The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I wish to give you in three lectures a survey of what Anthroposophy has to say concerning the human being and his relation to the universe. The universe and man are undoubtedly the two most important problems, for they embrace every question dealing with science and life and every problem of greatest and smallest importance.

It lies in the nature of these problems that in regard to these things I must limit myself to the anthroposophical horizon; that is to say, to the things connected with the great life problems of human existence which transcend the knowledge gained through sensory perception and which lie beyond the sphere of ordinary science.

In regard to the human being, self-knowledge is undoubtedly a problem which must appeal to us most of all. For in order to gain a foundation and a firm standpoint in life, we must first obtain a conception of our own nature. It must be said that at all times people sought to gain a knowledge of the universe, for they knew that the mysteries of the world's evolution are connected with man's own being; they knew that they could only learn something about man's being by seeking to know what the universe is able to give them, the universe of which the human being forms part.

Moreover, it cannot be denied that in connection with a knowledge of man and of the universe modern people show a deep interest for everything which transcends ordinary science, and we may say that innumerable attempts are now being made to transcend the spheres of ordinary science in order to investigate what lies beyond birth and death, beyond the world which can be fathomed by ordinary sense perception and by the understanding which is based upon it.

In recent times we can observe above all that there are scientific investigators who in many ways endeavor to transcend the spheres indicated above, and as an introduction let me mention a few striking conceptions of modern investigators, examples which prove that the keen interest in the problems which will form the subject of my three lectures really exist, but which prove at the same time how very difficult it is, even in the case of people well grounded in science, to penetrate into the sphere of the soul and of the spirit. As I do not wish to speak in abstract terms, let me proceed immediately from a few concrete examples.

A German scientist who worked very hard to discover how to penetrate into the super-sensible nature of the soul, and how to investigate the influence exercised by the soul's super-sensible nature upon the body's physical nature, tried to give many examples taken from his medical and scientific experience, showing the soul's influence, the influence of an unquestionably psychic essence upon the body; a marked example contained in one of the books written by this physician and scientist named SCHLEICH, who was personally well known to me, is the following: He describes a patient, who came to him in a great state of excitement, because in the office he had pricked his skin with an inky nib. The doctor could ascertain that it was quite an insignificant scratch. But the patient was under the delusion that this prick with an inky nib had given him a blood poisoning and that he would have to die unless his hand was amputated, and he begged the doctor to amputate his hand and his arm as quickly as possible.

The doctor could only tell him to be calm; that he would be quite well again in a couple of days and that there was nothing to be afraid of. As a responsible doctor he had to tell him this and could not, of course, amputate his arm.

But the patient was not satisfied. He went to another doctor who told him exactly the same thing and also refused to amputate his arm. Schleich was nevertheless nervous, for he was acquainted with soul moods, and so he inquired the next day how the patient was feeling and he was told that the man had died in the night.

The autopsy did not reveal any trace of blood poisoning, or similar symptoms. This was out of the question. Yet the patient had died.

In connection with this case, Schleich remarks: Death caused by radical auto-suggestion. The patient had the fixed idea that he had to die; it was an extremely radical auto-suggestion, and he really did die under the influence of this auto-suggestion.

This is the statement of an investigator well acquainted with all the natural-scientific methods, with all the medical methods. He reports this case in order to show a purely psychical influence; i.e., the influence of a thought, upon bodily processes, an influence showing, according to Schleich, that death set in as a result.

Schleich mentions many other cases, less marked and radical, in order to prove that it is possible to observe the soul, living in thoughts, feelings, sensations and will impulses, and that the soul can really influence the body. He wishes to describe, as it were, the influence of the super-sensible upon the physical.

Another case is described by a far more conspicuous scientist, by Sir Oliver Lodge: Sir Oliver Lodge lost his son Raymond in the last war. He fell on the Belgian-German frontier, and Sir Oliver Lodge, who had long ago felt the inclination to build a bridge leading from the sensory, natural-scientific sphere to the super-sensible sphere, was deeply stirred by the loss of his beloved son. Through many incidents, which are not directly connected with this matter and which indeed are not related, he was induced to use the mediumistic power of a certain person, in order to enter into connection with the departed soul of his son, Raymond.

When such a case arises in ordinary spiritistic circles, it is not necessary to consider it seriously, for one knows how unscientific these meetings are, and how amateurishly and unscientifically such cases are judged and investigated in spiritistic circles. But the matter must be taken more seriously when we have to do with the greatest modern scientist, with a man so thoroughly at home in the sphere of external, natural-scientific research and so well acquainted with scientific methods. That is why Sir Oliver Lodge's book on his spiritual intercourse with his son Raymond, made such a deep impression on the world.

On reading this book, we immediately feel that it is written by a man who does not approach the investigation of such things superficially, by a conscientious and responsible scientist. Even in other things, which I will not mention here, one can see that Sir Oliver Lodge applies to this sphere the same way of thinking, the same scientific method which he is accustomed to apply in his physical laboratory. The real facts which he now relates, and which, one might say, rightly produced such a deep impression upon all those who read Sir Oliver Lodge's book, are as follows:

Through the corresponding medium, Sir Oliver Lodge and a few other people who were present at the seances, were told that Raymond Lodge; that is, the soul or the spirit of Sir Oliver Lodge's son, wished to describe a scene enacted on the Belgian-German frontier shortly before his death, and the medium related that Raymond Lodge had a photograph taken and described this act in detail. In was expressly stated that two photographs were taken; these two photographs were carefully described and attention was drawn to the fact that upon the second photograph Sir Oliver Lodge's son had a somewhat different pose than on the first one.

When these communications were made in London through the medium (Sir Oliver Lodge describes it so that one can really see—I emphasize this expressly—that he took every possible scientific precaution), at the time when these experiments were made, no one in London knew anything about these photos, nor that they had been taken. After examining all the facts, Sir Oliver Lodge came to the conclusion that if this message were true, it could only come from his son, from the departed son himself.

In fact, after two or three weeks, the photographs which no one had seen before really arrived in London. They corresponded with the description given by the medium or, as Sir Oliver Lodge believed, with the description given by the soul of his son. Even a scientist could see in this fact, to begin with, one might say, an “experimentum crucis.” Nobody in London could possibly have seen those photographs. It appeared that the description was correct even in regard to the fact that two photographs were taken and that the second one showed a difference. The photographer had taken the photograph of the group which included Raymond Lodge twice, and for the second photograph he had shifted his camera a little. All this had been described exactly. A conscientious scientist could not find the slightest reason for questioning the medium's communication.

The two radical cases described to you just now, show that the longing, the great desire of unquestionably serious modern scientists leads them to seek a knowledge which goes beyond the facts revealed by ordinary external scientific research.

But one who speaks of anthroposophical research from an anthroposophical standpoint, must draw attention to the fact that the methods of anthroposophical investigation differ from those adopted even by such serious-minded scientists. For, in regard to a scientific way of thinking and a scientific mentality the foundations of anthroposophical research (I hope that my three lectures will make things clear to you from every aspect) should be stricter and more conscientious than any other, even in comparison with such strict scientists as the above. And one who dares to criticize such great scientists is perhaps called upon to judge and to explain the far greater certainty constituting the foundation of Anthroposophy, which is so often accused of advancing fantastic notions; this certainty given by Anthroposophy is far greater than that transmitted by the most conscientious scientific investigator of the present time. In order to indicate the critical attitude, the earnest and truly scientific character of Anthroposophy and its foundations, let me first bring forward the critical objections which can be raised against the scientific interpretations given in the two above-mentioned examples.

Let me now begin with these things, for in connection with today's subject my last two lectures already contained many explanations, so that the essential facts are known to the great majority of those who are now present; allow me therefore to illumine the things already explained to you from another angle.

The following objection must be raised in regard to Schleich and his case of “death through auto-suggestion.” Please accept this, to begin with, as a simple critical objection showing how matters might ALSO be viewed! Let us suppose that the man who pricked his hand with an inky nib and who believed that he had blood poisoning, really had some unknown inner defect, so that sudden death through a natural cause would have arisen in any case during the night after the accident. Such cases of sudden death really exist. On the other hand, all those who seriously investigate what can be achieved by a strengthening and intensification of the human cognitive powers, in the direction which I tried to indicate during the last few days, know that certain undefined soul forces may be driven to a special climax through some abnormal conditions, through—one can really say—abnormal PATHOLOGICAL conditions. Such cases undoubtedly exist and are critically described in books, so that everyone can test them … whenever the human will (and we shall see how this is possible) becomes transformed and thus attains cognitive power. Since the human will is directed towards the future, it is able, under certain pathological conditions, to have a premonition of events which prepare themselves, of events which will take place in the future out of the whole connections of a person's life. It is quite indifferent whether we call this a foreboding, or whether we give it any other name. But it is a fact that under certain pathological conditions of a lighter nature, which do not clearly appear in the form of illness, a person may foresee, in the form of a picture, that he will, for instance, be thrown by his horse. All precautions will be useless, for he cannot perceive the accompanying circumstances. He has simply had a foreboding, he has simply foreseen an event about to take place.

The critical objection which must be raised by one who really knows the intensification of spiritual conditions, is that in the case of Schleich's patient, the factors which brought about his sudden death on the following night, already existed and that he had had an inner presentiment of his near death. Such a presentiment need not be fully conscious; it can quite well remain in the subconscious depths of the soul. But its influence upon consciousness manifests itself in symptoms which can be designated as nervousness and restlessness. One does all manner of unpremeditated things, and it is quite possible to prick one's finger with an inky nib under the influence of the nervousness arising from such a premonition. The person in question therefore simply knew unconsciously (let me use this paradoxical expression) that he had to die. He did not clothe this in the statement that he had a presentiment of his near death, but he grew nervous, pricked his hand with the nib and clung to the belief that he would have to die through blood poisoning. Thus it was not a case of death through auto suggestion, but the man in question had had a presentiment of his near death and all his actions were determined by this. In that case Schleich simply mistakes cause and effect; there is no auto suggestion, as Schleich supposes, to the effect that a conscious thought exercises so strong a suggestion that death ensued; but death would have arisen in any case and the death presentiment was the cause of the patient's fixed idea.

You see, even such things can be viewed critically, if another, undoubtedly possible thing is borne in mind; namely, that certain subconscious conditions which always exist in the soul, faintly rise to the surface of ordinary consciousness, but masked. In the unconscious depths of the human soul many conscious manifestations have quite a different aspect, and ordinary consciousness simply gives them a different interpretation.

Let us now turn to the other case of Sir Oliver Lodge. Undoubtedly you are all acquainted with the phenomenon known as “second sight.” Through an intensification of the human cognitive forces, it is possible to perceive things which cannot be perceived by the ordinary sound senses; it is possible, as it were, to see things in a way which is not in keeping with the ordinary conditions of environing space, so that this perceptive faculty can, so to speak, transcend space and time. This fact supplies the critical objection which must be raised even against the conscientiousness of an Oliver Lodge. For Sir Oliver Lodge uses this “experimentum crucis” in order to prove that his son's soul and none other must have spoken to him from the Beyond. But those who know the fine and intimate way in which “second sight” works, and that under certain abnormal conditions the intimate character of such a perceptive capacity is really able to overcome space and time (mediums always possess this perceptive faculty, though in the great majority of cases this is not to their advantage) those who are acquainted with this fact, also know that a person endowed with second sight can go to the point of giving a description as in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge's son, a description which may be characterized as follows:

The two photographs arrived in London two or three weeks after the séance. The attention of the people who were present at the séance was turned towards these pictures; that is, to something pertaining to the future. And this fact pertaining to the future could be interpreted by a kind of second sight which the medium possessed.

In that case, it cannot be said that Raymond Lodge's soul shone in supersensibly into the room where Sir Oliver Lodge was making his experiments. Here, we simply have to do with something enacted completely upon the physical plane; that is to say, with a vision of the future surpassing the ordinary perceptive capacity, but which does not justify us to admit that Raymond Lodge's soul manifested itself from Beyond in the séance room.

I mention these two examples and the objections against them, in order to awaken in you a feeling for the conscientiousness and for the critical attitude of anthroposophical spiritual research. The spiritual investigation practiced in Anthroposophy does not at first proceed from any abnormal phenomena (the two last lectures proved this), but from completely normal conditions of human life, which appear in the forces of cognition, of the will and of feeling. Anthroposophical research seeks to develop these forces which enable one to gain a knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, in order to be, as it were, inwardly entitled to this knowledge, and in order to gain the true conscientiousness required in a training which strengthens thought

.Meditation exercises, such as those recently described to you, strengthen our thought to a high degree, so that our way of thinking becomes just as alive and intensive as sensory perception. Then there are the will exercises already mentioned to you, which will be characterized more fully in these lectures. Will exercises require above all an intensive observation of normal life; we must become quite familiar with the conditions in which we normally live.

Meditation exercises, such as those recently described to you, strengthen our thought to a high degree, so that our way of thinking becomes just as alive and intensive as sensory perception. Then there are the will exercises already mentioned to you, which will be characterized more fully in these lectures. Will exercises require above all an intensive observation of normal life; we must become quite familiar with the conditions in which we normally live.

A short time ago, a scientist published a brief resume of the science of Anthroposophy inaugurated by me. This man is in no way a blind believer. He briefly recapitulates what I have been giving you as Anthroposophy, a material which already constitutes a voluminous literature. He recapitulates it, by declaring that he is neither for nor against Anthroposophy, but then he makes a remark which has the semblance of being that of a strong opponent, although the author is neither an opponent nor a follower. I must confess that this strong remark pleased me exceedingly, particularly if seen in the light in which Anthroposophy appears in comparison with modern culture. The writer remarks that in the light of ordinary consciousness many of my statements produce an irresistibly comical effect. I must admit that I like this remark for the following simple reason: When things are mentioned, such as Sir Oliver Lodge's case, or the other case reported by me, people prick their ears, because in a certain way this appeals to their sensationalism and because it differs from what they are accustomed to hear.

This does not in any way seem comical to them. But when an Anthroposophist is obliged to establish a connection with altogether normal and human things, with human memory, or with the ordinary expressions of the human will, and explains that through certain exercises human thought may be intensified and that through self-education the will can be developed so that one changes and is able to penetrate as a transformed human being into the super-sensible world—when an Anthroposophist uses ordinary words designating things which ordinarily surround us, words which people do not like to apply to anything else—then he may produce an “irresistible comical effect”. Many things in Anthroposophy have such an irresistible comical effect on people who only wish to apply words to things in ordinary life. To an anthroposophical spiritual investigator, such views on Anthroposophy frequently appear like a letter which someone is supposed to read, but instead of reading it he begins to make a chemical analysis of the ink with which it is written. I must confess that many statements on Anthroposophy really appear to me as if a person were to analyze the ink used in writing a letter, instead of reading that letter!

The essential point in the foundations of Anthroposophy is to go out from completely normal human experiences, to have a good knowledge of modern scientific truths, of modern ethical life, and to develop these very things more intensively, so that one can penetrate into the higher worlds through an intensification of the cognitive forces which already exist less intensely in ordinary life and in science. One must, of course, have an understanding for these ordinary human experiences. One must bear in mind the ordinary normal experience, which falls out of what one likes to observe carefully. Things must, so to speak, become enigmas and problems. Although they form part of ordinary life, one easily fails to see their enigmatic character. For many people the “irresistible comical effect” begins at this point, where one begins to say: The questions connected with the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, these above all must be looked upon as enigmas.

During our life, we constantly change over from the condition of waking to that of sleeping, but we do not take much notice of this pendulum of life, swaying between the conditions of waking and sleeping. The strangest theories have been advanced in this connection. I might talk for a long time, were I to mention some of these theories relating to the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. But let me mention only one of these theories, the most well-known and usual one; namely, that one simply takes for granted that when the human being is awake he gets tired and as a result goes to sleep, and that sleep in its turn counter-balances fatigue. Sleep (this can be described in one or the other way, more or less materialistically) eliminates the cause of fatigue.

I would like to know if radical upholders of this theory can really say that fatigue is the cause of sleep; for instance, when they observe a person who really has no cause whatever for getting tired during the day—let us say, a fat gentleman living on private means, who goes to a more solid concert or to a lecture, not late in the evening, but in the afternoon, and who falls asleep not after the first five minutes, but after two minutes!

These things at first may really present a slightly comical aspect, but if they are viewed from every side, their earnest enigmatic character must stand before our souls. Those who believe that the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping can be studied with the aid of the ordinary scientific methods applied today, will never reach a satisfactory solution of this problem. Even such completely normal questions of life cannot be approached with the ordinary cognitive forces, but with a thinking intensified by meditation, concentration and other soul exercises described in my book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and in my “Outline of Occult Science,” and also with transformed forces of the will.

What is attained when we try to intensify thought by earnest meditation? I already explained to you that meditation must begin by intensifying thought to such an extent that it becomes a transformed memory. Our ordinary memory contains inner pictures which reproduce the experiences of our ordinary earthly life since our birth. Through memory, the picture of some real event stands before the soul, and that our soul life is soundly connected with the external world in which we live, is guaranteed by the fact that we do not somehow mix up things fantastically, but that our memory pictures indicate things which really existed.

We must therefore come to the point of placing before our soul, in the imaginative understanding described in the last few days, pictures which resemble our ordinary memory pictures. These pictures simply arise through the fact that we place them into our consciousness, and by filling consciousness with an ever greater amount of meditative representations we strengthen the soul capacity of thinking in the same way in which a muscle is ordinarily strengthened by exercise. We must reach the point of intensifying thinking to such an extent that it can live within its own content, in the same way in which we ordinarily live within our sense experiences through our senses.

When such exercises have been made for a sufficiently long time, when we really attain to such a living way of thinking, then something develops which may be designated as a plastic, form-giving, morphological way of thinking. Our thinking then contains a living essence; it has a living content which can ordinarily only be found in sense perception. In that case we begin to notice something new: What modern natural science brings to the fore, is a source of regret to many; it constitutes materialism. But Anthroposophy, which aims through its methods to penetrate into the super-sensible worlds, must in a certain sphere become thoroughly “materialistic,” stimulated in the right way by modern science.

This is the case if we learn to strengthen our thinking in the right way, if we can have before us, in imaginative thought, images which are just as alive as sense perceptions and with which we deal just as freely as with sensory perceptions. When we perceive something through our senses we know unmistakably that we see red or hear the note C sharp and that these are impressions which come to us from the external world, not impressions which rise out of our own soul. In the same way we know through imaginative thinking that the images which rise up before us are not empty phantasms produced by the soul, but that they are a living essence within, resembling sensory perception.

When we inwardly experience this emancipation from the body, this freedom which also exists in sense perception, we also know what constitutes memory in ordinary life. When we remember something, we always plunge into our physical body; every memory thought is connected with a parallel physical or at least etheric bodily process. We learn to know the material importance of that life which constitutes the ordinary life of memory. We then no longer ascribe the contents of memory to the independent soul, as does Bergson, the French thinker, but we know that in the ordinary memory process the soul simply dives into the body and that the body is the instrument which conjures up our memories. Now we know that only by IMAGINATION we reach the stage of being able to think independently of the body, of being able to think in ordinary life only with the soul, which we never do otherwise. In ordinary life we perceive through our senses, we abstract our thoughts from the sensory perception and retain them in our memory. But this process of retaining the thoughts in memory implies that we dive down into our body.

Imaginative knowledge alone shows us the true process of memory and that of sensory perception. Imaginative knowledge shows us what it means to live in free thoughts, emancipated from the body. It also shows us what it means to dive down into the physical organism with our thoughts, when we remember something. Even as we learn to know these things through an intensification of thinking, through an enhancement and strengthening of thought by meditation, so we may learn to know through the WILL how to pass through a kind of self-training which leads to similar results.

In ordinary life, the will only acquires a certain value when it passes over to external action; otherwise it remains mere desire, even though we may cherish the highest ideal, the most beautiful ideals, even though we may be true idealists. The highest ideals will remain mere desires, if we are not able to take hold of the external physical reality.

What characterizes a DESIRE, a WISH? It has the peculiar quality of being abstracted and withdrawn from the world of reality. Symbolically one might say: When we only have desires, this is like retracing the feelers of the soul. We then live completely within our own being, within the soul element. But we also know that desires are, to begin with, tinged by the human temperaments. A melancholic person will have desires which differ from those of a sanguine person. The physical foundation of desires could soon be discovered by those who investigate these matters conscientiously with the aid of natural-scientific methods. The etheric foundation of desires can therefore be seen in the temperament, but their physical conditions can be perceived in the special composition of the blood or in other qualities of the bodily constitution.

This calls for that critical attitude mentioned at the beginning of my lecture; such a critical attitude shatters, I might say, many a pleasant dream. Allow me to give you a few indications which show how such peasant dreams can vanish.

I certainly do not mean to be irreverent, nor do I destroy any ideal through lack of reverence, for I have a deep feeling for all the beauty contained, for instance, in the mysticism of St. Theresa or of St. John of the Cross. Do not think that I fall back behind anyone in admiring all the beauty contained in such mystical expressions. But those who have some experience of the special way in which, for instance, St. Theresa or St. John of the Cross produced their visions, know to what extent human desires have a share in these visions. They know that desires which live in the soul's depths have a share particularly in mystical experiences, and these desires may lead a spiritual investigator to study the bodily constitution of these mystics. Nothing is desecrated when a spiritual investigator draws attention to such things, when he indicates that in certain organs he discovers an inner state of excitement, that the nerves exercise a different influence on certain organs, thus producing certain effects in the soul, which may even take on the beautiful aspect of the visions described by St. John of the Cross or by St. Theresa, or by other mystics of that type. We are far more on the right track if we seek the foundation of such visions, which are so beautiful and poetic in the case of St. Theresa and of St. John of the Cross, in certain bodily conditions. This leads us far more on to the right track than if we seek some nebulous mystery as an explanation for these visions.

As stated, I do not wish to pull to pieces something which I revere as much as any other person in this room, but the truth must be shown, and also the critical attitude derived from an anthroposophical foundation. It must be shown that an anthroposophist above all should not fall a prey to illusions. To begin with, he should be free from illusion also in regard to human desires which are rooted in the human organism, desires rooted in a part of the physical human organism which flares up, comes, so to speak to a boiling point, if I may use this expression, and which leads to the most beautiful visions.

A person who wishes to become a spiritual investigator in the anthroposophical meaning, should not only strengthen his thinking through meditation, but he should also transform his desires through self-training.

This can be done by taking in hand systematically that which otherwise takes place as if of its own accord. Let us honestly admit that during our ordinary life we allow events to guide us far more than we ourselves guide the course of our life. In ordinary life this or that thing may influence us, and if we look back ten years into our past earthly existence, we find that the external conditions and the people whom we met, unfolded within us a side of our character which now presents a different aspect from what it was like ten years ago.

A person who earnestly strives to become an anthroposophical investigator must, in this connection, also make exercises which influence the will. The ordinary will in life acquires a meaning when directed towards external actions. But an anthroposophical spiritual investigator must apply the impulses of the will to his own development, to his own life. He should be able to pursue the following aim: “In regard to this or that expression of life, you must change, you must become different from what you were.” Though it may seem paradoxical, it is a great help if we begin to change something within us through our own initiative, through our own impulse, if we change some strongly-rooted habit, or even a small trifle. I repeat that it can be something quite insignificant; for instance, one's handwriting. If someone really strives with an iron will to change his handwriting, the application of energy required for the transformation of a habit may be compared with the gymnastic exercises for the strengthening of a muscle. By growing stronger and by being applied inwardly instead of outwardly, the will begins to exercise certain influences upon the human being. The transformations in the external world once produced by the effects of the will, now become transformations within human nature.

If we do exercises of the will, as described in detail in anthroposophical books, we reach the point of transforming our life of desires, so that these become emancipated from the human organization, even as our thinking emancipates itself from the body through meditation.

During the moments in which we live in anthroposophical research, we are no longer in a condition which may be described by saying that the wish is father of the thought. When we apply this self-training and these pedagogical impulses at a maturer age, our wishes and desires become an inner power which unites with the emancipated thinking. This leads us to a real perception of the true nature of the will impulses in ordinary life, and to a perception of the true nature of thoughts in ordinary life. Even as we ordinarily perceive red or blue, or hear C sharp or C, so we now perceive thoughts as realities; we learn to know the will impulses objectively; that is to say, separated from our own being.

In this way we reach the point of having a right judgment of the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. Only by rendering thought objective through exercise, as objective as a sense perception, so that we are no longer connected with our body as in the case of a remembered thought, only with this thinking developed in free meditation, can the act of falling asleep be rightly grasped and perceived.

A person who seeks to gain insight into the normal act of falling asleep, with the aid of the ordinary cognitive forces, may set up one hypothesis after the other, but he will not be able to recognize the true nature of sleep.

This intensified thinking which we acquire, and on the other hand our transformed desires, are those which show us that when we fall asleep we can, in a certain way, still follow the moment in which sleep takes hold of us; we look, as it were, upon the act of falling asleep and we learn to know that when we go to sleep we do not simply have before us a changed bodily condition, but that we really slip out of our body with our independent soul life; we go out of our body and we leave something behind; namely, our thoughts.

We can leave our thoughts behind consciously, when we fall asleep, only because our thinking has been intensified. The thoughts remain behind with the body and fill it in the shape of formative forces. We then notice that we abandoned our body only with our feeling and with our will. But by perceiving with what part of the soul we leave the body, we obtain at the same time an objective certainty that we have an independent soul essence and that we go out of the body with this independent soul essence.

Now we know that what we leave behind on the bed on falling asleep, is not only something which can be investigated by physiology, anatomy, and biology, but that it is permeated by the woof of thoughts. This woof of our thoughts must first be made strong enough, so that we can abandon it consciously, in the same way in which we consciously turn our face away from color and in the same way in which we turn away from a perception. Through this strengthened thought we know that we leave behind on the bed our physical body and a body of forces containing thoughts which act like forces; we leave these bodies behind so that they may exist independently between falling asleep and waking up.

These thoughts, these morphological thoughts described to you in recent lectures [Lectures given on the 25^th and 26^th of November, 1921.] exist in our ordinary consciousness only as reflected images. They, too, have a reality, and with this reality they fill out our physical body as a special etheric body.

Now we know that when we fall asleep we abandon our sensory body and our thought body. (I might also say, the physical body and the etheric body, or the physical body and the body of formative forces. We abandon these bodies with our will and with our feeling. In ordinary life our constitution does not enable our consciousness to remain clear; it is not strong enough to maintain consciousness unless it is filled out by thoughts. Consciousness, such as we have it in ordinary life and in ordinary science, must unite with the body and experience within the body the thoughts of the body; only then it is fully conscious. But when the soul goes out of the body as mere feeling and will, we ordinarily become unconscious.

A person who attains to the imaginative thinking mentioned in these days, experiences the moment of falling asleep consciously, and he can produce conditions which resemble ordinary sleep, except that they are not unconscious, but that forces are at work within him and that he can really experience the organism of feeling and of the will; that is to say, he really experiences that part of his being which can emancipate itself from the body.

If we thus learn to know the moment of falling asleep, we also learn to know the moment of waking up. We now learn to judge that the moment of waking up really consists of two parts: Our attitude on waking up is the same as when a sense impression is produced. Whenever we wake up, something must stimulate the soul. This need only be our own body, which has slept long enough and which produces this stimulus in its changed condition. But even as there is a stimulus in every sensory impression, so there is always a stimulus when we wake up, and this stimulus works upon our feeling, which left the body when we fell asleep. Even as the eyes and the ears perceive colors and sounds, so the emancipated soul now perceives through feeling something which is outside; the moment of waking up is a perception through feeling; we take hold of the body when we wake up. The independent will takes hold of the physical organism in the same way in which we ordinarily move an arm or a leg. Waking up really consists of these two acts.

In regard to falling asleep and waking up, we now learned to know the alternating connection between the independent soul which leaves the body every night with its feeling and with its will, and the conditions in which the soul lives from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, when it is united with the body. Anthroposophical investigation is therefore based upon a strengthening of the capacities of thinking and of the will, so that we are able to observe and really perceive things which we ordinarily cannot perceive. In this way we are able to perceive the alternating conditions of sleeping and waking, and we are then capable of passing on to something else.

If we continue more and more in the exercises described in these days and indicated in detail in the above mentioned books, we come to the point that we do not always fall asleep when we leave the body, but that we can at will draw out of the body our feeling and our will and really look back upon the body. Then the human body is as objective as a desk or a table in ordinary life. We learn to know a thing only because we are no longer connected with it, no longer penetrated by it subjectively, because it stands before us as an object.

The object which stands before us when we go out of the body with the will and with the feeling is above all the physical body. Tomorrow we shall see that this perception outside the body gives us a new aspect of man's physical being. We perceive, above all, the body of formative forces, consisting of a woof of thoughts, but active thoughts. We look back upon it as if it were a mirror. And then we are confronted by the strange fact that whereas formerly we were subjectively or personally connected with our thoughts, we now face this world of thoughts as if it were a photographic plate; in looking back upon our body our thoughts stand before us like a photographic plate. This is the same as the miniature reflection of the world which we ordinarily have in our eye. Even as the eye is an organ of sight through the fact that it can reproduce the world within itself, so the etheric and the physical body which remained behind, become a reflecting apparatus, where something becomes reflected soul-spiritually, whereas the eye only gives us a physical reflection of something outside. By leaving our thoughts behind in the physical body, we see through this mirror not only the woof of thoughts, but also the world.

The course of soul-spiritual events can therefore be described in detail, when the cognitive forces are intensified through meditation and a self-training of the will, in order to gain knowledge of the super-sensible worlds. Such a training enables us to develop certain conditions in which we are outside our body, but which do not resemble sleep; they constitute something which is indicated in my books as the continuity of consciousness. In higher knowledge we really go out of the body with our emancipated soul being. We can recognize that we have left the body through the fact that the mirror of thoughts is now no longer within us, but outside. We go out of the body, yet we remain completely conscious, as already explained.

We are able to return into the body whenever we like; we do not fall a prey to hallucinations or visions, but we can follow the whole process with mathematical precision. Since the whole process can be observed in this way, we are also able to judge the ordinary events of earthly life when we return into the body. Now we know what it is like to dive down into the body with the emancipated soul. We do not only learn to know the act of falling asleep, when we abandon the body, but now we also learn to return at will into our body with the emancipated soul.

It leaves a special impression upon us when we once experience this emancipated soul and then dive down again into the body, so that the soul becomes imprisoned by the body. The soul-spiritual world which was round about us when we were outside the body, now ceases to exist for us. We feel as if this world had vanished and that the body absorbs us as we dive into it. We also learn to know what it is like to abandon the body; we see how the thoughts go away from us, for they remain with the body, and how we abandon the body with the feeling and willing part of our soul. But in abandoning our body we feel at the same time that the spiritual world begins to rise up before us.

What knowledge have we gained? Through the processes of waking up and of falling sleep, we learned to know birth and death. We experienced how the human being unconsciously abandons his physical and etheric organism with his feeling and with his will and how he returns into the body when he wakes up in the morning.

When we have made the above-mentioned exercises, we grow conscious where formerly we were unconscious, upon leaving our body. In full consciousness we now experience in advance a process which takes place when we die. And when we dive down into our physical body on returning from the spiritual world, when the thoughts outside vanish and once more appear as mere images, asserting themselves within the personality as something which is not real, then we learn to know the process of birth.

Whereas the ordinary scientific methods content themselves with the ordinary understanding, with ordinary thoughts which are applied to external observations and experiments that remain connected with us, anthroposophical investigation transforms the personality by rendering thought objective and by using the body as an encompassing sense organ. I might say that the body becomes one large eye. This eye, however, is outside and it is simultaneously a photographic plate.

The world in which we penetrate through spiritual investigation, the soul-spiritual world, now reflects itself in the external world as thought. An insight into completely normal processes, such as sleeping and waking, or birth and death, now enables us to attain a vision of the soul world; we perceive everything that pertains to the soul. Now our own experience enables us to distinguish whether the process which Professor Schleich designates as death through auto-suggestion, or the “second sight” described by Sir Oliver Lodge, are mere unconscious representations, or not.

We can now recognize the attitude of a person who is not a conscious spiritual investigator, but whose soul is pushed out of the body by some abnormal conditions. This may be due to some illness of the physical body. Let us suppose that there is a lesion in an organ; this alone may suffice that the soul-spiritual being of a person not yet capable of independent spiritual vision is pushed out of the physical body, not because he falls asleep, but owing to a pathological condition of the body, so that he now obtains an imperfect perception of things which a spiritual investigator perceives consciously and methodically.

We need not deny the truth of abnormal observations which interest those people who wish to go beyond the sphere of ordinary, trivial facts. But we can look upon such abnormal observations critically, and such a critical attitude is due to the fact that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy is not the caricature which many people suppose it to be, but by awakening special spiritual forces and by fully recognizing the scientific conscientious method acquired by humanity in the course of the past centuries, it endeavors to rise up to the super-sensible worlds. Since the human being is connected with the super-sensible worlds with the innermost, immortal kernel of his being, spiritual investigation alone can recognize man's mortal and immortal essence. This will be explained more fully in tomorrow's lecture.

Through the fact that the human being dives down into his eternal part, that he does not only build up an anthropology transmitting a knowledge which can only be gained through the physical body, but through the fact that he builds up an Anthroposophy, transmitting a knowledge which can be obtained through the soul and spirit as independent parts, through this fact the human being really learns to know the world in its true aspect.

The aim of my next two lectures will be to describe the true being of man, also his immortal, everlasting being, and the true aspect of the universe, for the standpoint indicated today.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

“Ladies and Gentlemen, it is no longer necessary to introduce to you the lecturer of this evening: Dr. Rudolf Steiner! He has been in our town for a whole week and has expounded with singular energy and great oratory skill his views on important areas of human life in a number of public lectures.

Today, following the invitation of our State Economic Society, he wants to present to us the social views which he already developed in l9l9. He developed them, as you know, in the well-known book `The Essentials of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and the Future'.

I have the honour to welcome Dr. Steiner in our midst, and I thank you for coming here to introduce us to the thoughts of your social views. I can assure you, that here in Norwaytoo there are many who are following your social strivings with great interest in a time when such dark threatening clouds are on the social horizon.

And perhaps more than in an earlier time of world history it is now necessary that all good forces unite to solve the ever more appearing social questions. And every serious proposal, every plan, every spiritual effort which is put before us in this direction, deserves an unprejudiced and thorough investigation. We look forward to hearing how you yourself will develop your own views about the three-folding of the economic life, about that which you regard as the cardinal economic question of our time. I now have the honour of giving you the floor.”

First of all I wish to thank the honourable chairman for his warm words and ask you above all to note what I assure you with equal warmth, that it gives me deep satisfaction to be allowed to expound here some aspects of the social endeavours to which I have devoted a great deal of my time. But of course I have to apologize immediately, because to speak about the social question to-day is extremely difficult. In a short lecture one can actually only give a few aspects and perhaps indications, and I ask you to make allowance for this. Perhaps there could be the assumption that someone who in the main devotes himself to the popularisation and spreading of anthroposophical spiritual science could only talk of otherworldliness, maybe of phantasies or even utopia when he treads on social ground. But just what I have learnt from anthroposophical thinking in regard to the social question differs from much which at present is talked of in this direction, in that it wants to engage with practical life and actually doesn't just want to discuss social theories.

I myself have during a number of decades gained from various sources the view about the social question of which I would like to share some aspects, by direct observation of social life. From this I have gained the view that our social question and in particular the economic question is to-day actually a general human one. It announces itself when one studies it in real life, not in theory, as a question which throughout doesn't actually consist of economic aspects, but erupts in such a volcanic way in the present from purely human causes. And it will only be possible to tackle this question in a practical way when one seeks the solution—and of course there can only be the question of an attempt at a partial solution—from a purely human aspect. And here I must characterize something quite different as the central economic question from what one would normally expect. Indeed, I shall not even be able - as life is richer than theories and ideas—somehow to answer this central economic question in a short sentence, but I shall be able to let it appear as something that goes like a thread through my observations of to-day. But if I were after all to mention in the beginning a very abstract view, it is this, that we live in a time when man to a great extent alienates himself from life and from economic life in particular by what he thinks and what he makes his principles. This view has proved itself especially by working amongst the proletarian workers as teacher in the most varied fields of knowledge and instruction in the field of history and the field of economic questions. I could especially get to know the modern proletariat in their lives through the fact that I was privileged to conduct the teaching and exercises with the workers in free conversation throughout many years. There one gets to know how the people think, how they feel. And when one knows that especially the economic question depends on introducing the proletariat again to the work in a way relating to the economic needs of humanity, then one will initially be obliged to look at the economic questions from the point of view of this human side. And there it became clear to me that if one tries to create an interest within the proletariat to-day for this or that, then the actual concrete economic questions, the comprehension of really practical economic life, actually awakens no interest in them. The people have no interest in concrete individual economic questions. To-day there lives in the proletariat—and in international life millions of human beings belong to this proletariat of which I speak—only an economic abstract theory, an abstract theory however which itself constitutes the content of life in this proletariat. The proletarian worker is in his heart actually very aloof towards his work, towards the actual content of his work. He does not care about what work he does. He is only interested in how he is treated in his firm, and when he speaks about this treatment it is still from quite general abstract points of view. He is interested in the relation of his wages to the value of the product in the production of which he partakes, while the quality of his products is absolutely beyond the scope of his interests. I have tried, especially in the teaching of workers, to create an interest in concrete branches of manufacture and industries by introducing history and natural science. But all this is something which does not interest the worker as such. He is interested in the situation of the classes, the class struggle, he is interested in that—which I don't need to characterize for you here—which he calls the added value. He is interested in the development of the economic life in as much as he ascribes to it the reason for all human historic life, and he actually speaks of a theoretical region which exists totally above that in which he is involved from morning till evening and wants to form the reality from this. And one may say: What he accepts as his theory about the economic life again results from a theoretical way of looking at things. Most proletarians to-day are, as you will know, more or less modified of original Marxists, that means followers of a theory which actually doesn't concern itself with the conditions of economic life as such, but works towards the direction which I have just described.

This one gets to know within wide circles of the proletariat through the practical association with this proletariat, by working amongst the proletariat. But that is in a certain sense only the reflection of an ever increasing distancing of the purely human interests from the interests of practical life during the last centuries. One would like to say: The fact that our economic life has become more complicated has caused a kind of stupor, so that one can no longer dive down into the single complicated areas of economic life with that which one ethically accepts as the good and with that which one accepts as the just. But if one does not speak out of practical life but out of general abstract principles, one hardly touches on that which comprises the work of the day, the tasks of the day, with that which one always asserts as demands, as principles.

Just as I could share this with you out of my own life experience, so it can also be demonstrated by various examples from historical life. I would like to tell you a grotesque example for that which I want to say. It was 1884 when Bismarck said in the German parliament (Deutsche Reichstag) wanting to establish a foundation for his further handling of the core economic question, that he acknowledges the right to work of every human being. Then he instructed the delegates thus: Let the community give to every healthy human being the work which sustains him, make sure that those who are sick or weak are cared for by the community, that the aged are cared for, and you can be sure that the proletariat will leave its proletarian leaders, that the social democratic theories which are being promulgated will find no followers.—Now, that was spoken by Bismarck, who though he admitted in his memoirs that he had had republican sympathies in his youth, but whom you will surely acknowledge as a monarchist, whom you would surely not expect to have applauded it, if at a proletarian meeting the international social democracy had been cheered.

I would like to draw your attention to another personality who stated the same with almost the identical words, who however stood with his whole disposition, his whole human feeling on another general human standpoint. That is Robespierre. Robespierre said when he wrote his “human rights” in1793 almost the same, no, I want to say exactly the same as what Bismarck said in the German Reichstag in 1884: It is the obligation of the community to provide work for every healthy human being, to look after the sick and feeble, to care for the aged when they can no longer work.

The same sentences from Robespierre, from Bismarck, definitely from quite different human perspectives. And now comes the third thing which is also very interesting: Bismarck, when voicing his “Robespierre words”, which he definitely hadn't learnt from Robespierre, argued that these demands were already part of the Prussian state rights since 1794. Now, one may surely not conclude from this that the Prussian state legislation one year after Robespierre had written his “human rights” adopted these human rights in its code of law. And surely the world will not think that the Prussian state had wanted to realize Robespierre's ideas according to its state laws for almost a hundred years when Bismarck in 1884 again stated these demands. There the question arises in view of the historical facts: How is it that two such different people as Robespierre and Bismarck can say the exact same words and that without a doubt both imagine that the social milieu which they want to create with this is a totally different one?

I cannot see this in any other way than that we to-day, when we speak in such strong abstractions about the concrete questions of life which during the recent centuries has become more complicated, actually all—Bismarck from the right, from the extreme right, Robespierre from the extreme left—harmonize in relation to the general principles. In the general principles we all agree. But in life we immediately fall into extreme disharmony, just because our general principles are far removed from that which we have to do in particular all day long. Today we have no possibility, just when it comes to practical life, to really accomplish in particular what we think in general. And the most abstract is that, which in the proletarian theory is contained to-day as economic demand, for the reasons which I have tried to characterize.

