nothing other than a certain predisposition of the physical organs. Practicing mysticism in a nebulous sense is itself a kind of mental illness with a physical basis.

[ 7 ] You see, something like perceiving the spiritual within the material—that is what Augustine encountered in Manichaeism. But he had already been born too deeply—he had, as is well known, a Greek mother, Monica—into a longing to escape the physical world to be able to remain there. Therefore, he turned to Neoplatonism, and through this detour via Neoplatonism, he turned to Roman Catholicism.

[ 8 ] We can thus see how, in this 4th century—which coincides precisely with Augustine’s formative years—people did indeed turn away from the spiritual contemplation of both the external world and the inner world of the human being. This turning away was inevitable. This turning away had to happen for the simple reason that human beings could never have become free—could never have become free beings—if they had felt themselves to be merely a part of the external world, as I have described on previous evenings. Human beings had to, so to speak, break free from this fusion with the external world. They had to turn away from the external world at some point. And the culmination of this turning away from the external world—I would say, the very point at which humanity left behind the consciousness: ‘You are a part of the external world, just as a finger is a part of your organism’—that culmination lies in the 4th century A.D. What characterized the period before the 4th century A.D. was a development of humanity that, fundamentally speaking, arose entirely from the human organism—I would say, from the blood itself. In the southern European regions, in North Africa, and in the Near East, however, people had already come to be, so to speak, abandoned by their own human nature—insofar as it is physical and etheric—and to rise to something indeterminate. For it was toward an indeterminate state—one might say, toward a void—where nothing is any longer dependent on the blood, where a view of life no longer emerges from the racial characteristics of human beings; it was toward such a void that human beings had to evolve in order to enter into intellectual life. Whatever all the individual peoples had developed in terms of worldviews, knowledge, and so on before the 4th century A.D.—of course, this is approximate when specifying such a date—had arisen in them from their blood, just as we still develop through the process of losing our baby teeth, which we do not form through our intelligence but from our organic substances, or just as we develop toward sexual maturity, ultimately also from within the organism, and at the same time toward the maturity of judgment. Thus, everything these peoples had produced in their ancient, instinctive imaginations and inspirations developed from within the blood. This had a racial origin everywhere. And whenever two races, two peoples of different bloodlines, intermingled, one people remained at the bottom—they became slaves—while the other population, so to speak, rose to the top, forming the upper class. Both these social differences and what lived in the knowledge and in the souls of human beings were entirely a result of race, of blood. But now these southern peoples, these peoples settled around the Mediterranean, were working their way out of the realm of blood. Now they were working their way toward, if I may say so, the purely spiritual. For in the sphere of the purely spiritual, intelligence had to be developed.

[ 9 ] You see, if humanity had continued to develop after the 4th century A.D. solely from these Mediterranean peoples, it would, in a sense, have lacked a foundation. The bloodline had nothing more to offer. No further spiritual capacities developed from the racial foundations. In a sense, humanity—insofar as it originated from these regions—was compelled to develop into a space that was, figuratively speaking, a vacuum.

[ 10 ] The people of this Mediterranean region were now entering this vacuum—that is, this sphere of development free from racial influences. They needed something else to rely on. In a sense, they had to receive from the outside what had previously come to them through their blood. And they received it through the fact that calculating people—who at that time still knew, based on the ancient teachings of wisdom, how things actually are—transferred the old political views of the Roman Empire to the realm of religion and established the external Catholic Church. This external Catholic Church preserved what had previously emerged from the spiritual life of the various races; it preserved what the ancient times had preserved, and it condensed it into dogmas. These dogmas were to be perpetuated. Nothing more was brought forth from within humanity, but what was there was condensed into dogmas. And with this, a lifeless element entered, through which human beings could truly receive from the outside what they had previously received from within. For the Latin language was perpetuated as a dead language, and intellectual life unfolded in the Latin language.

[ 11 ] And so there was a certain spiritual current that consisted, in a sense, of what the old worldview had brought about coming to an end in a dead element. If nothing else had emerged, this dead element would have had to gradually die out. The entire so-called culture would have had to die out. One would certainly have had a highest reality, for it was a highest reality that had developed at that time. The Catholic Church itself adopted many Gnostic and Manichaean elements; it merely shed the terminology. It carried on the old worldviews. It also took up, preserved, and passed on the old forms of worship in a dead language. What thus survived was just as incapable of giving rise to anything that could have advanced civilization as, for example, a woman alone is incapable of giving birth to a child.

