The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees,

In a sense, my lecture today will make a prerequisite, since I gave the scientific basis for the examination of anthroposophy with the science of the present in the last lectures that I gave here in Berlin, and it would only be a repetition for those of the honored audience who were present at the time if I were to repeat these foundations today. So today I will have a few things to say that can be understood quite independently, but which require those lectures for their scientific justification.

When man speaks of spirit and spiritual knowledge, it must be said that he is actually pointing to something that is constantly present to him, at least insofar as he is awake. Man cannot doubt that both his cognitive and volitional activity with the external world is carried out by him in such a way that he is spiritually active with his whole being. And so man actually speaks of spiritual activity as if it were something independent. The difficulties actually only begin where it is a matter of penetrating deeper into the nature of the human spirit and the spiritual foundations of the world. When this is said, the most diverse things can be pointed out. For from many sides these inner soul difficulties arise in relation to the spiritual life in man. And I will, so to speak, pick out just one example that illustrates how these difficulties arise and ultimately take hold of the whole human soul. I will give an example that is perhaps not always felt as strongly as others. But much of what the human being has to deal with because of the inner destiny he has to live through lies in semi- or wholly subconscious mental processes. People do not always realize the origins of their inner suffering and their inner mood. But with unbiased self-observation, which is based on a certain, also scientific self-education, one can discover the origins of these moods, these feelings of happiness and suffering in the soul life, which mean a great deal, very much, for the way in which a person can engage with life, the way in which he can be active in life, and the way in which he can work for the good or ill of his fellow human beings in the world. And so I would like to point out how, when he summarizes what he calls his spiritual life, man can, as it were, feel the powerlessness of this spiritual life anew every day; as I said, even if he does not feel it, the result of these unconscious emotional connections in his soul life points to it. Man feels the powerlessness of spiritual life every time he sees this spiritual life paralyzing, when he sees it sinking into a state of sleep, and between falling asleep and waking up, this spiritual life completely sinks into a kind of unknown world for him. Then he feels, as it were, the powerlessness of that spiritual life, which he is able to hold within his earthly existence through his own soul power. The course of the world takes away this soul life from him, takes away this inner spiritual activity from him every day.

But then, when a person observes with a certain impartiality how he awakens from sleep again, how he perhaps, with the transition through the dream life, which he can only see as unreal compared to the external physical reality of the world, re-enters his physical earthly existence in such a way that he, as it were, strengthens his soul nature with all that permeates his bodily organization, with all that is active in his will, then the human being feels, or can at least feel, a difference. He feels how spiritual life becomes dependent on physical corporeality. But at the same time he feels that he cannot look down into this physical corporeality. He feels that, in a sense, this spiritual life sinks into his own being, so to speak, sinks into a kind of darkness into which he cannot look. He feels how that which he calls his spiritual life is seized by the processes of bodily life, by nervous processes or by others. He cannot see through it, it eludes him as if in a kind of inner darkness.

What one can feel when one is able to go so deeply into one's powerlessness in the face of the spiritual being of the human being, one might compare it to a kind of emotional breathlessness. And this emotional breathlessness, with all the uncertainties of life that it contains, can spread over the entire state of mind like an inner, spiritual cloud and give rise to the great question of life: What am I? What am I here for in this world?

And again, when a person sees how their spiritual life is submerged in the physical, as it were in darkness, they feel just as if, if I am to compare it with something physical, the air they breathe were being spoiled by the metabolism. He feels as if he is in some kind of mental suffocation, or at least he can feel it. But it is precisely these two poles of insecurity and uncertainty that lie at the heart of the human being. And that is what has led to humanity always searching for the essence of what the spiritual actually is.

Anthroposophy, in the sense in which it is meant here in my lectures, seeks to approach this spiritual world from the point of view of modern human consciousness. However, it must be well aware of what is easily placed before the door of the spiritual world, so that man is either unable to pass through it in the right way or is unable to pass through it at all. For two powerful enemies of the inner human life lie in wait at the gates of the spiritual world: superstition on the one hand, with all its delusions, and doubt on the other. Those who suffer from superstition, despite feeling so happy in it, are those who do not want to come to terms with what modern science has to offer. They then conjure up all kinds of images from the arbitrariness of their inner soul life, through which they try to understand what the spiritual world is for them. Yes, one can, in a certain respect, I would say, with a certain superficiality of mind, be satisfied with the delusions of superstition. But if you want to be or have to be an active person, if you want to intervene in life, when you encounter phenomena in nature or in human life, then you feel how everywhere that what the human soul produces in terms of superstitious delusions is shattered, and you end up with a certain lack of orientation in life. You can't find your way in life because you bump into everything, life becomes full of corners and edges, because what is revealed in things is something different from what superstition conjures up from the soul.

Those, on the other hand, who have become more immersed in modern science educate their thinking by the phenomena of the external world, by what observation and experiment can yield to modern man. But they often find that this thinking sticks to what the external basis of knowledge is, what the senses alone provide. This leads them to say to themselves: I can only apply this thinking to what the senses tell me. And they find this thinking, so to speak, too thin to somehow penetrate from the world of the senses into a world of the supersensible, into a world of the spiritual. Then doubt creeps in. This doubt can be thought up, can perhaps even be logically justified. But doubt cannot be lived in the long run if one does not want to help oneself over it through all kinds of superficiality and illusion. And if you do the latter, then doubt settles deep down in the mind and takes hold of the physical shell through the pathways that lead from the mind to the body. Gradually, through the influence of doubt, a person feels like a weakling, and it may then be that the more he entangles himself in doubt with his logic and science, the more the effects of doubt take hold of him in life and he comes, so to speak, if the expression seems exaggerated, it still has a certain justification, into a kind of mental “consumption” that makes him unsuitable to fully engage in the tasks of life. And if he does not notice how doubt consumes him, then others notice it, and what doubt has made of him comes back to him in the way he is valued in life.

In this way, one can look more deeply into the way in which man places and must place himself in relation to what he calls the spiritual world. In our time, people who have just come to doubt an immediate insight, an immediate realization of the healthy judgment of man into the spiritual world, either find a certain reassurance by turning back or not stepping out at all from what has become of them, to and into all kinds of old traditional worldviews and creeds. Many have a certain fear, a certain shyness, to step out of what they were born or raised into as old creeds, because they fear losing that foothold in life by losing a view into the spiritual world as a result.

Others, who cannot hold on to what has been passed down to us through the immeasurable forces of human civilization and the various revelations of the spiritual world, are going through strange developments today. They despair of the possibility that a healthy person can see into the spiritual world, and so they turn to what anthroposophy, in harmony with true natural science, must also understand, but in a certain respect to the sick person. They turn to what can be delivered to them through all kinds of mediumistic arts. They cling to what certain natures can see in visions and the like. What is the basis for this? In every case, if one really approaches the subject impartially, one can say that a medium can only arise from the fact that the physical organization is such that certain external impressions can be penetrated and suppressed, that the deeper physical nature can stir more than it can when a person is devoted to his healthy sensory impressions. From what can reveal itself in a certain way, it is believed that one can learn a great deal about what does not reveal itself in the normal state of life, and this is then seen as the intervention of another world in this, our world. It is easy to prove that in all cases where something visionary becomes present in the human soul, it is based on some kind of detuning of the human organization. Without delving into the pathological, it is impossible to explain what arises in a visionary way in the human soul as spiritual content. And so we see how those today who despair of the normal, active human being being able to penetrate into the spiritual world turn to the abnormally active person.

In the face of these things, anthroposophy behaves in such a way that it starts from the healthy person, both in soul and body. And when I had to deal here with how man can awaken slumbering powers of knowledge through certain soul exercises in life and in science in order to penetrate into the spiritual world, the prerequisite was made that such exercises are only undertaken when there is absolute mental and physical health. Anthroposophy must, to a certain extent, deal with the directions just characterized, which are taken to enter the spiritual world, if it wants to discuss its relationship to the spiritual world. In this respect, it can be seen that certain spiritual contents, which people today more or less accept as contents of revelation, are effective above all through their venerable age. Today, we also see what impression this venerable age of such revelation makes on people seeking the spiritual. We see people doubting the paths that the human spirit of science can take into the spiritual world.

And so they turn back to the ancient times of human development or turn to what still extends from such ancient times into our time, in order to see, as it were, how people once came to what is available in traditional religious beliefs as a world view through their own powers of knowledge. With supersensible vision, as I have developed it in my last lectures, one comes to an extraordinarily significant spiritual discovery about the development of human spiritual striving. If we look impartially at what is actually present in the traditional beliefs that exist today, to which thousands and thousands of people turn with the deepest needs of their souls, we find that, ultimately, they are based on paths of knowledge that people once walked, perhaps by very different means than we consider right today. It may be said that everything we take in as a worldview from historical development or tradition, or that we take in through faith, has once been regarded as knowledge. All the supersensible assertions and dogmas that can be found in our creeds, in our world views, in our philosophies are based on what people once sought out of themselves, on paths that are similar in some respects to the paths that I will speak of again today as the anthroposophical ones, but which were fundamentally different in earlier times. But even today we can gain some understanding of the path to the spiritual world by turning our gaze back to the paths that were once taken into these spiritual worlds.

Now I would like to pick out two paths that people have taken, both of which are completely impassable for us Westerners today. But if we look at them with an open mind, we will see that ultimately these paths also arose from the same attitude that we act on today when we seek the spiritual world through anthroposophy. These two examples are the ancient Indian yoga practice, through which serious seekers of the spirit once sought to enter the supersensible world, and, further, that which can be called asceticism in the times when it was not in a state of decadence, both paths which, as I said, are not suitable for our Western humanity, but by which one can ascend to an understanding of the path that is necessary today.

What did the ancient practice of yoga consist of? Among other things, it included a kind of regulation of the human being's breathing, such that the person, for the purpose of knowledge, did not give himself over to the natural breathing that is his in ordinary life, but rather breathed differently according to certain laws. What is the actual goal of such yogic breathing? What is the significance of the fact that one imposes on oneself the inner obligation to breathe differently, to draw in the breath differently, to hold it differently than one does in ordinary life, and also to shape the exhalation in a peculiar way, for a while and again and again, and again? The purpose of this is to direct one's consciousness to an inner human process, namely breathing, which otherwise takes place unconsciously, either entirely or at least for the most part. I would like to say that we take breathing for granted in our ordinary lives. We do not pay attention to breathing. But the moment the Indian yoga student begins to breathe differently from the way he takes breathing for granted, the whole attention of his soul life is directed to this breathing process. The breathing process becomes something he can experience strongly within. And what does he experience in the end? He experiences the connection between the breathing process and human thinking. What is presented here can be characterized in the following way in abstract logical terms. As we draw in the breath, we simultaneously push it rhythmically up into the organ of our thinking, the brain and nervous system. The breath interweaves and undulates through what takes place in the brain. As modern people, when we breathe, we do not pay attention to how the breath flows through the thinking process. But it is precisely this flowing that the Indian yogi wants to make clear. He permeates what is abstract thinking for us with the denser current of the breath, which he becomes aware of. In this way, he strengthens his thinking in ways that take place entirely internally in the human organism. He invigorates his thinking, but he also enlivens it. What now comes inwardly to his consciousness is a different thinking from what goes on in everyday life.

To one who has practiced yoga, this thinking of everyday life appears as a corpse appears to a living person. Ordinary abstract thinking, or thinking connected with sense perceptions, appears dead in comparison to the inwardly living thinking that is gained through such strengthening for the consciousness. But then, through his strengthened thinking, he who has done such exercises over and over again for a certain time looks deeper into the world. And because his thinking has now become so strong through this strengthening, as otherwise only our sensory perceptions are when, for example, we direct our eyes outwards, perceive the world of colors and it makes an intense impression on us, or when we perceive sounds through our ears, he sees because his thinking has now gained the same power as his perception. Although he does not see the external world with his thinking, he does experience the world. What has been seen in this way from the spiritual worlds by individuals who have undergone such a yoga practice has then been incorporated into the development of civilization of mankind. And some of those who today accept this or that, which has been handed down to them traditionally and historically as a world view, accept it without knowing that it is incorporated into human spiritual development from the results of this yoga practice. It can be said that in all worldviews, even in those that ascribe philosophical certainty to themselves – if one can only look at them correctly from an inner soul-historical perspective – much of what today's human being accepts comes precisely from that which once flowed into human consciousness in the way described.

Through the fact that thinking has been made alive in this way, the human being comes to know something about the eternal nature of his being, and comes to know something about the fact that he existed as a spiritual-soul being before he descended from spiritual-soul worlds into what had been developed for him in his mother's body out of the physical world: his physical-bodily organism. With our own thinking, without having undergone any training that strengthens thinking and enlivens it, we perceive only that part of the human being that passes between birth or conception and death. With invigorated and enlivened thinking, one perceives in the person what his own eternal being is, what can live even without being in a physical body, and what also immediately announces itself to the enlivened thinking as what lived in a spiritual world as a spiritual being before the beginning of our physical life. One vividly gains knowledge of the spiritual nature and the spiritual past life of the person.

This is the one path. Initially, it led its followers to look primarily at what is called the pre-existence of man in relation to his life on earth. And they devoted themselves to the practice of yoga with a certain one-sidedness. Through this, they gained an insight into the existence in which the human being was present in spirit and soul before birth or conception. They spoke of this part of human existence as if it were something self-evident. And in so doing, they overcame the powerlessness that humans feel in the face of the spiritual when they see it descend into a state of sleep every day. What becomes unconscious in sleep does not escape from animated thinking. For what becomes invisible to the sleeper is, so to speak, permeated with inner spiritual life, but in such a way that it extends beyond birth and death and announces itself as that which has a formative effect on the human organism – and it is already present from the moment of conception — so that it cannot be understood as a product of the human organism, but must be understood as that which submerges and immerses in this organism as its eternal, spiritual-soul nature.

Another direction is the one that has now led certain people of different cultural ages to see through the essence of a spiritual world, but which, on the other hand, spread light in life. As I said, the matter has often taken a harmful turn. But with anthroposophical science, one can look back to times when asceticism — I mean now — had not yet degenerated into its harmful currents, when it was not yet a certain spiritual coquetry, but when it was supposed to represent the most honest path of knowledge of certain soul seekers. Asceticism consists in the fact that man, in a sense, tunes down, paralyzes – one could even say – his ordinary life functions, that he suppresses what would otherwise well up and surge into his conscious life from his instincts, drives and passions in ordinary life, that he, out of full inner strength of soul, , to command certain inner stirrings, which are connected with the organism and the activity of the organs, to stand still for a while, that he even educates his body to keep a calmer pace for a while in relation to the bodily-physical functions and that which is connected with them: the urges, desires and passions. What was the reason for this? It was based on an insight gained through experience. For these ascetics came to certain insights, and in coming to them, they knew what asceticism is for them. They came to the realization that our physical body is indeed the rightful vehicle for everything we are meant to experience between birth and death, but that it is an obstacle to the perception of the spiritual world, and that everything that allows the essence of the spiritual world to arise in consciousness has the effect of descending in the manner indicated, on the expressions of this physicality. Those who in this way have, as it were, removed the physical obstacle to looking into the spiritual world, looked more to the other side of human eternity. They looked towards the gate of life that man has to pass through when he lays aside his physical body by dying, when he re-enters the spiritual world with his eternal being. They did not so much look at the pre-existence of human existence, but rather at the life that man enters when he has passed through the gate of death.

I have given you these two examples to show how, in other times, people have come to experiences and views about the spiritual world from certain backgrounds. But today we are faced with a world development, a cultural development, a life of civilization that must, above all, come into the right relationship with the outside world. Those who had acquired insights into the spiritual world either through the practice of Indian yoga or through asceticism had, in a sense, made themselves unsuitable for the outer life. By going through the yoga breathing practice described, the person tunes himself to become extraordinarily sensitive and to feel everything that is going on around him with extraordinary ease. He develops a tendency to withdraw from the outer life, just as when the horns of a snail are touched, it withdraws from the outer world into its shell. Thus we see that those who have come to real insights into the spiritual world have withdrawn and lived in hermitages, paying little attention to living with the outer world. We find the same with those who come into contact with the spiritual world through asceticism. They undergo exercises that aim to tune down the processes and powers of their physical bodies, thereby making them unsuitable for intervening in the more robust life of the outside world. Again, these people are also led to a certain inability to intervene in the external life. But again it was necessary for these people - for reasons that do not belong here - that they devoted themselves to a knowledge of the higher worlds, so that then the others, who more through authority accepted what such knowledgeable people could reveal to them, then accepted this in good faith and performed in the outer life what the reclusive hermits could not perform. But such behavior contradicts both our current knowledge and the demands of modern life.

We humans, who do not live like the original yogi scholars or like the former ascetics before the Copernican or Galilean era, but who live in the era in which a richly developed natural science has changed our entire external life and demands of us , if we want to be cognizant, we must also know how to intervene energetically in life. Today we must realize that it is no longer possible for us as people of the present to penetrate into the spiritual worlds in the ways described. But that does not prevent the modern man from finding his way into the supersensible world, if he undertakes certain things, as I have already indicated earlier, that have nothing to do with breathing practice, but that consist of meditation and concentration, through which the human being can enliven his thinking. In this way, it is similar to the inner experience of the yoga practitioner. Or when I describe the exercises of the will that a person can undergo, which aim to educate the self, to take one's own development into one's own hands, to discard certain habits with all one's strength, and to attain in terms of disposition or even attitude towards life, then what the human being experiences in this way through a strengthening of his will can bear a certain similarity to what the ancient ascetics experienced. But the aim is not to weaken the physical body, but rather to maintain it in its full efficiency and suitability for the outer life.

But what do we gain when we, on the one hand, invigorate our thinking through meditation and concentration in a way that is appropriate to the present time? We achieve something that, even in knowledge, does not need to withdraw from the outer world, but rather attains a very definite relationship to the outer world, a relationship that is entirely in harmony with what we are accustomed to applying as our methods of observation to the outer world at a lower scientific level. I will give an example in this direction, an example of what can become of our thinking through purely mental animation, through inner soul-strengthening of this thinking, precisely in relation to the outer world.

A large part of our present-day views about living beings, about the connection between animals and humans, for example, have been gained by comparing the individual organs, for example of higher animals or of animals in general, with the corresponding organs of humans. We also compare other things, for example blood composition and the like. From this we form an idea of how the human organization could be related to, how it could be related to what we encounter, for example, in the organization of higher animals. But there is a peculiarity. What I am going to say now is perhaps a little subtle, but the whole modern path of knowledge into the supersensible worlds is indeed a subtle one and must be considered in its details and peculiarities. Let us assume that an unprejudiced observer of the higher animal world forms a mental picture, not merely an external view through the senses, of a higher animal, and that he then also forms a mental picture of the structure and organization of the human being. He can visualize the relationship between the two. But if such an observer were now to be required to do the following, he would immediately notice how dead, how inanimate, how abstract his thought life actually is. It is just that man does not do this in ordinary life and in conventional science, and so he does not realize how inanimate his observation and his thinking are. Let us assume that he has formed an idea about their external organization and so on with regard to the higher animals. If he makes these thoughts alive, he cannot progress and draw the thought of the human organization from the living thought of the organization of the higher animals. He can only find a relationship between the two by first forming the thought of the higher animal, then that of the human being, and then bringing both into connection. But he cannot vividly bring forth the thought of the human being from that of the higher animal. His thinking does not have this inner vitality. We know this vitality from observing how we grow, carry out our daily metabolism and so on. But our thoughts stand side by side. We cannot let the thought of the human organization grow out of the thought of the animal organization, as the individual organs grow out of the more undifferentiated human organism in the human germ during the embryonic period. We have no living thinking in ordinary life, and all our thinking bears this imprint for common science as well as for ordinary life. But in the moment when one does soul-exercises that inwardly strengthen the thinking, the thinking comes to life, and one arrives at inwardly experiencing the form of a higher animal with these living thoughts, by going into how the higher animal bears the main direction of its organization horizontally, while man bears it vertically, how man frees his arms from the tasks they have in animals. To be able to do this, the human being must develop an inner relationship to that to which he has no relationship in ordinary thinking.

Because, dear honored attendees, in relation to external nature, we often think differently because we get by with dead thinking when we think about human nature, about living nature in general. For example, we look at a magnetized needle that can be rotated around its axis and find that it has a particularly distinct direction that points to the magnetic north pole on the one hand and to the magnetic south pole on the other. This leads us to the idea that the magnetic north-south direction in space has something distinctive about it compared to the other directions. We differentiate space, which would otherwise appear to us without distinction. When one has developed living thinking, the vertical direction can be similarly enlivened, which man acquires by bringing the animal organization, which is oriented in a completely different direction, into the vertical direction. One learns in this way to experience the world, and the whole space comes to life. But this enables one to move from the living thought of the animal organization to the living thought of the human organization. The thought of the human organization itself grows out of the living thought of the animal organization. One sees: by observing the phenomena of the outer world, thinking becomes alive. In the case of the Indian yogi, it only became alive through his coming into a relationship with the spiritual world; he did not enter into such a relationship with the outer world as we need in our process of knowledge.

Developing the ability to bring the world to consciousness as a living thing in this way still does not guarantee that we are dealing with reality. What we develop as living thinking could still be mere fantasy. One must have a criterion for knowing that one is not dealing with mere fantasy, but with something that, by living in our living thinking, also lives outside in the things themselves, so that the thought that I experience as living represents that which lives outside in the beings of nature itself. This characteristic arises for the one who, in the way I have presented it in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” or in other books, walks the path of knowledge to the living thought. The reality of the living thought presents itself to him simply by the fact that, when he has it, he experiences a mental pain, a suffering, in cherishing and experiencing this living thought with every step he takes inwardly in life. Yes, real higher knowledge cannot be attained without mental pain, without mental suffering. And what does this suffering, this pain, indicate?

Well, this pain and suffering is nothing other than what arises from the fact that our whole organism, our whole human being, becomes inwardly sensitive through and through, as otherwise only the senses are sensitive. We are accustomed to the sensitivity of the senses; they no longer cause us pain, even though processes also take place in the senses – for example in the eyes – which, if we had any sensation of pain at all for such processes, would appear to us as processes of pain. We do not have the sensation of pain for these processes. But when our whole organism becomes a total sensory organ through the exercises indicated, then we initially feel this as pain, as inner mental suffering. Therefore, one must say again and again: He who experiences joy, experiences pleasure, can indeed be grateful to life for this joy and this pleasure. Insights in a deeper sense will not come to him through this. Anyone who has acquired a little knowledge knows how much he owes to the suffering and pain that ordinary life has already given him; so that these sufferings and pains have prepared him to now, in inner self-education to living thinking, also to experience the sufferings and pains that precisely this living thinking prepares for man, because he is precisely placed in the outer world. By experiencing reality in suffering, we experience the spiritual world, which we now grasp with living thought, with the same degree of reality with which we experience the sensual world through our senses. In this way we become entirely spiritual sensory organs, if I may use this paradoxical, self-contradictory, but very real expression, and only as a whole human being can we become that. Then we perceive the spiritual world in its reality. Then we know how the living thought is just as much a reality as we know how to distinguish in ordinary life between a piece of hot iron that we really grasp with our fingers and one that we merely imagine in our minds.

Thus, in order to grasp the higher, supersensible world, these two things belong together: that the living thought is experienced in man, and that through inner, soul pain, his whole being is permeated with inner sensitivity. The thought must become alive – the whole human being must become sensitive to those moments in his life when he wants to seek a connection to the spiritual world. We see that as modern people, we remain entirely in the soul realm. We do not turn to the process of strengthening consciousness through regular or irregular breathing. Nor do we turn to the process of paralyzing our bodily functions. We remain entirely in the soul with our exercises, but on another level we develop the same thing that was developed through yoga practice and through asceticism for the vision of the higher world. We develop these higher insights and yet remain human beings who can fully face robust life, who, as neither men of insight nor men of action, do not have to retreat into hermitage. Why is that? We only perform inner soul exercises, but as a result we arrive at the invigorated thought, which the Indian yogi only achieved by letting the stronger current flow into the other of breathing. And on the other hand, purely inwardly, we arrive at the soul, which in a certain way becomes a kind of downgrading of physical processes. But we now have both in hand. We can, for example, keep suffering to the soul alone and we can return to our healthy soul and body state whenever we wake up from sleep. For it must be emphasized again and again that what is important in anthroposophical methods is that we can return from that state, which leads us into the spiritual world, to that state where we stand with both feet on the earth.

But when one has succeeded in enlivening thinking in this way, then one knows that one has something quite different from what the much-mocked natural philosophy once had. Oken and Schelling also came to a living thinking. And anyone who reads Schelling's works today will notice that there is something in them that is not a dead thought, that is a living thought. But what Schelling does not express is what makes his living thinking different from the mere image of such thinking. It is different because of what I have added, which testifies that we have become a sense organ with our whole being: the pains, the sufferings that one recognizes as a necessity when higher knowledge is to arise in man. Therefore, one can say, such knowledge as seems to be present in Schelling gives only a kind of inner soul voluptuousness, while the knowledge I mean is quite serious when the question arises: how can one bear it?

And yet another difference arises between anthroposophical knowledge and Schelling's. When we acquire knowledge through ordinary science or speculative philosophy, we are accustomed to the fact that once we have it, it remains with us, becoming memory images. I would like to say: it is not as easy as that with anthroposophical knowledge of the spirit, because it is a living thing. Once one has gained access to a certain area of the world in the manner indicated, in order to look into the spiritual, No matter how strong the experience and how powerful the vision at a given moment, after a short time it has faded away, like a dream that has gone cold. And if one wants to revive it, one must awaken it again within oneself, for one has just entered the sphere of the living. And just as no one in the sphere of the living can say that what has gone before makes what comes after unnecessary – for example, that if you have eaten once eight days ago, you do not need to eat again after eight days – so it is here too: that the knowledge you have acquired in the spiritual life must be gained again and again. This gives the soul life a certain disposition in relation to the supersensible world: the disposition that the spiritual shows itself to be alive by having to be grasped again and again by the living forces in order to be there for the consciousness. In short, one lives one's way into the supersensible world by experiencing the reality of this spiritual world at the same time, just as one lives one's way into a reality through the senses.

But then, when one has developed this living thinking within oneself, permeated by inner sensitivity and inner capacity for feeling, then one no longer faces the person one is dealing with in the same way as with dead thinking. In dead thinking, the peculiarity is that we have this person before us, we form certain ideas about him, which we then carry within us. But all these ideas do not extend beyond the space enclosed by the person's skin. If, on the other hand, we look at the person with living thinking, then a spiritual person is added to the physical-sensory view of the person, which in turn is structured within itself. We look at the person in their physical form. But this appears to us as enclosed in a spiritual shell, and this spiritual shell points us back to earlier earthly lives. We see how the present life on earth, in which the present form is being lived out, is a repetition of a previous life on earth. And we come to see the person in such a way that we recognize what he experienced in the spiritual world during the time between his previous death and the beginning of his present earthly existence. We look at the spiritual and soul nature of man as it was before descending into the physical world, and see how the activity of the spiritual and soul nature, which does not yet have a body, developed, how it is directed towards penetrating with a full, and now spiritual consciousness, the secrets of the human body. We now realize the profound meaning of the saying, 'Man is a small world'. For this small world is small only in space compared to the great world of the cosmos. It contains not only the secrets of the cosmos. It contains far more than can be seen with ordinary eyes in the cosmos, as we survey the external cosmos with the intellect and direct our gaze into it so that we can recognize it or act in it. Thus the human being, as a spiritual-soul being, lives in a spiritual world before conception, and his gaze is directed to the human organization, to the human being as he is enclosed here with his spiritual-soul being in his skin. That is the world one lives through between death and a new birth, and we look at this world through what - if one may use this expression - we see like a spiritual aura on and through the human being, and what points us to the world he lived through before his earthly existence.

And we look at the other structure through which it is expressed to us how the person acts in front of us. If we observe with our ordinary intellect how one person meets another in life, then we may attribute it to so-called coincidence if we notice that this encounter has a deeper meaning for the person. If we notice that this encounter, perhaps by bringing these two people together, is decisive for their whole life on earth, we may still attribute it only to chance that these two found each other. But if we look at it with strengthened thinking that guarantees reality, then we recognize how the whole life of these two people moved with a certain magic, and that one of them finally came into the other's field of vision because the other was sympathetic to him. It becomes a certainty, as sensitive people say to themselves when they reach a certain age, as Goethe's friend Knebel put it, for example: When I look back on my life, it seems to me as if I had wanted it out of unconscious, inner desires. It turns out that what wants to come out in a person's destiny binds us together in our inner being with the being of the other.

This is where we come to what the ancient ascetics, the yoga people, called karma, how destiny develops in connection with successive earthly lives. Today, this still seems paradoxical to many people. But anyone who takes seriously the question of how the reality of living thinking can be substantiated will, after all, form a conception of the connection between human destiny and that which one develops as higher, supersensible powers of knowledge. Just as one can say that what lives in the world of colors is unknown to the blindborn, but that the world of colors must not be denied because of this, so for higher knowledge the connection between human destiny and repeated earthly lives does not appear to contradict human freedom. When one considers human freedom, it might appear that it has nothing to do with such a view of karma and repeated earthly lives. But it is not so. For example, I am not unfree because I build a house this year and move into it the next year. But I am no more unfree because I develop certain powers in me and that these then seek their ways in earthly life. It remains, as with the construction of a house, still the freedom of the human being. But through such an insight, one sees how what human action is is the second link in the human aura. And through this one gains an insight into that part of us that works incessantly as the human being is active in the physical world. Not only the ordinary powers of perception live in it, but also that which the human being can otherwise feel in relation to his digestion, for example. In this way, man now sees what he experiences from day to day, what enriches his life, through which he becomes greater and greater – in the spiritual sense this is now meant, of course – and what then goes into the spiritual world through death: He sees the mystery of death.

This is the anthroposophical path to the spiritual world. And this path also explains why those who do not want to go it now condemn it, as we see today. They have an unconscious fear of what must one day be overcome in a higher realization, of suffering, of what brings human functions to a certain calm, but a calm that is under an inner domination. They therefore prefer to see visions and so forth arising from a down-tuned corporeality, as in the medium, but which have no cognitive value. While a cognitive value arises from not experiencing what is worked through the outer corporeality, but what is experienced from the inner soul, but as a certain suffering, which guarantees the certainty of the supersensible world.

And since the path to the supersensible world is sought in this way, its results must also be communicated in such a way that the whole presentation is an expression of the seriousness that must be shown by those who want to go up the path into the spiritual world and from there want to bring knowledge about this spiritual world to other people. The idea must take hold among people today that the messages about the spiritual world can be proclaimed by those who walk this path, and that the secret of birth and death can be revealed through it. People must be able to arise who seek knowledge of the spiritual world, not only of the natural world in natural science. And just as one does not have to be a painter to feel the beauty of a natural phenomenon, one does not have to be a spiritual researcher to feel the value of what the spiritual researcher has to say about the supersensible world. Only when a relationship has developed in which the spiritual world can be understood in a similar way to how one can understand works of art, even if one is not an artist, only then will the right relationship exist between the spiritual researcher and the non-spiritual researcher, just as the right relationship already exists today between astronomer and non-astronomer.

And spiritual science will establish the right relationship between the spiritual researcher and those who want to take up spiritual research. And since this relationship is directed towards truth, truth must also be felt if people allow their sense of truth and common sense to prevail, which is also the aim of the spiritual researcher's messages. But then, when such a relationship exists between spiritual research and this life, as I have just described, then that which can bring the spiritual impulses of this spiritual science into a real life practice will stand up for life. What do we have from the spiritual world today? We have thoughts from the spiritual world, we live in thoughts and ideas, but as I have characterized them, they are actually dead. But if one is able to infuse anthroposophical spiritual science into these ideas, then it gives life to these thoughts and ideas. As a result, the people who are able to understand these anthroposophical thoughts are themselves inwardly spiritually enlivened.