This is how things are to-day. And one has to say: Through the whole development of recent times this state of affairs has come about. We see how the section of economic life which we can call the production process has become more and more manifold through the complexity of technical life. And when I want to characterize it with a word which has already become a cliché—but one has to use such words—we see that the production life has become ever more collective.

After all, what can an individual accomplish within our social organism in the life of production? He is connected everywhere with that which has to be done in community with others. Our way of production has become so complicated that the individual is caught up as in a big production mechanism. The production life has become collective. That is just what appeals to the proletarian and he imagines in his fatalistic economic view that the collectivism will become still stronger and stronger, that the branches of production will amalgamate and that the time will come when the international proletariat will be able to take over the production themselves. That is what the proletarian is waiting for. So he gives himself over to the great delusion that the collectivism of production is a natural necessity—for he experiences the economic necessity almost as a natural necessity—and that this collectivism must be further established. Above all, that the proletarian is ordained to then occupy the chairs on which to-day's producers are sitting and that that, which will have become collective, will now be administered collectively. How strongly the proletariat believe in such an idea out of their economic interest, we can see from the sad results of the economic experiment in the East, for there, so to say, it was tried to organize the economic life in this way, albeit not as the proletarian theorists had dreamed but out of the military circumstances. One can already see to-day and one will see it more and more: The experiment will—quite apart from its ethical or other values, or from the sympathies or antipathies that one can have for it—by its own inner destruction forces miserably fail and bring unimaginable disaster to humanity.

Over against the life of production stands the life of consumption. But the life of consumption can never become collective by itself. In consumption the individual actually by natural necessity stands as an individuality. From the personality of the human being, from the human individual, the needs of the total consumption arise. Therefore beside the collectivism of the production the individualism of consumption remained. And starker and starker became the abyss, deeper and deeper became this abyss between the production aiming for collectivism and the ever more demanding just by contrast ever more demanding interest of consumption. For one who can look through to-day's life with unprejudiced eyes it is now no abstraction, but for him the terrible disharmonies into which we are placed are founded on the wrong relationship which has been established to-day between the impulses of production and the needs of consumption by what has been characterized.

To be sure, one can only have an idea of the whole misery which in this regard troubles the deepest feelings of people, if one has for decades observed, not through study but through practical life, that which has caused this disharmony in the various areas of life. And now truly not through any principles, not by theoretical considerations, but out of these life experiences, that has emerged which I put down in my book “Essentials of the social question”. Nothing was further from my intention than trying to somehow find an utopian solution for the social question from this life experience. However I had to experience that contemporary thinking of people spontaneously leans towards the utopian side. Of course I had to condense that which I had come to out of the great manifoldness of life, which I would have preferred to discuss by giving single concrete examples. I had to condense it into general sentences which in turn are condensed in the term “Threefolding of the social organism”. But what these words signify, that had at least to be explained by some indications. One had to say how one imagines that these things should be handled. That is why I have given some examples how the development of capitalism should proceed, how for instance the labour question could be regulated and so on. There I have tried to give concrete particular indications. Well, I have attended many discussions about these “Essentials of the social question” and I have always found that people in their utopian opinion of to-day ask: Now how will this or that be then in future? They referred to the indications which I have given about specific things but which I never meant to be anything but examples. In real life one can demonstrate something that one is doing, that one arranges to the best of one's knowledge, but which obviously one could also do differently. Reality is not like this that a single theory fits it. Of course one could also do everything differently. But the utopian wants everything characterized to the last detail. And in this way the “Essentials of the social question” have often been understood by others in an utopian sense. They have often been transformed into utopia, whereas they were not meant in the least as utopia but have resulted from the observation of that which emerged from the process of production as collectivism, from the observation of how for the production there is a certain necessity to flow into this collectivism, but how on the other hand all strength of production depends on the abilities of the human individual.

In this way by observing modern production, the eye of the soul could see with terrible intensity that actually the basic impulse of all production, the personal ability, was being absorbed by the collectivism which had been caused by the economic forces themselves and which continued to be caused by them. One realized on the one hand the tendency of the economic life and on the other hand the equally valid demand to let the individual strength of the single human being assert itself particularly just within the economic life. And one has to ponder about the social organism on how this basic demand of economic progress—the nurturing of individual abilities—can be safeguarded in the purely through technical circumstances ever more complicated processes of production. It is this which on the one hand stands so vividly before one's soul: The real economic process and the necessary demands on the economic life so that it may prosper.

On the other hand that which we call the present social question doesn't actually arise out of the interests of production. When collectivism is sought for in the realm of production, then one finds this actually in the technical possibilities of economic life, in the technical necessities, as well. What one usually calls the social question is actually asked totally by interests of consumption, which again are based totally on the human individuality. And the strange fact emerges that although seemingly something else is taking place—the call for social reform resounds through the world purely from interests of consumption. One can also see this when one practically follows up the discussions and life. I have seen this during the lectures I started giving in April 1919 and which were given again and again, and in the discussions following them, how unsympathetic those who are active as producers or entrepreneurs in practical economic life are towards the discussion of that which one calls the social question in the sense of how it is preached out of the interests of consumption.

On the other hand one sees how actually everywhere where the call for socialism appears, only the interest of consumption is focused on. So that here just in the ideals of socialism the will impulse of individualism is active. In actual fact, all those who are socialist strive towards socialism out of purely individual emotions. And the striving for socialism is actually only a theory which floats above that which are the individual emotions. But on the other hand, by a serious observation of that which has developed more and more in our economic life, again for centuries, the whole full meaning of that emerges which is popularly called `sharing of work' in national economy, in the teaching of economy.

I am convinced that many clever things have been written and said about this sharing of work, but I don't believe that it has already been thought through to its final consequence in its full significance for the practical economic life. The reason why I don't believe this is because one would then have to realize that actually it follows from the principle of labour sharing that nobody can produce anything for himself in a social organism in which there is full sharing of work—and I am purposely saying “can produce”. Even to-day we still see the last remnants of subsistence farming, especially looking at the small farms. There we see how he who produces retains what he and his family need. And what does it bring about that he can still be a supplier of his own needs? It brings about that he produces in quite a wrong way within the social organism which for the rest is based on labour sharing. Everyone who to-day makes a coat for himself or who supplies himself with his own food grown on his own land, actually sustains himself too expensively, because as there is labour sharing, every product will be cheaper than it can be when one produces it for oneself. One only has to ponder on this fact and one will have to realize as its final consequence that to-day nobody can produce in a way that his work can flow into the production product, into the product. And yet there is the strange fact that Karl Marx for instance treats the product as a crystallized piece of labour. But to-day this is not in the least the case. The product to-day is in relation to its value—and that is all that matters in economic life—least of all determined by labour. It is determined by its usefulness that is its consumption interests, by the usefulness with which it exists within the social organism that depends on labour sharing.

All this asks of us the great questions of the present time in the economic realm. And from these questions it became clear to me that at to-days' time of human development we stand before the necessity to form the social organism in such a way that it more and more shows its three inherent parts. And as one of these three parts I have initially to recognize the spiritual life, which mainly rests upon the human abilities. When speaking of the three-folding of the social organism I do not only include the more or less abstract life of thought or the religious life in the spiritual realm, but I include everything which depends on human spiritual or physical abilities. I have to say this explicitly, otherwise one could completely misunderstand the demarcation of the spiritual realm within the three-fold social organism. The one also who only works with his hands needs a certain skill for this work, he needs various other things as well, which in this regard does not let the individual appear as a member of pure economic life but as a member of the spiritual realm.

The other realm of the social organism is that of pure economics. In pure economics one is only concerned with production, consumption and circulation between production and consumption. But this means nothing else than that in pure economic life one is only concerned with the circulation of the produced goods which, as they are circulating, become merchandise. One is concerned with the circulation of merchandise. An item which within the social organism, because it is needed, becomes of a certain value which is reflected in its price, such an item becomes, in the sense I must regard it, merchandise.

But now the following transpires: Of course I can only make indications of the things which I want to assign to certain realms, otherwise this lecture would become far too long. It now appears that all that which is merchandise can have a real objective value not only in connection with the economic life but with the whole of social life. Simply by that which a product means within the life of consumption it attains a certain value which definitely has an objective significance. I now must explain what I mean by “objective significance”. By “objective significance” I don't mean that one could immediately determine the value of a product of which I am now speaking through statistics or such like. For the circumstances by which a product gets its value are much too complicated, too manifold. But apart from that which one can immediately know about it, apart from our perception, every product has a specific value. When a product has a certain price in the market place, this price can be too high or too low in relation to its real objective value or it can coincide with it. But as irrelevant as the price is which appears to us outwardly because it can be falsified by some other circumstances, so true it is on the other hand that one could ascertain the objective value of a product if one could ascertain all the thousands of single conditions by which it is produced and consumed. From this it is clear that that which is merchandise has a very special relationship to economic life. For what I now call the objective economic value can only be applied to merchandise. It cannot be applied to anything else which to-day has a similar relationship to our economic life as merchandise has. For one cannot apply it to land or to capital.

I don't want to be misunderstood. For instance you will never hear characterizations of capitalism from me as one nowadays hears them so often and which come from all sorts of clichés. It is obvious that one does not have to elaborate on the fact that in to-day's economic life nothing can be achieved without capital and that polemics against capitalism is economically amateurish. So it is not that which one can nowadays hear so often which I now have to say about capital and about land, but yet something else. If one can state for every product that its price is above or below a mean which admittedly cannot be immediately determined but which is objectively present and which alone is healthy, one cannot apply it to that which is nowadays treated like merchandise: land. The price of land, the value of land today is subject to what one can call human speculation, what one can call anything but social impulses. There is no objectivity in the determination of the price or value of land in an economic sense. That is so because a product once it exists—never mind whether it is good or bad, if it is good it is useful, if it is bad then it is not useful—can by itself determine its objective value by the manner and intensity in which it is needed.

That cannot be said of land and cannot be said of capital. In the case of land and capital the manner how it is productive, how it is positioned within the whole social and economic structure is absolutely determined by human capabilities. They are never something finite. If I have to manage land I can only manage it according to my capabilities and because of this its value is variable. The same goes for capital that I have to administer. Someone who practically studies this fact in its full significance will have to say: This radical difference between merchandise on the one hand and land and capital on the other hand definitely exists. And from this can be deduced that certain symptoms which appear in our economic life and which clearly seem to us unhealthy symptoms of the social organism, must be thought of in some connection with that which is caused in economic life by the fact that in practice one treats with the same money, that is with the same appreciation of value that which in actual fact cannot be compared. In other words one throws together and indirectly through money exchanges with one another, brings to economic interaction what is quite different in its intrinsic nature and therefore would have to be treated differently in economic life.

And when one further studies practically how the same treatment, that is the payment with the same money for merchandise, for consumables, as for land and capital—which has actually also become an item of commerce as anyone knows who is familiar with economic life—has entered our social organism, and when one studies the historical development of humanity, one can see that to-day three realms of life which come from totally different origins and only have a connection in social life through the individual human being, are working together in our social organism in a way which is not organic. That is first of all the spiritual realm, the realm of human capabilities which man brings with him to the earth from spiritual realms, which comprise his talents, which comprises that which with his talents he can learn, which are very much something individual and which are developed more intensely the more the single human individuality can assert himself in social life. One may be a materialist or whatever, one will have to admit: What is achieved in this realm the human being brings into this world through his birth. It is something which depends on the single individuality of the human being if it is to prosper, from the physical skill of the craftsman to the highest expressions and revelations of the faculty of invention.

Something else holds good in the realm of economic life. I want to explain what I want to say about this by a fact. You all know that at a certain time during the 19^th century here and there the ideal of a universal gold currency arose. If one follows up on what was said by practical economists, by economic theorists, by parliamentarians during the time when here and there, there was a striving for the gold currency—and I say this definitely without irony—it is very clever. One is often very taken by the sense that was spoken and written in parliaments, chambers of commerce and other associations about the gold currency and its blessings for economic life. One of the things which was said and what especially the most prominent people, at least many of the most prominent people emphasized, was that the gold currency would result in the blossoming of the economically beneficial free trade everywhere., that the economically harmful political boundaries would lose their economic significance. And the reasons, the arguments which were quoted for such assertions were very clever. And what has happened in reality? In reality it has happened that just in the areas where one had expected that the economic boundaries would fall because of the gold currency, they were after all to be found necessary or at least have been declared necessary by many. From economic life the opposite emerged from that which from theoretical considerations was predicted precisely by the cleverest people.

This is a very important historical fact which happened not so long ago and from which one should draw the necessary consequences. And what are these necessary consequences? It is these which one always finds when one looks at the real practical economic life: that in the realm of actual economic life, which consists of production, circulation and consumption of goods—let me say this paradox, I believe it to be the truth which really is revealed to the unprejudiced observer—the cleverness of the individual can be of no use to him. One can be ever so clever, one can have ever such clever thoughts about economic life, the evidence can be absolutely sound, but it will not be realized in economic life. Why? Because economic life can in no way be circumscribed by the consideration of the individual, because economic experience, economic perception can only come to valid judgement by he agreement between persons interested in economic life in various ways. The individual can never gain a valid judgement, also not through statistics, how economy should be conducted, but only by agreement say of consumers and producers who form associations, where the one tells the other what the needs are and vice versa the other tells the one what possibilities there are for the production. Only when a collective decision comes about by the agreement within the associations of economic life, a valid decision for the economic life can be found.

To be sure, we here touch on something where outer economic perception borders on let me say economic psychology. But life is a unity and one cannot omit human souls when one really wishes to speak of practical life. What this means is that a real economic judgement can only result from the agreement of those who participate in the economic life from the knowledge which individuals gather as partial knowledge and which only becomes valid judgement when the individual knowledge of the one is modified by the individual knowledge of the other. Only discussion can lead to a valid judgement in economic life. But with this we talk of two radically different realms of human life. And the more practically one regards life, the more one finds that the two realms differ from one another, and that for instance production, which requires knowledge about how to produce, how one works out of human capabilities, needs the human individual, but that everything to do with merchandise, with the goods when they have been produced, is subject to the collective judgement. Between these two realms there is a third where the individual is not there to unfold his capabilities which he has brought into life by his birth, nor is the individual able to associate with others in order to modify his economic judgement and bring about a collective judgement which holds good for the practical economic life, but where the individual faces the other human being in such a way that this encounter is a purely human one, a relationship from man to man. And this realm includes all relationships in which the individual human being directly encounters the individual human being, not as an economically active being but as man, where he also has nothing to do with the capabilities with which one was born or which one has learnt, but where he is concerned with what he is allowed to do within the social organism or what his duties are, what his rights are, with that which he signifies within the social organism by his pure human relationship with the other man despite his capacities, despite his economic position. This is the third realm of the social organism.

It might seem that these three realms were cleverly thought out. But that is not the case. It seems as though they were not taken from practical life. But that is just what they are. Because that which is specific to them is just what is working in practical life. And when these three realms of the social organism work together in a wrong way, then damage to the social organism occurs. In my “Essentials of the social question” I have used the example of the human organism—not in order to prove something, I know very well that one can never prove anything by analogies, but in order to explain what I had to say—which is definitely a unity but which, if one analyses it with true physiology, all the same consists of three realms. We distinguish clearly in the human organism the nerve-sense organism which, though working within the whole human being, is mainly situated in the head. Furthermore there is in the human being the breathing and circulation rhythm, the rhythm organism as a relatively independent organism. And as a third organism there is the metabolism-limbs organism, all that depends either on the inner functions of metabolism or the consumption of the products of metabolism by the outer human activity, which starts with the movement of the human limbs by which metabolism is used.

Indeed, man is a unity, but just because of the fact that these relatively independent members are working together harmoniously. And if one were to wish that instead of this organic working together man should be an abstract unity, then one would be wishing for something foolish. Each of these members has its own openings towards the outside world, the senses, the openings of breathing, the opening of nutrition: relative independence. And just because of this relative independence these members work organically harmoniously together in the right way, in that each member unfolds its own specific strength and thereby something unified comes about. As I was saying, I know that one cannot prove anything by an analogy. And I don't want to prove anything but just to illustrate something. Because he who observes the social organism as objectively as in this physiology the threefoldness of man is observed, will find that by its very own qualities the social organism demands an independent, a relatively independent working of the economic organism, the state-political or rights organism and the spiritual organism within the boundaries which I have indicated.

Through a misunderstanding of the three-folding of the social organism it has often been asserted that in the last resort this separation cannot take place, that for instance the rights relationships constantly play into the economic life, that the spiritual relationships play into it too and that it would therefore be nonsense to wish for a threefoldness of the social organism.

In the natural human organism the three members work together as unity just because each one of them can work in its specific way, and it is definitely so that the nerve-sense organism is fed, that it has is specific nutritional needs and that the nerve-sense organism has also got its importance for the metabolism. That the three members are still relatively independent is shown by a healthy physiology.

A healthy social physiology will also show that the three realms, the realm of the spirit, the realm where man simply relates to man, that is to say the legal-state-political realm, and the economic realm where man has to become a member of associations, of communities in the indicated way, that these realms can work together in the right way if they are allowed to develop their intrinsic qualities relatively independently. This is by no means an adaptation of for instance the old platonic threefoldness: teaching, military, economics, for there people are divided into three classes. In our time there can be no question of such a structure, but only of a structuring of the administration, of the external formation of the three realms of life when we talk of the three-folding of the social organism.

The spiritual realm should only be administered out of its intrinsic principles. For instance those who are teachers should also be the administrators of the education system, so that there is no division between pædagogical science on the one hand and the prescriptions of the political organism on the other hand for education. All administration in the area of the spiritual realm must come directly from the spiritual realm, from that which is pædagogical-didactic science. In the political-state area everything can be regulated from man to man in the relevant administrative and constitutional bodies. In the economic realm associations will have to be formed in which people will partake as economic entities for reasons which I explained today. What must these associations in the economic realm see as their main task? Well, in the structuring of this task the specific thing which I have tried to explain in my “Essentials of the Social Question” can be shown. In these “Essentials of the Social Question” it was nowhere stated that in this way or that social structures should come about, this or that would be the very best. For me that would already signify something utopian. For whosoever knows today's human life knows that even when one thinks up the best theories, practical life benefits very little from these theories. I am even convinced that if one were to convene twelve or more, or less, not even particularly clever people, one could get wonderful programs about everything, for instance for the organisation of the primary school, programs against which nothing could be said: point 1, point 2, point 3,—when all that were to become reality what is asked in point1, point2, point 3, there would be an ideal school. But it cannot become reality because although man can think up the most ideal situation, what can be achieved in reality depends on quite different conditions.

We have tried to found something as far as is possible in our time in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart which is not built on programs but only flows out of pædagogy and didactics. The Free Waldorf School has a number of teachers. They would, if they meet together, be able to think up ideal programs for the school, for which I would not particularly praise them. But that we don't need. The people, the living human beings constitute the staff. And what they are able to do, the best that can be elicited from them, that should be developed. All ideal programs are dismissed, all prescriptions are dismissed, everything is placed into the immediate impulse of the individual ability. No prescription disturbs him who is to act—and that is just the task of the individual human being—out of pædagogy and didactic in a certain area of spiritual life.

Of course to-day one can only realize such things up to a certain point. In practical life one can nowhere realize an ideal, but one must do what is possible in the circumstances of life. In the same way everything else from my “Essentials of the Social Question” must be treated. Nowhere has it been attempted to show how the different institutions should be. Not as a demand, not as an ideal, but as an observation of that which the human being in his present historical becoming wants, it is pointed out that human beings—although they are just as they happen to be—would be able to act differently from how they are acting today, if they were situated in their right place. Therefore I do not give actual proposals how this or that institution should be but turn directly to the human beings and say: When human beings work together in the right way and in the right way find the aspects from which they have to view the social question, then the best which can come about will come about.—And I just believe that the best structuring of the social organism out of the human being is this that every single person, I should say, in a separate association thinks and works in the spiritual realm, in the rights-state or political realm and in the economic realm. Every person can for instance be active in all three realms if he has the strength for it—the social organism is not divided into classes. The point is not that this or that person is active in this or that realm, but that objectively, apart from man, these three realms are administered independently out of their intrinsic conditions, so that a person can belong to all three or to two or to one, but administers it out of the principles of that realm. If one considers how through this the harmony of the three realms comes about, one will see that in this threefolding it is the unity with matters, not the separation, as misunderstood criticism and discussions assert.

And so it is especially important in the economic realm that solutions should not be found by some prescriptions let us say from the study of statistics or the like, but from immediate life. I will give an example. As everyone knows, an item of merchandize in the economic circulation becomes too cheap if a great number of people produce the same thing, when there is overproduction. And everyone knows, that an item of merchandize becomes too expensive when it is produced by too few people. Through this we have a measure where the objective mean is of which I have spoken. This mean, the objective value, this objective price cannot be fixed as such. But when associations come into being which see their activity in practically getting to know economic life, to study it in every moment, in every present time, then the main observation can be how prices rise, how prices fall. And because associations occupy themselves with this rising and falling of prices, it can be accomplished by negotiations that a large enough number of people can be formed for an economic entity, a large enough number of people is active in a branch of production, that through negotiation one can bring the right number of people into a branch of production. This cannot be worked out theoretically, this can only be determined by people being in their appropriate place, so that these things are determined by human experience. Therefore one cannot say: this or that is the objective value. But when associations work in economic life in such a way that they make it one of their tasks gradually to eliminate businesses which make the prices too cheap as is customary, and to inaugurate others in their place which produce something else, then enough people will take part in the various branches of production. This can only be accomplished by a truly associative life. And then the price for a certain product will become closer to the objective price. So that we can never say: Because of such and such conditions the objective price must be this or that, but we can only say: When the right human association comes about, then by its work in the immediate life of the social organism the correct price can gradually emerge. The point is not to state how institutions should be that the socially right thing happens, but to bring people into such a social connection that from the collaboration of the people the social question can gradually be solved. For whoever understands the social question rightly cannot see it as one that has come up once and could be solved by some utopia, but the social question is a result of modern working together and will in future be present more and more. But what is needed is that people observe the social currents from their economic viewpoint and through associations, in which alone an economic judgement can be formed, bring the economic life into the right streams, not by laws but out of immediate life by direct human negotiation. The social life must be based practically on the human condition.

Therefore the “Essentials of the Social Question” are not concerned with describing some social structure, but to indicate how people can be brought into a relationship in which they can by their working together do from time to time what is needed for the social question, not in the way which is sometimes dreamt about. As one can see from this, these associations will primarily be concerned with the actual economic life. In actual economic life merchandize is circulating. Therefore the associations will primarily have to further the tendency towards the correct price out of immediate life, so that everyone actually can purchase what he needs for his maintenance out of his own producing. I have once tried to bring into a formula what such a just price would look like. That does not mean of course that it should be determined abstractly. It is determined out of real life as I have indicated. But I have said: Such a price for any product in social life—that is, for merchandize—is this, that it makes it possible for a person to provide his keep and all his needs for himself and his family until he has produced the same product again.

I don't state this as a dogma. I don't say this must be so, because one would never be able to implement this, as one cannot implant such theories into reality, I only say that that which will appear as the correct price through the associative working together will tend towards this direction. So I just want to state a result. I don't want to draw up a dogma, some economic dogma. And in my view this is just what is essential for today's economic thinking, that one bases it everywhere on human foundations, that one recognizes again in what way the human being must everywhere be the driving force of economic life, that one does not think of organizing a social organism somehow out of institutions that come out of theoretical thinking, but that one tries to discover how human co-existence should be so that the right way comes about. I want to illustrate this still by the following analogy. In the realm of nature there exists this: that in the conditions which are created by people there is something which comes out of a basic human sensing but which doesn't intend to fix something which comes into being in outer social life. For in recent times there has been talk of how the human embryonic development could be influenced so that one could in a certain sense have a choice of whether to bring boys or girls into the world. Of course I don't want to discuss this question today in theory, but I consider it fortunate if this question cannot be practically solved. For even though human beings cannot determine abstractly what would be the best distribution of male and female gender in the world, this does happen more or less without people being able to influence it. There are objective laws which take effect when man out of quite different conditions simply follows his basic impulses. And in this way, when the associations work in the right way and out of the experiences of life without dogmatically saying such or such the just price has to be, this price will appear through the associative working. I call it associative working, because the human individuality should be present in associating, that is, in the combining of the strengths of the one with the strength of the other the individuality is preserved. In the coalition, in the unions, the individuality disappears. This is what in my view can lead to the realistic, not the dogmatic, economic thinking.

And one can think of further tasks for these associations. If we look again at the analogy with the human organism we can say: by this or that symptom we can notice that the human organism is sick. Out of a combination of symptoms we can gain knowledge about the illness, about the process of the illness. It is quite similar with the social organism. Today we see obvious symptoms of disease in the social organism. Associations are the health bearers. Associations work towards the harmonizing of interests, so that the interests of the producers and the consumers are harmonized by the working together in the association, that other interests are harmonized, that above all the interests between employers and workers are harmonized. Today we see how out of a diseased economic body the opposite of associative life is created, we see how passive resistance, locking out, sabotage and even revolutions come about. No-one with a healthy mind can deny that all this works in the opposite direction of the associative principle and that all this: sabotage, lock-outs, revolution and so on are symptoms of disease of the social organism that must be overcome through that which works in a harmonizing way. But for this one needs a truly meaningful form of the social organism, just as the human natural threefold organism has a meaningful form.

And now I come back to what I said, that land and capital cannot be considered as merchandize, for their value is dependent on human capability. If we have something abstractly uniform as it has more and more come to the fore in recent times, but also bearing within it the described symptoms of disease and others as well, then it tends to result through this abstract uniform treatment that land, capital and lastly also labour are treated as merchandize.

When there is a threefold organism, the forces of the individuality work in the realm of the spiritual life. Therefore all that has to do with the unfolding of the individuality in economic life that is that which is connected with land and with capital, is actually part of the spiritual realm of the social organism. That is why I have described how the management of the capital, the management of the land, have to be dealt with in the spiritual realm of the social organism.

He who criticizes me for tearing the three realms apart is not aware that—as I described it myself—the spiritual organism, which is built on the individual strength, takes on the management of the capital, the management of the land as a matter of course when people are put at the right place. But that which is labour in the social organism is a service which man performs for man. That is something which can never thrive if it is grounded in economic life alone. That is why regulation of labour belongs to the realm of rights, to the political realm. And just because of from a totally different premise from today, time and measure of work can be regulated by relationships between man and man—quite apart from economic agreements which are determined in economic life through the associations—something will come about which will be of the utmost importance: The economic life will be placed on a healthy basis by having nature with its conditions on the one side and on the other side man with his conditions.

It would be strange indeed if today we would sit together with a small committee to determine how many rainy days there must be in 1922 in order for the economic matters to proceed according to our wishes. One has to take nature as it is and only on the basis of accepted nature the economic life can be structured. That is the one side. In the threefold social organism man stands in relationship to man, not as economic object, over against the independent, relatively autonomous associations, autonomous even to the structuring of the money side. And as man he develops the labour laws. And now one will not determine human labour out of economic conditions, from which only the prices of the merchandize, the relative values of the merchandize, i.e. something purely economic must be determined, just as one cannot determine the productivity of nature out of economic conditions. But only then one will have based economic life on purely human as well as on purely natural conditions.

It will then however not be possible for Utopia to come about. But what good would it be to think about how man could be better constituted than he is? One can only study him as he is. Therefore it can be said that it would be very nice to talk of some future worlds in which man would be as well as one could wish for, but it would be fruitless; for one could think up all sorts of ideas of how the social organism should be structured. But that can never be the question. The question can only be this: How is it possible to structure it? How must its members work together, not that it is the best, but the one which through its own strengths is the possible one, which will have the least of the indicated disease symptoms and can develop in the most healthy way possible? I think that maybe as time goes by one will come to an understanding about this cardinal question of economic life which I have indicated, when one wants to understand this through a true realization of the social conditions of life. This cardinal economic question which has lived in all my deliberations and which I don't want to lay down in an abstract dogmatic formal way. But to-day our most terrible battles which assail the economic life lastly come from the fact that one does not study economic life with the same good will, does not follow up its conditions within the social organism as one does for instance in regard to the natural organism. And only when one will learn to proceed with regard to the social organism as one does with biology, physiology and their therapy, one will discover what possibilities there are, and then it will be possible to ask the questions which to-day one calls the social questions in the right way. With this they will be able to be brought back to the human level. That is why it seems to me to be of the greatest importance that as many heads and hearts can be won for an appropriate understanding of the social organism as possible, for an understanding which can look at the social organism in respect of health and disease just as natural science attempts to do with regard to the human organism. And I believe that today one can realize that indeed it must also be said with regard to the cardinal question of economic life, that the three-folding of the social organism can throw light into the realms of purely economic life, the rights, state or political life and the spiritual life. For these three realms should not be separated, but each one should be able to work harmoniously together with the others by virtue of being able to develop its strong powers in relative autonomy. And the core question of economic life is this: How must the political life and the spiritual life work independently into the purely economic life in relation to capital, land and measuring and valuation of human labour, so that in the economic life by the structuring of the associations not indeed an earthly paradise, but a possible social organism can be created?

And one can believe that when one thinks in such a true to nature way about the question, then such a question which one must call the core question of the economic life, can be asked in the right, close to life, practical way. And it often happens in life that the greatest mistakes are made not because one strives for wrong solutions—usually they are utopian solutions—but already by asking the wrong question, that the questions are not asked out of real observation of life and real knowledge of life. But this seems to me today the most significant question particularly in regard to the economic life, that the questions are asked correctly and that life be structured in such a way that not theoretical answers are given but that life, the total human and historical reality itself, gives the answer to the correctly put questions. The questions will be put out of the historical background, life must directly truly give answer. No theory can give this answer, but only the full practical reality of life.

The explanations which I took the liberty to give you, will have shown you that the acquisition of real super-sensible knowledge entails above all, with the aid of the exercises already characterized, that the two sides of human nature which are usually incorrectly designated as man's inner and outer being should be distinctly separated. Perhaps I may point out that in ordinary consciousness one does not carefully distinguish man's inner and outer being, when speaking of these. The way in which I characterized the exit of man's sentient and volitional being during sleep and the acquisition of conscious super-sensible knowledge outside the physical body, shows us that just this super-sensible knowledge enables us to separate distinctly those parts which are usually designated vaguely in ordinary consciousness as man's outer and inner being.

I might say that by this separation man's inner world becomes his outer world, and what we usually consider as his outer world becomes his inner world.

What takes place in that case? During sleep, man's sentient and volitional being abandons what we designated man's physical and etheric body, or the body of formative forces, and then this sentient-volitional being looks back objectively upon the physical body and upon the etheric body as if they were objects. We showed that in this retrospection the whole woof of thought appears outside man's inner being. The world of thoughts which fills our ordinary consciousness and which reflects the external world, does not go out with man's true inner being during sleep, but remains behind with the physical body, as the etheric body's real forces. In this way we were able to grasp that during our waking state of consciousness we cannot grow conscious of that part which goes out during sleep and which remains unconscious for the ordinary consciousness. (Self-observation can easily convince us that during our ordinary waking consciousness the world of thought produces this waking state of consciousness).

In that part of the human being which goes out of the physical and the etheric bodies during sleep, there is a dull twilight life, and we only learn to know this inner being of man when super-sensible knowledge fills it, as it were, with light and with warmth—when we are just as conscious within this inner being as we are ordinarily conscious within our physical body. But we also learn to know why we have an unconscious life during our ordinary sleeping condition. Consciousness arises when we dive down into our physical and etheric bodies at the moment of waking up. By diving down into the physical body, we make use of the senses which connect us with the external world. As a result, the sensory world awakes and we thus grow conscious of it.

In the same way we dive down into our etheric or life body; that is to say, into our world of thoughts, and we grow conscious within our thoughts. Ordinary consciousness is therefore based upon the fact that we use the instruments of our physical body, and that we make use, so to speak, of the etheric body's woof of formative forces. In ordinary life, man's true inner being, woven out of feeling and will, simply cannot attain consciousness, because it has no organs. By making the thought and will exercises of which I have spoken, we endow the soul itself with organs. This soul element, which is at first indistinct in our ordinary consciousness, acquires plastic form, even as our physical body and our etheric body acquire plastic form in the senses and in the organs of thought. Man's real soul-spiritual being therefore obtains a plastic form.

In the same measure in which it is moulded plastically and acquires (if I may use this paradoxical expression) soul-spiritual sense organs, the soul-spiritual world rises up around our inner being. That part of our being which ordinarily lives in a dull twilight existence and which can only perceive an environing world; namely, the physical world (when it uses the physical and etheric organs of perception), thus acquires plastic form and enters in connection with a world which always surrounds us, also in our ordinary life, even though we are not aware of it, a world in which we lived before descending into our physical being through birth or conception, as described the day before yesterday, a world in which we shall live again when we pass through the portal of death, for then we shall recognize it as a world which belongs to us and which is not limited by birth and death.

But there is one thing which rises up before us when we enter the soul-spiritual world. We cannot enter the soul-spiritual world in the same abstract, theoretical manner with which we can live in the physical world and in the world of thoughts or of the intellect. In the physical world and in the world of thoughts we use ideas and thoughts, which as such, leave us cold. With a little self-observation anyone can discover that when he ascends to the sphere of pure thinking, when he surrenders to the external sensory world without any special interest or a close connection with it, the external physical world, as well as the world of ideas, really leaves him cold. We must learn to know this in detail from single examples in life. We should note, for instance, how different are the inner feelings with which we consider our home, from these with which we look upon any other strange country which is indifferent to us. This will show us that in order to have a living interest for the environing world, our feeling and our will must be drawn in through special circumstances; we must include the feeling and the will which ordinarily dive down into the physical world only when we awake, obtaining from this physical world a connection with the senses and the understanding. The fact that love or perhaps hate are kindled in us when we encounter certain people in the physical world, the fact that we feel induced to do certain things for them out of compassion, all this demands the inclusion of our feelings and of everything which constitutes our inner being, when we come across such things in the external physical world. How conscious we are of the fact that our inner life grows cold, when we rise up to spheres which are generally called the spheres of pale, dry thought and of theoretic study!

The being which lives in a dull twilight state from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, must, as it were, connect itself during the waking daytime condition with our thoughts and with our sensory experiences through an inner participation in these processes, thus giving rise to the whole wealth of interest in the external world.

We thus recognize that in life itself feeling and will must first be drawn into the sensory world and into the world of thoughts. But we perceive this in the fullest meaning of the word only when super-sensible knowledge, which has become emancipated from the physical and etheric bodies, enables us to have experiences outside these bodies within our sentient-volitional being.

There we see that we simply must begin to speak of the world in a different way than is the case in ordinary life, during the ordinary state of consciousness. The dry ideas, the laws of Nature which we are accustomed to find in science and which interest us theoretically, though they leave us inwardly cold, these should be permeated with certain nuances and expressions which characterize the external world differently from the way in which we usually characterize it.

Our inner life acquires greater intensity through super-sensible knowledge. We penetrate more intensively into the life of the external world. When we try to gain knowledge, we are then no longer able to submit coldly to inner ideas. Of course, this gives rise to the objection that the objectivity may suffer through a certain inner warmth, through the awakening of feeling and of a subjective sense. But this objection is only raised by those who are not acquainted with the circumstances.

The things perceived through super-sensible knowledge make us speak differently of the super-sensible objects of knowledge. These do not change; they do not become less objective, for they are objective. When I look upon a wonderfully painted picture, it does not change through the fact that I look upon it with fire and enthusiasm; I would be a cold prosaic person if I were to face one of Raphael's Madonnas or one of Leonardo's paintings with a purely analytical artistic understanding, quite coldly and without any enthusiasm. It is the same when the spiritual worlds rise up in the super-sensible knowledge. Their content does not change through the fact that we connect ourselves with these worlds with inner feelings, far stronger than those which usually connect us with the external world and its objects.

When speaking from a knowledge of the higher worlds, many things will therefore have to be said differently, the descriptions will have to be different from those which we are accustomed to hear in ordinary life. But this does not render these worlds less objective. On the contrary, we might say: The subjective element which now comes out of the physical and etheric bodies becomes more objective and less selfish in its whole experience. The first experience which we have when going out of the physical body and experiencing our inner being consciously (whereas otherwise we always experience it unconsciously) is therefore the feeling of absolute LONELINESS.

In our ordinary consciousness we never have the feeling that by dwelling only within our inner self, independently of anything in the world pertaining to us, complete loneliness fills our soul, that we ourselves, with everything which now constitutes our soul-spiritual content, must rely entirely upon ourselves.

The feeling of loneliness which sometimes arises in the physical world, but only as a reflection of the real feeling, though it is painful enough for many people, becomes immensely intensified when we thus penetrate into the super-sensible world. We then look back upon that which reflects itself in the mirror of the physical and etheric body, as the spiritual environment which we left behind. We grow aware, on the one hand, of a complete feeling of loneliness, which alone enables us to maintain our Ego in this world … for we would melt away in this world of the spirit, if loneliness would not give us this Ego-feeling in the spiritual world, in the same way in which our body, our bodily sensation, gives us our Ego feeling here on earth. To this loneliness we owe the maintenance of the Ego in the spiritual world. We then learn to know this spiritual world as our environment. But we know that we can only learn to know it through the inner soul-spiritual eye, even as we see the physical world through our physical eyes.

It is the same when the human being abandons his physical and etheric bodies by passing through the portal of death, and in this connection I shall enlarge the explanations already given yesterday. It is true that in this case the physical body is given over to the elements of the earth and that the etheric body dissolves, as described, in the universal cosmic ether. But what we learned to know as our physical world, through our feeling and will, the world in which we experienced ourselves through the ordinary consciousness between birth and death, this world remains. The physical body filled with substance and the body of formative forces permeated by etheric forces, are laid aside with death, but what we experienced inwardly remains as a mirroring element.

From the spiritual world we look back into our last earthly life through death, through which we passed. Just because we have before us this last earthly life as a firm resistance which mirrors everything, just because of this, everything which surrounds us as we pass through the soul-spiritual world between death and a new birth, can also reflect itself. Through these experiences we perceive everything rising up in a far more intensive life than the one which we learned to know here in the physical world. And we first perceive as a soul-spiritual being everything with which we were in some way connected through our destiny, through our Karma. The people we loved, stand before us as souls. In our super-sensible vision we see all that we experienced together with them.

Those who acquire spiritual, super-sensible knowledge, already acquire the imaginative vision here in the physical world, through everything which I described to you. Those who pass through the portal of death in the ordinary way, acquire this faculty, though it is somewhat different to the spiritual vision on earth; they acquire it after having passed through the portal of death. From the sheaths of the physical and etheric bodies which were laid aside, emerges everything with which we were connected by destiny, or otherwise, in this earthly life—it undoubtedly arises in a different way, when those whom we left behind, still live on the earth, where the connection with them is more difficult, but when they follow us through death, this connection exists in the free, soul-spiritual life. Everything in our environment with which we were connected as human beings rises up before us. To super-sensible knowledge, the fact that people (if I may now express myself in words of the ordinary consciousness) who belonged together here in the physical world find each other again in the soul-spiritual world, after having passed through the portal of death, is not a belief to be accepted as a vague premonition, but it is a certainty, a fact just as certain as the results of physics or chemistry. This is something which the spiritual science of Anthroposophy can add to the acquisitions of modern culture.

People have grown accustomed to a certain feeling of certainty through the gradual popularization of a scientific consciousness. They strive to gain some knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, but no longer in the form of old presentiments handed over traditionally in the religious beliefs, for they were trained to accept that certainty which the external world can offer. In regard to that which lies beyond birth and death the spiritual science of Anthroposophy seeks to pave the way to this same kind of certainty. It can really do this. Only those people who tread the path already described, the path leading into the spiritual worlds, can lead the knowledge acquired in physics or chemistry beyond, into worlds which we enter when we pass through the portal of death.

Of course, not everything appears to us in this way when we look back upon our physical body through super-sensible knowledge outside the body. There is one thing which then appears to us very enigmatic, and this enigma can show us best of all that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy does not translate the truths which it includes in its spheres of knowledge into a prosaic, dry rationalism. It leads us to spiritual vision, or by communicating its truths it speaks of things which can be perceived through spiritual vision. But in being led to spiritual vision, we do not lose the full reverence towards the mysteries contained in the universe, towards everything in the universe inspiring reverence and which can now be clearly perceived, whereas otherwise they are at the most felt darkly. This enigmatic something which I mean and which appears to us, is that we now learn to know man's relationship with the earth, particularly his relationship with the physical-mineral earth.

I have already explained to you from many different aspects how our woof of thoughts, which is connected with the physical body, remains behind, and in addition to what has been described to you, in addition to what reflects itself and leads us to a knowledge of man's everlasting being, we can also recognize the true nature of this mirror which stands before us.