[ 12 ] That was only one aspect of the situation that was now necessary in order to move forward. The other aspect lay in the fresh blood carried by the Germanic and other peoples migrating from Eastern Europe. There was blood again. And what was peculiar was this: in their development—if we take the word not in a judgmental sense but purely objectively and terminologically—these peoples had lagged behind the southern peoples. The southern peoples had, so to speak, advanced at a gallop toward the highest level of civilization, from which the intellect then emerged. At its highest stage of development, the intellect reached its peak in the 4th century A.D. and was now to take root, to live on as a “dead intellect.” Thus we have the continued existence of this “dead intellect” and the emergence—the meeting of minds—with the Germanic blood of the other peoples who were appearing there.

[ 13 ] When we study external historical events, we come across something extraordinarily interesting. Namely, we find ourselves concluding that, over a certain period of time, a complete transformation—a metamorphosis—of Western life took place. We see, in fact, how across a vast, expansive region of Europe, as a result of the so-called Migration Period, the old culture died out and a kind of peasant culture emerged. What the upper classes had previously regarded as their culture in the old Roman Empire died out. What remains is what the broad, settled population had, and the Germanic tribes, in turn, brought something similar—albeit of a different nature—to this. Within this peasant way of life—where people actually lived in small village communities and told one another stories in these small village communities that were quite different from what the Catholic priests preached—within these areas where the village communities were located, the Catholic religion was now spread by external force.

[ 14 ] That was one movement that used the Latin language. What did the people who witnessed their churches being built and saw wisdom being passed down in Latin actually know? What did these people—who were the ones who really mattered in the villages at that time—know about everything that was going on? What they did know were the stories they told each other in the evening after a day’s work—stories that consisted largely of daydreams, as we have seen among the ancient Egyptians and the like.

[ 15 ] There was indeed a worldview here—one that persisted from the 4th through the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries throughout the village communities—that had long since been discarded in the southern regions, at least among the upper classes. A refined culture had long since emerged from these underlying strata among the upper classes. And now, in the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries, we see—as I explained in more detail recently in Dornach, though I will only mention it briefly here—how cities gradually crystallized out of the simple village communities. Urban culture begins, and it is as if human beings are torn away from external nature when they become concentrated together in the cities. Here comes this urban culture, which we can trace from Brittany deep into the Russian Empire, as far as Novgorod; from the north down to Spain and into Italy—everywhere this remarkable trend toward urban life.

[ 16 ] And if we look at what is actually taking shape in this transition to urban life, then—for those who can study history from within—it bears a great resemblance, a fundamental similarity, to what happened when, after the Trojan War, cities in Greece developed primarily out of an agricultural culture. What happened back then in Greece in the year 1200 B.C. was now repeating itself up here, around the year 950 or thereabouts—all these dates are approximate— and to the extent that 1200 and 950 years differ, to that extent were these people—who came from the east as Germanic peoples—actually behind those into whose territory they were now encroaching. If you add these figures—the pre-Christian ones to the post-Christian ones—you get 2,150 or 2,160 years, and that is roughly the number of years that lie between two such successive cultures. One can see this in history, if one is truly willing to study it. If one asks: By how much were these Germanic peoples behind? — the answer is the length of a cultural epoch. A cultural epoch lasted exactly that long, and thus one can calculate the duration of their backwardness based on the level of development of these lagging peoples.

[ 17 ] Now we can also gain some insight into why the fourth cultural epoch—which brought about the actual development of the intellect—begins around 747 B.C. and ends, let’s say, in 1413. That gives you 2,160 years. That is the duration of such a cultural epoch. However, if we go further back, these figures become somewhat blurred. But that is only natural, for historical development cannot, of course, be characterized by mathematically exact figures. These peoples carried in their blood something of the other, the southern, population—which, in essence, was an earlier influence. That was the other current.