Do we have spirit in our present culture? We may say: we have spirit in the sense that we have developed beautiful, great thoughts from the spirit. But in these thoughts the living spirit is not present. Anthroposophy does not want to develop thoughts about the spirit, but to pour the living thought itself into people as spiritual blood, so that they are permeated with spiritual blood in their spiritual nature just as they are permeated with physical blood in their physical nature. Then, however, we will succeed in permeating our whole life with spirit again, but not just with thoughts and abstractions from spirit, but with living ideas of this spirit. Then, however, the great questions of life, especially the social questions, will be solved in a completely different way when we can say: We not only have thoughts of the spiritual, but the spiritual world itself walks among us. It is there where we ourselves are as physical human beings. But because we — each of us in our physical body — carry a spiritual being within us, we are companions of spiritual beings that walk among us. We will relate to the world quite differently, and the great riddles of the present and the near future will present themselves to us in a completely different way when we stop having only dead spirit in our thoughts, but when we can say again: We humans are not alone on earth, we do not just harbor thoughts of a spirit in us, which, as thoughts, are unproven and lead on the one hand to superstition and on the other to doubt. For out of certainty we can say: We are not alone on earth, spiritual beings are among us, are connected with us, spiritual beings take care of the course of the world with us, and we take care of the course of the world when we enter into a relationship with them!

Thus, anthroposophy does not seek the spirit, which often proves to be a dead thing in life and can only give us a gloomy picture of the future. Rather, anthroposophy turns to the living spirit, so that people may not only have ideas about the spirit, but may have the living spirit walking among them!

Dear attendees! Today's lecture makes no other claim than to be merely an introduction to the considerations that I will be discussing in the next few days, considerations about the relationship between anthroposophy and the various fields of science and life.

One of the most significant facts of recent intellectual life is undoubtedly the coexistence, collaboration and thinking together of Goethe and Schiller, especially in the very early days of their friendship in the last decade of the eighteenth century. And it is extraordinarily significant that during this time, when two of the greatest geniuses of humanity found each other intimately, a burning intellectual question between these personalities was, so to speak, discussed and considered on all sides. Both Goethe and Schiller were artists at heart. But during the period in question, they were deeply concerned with the relationship between art and knowledge, as revealed in scientific observation, on the one hand, and, although somewhat less clearly, the relationship between art and religious feeling and perception in humans, on the other. And if one lets the keynote sink in, which resounds through all Goethe's and Schiller's discussions of the mutual relationship between knowledge, art and religion, then one comes to say: Above all, for these two minds, this question was one of the following: How do the powers of knowledge, art and religion work together in the human being to lead the human being to live out and express his full, harmonious human nature for himself and for the world?

Anyone who enters into this lively treatment of the question will no doubt be most deeply impressed by what has come to light in Schiller's examination of this question in his, unfortunately far too little appreciated, “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man” and by what Goethe added to Schiller's reflection in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, which forms the conclusion of the “Conversations of the German People”.

On the one hand, Schiller saw the scientific consideration, to which he was led in a certain sense by what his external position had to become at the time, by his professorship in Jena, and also by the fact that he wanted to enlighten himself about the philosophical foundations of art from Kantian philosophy. But every such question took on a character that led to the general human, to the more comprehensive question: What is the actual essence of man, what contributes most to this essence of man within the development of culture and the mind? And so the question became: How does man attain the possibility of coming onto the path of his destiny, out of knowledge, out of science, out of artistic striving? This question became a burning one for Schiller. He posed this question in the essay he wrote on the aesthetic education of the human race. At this time, Schiller often said to himself that there was something unsatisfactory about scientific observation when one wants to strive for the highest, purest development of the human being. Schiller made some remarkable statements in this regard. For example, when he received a piece of Goethe's “Wilhelm Meister” and read it with the utmost interest, he wrote to Goethe about his feelings about the artistic treatment on Goethe's part in this work, beginning with the sentence: “The artist is, after all, the only true human being, and the best philosopher is, after all, only a caricature next to him.”

What did Schiller mean by such a radical statement? He meant that by engaging in artistic creation or immersing himself in works of art in an appreciative, artistic way, man feels his full humanity to be inwardly active and inwardly alive, and that what he experiences in true works of art is something quite unsatisfactory compared to what he can experience in scientific knowledge. It was out of such feelings that Schiller arrived at the peculiar solution which he gives to this question in his Letters on Aesthetics. He said to himself something like the following: When we, as human beings, are most closely in touch with the highest things here on earth, when we are devoted to the contemplation of the world of ideas, which after all is the goal of all scientific endeavor, then we feel the necessity to be logical; we dare not deviate from the laws of reason, which, as it were, takes possession of our spirit and our soul and prescribes the paths for us. We are not truly free inwardly when we engage in this kind of cognitive activity, and in our inner freedom we can only truly live out our humanity.

In this cognitive activity, Schiller sees, as it were, the one pole of human activity; he sees the other pole in man's surrender to the natural necessity of his own being, to his instincts, his drives, to his capacity for desire, which in ordinary life emerges from his lower organism and his drives. It is out of these impulses that man acts, it is on these that he initially bases his life. But one is surrendered to the natural necessity of one's own being when one is surrendered to one's drives and instincts; one follows, so to speak, one's drives and instincts as much as outer nature follows its natural conditions; one is not free. Between these two states, surrender to the necessity of reason and surrender to the necessity of nature, Schiller seeks that “middle state” in which the human being can find himself, and which he calls the aesthetic state, that state in which man is as an artist or as an artistic enjoyer. How does Schiller now describe this middle state from his experience of art?

He says: When we enjoy a work of art as human beings, we do not feel the rigid, strict rational necessity that must guide us in our understanding, but nor do we feel the mere desire that lives in our urges and instincts; for when we work our way up to the free enjoyment of the beautiful, we must not get stuck in what only our sensual urges give us. The spiritless sensual impulses can never rise to the real understanding of the work of art. But in giving ourselves to the artistic, we do not live in an abstract, spiritually withdrawn, unsensual way, as is the case with scientific knowledge when it advances to the level of ideas; we live, because what appears sensually is also is the artistic, in that middle state of devotion to a sensual thing, but we live in devotion to a sensual thing in such a way that at the same time our own sensual nature is laid aside, that we are not devoted to its necessity, that we have spiritualized it, ensouled it. We have descended from the rigid necessity of reason into sensuality, which is appropriate and congenial to us in the artistic; we have torn ourselves away from the rigid necessity of reason; but on the other hand we have also torn ourselves away from the oppressive necessity of nature. In this intermediate state, we are truly free human beings. When we create art, for example, we do not follow methodical rules like those we have to observe in science; we surrender to the free play of what rules in our own soul. The inner free lawfulness, which at the same time appeals to our sympathy and antipathy, guides us as we create art. We are in a free state of mind.

It is from this background that Schiller dares to speak out so radically in these aesthetic letters. In this activity, which is governed by the senses and yet is spiritual, as spiritual as the necessity of reason without surrendering to this necessity of reason, and as sensual as only life in sensuality can be without losing itself to the necessity of nature, Schiller's gaze is drawn to the free play of the child, who does not yet know a necessity of knowledge, but who has also not yet immersed himself so deeply in his sensuality, as he indulges in his free play, unfolding from his sympathy and antipathy. It was in this mood that Schiller coined the radical sentence: Man is only fully human when he plays, and he only plays in the true sense of the word when he is fully human.

What Schiller expressed here belongs to a higher level of spiritual development. Here the German spirit was trying, so to speak, to enlighten itself about humanity from an extraordinarily high point of view. The German spirit was trying to grasp the whole inner essence of the artistic by asking: What can art be in order to bring man as high as possible in his development through the artistic essence?

Schiller was faced with this question. It was no less pressing for Goethe. Goethe followed with interest all the thoughts and ideas that Schiller developed, as it were, through the question: How is man made free through the content of his spiritual life? But Goethe, by nature, could not get used to the more abstract trains of thought in Schiller's aesthetic letters. For Goethe, who was an artist in a completely different, in a broader sense, than Schiller, the question was not as simple as it was for Schiller. Goethe said to himself: Schiller sees three forces at work in man: the necessity of reason, the necessity of nature, and in between the aesthetic state; from their mutual relationship, he wants to recognize the free human soul in a spiritual way. But it's not that simple, Goethe said to himself. Because this human soul is something endlessly complicated; you can't see through it by just piling up three such abstract forces, no matter how ingeniously you philosophize about it. Goethe couldn't just follow Schiller's philosophy. For him, the answer to the same question took the form of an image, that powerful image with the most diverse sub-images that we encounter in his “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. I will now pass over all the other figures contained in this fairy tale and describe the actual situation, how the soul wants to reach its goals, its freedom, its experience of its true nature, by different paths.

The paths that the individual characters – there are about twenty of them – take in Goethe's fairy tale are all paths of the soul, not intended allegorically or symbolically, but in the way that Goethe had to speak of these paths of the soul. Anyone who sees allegories or symbols in something like this “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” has not yet penetrated into the real, genuine spiritual life, as it prevails in Goethe, for example. If someone says: In these figures I see only allegorical or symbolic representations of states of mind or the like, then he has no idea how rich Goethe's experiences were on the individual soul paths, and how Goethe could not express what he wanted to reveal about the paths of the soul in any other way than in images that are ambiguous but also promising. But I would just like to point out the target figures: all the different personalities in this fairy tale ultimately move towards the temple of the four kings, towards the temple of the golden king, the silver king, the bronze king and the king who is composed of these three substances in an irregular manner. And we see how Goethe wants to lead the entire plot towards the goal of a certain relationship emerging with the golden king, the silver king and the bronze king, who, in a sense, by acting on another person in the fairy tale – on the beautiful lily – the essence of the world onto the deepest human; and as these three mighty personalities radiate the innermost essence of the world onto humanity, we see how the fourth king, who is chaotically mixed from the substances of the other three, collapses into himself.

If one tries to express in somewhat abstract words what Goethe felt at this encounter between the fair lily and the four kings, one must say: He wanted to show how the human soul, if it wants to come to true humanity, must ultimately arrive at a certain relationship to what the golden king represents: the cognitive, that which leads man to wisdom; how he must arrive at the silver king, who gives man that which is beauty, that which is artistic; and how he must arrive at that which is represented in the brazen king, at the good, at real pious deeds. Thus, for Goethe, man ultimately arrives at knowledge as it lives in science, at the beautiful as it lives in art, and at the good as it exists in the religious. But in that Goethe portrays how, separately, each of the three kings radiates this threefold world-being of wisdom, beauty, and goodness upon man, while at the same time man comes to comes to his true humanity, as that which previously influenced him – the mixed king, who is chaotically mixed together from the three substances – collapses and no longer has any existence. Goethe wants to show how true humanity can only be achieved through a very specific relationship between wisdom, beauty and goodness, or – as one could also say – between science, art and religion, in that these three revelations of the world have an effect on man.

What Goethe means by this should not really be expressed in abstract sentences, because it represents, one might say, the whole sum of Goethean experience in relation to wisdom or science, to art or beauty, to religion as it manifests itself in the kindness of human beings. Goethe had to attempt to depict in individual images what Schiller presented more in abstract, philosophical ideas. That alone is significant. It is significant for the reason that, out of his entire epoch with its characteristic intellectual life, Goethe – like Schiller – came to the question: How must science, art and religion fit into human life? And he found no way to express this other than in a fairy-tale-like way at first. Nevertheless, one can see that for him it was a burning question, just as it was for Schiller. Schiller saw in the merely cognizant a caricature of the true human being. But ever since he had come to a real, awakened consciousness of humanity, Goethe actually always strove to seek the foundations of the artistic essence and artistic creation and the significance of this artistic essence and creation for humanity in the nature of the world itself. And one arrives, I would say, at extraordinarily intense ideas and feelings in the indicated area when one follows how Goethe intensively studies Spinoza's philosophy with Herder, how he reads Spinoza's “Ethics” with Herder, how he wants to gain ideas from this ethics about how divine necessity, in its conformity to law, rules and weaves through the world. In a sense, God in the workings of the world – that is what Goethe wants to bring to life in himself by studying Spinoza. But basically he remains unsatisfied. And how he remains unsatisfied can be seen from the extraordinarily characteristic statements to his friends in the letters he wrote to his Weimar friends from his Italian journey. There, in Italy, he felt that he was in an element that suddenly began to satisfy him when confronted with works of art that gave him an idea of the artistic nature of the Greeks. We read in the letters that he wrote back to Weimar the words: Now, in the face of these Italian works of art, I am getting a feeling for Greek art; I have the suspicion that the Greeks, in creating their works of art, proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am on the trail of. Goethe believed he recognized: the eternal, iron laws of nature that he wanted to feel from Spinoza's philosophy, but could not find there, but which he felt from his own studies of nature and which he was then able to trace into his art in order to feel science and art in a unity. He could only feel this unity where he believed he was looking at the essence of Greek art. He believed that the Greeks had come to understand the essence of natural necessity, and that they had elevated this understanding and essence in their works of art, but in such a way that the same thing lives in these works of art – but in a transformed form – that otherwise only lives within nature. By feeling this, by feeling the necessity of artistic creation in what he now imagined to be Greek art, Goethe came to the shattering utterance, which he now wrote to his Weimar friends, standing before the works of art that he was able to see at the time: “There is necessity, there is God!”

We can see the path that Goethe took: he sought out necessity, divine conformity to law in the nature of the world, from the philosophy of Spinoza in order to gain knowledge; he stood in front of the works of art that he regarded as the most perfect, and he sensed from them what he strove for with all the fibres of his soul. It was in the presence of these works of art that he experienced what he felt to be a sense of the divine. But we also see from this that Goethe could not simply understand art as a mere optional addition to life, but that he strove to recognize how art is deeply rooted in the roots of the world in its forms. And perhaps a particularly characteristic saying of Goethe's, which, I would like to say, leads very deeply into what Goethe experienced and felt in this area. He once objected to speaking of the “idea of truth”, the “idea of good”, the “idea of beauty”. You can read about this in his “Sayings in Prose”. He said: There is only one idea, and it lives in nothing other than in the perceived all-embracing spirituality, as the form in which it can appear to man. He says of this idea that it can express itself as truth, as beauty, as goodness. In a sense, Goethe wanted to have established in the roots of the world, in the nature of the world, that which he shaped artistically; he wanted what the artist created to have its source not only in free human arbitrariness, but at the same time, as a free artist, the human being should stand within the nature of the world. And so it was that not only the question of true humanity developed for him through the question of art, but also the other question: How does the essence of the world prevail in man when he is truly an artist? How do the laws of the world continue to work in the creative, free artistic human being?

I have only mentioned this because it shows how, in the case of Goethe and Schiller, the full depth of the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion in the nature of man himself emerges in the spiritual life of modern times. I believe that anyone who approaches the minds of Goethe and Schiller with both an open mind and heartfelt devotion must feel this question, the question of the harmonization of science, art and religion. For these two outstanding geniuses of humanity considered it one of the most important questions in their lives to fathom how the world essence is a unified one, what relationship man gains to this world essence when he is cognitively active, when he is artistically active and when he is religiously active. Now, I would like to say that the deepest inspiration for a correct, intensely deep approach to this question can be drawn from Goethe and Schiller. But it cannot be denied that we, in an epoch that is so long after Goethe and Schiller, must also freely confront what they raised as a significant human question. And so it was precisely from a deeper, from a truly — I may say it without being immodest — devoted study of Goethe and Schiller that the human question appeared to me as the question of freedom at the time when I set about writing my 'Philosophy of Freedom'. It could not make sense to me that man is a truly free being only by living in the artistic. What Schiller asserted is certainly the case: that in the cognitive observation of the world of rational necessity, one must, so to speak, follow a spiritual compulsion. But something else is at hand: when one follows this rational necessity, when one devotes oneself to scientific observation in this sense, then one lives in what one experiences of nature, of the world in general, and even if it is the ideas of the laws of nature, in ideas.

One lives with it in images, and one feels that one cannot really fathom anything in nature unless one allows free inner human activity to prevail, and that even if the necessity of nature forces us, it cannot force us to act, but that we must freely take up the activity. One feels the pictorial nature of what nature and the world always are, and then, in knowing, one feels one's own free human nature in a very special way. This is what I wanted to present in my Philosophy of Freedom. When one advances to the real impulses of moral action, and when these impulses of moral action become pure thinking, then man lives again, prompted to action by images. We feel the pictorial nature in our cognition, and when we bring our morality to the same pictorial nature, then we feel ourselves in freedom. This is also what actually made man free in the age in which science emerged in the modern sense.

Only life in that which does not actually immerse itself in nature, and therefore also has its limits in relation to nature, only life in the realm of thought, in the realm of images, frees the human being from the necessities into which he is placed as a natural being, and only then could scientific activity have the possibility of full inner freedom when it really brought people to inner pictorial experience. One cannot be unfree in the face of images. One can be pushed or shoved into action by some other force, physically, emotionally or intellectually. Imagine whether you can be prompted to do anything by a mere image — compare mental images with linguistic images — they are powerless and impotent. And so our images are powerless and impotent in a moral sense. But if we start from mere images, then we are free human beings in moral action. It must therefore be said that man is a truly free being not only in the aesthetic state, but also when he elevates his morality to such heights that he can rule, when he devotes himself to a truly free cognitive activity.

Thus it becomes necessary to seek the inner harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a new way in the post-Goethean age. And anthroposophy, which does not want to be just any old theoretical, abstracted world view, but which wants to be a spiritual content that has an effect on the whole, on the full human being, because it and flows from the whole, complete human being, anthroposophy must, above all, seek to relate what it can give to knowledge, to artistic creation, and to religious experience. I would like to say that this does not lead to some kind of artificiality of the anthroposophical path, but rather that this anthroposophical path naturally leads to it, and by standing on anthroposophical ground, one can be fully in harmony with the particular way of posing questions in this field, as it arose with Schiller and oethe.

Dear attendees, I have to draw on something that is indeed one of the elements of anthroposophical research, but which I would like to sketch at least in a few lines to show how anthroposophy comes to a harmonization of knowledge, art and religion in a very natural way, and not through some contrived invention.

If one wants to characterize how anthroposophy proceeds, it is of course always necessary to point out how the forces of knowledge that lie dormant in the soul, and are not active in the ordinary life of man and in ordinary science, must be developed through certain intimate soul exercises. And the importance of such soul exercises for human life must also be spoken of in the most varied ways. At this point I would merely like to suggest that these soul exercises consist of meditation and concentration, but in a completely different way than they were once practiced in the Orient. In such meditations and concentrations, where the cultivation of thoughts is undertaken in a very special way, thoughts become more alive and more intense. Through through special exercises, one comes to live, not in mere shadowy thoughts, as in ordinary science, but in such strengthened thoughts, to live as one otherwise only lives in outer sense experience, where one is given over to sense experiences with one's eyes and ears. The essence of meditation is that one is given over to the life of ideas in an intense way, as one never otherwise lives in mere thinking. In this way thoughts come to life. One feels how one gradually frees oneself from the physical conditions of thinking and, as it were, learns to think free of the body. Thinking becomes, without becoming pathological, inwardly fuller, more intense. One arrives at images. What I have called in my writings imaginative cognition occurs. Through this one arrives at the first significant results of the anthroposophical world view.

When one has strengthened one's thinking in this way for a while, so that it has become more intense and alive and no longer needs the body for support, then one no longer experiences one's thoughts as a mere tableau of memories, but rather as an overview of the workings of forces within us that are in us because we are human beings on earth. In our contemplation, we have a tableau before us in which we see how our thought life has become intense and has become related to what works in us as growth forces, what itself works in us as forces of metabolism. We learn to recognize that, in addition to our physical body, which is already in space, there is a time body, a body of formative forces within us, which permeates our physical body and is in perpetual motion. We see through this body of formative forces in a single tableau. And by so elevating ourselves to get to know the first supersensible aspect of the human being in this body of formative forces, we get to know a thinking that is much more alive than ordinary, abstract thinking, so that we also come to experience all those realities where the thoughts of time overflow into organic growth. One sees into the workings of a spiritual body that has permeated us since our birth. By rising up to it, one comes to look very particularly clearly at that epoch in our human development which otherwise always lies outside our consciousness. In ordinary life we remember our earlier childhood back to a certain point. Before this point, up to birth, there is a time that is about as dark to us as the experiences of the soul in the state of sleep.

A kind of sleep state manifests itself to us, looking backwards from the point from which we remember, to birth, in this period of our life. This epoch of our earthly life begins to shine forth in its essence before imaginative knowledge, before this looking into the spiritual world. I would like to say that, alongside what is experienced as knowledge, a spiritual body, a body of formative forces, rules in us. Alongside this, one gets the great, powerful, moving impression of what has ruled in us since we entered the physical world at birth. At that time, the forces that shape our brain so plastically out of the wisdom of the world, so that it can become a tool of wisdom, were most intensely at work; the brain's formative forces shaped the rest of the organism. By elevating ourselves to an understanding of the body of formative forces, we experience what has ruled and woven in the very earliest years of childhood, and how everything that once works in human life, even if it weakens for other epochs, will appear again later. Thus, what is effective in the first years of childhood is most particularly, most intensely effective in shaping the human being during these years; it is also effective later, but then only quietly, while in the first years of childhood it is powerfully, mightily effective. And we learn to look at the forces that prevail in the first years of childhood, when the human being has just overcome infancy and still particularly needs the care of the outer world; we learn to look at how he, emerging from the first earthly dreaming, forming the physical human organism; we learn to look at something that now makes the impression on us that it is artistically greater, more sublime than anything we can develop in the world in terms of art. And by looking at it, we learn to recognize what the essence of artistic imagination and artistic enjoyment actually consists of. Only now do we begin to understand the real connection between later human life and earlier life, to recognize it in artistic creation and artistic enjoyment.

When we look directly at a work by a creative genius, we see that this genius has absorbed more from this first childhood period into later life than any non-artistic person. Likewise, a person who is particularly good at artistic enjoyment has more of these powers radiating into his life than an abstract person, a dullard. Without wishing to be in any way sophisticated, we learn to apply a biblical saying in the following way: Unless you learn to recognize the importance of the first childlike state, you cannot enter the realm of artistic experience. — It simply pours itself into artistic life with its special organic powers. That is why art is felt to be such an invigorating element in the whole human being, because art brings to life in us what was the strongest life at the starting point of our earthly existence.

So I would like to say: the primal forces of artistic activity in man arise quite naturally when we in anthroposophy — purely cognitively — ascend to the first supersensible, to the formative forces body of the human being, to imaginative knowledge. And if we then want to ascend to the next level of knowledge, we must indeed develop it in the following way. We develop the first, imaginative stage by repeatedly placing certain ideas at the center of our thinking in a meditative state of concentration, thereby awakening our powers of thought. However, we must also develop the opposite activity. We must learn to withdraw from our consciousness those images to which we have first directed all our attention, so that they become fixed in our consciousness to a certain extent, and then to create a completely empty consciousness. This creation of an empty consciousness is the second important step on the way to supersensible knowledge.

When we have developed this empty consciousness to such an extent that we know while awake: we have nothing in our consciousness now, neither of external impressions nor of internal memories, we have made the consciousness completely empty, then a spiritual world, hitherto unknown to us, penetrates into this consciousness; we thus make acquaintance with a spiritual world, as we make acquaintance with the ordinary world through our outer senses and through ordinary consciousness. Inspired knowledge then enters and with it the second result of anthroposophical research. We can now also suppress the whole formative forces body, everything that particularly organizes that from which we can ultimately gain an artistic sense, we can suppress it and create an empty consciousness in relation to the formative forces body. But then we have the essence of our spiritual soul before our soul eye, as it was before we descended from a spiritual-soul world into the earthly world through birth or, let us say, through conception with this spiritual soul from a spiritual-soul world, before we took on flesh and blood through our parents. We are now learning to recognize the eternity of the human soul – on the one hand, on the side of the unborn.

But we also learn, when we turn our feelings and perceptions to what arises for us as an insight into the spiritual and eternal being, to recognize now how this human soul lived in a purely spiritual and divine environment before its earthly existence, how, as it were, divine powers radiated through it in its existence, like natural forces in earthly existence. Just as the substances and forces that we absorb in our earthly existence give rise to those forces that in turn live in our organism, so the divine-spiritual rays of light live in our spiritual-soul existence before we penetrate into earthly life. There we are permeated by divine forces, just as we are permeated by natural forces here in physical earthly life.

We can certainly stop at mere anthroposophical spiritual science; then we come to the body of formative forces. But we can also turn our feelings, our heart life, to what the knowledge of this body of formative forces gives us; then we encounter the liveliness of the full human scope of what permeates us in the first years of our existence like a dream-like, like a sleeping life, but what works in the formation of our physical body. Likewise, we can remain purely cognitively and scientifically in the contemplation of the spiritual soul within us, as it was permeated by divine spiritual forces before our earthly existence. But we can turn to this being itself and turn our feelings to it; then we learn to recognize what this soul experienced inwardly at that time. It experienced the urge to embrace earthly existence with the divine spiritual forces that surrounded it.

The reason why the soul has immersed itself in the earthly body is to connect with the physical through the divine spiritual. This reason is none other than that which lives in the shadowy afterimage of earthly existence in religious feeling and religious piety. If we have religious piety, we may not concern ourselves with what this soul-like nature is before it has descended into earthly life. These are the powers of feeling and perception towards which the soul soul strove to live the soul-life into earthly existence, that is, when it strove for physical embodiment; but when we think of these powers in the lingering image of the earth, they live themselves out in religious life. Just as art is a radiance of the forces of the first child life into later life, so religious life is an echo of what the soul went through before descending into physical life.

And so we find that if we stop at the level of knowledge and rise to the idea there, as long as we dwell in mere earthly life, where we have to use our organism for knowledge, we find only knowledge, alongside which stands art, which can at most be considered aesthetically, and alongside which stands religion, which can be considered theologically. But with physical science we do not arrive at a living transition into artistic feeling or religious experience. When we rise to anthroposophical knowledge, we have thoroughly true scientific knowledge, but this rises to imagination. Imagination can remain thoroughly scientific. By remaining so, it does not become artistic. Therefore, no one needs to fear that by creating art they will fall back into allegory and symbolism if they are imbued with anthroposophy; they would do so if they merely stopped at ideas.

But anthroposophy is not like other sciences in that it stops at mere ideas; it continues to penetrate, feeling its way from the contemplation of the body of formative forces to the experience of the laws of that which first shaped us in our earliest childhood and continues to influence our lives, and through which we feel so stimulated in our imagination. This is not to say anything against the elementary nature of imaginative creation; but imagination can be stimulated by advancing in the manner described to epochs of life that would otherwise elude external observation. And by advancing further to the experience of the soul before its descent into earthly existence, one comes to sense what lives here on earth in the afterimage of religious life and experience, when we live in such a way that our life through what God is in us is at the same time something willed by God, so that the mood of doing what is willed by God is the echo of what was an important deed willed by God when God Himself still worked in the soul as a spiritual deed before the soul descended into earthly life.

If we consider the whole of human life with the eternal nature of the human soul, we find that there is a natural transition from science to art, to religion. For that which appears in knowledge appears in art and in religion if we follow it only to the corresponding human spheres. I would like to say that Anthroposophy cannot help but stimulate the human being artistically when it takes hold of him in his capacity for feeling and emotion. And Anthroposophy cannot help but, when it takes hold of the human being in his or her life of will, allow that person to feel an echo of how, in some way, they have committed themselves to the divine world-shaper in their earthly existence, and to do what is willed by God. Then the will is stimulated to religious experience.

Dear attendees! In the ancient mysteries, what later divided into three for the sake of humanity's enrichment, emanated from a unity. In the ancient mysteries, in the wisdom schools of gray antiquity, which are hardly known to external history but which anthroposophy is getting to know, science was so imbued with spirit that, in relation to the human soul, this spirit-imbued striving was also beauty. What a person recognized, he incorporated into matter; he made his wisdom creative and artistic. And by feeling what he learned in his liveliness as the world-ruling divine-wise, the mystery school student offered his act of worship to the divine, so to speak, having re-created sacred art into a cult. Science, art and religion were one. Man could not remain in this unity. For the sake of human wealth, the threefold division into art, science and religion had to arise: into scientific certainty, artistic taste and religious belief.

Today, however, we have once again reached a point where the inner harmonization of science, art and religion has become a question for the most outstanding minds. We have seen this in Goethe and Schiller. Today we must again strive to bring together that which has come to us in outward differentiation. Anthroposophy does not want to contribute to the chaotic mixing of religion, science and art, after they have historically differentiated – and this has its justification; it would thereby fall prey to the fourth king in Goethe's fairy tale. It seeks to develop wisdom, the gift of the golden king, beauty, the gift of the silver king, virtue and religion, the gift of the brazen king, in an ideal separation; then they can radiate together into the human being. When the human being directs his attention to the whole human being, then what lives in him as the whole of life, and which is particularly expressed in the first years of childhood, becomes the source of nourishment and also of the fertilization of art. But what the soul has experienced before descending to earth becomes the source of fertilization of religious life.

Without any chaotic mixing of these three areas, anthroposophy in particular can lead people in a completely natural way to science, art and religion, to truth, beauty and goodness, by allowing each to exist in its own nature, but still allowing it to have an effect on people in such a way that in human experience, what is found as truth may encounter the beautiful, the artistic – and respond to it as directly related, as another expression of the nature of the world – and in turn encounter the good, the religious, and also respond to it as another expression of the nature of the world. Goethe, although not yet standing on the standpoint of Anthroposophy, felt this very strongly. “He who possesses science and art also has religion; he who possesses neither, let him have religion!” — thus spoke Goethe; and thus, in essence, must Anthroposophical spiritual science speak again today, in the world being, forming three interlocking organized links: religion, art and science. And man finds his true humanity only by allowing the essence of each of these world revelations to permeate his soul, while maintaining his full individuality. But in him they find each other in full inner harmonization when he becomes a whole human being through it. And in this harmonization of science, art and religion, man can find his full humanity, his development worthy of a human being through all levels of existence of his being.

Dear attendees! With its scientific character, anthroposophy is not doing well with our contemporaries. The scientists find that this anthroposophy does not have the character of what they call science; and in turn, the people of faith, those who, from a religious point of view, advocate a way for people to find paths to the spiritual world, criticize precisely this scientific character of anthroposophy. Scientists are accustomed to taking what is accessible to sense observation , what can be investigated by experiment, to take it in, to combine it rationally, and then to ascend to certain laws that underlie the natural phenomena that are perceptible to the senses.

Anyone who has familiarized themselves with the investigations in this field with the kind of scientific conscientiousness and serious inner discipline that underlie our newer science has often absorbed the opinion that exact, real, scientific only possible when it relies on external sense perception and on what the intellect can fathom with the judgments it makes about sense perception and with the conclusions it draws from them. This kind of research has a certain certainty, I would even say a certain ground in that which cannot be denied in its existence, because it proves itself in this existence independently of the human being and announces itself to him out of this existence. One may, as is the case with many physiologically or even psychologically minded personalities of modern times, believe that what the senses directly perceive, what is the content of human perception, is conditioned by the peculiarity of the senses, and thus has a certain subjective character. But they are certain that even if what is perceived directly has a subjective character, for external observation there still underlies something objective for the human being, which presents itself to this observation and provides a firm foundation for research. Therefore, such personalities, who are, as it were, schooled in the exact investigation of external natural phenomena, feel insecure at the moment when this field of external sensory phenomena is left behind and they ascend to other fields. They believe that the inner certainty that is guaranteed by observation and experiment and by the mind that is bound to them, ceases the moment one leaves the soil of this sensory world. This is the source of such judgments as that made by du Bois-Reymond in his classic speech “On the Limits of Knowledge of Nature”, that science ends where the supersensible begins. Anyone approaching anthroposophy with this attitude will naturally have to deny its scientific character, and basically it is only this psychological background that rebels in the widest circles today when the scientific character of anthroposophy is mentioned.