I might say: Even as in the physical world we face a mirror and in this mirror the environing world appears simultaneously with our own self, so in super-sensible knowledge the spiritual world appears through this mirror. And in the same way in which we can touch the material mirror with its foil and investigate its composition, so we can also investigate this super-sensible mirror; namely, our physical body and our etheric body, when our real soul-spiritual being is outside.

There we see that during his earthly life the human being constantly takes in substances from the external world in order to grow and to sustain his whole life. We absorb substances from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but all these substances which we absorb from the animal and vegetable kingdoms also contain mineral substances. Plants contain mineral substances, for the plant builds itself up from mineral substances. By taking in vegetable nourishment we therefore build up our own body out of mineral substances.

By looking back upon our physical body from outside, we can now perceive the true significance of the mineral substances which we absorb. Spiritual vision reveals something of which our ordinary consciousness has not the faintest inkling; namely, the activity of thinking. We have left behind our thinking. Our thoughts continue, as it were, to glimmer and to shine within the physical body. Now we can observe the effect of thoughts in the physical body from outside, as something objective. And we perceive that the effect of thoughts upon man's physical body is a dissolution of its physical substances, which fall asunder, as it were, into nothing.

I know that this apparently contradicts the law of the conservation of forces, but there is no time now to explain more fully its full harmony with this law. The nature of my subject entails that I express myself in more popular terms. But it is possible to understand that the purely mineral in man, what he bears within him as purely mineral substances, must be within him because his thoughts must dissolve these substances. For otherwise his thoughts could not exist—this is the condition for their existence—his thoughts could not exist if they did not dissolve mineral, earthly substances, a fact also revealed by the spiritual sciences of earlier times, based more on feeling. This dissolution, this destruction of physical substances constitutes the physical intermedium of thinking.

When our sentient-volitional part, our true inner being, lives within the physical body and within the etheric body and is filled by the activity of thinking, we learn to recognize that this activity takes its course through the fact that physical substance is continually destroyed. We now learn to recognize how our ordinary consciousness really arises. It does not arise in such a way that forces of growth hold sway in us, forces which develop in the remaining organism through nutrition. For in the same measure in which the forces of growth are active within us, thinking is dulled. When we wake up, thinking must, so to speak, have a free hand to dissolve physical substances, to eliminate them from the physical body. To the spiritual science of Anthroposophy, the nervous system appears as that organ which transmits this elimination of mineral-physical substances throughout the whole body. This elimination gives rise to that thought activity which we ordinarily carry with us through the world.

You therefore see that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy not only enables us to recognize the eternal in man, but also how it works within his physical body; that, for instance, thought can only exist through the fact that man continually develops within himself the mineral substances; that is, something dead.

We can therefore say: If we learn to know man from this aspect, we also learn to know death from another aspect. Ordinarily death confronts us as the end of life, as a moment in life, as an experience in itself. But when we throw light upon man's physical and etheric body in the manner described, we learn to know the gradual course of death, or the elimination of physical-mineral substance—for death is nothing but the complete elimination of man's mineral-physical substance—we learn to know the continual elimination of a dead, corpse-like element within us.

We recognize that from birth onwards, we constantly pass through a partial process of death, and real death sets in when the whole body does that which we ordinarily do through the nervous system, within a small part of the body.

We therefore learn to look upon the moment of death by gaining insight on a small scale into its being through the activity of thinking in the human organism. Throughout the whole time after death, we can only look back upon our physical body because the following fact exists: Whenever a thought lights up within you during your ordinary life, this is always accompanied by the fact that physical matter is eliminated in the physical body, in the same way in which, for instance, physical substance separates from a precipitated salt solution. This lighting up of thought you owe to this obscuring, to this casting-off of physical mineral substance. When you abandon the physical body, you sum up in a comparatively brief space of time what lives in the continual stream of your thoughts. You confront the fact that in death there flares up all at once that which slowly glimmered and shone throughout your earthly life, from birth to death.

Through this strong impression, in which the life of thoughts illuminates the soul like a great flash of lightning, we acquire the memory of our physical lives on earth. The physical body may be cast off, the etheric body may dissolve completely in the universal ether, but through the fact that we obtain in one experience this powerful thought impression (to mathematicians I might say: this thought-integral in comparison with thought differentials, from birth to death), we always have before us, throughout the time after death, as a mirroring element, our physical life on earth, even though we have laid aside our physical and etheric parts—and this mirroring element reveals everything which we experience when the human beings with whom we were connected by destiny in love or in hate, gradually come up, when the spiritual Beings who live in the spiritual world and do not descend to the earth, whose company we now share, rise up before us.

The spiritual-scientific investigator may state this with a calm conscience, for he knows that he does not speak on the foundation of illusionary pictures; he knows instead that to super-sensible vision, when super-sensible vision arises through the organ of the physical and etheric bodies which are now outside, these things are just as real, can be seen just as really as physical colours are ordinarily perceived through physical eyes, or physical sounds through physical ears.

This is how the evolution of humanity forms part of the evolution of the world. If we study the development of the world, for instance the mineral life on earth, we understand why there should be mineral, earthly laws. They exist so that they might also exist within us, and thinking is therefore bound up with the earth. But in perceiving how the beings whose thinking is connected with the earth emerge from that which produces their thought, we also learn to recognize how man's true being rises above that which pertains only to the earth. This is what connects the development of the world with the development of humanity and unites them.

We learn to know the human being and at the same time we learn to know the universe. If we learn to know man's physical body and its mineralization through thinking, we also learn to know through man's physical body the lifeless mineral earth. This creates a foundation for a knowledge of the evolution of the world also from its spiritual aspect.

When we thus learn to know man's inner being, the development of the world appears in the same way in which the ordinary earthly experiences appear before us, the experiences through which we passed since our birth.

When you draw out of your memory-store an experience which you had ten years ago, this past event rises up before your soul as an image. You know exactly that it rises up as a picture. Yet this picture conveys a knowledge of something which really existed ten years ago.

How does this arise? Through the fact that in your organism certain processes remained behind which now summon up the picture. Certain processes remained behind in your organism and these summon up in you the picture, enabling you—as I once designated it—to construct what you experienced ten years ago. But super-sensible knowledge leads us deeper into man's inner being. We can perceive, for instance, that the physical body becomes mineralized during the thinking process; we perceive this in the same way in which we learn to know some past experience of our earthly life through the traces which it left behind within our being.

In the same way the development of the earth can be understood by envisaging the development of man; through the activity of the mineral in man we learn to know the task of the mineral kingdom within the development of the earth. And if, as already set forth, we learn similarly to know (I can only mention this, for a detailed description would lead us too far how the vegetable kingdom is connected with man, and how the animal kingdom is related with him (for this, too, can be recognized) the development of the world can be grasped by setting out from the human being.

Within the development of the world we can see something which is again of immense importance to those who are interested in modern civilization, just as interesting as the facts which I explained in connection with a knowledge of the human being, of the eternal inner kernel of man.

Modern civilization shows us that up to a certain point it is possible to consider man's relationship to the development of the world by linking up the human being with the evolution of the animals—even though the corresponding theories, or the hypotheses, as some people say, still contain many unclear facts, requiring completion and modification. We follow the development of the simplest organic beings up to the highest animals, and if we continue this line of observation we come to the point of placing man at the summit of animal development. One person does it in this way, and the other in that way; one more idealistically, and the other more materialistically in accordance with Darwin's theory of evolutionary descent, but methodically it can hardly be denied that if we wish to study man's physical nature according to natural-scientific methods, we must link him up with the animal line of descent (this has been done for some time).

We investigate how his head changed in comparison with the heads of the different animal species; we investigate his limbs, etc., and we thus obtain what is known as comparative anatomy, comparative morphology, comparative physiology, and also ideas on the way in which man's physical form gradually developed out of lower beings in the course of the world's evolution. But we always remain in the physical sphere. On the one hand people take it amiss today if the anthroposophical spiritual investigator speaks of the spiritual world as I take the liberty to do in this lecture; from many sides this is viewed as a pure fantasy, and although many people believe that it is well meant … they nevertheless look upon it as something fantastic.

Those who become acquainted to some extent with the things described by me, those who at least try to understand them, will see that the preparations and preliminary conditions for them are just as serious as, for instance, the preparations for the study of mathematics, so that it is out of the question to speak of sailing into a fantastic region. But just as on the one hand people take it amiss if a person describes the spiritual world as a real, objective world, so they take it amiss on the other hand if in regard to man's physical development one fully accepts those who follow man's development darwinistically, with a natural-scientific discipline, along the animal line of descent, as far as man. No speculations should enter the observations made in the physical sphere, as is, for instance, the case today in Neovitalism. This is full of speculations; the old vitalism was also full of speculative elements. But whenever we consider the physical world, we must remain by physical facts.

For this reason, the anthroposophical spiritual investigator who on the one hand ventures to speak in a certain way of the conditions after death and before birth, as I have done, does not consider it as a reproach (i.e., he is not touched by it) when people tell him that his description of the physical world is completely in the meaning of a modern natural scientist. He does not bring any dreams into the sphere which constitutes the physical world. Even though people may call him a materialist when he describes the physical world, this reproach does not touch him, because he strictly separates the spiritual world, which can only be observed with the aid of a spiritual method, from the physical-sensory world, which has to be observed with the orderly disciplined methods of modern natural science.

A serious spiritual-scientific investigator must therefore feel particularly hurt and pained at reproaches made to him on account of certain followers of spiritual science who sometimes rebuke natural science out of a certain pride in their spiritual-scientific knowledge and out of their undoubtedly shallow knowledge of natural science; they think that they have the right to speak negatively of science and of scientific achievements, but the spiritual-scientific investigator can only feel deeply hurt at their amateurish, dilettantish behaviour. This is, however, not in keeping with spiritual science. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy is characterized by the fact that it deals just as strictly and scientifically with the external physical world, as with the spiritual world, and vice-versa.

With this preliminary condition, the anthroposophical spiritual investigator entirely stands upon the ground of strictest natural-scientific observation in regard to the study of the world's development, but at the same time he turns his gaze towards the soul-spiritual world. And even as he knows that not only a physical process is connected with man's individual embryonic origin in the physical world, but that a soul-spiritual element unites with the human embryo, with the human germ, so he also knows that in the whole development of the world—though to the physical body it appears as a tapestry of sensory objects, and though it manifests itself to the woof of thoughts; i.e., to the etheric body, in laws of Nature—he also knows that the physical world is permeated and guided in its whole development by spiritual forces, handled by spiritual Beings, that can be recognized in their own appropriate way, as already described.

The anthroposophical investigator therefore knows that when he contemplates the external physical world in the meaning of genuine science, he comes to the true boundary, where he may begin with his spiritual investigation.

If we conscientiously trace the evolutionary development through animal descent up to man, as Darwin or other Darwinians or Haeckel did, and if we penetrate into the justifiable scientific aspects of the world development of man, we can continue this in a spiritual-scientific direction, after having reached the boundary to which we are led by natural science.

We now discover that a CONTEMPLATION OF THE FORM into which we penetrate through super-sensible knowledge, shows us all the SIGNIFICANCE OF FORMS, as they appear in the kingdom of man on the one hand, and in the animal kingdom on the other; we discover the whole significance of these forms.

Equipped with the knowledge supplied by super-sensible research, we see that the animal (this is at least the case with most animals, and exceptions can be easily explained) stands upon the ground with his four limbs, so that its spine is horizontal, parallel with the surface of the earth, and so that in regard to the spine, the head develops in an entirely different position from that of man. We learn to know the animal's whole form, as it were, from within, as a complex of forces, and also in relationship with the whole universe. And we thus learn to make a comparison: We perceive the transformation, the metamorphosis in the human form, in the human being whom we see standing upon his two legs, at right angles, so to speak, with the animal's spine, with his own spine set vertically to the surface of the earth and his head developing in accordance with this position of the spine.

By penetrating into the inner art of Nature's creative process, we learn to distinguish the human form from the animal form; we recognize this by entering into the artistic creative process of the cosmos. And we penetrate into the development of the world by rising from otherwise abstract constructive thoughts to thoughts which are inwardly filled with life, which form themselves artistically in the spirit.

The most important thing to be borne in mind is that when it seeks to know the development of the world, anthroposophical spiritual research changes from the abstract understanding ordinarily described—and justly so—as dry, prosaic, systematic thought, or combining thought, into concrete, real thought. Not for the higher spiritual world, in which concepts must penetrate in the manner described, but for the physical world, the forms in the world development should first be grasped through a kind of artistic comprehension, which in addition develops upon the foundation of super-sensible knowledge.

By thus indicating how science should change into art, we must of course encounter the objection raised by those who are accustomed to think in accordance with modern ideas: “But science must not become an art!” My dear friends, this can always be said, as a human requirement; people can say: I forbid the logic of the universe to become an art, for we only learn to know reality by linking up thought with thought and by thus approaching reality. If the world were as people imagine it to be, one could refuse to rise up to art, to an artistic comprehension of forms; but if the world is formed in such a way that it can only be comprehended through an artistic comprehension, it is necessary to advance to such an artistic comprehension. This is how matters stand. That is why those people who were earnestly seeking to grasp the organic in world development really came to an inner development of the thinking ordinarily looked upon as scientific thought; they came to an artistic comprehension of the world. As soon as we continue to observe with an artistic-intuitive eye the development of the world from the point where the ordinary Darwinistic theory comes to a standstill, we perceive that man, grasped as a whole, cannot simply be looked upon by saying that once there were lower animals in the world, from which higher animals developed, that then still higher animals developed out of these, and so forth, until finally man arose.

If we study embryology in an unprejudiced way, it really contradicts this idea. Although modern scientists set up the fundamental law of biogenetics and compare embryology with phylogeny, they do not interpret rightly what appears outwardly even in human embryology, because they do not rise to this artistic comprehension of the world's development. If we observe in a human embryo how the limbs develop out of organs which at first have a stunted aspect, how everything is at first merely head, we already obtain the first elements of what reveals itself in the artistic comprehension of the human form. It is not possible to link up the whole human being with the animals. One cannot say: The human being, such as he stands before us today, is a descendant of the whole animal kingdom. No, this is not the case. Just those who penetrate with genuine scientific conscientiousness into scientific Darwinism and its modern description of the development of the world, will discover that through a higher understanding it is simply impossible to place man at the end, or at the summit of the animal chain of development; they must instead study the human head as such, the head of the human being. This human head alone descends from the whole animal kingdom. Though it may sound strange and paradoxical, the part which is generally considered as man's most perfect part is a transformation from the animal kingdom.

Let us approach the human head with this idea and let us study it carefully. Observe with a certain morphological-artistic sense how the lower maxillary bones are transformed limbs, also the upper maxillary bones are transformed limbs, how everything in the head is an enhanced development of the animal form; you will then recognize in the human head that upon a higher stage it reveals everything which appears in the animals under so many different forms. You will then also understand why it is so.

When you observe the animal, you can see that its head hangs upon one extremity of the spine and that in a real animal it is entirely subjected to the law of gravity. Observe instead the human head; observe how the human being stands within the cosmos. The human head is set upon a spine which has a vertical direction. It rests upon the remaining body in such a way that the human being protects the head, as it were, against falling a prey only to the force of gravity. The human head is really something which rests upon the remaining organism with comparative independence. And we come to the point of understanding that through the fact that the human head is carried by the remaining body, it really travels along like a person using a coach; for it is the remaining body which carries the human head through the world. The human head has transformed limbs which have become shriveled, as it were, and it is set upon the remaining organism. This remaining organism is related to the human head in the same way in which the whole earth with its force of gravity is related to the animal. In regard to the head, the human being is related to his whole remaining body in the same way in which the whole animal is related to the earth.

We now begin to understand the human being through the development of the world. And if we proceed in this knowledge of the human form with an artistic sense and understanding, we finally comprehend why the human head is the continuation of the animal chain and why the remaining body of man developed later, out of the earth, and was attached to the human head. Only in this way we gradually learn to understand man's development.

If we go back into earlier times of the past, we can only transfer into these primordial epochs that part of man which lies at the foundation of his present head development. We must not seek the development of his limbs or of his thorax in those early ages, for these developed later. But if we observe the development of the world by setting out, as described by me, from the human being, if we observe it in the same way in which we would look upon some past experience, we find that the human being had already begun his development in the world at a time when our higher animals, for instance, did not as yet exist.

We can therefore say (let us now take a later epoch of the earth): In the further course of his development man developed his head out of earlier animal beings through the fact that his spiritual essence animated him. That is why he could raise his head above the former stage of development. He then added his limbs, which developed out of the regular forces of the earth. The animals which followed could only develop to the extent in which man developed with the exclusion of his head. They began their development later, so that they did not go as far as the human development of the head; they remained connected with the earth while the human being separated himself from it.

This proves that it has a real meaning to say: Man belongs to the development of the universe in such a way that he is related with the animal kingdom, but he rises above it through his spiritual development. The animals which followed man in their development could only develop as much as man had developed in his limbs and thorax … the head remained stunted, because a longer time of development should have preceded it, such as that of man, in order that the real head might develop.

Through an artistic deepened contemplation of the forms in the world's development the conscientiously accepted Darwinistic theory changes, insofar as it is scientifically justified today. We thus recognize that in the development of the world the human being has behind him a LONGER TIME OF DEVELOPMENT than the animals—that the animals develop as their chief form that part which man adds to his head. In this way man reaches the point of lifting one part of his being out of the force of gravity, whereas the animals are entirely subjected to the force of gravity. Everything which constituted our head with its sense organs is raised above the force of gravity, so that it does not turn towards ponderable matter but towards the ether, which fills the sensory world. This is the case above all with the senses; we would see this, could we study them more closely. In this way, for instance, the human organ of hearing depends upon an etheric structure, not only upon an air structure.

Through all this the human being forms part not only of the material world, of the ponderable physical world, but he forms part of the etheric world outside. Through the etheric world he perceives, for instance, what the light conjures up before him in the world of colours, etc., etc. Even through his external form he rises above heavy matter, up to the free ether, and for this reason we see the development of the world in a different way when we ascend from natural science to spiritual science.

But when we rise up to an artistic conception, we perceive the activity of the soul-spiritual in man, and we must rise up to such a conception if we wish to understand the human being. We should, for instance, be able to say: In regard to his soul-spiritual, sentient-volitional being, we must speak of loneliness and of a life in common with others, as if these were theoretical concepts, as described today; we must rise up to the moral world and finally we come to the religious world. These worlds belong together and form a whole.

If we study the human being in accordance with a natural-scientific mentality and in the meaning of modern civilization, we find on the one hand the rigid scientific necessity of Nature to which also the human being belongs, and on the other hand we find that man can only be conscious of his dignity—that he can only say “I am truly man”—if he can feel within him the moral-religious impulses. But if we honestly stand upon the foundation of natural science we only have hypotheses in regard to the beginning and the end of the earth, hypotheses which speak of the Kant-Laplace nebula for the beginning of the earth and of a death through heat for the end of the earth.

If in the face of the natural-scientific demands we now consider, in the meaning of modern civilization, the moral-religious world which reveals itself intuitively (I have shown this in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, if we consider this world we must say: We really delude ourselves, we conjure up before us a fog. Is it possible to believe that when the earth passes through the death by heat, in accordance with the natural-scientific concept, that there should still exist anything besides the death of all ideals?

At this point spiritual science, or ANTHROPOSOPHY, sets in, and shows that the soul-spiritual is a reality, that it is active within the physical and that it placed the human form, the human being, into the evolution of the world; it shows that we should look back upon animal beings which are entirely different from the present animals, that it is possible to adhere to the methods of modern science, but that other results are obtained. Anthroposophy thus inserts the moral element into the science of religion, and Anthroposophy thus becomes a moral-religious science.

Now we no longer look upon the Kant-Laplace nebula, but we look at the same time upon an original spiritual element, out of which the soul-spiritual world described in Anthroposophy developed in the same way in which the physical world developed out of a physical-earthly origin. We also look towards the end of the earth and since the laws of enthropy are fully justified, we can show that the earth will end through a kind of death by heat, but at the same time we can envisage from the anthroposophical standpoint the end of the single human being: his corpse is handed over to the elements, but the human being himself passes over into a spiritual world. This is how we envisage the end of the earth. The scientific results do not disturb us, for we know that everything of a soul-spiritual nature which man develops will pass through the earth's portal of death when the earth no longer exists; it will pass over into a new world development, even as the human being passes over into a new world development whenever he passes through death.

By surveying the development of the earth in this way, we perceive IN THE MIDDLE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT THE EVENT OF GOLGOTHA. We see how this event of Golgotha is placed in the middle of the earth's development; before this event, there only existed forces which would have led man to a kind of paralyzation of his forces. We really learn to recognize (I can only allude to this at the end of my lecture) that in the same way in which through the vegetable and animal fertilization a special element enters the fertilized organism, so the Mystery of Golgotha brought something into the evolution of the world from regions outside the earth, and this continues to live; it accompanies the souls until at the end of the earth they pass on to new metamorphoses of earthly life. I would have to describe whole volumes were I to show the path leading in a strictly conscientious scientific way from what I have described to you today in connection with the evolution of humanity and of the universe, to the Mystery of Golgotha, to the appearance of the Christ-Being in relationship with the earth.

But through a spiritual-scientific deepening many passages in the Gospels will appear in an entirely new light, in a different way from what it has hitherto been possible through the occidental consciousness. Let us consider only the following fact: If we entirely stand upon a natural-scientific foundation, we must envisage the physical end of the earth. And those who continue to stand upon this scientific foundation, will also find that finally the starry world surrounding the earth will decay; they will look upon a future in which this earth will no longer exist, and the stars above will no longer exist. But spiritual science gives us the certainty that even as an eternal being goes out of the physical and etheric body every evening and returns into them every morning, so an eternal being will continue to live when the single human bodies shall have decayed. When the whole earth falls away from all the soul-spiritual beings of men, this eternal part of the earth will continue to live and it will pass over to new planetary phases of world development.

Now Christ's words in the Gospels resound to us in a new and wonderful way; “HEAVEN AND EARTH SHALL PASS AWAY, BUT MY WORDS SHALL NOT PASS AWAY,” and connected with these words are those of St. Paul: “NOT I, BUT CHRIST IN ME.” If a Christian really grasps these words, if a person who really understands Christianity inwardly and who says, “Not I, but Christ in me,” understands Christ's words, “Heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away”—that is, “what lives within my everlasting Being shall not pass away”—these words will shine forth from the Gospel in a peculiar manner, with a magic producing reverence, but if one is really honest they cannot be understood without further ado.

If we approach such words and others, with the aid of spiritual science and in the anthroposophical meaning, if we approach many other sayings which come to us out of the spiritual darkness of the world development, of the development of the earth and of humanity, a light will ray out of them. Indeed, my dear friends, it is as if light were to fall upon words such as “heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away”—light falls upon them, if we hear them resounding from that region where the Mystery of Golgotha took place, and the whole development of the earth only acquires its true meaning through such words!

Thus we see that spiritual science in the meaning of Anthroposophy strives above all after a conscientious observation of the strict methods of the physical world, but at the same time it seeks to continue these strict scientific methods into regions where our true eternal being shines out towards us, regions where also the spiritual being of the world development rays out its light towards us, a light in which the world development itself with its spiritual forces and Beings appears in its spiritual-divine character.

My dear friends, at the conclusion of my lecture (I thank you that you showed so much interest in it) let me express the following fact: Spiritual-scientific Anthroposophy can fully understand that modern humanity, particularly conscientious, scientifically-minded men, have grown accustomed to consider as real and certain the results of causal natural-scientific knowledge, the results of external sense observation, intellectual combinations of these sensory observations, and experiments. This gave them a feeling of certainty. And by acquiring this certainty, they acquired a certain feeling in general towards that which can be “sure.” Up to now no attempt has been made to study super-sensible things in the same way in which physical things are studied. This certainty could therefore not be carried into super-sensible regions. Today people still believe that they must halt with a mere thought at the threshold of the super-sensible worlds, that feelings full of reverence suffice, because otherwise they would lose the mystery, and the super-sensible world would be rationalized. But spiritual science does not seek to rationalize the mystery, to dispel the reverent feeling which one has towards the mystery: it leads to these mysteries through vision. Anthroposophy leaves the mystery its mystery-character, but it sets it into the evolution of the world in the same way in which sensory things exist in the sphere of world evolution.

And it must be true that people also need certainty for the spheres transcending mere Nature. To the extent in which they will feel that through spiritual science in the meaning of Anthroposophy they do not hear some vague amateurish and indistinct talk about the worlds, but something which is filled by the same spirit which comes to expression in modern science, to this same extent humanity will feel that the certainty which it acquired, the certainty which it is accustomed to have through the physical world, can also be led over into the spiritual worlds. People will feel: If certainty exists only in regard to the physical world, of what use is this certainty, since the physical world passes away? Man needs an eternal element, for he himself wants to be rooted in an eternal element. He cannot admit that this certainty should only be valid for the transient, perishable world. Certainty, the certainty of knowledge, must also be gained in regard to the imperishable world.

This is the aim pursued in greatest modesty (those who follow the spiritual science of Anthroposophy know this) by Anthroposophy. Its aim is that through his natural certainty man should not lose his knowledge of the imperishable; through his certainty in regard to perishable things he should not lose the certainty in regard to imperishable things. Certainty in regard to the perishable; that is to say, certainty in regard to the riddle of birth and death, the riddle of immortality, the riddle of the spiritual world developments, this is what Anthroposophy seeks to bring into our civilization.

Anthroposophy believes that this can be its contribution to modern civilization. For in the same measure in which people courageously recognize that certainty should be gained also in regard to imperishable things, and not only in regard to perishable things, in the same measure they will grow accustomed to look upon Anthroposophy no longer as something fantastic and as an individual hobby, but as something which must enter our whole spiritual culture, like all the other branches of science, and thereby our civilization in general.

I have been asked to lecture this evening on The Necessity for a Renewal of Culture. During the past few days I have been speaking to you on the spiritual science of Anthroposophy. This is a field which may be dealt with generally by any individual, if he thinks that he can communicate to others this or that result of special investigations or impulses. For this is the expression of an individual impulse—although one must of course bear in mind that it is something which, from certain standpoints, may be of interest to all.

But I have quite a different feeling in regard to this evening's subject. In the present time, when one has to speak of the necessity for a renewal of culture, one only has the right to do so if one can perceive that this subject really corresponds to a general demand, that people are filled by the desire for a renewal of culture, and believe in what may be called a renewal of culture. An individual must therefore more or less interpret a generally ruling view. For in regard to such a subject, arbitrary individual opinions would only be an expression of lack of modesty and conceit.

The following question therefore arises: Does this subject correspond to-day to a generally ruling feeling, to a sum of feelings which exists in wide circles? If we look in an unprejudiced way into the hearts and souls of our contemporaries, if we study their soul-moods and their general frame of mind, we may indeed believe that this subject of the necessity for a renewal of culture is in many respects justified.

Do we not see that in the most varied spheres of life many of our contemporaries feel that something must penetrate into our spiritual life and into the other branches of human life, something which in some way corresponds to the longing which manifests itself so clearly?

To-day we come across searching souls in many fields of artistic life. Who has not noticed these searching souls? We find them above all among modern youth. Particularly there we find that youth expects something which it cannot obtain from the things offered by the generally prevailing spirit of the times. Especially in the sphere of ethical-religious life we come across such seeking souls. Innumerable questions, expressed and above all unexpressed, questions which live only in the depths of feeling, are now reposing in human hearts. If we consider social life, then the course of the world's events and all that takes place, as it were, within this domain, takes on the aspect of one great question: Where must we look for some kind of cultural renewal of our social life?

The individual, however, who considers these different questions, may nevertheless not go further than the belief that he can but offer a small contribution towards these problems, arising out of a generally felt need in this domain. But perhaps the explanations resulting from anthroposophical spiritual research contained in the last lectures which I gave to you here, entitle me to set forth a few facts on the subject chosen for to-day, even though the spiritual science of Anthroposophy knows that in regard to many things which people are now seeking, it can at the most offer a few impulses which can bear fruit; yet it is the very aim of anthroposophical research to offer such impulses, such germinating forces.

At Dornach, in Switzerland, we have tried to establish the School for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum. Here we can say that at least the attempt has been made to fructify the single scientific spheres by adding to the results obtained in medicine, natural science, sociology, history, and many other fields by the highly significant methods of recent times, the results which can be obtained through direct investigation of the spiritual world itself.

In the pedagogical-didactical field, the effort has been made to obtain some practical results through the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Attempts have even been made to achieve results in the economic field. But there we must say that present conditions are so difficult, that these newly founded economic undertakings must first pass the test showing whether they are able to—I will not say attain—but at least encourage what so many modern people are seeking to find.

Let me therefore begin with this quest. I cannot speak of course from the standpoint of your nation, where I have the great pleasure of being your guest; I can only speak to you from an international standpoint. Those who have open hearts, minds and souls for the longings of that section of mankind which counts most for the future, those who observe this in an unprejudiced way, cannot help turning their gaze to the young people and their quest!

Everywhere we find that our young people are filled with the longing, arising out of an altogether indefinite feeling, for something quite new. The earnest, significant question must therefore rise up: Why do our young people not have full satisfaction in the things which we as older people could offer to them? And I believe that this very quest of youth is connected with the most intimate and deepest soul-impulses, which give rise in men's hearts in the present time to this general sense of seeking.

I believe that in this respect we must penetrate deeply into human souls, if the call for a renewal of culture, which can now be heard plainly, is to be judged according to its true foundation. We shall have to look into many depths of human soul-life; above all we cannot deal only with the characteristics of modern culture, but we shall have to survey a longer stretch of time.

If we do this in an unprejudiced way, we find that in an international respect the special soul-configuration of modern humanity has been prepared during the past three, four or five centuries, and we also find that these last three, four and five centuries reveal something completely new, compared with the spiritual constitution which still existed in the Occident during the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, derived from a still earlier epoch. Whenever we survey these earlier times of spiritual life in the Occident, we find that man's soul-spiritual conception was not so strictly separated from his physical or sensory conception, as was the case later on and during the present time.

In earlier centuries, when the human being turned his senses towards the physical world which constituted his environment, he always knew that a spiritual element also lived in the objects which he perceived though his senses. He no longer had such a highly spiritual conception of the world as, for instance, the ancient Egyptian, or even the ancient Greek, who saw the external embodiment of soul-spiritual beings in the world of the stars, but he still had some inkling of the fact that a spiritual essence permeated everything in his physical environment.

Again, when the human being of earlier centuries looked back upon his own self, he did not strictly separate his physical-bodily part from his soul, i.e. from thought, feeling and will. I might say that by being conscious of his soul, he was at the same time conscious of the members of his body, of the organs of his body, and he also perceived a soul-spiritual essence in these bodily organs, he felt a soul-spiritual essence in his own organism. In the world outside he experienced this soul-spiritual essence, and within his own self he also experienced a soul-spiritual essence.

He thus felt a certain relationship, a certain intimacy with the world around him. He could say to himself: What lives within me, also lives in a certain respect within the universe, and Divine-spiritual beings, who lead and guide the world, placed me into this universe. He felt connected with the universe and had a feeling of intimacy with it. He experienced, as it were, that he formed part of the great soul-spiritual-physical organism of the universe.

This is a feeling which we do not fully understand to-day, because during the past centuries the times have undergone a complete change. This change appears not only among theoreticians and scientists, but it reveals itself in every human heart, in every human soul. It does not merely reveal itself in the way in which modern people contemplate the world, but also in the way in which spirit is embodied in matter in artistic creation and in the enjoyment of art. It reveals itself in our social life, in the way in which we face our fellowman, in the understanding which we have for him, and in what we demand from him. Finally, it reveals itself in the feelings which we have concerning our own ethical-religious impulses, in the way in which we experience the Divine within our own heart and soul, in our attitude towards the impulse which gave to the earth in the deepest way the key to the spirit underlying earthly existence in our attitude towards the deeper inner meaning of Christianity.

We can therefore say: What people thus search for in widest circles must in some way be related with this change. What is the nature of this change?

Now the last centuries have seen the dawn of an age which is frequently described as the age of intellectualism. But it was not intellectualism, an abstract use of the understanding which in the past made people feel so closely connected and acquainted with the surrounding world—as I briefly explained to you just now. Only in the course of human evolution has modern man thoroughly learned to have full confidence in the intellect and in the understanding, when contemplating the world, and even when experiencing it.

Now, however, there are two conditions of human life which are interrelated: inwardly, intellectualism and confidence in the authority of reason, of the understanding, and outwardly, faith in the phenomena of Nature and a sense for the observation of Nature's phenomena.

Inwardly, modern man developed an inclination to set everything under the rule of an intellectualistic observation based on reason. As a natural consequence, this inner capacity above all, could only be applied to the phenomena of Nature, to everything which can be observed through the senses, to everything which can be analyzed or combined in the form of thoughts. These two things, I might say, the indisputable observation of Nature and the development of the intellect, were the two great, important means of education used during recent centuries: they exercised their strongest influence upon civilised humanity during the 19th century and have also carried their fruits into the 20th century.

One of the characteristics connected with the use of the intellect is that in a certain way our inner experience becomes isolated. The use of the intellect (it clearly reveals itself in its picture-character) in a certain way estranges feeling; it takes on a cold, prosaic life-nuance, and in reality it can only develop in the right way through external Nature, through everything which constitutes the surrounding world.

Through this connection, through this relationship of man with the world, deeply satisfying explanations can be found in regard to Nature, but it does not supply in the same measure as in the past the possibility to discover oneself, as it were, within external Nature. The soul-spiritual element which shone out to the men of olden times from a world filled with colour, sound, warmth and coldness, and from the year's seasons, could be experienced as something which was related to what lived in their inner being.

Through our feeling, we can no longer directly bring into our own inner being the whole external life of Nature, which we learn to know through the intellect—all that we discover through intellectual research in physics, chemistry and biology. We can certainly strive to investigate biologically man's inner organic structure; we can even go as far as seeking to investigate the chemical processes of the human organism. But if we apply the investigation of external Nature to the human organism in order to understand it, we shall never find that this manner of investigation also takes hold of our feeling, that it can be summed up in a religious-ethical feeling towards the universe, and that finally it can be expressed in the feeling: "I am a member of the universe: Soul-spiritual is the universe, and I too am soul-spiritual."

This feeling does not shine out of the things which could be learnt during recent centuries through the magnificent impulses of natural science. Consequently, the very forces which brought the best and most significant fruit and which transformed the whole existence of modern man, at the same time estranged him from his own self.

The fact that he stands within the universe and admiringly looks upon his mathematical conception of the spatial world, of the stars and their movements, the fact that he can unfathom with a certain scientific reverence what plants, animals, etc., contain, is accompanied (in spite of all the problems which are still unsolved) by a certain feeling of satisfaction; people are filled with satisfaction that on the one hand it is possible for them to solve the riddles of Nature by using their intellect and their reason; but there is one thing which cannot be reached along this path, namely a Knowledge of Man's True Being.

The science dealing with the stars, the science which exists in the form of physics and chemistry, the science of biology, and in more recent times even the science of history, do not reveal anything in reply to man's deepest longing concerning his own being. And hence arose more and more the need to seek for something else.

Their quest is none other than the quest of modern man for the human being. Though we may do our utmost to summarize the true nature of this quest in different spheres everywhere, we find that men now really wish to solve the riddle of their own being, the riddle of man.

This is not merely something which may interest theoreticians, but something which deeply penetrates into the constitution of every human soul. To all who are interested in such things it is undoubtedly a source of deepest longing when the investigation of Nature leads to the desire to discover also what lies concealed behind the great expanse of Nature's life: namely, man's being, which greatly transcends all that can be gathered from the external kingdoms of Nature.

But I might say: At this point, the great riddle, the search for the nature of man, really begins. At this point we also understand the fact that we have allowed our feelings and our whole education to be influenced by forces which thus came to the fore during recent centuries. External life reflects this in every way. Far more than we think, external life reflects the forces which came to the fore in the spiritual life of humanity during its more recent course of development, as described just now.

We not only enquire in vain after man's true being from a theoretical standpoint—oh no!—but to-day we pass each other by, and under the influence of our modern education we have not the capacity to understand our fellow-men inwardly, we lack the capacity to look with a kind of clairvoyant sympathy into the human soul and into what lives in it, a capacity which still existed in many civilisations of the past. Not only theoretically have we lost the understanding for the human being, but in every moment of the day we lack a sympathetic comprehension, a sympathetic, feeling contact with our fellow-men. Perhaps this appears most clearly of all in the social question; in its present form it shows us that we have indeed lost this understanding for our fellow-men.

For why does the call for social reforms, for a social renewal, resound so loudly? Because in reality we have grown utterly unsocial. As a rule, we demand most loudly of all the very things which we most sorely lack, and in the loud call for socialism, a truly unprejudiced person can hear the truth, that we no longer understand each other and are unable to build up a social organism, because we have grown so unsocial. Consequently, we cling to the hope that our understanding, which has reached such a high stage of development through intellectualism, may after all lead us back to an organic social structure.

The social question itself shows us above all how estranged we have become from each other as human beings. In quite recent times the religious question confronts us, because we have lost the immediate inner experience of being directly connected with the divine essence of the universe; we no longer feel the voice speaking within our own self as an expression of the Divine-spiritual. The call for a religious renewal also arises through a really felt need.

If we now look more deeply into the seeking life of modern times, by setting out from such aspects, we find that the intellectual culture, the intellectual contemplation which gradually made even human feeling grow pale, is after all something which is connected with a definite age of human life.

We should not fall a prey to any illusion: for in regard to his intellect, the human being really awakes only when he reaches the age of puberty; his intellectual powers awake at that time of his life when he is ready to work in the external world. But intellectualism is never our own personal property, a force which can move our soul during childhood, or soon after when we go to school. In this early life the soul's configuration must differ from its later configuration. The intellectual element in modern life cannot and must not develop during childhood and in early youth, for it would have a chilling, deadening, paralyzing effect upon the forces of youth.

Thus it came about (in order to understand the present time and its longings we must penetrate into more intimate details of life) that we now grow into a culture which deprives us—though this may sound paradoxical—in our mature age of the most beautiful memories of our childhood.

If we look back in memory upon our experiences of childhood, we cannot draw up with sufficient intensity and warmth the undefined feelings and memories which frequently live in unconscious depths and which sometimes can only rise up in nuances of thoughts and memories. We reach the point of being unable to understand ourselves completely. We look back upon the life of our childhood as if it were a riddle. We no longer know how to speak out of our full human being, and into the language which we speak as grown-ups we can no longer bring that shading which re-echoes what the child experiences in its living wisdom, when it turns its innocent eyes to the surrounding world, when it unfolds its will during the early years of its existence.

We do not study history in a true way if it does not show us that among the people of olden times, the speech of men who had reached a mature age always re-echoed the development of childhood. We live through our childhood unconsciously, but in such a way, that this unconscious life of the soul still contains in an intensive form what we brought with us through birth, through the union with the physical body, what we brought with us from the soul-spiritual life of our pre-existence.

Those who can observe a child, those who have an open soul and mind for this kind of observation, will discover the greatest mystery when they see how week by week the child unfolds what the human being brings with him into the earthly-physical world from a soul-spiritual existence. What man's eternal being unconsciously brings into the human members, into the whole human organisation, so that it lives and pulses through the body, brings about an inner permeation with soul-spiritual forces, which however encounter a kind of chilling substance, when later on the intellect which really exists only for earthly concerns comes to the fore.

Those who to-day have enough self-observation for such intimate things, know that a kind of thin fog spreads over that which seeks to enter our mature consciousness from our childhood; they know that it is impossible to bring into words which have grown old the living experiences of childhood, because these exercise a soul-spiritual influence, and live within the child in a far more intensive soul-spiritual form than they can later on live in an intellectualistic state.

A witty writer of the 18th and 19th century once wrote: During his first three years of life, man learns far more than during his three years at the university. I do not mean to hurt the feelings of university students, for I can appreciate them, but I also believe that in regard to our whole, full manhood, we learn more during the first three years of life, when we form our organism out of our still unconscious wisdom, than we can ever learn later on. Yet our modern culture strongly develops the tendency to forget these most important three years of life, at least it has the tendency to prevent their coming to expression in a corresponding living way in that which manifests itself later on as the expression of our mature culture. But this fact exercises a great influence upon our whole civilised life. If we are unable to colour, animate, and spiritualize our mature speech and the thoughts of mature life with the forces which well up from our own childhood—because the intellect gives us pictures, a spiritual world in pictures, but is unable to absorb spiritual life, the life of the spirit itself—if we are unable to do this, we cannot speak to youth in a living and intensive way. We then speak out of a lost youth to a living youth round about us.