[ 18 ] And now the marriage of world-historical significance was concluded between what was flowing over in the Latin language and that which was working its way to the surface in the vernacular languages—in very backward vernacular languages. From these two elements, what could now develop further was bound to emerge. This then led, in the 15th century, to the development of what is called the “consciousness soul,” as I have often stated.

[ 19 ] The old culture would have had to disappear entirely had this new element not been integrated into it—an element that was, in turn, now encompassed by this Southern influence. What remained behind and what had advanced far balanced each other out, and the culture of consciousness replaced the merely intellectualistic culture.

[ 20 ] In this state, the intellect became a mere shadow. One no longer even continued to live within it as one would within a dead body; rather, it became a shadow-like product, something that lives only in inner activity. And with that, human beings were, in a sense, freed from being inwardly possessed by the intellect. They could apply the intellect in inner activity and could now turn to the observation of external nature, just as Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler turned to the observation of external nature. For this to happen, the intellect first had to be set free. If you look at everything that has emerged in European civilization since the beginning of the 15th century, you will see everywhere how this can be traced back to the penetration of this Germanic element into the old Latin-Roman tradition. You can perceive this quite clearly, right down to individual personalities.

[ 21 ] Humanity had thus, in a sense, stepped into a void as it developed from the south. But among the leading minds there was a strong awareness that, with the development of the intellect, one was entering into something empty. Certain individuals did not want to head toward something new. If I were to offer a hypothetical interpretation of historical development, one could express what people might have said in the period following the 4th century A.D. something like this: One could say: Either we set the intellect free and allow it to develop, in which case the following will happen. Whereas in the past what had risen up from within the human being had permeated him inwardly with spiritual and soul elements, he has now reached a highest point where his development has become free, so that he can evolve into the void. What no longer clings to his body must, as it develops further, lead to the human being penetrating a spiritual world from the outside. — That was one thing one could have said to oneself. Or one could also have said: We will preserve the ancient wisdom; we will conserve it. Then we can say to human beings: By developing upward with your intellect all the way to the 4th century, you have now reached the end. You must not go any further. You have reached a void. Now look back, behind you, not ahead; do not stride further into the void, as if you might find a new spirituality by continuing onward. — Imbued with this instinct to preserve the old, to keep the intellect from developing further, the Eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople was convened in 869, which established as Catholic dogma what is then expressed in the following words: Man has “unam animam rationalem et intellectualem”; he has a soul that is rational and spiritual. But beyond this soul he has nothing, nothing further that is spiritual; for if something spiritual were attributed to him, the path would have been open for him to develop toward a new spirituality. — Therefore, the spirit was denied to the threefold human being—composed of body, soul, and spirit—and only individual spiritual qualities were ascribed to the soul. Man was said not to have body, soul, and spirit, but body and soul, and the soul was said to possess thinking and spiritual qualities, to be rational and intellectual. It must not go any further. — This had now become dogma. It was nothing other than the assertion of what was actually the case—preserving the old, rationally processing the old—while at the same time seeking to prevent any further progress along the path of spiritual development. What was to become the offspring of the two intertwining currents was to be eradicated.

[ 22 ] And that is what has continued to exert an influence beyond the 15th century and into our own time. On the one hand, human beings have instinctively matured to the point of gradually engaging the intellect—over which they were already fully in control—in inner activity. On the other hand, they were unable to keep this activated but shadowy intellect within their spiritually empty inner being, where it could have acted upon nothing but its own shadowy nature. Although one might think that no one would attempt to process a shadow internally, this very thing became the subject of all philosophy of that time, which therefore has something only shadowy about it. Thus, Kantianism ultimately emerges, possessing nothing but forms and categories, and, like the other philosophies of the time, merely splashes about in this shadowy realm.

[ 23 ] It thus became apparent that a shadowy intellect alone was of no use; one had to fill it—and this is the other side of the matter—with something else, and that could only be the external world, that could only be external nature. This did not happen for any particular reason—such as because human beings were once childlike and are now gradually advancing toward an understanding of nature—but because human beings needed it for their development. They needed fulfillment. Over the last four to five centuries, we have experienced this fulfillment. The shadowy intellect has taken possession of nature. This led to a climax. It was precisely in the middle of the 19th century that reason had become most shadowy.