On the other hand, there are people of faith. They often do not dispute that Anthroposophy presents what it has to say about the supersensible worlds in the form of ideas and concepts, and also in the form of connections between ideas and concepts that are thoroughly scientific in character, or at least endeavor to emulate the scientific character. But they dispute Anthroposophy's legitimacy precisely because it strives for this scientific character. For they say: Whatever can reveal itself to man from the supersensible worlds must reveal itself to him in the most intimate experiences of his soul; man must, above all things, tend towards what he feels from the supersensible with feeling and inclination of will, and this supersensible must bear a certain mysterious character. It is precisely when one stands before the mystery with one's soul fervently and religiously attuned, before that which does not yield to the transparent idea, to the clear concept, that one can develop within oneself that elevation, that selfless devotion, which is necessary for the human being in relation to the supersensible world.

And so it is that precisely such personalities are of the opinion that anthroposophy, because it wants to bring the supersensible into the comprehensible element of human consciousness, thereby distorts the religious feeling of the human being, their pious devotion. What relates to the religious must – so it is said – bear an irrational character. One even says that religion must have a kind of paradoxical character, that it must not be confined to what is scientifically called the comprehensible.

Anthroposophy is now confronted with these two views. It is quite understandable that, compared to the usual schools of thought of our time, all of which can be more or less categorized into one of the two categories described, the scientific character of anthroposophy is incomprehensible and difficult to understand. For anthroposophy seeks to arrive at the supersensible in a scientific way, by paths other than those usually recognized in science, and it seeks to follow this path into the supersensible with courage — until the goal is reached where this supersensible subtle world yields to human ideas in exactly the same way as external nature yields to human ideas for natural science, and it becomes difficult for anthroposophy to justify its scientific character in the face of the often rigid tendency of the spiritual currents of our time. Now, in order to characterize this scientific character in today's debate from certain points of view, it will be necessary to address the methodology of anthroposophy from a certain point of view.

This anthroposophy feels most at home at its starting point when it can fully stand where our time of scientific thinking and scientific research has led. Dilettantism and laymanship in relation to natural science may perhaps be touched on enthusiastically by anthroposophy; but they will not be able to find the deepest inner satisfaction in it, because anthroposophy will seem to them to work far too much in the sense of scientific thinking. But it must be said that anthroposophy begins where today's recognized science ends. Today's recognized science starts from the externally given, rises from this given to the ideas called natural laws of this given. If we then live within these ideas, so to speak connecting the ideas we have gained from nature with our soul life, then we have an inner view of nature, and this inner view satisfies us because we can clearly survey the transition from one idea to another, because inwardly, so to speak, in the whole field of our natural ideas, we have clearly before us what presents itself to us externally in the details of sensory observation and experiment. And when this natural science has arrived at this experience of natural ideas, then it feels at its end. Anthroposophy, however, seeks to begin precisely at this point. It takes up what has entered into the soul as natural ideas, and looks at the state of mind of the person who has united such natural ideas with his soul. It looks at the way in which the human being has applied his own activity, has brought his soul and spirit into action while exploring nature, how he has arrived at his ideas of nature; it looks at the activity that the human being has carried out during the research, and it then seeks to develop this activity further. In a sense, it seeks to make the beginning with an inner soul development, using what natural science has arrived at as its end. This now seems to lead entirely into the subjective.

Yes, by further developing the ideas gained, by seeking an inner soul life as a continuation of what has been applied in relation to external nature, one believes that one can get into the purely subjective, into the purely personal, for which only assertions of a subjective character may be made.

Now, dear readers, for the first steps in this direction, this is undoubtedly the case. But anyone who follows the details of these inner soul exercises for the further development of human soul abilities in my writings “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science: An Outline”, and so on, will find that this subjective approach is only a transitional stage and that in the end, beyond the subjective, one arrives at an objective, an objective that is indeed inwardly experienced subjectively – like the ideas of nature – but which, in its certainty, in its validity, is as independent of human subjectivity subjectivity, as are, after all, the mathematico-geometric judgments that are worked out subjectively, albeit only formally. These judgments, however, are independent of human subjectivity in their truth character, despite being worked out subjectively. Only through the path taken by anthroposophical research does one not enter into a merely formal realm, as in mathematics, but into a realm in which human spiritual content is created that relates to realities. When we draw a triangle in mathematics and examine its laws, it is initially only an inward subjective experience, and we must then apply it outwardly to something that can be perceived by the senses so that we can speak of objectivity. The anthroposophical method leads to certain insights, just as in mathematics, but at the same time they lead to insights that have their meaning and validity in the truly spiritually existing world. This becomes clear when one describes – from a certain point of view, I can do this today – the methods that the anthroposophical researcher applies to his or her own inner soul life in order to enter the supersensible world. I say: from a certain point of view, I can undertake this, because this anthroposophical path of research is a very complicated one, it has to involve many details of inner soul practice, and with regard to these details, I must refer you to the books mentioned.

But now, with regard to today's topic, which is supposed to deal with the scientific character of anthroposophy, I would like to start from a kind of historical perspective, because from this the scientific character of what is currently trying to incorporate anthroposophy into human civilization will perhaps be most apparent. When we speak today of the methods by which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible worlds, many of our contemporaries are reminded of methods that are similar to them, or which they perhaps even consider to be the same as anthroposophy.

Just in the last few weeks, I have had to talk about anthroposophical methods in a wide variety of cities, and again and again I heard the judgment: Europe is not suitable for pointing people to the ancient Asian yoga cult, to the ancient yoga system, where one is to prepare the soul through inner soul exercises in order to see something other than what it is able to see without these exercises in ordinary life and in ordinary science. But people who judge in this way do not realize that there is a radical difference between what I describe as the anthroposophical methods and what was present — albeit going back to a distant gray antiquity — in oriental wisdom schools and oriental spiritual currents as soul exercises for arriving at another world in the manner of those spiritual currents, other than the one ordinary life presents. If we point out what these schools of thought wanted to give to man, we immediately notice that the ancient spiritual and soul character of man in the East was quite different from that of present-day Europeans.

If we are unprejudiced, we must take seriously the idea that we are seeking a progression in human development from one metamorphosis of the soul life to another. Anyone who believes that the human soul was essentially the same in all cultural periods, or at most different in certain primitive, wild tribes, is making a huge mistake. Anyone who is able to immerse themselves in the way in which, for example, the ancient Vedas or other ancient documents of earlier times sought to convey wisdom to the world will find that this way of imparting wisdom relied on a very different receptivity in the human being, in a very different state of mind, and perhaps only anthroposophical research is in a position to provide information about how the human being has changed in this respect in the course of his development. If we immerse ourselves in the ideas that have taken on poetic forms in the Vedas, for example, we find that there is an enormous difference between the way in which the Vedas were absorbed into the soul life and the way in which we feel today that they are appropriate to our soul state. We feel the need today to have strictly defined, sharply contoured ideas, ideas that have a recognizably logical character, that are transparent, that appeal not directly to the feelings but only indirectly. These are only isolated character traits that I can give. But anyone who compares the wisdom handed down to mankind in the Vedas, for example, with what we today call our pursuit of science and wisdom, will find a huge difference. What is the reason for this difference?

Now, what is usually called psychology today is not very capable of entering into the inner workings of the human soul, which is so mobile and carries so many individual, characteristic, essential traits. That is why today we find little that actually resembles the wisdom handed down to us in the Vedas. But some clarity can be gained if we do not compare the content of the Vedas with our sharply contoured, intellectualized concepts, but rather if we consider the following fact.

We imagine a human soul that is in the process of transitioning from a state of sleep to a state of wakefulness. We imagine it is imbued with the content of a dream. This dream content can take on wondrous and beautiful forms, can reveal an inner drama, can have a pictorial character that carries a thoroughly poetic mood. Certainly, this dream content cannot be directly compared with the wonderful wisdom of the Vedas. But there is something to it when Plato senses the poetic reliving of the world's secrets by the human soul as something dream-like. If we follow the soul as it emerges from the state of sleep and has these dream images before it during the transition to the waking state, we follow its path further: the dream images gradually paralyze, the person takes possession of his physical nature, especially of his will nature; because only when he has taken possession of his full will nature does everything dream-like disappear. Then he is able to make use of his senses through his corporeality; then he is aware of his connection with the physical world around him, then he is able to grasp the difference between the world of dreams and the world of reality.

What, then, is actually the essential thing in this transition from the state of sleep to the waking state? We can observe how, as it were, the dream fades more and more as the daytime perceptions emerge; the daytime perceptions dispel the dreamlike. But no one can be in any doubt that it is a real experience of the soul to which we surrender in our dreams, and that that part of us which later takes possession of our physical body lives in these dream images. The dream images escape it by submerging into physicality. With a more refined psychology than is available to our contemporaries, one can follow what I am hinting at here in great detail. Then one will find out how the soul actually emerges from a state that we will leave undefined for the time being, through the dream state, how it is in a state in the dream state of not quite having its body. At the same moment that it has its body, it is no longer dreaming. When anthroposophical research is applied to these facts, the following emerges. Anthroposophical research, as it must be understood today and as it takes account of contemporary civilization, initially aims to develop the human thought life so that thoughts become stronger and more intense than they are in ordinary science and ordinary life. This strengthening of thoughts is achieved through meditation and concentration. One devotes oneself to a particular content of thought, applying all the strength of the soul to it. In this way, the soul strengthens itself in the same way that a muscle strengthens itself when it is used in work. The whole mental life changes. One gradually feels that one no longer lives in abstract, pale thoughts, which can only be stimulated by the external world, but that one lives in thoughts themselves, as in an element that is as lively as otherwise only the experience of the external sense world; and by developing the power of thought further and further, one finally becomes free from one's physical organization in one's thinking. One develops an inner soul activity that, to a certain extent, takes place outside the body. Only now do you begin to realize what it means to have an inner soul activity. At first, through these exercises, they take place in mere thinking. But thinking is independent of all corporeality; one can bring it to such thinking independent of all corporeality. But then, when one has brought it to such inner vividness in thinking, one can distinguish between what occurs in waking life and what is present for the person from falling asleep to waking up in the state of sleep. For now we know through direct observation that when a person is awake and thinking, he must make use of the body for the activity of his thinking. For waking, ordinary thinking, the body is the foundation. The thinking that is peculiar to us in ordinary consciousness cannot, so to speak, illuminate itself to such an extent that it becomes truly conscious through its own power; the body must be its helper. Thought must be thought in the body, so that the thinking that we use in science and in our ordinary lives today is simply thinking with the help of the body. In this respect, anthroposophical research in particular makes people more materialistic than they would otherwise be with regard to ordinary thinking.

But you also learn to recognize something else, namely, the inner state of mind in which you are when you devote yourself to body-free thinking, which has arisen through meditation and concentration, when you have a thinking experience in the soul freed from the body, and you can now compare what you experience with what the state of sleep is like. One now learns to recognize that, with regard to one's body, one is just as independent during the strengthened independent life of thought as one is otherwise independent in sleep; only in sleep, in the independent soul that has left the body, the weakest prevails, which can only with the help of the body inwardly enlighten itself in such a way that it comes to consciousness. Therefore, thinking remains unconscious during sleep; we descend into unconsciousness during sleep. We enter into a very similar state of freedom from the body after meditation and concentration. But now the thinking has become so strong that unconsciousness does not occur, but rather a fullness of consciousness, so that one lives in a state that is radically different from the state of sleep, namely in a soul life independent of the body. Now one gets to know the character of human sleep. One now knows that the human soul leaves the body when it falls asleep, but that in the present state of human development it has only those thoughts that can be inwardly illuminated with the help of the body to the point of awareness; and by has consciously risen to such a state of soul, which is free of the body and is filled with content, one now learns to compare this state with that in which the authors of the Vedas were.

These authors of the Vedas could not make use of the kind of thinking that we have in our present-day civilization, and we are led back to a state of mind from older stages of human development, when man simply did not feel it to be his natural state to convey the secrets of the world through the body in sharply contoured thoughts, but where he could, through a certain instinct, externalize his thoughts, even if they could unfold outside the body. We look back to conditions, not as we have them today, but to dreamlike, dull, but still to conditions in which people developed the most important thing they developed in their soul life, namely the view of the world, outside of their body. One gets a picture of how the development of humanity in relation to the state of the soul was from older times to the present day. It can be said that the last remnants of an earlier state were still present until the middle of the Middle Ages, even until the dawn of modern times. It was only in the age of Galileo and Copernicus, which taught people to see the world in sharp, mathematically modeled terms, that this age progressed to an experience of the soul in thinking through the body ; whereas up to this age one still notices how the last remnants of a soul state free of the body are present in a form of knowledge free of the body, and the further back one goes in older times, the more one finds such knowledge free of the body. This could only express itself in soul formations similar to dreams. In a sense, people passed from the body-free state to the state where they use the body and develop what corresponds to their insight into the spiritual world.

We have to look back to such times if we want to understand what is communicated to us in older literature about the wisdom of the world. We must not criticize this wisdom of the world directly with our conceptual worlds; then we destroy it and cannot recognize it in its truth. But if we can transport ourselves back to these older times, and to that through which these older people wanted to go beyond their ordinary perception, then much will become understandable to us. For these people, it was not our science that was everyday, but rather what they saw in their images, in their instinctive imaginations. They did not need to achieve this through special exercises first. For them, the task of further development had to consist of something different than for us. If we now let ourselves in for this realization with what has been handed down to us, and especially look at the yoga exercises of the Orient, we must say: All these yoga exercises aimed at achieving a way of knowing that goes beyond the body in a body-free state, a way of knowing that uses the body as a tool.

This may sound strange, and yet, to an unbiased observer, it is how it presents itself! The goal of the older humanity was precisely to achieve something that is given to us in everyday life. They did not have the sharply contoured thinking that we apply with such triumph in science; they sought to achieve it through their exercises. Yes, even if you engage in the systematically well-performed yoga breathing exercises, where the personalities devoted to them do not perform the breathing process in the usual way, but in an abnormal but still lawful way, we see that they were designed to enable you to grasp the human body with what you were in a body-free state of mind. One might say: What is given to us as a gift is what these people strove for through their yoga exercises; we see everywhere how they endeavor to think in such a way that the body becomes the tool of thought. Thus, for anyone who fully understands the facts, the ancient yoga exercises that have been preserved to this day have the effect of making them see: These people strove for the state of mind that is, so to speak, partly innate and partly acquired through our upbringing since childhood.

Now, of course, the question may arise: But such a student of yoga has, through his yoga exercises, explored the secrets of the world for his own perception, has settled into wonderful worlds; but when one hears what they describe as the revelations they have heard, one soon gets the idea: what they have experienced is indeed very different from what we can strive for today with our abstract, blown-off thoughts. But here is an important psychological fact that must be considered. What can offer man the highest in a certain relationship in his relationship to the world arises precisely from practice, from striving, from inner work, not from the finished state. The yoga students had to conquer themselves with inner soul conquests to see what is given to us as a finished product, and only during this struggle and through this struggle do we become attuned to the deeper secrets of the world. If what is achieved is innate or acquired, it is taken for granted and presented as the self-evident in the environment; one no longer lives into the secrets of the world, one simply sees through the world according to one's organization in the environment. Therefore, for us, who are on the horizon that the yoga students first had to reach, the contemplation of the deeper secrets of the world, which the yoga students contemplated, has ceased. And today we feel the necessity to continue the practice, to continue it at a different level, to take the starting point where the yoga students left off.

The beginning of the yoga training is dreamlike, instinctively pictorial; but it is precisely to what we today feel is the actual spirit of science that the yoga student sought to develop. Today, because the spirit of science is now the natural state of civilization, we have to start from this state in our soul constitution and develop it further. We can therefore say: the yoga student has developed to our way of thinking, we have to develop further from our way of thinking. The yoga student designed all his exercises to incorporate thinking into his soul activity. Today, when I describe exercises to be practiced for the purpose of attaining higher knowledge, I do say that these exercises must be directed towards strengthening the thinking, elevating it – not just to unconscious imagination, which belongs to antiquity, but to conscious freedom from the body. We must become free from physicality again, whereas the yoga student strove to enter into it; so in a sense we are going in the opposite direction.

But then I must describe this path further, how these exercises must strive to develop a liveliness of soul such as we otherwise have in the experience of external sense perceptions. In our sensory perceptions, we are to a certain extent independent of our physicality. The senses are integrated into our physicality. However, we become relatively independent of our sensory perceptions; it is only in our thinking that we fully take in what is revealed to us from the outside world. Only when we develop further from this thinking, which the yoga student first strove for, does it now become important to suppress this thinking itself at a certain stage and to bring about a state that is similar to sensory perception, which does not merge into thought, but which, so to speak, leaves thought behind in the physical body. The essence of our exercises undertaken for the purpose of anthroposophical research is this: to overcome thinking in turn, to rise to a state that gives the person an experience, so to speak, in a second personality, but in such a way that this second personality now has the intense, the strengthened, the pictorialized thinking, and that the ordinary personality with common sense, with healthy thinking bound to the physical body, remains behind, fully aware.

Thus anyone who, in today's world, seeks to gain direct experience of supersensible knowledge must strive to achieve this twofold division of their personality. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with any kind of pathological condition. In hallucinations and visions, the personality is lost in the hallucinations and in the world of visions; in anthroposophical research, the personality remains and the ordinary, body-bound thinking continues to live. Those personalities who enter the higher worlds live in them with their developed, metamorphosed thinking. Thus the anthroposophical researcher is always in a position to follow up with his ordinary personality what he sees in the higher worlds, and to do so in a strictly critical way.

This training is now an absolute prerequisite for the anthroposophical path of research; and what is in the human personality by virtue of this training, the scientific character of the state of mind, is by no means abandoned. This scientific personality stands there, criticizes, controls - and even narrates - from its scientific concepts that which the other aspect of the personality, the one that has entered the supersensible world, beholds. But then we must say: on the one hand there is the outer sense perception; natural science turns to it, it seeks the laws of nature, it seeks to relive inwardly in the natural ideas, which have the laws of nature as their content, that which appears outwardly to the senses. The anthroposophical researcher finds himself in the state of soul that arises from this. By forming the ideas of nature in nature, we are scientifically satisfied by the character that this world of ideas bears. This scientific conviction is an inner experience! It is not the external world, nature, that tells us what is scientific, but our own methodology. When we give these ideas a content from sense perception with our ordinary thinking, we give them a supersensible content with the higher gaze of our strengthened thinking. There is no other content of thought, no other logic, no other scientific method that prevails in ordinary natural science and that prevails in what is seen supersensibly by the anthroposophical researcher and handed over to the scientific soul disposition for description.

That is the inner connection. The Yoga Training has sought the spirit of science as its ultimate goal. We have trained it in the age of Galileo and Copernicus in the outer world of nature, we are leading it further to conscious inner vision, but we do not deny it. We examine what is seen in the higher sense in the supersensible world, exactly in the same way, through the same ideas, as we examine what can be fathomed through the eyes, ears and other senses in outer experiment. In its development, humanity has striven for science. What science has become has become a human state of soul. This state of soul is cultivated by working one's way up into the supersensible world through anthroposophy.

But developing thoughts is only one part of what is striven for in anthroposophical schooling. In the previous lecture on “The Harmonization of Science, Art and Religion”, I already indicated that by strengthening our thoughts through meditation and concentration, we come to an intuitive perception of the soul and spirit of the human being as it was in a spiritual and soul world before birth or conception. One can rise to the eternal part of the human soul in its prenatal existence by developing the thoughts that are present in ordinary science. But if anthroposophical research is to be complete, exercises of the will must be added to this development of thought. Again, I cannot describe in detail what must be undertaken as exercises of the will for the purpose of anthroposophical research; I must refer to the books already mentioned, but I can again say something in principle.

To train the will, it is above all necessary that we raise the will, insofar as it extends into thinking, to a higher level than it is in ordinary life. A good exercise for this is what I call “reverse imagining”, for example when we look back on our daily life in the evening, preferably in images, so that a different force has to be developed than is contained in the thoughts. When we review our daily life backwards in such a way, allowing it to pass before our mind's eye in great detail, for example when we go down a staircase, we would imagine it in such a way that we start from the bottom step and work our way up to the top; not lose one's whole day to it, but it can be done in a short time if it is practiced correctly; if we get used to thinking about the course of ordinary events, then we have to exert the will to imagine events differently than they usually happen. We can also feel a melody backwards in this way or imagine a drama backwards. In doing so, we develop the will to a greater strength than is usual. We can now help ourselves in such exercises by doing other will exercises. In ordinary life, we proceed – if we consider longer periods of time, we can point out – from metamorphosis to metamorphosis; but it is the circumstances to which we surrender and which then make others out of us. But if you take your own development into your own hands, for example, if you try to break bad habits, if you try to unlearn something that may take years, and make this striving a characteristic of your nature by by taking it up into the will, one tries to take his development into his own hands according to a strictly outlined goal. The will is thereby strengthened, and one attains something in relation to supersensible seeing in a different direction than in the direction of thought. I want to express that through a comparison.

Take the human eye. Because it is transparent and does not bring its own materiality into play, we are able to see through the eye. The moment it brings its own materiality into play through a disease of the eyes, we can no longer see. The eye must be selflessly integrated into the human organism if it is to serve the purpose of seeing. Now I do not want to claim that the human organism is diseased in ordinary life; but for supersensible vision it is just as unsuitable as a strong-sighted eye is for ordinary vision. Through the exercises of the will our organism becomes, as it were, spiritually transparent. Normally the body is spiritually opaque; we carry it with us, we live with our will in its materiality. Through the exercises of the will, it becomes transparent in soul and spirit; it becomes, as it were, a sense organ. Through it, we learn to see spiritually and soulfully, as we see physically through the transparent eye. When we look through our body that has become transparent, we stand – as if through our physical, sensory eye in a physical outer world – in a spiritual world. We have progressed from imagination to inspiration and to the actual experience of being in a spiritual and soul world. We learn to be in the spiritual and soul world with our soul in the same way as we are in the physical world with our organization.

It turns out that we now experience something in the image that we would otherwise experience in death: in death, the body is shed, while the soul and spirit live on. That this is a truth is expressed in the image for this body-free will, that is, for the standing within the spiritual world, in the same way that what applies to our sensory environment is expressed only through a thought. We thus arrive at the other side of human immortality; we add to being unborn, being immortal. The anthroposophical researcher thus ascends to a real vision of immortality.

But when one comes to this vision, one also learns to evaluate other soul states of ordinary life in the right way in a more refined psychology. What is present in the waking state as facts of the soul's life can be recognized through strengthened thinking. That is why I gave the example of the soul waking up through the dream world into the waking state and linked it to the strengthening of strengthened thinking. But when we now do exercises of the will, thereby entering into the spiritual world and also being able to gain an image of our soul after death when we have left the body, then we also get to know the moment of falling asleep more precisely for our ordinary life. At first, we experience falling asleep in such a way that the sharply defined ideas that permeate our soul during waking hours gradually become darker and darker. But now we know that when we pass through the gate of sleep, our consciousness is not killed, but only paralyzed; and by experiencing that we now also live in a strengthened will, we can now also consider the states in which the soul is when it enters the spiritual world after falling asleep. There we experience how the soul becomes more and more immersed in an overall feeling for the world, and when falling asleep, what is seized in a very special way is what is opposed to the pictorial character of dreaming. When we wake up, the soul is more inclined to express in dream images what it has experienced during sleep; when we fall asleep, however, we also enter into a kind of dream, which dampens down our daytime perceptions, but we move towards a general experience of the magnitude of the world. When waking up, thoughts are more likely to be grasped in the form of images, whereas when falling asleep, feelings and especially the devotional will are more likely to be grasped. In short, one now learns to recognize, to recognize psychologically, the transition of the soul as it experiences it when falling asleep, from the experience of one's own self to being devoted to the world in feeling and will.

One learns to recognize what paralyzes thoughts, what dampens them, but on the other hand also what allows the other soul powers to merge into the world, which, when experienced in a kind of state of consciousness while awake – and it can be experienced – represents the state in which the pious soul is, that pious soul that does not want to have its inner soul state clothed in thoughts and ideas, that wants precisely the ideas and thoughts to be subdued in order to give feeling and emotion to the totality, to the majesty of the world, to the divine that permeates the world. In short, through anthroposophical research one gets to know both the state where the human being strives towards thoughts and the state where he strives away from thoughts, and one learns to see through both states at a higher level. One learns to recognize that the human being lives in such a way that he first moves out of the universe to use his body, and then moves back towards the universe when he leaves his body again. The states that are then taken over into consciousness are the states of everyday knowledge and everyday piety; but these states are raised to a higher level in supersensible contemplation, which is achieved through anthroposophical schooling.

Thus it can be said that the scientific character of the soul is not taken away by entering the supersensible worlds through anthroposophical schooling, for what one has gained as a scientific conviction, as the state of mind that goes with it, is carried up when one tries to fathom what the said second personality sees in the supersensible world. On the other hand, however, what the soul selflessly wants to submit to, what it wants to immerse itself in, is woven into the ideas. This does not lose its majesty at all, this does not lose the character of its holiness at all, by being brought out of the mystery and brought to intimate inner vision, by which it makes us look up to it with devotion, with reverence. The way in which anthroposophy brings the mystery into the soul, where it can be grasped, does not take away its sacred character. And so anthroposophy seeks to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge, not only in relation to the objects of ordinary experience, but also to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge of the supersensible. Just as nothing is taken from nature when we know it in the right way, through devotion to its beauty and to its majestic peculiarities, so nothing is taken from what is supersensible when it is brought down into direct human experience in its true form, not in an abstract form.

Thus it is that one cannot convince oneself of the scientific character of anthroposophy through a cursory definition or through cursory logical discussions of the criteria of scientificity, but rather by living oneself into into the course of anthroposophical research. The person who reflects on it must convince himself that here there is real scientificity, and one that certainly does not prevent the supersensible from taking on a religious character again. And so one would like to say: Anthroposophy has the courage to proceed with scientific exactness, with a scientific attitude and scientific method where the ground of the outer sensuality no longer exists. Anyone who objects, saying that there is no ground at all there, is like someone who would say the following: Just as a stone is attracted to the earth and falls until it can rest on it when we live on earth, so all things on earth are attracted to it and must ultimately rest on the earth's surface. This is true as long as we move within the orbit of the [earth] planet. But the moment we ascend from the conditions on our earth to those in our planetary system, we are dealing with something different; there the planets support each other, and they do not need any special ground as a base. Anyone who wanted to say that there must be a special world ground so that the planets do not fall into the depths would be saying something foolish. So it is here too. If we apply the same exactitude of the outer science to the anthroposophical field of research, we find that the two mutually support each other. The totality of supersensible science, the totality of anthroposophy, arises from the mutual support of the individual truths.

Thus, Anthroposophy has the courage to further develop science from the sensory to the supersensory, and it ensures that the scientific character is not lost. But it is not so timid that it believes that mystery must necessarily prevail over what the supersensible world is, so that man may retain his piety. No! Anthroposophy has the courage to affirm that the greatness of something does not only have its greatness for man because it is unknown to him, but it proves its greatness even when it is known; and through the familiarity with what religious content is, religion must not be thought of as diminished.

Thus anthroposophy seeks to justify itself in the face of the two accusations I characterized at the beginning of today's reflection. For it seeks to penetrate into the supersensible world with full respect for science, and it also seeks to develop the courage to bring down the supersensible into the human heart. And this supersensible is great enough to fill the human heart in such a way that this heart can still develop in true devotion even when the secret is revealed!

Dear attendees!

When speaking about the relationship between anthroposophy and human life, it must be pointed out again and again how, on the one hand, this school of thought arrives at its results and how, on the other hand, these results can be absorbed by the human being. Anthroposophy only arrives at its results, however, when the anthroposophical researcher has first undergone intimate inner soul exercises, soul exercises that enable him to move with his soul forces independently of the conditions of the physical body, so that he can truly enter into that state which must be described as 'experiencing the soul outside the human body'. But when, after such preparations by the anthroposophical researcher, the content of the higher worlds has been glimpsed to this or that degree and results are available, then every human being, even the simplest human mind, can grasp these results with common sense and also appropriate them. And today I would like to speak about what Anthroposophy can become for the individual through this appropriation of the meaning of life, which the individual can acquire for himself through the appropriation of anthroposophical insights with the help of common sense.

What the anthroposophical researcher himself has, by penetrating into the supersensible worlds, needs no mention from me. For those who have even just begun to tread the path that leads to these worlds need no further convincing of what they gain from beholding them. But we must go somewhat further than this meditation on the path to the supersensible worlds if we are to understand what a person who appropriates the results with common sense actually gains.

There are essentially three stages of inner soul-searching by which the anthroposophical researcher reaches his goals, and today I will only briefly mention what has already been discussed in the previous lectures I have given here in the last few days. The first stage of these soul exercises consists in strengthening the power of thinking through a certain practice, making it more intense than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Through this strengthening of the power of thinking, the human being then arrives at what I call imaginative thinking, imaginative imagining. One goes beyond the pallor, the abstractness of ordinary thoughts; one arrives at thoughts that are transformed into images, but in which one is just as vividly immersed [with the soul] as one is otherwise immersed in the experience of an external sensory perception. Through such exercises one attains a certain inner mobility of thought and through all this one's thinking is liberated from the physical corporeality of the human being, to which otherwise ordinary thinking is thoroughly bound. When the spiritual researcher has completed these exercises to the degree necessary for his particular disposition, he comes to survey his past life since birth as in a comprehensive tableau.

But this overview is an entirely active inner activity; it is not mere remembering either. This overview is a remembering of that which has been working and strengthening in our organism since our birth. The thoughts have become more intense and more pictorial; in this way they have at the same time become something different from the ordinary abstract thoughts that we carry in our soul. We have connected with thoughts that are indeed forces, and the same forces that our brain, when we are still a very young child, shapes and permeates and empowers until we are a fully grown human being. Thus, we first experience the forces of life in this empowered thinking. Through this, we see ourselves in our inner becoming here as an earthly human being since our birth.

Once you have managed to have the inner image of your earthly life before you in this comprehensive imagination, you can move on to the second stage of the exercises for anthroposophical research, which brings you to what I call inspired knowledge. One must absolutely disregard what these expressions traditionally carry with them; one must not think of anything superstitious or the like when doing so, but only of what I myself characterize here.

This second stage of supersensible knowledge is not attained by strengthening the thinking, but by treating the already strengthened thinking in such a way that one removes from consciousness those ideas that are present in consciousness through the strengthened thinking, and thereby acquires what can be called empty consciousness. If you are able to find yourself in this empty consciousness in your state of mind, which now allows nothing to enter from the external sense world or from the memories that are usually in you, then it is precisely by having first strengthened your thinking and then , to the perception of a real spiritual world, both in our present surroundings and, in particular, to the perception of the spiritual world to which the human soul belonged in its eternal essence before it descended from the spiritual world through birth or conception to take on a physical body here. Within the empty consciousness, one arrives at a real vision of that which is not present in the ordinary consciousness and which may therefore be called the object of an inspired realization, because it flows into our soul from initially unknown worlds, which is thus truly inspired by that which is so accessible to us from the supersensible worlds.

Once we have come to know the immortality of the human soul in this way, we can also come to know the other side of this human immortality by continuing the exercises from the thinking exercises to the will exercises. Again, one would say: on the one hand, the eternity of the human soul expresses itself as unbornness, and on the other hand, in the beyond of death, as immortality. But the further continuation to the third stage of supersensible knowledge then arises from exercises of will.

