The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees,Those who seriously want to talk about topics such as those on which this evening's and February 28th's reflections are based must be aware that there are quite a number of souls in the present who, on the one hand, are striving for new ways of searching for the soul and, on the other hand, are striving for new directions for our entire public and social life. For a foundation for a new soul-searching and a foundation for new social directions in life is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to provide, and these two considerations will be based on this.

On the one hand, humanity has undergone a significant intellectual development in the course of the last three to four centuries, particularly in the natural sciences. Those who speak today of a new search for the soul must not ignore the great and powerful triumphs that have emerged from scientific research. But this scientific research has also produced tremendous results in practical life. Everything that surrounds us today as magnificent technical achievements, which we encounter at every turn in life, is fundamentally the result of scientific thinking.

On the other hand, however, it should not be overlooked – and as I said, many souls are already aware of this today – that in the face of these great achievements of scientific research, in the face of the tremendous technical achievements, a deep dissatisfaction runs through modern spiritual life and that it can be seen quite clearly – it can be seen quite clearly from the catastrophic events of recent years – how humanity needs new directions. And so there are really many people here today who want to look up to a spiritual realization, a spiritual insight, after science has told them so much about the world and about man. And there are many who are clear about the fact that these scientific views and these momentous technical achievements have indeed penetrated the outer life in an intensive way, but that something is needed that can permeate our moral, our soul life in a similar way in relation to the widest circles of humanity. And so some people want to look up from the abundance of individual sciences to a comprehensive view of the world. And so some appeal to that which can only have its seat in the deepest moral interior of the human soul, in order to gain those social impulses which, as it must already be clear to many today, cannot be gained without the deepest inner - spiritual and moral - impulses.

But on the other hand, we also see how, within the abundance of modern intellectual life and within the catastrophic chaos that has occurred in recent times, the inner courage is lacking for an inwardly active intellectual life, for a new creation in intellectual life. Therefore, we must note how numerous people are today who cannot yet rise to enthusiasm for such a new creation and who look back to ancient times of humanity when the human soul still had a knowledge that may seem childish to us now, but which was still intimately related to the whole of human nature, which could still build bridges above all to artistic creation and to religious feeling and action. Art, religion, science have fallen apart for the modern man, but he wants to build bridges between these three areas of life, which nevertheless - if man is to be satisfied in the long run, if he is to come to a fruitful social creation, if he is to be efficient for a life practice in general - which nevertheless must connect to a harmonious wholeness within the human being.

But we also see many looking back with great respect, and certainly from a certain point of view rightly so, with great respect to ancient Oriental wisdom, as if we could today, from the mysticism of the Orient or from similar spiritual currents, regain that deepening and elevation of the spirit at the same time, which the breadth of scientific and technical thinking cannot give us. If one develops such a longing for the old, then one only overlooks the fact that the development of humanity as such has a meaning, that it is impossible to follow the same paths of the spirit today that were taken thousands of years ago.

But on the other hand, much of the powerful human impulses have come down to the present day through the external science of observation; much of what connected our ancestors spiritually and emotionally with the depths of the world, connected them with the depths of the world in their own way. This has given rise in people to a longing to understand something of how our ancestors went their spiritual ways, how these our ancestors, in order to satisfy the innermost needs of the soul, strove for a knowledge of the eternal, the supersensible in the human soul. One can have respect for this striving, but ultimately one can only orient oneself by that which today, nevertheless, as a completely new creation, must arise from within the human being through an inner calling of the deepest soul forces. One can orient oneself. And so, dear attendees, in order to prepare what I actually want to express, allow me to say a few orienting words, just for comparison, so to speak, about the way in which our ancestors sought the paths of the soul and of the spirit.

Above all, we must look at the feelings that our ancestors experienced thousands of years ago in ancient India, but even as far back as the older Greek times, when they were shown the path to the spirit by the leaders of the wisdom schools of the time, which can also be called mystery schools. The students were to be prepared energetically and conscientiously. For these people were clear about something of which we are no longer strongly aware in our general education today: that man cannot ascend from the knowledge he can attain from the external sensual world to the actual heights of a satisfying knowledge of the eternal and of the connections between man and the divine, guiding forces of the world without tremendous inner struggles, without tremendous changes in his entire soul life. The soul should undergo thorough, intensive preparation before it is even given the opportunity to gain supersensible knowledge. And they spoke of something, my dear audience, that sounds almost fantastic today. They spoke a word, but today, too, one should gain an understanding of it in the face of a serious spiritual search; they spoke the word from the threshold into the spiritual world, from the guardian of the threshold to the spiritual world.

What was this threshold for our ancestors? What was this guardian of the threshold to the spiritual world? Oh, these were truly real, substantial experiences that a person underwent who became a disciple of the ancient wisdom, at the threshold and when passing the guardian of the threshold. What did our ancestors say to each other? Between what a person can go through in his ordinary, everyday state of consciousness, what he can learn about himself and the world through this state of consciousness, and between the actual knowledge that gives us insight into the nature of our soul and tells us about the most significant life forces – between There is an abyss between us and this knowledge, and man cannot cross this abyss without reflecting on the soul's inner struggles, without engaging in the most intense inner struggles, without, in other words, becoming a completely different person in spiritual and psychological terms.

The preparation that the teachers of the old wisdom schools gave their students consisted essentially of a certain education of the intellect and an education of the will. Above all, the will of the one who was to be initiated into the supersensible as a disciple of wisdom was to be made more energetic and intense. Why should this will be strengthened? Why should the disciple of higher wisdom, so to speak, unlearn the fear of the unknown? Therefore, the disciple of higher wisdom should be inwardly equipped with powers of courage that one does not have in ordinary life. Therefore, it should be made clear to him that if he has not unlearned the fear of the unknown , if he has not cultivated this inner courage in his soul, then, by crossing that threshold beyond which he could receive supersensible knowledge about the nature of the soul, he would have to fall into the abyss.

We can best understand what was there as intuition and what has changed so dramatically into our times by remembering something quite ordinary in the history of science. Today, we see our planetary world, our Earth in its relationship to the Sun, in the way that the Copernican worldview has entered the visual life of humanity and how it has developed from this Copernican worldview. We know today that we are not able to think of the earth as being at rest and the sun as moving around it in the same way as medieval man did; that we are not able to think of the different planets in the same movements as this medieval man. We know, looking back to those earlier times when the outer phenomena of the external astronomical world picture were also taken as a basis, the scientific spirit out of which the Copernican world picture arose, with all that followed. But we see something very remarkable: we see in Greek thought, for example in Aristarchus of Samos, something similar to what we profess today, with some variation, of course, corresponding to the old world view, a heliocentric world view. When we read in Plutarch how Aristarchus of Samos places the sun in the center of our planetary system and has the Earth revolve around it, then we find hardly any difference in the main features of how people thought, between what this Aristarchus — and anyone who studies such things knows that all so-called initiates have thought as he did — what this Aristarchus thought about our planetary system and what we ourselves think, except for the results of our extremely well-developed observation.

What do we have here? In ancient times, a worldview of the external and spatial that is so similar to ours, and in contrast to it, in the general consciousness of mankind, merely a registration of the external appearance! The fact that those who were the leaders of the wisdom schools in older times carefully guarded something like the heliocentric worldview from people who were not considered sufficiently prepared for such a worldview by them. And this heliocentric world view is only one part of a general world view that is not at all unlike what modern science has brought us, at least in terms of fundamental ideas, but which was withheld from the broadest circles of humanity. Yes, the peculiar fact is that today we have views in the general human consciousness that were strictly guarded in schools of wisdom in ancient times and that students were only allowed to receive after conscientious preparation of the will to be fearless in the face of the unknown and to courageously embrace such insights.

What did the ancient sages tell each other, when they did not even allow the students to know what every educated person today knows, one may [ask]. Why was it considered dangerous for people in those ancient times to know what every person knows today? Yes, there was thought to be a gulf between the general human consciousness and the knowledge of our world view that the ancient sages possessed, and the sentinel of that gulf, that is to say the experience that one could have when one had gone through that inner struggle, when one had educated oneself to fearlessness and to the courageous comprehension of what we learn in school today, what is general human consciousness today. So in those ancient times, people were virtually demanding preparation for what we are not prepared for today, what is simply poured into our ordinary consciousness. So times have changed, my dear audience. And basically, every historical consideration is a mere external one that takes no account of such a transformation of the soul experience in the course of human development.

The ancient sages said to themselves about the state of mind that humanity had at that time: If man knew something of the heliocentric world view and of that which stands on the same level with it, he would not be able to bear it, he would fall into a kind of spiritual faint, his ordinary consciousness would be clouded. Therefore, they wanted to steel the will through all possible pedagogical-didactic art; they wanted to create a courageous grasp of the supersensible, they wanted to create fearlessness. Because they said: Without the education of these willpower qualities, man will lose consciousness when, for example, he really thinks with the intensity with which one thought in ancient times and of which modern man no longer has a proper idea, that the earth moves with the sun through space at a tremendous speed. In the truest sense of the word, this meant losing one's footing for the student. One did not want to expose the person to this by leaving him in his ordinary consciousness. One said to oneself: He loses self-confidence.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” I have tried to show how, in fact, self-confidence of humanity has changed substantially since relatively recent historical times, how, for example, self-confidence in ancient Greece was quite different from what it is today. It is truly not just an external fact that with Copernicanism, with Galileanism, the intellectual comprehension of the world has come about, that since those times human beings have developed an unprecedented strength of abstract thinking. In this abstract thinking, in this intellectualism, not only was external scientific knowledge gained, but something was also gained for the inner being of the human being. A strengthening of self-confidence was gained for this inner being of the human being.

My dear attendees, what we have today, when we simply go through our school as children and learn in the way we learn today, being prepared for abstract thinking and intellectuality, as happens today, then self-confidence in the human being is cultivated in a different way than it was cultivated even by the most developed Greeks. Unfortunately, far too little attention is paid to such very significant facts of the world-historical development of humanity today. But one senses it, one feels it, and therefore has a longing to once again bring the deeper reasons for all human development to mind. Today, there is no danger of succumbing to spiritual impotence when we receive the external scientific results with a general average education. But to what we are given today with general education from childhood on, the adult human being in the ancient times had to be prepared through very special pedagogical-didactic measures. Then he was introduced to what fulfilled the famous Greek saying: “Know thyself”. For the ancients, however, all knowledge was such that at the same time a certain knowledge of the world arose from their instinct. They did not yet have the developed self-awareness that today's people have. They were exposed to the danger of falling into spiritual powerlessness in the face of the heliocentric world system, but they had an intuitive knowledge of the cosmos based on their instinct. When this intuitive knowledge was then passed on to humanity in myths, the wise men were always there to receive these myths as inner experiences. We must not perceive these as symbolic interpretations of the myths, but we must feel them as an inner sharing of the secrets of the world in the human soul itself. World knowledge was given to the ancients in their, compared to our, weak self-confidence with the soul life at the same time.

You can see for yourself when you take relatively late works of literature into your hands. Today, one may think as one likes about the natural science writings of the tenth to thirteenth century, if one wants to call them that at all. Basically, one cannot read them today if one is not particularly prepared, because they use a language that is no longer used in ordinary scientific life today. But in what is found in these works, what the human being experiences inwardly in his soul is everywhere not separate from what he beholds outwardly. Soul is in him and body is in him. Outside is the physical-corporeal nature, but everywhere he also sees soul in the outward physical nature. We may call this nebulous or false mysticism today and we may be right about it; but the man of earlier times had what carried his soul, what inwardly filled his soul, what consciousness taught him: I am connected with the eternal powers of the world and as the eternal powers of the world develop their powers from beginning to end, I develop my powers with them.

Today we have the opportunity to carry our strengthened self-awareness into what natural science knowledge gives us. We have a broad specialization in the natural scientific worldview, and from this specialization we are told a great deal about the physical body of the human being. But as a rule, the threads break when we seek to understand the relationship between this physical body of the human being about which science tells us so much, and that which we experience inwardly in our souls and in relation to which we cannot but ascribe a different origin to it than can be ascribed to external natural facts and natural forces and natural laws.

And so it has come about, my dear attendees, that modern man, especially when he is steeped in what natural science offers him in a fully justified way – for the spiritual science represented here fully recognizes the triumphs of modern natural science – comes to nothing else, especially when he is conscientious, but to the limits of knowledge. And basically it was precisely the best natural philosophers who spoke of such limits to knowledge, of the ignorabimus that is fatal for the life of the soul: we cannot know anything beyond the limits of what our senses provide us with and what the combining mind can extract from these sensory experiences. One only has to go along with such theories about the limits of knowledge with an intensely developed soul life and one must be able to unload the outdatedness of traditional religious views onto this soul life, which in turn are connected with the old knowledge of the beyond of the threshold. And one will feel the whole inner misery of the modern soul life.

One cannot but say to oneself, my dear audience: We have learned something in the last three to four hundred years with regard to scientific conscientiousness and scientific methods, and what has emerged from this ground as results has become popular and is already shared by all those who claim some kind of education. But at the same time, all of this gives rise to a certain lack of knowledge about what the human soul, out of its deepest longing, wants to know about the eternal destiny of this human soul and about its connection with the eternal powers of the world. After the contemplation of the ancients, we stand on the other side of the threshold. They first tried to prepare themselves for the knowledge that is now quite commonplace and familiar to us. But with their less intense self-confidence, which was therefore fearful of the supersensible world, they developed a pronounced world-consciousness that satisfied them and felt no limits. We have gained a more intensely developed self-confidence, but we have lost our world-consciousness. We feel limits everywhere in the breadth of our knowledge. We feel that we cannot enter into the actual depths of the world. We have gained self-awareness; we must first regain world awareness, otherwise we stand as hermits with our developed soul, admittedly beyond the threshold of the ancients, but not beyond that threshold, which we today call the limit of knowledge of nature or the like.

This is where anthroposophically oriented spiritual science comes in, where this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to give modern humanity something that in turn leads it over the threshold that has been set for it. However, we cannot stop at a renewal or a rehashing of some old or oriental wisdom. We can no longer unite all this with our consciousness. Today we have to create anew out of the elementary nature of the human soul, but we have to bring it forth from a depth of consciousness that is just as profound as that of the ancients in their own way. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is still rejected by many today out of a certain intellectual laziness, or because it seems to contradict what scientific knowledge has brought forth in modern times.

My dear attendees, one does, of course, run the risk of being misunderstood and, in particular, of being found immodest if one chooses such a comparison as I now want to use to characterize the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences. But one can safely leave it to those who like to sneer and scoff. I am not claiming that what I am using as a comparison in terms of world-historical significance should be applied to what I am about to say, but the comparison will explain some things.

When Columbus set out to discover America, there was absolutely nothing in his consciousness that he would discover a new world, a previously unknown world. They believed that they would cross the ocean and land on the other side in India. They only believed that they could come to something known by an unknown path. This is roughly how it is for those who approach the modern scientific world view with the utmost conscientiousness and an inner, invincible desire for knowledge. They find that natural science is actually in the same position as Columbus initially. They want to use it to search for the secrets of the world and of life. They want to go down unknown paths. But either they step back discouraged and stay at home, as the others except Columbus did, or they try to venture out into the unknown. But then they only enter a world that they describe as something quite familiar. What is all that which is described beyond the limits of natural knowledge as moving atoms and molecules, ions and electrons, and all that which is supposed to be behind the curtain of the sensory world that is spread out before us? We search for the underlying principles of nature by unknown paths, and then describe what we encounter as something familiar.

But I would like to say that anyone who approaches things differently, who approaches them with a more lively soul life, especially in the face of this scientific world view, will indeed come to something different, to something comparable to Columbus's experience. He conducts research scientifically, he develops all the conscientious methods, all the intensive responsible thinking, through which one has come to the modern astronomical world view, to the modern biological world view, and then he reflects: What are you actually doing, how do you develop your soul life by experimenting externally, by using the microscope, the telescope, the [spectroscope], the X-ray apparatus, and thereby come to a summary of world phenomena? What is going on in your soul life? What do you discover by devoting yourself to living soul life?

The unknown becomes spiritually known; it is not material atoms and molecules that are discovered, but spiritual experience. Of course, it is rare for anyone to have the direct experience of happiness in natural science, to see the spirit within oneself, which pulses and undulates through the world from beginning to end, from top to bottom. But everyone can recognize the inner path of thinking in modern natural science. And then it can be further developed. And, you see, this further development, this taking up of a new path in the experiences one is having with natural science, that is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science! And what I have described in my books 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and 'Occult Science', is basically, despite the fact that some of the expressions and perhaps all of the terminology still seem adventurous to ordinary human consciousness today, it is nothing other than the higher training of the paths of knowledge that are cultivated by modern scientific research itself. But we must go further than the elementary experiences and develop special methods of knowledge of a purely spiritual nature. Then we shall be able to satisfy, in another way, the spiritual yearning that lives in many souls today, and which leads those who want to come to the spirit but who want to remain in the material world to spiritualism or similar superstitious things, instead of to real spiritual research. Only the intimate paths of the soul's inner life lead to true spiritual research. However, they are uncomfortable because they are different from the usual paths of science, although they are nothing more than a continuation of these usual paths of science.

When we enter life today, at whatever stage of development we do so, we have what we have as inherited qualities, developed through ordinary or higher school education. The results of school education are absorbed into the soul of educated humanity. But one has the awareness that one could remain at a certain stage of life. Today, people stop at a very specific stage of life. They are accepted into our highest scientific schools. There, they are not required to further develop their cognitive faculty, to add to the cognitive powers they have already developed, the cognitive powers that still lie dormant in their souls. They stop at the ordinary cognitive faculty. We observe natural phenomena, we make our observations, our experiments, we use the finest instruments, but we stop at the state of mental life, which is simply the general consciousness.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must proceed differently. It must start from a very specific feeling. I would characterize this feeling by the word “intellectual modesty”. And I cannot express myself about this intellectual modesty other than in the following way: Let us assume that a five-year-old child gets hold of a volume of Shakespeare. What will it do with it? It will play with it, tear it up. But when the child has grown ten or fifteen years older, it will behave in a different, more appropriate way. Its inner soul forces have been developed. That which was predisposed has been developed in these soul forces. Just as the soul forces of the child have developed through external educational influences or are being developed through the world, so something in the soul of the adult can still be developed today if he only says to himself: I must be intellectually modest. I must assume that I face the phenomena of nature in their totality in a way that this facing can be compared to the behavior of a five-year-old child towards a volume of Shakespeare. There is still something in the soul that can be developed in me just as the soul power of the five-year-old child can be developed up to the age of fifteen or twenty.

We must start from this feeling, which thoroughly encompasses the soul life in intellectual modesty. And then, then these forces slumbering in the soul must really be developed. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims to do this for its students, for those who are suited to it and have enthusiasm for it. It is not something like a miracle of the soul or the like; it is the continuation of what ordinary soul life is, but a real continuation.

There are two soul powers, my dear audience, which are necessary in ordinary life, but which are different in ordinary life than in the soul life of the developed spiritual researcher in the field of anthroposophy. One of the soul powers is the ability to remember. This ability to remember must, as we say, be developed in a normal way in every human being; for if our ability to remember is somehow interrupted for any length of time, we are mentally ill. It is a serious mental illness when the thread of memory breaks; our sense of self is destroyed. You can read about how these symptoms manifest themselves in the relevant literature. But what do we only achieve in ordinary life through this ability to remember? We attain that which we have experienced, by which we were connected with the world of facts with our soul. This emerges in memories with greater or lesser vividness. We have to live in them. The stream of memories must reach back to a certain point in early childhood for our soul life to be normal. That which would otherwise flash by is given permanence in the soul life through the power of memory.

This is where spiritual scientific schooling comes in. What is called meditation and concentration in the books already mentioned is nothing other than a higher stage of what, at a lower level, is the ability to remember in the human being. When we – without being deceived by auto-suggestion, without being led astray by reminiscences of life – have images presented to our soul that we have been given by an experienced spiritual researcher or that we have been able to learn in some other way, but which must be fully comprehensible so that we can survey them with our consciousness – when we bring such ideas into the center of our consciousness and now rest on them quite arbitrarily, when we give duration to the ideas, which otherwise only follow external events and flit by, then something in our soul is developed in the same way as muscles are developed when they are used in work. This meditation, this constant resting on easily comprehensible ideas, in which nothing of auto-suggestion or reminiscences may be mixed, that is modern meditation. As an inner soul method, it is truly no easier to carry out than the modern scientific work in the observatory, in the chemical laboratory or in the clinic. For years, this resting on such ideas must be carried out.

But then we make the inner discovery that, on the one hand, the ability to remember naturally remains as healthy as a normal person needs it to be, but that, on the other hand, something else develops from this ability to remember for supersensible knowledge. The ability develops, at first in our lives, because that is where supersensible vision begins, not only to survey our lives in memories — for they are indeed pale, however vivid they may be — but to survey it pictorially, as I call it, “in imaginations”. We develop an imaginative view in a moment of everything that otherwise runs in the stream of memory. We survey our life from the point we have reached between birth and death back to childhood, as in a large tableau of life. Here one can say: Time becomes space. No longer do individual memories emerge from the stream of life, but a coherent and unified overview of what we have lived through. This is the beginning of supersensible knowledge through the developed faculty of memory. In a certain respect, the faculty of memory breaks away from bodily conditions; we experience purely in our soul what we have experienced in the outer world.

But as a result, something specific happens in the human being. By first coming to such heightened self-knowledge through an increased ability to remember, he finally comes to understand what it means to live with his soul outside the body. This is the significant event that occurs on the path to supersensible knowledge: living with one's soul outside the body. One reaches a consciousness where one experiences soul-spiritual, first one's own soul-spiritual, then an expanded soul-spiritual, with such clarity, with such an interweaving of inner arbitrariness, as one otherwise only experiences geometric, mathematical conceptions. I would like to say: In this way, one best learns for supersensible knowledge what is given as mathematical presentation; once one has learned to present mathematically, geometrically, to form inner views in contrast to this, so that, when one has a doctrine, one can say: If I know its teaching, then I see through its truth, no matter how many people speak against it. When one has gained the totality and essence of the inner vision, one can inwardly fulfill it and compare it with what one experiences quite differently as more vivid through the developed memory. One finally comes to gain new ideas about certain things that play into life.

One arrives, I said, at connecting a concept to what it means to live outside of the body. But then, the moment of falling asleep, the time between falling asleep and waking up, and waking up itself, becomes something else. For the ordinary consciousness, awareness is dulled when falling asleep and rises again when waking up; it is interrupted between falling asleep and waking up. Through a culture of memory life and the ability to remember as I have described it, the human being becomes aware of himself outside of the body and learns to recognize through direct observation how he leaves his physical body in his soul and spirit. It is not to be understood spatially, but dynamically. But it is correctly spoken: He learns to recognize how he goes out of his body; the spiritual researcher rises into states in which he is completely independent of his body, just as one is unconsciously independent of one's body when asleep. But he experiences himself in states of consciousness where, although his eyes do not see, his ears do not hear, he does not even feel the warmth around him, he is permeated by inner soul life. What he then experiences is as if, by sleeping, a person would experience a new world, a world beyond the physical-sensory world, and would again submerge, as if emerging from a spiritual sea into the ordinary sensory world upon waking.

Then, when one has such experiences, one can now move on to something else that must prepare one for the modern crossing of the threshold, as the old sage prepared his disciples for the unknown through fearlessness and courage. Then another power of the soul must be developed; another power must be transformed into a power of knowledge. Many a person wants to accept, out of modern consciousness, that the ability to remember can be transformed into an independent power of comprehension, because it is related to the intellect, and modern man loves the intellect. He accepts the intellect in the scientific field. But the other soul power, which the one who wants to cross the threshold today must also develop within himself, is not accepted as an objective power of knowledge. Yet it becomes an objective power of knowledge when it is developed in the right way, that is the power of love. Love in knowledge is not accepted; one says: Where love appears, cognition must lose objectivity. But you can read in the books mentioned, “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science”, how you can actually make this love independent of what love is otherwise bound to in ordinary life.

Dear attendees, in ordinary life, love is bound to the bodily instincts, to that which a person is as a physical being. When you develop within yourself, just as I have explained before about meditation and concentration of thought, a certain way of looking at how to rise from level to level in life – after all, we basically become a different person every day; you just have to look seriously and honestly to consider what his view of life is today, what the purpose of his life is, what his soul's content is. One need only compare what he was nine or ten years ago with what he is today and he will have to admit that without the will's intervention in the course of life, he becomes another.

A certain schooling must take place in the spiritual researcher. He must learn to take full control of his self-education with complete arbitrariness. Self-discipline must become the education of life. And he must always be clear about what intervenes in his life. He must gain the possibility of confronting his own development of will as its own spectator. That this is necessary to attain a true consciousness of freedom is what I have tried to show in my Philosophy of Freedom, which I published in 1893 as a fundamental socio-ethical view and which has now appeared before humanity in a new edition. There I already dared to say, albeit in relation to ethical-liberal cognition: Love does not blind — but true love, which the human soul wins for merging with the object, educated to do so through faithful self-observation —, it makes seeing. This love makes man free. For by no longer acting out of instincts, out of impulsive drives, but by becoming absorbed in love in the outer world, and allowing himself to be guided only by what is necessary in the world of facts, he becomes free. Selfless love makes man free; but selfless love can also be educated to become a power of cognition. Then we can imbue what we have gained through the developed power of remembrance with what love becomes. And while the developed power of knowledge gives us an idea of how the human being is with the soul forces outside the body, the developed ability to love gives us a correct idea of the soul and spirit within. And when what one gains through the power of love connects with what one gains through the developed ability to remember, then such concepts expand. We know that one leaves the body with the soul, but is then in the spiritual world and that one enters the body again when one wakes up. This is a concept that has a certain significance for the time between birth and death and beyond life. By developing this higher knowledge, we gain the ability to see our soul in its journey before it connects with the earthly-physical human body through birth or conception. Just as we look at the soul as something real before it awakens, where it is indeed waiting for the prepared body, so we look at the soul that dwells in the spiritual worlds before birth and which now has different powers than the merely sleeping soul. The sleeping soul has only the power to revive the soul of the body lying in bed. The soul that dwells in the spiritual world before birth has the power, with the help of what is happening in its physical hereditary current, to organize the physical body so that the human individuality can live out its soul and spirit in it. And we come to gain insight into the eternal nature of the human soul. A view of what the soul is in the purely spiritual worlds is scientifically substantiated with mathematical clarity. And from this knowledge, the knowledge of what happens when we fall asleep as a transition through the portal of death, as the going out into a spiritual world when the physical body has been discarded, also develops. In brief, we attain as a higher stage that which appears on a lower stage as the merely imaginative overview of life up to birth; we attain an extension of this overview to an overview of the eternal of the human soul and the connection of the human soul with the spiritual cosmos. We learn to look into this spiritual cosmos. We learn to know: Here we are on earth in our physical body, looking through our eyes into the physical world, hearing physical sounds, perceiving physical warmth. But what rests in our physical body and says “I” to us, what thinks and feels and senses and wills, that lived in spiritual worlds before it took on this physical body.

And now we learn something extraordinarily characteristic: as we develop here in the body, the soul is shadowy, and we develop nothing but shadowy concepts with what lives inwardly as feeling, as thinking, as will, when we develop self-knowledge. But the world outside us, we have it clearly, it lies spread out before us. When one becomes conscious of what one was before birth in spiritual worlds, there is no external world of objects; we do not see through physical eyes into an external world, we do not hear physical sounds through the external ears, we perceive something else. We perceive the human being in his inner self as a world; the human being whom we have to help create when we are embodied in the world. Here the environment is our world. Before our conception in spiritual worlds, the human being's inner being was our world. The human being is revealed to the human being as the human being simultaneously cognitively grasps his or her eternal being. And here, then, my dear attendees, is where that which is anthroposophical spiritual science expands into a genuine feeling of true human significance and true human existence.

What has modern science ultimately brought? Conscientious research into the animal series, how it stands in development from the lowest creatures up to the perfect one, then, the human being, but nothing about the human being that describes him as a being of his own. He appears only as the end of the animal series. We look to him for what we found in the animal, only at a higher level, as a final point. But in a sense, we have lost the human being in his actual inner being. We stand before the boundaries of the world, we stand before a new threshold. We cross this new threshold in the way I have just described. What the ancients wanted to explore on the other side of the threshold is our present-day general human education; but what they had in world knowledge out of instinct, we must gain for ourselves by crossing the threshold, through such spiritual scientific methods as I have described. But then this spiritual scientific method is transformed into the feeling of true human respect. How this spiritual knowledge is transformed into the feeling of true human respect, how it is transformed into the knowledge of social impulses, is what I will be talking about in more detail on the 28th of the month, when I will draw the consequences for school and educational issues and practical social life issues from what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to say.

When I had the honor of addressing the Dutch population here in 1912 and 1908 on the subject of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I could only speak of it as something that, using a new method, strives for spiritual knowledge that is intended to satisfy the soul of man. I could speak of something that is sought and developed by individuals. Since that time, despite the catastrophic events that have occurred in the meantime, much has been achieved in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, including external development.

We have established the Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum, in Dornach near Basel. The Goetheanum bears this name because we are aware that what appears in Goethe at the elementary level as an intuitive power of judgment, as his artistic and scientific attitude, must be further developed, as I have discussed it today; then one arrives at what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Nevertheless, although the building is not yet complete, we tried last fall to hold a whole series of college courses in this unfinished Goetheanum. These college courses were not held on spiritual science in the narrower sense, but were held by about thirty personalities, by scientists, specialists in the usual fields of science, specialists in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, sociology, law and so on, and so on. But men of practical life, too, who stand in commercial and industrial life, have spoken. Artists have spoken about their art. All this — besides the spiritual-scientific sifting of philosophy — has been presented by thirty lecturers in the content of the Dornach School of Spiritual Science.

What did these college courses aim to achieve? They wanted to show how everything that is modern scientific life, modern practical life and what basically forms the content of modern civilization contains many descending forces that would have to lead to chaos and decline if they remain descending, and how these descending forces can be transformed into ascending forces. It should be shown how spiritual science can illuminate and fertilize the science, the practice of life, the content of our civilization, so that souls longing for knowledge of the supersensible and for the permeation of social life with new impulses can be fulfilled.

Much has been achieved in the development of anthroposophical spiritual science during this time, ladies and gentlemen. Whether the Goetheanum in Dornach, this University for Spiritual Science that wants to intervene in a fruitful way in the life of modern civilization, can be completed will depend on whether people willing to make sacrifices continue to be found who are willing to see it through to completion, just as a great many people have already come together who were insightful enough for spiritual science as it is meant there and have brought it as far as it is today.

This spiritual science has also influenced civil life in other ways. I will discuss the principles in more detail in the next lecture and would just like to mention today how the practice of school life has been influenced by the founding of the Free Waldorf School, an initiative of Emil Molt in Stuttgart, for which I have been entrusted with the leadership of education and didactics as they are derived from spiritual science.

And a start has also been made in terms of practical life through practical economic foundations in Germany and Switzerland. I will speak about this next time too.

But what must underlie all this is the need for a rethinking, a relearning of the newer humanity in the deepest inner soul life. For we need a new self-knowledge of the human being, which can only be gained if we learn to cross the threshold in a new way, the threshold that leads us into the supersensible world in such a way that we can carry our modern strengthened consciousness into the realms that lie beyond this threshold, and gain a new spirit-filled world view to go with our strengthened self-awareness. This is the first question of civilization in the present day.

The second question is this, which confronts us wherever we look at life today. We cannot achieve a corresponding social coexistence if we are not able to recognize the human being in his essence when he comes to us; if we are not able to respect, feel and appreciate the full inner significance of the being that walks the earth as a human being. We can only truly approach people as people if we gain an understanding of people from spiritual knowledge, and true human love from that love that strives towards knowledge.

And we can only deepen all this religiously and develop it artistically if we come from mere abstract knowledge, the intellectualism of modern times, to a true spiritual insight that in turn not only takes hold of us intellectually, but as a whole human being; carries us as a whole human being into life. The science that we have had could only show us a world of nature that runs by itself, that has developed from nebulous states and produces man as an external form, and which in turn will one day fall back into the sun as slag. And on the other hand, what sits within us as ideals, what sits within us as moral impulses. But this modern science, if it is completely honest, cannot bridge the gap between a person's inner soul consciousness and the outer cosmic consciousness. By acquiring spiritual science in the sense described here, the human being regains the ability to say: “What I gain in social life is not only significant for a perishing humanity, but, in that the human being is born out of the spirit of the world, for this world spirit.”

Human deeds will in turn be recognized as cosmic deeds. That man may know himself, that he may learn to appreciate man, that he may learn to appreciate his position in the whole cosmos, spiritually as well as intellectually, these are the great civilizing questions of the present, which are more closely related to the field of knowledge. They expand into the question of schooling, into the economic and social question, into the legal and technical questions of social life, which I will allow myself to supplement today's reflection by speaking to you about on the 28th.

Answering questions

Question: Are there dangers associated with the path to the spiritual worlds?

Dr. Steiner: Dear attendees! It must of course be said that whatever a person does in life can, under certain circumstances, be associated with dangers and that there is always the possibility of avoiding dangers by taking the right path. As you will understand, it is not possible to give more than hints in a short lecture, and of course I could only give such hints today. Therefore, I could not describe the details of the path to knowledge in the supersensible worlds. If I could have done so, you would have seen that the matter of supersensible knowledge, as it is meant here in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, the life of the soul in this way, stands in a very specific relationship to what the life of the soul otherwise is. We are familiar with the ordinary life of a human being as it manifests in the waking state, in which the human being makes use of his senses, combining the perceptions of the senses with the intellect, developing them into laws of nature or of history or of social life, and so on. But there is also another possibility, which is that the soul and spirit of man are more strongly bound to the body than is the case in ordinary life. According to the materialistic theory, it is as if the soul-spiritual experiences were nothing more than a result of the physical-bodily states. One refers, if one wants to prove something like that, to the fact that parallel physical-bodily states can indeed be proven for the soul-spiritual experiences. But if one approaches it only from a spiritual-scientific point of view, and it is precisely this that is important, that one goes into the details of spiritual-scientific knowledge, the view of the connection between spiritual-mental experiences and physical-bodily experiences, as it is usually given, is a thoroughly incorrect one.

Let us suppose, for the sake of a comparison, that I walk along a path that is somewhat soggy. The person following behind will see that there are tracks in the path that have been made by a human being. Another being, which is not visible to people, would be able to believe that these tracks on the path are determined from the inside of the path, from the earth; the earth would have powers through which these footprints arise. So anyone who just thinks about the configuration of the path could come to this conclusion. The one who has come to know the soul and spirit is not surprised that the traces of the soul and spirit are in the physical and bodily, for example, in the nervous system. They are imprinted, so to speak, like the traces in the soft earth. Therefore, everything that is experienced in the soul and spirit must be found again in the physical and bodily.

To do this, a certain independence of the spiritual-mental from the physical-bodily is already present in normal life. In the morbid life, in what we know as psychopathic, which of course occurs in the most diverse forms of mental illness, it turns out that the spiritual-mental life is strongly tied to the physical life, stronger than in the normal state. It should always be noted that mental illnesses are basically physical illnesses. Due to the physical illness, the soul-spiritual feels more bound to an organ than it should be. In this respect, medicine in particular will have to be deeply fertilized. Last spring I held a course for doctors and medical students in which I showed how medicine, especially therapy, can be fertilized. But it is precisely here, when one studies medicine in a spiritual scientific way, that one has to look at the physical and bodily foundations of mental illnesses. For they consist in the fact that the human being is more spiritually and soulfully bound to the body than in the normal state. The opposite state is brought about by the kind of education I have been discussing today, but not for spiritual knowledge, for spiritual insight.