This is the feeling which we discover in modern youth, this is the feeling expressed in their search and which may be characterised as follows: "You old people speak a language which we cannot understand; you speak words which find no echo in our hearts and souls."—This is why the call for a renewal of culture is to be heard above all in the longings of our young people, and we must realize that by going back to a comprehension of the spiritual we must again learn to speak to youth in the right way, and even to speak in the right way to children.

My dear friends, those who permeate their inner being with the truths which anthroposophical spiritual research seeks to grasp through the soul's living being and not through abstract thoughts, take hold of something which does not grow old, which even in mature years does not deprive them of the forces of childhood; they feel, in a certain way, the more spiritual forces of childhood and of youth entering their maturer life. They will then find the words and the deeds which appeal to youth, the words and deeds which unite them with the young.

It was this observation of youth's mood of seeking which led to the endeavor to create at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart above all a body of teachers able to speak to children out of a spiritual rejuvenation reached in maturer years, to speak to children once more as if they were real friends. To those people who acquire something of genuine spirituality in their life, every child is a revelation, they know that the child, the small child and the older child, can—if they have an open heart for this—give them more than they can give to the child. Though this may sound paradoxical, it is nevertheless the note which may lead to a kind of renewal of culture in this sphere.

If we let this shed light on the other things which confront us in life, we must say to ourselves if we clearly perceive that man is in search of man and that he must seek him; that is to say, if we can see that the human being who has become one-sided through intellectualism goes in search of the full whole human being, we shall come across this same fact very definitely in many other spheres of life to-day.

If we survey the times which have given rise to the great achievements of modern culture, achievements which cannot be prized highly enough, we find that modern civilisation could only be gained by forfeiting something of man's whole being. Man looked out into the world's spaces. He could build instruments enabling him to discover the nature and the movements of the stars. It is only since a few centuries, however, that results which thus confront us have developed in such a way as to supply a mathematical physical picture of the universe. To-day we no longer feel how in the past men looked out into the universe and perceived in the stars' courses a revelation of the spirit in the cosmos, in the same way in which we now perceive in the physiognomy of a human being the revelation of his soul and spirit. An abstract, dried-up mathematical-mechanical element now appears to us in the cosmos, although in itself it is one which cannot be prized highly enough. We look up to the sky and perceive nothing but an immense world-mechanism. The ideal has more and more gained ground to perceive this world-mechanism everywhere. And what has grown out of it to-day

Though to many contemporaries this may still seem contradictory, I think that to an unprejudiced observation it is everywhere clearly evident that the social sphere of humanity which surrounds us everywhere and which constitutes our modern civilisation, now sends out its answers to the concept of world-mechanism.

For to-day our social and also our ethical and juridical life, and in a certain way—as I will immediately show you—even our religious life, have taken on a mechanistic character.

We can see that in millions and millions of men there lives the view that the historical evolution of mankind does not contain spiritual forces, but only economic forces, and that everything which lives in art, religion, ethics, science, law, etc., is a kind of fog rising out of the only historical reality, out of economic life. Economic forms are realities and their influence upon men—this is what many people say to-day and one's heart should feel the great tragedy of such statements—gives rise to what develops in the form of law, ethics, religion, art, etc. This is their view: they think that all this is an ideology.

This has driven us in a direction which has, to be sure, produced great results in the spiritual life of the Occident, but to-day it has reached the opposite pole of what once existed in ancient better times of the past in the civilisation of the Orient—though even the Oriental culture has now become decadent. It was a one-sided culture, but our modern culture is also one-sided.

Let us bear in mind that once upon a time—in the East above all—there lived a race which described the external physical world as Maya, as the great illusion, for it only looked upon man's inner life as the true reality, man's thoughts, sensations, feelings and impulses of the will were the only reality. Once upon a time there was this other one-sided conception of perceiving the true essence and reality only in man's inner being, in the world of his thoughts, feelings and sensations, and of seeing in the external world nothing but Maya or the great illusion.

To-day we have reached the opposite conception, which is also one-sided. From the standpoint of modern culture we see the physical world everywhere round about us, and we call it the true reality. Millions of people see reality only in the physical course of economic processes and consider man's inner life an ideology, with the inclusion of everything which has proceeded from it in the development of culture. What millions and millions of people now designate an ideology is after all the same thing which the Orientals once called Maya, illusion—it is simply a different word, and used to be sure, in the opposite sense. The Oriental could have applied the word “ideology” to the external world, and “reality” to his inner being. Modern culture has reached the stage that countless people now apply these words in an opposite one-sidedness.

Our social life reveals something of which we can say: It has resulted in great and significant triumphs for science, but it has brought difficulties into human life itself, into the ethical and social life of men. But this mechanisation of life which now faces us does not only live in the ideas of millions of men, it really also exists. Our external life has become mechanised, and with our modern culture we are now living in a time which supplies man's answer in the social, ethical and religious spheres of life.

What first arose as a conception of the world in the great age of Galileo, Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, the conception which was then born, demands to be sure that it should be permeated with humanity in a different way from what has been the case so far. For the mechanisation of our human life is, as it were, the answer of civilisation to the mechanical character of our intellectual, scientific life.

We can see this in every detail. To-day we study natural science. We study the development of animal species from the lowest, simplest, most imperfect forms right up to man. Guided by highly praiseworthy scientific thought, we then place man at the end of this line of organic beings. What does this teach us in regard to him? That he is the highest animal. This is, of course, significant in a certain way, but we thus only learn to know man in his relationship to the other beings, not as he experiences himself as man. We learn to know what man develops in regard to the other beings, but not what constitutes his own self. Man loses himself in as much as he contemplates the external world in accordance with the admirable principles of modern natural science.

And hence the search for the human being, since through the great achievements of modern time, man has in a certain way, lost himself. And if we then look at the communal life in the social organism, we find that their reciprocal actions compel men to live as they do. In regard to this necessity we have gone very far in modern times. Into every sphere of social life there has entered a division of work. As regards the external mechanised life of modern times we must work so as to realize the truth of the words: All for one and one for all! In regard to external life we have had to learn to work one for the other.

But also, here we can see that for those who have not preserved old traditions but who have grown into the most modern form of life, human labour has become completely separated from the human being and that our modern understanding only enables us to grasp the external nature of man. Our conception and feeling in regard to human labour, through which we help our fellow men and work together with them, has therefore become a purely external one. We no longer observe the man and how he develops his work out of his soul-spiritual existence on earth, we do not see how human labour is the outcome of a man with whom we are closely bound up through feeling, who is a being like us. We see him and we do not feel that he is working for us. No, in the social life of to-day we look at the product, we see how much human labour has flowed into it and we judge human work in so far as we find it in the product.

This is so deeply rooted in people's minds, that by enhancing this great error of modern times Karl Marx reached the point of designating everything circulating as human labour in the form of goods produced for human consumption, as a crystallised condensed labour. We now judge labour separated from the human being, in the same way in which we have acquired the power of observing Nature apart from man. Our judgement of human labour is really infected by what we have learned to know concerning man and by the way in which we look upon him through natural science. This only leads us as far as the Nature-side of man, only as far as the fact that man is the highest animal: we do not penetrate as far as man's innermost being.

Even when we observe man in his work, we do not see how this work comes from him, but we wait instead until the product is there and only seek the work in something which has become emancipated from the man. And there stands man among us as a social being who knows that he must put into labour his human nature and frequently his human dignity, and he sees that this human dignity and the way in which labour comes out of his inner self, is not valued human work is only valued when it has streamed into the external product which is then brought on to the market; labour is there something which has been submerged in the wares, something which can, as it were, be bought and sold.

So in this connection, too, we see how man has lost himself. He has forfeited, as it were, a piece of his own self—his work—to the mechanism of modern civilisation.

We see this above all in the juridical part of the social organism. If we observe how the spiritual, mental, life prevails among us in modern times we find that the spirit only exists in abstract thoughts; that we can only have confidence in abstract thoughts and forget that the spirit lives within us in a direct way, that the spirit enters into us whenever we occupy ourselves with it, that our soul is not only filled by thoughts, but that our soul is really penetrated by the spirit whenever we are spiritually active. Mankind has lost this connection with the spirit, while its conception of Nature has become great. This in regard to the spiritual life.

In regard to our juridical, social and political life, the example of human labour has shown us that something which is connected with the human being has been torn away from him. When we observe the human soul in its intercourse as man with man, we do not see feeling flashing up and growing warm when one person looks at another's work. There is no warm feeling for the man at his work. We do not see the work developing in connection with man, but we only see something which can no longer kindle the other man's warm sympathy; we see the labour after it has left the man, and has flowed into the product.

So in this sphere, too, in the sphere of human intercourse and juridical life, we have lost man.

And if we look at the sphere of economics: in the economic life man must procure for himself what he needs for his consumption. The things which he needs for his own consumption are those for which he develops his capacities. Man will work all the better for others, for himself and for the whole human community, the more he develops his capacities. The essential point in economic life is the development of human faculties. When it is a question of people, an employee will find it advantageous to work for a capable employer. This is quite possible, for those whose work is guided by others physically or spiritually, soon recognize that they fare better with a capable leader than with an incapable one.

But does our modern economic striving tend above all to bear in mind the economic life and activity of mankind and to ask everywhere: Where are the more capable people? If we were to look upon this living element in man, upon this purely human element, if people were placed into economic life in accordance with their capacities, so that they might achieve their best for their fellows: that could achieve a conception, a culture, able to discover the human being in man.

But the characteristic of our modern culture is just this, that it cannot discover the human being in man, and to an unprejudiced observation it is evident that we have gradually lost the power of judging people rightly, in accordance with their capacities and gifts.

To be sure that testing entity, the examination, through which men's capacities are supposed to be shown, has acquired a great importance in our modern civilisation. But its chief aim is not to discover how a person can most capably work in life, for the mechanised way of living requires something else. In many respects indeed, there is the call to-day to let the best man fill the best place according to requirement, but this generally remains a pious wish, and we see that economic life above all—as well as other spheres, such as spiritual and juridical life—becomes severed from the human being. We do not consider the human being above all and his living connection with economic life, but we consider instead the best way in which he can become connected with something which is not really related to man. We see that economic life as well is separating itself from man. It is therefore no wonder that the call for a renewal of our present culture should arise in every sphere of life under the aspect of a search for the human being.

Things are not much better in the sphere of art. If we look back into the times of ancient Greece, we think that the Greek tragedians wrote their dramas in the same way in which we write them now. Yet the Greek conception of life in no way resembles the present one. The Greek spoke of Catharsis, the purification which must take place through the drama. What did he understand by catharsis or purification? He meant that a person participating in the action of such a tragedy or of some other piece, experienced something in his soul which made him pass through certain feigned emotions. But this had a purifying effect, and thereby a healing effect upon him, reaching as far as the physical organism; it had above all a purifying and healing effect upon the soul. And the most important thing in Greek drama consisted both in a higher spiritual impulse and, I might say, in a medical impulse; the Greek saw a kind of healing process in what he wished to impart to his fellow-men through his highly perfected art.

We cannot of course, become Greeks again; I am merely telling you this as an elucidation of the fact that we have actually entered into a mechanised way of living which is, as it were, a denial of the human being, and that this explains the deep longing which passes through the modern world as a search for man.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy in order to support this search for the human being, strives for what may be called the threefold division of the social organism. This is subjected to many misunderstandings. It only seeks ways, however, which will lead, in the life of the spirit, to the rediscovery of no mere abstract spirit, a pallid thought world, at most a reflecting upon the spirit; which will lead, in the juridical-political life, to the rediscovery of not merely the work that flows into the product, but the valuing of man's work, that human valuing of work which arises in the communal life when man as man confronts his fellows in pure humanity.

And in the economic sphere, the threefold division of the social organism aims at the forming of Associations in which people unite as consumers and producers, so that they can guide economic life in an associative way, out of the most varied human spheres of interest.

We judge economic requirements purely through the mechanism of the market. The Associations are meant to unite people as living human beings who recognize the requirements in economic life; they are to form an organism that can regulate the conditions of production determined by the common life of men and by a knowledge of these requirements arising from such a joint life.

The threefold division of the social organism thus seeks to connect these three members-spiritual life, juridical life and economic life—in such a way within the social organism that the human element may everywhere be found again in the free life of the spirit, that does not serve economic interests nor proceed from these, that does not serve political interests nor proceed from these, but that stands freely upon its own foundation and seeks to develop human capacities in the best way. This free life of the spirit seeks to show man the human being—it shows the human being to man.

In the free Life of the Spirit the human being can be found by experiencing the spirit, thus unfolding in a harmonious way the human capacities; from such a relatively independent spiritual life, it will then be possible to send into the political-juridical life and into the economic life the men with the best capacities, thus fructifying these spheres. If the economic life or political life dictate what capacities are to be developed, they themselves cannot prosper. But if they leave the life of the spirit completely free, so that it can give to the world out of its own foundations what every individual brings into existence out of divine-spiritual worlds, then the other spheres of life can become fruitful in the widest sense of the word.

The States-life should cultivate what men can develop as the feeling of legal rights, as moral disposition inasmuch as they face each other as equals. The Economic Life should discover man through the necessary Associations in keeping with his needs and capacities in the economic sphere. The threefold division of the social organism does not aim at a mechanical separation of these three spheres, but by establishing a relative independence of these three spheres it seeks to enable man once more to find through these three spheres of life the full humanity which he has lost and which he is seeking to discover again.

In such a sense we may indeed speak of the necessity for a renewal of culture. And this is particularly evident if we look still deeper into man's inner being, into that inner part where, if he seeks to be fully man, and experience fully his dignity and worth as a human being, he must connect himself with the divine-spiritual; where he must experience and feel his own eternal being, that is to say, when we look at men's common religious life.

My dear friends, I only desire of course to say that these are the convictions of anthroposophical spiritual science; I do not wish to press anyone to accept this particular solution of to-day's subject. Anthroposophy seeks above all to recognize once more the place of Christianity in the evolution of the earth. It points to the Mystery of Golgotha, as Anthroposophy can unravel it in the spiritual world. Historical evolution is then traced in relation to the Mystery of Golgotha.

A spiritual study of human history reveals that in primeval times humanity possessed a kind of primeval revelation, a kind of instinctive primeval wisdom, which gradually disappeared and grew fainter, and this would have increased as time went on. If nothing else had occurred, we should now be living within a pallid spiritual life deprived of wisdom, a spiritual life that could have nothing in common with the warmth of our soul-life had not earthly existence been fructified at a certain moment by something which came from outside the earth.

Spiritual science, in the sense of Anthroposophy, can once more draw attention to the man Jesus, who at the beginning of our era, wandered upon the earth in Palestine. We see that modern external Christianity more and more considers this man Jesus merely as a human being, whereas in older times people saw in Jesus a Being from spiritual worlds transcending the earth, Who had united Himself with the man Jesus and Who had become Christ Jesus.

By investigating the spheres outside the earth with the aid of spiritual observation, spiritual science does not only draw attention to the man Jesus, but also to the Christ Who descended from heavenly heights, as a Principle transcending the earth and penetrating through the Mystery of Golgotha into human life on earth. And since the Mystery of Golgotha, the evolution of humanity on earth has become different, for a fructifying process from the heavenly worlds took place.

Modern culture leads men to concentrate their attention more and more upon the man Jesus, thus losing that feeling of genuine religious devotion gained by looking upon Christ Jesus, a feeling which alone can give us satisfaction. By looking only upon the man Jesus, people really lose that part in Jesus which could be of special value to them. For the human being in man has been lost. Even through religion we do not know how to seek in the right way the man in Jesus of Nazareth.

Through a deepening of the spiritual-religious life, anthroposophical spiritual science once more discloses the source of religious devotion, in other words, it leads to the search of the divine in man within the human being himself, so that it can also rediscover in the man Jesus the super-earthly Christ, thus penetrating to the real essence of Christ Jesus. Anthroposophy does not in any way degrade the Mystery of Golgotha by saying that what formerly existed outside the earth afterwards came down to the earth.

And what does one experience in the present age of modern culture by pursuing such a goal?

The tendency of anthroposophical spiritual science to consider what transcends the earthly sphere has led people to retort that Anthroposophy is not Christian, that it cannot be Christianity because it sets a super-earthly, cosmic Being in Christ Jesus in place of the purely human being. They even think that it is an offence to say that Christ came down from cosmic spaces and penetrated into Jesus. Why do they think this? Because people only see the mathematical-mechanical cosmos, only the great machinery, as it were, when they look out into the heavenly spaces, and this attitude affects even religion, even man's religious feeling. Consequently, even religious people, and those who teach religion to-day, think that religion would be mechanised if Christ were to be sought in the cosmic spaces before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet spiritual science does not mechanize religion, nor does it deprive Christianity of its Christian element; instead it fills external life with Christianity by showing: out there in the cosmos is not mere mechanism, not merely phenomena and laws which can be grasped, through mathematics and natural science—there is spirituality.

Whereas modern theologians often believe that Anthroposophy speaks of a Christ coming down from the sun, from the lifeless cosmic space into Jesus, what is true is that Anthroposophy also sees the spiritual in the realms outside the earth, and considers it a blessing for the earth that the heavenly powers sent down their influence through this Being Who gave the earth its meaning by passing through the Mystery of Golgotha, by coming down from heavenly heights and uniting Himself with the evolution of humanity upon the earth.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy thus really seeks to render religious life fruitful again and to fill it with real warmth; it seeks to lead man back to the original source of the divine. And this is sought by listening to what lies in the call for a renewal of our culture.

We have watched the development of a magnificent science and are full of admiration for the achievements of this modern science which have brought about such great results in our civilisation. But in addition to this, we realize that there exists the call for a renewal of religious life, for a renewed religious deepening. On the one hand, we are to have a science which has nothing to do with religion, and at the same time we are to have a religious renewal. This is the dream of many people.

But it will be a vain dream. For the content of religion can never be drawn out of anything but what a definite epoch holds to be knowledge. If we look back into times when religious life was fully active, we find that religions were also filled with the content of knowledge of a definite epoch, though in a special form, with the breath of reverence and piety, with true devotion and (this is especially significant) with a feeling of veneration for the founder of the particular religion.

Our present time, our modern civilisation, will therefore be unable to draw any satisfaction out of a religious content which does not harmonize with the knowledge which is accessible to modern people. That is why anthroposophical spiritual science does not seek a religion in addition to science, but it endeavors instead to raise science itself to a stage where it can once more become religious. It does not seek an irreligious science, and beside it an unscientific religion, but a science which can cultivate a religious life out of its own sources. For the science which Anthroposophy seeks is not based in a one-sided way upon the intellect, but it embraces the whole human being and everything which lives in him. Such a form of science does not have a destructive influence upon religious life, and above all it has no destructive influence upon Christian life, but will shed light upon it, so that one can find in the Mystery of Golgotha which entered the evolution of the earth the eternal, supersensible significance which was bestowed upon humanity through this event. If we look upon the Mystery of Golgotha, religious enthusiasm and inner religious happiness will enter our feelings and in a moral way also our will, and this religious life cannot be destroyed, but can be illumined in the right way by the truths which we can see and comprehend in regard to Christ Jesus, and His entrance into the earthly development of humanity.

Spiritual science therefore tries to meet the search for the human being. As I already explained to you, this lecture is only meant to be a small contribution to the hoped-for and longed-for renewal of our modern culture. It only seeks to explain the way in which it is possible to view the significance, the deep, inner, human significance of the longings which can find expression in a problem such as the renewal of modern culture.

In my lecture I also wished to show you that this call for a renewal of culture is really at the same time a call for knowledge for the development of a new feeling of the true human nature. The problem dealing with the nature of this search which strives after a renewal of modern culture is one which really exists, and we must seek to gain a real feeling of the true being of man, a full experience of the human being. Perhaps it is justified to believe that we may interpret this call for a renewal of culture, a call which is in many ways not at all clear and distinct, by saying to ourselves: The striving human being is now confronted in a really significant way by the renewal of a problem which resounded in ancient Greece and which now re-echoes from there in the call: "O man, know thyself!"

Assuredly the noblest endeavors of hundreds and thousands of years have been spent in the attempt to solve this problem. To-day it is more than ever the greatest problem of destiny. No matter how individual persons may reply to the question, how are we to reach a renewal of culture (I think I indicated this to some extent) the answer will somehow have to lie in the following direction: How can we rediscover by a fully human striving man himself, so that in contact with his fellow-man (who in his turn should devote himself fully to the world and his fellows) man may once more find satisfaction in his ethical, social and intellectual life? This constitutes, I think, the problem dealing with a renewal of our modern culture.

I would like to say that modern natural science has actually only brought to light the full significance of what we call our sensory knowledge. And anyone who wants to speak — as is to be done this evening — of supersensible knowledge must, above all, be completely clear about the nature of sensory knowledge, without any dilettantism. By systematically applying the methods of observation, by developing the way experiments are conducted, and by mathematically and otherwise rationally treating observations and experiments, modern natural science has gradually raised itself to the ideal of arriving at something through the contemplation of the sensory world that something that approximates more and more to an objective reality, an objective reality into which nothing may be mixed from the subjective, personal arbitrariness of man, nothing from any phantasms or illusions. In this respect, supersensible knowledge must also emulate natural science.

If we use the human mind merely – and as mathematicians we do this particularly – to order and systematize the phenomena of the senses and thereby to divine their laws, then we gradually come to realize that the senses and their explanations are basically the great educators of the human mind, that mind which is nevertheless dependent in a certain respect on the inner organic constitution of the human being. We know how dependent we are — and modern science, physiology and pathology, can still substantiate this — in our judgments and in forming our ideas of what our physical and mental constitution is. But by devoting ourselves to sense perception in a scientific way, we are constantly compelled to rectify in an objective sense that which wants to leave us as illusions, as phantasms. This – I say this again – must absolutely be emulated by supersensible knowledge.

However, the modern scientific method comes up against a certain limit in its efforts to understand the external world, and important naturalists have clearly spoken about these “limits of natural knowledge” based on the nature of scientific knowledge. We cannot get beyond the order of sense phenomena. At the moment we want to go further, to go beyond the sensory tapestry that spreads around us through intellectual speculation, we must either state the limits of knowledge of nature, or we must, as it were, let go of the intellect and extend the concepts, speculate, build hypotheses into the void, into the indefinite. And there have been enough of these hypotheses. Many a person has cautiously tried to venture beyond the realm of sense perception with concepts and ideas. But in the end, all such efforts leave the person unsatisfied, for he can never give himself an explanation as to what justification there can be for extending the ideas gained from the sense world into the realm beyond the senses.

And so all philosophies and speculations that want to go beyond the sensory world are completely unsatisfactory for the serious thinker, especially for the thinker accustomed to scientific concepts, and we see the consequences of this in the various world view endeavors of the present. The human heart and soul cannot remain with what the external senses can tell it. The human soul knows that the merely temporary fate, which is bound to this sensory world from it, cannot affect its ultimate nature, and so deeper natures, more serious souls, often take refuge in all kinds of mystical endeavors.

These mystical endeavors are directed towards turning one's attention away from the external sense world, and also more or less away from the intellectualistic penetration of this sense world, and instead to look into the inner being of the human being. Just as it is impossible to arrive at a truly satisfactory understanding of the nature of the human soul through external natural science or through speculation based on it, so it is equally impossible to arrive at a satisfactory knowledge of the human soul through ordinary “mystical immersion”. For what does it profit us, no matter how much we develop this mystical absorption? What comes to the surface of our consciousness from the depths of the human soul? Some people may believe that they can exclude all subjective arbitrariness by quietly and meditatively devoting themselves to what an objective inner upwelling from the soul can tell us about our own human nature.

But anyone who can truly dissect the human soul, who can examine how, in this human soul life, there is nothing but the external impressions that we have taken into our soul from the external world since our birth, who can examine how, in this human soul life, there is nothing but the external impressions that we have taken into our soul from the external world since our birth, and who can examine how, in this human soul life, there is nothing but the external impressions that we have taken into our soul from the external world since our birth, will ultimately always discover that the mystic, who often believes he has found his divine origin, something eternal, in his own soul, is ultimately dealing with nothing other than reminiscences of experiences to which the human being was exposed, especially in those times of childhood when one is not yet fully aware of the relationship between the human being and the outside world. And if, in addition, one is able, through a sound knowledge of the human soul, to see how the inner state of mind, what one might call a certain inner pleasure, or also all kinds of inner fears, can cloud one's judgment of the mystical content and make it appear as something quite different from what it is, then one becomes particularly cautious in this area. An everyday experience over many years can metamorphose in the soul so that a trivial experience can emerge from the soul decades later as something connected with the ground of the world. He who knows how not only the soul-condition, which is after all more easily observed, affects man's general feeling, but even the human organism, he alone can see clearly in this field, and he will come to reject much mystical striving, which is taken seriously from this or that side. Whoever can analyze the human soul will see the reasons for some doubtfulness, for some skepticism, which appear as a world view, but in a disturbed digestion, and will have to look for the reasons for some mystical ecstasy in organic excitement, sometimes of a very questionable nature.

In short, anyone seeking serious anthroposophical spiritual science must avoid the two pitfalls: the limited natural science on the one hand and the mysticism that lives so richly in illusions on the other. He must seek a sure method, one that is modeled on the certainty of natural science, imbued with the same attitude with which one lives as a scientist when experimenting in the laboratory or studying physiology or pathology at the dissecting table. Not only must anthroposophy arrive at different results from those of recognized science, but it must also develop its own method.

Now you will understand that in this short lecture one evening, I can only give you guidelines, just a few suggestions, regarding the results of this anthroposophical spiritual science, as well as its method and evidence. I will be able to show how the evidence is found. But what I am thinking of giving a brief outline of here is already the subject of a great deal of literature, and so in the context of a lecture I can only make suggestions, not present anything conclusive.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must go beyond the ordinary scientific method! Why is science limited? Why does mysticism not lead to the real core of human nature? Because both natural science and mysticism are limited to those cognitive abilities that a person develops in normal life, whether through natural growth, organic development, or the education that is common today. Thus we only develop the scientific method. Anthroposophy must now draw attention to the fact that the human being can become aware of other abilities that lie deeper in his soul, that lie dormant in this soul for ordinary life and for ordinary science, and that he can also consciously apply such abilities to genuine scientific knowledge. In order to develop these abilities, however, we should not resort to some kind of mystic darkness, but we should start from what is available in ordinary science and in ordinary human life.

Here we have what mysticism presents to us with so many illusions: the human capacity for memory at the one limit of our ordinary pole. This capacity for memory is, of course, entirely dependent on the organic constitution of the human being. Yet it is this capacity for memory that gives us, as human beings, our coherent consciousness, our coherent self. One need only think of the terrible mental state of those people in whom the continuous memory into childhood is clouded. There are conditions in which long periods of time are missing from the memory. Such people have, so to speak, pushed a part of their own soul life out of themselves. They no longer feel and experience their whole being. They show us how important coherent memory is for a healthy soul life. What is the nature of this memory? It consists in our being able to conjure up images in our consciousness of experiences we have had in our ordinary life between birth and the present moment. We carry images within us that we can conjure up before our soul in our ordinary life, more or less faithfully. The anthroposophical method initially ties in with this soul ability and, by transforming this ability to remember, trains so-called imaginative knowledge. This is not a sum of imaginations, of illusions, but something that can be gained through strict inner self-education alone and that corresponds to an objectivity, albeit a spiritual objectivity, just as the memory corresponds to an objectivity, not to mere fantasy. I will briefly indicate the principle of how to arrive at this first step of supersensible knowledge, at imaginative knowledge.

The point is to allow representations to be present in one's consciousness in a manner similar to that which otherwise obtains in memory. However, since we are not dealing with training but with a transformation of the ability to remember, these must not be images that one simply retrieves from the treasure trove of one's memories. Such images are, after all, modified by the emotional life and even by the organic constitution of the person, and a person can never know what is being conjured up when he simply allows memories to be present in his consciousness.

In order to bring about what I would call meditation — I have called it that in my writings — either you have to have some kind of idea of an experienced anthroposophist , or one must try to form an idea or a complex of ideas oneself that is easily comprehensible, that one can survey, as for example a triangle in geometry can be surveyed, where one can be quite certain: what is present in consciousness is all that is present. Nothing from the world of the emotions, from the constitution of the organs, comes up; you really have everything in view.

But it is not the content that is important, but rather that the soul now draws together all its powers to allow this content to be present in its consciousness for a shorter or longer while – some need a longer time for this, others a shorter time, it depends on the disposition of the person –. For what matters is the development of these forces slumbering in the soul, not what we bring into our consciousness in the form of thoughts, but what we do with what we have thought about. If, by way of comparison, we exert our arm muscles particularly through some kind of work, they become stronger and stronger, developing more and more strength. This physical strength develops through work and practice. It is exactly the same when, after years of practice, we make ideas present in our consciousness in the way indicated and then hold them in our consciousness for some time. What the soul has to do here strengthens the soul forces that one does not have in ordinary life.

I would like to make it very clear that what I have described here is easy to explain but difficult to carry out. It is no easier to make progress in the methods of spiritual science than in the methods of a laboratory or an observatory. Of course, there are people who are particularly predisposed to developing such inner soul powers; they may make very rapid progress. But in general, without needing a lot of time every day (each individual exercise can be short; its effect depends on the power of the exercise, not on the length of time, which only puts one to sleep), one needs repetition , repetitive practice, to finally get to the point of noticing something very specific in oneself; namely, that one has brought something out of the depths of one's soul that one previously did not use either for ordinary life or for ordinary science. To make ourselves understood, I would like to use a comparison.

We remember ourselves as human beings with an ordinary consciousness up to a certain point in our childhood. What lies before this point eludes ordinary memory. Why is that? Well, during this time, what the child experiences psychically works through impressions of the outside world, through combinations of the outside world and through the penetration of the emotional side of his soul with will impulses. This is not yet working with the ideas that only emerge with the development of speech. Rather, what the child ignites in the outside world is imprinted in the still plastic, malleable brain, and it is an interesting study to see how malleable a child's physical brain is, how resiliently it develops according to what the child experiences in the outside world. But it can also be said that this physical human brain stiffens, and precisely at the moment when it has stiffened particularly, the formation of the brain stops, and those forces are released that used to work on the brain. They now provide the child's imaginative life. This is mainly sparked by language. The human being continues to develop this, and through careful education he or she continues to develop what he or she is able to produce through the formation of his or her brain in the first years of life.

In a wonderful intuition, a man like Jean Paul spoke of education in such a way that he said: Man learns more in the first three years of life than later in three academic years. Actually, this is absolutely true, because in the first three years of life our organism is formed, and we can basically shape and be shaped in our whole later education only in the sense that our physical brain is formed in the very first years of life.

With these abilities, which develop in this way, the human being today stops both in accepted science and in ordinary life. The anthroposophical method would now like to take up in a higher sense — which again is not for physical education, but for soul education — what has been achieved for the human organization in the first years of childhood. If we carry out such meditations as I have suggested, and allow the images to be present in our consciousness for a sufficiently long time, depending on our individual abilities, we will notice that something similar to what happened in early childhood now occurs, and this occurs in the full consciousness something similar to what happened in early childhood, only that in a properly guided meditation one does not intervene in the physical organization, but in the finer organization that underlies the physical organism and that is only now being discovered.

In the course of meditation, one must absolutely come to it, after first honestly admitting to one's imagination: there you have the limits of your knowledge. So you have to be able to stand there quite honestly on the ground of scientific research and say to yourself, in the sense of a du Bois-Reymond, who in the early seventies of the nineteenth century gave his famous lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” in Leipzig. For ordinary thinking, there are limits to knowledge that cannot be transcended. But if you live this meditative life, you will find that, just as a child, through development, weaves itself deeper and deeper into the outer secrets of the world, certain limits are now practically overcome. You can then honestly admit to yourself: Before, you had these limits because you did not use certain abilities. Now you have developed these abilities and can cross these boundaries. In this way, anthroposophy transforms knowledge, which is otherwise only an intellectual-formal one, into a practical one. Before certain boundaries of knowledge are crossed, the ability to cross them and, above all, the consciousness that can understand inwardly is first developed: Now you are capable of something different than you were before.

And it is particularly the one inner experience that one has: as one advances in meditation, one comes to realize that, without perceiving with the senses, one enters into an inner activity that proceeds with the same vividness with which a sensory perception proceeds. What one experiences inwardly in meditation are images, such images that are more vivid than the memories, as vivid as the sensory perceptions, but do not have the same content as the sensory perceptions. Just as one otherwise experiences only when one sees colors with one's eyes and hears sounds with one's ears, whereas mere imagining, even remembering, is something pale, so one experiences something new with the same input through the whole person, as one also otherwise experiences with the whole person in sensory perception: a world of imaginations that is there for consciousness, that was not there before, a thoroughly new world. And we have conquered the objectivity of this world by making the efforts I have mentioned.

I could not go into this in detail, only hint at the principle. In some of my writings — for example, in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and also in the second part of “Occult Science, an Outline of Its Methods” — you will find the details of this meditative practice described. Here it is sufficient to have hinted at the principle by which one comes to imaginative knowledge.

When speaking of this imaginative knowledge to those who today often believe that they are fully grounded in a scientific attitude, they say: It may seem to be laboriously acquired, but it is nothing more than something acquired through autosuggestion, something that, just like any visions or hallucinations, is brought up from repressed nervous strength to the surface of consciousness. Therefore, it must be emphasized again and again that what anthroposophy develops in this way is quite the opposite of the pathological experiences of the soul, of illusion, hallucination or mediumship. One need only be reminded of one thing: anyone who, for example, examines what I have written about meditation exercises in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' will see that particular care is taken to maintain the soul life of the human being completely healthy and intact alongside the development of this higher knowledge, that is, let us say, of the imaginative life. In the case of a diseased soul life, the diseased soul life drowns out the healthy one, as it were extinguishing it. In the case of the soul life that is sought for the purpose of higher knowledge of anthroposophy, the healthy soul life remains completely intact alongside what is now also sought as imagination. Imagination appears as something quite different from ordinary mental life, but at no moment is the person who has attained it in a different inner state of mind, so that all his other memories and insights remain healthy alongside the imagination.

Imagination, as I said, is transformed memory. This is also expressed in its very essence. Some beginners on this path develop this imagination. They are then delighted when they have arrived at the first elementary results, that they can develop a pictorial, objectively given life of ideas that now already, at least suggestively, points them to a supersensible world. But they lose it again. This is due to the essential nature of imaginative cognition, as well as that of all higher knowledge. The knowledge that we otherwise acquire in the external world through ordinary consciousness leads to memory; we can bring it forth again from memory. What arises in the imaginative life is there, alive, like a sense experience, like sounds or colors. But it does not imprint itself on memory. This is precisely what surprises the beginner the most. He believes that he can have a supersensible insight and that he can carry it with him through life like an ordinary memory. Just as we, when we have looked at a color, then turn away from it and no longer have it, so we no longer have the supersensible experience if we have forgotten it in our soul. All this must be taken into account. Anyone who speaks about this supersensible world never speaks from memory; he speaks from an immediate experience of the supersensible world.

Let me make a brief personal comment. Even when one gives a lecture such as today's, in which one speaks about the supersensible world in an orienting way, one does not prepare for it in the same way as for other lectures on knowledge. Rather, one has to direct one's preparation in such a way that one's organism and soul life are enabled to let the supersensible knowledge approach them.

For if I have a supersensible insight today, as soon as I have had it I forget it, and if I want to have it again, I have to bring it about again. I cannot simply remember it; I can only bring about what I did in meditation and concentration to bring about that supersensible experience at the time.

So already in the imagination, the supersensible worlds are such that they do not imprint themselves on memory. Why is that? The reason for this is that supersensible knowledge, as it is meant here, is not something formal at all, but, in contrast, really brings about the supersensible world for us. We can recall knowledge that merely gives us images of the external material world over and over again. Once we have acquired them, it is good to be able to recall them from memory. This kind of knowledge is based only on pictorial processes, on mirroring processes in relation to the external world. It is basically not a sum of real processes. Real processes take place in such a way that they are subject to repetition, to rhythmic repetition, not to memory.

It is a very trivial but accurate statement when I say that our organism needs food. What we take in as food is processed by it in some way that does not need to be explained further here. But once it has been processed, the corresponding process is over, so to speak. But the next day we must eat again, and no one can claim that he ate yesterday; nor will he. We are not dealing with a formal process of reflection, but with a real process. Such real processes are those that occur in the supersensible knowledge meant here. What has once been brought about as the content of the soul must be brought about again and again by taking the same measures again. One can remember the measures that formed the preparation for certain supersensible experiences at the time. But only by taking the same measures can one arrive at the same results.

Once you have entered this imaginative world, however, you are fully aware that you once had a world of imaginations. The way you experience these imaginations is an inner grasping of the whole human being. But you also know that you have not grasped an external world with consciousness, but that you have actually only brought up from your own inner being everything that you have brought out of consciousness. A hallucinator who surrenders to some kind of vision mistakes the images that arise in his mind for reality. Someone who lives in the imagination and is trained in anthroposophy knows that at first he has only himself in the imagination. There is already a certain development of strength in this awareness of having only oneself, because everything that arises in the form of vivid images, as vivid as any external sensory perception, tempts one to mistake it for an external world. It is also objective, but our own objective inner world. One must apply a certain inner power of consciousness in order to become fully aware that you are dealing with your own inner being.

But this imagination can progress to the point where you really only get this own inner being in front of you, and in such a way that you now, with the help of this imaginative knowledge, have the first, albeit now — I would like to say — subjective-objective supersensible experience. That one has something like a tableau of one's life — I cannot say spatial, nor temporal, it is something temporal-spatial, something where one has something temporal before one, but as if quite side by side — that one has such a tableau of one's life before one, one that extends back to the vicinity of one's birth, that one has gone through oneself in this earthly life up to the moment of one's birth. (This is what appears before the soul in such a temporal-spatial image.) At the same time, one can see what has happened to us over the course of a long time. Otherwise, memory is such that one or the other emerges from the stream of experiences. But now, not as a memory, but as an image, and indeed as an inner, thoroughly worked through image, one has one's entire life before one, as it is described by people who study nature and who are conscientious enough in such matters that one can recognize it as truth. Just as someone who is about to drown sees his life before him in a clear way, so the person who has advanced to imaginative knowledge in this way has his life before him in a clear tableau.

This is the first experience one has. It is the kind of experience that can already lead one to see that The person who presents himself as a spiritual researcher in the anthroposophical sense must also get to know all the inner experiences that accompany such supersensible experiences. What he shares serves to strengthen and calm life. It gives life security and shows the eternal essence of the human being, as we shall see. But the research and the experience itself is something that not every person would desire from the outset. One must already have developed a full and healthy soul life, for which the books mentioned above give comprehensive instructions, in order to be able to face what is necessary to understand and receive messages about the supersensible world, but is also necessary for research in these areas, with an open mind and strength.

The vision of this tableau of life gives rise to an inner experience that I would call “oppressive”; something like an anxiety attack settles over life. And herein lies progress: that the anthroposophical researcher confronts and overcomes these things with strong soul power, that he has first developed a healthy soul life to such an extent that he can endure in a healthy way what he encounters as side effects of knowing the supersensible worlds. Further progress lies in the development of such powers. For this must indeed go so far that the human being not only transforms the faculty of memory, as I have described, in order to attain imaginative knowledge. Rather, further progress consists in developing the art of forgetting, the suppression of perceptions, and in this suppression of perceptions, to the point where one can now suppress the entire life tableau, removing it from consciousness. One develops this artful forgetting by repeatedly and completely arbitrarily removing the manageable ideas described, after having allowed them to be present in one's consciousness, while they actually want to occupy our consciousness. While a person who merely surrenders to his nature develops the tendency to hold on to these images, someone who wants to become a true spiritual researcher in the anthroposophical sense must develop the ability to suppress these images with full awareness of will and to make the consciousness completely empty without — allow me this remark — falling asleep in the process. Most people, when they want to empty their consciousness, are only able to doze off gently. But that is what the spiritual scientific researcher must develop with all his strength, indeed with increased strength: to bring ideas into his consciousness and then to bring them out again, so that he is able to remain with an empty consciousness, for a shorter or longer period of time.

The significance of the anthroposophical method is that one must bring the will into the whole life of imagination, that one lets ideas be present in consciousness in a completely manageable way, conjures them out of consciousness again, and thus pushes the will into imagining, into forming thoughts. While otherwise one develops one's thoughts only in the continuous outer life, passively devoted to it, one has now, for some time, gained an inner strength from suppressing perceptions. When one has transformed one's forgetting in this way, one is then able to extinguish the entire life tableau, so that one no longer merely removes a single image from one's consciousness, but the entire inner life that has arisen before the soul from birth to this moment like a tableau. One feels oppressed when faced with this tableau because now one is not just confronted with pictorial representations as usual, but with forces that are themselves inner pictorial representations. One experiences that by grasping this tableau of life, one has grasped not just something intellectual and formal, but the same forces that are our inner forces of growth. One beholds what has shaped the organism since childhood as formative forces or, if I may say so, as purely etheric forces. What has shaped us is what one first calls into consciousness and what one now brings out of consciousness again.