One trains the will in such a way that it strengthens itself. I have already mentioned that this is achieved by detaching the will itself from the thread of external events, for example, by looking back at the end of the day at the course of one's daily life, by feeling a melody backwards, by imagining a drama backwards [going back from the last scene of the last act to the first scene of the first act] and so on, thus in the opposite direction to the external course. If one tries to control and develop the will in this way, as one sets out to do individually in the way I have described in my books “Occult Science: An Outline of Esoteric Science” or “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and if one succeeds in this way in tearing the will away from its usual course and physical conditions, then one, as a spiritual researcher, enters into a real spiritual world. One gets the picture of death, of the soul leaving the physical body when a person passes through the gate of death; one gets the cognitive picture of the eternal part of the human soul after death.

[My dear audience], these are three stages through which man works his way up into the supersensible world. What he has to say about these supersensible worlds after going through these stages of knowledge can be followed with the ordinary human mind, provided one is unbiased enough. However, it is the case that this human mind must now, of course, take a certain different attitude, I would say, in that it must become somewhat flexible if it is to follow what anthroposophy has to say. So, for example, this common sense must behave in different ways depending on whether it is following what the spiritual researcher has to say from imaginative knowledge or what he has to say from inspired knowledge or from the third level of knowledge that I mentioned and that I call intuitive knowledge. It is really the case that someone who follows the results of spiritual science only through their common sense feels compelled to look differently at what is gained through imagination, differently at what is gained through inspiration, differently at what is gained through intuition.

If we get to know the supersensible world of human existence through imagination, we get to know through inspiration what the human being has gone through before birth or conception. By extending inspiration to intuition, we get to know what the human soul goes through after death. But once you have come to know these two worlds, what man comes to know in the physical world as supersensible and what he comes to know as the supersensible world before birth and after death, then you also have an overview of the relationship between these two worlds and you now come to know something even higher. What presents itself to intuitive knowledge is something still higher, in relation to both the sense and supersensible worlds. One comes to the realization of repeated earthly lives, which certainly once had a beginning and will have an end; but for the intermediate situation of the human soul, it is the case that the person once goes through a life between birth and death and then an existence in a supersensible world between death and a new birth, and that this is repeated by the individual human beings at the most diverse levels. By pursuing what is brought out of the supersensible world in this threefold way with the ordinary human mind, that which can be gained from anthroposophy as the purpose of life develops precisely in this pursuit.

Dear attendees, anthroposophy does not give trivial rules for life, it does not give trivial comfort for this or that situation in life or the like, but it points to what the human being accomplishes by struggling to understand it. And in what one goes through in coming to this understanding through one's own inner work lies what one can work out for oneself as the purpose in life that comes from anthroposophy. Anthroposophy does not impose a specific content on the human being, but rather points to an inner work and may promise only this inner work, that it is able to give the human being a purpose in life, an inner support and inner security through this work.

Let us take the first step: a person tries to use their common sense to work their way through everything that the spiritual researcher has to say from imaginative knowledge, for example about the forces that organize the human being as an organism and work within the human being. Anyone who tries to reflect on what the spiritual researcher has discovered will find that in the process of reworking the material, their thinking itself becomes more inwardly powerful and inwardly active than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Ordinary life and ordinary science do not need this inner activity either, and that is precisely what holds back a great many people from anthroposophy, especially in our time. Today, people are accustomed to passively accepting everything that the outside world presents to them; they actually want to receive everything that comes to them, even in the form of knowledge, only passively, to enjoy it, so to speak. But anthroposophy, by its very nature, must make a different demand on the human being. Man cannot just passively surrender himself in thinking and imagining in order to understand; he must, by virtue of his inner nature, make his thoughts more powerful by setting about to gather the thinking power that reigns within him, to set it in motion and, in a moving thought, to follow what the spiritual researcher sees. But as a result, some people feel repelled by anthroposophy in the presence of it. They do not want to develop this inner strength in their soul; they want everything to be given to them, while they can remain passive. But it is precisely by demanding this kind of understanding that anthroposophy develops in the human soul that which leads to a certain independence of personality.

This, [my dear audience], is probably one of the first life experiences that a person has when he wants to get to know the world through anthroposophy. His personality becomes inwardly more independent, it is, as it were, inwardly condensed in such thinking - which he must practice - and thus he is given the opportunity to behave differently in life to many things than is often the case today.

[Dear attendees], one need only look a little impartially at life to see how passively people today are devoted to life, and especially to spiritual life. If you go to a party meeting today, for example, you can experience all kinds of interesting psychological phenomena. You can see how the audience does not counter the speaker with any inner independence of their own, but rather absorbs what is presented to them as if by suggestion. Catchwords would not have such power, phrases would not play such a role, if people could confront what is offered to them in this way with greater inner independence. And here it is precisely what one can get from anthroposophy: that one's own judgment is strengthened, made denser, that one's full personality is confronted with what comes from the outside world. That is an achievement for life in the first instance.

But what we get from this thinking, with which we pursue imaginative knowledge, goes much deeper into the destinies of human life. If we follow with common sense what the spiritual researcher says about the human being's inner organizing power, when he speaks of what a person thinks and what is more than thinking, what is a sum of inner living forces — we must then adapt this thinking to the inner work that the spiritual researcher himself develops. If he wants to bring his own ideas and thoughts, which are his means of expression, to people from the depths of his soul, he must speak in different thoughts from those borrowed from the external world of the senses. This stimulates the human being to unfold his active life forces; [by contemplating the spiritual researcher, the human being] appeals to his life forces, to his vitality. This causes the human being to bring his thinking down into his life, to bring life into it, so that a certain [freshness, an inner] confidence and strength comes into his thinking. The thinking undergoes a complete transformation, it becomes more powerful internally through the study of anthroposophy. If one continues this for a long time, this invigoration of thinking becomes apparent in what one achieves for one's organism.

[Dearly beloved attendees], there is a great difference in the way — this is just one example to characterize what a person gets from such a study of anthroposophy —, such as remedies that are absolutely correct remedies for certain diseases, acting on one or another human individuality. One can find remedies for these or those illnesses from the best medical methods and will still see that this or that organization remains dull in the face of a completely correct remedy. But by appealing to the deeper forces of his organization, by discerningly following what the spiritual researcher has to say, he calls upon healing powers in his organism. For what I recently called the body of formative forces, which we can see in a large tableau at a certain stage of higher knowledge, contains healing powers. It is not necessary that this strengthened thinking should work as a healing force from the outset; it can do so, but it will only really do so in the rarest of cases. However, anyone who has awakened their thinking through the inner freshness of their thinking power enables themselves to be affected by healing remedies in a more favorable way than someone who has not awakened their thinking power in this way. In this way we can bring about the possibility of being receptive to certain healing powers to which we would otherwise be insensitive. Many more examples could be cited of how directly such an understanding of the human being, which has been strengthened and refreshed in the way described, affects the human organism. We must say without reservation: precisely what is attained in relation to imaginative knowledge not only makes the human being stronger in relation to his thinking than he would otherwise be, but at the same time it invigorates him in relation to his physical being.

Anyone who has approached anthroposophy in this way will also soon notice that thinking becomes something that, like a current permeating it, fills their body more and more, so that they feel something going into their limbs; they become more skillful, actually simply in terms of the physical tasks they perform. People will discover how, by actually doing what I have described, they become much more skilled at the ordinary tasks of life, whatever their occupation. Anthroposophical work offers an extraordinary amount for our practical lives; in this respect, it already provides a purpose in life.

[Dear attendees], if we look at the second stage, which is reached in inspired knowledge, thinking feels stimulated again in a different way when we reflect on what the spiritual researcher in inspired knowledge from the supersensible world about the nature of this supersensible world, whether it underlies the nature that surrounds us or whether it is the supersensible world in which we ourselves are before birth or after death. Then thinking feels so stimulated [in a different way] that certain feelings are awakened in the person, feelings that are refreshed and become powerful. These feelings do not become so fresh and so powerful under any other influence than through the thinking pursuit of what has been explored through inspiration. Above all, you will see that [by training your mind in this way] you are able to penetrate nature with a completely different sense than you were able to before. I would like to say: Whereas before, when you looked at a plant, for example, you saw with your eyes its green leaves, its colorful petals and, to a certain extent, what the flower reflects of the sun, afterwards you penetrate, as it were, into the secrets of the plant itself. You feel, as it were, the sunlight absorbed by the plant pulsating within the plant. One gradually identifies with how the plant grows out of the germ, how leaf comes to leaf, how it drives out the flower; one's soul life goes hand in hand with the inner becoming of the plant itself and thus with every single [natural process]. It is something like a submerging into nature, like developing an elementary sense of nature. The peculiarity of the anthroposophical science that is meant here is that it does not produce a world-unrelated mysticism, but brings people closer to reality, gives them a sense of nature through which they can gradually deepen their understanding of the beauty and grandeur of nature, so that they can grow together again with nature and ultimately feel at one with it.

I am not saying, [dear attendees], that all these things cannot also be present to a certain extent through certain original, elementary, human predispositions. But what I am saying is that even for those who, through their innate abilities, have such qualities to a high degree, these can still be increased by pursuing the results of anthroposophical inspiration. Whether one has little or much of a sense of nature, one can still increase what one has in this way.

And another thing also comes about through the intellectual pursuit of inspired knowledge: one learns to empathize with one's fellow human beings in a different way. If, through the mental reliving of the imagination, one comes to possess one's own independent personality, then through the reliving of inspiration one comes into the inner life of nature, but also, to a certain extent, into the inner life of other people – again something that should be particularly considered in the present.

Let us look at how people today often pass each other by without understanding, or let us see how few people there are today who can really listen to others. Being able to listen to others is part of understanding people. How often do we see today that when someone speaks, if the other person has only a louder voice than the other, they interrupt and say what they want to say, what they know, even though social life could be very different if people were to approach each other with understanding. But [my dear audience], the person who follows the inspired insights with their thinking gradually realizes that what they experience with other people is basically something that belongs to the deepest part of their own soul. Here we have already reached a point where anthroposophy must go into its more precise results in order to be able to present certain things that are present in life in their correct relationships.

In our [sensory and] emotional life, we as human beings reveal what we experience in the outside world, which is the result of impressions from the outside world. But not all of these impressions directly form the content of our feelings, of our entire mind during our waking day-to-day life. Those who are able to study the nightly dream life with its inner drama more closely than is usually the case will already get an inkling of what anthroposophy can then raise to complete certainty: namely, that in the depths of our emotional life sits that which is the result of our intimate relationships [with the people] we come together with in life. Just as our dreams reveal in the most diverse ways what we might not even consider during the day, to which we are not attached with intense feeling, as it appears in the image, so the circumstances in which we find ourselves in our social interactions with people penetrate much deeper into our mental life than the things of which we are aware in our daily lives. There are relationships between people that penetrate deeply into the emotional life. We stand between people and talk to each other because we are involved in life, perhaps always only superficially, but there are many things that play between people at a deeper level. (Even for those who are not spiritual researchers, the dream life reveals many things.

Everything we experience [from person to person] forms the basis of our emotional life, our entire system of feelings. And some of the disharmony that arises from the depths of this emotional life, which arises in such a way that we feel permeated by an inner pain, an inner deprivation or disappointment, often stems from the fact that that relationships have been formed between people [that we have not brought to consciousness], which sit deep down in the mind, plague us and are just waiting for us to fully bring them into consciousness in order to place them in the right way in relation to our own soul life. Sometimes the solution to the mystery of our own mental life is that we know how to bring our experiences into consciousness in the right way.

If we now follow the results of inspired knowledge in our thinking, we acquire a sense of how to listen carefully to other people, for example, but in a broader sense, we also acquire an understanding of our fellow human beings, and it is precisely through this that we develop a social sense in the deeper sense. We develop that in us which makes us particularly suited to find our way into the social order of mankind for our own satisfaction and for the benefit of other people, insofar as this benefit can come from us. A person's life becomes most rich when he influences all good and evil in man by having trained his thinking in the comprehension of inspirational truths. World and human knowledge through this sense of nature and understanding of man is acquired by trying to penetrate the results of inspired knowledge. Again, it is the case here that anthroposophy does not make people unworldly, but rather brings them close to life and to people.

We experience many things in our time that are called social demands. But what is social feeling and perception is — [the unbiased can see it] — less developed in our time. But this is something that our time urgently needs to develop, and in this respect anthroposophy can and may fulfill a kind of task for the time by bringing people closer to each other in the way I have indicated. It is fair to say that it is precisely anthroposophy that can serve through understanding what I have described, through understanding the other person, through genuine, powerful love of neighbor. [And how is all this achieved, ladies and gentlemen? It is achieved by man acquiring a very specific internalized sense of truth by pursuing the inspired truths in the manner indicated.]

In our ordinary lives, we have – if I may call it that – a logical sense of truth. Through our conclusions [and judgments], we come to find one thing to be right and another to be wrong; this has a certain logical character. If we then apply this logical character to the inspired truths, our whole understanding of the world becomes internalized. Our sense of truth itself becomes different. We begin to feel that which proves to be right in the context of the world as something healthy. [This is a great achievement, my dear audience, when we no longer perceive a judgment, a conclusion, merely as logically correct, but truly perceive that which is right as something that heals, preserves and strengthens the soul so that we have a sympathy in looking at what is true]; when error presents itself to us in such a way that we perceive it as something that makes the soul sick, weakens it, and inwardly as an antipathy. As a result, something arises in the soul at a higher level that can be called a “psychic-instinctive life”, something that, precisely because it is instinctive, can guide us safely through life.

We know that animals have a certain security through instinct [in relation to physical life]; they avoid what is harmful to them as food and choose what is beneficial to them. Of course, we cannot compare the life of the soul with the life of physical instinct; but when we see something similar occurring in human life at a higher level [because it occurs at a higher level in the soul], we have to speak of a psychic-instinctive. [One comes to live in the world in such a way that one feels instinctively secure about truth and error, like a color, as an animal feels through its instinct about its food and poisons. It is precisely through this that this soul instinct enters our human organism through the contemplation of inspired truths. It is precisely through this that we enrich our purpose in life quite substantially.

Man gains something, [as inner support], such as life security, by being able to acquire this instinctiveness at a higher level. And precisely because we acquire the ability to perceive something as healthy conclusion or to perceive it as something pathological or destructive, precisely because of this, we are able to develop a sense of nature and understanding of people.

If I may mention another [dear audience], we come deeper into the results of anthroposophy. What is needed above all as preparation to receive the revelations of the supersensible worlds with one's developed knowledge is a certain quick apprehension, a certain presence of mind. I have described how to develop this in the writings “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science: An Outline”. Why do you need presence of mind? Well, at the moment when the real spiritual world appears before you, you are no longer dealing with the same conditions of space and time as before; rather, it is necessary to grasp a spiritual reality at the same moment it appears. For if one is not sufficiently quick-witted to grasp it at the very moment it appears, it is already gone; one cannot grasp it at all. It is a basic requirement for the anthroposophical spiritual researcher to acquire a certain presence of mind for his research. What he gains through inspiration and grasps with presence of mind still has something of the way the thing was found clinging to it when he reflects on it. For when a person reflects on it, he stimulates in himself the qualities that led to the discovery of something like this. (It is therefore a training of presence of mind to follow the inspired truths, if they really are such, in thought.) But in doing so, we make ourselves more capable of dealing with life. For how much some people suffer today when they cannot come to a decision about this or that in life that requires them to make a decision! Becoming decisive is what can be gained particularly from thinking about the inspired truths. And this presence of mind is further enhanced when one becomes consciously aware of how one can now grasp in an instant many things that previously required long chains of thought to understand, because one perceives them directly as healthy truth or as a disease-causing, destructive error, as directly as one otherwise has a taste, smell or tactile experience. It is absolutely the case that one develops the same kind of aliveness in relation to truth and error within oneself as one otherwise has in relation to external sensory perception, but that one develops this aliveness as the experience of a higher, supersensible realm.

[Now, dear attendees], the spiritual researcher then goes on to explore what presents itself to him through intuitive knowledge by further developing and strengthening his will so that this will becomes independent of the physical body and the person is able to place himself in the external spiritual world. He is then able to be in the external spiritual world with his soul and spirit just as he is in the physical world with the help of his senses. But this standing within the external spiritual world is basically nothing other than an experience of one of the noblest human impulses on a higher level of life: it is an experience in love. It is also an experience in freedom, for man becomes unfree only by becoming dependent on his physical body, as I explained in detail in the early 1890s in The Philosophy of Freedom.

, as I explained in detail in the early 1890s in The Philosophy of Freedom. The moment a person rises to have impulses that he grasps through moral intuition, he becomes a free personality [in a moral sense]. But he can also become a free personality in relation to his whole position in relation to the environment, namely to the spiritual, supersensible basis of this environment, to the supersensible basis of his own human being, when this supersensible basis presents itself in the experience before birth and after death and also in the experience of repeated earth lives.

What is contained in an external spiritual world, and also in an external spiritual world of facts, is love on a higher level, the love that, even in the sense world, frees man in a certain sense from what would otherwise be imposed on him by his physicality through his urges and instincts. Karl Julius Schröer once gave a beautiful definition of love, which he explained in more detail in his book about Goethe, saying, “Love is the only passion of man that is free of selfishness.” It cannot be said that love is free of selfishness in its lower stages; but it must be said that as love develops to ever higher and higher stages, allowing itself to be more and more imbued with soul and permeated by spirit, it will make the essence of the human being, in which he merges with his own essence into the other being and submerges with his own essence into the other, more and more free of selfishness. And precisely by making this love a real power of knowledge in intuitive insight, it will also awaken love in this sense in man, in accordance with the intuitive truths that are contemplated.

Dear attendees, I know very well how the present shrinks from speaking of love as a power of knowledge; nor is it at all about ordinary love as a power of knowledge. But when love is elevated through such [serious soul-will exercises] into the experience and experience of the spiritual world, then love becomes a power of knowledge; then, precisely through this loving engagement with spiritual beings and spiritual facts, one attains real objectivity, the penetration of the object in its true form into human knowledge and thereby also into the human overall experience. It is precisely in this development of intuitive knowledge and also in the intellectual pursuit of the results of this intuitive knowledge that one notices how man comes to the experience of his self and also what hinders him from experiencing his self.

For, [my dear audience], anyone who looks into his own heart without prejudice will very well realize how little his own self actually stands before his soul. More or less, what we call our self in ordinary life is only a summary of what is reflected from the outside world as if in a single point. But what the real I, the real self is, is not at all vivid to ordinary consciousness; and if we were to live in such a way that our ordinary consciousness were not interrupted again and again by sleep, we would not experience the human I at all for ordinary consciousness. If we were able to go back to an experience of things in an uninterrupted, uninterrupted course of our consciousness since birth, we would still only find a sum of external images of experience in it, but not the human ego. We become aware of the ego precisely because we withdraw again and again from external experience into a state of sleep – even if we do not develop consciousness in the process. [It is exactly the same when we look back and remember our life.] We actually only ever see what we have experienced during the day, and we always have to see it interrupted [by sleep] during the night. What presents itself through this interruption is, in a person's life, a sum of dark spots in the brightly lit space of memory. If it were not for these dark spots, we would have no resistance to the light that arises from them. We would only experience the outside world, not ourselves!

But the one who ascends through intuitive knowledge to the contemplation of repeated earthly lives, only then gets a view of the true self of man, which goes through repeated earthly lives and can only be recognized in this going through repeated earthly lives. Anyone who has gone through this, as the spiritual researcher has to express himself about the nature of his research into repeated lives on earth, gets a vivid idea of the self of the human being. But he also gets a vivid idea of what knowledge in love is: merging with the external object of the spiritual world. And he gets an insight into the fact that we can only really experience our true self when we become selfless. And love in particular, when it is described in its higher stages as the “only passion that is free of selfishness,” it is at the same time that which allows us to experience the power of our own self in our experience of the external world, in our devotion to the external world.

This is a profound mystery of human nature: that one only experiences one's self when one experiences the outside world, embraces the outside world in love and is able to penetrate [into the secrets of the outside world with love] so that one can immerse oneself in it with one's entire being. This underlies many sayings, such as Goethe's: He first acquires his true self who first loses it in order to gain it. Only when we live ourselves into the world do we thereby live ourselves into our true self; whereas our ordinary self is only [thereby ours] in that it is based on physical corporeality and thereby diverts us from our true self. But by training himself in such a way of thinking about the results of intuitive knowledge, the human being comes to not only think, feel or sense his self, but to bring into a certain [context] that which is most important to him for the earth – that is the human will.

How do we actually stand in relation to the will for ordinary consciousness? When we are awake, we are really only fully awake in our mental life; our feelings are in a state towards our ordinary consciousness that is otherwise like dreams, except that they occur in our soul life differently than dreams; but what will is, has sunk so deeply into the subconscious that it is experienced like the states from falling asleep to waking up. Let us just realize what happens when we carry out the simplest volition, for example when we raise our arm and hand. First we have an idea: the intention to raise our hand and so on. Then what is mysteriously hidden in this intention penetrates down into the depths of the organism, and we know just as little about what is going on down there as we do about what is going on with us from falling asleep to waking up – until we then find ourselves waking up. We also find ourselves again when we look at the raised hand or arm from the outside after the executed volition. [Thus we find the volitional content of our thought.]

In a sense, every single act of the will is a falling asleep and a waking up and an intermediate state of being absorbed in sleep. By developing in oneself the strengthening of willpower and the liberation from the physical body, the whole will becomes like a transparent, holistic sensory organ. Just as we have physical organs, for example our eyes, and through them see the physical world, so at a different level the human being sees into the spiritual world through his or her entire spiritual organization, and thereby also into the essence of his or her will. When a spiritual researcher describes the nature of the will or the nature of the human ego, they must clothe this description in such thought forms that anyone who follows these thoughts with a healthy understanding of human nature will receive something of the reflection of how the will must be spoken of in this particular way, how the human ego is connected to the will [this deeper aspect of human nature]. This human ego is basically as deep down in human nature as the will itself; it must be brought up. But a reflection of this bringing up passes over to him who reflects on the intuitive knowledge of the ego. In this way he develops energy of action in himself, in this way he strengthens his will.

While the reflection of imaginative insights elevates the personality and can make it independent, while the reflection of inspired insights ignites the human mind in the most diverse ways, leading to an understanding of nature and of true human understanding and to an experience of the healthy and the sick in truth and error, the reliving of intuitive knowledge educates the human will. Those who educate themselves in this way will soon notice how their will becomes more active and how they truly begin to love what their destiny imposes on them in the outside world. We learn to fit into our destiny, we become strong in relation to our will in an active and passive way towards life; we become strong also in bearing suffering and pain as well as in experiencing joy. We become strong – not by passing by the suffering and pain of life; no, but through what is aroused [in our mind in the healthy and sick soul life], we become more receptive to the joys and pains of life. We do become more sensitive to things and experiences, but by reliving intuitive insights, the will is strengthened so that we can go through life more uprightly and endure our destiny more surely in both suffering and joy.

And by developing the reliving of intuitive knowledge, we feel connected to the world in a way that itself represents a religious sense of the world, which represents what the deepest divine impulses in the world - through immersion in love in this world - are capable of achieving. The religious and artistic sense is kindled by this immersion in love in the world, to whatever extent it may be present. Those who adhere to anthroposophy in this respect will benefit themselves in terms of the further development of their artistic, [religious] and moral being if they adhere to what has just been indicated in anthroposophy.

So, [my dear attendees], anthroposophy, by wanting to speak of what can become the purpose of life through it, does not approach people with some abstract sermons or admonitions, but in such a way that it tells them: When people experience what can be explored in the spiritual worlds through it, he acquires inner strength for his thinking, which he makes alive, and for his feeling, which he makes more inward and more accessible to world phenomena. He also acquires further development for his will, which he makes stronger and at the same time more capable of suffering, but also more suitable for responding to the joys of life in the right way.

This is what anthroposophy has to say about the purpose of life that a person acquires by immersing themselves in anthroposophy and delving into it [a certainty in life that cannot be gained in any other way]. Anthroposophy has nothing ready to give to a person in this regard as their purpose in life, but only what they can work for themselves, but will possess all the more surely for it.

Life is something that philosophers view in a variety of ways: one views it pessimistically, another optimistically, and yet another more neutrally, and so on. But however one may feel about these various nuances, anyone who looks back on what he himself has been through in life will agree with the maxim: “Only those who have to conquer it daily deserve freedom and life!”

In every sense, life wants to be conquered by people every day. And that is good; because those personalities who would only passively grow into life would also have nothing of life for their own being, because what a person really possesses is what he has to conquer in life. If we remember the truth that only those who must conquer it daily deserve freedom and life, then we may add: Anthroposophy, for its part, wants to bring the means to man through which this daily conquest can be carried out by man!

Berlin, March 12, 1922

Dear attendees! It is admitted from many sides that today, when it is said that there is an urge to find something for the heart, soul and spirit of man that could not come from the previous traditions and also from the present science, it is not just the ideal or the longing of a few that is being expressed. It is admitted that a need of the times is being expressed. Anthroposophy wants to serve this need of the times. That it can even come close to doing so, however, is disputed by many. It is admitted that the need for spiritual deepening and for an uplift of the soul is present today in the most eminent sense. But people behave very strangely when they judge the anthroposophical spiritual movement on the basis of ideas that they often believe were really born out of these needs of the time. Among many others, one judgment is typical, which goes something like this (I will not give the name of the person who had this judgment printed; names are not important, as they often only annoy, but this is a judgment that is asserted from many sides): Anthroposophy is the wrong path after a correctly recognized goal that is necessary for the needs of the time. There must be something extraordinarily remarkable at its basis if it could be said that Anthroposophy could indeed recognize with a certain certainty the right and even necessary goal for the needs of the time, but that it was also, in the fullest sense of the word, a mistake to pursue this goal.

Let us now, at the end of this week's course on anthroposophy, try to understand what might actually underlie such a judgment.

Anyone who makes such a judgment realizes that the scientific way of thinking has educated the souls of people in the civilized world for centuries, has given their search a certain character, and has left a certain imprint on what they call knowledge. He also realizes that what has been instilled into humanity in this way must be taken into account. This has found its way into all minds, even the simplest ones; it has also given these simplest minds the critical standard for everything that approaches them as a world view. Furthermore, the critic recognizes that it is the old traditional creeds and world views that profess to have a certain knowledge of the supernatural and the eternal in human nature, but that the way in which they present this knowledge to humanity is precisely what fails to satisfy the needs of today's humanity, which has been shaped in the way described by the development of recent centuries. And so a judging person sees: There is humanity thirsting for satisfaction in its world view; there are others who are, so to speak, natural leaders, who see this humanity before them, but who do not know how to speak to this humanity – neither from the perspective of modern natural science nor from that of the old traditional creeds and not even from what they knew how to make out of the two — to speak to this humanity in such a way that humanity is able to receive what is said as a proclamation of what it demands from its thus developed needs of the time. And then those who judge see that anthroposophy appears. One may think as one will about the details of what emerges from the anthroposophical method of research, but even they will admit that anthroposophy is trying to take account of these contemporary needs that have just been characterized.

And then the judges say: Yes, a certain intellectualism, a certain rationalism, has developed precisely in scientific thinking. But if one develops the human soul only in the sense of this rationalism and this intellectualism, and if one offers the seeking souls only what can be achieved in this way, then this human soul does not feel satisfied. For its yearning, its urge, arises from something other than mere intellect or than that which can be satisfied by mere rationalism. Therefore, those who sense the need of our time but are unable to enter into anthroposophy speak of the fact that we cannot approach our contemporaries with intellectualism or rationalism; that which is offered as a world view not be clothed in the forms of pale, abstract thoughts; it must not be won by a [rational] path; it must be brought forth from the irrational depths of the human heart, perhaps even from the subconscious depths of the soul. And then perhaps someone will also say: What man recognizes has already become an object; but what he is to revere as his eternal in the soul must not be an object of knowledge. One can also hear that what man thus turns to must be an Unconditional, which penetrates into the human soul somehow, not by the clear path of thought, but by an irrational path. And one can hear similar things.

Something actually presents itself in a remarkable way when one considers reviews of anthroposophical will today. People criticize anthroposophy for wanting to overcome mere intellectualism, mere systems of thought, but for being something rational itself, for working with thoughts. People shy away from mental work, and with some justification, and it is said – again with some justification – that anthroposophy does not fully want to get rid of thoughts; that is why people are somewhat wary of it. It is said that the newer world view has been burned by the thought life, despite it being so cold and pale. One would like to take from the unthought, from the seething of the soul faculties, which are not touched by the thought, that which is to become the content of a satisfying world view and world knowledge. It is then quite natural that, if one shuns the thought, one guards against wanting to express such a world view in thoughts. And so, when one wants to express the content of one's soul, one chooses the thinnest of thoughts. One must have thoughts after all, because mere feelings or impulses of the will or something merely irrational cannot be incorporated into a worldview, nor can they be incorporated into a life that is merely conceptual. One cannot even become aware of it. But if you want to bring what you are already striving for into consciousness as the content of your soul, then you make your thoughts as thin as possible. You make a very small, tiny thought: the irrational, the unconditional, and so on. But you have not escaped the thought, you just want to make the thought so small, so tiny, so easily manageable, so infinitely trivial that you do not realize that you have a thought at the end, in which you want to summarize something else. In contrast to this, anthroposophy seeks to recognize to the fullest extent, in the most comprehensive sense, what fate the life of thought has actually undergone within the human soul in recent times. Anthroposophy knows that with modern science, the life of thought has acquired a certain character, one that allows it to penetrate into the outer world, into the world of the senses, but not into that with which the soul can feel connected in its eternal essence. But Anthroposophy, taking into account all the tremendous spiritual values gained through the more recent development of thought, cannot simply exclude thought. Rather, it says to itself: Humanity has developed once up to thought, to the comprehension of thought in its purity, and in coming to this, thought has indeed become something that initially has only a very limited field. But Anthroposophy knows: this thought, as it was gained, must be regarded as something absolutely valuable, it must be the starting point. It does not shy away from accepting that as a gift of human development, which has brought great results in a certain area of humanity, but which, in order to achieve these great results, has made the sacrifice that the human soul must have in its eternal perspective.

Thus, Anthroposophy first turns to the realm of thought, regarding thought as a germ that, while it cannot be taken directly for the immediacy of worldviews in the way that natural science has carried it on the waves of its development, but can be developed, from which something can be extracted that is not yet revealed by itself – just as the fully grown and flowering plant that is about to bear fruit is not yet present in the germ, but is only hinted at for those who can judge the germ. And so anthroposophy seeks to strengthen thought through meditation and concentration, the means of inner soul development.

Then, when we strengthen it through meditation and concentration, it becomes something different in our inner experience. And I was able to show that by strengthening the thought inwardly, we first see the supersensible aspect of what lives here on earth as a human being: we see the physical body; we see the formative forces body, the time body, that which is thoroughly organized between birth and death as something spiritual, which underlying the physical body as the [creative] spiritual force and which is so constituted that, when the thought strengthens itself, it can condense so strongly that it itself is identical with the sum of those forces that are at the same time growth forces, formative forces of the physical organism. These formative forces, by being born with us into the physical world, become rarified in the human organism; they become powers of thought. Thus we take them up into abstract thought. But when we condense these abstract thoughts again through meditation and concentration, they become inwardly full of sap, vigorous in growth, and become real growing formative forces of the human organism. In this way, we move up in full, living knowledge to that which forms, permeates and supports the human organism between birth and death. And when we are then able to move from imaginative knowledge to inspired knowledge, that is, when we can remove from consciousness these thoughts, the formative forces, that we have attained through meditation and concentration, so that we can create empty consciousness, then we move we advance to the perception of the spiritual in the natural environment, advance above all [to the perception] of the spiritual soul in the environment, as we ourselves were before we descended into the physical world and connected with a physical body. The inspired knowledge thus shows us the spiritual soul according to the side of the unborn.

What do we do when we do such exercises and thereby gain certain insights that satisfy our need for knowledge? What are we seeking within the human power of thought by doing such exercises?