[ 24 ] While the intellect is, in and of itself, the most spiritual thing, it had been completely disregarded, for it had become a mere shadow. Yet there was a well-developed, widespread natural science. The intellect had become filled with what nature offered from the outside, but the ability to perceive the spiritual was fading away more and more. This spiritual aspect could be seen less and less, for when one turned to the external world, one actually had only the shadow-like intellect. Consequently, 19th-century psychology—the study of the soul—became increasingly, I would say, nominalistic, mere verbal squabbling. It is downright disheartening to read in the psychological works of the 19th century how people talk again and again about feeling, willing, and thinking, yet actually have nothing but the words themselves—until finally Fritz Mauthner comes along and makes the great discovery that all knowledge consists of words, and that people who had been searching for something behind the words had simply been deceiving themselves all along.

[ 25 ] This is characteristic of the 19th century—not of humanity, but of the 19th century. In that sense, Mauthner’s discovery isn’t really so bad after all. The 19th century, especially when it spoke of the psyche, merely wove with words, until people finally became aware of this weaving with words, this constant juggling of thought, feeling, and volition, apperception and perception and all sorts of things—that which had emerged in English psychology since Hume, particularly in the 19th century since John Stuart Mill—this juggling with mere words—became too tedious for people. And they said: Now that we’ve discovered something wonderful in the natural sciences through experimentation, let’s also experiment with the soul. — Devices had been developed that could emit signals when a person had a perception. One could then determine when this perception became conscious—when the person moved their hand as a result of that perception—and conduct interesting experiments. Right up to the present day, the approach has been to assess children’s abilities not by putting oneself in the child’s mind—by a certain devotion to that childlike mind—but rather by using devices to test memory, thinking, all sorts of things—as is reported, for example, from Russian schools, where the old-style exams are no longer relied upon, but where abilities are determined from the outside with the help of machinery. Admittedly, this Bolshevik view has already made its way into our regions as well. Certain opponents of anthroposophy would also like to determine in such an external way whether this anthroposophy is based on truth, but this merely reflects a Bolshevik prejudice. All of this ultimately stems from what has gradually led people—through their disregard for the spirit—to apply their shadowy intellect to nature, thereby producing, on the one hand, a magnificent natural science, but, on the other hand, neglecting the soul. Now, however, this spiritual aspect is asserting itself once again, emerging from the depths of the human being, and demands to be explored. For this, it is necessary that we retrace our steps, that we, so to speak, remember it.

[ 26 ] Even though modern science believes itself to be independent, it is still under the influence of the Church’s dictum that human beings consist only of body and soul and have no spirit. We must return to the spirit. And, after all, spiritual science is nothing other than this striving to return to the spirit and thus to explore the soul of the human being—that is, to explore the human being itself. In doing so, one will have to pass through an element that is, admittedly, unpleasant to many—the human organism—but it is precisely through this that one will find the truly spiritual in the human being. This means, however, that the spirit must once again be introduced into humanity’s worldview. Yet today there is a considerable obstacle to this—a terrible obstacle. One might say that one is almost reluctant to speak of this obstacle, because doing so means stepping onto very thin ice; yet the entire character of our time must indeed be examined. People must become aware of what actually lies at the heart of our time as an impulse. You see, one must simply take the following into account.

[ 27 ] Since the middle of the 15th century—when human beings lived in a shadowy state of mind and, in fact, experienced their entire spiritual existence as something shadowy—human beings have been entirely dependent on the external natural world. And so he gradually came to investigate the external phenomena of nature experimentally—not merely as Goethe, who was still imbued with the spirit of antiquity, had investigated them—but to seek behind the phenomena something that is, in essence, merely a kind of phenomenon itself, yet which must not be projected into them. Humanity arrived at atomism. Humanity came to conceive, behind the sensory world, yet another, invisible sensory world—smaller beings, demonic beings—the atoms. Instead of moving on to a spiritual world, humanity turned to a duplicate of the sensory world—once again to a sensory, yet fictional world—and as a result, its capacity for knowledge of the external sensory world became rigid. And over the course of the 19th century, this increasingly gave rise to something that had always been lurking in the background, but which—precisely because of this complete stagnation of the capacity for knowledge regarding the external sensory world—only emerged with full radicalism in the 19th century, and that was the extreme extrapolation of the law of conservation of energy, of the conservation of force. It was said: In the universe, no new forces arise; rather, the old ones merely transform; the sum of the forces remains constant. If we consider any given moment—as it were, isolating it from the flow of world events—then up to that moment a certain sum of energies was present; in the next moment, these energies have regrouped somewhat differently; they have intermingled differently, but the energies are the same; they have merely transformed. The total energy of the cosmos remains the same. — It was no longer possible to distinguish between two things. One was fully justified in saying that the measure, number, and weight of the energies remain the same. But this is confused with the energies themselves.