Once this has been achieved, the next step is the other stage of supersensible knowledge, which I have called inspired knowledge in my books. This is not meant in any old superstitious way, but only in the sense in which I describe it. This inspiration consists in clearing away what has arisen in the previous way, in bringing about the conditions that empty the consciousness. But consciousness does not remain empty. Because we have had the formative forces of the human being in consciousness – the forces that develop the liver, lungs, heart and so on, we perceive this in them – and by now removing these forces from consciousness, it does not remain empty. Rather, what now arises in consciousness is a real spiritual life, a real supersensible world. For in that we remove these formative forces from our consciousness, we take leave, as it were, as we otherwise take leave of an experience, initially for the moment of realization, so to speak, of the outer sense world with which the life experiences are connected that are reflected in the life tableau. We are in a different world at this moment. We are in the world in which not only the forces that have been forming us since birth lie, but which have formed us before birth or conception.

We now become aware, through developed knowledge, that before we, as spiritual beings, incorporated what the inheritance of the physical-material world can give us, were in another, spiritual world from which we descended and incorporated ourselves into what, materially, surrounds us like an outer covering, like an outer instrument during physical life on earth. In this way, through a real practice of knowledge, we come to perceive what cannot be perceived by the ordinary powers of knowledge. We come to perceive a world even when we have taken leave of the sensory world in the way described. We perceive a human power of being when we have not only extinguished the view for the sensory world, but have also extinguished our experiences with the life tableau just described. But for one who has thus attained knowledge, a healthy soul condition always remains. He who ascends to inspired knowledge in this way is never in a position to have something within him, as in the case of the hallucinator or the psychopath, that extinguishes his healthy soul life and takes its place. And just as in the imagination, the healthy soul life stands alongside the imagination, so it is now that there is a rhythmic alternation: prenatal life, life in the spiritual-soul, then the human being who stands here on earth on his two legs and thinks with us. And we swing back and forth in rhythm, in rhythm between the supersensible and the sensual world. We breathe in, we breathe out. It is almost experienced: what we were before we integrated ourselves into the earthly world, and we live back to what we are as earthly human beings. We experience a rhythm like the rhythm of breathing. And if all rhythms in the world are related, one rhythm is always the image of the other, then at least in the breathing rhythm something can be seen that forms an analogy to what I have just described as a rhythm. Therefore, there is a method that is no longer useful for Westerners today: the ancient Indian yoga method, which also speaks of these things. But it is no longer useful for today's people because they cannot do ordinary yoga exercises like the ancient Indian or the modern Indian, but the Westerner needs exercises today as I described them.

But how are the yoga exercises performed? It is briefly stated here for clarification. The yogi devotes himself not to unconscious breathing, but to a regulated, conscious breathing process. He consciously experiences what otherwise occurs unconsciously. In this way, he lives into the rhythm of the world through an altered, regulated breathing process and in a corresponding inhalation and exhalation. And in fact, through his special constitution, he is able to see the supersensible life before birth when he performs his exercises for a long time, where it sometimes appears as a spiritual soul, the other time here in earthly life. One sees that there is already an authorization through the analogy to speak of “breathing” here. For just as we draw in our breath and then push it out again, so the physical part of man, given by the material current of heredity, unites with the spiritual-soul, breathing into it, as it were. The breath lasts only as long as one earth-life. And in the same way, at death, the spiritual-soul is breathed out again.

This process of birth and death is what is now, in the process of realization, being recreated by the inspired realization. However strange and paradoxical it may sound, what is otherwise only experienced once in the process of being born and dying, this uniting of the physical body with the spiritual-soul, and then the emergence of the spiritual-soul, is what is formed in the imitation of knowledge, which is anthroposophical knowledge. In this way, not through speculation, not through philosophy, nor through some kind of mysticism, which can only be based on illusions, but through a real practice of knowledge, one enters into the experience of the world in which man was before birth and in which he will be when he has crossed the threshold of death. It is certainly still strange for modern man when, as for example in “Occult Science: An Outline”, the worlds that man experiences before birth and after death are described in such detail, as are otherwise described by the naturalist, the botanist, mineralogist or geologist, the details of plant life or other things in our sensual world. But humanity will have to get used to the idea that it is possible to make people aware of their inner powers, their formative powers, which are soul-imbuing powers, but which are already supersensible sense powers — let me use the paradoxical word — and which therefore bring the human being as a spiritual-soul being into a reciprocal relationship with the spiritual-soul worlds, by which he is surrounded before birth and after death.

It is not logical reasoning that underlies the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here when speaking of supersensible worlds, when speaking of the eternal nature of man, but a leading of practical knowledge to the of that in the human being which is truly of a spiritual-soul nature, which is creative, not created by the organism, which transforms the organism of its own accord and thus has the guarantee of eternity, of passing through birth and death. It is only the unusual nature of such a method of knowledge that still gives rise to the many misunderstandings surrounding anthroposophical spiritual science today. And it is perfectly understandable that even well-meaning scientists, when they set out to study what anthroposophy offers and what is so rigorously described as a genuine method of knowledge, as is usually the case with mathematics, for example, first create a and then, when they do not understand it, they say: This is nothing more than a sum of illusions, hallucinations and fantasies, when they first present their distorted image and then criticize their own construct. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, if anthroposophy were what some of today's scholars make of it, then I would criticize it much more severely and much more disparagingly than some scholars do. But anthroposophy is developing the healthy paths in the face of all the pathological paths attributed to it by those who misunderstand its methods. But I don't want to dwell on the many misunderstandings, I just want to draw attention to one more.

It is indeed the case that the practical powers of knowledge that I have described are strengthened by everything one goes through. At first, one has gained strength by letting one's life tableau sink, but then it is filled with a spiritual power. Now the researcher is faced with a new experience, which many are unconsciously afraid of and for which reason they would not even want to approach this spiritual knowledge if they were to become acquainted with it. Anyone who views the spiritual world in this way, as I have described it, actually feels something like a painful deprivation in his soul throughout the time that he has exposed his consciousness to this spiritual world. If it is not experienced with a fully healthy soul, it can give rise to a very pessimistic view of life. However, since all preparation in anthroposophy must be undertaken in such a way that the human being is thoroughly healthy in his soul, he knows that he would say of this pessimism, which lies before his soul if he were to surrender to it, The whole world is permeated with pain and sighs in pain. But this pessimism arises as something that belongs to the necessities of the world. One experiences it, one experiences something quite painful, while one is devoted to the supersensible world in inspiration.

But why do we experience this pain? One realizes that this pain is only the repetition of that painful longing which forms the power of the soul, through which the soul feels drawn from spiritual-soul worlds into material physical embodiment. This longing of the soul must be relived in knowledge at precisely this stage. And what appears in the pessimists as world-weariness is a ray of this feeling that reaches only into the consciousness of imagination. It is felt in a very different way by those who want to attain supersensible knowledge, and who, when they have reached the highest degree of supersensible knowledge, experience it as a kind of life-weariness. We must indeed be clear about the fact that the seeking of knowledge cannot always be a pleasurable matter. Anyone who has attained a few, perhaps modest, extrasensory insights or even real, true insights into life will always say: “I gratefully accept from the Powers that Be the good fortune I have experienced. But the painful experiences and bitterness I have gone through have been a good preparation for me to reach the state of mind that really leads to a deeper understanding of the secrets of life. Therefore, even the most ordinary painful experiences are a good preparation, if they are lived through in good health and one does not allow oneself to be completely depressed by them, also physically, for what one has to experience as a side effect of inspired knowledge. But through everything one goes through, one now comes to carry that imagination, which is immediately lost to man when he descends into the emotional life or into his own will, into all that I have described as being above the sensual world.

That is the essential thing, that one does not surrender to nebulous soul content, but that one takes with one on the entire further path what one has first developed in the imagination as a strong pictorial image. Our emotional life rises, like dreams, from dark depths of the soul. We become aware of our feelings in our imagination. As people of the present day, we can only truly live in our imagination when we are actually awake. Our emotional life always has something dream-like about it in comparison to our imaginative life. And our life of will is usually dormant even during the day. We do perceive that we move our arms through our will, for example. But what lives in him as volitional forces is actually just as hidden from him as what he experiences in his soul from falling asleep to waking up. Thus, for the ordinary state of mind with the emotional life, we get a dreamy element into life, but with our life of will, we even get a sleeping one.

It is interesting to see how psychologists such as Theodor Ziehen struggle with the fact that in ordinary life, experiences of the will are only present in the imagination. But with the soul life that I have just described, the human being takes his life of ideas everywhere with him and permeates it with fully conscious will. Just as he otherwise combines the individual ideas in fully conscious judgment, willfully, so he pursues everything I have just described — although it may seem paradoxical to some — through anthroposophical knowledge with a fully conscious, alert life of ideas. As a result, he ultimately develops an inner strength that does not cause him to lose his self within the enriched inner life, but on the contrary, allows him to see his self in a form that is never presented in ordinary consciousness. This is because our ordinary consciousness is guided inwardly in such a way that we look at the same thing and designate it with the word “I”. But if we can see what is expressed in this little word “I”, we are aware that it is based on a reality, but in our ordinary consciousness we do not have this reality.

When we say “I am”, we are actually pointing to something that we only have as an image, just as we only have our impulses of will as images. For this I points deep down into the sleeping depths of the soul and of organic life in general, where the sleeping will is also rooted. Only an image rises up. But now we have descended down there ourselves, now we have carried our consciousness down to the reality of consciousness through supersensible knowledge of imagination and inspiration, now our true being has been given to us in a third stage of supersensible knowledge: In intuition — whereby this word is not used in its usual sense, but rather to refer to that which can be based on the two other preliminary stages — in this intuitive consciousness, the idea of repeated earthly lives takes on meaning. Through inspired realization, one looks back at the spiritual and soul life before birth. In this self-knowledge, which appears as intuition, one sees one's self in that enriched form in which it is not exhausted in one earth life, but in which it brings the results of earlier earth lives over into the present one, and in which it shows the results of this life as the foundations for later earth lives.

I just wanted to briefly explain that when the anthroposophical spiritual researcher speaks of repeated earthly lives, it is not a hypothetical way of talking, but rather a very systematic search for those powers of knowledge that lead people beyond the ordinary sense world. This systematic search now also leads them to recognize repeated earthly lives. But with that, he also sees through how what appears as a necessary fate and places us in a certain way in life is connected with these repeated earth lives, while everything that develops as our ordinary, conscious thinking between birth and death is precisely the basis of the human freedom developed in this earth life. At this level of knowledge, one gains an understanding of how that which is necessary in us, which constitutes our destiny, is connected with our repeated lives on earth. In contrast, in the individual life on earth, through his fully developed individual, personal thinking, which breaks away from repeated lives on earth and develops personally in the individual life, the human being places himself as a free being precisely in that life on earth. That is why the person speaking to you today not only developed anthroposophy, but also wrote his “Philosophy of Freedom” as early as the beginning of the 1890s, in which he examines the real foundations of human freedom. The necessity in which man is placed through repeated earthly lives is built on what lies below the threshold of what flows from our free thoughts. A “philosophy of freedom” is entirely compatible with anthroposophical spiritual science.

In this lecture, I have only been able to sketch out the guidelines needed to gain an orientation in anthroposophical spiritual science. Anything beyond the scope of this lecture must be sought in the relevant literature. In conclusion, I would just like to hint at a few points concerning the impact of anthroposophy on the individual sciences.

Through the kind of insight that is gained through imaginative knowledge, one gets to know the whole of the human formative forces. One is then able to get to know not only what human formation is on the dissection table through autopsy, and thereby establish physiology, therapy and pathology, but also how one learns through ordinary knowledge how the mathematical dominates the outer world. In this way, one comes to know the qualitative aspect of external beings through an inner realization, through a realization that is inspired like mathematics, only that it is qualitative, not only quantitative and formal like mathematics, but immersed in the reality of beings. In this way, one comes to know the human being inwardly. And in the moment when one comes to the inner formative forces of the human being — in that tableau as I have described it — one also gets to know the inner formative forces of mineral, plant and animal beings and the formative forces of the world. This then opens our eyes to the sense of belonging that is found in everything that is spread out in nature, in the inner formative forces of the human being and in their consequences in the human organs.

One gets to know the organs of the human being in both a healthy and diseased state. Anyone who, with this knowledge, observes the human heart, for example, knows that a heart is not just a form that can be grasped in an external view, but that the heart process is one that can only be understood from the knowledge of the whole human being, because otherwise one would only view it one-sidedly. It is similar to the magnetic needle, which one also looks at one-sidedly if one were to say of it: It points its one tip to the north, the other to the south. No, to explain the magnet needle, we use the whole Earth and say: the Earth's North Pole attracts one half of the magnet needle through its forces, the South Pole the other. But especially with humans, we only want to look at what lies within the skin, individually. But even with humans, we have to go beyond what lies within the skin, just as we go beyond the magnet needle itself. You have to know the whole person if you want to study both the healthy and the sick person. Spiritual science opens up the possibility of this, and we have been able to develop a medicine based on anthroposophical spiritual science. In Stuttgart, there is also a medical-therapeutic institute among the “Kommenden Tages” institutions, with doctors who work with the whole of anthroposophy. I myself was able to hold two medical courses for doctors and show what anthroposophy is capable of achieving by adding what underlies the spiritual entity of the sensory world to the other, and how it can thus enrich a science that is merely regarded as empirical, such as medicine. Contemporary humanity will have to become accustomed to the idea that reality is not only material but also imbued with spirituality.

Just as medicine can be enriched by anthroposophy, so can, for example, external social life, as can other sciences. We have already tried to provide practical proof of this in one area in particular, namely in the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which is intended to be a comprehensive school in the best sense of the word and is headed by me. This Waldorf School does not practice any kind of worldview in the anthroposophical sense; only those who want to create all kinds of misunderstandings about anthroposophy say that. In this Waldorf school, the human being is educated and taught on the basis of real knowledge of the human being, including the child, which not only looks at the human being's exterior and puts it into pedagogical, didactic and so on formulas; but on the basis of real knowledge of the child, so that the person who is a teacher at this school must above all observe what is working its way to the surface in the child's body, soul and spiritually, and what is working its way through the features and speech, through thinking, feeling and will, so that with an eye trained by anthroposophy in this respect, the teacher can educate the person in such a way that the education itself is an organic one, through what he encounters from week to week, even from day to day, in the developing human being. Nowadays, education in most cases proceeds in such a way that we are taught certain things in childhood, some of them quite well. This is not to decry the existing education system, but it must be said that in the developing human being, some things are brought up that are introduced to the child with far too sharply defined contours, and then later do not develop further with the human being, but simply remain in him. In contrast to this, the method of the Waldorf school is to give the child ideas, feelings and impulses of will, without claiming that they will remain by definition as the child receives them, but that they are transmitted to him in an entirely organic way, that is, in moving contours, so that what the child receives as instruction is itself something that grows, just as the child's limbs themselves grow.

In this way, the various areas of social life can be modeled on the processes of the world, those world processes that are not only permeated by matter but also by spirit. And it seemed to me a significant achievement that at the last congress of the Anthroposophical Movement in Stuttgart (from August 28 to September 7, 1921), Dr. Caroline von Heydebrand, a Waldorf school teacher, was able to give a lecture on the topic “Against Experimental Psychology and Experimental Pedagogy”. I do not wish to say anything here against the great merits of experimental psychology and pedagogy. But precisely when one recognizes such merits, one cannot ignore how, in the fields of pedagogy and psychology, the human being has actually become inwardly alien to the human being, and thus also to the child. One must first experiment externally, how the human being perceives, how he retains things, because one is not inwardly connected to the child. An important lecture was delivered by Dr. Caroline von Heydebrand at the Stuttgart Congress, and deserves to be known everywhere. Emil Leinhas gave another lecture that should also be made known. In it he characterized present-day political economy with all its contradictions. This lecture could be a real breakthrough for a renewal of the scientific and practical treatment of the social question, to be drawn from spiritual science, as I have tried to present it myself in my “Key Points of the Social Question” from the necessities of life in the present and the near future.

Thus, through what it attains in direct spiritual vision, spiritual science can not only give man certainty about his eternal essence and thus give him an inner center that he needs if he is not to become unfit for life through perceiving, for example, his supposed nothingness, but anthroposophy can generally fertilize life very much, just as it can penetrate art. Goethe said, in that he sensed such things from his comprehensive world view — I tried to show this in the 1880s in my Goethe writings, from which it can be seen how anthroposophy can also emerge from Goethe's world view, you just have to take it further. At one point, Goethe said that art is based on a certain manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never become apparent without it. Or at another point he once said: He to whom nature reveals its secret is longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. And when he traveled in Italy, he wrote to his friends in Weimar after seeing artistic creations that particularly interested him: “The great works of art, as the greatest works of nature, are produced by people according to true and natural laws. All that is arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God.

And: “I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am on the trail of.

But we can only see this creative power of nature if we behold the spiritual that lies behind the sensual facts and natural essences through anthroposophical knowledge. Therefore, what confronts us sensually in art, but in such a way that the sensual always speaks to our spirit and soul, can be thoroughly fertilized through imaginative and inspired beholding. Only those who have no inkling of spiritual science as it is meant here, but have only ordinary intellectual knowledge in mind, talk about the fact that one can only come to a straw-like allegorical art through creation from the spirit. But you will find nothing allegorical or symbolic, for example, in the School of Spiritual Science building in Dornach, which was built there for anthroposophical spiritual science and which was created in all its forms from the vision of the spiritual world, from the vision of of forms and color harmonies that can be so secretly interwoven into the outer material that what is fulfilled is what Goethe expressed with the words: Art is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would never be revealed without it. — So art too can be fertilized by anthroposophy.

And in eurythmy, we are now bringing an art of human movement to the world that has already been widely studied, in which what is inside the human being in terms of measure, harmony, meaning and inner stylization is brought out and expressed in the movement of individuals or groups of people, so that not just mimic dances are created, but something completely different, something that is a real visible language and therefore expresses the inner soul life as necessarily as audible language or singing.

And religious life must also be enriched by leading man up into those supersensible worlds in which he must have the home of his spirit and soul, especially for religious feeling. It is therefore actually grotesque when, in a recent publication dealing with religious experiments in the present day, and including a section on anthroposophy, which does not in any way seek to found a religion but, as I have described today, — as I have described it today — scientific knowledge, when it is judged in such a way that one says: the truly religious person could not actually tolerate it, because it is a rival to religion, it could perhaps even become a substitute for religion. A substitute for religion — the most terrible of horrors! The person appointed to officially care for religious life today already thinks about anthroposophy in a very economic and commercial way. A competitor is emerging for him, and he continues to speak from the feeling of the competitor: “The creation of anthroposophy means the death of religion.”

Now, dear audience, one should indeed believe with a sound mind and a straight mind that precisely religious life could feel encouraged by the fact that a science that takes it as strictly as any other scientific knowledge opens up the supersensible worlds to human observation in such a way that the presentation given by a spiritual researcher can also be understood by the non-researcher. For this can be the case with spiritual science, which, in addition to material knowledge, simply brings the knowledge of the spiritual life that permeates the material processes of the world. But today there is already some fear of this knowledge. A philosopher who is highly regarded today once said a few years ago: He wanted to talk about the relationship between the spirit and the body of man. One could do that, because one need not know the spirit or the body, but only study the relationship between the two. To illustrate this, he then told a parable, saying, speaking to his audience, I do not need to know each and every one of you and be introduced to each one individually, but there is a certain relationship between us even without us knowing each other. Just by being in the same room, there is a certain relationship between you and me.

So, today in the circles where one talks about world view, one is afraid of a real spiritual knowledge, but one needs this knowledge if one wants to talk about spirit and body, because one has talked oneself so much into an agnostic way of knowing that only wants to see limits everywhere, and one does not want to develop the practice of knowledge that goes beyond the limits of knowledge.

Of course, spiritual science has to be slowly developed, like any other science. But the practice is such that, like the other sciences, it leads into the existence of nature. And spiritual science does not lead people into a dreamed-up cloud-cuckoo-land, but into the real spiritual world. Therefore, it permeates the material world with spiritual impulses that can enable people to intervene in all material circumstances, so that they do not become brooders about the spiritual life, but rather people who are imbued with real spiritual activity and can thus recognize and work in the great world. For only he is truly cognizant who does not dream himself away into a cloud-cuckoo-land, but who is aware that the spirit must intervene practically and creatively in material life through man. In this sense, anthroposophy does not make people impractical, but rather practical for ordinary life on earth, placing them in their duties and in the ordinary tasks of life. It prepares them for eternity, but it prepares them in such a way that they can carry the eternal into the temporal. It does not reject the honest study of material phenomena and material entities, but seeks the spirit that permeates matter everywhere. It seeks the spiritual above all in human knowledge itself, thereby freeing knowledge, which otherwise can only slavishly attach itself to the material world, and thereby creating such impulses for action that the human being can practically intervene in life. Therefore, it can be said of anthroposophy that it at least strives to spiritualize matter through the human being itself, but that the human being does not lose himself in the context of material processes, but that he can find himself through free knowledge as a free human being in the whole scope of life.

Dear attendees! Today, anthroposophy is still seen by many people as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into areas of the world through knowledge, which serious science should have nothing to do with. Now, however, there are also scientists who are to be taken very seriously indeed, who speak of the fact that going beyond the usual scientific methods to knowledge of worlds into which these scientific methods do not lead must be striven for, and one speaks then of all kinds of abilities that one or the other person may have in order to penetrate into such worlds. They then endeavor to fathom what comes to light through such abnormal abilities and register it in the usual scientific way. But even such serious scientists will not want to have anything to do with anthroposophy for the reason that they do not want to recognize the path by which anthroposophy attempts to penetrate into supersensible worlds as a scientific one, but at most want to regard it as a kind of fantasy, as a special kind of impossible mysticism or even as a special kind of superstition. Now, my dear audience, those people who strive for enthusiasm, for nebulous mysticism or even for superstition will sometimes come close to what anthroposophical knowledge wants to incorporate into our spiritual life, but in the long run they will hardly get their money's worth. People who run everywhere where there is talk of some “Sophie” or some “occult” will very soon see that Anthroposophy in particular endeavors to work entirely out of the spirit of modern scientific spirit, and even to take this spirit of modern science to its very last consequences, but above all that a thoroughly healthy and as far-reaching thinking as possible is necessary for anthroposophy. And that is not exactly what the devotees of enthusiasm and nebulous mysticism love. The fact that anthroposophy has such aspirations cannot, however, prevent those people who would like to reject it with a slight wave of the hand from repeatedly saying that only neurasthenics or hysterical people can approach anthroposophy.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, this evening I would like to take the liberty of addressing the essence of anthroposophy, as it is intended by those who who, in the spirit of this serious science and serious thinking, strive for an expansion of our knowledge because they recognize that, in our scientific culture and in that which opposes it, the modern person must remain unsatisfied in two directions. In the first instance, where it is a matter of research in natural science, anthroposophy places itself firmly on the ground of this natural science research, and it sees, with all those who proceed as cautiously as, for example, the famous du Bois-Reymond, it sees precisely the limits of this natural science research. It sees how human thinking, which has celebrated such great triumphs in modern times and is justifiably so proud of its methods, can nevertheless only work in the direction of natural scientific research by adhering to external, sensually given facts, by more or less summarizing these sensually given facts and arriving at natural laws. When we realize that our present thinking, which is so conscientiously applied in science, is trained entirely on external, sensory facts, that it can only have methods that correspond entirely to the course of these sensory facts, then we will have to speak of the limits of scientific recognize the limitations of scientific knowledge and admit that all philosophical speculation that seeks to go beyond these limitations by means of pure thinking, by thinking left to its own devices, will enter into uncertainty in those areas where the actual being of the human being is rooted in its immortal foundation. That is why there is so much controversy about the one or other philosophical system that wants to speak about the immortality of the soul, about the divine spiritual foundations of the world. One feels how thinking, tearing itself away from sensual facts and wanting to build on its own foundations, how this thinking absolutely enters into uncertainty, so that one can actually have the feeling: this thinking no longer deals with anything outside of the sensual facts. On the other hand, there are numerous people today who have a more or less clear feeling that they still want to penetrate to the deepest human longing, to penetrate to the world reasons with which man is connected in his innermost being and through whose knowledge he could gain insight into his immortal being. Then such people probably surrender to one or the other direction of mysticism, that is, they say goodbye to all knowledge. They delve into their own inner selves. They believe that if they delve into their own inner selves, if they dig deeper and deeper into the shafts of their own human soul, then the eternal essence of man must also be found.

In this area, I would say that anthroposophy takes exactly the same scientific approach to observation. And by engaging in taking what some mystics present as the actual essence of the human being, it sees how there is nothing in it but transformed perceptions of the external sense world, which to a certain extent withdraw into memory and the ability to remember. And who knows how, over the course of years and decades, that which this mysticism may have half-consciously taken up into its memory can be transformed and how it is brought forth by mystics as something quite different, how they believe that something is telling them about a certain divine spiritual being in man, while in fact they are only dealing with the transformed memories of external perceptions. Anyone who has insight into these things will see, precisely in these mystical endeavors, however well-intentioned they may be, a stumbling block to truly scientific penetration into a spiritual world to which the human being truly belongs.

And so, dear attendees, there are two pitfalls that anthroposophical research must avoid. The first is mere mental work, which wants to be left to its own devices, philosophical speculation about the supernatural and the beyond, which leads into uncertainty and even into nothingness. The other is mysticism, which, although it believes it is penetrating to the divine-spiritual through immersion in one's own inner self, nevertheless has nothing to do with anything other than what the human being has first led down into his soul through observation of nature, through observation of the external sense world, and what he then later brings up again.

These two pitfalls stand in stark clarity before anthroposophical research. Therefore, anthroposophical research tries to simply say: the paths of knowledge that one must take in the field of external knowledge of nature do not lead at all into the spiritual, supersensible realm. Other paths of research must be taken. And since the usual paths of research make use of the cognitive abilities that a person has in ordinary life, anthroposophical research must seek out other cognitive abilities. It can be said right from the outset: the anthroposophical research referred to here is not based on any kind of abnormal ability that individuals may want to have through grace or illness, but on the fact that there are abilities slumbering in every human soul – if one wants to express oneself scientifically – that are latent abilities that can be brought out by certain methods, so that only when man has come into full possession of the cognitive faculty, which is applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science, only then does he begin, I might say, to imitate the child once more. We see the child as it enters the world with only limited abilities to gain insight into its surroundings. We see how these abilities lead ever deeper and deeper into the outer and inner world and how these abilities develop. In our ordinary lives, we complete this development at a certain point. And having acquired a certain way of thinking, a certain way of feeling and a certain way of willing as adults, we stop at that point, using these to drive our everyday lives and our ordinary science. Those who want to do anthroposophical research must continue this development. At a certain point in their life, they have to say to themselves: the abilities in the soul are not fully developed in this way; more can be raised up from the depths of the soul. And this bringing up leads to those cognitive abilities that can guide us into the supersensible worlds. I have described in detail, Ladies and Gentlemen, what a person has to do to bring up dormant abilities in his soul. I have described it in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in the second part of my “Occult Science” and in other writings. I would like to take the liberty of now quoting in principle what is described in detail there.

What a person has to do in order to develop their higher, their supersensible cognitive abilities is not an external process, but a process that takes place within the most intimate depths of the soul itself. There are certain soul exercises, soul exercises that lead in two directions. One direction is a certain treatment of thinking, of imagining, and the other direction is a certain treatment of the human will. The way in which imagining is in every human being can be transformed and furthered by certain soul exercises, and the same applies to the human will. What is to be achieved through thinking is a certain inner strengthening, a certain inner strengthening of the thought life itself in the first instance. This is not achieved by some arbitrary act, by an arbitrary inner contemplation or the like, but it is achieved in the sense of anthroposophical research by giving thinking itself a kind of inner schooling, and indeed a schooling that works, I might say, according to the principle by which we otherwise also make the human being stronger in life. If I may use a very trivial example, I can say: If a person repeatedly strains a particular muscle system in his work, this system becomes particularly strong. The same can now be achieved in relation to the act of visualizing itself. For example, you can do the following – and many such exercises are mentioned in the books I have mentioned – you can place any idea or a set of ideas at the center of your entire mental life. I call this meditation and concentration of thought. This is truly not some kind of magic, but a development of the very ordinary, normal human abilities. So you put some idea that you can easily grasp at the center of your mental life. It is often recommended — and rightly so — that you look up such an idea in a book or elsewhere so that it is new to you, or that you get it from an experienced anthroposophical researcher so that it is new. Why should it be new?

Because when we have an idea that we have had for a long time in our lives, or even for a short time, because such an idea, by bringing it into the center of our attention, evokes all kinds of memory remnants. Much remains in the subconscious and unconscious. We do not overlook what we put into the soul when we take such an idea or series of ideas from our treasure trove of knowledge. But if we take something that is completely new to us, or something that we have been given, then there can be no question of any reminiscences emerging. Instead, we then devote our entire soul life to a new, but now inner, impression, an impression that we can only grasp with thought. We give ourselves over to such an image with all our soul life as intensely as possible, and we try to bring it to the same kind of vibrancy in the act of visualizing such an image as we otherwise have vibrancy when we are confronted with an external sensory impression. This activity of the soul in response to an external sensory impression must in every respect be the model for every exercise that the anthroposophical researcher first undertakes in his soul.

This clearly shows — my dear audience — that it is not a matter of bringing something out of the depths of the human organism in a pathological way, so that what I am describing to you now can by no means lead to hallucinations, visions or the like, but on the contrary, leads precisely to the other pole of human soul life. The ideal is not what can be achieved by some kind of morbid brooding, isolated from external perception, but rather the ideal is, so to speak, that healthy human devotion of soul that one develops when one faces external sensory impressions with full consciousness and with the most absolute control of the will. And by applying this liveliness to that which one places at the center of one's soul life in the manner described, one actually comes to strengthen one's imaginative and thinking life, to make it more powerful, just as one strengthens a muscle when one uses it continually.

If you continue such exercises — they require a lot of patience and perseverance, because anthroposophical research is no easier than research in any field of external science — you will eventually notice how your thinking has become more intense, more vigorous, more powerful. And one arrives at developing within oneself what can be described as a kind of first step on the path to supersensible knowledge, and what I have called — names must be there, one must not be offended by them — imagination. One gradually learns to live completely, as otherwise in the world of the senses, in an inwardly intensified thinking.

But what is most urgently needed now, above all, is to be clear about one thing: when one's entire soul life is concentrated on such a complex of images, then — I would say — the soul life gradually submerges into a realm in which it , to imagine them vividly, to have such images in abundance, they would arise with an inner intensity that is otherwise only found in external sensory perceptions; but if one did not develop another faculty, one would ultimately come to be dominated by these images in a certain way. They would besiege you, they would be there, you would be devoted to them. It would come to pass that the ideas have the person and not the person the ideas. Therefore, it is necessary that these exercises — modified in the most diverse ways — are accompanied by others, exercises that consist of suppressing such ideas, of removing them from consciousness; so that on [ on the one hand, to develop the ability to make one's consciousness as intensive as possible through thinking, and on the other hand, to remove these thoughts at will and to pass over into a state that can be called empty consciousness. But one notices that after such exercises have been continued for some time, one's entire thinking has become free of that which the body has as its share of ordinary thinking life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, can only be realized, I would say, through the experience itself. In the practice of thinking, as I have described it to you, of thinking that has been thoroughly worked through, it becomes apparent how one moves freely in thought and then has the thoughts as something like an external table or some other object. And just as little as one would think of placing an external object in the interior of the soul or the human body, so little would one, when one has penetrated into such a modified imagination, place what then arises in consciousness only in the interior of the organism. It is an experience that one comes to a soul life that takes place outside the body. It is important, my dear audience, that this first stage, the stage of imaginative knowledge, be transcended before moving on to higher stages.

But now we must be clear about one thing: everything that arises in this way initially takes on a pictorial character. The usual abstract way in which we otherwise follow natural phenomena, carefully lining them up link by link, can certainly be evaluated by the spiritual researcher in the right way, and must remain so, because common sense must run entirely parallel to what I describe as supersensible research, this kind of linking-together abstract thinking ceases for the field of supersensible research itself and an inwardly intensive, pictorial imagining occurs. One lives in pictures and manages to remove these pictures from consciousness in order to remain with an empty consciousness.

Dear attendees, it actually seems quite easy to remain with an empty consciousness. But most people who have not undergone this training immediately fall into a kind of sleep when there is no content of consciousness, when the content of consciousness is suppressed. That is what must be achieved for anthroposophical research: that after one has first brought the life of thought to its fullest development of strength, one can then immediately suppress it again and, so to speak, face the emptiness on one's own initiative. One does not stand there facing the void, because we will see in a moment that if one makes the consciousness empty from within, after first having permeated it, that if one has become free of the body penetrates with his imagination into the supersensible world, that this is the way not to remain with a sleeping consciousness, but that this consciousness is filled with the content of a supersensible world. But man still has to imagine — I would like to say — undergo a transition. When one enters ever more strongly into this world of images through intensified visualization, one comes to the point where one can simply say, from the facts that one experiences inwardly: You do not have the same lightness of thought within you that you used to have and that you reserve for ordinary life; you do not have this lightness within you in imaginative thinking. You live in these images now in such a way that you are devoted to them. You know that you cannot simply structure one image within another as you used to, but that the images structure themselves. They demand, through their own essence, the form they are to take, and you feel yourself in a world that is a reality.

You enter this imaginative world and from a certain point onwards you experience how you are immersed in reality, I would even say, how you are immersed in the soul. And the first experience one has when one has penetrated to such imaginative vision is that one's life on earth since birth comes to life before the soul as in a great tableau. Otherwise, a person has the stream of memories from this life, from which this or that emerges, either voluntarily or involuntarily. This is not the case with what I am now describing, but what emerges from a certain point of imaginative knowledge is that the human being has before him, as in a broad overview, the workings of his inner being. He overlooks how certain forces have given rise to this or that disposition in him, how he has come to this or that heroic or unheroic decision. He does not so much gain insight into the individual facts of life as into the forces that lie behind them, that have shaped us ourselves, that have given our thoughts their direction and content, that have guided our feelings from within when they have been stimulated by the outside world, that have impulsed our will. All that has been incorporated since birth, one can see.

One comes to experience, not through fanciful arbitrariness but through the realization of the experience of anthroposophical research, what is called the formative forces, or, with an older term, the etheric body. One experiences that which the human being carries within, which has not only a spatial character but also a spatial-temporal character. What stands as a unity above the time space since birth is experienced as something that cannot be depicted in detail, unlike a flash of lightning. One can depict this formative body in a single moment; but it is in motion, it is that which works in us, which flows through and pulses our entire soul life. In that, one lives initially.

But – dear attendees – once you have acquired the ability to extinguish the images that arise in the imagination over and over again as I have described, so that you can penetrate to the empty consciousness, then you have gradually acquired the ability to powerfully concentrate and suppress this entire formative force body, so to speak, to remove it. Just as one otherwise only removes the individual images that one has brought to, so one removes this formative force body, thus emptying one's consciousness of this content, which now contains not abstract ideas and images, but the forces of inner growth. When you remove it, you have not only stepped out of your body, you not only perceive spiritually outside of your body, you have stepped out of your earthly existence. Then you perceive in that in which the essence of the soul lived before birth or - let us say - conception, and in which it will live after the human being has passed through the gate of death.

You see, dear attendees, for the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here, it is not a matter of philosophical speculation, but of something that is achieved through gradual, truly systematically applied inner methods as a human ability. One does not penetrate to human immortality with mere thoughts, but one penetrates to that which precedes birth and follows death — I would like to say — through an inner method of experimentation — please do not misunderstand this word — but one must continually make the attempt. When you have come so far that you can imagine without the body and can suppress the images that arise in the imagination, that you can step out of the life between birth and death and enter into the essence of the human being, which is the immortal part of the human being, when you have strengthened the soul to such an extent that it can become empty, then it is not an empty consciousness that enters. Rather, this consciousness is filled with facts that one could never perceive otherwise, with facts from a purely spiritual, supersensible world, from a world that is always around us, permeating all sensuality, in which the human being lives without his sensual body before birth or, let us say, conception as in a spiritual world. And in this way one actually enters into concrete spiritual ideas that cannot otherwise be obtained except through inner experience. One arrives at the experience of human immortality.

You see, dear audience, you may doubt the results of anthroposophical research at first – not only do you have the right to do so, but it is even understandable for the first attempt at human understanding – but if you look at what underlies the anthroposophical researcher, if he puts himself in a position to get these results, then you will have to admit: He has the right attitude for true science and scientific conscientiousness. He tries to change his soul, but not arbitrarily, but out of such inner conscientiousness as can be found in the laboratory or clinic.

The fact that a person, having created an empty consciousness, now perceives something, means that in the most eminent sense he no longer perceives with the body – which he otherwise always does for ordinary and scientific consciousness – but perceives with the soul, freed from the body. And when a person perceives, as I have now indicated, that which is not contained within the sense world, that which is the essence of the human being before he enters into embryonic life, then one can speak of the second stage of higher knowledge, of knowledge through inspiration. That which penetrates into the soul because the consciousness has learned to empty itself, is inspired into this consciousness. And from experience we know that through such inspiration alone man can form an opinion about immortality. But if it is presented as a result, then everyone can follow with common sense what anthroposophical research does. Anthroposophical research does not lead to visions or pathological states, but can be followed at every stage with common sense. Therefore, one can always verify whether the paths taken by the spiritual researcher are reasonable and whether reason can therefore also be found in the results he gives.

And when one now advances to such inspired insights, then the first step is indeed the recognition of the supersensible entity of the soul, as it was before birth or – let us say – conception, as it will be after death, the realization of the immortal essence of the soul But one can only penetrate to this immortal essence of the soul if the soul has come to a body-free realization, if it exercises pure mental, transparent cognitive activity, which it otherwise exercises with the help of the brain and nervous system. This is independent of brain and nerve activity. And just as, to the ordinary consciousness, man must be more or less a materialist, as materialism is right for the ordinary consciousness, that it is bound to the physical organization, that the physical organization must underlie its activity, so it is true on the other hand that, by developing such abilities as I have described here, man then comes to make free use of the soul as an organ of knowledge. In this way he not only penetrates into the supersensible world just characterized, but also into that which is continually around us, of which the ordinary sense world is only a manifestation. That is to say, now man can penetrate into a world that lies behind the sense phenomena, not merely through philosophical speculation, but by using purely soul organs that he has first — I would almost say, if it did not sound philistine — laboriously acquired. And then one does indeed enter into regions that are still very much resented by today's familiar modes of representation.

But before developing knowledge for these areas, other methods of imagination and concentration must be added to those described. These other methods go in the direction of the will. Just as thought, for ordinary consciousness, is dependent on the brain and nervous system — I cannot go into the details here, but for those who are truly familiar with modern scientific developments, this will be beyond question — so too is the human will, as it unfolds in all that leads a person to action, dependent first of all on the human physical organization. Just as one has to free the life of thought from the bodily organization for supersensible research, so one also has to free the life of will from the bodily organization. But even that strong effort of the will, which one must unfold in imaginative knowledge, leads one to gradually apply the will in a body-free way.

Dear attendees, perhaps I may make a seemingly personal comment here, but one that is entirely relevant. I published my “Philosophy of Freedom” at the beginning of the nineties and tried to show what human freedom is actually based on. The usual question is: Is man free or subject to an absolute necessity? Does everything that leads to a decision of the will, to an act, flow from the necessary conditions of his organism, or does the possibility lie within man to decide freely out of himself, without necessity? I tried at the time to show that, for the vast majority of human actions, one must indeed speak of necessity, that the instinctual, the drive life, the emotional life, that everything that is bound to the human organism, is the basis for the vast majority of our actions, but that man can also rise to have pure thoughts as his volitional motives, pure thoughts that live inwardly in moral ideals.

When man lays such pure thoughts as moral ideals at the foundation of his volitional impulses, then he gradually comes to be a truly free being as a personality. And I called this sum of moral ideals that can find a place in a person, and which then find their outward expression in the way a person morally lives, I called this sum of moral ideals moral intuition. And I have said that the truly free life of man is based on such an intuition, an intuition of which I said: What its content is does not come from the human organism, but is taken from a spiritual world, and it is from a spiritual world that the free man is determined. And if one now pursues the philosophy of freedom in this way, then this philosophy of freedom is thoroughly a preparation for insight into such cognitive abilities as I have described today.

When one sees the essence of these moral ideals that are to be realized here, then one comes to expand this essence more and more. And when one adds such inner exercises as I have described today in principle, then one realizes: what is granted to man as an earthly being in terms of free actions can take part in a spiritual world. This can fill his entire soul, it can bring him to imagination, through which he surveys his body of formative forces, and can bring him to inspiration, through which he surveys the soul that he was before he entered earthly existence through birth or, let us say, conception, and that he will be when he has crossed the threshold of death. But the capacity for such supersensible knowledge as this in man must be cultivated also in the sphere of the will.