If I want to hint at what one is looking for, then I must say the following. The human soul is a unified whole; but it appears in three different external revelations: as a thinking soul, as a feeling soul, and as a willing soul. But in thinking, there is also willing; and in willing, there is also thinking. One would like to say that the life of thought is only the main thing in the life of thought; it has a hidden life of will in it. When we connect and disconnect thoughts, so that we enter more and more into reality through the disconnecting and connecting, the will works in this connecting and disconnecting of thoughts. But one does not see that; one overlooks this will, as it were, one hides this will. But when we meditate and concentrate, we disregard what the ordinary consciousness has as the content of thought; through meditation and concentration, through resting on a particular content of thought, we suppress, as it were, precisely that content. But what we bring up into consciousness is the will, as it is never otherwise taken into account, which lives in thinking itself. And it is this will that one grasps in order to then grasp with it the formative forces of the body and the eternal part of the soul, as it was before birth, as it was in the spiritual-soul world, in order to enter into a physical body. Thus, in the will, one grasps what can be grasped by the human being on the one side of eternity. The other exercises I have described are exercises of will; they lead to the will becoming independent of the physical body. And what is it that we are seeking when we practise this strengthening of the will? Just as we seek the will in the power of thought through meditation and concentration, so we seek the thought in the will through the exercises of the will. When we develop our will in our ordinary lives, we actually notice nothing of the power of thought in this will. We do start from the idea, as I have already explained these days, that when we bring about a simple development of will, for example, when we just raise an arm or a hand. But then the will penetrates down into the depths of our organization, and we see the result again only in the raised hand, in the raised arm. But anyone who does such exercises of will as I have described will find that, wherever he turns his will, it is permeated and glowing with the power of thought, with a power of thought that goes down into our limbs, a thought-power, the content of which we cannot even describe as human thoughts, but whose content we must describe as world-thoughts, because we stand in them through those thoughts that are not in our consciousness, but which are in our whole being and in our whole development of will. These thoughts, which are not in our consciousness, we discover as world-thoughts, as wisdom, but also when we lay down our body and go through the gate of death. Within our stream of will, we discover our eternal selves through thoughts that are otherwise deeply hidden in the human soul. This is how the picture of knowledge of dying emerges; this is how we come to know what we are when we have passed through the gate of death and moved back into the spiritual world.

Thus one sees that anthroposophy seeks the will in the power of thought and the thoughts in the power of the will. And by taking into account, in this way, I would say for itself, what a person otherwise leaves out of account in life, it comes precisely to that which otherwise remains hidden for the person, namely, to that which passes through birth and death as the eternal part of the human soul; and at the same time it comes to that which underlies all external nature as its spiritual-soul element. Anthroposophy values the thought. In thought-exercises it values thought as the germ from which other soul faculties are developed, and these are unfoldments of the will. But anthroposophy also appreciates thought when it lies hidden beforehand, like a flower in the bud. However, because one knows the thought beforehand from the ordinary consciousness, it is coaxed out as something well known when one experiences the will independently of the body.

Thus, anthroposophy is able to respect the thought and to endure it quietly when it is said that it is rationalistic after all. It is not rationalistic, as the people who say this believe, but it is able to make something else out of the thought at the same time, by appreciating the level of the thought.

Anyone who now goes through these exercises, both intellectually and will-wise, will sense something before actually entering the spiritual world that should not be ignored if anthroposophical research is to be appreciated in the right way. A true rationalist who immerses himself in the world of thought, which is rejected by the needs of the time, does not actually realize how thin an element of soul thought is. But he who does become aware of this will speak something like Friedrich Nietzsche spoke — it is recorded in his posthumous writings — about the tragic philosophical age of the Greeks, where he shows how those pre-Socratic Greek philosophers came to the first reflections, which, although not yet as pale as ours, nevertheless already had enough of a pallor of thought in them. Nietzsche found these concepts of Heraclitus, Parmenides and the others chilling; the human soul literally feels permeated by the icy cold in these thoughts. Nietzsche describes this in a poignant way as a philosophical experience of the most intimate kind.

Anthroposophical research must come to this experience and must know with whom what lives in the soul can be compared. If one can approach this thinness, this paleness and abstractness of thought, and really experiences it, then one does not set oneself above it by simply returning to the full succulence of life, but one surrenders to these thoughts. If one wants to enter the spiritual world, then a certain fear comes over one, a fear of nothingness, the fear that always arises before the void. And this fear must be overcome in such a way that the person is well prepared beforehand by such things as I have also described in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and in the second section of my “Secret Science.” The person must be prepared to go through this fear in the right way, so that when he arrives at the experience of the pale thought, he has the certainty: You have to go through this fearfulness, just as you have to go through the state of sleep for the time from falling asleep to waking up. But just as you may believe that you will awaken from sleep every morning, so you may believe that when you go through this fearfulness, a world will greet you that you will only be able to judge then. Before that, you have only earned the confidence that the spirit permeates the world and that you will find it when you leave this state of fear. The one who wants to prepare the soul to see the spiritual world must undergo many trials.

And when, on the other side, the human being is to arrive at the pictorial experience of death, he experiences something else. The spiritual world appears in the form of objective world thoughts from the currents of the will. But after it has emerged in this way, after we begin to imbibe these thoughts, which are greater than our subjective thoughts, in which we feel that the laws of the world, as living beings, draw themselves into our organism, we then become aware that something is also drawing into our will impulses, drawing into them like an alien feeling that takes hold of us as a certain anger at the merely finite. However paradoxical it may sound, one must experience a certain anger, one must expose oneself to it, at the experience of the eternal in the finite. This anger gives one something by which one can visualize the great distance between the infinite and the finite. For what is to be experienced by man must be cognitively experienced by the spiritual world. It must be grasped in clear thought, but if it were only that, it might be merely rationalized. But it penetrates into the human being as reality, entering into a relationship with human feeling and also with human will impulses, so that it is clearly announced that we are dealing with the unity of a reality, not mere thoughts, in the human being.

Dear attendees, what can now be clearly and distinctly present in the developed soul in this way is, however, present in all human souls, even in those belonging to the most naive minds, it is present in the subconscious state. It is present in the subconscious state when, from the newer spiritual development, man approaches the abstract thoughts, as they occur in natural science, for example, when he approaches them with the intention of creating a world view out of them. Then he experiences subconsciously what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher experiences consciously, he experiences this fear described. He does not bring it to consciousness, does not bring it up into his mind, but he devises logical reasons why what anthroposophy now wants, for example, by looking at thoughts, would be impossible. He reinterprets it to himself in order to avoid the necessity of transforming the thought in a living way and penetrating through the fear, as one penetrates through the night with the confidence that one will wake up again in the morning. And on the other side stands the shyness — that anger that overcomes one — to enter into the reality of the human soul as eternal.

In this final lecture, I will give you only a few characteristics of what the living knowledge of anthroposophy can do for the human being who, as I said in the previous lecture, can use his or her common sense to can relive with his healthy human understanding what is lived in this way by those who are really entering the path into the spiritual world to seek that which the deepest need of our time in this world is sighing and pushing for in the human soul. And in the face of this, people spend all kinds of energy, and certainly rationalistic developments, in order to avoid admitting to themselves that they shy away from that fear, from that patience in the face of anger, which I have described.

Then such people come along and say: Yes, it is right, people's need for time must be satisfied. But we don't want to know anything about anthroposophy, because it wants to take refuge in thought again – we have seen how it wants to do so not in a rationalistic form, but in a completely different form – but we want to seek out of the irrational what can satisfy the human soul. We want to try to analyze what can be in every human soul in order to find out how it can be expressed in the simplest non-rational way. Then such people believe – at least that is how they speak – that they can bypass anthroposophy by reinterpreting what they experience in their subconscious!

And then you can experience some very strange things in the opposition to anthroposophy. For example, it is said: This need of the time already exists, but anthroposophy is a wrong path to the correctly recognized and necessary goal; and those who correctly recognize this need of the time but do not want to go the wrong path of anthroposophy — oh, they would know how to wait for what Anthroposophy offers, but how the need of humanity for time could be satisfied from completely different, irrational human soul foundations.

Now it is very strange when you address such objections individually, in concrete terms. Today, I will avoid mentioning names for good reasons; but one can find out, for example, I am telling facts, that it is said: Oh, what does this anthroposophy want? There are other people today who are trying to gain a relationship in a very elementary way, firstly to the other human soul, which is also spiritual, and then to the spiritual soul of the world. When something like this is said, a name of a personality is mentioned who, with her writing, is held up in contrast to anthroposophy. I then found out these days that a name of a personality had been mentioned — I have to tell this so that the misunderstandings about anthroposophy are not repeated over and over again, and I am allowed to tell it because I am talking about a personality whom I hold in very high regard. This person, who is said to offer something for which there is no need to wait for anthroposophy, met with me about eighteen years ago to talk about anthroposophy. However, because she could not get to anthroposophy, but would not have been against it if she could muster the inner strength to approach it, she then tried the external methods, which were just appreciated by the opponents of anthroposophy in the manner just described. Then a few years passed and I met the same person again in a different place; she was trying again to get to anthroposophy, but she couldn't — perhaps also taking into account what is valued more in the outside world today than anthroposophical research. And during my last lecture tour a few weeks ago, this personality had come to me again, clearly expressing: There must be something that goes beyond what I can do myself, what I can give myself in my books. And this personality literally said: “There is something that seeks paths into the spiritual world not only from thought, from the rational, but from the will, from ethics; that is something that interests me, I would like to know more about it.” This is roughly what this personality said to me. A few days ago, I heard that the personality who would like to connect with anthroposophy in this way had achieved something that anthroposophy has no need of!

Dear attendees, behind the scenes of existence, things often look quite different than they are presented by those who often have very different goals — perhaps unconsciously — than those who are in the words. So, with our present life and its temporal demands standing before us, we need not be surprised if the position of those who would actually be called upon to understand anthroposophy in the light of the demands of the time is often still a grotesque one.

Listen to how I describe the methods of knowledge in anthroposophy: they are purely inward methods of knowledge, such methods by which the soul enters into the spiritual world through inward experience; what is experienced there is experienced as inwardly as only mathematical experience is; truth and certainty are experienced inwardly as only mathematical certainty is is experienced inwardly, only that mathematical certainty is formal and does not go to reality, whereas the knowledge gained by the soul through meditation, concentration and exercises of will and so on is quite real, and its standing in relation to this knowledge is then a standing in the real supersensible when it attains to it. And it is precisely in such books as “Occult Science”, “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Riddles of the Soul” and others that it is described how the anthroposophical researcher arrives at these results; it is described in such a way that anyone who wants to apply these methods to their own soul can come to verify these things at any time. It is only a matter of the one who wants to verify having to apply the methods to his soul. Those who merely want to understand anthroposophy and make it fruitful for their lives in this way, as I discussed in the last lecture here, do not need to apply the spiritual-scientific methods to themselves, but can certainly stop at taking them in through common sense and a healthy sense of soul.

But even if you are not a very important philosopher or scientist in the present day, you must still gain an idea from this description of anthroposophical methods and their results that a real examination of what anthroposophy says about its results can only be done by applying the same methods that he uses, by checking how he arrives at his results — in our soul — that is, in the spiritual world itself, by also checking it in our soul in the spiritual world itself. Instead of understanding things this way, people who call themselves scientists today come along and say: Somebody who comes to anthroposophical conclusions should come to some experimental laboratory and try to verify whether he can really come to such conclusions! But the nonsense inherent in such a demand is no less than that which would be spread in the following way. Someone says: I am a mathematician, I have solved these and those mathematical problems; see if they are correct by acquiring the appropriate mathematical skills and checking them out. But then people will reply: We don't like that; why should we first acquire these mathematical skills? Come to the laboratory, where we will examine your skull through experimental psychology and so on and determine whether your mathematical results are correct! Such absurd demands are trumpeted out into the world today and unfortunately find a believing audience.

This is what must be said first about the path of anthroposophy in relation to the needs of the present time. But what the soul penetrates into and from which it announces the results to humanity in such a way that these results can be grasped by the healthy human mind, if it really wants to, what is that actually?

To characterize what can be given to the world through it, or – if I may express myself more modestly – would like to be given to the world, we must recall how earlier times related to the content of spiritual life. Let us look back to earlier times, from which the traditional world-view beliefs have remained with us. There people spoke as if of spiritual beings. They naturally did so in terms of concepts and ideas. But even though the knowledge and perception of spiritual beings was instinctive in ancient times, people still had an inner certainty about this spiritual world, so that they knew: you do not just have concepts and ideas about the spiritual world, you have the spiritual world itself within you; you are not just speaking of gods and angels, these gods and angels – one could also choose other terms – do not just live in your ideas, but they live as living beings in that with which you are connected with your soul, they are spiritual realities.

This is what the more recent period has brought about, that this direct spiritual experience is no longer there. When the more recent period speaks of spirit, it means thoughts. No one in earlier times would have understood what it means when we say today: ideas are realized through history. But everyone would have understood what is meant: spiritual beings realize themselves through history. The ideas are only the means of expression for the spiritual world behind them, and this lives in every single activity that a person performs. Just as a person feels at home in the sensory world, so he also feels at home in a spiritual world. But people who come from this direct experience of the spiritual world used to have, for example, when they were faced with a bush – I am talking radically now, but perhaps this will help to adequately characterize it – an immediate relationship with it, so that the spiritual immediately confronted them and the natural object was also immediately seen through.

Recently, we have seen this coming to humanity: to look at the details of nature in such a way that we no longer experience them in an elementary spiritual and soulful way, but that the abstract thought that expresses the natural event is there first. We stand before the bush; in our thoughts, we first consider what we can experience about the bush. But this separates us from the spiritual, and so nature has been de-animated by us. Because we were able to penetrate nature with abstract thought in the newer epoch of human development, abstract thought separated us from the actual spiritual world. But what human beings did not have when they saw the elementary spiritual in each individual thing was human freedom. It could only develop in the age when man now experiences abstract thoughts in nature instead of direct spiritual images, so that nature is no longer compelling and no longer has a direct effect on human nature.

The fact that we have lost the spiritual reality in nature and only retained the image of spirituality in abstract thoughts has made our freedom possible. This is described in detail in my Philosophy of Freedom. But this has also brought about the necessity that if we want to come to the spiritual again, we cannot stop at the thoughts that we find today in bushes and trees, in stones and sun, rivers and mountains; there live the abstract thoughts that the human race had to experience in order to become free. Today we have to condense thoughts through meditation and concentration. Then we will look at nature again in such a way that the spirit looks back at us from all the beings of nature. And in the same way, we find the spirit in social human life in the way we as human beings face each other, by developing love for our neighbor and expressing this love through deeds.

Thus, anthroposophy relates to the experience of thought in modern times in such a way that it says: Thought has also become the thinnest in external natural phenomena, has become what one might say is a last memory of the spirit; it must be condensed again, must be strengthened, then it will lead us back to the spirit again. Anthroposophy is not rationalism; it does not stop at the pale thought, but struggles through to this thought — really to this inner coldness of thought, which Nietzsche also describes in such a poignant way; but by the soul coming to such thin thoughts, it is, as it were, thereby enabled to have windows everywhere. For anthroposophy, abstract thoughts are like windows; the environment reveals itself everywhere. And then, by condensing the power of thought, the soul penetrates through the windows that have been opened by the abstractness into the spiritual world. In this way we come to experience not only a world of abstract ideas and ideals, but again to that which humanity once experienced as a reality, but of which only the abstract copy remains in the present worldviews and religions, even if today one believes that one is looking into a spiritual world in the irrational. And then we come back to not just wanting to know about the spirit, not just to represent it in our thoughts, but to experience it.

Our living knowledge is only a detour to bring living spirituality into our lives, so that we live again from morning till night in such a way that we know: every one of our deeds, every one of our feelings, every one of our thoughts is such that the spiritual lives in it. That the human being does not become unfree as a result, but precisely free, is what I sought to show in the “Philosophy of Freedom”. I tried to show that if man can grasp thinking in such a way that he can also grasp it, that he can, for example, ascend through the moral intuitions into the spiritual world in the ethical and moral spheres – if he ascends to pure thinking in this way, then he is in a position to grasp world events at the root. But that is the second thing, quite apart from the path: it is a God-filled, a spirit-filled world that is coming into being. Anthroposophy is not meant to provide a mere world view, but should become the cause for man to have a real experience through which the divine-spiritual draws into the newer development of humanity, because man — for the sake of his freedom — can no longer go the old ways to the spirit and would remain spiritless if he did not seek the way from the thought and from the will, as I have characterized it.

Thus, anthroposophy does not merely strive for spiritual experience, but strives to prepare a field, a dwelling for the spirit that will permeate humanity, to offer this spirit a field and a dwelling so that it can be among us, so that we can think, feel and want everything not only out of a temporally ephemeral humanity, but out of an eternal divine spirituality! Anthroposophy does not want to be just a process of knowledge, it wants to be a real process. And in that it, I would say, prepares the Lord's dwelling here on earth, in that it wants to be a knowledge that is at the same time life and at the same time builds the dwelling for the Lord, the Spirit, it has a relationship of its own accord to the third aspect of our great contemporary needs: to the social aspect.

The social question, and that which it summarizes, has a deep impact on the soul and heart of today's man, insofar as this man has soul and heart at all in the true sense of the word. That is, of course, the fundamental question. But can it actually be understood in the way it is often understood today?

Of course, esteemed attendees, every well-intentioned human perception must be thoroughly appreciated and valued for the moment; but something else is still needed for the good of humanity. Today we hear how millions are starving; we ourselves may have the opportunity to experience the misery that has remained from the terrible war catastrophe in the civilized world. We learn how unemployment is spreading everywhere, how it has affected the victors even more than the defeated countries, and especially the neutral countries. We look at this world that has been so severely tested. Certainly, we have no objection to those people who now say, out of a good heart and also out of a certain knowledge of the world: “The next thing to do is to create bread, bread to satisfy hunger!” Yes, that is so; that must also be considered the next step. But we, as humanity, must move forward again in such a way that such times of hunger and need will no longer be possible, as they have become possible today. For what caused them?

Anyone who looks at the world with an open mind will say: Even if there is a natural disaster, if there is any kind of natural disaster or infertility, it must be compensated for in the world economy if it is managed properly. On the whole, nature gives people what they need from it. If entire groups of people do not have what they should have, it is not because nature is withholding it from them, but because people do not understand how to properly process and deliver what nature provides! Nature provides everything that could feed and clothe all people, everything that could provide the barest necessities for all people; it just needs to be worked in such a way that people can give and take it for people in the right way. Need is not caused by nature, at least not in the main, leaving out the details. Need is caused by the way people have treated nature, by the way people have behaved towards each other. Need has come and comes from the kind of spirituality that prevails among people, and only the kind of spirituality can remedy the need in the long term. We must not only find abstract concepts in human interaction, through which people envision themselves, for my sake also a spiritual one, but we must find a living spirituality through which we also approach work, through which we find the means and ways to work out what our fellow human beings can demand of us in terms of the results of our work. We must find that spirituality through which trust can be restored in those people who can lead the work, so that its results can flow into the human social organisms in the right way. And we must find the God who is able to permeate social life in the right way. But we will only find him for social action if we have first found him in living knowledge, if we have first found him in nature and introduced him into human life as a living spirit, as I have described. We first need a path to the spirit; but we need a striving for the spirit that leads not only to a theoretical knowledge, but to an experience of spirituality, which, in relation to social life, leads not to abstract ideas about the social order, but to concrete ideas, so that through the flow of these ideas, the divine-spiritual itself flows into the social order. As much Leninism, as much Trotskyism, that is, as much materialism as there is in the world, there are as many forces of destruction in the world! The only help is to draw a spirituality back into humanity. It is quite true that much can be criticized about the social life of older times, but that belongs in a different chapter from the one we are discussing today. What needs to be discussed today is that our time demands a spirituality that can only come from the highest development of thought, and only through this path.

But anthroposophy wants to go this way. There may well be individual aspects of anthroposophy that are capable of improvement and in need of it. But humanity, having to live out of the needs of the time, will not be able to avoid seeking its leaders where such paths into the spiritual world are taken as anthroposophy would like to take them. For it is important that we not only escape materialism, but that we escape the dead thoughts that are mere representatives of something real, and that we grasp the real in the thoughts themselves. This cannot be in abstract thoughts, but only in the condensed thoughts that have been further developed in the soul; this can only be by experiencing the world thoughts in the developed will. To many people today, who have settled into the old currents of science, this seems paradoxical to such an extent that they want to test the anthroposophist in the laboratory using laboratory methods, just as one would test a mathematician in the laboratory to see whether an integral is correct or not; one does not want to follow what he presents as his mathematics, but rather wants to examine his personal behavior. But it must be realized that the spirit can only be experienced in the spiritual realm, in that realm which, however, has the indicated windows everywhere for the spiritual soul. There the thoughts, the windows through which the spiritual can enter the human soul, are experienced, and in this way the reality of the spiritual world is experienced as something with which people grow together as spiritual and soul beings.

This, esteemed attendees, describes the way in which anthroposophy believes it can serve the needs of the times. I have endeavored to explain today what the real path of anthroposophical research is. For I do believe that once we take a close look at this real path, we will not be able to say that anthroposophy represents a wrong path after a correctly recognized goal that is even necessary for the times. No! If you examine what people who judge it call a mistake, you will ultimately discover again and again: it is not the anthroposophical path, it is the caricature that people themselves make of this anthroposophical path; it is the bugbear that they themselves make and then criticize, so that their words have absolutely no relation to the true anthroposophical path. This is what one experiences day after day: people criticizing their own spectres of anthroposophy because they do not want to get to know the true anthroposophy.

Those who, in the days of this college course, represented the anthroposophical method of research in the most diverse scientific fields, have honestly stood up against what is prevailing and for what is needed in our time. They wanted to show how this method of research can fertilize the most diverse fields of science, life, art, and social order. They wanted to advocate for the true nature of that which every honest critique wants to take up, but which today often only sees as it caricatures, turns into a bogeyman and then criticizes in the way I have indicated. Therefore, I would not want to fail, for my part, since I am connected with all my heart with this anthroposophical current, to thank you all here at the end, all those who in the last few days have entered from what they have gained through their science, through their life experience and so on, for anthroposophical research, for the anthroposophical worldview. It is to them that I would like to express my heartfelt thanks, in the name of anthroposophical thinking and the anthroposophical ethos. For whatever one's opinion of what anthroposophy has already achieved and produced, it is making a truly conscientious effort to adjust its intentions to the needs of the present day — not because it wishes to serve only the temporal, but Anthroposophy does not direct itself at all to these temporal needs. It speaks out of the eternal depths of the human soul, and actually of the eternal, but its striving coincides with the needs of the present time. For long enough, humanity has been concerned only with the transitory; today, in response to the demands of the times, it desires to get to know the eternal again, to reintroduce it into human feeling and human action. Anthroposophy can serve these demands of the time, this striving of the human soul, because its striving coincides with the needs of the time. It strives in such a way that I would now like to summarize in the following words what it has achieved today, but what it wants, which is perhaps still a long way off, and which is intended to express what the attitude and the will of the anthroposophical is.

This will knows full well how dark, how gloomy human paths of life are if they are not illuminated by a certain light; and today's humanity is coming to realize its contemporary needs, as I have characterized them, by being surrounded by much darkness in life and therefore must strive to attain that light that can illuminate the darkness, the darkness of life. How can this light be found? For this light, the human soul alone is the lamp. But this lamp can only be ignited by the spirit. The human soul becomes the shining light of life when the spirit ignites it! But when the human soul is ignited by the spirit as a light of life, then it also becomes the torch that can properly illuminate human life: the fruitful insights, the life-warming feelings, the active volitional impulses that are necessary for the human being.

Welcome, all who are present here! It was the wish of the committees of this High School week that I give an introduction each day regarding the course which will take place in a scientifically orientated process. It will be conducted with the aim of Anthroposophy fructifying the individual branches of science and of life, and with these introductory words I ask you to take up this first lecture.

What has surprised me the most at the reception of the anthroposophical research method is the opposition, particularly from the philosophic-natural scientific side—I'm not only saying the natural scientific side—brought against Anthroposophy, and it stems from a basic belief that Anthroposophy's methods stand in an unauthorised, opposing position to those of natural science which has developed exponentially in the last century, particularly the 19th Century. It seems to me that among all the various things related to Anthroposophy which our contemporaries find the most difficult to understand, is this, that Anthroposophy in relation to natural science doesn't want anything other than that the methods used by natural science which have proved so fruitful, be developed further in a corresponding manner. In any case, with the idea of further development something else needs understanding, if one wants to arrive at an anthroposophic understanding, than that which one usually calls further evolution from a theoretical point of view.

Further development from a theoretical point of view for most people means that the particular way thoughts are linked—particularly if I may express it as the field of thought—remains constant, also when relevant thought systems expand to other areas of the world's phenomena. So for instance when you engage scientifically with lifeless, inorganic nature you necessarily come to linking thoughts, to a certain field of thought, which means the sum of linking thoughts is a foundation, in order to gradually arrive at a theory about lifeless, inorganic nature. This system of thoughts, as it stands, you now want to extend when you enter another sphere of the world, for example the sphere of organic phenomena in nature, in order to understand it. You would want with this causal orientation, which has proved itself so fruitful in the inorganic area, to simply apply it to living beings and in the same terms, drenching and explaining it, thus gradually conceptualising the sphere of the living beings similarly into an effective system derived from inorganic causalities which you would be doing with regard to lifeless, inorganic nature. What you have appropriated as a system of thought derived from lifeless nature, you simply apply to organic nature. This is what is usually understood today, as the ‘expansion’ of thoughts and theories.

This is of course quite the opposite of what Anthroposophy regards under such an idea as the expansion of thinking. A fully rounded concept of an independently developed, self metamorphosed idea need to be contained, so that if you want to go from one sphere of world phenomena into another, that you don't merely apply what you have learnt from lifeless natural phenomena, and—I could call it “logically apply”—it on to life-filled phenomena in nature. By comparison, just as things change in the living world, growing, going through metamorphosis, and how they often become unrecognisable from one form into another, so thoughts should also take on other forms when they enter into other spheres. One thing remains the same in all spheres which is what gives the scientific point of view its monistic and methodical character, it's the manner and way in which you can position yourself internally to what can be called “scientific certainty” which forms the basis of scientific convictions.

Whoever wants to find proof why one can't use concepts gleaned from lifeless nature, concepts which are applied through habits, in which to verify human causalities—if I may use Du Bois-Reymond's expression—whoever gets to know this intimately, can then shift over to quite different concepts, concepts which are metamorphosed from earlier concepts, and sound convincing in the world of the living. The way in which the human being is positioned within the scientific movement is completely monistic right though the entire scientific world view. This is usually misunderstood and results in the anthroposophic-scientific viewpoint not having a monistic but a dualistic character.

The second item which commonly leads to misunderstandings is phenomenology, to which Anthroposophy with regard to natural science must submit. We are experiencing a fruitful time of scientific developments, a time in which the important scientific researcher Virchow gave his lecture regarding the separation of the philosophic world view from that of the natural scientific view, how everything had been conquered which at that time had a certain historic rating of fruitful concepts regarding the inorganic, resulting in a certain rationalism being established in science. This period which worked on the one side earnestly from empiricism against the outer world of facts, this still went over to a far-reaching rationalism when it came down to it to elucidate the empirically explored facts of nature.

By contrast we now have the standpoint of Anthroposophy which comes from—at least for me it comes from this, if I might make a personal remark—from the Goethean conception of nature. Anthroposophy stands on the basis of a phenomenological concept of nature. In a certain way this phenomenology of recent times was established again by Ernst Mach, and as he established it, he again appeared to reveal fertile points of view, if one complies with his boundaries. For

I know very well how in the 19th Century several—one could say nearly all—of the details of Goethe's interpretations regarding natural scientific things have been overhauled. Despite that, I would like to sustain a sentence today which I made in the eighties of the previous (19th) Century in relation to Copernicus and Kepler of organic natural science.’ I want to still support this sentence today because I believe the following is justified by it.

What is it that lets us finally arrive at a true perception of nature on which so much of the 19th Century had been achieved? What I'm referring to can't but be set within the boundary of a historic category. What has been achieved through science during the 19th century nearly always refers back to the application of mathematical methods because even where pure mathematics aren't applied, but thoughts steered according to other principles of causality, where theories are developed, here the mathematical way of thinking forms a basis.

It is significant in what happened: we have seen in the course of the 19th Century how certain parties of science in a certain rationalistic way had to form a foundation by the introduction of mathematics. The Kantian saying claims that there is only as much certainty in a science as there is mathematics contained within it. Now obviously mathematics can be introduced into everything. Claims of causality go further than possible mathematical developments of concepts. However, what has been done in terms of explanations of causality was done extensively according to the pattern of mathematical conceptions. When Ernst Mach became involved, considering it with his more phenomenological viewpoint of these concepts of causality, as it had developed in the course of the 19th Century, he wanted to arrive at a certain causal understanding of the contents. Finally he declared: ‘When I consider a process and its cause, there is actually nothing different between it and a mathematical function. For instance, if I say: X equals Y, while X is the cause under the influence of the working called Y, then I have taken the entire thing back to the concept which I have in mathematics, when I created a concept of function. It can also be seen in the history of science, how the concept of mathematics has been brought into the sphere of science.’

Now Goethe is usually regarded—with a certain right—as a non-mathematician; he even called himself as such. However, if one places Goethe there as a non-mathematician, then misunderstandings arise—somewhat in the sense that Goethe couldn't achieve much with mathematical details, that he was not particularly talented in his time to solve mathematical problems. That may of course be admitted. I also don't believe Goethe in his total being had particular patience to solve detailed mathematical examples, if it was more algebraic. That has to be admitted. However, Goethe had in a certain sense, as paradoxical as it might sound, more of a mathematician's brain than some mathematicians; because he had fine insight into mathematized nature, in the nature of building mathematical concepts, and he prized this way of thinking, which lives within the soul process also with the content of imagination when concepts are created.

The mathematician, when building concepts, scrutinizes everything internally. Take for instance a simple example of Euclidean geometry which proves that the three angles of a triangle amounts to 180 degrees, where, by drawing a line parallel to the base line, through the tip of the triangle, two angles are created, which are equal to the other two angles in the triangle—the angle in the tip remains the same of course—and how one can see that these three corners at the top add to 180 degrees, being the total of all the corners of the triangle. When you consider this, you can see that with a mathematical proof you have simultaneously something which is not dependent on outer perception but it is completely observed as an inner creation. If you then have an outer triangle you will find that the outer facts can be verified with one's previous inner scrutiny. That is so with all mathematics. Everything remains the same, no perception of the senses need to be added to it in order to arrive at what is called a “proof”, that everything which has been discovered internally can be verified, piece-by-piece.

It is this particular kind of mathematics which Goethe regarded as eminently scientific and insofar he actually had a good mathematical brain. This for example also leads to the basis of the famous lectures which Goethe and Schiller, during the time of their blossoming friendship, had led regarding the method of scientific consideration. They had both attended a lecture held by the researcher Batsch in the Jena based Naturforschenden Gesellschaft (Nature's Investigator's Club—Wikepedia: August J G Batsch). As they departed from the lecture, Schiller said to Goethe that the content of what they had heard was a very fragmentary method of observing nature, it didn't bring one to a whole.—One can imagine that Batsch simply took single natural objects and ordered them one below another and refrained, as befitted most researchers at the time, from ordering them somehow which could lead to an overall view of nature. Schiller found this unsatisfactory and told Goethe. Goethe said he understood how a certain unification, a certain wholeness had to be brought into observations of nature. Thus, he began with a few lines—he narrates this himself—to draw the “Urpflanze” (Original Plant), how it can be thought about, looked at inwardly—not like some or other plant encountered in the day, but how it could be regarded inwardly through the root, stem, leaves, flowers and fruit.