The spiritual researcher will be fully immersed in practical life. If you sleep well and are able to function well during the day in your outer practical life, you are not a clumsy, useless, inept person, and you are not a proper spiritual researcher either. These things are definitely connected. Precisely because the spiritual soul becomes independent of the physical body, the method I have described lies in the opposite directions of mental illnesses. Mental illnesses are a sinking of the spiritual into the physical and bodily, and it is precisely through this method that I have described that one can, at the same time, make human life healthy, quite apart from the fact that they are methods of knowledge. And it is slander that dangers are associated with the spiritual or physical life of a person when these methods are followed. That is not the case. It is just that all kinds of amateurish methods of soul development are cropping up in the world. These are actually always associated with dangers, because they always push the spiritual-soul into the physical, whereas what is described here as the spiritual path from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not in any way attempt to connect the spiritual-soul with the physical-bodily in a pathological way, but to liberate it in such a way that the experience is as inwardly light-filled and clear as mathematical experience is. It is important to note that nothing that is striven for in spiritual-scientific methods is in any way mystically nebulous, but that everything is imbued with complete clarity. Therefore, there will be nothing more superficial than nebulous mysticism, which only appears to be deep but is in fact superficial. What is striven for is thoroughly intellectual and spiritual, but it is a healing of the soul, not an illness.

Dear attendees,

Those who speak about a topic such as the one that is to be the subject of tonight's evening reflection must be seriously aware that there are numerous human souls in the present who, both out of the currents of knowledge of the present and out of the practical social directions of this present, long for a re-creation of things, for a re-creation of the world view, souls that feel that in a certain respect, with the ideas, with the feelings and also with the will impulses that have come down to people from the last centuries and in which we have been educated, it is no longer easy to continue in spiritual and social life.

We, as humanity in the civilized world, have experienced, on the one hand, the great, the tremendous progress of the natural scientific worldview and, on the other hand, we have experienced the tremendous results of this natural scientific worldview in the field of technology, in the field of practical life, which we encounter at every turn, so to speak, from morning till night. But we have also been influenced by the tremendous scientific results, by the practical consequences of these scientific discoveries in social life. Today, people can – and this is the case in every field, if they allow themselves to be influenced by scientific knowledge in one form or another, through their usual reading, through everyday life, through everything that otherwise brings us together with existence, from morning to evening – they cannot help but ask the eternal questions of the human soul and spirit, the questions about the immortal essence of the human soul, about the meaning of the whole world, about the meaning of human action itself; he cannot help but ask these questions, the answers to which have been given to him earlier through religious beliefs. He cannot help but is still so devoted to religious creeds, when he absorbs modern education, than to think and feel about these questions, to consider what the impulses for his actions are, and to link them to what science has been saying for three to four centuries, which has not spoken to people of earlier centuries in this way. And this modern human being cannot do otherwise than, by standing inside of life that has become so complicated, the tone of which depends entirely on modern technology, by being harnessed to it through this modern technology, he cannot do otherwise than look at how his life is dependent on this technology. And he cannot help saying to himself: Fundamentally, people have become quite different from the old, simpler conditions throughout the whole civilized world. And he must then become fully aware of it, he must sense that in this social relationship, in relation to the coexistence of people with one another, many things must be resolved as a question.

Yes, we can even say the following in a certain respect; we can say: scientific knowledge compels us to reckon with it. The practical technical results that our modern life has brought about, they compel us to live with them. But neither of these actually answers the big questions of human existence; basically, they raise new questions. For anyone who delves with an unbiased mind into everything that science has to say in such a great and significant way about man, his organization, his form of life on earth, and so on, anyone who deals with all this, who really delves into these things, does not receive answers about the eternal nature of man, about the meaning of the world and existence; on the contrary, he receives deeper, more meaningful questions. And he must ask himself: Where now are the answers to these questions, which have become deeper and more urgent through the newer life? For from the side of knowledge, we have not actually received solutions to the great riddles of the world through the achievements of science, but rather new questions, new riddles.

And what about practical life? Well, we have been placed in this practical social life, with the means of our powerful, extensive industry, the means of our widespread world trade, and so on. But it is precisely this practical life that presents us with ethical, moral, spiritual questions about the way people interact with each other. And precisely the riddle that presents itself to us in the interaction between people is what is stirring minds today as a social question, and what often appears before people who think seriously and take life seriously in an alarming way. So it is also the practical side of life that presents man with a riddle.

These riddles, which approach the human soul from two sides, are now confronted by what the speaker calls “anthroposophically oriented spiritual science”. It seeks to find those sources of human nature, starting from the foundations of knowledge and then from the foundations of practical life, which can lead to at least a partial solution to this riddle; to that solution of these riddles that is possible for man, but also necessary; necessary because it is obvious to anyone who is unbiased that life continues in this way, when souls face the pressing questions in this way and become inwardly desolate, if new impulses for social life are not found from the depths of the human soul, we as humanity will go into decline and will not be able to rise in relation to the great civilizational issues of the present.

The goal of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not directed against scientific knowledge. Anything that was directed against the scientific knowledge that has brought humanity so much good would be completely amateurish and doomed to superficiality. But precisely because anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is completely serious about what natural science has really achieved for modern humanity, that is precisely why it comes to different conclusions than those that are still being achieved today by scientific investigations or the like, which are carried out everywhere in ordinary life.

The same path is followed in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but it continues in a certain way. And I would like to use a comparison to illustrate and make clear how anthroposophical spiritual science relates to scientific research. I am certainly not using it immodestly to pin what anthroposophy has been able to achieve so far to a world-historical event and to try to explain it in a similar way. It is just a comparison, and I can certainly leave it to those who want to scoff to scoff at such a comparison. When Columbus set out across the ocean, it was by no means clear where he would end up. In those days, the problem of world trade, which Columbus then introduced into civilization, was either met either by ignoring the great unknown that lay across the ocean, or by remaining with what one already had as a home place; or one faced it in such a way that one ventured out onto the wide ocean, like Columbus and his men, but even then one did not yet hope that one would discover an America or the like. One only wanted to find another way to India, from the other side. One wanted to reach what was already known. In this way, I would like to say, as it was with Columbus, who wanted to reach something already known from the other side, but then found something completely different along the way, found something new, so it is with the spiritual scientist who seriously engages in scientific research. Usually, when people engage with scientific research at home, they stick to what they already have, to the observation of sensory phenomena and the rational combination of what the sensory phenomena present. Or, when one is armed with the instruments, the tools that serve observation, with the telescope, the microscope, the spectroscope, the X-ray machine, and then, armed with the conscientious, excellent method of thought of the newer sciences – when one ventures out with all of this into the sea of research, then on the other side one only wants to find something familiar, which is similar, but only similar to what one already has: atoms, molecules with complicated movements, a world, then, behind the curtain that is spread out as the sense world; a world that one describes as small movements, small bodies and the like, but which is basically similar to what one already has here and sees with one's eyes, touches with one's hands and the like. For that is what then underlies this supersensible world of the natural scientist.

But the person who, with the same seriousness, but only going further into this sea of research, sets out on this journey with anthroposophical spiritual science, comes to something else. He does not encounter the familiar atoms and molecules along the way, but by becoming aware of: What are you actually doing by investigating nature in the way that the more recent centuries have done? What happens in you during the research? What does your soul accomplish at the observatory, researching in the clinic? Your soul – as someone who combines a little introspection with what he is doing would say to himself – your soul works entirely spiritually, but it works by trying to explore the development of animals up to the human being, by trying to penetrate the course of the stars, in a way that people did not work in the past. But then, humanity did not always observe it that way. They did not always say to themselves: By exploring nature, it is the spirit, the soul, that is actually working in me, and I must recognize this spirit, this soul.

Dear attendees, what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science presents as its results has actually been gained through the path of natural science. It is won, as was found by Columbus as an unknown America. But that which is carried out, that which becomes conscious as spirit, as soul, in the truly searching mind, can then be further developed, further cultivated. In this way one attains a real knowledge of what spirit is in the human soul. And the methods of developing what I have just hinted at, what is thoroughly active in the human soul in the modern natural scientist, these methods of developing that, that is the task of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here. But a very specific starting point must be chosen for this spiritual science. One must start from what one could call “intellectual modesty”.

Indeed, one must have this intellectual modesty to such an extent that the comparison, which I will now use only as a comparison, is entirely justified. One must say to oneself: If, for example, you give a five-year-old child a volume of Shakespeare, what will the child do with it? He will tear it up or play with it in some other way. If the child has progressed in his development by ten to fifteen years, he will no longer tear up the volume of Shakespeare, but will do with it what is appropriate for the volume of Shakespeare. The child already had certain abilities in his soul as a five-year-old child, which could be brought out of this soul and developed, and through the development of these abilities the child has actually become a different person than he used to be. Is it possible for an adult human being – a person who has already achieved the usual development of everyday life and ordinary science – to summon up the intellectual humility to say to himself: when faced with the secrets of nature, I am basically in the same position as the five-year-old child in front of the volume of Shakespeare. There are still abilities in me that are hidden, that I can bring out, that I can develop and unfold from my soul, and I must further my soul life through self-education, then I will be able to face all of nature anew in a similar way to how the child, in relation to its five-year-old state, faces the Shakespeare volume when it has reached fifteen or twenty years of age. And I have to talk to you about the methods by which such powers, lying in every human soul, can be developed out of this human soul. For by developing these methods, we do indeed gain a completely new insight into nature and into human existence. These methods, the modern, seeking human soul senses in a certain way, but one does not get beyond these intuitions in the broadest circles until now.

You see, it is still the case that there are many people among us who say to themselves: When we look back to ancient times or when we look across to the Orient, for example, where the remains, albeit the decadent remains, of an ancient wisdom, there is still something of the knowledge, of that which is called science, at the same time takes on a religious character, where one can bring the human soul to a certain satisfaction about the world and one's own existence. And because one sees such, because also the outer anthropological science has brought up realizations of very deep nature over old human world views within our civilized life, therefore many people long back to those earlier soul conditions. They want to bring ancient wisdom back to life, and they want to spread what has been preserved of such ancient wisdom in the East to our Western world, according to the saying “Ex oriente lux”. Such people, who long for a knowledge that is not that of our age, do not understand the meaning of human development. For every age has its special tasks for humanity in relation to all areas of life. We cannot today fill our souls with the same treasures of wisdom that our ancestors filled theirs with centuries or millennia ago. But we can orient ourselves in a certain way to how they did it, these ancestors, and then we can seek a path in our own way into the supersensible. For the human soul does sense that in the depths of its being it is connected not with the natural world, to which the body is connected, but with a supersensible nature, to which the soul's eternal nature and the eternal destiny of this soul are connected.

Now, in earlier centuries or millennia, our ancestors had a very definite view of man's relationship to that world to which man belongs outside of birth and death. These were very definite ideas that filled the soul with deep feelings and emotions, which were linked to entering this path into the supersensible world, to supersensible knowledge. And there is one idea in particular that filled those who heard it resounding in all its depth from ancient times with shivers. It is the idea of the Guardian of the Threshold, of the threshold that one must cross if one wants to ascend from ordinary knowledge, which guides us in everyday life and in ordinary science, to the actual knowledge of the spirit and soul. People in ancient times sensed: There is an abyss between ordinary knowledge and that which actually provides insights into the nature of the soul. And it was a very real feeling for these people that something stood at this threshold, a being not of human kind, a being of spiritual kind, that guarded them from crossing this threshold before they were sufficiently prepared. The leaders of the old wisdom schools, which are also called mysteries, did not allow anyone to cross this threshold who had not first been properly prepared, namely through a certain discipline of will. We can understand why this was so by looking at a very simple example.

Today, we as human beings are quite proud of the fact that for centuries we have had a different external view of our planetary system and the rest of the starry world than the Middle Ages had, or than, in our view, ancient times had. We are proud of the Copernican worldview, and rightly so from a certain point of view. We say: We have the heliocentric world view in contrast to the geocentric world view of the Middle Ages and ancient times, when it was imagined that the Earth was at rest and that the Sun and the stars moved around the Earth. Today we know that the Earth orbits the Sun at a tremendous speed, and we then calculate from the observations that arise in connection with this what we then have as a world view of our solar or planetary system. And we look back to the Middle Ages and know that they had a world view that can be said to be childlike in a certain way in relation to this heliocentric system. But if we go further back, for example even to a few centuries before the birth of Christ, we find that in ancient Greece, for example with Aristarchus of Samos, a heliocentric world view was given; Plutarch tells us about it. This world view of Aristarchus of Samos does not differ at all in its main features from what everyone learns as the right thing in primary schools today. But in those days, Aristarchus of Samos only revealed it to a wider circle; otherwise it was only taught in the narrower circles of the mysteries. It was only brought to people who had first been prepared by the leaders of the wisdom schools. It was said: Man with his ordinary consciousness is not suited to receive such a world picture; between him and this world picture the threshold to the spiritual world must be erected; he must be guarded by the Guardian of the Threshold of the Threshold, from experiencing unprepared something like the heliocentric system or many other things that are known today by all educated people, but which were withheld from the ancients if they were not sufficiently prepared.

Why were people kept in the dark about these things back then? Well, our historical knowledge does not usually extend to the depths of human soul development. In this science of history, which is common practice today, people are not told how the souls of human beings have changed in their constitution over the course of centuries and millennia. In Greek and Roman times, and even in the early Middle Ages, people's souls were in a completely different state than they are today. People had a world consciousness, a world knowledge, that arose from their instincts, from very vague, half-dreamy states of soul. Today we cannot even begin to imagine this knowledge of the world. When we look at the works of that time that could be called scientific, we may think of them as we will. We may call them superstitious, and in terms of today's education we would be quite right to do so. But the peculiar character of these works was that people had never before looked at minerals, plants, and animals, at rivers and clouds, or watched the stars rise and set with such dryness and sobriety, and with such an emptiness of spirit. They perceived the spiritual soul in every stone, in every plant, in every animal, in the movement of the clouds, in all of nature. Man felt the spiritual soul within himself and what he felt within himself was also spread out for him in the outer world. He did not yet feel as separate from the outer world as man feels today. But his self-confidence was also weaker for that. And in the old days of human development, one could rightly say to oneself: If you told a person something of the nature of the heliocentric system, as it was communicated to the wise, as it were, if you told him that the Earth orbits through space at a tremendous speed, he would fall into a mental faint.

Yes, my dear attendees, this is an historical truth. It is just as much an historical truth as the historical truths we learn at school about Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian and the Persian Wars. But it is a truth that we usually do not learn, that the Greek soul was different from the human soul today. It was duller in relation to the powers of inner self-awareness. The wise leaders of the mysteries would have been right to fear that these souls, if led unprepared into supersensible knowledge, or even into the knowledge that is common to all educated people today, would have fallen into spiritual fainting. Therefore, it was said, the souls of men must first be made strong and courageous by a discipline of the will, so that they can endure when their self-consciousness is led into a very different world from the ordinary. And the souls must be made fearless in the face of the unknown into which they were to enter. Fearlessness in the face of the unknown, a courageous grasp of that which, according to the view of the ancients, literally causes one to lose the ground beneath one's feet — because when one is no longer standing on the resting earth, one the ground under your feet —, it was a courageous state of mind and fearlessness and many other qualities that prepared the students of the wisdom schools to cross the abyss into the spiritual, supersensible world.

And what did they learn then? They learned – and this is the surprising, the paradoxical – they learned what we [all] learn today in elementary school, what is considered to be an insight that is common to all educated people. This was what the ancients were actually afraid of, and they had to be courageously educated to it first. Thus, the human soul has developed over the centuries that it is now in a completely different state; that what could only be given to the ancients after difficult preparation is already given to us today in elementary school. Basically, we are well beyond the threshold that the ancients were only allowed to cross after long preparation. But we also have to bear the consequences of crossing this threshold. We stand before that which our ancestors feared, and for which they first had to train themselves to gain courage; but we have also lost something. What we have lost within our modern civilization is told to us, on the one hand, by those who, precisely as the serious researchers of our contemporary science, dwell on that which we cannot know. And why this is so, that must basically be explained to those who, from a serious spiritual science, confront such facts as I have just described to you.

Since the time of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler, we have acquired a completely different self-awareness. We have progressed to abstract thinking. We develop intellectuality in such a strong way that the ancients did not develop it in their dull consciousness. That is why we have such a strong self-confidence that we can place ourselves in the world in which the ancients could only place themselves after preparation. But we enter this world, as shown by the most unbiased researchers, who speak of ignorabimus, of the limits of knowledge, and so on, by having a strongly developed self-confidence, a self-confidence that is strongly developed through thinking, through intellectuality, which the ancients did not have, but we lack the connection with the deeper reasons of the world in this strong self-confidence. We have acquired an insistence on ourselves, a strengthening of self-awareness; but knowledge of the world, we have lost that. We no longer gain such a connection from instinct as people could still achieve in the tenth or twelfth century. We must therefore speak of a new threshold into the spiritual world. We must in turn develop something through our increased self-awareness that will lead us into the spiritual, into the supersensible world, into which we cannot enter instinctively as the ancients [still] could. Just as the ancients developed self-awareness through self-discipline in order to endure in the world into which we come unprepared, we must prepare ourselves for something else. We must also prepare ourselves to develop the forces slumbering in our soul, which we become aware of through intellectual modesty.

You see, one starts from two well-known powers in the human soul, not from some obscure things or the like in the human soul. In serious spiritual science, one starts from two powers that are absolutely necessary in human life, but one develops them further. You say to yourself: they are only at the beginning of their development in ordinary life, you continue this development through your own work on yourself. One of the forces that is further developed in this way is what is called the human ability to remember. It is through this ability to remember that we are actually a self. It is through this ability to remember that we have ordinary self-awareness. We look back to a certain year in our childhood, and the experiences we have had emerge in memory images, more or less faded and shadowed, but they do emerge. And we know from ordinary medical literature – everyone can see for themselves that this is the case – we know what it means when an area of our lives is erased, when we cannot remember anything in the course of our lives. We are then mentally ill. Such an illness is one of the most severe mental illnesses. But this ability to remember, which is so necessary for ordinary life, is in this ordinary life quite bound to the body, to the body of the human being, as everyone feels. And those who are more materialistically minded point out how this dependence shows itself, how certain organs or organ members need only be injured, and the memory is also injured, interrupted, destroyed. But this faculty of remembrance can become the starting-point for developing out of him a new and higher soul power, and that happens in the way I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in my “Occult Science” and in other writings. There I have shown how, through what I call meditation, what I call in the technical sense concentration on certain worlds of thought, of feeling, and of will impulses, the power of remembrance can be trained to something higher.

What is then the peculiarity of memory images? Otherwise we form our images and thoughts from the external world; they flit past like the external world flits past us. Through memory we constantly relive what we have experienced. Even years later we can still draw from the very depths what we have experienced. Through memory, images are constantly forming within us. We use this in meditation and in concentration when we want to become spiritual researchers. We form — or we let ourselves be advised by those who know about these things — easily comprehensible ideas; such ideas that cannot come from the subconscious, that cannot be reminiscences of life either, ideas that we can understand as precisely as we can understand mathematical or geometric ideas. Then we rest with our soul on these images. Training these methods is truly no easier than clinical research, research in a physics or chemistry institute or at the observatory. It is certainly an inner work of the soul, but it is a very serious work for this soul. It can take years, for some it can also take less time, depending on the inner destiny of the person, but it always takes some time until this repeatedly evoked resting on certain ideas can lead to something. Of course, the rest of life must not be disturbed by these exercises; one remains a reasonable, capable person, because these exercises only take up a short time. But they must be practised for a long time, then they will achieve what one might call a higher development of the power of recollection. We then become aware of something in our soul that lives like the thoughts of the experiences we have gone through. Only we know that what now lives in our soul does not refer to anything we have gone through in life since birth; but just as we otherwise have the images of such experiences, so we now have other images. I called them 'imaginations' in my writings. We have images as vivid as the memory images, but not linked to what we have gone through in our ordinary lives. Instead, we become aware that these imaginations do not relate to anything we have gone through in our ordinary lives, but to something outside of us, in the spiritual world.

And we learn to recognize what it means to live outside of the human body. With the ability to remember, we cling to our body. With this developed, trained ability to remember, we no longer cling to the body, and something occurs that we can call similar and yet quite different from the state that a person goes through from falling asleep to waking up. There he is usually unconscious, there is the consciousness extinguished, in this time from falling asleep to waking up, because man does not see with his eyes or hear with his ears. In this state one is when one uses the developed ability to remember. One does not perceive with eyes and ears, one does not even perceive the warmth in one's surroundings, but one does not live unconsciously as in sleep, but one lives in a world of perceptions, in a world of perceptions. One now perceives a spiritual world. It is really as if one were beginning to fall asleep, but not passing into the dullness of unconsciousness, but into another world. This other world is perceived through the developed ability to remember. And one now learns to recognize, as a first view, what I would like to call the 'memory tableau', but the developed memory tableau of this life up to the birth. That is, in a sense, the first supersensible perception.

Otherwise, one has memories of one's life, one lets images arise, memory images, from the stream of life. It is not the same when one looks at life through this supernaturally developed ability to remember. The whole stream of life is combined in a single moment — like something spatial — into a comprehensible image. What otherwise only emerges as individual memory fragments in the course of time becomes a coherent stream when we achieve this independence from our body. Then, once we have become accustomed to imagining independently of the body, just as a sleeping person would imagine if they could, what can be called a real contemplation of what it is to fall asleep, to wake up, and what it is to sleep in general develops. One learns to recognize how that which is in the human being spiritually and soulfully really comes out – not spatially, but dynamically. It is correct to say that it usually remains unconscious, but that the human being can develop his consciousness outside of the body and how consciousness consists of the spiritual and soulful re-immersing itself in the body. And once this has been developed, one can gradually ascend to further perceptions.

If you can imagine what a person is like when asleep as a living spiritual-soul entity, then you will also come to recognize how the spiritual-soul has lived in a purely spiritual world before descending into the physical world through birth or conception, if you keep working with the developed memory in the manner described. You learn to distinguish between: The sleeping person has a sensual and supersensory desire to return to the physical body lying in bed and to revive it spiritually and mentally. But this power is also known as a strong power in the soul, which first waits to be received by a physical body that comes from father and mother in the physical inheritance current, but one learns to recognize how this soul rises from the spiritual-soul world and permeates the body. One acquires knowledge of how our soul lives spiritually before birth. One gets to know the eternal in the human soul. It is no longer a belief that one clings to this eternal in the human soul, but a knowledge that is acquired through supersensible vision. And one also acquires knowledge of the great falling asleep that the human being experiences when he passes through the gate of death. Just as consciousness is only dulled, not lost, in sleep, so it is with the human soul as it passes through the gateway of death, only it is the other way around: while a person, when he falls asleep and wants to return to the body, clings to the body and thus, in ordinary sleep, his consciousness is dulled, when he passes through the gate of death, his consciousness is awakened because he has no desire for the body. Only after he has lived in the spiritual world for a long time does something occur that could be compared to the age of the physical body, which is reached in the 35th year of life. When the soul has lived for a time after death, a longing arises again to return to the body, and a transition to a new life on earth occurs. I have repeatedly described these experiences of a person between death and a new birth in more detail. When these things are described, they are still widely ridiculed and mocked by people today, seen as fantastic. But those people who consider what is gained in this way to be fantastic should at the same time consider mathematical concepts to be fantastic, because what is gained in this way is just as real as what is found through true and earnest natural research.

And a powerful and significant image appears. It is not the case that when we have a memory image, we actually have something that we experienced years before in front of our soul. We have that before us as an image that we have experienced. When we have that before us, which we do not have through ordinary memory, but through the developed ability to remember, we have that spiritual world before us in which we are as a sleeping person, but in which we are also before we descend to earthly life. We have that which does not appear to the senses in the external world around us, but which appears to the spiritual eye, the soul eye. We have the spiritual foundations, the world's width before us. We ascend again, past a new guardian of the threshold, over a new threshold, into the supersensible world, to the spiritual background of natural existence, to which we belong. There it emerges like a mighty memory of stone and clouds and of all that is in the realms of nature. This is what a stone looks like to the eye, a cloud. To the spiritual eye, something appears to which we are related because we have lived in it before our birth or conception. There is the great memory of the world. And as this world memory of our own superphysical existence before our birth arises, as our eternal self appears to us from the outer world before the spirit eye, we simultaneously receive a tableau of the spirit that is spread out in the world around us. We attain real spiritual knowledge of the world.

Spiritual science must speak of these things, because this is something that must enter into modern civilization, just as the Copernican worldview entered a few centuries ago, just as Galileo's worldview entered. Just as these things were rejected in those days, just as they were seen as paradoxical, as fantastic, so too is spiritual science seen as fantasy today. But these things will be taken up into the human soul and will have, as I will mention in a moment, an effect on the outer, social, and whole existence of man. But first I must point out that for full spiritual knowledge, another power of knowledge must be developed.

People will still admit that one can develop the power of memory into a cognitive faculty. But perhaps the strict scientists in particular will not accept the second power that I have to mention as a cognitive faculty, and yet it is, although not as it occurs in life, but when it is developed, a real cognitive faculty: it is the power of love.

In ordinary life, love is tied to human instincts and the human libido, but just as the ability to remember can be extracted from ordinary life, so too can this love. In terms of love, one can also become independent of the human body. The power of love can be developed by using it to achieve real objectivity. While in ordinary life one loves because the inner being of man encourages this love, one can develop this love by immersing oneself in external objects, by becoming one with the external object, forgetting oneself. When you perform an action not out of inner impulses that come from the drives, the instincts, but when you act out of love for external events, then that is the love that is at the same time the power of human freedom. That is why I already said in the book I published in 1893 under the title “Philosophy of Freedom” that in the higher sense the saying that love is blind is not true, but that love is precisely what enables us to see. And the one who finds himself in the world through love truly makes himself free, for he makes himself independent of the inner instincts and drives that enslave him; he knows how to become absorbed in the world of external facts and events and to let the world dictate his actions; but then he can act as a free human being in the sense of what should happen, no longer carried and led by what his instincts and drives are. Just as I wanted to provide a basis for a free social feeling within modern civilization in my Philosophy of Freedom, for that which can truly found a social life from the depths of the human being, so it must also be said that this love must be developed as a power of knowledge, for example, when one develops a keen power of observation for that which one becomes anew with each passing day.

Let us be honest, honored attendees, honest with ourselves: Are we not fundamentally different every day? Life drives us; what we experience in other people and what we experience in them, everything drives us. If we think back to how we were ten years ago, we will admit to ourselves: We were quite different from what we have become today and basically we are something different with each passing day. But we drift in our ordinary lives. This is what the spiritual researcher must do as a discipline of the will, that he must take this development of the will into his own hands, so to speak, observing himself: What have you been influenced by today? What has changed your inner life today? What has changed your inner life in the last ten or twenty years? What has occurred in you? On the one hand, you have to do this, but on the other hand, you have to do something else. You have to give yourself very specific impulses and drives so that you not only live in such a way that you are changed from the outside, that life is changed from the outside, but you also have to stand next to yourself as your own spectator, so to speak, and watch your will and your actions. If you do that, then you simply develop that higher love, which is completely absorbed in the objects, in a lawful way.

And when we develop these two soul powers: on the one hand, the memory that is freed from the body, on the other hand, the power of love, which actually makes us one with our true spiritual being and brings us to a higher self-awareness, then we cross the threshold to a spiritual world. Then the external knowledge of nature complements each other in such a way that we can fertilize all the individual sciences through this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

I have experienced it, how at a famous medical school, the great medical authorities were talking about medical nihilism. They spoke of medical nihilism because they had gradually come to the conclusion that, basically, no remedies can be found for typical illnesses. In more recent scientific life, the connection with nature has been lost; it is not understood. At most, one tries out this or that substance to see if it has a healing relationship to this or that disease, but one does not see the bigger picture. Through spiritual science, one sees through plant life, the individual plants, the great differences that exist between the root life, the leaf life, the flower life, and one sees through the relationships of the spiritual being that is behind it, behind the root life, the leaf life, the flower life, the herb life of plants. Knowledge is gained about how this relates to the human being, who, as a whole human being, has grown out of this nature. One gains an insight into the relationships of animals, plants, minerals to man, and one thereby gains a rational therapy. Medicine can be fertilized in this way. Last spring I myself gave a course for doctors, medical practitioners and medical students, in which I showed how spiritual knowledge can be used to enrich the study of remedies, but also pathology, the study of diseases.

And so all the individual sciences can be enriched by spiritual knowledge. By attaining this spiritual knowledge, by truly growing together with what we were, with the spiritual and soul life, but which now works in our physical body, we acquire a completely different knowledge of human nature than through ordinary science. This ordinary science only wants to have logical, abstract, and delimited concepts about nature and human existence, and it is said that it is not a true science where such abstract laws cannot be derived. Yes, my dear audience, if nature does not work according to such abstract laws, then we humans can declaim about such laws for a long time; we only limit our knowledge if we only want to proceed logically and abstractly in science, if we can only indulge in abstract experiments. Then nature could easily say: Under such circumstances, I will not provide any insights into humans.

By approaching the subject with spiritual science, we learn to recognize that nature does not create according to laws, but according to principles that can only be attained through artistic observation, through real imaginations. We cannot fathom the wonderful secret of the human form, of the entire human organization, through abstract laws or through observation as it is done in ordinary science. We have to develop and grow into that which we gain in elementary knowledge for imaginative observation. Then true human nature is revealed, and thus an artistic view of the human being springs forth out of spiritual knowledge.

This is how the bridge is built from spiritual knowledge to art. For anyone who devotes themselves to knowledge in the sense of the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, knowledge is not something external. And if he is an artist, he does not create dry symbols, didactic theories or the like, but he sees forms in spiritual life and can impress them on the material. In this way, a renewal of art is created at the same time. We can experience it if we are open-minded. The old artists created great and powerful things. How did they create? In the past centuries, they first looked with their senses at external matter. Take Rembrandt or Raphael, they looked at the external matter in their age; they knew how to grasp the spiritual from the external sensual reality and depict it. The essence of their art consisted in the idealization of reality. The person who looks at this art with an open mind and sees how it has developed knows that the hour of this art has passed and that nothing new can be created along these lines. Spiritual science leads to spiritual insight. Spiritual forms are seen in spiritual and soul-like vitality. And with the same reality, with the same sense of reality, as was previously created artistically, where reality was idealized, artistic creation is now beginning through the realization of the spiritual and the spiritual. In the past, the artist extracted the spirit from matter; now the spirit is being carried into matter. But not in an allegorical or symbolic way. Only those believe this who cannot imagine how immediately real that can be which can be created as new art.

Thus we see how this spiritual science actually leads to real art. But it also leads to a real religious life. It is remarkable that today there are critics of this spiritual science who say: spiritual science wants to bring down into everyday life that which should only be felt at lofty heights as the divine world. Yes, that is what this spiritual science wants. It wants man to be so imbued with spiritual and soul existence through the knowledge of the supersensible worlds that the spirit is not only grasped in a mystical fog, experienced in an asceticism alien to life, but that this spirit can be carried into every practical existence. People believe that they have already achieved a great deal if they have given the other person an education. So that when they close the factory gate behind them, they are finished with their work; that they can then have all kinds of beautiful ideas outside. But a person cannot yet feel fully human if they first have to close the factory gate behind them in order to then devote themselves to elevating their soul. No, if we want to solve the great problems of civilization to some extent, we must proceed to carry the spirit into the factory when we enter the factory through the factory gate, by permeating with the spirit what we work with in our daily lives. This is what deserts life, this is what the catastrophic time has finally brought about, that we have created an external spiritless life, a mere mechanism of life.

Spiritual science fulfills the full human being. It will be able to carry the spirit from within the human being into the most practical, seemingly sober areas of life. And so everyday life - where we work for others, where we stand at the machine, where we participate in the totality through the division of labor - will become spiritualized when spiritual science, which can be knowledge and religious fervor at the same time, enters into life. It will be a social force in itself. It will stand by people as they work. Economic life, practical life in the outer world, will be seized by a science that has not only an abstract spirit in concepts and ideas, but a living spirit, and that can therefore also fill life with this living spirit.

My dear attendees, what only wants to reshape external institutions cannot lead us to a solution of the social question. We live in an age in which social demands are being made. But we also live in an age in which people are highly unsocial. A realization as I have described it will also bring social impulses among people that can solve the great riddles of life in a different way than the abstract way of thinking, which appears as Marxism and the like, which can only destroy because it arises from the abstract, because it kills the spirit, but because only the spirit can make life come alive. This is what spiritual science promises in a certain sense, that it can not only give satisfaction to the soul in its connection with the eternal, but that it can also infuse forces into social life.

This has led to the fact that one did not want to remain in spiritual science with mere mystical views. We do not have abstract mysticism. We have that which does not shy away from crossing the threshold into the spiritual world and leading people into the supersensible world in a new way. But at the same time we bring down into the physical, sensory world what we gain in this way. This has led to the practical view of life that is set forth in my book 'The Core of the Social Question' and in other writings, and that is represented by the 'Federation for the Threefold Social Organism'. There are still some people who say that spiritual science leads away from the old religion; for example, that it is anti-Christian. But anyone who takes a closer look at this spiritual science will find that it is precisely suited to present the Mystery of Golgotha and the true meaning of Christianity to people once again. For under the influence of the modern, naturalistic world view, what has become of the Christ, who must surely be a supersensible being drawn into a human body, who has given the earth a new meaning? The simple man of Nazareth; a mere human being, albeit the most outstanding human being in world history. Once again, supersensible knowledge is needed to understand Christianity in a way that is absolutely necessary for modern humanity. And through this spiritual science one will be able to arrive at an understanding of Christianity that is appropriate for the modern human being. Those who speak of a hostility of spiritual science against Christianity, even if they are often the official representatives of Christianity, seem to me to be fainthearted, not as true understanders of Christianity. When I hear such faint-hearted representatives of Christianity, I always have to remember a Christian Catholic theologian, a friend of mine, who, in a speech about Galileo, as a professor of Christian said: No scientific knowledge can ever belittle Christianity, but the knowledge of the divine can only win if the knowledge of the world continues to progress and presents this divine in ever higher glory. Therefore, one should think highly of Christianity and say: It is so well founded that extra-spiritual and spiritual knowledge will enter humanity by the thousands. But we need a Christianity that intervenes in life, that does not limit itself to saying, “Lord, Lord!” but that lives out the power of the spiritual in outward action. And such a practical Christianity should live in that which is striven for through the threefold social organism.

The person who introduced what I had to say today with a few words said that I had already spoken in Holland in 1908 and 1913. At that time I could only speak of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as something that wants to come from one or more human souls to solve the questions of modern civilization.