Here one can indeed bring forth the best fruits by endeavoring to make one's will ever stronger and stronger in relation to the purely inner life. This can be done in many ways.

I will give the following one. We are accustomed to thinking in terms of how external facts unfold. We treat what is earlier as the cause and what comes later as the effect. And when we are immersed in ordinary life, we think along the lines of external facts. The one who only thinks in this way along the thread of external facts, who thus, so to speak, passively surrenders to the course of external events, cannot achieve the development of will that is necessary for the purpose of supersensible knowledge. But the one who, for example, does the exercise – and does it again and again – that he, instead of thinking along the thread of external events, imagines these external events backwards, the last ones first, then the penultimate ones and so on and so on – let us say, for example, the course of a drama from the last act to the penultimate, third-last and so on, in the smallest possible portions backwards – or if he considers his experiences of the day in this retrospective view in the evening, then, if it is to be done seriously, a different effort of will is required than that used when he lets his thoughts run along the thread of external facts.

This effort of will, which one then arrives at, ultimately brings about what otherwise – I would like to say, although this is perhaps not popular with those people who only ever speak of objective knowledge — this effort of will brings about a deeper sense of what, in ordinary life, is tied to the organization as the most beautiful and best expression of the human will: to develop love. I know, dear listeners, that love is not readily seen as a cognitive faculty. And in the way it is in ordinary life, anthroposophy does not seek to appropriate it. But when the will unfolds in the way I have described, then the human being comes to discover that the capacity for love is one of the most significant cognitive faculties.

Through this cognitive faculty, which he can still increase by, when he has, as it were, grasped this ability to love within, when he has become aware of it, by now pursuing the external facts in such a way that he really lovingly puts himself in the individual kingdoms of nature — I have described this in detail — as a person develops such cognitive abilities, as he lovingly follows the life of a plant from germination to fruit, so that he experiences how leaf by leaf unfolds. Likewise, one can — I would say — with such a developed capacity for love, delve into the animal organization and so on. If one also strengthens the life of the will in this way and begins to observe oneself more seriously than usual as an active human being, if one observes oneself in one's actions as objectively as one otherwise only observes external objects, if one gets into the habit of walking beside oneself like a second person and always watching oneself in his volitions, then the will comes to not only let inspiration unfold in man, but to let that which speaks into the human soul from a spiritual world also be experienced through the imagination. Then man comes to make his own soul a living organ of knowledge for the spiritual. In inspiration, the spiritual world does not yet reveal itself to the soul in a clear way. In the third stage, which I have called intuition — real intuition, not the vague one that one also speaks of in one's outer consciousness — in this intuition, man truly penetrates into the spiritual world.

This is what anyone who wants to penetrate the spiritual world, which always surrounds us and of which the external sense world is only the manifestation, only the outer expression, should have achieved.

Just so that I am not misunderstood, I would like to say in advance: when a person enters into abnormal, pathological states of visionary life, when he is taken in by a hypnotic state, when he is suggested something by others, then he is in this abnormal state of mind and the other state is, as it were, suppressed. The person is completely surrendered to the abnormal perception or experience. Those who are really pursuing the anthroposophy referred to here will see that there is not the slightest reason to confuse what is referred to here as the anthroposophical method of knowledge with anything hallucinatory, visionary, or pathological. The latter comes from a completely different direction. This can be recognized mainly by the fact that in all hypnotic, hallucinatory, visionary, pathological states, the person is given over to these states, and his ordinary soul life is extinguished, either temporarily or permanently. In the case of the supersensible form of knowledge described here, we do indeed penetrate into a completely different way of looking at things, into a perception of the world of the spirit that has nothing in common with the world of the senses. However, in every moment in which one surrenders oneself to this supersensible knowledge, ordinary knowledge and the ordinary state of consciousness, the completely normal, healthy human understanding, remain present at the same time. In the process of realizing spiritual life, this maintained healthy state controls the other unusual, but no less healthy, state in every moment.

I must say this before I describe how things appear under the influence of supersensible knowledge. Let us take something cosmic, the sun. We see it for ordinary observation in the way you know it: as a disk within space. We construct its true size and shape and so on with the physical methods we have. For the knowledge I have described here, the picture we have of the sun through ordinary science is completely transformed. The solar phenomenon that appears with firm contours and emits rays ceases to exist in this way before supersensible knowledge. For supersensible knowledge, the solar phenomenon, as it were, fills the whole space. The sun-like quality is everywhere and we become aware that this sun-like quality, which is everywhere, is only concentrated, so to speak, on the physical sun, that this physical sun is only the physical manifestation of something spiritual that fills all of space. Then one becomes aware of how this sun-like quality is a process, an event, and indeed an event that one is now [getting to know], since one has indeed got to know the formative body of the human being, which is the creative force in the human being, the creative force that gives us our abilities and forms our organs plastically.

By getting to know this formative body of the human being and how the forces of this body are connected to the forces of the sun, we recognize that everything that is constructive growth forces, that is the progressive forces of flourishing, of increasing, of becoming, is contained in the sun. In short, I would like to say that the cosmic space that has now been transformed into spirituality is filled with the power of becoming, of growth, which unfolds outside in nature and underlies nature. One sees this solar aspect as that which is becoming, growing, penetrating everywhere, one sees it penetrating into the own constitution of the body of formative forces. One learns to recognize how the human being, with his intimate spiritual-soul and bodily organization, is integrated into a cosmic principle of development. The world of facts is truly enriched by a sum of spiritual processes.

Just as one gets to know the solar, one gets to know the lunar. It becomes apparent as the process that asserts itself in everything as that which dies, decreases and withers, and which also extends into the human being, constantly bringing about the fact that not only ascending forces of growth are within us, accompanying us from youth, becoming less and less towards old age, but which nevertheless accompany us until death, that not only the forces of growth are in us, but also the others, those of destruction, of decline, of aging, that the lunar forces are this.

The human being learns to fit into the solar and lunar process. And in this way, I would say, the human being appears as a member of the whole cosmos. Just as our hand appears as a member of our organism, which, as we know, is no longer what it is as a member of our organism when we cut it away; it only makes sense through the whole organism. In the same way, when we look at it with the means of knowledge, we perceive how man, though closed off from the other things of the sensory world by his outer sensory form, is nevertheless backed by the forces that shape this sensory form, but which at the same time make it a member of the whole cosmos.

Here it is possible to show that to get to know the cosmos as a sum of spiritual beings is not based on fantasy, but on the fact that man first grasps within himself the means by which he can see through the processes and events of the cosmos in their spirituality. In this way one goes further and further, and comes to recognize the cosmos as a spiritual world. And when one has ascended to the point of really seeing the spiritual in the soul in this way, then one actually only ascends to that which is now exalted above the forces of growth and destruction, which, in the case of a person with an inner struggle, so to speak, carries the victory over what is solar and lunar in man. There one arrives at the most complete realization of the human ego, and one learns to recognize that this ego is not limited to this one earthly life.

Once one has recognized through inspiration what goes through birth and death, and what the soul is like outside the body, one has recognized how that which is outside the body connects through conception with that which is given to it through the powers of inheritance. Then one notices, when one can perceive this together, that something else is at work in the soul that is purely spiritual, but which works in our ego. Without this spiritual element, the ego in man would be a completely powerless thing. This spiritual element, which manifests itself when one reaches intuition, is a repetition of earlier earthly lives. Man has gone through earlier earthly lives and lives again and again between death and a new embodiment. And that which, in an earthly life, is active in the ordinary life and ordinary science with the help of the ordinary organism, and which finds its expression through this ordinary organism, passes through the gate of death and through the spiritual worlds. Having passed through the spiritual worlds, having absorbed everything that it had previously only worked and experienced through the body in the world, it enters a new earthly life.

What one experiences in this realm is one of the most intimate experiences of the soul, one of those experiences in which one becomes aware that behind even the spiritual-soul activity at work in the organism lies something else, something that has already gained earthly experience, that brings something into this life that is not contained in the two worlds that one has already become acquainted with. It is not contained in the sense world and not in the spiritual-soul world. One learns to recognize that which is now elevated above the sensual and the soul-spiritual in that it has already experienced a sense world. One learns, because one has first got to know those other two worlds, also to know that world where the repetitive in man reveals itself.

This can be said about the world outside of man in connection with man himself.

In this way, I have roughly indicated to you the essence of anthroposophy, how through it one can penetrate into the immortal part of the human being, how one can penetrate into the cosmos and into the connection of the human being with the cosmos. But when we get to know the human being in this way, and his or her relationship to the world, we gradually advance to the areas where anthroposophy is not just a form of knowledge, although that is what it seeks to be at first, and from which it but one advances to that which anthroposophy is already capable of in a certain sense today, namely to the applications of anthroposophy to the most diverse fields of science and practical life. I can only make brief references to these things here, but I would like to make them based on the principles that I have just discussed about the nature of anthroposophy.

First of all, we get to know the human being as a sensory being, as a being that exists as a natural being within natural facts, natural forces and natural substances. When we learn through physiology and biology how the substances of the external world penetrate into the human being, which paths they take, which forces then continue to work, then we become aware of how the human being stands – I would like to say – as a physical-sensual whole. But when we get to know the human being in the way I have just described, then we see not the physical-sensuous whole, but we become aware of the many different ways in which the human being is determined by the cosmos in relation to his various members. Thus, for the characterized supersensible knowledge, it shows that the solar element, which has an effect on man from the cosmos and continues to have an effect on man, has its effect on everything that I would like to call the main, the head organization of man, the one that is mainly the nerve-sense organization. This is therefore what has to do with the development and growth of the human being, and what is most active internally in the very young child.

In the course of life, the moon-like forces, the [dampening] forces that lead to physical death, become more and more effective. These are mainly active at the opposite pole of the human organization, in the system of limbs, the organs of movement and the internal organs of movement, the metabolic organs. In short, we now learn to understand the human being not just as a whole, but learn to integrate it into the outside world. This can then be further specialized. What seems to us to be closed off in the human being for the ordinary consciousness becomes an event, a process for supersensible knowledge. We learn to speak through supersensible knowledge not only of the brain and its parts, but of the brain process, the lung-like process, the heart process, in short, of the human being as a form that is mobile in itself, even in its physical organization, permeated by the formative forces of the body, moving it, and we get to know what the etheric body accomplishes with the physical body as a sum of processes. In this way, however, we penetrate deeper into the human being.

We get to know the human being's relationship to its surroundings, in the broadest sense to the cosmos. In this way we arrive at a real, genuine knowledge of the human being. And you have seen that we not only gain knowledge of the human being, but also of the outer world. We get to know the sun-like, moon-like, that which otherwise lives in the cosmos, in the plant, animal and rock world. We learn about the processes that take place in healthy and sick people. We recognize external processes that are, in a sense, the opposite processes of these processes. We get to know the plants and minerals that contain the opposite processes. We penetrate to a pathology and therapy, to a medical science that is not only based on trial and error, but that, like any rational science, learns from knowledge of man and the world how to observe health and disease and how any medicinal substance helps any process in the human body that deviates from what is beneficial for the human body. So you can see how it has come about that anthroposophical research has been made fruitful by setting up our Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart, where we are looking for new remedies and new therapies. The experiments have already progressed so far that they can go out into the world and prove how it has been possible to make anthroposophy fruitful in this field of practical scientific life.

Likewise, my dear attendees, we were able to find a path that may be said to fulfill Goethe's path of art in a certain way, by which I mean a path that leads from what is there into what is formative, for example, through our building in Dornach, the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science, which is not only, so to speak, an external framework for anthroposophical activity, but is artistically so imbued in its architectural style as anthroposophy with that with which it, as a world view, presents itself to humanity. If any other spiritual movement had needed its own building, it would have turned to this or that master builder, who would have created a setting for it out of the Romanesque or Gothic or some other architectural style.

Anthroposophy does not want to be abstract knowledge, it does not want to be mere theory. It cannot merely fertilize the individual sciences, but it penetrates from the formed world to the forming world. And let us take a saying by which Goethe has just characterized his own artistic perception. He says: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that could never be revealed without art. By creating art, Goethe does not want to implant human arbitrariness into the material, but rather what is felt or, as we would say today, seen in the spiritual from the cosmos itself. A building could arise that says exactly the same thing in its forms for external observation as is said in words, by representing the anthroposophical view, the view of the spiritual world, from the idea. And so anthroposophy will also be able to have a fruitful effect on artistic life.

In Stuttgart, Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School in 1919, which I run. This Waldorf School is by no means a school of world view, and those who think that anthroposophy is taught there as a world view are quite wrong. That is not the case. It has gone so far that the religious worldviews are represented by the representatives of the individual religious denominations. Catholic worldview is taught by the priests of the Catholic Church, Protestant worldview by the priests of the Protestant Church. We have introduced special religious education only for those children who would otherwise have no religious education at all, but this does not aim to graft an anthroposophical worldview onto the children. The educational method of the Waldorf School, its didactics, should express what anthroposophy can give in this most important area of practical life.

And, dear ladies and gentlemen, anthroposophical knowledge gives us knowledge of the human being. With it, we can follow how the soul and spirit of the child express themselves from the first moment of life, how the soul and spirit have an ever-increasing plastic effect on the external physical form. Certain laws can be found that are different in the child up to the time he learns to speak, then different again up to the age of nine, and then again up to sexual maturity. We can get to know the child completely without having to become a revolutionary with regard to the basic laws of life. What we need is practical knowledge of human nature. Anthroposophy does not want to create revolutionary new principles at any price; it wants to get to know the child in such a way that anyone involved in teaching can, so to speak, deduce everything that is developed in the curriculum and teaching objectives from the spiritual, mental and physical knowledge that anthroposophy can provide, as I have described it.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is fair to say that if anything in any other field had been able to bear fruit in the same way as some things did at the Anthroposophical Congress in Stuttgart this past summer, the world would have looked at something like this differently. At this congress, for example, we saw how external experimental psychology and education were so excellently discussed, as in the lecture by Dr. von Heydebrand. If this had been given in other fields too, it would have been the talk of the day for a long time for all those involved in education and teaching. Anthroposophy, which has to fight for its field, to fight for it in the field of education and also in other fields, will then also be fruitful for other fields.

We have experienced in modern culture that thinking, the whole way of imagining, which simply emerges from the scientific way of thinking, has led us into a social world view and outlook on life that is now bearing its terribly destructive fruits in Eastern Europe in particular. We have seen the fruits of a purely scientific life that does not want to penetrate to the spirit in the social sphere. The Anthroposophy that is to be revealed does not merely comprehend man as a natural being and also think him into social life as a natural being, but comprehends him as a being of body, soul and spirit. And in this way Anthroposophy can fertilize social life. However, this can only be shown little by little, it must gradually be lived out in individual practical things, which have already been pursued. I do not want to talk about that, but about the fact that even economics, which arose from purely external views, has been subjected to an excellent critique by Emil Leinhas, so that here, in his lecture 'The Bankruptcy of Economics', which is now also available in print, a way has been shown to introduce spirituality into social life. But social life is not steered in the right direction merely by speaking to a stove: “Dear stove, your task is to warm the room, so warm it up.” That is of no use, as we know; instead, you have to put fuel on the stove, and then the warming will come of its own accord. Social life is not steered in the right direction by persuasion, by a categorical imperative. This can only be achieved by making use of the forces that can really be introduced into practical life.

And finally, where anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect – but this is perhaps the most important thing, although it does not belong to our topic – I mention the area of religious life. It is precisely here that anthroposophy is misunderstood, in that people believe that it wants to incorporate something sectarian into life, when in fact it shows how knowledge — which is as rigorous as ordinary science — penetrates to the spiritual and soul life in the world and, in the core of the human being, fulfills that which comes from it, the human soul, with religious intimacy. In a sense, the human being learns to recognize this through being a religious adult, illuminated by the light that can only come from beholding the spiritual worlds to which the human being truly belongs.

Nothing would like to be anthroposophy for religious life more than what, according to the demands and longings of modern man, can live through this life in such a way that it offers inner security, that it gives support for life, that it can also enter into life practice. Because ultimately that is what everything depends on: life practice. If we were to ascend to a spiritual world that we only half-dreamt of, glimpsing it out of cloud-cuckoo-land, and if our lives on earth were to continue without the influence of this spiritual world, then this spiritual world would be of highly questionable value to human beings. Anthroposophy does not present itself to people in such a way that they should follow the example of certain mystics for whom the material world is always too bad. It also wants to advance to the higher worlds, but it knows that the higher spiritual worlds are those that bring their lives to a revelation precisely by creating the physical-material.

And so anthroposophy seeks to become the basis for a true practice of life. We permeate ourselves with what can be seen in the spiritual life, but we try to carry it into all areas of life, into the practice of life. Because it is not the spiritual world in which one must flee that is the right one, but the one in which one can actively immerse oneself in life. And so anthroposophy does not want to become something that turns against the great advances in knowledge of nature and what comes from it, but something that further develops this knowledge of nature in the sense of a knowledge of the spirit, but also in the sense of a true spiritual practice worthy of human beings. No one more than the one who stands on the ground of this spiritual-scientific anthroposophy will recognize the great importance of modern science and reject any dilettantism in any field if it wants to set the tone for the spiritual life. But it must nevertheless arise from the deepest longings of the human heart and all human striving for knowledge, which ultimately wants to be anthroposophy.

Just as we only have the whole, the full human being before us when we not only consider the outer nature of the human being, the outer, bodily organization, but when we see him or her as ensouled and spiritualized , we only have real knowledge of the world and of the human being and a spiritual and humane way of life if we want to penetrate our natural practice and our natural knowledge with what comes from the spirit, from the soul. And so anthroposophy does not want to oppose scientific progress, but wants to have genuine scientific meaning itself, wants to be that which is soul for the whole human being, which is spirit in corporeality. It seeks to be this for external natural knowledge and for external natural practice. To a certain extent, it seeks to see a soul and a spirit in the magnificent and powerful contemplation and practice of nature in recent times, and it is this anthroposophy that is meant here that seeks to act as and be understood as the center, as the soulful and spiritual center for natural knowledge and natural practice.

Dear attendees! Man only really faces the riddles of existence when he has developed a degree of awareness of life, when he is compelled to form ideas, sensations and feelings about his relationship to the world. But then, when he has reached such a situation, the riddles of existence mean to him what can be called a vital question. For they are not only connected with some theoretical longings, they are not merely external questions of education, but the whole position of man in the world depends on them, the way in which man can find his way in the world, the degree of security he can have in life, and the inner support with which he can move through this life.

But there is a considerable difference between the various types of existential conundrums. Man is confronted with nature and must form ideas and feelings about his relationship to nature. And if I may use a comparison, I would like to say: When man has come to consciousness in the way I have characterized it, and he cannot find his way into certain things that confront him as mysteries of nature, then existence, to which he once belonged – as I said, it is only expressed as a comparison – appears to him as a spiritual darkness. He feels as if he has been placed in a dark world, and cannot find his way about in it. But to a certain extent this whole relationship to the secrets of the outer, natural world remains something external to the human being; it concerns his outer relationship to existence.

But the situation for the human being is quite different when it comes to the riddles of his soul, these riddle questions themselves. He lives in these riddle questions, these riddle questions basically constitute what can be mental health and illness in the first instance, but what can also become physical health and illness. Because, ladies and gentlemen, the life of the soul is something extraordinarily complicated, however simple it may initially appear. What we carry in our consciousness during our waking hours from morning to evening is, as is now also scientifically recognized, only part of our soul life. A large part of our soul life rests in unconscious or, as I could also say, subconscious depths, and it surges up in the form of vague feelings, of vague moods, and also of all kinds of other soul content, and forms what is an indeterminate basic state of our soul life. But that which takes place and rises in this more or less indeterminate way in the depths of our soul life is intimately connected with what actually constitutes the happiness or suffering of our lives. And anyone who attempts to penetrate the soul life of a human being by anthroposophical means will very soon notice how everything that flows up from the depths of the soul in this kind of indeterminate way with the physical body, how at first quietly, then more and more, our entire state of health, which makes us capable of living or unable to live, can depend on these subconscious soul moods.

Now I do not want to speak to you today, my dear audience, in the way that this unconsciousness of the soul is very often spoken about at present, by placing everything that shimmers unclearly in consciousness in this great container of this unconscious and forming more or less vague ideas about how this unconscious or subconscious works. I have been speaking here in this place about questions of anthroposophical research for many years and therefore cannot start from the most elementary of this research today, but would like to consider the questions of the soul life in their very own sense, as they are connected in a certain sense with the happiness and unhappiness of life. But to do that, we have to look at what, in the human soul, permeated by all kinds of things that are initially unknown, which we just want to point out more or less clearly through today's reflections, can have a disturbing or calming, happy or sorrowful effect in this soul life, and what lies in between.

Now, if we take a glance, even a superficial one, at our soul life, we find two clearly distinguishable poles: on the one hand, the life of the imagination, which actually encompasses everything that takes place clearly and brightly in our consciousness. And on the other hand, we find the life of the will, which initially plays out from the depths of the soul in a somewhat dark, gloomy way.

As I have mentioned here before, we distinguish between two states of consciousness in the ordinary course of a person's life, of which only one is actually a distinct state of consciousness. We distinguish between the waking state and the sleeping state. In the state of sleep, the conscious life of imagination ceases, the whole life of the soul sinks down into a more or less dark darkness. But if we look at our soul life quite impartially when we are awake, we can actually only speak of the fact that in relation to everything that is conceptual, we are really awake. To a certain extent, we have ourselves in our hands as waking human beings, insofar as we have filled our consciousness with clear images, with thoughts full of light. We also accompany our will impulses, we accompany our actions with thoughts. But even with the simplest movement of the human body, how the thought of consciousness is connected with what actually happens during a will impulse, during an action, remains completely dark. How dark it is, what actually happens inside the arm when I just lift this arm, when the thought that has the goal of lifting this arm wants to realize itself, wants to shoot into it, so to speak, and wants to set the arm in motion willfully.

What happens in our own organism eludes our waking consciousness just as much as what actually happens in the human soul from falling asleep to waking up, so that we actually have to say: It is the case for the human soul life that even when we are awake we have an element of sleep, that the state of being asleep pervades us continually, and that we are fully awake only in thinking, in the experience of clear, light-filled thoughts. Between these two states, between the — I would like to say — fully waking state of imagination and the life of will immersed in darkness, lies, participating in both, the life of feeling and of the mind. Our feelings permeate our ideas. We bring certain sympathies and antipathies from our feelings into the life of our ideas, and thus we usually either connect or separate our ideas. We accompany what flows into our will impulses with our emotional judgment, in that we perceive some actions as being in accordance with duty and others as transgressions against duty. And because we experience a certain emotional satisfaction when we fulfill our duties, or a certain dissatisfaction when we fail at something, or when we cannot succeed at something, or when we fail at something for some other reason, our emotional life flows back and forth between our mental and our volitional life.

But the real soul mysteries do not present themselves to the dull person who, in the manner just described, devotes himself to the life of ideas on the one hand and to the life of feeling and the life of will on the other, but these soul mysteries emerge as the person becomes more and more conscious of himself. And even then the actual experienced soul mysteries do not occur in full consciousness, but they belong precisely to the more or less subconscious experiences of the human being. Man never becomes completely clear in his consciousness about what actually influences the mood, the states of his soul life, his daily happiness, his daily suffering, where these actually come from.

And one must seek out and clearly express that which lives unclearly in consciousness, and I ask you to take this into account in the remarks that I am about to make, that I will be obliged to express in clear words something that express in clear words what never lives in consciousness with such clarity, but what is present in the life of the soul, either healing or causing illness, and what the human being senses without being able to bring it to consciousness. And because this is so, the soul puzzles are not merely theoretical, they are thoroughly existential puzzles that are experienced.

When a person lives, as it were, according to the life of imagination, then he feels – as I said, I am speaking clearly about what is only felt unclearly, what is never fully brought to consciousness – then the person feels something like the vanity of his own existence. The life of imagination is a life of images. The life of imagination is something that we fill during our waking day-to-day life with what we receive from the outer world in the way of impressions and perceptions. What we experience from nature forms the content of our imagination; it lives in us and is what we draw from our memories. But although we are aware that Yes, you are active in processing these experiences into representations. You are inwardly active in separating and connecting representations, but you are not fully aware of this activity in your mind. What is present in your mind is basically a reflection of the outer world. We know that we have to align our imaginative life with this external world. What we have is merely a reflection of the external world. We live by living in our imaginations, in images. We do not feel a full sense of existence in our imaginative life.

And this feeling, it lives out subconsciously, however strange, however paradoxical that may sound. And as little as it is present in consciousness, it is alive in the subconscious; this feeling lives out in certain anxious feelings, in feelings of fear, in relation to the life of imagination.

It sounds paradoxical, dear audience, but there is an undercurrent to the life of the human soul. Most people know nothing about it, but most people, or all people in fact, are constantly under its influence. And this undercurrent is a fearful current, that we can, so to speak, lose ourselves in the world, that we stand over an abyss because our world of ideas is a world of images. And again, the indefinite longing lives in the human soul: How do I find existence in this mere world of images?

This unconscious feeling in the undercurrent of the soul can certainly be compared to the feeling that a person has when they are physically short of air, when they suffer from air hunger and thus consciously fall into anxious feelings. What a person consciously experiences through physical conditions is actually always unconsciously felt as a concomitant of the life of the imagination. And so, on the one hand, we can point to a soul enigma, not in a theoretical formulation, but by bringing up from the depths of the soul what is germinating or slumbering in this soul.

And on the other hand, by living towards the element of will, the human being feels — I would say — the opposite state. There is a different undercurrent in the life of the soul. The human being senses how he is exposed to his drives, his emotions, his instincts, how something natural plays into the human soul life that does not open up to the clarity of thinking, that is always immersed in a certain way in a reality that we cannot penetrate with light, that forms a darkness within ourselves. And if you can penetrate into these undercurrents of the soul with unbiased observation, you can indicate how that which exists in the depths of the soul is unconsciously felt. One must then characterize it by saying: It is felt in the same way as anger is felt in consciousness, or also how a person feels when he cannot breathe, when his blood circulation is disturbed in such a way that the inhaled air is not properly converted in his body, when a kind of suffocation sets in. Something like anger-fortitude is always there in the human soul as a result of such a way of living towards the element of the will.

These are forces that live deep in the unconscious of the human soul, that flood up and that constitute the real mystery of the human soul life. And the one who merely takes the ideas in their pictorialness, the will in its instinctuality, as they present themselves to consciousness, does feel these soul riddles as something indeterminate, as an indeterminate sensation of the soul, but he does not make these soul riddles clear to himself. He does not really know what the indeterminate workings in him are, but they deeply influence his happy or unhappy mood in life.

It must be said again and again: the soul puzzles are not the same as those we experience in nature; the soul puzzles are those that are experienced inwardly, that flood up from the deep undercurrents of the soul and that must first be interpreted. Therefore, my dear audience, every scientific discipline – against which, of course, as has been emphasized here many times before, I have no objection in its legitimate field – therefore every scientific discipline has little to do with the actual riddles of the soul. We can see this, and I would like to give two examples. We can see it in all of modern scientific thinking, how helpless science, which celebrates such great triumphs in other fields, is when it comes to the soul, despite the fact that the greatest existential riddles are connected to the human soul. I would like to recall two examples, which, however, are deeply significant for what is there and for what is scientifically necessary in order to penetrate into the actual field that man experiences as a soul riddle.

It is now almost half a century since the great physiologist du Bois-Reymond gave a speech at the 45th Naturalists' Conference in Leipzig that must always be referred to, despite the fact that it has been talked about an extraordinary amount and has now almost been forgotten and disappeared from the discussion. This speech was about the “limits of knowledge of nature”, and du Bois-Reymond rightly states on the one hand, the limits of knowledge of nature, the material world in its essence. He says: Wherever matter comes into play, the human mind cannot penetrate. It penetrates from the external observation of the external sensory phenomena to the revelation of material existence, but it cannot specify what matter itself actually is. This is the one limit du Bois-Reymond indicates. He indicates the other limit as that of human consciousness, but today this is nothing other than the human soul. He says: Even with the most complete knowledge of nature, one cannot even gain any idea of how the simplest sensation comes about in the human soul. Even if one knew quite clearly how carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen atoms move in the human brain, one would never be able to fathom from a clear insight into these movements how the simplest sensation – “I see red”, “I smell the scent of roses” – comes about, that is, how the first elements of mental life come about.

And du Bois-Reymond is actually completely right in this statement. There is a second limit for external natural science here, except that du Bois-Reymond's conviction is the one that must be overcome through anthroposophical research. Du Bois-Reymond believes that the limits of knowledge of nature are the limits of all science. Therefore, he says: If you want to penetrate into this realm of the spiritual and soul, you have to do it by means other than scientific ones. Because where supernaturalism begins, where, in other words, one enters the realm of the spiritual and soul, that is where science ends. This is precisely what anthroposophical research wants to defend before the world: that science does not have to be limited to the external-natural existence, that science can develop the means to penetrate into the spiritual-mental as well.

The other example I want to give is that of an excellent personality, Franz Brentano, who wanted to establish a psychology entirely according to the method of modern natural science. That was his ideal. I have — dear ladies and gentlemen — discussed the whole state of affairs underlying Franz Brentano's research in detail in the third part of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (On the Riddle of the Soul) and would like to mention only a few fundamental points here. Franz Brentano then tried, at the beginning of the 1870s, to write a psychology, a psychology. The first volume appeared in the spring of 1874. The second volume was promised for the fall; it never appeared. The whole work was intended to be in four volumes; except for the first volume, nothing ever appeared except individual attempts, which, however, are always only attempts. The whole work remained a torso. In the work mentioned, I have discussed why this had to be so. Franz Brentano wanted to conduct research into the life of the soul in the same way as in the natural sciences, and in this first volume one finds a remarkable confession by Franz Brentano. He says, for example: With this scientific research, it is indeed possible to modestly find one's way in the details of mental life. One can indicate how one representation connects with another, how one representation separates from another, how certain feelings attach to representations, how volitional impulses attach to representations, how memory works, and so on. But if, as Franz Brentano says, we have to content ourselves with investigating only these details of mental life, and if knowledge of the most important questions of human existence has to be bought at the price of this strict scientific method, where would that leave us? For Brentano finds justified the longing, already present in Plato, in Aristotle, in ancient Greece, to lead what can be investigated in the individual soul to the great questions from birth to immortality. And it would be sad, says Franz Brentano, if, in the desire to be scientific in the exploration of the soul life, one had to renounce knowledge of what happens to the better part of man in us when the physical part is handed over to the earth at death.

And it is evident from what Franz Brentano has expounded in the first volume of his psychology that his whole scientific yearning is to lead the individual questions, which basically can touch the wider public little, which this wants to leave to the scholar, but to lead these individual questions on a long path to the great questions of human immortality and the divine-spiritual content of the world, as it is reflected in the soul. But Brentano could not find this way out of his scientific way of thinking, and because he was an honest researcher, he left the following volumes, for which he could not find a research path, unwritten until his death a few years ago.

I would like to say that it is precisely this researcher's fate that shows in the truest sense how tragic it is that what is often recognized today as the only scientific approach must falter when faced with the great riddles of the human soul. That is it – I must say it again – that Anthroposophy must defend before the world today: that the path that Brentano could not find out of natural science, out of mere natural science, can be found, dear ladies and gentlemen! And it can be found if we do not stop at the ordinary abilities of the soul, as they present themselves in the outer life and as they are used in ordinary science.

I have often spoken of the fact that there are dormant, let us say with a scientific term, latent cognitive abilities in every human soul that must first be brought up out of this soul, just as certain abilities must be brought up out of the child through external education. Once a person has matured to the point where they have developed ordinary cognitive abilities, they must undergo such an inner education through devotional inner soul exercises. In this way he can develop those abilities in the soul through which it is no longer unclear what I have characterized on both sides as human, enigmatic soul experience; the experience in relation to the ideas, the experience in relation to the will impulses, so that, as it were, the human soul process becomes transparent, so that one can penetrate into what is actually going on in the human life of ideas and the human life of will. For without penetrating into these everyday soul puzzles, one cannot find the way to the great questions of immortal existence and the divine-spiritual content of the world, in which the human soul also originates.

Now, in my lectures here, I have often described how a person can do inner exercises, purely soul and spiritual exercises, through which he awakens the otherwise dormant cognitive abilities to existence, so that they can really help him in his knowledge. I have pointed out how one can strengthen one's own imaginative life. Just as we strengthen a muscle when we use it continually in work, so we can strengthen our imaginative life when we work at it in the way I have described in detail, for example, in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds.” If we direct this life of imagination through inner, soul work in a certain direction, if we move certain easily comprehensible images into the center of consciousness and always devote ourselves to this kind of imaginative work, to which we would otherwise not devote ourselves. I can only hint at this in principle here, but you will find clear indications in the work just mentioned and also in the second part of my “Occult Science” that the imaginative life of the human being can become something quite different through such meditation and concentration exercises of thinking. I would like to say that a stronger, more vigorous life of imagination can be produced without any kind of abnormal action, but through the mere further development of what is normal in the life of thought, in the life of imagination in man. And by generating this stronger imaginative life, by elevating ourselves through meditation and concentration above that which is actually merely pictorial in our ordinary imaginative life, we come to what I call in the books mentioned, the imaginative presentation that is rich in content.

This imaginative presentation, lives with such an inner liveliness in the mere thought, as otherwise the human being lives in his outer perceptions. But through this — my dear audience — one gradually comes to the point where the life of presentation is no longer this merely abstract, this — I would say — merely pictorial, but through purely inner research, which is, however, pursued with the same seriousness as any other kind of scientific research, through inner research one makes the discovery that the soul, which otherwise could only fill its mental life with the results of external impressions, that the soul is inwardly filled by forces that, as it were, shoot into the soul life. The images are no longer just this light liquid when they are formed through meditation and concentration, but they are permeated and imbued with forces that I would call formative forces, forces that make up an inwardly spiritual-plastic element. And after some time, one discovers that through this development of the life of imagination, one grows together with that which the formative forces of the human body itself are. After some time, one discovers that the life of thought is, so to speak, nothing other than the rarefied life of forces in human growth. That which inwardly shapes us plastically in the physical body from birth to death is – I would say – in a rarefied state our life of imagination in ordinary consciousness.

We look at the newly born child. We know, dear listeners, that in this newly born child, the formative forces are at work in the brain, shaping the body. We follow the growth of the child, how it radiates straight from the plastic brain activity, we follow it to a certain point in human life, until the teeth change, until around the age of seven. We will, by feeling this life of strength that pulsates in man, that is vividly active in him, by feeling this first as something indefinite. We will, on the other hand, by powerfully developing our life of imagination through meditation and concentration, be unconsciously led to the same element that worked so vividly in us from our earliest childhood. And this is a significant discovery of the inner human life: that one can strengthen one's imagination in such a way that one can make it so intense inwardly that one then feels oneself in that which is the formative forces of the human being, which formative forces are in one's growth, in one's metabolism. However strange it may still sound to today's research. It is the case that it is possible, by strengthening the soul life, to grow into that which then, in a sense, takes us up as that which plastically shapes our outer physical body as its formative forces. One grows through the life of the imagination into reality, one grows into a formative element. And in this way one gets to know – dear ladies and gentlemen – what lies behind the mere thought process. One learns to recognize how a spiritual, with which one has now connected, works on the human organism from birth to death. The life of the imagination acquires its reality, the life of the imagination is no longer the mere life of the image, the life of the imagination becomes a life of strength that is inherent in existence itself.

And only through such an insight can that which - one could say - the undercurrent of anxiety, of fear, produces in the human soul, can this fear, this anxiety, be overcome from consciousness, so that it is indeed not a theoretical solution to the riddles of the soul that anthroposophy points to here, but a thoroughly inward, practical solution that can be experienced. Anthroposophy must point out that, as a result of its research, human consciousness can be opened to an understanding of what lives in the human being, which — I would like to say — only appears to be so diluted that it emerges as our ordinary life of imagination, but which, in truth, is the inner sphere of growth of our existence. And on the other hand, when a person loses their center of gravity in their mental life and gets caught up in a fearful undercurrent of their soul life, they can absorb the results of spiritual science anthroposophy about the mental life and can maintain this mental life through the path of knowledge. Anthroposophy does not offer a solution to this soul riddle by putting forward a theory, but by putting forward a result that the human being can fully grasp with his or her common sense and that then — by lending heaviness — occurs in the life of ideas for his consciousness, for his soul life, so that into the soul mood, into the soul condition, solving riddles can flow that which Anthroposophy seemingly asserts as mere knowledge of the life of ideas. On the one hand, we recognize how the human being is a formed being, how he appears as a whole in a certain form, how his individual organs are formed out of the spirit and how we, in order to be free beings, can act not only through these inner forces but can also surrender to free mirror images, how we can develop our mere pictorial representations into a plastic form.

What is presented here, I have - my dear audience - explained in the early 1890s of the last century in my “Philosophy of Freedom” by showing that man is a free being precisely because he can live in pure thoughts that are not related to any external reality for his consciousness, that he can shape his moral impulses in these pure thoughts. One is faced with the fact that one must carry out something oneself if one's mirror image is to change; mirror images do not determine one causally. One would never become free if one were determined by a reality in one's ordinary consciousness. In one's ordinary consciousness, ideas live as images. One is not determined by them, just as one is not determined by mirror images. One is free. In order for him to be free, his life must be distinguished from that which permeates it plastically as a growth force, as a growth body – one could say – as a body of formative forces. But the human being must pay for this life in freedom with the characterized anxious undercurrent in his soul life. And so, in his ordinary consciousness, the human being must come to fully experience his sense of freedom, but also, as a polar opposite, be able to contrast this experience of freedom with what anthroposophy can give as a way of strengthening the life of ideas in the manner indicated.

But if we continue along this path, we move from what I would call the very rarefied, purely pictorial life of ideas to that which is real, which lives and forms in the human being. It is not the physical body, it is not the physical organs, it is a supersensible force, but it is there. One grasps something that lies outside the physical body. And one can penetrate into it by simply pursuing the riddles of the soul on one side; one can penetrate into that which, independently of the human physical body, has a supersensible reality in man. One advances to what, through birth or through conception, let us say, as a human physical body, is prepared by mere hereditary relationships, by mere external natural facts, what is preformed as a human body. One learns to recognize how the inherited traits, which come from parents or ancestors, connect with the whole body, which is formed in the maternal organism, from the spiritual world, and how one finds this again in life when one strengthens one's imaginative life. One arrives – I would say – at one side of the question of immortality. We look at what is immortal, what is eternal in human nature, because it penetrates from a spiritual world through conception and birth into what is humanly physical, and because it continues to have an effect even during earthly life as the inner, plastic formative power with which we connect by strengthening our thought life in the manner indicated.

Thus, dear attendees, anthroposophy offers the perspective that someone like Franz Brentano was looking for. Brentano also began with an investigation of thoughts, but he left thoughts as they are in ordinary consciousness. He limited himself to merely registering what is present in ordinary consciousness. Only the strengthening of the thought life through meditation and concentration leads this thought life to the inner, plastic formative power. And it really leads to the path that begins with the simple, everyday thought and ends with the spiritual-soul element of the human being that lived there before birth, before conception, in the spiritual-soul world itself and that connected with the powers of inheritance, with the physical powers of the human body. There is no other way to solve the riddle of the soul than to find this path from the simplest phenomena of everyday life to the great riddles of existence.

I have — my dear audience — so far pointed to what man can achieve in relation to his thought life. There he comes to that which, as it were, drives man out into space, which plastically permeates the spatial corporeality of man, which lives itself out in the form, which descends from the spiritual world, as I have indicated, and flows into the outer form of man, and also into the form of his inner organs. But that is only one side of human life. And the soul also participates in the other side of human life, if we can also develop the life of thought through meditation and concentration. If we do not develop the life of will on the other side in such a way that one can say in the proper sense that it is strengthened, but rather develop it in such a way that we make it more devoted, more spiritualized.

This can be achieved by, in a sense, tearing ourselves away from our everyday life of will. I have again given many individual exercises that would have to be practised for years — spiritual science is no easier than research in an observatory or in a clinic —. But I would like to pick out a few individual exercises to indicate the principles involved. When we consider what functions as will in ordinary thinking — for there is always a will present in thinking, thoughts are shaped by the will, the thought-life is only one side of it, in the life of the soul will is always interwoven with thoughts and thoughts with the will. When the will element that lives in the thoughts is thereby torn away from its usual course, which adheres to external physical facts, for example, by presenting something backwards, let us say. While one is accustomed to presenting a drama from the first to the fifth act, we present this drama backwards, from the last events to the beginning. Then one proceeds to presenting external facts backwards. For example, one can imagine one's usual daily life in reverse, proceeding in as small portions as possible, from evening to morning, even to the extent of imagining going up a staircase in reverse, imagining it as going down backwards from the top step to the penultimate step and so on.