In my introduction to Goethe's “Naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften” (Natural Scientific Notes) of the 80's of the previous (19th) century, I tried to copy the image which Goethe presented to Schiller on paper.—Schiller looked at it and said, as was his way of expressing himself: ‘This is no experience, this is an idea.’ Schiller actually meant that if one made a drawing of something like that, it had been spun out of oneself, it is good as an idea and as a thought but in reality, it has no source. Goethe couldn't understand this way of thinking at all, and finally the conversation was concluded by his reply: ‘If that is the case then I can see my ideas with my eyes.’

What did Goethe mean by this? He meant—but hadn't expressed it like this, he meant: ‘When I draw a triangle its corners add up to 180 degrees by themselves; when I have seen as many triangles and constructed them within me, the sum of all triangles fit on to this triangle, I have in this way gained something from within which fits the totality of my experiences.’ In this way Goethe wanted to draw his “Urpflanze” according to the “Ur-triangle” and this Ur-plant would have such characteristics that one could find it in all individual plants. Just as the sum of the triangle's corners, when you draw the Ur-triangle, amounts to 180 degrees, so also this ideal image of the Ur-plant would be rediscovered in each plant if you go through an entire row of plants.

In this manner Goethe wanted all of science to take shape. Essentially he wanted—but he couldn't continue—to let organic science be developed and introduce such methods of thinking as had been proven so fruitful for inorganic science. One can very clearly see, when Goethe writes about Italy, how he developed the idea of the Ur-plant ever further. He more or less said: ‘Here among the plants in South Italy and Sicily in the multiplicity of the plant world the Ur-plant rose up for me specially, and it must surely find an image which all actual plants possibly have within them, an image in which many different sides may appear taking on this or that, adapting elongated or other plant forms, soon forming the flower, soon the fruit and more, and so on—just like a triangle can have sharp or blunt corners.’ Goethe searched for an image according to which all plants could be formed. It is quite incorrect when later, Schieiden [Matthias Jakob Schieiden (1804-1881), botanist, Physician and lawyer.—“The plant and Its Life”, 6th edition of Leipzig 1864, Lecture 4: “The Morphology of Plants”, p. 86: “The idea of such laws for the design of the plant was first developed by Goethe in his idea of ‘Urpflanz’, what he put forth as the primal, or ideal plant. That realization was, as it were, the task of nature, and which she more or less has completely achieved completely.”] indicated that Goethe was looking for an actual plant to fit his Ur-plant. This is not correct—just as when a mathematician, when speaking about a triangle, doesn't have a particular triangle in mind—so Goethe was referring to an image, which, proven inwardly, could actually be verified everywhere in the outer world.

Goethe basically had a mathematical brain, much more mathematical than those who develop Astronomy. That's the essence. This led to Goethe, in his conversation with Schiller, to say: ‘Then I see my ideas with my eyes.’ He saw them with his eyes because he could pursue them everywhere in the phenomena. He didn't go along with anything only being an “idea”, because he found complete resonance in the experience of building an idea; just like a mathematician senses harmony within the experience of creating mathematical ideas. This led Goethe, if I might say so, through an inner consequence to arrive at mere phenomenology, that means not trying to find anything behind appearances as such, above all not to create a rationalistic world of atoms.

Here one enters into the area where many—I can but say it—misunderstandings developed relating to battles against some scientific philosophic points of view. It simply meant that what the outer world offered the senses were seen as phenomena. Goethe and with him the entire scientific phenomenology was narrowed down to not going directly from some sense perceptive phenomenon into the atomic content behind it, but by focussing purely on the perceived phenomenon and the single element of the perceived facts, and then to search not for what lies behind it, but for its correlation to other elements of sense-perceptible appearances relating to it.

It is very easy—I understand totally where misunderstandings come from—to find such phenomenology as hopeless. One can say for instance: When one wants to merely narrow down descriptions of mutual relationships in sensory phenomena and search for those phenomena which are the simplest, which possibly have the most manageable facts—which Goethe calls “Ur-phenomena”—then one doesn't come to an observation about endless fruitful things as modern Chemistry has delivered for example. How—one could ask—can one actually arrive at atomic weight ratios without observing the atomic world? Now, in this case one can counter this with the question: When one really reflects what is present there, does it involve a need to start with the phenomenon? One has no involvement with it. With atomic weight ratios one is involved with phenomena, namely weight ratios. Still, one could ask: To go further, could one express the atomic weight ratios numerically in order to clarify how specific molecular structures are built out of pure thought, rationalistically? One could pose this question as well. Briefly, what is not involved when Goethean observation is used, is this: remaining stuck in the phenomena themselves. I would like to compare it with a trivial comparison.

Let's imagine someone is confronted with a written word. What will he do? If he hasn't learnt to read he would meet it as something inexplicable. If he was literate he would unconsciously join the single forms together and encounter its meaning within his soul. He certainly wouldn't start with each symbol, for instance by taking the W and search for its meaning, by approaching the upward stroke, followed by the descending stroke, in order to discover the foundation of the letters. No, he would read—and not search for the underlying to obtain clarity. In this way phenomenology wants to “read” as well. You may remain within the connections of phenomenology and learn to read them, and not, when I offer a complexity of phenomenon, turn back to atomic structures.

It comes down to entering into the field of phenomena and learning to read within their inner meaning. This would lead to a science which has nothing rationalistically construed within it behind the phenomena, but which, simply through the way the phenomena are regarded, lead to certain legitimate structures. In every case this science would be a member of the totality of the phenomena. One would speak in a specific way about nature. With this approach the laws of nature would be contained, but in every instance the phenomena themselves would be contained in the forms of expression. One would achieve what I would like to call a natural science inherent in the phenomena. Along the lines of such a science was Goethe's striving. The way and manner of his approach had to be changed according to the progress of modern times but it still is possible for the fundamental principles to be maintained. When these fundamental principles are adhered to, nature itself presents something towards human conceptualising, which I would like to characterise in the following way.

It is quite obvious that we as modern humanity have developed our scientific concepts according to inorganic nature. This is the result of inorganic natural phenomena being relatively simple; it was also the result of, or course, when one enters the organic realm, the agents of the lifeless processes still persist. When one moves from the mineral to the plant kingdom then it does not happen that the lifeless activities stops in the plant; they only become absorbed into a higher principle, but it continues in the plant. We do the right thing when we follow the physical and chemical processes further in the plant organism according to the same point of view which we are used to following in inorganic nature. We also need to have the ability to shift our belief system towards change, to metamorphosed concepts. We need to research how the inorganic also applies to the plants and how the same processes which are found in lifeless nature, also penetrate the plants. However, this could result in the temptation to only research what lies in the mineral world within the plant and animal and as a result overlook what appears in higher spheres. Due to special circumstances this temptation increased much more in the course of the 19th Century. This happened in the following way.

When one looks at lifeless nature one feels to some extent satisfied because research of the phenomena can be done with mathematical thinking. It is quite understandable that Du Bois-Reymond in his wordy and brilliant manner gave his lecture “Regarding the boundaries of Nature's understanding” in which he, I could call it, celebrated the Laplace world view and called it the “astronomical conception” of the entire natural world existence. According to this astronomical conception not only were the starry heavens to be regarded this way, through mathematical thinking constructing single phenomena into a whole, as far as possible, but that one should try and penetrate with this into the constitution of matter. One molecule was to construct a small world system where the atoms would move in relation to one another like the stars in the world's structure. Man constructed himself in the smallest of the small world system and was satisfied that he would find the same laws in the small as in the big. So one had in the single atoms and molecules a system of moving bodies like one has outside in the world structure's system of fixed stars and planets. This is characteristic of the direction in which mankind was striving particularly in the 19th Century and how people were satisfied, as Du Bois-Reymond said, as a result of the need for causality. It simply developed out of the urge to apply mathematics fruitfully to all natural phenomena. This resulted in the temptation for these mathematicians to remain stuck in their observation of natural phenomena.

It won't occur to anyone, also not an Anthroposophist, if he doesn't want to express himself inexpertly, to deny that this is justified, for instance when someone remains within the phenomena and concerns himself with details, for example in Astronomy, and conceive it in this way. It won't occur to anyone to start a fight against this. However, in the course of the 19th Century it occurred that everything the world offered was overlooked which had a qualitative aspect and only regarded the qualitative aspect by applying mathematical understanding to it. Here one must differentiate: One can admit that this mechanical explanation of the world is valid, nothing can be brought against it. One needs to differentiate between whether it can be applied justifiably to certain areas only, or whether it should be applied as the one and only possible system of understanding everything in the world.

Here lies the point of difference. The Anthroposophist will not argue in the least against something which is justified. Anthroposophy namely won't oppose the other and it is interesting to follow arguments how Anthroposophy actually admits to all which is within justifiable boundaries. It doesn't occur to the Anthroposophist to argue against what natural science has validated. However, it comes down to whether it is justified to include the entire sphere of phenomena with the mathematical-causal way of thinking, or whether it is justifiable, out of the totality of phenomena, to place those of a purely mathematical-causal abstraction as a “conceived” content, as it had been done in earlier atomic theory.

Today atomic theory has to a certain extent become phenomenological, and to this extent Anthroposophy concurs. However even today it comes down to some spooks of the 19th Century appearing in this un-Goethean atomic theory, which doesn't limit itself to phenomena but constructs a purely conceptual framework behind the phenomena. When one isn't clear about it being a purely conceptual framework, that the world searches behind phenomena, but that the appearance claims this conceptual framework is reality, then one becomes nailed down by it. It is extraordinary how such conceptual frameworks nail people down. Through them they become more dogmatic and say: ‘There are people who want to explain the organic through quite different concepts which they find from quite somewhere else, but this doesn't exist; we have developed such conceptual structures which encompass the world behind the phenomena; this is the only world and this must also be the only workable way with regard the organic sphere.’—In this way the observation of the organic sphere is imported into the phenomena observed in inorganic nature; the organic is seen as having been created in the same way as inorganic nature.

Here clarity needs to be established. Without clarity no real foundation for a discussion can be created. Anthroposophy never intends sinning against legitimate methods in a dilettante manner, it will not sin against justified atomic theory; it wants to keep the route free from the creation of thought structures which had been developed earlier for the inorganic sphere and now needs to be created for other areas of nature. This will happen if one says to oneself: ‘In the phenomena I only want to “read”, that means, what I finally get out of the content of natural laws, dwell within the phenomena themselves—just as by reading a word, the meaning is revealed from within the letters. If I lovingly remain standing within the phenomena and am not intent on applying some hypothetical thought structure to it, then I would remain free in my scientific sense for the further development of the concept.’ This ability to remain free is what we need to develop.

We may not take a system of beliefs which have been fully developed and nailed down for a specific area of nature, and apply it to other areas. If we develop mere phenomenology which can obviously only happen if one takes the observed, or through an experiment of chosen phenomena which have been penetrated with thought and is thus linked to natural laws, one remains stuck within the phenomena, but now one arrives at another kind of relationship to thoughts themselves; one comes to the experience of how phenomena already exist within the laws of nature and how they now appear in our thoughts. If we allow ourselves to enter into these thoughts we no longer have the justification in as far as we are remaining within the phenomena, to speak of subjective thoughts or objective laws of nature. We simply dive into the phenomena and then give thought content to the content of the natural laws, which presents us with the things themselves. This is how Goethe could say naively: ‘Then I see my ideas in Nature’—which were actually laws of nature—‘with my own eyes.’

When you position yourself in this particular way in the phenomena of inorganic nature, then it is possible to go over into the organic, also within scientific terms. When a person sees that his horse is brown or a gray (Schimmel) horse is white, he won't refer back to the inorganic colour but refer to what is living in a soul-spiritual way in the organism itself. People will learn to understand how the empowered inner organisation of the animal or plant produces the colour out of themselves.

In addition, it is obvious that all the minutiae, for example the functioning of metabolism, need to be examined from within. However, then one doesn't apply the organic to what one has found in the inorganic. One doesn't nail oneself firmly on to a specific system of thought, and one doesn't apply the same basic conviction you had in one area on to other areas. One remains more of a “mathematical mind” than those who refuse to allow concepts to metamorphose into the qualitative. Then one is able to reach higher areas of nature's existence through inner examination just as one is able to validate through inner examination, the lifeless mathematical structures. This is what I briefly wanted to sketch for you, and if it is expanded further, will show that the scientific side of Anthroposophy is always able, what Goethe calls being accountable, to all, even the most diligent mathematician. This was Goethe's goal with the development of his idea of the Ur-plant, which he came to, and the idea of the Ur-animal, at which he didn't arrive. Anthroposophy strives to allow the origins of Goethe's world view to emerge with regards to nature's phenomena and from the grasping of the vital element in imagination to let it rise to the form of the plant and to the form of the animal. Already during the eighties (1880's)I indicated that we need to metamorphose concepts taken from inorganic for organic nature. I'll speak more about this during the coming days.

As a result of this one comes to perceive within the organic what the actual principle of the process, the formative principle, is. Now, in conclusion of this reflection I would like to introduce something which will lead to further observations in the coming days; something which will show how this materialistic phase of scientific development is not be undervalued by Anthroposophy.

Anthroposophy must see an important evolutionary principle in this materialistic phase of natural science, an educational method through which one has once learnt to submit oneself to the empiricism of the outer senses. This was extraordinarily educational for the development of mankind, and now when this education has been enjoyed, one can look at certain things with great clarity. Whoever now, equipped with such a scientific sense for observing the outer material world, will make the observation that this material world is ‘mirrored’ in people, if I might use this expression.

The world we experience within is more or less an abstraction of an inner image permeated by experiences and will impulses of the outer material world so that when we move from the material outer world to the soul-spiritual, we come to nothing but imagery. Let's hold on to this firmly: outwardly there's the totality of material phenomena, which we are looking at in a phenomenological sense—and within, the soul-spiritual which has a particular abstract character, a pictorial character. If one approaches the observation with an anthroposophical view that the spiritual lies at the basis of the outer material world, the spirit which works in the movement of the stars, in the creation of minerals, plants and animals, then one enters in the spiritual creation of the outer world; one gets to know this through imagination, inspiration and intuition, then this is also an inner mirror image of the human being. But what is this inner mirror image of the human being? It is our physical organs. They respond to me in what I've learnt to know as the nature of the sun, the nature of the moon, minerals, plants, animals and so on; this is how the inner organs answer me. I only get to know my inner human organism when I get to know the outer things of the world. The material world outside mirrors in my soul-spiritual; the soul spiritual world outside reflects itself in the form of lungs, liver, heart and so on. The inner organs are, when you look at them, in the same relationship with the spiritual outer world as the relationship of our thoughts and experiences are to the material outer world.

This shows us how Anthroposophy consistently does not want to reject materialism in an enthusiastic sense. Look at the entire scope of natural science: thousands will be dissatisfied with results obtained through the usual methods of natural science. Anthroposophy and its methods will gradually gain an opinion regarding the material world which does not result in dissatisfaction. It acknowledges matter in its own organisation and in the phenomenology of the environment but it has to acknowledge at the same time that the inner organisation is the result, the consequences of the cosmic soul-spiritual. Through this it wants to supplement what has only mathematically been accomplished in astronomy, astrophysics, physics or chemistry. This it wants to explore further in an organic cosmology and so on, and as a result bring about an understanding with materialistic people. In this lies the foundation of what Anthroposophy wants to offer to medicine, biology and so on.

So I believe that through these indications which I've only been able to give as a sketch, it will point out how Anthroposophy, when it is correctly understood, can't be seen as wanting to initiate a war against today's science but on the contrary, that the present day representatives of science haven't crossed the bridge to Anthroposophy to see how it also wants to be strictly scientific with regards to natural phenomena.

Welcome, all who are present here! In this second lecture I would like you to consider that I had assumed last night, to hearing Dr Kolisko's lecture today, and not present it myself. Due to this it wasn't possible in this short time to quite sort out what I would say and I can only hope, as a whole, to roughly cover the details which Dr Kolisko wanted to convey to you.

When from the anthroposophical viewpoint the relationship of the animal world to the human world is spoken about, then it must be pointed out in particular how the present anthroposophical ideas relate historically to the Goethean world view—I have mentioned this twice here at least. The theme in question today, specifically the very first of Goethe's accomplishments in the natural scientific area, will come under scrutiny, namely in his treatise entitled: “Human beings, like the animals, are attributed with an intermaxillary jawbone in the upper jaw.” One needs to keep all the relationships in view when considering how Goethe came to this treatise on the basis of some anatomical and physiological studies and on which grounds of his approach to embryological studies he attributed this to.

During the time when Goethe, already as a young student and later as a friend who to a certain extent had made the Jena University Institute dependent on him, lived with these problems to which he was exposed, namely the problem of what the actual difference could be between human beings and animals. He noticed how people all around him were focused on discovering the difference within the form, within the human and animal morphology, of the differentiation between people, who should be, to some degree, the crown of creation, and the animal world. Also regarding the circumstances where the intermaxillary, which is clearly detached in all animals from any other jaw bone but which is not found in the human being as a separated bone, made people believe that this part of the head's development gave the decisive difference between humans and animals. Goethe didn't agree. He was of the opinion that man and animal were created according to their entire organisation in the same way, therefore such a detail could not indicate a differentiation. In addition, the intermaxillary bone in mature people grow together, so Goethe tried to show how this phenomenon relied only on later development because in the embryonic stage, human beings displayed the same relationship in their upper intermaxillary bone as in animals.

You only have to follow the enthusiasm with which Goethe pointed out to how lucky he was, that the human being actually has the intermaxillary jaw bone in common with the animals, and how out of the whole big picture of the morphology, no decisive difference between the human being and the animal could be found in a single detail. From the kind of limitation of man and animal as you find everywhere in the 18th Century, it could not be stated in this way—also for Anthroposophy it could not be stated in this way. What Goethe accepted was this: By the animal organisation developing up into the human organisation, details already in the animal organ formation were transformed and then gradually through its evolution created the possibility to make space for what is within man, and in such a way reveal the transformed animalistic organisation in the totality of man. Goethe thought only about the metamorphosed animal organisation within the human and not of an autonomously separated human morphology.

This, I might add, needs to be established as the foundation in the search for the differentiation, in the anthroposophical sense, between animal and human organisms. If an organisation itself, in its forms, only depends on the animal and the human metamorphosis, then one has to, if you are looking for differentiation, primarily watch the course of life of a person and of an animal, and gradually observe how the human being unfolds out of the functioning of his organs, and how an animal takes on form through his organs. In brief, one needs to search more from biological than from morphological regions.

Now, one can prepare, in a specific way, how to discover the understanding through biological differences, by finding a foundation in which the animal functions originate and which appears in both man and animal, and this relates to the sense organs. The sense organs, or better said, the functions of the sense organs are more or less vital in everything which takes place in the animal and human organisms. We may assume that in the simple nutritional processes in the lower animals, in the purely digestive processes, a function of a primitive sense happens, which, we say, is where taste experiences for instance happen more or less as a purely chemical function of metabolism. These things become increasingly differentiated the further one ascends the animal row, right up to the human being. We won't get anywhere if we go straight to the animal organisation to find something which does not have a sensory life. Certainly one could say: what for instance do the senses have to do with the development of the lymph and blood?

Today already there is talk from the non-anthroposophical scientists about subconscious processes in the human psyche, and as a result we will for the sake of brevity only hint at it, and not let it appear as something completely unauthorised when I say: What takes place in the mouth and palate as a taste experience, what takes place in the process and function with for instance the ptyalin, pepsin and so on, how can it not also take part in the subconscious? Why should—I say this as a kind of postulation—the experience of taste not continue through the entire organism and why should the subconscious experience of taste not happen parallel to the lymph and blood development in all organ processes? Through this we can follow the biological side of the human and animal organisations by looking at their sensory life.

The sense life unfolds—as I have indicated years ago how it is partially a fact of outer science—not only in the usually claimed five senses, but in a clear discernible number of twelve human senses. Now, we are only talking about human beings. For those who want to understand if one could speak about twelve senses in the same way as for five or six—from seeing, hearing smelling, tasting, feeling or touch—for those it is valid that one can speak for instance about the sense of balance, which we recognise inwardly whether we stand on two feet or only one, whether we move our arms in one way or the other, and so on. By our position as humans in the world, we are in equilibrium. This equilibrium we accept, although from a much duller position than that of our perceiving through the senses about what takes place in the process of seeing; so that we may speak about the sense of equilibrium as we speak about a sense of seeing. Let us be clear about this. When we speak about the sense of equilibrium we turn ourselves more towards our own organisation, we perceive inwardly, while with our eyes we look outwardly. However, this experience of equilibrium fosters its basis as a sense perceptible function. In the same way we can expand the number of senses on the other side. When we merely hear something, the function of the human organism is really different to when we, as it were, hear directly through the ear, and then explore what becomes indirectly perceptible to us, through speech. When we follow the words of others with inner understanding it doesn't involve mere judgement, but a process of judgement comes out of a perceptive process, a sense process; so we need to speak about it as having a sense of speech—or a sense of language, a sense of the word—just as we have a sense of hearing. In other words, we must, if we consider the words more anatomically-physiologically, presuppose there is within the human organization a special (sensory) organization which corresponds to the hearing of what had been spoken as well as hearing inarticulate sounds. We must assume a special organisation for the sense of speech, which is quite similar to a sensory organisation, for example the organisation of sight or of hearing.

We may also, when we go to work without prejudice, not say: we get to know that a person is standing in front of us, when we see there is something in the external space shaped like a nose, like two eyes and so on, and through an analogy conclude that a person is stuck in there, because we see that in us there is also a person, revealed outwardly through a nose, eyes and so on. Such an unconscious conclusion in reality doesn't form the basis; it is rather the direct entry into others which corresponds to something special within them which can be compared to a sensory organisation, so that we can speak about a sense of Self (Ichsinn). When we look through the functioning of people in this unprejudiced way, then we need to, with the same authorization with which we spoke about the sense of hearing, of taste and so on, speak about the organisation of perception for words, about an organisation of perception for thoughts, for an organisation of the Self—not for one's own self, because for one own Self it is dependent on something quite different. Further, we must speak about a sense of movement, because it is something quite different, whether we call it movement or rest. Likewise, we must speak about a sense of life—ordinary science already speaks partly about that.

When we determine the number of sense organisations, we arrive at twelve human senses. Of these, several are inner senses, because we involve the inner organism—how we feel and experience the sense or equilibrium, sense of movement and so on—while observing it. However, qualitatively the experience with observation of the inner organization remains the same for the seeing, hearing or taste processes. It is important to see things only in the right context.

If the starting point is from a human angle of a complete physiology of the senses then certain biological phenomena from the human realm, on the one side, and the animal realm on the other, reveal a particular meaning. This meaning can exist even if you admit to everything which has been presented by recent research, even from Haeckel, regarding the morphological and also physiological human organisation in relationship to that of the animal. Here the most impossible misunderstandings come about. It is believed, for instance, that Anthroposophy must oppose Haeckel, simply on the grounds that it rises from mere observation through the senses to the empirical observations of the spiritual; it is believed that Anthroposophy must from this basis change Haeckelism. No!—What needs to be changed in Haeckelism must be changed out of natural scientific methodology, so Anthroposophy doesn't need to argue here because one can have discussions, as scientific researchers, with Haeckel.

What Anthroposophy has to offer refers to quite other areas. It is correct to emphasize that by counting the bones of the higher animals, there's no differentiation to the number in humans. The same goes for the muscles. This gives no differentiation between human and animal organisations. If, however, we proceed biologically, we discover real differentiation. We find that we can attribute a special value to the essential way the human organism is placed differently in the cosmos to the animals. When we observe the higher animals, we have to admit that their essential aspect is that the axis of their backbone is parallel to the earth's surface while by contrast, humans in the course of their life make their horizontal spinal axis vertical, which means an important function in the life of humans are to stand upright.—I know objections can be raised: there are some animals which have more or less of a vertical spinal axis. This is not the salient point as to how it is excluded through outer morphology, but how the entire organisation is adjusted. We will also see how with certain animal, bird types or even mammals, where the spine can be brought into more or less of a vertical position, a kind of degenerative effect appears in their total predisposition, while with people there is already a predisposition for the spine to be vertical.

When I mentioned this some years ago in a lecture in Munich, a man educated in natural science approached me, who I could naturally understand quite well, and said: ‘When we sleep, we do have a horizontal spine.’—This does not matter, I replied, but what matters is in the relationship to the situation, let's say, of the bone in the leg or foot to the rest of the bodily structure and to the whole cosmic relationship of mankind, and how this is processed by the human or by the animal. Indeed, the human's spine is horizontal during sleep, but this position is outward; inwardly the human is so dynamically organized that he can bring himself into a condition of equilibrium where the spine is vertical. When animals come to such a state of equilibrium, they are degenerating in a certain sense, or they tend towards developing some human-like functions and as a result prove, what I want to present now.

We can say that by the human being purely functionally, out of the total dynamic of his being in the course of his first year of life, forming his spinal axis vertically, he has brought himself into another relationship of equilibrium cosmically than the animal. However, every being is created out of the cosmic totality, and one can say, and adapt—I don't want to enter further into this.

When we track the formation of single bones, for example the ribs or head bones further, then we also gain the morphological possibility of how the formation of ribs or head bones in a man or dog adapt to the vertical or horizontal spine. Because the human being finds himself in a vertical position he lives in contrast to the animal, who stands on four legs, in quite a different state of equilibrium, in quite a different cosmic relationship.

Now we must try to clarify the problem from the other side, what actually happens in the sense's processes in a person and what happens to him with reference to the sensory process. Due to our limited time I wish to speak only with indications, but this can also be translated into a completely precise biological-physiological terminology.

Let's take the process of seeing. We could create divisions into what the specific function of the organ of sight is, and into what happens further as a continuation within the physical; one could call it an analogy of the optical nerve of the eye which loses itself in the inner nervous system. Thus, we could differentiate, on the one side, the process of sight itself, and then everything connected to it in the totality of experience. In the direct present process of vision there is also the imminence of the image perceptibility; when we look at something then we don't separate the imagery from the vision. Turning our eyes away from what we looked at, we then retain a kind or imaginative remnant which clearly shows a relationship with the vision's observation. Whoever can really analyse this will see the differences between the imagined remnant obtained through the organ of vision as opposed to what happens with the hearing process. We have within us an experience of the process of sight, one could call it, in a dualistic way. First being more turned to what actually is observed through the senses and then turning again to the remnant within imagination which remains more or less as a manifested memory.

Let's take everything that lives in the inner image perceptibility of human beings, which depends on the five senses. The one which is the most dependable is of course the process of sight. Only a ninth of what is found through vision, is found through the hearing process. When we consider soul life, there is even less found in it than the seeing and hearing processes, and so on. We know, that in addition to the image perceptibility which leads to lasting memory, it also plays a role but in reality, less than with the seeing and hearing processes.

Now we can pose the question: Is there also for the more hidden senses, like the sense of equilibrium or sense of movement, this duality which is found in the observation perceptibility and image perceptibility? With a truly unbiased physiology and psychology the duality is there for instance in the sense of equilibrium, but the connection is seldom noticed. In the lectures I've just given, I spoke about the mathematical geometric relation of finding oneself upright in relationship to space. We construct relationships to space. What is it actually, that we are doing here? It is connected to the entire person just as it is when with the process of sight, the observed element is clearly separated from the image perceptibility, because we keep the imagination inside. We don't observe the colour outwardly but we experience the qualitative aspect of the colour, of colour tones, and what lives as a feeling, a feeling I have towards warm or cold colours strongly within myself.

We can now say the following: ‘I want to instantly see a show of all the soul images which I've acquired through my life, which I can see through my eyes.’ We would then enter into a visual system of the soul. We would, without having outer sight, rise inwardly into a kind of reconstruction of the visual process. If you apply this same kind of consideration to the sense of equilibrium, you obtain everything which you have experienced through the sense of equilibrium in your own organism, rising within, which corresponds to the geometry in outer life.¹ Mathematic and mechanistic laws have not been discovered by outer experience. Mathematic and mechanistic laws have been acquired though inward construction. If you want to recall mechanistic laws you have to access them through the image perceptibility of your sense of equilibrium. The entire human being becomes a sense organ and thus inwardly creates the other pole of what had been observed. For instance, we create mathematics and we believe we have a purely a-priori science. However, mathematics is no pure a-priori science. We don't notice that what we are experiencing as a sense of balance is what we translate into mathematical geometric imagination, like the observation through sight is translated into the imagination of the observed sight. Without noticing the bridge, we have created the sense of balance through maths or through mechanics.

When you think about this, you would understand the innermost relationship of the human organism with its position of equilibrium in the cosmos. Then you could say to yourself: With the animal, which stands on its four legs and which has been given its equilibrium position and sense of equilibrium, the animal must experience equilibrium in quite a different way within itself than a person does mathematically. We find the mathematical simply as a result of us being placed in the cosmos.

We talk about three dimensions because we are positioned in three dimensions in the cosmos. However, the vertical dimension we have only achieved in the course of life. We have placed ourselves into the vertical position. What we have experienced in our earliest childhood reflects later in us as mathematics; it only doesn't develop as quickly as the seeing process. The reflection of the experience of equilibrium goes on in the course of life. In childhood we have a very strong experience of the sense of equilibrium, when we go over from crawling to walking and standing. This reflects in later life and becomes visible as mathematics and mechanics. We often take mathematics as something woven out of ourselves. This is not so. It comes out of the observation of our organism. Why then are there certain thoughts which can be related to the cosmos, which then can create an entire construction in thought, a ‘thought-edifice?’ That is merely a result of human beings standing within the cosmos. When we now compare the position of equilibrium between the animal, in his relation to the cosmos, with that of the human being, then we could say: We have with the animal the bondage with the earth organisation and we have with the human being the uprightness, being ‘lifted-out’ of the earth organisation. What we express as individualized thoughts result from our human organisation having an individual position of equilibrium.

Thus, this actual act of placing oneself in the cosmos is not something which emerges from the organism itself as is found with the animals, but it is something formed within the human organism which is only achieved in the course of the first seven years of life, and goes right into the organs. As a result, we have this polarity between animals and humans that on the one hand humans stand upright and walk vertically. This is quite a cosmic position which lives in the human being, to which everything now has to adapt, and which distinguishes it from the animal. On the other hand, thoughts appear in the soul, thoughts which go beyond the sensual perception, beyond what is sensed with the five senses, extricating themselves from that. Just as the human being frees itself in its cosmic position from the earth, so the human thoughts extricate themselves from the bondage of the sense world, they become free in a certain way.

We must—for anthroposophy it is a definite but here I want to present it more as a hypothesis—we must see in the human being, through his upright spinal axis, a certain position of equilibrium which separates him from animals, and on the other hand we must regard thoughts of a particular imaginative form, as specifically human. Whoever examines such things from an Anthroposophic viewpoint—it could still become more or less relevant—will see how the human being's particular development of his sense of equilibrium and sense of movement achieve more towards a free system of thought than the case is through the eyes and ears, and we also gain insight of the human being requiring an inner organisation for this. The human being simply has an organisation within itself which is not yet found in the animal—this can also be proven materially—which simply supports ideas which are torn free from the earth's bondage to which the animal is bound, but which is limited by the special equilibrium position in humans. Therefore we can say: by the human standing upright, he has created an organ for abstract thinking.

So we have with the upright related organisation of human organs a different situation to those in the animals, which have organs too. Through the upright position the nerves and blood organisation work in a different way under the influence of the equilibrium position so that in the human something appears which can't be brought about in the animal. We discover this relationship really in the physical organization of humans and not as mere dynamism. This is of fundamental importance. Just imagine what happens in the evolution of an organization as a result of a change in their position of equilibrium, how it appears in the animal, how it is in the human being, what changes there for instance with reference to the upper and lower leg, hands and so on. Just imagine what it means that the human being is a two-hander and not a four-footer. The human being is fitted out with the same forms as the animal but they are in different positions and as a result are changed, metamorphosed forms. This can also simply be anatomically demonstrated if the necessary tools and experimental methods qualify. We are looking for such tools and experimental methods in our institute in Stuttgart. In any case before these methods can be empirically found externally, the differences need to be arrived at firstly through imaginative observation. Therefore, Anthroposophy is not useless with reference to research into the finer areas of the human, animal and plant forms, because science can't discover these things through imagination. Once they are discovered they can be verified by science.