[ 28 ] Well, if this theory of energy—this law of the conservation of energy, which today dominates all of natural science—were correct, then there would be no freedom; every idea of freedom would be a mere illusion. That is why, for the adherents of the law of the conservation of energy, freedom became more and more of an illusion. Just imagine for a moment how such people—Wundt, for example—explain the freedom that one nevertheless feels. If I were, say, Buridan’s famous donkey standing between two bales of hay—one on the left and one on the right—that are equally large and equally tasty, then if I were free—that is, if I were not being pushed toward one side or the other—I would starve to death because I could not make up my mind. If I have to choose not just between two such things, but between many, then—according to such psychologists—I am still driven, but because there are so many concepts that clash with one another, which torment me from within and work in confusion, I finally make a decision and, because I cannot fathom what actually compels me to do so, I experience the feeling of freedom. Yes, it’s not ridiculous; it really isn’t ridiculous for this reason: because what I’ve just told you—I didn’t expect anyone to start laughing at all—is presented in numerous highly scholarly works as a great achievement of modern thought, born out of the natural sciences; so it’s actually disrespectful to science to laugh at something like this. Well, you see, freedom would simply be impossible if the law of conservation of energy were true. For then I would be determined at any given moment by everything that came before; energies would merely be transformed, and freedom would have to be a mere illusion. In fact, as a result of the development of humanity in the 19th century—through the formulation of the law of the conservation of energy—we have come to hold a view of nature that excludes freedom as an idea, renders it impossible, and makes human beings unconditionally a product of the necessary order of nature. The groundwork had already been laid; I would say that people have felt this way for centuries. What, then, is to become of such things as moral responsibility, ethics, and religious conviction—which, after all, cannot actually exist if there is merely a natural order? The materialists of the 19th century were, in a certain sense, honest; they therefore rejected these ethical illusions of the past and truly declared human beings to be nothing more than a product of natural compulsion. But others could not go along with this—partly because they lacked the courage, like David Friedrich Strauss or Vogt, and partly because they held ecclesiastical offices within which they were obligated to speak of freedom, ethics, and religion. One cannot address such matters in that context. The situation had long since become problematic, and so it came to pass that people said to themselves: “Well, as for science—it’s of no use whatsoever when it comes to necessity. This science proves that the world emerged from a primordial nebula and that every subsequent state has necessarily developed from the previous one, that the sum of forces has remained constant, and so on. With this science, there’s nothing to be done when it comes to ethics, religion, and so forth.” So away with this science! No more science, only faith! We must maintain a double standard: on the one hand, for the external world, for the natural world—science; on the other hand, faith, which now establishes ethics and even proves the existence of God. So let us take refuge in a realm entirely different from that of science.

[ 29 ] You can see the aftermath of this peculiar state of affairs everywhere since the emergence of modern humanities. Those who wish to preserve this faith are called Zaun, Niebergall, and Gogarten, and I could name a whole host of others—Bruhn, Leese—who believe that the realm of faith must be preserved; if science encroaches there, things will turn out badly. So science—we let it have its way, it can do as it pleases—but what we want, we call something else: faith. — Well, as I said, it was the law of conservation of energy, which is, however, merely a dogmatic—and now a scientific-dogmatic—prejudice. For in the end, what does it actually mean? You see, someone could conduct the experiment, say: “Yes, I’ll stand in front of a bank building and observe how much money is carried in, and compile statistics from that.” And then I’ll observe how much money is carried out and compile statistics on that as well, and I’ll see that the same amount of money is carried out as was carried in. Now I’m supposed to stretch my imagination to the point of believing that people are actually working in there! What comes out is, after all, merely the transformed money. It is, after all, purely the law of the constancy of the amount of money. — Very interesting experiments have been conducted, which, it seems, have been extended to include students. The thermal energy of food was calculated, and the physical activity of these people was measured, and it was correctly determined what was consumed and what was expended through work: the law of conservation of energy! — This law of the conservation of energy is based on nothing other than a whole host of such prejudices. And if we do not rise above this law of the conservation of energy, we will continue to extinguish the spiritual through this very law. For this law of the conservation of energy is the entrenchment of the intellect in external nature and the disregard for the soul.