Because we are accustomed to always thinking in the same sense as the external facts unfold, thinking actually plays a passive role for us in relation to the will that unfolds in it. It becomes actively inwardly active, permeated with inward initiative, when we train it through such exercises as retrospection, where we tear it away from the course of external facts and make it rely on itself. For when we reinforce what we achieve in this way through careful and energetic exercises with truly serious self-observation, observing what we do as a person of will as if we were standing next to us and observing ourselves piece by piece in our development of will; or also when we would go over to action, when we do exercises for the purpose of making a resolution and then executing it with iron energy, so that we live completely in the element of will. I just wanted to mention in principle such exercises that not only tear the will away from external facts, but also from its and its being to the body itself, which make the will independent, spiritualize it - then we actually come to a development of the will in this way, so that we experience ourselves with our soul life, which now develops the will, outside of our body. It is a significant experience.

But only through this does one begin to understand what the will is. In ordinary life, the will is bound to the organs. We see it unfold as we move our limbs. We observe, as it were, only through our thought life the processes, the effects of our will. We see into it when we have torn it away from the body, when we experience it in itself, becoming completely one with it. Then it is permeated by an elevation of the power that is otherwise also bound to our physical organism, permeated by the power of love. And that devoted element in the life of the soul is developed into a transparent, bright clarity, which otherwise — I would like to say — appears to us darkly as the emotional life of the will in love.

I know how little people today want to accept love as a force of knowledge. In ordinary life it is not. But when it is developed in such a way that the will is no longer rooted in instincts, in drives, in emotions, but in the pure soul, apart from the body, then this will is actually only understood in terms of its essence. And then it shows itself to be something quite different from what the thought element has shown itself to be. The thought element, in its intensified form, has shown itself to be that which shapes constructively, which — I would say — allows an organ to flow out, which culminates in human reproduction. The thought element unfolds as the plastic activity, from the soul into the human body. The will element unfolds in such a way that – especially when it is recognized separately from the body – one can then see how it affects the body. It unfolds in the body in such a way that it does not shape the physical in a plastic way, but the plastic-shaped is regressed, dissolved, atomized, made to flow. The will element is what constantly — I would like to say, I beg you not to misunderstand me — what constantly, the expression is meant figuratively, but it means something very important, what constantly burns the formed elements of the human being again, lets them rise in flames — spiritually speaking.

Human life, as it pours out of the soul into the physical body, can only be understood by looking at it, on the one hand, as this plastic element and, on the other hand, as the re-dissolving of the plastic element, as that — I would like to say — into the atomized, into the dissolving of the plastic element. And in that everything that unfolds as will in the human being is such a dissolving, atomizing, and melting element in the human body, this will-like element is what is now experienced as pointing the way to the other side of human life, pointing the way to death.

In the same way that we first get to know the spiritual-plastic element of the human soul through the plasticity of thinking, which enters the physical body through birth or conception, we learn to recognize how the will-like element dissolves the human body, but in the dissolution – I would like to say, as I said, figuratively speaking – pure spirituality emerges from the flame. We get to know the soul's departure from the body. In this way we understand death as a result of the dissolution of the will element. We understand what happens to a person in death because we understand what happens in the everyday act of will. Everyday volitional decision brings about a kind of combustion process in the physical body, but from this combustion process emerges that which is our inner soul life. What we feel inwardly as soul could not be there if we were always merely bodies, merely shaped in a plastic way. The plastic must be broken down, flow, and from the flowing of the plastic, from the continually being destroyed of the bodily, the experiencing of the soul arises. And we understand the departure of the human soul with death from the physical body, which only in an instant summarizes what is always unfolding in the will to the spirituality of the soul. Just as I experience my will in the present moment, how it forms a kind of process of combustion, of dissolution in the body, how through this destruction the spiritual comes to life in the human body, so I learn to recognize how, with the other destruction of the body in death, which is nothing other than the last effect of the will hidden in the body, how the spiritual returns again to the spiritual-soul world.

This is the living teaching of Anthroposophy that leads to the riddle of the soul. Anthroposophy is not a theory; it certainly wants to give knowledge, but not a theoretical knowledge, it wants to give a knowledge that is soul food. And in this way it can present the individual daily experiences of the soul being before the spiritual eye. From these individual experiences, it can then move on to the big questions of the soul's life.

Dear attendees, allow me to elaborate on this one detail so that you can see what anthroposophy is based on to guide people into the riddles of the soul. Allow me to give you the details of human memory.

Once you have developed the intensified life of imagination that I have characterized, and once you have also become familiar with how the plastic is continually being broken down by the life of will, then you can also see the inner soul processes with transparent clarity. One sees how the human being faces the outer world, how he receives his impressions from the outer world, how he then forms ideas, thoughts about these outer impressions, how he then after some time – or even after a long time – brings up these ideas as memories from certain sources, or how they also arise by themselves – as one says today – as freely rising memory ideas.

For anyone who wants to look at the human soul with an open mind, the mere emergence of these recollected images heralds a significant mystery of the soul. It can be said that, in a rather curious way, people have spoken of what the essence of memory actually is. They have imagined – and sometimes still do today – that: Well, a person receives impressions through perception, they are evoked by his senses, then they are continued through his nervous system, he transforms them through his imagination. These images then plunge into certain depths of his soul life and then come up again when they are remembered. Now, no person who thinks impartially can form any clear idea about how these images, when we do not have them, are supposed to go for a walk down there in unknown depths of the soul's life, only to come up again when they are needed, either through arbitrariness or because they want to lean against something that appears as a new perception, as a new impression of the outside world.

Anthroposophy goes beyond this to the real, true observation of the human soul life itself. It sees through the intensified life of imagination and the spiritualized life of will, it sees through the whole process that takes place from the perception of the external thing through the formation of imagination, through the formation of memory, to the re-emergence of the remembered imaginations. One would like to say: in that anthroposophical research penetrates to the forces of knowledge through such a shaping of the life of imagination and will — as I have indicated — the whole soul and bodily process, the way these two interact with each other, is transformed in such a way that, if I may compare it, something that I have before me as something very dark and opaque is suddenly made transparent by being illuminated. The whole human soul process becomes transparent through this strengthened life of imagination and spiritualized life of will.

And what do we now see in relation to what I have indicated? My dear audience, we see how external impressions stretch for miles through the senses, how the whole process continues, and how, in fact, what I have described as the formative, plastic element of the thought life, of the intensified thought life, how that works in the ordinary process of perception as a continuation. I perceive outwardly, but it is not only the abstract thoughts that I have in ordinary consciousness that work in me, but also that which is merely fathomed by spiritual science, that works continually. This plasticity in these representations has an effect down into the depths of the human soul and body. And then, when this has happened, when the thought has had a formative effect in the depths of the soul and body, then the person moves on to something else. A volitional decision is at work, the will is at play, but the spiritualized will is present. In that part of the human being that is connected to the outer brain, this will unfolds. It breaks down what is there for the ordinary consciousness by dissolving the plasticity of the brain, it breaks down what the impression has built up, so that we have an outer brain surface – if I may express myself crudely – spread over substrates, but where the plasticity continues to have an effect.

Now let us assume that I remember something in an arbitrary way, then it happens in such a way that I unfold this will out of a certain series of images. The development of the will is in turn connected with a breakdown, if external impressions do not now penetrate again, and the fact that these do not come is ensured by the development of the will, which is a breakdown. And this dismantling allows that which is in the subsoil to emerge as a sculpture of the human being when the memory is voluntarily recalled. If free-rising images come up, it happens the other way around. There is some external impression present that forms into a thought. The thought is vividly active. It is imprinted on the brain. This plastic activity is similar to the plastic activity that once developed in the substrate that which can live in the substrate in a certain form. This lives in the plastic activity that the thought has now formed.

In short, as you can see, the life of the soul becomes transparent in this way. You learn to recognize it in its inner plastic structure, in its continuous extinguishing, burning away through the will element. And by learning to understand every single moment of life, one learns to grasp in these currents of life what the great questions of life are. One learns to recognize from the thoughts that which enters into physical life through birth, and one learns to recognize from the will that which moves out into the spiritual world through the death of the human being. In this way, the results of anthroposophical research emerge as something that penetrates from the details of life to the enigmatic essence of the human soul.

In this way, my dear audience, by recognizing how thought already works vividly in ordinary memory, as if something is being formed in the body. In memory, we also experience how that which is not yet in the body, but connects with the body through birth and conception, how that intervenes in the body in a plastic way. We get to know the human life element in this plastic formation because we get to know the individual plastic element that already appears in the formation of memory.

Anthroposophy wants to look at the riddles of the soul with a full life! This should be understood as the essential thing about anthroposophical research: that it stops everywhere at the scientific conscientiousness to which one has been trained today by the great, powerful advances of external natural science, but that, by stopping at this conscientiousness, it simultaneously goes beyond what mere external observation and mere external experiment can offer, that it progresses from the abilities which, precisely by their special presence, make the human soul a mysterious being for the human being himself, that through the development of these abilities it leads to the soul's riddles being solved not theoretically but practically.

There is no need to fear, dear attendees, that someone who is on the point of view of such a so-called solution of the soul's riddle questions might one day want to present it as a finished thing, as a completed realization of what solves the soul's riddle, so that the soul could then fall into inertia towards its own life, into carelessness. No, my dear audience, the soul poses the riddles that I have presented today as the living, as the experienced soul riddles, the soul poses these riddles in every moment of life, and in every moment of life we need the results of spiritual research anew, which have a balancing effect on that which arises so mysteriously from the dark depths of the soul. What I have called the anxious current of human soul life, what I have called the wrathful undercurrent of human soul life, is nothing other than the inner call of the human soul not to take itself for granted, but to take itself in full, continuous experience, to take itself in such a way that this human soul is constantly a mystery to itself, that it constantly needs the solution to this mystery.

And it is precisely this kind of ongoing solution to the mystery of the soul that anthroposophical research seeks to offer, linking to the reality of existence in such a way that one can say – if I may use a trivial comparison – Just as a person in their physical life is a being that must constantly take in nourishment, that cannot be satisfied with a single intake of nourishment because it consumes this nourishment, because it connects this nourishment with its life process, so it is also with what is offered to us by anthroposophy as the result of the riddle of the soul. Its intense inner effectiveness eludes us if we do not continually contemplate it, if we do not continually progress. Because we are dealing with a reality in this area – not with a theory that can be learned and memorized, as with the reality of nourishing oneself – we are dealing with something that must penetrate the continuous process of life through anthroposophy.

And it is indeed so - the human being will become aware of the following, especially when he deals with the results of anthroposophy in relation to his own soul puzzles: Learning – dear attendees – however strange it may sound, it is a truth that anyone who deals with anthroposophy can experience, especially with regard to the riddles of the soul. Basically, you cannot learn anthroposophy. You can let its results approach you, you can read books, listen to lectures. But if you do not continually experience what you have absorbed in this way, if you do not connect it with the human soul in an ongoing process — as you continually connect the physical substances of the external world with the physical processes through the process of nutrition and metabolism — if one does not connect with the soul processes that which is presented in anthroposophy, one will see that it loses its significance for the soul, just as the physical loses its significance for the body if it is not continually introduced into this body. And just as hunger and thirst express the absence of physical nourishment, so does a being that is anxious and pathologically irascible, emerging from the depths of the soul, express what needs to be influenced by a real knowledge of the spiritual significance of the life of imagination and will. And if a person advances by always being able to cultivate in his consciousness, as a nourishment for his soul, what anthroposophical research gives him, then he finds what he needs to balance his soul life, what he must feel and experience as a continuous, living solution to the continuously living riddles of the soul.

And it must be said again and again: Anthroposophy does not depend on this – although by allowing and examining what is set out in the books mentioned, one can set out on the path of independent anthroposophical research – that every person can verify through anthroposophy what is presented in anthroposophy. Even if you don't do that, you can still use your common sense to find what is in anthroposophy. Without becoming an anthroposophical researcher, a person can use their common sense to follow what the anthroposophical researcher claims. But apart from this common sense, a person has something else. Even if he is a layman in the fields of physiology or biology, he does not know the chemical composition of the food he eats, but he tests what the food really is for the human being by consuming it and combining the forces with the forces of his bodily processes. In this way, he can unite the results that anthroposophy offers him, the way it shows how to solve the soul's riddles, with his soul life, and he will find that it satisfies him emotionally.

And what are soul riddles in front of this anthroposophical forum? Soul riddles, grasped in their liveliness, are nothing other than the expression of soul-spiritual hunger and thirst. And the solution to the soul riddle is basically nothing other than the assimilation of true spiritual content, true spiritual beings, which unite with the human spirit and with the human soul life. And so, I would say, spiritual saturation, which must continually repeat itself, is the solution to the riddle of the soul. The more vividly one grasps the process and the more one realizes how anthroposophy seeks to reach into every aspect of practical life, how it seeks to take root in the most mundane things and reach up to the great riddle of existence by introducing man to the divine spiritual source of existence, by leading him to his immortal self, the more one will realize that anthroposophy cannot be theory, but something that can be experienced. R

From this point of view, dear ladies and gentlemen, anthroposophy tries to have an effect on the most diverse practical areas of life. From this point of view, it has tried to shape what I have often discussed here as the founding of our Waldorf School by Emil Molt, what is being attempted in the practical social field.

Anthroposophy, as you can see, solves the riddle of the soul by addressing the whole living human being, body, soul and spirit. In doing so, it overcomes the one-sidedness of the knowledge and soul life that would necessarily arise with the fully recognized results of modern natural science in their field, which is also seen as a triumph of anthroposophy.

However, ladies and gentlemen, people would take note of this and would pay attention if anthroposophy were not so misunderstood, as happened, for example, during the past summer here in Stuttgart at the Anthroposophical Congress, where Dr. von Heydebrand, in a lecture that was also printed, presented the one-sidedness of mere external experimental psychology, based on Waldorf education. Not because opposition should be taken against this experimental psychology – it will be possible to appreciate it in its own right and its results in the right way in its own field if, on the other hand, what is explored so externally can be permeated with what can be achieved spiritually and soulfully by anthroposophy. For Anthroposophy comprehends that which works out of spiritual-soul worlds into the physical body of the human being; this is comprehended.

But in this way all outward research can be enlivened, education can be enlivened, medicine can be enlivened – this too has been dealt with in earlier lectures here – and social life can be enlivened.

Here, too, I would like to point to a fine example in the lecture given by Emil Leinhas at the above-mentioned congress, which is also printed here and which explains what economics, which has arisen from merely imitated scientific methods, cannot achieve. A start has been made here for a real recovery of social life that emerges from the spiritual and soul. And what is the ultimate reason for this?

Through anthroposophy, we can see how thought has a formative effect. Now, thought not only has a formative effect in the human body as the soul-spiritual element, it also has a formative effect if we can introduce it into human social life in the right way as social ideals, and the will that has been understood in the right way also works in a social relationship. For just as we know that the human body is dissolved through it, so too that which, as a comprehended element of will, is properly introduced into social life, will recognize at the right moment when any institution has outlived itself and must disappear, so that its fruits can be reborn in a new form. Just as the soul and spirit rise up out of the physical in the way described, so the higher structures of social life rise up through the disappearance of certain external institutions that have outlived their purpose, through this disappearance working together with the plastic-constructive. I would say that the question of social riddles can also flow out into social life, solving that which is seen through in the right anthroposophical grasp of the riddles of the human soul.

But through this, the human being comes to understand himself in the right way, to be imbued with the right inner strength, with the true strength of his real self, which lives in human feeling, in human soul. Between the life of ideas and the life of will, there lives the always incomprehensible, always intangible, but no less tangible emotional life of the human being. And in this emotional being, for those who are able to look at life in this way, as I have characterized it today in relation to the riddles of the soul, they experience the eternal I, which goes through repeated earthly lives. Then one knows how to look at the plastic-creative, developed life of the imagination and the spiritualized life of the will, which breaks down.

In this way, one learns to grasp that in man which has entered him through birth or conception in such a way that it initially points back to earlier earth lives, to the state in primeval times when the outer cosmic was so little separated from the inner life of man that he needed not repeated earth-lives, but one of continuous spiritual, soul and natural progress in order to achieve this progress. One learns to look at repeated earth lives, at spiritual-soul lives lying between them; one learns to look into the future until a state where man will again have connected himself with the spiritual so that the repeated earth-lives lose their meaning, in that man elevates himself to the spiritualization of his existence — I would say — with an experience that strives from the mere inanimate into spirituality.

One is led through the solution of the soul riddle to the true solution of the riddle of the world; one ascends to the human soul, to the cosmos. But through this one attains living knowledge, living insight, which, as I have already indicated, is spiritual nourishment. Thus knowledge, as it is presented by anthroposophy, becomes a real inner support for the soul in the element where life is faltering. Security, sustenance and orientation in life can be found by seeking the spiritual nourishment that comes from anthroposophy. It is something that secretly makes us rejoice, that we could lose ourselves in, and it brings us back to ourselves, transforming it into inner support, giving our inner balance an inner center of gravity. And in the difficult moments of life, too, when we are often in danger of sinking in misfortune; we can find support in a mood of the soul that is inwardly sustained by the full awareness of the spirituality that fills the human being, where we become fully aware of that the life of thought is not in vain, that it can find reality in the power of the soul and the world, which gives plastic form. This gives support in the difficult moments of life, it places life on a firm foundation and leads in the right way to the end of life.

Sometimes words spoken before the turn of the millennium linger on. So we could be reminded here, in reference to what has been said today, of the saying of an old Greek pre-Socratic sage, who, out of an initially intuitive realization, speaks the weighty word: “When the human soul, freed from the body, soars into the free ether, it is an immortal spirit, freed from death.”

Yes, the riddles of the soul can be solved by real science. One can come to this conviction by trying to solve the riddles of everyday life of the soul through real spiritual insight. One can see a glimpse of the knowledge of immortality in the ordinary events of life. And he who can judge the individual unfoldings of thought, feeling and will aright, already sees the immortal in them. And he then looks up to the immortality in the all-embracing sense and thus comes to a real grasp of the eternal in human nature, which is rooted in the eternal ground of existence in the Cosmos, in the evolution of the world.

Dear attendees, Anthroposophy is regarded by many people who have only been superficially introduced to it as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into a realm of the world by way of knowledge, a realm that a serious scientist should not concern with. For in fact, anthroposophy seeks to find the means to penetrate through real knowledge into those supersensible worlds in which the immortal germ of the human soul is rooted, and from which the human soul can learn its true nature. Now it is well known that even today quite serious scientists are already dealing with all kinds of abnormal soul abilities that occur in many personalities, which indicate that in the human being, indeed, quite different world connections are revealed than those that can be mastered with the recognized scientific methods.

But these personalities, who preferably turn to the abnormal human soul and bodily abilities, which then register what comes to light through observation in a completely scientific way, seek laws for this, which alone only truly give the anthroposophical spiritual paths. Since it seeks to lead the ordinary, normal human cognitive faculties beyond their ordinary measure, the anthroposophical path of the spirit often appears to them as something fanciful, as something fantastic, and sometimes they even categorize it as superstition. But it cannot be said that those of a visionary, nebulous and mystical nature could find particular satisfaction in what is considered anthroposophy today.

This anthroposophy certainly does not want to take its scientific attitude and conscientiousness any less seriously and methodically than the recognized sciences themselves. And even if it is true that there are a great many people today who, simply because of a certain dissatisfaction with life, run to everything that is somehow called occult, it must be said that very soon such natures in particular will not be able to find satisfaction in the strict, methodical thinking that is sought in anthroposophy as well as in other fields of science. This does not, of course, prevent some people from simply dismissing it with a slight wave of the hand because of something unusual in anthroposophy, since those who are interested in anthroposophy belonged to the neurasthenic or hysterical types! And so it is somewhat difficult to speak briefly about the actual essence of anthroposophy in an introductory lecture. I would like to do it by attempting to subject the research paths of anthroposophy to a consideration before you today and then hint at some of the essential results.

From these words alone, you will have gathered that, at least in spirit, anthroposophy seeks to emulate and live up to the ideal of the strict scientific method that has emerged in the last three to four centuries of scientific research. Anthroposophy does not want to be in opposition to the legitimate paths of scientific knowledge. It only wants to extend what science gives for the sense realm into those realms that can be described as the supersensible world, but in doing so, if it does not want to proceed in a dilettantish manner, it faces two very formidable obstacles that hinder human knowledge.

The first shows how strict scientific knowledge comes up against certain limits, how it can indeed lead to satisfactory results when it deals with facts, but how it immediately encounters unsatisfactory ones when it wants to go beyond the realm of facts that can be perceived or combined by the human mind. We know that the most serious natural scientists are very particular that these boundaries should not be crossed by all kinds of fantasies. It is precisely in this respect that Anthroposophy initially places itself squarely on the ground of scientific thinking. It is clear, however, that the thinking that humans apply in ordinary life and in science is by no means only suitable for the realm of external facts. Now, some try to move on to pure thinking in order to fathom what lies behind the world of sense perceptions. But human thinking does not dwell only on facts. Rather, having been educated through the social culture of the last few centuries, it has gained its own character from these facts, and by leaving philosophical speculation, it enters into unsatisfied areas, into a kind of emptiness. This is the source of the many disputes among the philosophical systems of worldview. And it is the source of the feeling that if one philosophizes into the world with thinking that has escaped from facts, one can subjectively guide the direction and current of thinking, and therefore what can be achieved must remain unsatisfied because it must carry an element of subjective arbitrariness of the human being. That is the one pitfall of philosophical world view speculation.

But there are people who, out of the deepest longings of the human soul, who strive for the knowledge of the eternal, feel unsatisfied with mere knowledge of nature, who understand the unsatisfactory nature of philosophical speculation left to its own devices, and therefore turn to a more or less unclear mysticism, in the belief that they can penetrate into the depths of the human soul through inner contemplation and, through this inner contemplation within human nature, recognize the eternal of the human soul beyond death and birth.

Those who look at these often sincerely meant mystical aspirations with an open mind will also be able to see through the deceptions into which man falls precisely through these mystical contemplations. After all, what man takes in for his ordinary consciousness are only external impressions and perceptions. These communicate with the soul, they are presented. They are felt and sensed, and the results of them ignite the impulses of the will. But after all, everything that is in the soul through ordinary consciousness is a result of external perceptions. And those who believe that they can already bring something eternal out of the depths of the soul with this ordinary consciousness cannot examine the inner life of a person in an unbiased way. Those who know how impressions that the human soul felt decades ago, impressions that it was not fully aware of, are processed internally, transformed in the realm of ideas and imbued with emotional content, how then these ideas can be brought out of the soul after many years, having undergone a complete transformation. If one is not conscientious, one might succumb to the illusion that one has brought something divine out of the depths of the soul, when in fact one has only drawn up something transformed that had been slumbering there for a long time.

I had to mention these two pitfalls at the outset because, in an introductory lecture, I can only create a sense of the strictness with which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible world and how it seeks to avoid illusory paths in both directions. Thus, Anthroposophy recognizes that one can penetrate into supersensible worlds in a satisfactory way neither by the path of left-to-itself philosophical speculation nor by mysticism. By clearly recognizing this precondition for its own task, anthroposophy comes to say: Man, who is sometimes guided so surely by the practical tasks of life from birth to death and who is led by them into the triumphs of science, cannot, if he understands himself correctly, believe that he can penetrate into the supersensible worlds through all of this. Therefore, Anthroposophy does not appeal to these ordinary powers of knowledge, nor to abnormal ones either, but says to itself, there are dormant cognitive abilities in every human soul that can be brought up through conscientious, strictly regulated, methodical inner soul exercises. You have to have intellectual humility. You have to be able to say: I look back: what was I like when I was a very young child, when the world passed before my soul like a dream, how did I have to develop my abilities from week to week, from year to year, how did I have to bring them out of the depths of my human nature.

Now anthroposophy shows that it is possible to take all the soul abilities that have developed since childhood and, as a mature human being, to take their development into one's own hands and lead them to higher abilities. This is what distinguishes anthroposophy from the other fields of knowledge: the latter take the ordinary cognitive abilities into account, but anthroposophy begins where these sciences end, by developing these abilities into supersensible cognitive abilities.

This does not happen through some fantastic method, nor through external action, but rather in such a way that the same strict method prevails in its training, which is otherwise only known when one truly understands the essence of science. Developing anthroposophy is no easier than conducting research in an observatory or medical clinic. The exercises take years of soul-searching for the individual. I have described these in more detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science”. The main thing is to develop the human thought life of ordinary life, to strengthen it inwardly. Just as one can strengthen a muscle when it is used for work, so one can strengthen the imaginative life of the soul when it is directed in a certain direction. The strengthening of the human imaginative life should be brought to the center of your consciousness so that it occupies a manageable complex. It is necessary that the human being experiences this imagination as he otherwise only regards an external sensory perception. We must look at this external perception impartially, objectively, we must take it as it is. Exactly the same relationship must exist in the soul towards that which is practiced as meditative, concentrating thinking.

For this reason, it is good if the person does not bring any ideas from memory to these soul exercises, because these have become intertwined and transformed, but takes a completely new sentence or saying from some source. Then the content of the image is incorporated into the soul life, and all the soul activity seeks to concentrate on this single content. All the powers at work in the soul are directed towards this content, and this applies to all exercises. They must be subordinated to the human will; there must be nothing of suggestion or dream-like in the activity. As strictly as one is consciously devoted to a mathematical operation, so must one concentrate on a particular thought. This enables us to concentrate on a particular thought in a way that is otherwise only possible with external sensory impressions, so that the inner idea acquires exactly the same vividness and vividness as an external experience. Through these deliberate efforts of thought, one comes to face thought itself quite differently. Only now do we learn to recognize that our ordinary thought life, devoted to external facts or memories, is bound to the human organism. This new thinking is inwardly pictorial. One's soul life leads into a pictorial experience, into an experience that I have called imaginative, not because mere imaginings are to be achieved, but because the human soul can indeed enter into an inner plastic image life and because it feels in it how it becomes more and more free from the body and gains more and more disembodied soul life.

But one thing must be clear: at first everything that is attained is an inner subjective experience. Those who approach anthroposophy seriously will see the enormous difference between this new thinking and the morbid, hallucinatory. Those who have only a superficial knowledge of anthroposophy point out, in a misleading way, that the higher soul abilities that are praised can be nothing other than what predominates as dream-like soul experiences in visions and so on. In truth, anthroposophy is directed towards the opposite pole of what is pathological. There, the person loses their ordinary consciousness; the hallucinator lives in their hallucinations; the suggestible person lives solely in the experience of this dream-like, illusory state. Those who direct their soul life towards real imagination know that at first they only experience images, but they always have a second personality, a consciousness, alongside them, just as they do in ordinary life and in science. They have their human personality with everyday, healthy common sense, which can constantly control and subject to criticism what arises as a second, imaginative consciousness.

But what must go hand in hand with such exercises, so that not only the concentration of thoughts is practiced, the directing of the soul's abilities to some complex of ideas, so that one may gain an inner strength, is the same arbitrariness in the opposite activity. One will soon notice when concentrating in this way that these thoughts take up one's attention, that one can become absorbed in them. Now one must learn to use one's free will in such a way that one can bring such ideas out of one's consciousness again and suppress them just as arbitrarily as one has taken them in. On the one hand, we see the invigoration of the soul life in the absorbed complex of ideas, and on the other hand, the redirection of the same. This empty consciousness is not a state of sleep, but a full consciousness that has consciously eliminated a mental image.

Once you have done these exercises, you will be able to survey your life from birth onwards, but inwardly. We have a current flowing in the depths of our soul from which we can bring up one or the other memory, but usually only in fragments and temporal fragments. But by reaching into the imaginative life of the soul, we grasp the individual elements of it all at once in a tableau, we have before us the basic forces that form it and how they have been working in man since birth. It is as if the time during which we usually review our memories had become a single moment. This is the first supersensible experience we have. We see through the entire stream of our life on earth. Man feels within himself a second supersensible body that cannot be developed with the physical one, it can only be recognized through imagination. Furthermore, it is something that is not limited as a single form in space, but something that runs in time, although it can be seen in a single tableau. I would like to call this second supersensible corporeality of the human being the formative forces body, the etheric body. One comes to see oneself inwardly, how one inwardly guides one's abilities, how one comes to one's moral forces, and so on. One learns to recognize oneself as a whole human being in the course of time. One cannot paint this formative body other than as a flash of lightning that can only be captured in a moment, as everything in constant motion allows only a momentary reproduction, as one cannot philosophically speculate on what one directly perceives if one continues in the described manner.

Once the soul faculties have been strengthened, it becomes possible to suppress everything comprehended in its totality, as previously the individual pictorial components, so that one now produces an empty consciousness and becomes capable of exposing oneself to a world and waiting to see what now enters into this world. What enters the human soul is quite different from what is present in the world we are accustomed to in the senses. For what now enters the empty consciousness is the supersensible, the eternal spiritual of the human soul. One has received the power to survey the spiritual-soul realm! One experiences the moment of each individual memory, as it was before the soul had connected with a body through conception or birth. One experiences the spiritual-soul as it was when the human being was still rooted in the spiritual-soul. In this way, one gains an insight into what is given to the human being not only as a result of his physical body, but also in terms of the forces of heredity. One sees how these forces work their way into the physical body, but what was already there before it took possession of the body, before the first appearance of the body in a spiritual-soul world. We arrive at the creative aspect of the soul-spiritual by juxtaposing the mortal human body and that which works into the forces of inheritance. Then we will come ever closer to an understanding of the immortal part of the human being. This level of knowledge is the inspired one. Just as the breath is first in space and then processed in the body, so the spiritual-soul enters into the human mortal body, and by recognizing it, we speak of inspired knowledge.

In this way, the human being has gained the preparation not only to strengthen his world of thoughts, but also to advance his world of will through a spiritual training that goes beyond what is possible in ordinary life. On the one hand, it must be pointed out that one can only penetrate into the supersensible worlds by transforming the thinking of ordinary life, and so one recognizes that anthroposophy begins where ordinary science must end.

However, one only reaches one side of the supersensible existence. Just as the life of feeling is found between will and thinking in the complete human soul, so too must this life of feeling and will be further developed in a similar way. Again, it must be practiced with strict conscientiousness, just as one can also tear the will away from the human body. This then takes us to the other side, to the side of death, which leads beyond death to the human soul. The exercises of the will strive into the supersensible realm, and must therefore be linked to those parts that already fall from the supersensible into ordinary life. This, in turn, can be achieved in a wide variety of ways; I refer the reader to the books already mentioned. I would like to give only a few examples here, by means of which the liberation of the human will from its bondage to the body can be achieved.

In human life, the impulse of the will is permeated by our instinctual life. But we can arrive at exercises of the will precisely by considering how everything that is isolated in the intellect becomes a unified whole in the soul. When we think, the element of the will lives in our thinking. If we consider how our inherited thinking unfolds in ordinary life, we find that It adheres to the sequence, the course of events. We abandon ourselves to our thinking, more or less passively, to the course of events. Even if we free this thinking logically, it happens in such a way that we want to understand the course of events logically with our logic, but we do not move away from it! Only when we tear thought away from its usual mode of activity, when, for example, we imagine a drama piece by piece from the last scene to the first, or when we review the day in the evening backwards to the morning, going into as much detail as possible, so that we fully engage our soul life, or when, for example, when climbing several floors, we follow the staircase backwards to the first one, and thus gradually make a strong willpower a habit, you also tear the will away from ordinary life and achieve a transformation of the soul's will, until you learn to watch your own actions as you can watch a foreign personality. One must acquire a certain skill in walking alongside oneself and controlling oneself like a stranger, in exercising the will to undertake things that one then conscientiously carries out. In this way one comes to detach this will so completely from the physical that one knows: You now want outside of your body! The life of feeling then connects on both sides, it transforms like the life of thought and will.

But since it is the most intimate part of the human soul, it should not be artificially developed, but this life of feeling follows human development into the supersensible world.

We learn to develop the necessary enthusiasm for what we encounter in the spiritual worlds, seemingly for objective reasons. When the will is freed in the above way, one reaches the third stage of supersensible knowledge, which is called intuitive. There the word is applied when the soul is truly able to place itself in the spiritual world, free of the body. By ascending to this intuition, man becomes acquainted with that which continues to have an effect in him after it has come into the human body as his soul and spirit through conception and birth. He learns how the soul detaches itself from the human being, what is spiritual and soul-like, what is independent and immortal, what enters the gate of death when the body is left to decay – then what is intuitively seen enters the spiritual and soul world.

In the nineties, I tried to address the problem of freedom in my “Philosophy of Freedom” and to show that the question is not posed correctly. The truth is that man is dependent for a large number of actions, but that he stands out, develops into a free personality by learning to shape his will impulses, grasped in pure thinking. Only in these areas, in the impulses that underlie our truly free actions, do we have a presentiment of what also lives objectively in the human being and what enters the spiritual-soul world after death. In “Philosophy of Freedom” I called this the moral intuition. A higher stage of development is formed by cognitive intuition, in which we gain a complete overview of immortality, that the spiritual soul enters through the gate of death to further paths in the spiritual-soul world. After recognizing the eternal nature of the human soul in this way, one also gets to know the soul's environment before it enters the body and after it has left it. Not only does the outer world of the senses open up, but the developed powers of the senses can penetrate into the human soul. They are able not only to bring up what is nebulous and mystical, but also to see the truly eternal in the human soul. By having the spiritual and soul life of the human being concretely before us, we can distinguish the two worlds from each other, what belongs to the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. By getting to know these two worlds, one learns, precisely through the characterized intuition, to know something else in the human being, which connects with human feeling and is recognized as the essence of human feeling. Then the observation extends to the past, in that one not only beholds the soul before birth. Rather, one looks at the repeated earth lives, at what the spiritual world has gone through. One gains the confidence that worlds will continue to be experienced in the future, in repeated earth lives of progressive development. This becomes clear to him who beholds the affiliation of the human soul to the supersensible world.

And he recognizes that which rises to a higher existence of forces, which carries the acquisitions of both worlds from life to life. But he recognizes not only the human entity, but also the spiritual-soul entity, free of illusion, which lies within the sense world, but which is not recognizable to the ordinary faculty of perception.

By developing these abilities over time, one learns to look at this physical-sensory world, not as if one could no longer fully trust common sense, but by developing the second personality alongside it, which has spiritual-soul senses that can see what it sees physically-sensually, also in a soulful way. One also learns to look at the cosmos differently. However, I am coming to something here where anthroposophy is even more antipathetic!

For example, in our ordinary lives we face the sun as a limited spatial being, we describe it in science in the familiar way. If we now acquire the higher cognitive abilities, then the sun presents itself to us in a different way. We learn to speak of something that is not limited within its contours. We get to know the sun-like, which permeates everything, which belongs to the human environment, which fills and permeates the world, which penetrates into human life. We can also clearly recognize this transformed sun-like quality in ourselves. It proves to be as related to us as any external object of perception. We come to understand how much that is sunny enters into the human being, how it strengthens all growth forces, how it makes us young, keeps us young, accompanies us through life, makes our nourishment a process, permeates us in ascending development — that is the result of the spiritual-sunny.

In contrast to this, we recognize the lunar. It permeates everything that is already stored in us from birth as the forces of aging, withering, dying, as descending life. From the mid-thirties onwards, the disintegrating forces in the human being gain the upper hand, the degenerative, retrogressive, morbid — all this lies in the lunar. We learn to recognize how everything in the cosmos affects the human being. In this way, we can see what we recognize from the relationship between man and the cosmos, beyond the stars. We arrive at a spiritual-soul cosmos through direct observation, not through analogical conclusions! There are no illusions here. Life immediately distinguishes reality from fantasies. Just as one can philosophically distinguish the mere idea of the heat of steel from the concrete touch of the hot iron rod, so does experience in the spiritual realm distinguish the merely conceivable from that which really is. And just as one progresses from imagination to inspiration, so one knows that one is progressing to a real world.

Thus, in a systematic development of the human powers of knowledge, the spiritual-soul cosmos with its immortal beings enters the ordinary world of the cosmos of the senses. In this way, by beholding the deeper-lying forces of the world and of human nature, one also comes to recognize how that which is in human nature transforms. As supersensible knowledge is attained, what otherwise appears in sharp contours dissolves. The human heart, lungs and so on dissolve into processes. One can only speak of the brain-lung-heart process. What is otherwise sharply defined in space becomes mobile. In this we see the sun-like and moon-like forces at work, and here the potential of anthroposophy is extended to include the fertilization of the individual sciences.

By looking into the process of becoming and building up in the human organism, into the becoming and degenerating plant and animal beings, by discovering the forces of the supersensible in the realm of dead stone, we find the relationships of the inner human being to the inner forces of the cosmos. There is a way in which anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the medical element. This is why we were able to start therapy with pathology. In Stuttgart and Dornach, we have a therapeutic institute based on anthroposophical principles. And it is possible to gain insights into irregular degradation processes and to recognize how this disease can be healed by building up forces. Instead of a medicine that only tries things out, we have a healing art that, on the one hand, takes in both the healthy and the diseased and, on the other, the healing. Here we have an example of how anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the individual sciences. [There is also a physical and biological institute in Stuttgart.] On the basis of scientific research, the supernatural is incorporated into the results. These forces also have a significance for technology and for practical life in a new form.

Anthroposophy also has a fruitful effect on the artistic side. This is manifested at the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science near Basel. When Anthroposophy draws on the deeper human soul forces, it has an effect on and from the whole person. Just as the nut is governed by the same forces within as it is in the shell, so the artistic framework that Anthroposophy needs must be like the shell around the kernel, arising out of the same impulses from which ideas flow when they are born of spiritual insight. This is how the new architectural style in architecture, sculpture and painting came about. In a further progression, it realizes what Goethe felt in his soul when he said: When nature begins to reveal its true secrets to us, we feel the deepest longing for its deepest interpreter, art. — Art is a secret manifestation of the deepest laws of nature. Not through allegories or abstract symbols, but through the creation of real art forms, it shows that anthroposophy is not a theory, but direct life that can have a fertilizing effect in all areas.

The Waldorf School in Stuttgart shows what can be achieved in the knowledge of the whole human being in body, soul and spirit. The great educators do not stand in opposition, but by grasping the full human being in the child, the highest pedagogical achievement in education is already achieved. The Waldorf School is not a school of world view, and religious education is also given in the various denominations. The Waldorf school is an institution in which the practical implementation of teaching from morning to evening is realized with pedagogical and didactic skill based on anthroposophical knowledge. Teachers know what is developing in each human being at each age, they can read the curriculum and teaching objectives from the human being, they do not graft anything into him, but they develop in the child what already resides in the human being.

Finally, I would like to point out how the scientific world view, due to its one-sidedness in social terms, has reached a kind of dead end. What is to take effect in social life cannot, as Marx says, work according to abstract laws; one must look at the whole human being, the fully developed human being. Today, the one-sidedness that comes from the man of sense and intellect has already become a fact, as we see in Eastern Europe. It is this that makes us long for an understanding of the whole human being, of body, soul and spirit. Only that which has a real effect on life in the social sphere can have a healing and salutary effect.

Anthroposophy will continue to develop in this direction. During the various presentations at the Anthroposophical Congress in Stuttgart in the summer of 1921, it was shown how experimental education must be supplemented by the results of spiritual anthroposophical research, and how a complete education can only be formed from this. The bankruptcy of national economics was demonstrated by Director Leinhas. He showed where the real life-giving forces for a healthy social organization must flow from. Anthroposophy does not want to lead to a mystical, nebulous cloud-cuckoo-land, to those who despise ordinary everyday life, but the spirit is so powerfully grasped that we can also work creatively in the physical-practical , because the spirit that created matter should not flee from it, it, which is life practice, can submerge everything in the physical-material existence, so that it becomes more and more perfect in its further development.

And so anthroposophy wants to offer the knowledge that a large part of our contemporaries yearns for, even if unconsciously. I would like to summarize everything that has been said so that I can characterize the essence of anthroposophy.

When we have the whole human being before us, we look at him through our senses themselves as a sensual being according to his outer form. But he does not stand before us in the one-sided revelation of a new being. In him lives a soul permeated by spirit. The human being needs a conception of life that permeates him from the spirit. In the last few centuries, we have achieved great things in the field of natural science. However, we are still far from realizing its ideals. While we fully recognize the achievements of science, anthroposophy recognizes that this science is concerned with the outer formations of the world. Just as the soul permeates and spiritualizes the human being, science also needs something that is inspired by the spirit. Anthroposophy further develops science. For it wants to be nothing other than the spiritual, blissful element for the body of natural science. And just as we encounter people in life with souls permeated by life and spirit, so anthroposophy strives for natural science to achieve knowledge that can gradually become a soul permeated by spirit.