When one looks at how another position of equilibrium reorganises the organs, one also finds that certain organs are changed in such a way that they become the human organ of speech and the organism becomes capable of creating speech.

Through this you have gained an insight into the extraordinary organisation of mankind, which has simply come about because of it being an upright being, having repercussions right into matter. Also in relation to the physiological organ of speech it has contributed—where an outer morphological distinction between man and animal can be determined—which after all shows the difference between man and animal biologically.

Here you have a few suggestions which can indicate the way how, in an outer lay method, research may be done which can also be actually researched scientifically. What I wanted to bring I could only briefly sketch here. However, continue to think about these ideas and the results will actually be a way for science to research the differentiations between the animal and human organisations in a biological relationship.

• 1. In the next few sentences some word-gaps followed in the stenographic text. The omissions were filled in with the help of the lectures of Dr Steiner on the 16th March 1921, 29 September, 1 and 3 October 1920 in GA 322

My dear venerated friends! It is always difficult when you have a serious scientific conscience to translate the traditional expression of “Logos” into some or other younger language. We usually employ “Word” to translate “Logos” as is commonly found in the Bible. However, when we have the word “Logic” in a sentence we don't use “Word” but rather think about “Thought,” as it operates in the human individual and its laws. Yet when we speak about “philology” we are aware that we are developing a science which is derived from words. I would like to say: what we have today in the word “Logos” is basically in everything which is philosophic. When we speak about “philosophy”, we can, even though defined as experience in relation to the Logos, sense how a reflection of these undetermined experiences are contained in all that we feel in “philosophy”.

Philosophy implies that the words—which no doubt came into question when philosophy was created, that only words were implied—indicate a certain inner personal experience; the word philosophy points to a connection of the Logos to “Sophia”; one could call it a particular, if not personal, general interest. The word philosophy is less directly referred to as possessing a scientific nature but rather an inner relationship to the wisdom filled scientific content. Because our feeling regarding philosophy is not as sure as in those cases when philosophy, on the one hand was included with, I'd rather not call it science, but scientific aims, and on the other hand with something which points to inner human relationships; so we have today an extraordinarily undefined experience when we speak about philosophy or involve ourselves with philosophy. This vague experience is extremely difficult to lift out of the depth of our consciousness if we try to do it through mere dialectical or external definitions, without trying to enter into the personal experience which ran its course in the consequential development. To such an examination the present will produce something special.

If we look back a few decades at people in central Europe, the involvement they were looking for with philosophy was quite a different experience, in central Europe, as it is today in the second decade of the twentieth century, where we basically have lived through so much, not only externally in the physical but also spiritually—one can quietly declare this—than what had been experienced for centuries. When one looks back over the experiences, of—if I may use a pedantic and philistine expression—the philosophic zealot of the fifties, sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century, perhaps even later, which the central Europeans could have, it is essentially as follows. Looking at the time of German philosophy's blossoming, you look back at the great philosophic era of the Fichtes, Schellings, and Hegels; surrounding you there had been a world of the educated and the scholars, a world which this philosophic era thoroughly dismisses and which in the rising scientific world view sees what should be taking the place of the earlier philosophic observations. One admires the magnitude of the elevation of thoughts found in a Schelling, one admires the energy and force of Fichte's development of thoughts, one can perhaps also develop a feeling for the pure comprehensive, insightful thoughts of Hegel, but one would more or less consider this classical time of German philosophy as something subdued.

Besides this is the endeavour to develop something out of science which should present a general world view, right from the striving of the “power/force and matter/substance people,” to those who carefully strive to find a philosophic world view out of natural scientific concepts, but who lean towards the former idealistic philosophy. There were all kinds of thoughts and research in this area.

A third kind of thinker appeared in this sphere, who couldn't go along with the purely scientifically based world view but could on the other hand also not dive into solid thought of the Hegel type. For them a big question came about: How can a person create something within his thoughts, which originate in himself, and place this in an objective relationship to the outer world?—There were epistemologists of different nuances who agreed with the call “Back to Kant”, but this way to Kant was aimed in the most varied ways; there were sharp-witted thinkers like Liebman, Volkelt and so on, who basically remained within the epistemological and didn't get to the question: How could someone take the content of his thoughts and imaginative nature from within himself and find a bridge to a trans-subjective reality existing outside human reality?

What I'm sketching for you now as a situation in which the philosophic zealots found themselves in the last third of the nineteenth Century, which didn't lead to any kind of solution. This was to a certain extent in the middle of some or other drama during a time-consuming work of art, to which no finality had been found. These efforts more or less petered out into nothing definite. The efforts ran into a large number of questions and overall, basically failed to acquire the courage to develop a striving for solutions regarding these questions.

Today the situation in the entire world of philosophy is such that one can't sketch it in the same way as I've done for the situation in the last third of the nineteenth century, in its effort to determine reality. Today philosophic viewpoints have appeared which, I might say, have risen out of quite different foundations, and which make it possible for us to characterise it in quite a different way. Today, if we wish to characterise the philosophic situation, our glance which we have homed in the second half of the twentieth century comes clearly before our soul eyes, namely such sharply differentiated philosophic viewpoints of the West, of central Europe and Eastern Europe. Today things appear in quite a different way which not long ago flowed through our experience of the philosophical approach to be found in three names: Herbert Spencer—Hegel—Vladimir Soloviev. By placing these three personalities in front of us we have the representatives who can epitomise our philosophic character of today. Inwardly this had to some extent already been the case for some time, but these characteristics of the philosophic situation only appear today before the eyes of our souls.

Let's look at the West: Herbert Spencer. If I want to be thorough I would have to give an outline of the entire course of philosophic development, how it went from Bacon, Locke over Mill to Spencer, but this can't be my task today. In Herbert Spencer we meet a personality who wanted to base his philosophy on a pure system of concepts, as is determined in natural science. We find in Spencer a personality who totally agrees with science and out of this agreement arrives at a conclusion: ‘This is the way in which all philosophic thought in the world must be won by natural science.’ So we see how Spencer searched in science to determine certain steps to understand concepts, like for example how matter is constantly contracting and expanding, differentiating and consolidating. He saw this for instance in plants, how the leaves spread out and how they drew together in the seed, and he tried to translate such concepts into clear scientific forms with which to create his world view. He even tried to think about the human community, the social organism, only in such a way in which his thoughts would be analogous to the natural organism. Here he suddenly became cornered.

The natural human organism is connected to the confluence of everything relating to it from the surrounding world, through observations, through imagination and so on. Every single organism is bound to what it can develop under the influence of the nervous or sensory system (sensorium). In the human community organism Herbert Spencer couldn't find a sensorium, no kind of centralised nervous system. For this reason, he constructed a kind of community organism, totally based on science, as the crown of his philosophic structure.

What lay ahead for the West with this? It meant that scientific thought could reach its fully entitled, one-sided development. What lay ahead was the finest observational results and experimental talents developing out of folk talents. What came out of it was interest created to observe the world in its outer sensory reality into the smallest detail, without becoming impatient and wanting to rise out of it to some encompassing concepts. What came out of it was also a tendency to remain within this outer sense-world of facts. There was what I could call, a kind of fear of rising up to one encompassing amalgamation. Because they could do nothing else but exist in what the sense world presented to them, simply being pushed directly into the senses here in the West, there appeared the belief that the entire spiritual world should be handed over to the singular faiths of individuals, and that these beliefs should develop free from all scientific influences. Religious content was not to be touched by scientific exploration. So we see with Herbert Spencer, who in his way took up the scientific way of thought consequentially right into sociology, earnestly separated, on the one hand, from science, which would proceed scientifically, and on the other hand with a spiritual content for people who wanted nothing to do with science.

Let's go now from Herbert Spencer to what we meet with Hegel. It doesn't matter that Hegel, who belonged to the first third of the 19th Century, was outwitted during the second third for central European philosophy because what was characteristic for Middle Europe was most meaningful in what exactly had appeared in Hegel. Let's look at Hegel. Already in his, I could call it, emotional predisposition, lies a certain antipathy against this universalist natural scientific way with which to shape the world view as Herbert Spencer had done in the West, but of course had been prepared by predecessors, both by scientific researchers and philosophers as well. We see how Hegel could not stand Newton and was unsympathetic to his unique way by thinking of the world-all as totally mechanical, how he rejected Newton not merely in terms of the colour theory but also in his interpretation of the cosmos. Hegel took the trouble to go back to Kepler's planetary movement formulations, he analysed Kepler's formulations about planetary movements and found out for himself, that Newton had actually not added anything new because Kepler's formulation already contained the laws of gravitation. This he applied from the basis of a scientifically formulated thought, while with Kepler it had resulted more out of a spiritual experience, which he saw as encompassing and that one could try to grasp the outer natural scientific through the spirit. Kepler is for Hegel simply the personality who is capable of penetrating thoughts with the spirit and building a bridge between what is acceptable scientifically, and what simply has to be believed according to the West, and which is also capable of lifting science into the area which for the West is limited to belief.

From this basis Hegel, in tune with Goethe, strongly opposed the Newtonian colour theory. We can see how the Hegelian system had a kind of antipathy against what appeared quite natural in the Newtonian system. For this Hegel had a decisive talent—to live completely in a thought itself. For Hegel Goethe's utterance to Schiller was obvious: “I see my ideas with my eyes.” It appears naive, however, such naivety, when considered correctly, comes out of the deepest philosophic wisdom. Hegel would simply not have understood how one could state that the idea of the triangle is not to be grasped, because Hegel's life went completely—if I might use the expression—according to the plan of thinking. For him there was also a higher world of revelations, a world of higher spirituality, which gradually casts its shadow images on a plane which is filled with thoughts. From up above the spiritual worlds throw their shadow images on the plane of the human soul, on which human thought can develop. Through this the idea of higher spirituality came about for Hegel, that on the plane of the soul it is shadowed as thoughts. Hegel was inclined to experience these thoughts as fully spiritual, and he also experienced natural events not in their elementary present time, but he saw them in mental pictures, thrown on to the plane of the soul.

So it is impossible in Hegel's philosophy to separate, in an outer way, wisdom from belief, which was quite natural in the West. For Hegel his life task was the unification of the spiritual world (which the West wanted to simply refer to as part of the large sphere of belief) with the sensory physical world, into such a world about which one can have knowledge. This means there is no longer knowledge on the one hand and belief on the other; here the human soul faces the great, meaningful problem: How does one find during earthly life the bridge between belief and knowledge, between spirit and nature? To a certain extent it was the tragedy of Hegel that the problem he posed in such a grandiose manner, he wanted to understand actually only on the level of thinking, that he wanted to understand the experience of the inner power, the inner liveliness of thinking, but he could not grasp anything living from the content of thought.

Consider Hegel's logic—he wanted to return repeatedly to the concept of the Logos! He felt that when we actually wanted to attain a true understanding of the Logos, then the Logos must be something which is not merely something thought, but a real activity which floods and works through the world. For him the Logos did not only have an abstract, logical content, but for him it became real world content. If we look at one of the three parts of his philosophy, namely his “logic” we only find abstract concepts! So it is terribly moving for someone who enters on the one side into the Hegelian philosophy, with his whole being, and has the fundamental experience: that which can be grasped through the Logos, must be penetrated with the creative principle of the world. The Logos must be “God before the creation of the world”—to use an expression of Hegel.

This is on the one side. Now how did Hegel develop this idea of the Logos on the other side? He starts with “being” and arrives at “nothing”, goes from “becoming” to “existence.” He arrives at the goal through the causality, to the belief that certain phenomena are best explained in terms of purpose rather than cause. One can look at the all the concepts of Hegel's logic and ask oneself: Is that what, “before the beginning of creation as the content of the divine” could have been there? This is abstract logic, the demand of the creative, the logos as postulate, but as a purely human thought postulate! One finds this tragic. This tragedy goes further, for the Hegelian philosophy is deemed as valid. Yet it contains instances where through action new life can germinate. It contains sprouts. Hegel saw his redemption in this: being—nothing—becoming—existence.

When people are presented with Hegel, they say: ‘This is a dark one, we don't need to be lured into it.’ However, when one makes the effort to allow one's inner soul to enter into it, to experience the concept inwardly, as Hegel tried to experience it, then all the ideas of empiricism and rationalism disappears, then thought experiences and the one who is thinking is directly thought of. Whoever goes along with it finds the impetus of loosening the thoughts from the abstraction, and take Hegel's logic as the sprouts which can become something quite different, when they become alive. For me Hegel's logic looks like the seed of a plant in which one can hardly see what it will become and yet still carries the most varied structures possible within it.

For me it appears that when this seed sprouts, when one lovingly cares for it and plants it into the soul's earth through anthroposophical research, then what emerges is that thought can not only be thought but can be experienced as reality. Here we have the central European aspect.

If we now go to the East, we have in Vladimir Soloviev a man who is able like no other philosopher, to become gradually more the content of our own philosophic striving, who must now become so important to us because we allow the particularities of his character to work in on us. We see in Soloviev both the European-eastern way of thinking, which is of course not Oriental-Asiatic. Soloviev absorbed everything which was European, he only developed it in an Eastern fashion. What do we see being developed in terms of human scientific striving? Here we see how actually this method of thinking, found mostly in the West by Herbert Spencer, which Soloviev basically looked down on, is something against which the truth and knowledge he was seeking, could so to speak be illustrated. In comparison, what he actually presents is a full experience of spirituality itself. It appeared in full consciousness to him, it appeared more atavistically, subconsciously, yet it is an experience in spirituality itself. It was more or less a dreamlike attempt to knowingly experience what in the West—here quite consciously—was transposed into the realm of belief. So we find in the East a discussion which can be experienced in an imprecise way, which looks like a one-sided experience which Hegel wanted to use to cross the bridge out of the natural existence to the spiritual world.

If a person delves into the spiritual development of someone from central Europe, like Soloviev, then he will primarily have an extraordinary uncomfortable feeling. He is reminded of an experience of something misty, mystical; an overheated element in the soul life which doesn't arrive at concepts, which can externally leave him empty completely, but which can only be experienced inwardly. He senses the entirely vague mystical experience, but he also finds that Soloviev makes use of conceptual forms and means of expression which we know, from Hegel, Humes, Mills, even those of Spencer, but only as illustrations. Throughout one can say he doesn't remain stuck in the mist but through the way with which he treats religious aspects as scientific, how he searches for it everywhere and unfolds it as philosophy, he can evermore be measured and criticised according to the philosophic conceptual development of the West.

So we find ourselves today in the following situation. In the West comes the striving to formulate a world view scientifically; science is on the one side and the spiritual on the other side and wrestle in the centre with the problem of how to create a bridge to include both, to express it imprecisely, as Hegel said: “Nature is Spirit in its dissimilarity,” “Spirit is the concept of when it has returned again to itself.” In all these stuttering expressions lie the tragedy that Hegel could only care for abstract ideas, which he strived for. Then in the East, with Soloviev we see how it was somewhat still maintained, how well the church fathers wanted to save it in terms of philosophy, before the Council of Nicaea. It places us completely back in the first three post Christian Centuries of the West.

So we have in the East an experience of the spiritual world, which is not able to soar up into self-owned terminological formulations, formulations and concepts used by the West in which they express themselves, and as a result remain in vague, somewhat extraneous, foreign expressions.

So we see how the threefold nature of the philosophic world view unfolded. By our tracing how the threefold philosophic world view was formed through the characteristics and abilities of humanity in the West, the centre and the East, we can see that we are obliged today—because science as something embracing must spread over all of mankind—to find something which can lift it above these various philosophic aspects which basically still provide elements where philosophy is still a human-personal matter. We see today in different ways in the West, central Europe and the East, how they love wisdom. We understand that in ancient times, philosophy could still be an inner condition of the soul. Now however, in recent times, where people are strongly differentiated, this way of loving wisdom expresses itself in a magnitude of ways. Perhaps we could realise due to this, what we have to do ourselves, particularly what we have to do in Central Europe, where the most tragic and intensified problem is raised even if it is not regarded in the same way by all philosophic minds.

If I want to summarise all of what I have brought into a picture, I would like to express it as follows. Regarded philosophically Soloviev speaks like the old priest who lived in higher worlds and who had developed a kind of inner ability to live in these higher worlds: priestly speech translated philosophically is what one encounters all the time with Soloviev. In the West, with Herbert Spencer, speaks the man of the world who wants to enter practical life—as it has come out of Darwinian theory—to expand science in such a way that it becomes the practical basis of life. In the Middle we have neither the man of the world not the priest: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel have no priestly ways like a Soloviev. In the Middle we have the teacher, the educators of the people and it is also here where the German philosophy emerged, for example, from religious deepening; because the priest became the teacher once again. The educated also adheres to the Hegelian philosophy.

We see recently—as with Oswald Külpe—how it has happened that philosophy, when it was already lost, is no more than a summary of the individual sciences. From inorganic science you can ask—what are the concepts? From organic science you can ask—what are the concepts? Likewise with history, with the science of religion, and so on. One collects these concepts and forms a separate abstract unit. I would like to say that the subject of the teaching in the separate sciences should create the totality of teaching. This is what the science in the Middle must basically come to after the entire assessment.

If we look back at what has happened, we see with Herbert Spencer the unconditional belief in science, the belief for the necessity to cling to observation, experiment and a thinking mind, which can be experienced through the observation and experiment; and one is mistaken about the contradiction which appears here, when the acquired concepts can be applied to the social organism and—although these do not have the most important characteristics of a natural organism, the sensorium—they are nevertheless grasped with the same concepts which arise in natural existence. We see the inclination to the natural sciences so strong that some characters—like Newton—became one-sidedly stuck to the mechanistic and even satisfied their soul-striving with it. It is generally known that Newton had tried in a one-sided mystical way to clarify the Apocalypse; besides his scientific world view he had his own mystical needs.

Let's look, for example, at everything which has arisen from natural science and what it gradually in the course of the 19th Century has subconsciously taken over in Central Europe; because in Central Europe science has simply followed the pattern of the Western scientific way of thinking. There is a tendency not to take notice of it, but still all points of view are modelled on the Western pattern. How wild the people become when someone tries to apply Goethe's way of thinking in physics in contrast to them taking shelter under Newton!

How does the development happen in biology? Goethe created an organism for which the integration into its concepts depended on an understanding of a mathematical nature. Time was short to obtain a biology more appropriate to modern thinking than to that of olden times. The progress in the 19th Century in central Europe however brought about not the Goethean biology but Darwinism, which was interspersed with concepts contrary to those of Goethe, like the concepts of the 16th Century opposed to those of the 18th Century. Only in Central Europe did these concepts develop; in the West people remained with those concepts that sufficed for the understanding of nature. So it happened that certain concepts in the West simply were not available and simply got lost because people in Central Europe had adopted western thinking. For example, that a thought, a lively thought, can form a concept of grasping a reality, quite apart from empiricism, as it had happened with Hegel—this is not present in Central Europe; it got lost because the central European thinking was flooded by western thinking.

So we have the task in Central Europe to look at what scientific thinking can be. Anthroposophists resent it when this scientific way of thinking is cared for with as much love as for the researcher himself. Nothing, absolutely nothing will be said by me in opposition to scientific thinking; if someone believes this then it is a misunderstanding. However, I must understand the scientific way of thinking in its purity and then also try to characterise it in its purity. Now these things are presented to those who confront scientific thinking with impartiality—somewhat like a western researcher will present them, like Haeckel in his genial way did it—these results are presented in a western way of research, when they are thus left and not reinterpreted philosophically, not given as solutions, not as answers, but are presented above all as questions. The totality of natural science does not gradually become an answer to a question for the impartial person, because it turns into the great world question itself. This is experienced everywhere: what is now being researched in the most beautiful way by these researchers—for my sake right up to atomic theory, which I don't negate but only want to put it in its correct place—this comes to a question and out of the West a great question is posed to us. Where does this question come from?

When we link our gaze to the outer world and only turn to the observation of the given elements, we don't fathom its complete reality. We are born as human beings in the world, are constituted as such, as we already were before and take part in the reality by looking at ourselves in our own inner being. As we look then at the outer world, the sense perceptible objects—we find that part which is living in us, is missing in reality, as we can only through human struggle connect to the other half-reality, which observes us from the outside. If we look towards the West, so we see the half-reality is researched with particular devotion; however, it only provides a number of questions because it's only a half-reality. So on the one side there appears only one half of reality as a given; if one really looks at it, it raises questions. In Central Europe you discover examples of questions which Western thinking can answer and one tries to push through to thinking. That is the Hegelian philosophy.

In the East one felt that which lives above the thought, which works down into the thought; but one couldn't come as far as awakening it to life, that so to speak the flesh could also sustain a skeleton. Soloviev was able to develop it in flesh, muscles and even blood in his philosophy—but the skeleton was missing. As a result, he took Hegel's concepts, those of Humes and others, and built in a foreign skeletal system. Only when one is in the position of not using a foreign skeletal system then something comes about which can be lived through spiritually. So, however, as it happened with Soloviev, it leads to a shadowed existence because it didn't manifest into a skeletal system which could as a result be descriptive. If one doesn't want to remain with building only an outer skeletal system, but live spiritually and prepare oneself through strong spiritual work, then one develops for oneself an inner skeleton within spiritual experiences; one develops the necessary concepts. For this, various exercises have been given in my writings, “Occult Science” and “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and in others. Here one develops what really can become a conceptual organism. This is then the other side of reality, and this side of reality has its seed in the eastern philosophy of Soloviev.

In central Europe there is always the big problem of striking a bridge between nature and the spiritual. For us it has at the same time become a meaningful historical problem: to strike the bridge between West and East, and this task must stand before us in philosophy. This task also directs itself into Anthroposophy. If Anthroposophy becomes capable of inward thought experiences developing into living form, then it may on the other side experience quite materialistic natural phenomena as they are experienced in the West, because then it will not be through abstract concepts but through living scientific circles that the bridge is built between mere belief and knowledge, between knowing and subjective certainty. Then out of philosophy a real Anthroposophy will develop and philosophy can be fructified from both sides by these living sciences. Only then would Hegel's philosophy be awakened to life, when through the anthroposophical experience you let the blood of life be spiritually added to it. Then there won't be a logical base which is so abstract that it can't be “Spirit on the other side of Nature”, as Hegel wanted it, but that it really can be grasped, not as abstraction but as the living spirituality of philosophy.

This gives Anthroposophy the following task. How must we, according to our present viewpoints, which lie decades behind Hegel, strike the bridge between what we call truth on the one side, which must encompass all of reality, and that which we call science on the other side, which also must encompass the entirety of reality? Briefly, the problem must be raised—and that is the most important philosophic problem in Anthroposophy: what is the relationship between truth and science?

This is the problem I wanted to present in the introduction today at the start of our consideration, which I believe you will now understand.

My dear venerated guests! To render the Anthroposophical world view understandable, it is always accused of having its ideas and results as based on research by people who first need to be schooled for it, therefore results of Anthroposophical research can't be verified from the outset by anyone and that nevertheless these observations are presented to unprepared people.

Yet this accusation, however justified it seems, belongs to the most unjustified ones that can be made against the Anthroposophical Movement, because it doesn't stipulate that every single person is to be immediately directed towards becoming a researcher in a supersensible area, but it deals with their research results being presented in such a way that every other individual can prove it for themselves, simply with ordinary human understanding and ordinary healthy logic. In any case this doesn't make it unnecessary that at least the first steps towards supersensible research must be striven for, and therefore there are indications in various publications which have been mentioned here already. Everyone can to a certain degree become an anthroposophical researcher—simply out of the conditions of present civilisation—but as proof of results of anthroposophical research this is not necessary because this proof can simply come through a healthy human understanding. One of these areas in which results can really be practically proven, is in the pedagogical area.

Dear friends! The Anthroposophical world view for a long time had to work purely through people coming continuously closer to ideas about the supersensible, before it became possible to bring them into present-day cultural conditions, into practical life, where they felt themselves particularly ready to actually penetrate. This was only possible in a limited area—and also only to a small degree—when Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, whose office was given to me. Already before that, as shown in the small publication “The education of the child from the point of view of spiritual science”, the attempt was undertaken to represent certain educational principles from the basis of Anthroposophy. Only through the founding of the Waldorf School did it become possible to apply these things in practice, and since this time it is also possible to carry out the pedagogical-didactic side of Anthroposophy in detail. It will of course not be possible for me to give more than a few indications in this introductory lecture, but I think other lectures during these days would be able to accomplish more.

Whatever is taken up through anthroposophic ideas, when they are simply verified through healthy human understanding, is not merely theoretical observation, are no mere ideas of abstraction which one can have in order to satisfy some or other need for theoretical knowledge. No, these conveyed ideas are being created out of an anthroposophical source, this is real human power; this is something which passes into the whole person, this makes love more intense, transforms human vigour. While the ideas and thoughts of usual science, which only draw on the sense world, have their peculiarity by being in the service of theoretical interests, and being of the sense-world its characteristic is to only relate practical interests to the sense world, by contrast it is characteristic of the ideas from anthroposophic research that their results work on the entire human being, on his empowerment, on his—if I might call it so—life skill, on his understanding of life, and it is this understanding which enables him to grasp the most varied of life's opportunities. If one takes on this life and fructify it through anthroposophical ideas, one can see how the actions of people, when they allow themselves to be directed by these ideas, acquire greater power, greater urgency and so on. This is what must be especially treasured in the pedagogic didactic sphere.

When we founded the Waldorf School we didn't have the opportunity to choose the outer conditions for the education and teaching of our children. In the present it is repeatedly asserted that for a satisfactory education, satisfactory teaching to be established, then some or other place for the school, for the educational institute or its equivalent, must be chosen. Certainly, much is said about these claims and in practice they are to some extent successful. We didn't have all of this. The next thing was the attempt to use the given circumstances and start with the children in the Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette factory. Next, we had a very specific kind of material environment for the children, we had to house ourselves in a place which was obviously hardly suited—it had previously been a tavern—to begin our teaching and education. So we couldn't rely on anything but on what began on a purely spiritual basis for the pedagogical and didactic aspects themselves.

Here it must be stressed again: while Anthroposophy doesn't strive for an abstract head knowledge—if I might use this expression—but an insight into the world and its secrets, it involves the whole human being, possibly leading to self-knowledge, to a self-understanding which one can't achieve in some or another theoretical sphere. In the end all education, all teaching is based on the understanding of the human being, which is proven in the relationship of the teacher, the educators to the emerging, growing adolescent, to the child. For this reason, our Waldorf pedagogy is developed upon an intimate knowledge of the growing person, the child. I only need to give one detail in which it can be seen how true insight into the whole human being must prove in practice.

Today we have a psychology which has more or less been proven by recognized science. However, this psychology theorizes around many questions which always leave unsatisfactory results. They pose the following question, for example: what is the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily aspects of the human being? They have developed all possible kinds of theories about this. Here we have three types of theories. The one tries to come from the soul-spiritual and try to define this in some way, to formulate an abstract concept and then to try in how far the soul-spiritual can work on the bodily-physical. Another, more materialistically coloured theory assumes that the bodily-physical should form the basis, so that the bodily-physical brings forth the soul-spiritual as one of its functions. A third theory is that of psycho-physical parallelism, which assumes that the soul-spiritual and bodily-physical matter equally, and only to pursue how the functions of the one takes place beside the other, without looking for any exchange taking place between them. These are all psychological speculations. At the moment a practical situation is present, through psychology, through soul knowledge, it finds driving forces into the pedagogic didactic impulses.

One can simply say our sphere of observation of the soul-spiritual human being has not yet reached a principle which we are accustomed to follow naturally according to science. In natural science for example, when we look at the phenomena where warmth appears, without the usual kind of warmth coming forth as usual, then this warmth from other circumstances is considered as so-called latent warmth and how it had developed out of latent conditions, and now appears as warmth. Such principles which are common practice in science must—obviously metamorphosed in corresponding manner—also be taken up in the observation of the totality of the human being, in which the soul-spiritual is included.

One comes to such an approach of observation which is fully justified by science—if it hasn't yet been seen today—if one focuses on the first important transformation which happen in the human organisation with the change of teeth around the seventh year of life. Such transformations in the human being are usually only observed outwardly. However, the change of teeth is something which penetrates the entire human life deeply. Whoever trains his abilities of observation will learn to recognise how with the change of teeth an entire change in the child's soul life takes place. He learns to recognise how the child in the fullest sense of the word, didn't really live “in himself”, but completely absorbed his soul-life in his environment. He learns to perceive the most essential of the driving forces in the child organism before the change of teeth, which is imitation. Through imitation the child learns movement.

One can through unbiased observation determine precisely how the movements from the father and mother or others in the child's surroundings enter into the childlike organism itself. One can follow how under healthy conditions speech is learnt under the influence of imitation. One can see how the child, in the fullest sense of the word, comes from his surroundings, with his whole being. This alters completely with the development at the change of teeth. Here we see how forces develop in the child, enabling the child to bring forth independent imagination, in which the inner child up to a certain degree is set free from the surroundings, which is not so before his seventh year of life. With the change of teeth, the child acquires a certain introspection and becomes gradually more accessible to abstraction.

Now the childish nature is again conditioned by everything which lives inwardly in the people surrounding the child, as it is absorbed by the child. That is why in the second period of life which begins with the change of teeth up to adolescence, is seen in such a way that everything which develops in the child is an adaptation of the people surrounding it. Not what the people do in the child's surroundings, because that is imitated, but in what lives in these people, this means what comes to expression in their words, their attitude, the direction of their thoughts, these are passed on to the child—as it were not through imitation but through taking up a power which is as part of him or her, as growth and nutritional powers in them: the power of authority. What is meant by the power of authority is not to be misunderstood because for someone who has written “The Philosophy of Freedom” it is necessary to point out how this authority principle comes under scrutiny in a certain phase of life. This means not the entire education should be put down to what is referred to today as the principle of authority. If one applies the corresponding value to such observations then things become ever more clearly differentiated and one gains the ability gradually to not only being able to observe the transformation in people from year to year, but also from month to month. What then happens actually between the change of teeth and puberty?

When you direct your gaze in order to learn what really happens there between the seventh and fourteenth year—those are of course only approximate numbers—the hidden forces within the child's soul now come to be expressed outwardly. This is hidden in the bodily nature and activates the expression of the human organism, works also in the formation of the brain in the first years of life and in the preparation of the speech organs, works also in everything the child develops in his bodily nature. Thus, you can say the following. Just as for instance the warmth in a body is hidden and can become free under certain circumstances, so the soul-spiritual, which works latently in the first seven years in the physical organism, expressed in every single movement, in every bodily process, only becomes free later. After the seventh year of life the body is left to itself more; the soul-spiritual does not withdraw completely out of the bodily, yet it does to a high degree. The change of teeth is then a kind of termination point of the first developmental phase, where the soul-spiritual was still in harmony with the bodily-physical.

You see that through this manner of observation you can reach a position where you are able to recognise a real relationship between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical. People don't theorize only around the question of how the one works upon the other, and so on. People simply see the soul-spiritual during one period of life as completely in the physical—this is clearly seen in the child's development—and later, after acquiring freedom, the form appears. So a comparison isn't made of what had been understood as abstract concepts earlier, but the reality is followed in the process of the soul-spiritual in the bodily form during the various periods of life. This means, however, that that which in natural science had been openly researched through the outer senses is lifted up into the spiritual sphere.

If you were to enter more into the details, which Anthroposophy wants to do, to penetrate it and not remain stuck in superficial definitions, you would soon see what kind of a faithful continuator of the justifiable scientific thinking of the spiritual scientific anthroposophical viewpoint actually is. Then, however, when in this way you gain the world of concepts and ideas of human knowledge, then the accusations regarding the alienation of the world of ideas is solved by itself.