[ 30 ] We can only proceed further from the soul realm if we in turn penetrate into the spiritual realm; and to penetrate into this spiritual realm means nothing other than to truly understand what actually entered into the evolution of the worlds at the beginning of the Christian era as a completely new impulse—the Christ impulse. As I have already mentioned, he was understood in whatever way he could be understood by one spiritual current or another. But today we are compelled to understand him anew. For a time, he was understood in such a way that people were initially unwilling to admit that the intellect, which had been heading into a void, could once again arrive at a new spiritual reality. As I have already told you, Neoplatonism brought Christ into the innermost being of the human being. This has, after all, remained the norm until now. As we turn our attention outward, we must also conceive of Christ as connected to the outer world; that is, we must bring him into the evolution of the outer world. But this is precisely what is particularly opposed in anthroposophy—that one does not merely speak of Christ in empty phrases, but rather sees him in connection with the entire development of the world. And when it is said that this is truly a cosmic event—that a cosmic being has indeed appeared in a human body, namely Christ—and that just as, ultimately, sunlight on the earthly plane unites with the Earth every day, permeating the Earth as something cosmic, so too do such things take place on the spiritual plane—this is something that the scholars of our time, in particular, still do not understand. But it is necessary that what has initially been gained in the realm of natural science through the intellect—which has become a shadow, yet precisely through this has become applicable to the external world as a free human faculty—that this intellect also become applicable to the inner world. Hence the ascent to imagination, to inspiration; hence the ascent to true spiritual knowledge must take place.

[ 31 ] The historical development of humanity gives rise to the necessity of the natural sciences, and the existence of the natural sciences gives rise to the necessity of advancing toward the spiritual sciences. Turning to the spiritual sciences in the anthroposophical sense is not a whim, but rather a historical fact of development in and of itself. However, as I said, one must tread on thin ice to draw attention to where the obstacles lie. On the one hand, the obstacles lie in something like the law of conservation of energy. There were two laws in the 19th century that sought, in two different ways, to limit the human intellect to merely that which exists in the earthly-sensory realm, that which exists in the material world. One of these laws was established by a scientific council as the law of the conservation of energy. If this law is correct, then human knowledge cannot advance any further toward the recognition of the spiritual and of freedom; rather, it must remain stuck at the level of mere automatic necessity, and it must remain confined to the purely psychological, which gradually becomes shadowy. But then one cannot go beyond what was already established by the Eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869.

[ 32 ] These are the two councils: one that originated from the natural sciences. The other council stands in polar opposition to it. It is the one that, in 1870, declared the infallibility of the papal see when it speaks ex cathedra. There, in order to arrive at knowledge, one no longer appeals to the spiritual realm; instead, one appeals to the Roman Pope, and it is the Pope who decides ex cathedra what is to be considered true or false within Catholic doctrine. Here, the decision regarding truth and error has been brought down from spiritual heights to the earth, into the material realm. Just as our knowledge has been submerged into the material realm by the law of the constancy of force, so too has the living development of the human being in the spiritual realm been submerged into the material realm by the dogma of infallibility. The two belong together; they relate to one another like the North and South Poles.