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy is currently regarded by many people who initially deal with it from the outside as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into areas of the world through knowledge that serious science should not concern itself with.

Now, anthroposophy does indeed want to penetrate into those regions that are usually, more or less justifiably, referred to as supersensible regions, and in which the human being is rooted with his or her own deeper, eternal being. There are, of course, already scientific researchers today who are to be taken very seriously and who turn to all kinds of abnormal human abilities that point to the fact that the human being is subject to other laws and is connected to the world in other ways than can be determined by the usual scientific studies.

However, precisely those who turn to such abnormal human abilities, which they then, quite justifiably, only register scientifically and research according to their laws, often see the path that anthroposophy takes as a fantastical, nebulous, mystical one, one that must even lead to all kinds of superstitious beliefs and enthusiasm. Now, my dear ladies and gentlemen, one cannot say that in the long run, enthusiastic mystical natures can be satisfied by what anthroposophy actually is in its essence. Such natures, who, indeed, there are many such today, run everywhere where there is talk of anything occult, as they call it, such natures very soon find that Anthroposophy wants to be based on strict thinking, on that which can be described as a conscientious scientific method. And that is not really suitable for enthusiastic, nebulous and mystical natures. Of course, on the other hand, this does not prevent those who want to reject what is unfamiliar to them with a slight wave of the hand from finding that neurasthenic or hysterical natures and the like come to anthroposophy.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, in the face of this caricature, which is still very often presented of anthroposophy, it is not easy to characterize the essence of this research and this world view in a short lecture. I will try to do so this evening by first characterizing the paths by which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate into those areas that are not accessible to ordinary science. And then I will try to say something, at least in outline, about the results that are obtained in such ways.

One should not think that anthroposophy, as it is meant here, wants to oppose in any way what the unique scientific methods have achieved for human progress in the course of the last few centuries and especially in the nineteenth century. It must be accepted as a prerequisite that anthroposophy claims to be in full agreement with the scientific results of modern times, and that anthroposophy wants nothing to do with any abnormal human abilities, but only with an appropriate continuation of the completely normal human capacity for knowledge and soul. It is often believed that nothing of significance can be achieved through such a normal continuation and further development. Anthroposophy first has to fight against this prejudice. But here it encounters two formidable obstacles. And by becoming clear about these two obstacles to knowledge in a completely unbiased way, it wants to find a way to avoid them.

On the one hand, as I have already mentioned, we have the tremendous scientific research results of recent times with their great practical effects on life. Anthroposophy looks squarely at the views of those 'cautious' natural thinkers who are at the forefront of their science and who speak of the necessary limits of this knowledge of nature.

Initially, human knowledge is presented with that which comes from sense impressions, which is accessible to observation and experimentation, and which the human intellect can find in terms of laws within this sensory realm. Now, there is often an effort to go beyond this sensory realm through mere, self-directed thinking to realms that lie beyond the sensory world. These are the attempts that, through philosophical thinking, as it were, philosophical speculation, seek to go beyond the sensory realm. But anyone who approaches these subjects not as a layman or dilettante, but as a connoisseur of scientific methods, can also know, through the special way of handling thinking in natural science, how the thinking that our scientific conscientiousness has produced, how it does not only arbitrarily binds itself to the external facts of the sense world, but how, in more recent times, it has developed to its greatness precisely by adapting to the laws of the external sense world, by conscientiously following the facts that can be observed in the external sense world. And once one has gone through this process of seeing how scientific thinking follows the facts, then one also knows the uncertainties and subjective arbitrariness one encounters when one leaves the safe territory of sensory facts, the territory of observation and experiment, and surrenders to self-abandoned thinking.

This is why those who are approached by a world view that has come about through such thinking feel unsatisfied. They have to say to themselves: Yes, what one or another thinker, going beyond the sensory world, combines in his thoughts could have turned out differently if he had been differently predisposed. And it does turn out differently. The philosophical systems argue with each other, and the dispute between the philosophical systems justifies the very dissatisfaction that must immediately arise for the unbiased human mind when natural science crosses its borders in the manner just indicated. Now, anthroposophy is not at all inclined to think about nature in a different way than the strict natural scientist himself. And what it attempts to fathom about the supersensible worlds is only meant to be a genuine continuation of the unified scientific world view, not the discovery, in a dualistic sense, of some second world to the one in which we live as human beings. But today there are many natures that are much more deeply laid who feel themselves unsatisfied by what science can give about external nature, in which man with his physical corporeality is also integrated. Such deeper natures then turn away from all research, from all conscientious knowledge in the sense of science, and they turn to a certain mystical direction. This is very common today: people say to themselves that external observation and external experiment provide great things for practical life, but they cannot give the human soul, with its hopes for eternity and its longing to fathom its own deeper being. Such natures then seek ways to delve down into the deeper shafts of the soul, and then believe that they will find in these deeper soul shafts, through mystical contemplation, that which cannot be found through external observation.

And this brings me to the second obstacle that anthroposophy must avoid. It cannot remain with a limited knowledge of nature, just as it cannot remain with some kind of nebulous mysticism. For precisely the person who, through unbiased observation of the soul – and one must indeed penetrate ever more deeply to such observation through anthroposophy – the person who, through unbiased observation of the soul, penetrates into the inner self, knows how impressions that we may have absorbed into our souls decades ago, perhaps half unconsciously at the time, resurface after a long time , they do not just emerge as they were received at the time, but in the depths of the human mind they combine with all kinds of feelings and sensations, they are often interspersed with volitional impulses in such a way that the person is not even aware of this subconscious soul activity. And then, after years, they emerge from the soul of the mystic who is absorbed in contemplation. They do not know that these are only transformed external impressions; they consider them to be divine inspirations and believe that, in what they are bringing up in the way of transformed external perceptions, they are approaching the very sources of the existence of the world, in which the human soul is immersed with its eternal essence.

Anthroposophy does not turn to this side of the supposed knowledge of the eternal either, but says to itself: In the external knowledge of nature, the external facts and their laws arise; in inner contemplation, only that which is a direct or transformed memory of the impressions of the external sense world arises. And precisely because anthroposophy deals with these things in such detail, it comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to transcend the limits of natural phenomena on the one hand and to penetrate more deeply into the nature of the human soul itself on the other with the cognitive abilities that a person initially has for normal life and also for ordinary science. It is precisely for this reason, because Anthroposophy looks at both directions impartially, it seeks the path of further developing human soul abilities.

Now, my dear listeners, if you want to embark on this path, you need something that is admittedly difficult for human beings to achieve, and which I would call intellectual humility. You have to be able to say the following to yourself at a certain moment in your life: As a very small child, I was not at all equipped with the abilities that I have today. I was disoriented in the world, and from the depths of my humanity the abilities have developed that make knowledge possible for me today, that make practical orientation in life possible for me today. In ordinary life and also in ordinary science, one now draws a line with what has been acquired through education and what has been appropriated through life. But anyone who wants to do research in the anthroposophical sense must not stop there, but must realize that, in addition to these abilities of ordinary life and ordinary science, there are abilities slumbering in the soul that can be awakened through certain soul exercises, intimate soul exercises, and that through their development one comes to the contemplation of a completely different world than the one that otherwise surrounds one. The development of these abilities does not take place through external measures, but through intimate soul exercises. And it should be noted that these soul exercises are carried out in such a way that they are thoroughly and scientifically conscientious, which can be acquired in the currently legitimate field of science. Initially, however, what can be achieved through anthroposophy is directed towards the soul, but it is done so rigorously that it can be accounted for by the methods of conscientious science.

Now, the aim of these intimate soul exercises is to strengthen the entire human soul, on the one hand by strengthening the life of the imagination.

My dear audience, just as you strengthen a muscle when you need its power for work, so you can also strengthen the power of the imagination in man by simply translating it, by implementing it in a soul work that does not otherwise occur in life. I will describe the principle of this soul work, but the details — for it takes many years of practice to strengthen the life of the imagination — can be found in my books, for example in 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in the second part of my 'Occult Science', or more briefly presented in the last chapter of my 'Riddles of Philosophy'. But, as I said, I would like to present the principles, the essentials of the matter this evening.

First of all, in order to strengthen the human faculty of imagination, easily comprehensible ideas or complexes of ideas are brought into the center of consciousness and then, turning away from everything else, the soul life is completely devoted to such a complex of ideas. It is good, indeed almost necessary, to either find such a complex of ideas by seeking it out – let us say – in a book that is completely unknown to you at first, or by simply turning to a page, taking some saying or sentence that you are quite certain that it has not yet passed through one's consciousness, through one's soul life, or one can also get some such content from someone who is experienced in these matters, on which one then concentrates one's soul life, to which one, as I have described in the books mentioned, devotes oneself in meditation. It is necessary to devote oneself to soul-content that was previously unknown in this way, because when one brings up any soul-content from the treasures of one's memories, it is bound up with all kinds of other areas of the soul life. One cannot know what one brings up from the subconscious depths of the soul and what then arises as reminiscences. You can only protect yourself from this if you have a readily comprehensible set of ideas that has been unknown to you until now. Then it is a matter of concentrating the soul on this set of ideas, while disregarding everything else, turning away from all the rest of life and the world, and concentrating it in such a way that the fully conscious will, the genuine reflection, never ceases, but rather the person surrenders to such concentration or meditation with complete inner arbitrariness, with the same inner arbitrariness with which one is also surrendered to an external, sensual perceptual content.

Because that, dear attendees, is the ideal of the anthroposophical method: not to plunge into all kinds of physical or other hidden human conditions, but to strive for the state of mind that one has when one is devoted to external sensory impressions. Anthroposophy is completely misunderstood when it is believed to strive for those areas that involve the visionary, hallucination, suggestion or the like. In all these things, the human being turns to a kind of soul activity that delves into depths that are only weakly active in relation to an external sense perception, an external sense impression. The anthroposophical method does not descend into this foggy darkness; it is the opposite of the visionary, the hallucinatory, the suggestive. This is the opposite of what the anthroposophical method strives for. It further develops the state of mind one has in relation to external sensory impressions, but it develops it in relation to a conceptual content that can be characterized in such a way as I have just described.

And then one must strive more and more to become as alive in one's consciousness when surrendering to such a content of thought as one is otherwise only when facing an external sense impression. You know, my dear audience, how much more alive a person is when they are devoted to an external sense impression than when pursuing ordinary thought life. It is indeed true that one speaks of pale thoughts in contrast to the intense, fully-lived outer sensory impressions. But the anthroposophical method must strive to achieve this liveliness and intensity in relation to the characterized thoughts, which otherwise can only be achieved in relation to outer sensory impressions. As I said, this requires a great deal of stamina and energy.

And the spiritual research we are talking about here is no easier than research in an observatory or in a physics or chemistry laboratory or in a clinic. A great deal of practice is needed in this direction. But when it does take place, then after some time the person does indeed feel an inner mobility of the imagination that he did not know before, and he finds himself in an experience that tells him through the experience: You become more and more free from physicality in your soul experience.

My dear audience, everything we have in our ordinary lives for knowledge, everything we have for the other expressions of the soul, is bound to the physical. The unbiased person knows how our memories are bound to bodily functions. He does not easily give in to the idea that one can be free of the body, that one — I want to use the quite unappealing word — that one can really live spiritually outside of one's body. But that is what one can achieve through a perpetual increase in such practice. One comes to be outside of one's body with one's soul life. But at the same time, one knows that in this kind of knowledge, which I have described as the first stage of higher knowledge in the books mentioned, the stage of imagination, one also knows that with this soul life, which lives in a living, intensified, strengthened thinking, only subjective, pictorial experiences can be had at first. This, in turn, distinguishes the anthroposophical researcher from the false mystic or even from the pathological nature. The one who, out of pathological states, devotes himself to a soul ability, never knows how to preserve what he has in his soul state in ordinary life. I would like to say: He slides with his whole consciousness into the visionary, into the hallucinatory. The person who, as an anthroposophical researcher, develops the soul abilities of which I have spoken, remains, even when developing these abilities, the level-headed person that he is in life, the person with strict self-criticism and world-criticism, who can control at every moment what is going on in the second personality to which he has risen as the imaginative-cognitive one. While for this reason the pathological person takes his hallucinations, his visions, as they are, for realities, the anthroposophical researcher knows that in the imaginations he has something pictorial, something subjective, but that the self-life is increased, that he has this self-life before him in a different way, spiritually, than is otherwise the case in the human soul.

One difference between this imaginative cognition and ordinary imagination is that it is not abstract, as are the concepts and ideas of ordinary cognition, but that it lives in fully saturated images. That is why I call it imaginative cognition. In this imaginative cognition, in which one's subjective awareness of one's own being has been heightened, in this imaginative cognition, the first result of anthroposophical research occurs at a certain stage in the development of these soul abilities. One comes to have before one, as in a large tableau, the inner soul forces that have been at work in one's own human being since birth. What else do we know about this inner human being? It is contained in the stream of memories, from which we can either arbitrarily select individual areas in images of what we have experienced, or images can arise freely. So it is not what you see now, but what you see first, is the sum of those forces that you now know have shaped your abilities, have given direction to your moral impulses. One sees how, in a unified tableau, one has become, and how one has shaped oneself from within through the years. That which otherwise has passed in time confronts one in a unified image, but one that has inner mobility.

This is the first new thing that one sees through such soul development. I have seen what one sees in this way and what one now knows directly: there is a second body, a spiritual body in man, which I have called the formative force body. Older, instinctive knowledge, which already knew something of these things, spoke of the etheric or life body. It is not something that can be drawn – at best in the way one paints a flash of lightning – one must know that one is dealing with something that is intrinsically mobile, that changes in every moment, that one can only capture just as it is in a moment. One is dealing with a – I would say – time body of the human being.

Now, my dear audience, through imaginative knowledge, one can first discover this inner, this inwardly mobile, this formative body of the human being, if I may express it in this way. But the soul developments that I have characterized so far must be continued. When one has first practiced concentrating on certain ideas, one is, in a certain way, nevertheless, one surrenders to these ideas with full inner willfulness, as only a mathematician surrenders to his combinations of thoughts. But in a certain way one is held fast by these ideas. But that should not really be the case. Therefore, from the very beginning – you will find a description in the books mentioned of the appropriate exercises that need to be done to achieve this – not only must this concentration on images be practiced from the very beginning, but a second thing must be practiced. Through the same free arbitrariness, the ideas to which one has just turned with the greatest strength, with increased soul strength, must be able to be suppressed again, completely suppressed, so that one learns to establish what one could call: empty consciousness, a consciousness that is empty, as otherwise only the consciousness is empty in sleep. But just as the soul's inner disposition sinks and is completely paralyzed in sleep, so it remains alert when meditation, as characterized by me, precedes it. One is then fully awake in the empty consciousness. And I will have to characterize to you how the possibility of living in such an empty consciousness is precisely what allows one to enter a spiritual world.

First of all, I would like to point out that anyone who has gained the ability not only to experience individual images that arise in the imagination devotedly, but also to remove them from consciousness so that they can live awake in an empty consciousness, gradually acquires the ability to suppress everything that I have now characterized as the formative forces body, as the great tableau of life that makes us inwardly comprehensible in the life of forces that has been shaping us since our birth. One arrives at this, this whole inner life, after first having fully looked at it, again from the consciousness. But when one arrives at creating an empty consciousness in relation to one's own inner life, then the second stage of human knowledge also arises with all clarity, which I have mentioned. I ask my dear audience not to be offended by expressions . They are only a way of expressing myself. I do not mean anything superstitious or traditional, but only what I myself characterize. I have mentioned the second stage in human knowledge: inspired knowledge. The first stage is imaginative knowledge, the second stage inspired knowledge.

By attaining this inspired knowledge through the empty consciousness, one is then able to expand consciousness beyond birth by suppressing the inner soul tableau of the body of formative forces. One now experiences the soul, the soul-spiritual of one's own being in the state in which it was before it united through birth - or let us say through conception - with the forces of inheritance, which are the forces of the body that man received from his ancestors, from his parents. One comes to understand the destinies that the soul and spirit, the eternal core of the human being, has gone through before uniting with a physical human body. You may ask, my dear audience, how does one know that what one sees really belongs to a soul experience before birth or before conception? Dear attendees, I would like to clarify what appears before the anthroposophical researcher by means of a comparison. When I have a memory of an experience from ten years ago, I know from the content of the memory itself that it is not something that arose in the consciousness at the time, but the content of the memory itself points me to the time ten years ago. Thus the content of what one experiences as spiritual-mental is that it indicates its own time in the relationship, that one knows these are experiences of the soul before it came into an earthly body.

However strange this may still seem to today's humanity, people will be convinced that soul abilities are developed with complete, convinced conscientiousness, not to speculate or to immerse themselves in mystic nebulae, but to come to a real insight into what the eternal-spiritual-soul core of the human being is. In this respect, Anthroposophy has a contribution to make to the further cultural development of humanity: it will show that experience itself must be further developed, that experiencing itself must be increased, so that in increased knowledge, man comes to the contemplation of that which is his eternal core of being. For this reason, Anthroposophy can proceed in the field of natural science in exactly the same way as the strictest natural scientist. It will not misuse the usual method of knowledge, it can, within the justified limits, be Haeckelian for the external physical field, profess Haeckel, because on the other hand it knows how to develop cognitive abilities that come close to an immediate insight into the eternal, spiritual-soul core of being in man. Then, my dear audience, when one has developed this spiritual-soul core, when one has attained inspired knowledge, one not only gets to know what the human soul itself is, but just as one gets to know the sensory environment through the human body, which the senses, one gets to know the sensual environment, in the same way one gets to know the spiritual environment through this knowledge of one's own soul-being when it was in a body-free state before it moved into the physical-earthly body through birth or conception.

But it is not enough to stop at this inspired knowledge. Only one aspect of the soul's abilities has been developed, namely the ability to imagine. The other aspect, the will, must also be developed in the human soul. Then, one might say, the life of feeling and emotion, which lies right in the middle between the life of imagination and the life of will, follows of its own accord. This life of feeling is the very own, most intimate element of the human soul life. It follows the inspired, imaginative knowledge and the one that I will now further characterize by showing how one can also lead the human will into the spiritual world, freeing it from the body.

From the wide range of exercises that I have outlined and explained in the books mentioned, I would like to highlight a few principles that show how this development of the will takes place.

First of all, I would like to point out a very simple exercise, but one that must be undertaken with perseverance and energy in order to achieve real positive results. It consists in starting from the realization that our ordinary thinking is already permeated by the will at all times. It is indeed the case that in abstract thinking we can distinguish the soul abilities according to imagining or thinking, according to feeling, according to willing. In reality, everything that is imagining, feeling and willing flows together in the soul. And even in the purest thinking, the will element is always present. Therefore, for the higher schooling of the spirit, the will element should first be developed in thinking. But ordinary thinking, and also the thinking that a person initially uses in his or her usual science, is in harmony with the external sequences of facts. The earlier is presented earlier, the later later. And even if we free thinking for ordinary life and ordinary science from external temporality and spatiality, we still need it in ordinary logic in such a way that we want to come to the conclusion that things are arranged in space and time. If we also detach thinking from reality, it is only a detour to get to the true reality through thinking. But what will training should be must tear this thinking away from the usual sequence of facts, and this can be done by presenting, if I may call it that, in reverse. Suppose we present a melody or a drama in reverse, a drama from the last events of the fifth act back to the first of the first act. When one presents in reverse in as small portions as possible, then one is forced to apply a stronger will to thinking than is otherwise the case. One can train one's thinking, or rather, the will that lives in thinking, in this direction particularly well by retracing one's own day experiences backwards every evening in as small portions as possible, starting from what one has experienced that evening, going to the afternoon, to the morning, and then really then into the most minute details — I would say —, into the atomization of the day's life, so that one imagines going up a staircase in such a way that, when one has reached the top, one then goes back in thought, going backwards from the last to the penultimate step and so on. You will see how this becomes more and more difficult the smaller the sections you take. But it is precisely through this that the will, which lives in thinking, is torn away from the external sequence of facts and you will gradually notice how you not only tear it away from the external sequence of facts, but how you tear it away from your own corporeality. You can support yourself with other exercises, for example, by developing a habit of observing yourself as a second personality alongside yourself in your own actions and in the expressions of your own life. If you practise such clear self-examination, if you, so to speak, observe every step, including every step of your soul life, as if from the outside, you will strengthen the will element.

When one then proceeds to go more into the depths of the soul, to say: You now have the intention of doing a very specific, concretely outlined action in some future time, you take self-observation so far that it becomes an activity, that you take your own inner life into your own hands, become master of your development, while otherwise you have left yourself to the stream of life. When one takes into one's own hands what the stream of life accomplishes for the soul's own development, one then also succeeds in tearing the will away from the ordinary physical body. Then one also comes with the will outside of one's body, and this willpower, which can be experienced outside of the body, unites with the power of imagination, which I have characterized.

But in this way one arrives at developing something in the human being that is rightly not regarded as an ability to perceive in ordinary life – and I know, esteemed attendees, how fully justified the reasons are for not regarding the soul abilities are not regarded as cognitive abilities — but when the soul nature of man is so elevated as I have characterized it, then the ability to love, devotion to something external, can indeed become an ability to cognize. And just as the body-free imagination, which is similar to memory but again quite different from it, presents us with pictures of a life that we cannot otherwise recognize, so too does this will, which has become body-free and now represents an increased ability to love, represent an increased living out into reality and, since it is body-free, into spiritual reality. We acquire the faculty which I have mentioned in the books referred to as intuitive knowledge; we acquire the faculty not only of allowing the revelations of a spiritual world to flow in, as in inspired knowledge, but we acquire the faculty of living over into the outer spiritual world with our own life. When I speak of intuitive knowledge, I naturally mean an intensification of that which is also called intuition in ordinary life, a knowledge that is not only based on abstract-logical thinking. What I mean, however, is an exact increase of what is otherwise called intuition, and represents a real cognitive survival of the human being into objective spirituality. And when a person has attained this intuition, then he also gets to know the other side of his being. Through what has been described so far, he reaches the moment of his birth, to that spiritual-soul that preceded the birth or conception. Now, by developing the will to intuitive knowledge, so that he can step out of himself with the will, now he also reaches the knowledge of that which steps out of the human body in reality when the human being passes through the gate of death. Only at that moment does man recognize the soul-spiritual that passes through the gate of death as something eternal, when, through a development of will, he has grasped this soul-spiritual in such a way that it can truly step out of itself, out of the ordinary human being, out of the bodily being, in intuitive knowledge. And now the human being beholds the nature of immortality on both sides, on the side of the unborn and on the side of what is usually called immortality. In this way, as I said before, the human being also gets to know the spiritual environment in which he lives before birth or conception and after death.

But once these two worlds have been grasped, once the sense world is really recognized in accordance with natural law, once the spiritual world is recognized through the cognitive faculties I have described, then there is still something within the human being that cannot be explained from either of these worlds. After becoming acquainted with the two worlds — I call them 'two worlds', although they only constitute a unified whole — we now stand before the mystery of the human soul. But we also acquire the ability to see through that in man which, through his development, unites both worlds in himself. And that is that in man which goes through repeated earth-lives, which thus goes through repeated earth-lives in such a way that it lives through the existence here in the physical body between birth and death, or let us say between conception and death, but then another existence between death and a new birth. And since one learns to recognize what the soul acquires through one life and the other, when one looks into what the results of development from both give, one arrives at the view of what underlies repeated earthly lives. And these repeated earthly lives themselves also become a view.

You see, my dear audience, that in speaking here in all seriousness about Anthroposophy, I cannot present these things of repeated earthly lives to you as fantastic creations. I must present to you everything that the human soul must do in order to cognitively arrive at these things. Today, I must of course briefly present this in an introductory lecture, and it could very easily be thought that only someone who has gone through everything I have described in principle in more detail in the books mentioned can see into these areas. Now these books are precisely there so that everyone can do the suggested exercises up to a certain level, and so that what the anthroposophical researcher says can be verified by actual observation. But the anthroposophical researcher uses ordinary common sense, ordinary thinking. And anyone who, uninfluenced by certain prejudices that are unfortunately so widespread today, simply asks themselves: “Is what is being presented reasonable or unreasonable?” does not need to become a researcher themselves, but can use their common sense to form an opinion about the value or lack of value of the anthroposophical results. Just as one does not need to be a painter to get a proper impression of a picture, one does not need to be an anthroposophical researcher to judge whether something that comes to light in anthroposophy is reasonable or unreasonable. Intuitive knowledge completes the stages of higher knowledge in a certain way.

Now, my dear audience, even in ordinary life, intuition points to a certain area. In my book, which was published a long time ago, I wrote it at the beginning of the nineties of the last century, in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, I pointed out how man's truly free actions are based on impulses of sensuality-free thinking, on moral ideals, which are created by the human being from a spiritual world quite free of the body, so that in this “Philosophy of Freedom” at the beginning of the nineties of the last century I spoke of the deepest impulses of the moral life of the human being as moral intuitions. And I tried to grasp the concept of freedom in a way that would guide today's natural science by showing that the question is completely wrong as to whether man is free or unfree, that the question must be formulated in such a way that one realizes that man is unfree for a large number of his actions, that they arise from his instincts, his drives, which are tied to the body. But the human being develops to the point of experiencing intuitive moral impulses, which are purely spiritual in nature and yet are impulsive for moral action. At this stage of development, in the way he grasps moral intuition, he is free. What I am characterizing today as the intuition of knowledge is only an expansion and deepening of what can actually be experienced by everyone who seeks out this moral world in its impulses through real self-knowledge.

What gives a person their true value and dignity here in this world, their moral nature, is what, when properly grasped, points to the end of all knowledge. And anthroposophy must then lead to the insertion of imagination and inspiration between intuition, which it expands into the cosmic and the human, and between this and ordinary knowledge, as I have characterized it today.

So, my dear audience, this is how one attains knowledge of one's own eternity in the human being. But if one develops the abilities of which I have spoken, then the world around us will also approach the human being in a different way. Man, so to speak, as a whole human being, becomes a sense organ for the outer world. And whereas before we only encountered the world, I would say, as a sensory tapestry, which the intellect then discerns its laws, the spiritual world enters human consciousness, imaginative, inspired and intuitive consciousness, in a new, metamorphosed form, but in such a way that the earlier, sensory one is fully preserved. And it enters in such a way that the contemplation of nature, which is otherwise present in the person who becomes an anthroposophist, is preserved. While the hallucinator, the visionary, turns away from nature and usually has no love for nature either, everything that is given by external natural science and ordinary love of nature remains fully intact for the one who becomes an anthroposophical researcher. It is only that the material world, which is the object of outer natural science, is permeated with the spiritual world, which is always around us, just as the physical is. Now the outer, physical world, if I may express myself comparatively, appears in a certain respect in sharp contours, in finished forms.

The spiritual view, which is gained in the way described, develops everything according to certain processes, according to an event, according to a becoming. This gives a completely new slant to natural and cosmic events. And I do not want to shrink from describing specific details as an example, despite the fact that such things are still not very well received today. We see the sun, for example, as a limited structure in the sky. We explore it with our science, with astronomy, astrophysics and so on. But what we encounter as the sun appears in a new form in the described supersensible knowledge. It now emerges not only tied to the place where it otherwise appears, but emerges as something solar, permeating and flowing through and permeating the whole cosmos. One learns to recognize the solar as permeating all spaces. And by relating it to the human, one learns to recognize the solar in its deeper meaning. I would like to express myself in the following way to make myself clear.

By having the outer world around us, which provides us with our experiences, we compare these experiences with what we form inside in our soul out of them in terms of ideas and feelings. And afterwards we still have the experiences in our memory, we can relive them. We can relive something that has long since passed and connect with the long-gone past. So there is a relationship between this — I would say — abstract soul-life and the outer concrete sense world. But there is also a relationship between the deeper part of one's own human existence and what is recognized through supersensible perception. We carry within us the effect of what is solar that the spiritual vision finds in us. This solar element enters into our human being, just as an external sensory experience enters into our memories, only it forms something deeper in the human being. This deeper aspect must first be recognized only through such a view as I have described. Then one learns to recognize that everything that is in us by virtue of growth, that is by virtue of youthfulness, that is even the force that converts our nutrients in our own human process, that this is the sunlike in us. We get to know the rising, sprouting, sprouting forces of the universe and the sprouting, sprouting forces, the rejuvenating forces in ourselves, in their interrelationships. We thus get to know a more intimate connection between the human inner being and the cosmos. Just as we learn to recognize the solar in this way, we learn to recognize the lunar.

In our sensory perception, we experience the moon as a closed, limited, contoured entity. For the spiritual perception that I have described, this moon-like quality becomes the dying forces in the cosmos that permeate all spaces and fill all of time. Everything that breaks down, everything that appears in the cosmos in a paralyzing way, everything that leads to death is moon power. And one would like to say: the solar and the lunar, as I am now describing them, are merely concentrated or consolidated in the bodies that we have given ourselves through external sensory perception. We get to know the world as processes, as becoming, and these processes, this becoming, continue within our own human inner being. We also get to know the outer natural kingdoms, how they are permeated by such cosmic forces. Just as we get to know the solar and lunar, we get to know other planetary or other forces of the universe without superstitious mysticism, through very exact observation that has been developed exactly. One gets to know the interplay of a cosmos that cannot be grasped merely mathematically or astrophysically, but spiritually and soulfully. One gets to know this interplay in human nature, and one recognizes the interplay of such cosmic forces in plant and animal nature. One learns to recognize the solar element that urges the plant towards flowering, and the lunar element that is revealed in the dying away of the plant world. One learns to recognize the forces right down to the mineral kingdom.

When one advances to this knowledge, the side of anthroposophical research also presents itself through which this anthroposophy has a fertilizing effect on all other areas of life. And that is the hope that the anthroposophical researcher devotes himself to, and which - at least in part - is already realized in its beginnings, that anthroposophy can become fruitful for the other sciences, for the practical areas of life.

We already have a medical-therapeutic institute in Dornach and Stuttgart that is based on anthroposophy. This medical-therapeutic institute is based on research that can be carried out on an anthroposophical basis into the relationship between humans and the surrounding universe. By appropriating the cosmic effects in this way — as I have only been able to hint at with the recognition of the solar and lunar — one does not merely gain the knowledge of human nature that ordinary physiology or biology gives us. You also get to know the whole human being, but in such a way that the sharply contoured merges — it remains, but at the same time merges, it shows itself from a different side as a process. While in ordinary biology, as one is accustomed to, one speaks of the lungs, heart, brain and so on, from the point of view of anthroposophy one must speak of the brain process, which is vividly there, not merely , or not merely shown in its parts by external physical experiments, but be observed; of the heart process, of the lung process, of all that makes up the human being, of processes, of a becoming. All this is, after all, only the inner continuation of the ascending solar becoming and the descending lunar becoming.

And if we pursue these things further, we not only get to know the healthy human being with his organs, but we also get to know the pathological [degenerative and] anabolic processes, the growths, the paralyses, the killing off of organs. One learns to recognize how processes can be held back in individual organs. One learns to recognize how processes can proliferate when one understands the connection between such internal anabolic and catabolic processes. With the anabolic and catabolic in the universe, with the solar and lunar, one can see how these forces are then present in the plant, mineral and animal kingdoms. And then the remedies for certain illnesses present themselves, in that we know: a catabolic process is taking place in this organ, so you have to counteract it with the catabolic process that is present outside in this plant or in that mineral. We learn to recognize the inner relationship between the human organism and the kingdoms of nature. One learns to recognize how medicine can advance from mere trial and error to a rational understanding of both the healthy and the diseased human condition, how pathology can become rational, how therapy can become rational, that the process of recovery and disease can be understood. This is what emerges as a development on an anthroposophical basis that is fruitful for medicine.

I am well aware, dear ladies and gentlemen, that to raise such matters is to stir up a hornet's nest. But the world has had to face many things that were unaccustomed in older times, and what was at first met with hostility has sometimes later become accepted practice. The anthroposophical researcher must console himself with such things. I will simply cite this example of the fertilization of medicine for the fertilization of the individual sciences. We also have a physiological, a physical, and a biological research institute in Stuttgart and are trying to introduce the anthroposophical method into the individual sciences in an anthroposophical way.

But anthroposophy can also have a fertilizing effect on other areas of life. We were – for anthroposophy has existed as a spiritual movement for quite some time now – we were faced with the task of building a home for the anthroposophical movement. Friends of the anthroposophical movement came together to create a home for this movement. This building, known as the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science, was erected in Dornach near Basel. What would have happened, dear ladies and gentlemen, if some other spiritual or cultural movement had had to erect such a building? They would have turned to an architect who would have given it a framework in the Renaissance, Rococo or antique style, and then they would have done in it what stands as a present.

Anthroposophy could not proceed in this way. It does not want to be something that expresses itself one-sidedly through ideas, that is spread only in theory, as it were, but something that takes hold of the whole human being directly, and therefore reaches into all areas of life. If I may use a trivial comparison, it would be this: When you look at a nut, you say to yourself: the nut is formed by certain forces that work within it, but the shell is formed in the direction of the same forces. Basically, you cannot separate the lawfulness of the nutshell from the lawfulness of the nut kernel itself. Both are one! This is how anthroposophy wants to be. Therefore, it must build its shell, its framework, its house out of the same impulse with a new architectural style, with the architectural style that corresponds to its innermost impulses, just as the nut shell is formed out of the same natural forces and their directions, like the nut kernel itself.

And when, from the pulpit in Dornach, the language of ideas is used to speak of what can be seen in the spirit about man and the universe, then this expression of ideas through the language of thoughts should contain exactly the same life that the columns, the paintings and the sculptures of this Dornach Goetheanum contain. Art forms, without being allegory, without being straw-like allegory or abstract symbolism — neither that nor the other is found — but everything has flowed into real art forms. Everything should speak out of the same life, out of which the content of spiritual vision can be spoken in thought. On anthroposophical ground, one believes that one is approaching an artistic view that is truly in line with Goethe's thinking. Perhaps one can see most deeply into what Goethe strove for in the artistic field if one recalls such sayings of Goethe as these: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never become apparent without it. And Goethe also says: When nature begins to reveal its secret to someone, that person feels the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter, art.

Yes, my dear audience, one can express one's ideas about the secrets of nature in art forms without becoming inartistic, without becoming allegorical or symbolic, and by proceeding in this way, an architectural style that is still unfamiliar today is created. Anthroposophy could not turn to something else, which would have been a foreign framework. Anthroposophy does not want to be theory, anthroposophy wants to be life. Therefore, it also had to flow into the forms of the architectural style itself, which constitutes the building, which has shaped the building, in which anthroposophy is to live first.

With that, I have indicated a second area that can be fertilized by anthroposophy: the field of art. Anthroposophy also wants to have a fertilizing effect in other fields of art. A eurythmy performance is to be given here in a few days. On this occasion, it will be possible to hint at how Anthroposophy can be fruitful in the sense of such an art of movement.

In Stuttgart, Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School, which I run. This Waldorf School seeks to make fruitful use of what comes from anthroposophical sources in the field of pedagogy and didactics. How does real human knowledge arise from these sources? We come to know the human being in terms of his or her full nature, body, soul and spirit, not just through some abstractions, but through concrete observation. We learn to follow the child as it gradually shapes the outer physical body out of the spiritual and soul. We learn to revere the divine spiritual being in the child, and we learn a complete unity, a mutual formation of the physical and the spiritual. Anthroposophy does not want to found schools in the usual sense in the pedagogical and didactic fields. We go so far as to leave what religious worldviews are, for example, to the representatives of the individual religious fields for the time being. Catholic priests teach Catholic children in the Waldorf School, Protestant priests teach Protestant children. However, since a large number of dissident children were enrolled at the Waldorf School after it opened, it was necessary for us to set up a free religious education for them; however, this is run in the same way as the others, as a worldview lesson. The school itself does not want to graft any anthroposophical theories into the children, but it wants to allow what can flow from anthroposophical knowledge to flow into the pedagogical-didactic skill, into the practice of education. Anthroposophy does not want to oppose the achievements that have been made through the great pedagogy of the nineteenth century. Anthroposophy is aware of the significant maxims that exist in this regard, but it also knows that the means must first be acquired in order to fulfill the justified pedagogical demand. These means can only lie in a penetrating knowledge of the human being, and Anthroposophy would like to provide these means through the knowledge of the human being that can be attained through spiritualized vision, as I have described it today. In this way, anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the field of education.

My dear attendees, just how little knowledge of human nature there actually is in the present day, knowledge of human nature suitable for education, was demonstrated in a lecture given at the Anthroposophical Congress held in Stuttgart last summer. The individual topics discussed at this anthroposophical congress would have flooded out into the world and been widely discussed if they had not originated on anthroposophical soil, which is still so unpopular today. From the rich field of what was discussed, I want to emphasize the lecture by Dr. von Heydebrand, a teacher at the Waldorf School. In an extremely vivid way, it shows how experimental pedagogy, which is repeatedly being worked towards today, must be complemented by a direct insight into the soul and spirit of the child, as it can flow from anthroposophy. Anthroposophy does not oppose the legitimacy of experimental pedagogy and psychology, but this legitimacy attains its practical value precisely by being permeated by the spirit. Anthroposophy is never opposed to the legitimate findings of natural science. It seeks to bring out what can be found in these natural-scientific findings, everywhere, wherever it is possible to do so, and to do so in complete harmony with the legitimate demands of modern times with regard to natural science.

Dear attendees,

In today's world, it is particularly necessary to arrive at a deeper understanding in a field that is infinitely close to people, and whose proximity must be particularly evident to them in the present, which has emerged from the great, terrible global catastrophe. It was believed that the social life of man could also be mastered by the laws of nature, which are one-sidedly scientific. The social laws were imitated, and gradually, quite automatically, from the unconscious, the social forces were imitated from the natural laws, from what was naturally effective. Today, anyone who looks at life impartially can see the results. Many other things could be pointed out, besides Marxism, that can be gained from purely natural forces in terms of social insights; one need only point to the way in which this view is already devastating and destructive in Eastern Europe, because it is being put into practice. What began in the East hangs threateningly over Europe. And Europe – indeed, modern civilization – will only escape this impending doom if we once again immerse ourselves in the spiritual and psychological. If we can develop a conception of the whole, of the complete human being in body, soul and spirit, then we will also gain insights and perspectives for our social life, insights into how the moral impulses from the free, from the complete human being, can flow into social life. The one-sided economic view, although it can remain an economic view, will lead to an insight into a social structure that takes into account the whole, the fully human being. There was also a beginning to this in the lecture given by Emil Leinhas at the Stuttgart congress mentioned above, which has already been printed. In this lecture, Emil Leinhas showed in an excellent way how present-day national economy has reached a kind of bankruptcy, and how no social impulses can be found from it that are fruitful for life. Anthroposophy has set itself the task of transferring what is cognitively experienced in man into life, into the social and moral life.

And to mention one last thing – which is only mentioned as a last thing, but is by no means of least importance – I would like to draw attention to the fact that, while anthroposophy can invigorate the impulses of the social, it can also deepen religious experience, even when it is not working externally in human society, but rather in the deepest inner being of the human being. Anthroposophy – oh, it is misunderstood when characterized in this way – Anthroposophy does not want to be a sect of any kind, it certainly does not want to found a new religion, it wants to deepen what people can experience in their religious minds by illuminating it with the clarity of an understanding of spiritual life. Those who believe that religion or even Christianity is endangered by anthroposophy are labouring under a serious misunderstanding; firstly, the misunderstanding that what they present as an ideal in a blind faith can hold its own in the face of the growing knowledge of nature; and then they succumb to the blind judgment that clarity, clear insight into the spiritual world, could somehow be disturbing to the most profound piety. And this most profound piety can be strengthened if it can be attained on the basis of a true knowledge of the spirit. Anthroposophy does not want to found a new religion or a new sect, but wants to serve life as a spiritual science, and also wants to serve the innermost, most intimate, religious life of human beings.

And so, in conclusion, I would like to summarize what the essence of anthroposophy is. From my discussions this evening, it should have become clear how anthroposophy is by no means in opposition to modern, progressive worldviews, but how it is entirely in line with them. But just as the human being presents us with the physical, the bodily, and we experience from this physical, this bodily, its mobility, its physiognomic, and other revelations of the spiritual-soul, so too, when we survey the natural realm in strict natural science, we should also recognize that within the realm of nature with which the human being is connected to his eternal core, where he originates with that which is immortal in him, is one with the divine-spiritual essence of the world. And just as we can only fully recognize a person when we see their soul and spirit in their physical body, so we will only fully recognize the world, the cosmos, when we want to juxtapose the external knowledge of natural science with the spiritual knowledge of anthroposophy. But anthroposophy strives to do just that. It seeks to be in touch with nature and the world by taking the human being as its model, in whose corporeality the soul and spiritual reveal themselves.

So, dear attendees, while Anthroposophy would like to look at the knowledge of external nature with full recognition, it would also like to add something that can be there, the inspiration, the spiritualization of this external natural science.