But since that time, despite the bitter war years in between, a great deal has happened: since 1913, when we laid the foundation stone, the Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum, has been built in Dornach near Basel. This School of Spiritual Science is intended not only to serve abstract spiritual science, but also to fertilize all sciences through spiritual science. That is why, last fall, despite the fact that the Goetheanum is not yet finished and still needs a great deal before it is finished, we held the first course, and we will also hold a second course at Easter, which will be shorter. During the autumn courses, thirty prominent individuals have spoken, some of whom are scholars in their respective fields: mathematics, astronomy, physiology, biology, history, sociology, and jurisprudence. But practical people of life have spoken as well, people who are industrialists, people who are merchants; artists have spoken. As I said, thirty personalities have spoken, who have shown that what can be gained as spiritual knowledge can be carried into the individual sciences. It could be shown that this science does not thereby acquire a superstitious character, but rather a rational, an inner, spiritual character and thereby a true character of reality. And so we will try to work in this Goetheanum. This Goetheanum, when you will see it one day, is built in a new art form, a new art style. In the past, if a scientific centre was to be built, negotiations would have taken place with this or that architect as to whether it should be built in Greek, Gothic or Renaissance style. This could not be done by spiritual science, because it shapes out of itself what it recognizes as reality, not only in ideas, not only in laws of nature and of the spirit, but also in artistic form.

One would simply have committed a sin against one's own spiritual life if one had applied a foreign style, not the style that flows artistically from spiritual science itself, to this building. And so you see the attempt at a new architectural style embodied in Dornach, so that you can say to yourself when you enter the building: every column, every arch, every painting speaks to you the same spirit. Whether I stand at the podium and express the content of this spiritual science, or let the columns, the capitals or something else speak for me, they are different languages, but it is the same spirit that is to be expressed in all of this.

This is the answer that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to give to the great civilization questions of humanity. For the first of these civilization issues is the question of a real self-knowledge appropriate to the new times. This is gained by crossing the threshold in a new way, as I have described it, by gaining powers of knowledge through the developed ability to remember and the developed power of love to behold the eternal in human nature. And in this way one arrives at a new sense of what the human being actually is, one that is worthy of the human being. One approaches one's fellow human being in such a way that one respects in him that which is born of the spiritual world, that one sees in him a piece of this spiritual world. In this way, human life is ennobled anew in a moral sense, human interaction is ennobled by the spirit. This is the answer to the second question, the question of social interaction.

And the third great question of civilization in the present time is this: Man can know that in his deeds and actions here on earth, he is not merely the being that stands there and whose actions have a meaning only between birth and death. Rather, what I do on earth has a world significance; it is integrated into the whole world. By developing moral ideals in me, I develop something that has world significance.

Let me summarize: modern natural science separates the outer nature from the inner life of man. It sees in the development of the earth and the whole planetary system something that has emerged from a kind of primeval nebula. Man was also produced. But then, after some time, man will disappear. The earth will sink back into the sun as slag. A field of corpses will spread out. This is what natural science must say when it only looks at its own field. But from the human soul arise moral ideals. They are that which is most valuable in the human soul. The school of thought that has brought it to such a high level of sophistication knows no place for ideals. The ideals will disappear like smoke. Therefore, what is called the ideological world view has already taken shape in millions and millions of people. The modern proletariat speaks of custom, law, religion, and science and art as an ideology because the sense of the living spirit has been lost. If we come to recognize this living spirit, we will know that what lives in the human soul as moral ideals, as spiritual, is related to what is the germ in the plant. When what is a plant this year falls away, a new plant develops from the germ.

Thus, we know from spiritual scientific knowledge: the clouds, stars, mountains, springs, stones, plants, animals and the physical human being too, will disappear as the withered leaves fall off and decay from the plant. But just as a new germ comes out of the plant, so too, and not only for the next year but for an eternal future, that which rests as a germ in the human soul will come to life as moral ideals. And we can repeat the wonderful words of Christ:

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words” — that which we develop in the human soul as spiritual knowledge — “it will not pass away”.

We can speak of the fact that, once again, a unity stands before us: the passing physical world, the arising spiritual world. Man acquires world significance through this. His social life also acquires weight. And the empty solutions that so torment humanity today, that carry such heavy social storm clouds in the East, will disappear when the social question is made a world view question; when one tries to find the impulses for solving this social question also in what the human being can fathom within himself as a living spirit.

In this way, the modern questions of civilization will receive their impulses from spiritual science. We have already made educational attempts in this direction. In Stuttgart, Emil Molt founded the Freie Waldorfschule, which I run. It seeks to develop and bring to children, in an educational and artistic way, that which can be derived from living spiritual science.

In short, my dear audience, the task of reconciling religion, art and science, of introducing real science, real religion and real art into the most practical of lives, is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science feels called to do. The Goetheanum in Dornach was built for this purpose, to be a first place where such a science can be cultivated in free scientific, free spiritual life. In the beginning and up to the present stage, people willing to make sacrifices have ensured that the Goetheanum could be built; but as I said earlier, the Goetheanum is not yet finished. Its completion will depend on whether there are already enough people who understand the need for progress in this world; whether the Goetheanum remains a torso and humanity says: we do not want to reawaken the spirit, or whether, through understanding of the living spirit, its first home can be completed. Then others will follow. For this much is certain: in the long run, the cultivation of a knowledge of the living spirit will be necessary in modern civilization. For it is certain that even those people who hate the spirit as such, who regard spiritual research as something fantastic, even they need the spirit. The seeking souls need the spirit, and those who do not seek need it even more. And this fact cannot be eliminated. One will seek the spirit because, if one truly wants to be human, one needs the spirit.

Answering Questions

Question: Is it your intention to establish schools in different countries based on the model of the Waldorf School or should the Waldorf School remain as one?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, we would not be able to muster the necessary strength to establish the Waldorf School if we did not actually want such a school to be established wherever there are schools. Because the Waldorf school is not based on some quirk or personal agenda, but on what can be gained as the right pedagogical art from the knowledge of man, also the knowledge of the developing human being, the child, which can be gained through spiritual science. This means that an attempt has been made to fathom what one has to do with the child until it is an adult, so that body, soul and spirit develop in equal measure. Of course, I cannot develop the art and science of education on which the Waldorf school is based in a few words here; I will do that in other places in Holland, where I will speak about practical education and the art of living from the point of view of spiritual science. But if one is of course convinced that true, all-round educational theory can be found in this way, and if one has based the Waldorf School on this, then one cannot but intend to do at least as much as one can for the establishment of such schools. Now, of course, we are not yet allowed to do very much, because for the Waldorf School it is enough for the time being, but it is not enough for any other schools. And what is not enough, I may perhaps pose as a puzzle question this evening. You can easily imagine what is not enough at the moment. However, something else is not enough at the moment. When the Waldorf School was founded, it was necessary for me to hold a pedagogical seminar for the Waldorf teachers first. And so, in turn, the pedagogical must first be worked out from the spiritual scientific. All this could happen in the broadest circles throughout the civilized world, because the pedagogical question is primarily a question of civilization in the present day. If the civilized world were to come to the conclusion that something must be done for the education of the child.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, I said that we live in a world in which great social demands are made, but in which people's inner impulses and instincts are not particularly socially minded. We have to rely on the coming generation in many ways. And this coming generation, we must educate differently in a certain way, unlike the people who have led the world into the current catastrophes. We need a new education and, above all, we need to recognize that social people must be educated, that the general humanity of human nature must be brought out in the child.

If I may mention just one detail: in ordinary schools – and I am sure the Netherlands is no different in this respect – we find the examination system to be very strange. The Waldorf School has only existed for a year. We have thoroughly implemented it in the Waldorf School: we do not need exams, we have achieved something different. We have held conferences throughout the year that have had real psychological content. In a sense, each individual child became an object of study. We were able to study the largest classes. Strange things came to light. For example, it became clear what imponderables are at work. It was shown that a class looks quite different due to imponderable forces, where there are more girls than boys, than a class where the number of girls and boys is the same or where the majority are boys. All these things must be carefully studied. The old educators say that one should bring out what is right in the individuality of the child. But it is only through spiritual science that one will be able to recognize the individuality of the child. This changes from year to year, from month to month. One must become a careful observer of human beings. And instead of the certificates saying “almost satisfactory”, “almost sufficient”, which means nothing if you can't bring these things into concordance with the real individuality, instead of that we gave each child a real description of his or her nature, which can also be used, and a saying that was entirely from the soul of each individual child, which is a power saying, a motto for the child for the whole of the following school year. The child has a kind of mirror. And the children who receive these reports are most intensely happy about them, even if they have been criticized.

And we have experienced many things. When I repeatedly come to the school for inspections, not as a cliché but because it is part of a vibrant life, I quiz the children, and sometimes I ask them: Children, do you love your teachers? And you should see how, not as something learned, but wholeheartedly from the soul, the children answer with their “Yes”, even though they are not educated in a philistine way in some special philistine discipline, they are honest, so that they fully understand: You can only be educated in love. And so, for example, we achieved that the children, although they liked going on vacation, longed to be back at school. We were able to observe many interesting details. A boy who used to be a grumpy urchin and never wanted to kiss his mother gave his mother his first voluntary kiss on the day he was able to go back to school after the holidays, he was so happy. This shines a light into the whole imponderable life. We need something like this from the living spirit. Therefore, it seems to me to be a necessity that the ideas of the Waldorf school be understood in the broadest circles. If a world school association could be established, which consists almost entirely of consumers – that is, of those people who have children, and also those who have an interest in the development of future generations, because all people are actually interested in that – then such a world school association, which could be completely international, could establish such schools wherever possible. And that is actually the idea of the Waldorf school: to be a germ cell radiating forces of growth in all directions. The Waldorf school should be a model, although we should not try to make it as perfect as possible; things only reveal their true perfection when they are spread further. That is why I say: certainly, the Waldorf school should not be isolated; it does not arise from a single ideal, but from general world ideals. Therefore, the World School Association should establish as many schools as possible in the shortest time, even if we have to struggle with many old traditions.

Dear attendees! Anyone who speaks in all seriousness about a topic such as this evening's, or the one that I will discuss here in Utrecht on the 24th, must be aware that there are already numerous souls in the present who long for a new world view or at least for a new slant on the world view and on the way we live.

It can be said, however, that not all of the souls yearning for such a new direction in our present time are fully aware of it. Much of this yearning lies dormant in the depths of the human soul. But for those who can look at the soul life of the individual as well as at the social life of the present impartially, it is clear that there is a search, a serious search, going on in the present for such souls. And this search is basically connected with the great civilizational questions of our present time.

There are many such issues of civilization in the present day, but they can all be more or less mastered if they are viewed from two perspectives. One great riddle that has been dwelling in human souls for a long time – one might say – and which today already finds a very special revelation in these souls, comes from the scientific development of the last three to four centuries. This scientific development has brought humanity great, tremendous triumphs in the realm of knowledge, and provided remarkable insights. But for those who approach the results of this modern science with all their soul, especially with regard to soul and spiritual questions, understanding becomes clearer and clearer. I would like to make it clear from the outset so as not to be misunderstood: the spiritual science that is anthroposophically oriented – and that is what I mean here in giving my explanations – is fully grounded in the modern, scientific way of thinking. But we will see that precisely because it wants to be fully grounded in this way, it must go beyond what is usually considered the limits of this scientific way of thinking. Those who not only want external knowledge for some practical or other life tasks, but who want to gain something for the life of their soul and spirit from scientific insights, will indeed, if they are open enough to do so, gradually realize that the deeper one delves into these insights, the more they are actually riddles, the less they solve anything for us that wells up from the depths of the soul as the great existential questions of human life. On the contrary, these scientific insights teach us something quite different; they teach us to ask the questions that arise from the depths of our souls as human beings more deeply and more fundamentally. They teach us to pose more riddles than we posed before. For someone so unbiased, who lives with all his soul into these insights, there is no other way than to establish a relationship between what science has brought in the last three to four centuries and what is given in the old, traditional religions as a real spiritual upliftment, as a real spiritual content. Theoretically, one can discuss at length the question of whether religious life, a person's deepening of their religious life, should follow a path of its own alongside more recent scientific knowledge. The soul of man is one, and he cannot help it, when on the one hand he draws life-nourishment for the eternal destiny of his soul from religious foundations, and on the other hand he accepts what [the natural sciences] have to say to him, for example, about the structure of the heavenly building, about the development of organic living beings and the like. He cannot help but ask: How do the two relate to each other? We can say with our intellect: the two areas of life flow from different sources. However much we may declaim about how they flow from different sources, in our soul they flow together, and we must seek a balance. But in the search for this balance, new riddles arise, to which the man of the present day, when he really looks up to the general educational life, when he is immersed in this general educational life, is driven, which trouble him, which call for some other sources, from which a real unification of our whole soul life must flow.

And so we see that one of the most important questions of civilization today is actually an inner question of the soul. We have to come to terms with ourselves before we can meaningfully intervene in social life. We have to gain a certain inner strength. Therefore, all external questions of life, all questions of practical life, are fundamentally dependent on the questions of the human soul.

On the one hand, there are the great issues of civilization in the present. But from another side, too, life's riddles come to the contemporary, the modern human being. Scientific knowledge has not remained mere knowledge. They have intervened in practical life in a remarkable and admirable way. They have brought us modern technology, which we encounter at every turn in our external lives today, without which modern humanity can no longer really live. But here too, the modern results, the practical results of the scientific way of thinking, have not actually brought us solutions, but basically new, practical puzzles for life. Over the last two to three centuries, we have managed to create a complicated technology and a complicated human life that goes with it. We had to put people in large numbers at the machine, which is a result of the modern scientific way of thinking. We had to put humanity into the modern traffic conditions, which are a result of this very way of thinking. In the field of purely mechanical-machine work, even where the mechanical occurs in commerce, in world transport, in the world economy, the scientific way of thinking has proven fruitful. But in relation to the social way of thinking, in relation to the way people interact with each other as human beings, it has, so to speak, left everything behind. There is no need to study this theoretically; it can be seen in the convulsions of a social nature that are manifesting themselves in the present and that have a shockingly disturbing effect on humanity. You can see it in how little advice there is in humanity at first, these forces that gradually take on a terribly destructive character, a life-destroying character, in some way beneficial to humanity to guide and direct.

And so, especially with regard to the human, the moral, the soul-spiritual in the interaction between people, many puzzles have arisen in this modern, civilized life. And we are faced with the great soul question: How does modern insight unite with what the religious needs of humanity are? And we are faced with the great practical, social question of life: how do we bring such a direction into what has become mechanical-technical life, that in a sense that has grown out of modern thinking, human interaction is possible in such a way that all people perceive this relationship as leading to a dignified existence?

In short, we are faced with civilizational issues that require solutions and that run in the two currents mentioned. The anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, about which I would like to speak here today, first of all in terms of its insights, wants to approach precisely these riddle-like questions that come to modern man from the two sides just characterized. But it must do so in a way that is still unfamiliar to the broad masses of humanity, to the civilized world. It is therefore regarded as fantasy by one side; it is perhaps regarded as something even worse by the other. But we cannot advance in the evolution of humanity if we do not dare to express what in any age, because it is unfamiliar, will be fought against with extraordinary vehemence.

We see it in the souls that feel what I have just described in a particularly sharp way; they long, as it were, for a flood of knowledge from the supersensible, spiritual world into the human soul. And today such longing souls come up with many things that are, however, not compatible with our present-day civilized life. We see numerous souls looking to what was available to our ancestors in ancient times: a certain harmony between religious sentiment, artistic expression and scientific knowledge. Through its research into ancient times, external anthropological science also imparts to humanity today things that command great respect for these ancient cultures.

Some people look to the Orient, where the remnants of an ancient and original wisdom have been preserved in a decadent way. They want to have a sense of what once was. We see this emerging in numerous souls, but if we really want to understand the meaning of human development, we have to realize that we can understand such souls who long for something ancient or for what remains of something ancient in decadence, such as Indian mysticism or the like. We can understand such a yearning, but we have to say that it completely contradicts the meaning of the whole of human development. For this development is such that each age has its own character. And what was once in keeping with the drives and feelings of the human soul in ancient times is no longer so today.

However, we must also say something else. We must say: this urge for the old or this urge to warm up oriental wisdom also arises from a certain tiredness in the modern human soul. This weariness of the modern human soul announces itself in the fact that although a person may immerse themselves in what is centuries or millennia old tradition, or devote themselves to what are traditional external arrangements of practical life, within today's complicated life, it is difficult for him to muster the strength to unfold a creativity, an elementary creativity in the human soul, that is capable of bringing new spiritual forces from the depths of the soul to the surface of the soul, that is capable of giving new guidelines to practical social life. It is easy for the modern person to devote himself, but creation is far removed from his soul, which is fundamentally very tired. But it is precisely the creative powers of the human soul that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here seeks to address. For it believes that only through a new creation from the deepest, most elementary powers of the human soul can satisfaction come from what, in the manner characterized, is basically longed for by numerous people today from the great currents of civilization.

What spiritual science has to offer initially in terms of knowledge is, however, based entirely on the modern, scientific way of thinking. But at the same time, because it is based on this ground, it must go beyond this scientific way of thinking to the knowledge of a supersensible; while this scientific way of thinking only grasps the outer sense world and that which the mind can combine out of this sense world as abstract natural laws and the like with its means of knowledge, with its admittedly magnificent and admirable means of knowledge.

If I am to characterize the relationship between what I mean here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and this modern natural science, I would like to use a historical comparison. But I ask you not to count this comparison as immodesty. It is not meant that way. It is not a straightforward comparison that can be made today with spiritual science and the weak human power that corresponds to a great, powerful event, but rather with something that is also peculiar to this historical event: I am referring to the discovery of America. When Columbus set out to discover America, it was because he actually meant to cross the great ocean to reach what was already known to him from the other side, namely to reach India from the other side. So it was believed that one was heading for something already known. But on the way one found something unknown that had not been suspected.

This is basically the situation of the modern spiritual researcher. He wants to start from what modern life offers based on numerous scientific endeavors. He would like to venture out onto all the paths of research that are being taken in a conscientious and thoroughly methodical way in this modern scientific life. But on the way to this, he does not find what a large number of researchers basically think they are finding: a kind of knowledge that, although it is supposed to be distinguished from what we have around us in our sensory world by its smallness or the like, is still a kind of knowledge. Just as Columbus thought he was reaching India, that is, something familiar, so the researchers of the external sense realm want to discover atoms, molecules, ions, electrons and the like, which is nothing more than the smallest realization of what we already have in the sense world. And when we now look out into space with conscientious modern research methods, armed with all the admirable instruments that have been constructed, we also want to find nothing but what we already know here on earth. We construct the whole sky for ourselves out of the sensory elements that we already have on earth. One might expect this at first, and basically anyone who is not a dilettante in scientific life, but rather proceeds from the conscientious scientific life of the present, might expect something similar. But when he becomes very clear about what is actually available to him as a researcher, then he comes to something else. He may think he is coming to something familiar, to atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, but on the way he discovers something unknown, as unknown as America was to the Indian explorers. He discovers on the way, precisely by immersing himself in the thought processes, in the whole soul processes that he has to apply in scientific research, a previously unknown, supersensible world.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims to develop what one does inwardly in the soul through research in the clinic, in the laboratory, or at the observatory in a more refined and expanded way. By paying just the right amount of attention to this inner activity of the soul, it becomes clear that There it is the spirit, which, even if it adheres only to the external material, is active in you, especially in methodical research. And then, when one becomes aware of one's own activity in research, quite earnestly and as strongly as the human soul can, one gains the urge to further develop these soul powers that one carries within oneself, which are to be stimulated, as it were, by ordinary education. And then one comes to the spiritual scientific methods, of which I would like to give you a small indication here.

At the starting point of these spiritual scientific methods, however, there must be something that is also quite unfamiliar to today's humanity. That which I would call “intellectual modesty” must stand before the path of spiritual research. And again, I would like to explain what I mean by intellectual modesty by way of comparison. Imagine a five-year-old child, we give him a volume of Shakespeare in the hand, what will he do with it? It will tear him or play with him, but certainly it will not do that, what is appropriate for the band of Shakespeare. If the child has lived another ten to fifteen years, his soul forces will have developed so that it will do the right thing with this band of Shakespeare. We can say: What has been brought out of the most hidden depths of this child is what now enables him to do something quite different from what he was capable of earlier. If you want to become a spiritual researcher, you have to be able to say this with intellectual modesty: As an adult, you could face all of nature that surrounds us in the same way as the five-year-old child faces the volume of Shakespeare. might feel challenged to develop the soul forces further through their own use, just as the soul forces of the five-year-old child were gradually developed, whereby the child became something quite different from what it was before. Spiritual scientific research seeks to further develop methods such as those already begun in natural scientific research, only in a natural way. And this spiritual scientific research is not based on any external measures, it is based entirely on inner soul work. This inner soul work is certainly no easier to perform than the work in the laboratory, in the clinic or at the observatory. What I am about to describe to you as the inner soul path of the spiritual researcher requires years of inner effort for its real training, although one does not work with external tools or instruments, but only with the powers of the soul itself; and basically, these soul powers are already present in ordinary life, they just need to be further developed.

Today, humanity does not love to further develop such soul powers within itself. Precisely because of the modern path of development, people have come to no longer think as they did in certain ancient ages about human development. From one point of view, this is fully justified. But on the other hand, it is also the case that other views must take the place of those that are currently popular. It is precisely for this reason that many seeking souls today long unhistorically for a certain way in which our ancient ancestors came to their insights, because these ancestors saw something completely different in the path of knowledge than people today see in it.

In ancient times — I can only hint at this, you can already find more explanations in outer science today — in ancient times there were wisdom schools, which are also called mysteries. In these mysteries, a science that was directed more towards the intellect was not cultivated in the same way as it is today. Instead, a science was cultivated that spoke so intensely to the human soul that it into the depths of this soul, while at the same time releasing religious fervor from this soul, which so stimulated this soul that it received what it received as knowledge in artistic visions at the same time. Art, religion and science were one in these ancient mysteries. But in these ancient schools of wisdom, the attainment of higher knowledge was spoken of in such a way as to appeal to the whole person and not just to the head. And one spoke of something that is somewhat dangerous to speak of today, because one will be considered paradoxical or fanciful when speaking of it. They spoke of the fact that between what a person can know, feel and want in ordinary life and that to which his soul actually belongs as the supersensible, an abyss opens up between these two areas of outer and inner life; that this abyss can only be crossed by the human soul through overcoming, through inner struggles. They spoke of the threshold that separates ordinary life from the supersensible world, to which the soul actually belongs. And it was said that man is protected by the world powers from entering the realm of supersensible knowledge unprepared. It was not a mere personification, but a very real experience for the students of the old wisdom schools when they spoke of the Guardian of the Threshold. This Guardian of the Threshold had not been experienced if one did not want to cross the abyss between the sensual and the supersensible world. But one had to pass by him if one wanted to enter this supersensible world. He only became visible, so to speak, when one wanted to swing one's insights up to the supersensible regions of existence. But one should not and must not do that, the old wisdom teachers said, without the human being being prepared in a healthy way and without fulfilling other conditions.

For differently than we speak now, people in ancient times spoke of what actual human wisdom and human science is. They said: The unprepared person, when handed the science of the supersensible, becomes a source of temptation for him, not only to do good but also to do evil. Knowledge of the supernatural incites human desires that would otherwise remain silent and tamed by external morality. These desires can no longer be tamed by insight into the supernatural. That is why these ancient wisdom teachers demanded of their students that they undergo such a discipline of the will, such an education, that these instincts receded, that these instincts no longer spoke, so that these students listened to everything that the ancient wisdom teachers presented to them as pure morality by virtue of their natural authority. And they demanded strict obedience.

You see, this was a relationship between student and teacher that has been preserved in many ecclesiastical contexts. But you will also admit that modern life is such that people no longer want to have such a relationship in any area. We can look up with great respect and full understanding to those ancient times when certain commandments, strict commandments for ethics, morality, obedience, and religious respect were handed over to the student of science and wisdom – otherwise they were not handed over if they did not submit to these conditions. We can understand this in the past, but today we can no longer enter into such relationships with science and wisdom from our modern, humane circumstances. Those who want to revive the old wisdom of the East do not understand this. Today we need something different, and this is revealed to us from a fact that I will characterize in the following way.

First of all, I would like to ask why it was that the ancient teachers of wisdom subjected their students to such strict discipline, willpower, and will training before they handed down their knowledge and wisdom? The reason for this was that the state of mind of people in the distant past was quite different from that of our own. External history only gives us the outer appearance of human development. The fact that the human soul has indeed undergone tremendous metamorphoses over the course of time is something of which this external history tells us very little today. We do not need to go back to ancient India or other regions of the Orient; we only need to look back to the times of ancient Greece, perhaps to the somewhat earlier and middle periods of ancient Greece, and we find a very different state of mind in people. That which we call intellect, that to which we attach such great importance as our intellectual culture, was not yet developed as a separate faculty of the soul in these older people. In them, instincts, drives, volitional impulses, emotional stirrings, and emotional forces rose up from the depths of the soul and permeated abstract concepts. Cognition worked its way out of the full human being, not just out of the head. We can only begin to understand what knowledge was for the Greeks if we can enter into this origin of their knowledge from the full human being.

This has changed in our time. From the Galilean-Copernican world view and from everything that is connected with it in the modern conception of nature, intellectual life has developed one-sidedly for us.

Some of you will surely say: This intellectual life would not be as one-sided as I would like to present it. It is true that we experiment. We are dealing with external facts and with what they reveal, and not with the mere intellect. We observe conscientiously according to our methods in all realms of nature and in the rest of the world. We are not dealing with the mere intellect. Of course we experiment and observe, but in doing so we apply only our intellect to these experiments and observations. And we are intent on recognizing as science and human wisdom only that which is gained from the experiment and the observation by the intellect of such natural laws or historical laws that can be expressed in intellectual forms. Our entire disposition has become intellectualistic. In this way it differs from the old soul disposition.

This old soul disposition, it came - not merely concepts, not merely ideas, but feelings and soul content about the world itself - from the depths of the whole human organization. There was a world knowledge for the ancients when they set out on the path of knowledge at all. They felt so closely connected with nature that, by observing minerals, plants, and animals, and by observing the physical human being, they simultaneously observed something spiritual and soul-like everywhere. Today we call this animism, but we know very little about the essence of what we are dealing with. This essence consists in the fact that in ancient times, when man looked at the outer nature, he did not just have the dry outer sensory perception before him, but a spiritual essence came out of everything to meet him. He knew that lightning was intimately connected with what was going on inside himself. He knew that moving clouds were connected with what was going on inside himself. He felt that he belonged to the whole universe. He felt as a part of the universe as a finger would feel about me as a part of me, if it had a consciousness. From this sense of the world all ancient knowledge emerged. But this sense of the world was only present because the sense of self, even in the ancient Greeks, was not as developed as our sense of self. The sense of self was dull, and that is why the old wisdom teacher said: One must not simply introduce the students to a higher knowledge, for which a higher sense of self is absolutely necessary, because if they came to this knowledge unprepared, they would fall into a kind of mental powerlessness. This mental powerlessness should be combated through the discipline of the will, the education of the will.

What about us? Yes, we can see this best from the following: Today we are justifiably proud of what we know, for example, about the structure of the external world through the Copernican worldview. We now profess the view that the sun is at the center of our planetary system and that the earth moves at great speed around the sun. We call this the heliocentric worldview, in contrast to the worldview of the Middle Ages and antiquity, which had placed the Earth at the center of our planetary system, so that man felt on the firm ground of the Earth, resting in space and letting the Sun circle with the other planets around the Earth. But even from the external history one can see that what we today call the heliocentric worldview was not unknown to the ancients, that it was not unknown in the schools of wisdom. Today's world view does not speak of this. But if you just read Plutarch's account of the astronomical view of Aristarchus of Samos, centuries before the emergence of Christianity, you will see that Aristarchus of Samos proclaimed the heliocentric world view, that he placed the sun at the center of the planetary system, that he made the earth revolve around the sun. Aristarchus of Samos only proclaimed in a more outwardly perceptible way what had otherwise been proclaimed to the students in the wisdom schools, after they had first undergone the preparation. And many other things were taught there that, like the Copernican world view and the heliocentric solar system, are now part of our general education, things that we learn, so to speak, at elementary school as part of our general education.

Thus we can note the remarkable fact that the ancient teachers of wisdom only handed down to their pupils what is now part of our normal school education after the pupils had undergone a strict training of the will. They awakened in their pupils the consciousness that they had to cross the threshold to the spiritual world. After that, they imparted to them the things that are now part of our general education.

We stand, so to speak, beyond the threshold through the very ordinary human development. The sense of historical metamorphosis is that what was given to students in ancient times, for example, only after tremendous preparation, is learned by every child today. Every child is led beyond the threshold today, which the ancients described in the characterized way. Why is that? It is because, through human development, we in turn have a different inner soul disposition from that of the ancients. We are no longer exposed to the soul fainting and soul numbness that had to be feared in ancient times. For centuries, we have, as civilized humanity, undergone a strengthening, an invigoration, precisely of our self-awareness through intellectual education. This self-awareness cannot be diminished, paralyzed, or rendered powerless by our entering into the world, which for the ancients was the world beyond the threshold. It cannot. The ancients would have said something like this: If one wanted to convey to the unprepared human being the realization that the earth moves in space with great speed, he would feel as if he were losing the ground under his feet, he would have the mental and spiritual feeling of losing his footing, as if he were becoming dizzy in his existence.

That is not the case today. But we are facing something different instead. The knowledge of the world that the ancients had instinctively is lost to us today, because we recognize from the outer world of the senses what was only given to the ancients after long preparation. We are standing at a different threshold today. We are just learning from the conscientious natural scientist how we must speak of the “limits of knowledge”, of “ignorabimus”. We sense this limit of knowledge wherever this knowledge of nature has to be put into practice for the benefit of humanity. We sense it in modern medicine, where it is so difficult to build a bridge from pathology to the actual practice of healing. We sense it when we want to apply the results of our knowledge to social life. We sense these limits, they are there.

We feel we have been moved to a new threshold. The task of spiritual science is to cross this threshold in a way that is appropriate for modern man. Therefore, it starts from intellectual modesty in order to bring back to its measure that which has just become great in modern man, and to develop the human soul forces out of the full human being. Spiritual science takes as its starting point two soul powers that are well known in ordinary life, and develops them further. It begins with what we call the power of memory in ordinary life. What does this power of memory give us in our ordinary human existence? It conjures up from memory what we have experienced since our birth or a few years after, what we have been through. These appear before our soul in more or less faded images through memory. What happens in this life fades away. We know, and modern science characterizes it very clearly, that when this ability to remember is not intact, there is a serious inner soul disease. This coherent memory, reaching back to childhood, must be present in the human being.

The methods of spiritual science take this power of remembrance as their starting point. They develop this power of remembrance into something different, into something more highly developed, through what I have described in detail in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', in my 'Occult Science', in other of my writings, through what I call meditation or concentration. Here, however, I can only give a rough outline of what must actually happen to the soul in order to come to an immediate grasp of the supersensible world. Man must rest in a devoted way, rest energetically and patiently on ideas that are either recommended to him or that he prepares for himself by getting to know spiritual science. While otherwise the images flit past, he must, as memory becomes lasting, rest, and keep on resting, on clear images, and this he must do out of inner arbitrariness, out of complete inner composure — which must be as great as that which we develop in mathematical thinking — and this inner composure must be as great as that which we develop in mathematical thinking. Then, after some time, he will make a very definite discovery. He will feel that with his ordinary ability to remember, he is dependent on his organism. But if he further develops his ability to remember into a completely new soul power, then he is placed in a spiritual-soul activity in relation to which he is no longer dependent on his organism. He learns to understand what it means to think, feel, will or perform similar activities without the body providing the basis for it. He learns to unfold a soul life outside of his body.

I would like to characterize this soul life, which the human being gets to know as a spiritual researcher, in yet another way. We find that the ordinary life of a human being proceeds in such a way that it alternates between waking and sleeping. The human being goes through the states of falling asleep, sleeping and waking up. When falling asleep, consciousness is dulled. The human being is not aware of what he is going through between falling asleep and waking up because it is not shown by what pulses through the organism from the will. But what pulsates through the organism from the will, what the senses offer the human being in the way of perception, the spiritual researcher silences by immersing himself in self-made images. The content of the images is not important, but the immersion is, so that he feels the activity within him, which wells up from the depths of the soul through such resting on images, such lasting resting. He learns to be in a state in which one is otherwise only in sleep. But while one is unconscious in sleep, one is in a fully conscious state, in inner soul activity and soul activity. Only, this soul activity and soul activity does not refer, as the memory images of ordinary life, to things that we have gone through in the outer world and that now only arise from memory, but those images - I call them imaginations in the cited works — they can be immediately recognized as depicting a world that we have not lived through between birth and the present moment, but a world that is outside of us, just as colors and sounds are outside of us for the senses, just as warmth qualities are outside of us. We learn experientially that the spiritual world surrounds us; a spiritual world with real spiritual beings; that we are also in it in the time between falling asleep and waking up. But now we learn to look at it as a real world.

And by learning to see it in this way, we can broaden our view beyond life between birth and death. Let us learn to recognize at an elementary level how the life of sleep is nothing other than a separation of the spiritual soul from the physical body – not spatially, but dynamically. And how, when a person sleeps, there is a growing , there is an urge to return to the body. Through such inner vision, as it arises from the developed ability to remember, we learn to observe how sleep is nothing other than a separation of the spiritual soul from the physical body – not spatially, but dynamically. And we also learn to observe it in the times that preceded our birth, in which we lived in a spiritual-soul world from which we descended through birth, through conception into this physical-sensual world. We learn to distinguish between what lives in the soul as a mere desire to penetrate the body again, and the very different, stronger power that pervades the soul in the times when it is not yet conceived or born in a physical body, but which nevertheless tends to descend into the physical world in order to experience life between birth and death. Then we learn to recognize, as a development of what we have gained from the moment of falling asleep, what the soul experiences when it passes through the gate of death. We learn to recognize how this soul, because it is inwardly active, is driven precisely by the desire for the body lying in the bed; but as a result, its consciousness is extinguished. In death, consciousness is not extinguished, but remains. We learn to recognize that the extinction of consciousness in ordinary sleep comes from the fact that the bond between soul and body remains intact. When we learn to see through this, we also see through the mystery of death, just as we learn to see through the mystery of birth in the way indicated.

And so we learn to look at that which underlies us as human beings, as our eternal self, which passes through birth and death. We learn to recognize the inner strength of the human soul. We learn to recognize that which leads us through death. We learn to recognize that when the soul is led through death, at first it has no connection to a physical body, but that it receives this connection as a strength, so that it can descend to a new life. What we call 'repeated earthly lives' in spiritual science is not warmed-over oriental wisdom; it is drawn from the facts of spiritual life, which can be seen through in the present, and is scientifically extracted from them in the same way as other things are discovered by science. And anyone who says that such things are merely old wisdom, such as Gnostic or Oriental, or Indian wisdom, should just say: when we do geometry today, we are merely warming up the old Euclid. No, it is not just something historical that is brought out, but what is to be said about such things is brought out of original insights.

But then, when we get to know ourselves in this way, when we tap into the eternal of knowledge, then the eternal, the supersensible, the spiritual of the outer world also opens up to us. Then we will gain a different relationship to nature research than is otherwise possible for us in relation to today's civilizational spiritual current. What does the modern scientific world view give us – and if it is honest, it cannot give us anything else? Modern natural science, which must not be reproached for what I am about to characterize, can offer nothing else if it proceeds honestly and conscientiously. It can only give us a picture of external, natural, necessary events. It cannot help but look back to the times of the earth's formation, which it deduces from biological, astronomical, and other facts. At the starting point of this development, there is a nebulous world or something similar. Even if this is regarded as hypothetical today, science cannot arrive at anything other than the conclusion that man once formed out of purely external natural laws, which only imply an elementary necessity, but that the scene on which man forms will one day fall like a cinder into the sun, that everything that man experiences inwardly will be extinguished.