[ 33 ] What we need in the development of humanity, however, is a free spirituality. The ruler must be the spiritual itself, and human beings must find their way into the spiritual. That is why we need to ascend into the spiritual. We need this ascent in order to rise, on the one hand, above the defeat that the spirit has suffered as a result of the establishment of the law of conservation of energy, and, on the other hand, above the defeat it has suffered as a result of the materialization of all that is religious—namely, the decision regarding truth and falsehood having been brought down to earth by Rome. It is understandable that a breakthrough on the path of the spirit is, of course, not easy today, for the world is thoroughly steeped in superficiality and takes tremendous pride in its superficiality. It allows authorities to make decisions, but those authorities sometimes make very strange decisions. I recently read an article written by a professor who teaches here and lives in a neighboring town, because a local newspaper had asked him to offer an authoritative judgment on this anthroposophy. This professor wrote all sorts of things in that article. Then, right in the middle of it, one comes across a strange sentence. It states that I claim—in describing the spiritual world—that one could see in this spiritual world how spiritual beings move about as freely as tables and chairs do in physical space. Well, that’s Traub-style logic! Seeing tables and chairs move in physical space—I’d rather not delve further into the author’s state of mind at the very moment he wrote such a sentence! But it is to people of such spiritual caliber that the journals turn today when an authoritative judgment is to be made about spiritual science. People are indeed strange sometimes. For example, there’s one named Zaun. Since I have a lecture to give tomorrow, I read this little book by Laun yesterday as well. I’ve always asked myself: Why on earth does Laun talk such nonsense? I actually couldn’t make sense of it because I didn’t hear a single person speaking; it was something completely hollow. However, I once came across a very peculiar sentence there that goes something like this—I don’t have the booklet here—: “It is indeed true that a Catholic Christian, when called upon to judge anthroposophy, actually comes across as someone who can know nothing about anthroposophy.”—That’s the exact wording in there. One can actually believe Canon Laun on this point, for he then says quite correctly: Yes, it would go without saying that a Catholic Christian can know nothing, since, after all, Christians have been forbidden to read the books since July 18, 1919. They are not forbidden to write counter-texts, but they are forbidden to read the books! — One isn’t allowed to know anything at all. There really are some strange people out there.

[ 34 ] And that is precisely the other extreme: this state of having arrived at a completely passive surrender—not to something spiritual, but to something very worldly, to something that exists entirely within the material world. And one could certainly list many such examples. If one were to describe the morality of our time from a cultural-historical perspective, one would find quite a few amusing little documents. But I’ll give you just one more example. Here, a dangerous heresy—you can imagine which one it is—is discussed in a cultural supplement from Göttingen. But they are evidently counting on the fact that the readers who read this have read nothing at all—and, in fact, have heard nothing accurate—about the very subject being judged here. That is why they include a fourteen-line note, and in these fourteen lines, the following is discussed: anthroposophy and the threefold social order. I’ll spare you the discussion of anthroposophy; I’ll just read you the last sentence regarding the threefold social order: “The movement strives for the highest possible development of humanity. It has also defined its views regarding the state. It advocates a division into an economic, financial, and cultural state!” There you have the threefold social order: the economic, financial, and cultural state! So you see, this is how one seeks to educate those to whom one is addressing such critiques, and one can educate them in this way. One writes such articles by making comments on them that demonstrate how well-informed one is! So it is indeed difficult—on the one hand, what emerges from the development of world history as an appropriate impulse, and on the other hand, what arises from the scientific way of thinking itself, which, one might say, has turned into its opposite with its convergence into the law of the conservation of energy or force—it is indeed necessary to truly bring oneself to a recognition of the spiritual world. Much will rise up against this work, which consists in the discerning grasp of the spiritual world. But this work must be done, and even if opponents were to have the power to crush it for a time, it must rise again; for if we are to learn from history, we must not only learn to speak of this history, but we must learn to use this history to kindle our will and warm our hearts! If we allow history to take effect upon us in this way, then it will show us what our actions must accomplish, what must penetrate into the spiritual realm, into the legal and political sphere, and into the economic sphere as spirituality.

[ 35 ] That is what I wanted to say in closing. I wanted first to give you an objective account of how the natural sciences have emerged from the course of human development, so that, precisely through this, I might now, at the end—and perhaps this is merely an addendum—offer the insight that it is a lesson from real history—not from an agnostic history, such as we experienced in the 19th century—but that it is a lesson from real history: We humans must strive toward spiritual knowledge!