Dear friends! Anthroposophy is the last to be in opposition to big and important events particularly during the 19th century in the pedagogical sphere, presented by great educators of humanity on pedagogical principles. Anthroposophy fully acknowledges the existence of great, meaningful educational principles and does not stand back before anyone in the recognition of the great educators. Only, you have to admit nevertheless, with all great educational principles there is often a certain dissatisfaction today regarding educational practice, educational methods; the most diverse kinds of educational practices bear witness to the fact that this is so. Why is this so?

It is often just a result of the intellectualism of our time. This intellectualism results—more than one normally believes—in a particular hostility towards life, especially in the social areas. It breeds in relation to ideation actually only abstraction. The abstract has no life-forces, it is in a certain way the corpse of the spiritual and is experienced as such. Even in having the most beautiful principles in which you can almost glow with enthusiasm—as long as these principles remain abstract, they can't obtain any kind of favourable influence. Only when these principles are permeated through with spirituality, living spirituality, which merges with the beings of people, could these principles become practical. Thus, Anthroposophy doesn't want to propose new educational principles in an abstract manner; it only wants to be an introduction for pedagogical and didactic skills, for the implementation of the art of education and art of instruction, and wants to present what the most beautiful educational principles can't give: spiritual foundations for the practical implementation, for the inner talents of teachers, to work in the school and in education.

For this reason, the Waldorf School is not so geared—as is often believed—to take our world view as it is conveyed to grownups, and to stuff it into our children. As a result, we have to particularly stress that as far as religious instruction go, the Catholic children are left to the Catholic priests, and the evangelist children to the evangelist priest. We have only arranged free religious instruction for those dissident children and if these lessons had not been organized they would have no religious education. As a result, some experience of the religious feeling can be accomplished because those parents who withdraw their children from religious instruction, send their children now into religious instruction in which we make the effort not to lecture Anthroposophy but to present it as is required at that particular age of the child. So it's not about depositing Anthroposophy into the childish mind, but it comes down to the teachers working through Anthroposophy, the pedagogical didactic methods employed in such a way that they really fulfil true human education.

This results in, simply through the practical implementation of such education and such teaching, not only in the child being looked at but the whole person being considered. It would be highly foolish to take the feet or hands as they are at a child's age and regard them as something complete and force them to remain as they are in childhood. It is obvious that we consider a child's organism as something coming into being, which has to be different later in life. However, in relation to the soul-spiritual we don't always do the same thing. We often even see rigid concepts introduced and that the child is frequently taught from a young age as having something like sharp contours in its soul. This is false! With anything which we want to allow incorporation into the childish organism, it must be introduced in a growing way, that it can gradually be transformed so that the human being later, in his thirtieth year for example, not only has a memory of what he had absorbed in his childhood but that the content of this has been as transformed by him as he had transformed his limbs. Everything of a soul-spiritual nature we give the child must also contain powers of growth, powers of transformation; that means we must make our teaching more and more alive.

Certainly this could be expressed as an abstract principle but practically it can only be accomplished when true intimate human knowledge is present. Such a kind of intimate human knowledge makes it possible to deduce everything from the childish nature into what is understood as the syllabus and goal of learning. Out of this the Waldorf School has taken its syllabus and the objectives of learning from actual human knowledge which can be read from month to month in the developing childish nature itself. The effort has been made to bring all of this about in a living sense.

I only want to mention one thing. Today in various ways teaching has improved even in some public tuition. But, you all know that during the school year the child becomes even more conscious than one is aware, and suffers under a system where the progress of the child is judged. It depends on the one side on the child's performance and on the other, the teacher's judgement of this performance, and is expressed as: “satisfactory”, “nearly satisfactory”, “nearly not satisfactory”, “less satisfactory” and so on. I have to confess to you, I was never really capable of differentiating between “nearly satisfactory” and “nearly not satisfactory” and so on. With us in the Waldorf School it involves that out of the totality of progress made by the end of each school year, the child is given a kind of witnessing presented by the teacher which characterises each individual child and that he simply writes this on a piece of paper as his experience of that child. So the child sees a kind of mirror image of himself, and this practice—which doesn't depend on “satisfactory”, “nearly satisfactory” and so on for the individual items—has been accepted with a certain inner satisfaction and received with joy, even when there is blame. The child also receives a kind of powerful verse which echoes with his own nature, which he takes up and which serves as a mission statement for the following year.

In this way one can, if one has the love for it, enter in a lively way into education, even working through unfavourable relationships in a lively way.

As a result, we come again to something which needs to be overcome, needs to be conquered in pedagogy and didactics in our epoch. Today one will hardly find any evidence in the outer historic descriptions, of how souls' constitutions have changed during the single evolutionary epochs. Whoever is without bias can readily understand how the spiritual utterances which were revealed to souls during the 10th, 11th and 12th Century for instance, are of a completely different character than what had been presented since the middle of the 15th Century to the soul constitutions of civilised humanity. Yes, up to the 20th century intellectualism in humanity has developed up to a culmination point. Intellectualism has the peculiarity, that it—just like the principle of imitation or authority—only shifts at a particular human age out of its latent position and in the case of intellectualism it is related to a later period in life. We see how the human being only when he has reached puberty, actually even later, becomes suitable to progress towards intellectuality. Before this age intellectualism works in a paralyzing, deadening way into soul activity.

As a result, we can say we live in an epoch which is only appropriate for grownups, which has as its most important cultural impulse, something which should only come into expression in adults. As a result, because our entire cultural tone is set towards grown adults, we are actually unable to understand the child—and even young people!

This is the most important aspect our civilization needs to look at. We need to be clear that precisely through those powers which our sciences and our technology have triumphed and have been brought to such a great blossoming, we must take up the possibility to fully understand the child and enter into the human nature of the child. It just needs our own effort to strike our bridge across to the young people and the child. What appears in various forms as the youth movement—one can say whatever one likes—has its deepest entitlement; it is nothing other than the cry of the youth: ‘You grownups have a civilization which we simply don't understand, when we bring our basic natures to it!’—This bridge between the adult and the child's world must be discovered again, and to this Anthroposophy will contribute.

When you go down from the general cultural point of view to the individual you will once again find that these syllabi which are deduced from the essence of the child itself, teach us what syllabus we need to develop for the phases in the child's life. Reading and writing were in earlier times something quite different to what they are today. Take for example the letters: they are something abstract, strangers in relation to life actually. If we go even further back, we find something in the pictorial writing which is directly related to life. We often today don't even think about how intimately life was connected to this image rich writing and how strange these are in life: reading and writing. Yes, we stand within a civilization in which it is natural to have the strangest elements in life developed into civilization's goals. When we in an open-minded way look at for instance a stenographer or a typist sitting at a typewriter, we know that with such activities humanity has been sucked into the strangest civilization.

My dear friends, we don't want to be hostile to culture or become reactionaries, when we express this. Nothing is to be said about these means which have entered in modern times; they must be there. Yet, powers of thought need to be developed which can heal this once again, this, which if it is left to work all by itself could only lead to a definite decline of culture and lead to decadence. The most important moment in which a healing remedy can be introduced, lies in education and in the classroom, to be designed through education.

When the child enters elementary school, then it is indeed so, that the intellect is drowsy. The ability for abstract thinking, which first needs to be experienced through others, only appears later. As a result, abstract forms of writing and reading introduced to the child as it arrives in school, cannot be related to. We can only take something which can reach the child in a lively way, which works in the child itself already as an artistic soul principle, something more pure and splendid than any other art. This works on a subconscious level. We must continue this way and try to find forms of a particular nature, through which the child in an artistic way can be active in his total being in the artistic form of writing which can evolve into reading. With relevance to pedagogy, when the children haven't learnt to read or write at the age of nine or ten, one must have the courage to say: ‘Thank goodness that these children can't read or write yet!’—because it isn't important for the child to learn this or that but that he or she learns in the right way at the right age.

This is why the Waldorf School education is orientated in an artistic way. Out of pedagogic-artistic principles it commences and gradually leads over into the intellectual. We take into account that music must appear early in education while this has a relationship to development of the will forces. As a result, we take into account that the usual physical education, as animated gymnastics are given as Eurythmy, is inserted into the lessons. It needs to be metamorphosed, transformed pedagogically-didactically, then those who have observed it discover that through this art of movement, the soul and spirit have been provided with something meaningful. One discovers that the child in his school-going education experiences him or herself into the art of movement in a similar way as a small child finds its way into speaking, with inner pleasure and inner naturalness.

Working from an artistic basis results in the child handling colours from very early on. Even though it is also sometimes inconvenient and might mean more stringent cleaning rules need to be applied, it will still affirm that the child enters more deeply into life than otherwise. Brought into the bargain is the development of a sense for life, that life doesn't go by but that the child lives with the outer world, that it becomes sensitive for everything which is beautiful, every encounter in nature and in life being meaningful. This is more important than the transference of details from this or that sphere on to the child.

Added to all that I've only indicated in an outline, the Anthroposophical foundation is what flows into the teacher's mindset, what the teacher simply through his entire being attributes to the pedagogical-didactic imponderables, when he closes the classroom door behind him, when he steps in front of the children. Whoever looks in a lively sense—not with abstract ideas—how the child copies and adapts to his environment, knows what works in the child in a soul-spiritual way. The teacher gets to know the child and as a result obtains the requirements with which to judge in quite a different way than is usually done. I want to present an example of this.

You learn quite a bit when you look at life in the following way. Once parents came to me and said their young son, who up to that point had been quite neat and tidy, had suddenly stolen something. I asked: “How old is the child?” The parents answered: “Five years.” I said: “Then you must first examine what the child has actually done because perhaps he has not stolen anything.”—What had he done in fact? He took money out of the drawer in the same way his mother takes money every morning when she wants to go shopping. From the money the little boy had bought treats which he didn't keep for himself but had given to other children. In this case a person can say: There is no reason to see this as stealing; the child simply saw what the mother did each morning and felt capable of doing the same. The child is an imitator. Each relationship of a child to the norms of adults, in which the expressions “good” and “bad” appear, only become applicable when the change of teeth has taken place. Therefore, we must obtain a completely different way to form judgements and learn that everything we do in the child's surroundings need to be so orientated that the child can copy them, can imitate them right into the imponderable thoughts within them. This proves the reality of thoughts. Not only our actions but also the manner and way of our thoughts give substantiality. In the child's surroundings we should not give in to any random thought because this works in on the child. Therefore, we need to look into even the imponderables in thoughts.

If one looks at how the child up to his seventh year lives in his environment one can get the impression of what the child had been before he came down into the physical sense world. Up to then—this is shown in anthroposophic research—the person is surrounded by a soul-spiritual world which is permeated by the cosmos, just like in the physical world his body is connected to the physical world. We become able to see that in the child's life, up to his seventh year, it has been a true continuation of life before birth or conception. This however must be transformed in the pedagogic-didactic experience so the teacher, standing in front of the children, must say to himself: The super-sensible worlds have given me something to unravel, which I must level out in the path of my life.

Teaching and education really becomes an act of sacrifice towards the whole world. There is a conviction being uttered about teaching and education being a force and without which in real teaching and real education, nothing can come about. This conviction which hasn't been adopted from outside, but has come through inner work, through the anthroposophical world view, this is the most important in pedagogical-didactic work. You stand with shy religious reverence to what is hidden within the child's body, you look at one who has risen from eternal world foundations which is gradually revealed in childish movements, gestures and so on, and you know that the riddle of life needs to be solved in a practical way. Only in this way are the entire teach, and educational convictions directed correctly. This atmosphere which spreads in all activities, which needs to take place in the school life, is what Anthroposophy above all wants to have within the teaching and educational being and from where all details need their direction. However, to be master of them, it is necessary that you, through true inner observation of the smallest movement of the child's life, see how the spirit works right into its very fingertips. The teacher will acquire an inner overall view so that he out of an ability, which must become an instinct, meets his class in the spirit and skilfulness that come from his internal processing of the anthroposophical world view.

Here are a few indications which I was able to give; they could be implemented further in the next lectures. These indications should show that Anthroposophy doesn't want to be radically against great pedagogic accomplishments but that it will be the assistant to the great one, if we are not to remain stuck in abstractions, so that we can enter practical life in a vital way, in order for the art of education to become a real impulse, an effective factor in our social life!

My dear venerated guests! Besides the introductory words I want to say regarding today's task, I want to limit myself to essential indications in the following lectures to details of the economic life in its relationship to the area coming under discussion.

Social science can't be talked about today from only a theoretical standpoint. Today—I mean at this very present moment—one can only speak about such questions while the dire situation of the economic life existing in the civilised world is in the background. Into this desolate situation was also added something which I set out in my “Key Notes of the Social Question”, after the temporary end of the terrible catastrophe of world war.

At that time, I urged everyone to observe the social economic life in relation to the present time of world development. It is this economic life at present which is intimately intertwined with that which moves in the entire circumference of the social question. Yes, most people at present can hardly sense that the social question can be separated from the economic question. Yet my book “Key Notes of the Social Question” enters into establishing clarity in relation to the area in question here, where it will be pointed out how the economic life within the social organism needs to establish its own independent position, such an independent position within which the same facts and indications acquire their form only according to economic principles, economic opinions and impulses. In this respect my book—I say it here in quite frankly, because that is what matters most—contains an inner contradiction. Only, this book is not to be regarded as a theoretical book on social science. This book wants to give suggestions above all to life practitioners; this book was written out of observations of the European economic life over decades. Because this book strives to be completely realistic, a direct encouragement for practical activities—practical action in the moment—it had to contain a contradiction. This contradiction is namely nothing other than what permeates our entire social life and consists in our social life being in the course of modern time mixed up, chaotic; only viable if it develops its individual branches from out of its own conditions.

I must speak about the threefold divisions of the social organism which leads to the economic life becoming separated in a fully, free way from the organised legal and state life as well as from the spiritual life, so that the economic life becomes, for those who stand within it, formed out of their personal actions and initiatives. However, we presently live at a time in which such a situation doesn't exist, in which the economic life stands within the structure of the general social organism. We live in a time in which contradiction is a reality. As a result, a manuscript, which has aimed at being written out of reality and is being offered with suggestions based on reality, can bring about a contradictory turn; it could only come from the standpoint of bringing the contradiction to clarity, and with this clarity achieve relationships.

I am thus in an unusual position today by giving this introduction because in connection to what is based on anthroposophical grounds, created with anthroposophical methods of thought, founded on decades of realistic observation of European economic relationships—it is in the widest circles where it was first misunderstood in the worst possible way. I can only say I fully understand these misconceptions which have been given to these underlying intentions; these misunderstandings are phenomena of our time. However, I must be on the other side of the standpoint, that in overcoming these misconceptions lies what we first have to strive for sociologically, socially, and to this I would like to say a few words to orientate us.

When my book “Key Notes of the Social Question” was first published, it took place in the middle of the European development which was immediately followed by the terrible war catastrophe. It was during the time preceded by the Versailles treaty, a time in which value relationships in central and eastern European states were essentially different. Not from some cuckoo land cloud impulse was my “Key notes” written down, but thought through from the immediate world situation in such a way that I hoped to believe a large number of people would find it, and on the basis of these suggestions search further, then one could—namely from central Europe—throw an impulse also into the economic development which would lead to a significant, acceptable ascent which from then on and up to today had been a continual waste on the economy and social life in general. At that time you could say to yourself that a person could think out of this complicated world situation: Perhaps no stone will remain standing as he has created into the thought structures of the “Key Notes of the Social Question”—; that these ideas would be made up out of those who were there. Still, it could be grasped and would perhaps have given quite a different result to what could be fixed in a manuscript. It is not important that ideas are presented in a utopian manner, that an image can be presented as a social futuristic organism, but it comes down to people discovering and understanding: real problems exist here, directly in life; we have to deal with these problems out of our expertise and see if we can handle these issues by finding an ever wider understanding for them.

Basically, something quite different has happened. On the one hand theorists have all kinds of discussions regarding the content of my book, discussions to which all manner of demands are linked regarding its contents. Some theoreticians misinterpreted what had been said completely, wanting to turn it in a utopian sense by asking: How will this be, how will that be?—ie: what one could actually expect. It turned out to be a strange fact to me which took me by surprise because precisely those practicing economists who work routinely within the economic life, who know about this or that branch of business and rejected what I had said, spoke about things in their business which wasn't practiced in their business—that these practitioners argue over the key points of the social question and as a result, prove themselves to be abstract theoreticians. This shows that one can have a routine practical involvement in economic life—in the old sense; under the newer relationships it can no longer be—these practitioners were absolutely not in the position to what was being battered here as also being related to problems of the economic life, other than discussion points made in abstract theories; which could raise doubts when you oppose practitioners and get involved in their discussions because nothing concrete is entered into but only completely trivial generalities are repeated about the social question, if you question someone.

The other thing you could come across would be that at first those, who on the whole are quite substantial practitioners, even reject wanting to talk in this way about the possible form which economic problems could take on. Going on from here, some interest could be stimulated for instance in socialistic circles; here the experience could be that what is wished for is the least understood from that side and that everything should be judged according to whether they fit into old party templates or not. And so time passed by from when these suggestions were thought about. The whole terrible Valuta-misery came about which has to be considered in quite a different way to how it is usually judged today.

With the first appearance of my “Call to the German Nation and the Cultural World” and then “Key Notes of the Social Question”, individual personalities immediately appeared who in their way are quite honest about healing central European economic life, and said: ‘Yes, such proposals’—they called them proposals—‘look quite attractive, but it should first be asked how we can enhance the Valuta.’ That was said during a time when the Valuta-misery according to today's relationships, still existed in pure paradise. Now it shows in such demands that tampering with only external symptoms are wanted. It has little understanding that Valuta relations battered on the surface show unhealthy economic relationships, that with such a cure of a symptom the evil is not addressed, and that it requires entering into much, much deeper social economic conditions today if one wishes to in some or other way arrive at speaking about problems realistically, regarding the indications in my “Key Notes of the Social Question.” Now it has come about that what I repeated in conclusion of lectures which I held in the end of the “Key notes” at that time, had the call: people have to wake up before it is too late—that this “too late!” has come to the fore to a large degree today. We are not at all in the position to resonate in the original sense with the “Key notes” to understand them because in the mean time chaos has broken into the economic life where now quite other additions would be necessary and not what was merely mentioned but what had to be spoken about according to my conviction. One can hardly pass by a characteristic common to our age if one wants to discuss the most damaging aspect in today's economic life.

When I picked up the newspaper yesterday, I came across—and it could today be one of the most important symptoms we find everywhere, which our contemporaries express in single sentences—I came across the article “Postponing the resignation of Lloyd George until after the Genoa Conference”. With this once again our daily situation is announced because the characteristic of today is “wait”. “We want to wait”—this has actually become the ruling principle: wait until something happens but you can't tell what it will actually be. This is what is deeply embedded in the human soul today, on all levels.

Now I want to apparently—only apparently—introduce something quite abstract: this is intended in a complete realistic way because it indicates the forces working among us which have in the course of human development gradually enabled us to arrive at such a promising principle as “We want to wait” and apply it to everything.

When we look back at ancient cultural development we find in these old cultures, that factual thinking, in the sense as it appeared in ancient times—you know this from my lectures I held in the Philharmonic—can't be called purely “scientific”. If one considers what stands in the place of today's scientific thinking then you will know that first of all, out of this thinking the economic life could not have directly emerged. The economic life had to more or less first become independent of human thinking, developed instinctively—not meaning automatically—as exchange in humanity. What wanted to be done in the economic life simply developed out of practical life. People acted instinctively; even expanded trade into this or that area but everything happened more or less instinctively. Now, one can from some point of view object according to today's understanding of human freedom, human worth and so on, to the economic conditions of olden times; all this would be good to be seen from the other side, how the extraordinary symptoms of human evolution, which even today can be instructive, for instance appear in the way employees and employers—if you want to apply a modern expression to olden times—lived in relation to one another during ancient Greece, old Egypt and right over to Asia. Today these things are taken in such a way that they elicit the sharpest criticism; but, each such a criticism is not historical and one must say: the conditions in the corresponding epochs resulted from the feelings of humanity at that time. This is what one needs to focus on.

The other one is a fact connected to that shift in humanity's evolution which I've often pointed out, of around the fifteenth century, through which the soul constitution of civilised humanity became something quite different. I've already said outer history hardly points out that the collective soul constitution of humanity has become something different. If we ask ourselves how this human evolution relates to the economic life, then we get the following answer. The time for instinctive leadership as I've characterised, this time reached into the epoch of the shift. With this shift intellectualism arrived into the soul constitution; the drive to understand the world purely through human mental logic. This drive, which simply became a deep need in the human constitution, proved itself so brilliantly in the field of natural science and in that field which developed as a result: the field of technology where in the most extraordinary way it has not celebrated enough triumphs. However, this intellectualism—it was shown in various arguments, which during this course have already been dealt with—has shown itself as completely incapable of understanding the phenomena of human life and human nature as well as social relationships. With this intellectualism, this intellectual orientation, the soul can be brought back in a grandiose way to outer sense perceptible nature and its laws. You can't intertwine the one with the other in this intellectualism and while this intertwining goes on, get organised and while organising yourself also enjoy life and grasp spiritually permeated social relations. I would like to say the following. The network of intellectual ideas is too broad for what lies in social life. To think scientifically—that, humanity learnt from this intellectualism. Everything has been drawn into it, even theology. Intellectualism rules while we observe and experiment with our entire scientific way of thinking, and finally, what we have introduced into it which can't fit between the lines of intellectualism, we see as not scientific.

During this time intellectualism fell into the transition from a purely instinctive economic life to one fuelled with human thoughts. We may say that in the time when people didn't think intellectually about the world, the economic life was directed instinctively. When however, the time came when more and more world economy and world traffic appeared, this tendency required human beings to penetrate world economy and world traffic with their thoughts. These thoughts only came from intellectualism. As a result, everything which came from economic thoughts—in mercantilism, physiocratism, in the national economic ideas of Adam Smith, as in everything which later appeared right up to Karl Marx—on the one side demanded economic life, which was not merely instinctively mismanaged but it was grasped with thoughts, however on the other side, where thoughts could only come from intellectualism, all economic observations would become thoroughly one-sided, so that nothing could result from this economic observation which could be seen as continuing to work in economic practice. On the one hand you have the economic theorists who created axioms from intellectual sentences—like for instance Ricardo, Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill—and who now develop systems on the basis of these principles on which they built a complete self-contained mentality (Geistesart). On the other hand, the economic practice needed and demanded penetration by the spirit, but found no connection to what had continued to work instinctively and as a result it fell into complete chaos.

So these two streams became more and more common in recent times, on the one hand were the economic theorists—without the influence of economic practice; on the other hand the practitioners with their old practices which had become a continued routine and as a result let the economic life of the civilised world fall into chaos. Obviously one must express such things in a somewhat radical manner because then one will really distinguish what works and what can be understood as a problem.

If one now wants to find, I might call it, a connection, a kind of synthesis between economic thinking—which has gradually been eradicated by practice—and this economic practice—then one finds this connection at least in one of them. Recently a kind of economic realism has developed; a kind of economic-scientific realism which says that one can hardly find general laws for economic life if economic facts are not considered and events between single nations or groups are looked at what has happened only in an external way, to find guidelines for economic trade. From this basis has developed the so-called social-political in economic law-making. This means people gradually believed they have discovered through mere observation of factual economic relationships in connection with the permeating social connection that they could find certain guidelines which could be brought to expression in economic law-making; people now had, by taking detours through the State, tried to actualize some of these which had developed out of observation, but as a result it had to be actually admitted that these foregoing observations of real scientific economic laws could not at all emerge. Yes, we are actually still basically in this situation today. Just when one is in the situation of encountering decisive experiences, I could call it social Ur-phenomena being judged in the right way, then one sees the situation one is in.

You all know that Woodrow Wilson's “fourteen points” arrived at the dreadful chaotic point civilised life had entered. What were these fourteen points actually? They were basically nothing other than abstract principles of an unworldly man, a person who knew little about reality, who appeared in Versailles where he could actually have played an important role. This man who was a stranger to reality wanted to show the world how to get organised according to principles founded on intellectualism. One only had to experience with what inspiration civilised mankind hung on to these fourteen points, however with the exclusion of a large part of the central European population, they unfortunately also fell for these fourteen points after a short period of time.

During 1917, by contrast, I tried to show individual central European personalities who were interested but who were not following it, but were either approached or brought to it, how abstract, how unrealistic this was which wanted to be brought into the social form, how so to speak everything which ruled in the poor educational principles in modern civilisation was a concentration of what this school master Woodrow Wilson had introduced, and how the abstract principles—in a bad sense—were received with enthusiasm. At that time, I tried to show that a healing of the relationships could be entered into if you take a stand in opposition to such abstract attitudes, without excluding thoughts but which promotes realistic thoughts in order to develop from a realistic basis. Then it will not be a utopian invention—I would like to say the Woodrow Wilson principles were the most condensed utopian, utopianism already in its third potency, but one must be clear about finding contemporary humanity in its real conditions in order to discover impulses. Therefore, I gave up having to deal with any utopian theory, refrain from even saying how capital, how labour and suchlike must be formed; I gave at most some examples for how one could think about forming the future according to contemporary relationships. That was however only as illustration to what should happen; because just as I have spoken about the transformation of capital forces in my “Key notes”, just so this transformation can be fulfilled in a modified way. It is not important for me to present an image of the future but to say from which foundations, in a real way, one can now—not with theoretically thoughts—come to an actual solution for the so-called social question. It is not important to say that this or that is the solution to the social question. I have already had too many experiences in trying to find such a solution. Already in the 1880's in pleasant Vienna all kinds of clever people gathered nearly every afternoon after two o'clock. In the course of one hour the social question was solved many times! Those who considered the relationships of the present in an unbiased manner, know very well that solutions which often appear in thick books have much less worth than those negotiated in comfortable Vienna with a stroke or two of the pencil and fantastic words across a white tablecloth. That is not the point and it was the worst mistake brought to me that it should be something like that.

What I wanted to point out was the following. The solution of the social problems can only be affected in a real way out of itself; the result can't be solved through discussion but through events and actions. Conditions first need to be established to contain this activity, conditions I try to refer to in my “Key notes” and in other sources. I'm trying to show we need arrangements in our social organism which makes it possible for a spiritual life to develop out of its own conditions in which the spiritual life itself works; that we need a second member, where only legal-state impulses are at work, and besides that a third member, where only those impulses work which come out of production and consumption of goods, and lastly that it develops out of an associative economic system, culminating in healthy pricing. In this way the old class system will not be recalled. It won't be people branching into an educational class, a defence class and a nutritional class, but the modern human being has moved into individuation and will not be divided into some particular state.

What exists externally as an arrangement simply comes from the forces in history's unfolding, which are separate from the conditions out of which they are negotiated, to do something for the spiritual life, the legal or state life and economic life. Only when conditions are created which for instance the economist can do purely out of economic impulses, which would be modified by contemporary market trends, or should modify the capitalistic relationships, only when such possibilities are created among people will they develop something of a real solution—which is in a continuous becoming—of what can be called the social question.

It is not important for me that the social question is solved because I have to agree that the solution can't at any one moment be given as something self-contained, while the social problem from which it has originated is in a constant forward flow. The social organism is something which becomes young, and older, into which new impulses must flow, of which the following can never be said: it has this or that form. If the social organism is not so, that people sit together in one parliament that mixes all interests together, where those interested in economics make decisions about questions of the spiritual life, legal life and economic questions and so on, but when in a healthy social organism each individual sphere is considered out of its own conditions, then the state life can be placed on a realistic democratic foundation; then what is to be said doesn't come from one person in one such a single parliament, but it will emerge from continued ongoing negotiations among individual branches of the social organism.

In this context my book was also a warning to finally stop the fruitless arguments about the social question and to place it on the foundation where the solution to the social questions can be taken up every day. It was a call to the understanding how to take what was abstract in thought and to really translate this into thoughtful action. Added to this for example the associations can serve the economic life. Such associations are different from those which in recent times have been established as socialization, and can be created every day out of economic foundations. They are concerned with those people who handle goods production, in the circulation and consumption of goods—which every person is—to unite in associations through which healthy pricing can develop. It is a long way from knowledge of the subject and specialised knowledge which have to be achieved by people linked to associations, up to what doesn't come from legislation, also not from results of discussions but results from experience, which will give healthy pricing. Above all people have the desire, the broad outline of what they want at the time and which I am trying to present to you to discuss through these introductory words, because the world is so schooled in abstract thinking that one also takes this suggestion only from the point of view of abstract thinking, which I'm only using as an illustration, and discuss it for hours, while it should be about really understanding how each day the members of the social organism can be tackled in the way as indicated in my “Key notes.”

Today it is not of importance to find theoretical solutions to the social question but to search for conditions under which people can live socially. They will live socially when the social organism works according to its three members, just like a natural organism under the influence of its relative threefoldness also work towards unity.

You see, it first has to be explained what is meant by such things. When these things are spoken about, words are still required; yet words need to be taken up according to their intellectualised meaning which we attach to them today. These are translated immediately into intellectual things which are quite clearly not immersed in intellectualism. Therefore, in my book I have spoken in such a way about capital and about the natural foundations of production simply as ideas being thought out. When we want to deal with things abstractly, we can create definitions for a long time, and that has in fact happened. Someone says with equal right: Capital is crystallized labour, work which is stored up—and someone else says with the same right: Capital is saved labour. You can do this with all economic concepts if you remain within intellectualism. But these are not all things which can be dealt with theoretically only; we need to understand them in a lively form. If practitioners do a lot for the benefit of their practice and routine, cultivated out of the abstractions in these things, they can achieve the following, which I want to explain through a comparison.

I look at Ernst Muller. He is small with completely childish features and childish qualities. Twenty years later I look at Ernst Muller and say that this is not Ernst Muller because he is small and has childish qualities and quite a different physiognomy.—Yes, if at that time I had formed a concept of Ernst Muller and now want to attribute him with what at that time I had met as his real being, then I'll be making a terrible mistake. As little as people want to believe this, yet it is the way people are thinking along economic routes. They form thoughts and ideas about capital and labour and so on, and they believe these ideas must always have the same validity. It is not necessary to wait twenty years; you only need to go from one employer to another, from one land to another to discover the concept which you had created in one place is no longer valid in another because a change has been brought about—like in Ernst Muller. People don't recognise what exists when one doesn't have mobile ideas moving within life.

This is what makes it possible that on an anthroposophical foundation today's needs also find their expression in economic institutions because Anthroposophy's nature involves flexible ideas, which can teach you how you can provide your ideas with forces of growth and inner mobility and that with such ideas—as little as today's practitioners want to believe it—they can dive into other kinds of reality, which are revealed in the social life between one person and another, between one nation to another, through to entirely what has become necessary now in the artificially impaired world economy. One can therefore rightly say it is not an external attempt made on Anthroposophical grounds towards social ideas but to arrive at social impulses.

I still remember a time when many discussions took place about these things. I always had to stress: I'm talking about social impulses!—This upset people terribly. Obviously I should have said: social ideas or social thoughts, because the people only had thoughts in their heads about such things. That I spoke about impulses angered them terribly because they hadn't noticed I used “impulses” on this basis of indicating realities and not abstract ideas. Obviously one had to express oneself in abstract ideas.

Today it must again be grasped that a new understanding must be found for what is called the social question. We live in different relationships today than in the year 1919. Time is moving fast, especially in economic areas. It is necessary that even those very ideas which were considered at that time as mobile, continue to be contained in the flow and that one's observations of viewpoints stay within the spiritual present.

Whoever wants to look at the reality of relationships within the economic life knows they have essentially changed since the writing of my “Key notes” and one can no longer just use deductions as before. At least in the “Key notes” one would find an attempt to search for this method of social thinking in a realistic way, perhaps exactly because this attempt has grown from the soil where realities are always looked for, where one doesn't want to fall into fanaticism or false mysticism—because this attempt is grown out of accuracy on the wrestling ground of the anthroposophical world view.