And so we get to know, alongside what an honest study of nature can offer us, how the moral world, ethical ideals, the whole spiritual and religious life, arises from within us . We feel it as the most valuable thing in us, but we cannot connect it to this outer world, because we find no connection between the moral in us and the physical-natural outside of us. If we want to remain on the ground of today's world view, we must regard them as two parallel worlds. But then the scientific world view asserts its persuasive power in such a way that it nevertheless predominates, that it nevertheless says: the ideals may be beautiful, they must be so, man must recognize them as valuable, but the world in which we live will one day be the great churchyard where the ideals that are now most valuable to us will be buried.

Through spiritual science, by looking into the transcendental world, by seeing the spiritual in every stone, in plants and animals, in clouds and springs, as it was revealed to the ancients; by developing the organs of the spiritual within himself, by learning to recognize himself as belonging to the spiritual world, he also comes to know the outer spiritual world in all of nature. But through this he can look back into distant times and say to himself: That which has come into being materially, in which you live today, has emerged from the spiritual, and that which you experience today as material will in turn be transformed into physical dross in the future; the physical dross will fall away, as the body falls away from the dying man. But just as the earthly-dying human soul enters the spiritual world, so that which lives in man, in humanity, will enter a spiritual world. The material world appears as a middle piece between one spiritual and another development. Man, however, belongs to the spiritual development of primeval times and he belongs to the future.

And today, when we see the interconnection of the world through spiritual science, through real knowledge of the supersensible, we can say: It is not true that what surrounds us as the material world has a future in the way that external science, if it is honest, must recognize. Rather, we have to say to ourselves: that which is external nature will fall away from that which is internal, and what human souls carry within themselves will leave the spiritual realm to which human beings belong, just as the body leaves the human soul. But that which lives in us today as moral ideals, as religious experiences, will have a future. One day it will break free from the earth, just as the individual human soul breaks free from the human body to find life and not death.

But when man learns to feel: That which is moral in him is like the germ of a plant; when the plant, when blossoms and leaves wither and dry up, the germ remains for the next year from the previous year's plant; we carry within us as a germ a distant future in which the earth will no longer be; when everything else by which we belong to the earth falls away from us; we carry our ideals, our fulfilled duties, we carry the social and religious life within us, which escapes from the earth with humanity. Let us consider what this means for the impulses that a person takes up for their social action. With such an awareness, they no longer stand in social life like a hermit on earth who can only think: I fulfill what is pleasant for me as a duty between birth and death, because the earth is only a body in space; it passes away. And when it has passed away materially, what is to become of ideals? If he remains true to natural science, if he does not claim to know from other sources what need not be united with natural science, then he will necessarily have to insert what ideals are into natural necessity. But thanks to spiritual science, his earthly consciousness is joined to the cosmic consciousness. This is the way to think about these things that the modern man needs.

Let us imagine today's social life. We make great social demands as today's humanity, but we have little social in our inner soul condition. We do not have social instincts, social drives. It is precisely because we do not have them that we demand so much from life on the outside. But everything that a person today feels as selfishness in relation to the social instincts is basically only an expression of the consciousness of the hermit on earth, as corresponds to the purely scientific view. If we learn to recognize that Everything you do for your neighbor or your fellow human beings, everything you do in the context of humanity, has a cosmic significance, a significance far beyond what it is for the day. If you link your earthly existence with your universal existence, you know that you are part of the universal existence, then social issues take on different impulses than they do today.

Therefore, it is indeed the case that something can be given to people from three sides through what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to develop. First of all, they are given a new understanding of the human being, an insight into the supersensible foundations of their existence. They are given self-knowledge in the true sense of the word. They can cross the threshold again. The limits of knowledge of nature can be crossed. He can again transcend himself; he can again enter into the world to which he belongs with his soul and spirit.

That is one thing: that the human being thereby gains inner support and security; that he does not sink into the abyss when he wants to acquire knowledge of the world, when he does not want to look at the unknown beyond the carpet of sensory perception. But when a person recognizes himself in this way, in his entire cosmic context, then he also encounters the other person with the respect that must arise when one knows: with every person there is a spiritual soul aspect. Our whole legal and constitutional life is placed on a different footing when we know that it only makes sense because it is the outer covering of that which is transplanted to earth from the spiritual realm of human souls, which we can also see through in terms of knowledge.

And the third thing is that human life takes on an immediate religious nuance, real brotherhood, because man behaves as we can understand the word, the wonderful word of Christ: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” So said the Being through whom the earth first received its meaning, without which it would have no meaning.

But it is true that this is the case with human ideals themselves. They germinate while the rest is ripe and withers all around. They are for the future. Everything that is lived out socially is basically the germ of future worlds; just as what surrounds us today as the natural world, as the material world, is the material expression of earlier moral worlds. If we see this clearly, we will be strengthened from three sides. And social life must also be transformed from within.

In 1913 and 1908, I spoke in Holland about spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy. At that time I could only point out what this spiritual science was striving for, but not in a sectarian way or with the will to found a new religion. No, that is not what spiritual science wants. It wants to be science, and precisely through its scientific nature, to lead to the true religion, which places the mystery of Golgotha at the center of earthly development, in the right way. I was able to point out at the time how something like a world view has emerged in many souls. Since then, however, something has been added. We were able to start building the Goetheanum, a Free University for Spiritual Science, in Dornach near Basel in 1913. However, this construction has presented many difficulties; in particular, the times of the world catastrophe have also brought difficult times for this construction. But we can say that this fall, despite the fact that the building is not yet finished and much remains to be done to complete it, we were able to hold a number of courses. These courses were intended to show how the fundamentals of what I have described to you today — but which you can find more details about in the books I have mentioned — can have a fertilizing effect on all sciences as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Thirty personalities have been involved in these Dornach Autumn Courses, experts in all fields of science, from mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, jurisprudence, history and sociology. Artists also contributed, shedding light on spiritual science from their art. Men of practical life, of industrial and commercial life, have contributed to show how, when thinking in terms of spiritual science, one does not become an impractical person, but how one becomes more practical than one can be through any other contemporary way of life.

Furthermore, in the spring of 1920, I was able to show doctors and medical students, some of whom are here in Holland, in a course how what can be called medicine in the true sense of the word, how medicine can be fertilized by this insight into the supersensible life. For we come to know the inner nature of the outer products of life in the various kingdoms only when we are also able to observe them from the supersensible side. And those people who may absorb what is initially given in the form of a worldview through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should at least make a little effort to inquire how one can speak with full knowledge of the subject to the experts; how one can speak from the individual fields of science without dilettantism and with full mastery of what modern science is, to the renewal of science, precisely to lead beyond those boundaries that are not felt theoretically as boundaries, but that are felt as boundaries, that show up as unsatisfactory, as insufficient in the practical way science works in life.

In the fall, we were then able to show how spiritual science can have a stimulating effect on the individual sciences and branches of practical life and art. And those who gathered in large numbers — more than a thousand people were present at the opening of these courses — were able to see what this Goetheanum itself represents as an external structure. Where else would one have built such a university? If one had needed a special building in which to pursue this or that spiritual life or to pursue science, one would have called upon an architect; one would have had a Greek, a Romanesque, a Gothic or a Renaissance building designed, or something else. That was not possible in Dornach with our free university, the Goetheanum. There, out of the same soul impulses that were to be spoken and researched there, one also had to build, sculpt and paint. And so one sees in this Goetheanum, which is admittedly a first attempt — the first lift cannot be anything else — a new architectural style. For that which is spiritual science is not a one-sided culture of the head, it is something that engages all branches of practical life. It is something that, without becoming didactic or pedagogical or symbolic or corny allegorical, will also inspire artistic creativity. What is proclaimed from the podium as spiritual science, what is communicated there in ideas, in thoughts, in scientific results, comes from the same source of soul life as the columns are built from, the ceiling is painted from, and the figures that are sculpted are created from. Sometimes we speak of the living spiritual life through words, at other times through the forms of architecture or sculpture or through painting and so on. Spiritual science is something that comes from the full human being, but through this it can also intervene in all branches of human life.

There have been many people willing to make sacrifices who have supported us so far that we have been able to take this project to the point it has reached so far. It is with a sense of melancholy that we realize how much remains to be done and how many people are needed who understand the matter if this building is to be completed. But we want what is meant by this building to speak urgently to the souls of men.

And we have not stopped at what the Dornach building merely is, but we have also moved on to practical institutions, especially in the field of education. And today I can only briefly mention this – I will be discussing on the 24th what practical institutions have emerged from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for practical life itself – I can only briefly mention that the Waldorf School has been founded in Stuttgart as a creation of Emil Molt, and that I am leading it according to the educational-didactic impulses that can flow from spiritual science. This Waldorf School, despite its short existence, has achieved successes in the educational and teaching fields, which I will also talk about on the 24th of the month. Then we proceeded to form what are purely practical institutions, economic institutions, out of the spirit of spiritual science. For it must be shown everywhere that spiritual science does not mean an unworldly, remote spiritual life to which one can ascend when one finds earthly life too bad. Rather, spiritual science is meant to permeate the spirit so that it can be carried into all material things, including economic material things, so that everything becomes spiritualized and thus truly practical. I will have more to say about this on the 24th of the month. Then I will speak about education and teaching issues and about practical life from the point of view of anthroposophical spiritual science.

Today I just wanted to discuss what the direction, the actual spirit and meaning of this spiritual science are, and how this spirit and meaning of spiritual science accommodates the searching souls of the present day. And however much this soul searching has been decried as fantasy, as folly , humanity will have to learn from the catastrophic events of the present, from all the things that so clearly express the mood of decline and fatigue today, from all the things that are heralding in modern civilization as that which leads modern civilization into decadence , from all this humanity will have to learn that the seeking souls are on the right path – and of these seeking souls, those who seek in the whole of the rest of the universe that which must be experienced there in the innermost being as the deepest and most significant; who seek the spirit in spirit. Because, dear attendees, no matter how much one may deny the spirit, in the end, through reaction, what must emerge from this denial is the conviction that humanity cannot be without spirit in the long run, because the innermost depths of the soul need the spirit! And that which the soul needs so much, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to seek, albeit today with weak forces.

Answering questions

Question: Is it really inhibiting to search for ancient wisdom in the sense of earlier times because we have become different people within the present civilization?

Rudolf Steiner: That is absolutely the case, my dear attendees. Today, there is indeed a widespread yearning for the renewal of ancient wisdom. When one stands before humanity with something like anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which draws from the very sources of today's soul life and, from an external point of view, arrives at many things that are similar to what was known to the ancients, people come and say, “Why not the old?” That many people cannot imagine anything different absolutely contradicts the meaning of human development.

Let us look at the matter from a point of view that can explain a lot: Suppose someone wanted to seek satisfaction for their soul without prejudice to what I have just said, simply by applying, say, ancient Indian wisdom in modern yoga philosophy or the content of Vedanta philosophy. What would happen to that soul? Something would arise that is simply not compatible with what this soul has become today, something that cannot be fully experienced by the soul of the modern human being. It is then the case that the person believes he has something to do with this old, warmed-up wisdom, but he does not get real soul content, but he gets a soul content that he cannot penetrate, and to which he actually only becomes intoxicated. We find such intoxication in people who unite in societies for the renewal of old wisdom. A certain inner untruthfulness then occurs in the soul. One believes to have something, but one cannot have it. And this inner dishonesty, even if it is not wanted at all, if it is striven for by the soul even in the most honest, consciously honest way, it still has a destructive effect on the soul life of the human being. It hollows out rather than filling it with a truly satisfying content.

One could also say that today, even if they do not participate in scientific life, people have already attained a certain kind of self-awareness through what they absorb at school. This self-awareness is dampened, tuned down, when one takes in an old world view, despite its beauty. One's consciousness is dampened and one does not arrive at a real understanding, but at a fantasizing, even if it sometimes looks more like dreaming. There is no reality in a soul that takes in something so old. These are things that can only be spoken from experience. Theoretically, one can of course believe that what was right for people in ancient times must still be right today. But I must say that it is rare to find the right understanding on this point.

I was once very pleased to be visited by an American clergyman in Berlin who had devoted much time to spiritual science. Unfortunately, he had already died, despite being still a young man, and so was torn away from his work in America. He addressed me immediately with the following words. He said: 'Today you speak of what you represent as anthroposophical spiritual science, what is in your books, for example in 'Geheimwissenschaft', in '' or otherwise in social views, of what is to come into the world as impulses. Do you believe that what you are giving now, in terms of content, as you are giving it now, must remain permanently?' I said, realizing very well that he was on the right track: “I don't think so. I am imbued with the recognition of human development that the spirit lives from eternity to eternity, but that what we express in our full humanity through the spirit, be it in religion, science or art, is in full development.” And so I believe that what I present as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is the right thing for the present time, but that it is precisely because of this that it will have changed completely after a relatively short time – times are moving ever faster, after all – and will undergo completely different metamorphoses. From this question I saw that I was understood by this American quite well. One must have this feeling about it; it lies in the development of humanity. Question: What reasons do you have for assuming that no more was taught in earlier schools than has become known today?

Rudolf Steiner: I did not say that. Much more was taught in earlier schools than is now known. I believe that even what I have said today about the teaching in the old schools is unknown in the widest circles. What is known today — mainly in the style —, in the present direction of the world view questions, that is general education today. That is the significant thing. I gave the example of the heliocentric world view; one could give many such examples. If we go back to ancient cultures, we find everywhere – although we first have to understand the languages of the ancient cultures and overcome the prejudice that primitive man made up some kind of world view and did not let his experiences speak – we find everywhere the content of ancient world views that commands respect, more and more respect. It is precisely by becoming acquainted with the old Chaldean ideas of the world and other blossoms of old mental states, the Indian, Egyptian, Greek worldviews in their true form, in their deeper, fully human impulses, that one gains great respect for the old. But then, as a spiritual researcher, one also becomes familiar with those soul experiences. It is really not the case that one produces things out of one's imagination. I must say that I began with some of the research that I am presenting today thirty to thirty-five years ago, and only in recent years have I dared to express these things because I have worked on them in the meantime. Everything I have said about the threefold human being in my book 'Von Seelenrätsel' (The Soul's Enigma) is based on thirty to thirty-five years of research. There one comes across many things, which are then indeed investigated in a modern way, and which are connected to the modern soul life, but which in a certain way were present in vague instincts in old wisdom that is no longer useful to us. Then a great respect arises for what the ancients have achieved in a completely different way, what we rediscover today, but what we must seek in a completely different way today.

And I would like to say: What the ancients have achieved by instinct, we have lost by instinct. But what they have achieved beyond the threshold is the result of our ordinary education. We must develop out of a developed consciousness what the ancients had as world knowledge from their instinctual life. These are deep connections. If we know how to read it, outer history speaks on every page, and we are not satisfied with just any old meanings of words.

For example, what Indian wisdom is, can be translated as Deussen translated it. But then those who receive such translations do not get any idea of this Indian wisdom. But you can also imbibe it with your mind, then you learn to recognize that in the old Indian schools of wisdom, based on the philosophy of yoga, things were found that we have to seek in a different way, and that is what matters. We learn to recognize how people said to themselves: If we start from our ordinary consciousness, we are not very connected to the world. But if we start from the things that give us more than sense perceptions, if we delve into the breathing process, then, by following breathing inwardly and organically, the meaning of the world becomes clear to us in a completely different way. This was then recorded, which was understood as the meaning of the world in this way. We can no longer renew these yoga schools, and if we do, we will stifle the organism. For what has been revealed to people is, in its main features, general human education today. We must do something else. We must deepen that which we have appropriated more completely than the ancients, the intellectual culture, so that we can plant the intellect in the life of the feelings and will impulses; in this way we can reach deeper into human nature and into nature itself. In this way we arrive at the spiritual. We have to go a different way, a way of soul and spirit. And only by knowing what the path of the Indian world view actually was, can we understand what is communicated in the scriptures. Then, whenever we discover a supersensible truth in some other way, we can understand it in its earlier form, although the reverse is not the case. From such insights arises what I have said about the relationship between what is today general human education and what the ancient students were initiated into.

It is not possible in a lecture, which has already lasted too long, to give more than the guidelines. In the literature, however, you will find that every assertion made in such a lecture has always been turned around in terms of its evidence, and that it is indeed the case that most of the objections raised by spiritual researchers have already been raised by them in the most diverse ways.

That is what I wanted to say about the justification of such a judgment as I have given. It is entirely possible to say, on the basis of the apologetic traditions, that it is as I have explained it using the example of Aristarchus of Samos and the heliocentric worldview.

Dear attendees,

Anyone who speaks on a topic such as this evening's topic and the one I will be speaking on the 27th of this month must be aware, especially with regard to the spiritual life of the present day, that there are numerous souls today who long for a new impetus, for a renewal and metamorphosis of of important parts of our entire civilizational life, out of many things that today clearly bear the hallmark that, if continued, would lead humanity into the decline of civilization, out of many things that have been the civilizing current for a century or two or more. We find this especially in those souls who are trying to look most deeply into their own inner being in the present. We can say that whatever needs to be said about the supersensible worlds can be spoken to every human soul at any time. It can be spoken, one might say, to the hermit who has withdrawn completely from the world and is only interested in his immediate surroundings; it can also be spoken to personalities who are fully involved in life. For what is at issue here is, after all, a thoroughly human matter.

But it is not from these points of view alone, dear ladies and gentlemen, that I would like to speak to you today and on the 27th, but rather from the point of view that arises when one allows the most important civilizational issues of the present to take effect on one's soul. And there, especially leading souls find much that shakes them to the core, that drives them in their innermost being to long for a renewal of certain parts of spiritual life.

If we survey the situation in which we find ourselves in the spiritual life of the present, I would say we can trace it back to two main questions. One of these questions is illuminated by the scientific life, by the form of scientific life that has been observed within the civilized world for three to four centuries. The other of these questions is illuminated directly by practical life, but also by that practical life that has experienced the deepest influences from modern science.

Let us first look at what modern science has brought forth. I would like to say, precisely in order to avoid being misunderstood, that what I am representing here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should by no means be opposed to the spirit of modern science. The great triumphs and significant results of this modern scientific spirit are to be fully recognized by the spiritual science meant here. But precisely because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to penetrate with an unbiased soul into the spirit of this science, it must go beyond what has become the object of a general human education from this scientific spirit. In its specific disciplines, this science provides precise and conscientious information about many aspects of the human environment. But when the human soul asks about its highest concerns, about its deepest, its eternal destiny, it cannot receive any information within the spirit of science, especially not when it consults with itself quite honestly and quite impartially. And so today we find numerous souls who, out of more or less religious needs, long for a renewal of old worldviews.

What is external science, in particular anthropological science, is already drawing attention to the fact that our ancestors centuries ago did not know what is dividing and fragmenting human souls today: a certain disharmony between scientific knowledge and religious feeling, religious longing. If we look back to ancient times, it was the same human beings who cultivated a science that seems childlike to us today, but only seems childlike, and who, from this science, at the same time kindled the religious spirit in humanity. There was no discord between these two currents of thought.

Many souls today long for something like this. But one cannot say that a renewal of ancient Chaldean, ancient Egyptian, ancient Indian or other wisdom teachings would bring a special blessing to the present age. Those who believe this do not understand the true spirit of human development. Human development is such that each age has a special character, that in each age human souls want to be satisfied by something different. And what our souls need, simply by virtue of the fact that we live in the 20th century and have received our education from the 20th century, must be something different from what people of a distant past needed for their souls. Therefore, a renewal of old worldviews cannot serve the present. But one can orient oneself to what those old worldviews were. We will then see what actually gave rise to the satisfaction that human souls experienced within those old worldviews. We have to admit that the satisfaction for human souls in those days arose from the fact that they basically had a completely different relationship to scientific knowledge than we have today.

I would like to draw your attention to a phenomenon, my dear audience. If you point it out today, you are very easily accused of paradox or fantasy. But there is much that needs to be said that, just a few years ago, would have been considered highly dangerous for general education. After all, the last catastrophic years have at least brought about a change in the way we think and feel. And today, souls are better prepared than they were even ten years ago for the fact that the deepest truths may nevertheless initially appear paradoxical and fantastic to our habitual ways of thinking and feeling.

In ancient times, people spoke of something that, in view of scientific knowledge, is hardly questioned today, but which people will speak of again, probably also in the context of general education, in a relatively short time: of the Guardian of the Threshold, of the from the ordinary world in which we live in everyday life, in which we live with ordinary science, to that higher world in which man can recognize how he himself, with his supersensible, inner being, belongs to a supersensible world. Between these two worlds, the world that man perceives with his senses, the facts of which he can combine with his mind into natural laws, and the world to which man belongs with his actual being, one saw an abyss in those ancient times. One first had to cross this abyss. Within the old civilizations, only those who had been intensively prepared by the directors of the educational institutions of those days, which we now call 'mysteries', were allowed to cross this abyss. Today, we have different views on how to prepare for science and for a life of scientific research. In those ancient times, it was said that an unprepared person should not be allowed to receive higher knowledge about the nature of man at all. Why did they say this?

The reason for this can only be understood by someone who, going beyond ordinary historical knowledge, gains an insight into what the human soul has gone through in the course of human development. Today, we only have a knowledge of the externalities of human development. No attention is paid to the state of the soul. For example, no attention is paid to the state of the soul of people who have stood in the ancient oriental wisdom, of which only decadent forms still live in the Orient today. Basically, people have no idea how different the souls were in the world in those days. People in those days, just like us, saw the nature around them with their senses; they also combined in a certain way what they saw of nature with their minds. But they did not feel as separate from the nature around them as people today feel. They felt a spiritual soul within themselves. They felt that the human physical organization was filled with a spiritual soul. But they also felt a spiritual soul in lightning and thunder, in the passing clouds, in minerals, in plants, and in animals. They felt that which they suspected within themselves also outside in nature, in the whole universe. The whole universe was permeated by spiritual soul for them.

But they lacked something that we humans have today within our state of mind: they did not have such a pronounced, intense self-awareness as we do. Their self-awareness was duller, more dreamy than ours today. This was still the case even in Greek times. One can only understand later Greek culture if one imagines the souls of people in the Greek era as being in the same state as our souls. In earlier Greek culture, there can be no question of a state of soul such as ours. There was still a vague sense within nature. I would say: just as if my finger had a consciousness and then felt itself as one with my entire organism, as it could not conceive of itself as being separated from my organism, without which it would die, so man felt himself within the whole of nature, [unseparated] from it.

And those ancient sages who were the leaders of those schools of which I have spoken, they said to themselves: This is the moral in human self-awareness. But this self-awareness must not look at the world in such a way that it appears to be spiritless, soulless. If this state of mind were to face a world that is more spiritually empty – a world, I might add, that we perceive in our science, in our everyday life – then the souls of human beings would be overcome by a spiritual powerlessness.

This mental fainting was recognized by the ancient wisdom teachers in those people who were to arrive at such a world view as we have. Yes, can it be said at all that these ancient wisdom teachers said to themselves that souls should not arrive at such a world view as we say we have today? Yes, that can be said. And I would like to give you an example of this. Many examples could be cited, but I will highlight just one.

Dear participants, today we are justifiably satisfied that we no longer view the external and spatial structure of the world in a medieval way, based only on outward appearances. We stand on the standpoint of the Copernican world view, which is a heliocentric one. The medieval man believed that the Earth was at the center of the planetary system, and indeed of the entire star system, and that the sun and the other stars moved around the Earth. The heliocentric solar system brought about a complete reversal of all relationships, and today we hold fast to this reversal as something that we already absorb in our ordinary school education, in which we are immersed with all our education. We look back at the people of the Middle Ages, we look back at the people of ancient times, who in their Ptolemaic world system saw that which I have just characterized, the geocentric. But by no means did all people in those ancient times accept only the geocentric world system. We need only read Plutarch's account of the world system of an ancient Greek wise man of the pre-Christian era, Aristarchus of Samos. Aristarchus of Samos already places the sun at the center of our planetary system; he has the earth revolve around the sun. And if we take, not in the details, about which recent natural science has brought so much, but in the main features, the heliocentric system of Aristarchus of Samos, then it basically completely agrees with the one that is ours today.

What do we actually have here? Well, the world system that Aristarchus of Samos merely revealed was the one taught in the ancient schools of wisdom. Outwardly, people were left with the world system of appearances. Why was that so? Why were they allowed to keep this world picture of appearances? Well, it was said: Before a person can advance to this heliocentric world system, he must first cross the threshold to a different world than the one in which he lives. In his ordinary life, he is protected by the invisible Guardian of the Threshold, under whom these ancients imagined a very real, albeit supersensible being. He is protected from suddenly opening his eyes as if he were seeing the world, dead, de-spirited. For it is in a dead and spiritless way that we see the world today. We look at it and form our view of nature through the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and we see it as dead and spiritless. When we form ideas about the path and movements of the heavenly bodies at the observatory with the help of a telescope and calculations, we see the world as dead and spiritless. The ancient wisdom teachers of the mysteries knew that the world could also be seen in this way. They conveyed these insights after the preparation, after they had led their students past the Guardian of the Threshold, but they prepared the students through strict training of the will. How was this willpower given to the students? By leading the students through privations, but also by encouraging them for many years to strictly obey the pure morals prescribed to them by the wisdom teachers. The will had to be strictly disciplined, and this willpower was to strengthen self-awareness. And when the disciples had progressed from a dreamy, dull self-awareness to a more intense self-awareness, only then were they shown what lay beyond the threshold for them: the world that, in the heliocentric system, represents outer space. But they were also shown many other things that we now recognize as the content of our everyday worldview.

So it was that the pupils of those ancient times were first prepared, carefully prepared, before they were taught what, so to speak, every schoolboy and schoolgirl today absorbs. So times change, so do civilizations. One simply gets a false idea of the development of humanity if one only knows the outer history, not this history of the human soul.

What had the students of the old wisdom schools brought with them to the threshold of the supersensible world? They had brought with them an instinctive knowledge of the world, which arose, as it were, from the instincts, from the drives of their bodies. Through these, they saw — today we call this animism — everything outside as ensouled and spiritualized. They felt the kinship of man with the world. They felt their spirit within the spirit of the world. But to see the world here as we learn to see it today, already in elementary school, these ancients had to be prepared.

Dearly beloved attendees, in all the various types of literature that amateurishly tackle mysticism, even if they sometimes give the impression of being scholarly, there is a lot of talk about the Guardian of the Threshold, about the threshold into the spiritual world. And they are often believed all the more, the more nebulous mysticism one pours out about these things.

What I have presented to you now is what arises for the unbiased spiritual researcher precisely through what the ancients called the threshold into the spiritual world. Not those nebulous things, of which some orders and some sects and the like speak today, were sought beyond the threshold, but precisely that which is general education with us today. But at the same time we see from this that we face the world with a different self-awareness. The old wisdom teachers feared that their students, if they had not first strengthened their self-confidence through self-discipline, would have become mentally impotent if, for example, they had adopted the idea: The earth does not stand still, but circles around the sun at great speed; one circles around the sun with the earth. This loss of ground under their feet would have been unbearable for the ancients, it would have dampened their self-confidence to the point of unconsciousness. We learn to endure this from childhood on. We live, as it were, in the world as our world of education, into which the ancients had to penetrate only after careful preparation.

Nevertheless, we should not long for the conditions of ancient civilizations. They no longer fit with what nourishes our souls today. What I am presenting to you today as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is neither a renewal of old Gnostic teachings nor an ancient oriental wisdom, which could only be brought to human souls today as something decadent. It is something that can be found today through elementary creative power from this human soul, in the ways that I will explain in a moment. But first, I would like to point out that in a sense we can also speak of a threshold into the supersensible world, or in any case into a world other than that of ordinary life and ordinary science.

The ancients suspected a different world from the one presented to them in their everyday life beyond the threshold. But what do we hear from our conscientious natural scientists, from those who are most right in terms of their methods? We hear that natural science presents us with limits to knowledge. We hear about “ignorabimus” and the like, and, it must be emphasized, within natural science with full justification. If the ancients lacked the intense self-awareness that we have today, then we lack something else.

Where did we get this intense self-awareness in the first place? We got it from the fact that the way of thinking and the way of looking at things that began with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Giordano Bruno and so on came into humanity. As a result, we have not only gained a sum of knowledge, but modern humanity has also undergone a certain education of its soul life. Everything that we have developed under the influence of the way of thinking of these minds in modern times tends to cultivate the intellect, the powers of reason. Of course, today we experiment in science, we observe carefully and conscientiously. We observe the phenomena around us with our instruments, with the telescope, the microscope, with X-rays, with the spectroscope, and we use our intellect, so to speak, only to extract the laws of nature from the phenomena. But despite all this, what are we doing when we observe, when we experiment? We are doing it in such a way that within this work of knowledge we only let the intellect speak in formulating the laws of nature. And it is also the case that, in the course of the last three, four, five hundred years, it is primarily the intellect that has been emphasized in human development. But the mind has the peculiarity of strengthening, hardening and intensifying human self-awareness.

Therefore, today we can endure what even the ancient Greeks could not have endured: the awareness that we move with the earth in the bottomless, as it were, around the sun. But on the other hand, precisely because of this strengthened self-awareness, which shows us the world as soulless and spiritless, we are led to lack a realization that souls must nevertheless long for: We see the world in its material phenomena, its material facts, as they have never been seen by ancient people without a preparation of the mysteries. But we do not see - and that is why conscientious naturalists speak of ignorabimus and of the limits of knowledge - we do not see the world of a spiritual around us.

We stand as human beings in this world. When we reflect on ourselves, we have to say to ourselves: it is the spirit that is active in us simply by thinking about things, by summarizing the experiments, by summarizing the observations. But is this spirit the same as the hermit who stands in a world of material appearances? Is this spirit only present in our body? Is the world spiritless and soulless, as we have to understand it from the point of view of the physical and biological sciences, and rightly so? Today we stand before our environment. We are standing on the threshold of a new era. This has certainly not yet dawned on the broadest sections of humanity. But what humanity does not fully realize is not completely extinguished in the soul. One does not think about things, but inwardly these things sit as feelings of the soul. We have an unconscious soul life. For most people it remains unconscious. But out of this unconsciousness arises the longing to cross a threshold again, to gain spiritual knowledge of the world through self-awareness.

Now, whatever else one may call these things, which one usually feels only unclearly, they are in truth, from one side, the deepest riddle of civilization; they are such that people feel that a spiritual world around them must be found again. The world of ordinary science, devoid of spirit and soul, cannot be the one with which the human soul also forms a unity in its deepest essence. This is the first great civilizational question of the present: How do we again find knowledge that at the same time deepens our religious feeling? How do we find knowledge that at the same time satisfies the deepest needs for a sense of the eternal in the human soul?

It can be said that this modern science has brought great and powerful things, but for the unbiased person it has not actually brought solutions, but rather, one might say, the opposite of solutions. And we should be satisfied and glad about that too. What can we do with modern science? Can we solve the questions of the soul? No, but we can ask them in greater depth! Through this modern science, we have before us the world of material facts in their purity, free from what the human being brings into the world of soulfulness and spirituality from his or her subjectivity. We see, so to speak, the pure phenomena of the external material world. Through this, we get to know the questions of the soul more intensely. This is precisely the achievement of the modern spirit of science: it has brought us new riddles, deeper riddles. This is the first great question of civilization in the present time: How do we face these deeper riddles? One cannot solve the great soul questions in the Haeckelian, Huxleyan, Spencerian spirit, but one can, in this spirit, feel the great riddle questions for the existence of humanity today more intensely than ever before.

This is where spiritual science comes in. Its aim is to guide humanity today, in accordance with its nature, over the renewed threshold into a spiritual world. And the way by which modern man can cross the threshold differently from the ancient man, it is to be described here today in outline. I can only do this in brief strokes. What I only want to explain in principle can be found in more detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” and in other writings.

I would first like to draw attention to the starting point that a person who wants to become a spiritual researcher must take today. He must start from a point that, due to the whole of our time, people today are least willing to accept. It is the point in the soul's makeup that I would like to call intellectual modesty. Although we have developed intellectually to a height never before seen in human development as humanity to a particular height in the last three to four centuries, as a spiritual researcher one must rise precisely to intellectual modesty.

I would like to illustrate what I mean by comparing it. Let us take a five-year-old child and give him a volume of Shakespeare. What would he do with it? He will play with it, leaf through it, tear it up; he will not do what is appropriate with it. But when the child has lived for another ten or fifteen years, he will relate to the volume of Shakespeare quite differently. What has happened? Well, abilities that were inherent in the child have been developed in the child through external intervention by people, through education and teaching. It has become a different being in the course of ten to fifteen years. Intellectual modesty allows the person to say, even when he is an adult, when he has absorbed the current education in science intellectually: you could face nature and the environment in such a way that your approach could be compared to that of a five-year-old child facing Shakespeare's works. There could still be potential in you that can be further developed, so that you become a different being in terms of soul and spirit.

People today are not very keen on adopting the point of view of such intellectual modesty. Our habits of thinking and feeling towards the life of education are different. Those who have received the usual education today are then accepted into our higher educational institutions. There, one no longer has to deal with the development of knowledge, willpower, and the abilities of the soul. Basically, one remains within the scientific research at the point of view that inheritance and ordinary education give. Certainly, observation was broadened in an incredible way through experiment and science, but the same powers of cognition were applied that one has once in so-called modern intellectual life. One did not aim at developing one's human being to bring these powers of cognition further. One did not say to oneself: the person who has these powers of knowledge of life or science could stand opposite nature as a five-year-old child stands opposite Shakespeare's works, and he could develop powers and abilities of knowledge within himself that would lead him to a completely different behavior towards nature. But this is said by someone who, in the sense of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here, wants to become a researcher in the supersensible worlds. This is really about the development of human abilities that initially only exist in the Anlagen, albeit in every human being, but in order for them to be developed, a great deal has to be gone through.

I am not talking, dear listeners, about some kind of miraculous or even superstitious measures for the human soul, but rather about the development of abilities that every person is well acquainted with, that play a major role in everyday life and in ordinary science; they are just not developed to their full potential for the human being between birth and death.

There are many such abilities, but today I would like to characterize only two in their further development. You can find more details about this in the books mentioned. First of all, there is the ability to remember. This ability to remember is absolutely necessary for everyday life. We know, and those who are particularly interested in such things will know from the psycho-pathological literature, what it means for a healthy mental life that the memory is intact up to a point in childhood that lies quite early; that there is no period in life from which memory images do not emerge, bringing to mind the experiences we have gone through. If that which memory is extinguishes, then the human ego is destroyed; a severe mental illness has come over him. Now, what memory gives us is a re-emergence in pale or vivid images. It is precisely this ability, this power, that can be further developed. What is its peculiarity? Well, otherwise the experiences flit past us. The images we form of these experiences also flit past our soul. Memory retains them. I can only speak about this memory in sketchy terms; in my literature you will find a developed science precisely about this ability to remember.

What memory does with the otherwise fleeting images is that it gives them duration. This is what one first takes up and develops in the spiritual scientific method; one develops it through what I call meditation and concentration in the books mentioned. This consists of either seeking advice from someone who has experience in these matters or gleaning the advice oneself from the relevant literature, and of taking easily comprehensible complexes of images such as are geometric or mathematical figures, which one completely overlooks, knowing that these are not reminiscences from life emerging from the subconscious, but everything one has in consciousness is there through one's own arbitrariness in consciousness. One is not subject to auto-suggestion or reverie; one surveys that which one brings into the center of consciousness. Then one remains in consciousness for a long time with complete inner calm on this idea. Just as muscles develop when they perform a particular kind of work, so certain soul powers develop when the soul devotes itself to this unusual activity of remaining on such ideas. It looks easy, and not only do some believe that the spiritual scientist draws what he has to say from some kind of influence, but some also believe that what I am describing here as methods that take place in the inner, intimate life of the soul itself is easy. No, what I am telling you now also requires a long time; some people can do it more easily, others more difficultly. The depth of the performance is much more important than the length of time spent in such meditation.

But one must do such exercises for years. And what one has to accomplish within the soul is truly no easier than what one accomplishes in the laboratory, in the physics room, or at the observatory. Outward research is no more difficult to acquire than that which is carefully and conscientiously cultivated in the soul over many years. But then certain inner soul powers, which we otherwise only know as powers of remembrance, become stronger, and thus something arises in us as soul power that we have not known at all before. This enables us to clearly recognize what materialism says about the power of memory and remembrance. Materialism tells us that the human being's power of remembrance is bound to the material body; if something in the nervous system is not properly constituted, then the power of remembrance also declines, and it declines with age. In any case, mental powers depend on physical development. Spiritual science does not deny this for the life between birth and death. For someone who is developing his memory as I have just described it knows from direct experience how the ordinary memory, which conjures up images of our experiences before our soul, is dependent on the human body. But what he is now developing becomes completely independent of the human body. And the human being experiences how one can live in a soul realm, so that one has supersensible experiences in this soul realm, just as one has sensory experiences in the physical body. I would like to explain to you how these supersensible experiences are in the following way.

You know that human life alternates rhythmically between waking and sleeping. The moments of falling asleep and waking up and the intervening period of sleep occur in our waking life. What happens then? The following is present for the ordinary consciousness: when we fall asleep, our consciousness is dulled, and in most people it reaches absolute zero. Dreams sometimes bubble up out of this half-dulled consciousness. In this state, the person is indeed alive; otherwise he would have to pass away and be reborn, in a soul-spiritual sense, but his consciousness is paralyzed. This is because from falling asleep until waking up, the human being does not use his senses, does not use the impulses that represent his organic will impulses.

But the one who has developed the higher ability out of the ability to remember, which I have just mentioned, can switch off precisely the same. Such a spiritual researcher comes to the point where he no longer needs to see with his eyes, as one does not see with one's eyes when asleep; nor to hear with his ears, as one also does not hear with one's ears when asleep; nor to feel the warmth in the surroundings, nor to use the will impulses that work through the muscles, or through the human organization in general. He can shut out all physical things. And yet his consciousness is not dulled as it is when asleep, but he is able to devote himself to states in which otherwise a person is only in sleep, but unconscious; the spiritual researcher is fully conscious. Just as the sleeping person is surrounded by a dark world that contains nothing for him, so the spiritual researcher is surrounded by a world that has nothing to do with our sensual world, but which is just as full and intense as our sensual world. We face our sensory world through our senses; the spiritual researcher faces the supersensible world when he can consciously free himself from the body, when he is in a state that is otherwise experienced by a person between falling asleep and waking up; but he is fully aware in this state.

In this way, one learns to recognize that a supersensible world constantly surrounds us, just as a sensual world otherwise surrounds us. However, there is one significant difference: in the sensual world, we perceive facts through our senses, and within the facts, we also perceive entities. Facts predominate, and entities arise in the course of these facts. In the supersensible world that we open up for ourselves in this way, we first encounter entities. When we open our spiritual eyes to see the supersensible world, we are surrounded by real entities. And at first it is a world of very concrete, real, supersensible entities in which we are, not yet a world of facts; we still have to conquer that through something else.

So this is the achievement of modern anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: that the human being crosses a threshold again and learns to enter a different world from the one that otherwise surrounds him. And when a person learns to recognize how he is independent of the body, then he finally comes to say to himself: Not only when the soul falls asleep does it, as it were, separate itself from the body and then return to the body when it wakes up; through the desire for the body lying in bed, it returns. Through such supersensible knowledge one also comes to really get to know the essence of the soul, how it returns to the body through this desire when waking up. But if you acquire such real concepts of falling asleep and waking up, these concepts will eventually expand to include learning to recognize the human soul in its essence, as it was before it descended from the spiritual worlds through birth or conception into a physical body that is given to it through inheritance.

Once you have grasped and learned to follow the soul outside the body between falling asleep and waking up, just as you learn to recognize the lesser forces that draw the soul to the body in bed, you learn to recognize the soul as it lives when it is freed from the body after passing through the gate of death. In particular, the following ideas are recorded: One learns to recognize why the human soul has only a duller consciousness during sleep. It has this because the desire for the body lives in it. This desire for the body dulls consciousness between falling asleep and waking up to the point of unconsciousness. When a person passes through the gate of death, this desire no longer exists. And by getting to know the soul through the developed ability to remember, one gets to know it precisely in the state in which it develops after passing through the gateway of death; how it can then have consciousness because it is not bound to a physical body, because it no longer has any desire for one. This freedom from desire makes consciousness possible.

When a person passes through the gateway of death, he acquires a different consciousness from the one he had through the instrumentality of the body. In this way one also learns to recognize what forces were in the soul that attracted it to a physical body when it was in a spiritual world, but to a physical body that only generally shone before it as a physical body, which was not a specific one. One learns to recognize the soul as it absorbs the desire to come down again into physical life on earth. In other words, one first gets to know the eternal part of the human soul in its true meaning.

And that, dear listeners, is one thing that one gets to know in this way. But one also gets to know something else through it. By learning to recognize the eternal in the human soul that passes through births and deaths in images, I call them imaginations in my books, one learns to recognize that this human soul belongs to a supersensible world; that the soul belongs to a supersensible world just as the body belongs to the sensual world. And just as one can describe this sensual world through the body, so one can describe the supersensible world in its spirituality. One learns to recognize a supersensible world in addition to the sensual world.

However, one must be willing to develop a second soul quality, beyond that which is present in ordinary life. Today's scientist recoils at the mere mention of this quality as an intellectual capacity. One can fully appreciate the reasons why he does this; but nevertheless, what I have to tell you about the further development of this human soul ability is true.

The first power that had to be developed was the ability to remember, which becomes an independent force. The second power is the power of human love. In ordinary life between birth and death, love works through the physical organism; it is intimately connected with the instincts and drives of human nature. And only in the most sublime moments does some of this love detach itself from the physical. Then man has that uplifting moment when he becomes free from himself, which is the state of true freedom, where man does not give himself over to his instincts, but forgets himself, where he bases his actions on external facts, on the necessity of those facts. Because love is inwardly connected with freedom, I dared to say as early as 1893 in my Philosophy of Freedom, by which I wanted to found a philosophy of sociology for the present day, that true love does not make man blind, but rather seeing, that is, free. It leads him beyond that which otherwise blinds him when he is dependent on what is within him. Love allows us to be devoted to the outside world, and in so doing frees us from that which we must be freed from if we are to act freely.

But this love, which only shines into our ordinary life in truly free actions, must be cultivated by the modern spiritual researcher. Love must gradually spiritualize in the same way as the faculty of memory must spiritualize; it must become a power that is purely soul-life, and which makes him, as a soul-being, independent of the body, so that he can love without the body, through its blood, through its entire organization, providing the basis for this love. This is how immersion in the external world, in people, comes about; this is how you become one with the external world.

This developed power of love now brings us a second thing; it puts us into the spiritual world in a substantial way, which we enter through the developed ability to remember. And we now get to know spiritual facts and learn to describe the world in such a way that we do not merely say how our present planetary system once emerged from some old nebulous world, which will then in turn either disperse or fall into the sun. We do not look at such a world, which is alien to the spirit, and which is confronted by something else. And if a person is honest, they must feel that this world, as viewed scientifically, is confronted by the most valuable thing in the human being. In modern spiritual life, we have been able to get to know the besieged souls who tell us again and again: Science tells us about a world of pure natural necessity, that our world comes from worlds that were fog worlds, that clumped together into the four natural kingdoms, the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, up to man. But now, in the depths of his being, something arises in man to which he must attach the greatest value: his moral, his religious world. This stands before his soul, and it is what actually makes him human in the first place. But he must say to himself, if he is honest with regard to the purely scientific world view: This earth, on which you stand like a hermit of the universe with your moral ideals, will disintegrate, will fall back into the sun, will become a slag. There will be a large churchyard, the ideals will be buried.

This is where spiritual science comes in. It does not approach this situation from the standpoint of faith and hope, but from real knowledge, which is developed in the way I have indicated, and says: No, the mere scientific world view offers an abstraction of the world. This world is permeated with spirit, this world is permeated with supersensible entities. And if we look back to prehistoric times, what is material on earth has emerged from the spiritual; and what is material now will become spiritual in the future. Just as man discards his body and enters a spiritual world spiritually with consciousness, so that which is material on earth will fall away like a corpse, and that which is spiritual-soul on earth, that which is spiritual-soul in man, will arise in the future, even when the earth has perished. One could say that the Christian saying “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” proves true here with a certain variation. Man can say: Everything my eyes see will perish, just as the human body perishes in the face of human individuality. But what lives in man as morality rises from what is perishing. Man senses a spiritual world around him; he lives into a spiritual world.

In this way, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science deepens our knowledge of the spiritual, and in doing so, it takes on a different form from that of external science in relation to the civilizational needs of the present. External science can in turn deepen knowledge and insight to religious fervor and higher consciousness. It gives the human being a spiritual self-awareness.

This is basically the first great civilizational question of the present day. If a person does not have the right inner support, if he feels like he is floating in the void as a mere material being, he cannot develop a strong inner being, nor can he appear as a strong being in social life. Man must create what external institutions are, man must create what external social conditions are. There is something significant about external institutions and external social conditions in terms of the great civilizational questions of the present and the future, and these civilizational questions lead us back to the search for the great, true consciousness of humanity. For only people who have such inner support, which can give them peace of mind, will be able to integrate themselves properly into social life. That is the first question: how can a person with inner support, with a secure hold on life, integrate themselves into our social conditions? The second is what we might call the encounter between people, human interaction. And here we enter a field where, no less than in the field of knowledge, modern civilization has brought man not new solutions but new riddles. Consider only the breadth of technology, of technical life, that the achievements of modern natural science have brought. Technical life, commercial life, life of intercourse, as they surround us from hour to hour today, they are the achievements of this magnificent, modern view of nature. But what we have not found within modern technology, what is posed as a new vital question, is: How should people live in this complicated technical, commercial and transport life?

This question is posed by modern civilization itself. That it has not yet been solved is shown by those terrible movements that present themselves all the worse the further east we go, into Asia, where human instincts are not used to create something upward, but, because the great civilizing questions have not been solved, are used to create something destructive. Undoubtedly, the whole of modern civilization would have to perish through what is emerging in the East. Much more terrible than people in the West imagine is what is lurking there to lead to the decline

of modern civilization. But it also testifies to how necessary it is to find something else to solve the civilizational issues of the present.

We must not only work in modern technology, which has emerged from the modern view of nature, but we must also gain another possibility: Man has become estranged from nature; he has been placed, practically speaking, with his actions and his whole occupation in a soulless, mechanistic way; he has been led from dealing with nature to dealing with the spiritless machine, with the spiritless mechanism of traffic; and we must find ways to give man something again that he can feel as something given by nature. It must be a world view that speaks to his soul with great power and tells him that man is something more than what he experiences here; that he belongs to a spiritual-soul, a supersensible world that surrounds him and can be explored in an exact science, just as the outer science is that leads to technology. But only such a science will also be able to establish the right relationship between people. Such a science will enable us to encounter a being in man that not only appears to us as it comes to us, as it appears between birth and death, but in such a way that we learn to respect the eternal, the immortal, the connection with a supersensible world forever. Through such a deepened knowledge, the feeling must change from person to person.

And a third thing is also important. It is important that the human being learns again that his life is not exhausted with the life between birth and death, as the modern proletarian believes from his ideology called ideology, but that what we do here in every moment has not only an earthly but also a cosmic significance. For indeed, when the earth has perished, what we bring out of our souls into our daily work, out of moral, spiritual and soul foundations, will arise in another world; it will take part in spiritualization in the metamorphosis.

Thus, spiritual science as anthroposophically oriented approaches the questions of the present in three ways. It brings people to a spiritual self-awareness. It brings people to see in their fellow human beings, in their neighbor, a spiritual being in turn. It brings people to give their work, their earthly activities, a cosmic, universal, spiritual meaning, however material they may be.

Spiritual science today not only has theoretical views about what can be worked out in this way, but has already begun to apply it in practice in life. In Stuttgart, we have the Waldorf School, which was founded by Emil Molt and which I am in charge of, and where a pedagogy, a didactics, is being developed through the knowledge of human nature that can be obtained through spiritual science, as it is meant here. Furthermore, in Dornach near Basel, we have the Goetheanum, a Free University for Spiritual Science, the construction of which I will show you in a few days with the help of slides. This Goetheanum in Dornach is not yet finished, but we were able to hold a large number of courses in the unfinished building last fall. I have also been able to speak here in Holland about spiritual science in the past. At that time I could only speak of spiritual science as a form of research, a research tendency, as something that lives in individual human beings.

Since then, this spiritual science has taken on a different form. It has begun to establish its own School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. Last spring I myself showed how what I have only outlined for you today in its beginning as spiritual scientific research can be applied to all fields of science in its execution. I showed physicians and medical students how what can be gained from this spiritual science in a strictly exact method can have an effect on medicine and therapy. Those questions in medicine that become borderline questions are juxtaposed with the health issues of humanity. Every conscientious doctor will perceive those practical questions of medicine as cultural issues. These questions are the ones that remain unanswered today because today's science does not want to rise from the sensory to the spiritual and supersensory.

How medicine can be fertilized, how all sciences can be fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, experts from all fields, from jurisprudence, mathematics, history, sociology, biology, physics, chemistry, pedagogy, tried to show it. Then there were also personalities who belong to the arts, to artistic creation, who showed how artistic creation can be fertilized by spiritual science. There were representatives of practical life, of commercial and industrial life, who showed how their lives, guided by spiritual science, are no longer merely caught up in the old routine that led us into the catastrophes, but how, through it, the human being is brought into life practice in a higher sense. This is precisely what these courses should show: how spiritual science does not want to cultivate some kind of dilettantism, some nebulous mysticism, but how it can fruitfully intervene in the individual sciences. But in doing so, it simultaneously elevates what is in these sciences to an overall spiritual and supersensible conception of the human being.

I will have more to say about the practical side here; then I will speak about teaching and educational issues and about the social question. Then you will see how the spiritual science meant here, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, does not seek some nebulous mysticism in a sphere that is alien to life, but how it wants to grasp the spirit for other reasons: firstly, because the human being must become aware of his connection with the true spiritual origin; secondly, however, because the spirit wants to intervene precisely in the material, in the practical life, as it makes a distinction between the spiritless practical life and a spirit conceived in terms of a lack of life, which certainly does not grasp the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, nor that which is most necessary for the present.

Dear attendees, we have found people who have an understanding of what is to be achieved in the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach for the development of humanity, and how necessary it is in the face of the great civilizational issues of the present day that this be achieved. The difficult circumstances have slowed down the construction very much. We are not yet finished, and completion will depend to a large extent on whether people who have a heart and mind for all the human progress that is needed today will continue to come to our aid. In its unfinished state, we gathered more than a thousand people at the opening of our courses. Those who come to this Dornach after this — as will also be shown in the next lecture — will see that at the same time this spiritual science wants to work out of the full humanity: that it does not just want to speak to the human head, that it not only wants to gain that which can be presented through experimentation and observation, but that at the same time it strives for truly artistic expression, without falling back on straw-like symbolism or abstract, pedantic allegories. Therefore, not just any architectural style could be applied in Dornach – as the slide lecture will show – but the architectural style had to be drawn from the same sources from which this spiritual science itself flows. It is not a one-sided science such as today's experimental and observational sciences, but seeks to draw from the full human being. It wants to speak to the full, whole human being, despite the fact that it is as exact as any science can be.

I will still have to talk about the practical implementation, but today I had to present the results of the spiritual research on these matters, in order to then show in the practical areas how necessary this is for our time, which is based on the observation of the history of this period by this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It aims to add to the conscientious and methodical study of the material world, which it recognizes more than any other spiritual direction, the science of the spirit, which in turn can lead to religious deepening and to artistic creativity, just as the old instinctive science, which we can no longer renew, led to art and religion in the mysteries.

That this spiritual science is not opposed to religion and Christianity, I will have to show in the further explanation of the practical side. It strives for that which every true, religious deepening has to strive for, it strives for the spirit. Hence we have hope: all those people who today still resist this spiritual science will come round to it in the end, because this spiritual science strives for something universally human: it strives for the spirit, and for humanity, it needs the spirit.

Dear attendees! First of all, I would like to express my sincere thanks to the esteemed board for their kind invitation, and in particular to Professor Hallo for the kind words he has just spoken. I have all the more reason to do so because it may seem understandable that everything one is able to say today about a question that touches humanity so deeply, as is the case with my topic today, can only be an attempt, perhaps even just the beginning of an attempt. And the appeal is necessary to understanding and sympathetic humanity.

This brings me immediately to the point where the remarks I have to make to you today differ in principle from all similar discussions that have taken place so frequently in recent times on economic issues in the narrower sense, and on social issues in the broader sense. We have had enough of utopias and utopian constructs. They have emerged from the legitimate foundations of modern human endeavor.

Modern technology has complicated economic life and has brought the whole of social life into extraordinarily diverse new circumstances compared to those to which humanity was accustomed in the past. And so the opinion arose in a great many minds that one could say dogmatically in some way how this more complicated modern social life should be shaped so that every human being, including the broad masses, would be able to lead a dignified existence. But it must be said that anyone who today believes that they can make an impression on their fellow human beings with utopian, dogmatic definitions of social conditions does not understand the basic nature of today's civilization, of today's human life.

Let us assume, dear attendees, that someone could ingeniously devise some economic or social system, or even construct one dogmatically from a broad life experience, if he were to hold it up to humanity, he would not be able to make any impression with the most ingenious arguments, which would be held in this sense. Because we live in a time when the prophets should actually be extinct. We live in a time when people are not inclined to accept anything on authority or on the basis of prophecy. Anyone who takes something seriously and honestly, such as the social question or the reorganization of the present and future economic life, must take this into account.

People today are of the opinion that they themselves must find the guidelines for life. They are of the opinion that they must shape what they determine to be the goals of life out of their own elementary soul and organic powers. In this, I would say most universally democratic point of view, stands what I call the impulse for the threefold social order. This impulse is not intended to say that economic or other social conditions should be shaped in this or that way; it is only intended to point out how people can be brought into a position where they want to shape their lives according to the demands of the present, the demands of their own soul, regardless of whether they consciously or unconsciously strive for them.

The impulse for the threefold social order appeals to the human being, not to a description of any institutions or conditions. It wants to call upon the human being and first hear from the human being what this human being considers appropriate. But this impulse will say how the situation can be brought about in which people are given the opportunity to actively shape their own destiny. Thus, the impulse for the threefold social order wants to work entirely from the habits and aspirations of present-day life, without any utopian nuances, purely from practical life. It does, however, start from two premises. The first, which probably few people would admit to at first, but which emerges from what I will be obliged to characterize at least to some extent in a moment, it emerges from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

It is the conviction that human development goes through meaningful epochs, so that one can look back, for the time being, only at historical times. One sees that there have been different epochs of human development, and in each such epoch, humanity goes through a phase of its being, a phase of its soul and spiritual constitution. What has occurred in one epoch can no longer be repeated in a later one. What earthly humanity has to go through in the course of time through its development thus arises in the course of successive epochs as various missions.

In our epoch, which in this respect has lasted three to four centuries – what has now slowly been preparing has reached a certain culmination – in our epoch we see, welling up from the depths of the human soul, what I would call the democratic urge that runs through the entire modern, civilized world. But I do not mean the triviality that is very often associated with this term; I mean, when I say “democratic urge”, the form of human self-awareness that is developing in our era, through which every human being wants to find within themselves the source for a convincing spiritual life — life of knowledge, life of faith, life of art — welling up from within himself, and in which every human being wants to develop out of himself those feelings through which he relates to his fellow human beings, without this relationship being firmly determined by authority. The human being wants to find their relationship to their fellow human beings from their own free will. And in relation to economic life, the human being wants to come to conditions that enable them to have these foundations of soul and spiritual life in such a way that the democratic impulse can be lived out in the highest sense of the word. In earlier epochs, such a democratic impulse was not present universally within human development. Principles of authority dominated social organisms. And only around the middle of the fifteenth century did the ground slowly begin to prepare for what then came, so to speak, to a grandiose outburst at the end of the eighteenth century and to a culmination in our time, where it wriggles out from civilized humanity through convulsions, through severe trials, through misery and hardship, even through something like the terrible catastrophe we went through in the second decade of the 20th century.

This is one of the things that the person who comes to the impulse of the threefold social organism looks at. He asks himself: What is the most important historical characteristic in the present human being? And the other thing that serves as a starting point for the threefold social organism, I can only characterize it by becoming personal in a certain respect.

I can say that for decades I have observed European economic life, European state life and European intellectual life from different perspectives. For thirty years I have lived in Austria, the experimental country for such observations; in that Austria, where it was shown, especially in its downfall, how the external circumstances were not suitable for solving the great questions of contemporary existence in any way. These and many other conditions of the entire civilization of Europe show that, everywhere in the depths of human souls (one cannot always speak of consciousness, because much still lives in the unconscious or subconscious of most souls today), there is an instinct that a new order must come about. And what I am presenting as the threefold social order is not something I have thought up, least of all fantasized. It is, in a sense, a reading of what could be observed by acquiring an unbiased sense of the economic, constitutional and spiritual development of the present and the last decades. And so what I have to present is the result of observation and experience.

If you take what has been brought into the world in the direction of social and economic issues, up to Karl Marx and those who came later, you will find everywhere that these are logically linked systems. A great deal of ingenuity has been expended. But what humanity needs today is not a logically constructed social system, it is rather something that is as manifold as reality itself. Reality presents itself to us in such a way that what is formed in it could also be different. And if it were different, one would not even be able to say that it is more imperfect. Reality is not unambiguous. Therefore, anyone who speaks about social conditions based on reality cannot speak with the same unambiguousness that is often demanded based on certain dogmatic prejudices. Therefore, my dear attendees, some of what I have to say will give rise to one objection or another, just as one or the other can be objected to in reality itself. But such objections are not important. What is important is whether what one proposes in social terms has the power to sustain life, whether it has the strength to carry us through the present and into the near future.

Today I am speaking to you about economic life in the narrower sense, from the point of view of the threefold social order. But I would not be able to do that if I did not also present you with at least a rough sketch of the nature of this threefold social organism and also of the nature of the starting point of that which underlies what I would like to give as a certain characteristic of economic life, namely anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

When anthroposophy is mentioned, it is easy to imagine something mystical, vague, distant and unworldly. People are accustomed to identifying anthroposophy with such movements when they consider all kinds of sectarian, mystical-theosophical and similar movements. If you identify anthroposophy with such movements, you will misunderstand it completely. Anthroposophy is based on the same starting points as the modern scientific way of thinking, this scientific way of thinking that has brought us such tremendous insights into the external world, that has basically created all modern technology, and that has transformed our social life to such an extent. But just as it is true that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science fully recognizes the great significance of science and modern technology, so it cannot, for that very reason, stop at the methods that science has developed. Starting from these methods, it must develop spiritual scientific methods in order to penetrate from the physical world into a superphysical world. For everything that surrounds us in the physical world is rooted in the superphysical world. A person only becomes aware of this when he develops other cognitive powers, in addition to those he has through ordinary inheritance, through ordinary child and school education, and through academic life and so on, which, so to speak, do not come into play in ordinary life and ordinary science, and which initially remain latent in the human soul life.

Certain higher powers of knowledge are brought out of the human soul through very specific methods, methods of a proper meditation and concentration permeated by a spirit of mathematization, through methods of a proper schooling, which I have described in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science”, “A Path to Self-Knowledge”. In my books “The Riddle of Man” and “The Riddle of Souls” I have called these higher powers of knowledge “eyes of the spirit” and “ears of the spirit” in the sense of Goethe's world view. Just as our physical organization develops physical eyes and physical ears in us, we can indeed develop spiritual organs that do not sit partially somewhere, but engage the whole person, working from within the fullness of humanity. We can train such spiritual organs and become aware of a supersensible world around us, just as we perceive the physical world around us through our physical organs and through the mind, which is connected to our brain and which combines physical phenomena. And just as we follow the development of the universe through ordinary natural science by looking back to the first physical states and trying to understand how individual beings have developed up to the point of man, so through spiritual science we arrive at the spiritual foundations and starting points of the universe and the spiritual goals of this universe. In this way, two parts of our spiritual life are joined together into a unity, which modern spiritual life has tragically torn apart for man.

My dear attendees, anyone who, like me, has met those individuals who not only live in the theoretical sense in the knowledge of modern times, but with their whole being, their whole mind, knows what tragedy can play out in the soul of those who take the achievements of modern knowledge, which are to be fully recognized, seriously and honestly. You see, I have met people who said to themselves: 'There I look out into a world of mere natural necessities. Man also comes from this world of mere natural necessities. But something sprouts up in this human interior through which man can truly find himself valuable in life. These are the moral ideals, these are the religious feelings, these are the artistic perceptions of the universe, these are all the things we call right, custom and so on. But then such honest people say to themselves: All this arises from a powerful illusion, from a great deception, like smoke and mist from the depths of the human soul. For in reality, man is an external physical organism that has emerged from the universe only through natural necessity. One must look at how this universe will one day arrive in a state of heat death or the like, and how the great cemetery of all ideals, all moral life, all that appears to man as if it were only giving him a dignified existence, will have disappeared and been extinguished.

But anyone who has seen human beings suffer under this effect of the modern world view on the human mind knows what it means for spiritual science to make a unity out of what lives in the human soul as moral ideals, as religious impulses, as artistic perceptions, and what is out there in nature. Today I can only sketch this out; in my books, which I just mentioned, you will find the above substantiated and proven. But I would like to make myself clear with a comparison: we see a plant, it grows out of the ground. As it grows out of the ground, it unfolds leaves and flowers; but then it also unfolds the germ in the flower, which is already the plant for a new plant next year. The germ is inconspicuous, but it is the germ for an entire plant next year, while the leaves and flowers wither and fall off. This is the case in the universe before the knowledge of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. There we see the outer universe with the natural laws that govern it, right down to the law of the conservation of energy and matter. We see it in the sense of this spiritual science as that which withers, dies, and perishes in death. And we see in the human being the moral ideals, the religious impulses, and the artistic perceptions, and we know that these are the seeds for future worlds. That which we see around us today as nature is the result of the moral experiences of beings from a very distant past. What we carry within us as spiritual worlds is the germ for physical worlds of a distant future.

As I said, I can only sketch this out now. I do this for the reason that I can point to what spiritual science, by developing the spirit of natural science, can provide for humanity as a worldview. There we learn to recognize the living spirit again. There one learns to recognize the difference between the conviction that says: I approach the real, actual spirit of the world through spiritual science; I learn to recognize: not only thoughts and ideas live in me, but living spiritual beings live in my thoughts and ideas. One learns to recognize the living spirit again. The old religions, by merely continuing to live traditionally, have lost the great meaning they once had. We need creativity in the human soul in order to gain access to a spiritual life that works in such elementary ways. In contrast to this, the spiritual life that has developed over the last few centuries is an abstract, theoretical one. We experiment, we observe, we use wonderfully ingenious tools and instruments to explore the physical environment and its laws. But all that we explore is only something that gives us abstract concepts and theories, which we may then apply, but which does not fill us inwardly with a living spirit. So that we can say: we do not merely think in thoughts, we do not merely live in images, but as human beings walk around here on earth, supersensible worlds live in us through their spiritual beings, just as the three kingdoms of nature live in our physical organism.

What the threefold social order has to say about the various areas of social life also stems from this real grasp of the spiritual world. For it is the economic questions that are at the root of the social question today. And if one has come to know this social question not from the outside but from the inside, then one must think about it somewhat differently than is generally the case today. For many years I taught at a workers' education school, where I taught a wide range of subjects to proletarians, people who wanted to satisfy their strong urge for education. But it was also possible for me to get to know the proletarian soul, and at the bottom of the proletarian soul to recognize what wells up from the broad masses of the people as the actual foundations and fundamental difficulties of today's economic problem. Time and again, when talking to thousands upon thousands of people – and these days there are millions of people who have not come to know the proletariat and therefore have no idea of the real issues – one hears the same word over and over again: the word 'ideology'.

The word 'ideology' has become popular among the broad masses today. What does it mean? It means that today these broad masses, who have stood at the modern machine, who have been woven into the fabric of modern technology, have been alienated from the joy of the immediate products of labor , that these broad masses have adopted a deeply internal conviction that only the external, material, economic processes, as people express themselves, the production processes, the modes and types of production, actually have a reality. What man stands in as in material production, that is the actual reality, and what he develops as custom, as law, as religion, as science, as art, is only what people call a superstructure, that is, something that arises as an ideology, as smoke and fog, from the only reality, which is material reality.

Those who belong to the educated classes still have old traditions or at least live in a life that is still dominated by old traditions, by religious traditions, artistic traditions and so on. The broad masses of the people have said goodbye to these traditions. The broad masses have taken on board as their innermost conviction what is a theory of the other classes. One can have such a thing as a conviction, one can even defend it, one can cite all sorts of logical reasons for it, but one cannot live with it. And that one cannot live with it in the deepest part of one's soul can be seen by anyone who has been in contact with these people for years, especially as their teacher. It deserts the soul, it empties the soul when it regards spiritual life as an ideology.

Truly, the leading circles, by having also alienated themselves from the living spiritual life, have made what can become spiritual experience into mere theory, mere abstraction, mere head culture. The modern worker wants to fill the whole person with it, and as a result he remains afflicted with a barrenness of soul. The origin of modern economic difficulties must be sought in this state of mind, which the modern proletarian has inherited from the intellectual life of the ruling classes, in this spiritual barrenness. These economic difficulties do not lie in external institutions, they lie in the mental state of the broadest sections of modern humanity, sections numbering millions, as just outlined and characterized: ideology instead of a living intellectual life.

We must then look for the causes of how it actually came about that ideology could take the place of a living spiritual life in social life as well. And here we come to something that may still be perceived as a paradox today, because people do not realize that what is fully justified for one epoch of humanity cannot also be for all epochs of humanity.

When this modern life emerged, from the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth century, there were already individual states, state structures, that had formed from different prerequisites within modern civilization. These state structures gradually took over all tasks of human development. We know, of course, how educational life was dependent on the denominations in ancient times. The state structures rightly took over the schooling, the educating, the educational life from the denominations. They could not remain with the denominations. For this it was necessary that what school and educational life is was incorporated into the framework of the state. And another urge developed; because one actually only had this social framework of the modern state, the urge also developed, as modern economic conditions became more and more complicated under the influence of triumphant technology, to gradually have economic life also more and more encompassed by state principles and state forces.

And so the three areas of human development were made into an external, abstract unity. In a certain way, it was beneficial that this unity came about, but on the other hand, we are now at the historical point in time where the three different areas of human social life are breaking away from this unity, demanding that they receive their own administration that follows from their essence.

Let us first take spiritual life, as I have characterized it, as it wants to emerge anew from the creative sources of the human soul through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This spiritual life can only develop if it can independently administer itself on its own ground, if it does not receive its guidelines from any state measures, from any state administration. These matters, ladies and gentlemen, can easily be challenged on logical grounds. But for anyone who can immerse themselves in the particular structure of intellectual life, it is clear that intellectual life, that which is creative in it, that which brings its own character to the surface, can only develop if the educational life is educational and school system is put on a firm footing; if this spiritual life, namely the most important link in this spiritual life, the public education and school system, is designed in such a way that those who are teaching, instructing and educating in it are also the administrators. They should devote only as much time to education and teaching as is necessary to enable them to administer the education and teaching system itself, in accordance with the same principles as those they teach by the hour. Intellectual life, education and teaching must not be dependent on any external norm. For the interference of an external norm kills that which must be in every educator and teacher: direct responsibility not to a state, not to an economic power, but to the supersensible spiritual life itself.

If each person feels responsible as an individual of humanity towards spiritual life in its essence, then we have a living spiritual life. To shape this living spiritual life, it is necessary that this spiritual life receives its own administration. It will be able to establish its own validity. One only has to emancipate this spiritual life from state and economic life, give it its own administration, and one will see that, because one needs the abilities of capable people, one will also recognize these abilities. And in the same moment in which a person's position in the spiritual life is not determined by external laws and administrative measures, but rather by the fact that a person works out of his or her individuality according to his or her abilities in the free spiritual life, in that same moment there will also be the free recognition of human abilities with regard to the spiritual life.

And basically, one can only get an idea of such a spiritual life from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Abstract spiritual life is alienated from the world. The spiritual life that we cultivate at the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum is a spiritual knowledge that approaches the whole human being, that is not a cerebral culture, but that can be said to develop the human being right down to their manual dexterity. I would just like to mention briefly that last fall, at the Goetheanum, we held courses for the School for Spiritual Science, in which thirty personalities participated: scholars, artists, business people, and industrialists who wanted to show how anthroposophical spiritual science can be applied to the whole human being and to all of life. Theoretical and abstract spiritual life does not reach into the muscles and dexterity; it must first acquire routine. A living spiritual life reaches into manual dexterity, into the muscles and nerve formations.

Therefore, a free spiritual life, which from this perspective is the basis of the rest of the social order, will be able to embrace not those unworldly teacher-natures who are often to be blamed for this, because they are, after all, the result of human conditions in the present, but rather people of life. And it is precisely out of this attitude that practical insights into life, everything that is directly related to everyday life, will be recognized and developed from the spiritual life in the same way that philosophy or basic religious conviction is developed. For in such a spiritual life all material and all spiritual is one, and the spirit has the right power in man only when it does not close man off from material life, but when it gives man the ability to intervene in material life in practically every field. We must not withdraw into a nebulous, mystical spiritual life, but let the spirit permeate us, so that precisely the external, physical reality can be spiritualized.

We need this spiritual life as the basis of a healthy economic life. For this spiritual life will in turn embrace man. It will not, as the so-called spiritual life of the last three to four centuries has done, bring the broad masses what is only a dull, deadening ideology, but it will give them a sense of their human dignity. Then it will be possible to work with them. For the social and economic question can only be solved from the human soul, from human knowledge, human feelings and convictions and will impulses. We must find access to the souls of working people. We will not find this access if we continue to talk to them about our sciences as we have talked to them so far, and if we talk about social conditions in the way that these sciences have taught us to talk about them so far.

Thus I have described the first link in the threefold social organism: the independent spiritual life, which is placed in the administration of those who are spiritually creative, namely those who educate and teach. This is, so to speak, on one wing of the modern social organism. On the other wing is economic life. This economic life is fundamentally different from the spiritual life. What does a person in the spiritual life strive for? He strives to come out of his soul to an understanding of the harmony of life. Even the simplest person must have a certain totality of life in relation to the spiritual life. In relation to the economic life, we can never have that. Here, if a person really observes life and has a sense of life, he must make a confession to himself: in economic life there is no total judgment of the individual. What does that mean? I will first make myself clear through an historical fact. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the gold standard was discussed in many states, and in many areas of public social life in general. In some states, the gold standard was introduced. What was said about the gold standard at that time by parliamentarians, by practical economists, by other practitioners of life – I do not mean this ironically, but quite seriously and honestly – was indeed very astute and clever. One still has great respect for those people who spoke about economic life at that time.

But all that was explained, and with excellent reasons at that, was the prognosis: Free trade would flourish under the influence of the gold standard, the individual states would open their borders, and the appropriate global economic life would be able to develop freely, unimpeded by the borders of the individual states. These state frameworks have, after all, arisen from completely different conditions than modern economic life, which has gradually become a unit through the world economy and which needs completely different connections than those that states can create. Free trade will flourish. So very clever people have said. And what has actually happened? Customs barriers have sprung up everywhere; the superiority of protective tariffs has been much discussed since then, less wisely but with more prospect of achieving things.

What is actually at hand here? What is at hand, ladies and gentlemen, is that in the field of economic life, the cleverness with which one progresses in intellectual life as an individual is of no use in economic life. It is a profound and significant truth that no matter how clever an individual may be, if his economic judgment is to have any weight in economic life, then no matter how clever a judgment based on individual abilities may be, it counts for nothing; in economic life, the only thing that matters is what we acquire through expertise and skill in the individual subjects of economic life. But this cannot develop directly in economic life; rather, it relies on being complemented by what others in other industries, in other fields, can develop as decisive judgment, as judgment that is viable for reality. In economic life, only collective judgment can be decisive, that is, what a particular group of people, uniting the most diverse economic sectors, presents in such a way that one is not dealing with mutual advice; in the case of advice, not much comes of it, only a formless parliamentarization; but rather, you are dealing with mutual interests coming into relation with each other; that you are dealing with working life itself; that one person has this to realize, the other that; that one person has something to assert, a skill in a particular field, the other something in the field of [production] and so on. And it is entirely possible that associations will be formed that must have a certain size, associations in which people from the most diverse economic walks of life unite. Things start from needs. Then it is a matter of uniting with those people who, based on their life experiences, can talk about the needs of certain circles, with other people who are involved in certain branches of production that meet these needs.

And, esteemed attendees, something else is possible than what appears in the modern social democracy when the slogan, which is correct as a slogan, is repeated over and over again: one should not produce to profit, but to consume. What could be more correct than this! But what could be easier than to utter such an abstract sentence? It is always a question of how to do something like that. Because the matter is actually self-evident.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, until now it has only been possible to implement such things in a limited number of areas. And I would like to start by presenting an area to you that you may not recognize because it belongs more to the spiritual realm. However, I will characterize it now only in economic terms – the area of anthroposophical book trade. Many years ago we founded the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House in Berlin. Consider how a publishing house is usually run today. I am citing something from the spiritual life, but you will soon see that it can be applied to the whole material life. How is a publishing house run today? The publisher takes the manuscript from the author. The manuscript is typeset. Books are produced and sent to the booksellers, but are they all sold? Well, anyone who knows the book trade also knows what the term 'crabs' means. These are the books that are returned by the booksellers. There are many such cancers, not only among poets, where almost everything that is printed takes on the nature of cancer. But let's look at what is actually happening. So and so many people are employed to produce the paper, so and so many people to set the books, print them, then ship these books and so on. Do you realize how many people are kept busy with books that are not at all necessary for the life of the general public? Most of them are not necessary, life would go on just as well without them, especially in a field where everything hinges on production. So how did we do it at the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press?

We have not printed a single book that was not certain from the outset to sell. Because we started from spiritual consumption. First there was the Anthroposophical Society. However critical you may think of it, I am only talking about economic matters now. This society developed a need, we knew this need, we lived in association with the Anthroposophical Society, we got to know its needs in a living way, and we took these needs into account in our spiritual production. And the publishing house was never in a position to employ people unnecessarily. It would be much more important than the empty phrases we hear in many programs and the like today to think about how to do things, how to fight worthless production and the worthless employment of people in social life. This can only be done through the principle of association. However imperfect this association I have described is, it is an association.

Later, I tried something that was then interrupted by the war. We had a member in the Anthroposophical Society who was a master baker. I said: Why shouldn't the Anthroposophical Society also be seen as a sum of consumers for bread, which it certainly is as well. So I get them so many consumers that they can pursue their production, I said to the person concerned. It did not succeed, partly because of the individuality of the person concerned, but it could have succeeded; but the war came into the picture as well. Again, starting from demand, an attempt was made to associate demand with production.

You see, what I am describing to you as the associative principle in economic life also shows itself as something that wells up from the subconscious of human society today, so to speak. On the one hand we see the formation of cartels, on the other the formation of trusts, but always only among mere producers, while the connection between producers and consumers is provided by the agencies, and this is also one-sided. By eliminating the agencies and creating associations that stand between consumption and production with their living interests and mediate between them, a fruitful future for economic life is ensured. Cartels allot profits, allot consumption, allot various things. One sees that, under the influence of the world economy, unification is necessary, but the matter is initially approached from the wrong end. Instead of encompassing the entire economy in associations, they initially associate only producers. This exacerbates the very thing that has brought chaos to our economic life. It does not reduce and mitigate it.

Now, my dear attendees, what is it exactly that suggests, when we look at our economic life with open minds, that economic life, as a special link in the three-part social organism, must also be distinguished from the other two, as I have already characterized for the spiritual link and will still characterize for the other link.

I will characterize a very specific fact of today's economic life, which, for those who are now routine in economic life, is felt as an economic difficulty, but about which it is not easy to gain clarity. It is the fact that in our complicated social entity, in which the division of labor prevails, in which people work for each other, we pay for goods as a product of labor; we pay for human labor in the same way as we pay for goods as a product of labor. We pay for both with the same money, so to speak. Sometimes money can represent a certain amount of coal, and at other times it can represent a certain amount of labor. Now imagine if someone wanted to measure with a common measure, lambs and apples, things that simply do not have a common measure, things that have nothing in common. Human labor power as such is not comparable with a commodity in an agitative way, in a very wrong way this thing lives in Karl Marx's agitation.

But in every unbiased sense of humanity, it lives as the source of an explanation of how we have pushed two things together in our economic life that really cannot be measured by any common measure. And here, too, modern life is already working in such a way that it unconsciously wants to help itself, so to speak, in the right direction. Individual states have tried to regulate working hours, set up work insurance, pension insurance and so on, in short, to regulate work through a special legal system, independently of what is contained in economic life itself. Because economic life only includes the production, circulation and consumption of goods. In economic life, work is only indirectly included.

Basically, the situation is as follows: on the one hand, we have nature in the economy. We cannot possibly dictate from mere economic motives – because we as a consortium may need to sell wheat at such and such a price next year if we are to achieve this or that – that there will be so and so much rain or sunshine next year. Nature is taken for granted. We have to accept it. We want to bring human labor directly under the economic point of view. We want to regulate human labor from the economic basis. Social democracy wants it itself, wants it precisely from the economic basis. It represents nothing other than the terribly one-sided continuation of that which led into chaos.

It is important to recognize that goods and human labor are not comparable values, that they must be managed from two different perspectives. We do not need to manage nature; it cannot be managed; it underlies our economic life just as it underlies the economic life of birds and the like. Within the actual economic life, we manage the production of goods, the circulation of goods, and the consumption of goods. However, modern conditions have led to a confusion between the comparative value or price of the goods and that which labor quite remunerates in the same way as one pays for goods – while labor must be regulated according to completely different aspects.

Just think about what has emerged from the unnaturalness of modern conditions; for example, within modern proletarian theory. People say: the manual laborer works this or that, and in doing so consumes organic power that must be replaced; for this he must be remunerated. A great contrast has even been constructed between manual labor and mental labor. Mental labor consumes less because it provides ideas that are then always imitated. It does not provide something that works in this way towards consumption. All these theories have arisen because work has been put into the process of commodity consumption, commodity circulation and commodity production, because the line has not been drawn between the actual economic life and the state or legal or political life. Thus we have the three limbs of the social organism, the spiritual limb, namely, the most important, public spiritual life: the teaching and education system; the state-political limb, in which, for example, labor is to be regulated.

How does someone who takes what I said at the beginning of my lecture very seriously and honestly – the awareness that modern humanity must move towards democracy – cope? Only those who leave out what cannot be democratized from the democratic can take democracy seriously and honestly.

There is a broad and comprehensive area of human affairs in which every person who has come of age is competent; that is the area in which majorities rightly prevail. This is the area where something can be achieved by parliamentarization. Parliamentarization cannot achieve anything in the field of intellectual life, where only the development of the individuality of the individual can be fruitful. Parliamentarization, majority decisions, cannot achieve anything in the field of economic life. There associations must come into being in the way I have described, out of the most diverse branches of life. And these associations will develop to a certain size. There is no need for statistics; they are of no help, they only refer to the past, but it is life that matters. And it is life that should be grasped by people who are members of associations, and that the associations should grasp the needs, not regulate them. Economic life has nothing to do with ethics, with a critique of needs, but only with the observation that the needs are there. The free spiritual life has to do with critique, with the regulation of needs. Political life has to do with what I have just spoken of and what I will speak of yet. In economic life, associations only have to do with what is alive in the production, circulation and consumption of goods.

Once the need has been determined, it is known how many people have to be involved in the production of certain articles. If too many people are involved, the products become too cheap for the need; if too few people are involved, the products become too expensive. We arrive at what I would call the shaping of the price out of the life of the associations. Of course, we can only take something as a kind of calculation, as a kind of general formula. But it is possible to arrive at something fruitful out of such associations by concluding contracts to the effect that as many people as are necessary can work on an article in a certain field. We can arrive at a situation in which what I would call the 'primordial cell of economic life' is fulfilled more and more. It will seem paradoxical to you. And yet, in its subconscious depths, humanity strives for economic satisfaction in the sense of this economic primordial cell: every person should receive for his product of labor — not for his labor, labor does not belong in economic life — he needs for himself, his family and everything else for which he has to provide, in order to fabricate an equal product in turn; thus, he needs as much for the satisfaction of his needs as it takes to produce an equal product. Roughly speaking: If I make a pair of boots, I must receive so much for this pair of boots through the regulation of economic life that I can make a new pair of boots, and while I am making this new pair of boots, I have everything I need for myself, my family and other expenses.

I am not saying that this should be determined by some kind of socialist dogma, but that the associative principle is the necessary one. There is no need to fear that this will lead to a terrible bureaucracy. After all, bureaucracy is already sufficiently taken care of in all countries of the world precisely because of other circumstances. What I mean here by economic association will establish itself alongside work and through work. And since economic areas and economic associations become confusing when they are too large and uneconomical when they are too small, economic organization has a certain size depending on climatic and other conditions, as well as on the characters of the people and so on.

The associations continue to associate. This then provides the basis for a large world association, for the great world economic federation, which can only be created out of economic life, out of an economic life independent of intellectual and political life. Of course, work plays a role in this economic life, but on the other hand, work must be left to the realm of the political and legal state. Every person who has come of age is competent to speak about the extent of work, in association with other people.

My esteemed audience, I spoke earlier about the ill-fated experimental country of Austria, where I spent thirty years. There one could see how modern parliamentary life has emerged. You could see what it means to carry economic interests into political life. When parliamentary life was to be created in Austria in the 1860s, the parliament was composed of four curiae: the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the chamber of commerce, the curia of the cities, markets and industrial towns, and the curia of the rural communities – purely economic points of view! Four curiae, put together purely on the basis of economic interests. They were now supposed to decide on the legal and political situation. Not only the intellectual and national life, no, the internal impossibility has already created destructive forces in a country as difficult to construct and as difficult to put together as Austria, which could already be seen in the 1870s and 1880s by anyone living in Austria with an unbiased mind. There one could study how necessary it is to keep economic life separate, with its own administrative instances, rooted in the associations of the various professional and industrial guilds and of the various branches of economic life in general, and to have, in addition, the free spiritual life, which certainly plays a part in economic life. How it plays a part, I have described in detail in my 'Key Points of the Social Question'. You will also find details in our newspaper on threefolding, which appears in Stuttgart, and also in a Dutch newspaper on the threefolding of the social organism.

Just as you can educate yourself about the fertility of the free spiritual life in the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which we have established and which Emil Molt has set up and which I run, so you can principles, which are, however, only in their infancy, by acquainting yourself with our writings and with what is being attempted, for instance, in the economic institutions of Futurum in Switzerland and Kommenden Tag in Germany. Of course, it is not yet possible to found many associative life; the facts of external life, of today's social order, are too much opposed to this associative life, but the beginnings should still be created for it. The impulse given for the threefold social organism should definitely work its way into practical life. And so, in my aforementioned book 'The Core of the Social Question', I also showed how capital basically also has its origin in spiritual life, and must therefore also pass into the individual administration of the human being in connection with spiritual life, with the spiritual element of the social organism.

There have been critics of the threefold social order who said: Yes, this threefold order tears apart into three parts what is a unity. No, it is only through the fact that these three parts are administered in the sense of their own essence that true unity is created. Through the spiritual life and through human individuality, the circulation of capital will gradually come about. I can only mention this briefly here, but you can read more about it in my book “The Essentials of the Social Question”. The regulation of labor will be subject to the rule of law. In this legal or political state, all matters for which every adult is competent will be regulated. And anyone who is sincere about democracy must, on the one hand, exclude intellectual life and, on the other, economic life, in which nothing can be regulated purely democratically; then there remains for the actual state a broad area that encompasses all human affairs; that is, those matters in which one person is equal to another, those matters in which all people are truly equal.

This impulse for the threefold social order is truly drawn from the depths of human nature. Because of the diversity of spiritual, state and economic life, a separate administration is required for all three areas, and because the human being is involved in all three, the right unity and the right interaction will only arise. From the spiritual life into the economic life, capital administered by the spirit is at work. From the state into the economic life, the way in which each human being, as an equal, regulates his work, the measure and so forth, is at work. This work will have to be accepted in the economic life, as nature is accepted. We will say to ourselves: Rain or shine, I cannot control it. I must accept economic life as it unfolds under these conditions. Likewise, in the field of economic administration, I must accept what is regulated as work. And when the associations set prices, the only thing that will be considered is the product of labor, not labor as such.

But this brings us to the intimate interpenetration of the three members of the social organism. And an economic life that does not somehow deal with all kinds of spiritual matters, a state life that does not deal with all kinds of spiritual programs and the like, but only deals with those matters in which all people as equals are competent, such an economic life and such a state life will receive the most beautiful fertilization from the free spiritual life. There will be a vigorous interaction between the three elements, if each is administered in its own way.

I have also been told that I want to resurrect an old Platonic idea of the teaching, military and nutritional classes. No, it is not the various classes that are to be constituted, but rather the external administration is to be constituted by leading people to a free judgment in these three areas. No utopia is to be presented dogmatically. No fantasies are to be used to describe how the institutions should be. Rather, attention should be drawn to how people must organize themselves in the social organism so that, through their cooperation, they can find the solution to the social question, and so that the organization of economic life, which must basically take place with the constant active participation of the competent associations, can also be found. Just as the human organism must be nourished every day.

And so we can say: Three areas confront us in the entire social organism; three areas that each demand their own administration based on their own nature. Freedom should prevail in spiritual life; equality should prevail in democratic state life, where only those things are administered from the majority that can really be decided by the majority, because every person is competent for them. And fraternity can develop precisely in an economic life that is built on the associative principle in the way described. These three great maxims of human development resound across to us from the eighteenth century. And what human heart would not beat faster when it allows these three maxims of human development to take effect on it with deep understanding. But clever people in the nineteenth century repeatedly emphasized that in the unitary state these three lofty ideals contradict each other. And they were right. The solution to this riddle is that although people have asserted the three greatest ideals of social life, freedom, equality and fraternity, out of an inner intuition, they have so far been under the suggestion of the unitary state that only the threefold social organism can realize these three ideals, namely, freedom in the spiritual realm, equality in the state-political realm, and fraternity in the associatively shaped economic realm.

And in characterizing economic life today, I had to show how it can be built as a foundation for a free spiritual life and for the true, state-based democracy that modern humanity strives for. But these two areas are in intimate harmony with economic life. For it is an economic life that alone can give all people a dignified existence; one that is built on the basis of the laws that shape the economy itself, that draws its fertilizing forces from an independent, real state-based life and its administrative roots from a free spiritual life. Therefore, we can say that an economic life of the future is only conceivable as being associated with an independent legal life and a creative, free spiritual life that works out of human souls.

Answering questions

Question: You have not told us how the associations are to come into being. Do these associations float in the air? Where do they come from? Do you think that today's workers' organizations or the existing consumer cooperatives can become associations through their training and development, or are associations only utopian? Are they based on something that has emerged historically or do you want to build something, do something, create something? You have talked about utopias so often.

Rudolf Steiner: When I speak of utopias, I mean something that has come to light, for example, in Proudhon, Blanc, Saint Simon, [Bakunin], and to some extent also in Karl Marx. There you will find utopias, thought structures about a social order of the future. The only thing that sets Marxist utopia apart from the others is that it appeals to a particular class, appeals to the instincts of a particular class, and has therefore become a very real force in the world of agitation. But it is precisely in the present day, when this utopia is producing the most terrible results by claiming to be realized in reality, that we see the utopian aspect of the matter. This utopianism can be seen to the highest degree in those who believe that they are standing firmly on the ground of reality. One does not need to go to Russia to study the details of how Leninism kills culture and civilization. One only needs to familiarize oneself with what lives in the mind of Lenin. All sorts of social conditions are described that this new tsar wants to realize. But then Lenin says: with all this, what is actually humanly dignified is not achieved after all, but something is achieved that destroys the present. Then the present perishes, and with it people go into decadence; and then a new human race will arise, which will establish the humanly dignified existence. — There we have posited something utopian to the point of blood. This utopianism basically dominates more than one might think the minds and souls of contemporary people. What I have presented to you is not at all conceived utopianistically, but is conceived in such a way that, basically, it can be started every day with the appropriate things.

If I immediately tie in with what the previous speaker said: we have consumer cooperatives. The consumer cooperatives do not work in the sense that today the incommensurability between labor and labor product and commodities could somehow be eliminated, but they work in the midst of these conditions. If they are not production-consumption cooperatives, they ultimately only aim at regulating consumption, not at an interaction between producers and consumers, as the associations do. But it can be developed. It is not utopian to build on what already exists. Of course, you must not have the idea that it is already utopian if you just don't leave what is there as it is. So what is there are, so to speak, the elements that associate. I'm not talking about organization.

Dear attendees, I am actually Austrian, but I have spent half of my life in Germany, then in Switzerland, but I come from Germany. Nevertheless, although I come from Germany, the word “organization” really seems like something burning to me. I expect nothing from an organization, because an organization emanates from a center. The organization is regulated from above. In reality, it is the special love for the organization that has prepared Germany for what is happening now. And if you come to Germany today, you will find that the addiction to organization is still flourishing terribly, even if you believe that you have outgrown these organizations. What is called organization in Germany has the same effect on me as a red cloth on a bull (not that I claim to be a bull). Association is different from organization. The best and the most capable join together, not those who are at the center of things and want to organize.

Particularly with regard to this organization, an example can be given in Germany. A German professor has now written a book about price formation during the First World War. On the basis of extremely thoroughly compiled material, he has determined what happened as a result of the state intervening in economic life through the organization of prices. He presents four sentences with the right consistency, which are worthy of being in a scientific book in terms of methodology: Firstly, the price-setting authorities had no idea what was important. Secondly, prices were regulated everywhere in such a way that the opposite of what was actually believed to be achieved was achieved. Thirdly, by regulating prices, large sections of the population have been affected in the most terrible way. Fourthly, profiteering has been encouraged at the expense of honest industry and honest trade. These are the scientific conclusions that the economist in question has reached. Then he adds: Yes, science says that about economic life, but in social life there are other interests; there the state must intervene, and what is recognized as economically right by the economist no longer applies before the state.

Now, what is more sensible: for the economist to stand and lament that the state is thwarting his correct scientific conclusions, or for him to say: economic life must be organized in such a way that there is no need to point out what disturbs correct price formation. Everywhere, the impulse of the threefold social organism ties in with natural conditions. What is the production of goods, the circulation of goods, the consumption of goods, must arise out of the individual human being, out of the individual human being, the individual human groups. And this efficiency in the individual associates itself. At the beginning, one does not know what is associating, not organizing; only in accordance with one's own efficiency does what is to come about arise.

This is also the case in the spiritual life, for example, if you look at the Waldorf School, which leads a completely free spiritual life. I run the school, but I have never done anything other than advise individuals. I go into the classes, study the children's development from a psychological point of view, and discuss my psychological studies with the teachers in an advisory capacity, who then try to take things further. In fact, we have even come up with completely new laws for childhood development at different ages, for example, for how children live together and so on. But how does this Waldorf school work? Yes, you see, you would have felt at the beginning like a civil servant or a member of parliament, then you would have sat down with others who also feel like civil servants or members of parliament and made programs. The programs are made very cleverly, because in terms of the intellectual, people are terribly clever. You can set up the most perfect programs, but can they be carried out? We have not done that. What matters for the Waldorf School is that we have our twenty-two teachers, and the Waldorf School will be as good as these teachers are able to make it. There is nothing more dishonest than to set out a program that cannot be followed because the teachers can only work according to their abilities and not according to programs. They try to work out of their abilities. And so it is in economic life. The associations are not formed utopian, but rather by continuing to work on what is already there. I only believe that when the associations are formed, the individualities will also become more efficient. But today we are building on what is there.

Chairman of the students: This evening you have given us an insight into your view of economic life. It is of course impossible to have an overview of the whole problem, but your lecture will certainly be a stimulus for many of us to take a closer look at the threefold social organism. And in this you have achieved an important goal. You came to us despite the fact that you are almost overburdened with work. I would like to thank you for this on behalf of the assembly. It was a very interesting evening.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear Mr. Chairman and all those who helped to organize today's invitation. I can only say that this invitation gave me a very special satisfaction. It came from the student body. And who should be more aware than those who are faced with such problems as those I have mentioned, that today, for the solution of these questions, which will take up the next decades - initially, of course, the preliminary solution - we need above all those who are within the student body today.

I am long past that, but today I often think back to the times when we lived through things differently than you do today. At that time, we had a lot of intellectual, national and, in particular, economic hopes, and many of these economic hopes have indeed proved to be illusions – and not just here or there, but in the whole of international life. This has deterred many from seriously pursuing the deepest human issues. Those who are in a position to go through their student days today can hardly indulge in illusions in the same way. They learn from the great hardship, from the crisis-prone nature of today's life, that deepening is necessary. That is why it fills one with a deep sense of satisfaction to find interest in suggestions of this kind among the student body. Because I didn't want to give more than suggestions. From this point of view, that perhaps, even if I am no longer there, work will continue on the basis of these suggestions, especially by those who are young today, that at least, even if only a very small, tiny drop could be added today through this invitation, from this point of view, I thank you and the whole committee warmly for your kind invitation.

Herman Sijbrand: Hello, Dr. Steiner, you have expressed your thanks for the invitation. Let me now bring up an issue, let me express what has just come to me. The matter is quite the opposite, the feeling of gratitude is entirely on my side. Because you are the one who has succeeded in showing me the synthesis of art, science and religion again. You are the one who, to me, who is and wants to be in the strict service of science and technology, you are the one who has shown me the true path to the ideal of humanity, to the ideal of humanity, to Christ, to the true understanding of Christianity, to the true understanding of Christ and his teaching, I owe it to you. I would still like to have said that.

There followed an untranscribed closing speech by Herman Sijbrand Hello to those gathered in Dutch.

Opening words by Leo Polak: Dear attendees and Mr. Speaker! As the chairman of the local Philosophy Association, I would like to welcome everyone here and believe that I have the right and the duty to make a very brief preliminary remark. We were in fact surprised that the Philosophy Association, a scientific association, organized an evening in the auditorium of the university with Dr. Steiner, whose relationship to philosophy was well known. Some people wanted to see this as a sanction and recognition of the scientific-philosophical value or significance of Dr. Steiner's work. I believe that both sides thought this wrongly. Firstly, our association did not spontaneously invite this evening's speaker from its own ranks, but merely responded to a request from the anthroposophical side to organize such an evening here, and rightly so, as I will have more to say in a few moments. Secondly, organizing this evening does not in any way imply agreement or unanimity with the work of Dr. Steiner. They know that in the same lecture halls here at the university, where, for example, critical philosophy, Kantian philosophy, is read, dogmatic, Thomist philosophy is heard, and rightly so. That is not to say the approval of those who gave rise to it, but purely and exclusively the objective attitude of science itself, which always and everywhere sees and examines everything and retains the good, which always and everywhere says, “audite et alteram partem”. Our philosophical association also wanted to express this idea. We did so in the justified conviction that the speaker this evening also holds exactly the same opinion. We also asked beforehand whether there would be an opportunity to give an account of a dissenting opinion afterwards, and, I might almost say, Dr. Steiner naturally agreed. So he also wanted to apply the “audite et alteram partem”. After these brief but necessary conditions, I ask the speaker to take the floor.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! In the various lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Holland since February 19th, on anthroposophical spiritual science and its practical orientation, my main concern has been to emphasize the practical aspects of these spiritual scientific endeavors. For these spiritual-scientific endeavors seek to accommodate the innumerable souls who, in the broadest circles of life today, long for something that arises out of the facts of this present time.

Today, however, my dear audience, allow me to speak from a completely different point of view. If, on the one hand, the anthroposophical spiritual scientist is condemned to seek their circles in the general public because of its practical approach to life, it is also the case that the roots of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science extend in a very precise way, I believe, into the philosophical foundations of human endeavor. And it is this connection between anthroposophy and philosophical research, with the way of thinking that is philosophical, that I would like to speak to you about today. I will try not to speak in generalizations, but rather to speak in three directions, in the hope that this will shed light on the connections between philosophical research and anthroposophical spiritual knowledge.

Within philosophical research, we recognize a wide variety of problems and problem formulations. Today, I would like to focus mainly on the relationships between anthroposophy and three problem formulations: the epistemological problem, the ontological problem and the ethical problem. It would be tempting, however, to also touch on the aesthetic problem, but that would mean taking up too much of your time.

The epistemological problem, in the way we find it presented today in philosophy in the most diverse forms, is concerned with justifying man's belief in the reality of the external world; it is concerned to show the extent to which we can assume a valid relationship between that which is present within our knowledge in our consciousness and that which we can regard as some kind of objective reality outside ourselves. This problem, as well as numerous others, swings back and forth between dogmatics and skepticism in the history of philosophy, one might almost say as a matter of course. And anyone who is familiar with the history of more recent epistemology knows how extraordinarily easy it is to fall into a kind of skepticism when faced with the epistemological problem. I will have more to say about this later. In any case, here we have something of what must be of particular interest to anthroposophical spiritual science in relation to philosophy: in a certain way, it presents epistemology in a very vivid and very pressing way for human research and knowledge of the limits of knowledge.

The second problem I would like to talk about is the ontological problem. It is much older than the problem of knowledge. It seeks to bring reality – namely insofar as this reality goes beyond the sensory – into consciousness in some way, by means of knowledge, from what man can experience in the entities of consciousness. Now anyone who is familiar with the history of the development of ontology knows that, basically, a very understandable skepticism has entered into the ontological problem since the time that the ontological proof of God's existence has fallen victim to criticism, especially since the criticism of Kantianism regarding this ontological proof of God's existence. Since that time, there has also been little inclination within philosophical research to find something in the ontological that can provide clues for placing oneself in the sphere of reality itself through the development of inner knowledge. So here, too, in a sense, we are approaching a kind of limit, which is probably felt much more clearly in the face of ontology than in the face of many epistemological problems.

With regard to the ethical problem, I would just like to point out in the introduction that, out of a certain – forgive the expression, it is only meant terminologically – philosophical despair, we have come to the so-called value theory in relation to the ethical problem in recent times. But that means basically nothing more than despairing of being able to see through the ethical impulses present in our consciousness in their connection with reality and therefore seeing as based on something that is supposed to have validity in our world view - the value - but which is nevertheless formulated in such a way that one does not want to imagine a certain relationship to reality, to objective being.

I did not want to say anything binding, but only point out certain forms that the three problems have taken and which give reason to intervene in these three problem formulations with anthroposophical spiritual science. Before I can do that, I would like to briefly discuss the methodology of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science here, which I also do in my public lectures. However, I then try to present the things as popularly as possible, which of course has its drawbacks, but in some respects perhaps also some advantages.

I would like to say only this much today about the methodology of anthroposophy: that the entire path of research in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is based on the development of soul forces that already exist in ordinary life, that are also applied in ordinary science, but which are initially obtained from both ordinary life and ordinary science at a certain level, a level to which they are brought by inheritance, by ordinary education and so on. I need not define this stage, to which certain soul-powers are brought, for it is generally known, and what I actually want to say with this will emerge from what I have to communicate about the further development of these soul-powers.

Anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher must, through careful inner soul work, further develop certain soul powers beyond those applied in ordinary life and in ordinary science. He must first further develop what is popularly known as the ability to remember, which underlies our memory, beyond what it is in ordinary life. The method of systematically ordered meditation and concentration, as I have described it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', and in other writings of mine in the anthroposophical literature, serves this purpose. The essence of this further development of the ability to remember is based on the fact that one forms ideas that can easily be overlooked. This fact, that one demands easily comprehensible ideas in the spiritual scientific method, has its profound significance. For nothing may be used for this further development of soul forces that could somehow be a reminiscence of life or that could somehow have an autosuggestive or even suggestive effect. Therefore, it is necessary to keep the images used in meditation and concentration as simple and straightforward as possible. It is not important that such images have a truth value in the usual sense, because they are not intended to point to any reality at all. They are only to be used to develop inner soul forces. Therefore, it is important that we not be deterred by the questionable character of the relationship between a representation and reality; whether the representation is fantastic, whether the representation is somehow made quite arbitrarily, is not the point, but rather that we can survey it in terms of its entire content, so to speak, like a mathematical representation, a geometric representation. Then it is a matter of mustering the strength to go through a certain period of time – this must be learned, at first one can only do it for a very short time, little by little one acquires a certain inner practice – then it is a matter of learning to rest with the whole intensity of the soul on such ideas.

Now a misunderstanding can arise right away. Because if it is done wrongly, if all the things that I have carefully compiled in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” are not observed, then the inner state of mind that is absolutely necessary for the spiritual scientific method to work properly will not be achieved. This state of soul must be exactly the same as when solving problems in geometry or in mathematics in general. In the same way that one is fully aware of one's will at work in the soul when constructing figures, when searching for any algebraic or other relationships, one must remain fully aware of the entire content of consciousness while resting on easily comprehensible ideas. It is therefore very important that anyone who is to become a spiritual researcher in an impeccable way should actually have at least a certain degree of mathematical training, and to such an extent that he has in particular acquired the way of thinking about mathematical problems.

Perhaps I may refer to a personal experience, the following one. I always think, when I am dealing with spiritual-scientific problems, which sometimes become quite difficult for one, because they often slip away from one when one already has them – I always think of the event that helped me decades ago, perhaps forty years ago, to get ahead on the path that I am about to characterize. It was the moment when I was able to grasp the strange fact in synthetic geometry for the first time – we don't want to dwell on the justification of this assumption now – that, based on the assumptions of synthetic geometry, the one infinitely distant point of a straight line on the right side is the same as the infinitely distant point on the left side. It was not so much this mathematical fact, but the whole way of thinking, how this assumption arises from the prerequisites of synthetic geometry, of projective geometry. I am only pointing this out here to draw attention to how the same state of mind, the same way of letting consciousness work, must take place in what I call meditation and concentration.

If one now does such inner soul work for a sufficiently long time — it depends entirely on the inner destiny of the person whether it takes a short time, two or three years, or much longer, until the first inner results of this further development of certain soul abilities occur, But out of the ordinary power of memory, by which we can conjure up past events before our soul, through the further development of this power of memory, a new soul power actually arises, a soul power of which we had no idea before. This soul power is developed memory, and yet it is quite different from ordinary memory. This soul power enables us to link certain states of our consciousness with other ideas than we usually do. In his everyday life, a person lives in the alternating states between waking and sleeping. We are, of course, familiar with the various physiological hypotheses that have been put forward about them, but these are of little interest to us here. What interests us is the state of ordinary consciousness. This ordinary consciousness is dulled, even paralyzed, to the point of complete dullness when we fall asleep, and returns to its bright state when we wake up. Of course, the human being does not arise spiritually and mentally when he wakes up; he must exist in some way between falling asleep and waking up. The fact is that during this time he does not use his senses, does not use his will organization, and does not use the mind that combines sensory perceptions. I will not go into the interruption of sleep by dreams, that would be taking it too far.

The person who has trained their memory in the way described is in exactly the same state in relation to their physical organism. When this trained memory awakens in them, they do not use their ordinary senses in the states in which they induce this memory. He knows how to switch them off, he knows how to switch off everything that is switched off during sleep. But his consciousness is not dulled. He lives in a conscious state, in a consciousness that is filled with content, and he knows that this content is of a spiritual-soul nature. Just as we otherwise receive soul-content in ordinary life through our senses, through the combining mind, so there is soul-content when the spiritual scientist makes use of the developed faculty of memory. Just as we have a sensory environment around us through our physical organism, so the spiritual scientist has a truly supersensible environment that permeates our sensory environment all around him. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a fact of the developing experience that occurs in the spiritual researcher; and any conceit, as if one were dealing with some kind of illusion, is simply excluded by the whole context of life in which one is placed by virtue of the method, which has only been outlined to you in principle, by which one reaches such a developed consciousness. One learns to recognize what it means to have consciousness in the body-free state.

I would like to show you, so that you can see that anthroposophical spiritual science does not speak from some vague, nebulous realm, but from concrete facts, to explain something very specific: our ordinary ability to remember, which is precisely what is needed to recall what we have once experienced. When this ability to remember is further developed in the way I have just described, then it becomes something else, and that is the peculiar thing. It is indeed developed memory, but there is no actual memory; the ability to remember has been transformed into an immediate perception of the spiritual, supersensible environment. This can be seen from the fact that once one has a spiritual-supernatural fact before one and can also characterize it, and one simply wants to recall this spiritual-supernatural state into consciousness again later from memory, one cannot do so immediately. It does not come up directly from consciousness. The ability to remember has been developed, and yet one does not remember exactly what one experiences through this developed ability to remember. You have to do something completely different if you want to see a spiritual state that you have once had again.

You then have to re-establish the conditions through which you called the fact before you. You can remember everything that led you to the moment of seeing the fact, then you can have the fact again, but you cannot simply reconstruct this fact from memory, as is the case with an ordinary memory. Therefore it is true when one speaks of the paradox: the one who writes his books as a spiritual researcher forgets the contents; he writes down the spiritual facts, so to speak, he takes them in, but he forgets them. Nor can he repeat a lecture from memory a second time, but he must recall the conditions under which he was placed before the vision the first time, then he can have the vision again. It is just as one can only have a perception again, if it is just a perception, by approaching the fact. Memory only gives one an image. The developed faculty of memory must simply go back to the event in the spiritual-supernatural world in order to be able to experience it again. This is, in a sense, the first step in entering the supernatural world, in developing the faculty of memory in a certain way so that it becomes a kind of supernatural faculty of intuition. In this way, one gradually comes to truly recognize the spiritual and soul as such, the spiritual and soul that underlies the human being, and the spiritual and soul that surrounds us in the outer world, which is also the basis of the facts and laws of nature.

And I want to characterize a second soul power in its further development. I believe that the development of this soul power as a power of knowledge must justifiably evoke even more contradiction than the development of the memory, because one does not want to accept this second soul power as a power of knowledge at all, it is the power of love. Of course, my dear audience, love is certainly considered to be something subjective. It is also in ordinary life. But if you apply certain spiritual research methods to the ability to love, as I have just described for the ability to remember, then something else emerges from the power of love, which is then also a power of knowledge of the supersensible world. The point is to first become aware of how you are actually undergoing a transformation every moment of your life, how you become a different person. You only have to look honestly into the depths of your soul and you will realize that what you are today was something different ten or twenty years ago. And you will have to say to yourself: In the vast majority of things, one has left oneself to the stream of life, one has had very little influence on the developmental conditions that have made one different from year to year, from decade to decade.

The spiritual researcher must move on to action in this area. He must, so to speak, take the development of his entire soul into his own hands through self-discipline. He must give himself certain directions, without thereby losing the naivety and the elementary of a full life. He must give himself certain directions and must be able to pursue what is formed out of him in metamorphosis, in careful self-observation. In this way, a certain soul power, which is otherwise latent, is drawn out of the depths of the soul. And love, which in ordinary life is bound to the physical organism, becomes independent of this physical organism in a similar way to soul power, just as the developed ability to remember does, except that the developed ability to remember conjures up images and imaginations of a supersensible world before our soul, whereas the developed power of love enables us to inwardly participate in what is presented to us in these images. Objectification of one's own soul life, absorption in objectivity, is the precondition for the knowledge of the supersensible and is achieved by developing the ability to love in this way. Through the development of the ability to remember, we attain the possibility of developing higher worlds of imagination, worlds of imagination about the supersensible. Through the development of the ability to love, we attain the ability to experience the inner reality, the essentiality of the supersensible.

I have only briefly sketched out what actually leads to the knowledge of a spiritual world, to which we belong with our actual inner human nature and in which we find the clues to the knowledge of the eternal nature of this human being. The real knowledge about the question of immortality is achieved on the path I have just characterized. In this way we come to know that part of us which passes through birth and death; we learn to recognize those worlds in which we live as [spiritual beings] before we descend to a birth or to a conception, and into which we also descend when we pass through the gate of death. But I will only hint at this; a more detailed explanation can be found in the literature, it would lead too far now.

Now, by means of such a method of spiritual research, two wrong paths of the human soul are, firstly, seen in the right way; but secondly, the conditions for avoiding them are created. The first thing is that in this way one gains a real insight into what memory actually is, by developing it. We need this power of remembrance; if we want to keep our ordinary life intact, we must be able to conjure up before our soul the images of our experiences from a certain point in our childhood that lies very early. We get to know this ability to remember through the insights I have just described, in that we say to ourselves: it actually prevents us from looking into our inner being. The mystic wants to look into the depths of the soul through direct experience. The spiritual researcher studies the dangers associated with such mystical introspection. It is a peculiarity of the soul life that what one has been experiencing since childhood between birth and death can not only arise in its original form at any given moment in consciousness, but that it can arise in the most diverse met amorphoses, so that there is the possibility that some experience, perhaps quite trivial, may gradually transform itself in the subconscious so that it later enters consciousness as a sublime-looking event. The mystic then perhaps believes he is immersing himself in some divine substratum of the soul and the world, while he has nothing but a transformed memory of life. The exact knowledge of the ability to remember leads us to avoid the mystical paths in the right way. Because if you have developed the ability to remember in the way I have described, you naturally remain a perfectly rational person. You only use this developed ability to remember when you want to. But if you have developed this ability to remember, you can really see through the ordinary memory. One can then take the path that the mystic only believes he can take. The mystic dwells in the same region of the soul where the memory is also present; basically, he sees only sensual, transformed memories. But the one who knows the developed memory, he, so to speak, sees through the ordinary memory region. Then, however, he does not get to see what a Tauler, a Mechthild of Magdeburg or anyone else believed they saw mystically, but he gets to see, but now from the inside, the material organs of the human organism. That is the real way, my dear attendees, to get to know people physically from the inside.

The mystic gets to know nothing else, so to speak, but the soul smoke, the soul mist that rises from the boiling internal organs. That is what needs to be said, that it is not at all the case that mystical raptures are present when one comes to self-knowledge through a developed memory. Rather, self-knowledge radiates into the real human organization, which can of course be recognized from the outside through anatomy and physiology, but its inner essence cannot be seen through. Here, my dear attendees, we reveal those things where we see the inner being of man in an inner connection with the surrounding nature in its various kingdoms. Only when we get to know the inner workings of the human organization in this way do we get to know the kind of physiology that shows the relationship between the various organs in their healthy and diseased states and what is present in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and in the other natural spheres and kingdoms.

This is where it is possible to internalize our medicine, which has advanced so far through external research, to build the bridge between pathology and a therapy based on a real understanding of the human being and the world; last spring I presented to doctors and medical students at our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach about such a deepening of medicine. And it is precisely in this field that one can show how the individual sciences can in turn be fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This was also shown for the other sciences by the university courses in Dornach last fall, which were given by thirty scholars in various fields of science, as well as by artists, by practical people, by commercial people. They showed how anthroposophical spiritual science can enrich the individual sciences by adding to what has led to such research triumphs in recent times, to what external research can offer, that which can be seen inwardly. For just as I have described, that through the real knowledge of the ability to remember, through its further development, the knowledge of the human being truly comes about, so too does a spiritual-supernatural knowledge of nature come about in this way.

The other pitfall to be avoided, which can be seen through with such further developed cognitive abilities, is that of dialectical-philosophical speculation, which is of course present to a certain extent within our scientific research, or at least our thinking. We research by observing phenomena and by causing phenomena through our own experiments. But we do not just apply our combining mind to it, for example in the methodical sense of doing natural science, which remains phenomenology, but we apply it to extrapolate beyond the empirical, and then we arrive at those constructions that are given in atomistics, in molecular theory. It is not the intention here to criticize the significance and justification of molecular and atomic theory, which has been confirmed by experiment. But that which, to a certain extent, is present as the supporting element of natural scientific phenomena in the form of atomistic thinking, is seen through in its unreasonableness when the second power of cognition, that which arises out of the power of love, is developed in the way described. Then we learn to recognize that we must remain within the outer empirical-sensory environment in the world of phenomena. Further penetration then depends on whether we actually get the spiritual-supersensible, and not just a small-scale translation of the sensory world of atoms.

Here, my dear audience, I would like to draw your attention to something that cannot be ignored, especially if you are a spiritual researcher. In philosophical epistemology, we speak of having sensory impressions. We speak of the quite legitimate research results of modern physiology, through which one wants to form an idea of the formation of an objective fact unknown to us, which then continues to the sensory organ. We speak of what takes place in the sensory organ, what possibly takes place in the corresponding brain sphere, and so on. In this way, one arrives at pushing the epistemological problem to the physiological problem in a certain sense, but one considers this problem at every single point in the world. One wants to go from a single phenomenon to what is behind it. One proceeds in exactly the same way as if one wanted to conclude something from a single letter on a written page. You read the whole page; the context of the letters on the whole page reveals the reason why the individual letter is as it is. In this way, we also remain within the world of phenomena. We do not speculate about the individual phenomena in terms of something underlying them, such as a “thing in itself.” Rather, we consider the context of the phenomena, reading the reality of the phenomena to certain totalities, one might say, studying them. This then leads us to that which is expressed spiritually in the phenomena, and can only be grasped spiritually with the supersensible powers of knowledge of which I have spoken.

In this way, I tried to penetrate deeper into the world through a kind of further development of the cognitive abilities of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. However, this also presents the epistemological problem to anthroposophy in a very specific way. This epistemological problem, as I have just mentioned, suffers from such things. We study in a certain way that which is supposed to be unknown to us. We then pursue it to the sense, to the brain. We come to the point where we find no transition to what actually lives in the soul. And if I — naturally leaving out much that could be said, but which is certainly well known to those present from the history of more recent epistemology — if I just pick out the most important things, so it might be the following: The conscientious epistemologist comes to the conclusion that he no longer allows the possibility, within the world of representation – on closer analysis, however, not only the world of representation arises, but also a part of the world of sensation – but let us stick to the world of representation – to relate the representations, as they live inwardly through logic, psychology, to some actual reality or to something that he would like to take as an actual reality. It comes about, so to speak, that one feels very strongly the pictorial character of the life of imagination in the empirical fact; to feel it so strongly that one sees no bridge from this experienced pictorial character of the life of imagination over into reality. Therefore, many of the newer epistemologists have given up trying to build a bridge from the life of imagination over into reality. They appeal to the will, to the will, which they felt to be the elementary point of contact with things; for them, the will has become the thing by which man is actually authorized to speak of the reality of the external world, whereas he should never actually be able to derive the reality of an external world from the world of imagination.

I believe that in this area of epistemology, an enormous amount of conscientious work has been done in recent times, and that ingenious things have come to light; the literature is indeed one of the richest. But I do not believe that one can recognize, by immersing oneself in this literature with a completely open mind, that one is standing on quite uncertain ground within this epistemology and that one cannot build a bridge from something in the soul to some reality that can reasonably be assumed. The world of imagination – if one can grasp it, it shows – really does have the character of a picture. No matter how significant the conclusions we arrive at in this pictorial realm of the life of imagination may be, we cannot escape from the pictorial to arrive at any kind of reality.

On the other hand, I do not believe that the way out of approaching reality through the will can be fully realized epistemologically. Because, dear attendees, in the imagination we are at least completely filled with the full clarity of day-consciousness; in the world of imagination we overlook exactly that which is happening, at least in the imagination, pictorially. In the activity of the will, we are asleep to a certain extent. We do not experience the activity of the will inwardly; it is not transparent to us. Therefore, it was particularly striking to me that a recent epistemologist who rejected the justification of the objective reality of the world of imagination and who assumed the activity of the will in order to establish a reality, Dilthey, that he did not refer to the experiences of the adult, but of the still dreaming child. It is indeed the case that we never come to a full awakening in relation to the actual inner essence of the will in our lives between birth and death if we do not develop the ability to love in the way I have shown. But when that happens, the whole inner soul condition changes. Then one comes to understand the reason why our imaginative life is essentially pictorial.

If one wants to grasp something like the developed capacity for knowledge, one must be prepared for a completely different state of mind. Then, of course, the usual conditions for understanding are not present. Understanding is much more an experience, an immersion in things. But the person must fulfill this prerequisite in order to penetrate into the matter at all. If one now approaches with the developed ability to remember, with one's soul experience — leaving aside bodily functions — and observes what, because of its pictorial nature, prevents the epistemologist from building a bridge to it, then one finds out why the life of imagination is essentially pictorial. One then examines precisely, but now with the developed ability to remember, what the relationship actually is between the imagination and the external, empirical world. And one finds: there is basically no relationship at all between what arises in us as an image and what is, so to speak, reflected back as images of our imagination when our organism is affected by the external world. There is no inner relationship at all between these images. There is a relationship between the content of the images and what is in the external world, but not between the essence, the being of this world of imagination and what is externally the environment. We are confronted with an environment and an inner world that are essentially distinct from one another. One can be reflected in the other, but they are different. Through the developed power of memory, one learns to recognize what actually lives in the imagination, which is essentially bound to the main human organization. It is not what comes from the outside world, which we can look at with our senses, but rather the echo of our prenatal or pre-conception spiritual being. That which essentially underlies our imaginative life is like the penetration of a shadow of our prenatal existence into our existence between birth and death. We think essentially with the powers with which we lived in the spiritual world before our conception.

This analysis is arrived at through the developed faculty of memory; hence the lack of affinity between what is actually the echo of a completely different world and what surrounds us in the external world. It is only in the course of our lives that we establish the relationship between what we bring with us from the prenatal world and what we perceive through our senses. This, ladies and gentlemen, becomes a fact. And now the epistemological problem no longer presents itself before our soul as a mere formality, but now it presents itself, so to speak, like the shadow of a very real world of facts. We learn to recognize what we actually want through conceptual cognition as human beings. Through this conceptual cognition, we want to bring two worlds into concordance: the prenatal purely spiritual world and the postnatal sensual world. The purely spiritual world dismisses us with a question, the sensual world gives us the answer.

I first tried to present this development of the human being in relation to truth in a philosophical way in my small epistemological work “Truth and Science”, where I tried to show how the grasping of reality is not a mere formal, but how man first stands vis-a-vis reality as a half, as a something that is made by himself as something not quite real; how he then acquires knowledge, especially in scientific work. That was purely scientific, philosophical-formal work based on Kantianism, an epistemology that then had to be supplemented by what I have just presented, so that light is shed by the recognition of the supersensible in methodology with regard to this supersensible, in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are some highlights with regard to the epistemological problem. This epistemological problem came to my mind particularly 30 years ago when I devoted myself to the study of the problem of freedom. I will just summarize in a few sentences what I explained in my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1892. I do not want to define freedom now, but just point out how it lives in everyone. It would be impossible to understand free actions in any way if the basis for those free actions were available to us as the result of an external, physical-sensory reality or as the result of an internal, organic reality. Only because we have images in our life of ideas, images that, as it were, mirror our prenatal existence as mirror images do not have reality but mirror what is in front of the mirror, only because such images, for which there is no external reality in relation to their essence, provide the impulses for our free actions; only because of this are free actions possible. If free acts were not based on pictorial impulses, they could not be free acts. The fact that a truly real epistemology leads us precisely to the pictorial character of the life of imagination, and in particular to the pictorial character of pure thinking, makes it possible to base a real philosophy of freedom on such an epistemology.

Now, my dear audience, how has the ontological problem been brought to skepticism? The fact that in the course of human development, which I have shown in relation to philosophy in my two-volume book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, humanity has increasingly lost the inner experience of reality, that humanity has virtually moved on to the pictorial character of conceptualized experience. Why did the ontological proof of the existence of God become invalid in a certain age?

In fact, if one studies the true history of philosophy, one finds that this refutation of the ontological proof of God's existence would have had no value at all for older times, because in those times, not only was the existence of God the existence of God with ontological proofs, but rather, one inwardly experienced the divine in the concepts, and by letting the concepts run dialectically, a reality lived in this dialectical process. This reality was lost inwardly more and more. That is the meaning of the development of the ego in humanity: that more and more the inner connection with reality was lost, so that finally the very theory of knowledge became necessary, which wanted to build a bridge from the non-existing, but merely pictorial concept to external reality. In ontology, this occurs at a higher level. We have mere dialectics instead of the dialectic full of content, instead of the real process, which lived as a supersensible process in the world of concepts. Our ontology – we have almost none anymore, but the one that still remained in older philosophers – is, I would like to say, the filtered dialectical product of an old, inner experience; inner experience that has become mere concept, mere conceptual web.

Now, what I have just characterized as the experience of a supersensible world through the developed powers of knowledge, leads one, as I have already mentioned, to ultimately rising to recognize the simultaneously real, for example, behind natural phenomena. The enrichment of therapy through spiritual science is based on the fact that what lives spiritually and soulfully in natural phenomena can be related to the recognized inner organs of the human being. At the same time, ontology takes on meaning again because the external and the spiritual and soul-like can be seen through objectively. So that what humanity, as humanity becoming free, has felt towards ontology is a kind of intermediate stage. In earlier times, through an instinctive experience of the concepts, reality was in the experience of the concepts. Then this was lost, had to be lost in the process of educating humanity to freedom, to life in pure concepts. For that is what it means to experience freedom: to be able to experience pure image concepts and to act accordingly. Now we are again faced with the possibility of giving ontology a content through the visions of the simultaneously spiritual-supersensible.

Dearly beloved, I have thus pointed out to you two fields of supersensible vision: that which, as it were, precedes our birth, and that which is the supersensible present at the same time.

And a third sphere reveals itself to man when, through a developed psychology, he first looks at what is not his imaginative faculty, but his will; the will and a part - I expressly say a part - of the feeling nature. These spheres, they also lie so far below the threshold of our waking consciousness, as our nocturnal experiences lie below this threshold for the ordinary consciousness. If one analyzes the facts of the soul without prejudice, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that the same intensity of inner experience that one sees in the dullness of sleep consciousness is also seen in the experience of what is actually the effect of the will in us.

A careful analysis of consciousness, which has been carried out by numerous psychologists, shows that the human being first experiences ideas of what he should want and what he should do. He does not then experience the whole intermediate stage, where what is imagined passes over into the organism of the will. Then he experiences the other end of this will life, he experiences the transition of his will into the outer deed; he looks at what is happening through him. What lies between these two extremes, that is experienced by man with exactly the same subdued consciousness as he has in deep sleep. The emotional life is not experienced with the same intensity as the imaginative life either, but with the intensity of the dream life. But what is important now is to look at how the actual life of the will is experienced with the dullness of the life of sleep. We not only sleep in time and wake in time, but also while we are awake, we sleep with a part of our being, with our volitional being. What makes us sleep in relation to our volitional being, the reason for this, becomes apparent when knowledge is developed in the way I have explained. If one succeeds in developing the ability to love to the point where one experiences the supersensible, then there arises as a special experience the living over into the process of the will, which otherwise does not enter into consciousness, which otherwise remains dull. One does indeed come to know not only the organs of the body, as I explained earlier, but one also comes to see that part of the will that is otherwise overslept in waking, in the same way as one otherwise looks at an external fact through the senses. One arrives at a self-knowledge of the will. And through this, my dear audience, the ethical world is integrated into the rest of the world, into the world in which natural necessity otherwise prevails. In this way, we learn to recognize something that is still extremely difficult to describe, even for today's ideas.

When we consider the content of our consciousness, we can ascribe certain intensities to it in its individual parts. We can then – this can be said with particular reference to certain senses – we can then go down to intensity zero with regard to certain contents of consciousness. But we can also – and this is usually given little attention, because the necessity for it only emerges in spiritual research – we can also go down from an objectivity with regard to the intensive experience of consciousness, we have to go into the negative. Yes, it turns out to be necessary not just to speak of matter, but to speak of matter, to speak of empty space and of negative matter; thus not just to speak of empty space, but to speak of emptied space, to bring the intensity below absolute zero. This is a concept that necessarily arises for the spiritual researcher when he attempts to make a transition from the essence of the life of thinking to the essence of the life of will and the relationship of this life of will to the physical-organic functions. If we imagine by name — it could also be the other way around —, if we imagine the processes that take place between the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily when imagining, if we imagine these processes as positive, then we must imagine the will processes as negative; to a certain extent, if one represents a pressure effect, we must imagine the other as a suction effect. These are more or less comparative ideas, but they lead to reality. I may briefly characterize this reality.

We usually imagine, through today's psychology, which has become more and more abstract, that there is an interaction between the processes of the brain, that is, the nervous organism, and between the soul and spiritual processes. Certainly, such an interaction exists. But the nature of this interaction presents itself before the developed ability to remember, as I have described it. That which actually comes to life in the act of imagining is not based on the progressive growth of the nervous organism, but rather, quite the opposite, on the wearing away of the nervous organism. Once this has been properly understood, then spiritual science will be followed on this point. I can only sketch it out here, but you will find detailed descriptions of the matter everywhere in our literature. Once this has been understood, you will say to yourself: you are deceiving yourself if you assume a parallelism between spiritual and mental processes and brain processes in the usual way; a deception that I will illustrate with an example.

Let us assume that someone walks over a soft road surface, a car drives over the soft ground, impressions are formed, footprints, wheel tracks. A being from Mars or wherever could now come and speculate about these impressions and say: under the surface of the ground there is a certain force that causes these impressions by pulling down and pushing up. There is no power there that causes these impressions, but they have been caused by a person who has walked over them, or a wagon that has driven over them. In what the spiritual-soulful is acting out, it simply finds a soil, a resistant soil on the physical organization, makes impressions, and in fact it even destroys the organic substance. So the organic substance is worn away. The organic processes are regressed. And by making room for the spiritual in this way, the soul penetrates. If we imagine the process as positive, then the will process is the negative, then the will process promotes organic growth, albeit in a roundabout way. But just as the process of imagination continues in the organism as a process of removal, as a process of destruction, and to a certain extent as a process of excretion of organic substance, so too does the will lie in the increased, more lively construction of the organic. This is the effect of willpower. In this way, we learn to see the interaction between the physical and the spiritual in a positive and concrete way. But through this we also learn to recognize how we not only have a nature around us that contains natural laws, but just as the will integrates itself into our own organism as a growth-promoting, growth-stimulating force, so the spiritual-soul element that we are aware of in our consciousness as ethical impulses integrates itself into the whole of nature around us.

In this way, through this supersensible knowledge, we find not only values, or something that merely corresponds to utility, but we actually find within the world that surrounds us, on the one hand, natural necessity and, on the other, objective ethical necessity. Ethical impulses are actually integrated into objective world existence. And what comes out of it – I would have to describe the process at length, but for now I can only characterize it by way of comparison – what comes out of it is this: we live in the world of natural necessity. The moral ideals arise within us. It is like with a plant. It develops leaves, flowers, and in the center of the flower, the seed of next year's plant. Leaves and flowers fall away, but the germ, which is inconspicuous, remains and develops into next year's plant.

From this point of view, which I have just discussed methodologically, the relationship between natural necessity, everything that surrounds us as natural necessity, and what arises in us as ethical impulses appears as follows. Natural necessity will undergo a process that cannot be understood merely as natural necessity, as Clausius, for example, wants to understand his entropy of the universe. Rather, there is a process of mortifying that which appears physical to us today, and how the germ lives in this physical [that which ethical impulses are] to the physical world of a distant future. And we come to realize that our physical world is the realized ethical world of a distant past, and our ethical impulses of the present are the germs of a physical world of the future. The ethical problem, understood anthroposophically, is part of the cosmological problem. Through this anthroposophical view, the human being is in turn incorporated into the whole cosmos.

This has important social implications. The ethical ideal, the ethical impulse, is intimately connected with the social impulse. The social impulses will only take hold of humanity in the right way again, they will only lead us out of the chaos of the present, when it is grasped that what man does here on earth is not something that disappears like smoke and fog, which is like ideology based on purely external, purely economic processes, but what has a cosmological significance so that, in fact, with a variant, the Christian word is true, which every person can pronounce, can repeat after the Christian master: “Heaven and earth will pass away” – that is, what surrounds us as the physical world will pass away – “but my word,” that is, the logos that lives in me also as the ethical, “will not pass away.” It creates a future world. Thus, that which lives in the human being expands into a consciousness that in turn integrates the human being into the cosmology of world evolution.

I just wanted to show you today, dear attendees, what the relationship is between anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the epistemological problem; how, in fact, what makes this epistemological problem so difficult for today's philosophy, in that on the one hand, cannot get out of the image character of the life of imagination, and on the other hand, cannot really do anything with the will because it cannot be brought out into the bright clarity of consciousness, how this problem, when grasped anthroposophically, places the human being in reality. Because that which he was in reality before his birth or conception takes on the character of an image in our life between birth and death. In this way, what is in the human being in the form of an image is linked to the external reality that he experiences and to which he himself builds the bridge. If one looks between two realities — the external environment and the internal world of ideas —, one can basically come to no solution to the problem, because one is dealing with a [shading] in the actual impulses of the inner world of ideas, an influence of that which was our reality before birth.

The ontological problem is posed anew by the fact that the human being experiences real spirituality again, that is, not only thinks dialectically, but by thinking dialectically, the spiritual-substantial, the essential is within this dialectical thinking.

The ethical problem, viewed anthroposophically, places the human being within the whole of cosmic becoming. It elevates what we do as individuals to a world fact by showing that what is ultimately necessary for a comprehensive world view is that in what happens in a person, there is not only something that is enclosed by his skin, but that, apart from the fact that he experiences it subjectively, it is also a subjective fact, it is also an objective event for the existence of the world. We live the existence of the world with us. Something lives in us, it is our subjective experience, but at the same time it is an objective experience of the world. By connecting the ethical impulses in this way with the cosmological existence, the cosmic experience of existence, the human being transcends death in the same way as he transcends birth in the other way. By understanding the powers of imagination, one comes to understand existence before birth. By understanding the will, one gets to know the germinal forces in the human organization, that which cannot be lived out at all until death, that which lives in us as the germ lives in the plant.

And from there, the path, which I cannot even hint at because of the shortness of time, is to recognize the immortality problem, namely, life beyond death. We have become so unclear about the problem of immortality in recent times because we cannot see it properly by the hand of the other problem. We do not even have a word for this other problem in ordinary language. We talk about immortality, but we do not talk about being unborn, about unbornness. Immortality belongs to the realm of the unborn. Until we are able to think and talk about being unborn in the same way as we do about immortality, we will only grope in matters of faith and not come to certain knowledge.

Dear attendees, I am well aware of how much can be objected to what I have been allowed to explain today. Believe me when I say that the spiritual researcher raises the objections that can be raised, because he is aware of the difficult and questionable areas his research enters into. But perhaps these arguments have shown that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, insofar as it emanates from the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, is not concerned with wild fantasy, nebulous mysticism, or some kind of enthusiastic theosophy, but that it has to do with something that, at least in its striving, wants to continue on the path of serious, even exact science. To what extent this can be achieved today, I cannot say. But serious research is being pursued precisely because the tremendous scientific advances of recent times point not only to themselves, but at the same time beyond themselves. It is my heartfelt conviction that today's good natural scientist is not driven by the results of natural science research, but by what a natural scientist does with mind and soul, into the development of these soul abilities, which are already applied unconsciously in natural science research. He is driven to consciously develop these abilities and is then drawn into a truly concrete grasp of the spirit. A concrete grasp of the spirit, just as science is a concrete grasp of nature, of objective natural facts, that is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to achieve.

Discussion

Leo Polak: Since no one else wants to take the floor, I would like to do so myself. After we have heard about anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, I would also like to hear something from the other side, I would like to say, from the purely philosophical side here, especially from the epistemological side. Because what pleased me most this evening was at least the striving to also give an epistemological foundation for this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as Dr. Steiner also tried to do in his works, which I am familiar with for the most part.

But then it became clear to me that there really is a fundamental contradiction, I would even say a contradiction, between anthroposophy and philosophy. In my opinion, this contradiction is not based on what Dr. Steiner founded it on. He explained somewhere that the real fact of the matter is that it is not philosophy that contradicts anthroposophy, but rather that philosophers, and especially Kant, do not understand philosophy. Now I believe that the whole attitude of philosophy towards anthroposophy is different from the opposite. I would like to say, even if it sounds a little immodest: philosophy is a little more modest; it will never dare to say, “This clairvoyant knowledge does not exist.” It will not dare to say that if Dr. Steiner believes and thinks that by developing certain soul forces he can expand memory or expand it to see a supersensible world, to see the higher world of ideas, to think with prenatal spiritual powers, and what else we have heard here, to purely spiritual in this sense, and when he thus directly beholds the supersensible non-ego, when he beholds what occurred before birth and after death, then we can simply say: We do not see this, we lack this cognitive faculty, in principle, not gradually, but in principle, and so we have to remain silent about it. The only thing we can critically note here is that it is a mistake to speak here of a mere extension of the known forces. Each time, the familiar force is not expanded, but transformed into and transferred into something that is fundamentally opposed to it. Remembering is always only remembering what one has experienced oneself. When remembering becomes beholding, when it becomes supersensible, it becomes something fundamentally different, an insight into something that is no longer and never can be a power of remembrance.

It is exactly the same with love. We do not believe for a moment, at least I am convinced, that it is a lack of my ability to love that I cannot immediately merge with that objectivity in which Dr. Steiner can, that I cannot experience the inner reality of the supersensible and therefore also solve the question of the supersensible when a before and after is experienced. I do not believe that, that is the only thing I can say; and what I can definitely say is that something new is being achieved here, and not just an expansion of our powers of knowledge and love.

But if epistemology and philosophy do not want to and cannot presume to pass judgment on spiritual powers, about which they themselves absolutely do not dispose, do not know and even cannot think, a seeing of a non-ego, then on the other hand, where the spiritual scientist turns to epistemology and wants to judge and condemn epistemological questions, she feels obliged to let her criticism be heard and to say: It is possible that clairvoyance has penetrated into the core of matter, even if epistemology does not recognize this whole matter as reality; this vision may be able to enter into the inner being of matter, but it has not entered into the inner being of epistemology; it has only been able to see epistemology and especially critique, the Kantian one, from the outside, without ever being inside.

It is clear that it would be taking this far too far if one were to expand on this with specific reasons. I would then need a whole evening here, just as the previous speaker would have needed this and more to express his view on epistemology. But there are some words that I just want to touch on briefly because they are of the utmost and greatest interest in principle. In the book 'Philosophy of Freedom', for example, Dr. Steiner particularly addresses the problem of knowledge, and perhaps the most characteristic sentence in the book is that, from the concept of knowledge as we have defined it, we cannot speak of limits to knowledge. Well, there could hardly be a more fundamental contradiction than that between critical epistemology, which I have the honor of representing here at the university and on which I give my lectures, and a statement like this, which rejects every limit of knowledge that the exact research work of so many of the greatest thinkers, and especially Kant, has taught us, could hardly be more fundamentally opposed than this between a theory that denies the limits of knowledge and one that establishes them. And this denial of origin is also the basis of the rest of the antagonism. Dr. Steiner has criticized critical idealism in this book and elsewhere, but he always remained outside the actual problem, never even touching on the essence of actual Kantianism. He believes that the phenomenon of nature is the nature of Kantianism, for which every nature, every material world, for example, not only exists as a physical world for Dr. Steiner, but there is also an ethereal body outside our physical body , we also have an astral body, we not only have the one spirit, but also four kinds of spirit, so to speak, which are then named with these Indian words: manas, budhi, atma and so on. But the physical body is denied by Kantianism as an independently existing reality; it is merely a phenomenon of the thing in itself. We also heard that day that one had even come to speculate, to a “thing in itself,” as if that were the most unreasonable thing one could do. And here, no less a figure than Kant said of the denial of this thing in itself: “I have shown with all my criticism that what we perceive, the things of the world of appearances, are not things in themselves, but appearances. That is, as is well known, the sum total of Kant's entire critique of knowledge: it would be incorrect to consider these appearances to be things in themselves; but it would be an even greater contradiction to want to deny the existence of any “thing in itself” at all. It would, of course, take me much too far afield if I were to elaborate on this point, but I can completely hint at Dr. Steiner's fundamental errors here with a few words: He has partly adopted Hartmann's criticism of idealism and in any case made the big mistake in it – which I believe I have shown in my book, and that is this – that idealism or the phenomenon of matter or nature, that one could arrive there only if one presupposes the reality of nature, the reality of [gap in the text]. This is quite incorrect and is based on the false formulation of this subjectivity of the content of perception. Not a single critical idealist in this sense says, as Dr. Steiner has him say, as he himself believes that it should be said, that colors merely depend on and exist for an eye, but every critical thinker knows here that that the eye is just as much a phenomenon and just as dependent and is not the eye [the first principle] but just as secondary, so he says: All colors exist only for and through the sense of color, the sense of sight, as a mental faculty. And in exactly the same way, all sounds in the whole world only exist if the sense of hearing is presupposed as the [primum], and not the ear or the brain. If one makes this single and absolutely necessary change in this whole critique of Dr. Steiner on Kantian idealism, then it collapses into nothing and then Dr. Steiner's only argument remains, but it is scattered and shown to have been insignificant. I would ask those experts who deal with epistemology to read the relevant passage from Dr. Steiner's work, and I would ask Dr. Steiner to consider the matter in this light and to see whether this change is not enough to show that what he has brought up here in a critical sense is unfortunate.

And there is still another fundamental difference between this merely formal, merely critical idealism and everything that Kant, I believe rightly, called enthusiastic, mystical idealism. The previous speaker wanted to make a fundamental distinction between mysticism and his teaching. I fear that some of those present here were unable or hardly able to find this difference. There was much in it that must be considered enthusiastic from a Kantian point of view, as belonging to that higher idealism. The higher [gap in the text] [is] not for me; for me it is only the pathos, the depth of experience. I believe that for some people what was presented tonight will have had a mystical quality, and quite rightly so. For mystical has always been used to describe that which is based on the direct content of the transcendent, the non-ego, that which is not directly given in the ego, that is, the non-ego. And it is precisely this insight into the supersensible, the other, the non-ego, the non-self-experienced, the previous and the subsequent, all these mystical things that we have heard proclaimed as the elements of anthroposophy. I would like to conclude with a motto from Kant's “Prolegomena”. It goes without saying that I cannot go into everything in detail, that would of course be impossible. Dr. Steiner said: “The interaction between brain and soul certainly exists.” We are very surprised at this certainty, since the whole critical theory of knowledge, in contrast to the psychology Dr. Steiner pointed to, not only denies this interaction in principle, but can also demonstrate the fundamental impossibility of interaction, because interaction requires two, two realities, and for critical idealism one of these realities does not exist materially as such, but in itself something else, something that is in itself psychic and ideal, just as we ourselves are, and just as one's own deeper opinion may be Dr. Steiner's own, but which he merely clothes in this uncritical, dogmatic, duplicated theory of perception, never speaking of images and even mirror images; when criticism shows, never Kantian criticism, that our perception never delivers images, never reproduction, but production. That would be the fundamental error, but I cannot go into that in detail now. The words of Kant with which I would like to end – there are actually two – I would first like to formulate the contrast between this clairvoyance and critical philosophy in Kant's words. Because “this much is certain and certain to me: anyone who has ever tasted criticism is forever disgusted by all the dogmatic drivel they previously had to make do with.” And further: “Criticism relates to ordinary school metaphysics” – and I would like to say also to this new metaphysics, to anthroposophy – “just as chemistry relates to alchemy or astronomy to divinatory astrology”. That is the one word that formulates the opposition in principle. The other is this: “Now suppose what seems most credible even after the most careful examination of the reasons. These may be facts or reasons, but reason does not deny that which makes it the greatest good on earth, namely, the prerogative of being the final touchstone of truth."

With this final touchstone of truth, we want to measure anthroposophy and theosophy. For, as Kant says - and with this I would like to conclude - otherwise you will become unworthy of this freedom and surely lose it.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to just touch on a few points and not keep you any longer. The first is the fundamental point that your esteemed chairman has brought forward, that there is not just a difference in degree between what I characterized as a developed ability to remember and remembering, but a fundamental contradiction. Nothing else emerges from my characterization, of course. Perhaps I may trace it back to the difficulty in communication through language, when your chairman introduced a word to justify his criticism that I have not used and would never use. I spoke of a further development of the ability to remember, not of an extension. I would like to explicitly draw attention to this. Extension is wrong. Further development can also lead to a form of the same thing, a metamorphosis that shows a fundamental opposition to that from which it developed. That just to point out how easily misunderstandings could arise within a critique. Because what I have explained is basically not changed by the fact that this principal opposition, which was already clearly included in my formulation, is particularly characterized. Because, my dear attendees, since there is of course an opposition, yes, a principal contradiction between what I have explained and Kantianism, I will never deny that.

I have never made a secret of the fact that, based on all my research results, I had to become an anti-Kantian. And what I have written in my “Truth and Science” and in my “Philosophy of Freedom” is, of course, to be taken as an examination of Kantianism based on years of effort. It is of little importance whether one says, perhaps with a somewhat imprecise expression, “Without the eye, there is no color,” as Schopenhauer actually said in various places, or whether one says, “Colors are not objective, but phenomena; the eye itself is a phenomenon.” Of course, that is all correct. And if one then goes on to say, “Without the sense of color, there would be no colors,” then one would really have to weave this into a critique, not just hint at it. Of course, all that is correct. And if one then goes on to say, “Without the sense of color, there would be no colors,” then one would really need to weave this into a critique not just in a suggestive way, but then one would need to go into great detail about how to characterize what is called the sense of color. For in my opinion, the transition to the sense of color, as soon as one wants to arrive at clear, sharply contoured concepts, is very mystical. Kantianism becomes a rather nebulous mysticism for me. And in the newer epistemology, Kantianism has become a nebulous mysticism for me in many ways. It would be more fruitful, ladies and gentlemen, to discuss the things that I have actually presented in the lecture. Because to pick out one thing from my “Philosophy of Freedom” is virtually impossible. This sentence stands in the middle of a long development. It is impossible to grasp its meaning without this long development.

When I say that one should not assume any limits to knowledge, it must be borne in mind that the meaning of this sentence emerges from the whole argument. This sentence can be understood in the most diverse ways. It can be understood in such a way that one does not initially speak of fundamental limits to knowledge, as do du Bois-Reymond in his Ignorabimus or as certain representatives of Kantianism do. But it can also be understood in such a way that one does not set any limits to research, but sees research as an [asymptotic] approximation to truth, so that one should not speak of limits to knowledge in order not to hinder the progress of research.

I don't want to try your patience too much by going into all the quotes from my writings, because that would take a really long time. I could only pick out certain things from the whole range of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and, you see, you have to start with certain things with a certain understanding. It seems to me that it is not acceptable to formulate the contrast between anthroposophy and mysticism so sharply, not only defining it so sharply, but also showing how anthroposophy can be used to avoid the danger of going astray into nebulous mysticism. It is not acceptable to describe anthroposophy as mysticism by means of pure definition. You can do that if you have made a definition of mysticism and subsumed everything that does not belong in that which you want to accept. But the progressive path of knowledge must be allowed to go beyond given definitions; you will also find in my “Philosophy of Freedom” that there is no need to rethink Kantianism. It has been considered from all sides precisely by these considerations, which I have tried to employ in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

Today, after I have passed my sixtieth year, it makes a strange impression on me when I am given the advice that I should consider Kantianism. As a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, because I didn't like my history teacher, I stapled the then-published edition of the Critique of Pure Reason into my school notebooks so that I could read Kant while the teacher was teaching history. Since that time, I have been studying Kant and I have followed this advice, given from various sides, to thoroughly consider Kantianism. That was forty-four years ago. If the admonition had not come at this point in Kantianism, with regard to which I want to confess that I am somewhat sensitive, I would not have kept you these few minutes with this purely personal matter, because that is what it is. Otherwise, I would have liked to have been mindful of the fact that I was speaking here only as a guest and therefore should have behaved as a guest. Perhaps I have already gone beyond what is necessary here by making this latter personal remark. But sometimes the personal is necessarily connected with the objective and may then be permitted as personal.

I would just like to have this mentioned for the reason that too little has actually been said about my lecture, and more of what has been formulated by me in completely different contexts has been criticized, which I find very understandable; for anyone who has been involved with Kantianism for forty-four years also understands the enthusiasm for Kant's critique of reason, for Kantian idealism; understands how one can speak of the “thing in itself”. I also appreciate all the objections that have just been raised, and I thank your chair for them. I don't want to bother you any further, but I would ask that what I actually presented in my lecture today be examined more closely.

Leo Polak: If I have perhaps given rise to misunderstandings in my words, I am happy to acknowledge my error. I see that there has also been constant talk here of further development, which I read in my notes as “expansion” of the power of remembrance. If, as the speaker himself says, he does not mean an extension, but something fundamentally new, then we fully agree on this point. And I have also given the reason why it would be unfeasible for me to go into these positive statements in more detail: because I lack all knowledge in this area. I can only say: I do not possess this ability of clairvoyance and therefore do not talk about something I do not know.

And if I might have been a little immodest again in the formulation of my advice, where it appears as if I am telling an older thinker and writer to consider this or that, I did not say he should study Kantianism; I know his work and know what he thinks about it. But he should reconsider his one argument against Kantianism – eyes, colors, sense of color – and I must stick to that. I know that Dr. Steiner has studied Kantianism, has read Kant, and so on; I simply wanted to state that in a sense he would have remained on the outside. Perhaps I am allowed to say one more thing, a saying that was not made this evening either, but that was taken from another book, “Philosophy and Theosophy”, the essay that deals with the relationship between these two, which says that Kant can only imagine a “thing in itself” in material terms, however grotesque it may sound. Therefore, I also understand why Dr. Steiner must deny the “thing in itself” if he thinks that the “thing in itself” must be imagined materially. This “thing in itself” would then be an “un-thing in itself”.

Rudolf Steiner: That is not there.

Leo Polak: Dr. Steiner says it is not there. Here it is!

Rudolf Steiner: You have the translation there. Then the sentence has been mistranslated. It doesn't mean that I refute Kant, that he could only imagine the “thing in itself” materially, but that I find that the “thing in itself”, if you want to imagine it impartially, could be imagined materially. This is not an objection that I am making, but one that many have already made, that the Kantian definition of the “thing in itself” does not exclude a material conception.

Leo Polak: Now this is the fundamental opposition of the whole of Kantianism to this doctrine, that Kant has shown by all means of epistemology and criticism, at any rate, that the “thing in itself”, whatever qualities it may have in addition , can only be in principle and fundamentally non-sensuous, supersensuous; that sensuous qualities are only the sense-thing, that is, the phenomenon. So if I also agree with Dr. Steiner, then so much the better. Then he will see that what he calls the supersensible world is not so far removed from what Kant says, only that Kant does not have a faculty of vindication. I think I have explained why I cannot go into Dr. Steiner's positive assertions: because I am a layman in that field, and that was the first commandment of spiritual science: one should not speak of what one does not understand. And if we can all finally agree that we want to understand and comprehend the world only with the means that the spirit provides us with — as Dr. Steiner ultimately also wants to do, even if he says that one can further develop the powers —, and if we want to understand the world with the spiritual powers that everyone feels within, and if we take as a point of reference, just as Kantianism does with all of critical philosophy, and just as Dr. Steiner does — I grant myself the concession of emphasizing, in a conciliatory way, that we agree — if one no longer, as a past period of science did, regards the objective, the material, the mechanical as the primary and original given, but rather, emphasizing the ego, the ego experience, the psychic, the inner life itself, and seeing, recognizing and knowing it as the primary, the founding, the starting and secure point of all science, then I believe that, marching separately, one can still beat unitedly the forces of of ignorance, of superstition and of enthusiastic mysticism, which, as I was pleased to hear, Dr. Steiner also regards as an opponent; marching separately, but unitedly overcoming these black forces of ignorance and superstition in order to achieve some light, some understanding, some insight, some comprehension. In this happy hope we want to agree and finally thank Dr. Steiner with all our hearts for what he has given with all his conviction after a long life of so many years as the result of his research. That it does not agree with our results, with the results of our research and others, that we object to in principle, I have considered it my duty not to keep to myself. Even if Dr. Steiner is a guest, I have not taken this into account and neither has Dr. Steiner. Even if the guests are friends, [gap in the text].

Dear attendees! First of all, I would like to apologize for not giving this lecture in the language of your country. However, since I do not use this language, I must ask you to allow me to make the following comments in the language I do use.

Anyone who wants to talk about the spiritual nature of man and how we can get to know it today will indeed meet with a certain interest within our contemporary educated society. The fate has befallen wide areas of modern civilized life that people today can often be thrown into confusion and a sense of loss when faced with what the external world throws at them. And so many people today seek that which was once sought in the external world in the inner human soul itself, seeking the strength to sustain themselves, seeking the security that the human soul needs for a strong life. On the other hand, if one wishes to speak in the spirit of the present age about the realization of the supersensible human being, as I intend to do today, then one immediately encounters resistance from precisely that world and world view that should actually be the most valuable to us today must be the most valuable to us. We meet with the opposition of the scientific world, which, from the most diverse foundations of its own mode of knowledge, must assert that ascent into the supersensible, into the spiritual worlds, is not possible by means of the methods which are habitually employed in scientific life.

Nevertheless, modern civilization has approached man in such a way that he has become accustomed to viewing everything in the light that comes to him in some way from scientific knowledge. And so it is that in the sense of today's education, people no longer want to seek satisfaction for their spiritual life in the sense of old traditional beliefs, but they do have the need to strive for such knowledge with regard to the spiritual world, which can still be justified in the face of the scientific needs of the present. And it is this kind of knowledge of the spiritual essence of the human being that is sought by the anthroposophical world view, which I would like to speak about today and next Friday, today more about the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the human being, and next Friday about the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the world.

When one speaks of the spiritual essence of the human being as the deepest mystery of existence, what does one actually mean, dear ladies and gentlemen? Actually, one does not think that there can be any doubt about the spirit and its activity in the human being; because anyone who reflects on himself, even a little, will see precisely in what is spiritual in him that which gives man his actual dignity, which elevates him above the other beings in the world. And it can be said that not even the convinced materialist will actually doubt the value and the existence of the spiritual life in man. He will only raise objections against the independence, against the own entity of this spiritual life within human nature. He will say: That which you acknowledge as human being as your spiritual entity, that goes out of the physical, like the flame from the candle; that arises out of this physical; that extinguishes with this physical-physical.

Is it then, as one should believe, since man must once see the spiritual as his actual, peculiar dignity, is it then really grounded in ordinary life, that man, if not about the existence and the existence of the spiritual, so can be driven into deep doubt about the fate of his spiritual being? Yes, he can. He can do it through everyday life. And basically there are no other doubts in the science of the spiritual than those that unconsciously exist in the everyday life of man, that confuse man, that make man uncertain when he wants to have clarification about the nature of his own spirit.

And these doubts come from the most diverse sides. They are particularly strong in those who receive a scientific education in the present day. Of the various doubts that arise in a person, I will mention the two main ones, which a person does not really realize in everyday life, but there is indeed much, my dear audience, that sits unconsciously or subconsciously in the depths of the human soul, which surfaces into consciousness, not as clear concepts and not as clear doubts either, but as uncertainties, as something that, from the very bottom up, constitutes a person's inner happiness or inner instability. The one thing that — I emphasize it again —, not with complete clarity, but all the more strongly emotionally, gives rise to doubts about the fate of the spiritual, we actually encounter as human beings in every course of fate.

With each passing day, we sink into the life of sleep, through which the spiritual life, which is active during the day, gradually fades and finally extinguishes completely, until it arises again when we wake up and fills our consciousness. It is this extinguishing, this everyday disappearance of spiritual life, that repeatedly makes people uncertain when they ask themselves: Does the spirit have an independent existence? Doesn't it arise, this spirit, in the human physical life, just as it develops from childhood from the dull to the brighter more and more, like the flame from the candle when it is lit? Does it not go out again, this spirit, does it not go out, this soul life, when the body passes through death, as the flame goes out when the fuel is exhausted?

From this [night experience] everything that one seeks to eliminate and solve deep doubts and life's riddles actually emerges. But basically, and this will be the other side of the matter that I have to emphasize, basically it is no different in the waking life of the day. If we see the spirit extinguished in our sleep, then in our waking life we see it, as it were, immersed in the darkness of our own body in relation to its activity.

What is it then that we entertain in clear consciousness as our thoughts? Certainly, we have them. But if we only ask ourselves how our soul works in the simple movement of the hand when this primitive expression of the will comes about, we can only say to ourselves: Yes, we grasp the thought; the hand is to be raised. But the thought disappears into the darkness of our own organism. In our everyday consciousness we have no idea what our soul accomplishes within our organism in order to send its power through muscles and tendons in a flash, as it were, to actually bring about the act of will. We see, finally, how the hand moves – so again a mental image – and we see an external action as a result of going from mental image to mental image. But how the soul and spirit descend into our own body, that actually remains in darkness for us.

This darkness and this extinguishing, as I have just characterized them, is what anthroposophy, as a modern spiritual knowledge, now seeks to overcome, just as these doubts have been overcome at all times in the development of the human soul. What Anthroposophy strives for, ladies and gentlemen, is, I would say, exact clairvoyance, and by this term I would distinguish the knowledge of Anthroposophy from all the nebulous mystical views to which people in our time of uncertainties so often turn. It is this exact clairvoyance, this exact seeing-through, that aims to take full account of the requirements of modern science.

What, then, are these requirements of modern science? Well, they are that one can, with an inner clarity in observation and experiment, survey that which presents itself to the senses, and the genuine, as he calls himself, the exact modern scientist, in pursuing that which his senses observe, that which he wants to achieve through the experiment, he wants to have such clarity, such inner necessity in it, as he has in mathematics. That is why mathematical thinking is so readily applied to the natural sciences. One would actually like to apply this mathematical thinking everywhere, because it brings about exactness, that is, transparency, inner necessity. Now, anyone who speaks of exact science in this sense today seeks to bring this exactness into the way he follows external things and processes, or, for that matter, if he wants to be a psychologist, into the way he follows his own soul processes.

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, also applies this exactitude. But it does not apply it to the external world, not to the observation of sensual things and to external sensual experiment. It applies this exactness to something that is not initially available to human consciousness. It applies this exactness to the development of soul forces that are initially hidden in the human being, but that can be evoked in it. Anthroposophical spiritual science has certainly learned from natural science how, through external sensory observation, through external experiment, through the methods by which natural science has achieved such triumphs, as they are also fully recognized by spiritual science, that through all this one cannot penetrate into a spiritual, not into a supersensible world, that the soul forces of man, as they are in everyday life and also in ordinary science, are unsuitable for penetrating into the supersensible. The human soul must first be made suitable for this, and the hidden powers deep within it must be brought forth. In doing so, one can proceed in an inward, mystically unclear way. Anthroposophical spiritual science specifically rejects this. But it wants to bring hidden soul forces out of the nature of man. And by adhering to this bringing forth, it observes a method that is as clear and inwardly necessary in the same sense as the research of external science in sensory observation and in experiment.

What exact science does to the finished outer nature by introducing clarity and exactness, that is what anthroposophy does to the development of the human soul forces. Nothing is done in the human soul that is not done with the same inner clarity, comprehensibility and necessity as the strict mathematician does with his investigations. In this way, the method of this exact clairvoyance seeks to develop the human soul in such a way that, to a certain extent, one's own development initially becomes a mathematical problem. I wanted to start by characterizing how the anthroposophical spiritual science that we are talking about here does not believe that one can research the spirit in the same way that one conducts external research in the natural sciences. Rather, it carries the scientific spirit that is present in the natural sciences into spiritual research in the truest sense. So the first step in anthroposophy is to work on oneself, on those forces of one's soul that then lead to insight into the supersensible world.

From this you can see, my dear attendees, that the person who wants to penetrate to the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the human being, let us call him a spiritual researcher, must, so to speak, turn back to himself in order to, first of all, I would say, illuminate his soul inwardly. It is a process of illumination and strengthening.

We shall most easily be able to understand what this modern way of observing the soul is to become if I remind you, my dear audience, of how such spiritual knowledge was sought in the more ancient times of human spiritual development. They were, I might say, striven for in a somewhat more material way. And since that which I have to describe to you later as today's method is more spiritual and soul-like, we shall be able to present this spiritual and soul-like more easily if we start, I might say, from the coarser, more material older methods.

But to do this, we must first take a look at how, in earlier periods of human development, people related to their environment. It is easy to believe that the human race has always been the same in its state of mind as it is today, since historical times. But this is not correct. Those who have an inner view of the human soul life will find that, even if they go back only a few centuries, people thought, felt and wanted quite differently, indeed, their whole soul mood, their whole soul condition was different than it is today. And if we go back thousands of years in human development, it becomes significantly different. The external historical monuments can only tell us a little about this, because, firstly, even if we look at the oldest times, for example, Egyptian monuments, they do not go back very far. Secondly, however, it depends on how the present-day person interprets these monuments. And according to that, he then finds one thing or another, which is basically only a reflection of his own state of mind, which he dreams into the souls of older humanity.

The spiritual science itself, of which I want to speak to you today and next Friday, sees the soul life of an older humanity in a different way than ordinary history. It looks at what has been preserved in significant, let us say, poetic or other monuments and can form an idea of how what is preserved in such monuments basically breathes from a completely different kind of spirit than that of today's human beings and she gradually comes to recognize that primitive humanity already had a kind of clairvoyance, a clairvoyance that was, however, dreamy, a clairvoyance that, compared to today's demands for clarity of consciousness, must appear to us as something foggy, as something dreamy. But this dreamy clairvoyance of ancient times looked deeper into the inner structure of the world, into the spirituality of the world, than today's sensory consciousness can. Fundamentally, the older person's relationship to the world was quite different.

It is easy to say that this older person saw all kinds of things in the things around him, that he saw a spiritual being in every plant, in every tree and bush, in every wave and ripple, and that he dreamt spiritual entities into clouds and winds. Yes, his consciousness was dream-like. But he did not simply project his own imagination onto the spiritual and soul-like beings he saw in water, in the spring, in the clouds, in the rain and in the wind. Rather, his state of soul was such that he saw all the spiritual beings in the world so naturally, with such elementary power, as we see the red or yellow color in the environment today, as we hear the sound in the environment, as we feel the warmth. We only perceive the senses and their contents; the older person experienced a spiritual element in the whole natural environment through the same elementary world, but in return he did not feel such an I, such a distinct self-reliant I as the modern person.

This feeling of a solid ego only developed over time in the course of human development, and only with it did the experience of human freedom arise. For this experience of freedom, this ego experience, to come about, the older dream-like, clairvoyant way has faded away. Man has been limited to the external sense world. In it he acquired his freedom. But today we have again reached a point where we, in our position as humanity within the sense world, must long to find the connection with the spiritual world again, where we are dependent on regaining a kind of clairvoyance. For the reasons already mentioned, however, this cannot be an old, dream-like clairvoyance; it can only be an exact clairvoyance, a clairvoyance that is modeled on modern scientific requirements. The older person had a dream-like clairvoyance; but just as we cannot be satisfied with external science today, so he was just as little satisfied with his clairvoyance, even though he found everywhere in the plant, in the bush, in the tree, in the cloud, in the wind , in the wind, he found a spiritual essence everywhere. He was not satisfied with this, and he turned his gaze to those personalities who, in those older times, represented what scholars represent today, what priests represent today. He directed his gaze to those personalities in older times who can be called initiates, initiates, for they were perceived as such, and who, through the development of special soul powers, but in a more material way than we are to do today, came to a kind of spiritual knowledge of man.

Yes, this kind was more material than our present-day one may be. I would like to describe such a kind of ancient spiritual knowledge first. I would like to describe to you what has actually come down to us, more or less distorted, in the external literature from the ancient Orient, and was practiced in the oldest times of the Orient by individual personalities in order to gain knowledge of a higher, spiritual world and to be able to communicate it to the broad masses of humanity, who lived with their state of soul as I have characterized it.

I know, esteemed attendees, that what I am about to describe as the so-called yoga method of that oldest oriental spiritual development has then come into decadence, that it has fallen into decay, and that even in many descriptions of that yoga method, because they actually describe periods of decay of this kind of spiritual research, something very bad is given.

But I would like to give you a little description of the genuine ancient yoga method, so that we can then get some orientation about what modern man can strive for as exact clairvoyance. It was a special kind of breathing that was aimed for through that yoga method. How does breathing actually work in the ordinary person? He doesn't really know much about it. He breathes in, he breathes out. Only when our breathing becomes irregular during illness do we actually feel our breathing. We do not pay attention to it in ordinary life. It fulfills our corporeality, but it fulfills our corporeality in such a way that its activity basically remains unconscious. Nevertheless, this breath plays - we can also prove this physiologically today, I can only hint at it in this lecture - but this breath nevertheless plays a significant role in our entire human life.

We breathe in. The breath does not just take the path into the inner cavities of our body, only to be exhaled again in a different form, but, for example, it passes through our spinal canal, flows into our brain, and we have , within our brain, while we are awake, we do not merely have nervous activity, but we have this nervous activity continually vibrated, radiated, and permeated by the breaths, by the rhythm of the breathing process. And we can say that even in our thinking, in our imagination, the breathing process has the greatest conceivable share.

But just as we pay little attention to the breathing process in the rest of our organism, we are just as unaware of it in our head organization. The ancient yogi changed the breathing, that is, he shifted the breathing into a different respiratory rhythm than the usual one. The ordinary breathing is not noticed. By breathing in differently, slower or faster, holding it longer or shorter than one does in ordinary life, breathing out longer or shorter, the yogi brought himself into a different rhythm. This made him aware of the breathing process. This allowed him to follow the course of the respiratory flow from inhalation through the lungs, how it spread throughout the entire organism, and how it ran through the spinal canal into the brain. In this way, the person pervaded the organism with his consciousness. He followed the respiratory flow everywhere. In this way he got to know his own organism. And this getting to know one's own organism, my dear ladies and gentlemen, means that all mere material experience comes to an end. In ancient times of human spiritual development, anyone who consciously radiated through their own humanity with an altered breathing rhythm would have seemed foolish if they had said that only material things were circulating through their body. No, the breathing current appeared to those old yogis, so to speak, as an internal scanning of the organism. And what arose for them through this scanning was the inner soul and spiritual being of the person. The method was material. What was discovered was the inner soul and spiritual being. What was discovered was how one feels, how one thinks. They proceeded materially and discovered a spiritual being. They examined themselves inwardly, so to speak, feeling their way. And what the ancient yogi strove for on the one hand was precisely the sense of self that he did not yet have through his natural knowledge, which he tried to acquire in this way.

You just have to look at such things not with the dry, philistine way that is often applied today, you have to put yourself with all the full human feeling in that, what is one, so if you scan his inner human.

Then, my dear audience, you feel what is described in the wonderful Bhagavad Gita as the true human self, which flows into the spiritual and soul world as the eternal in man. One feels that what is described as the ego in a wonderful world poem is the result of a process such as I have just described as yoga breathing.

Now, my dear attendees, we cannot proceed in this way as modern people, because after all, it is the case that the one who, on this path, through the change of breathing, or also because one wanted to support all of this wanted to support this by means of special postures, by means of the position of the person in relation to the physical body, because by doing so they made the physical body particularly intense, because they made themselves hypersensitive as a person in general, it happened that they had to withdraw from life. But that was entirely in keeping with the old habits of knowledge of mankind. Those who, in this way, made themselves overly sensitive as seekers of the spiritual world sought solitude, for it was not appropriate for them to always be in relation to the harsh rest of the world, to come into contact with it. But on the other hand, those who wanted to know something about the fate of human souls sought out such lonely personalities. People trusted these hermits. They were considered to be able to give sound advice on the temporal fate of the human soul in relation to the eternal.

We cannot proceed in the same way today, because humanity has come to a point in its development that it can no longer trust the one who, in order to explore the truth, to explore the spiritual, withdraws from life, but that it can only trust the one who fully cooperates with life, who, like every other person, engages in the practice of life, in the needs and demands of the day. Today we need methods that do not make the human body overly sensitive, but that strengthen the human soul. These methods can be attained, and they can lead to a truly exact clairvoyance.

First of all, there are intimate processes of the human soul life to which one must devote oneself: meditation, concentration of the life of imagination. In a similar way, I have described in my books, for example in “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in my “Occult Science”, what the human being must devote himself to. I have pointed out what today's modern man must do in order to enter the spiritual world in a similar way, but now according to his needs, as was given to the ancient yogi.

Shall I now give you a brief definition of meditation? Meditation is a specific training of the life of thought, which is not present in ordinary existence. And through this training of the life of thought, one first comes to the development of such soul powers that lead into the spiritual world, into the supersensible. But what is this meditation?

Now, dear audience, you will find more detailed descriptions in the books mentioned above of what this meditation is, what these modern methods of clairvoyance are. But you will also find more detailed descriptions there of how the modern person must undertake, what the modern person must undertake to achieve such exact clairvoyance. But here I can only state the principles.

And if I were to describe to you in a single word what the soul has to do, I would put it like this: when we develop our imaginative life in other ways, we are immersed in our ideas with a certain indifference; in our ordinary lives we are often immersed in intense warmth or deep antipathy. Our whole inner being can be stirred up in hot passion or wild repulsion when we are immersed in ordinary life. But the images, they are, I would like to say, a cold current in our everyday life; they accompany this everyday life.

However, anyone who wants to progress to meditation must do something other than the coldness of the imaginative life that one otherwise deals with in ordinary daily life. One must be able to call thoughts into one's soul, thoughts that one may have guessed at from someone who is already a spiritual researcher, or thoughts that one otherwise finds out in the world, but which should work in the soul in such a way that they calmly fill the soul life. One tries to distract one's soul life from everything else in the world. One seeks to direct one's attention to such images and to dwell on such images; one seeks to devote oneself entirely to the imagination, to individual images. But there is something necessary in this devotion to the images: that we can love these images at the moment when we thus devote ourselves, when we disregard all the rest of the world and live in complete inner peace in one image or one complex of images.

Yes, my dear attendees, the development of inner love, the development of inner warmth of soul when resting on ideas – ideas that we ourselves have first placed in the life of the soul – these are what make it possible for ordinary imagining to become meditation. When we can love our own thinking with the same inner love with which we love our objects or fellow human beings, when we can love our own thinking universally, when we can merge completely in it with love, when we can remain in him, then this life of imagination receives that inner power which is indeed something quite different from yogic breathing, but which works in the same way, only producing somewhat different results than yogic breathing. While yogic breathing attempts to send the breathing process into the head in order to scan and illuminate the whole person inwardly and to recognize their spiritual and soul essence, we gradually develop gradually develop an inner, true power of thought, by means of which we can scan and examine ourselves inwardly, not in the same way as with the modified breath, but still to a certain extent.

And so, in modern man, exact clairvoyance can be evoked by strengthening and energizing the soul life, while in more physical terms, dreamy clairvoyance was sought in the earlier periods of human development.

But then, when we really come to examine ourselves inwardly in this way, through intensified, strengthened thinking, we become aware of something different from what we have in ordinary life; then, my dear audience, we have developed a power of knowledge in us that leads us out, initially, beyond the ordinary life of memory. What do we have in this memory life? We look back from the present moment of our existence on earth to some time after our birth. Thoughts of experiences emerge from memory. There is a continuous stream, but it remains in the subconscious; memories arise, either freely, as they are said to do, or evoked by ourselves. These memories are abstract thoughts of experiences that we may have gone through in all the heat of life. These abstract thoughts remain with us. But then, when we apply meditation or concentration, loving thoughts and repeatedly thinking loving thoughts to our soul life – whether it takes a short time or many years for each person depends on their destiny, depending on the nature of their destiny, can attain such exact clairvoyance. When we use it to illuminate our inner life, our past soul life since birth lies before our spiritual gaze like a unified, temporal panorama. But not as memories, but as creatively active in us what can be called an ethereal human existence.

We do not just look at how we have had external experiences that have remained in us in abstract thoughts, we look at our previous life, how we ourselves have worked on our organs from a spiritual and soul perspective since our childhood. We look at how we have shaped our still untrained brain in a plastic way in our early childhood. We look at how we have taken in external substances into our organism, how they have worked in us in terms of growth force, how we still work on ourselves daily in the forces of nutrition. We look at the outer organism as that which we ourselves are working on. After all, we do not have a spatial organism, a spatial body, in front of us, but we do have a temporal body in front of us.

All at once there stands that which is our whole life, but which only underlies the external appearances, which works on our outer organism, a time body - anthroposophy calls it the etheric body - a time body that cannot be drawn or painted, just as a flash of lightning cannot be drawn or painted, but can only be captured for a moment.

That is the first thing that one discovers through this exact clairvoyance: a time body that we carry within us, which is a unity like our spatial body, just as –– in our physical spatial body a unity is to be thought with the arms or with the hand, a unity is to be thought with the head, how the one is not to be thought without the other, how the one stands in reciprocal interaction with the other – we look at our time body when we turn 50 years old, just as we formed our physical body out of our etheric soul at the age of 30, we look back at our 28th year, we look back at our 18th year, we look back at that which is as interconnected as the individual limbs of our physical body. We look at an etheric element that underlies us. This etheric element remains in us throughout our entire life on earth, from birth to death. While we remove the substances that make up our body from our physical body after a relatively short time and replace them with others, what we see as the time body is a unity from our birth or conception to our death , a unity that is continually active within us, which, like a vast panorama of time, now stands before the soul life as that which we have acquired through meditation, through concentration, through the loving life of thought.

But we can go further. Those who remain for weeks or months, or for years in such meditative, that is, loving thought, even if only for a very short time each day, will eventually come to see how their thought life is strengthened. And because it is strengthened, it works in them as forces of growth, as realities, not just as abstract thoughts. He takes hold of those forces in his thoughts that have brought about his growth, that bring about his nourishment, that work in his inner being as nourishing forces. He transfers himself, so to speak, from the passive, abstract, dead life of thought into the world of living thoughts. And he first learns to recognize in this world of living thoughts his own etheric body, which has been building him up since his birth or conception and which is still working on him today.

Oh, it is as if, one day, something happened in our inner being through this loving introduction, through this loving thinking, through the attainment of this exact clairvoyance, as if something arose in our inner being which seems to us, as when we have gone through a dark night and see the morning sun come up and see it light up around us; so we experience for a moment in our inner being something like an inner soul sunrise. Our inner being, which was previously dark and we had to say to ourselves, we do not penetrate down to where our soul works on our body, we do not even penetrate down to those depths where, as I said before, the soul twitches like lightning through the muscle to move the arm through the thought, to raise the arm. Now we look into our organism through loving imagination. What we otherwise have only when we look into ourselves, thoughts, we now have as living forces; these are we ourselves as we have been in every hour of our earthly existence since our birth.

But by continuing our meditations, we come to the point – I have described it again in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or in my “Occult Science” or in other books – we finally come to the point of perceiving other exercises as necessary, because we learn to recognize that even if we always work on our soul life with the same inner awareness as we otherwise only have in mathematical work, when we work with such inner awareness, with absolute inner clarity and lucidity on our soul life, we come to see that it is now becoming more difficult to remove from our consciousness those thoughts that are now living forces, yes, that are ultimately what we recognize as ourselves, these living thoughts. It is as if they become fixed, because in the end we ourselves are what these living thoughts are. But just as we first learned to live lovingly in these ideas, so now we must turn to something else with all our inner effort. To do this, we must be able to remove the ideas from our consciousness of our own free will.

This is more difficult for us than in ordinary life, especially when we have previously lovingly placed them there. Therefore, as a rule, someone who has meditated for a while and is then advised by the spiritual researcher to move on to removing the ideas will say: Oh, the thoughts rush in like swarms of bees; I can't get rid of them. But the effort must be made to bring about an artificial forgetting within, a suppression of thoughts. And one can actually achieve this by making an effort, practising inner self-discipline, suppressing thoughts again, and finally, after first strengthening and reinforcing thoughts, creating an empty consciousness. One can then rest in this empty consciousness. One is actually now in a state that is only awake. One is awake, but one has no content of waking.

That this is difficult, my dear audience, you will see from the fact that most people immediately fall asleep when they have no content in their everyday consciousness. But that is precisely what must now be developed for the purpose of gaining knowledge of the higher worlds: to have a completely empty consciousness at the same time as an alert consciousness. If one really succeeds in this, then, as light and color effects stream into the eye and sounds stream into the ear from the physical world, so, when this has been prepared, the spiritual worlds stream into the empty consciousness. And now, for the first time, one becomes aware not only of what I have described before, seeing one's own life as an ethereal-spiritual world, but one now becomes aware of a spiritual world around oneself. I will say more about this next Friday, but now I want to talk about the spiritual essence of man and show that one can go further.

In the same way that one can come to discard ideas that one previously sought to gain with all one's strength, one can, by increasing one's strength of this discarding, come to finally discard the whole overview of one's own life. Everything that one sees there, what works inwardly on one's own organism, what growth and nutrition brings about, what allows us to develop from small children into fully grown adults, everything that is at work within, what stands before us like a spiritual panorama, one can remove it; just as one can abstract from one's own perception, one gradually learns to disregard one's own life. Just as it is otherwise difficult to achieve an empty consciousness, so now one can achieve an empty consciousness by having removed one's own consciousness in life. Then one stands there with an empty consciousness in full wakefulness. One stands beyond one's own life.

Now, a spiritual life flows into this soul, which has removed its own life between birth and death from consciousness. We learn to recognize this spiritual life by seeing it more and more as our pre-earthly existence. And now we are looking into a spiritual world that has nothing of what is otherwise around us in the material world, which is a purely spiritual world. But in this spiritual world we ourselves are in it, we are in it as we were before we descended as spiritual-soul beings into the physical-sensual world and united with what was given to us by father and mother as our physical body. Now we do not need to believe; now we have acquired, through the appropriate exercises, a real, exact knowledge, an exact observation of what we were in the spiritual and soul world before our birth or conception. How we worked, thought and willed in the spiritual world, how we work after we have clothed ourselves with our physical body between birth and death in earthly existence, how we bring about everything in earthly existence through our bodily organization , and even the thought we conceive can only be conceived through the medium of the nervous system, so we see ourselves in our spiritual-soul existence through a truly exact clairvoyance before we descended to our earth.

We see ourselves surrounded by spiritual beings, just as we see ourselves surrounded by physical beings here in the physical world. What leads us back a little in the physical world, but not out of the physical world, is our memory. We have abstract thoughts in the present moment. They bring into our soul the experiences we had years ago; but now, through the processes I have described, we not only have before us the ordinary experience on the physical earth, now we have before us – albeit in an image, but in an image of a reality – we have before us our pre-earthly existence with all its essence, with all its activity.

I could only describe to you, dear audience, the paths that the soul must take to penetrate the transitory, which the soul has as thinking, feeling and willing, to that which was creatively at work in the human body, what was there before this human body united with it, what belongs to a spiritual world, what does not come into being with the body, but rather first takes place in the body and actually makes its existence as a human body possible. Through such exact clairvoyance, we gradually advance from the physical existence into the super-physical, into the spiritual. We do not speculate, we do not philosophize in abstract terms, we seek experiences of the spiritual world, and seek to come to an understanding of the spiritual nature of man through experience.

In this way we arrive at discovering the eternity of the human soul. On the other hand, we can now train in a modern form for an exact clairvoyance, which an older time, which had more of a dreamy clairvoyance, trained in so-called asceticism. Let us again make clear in asceticism what was sought in a more material way, while we must seek it in a more spiritual way in modern times: the ascetic tried to paralyze his body, to kill it, even to make it ill in a certain way. Now, as a modern person, I will certainly not advocate the weakening or mortification of the body in any way; but in those older times, people knew exactly what they were doing when they systematically mortified their bodies. What happened to the person in the process? To the same extent that people systematically mortified their bodies, to the same extent did their soul come to life. It is precisely through this mortification that the body became, I would say, more and more transparent and more and more transparent. It was an experience of these ancient ascetics that by paralyzing the body, the soul became more and more alive and more and more alive. And in this way they attained a knowledge of that which man experiences unconsciously during the ordinary state of sleep.

In this way I have described to you, in the one way, in the yoga philosophy, and in the other way, in the modern way, through modern meditation, how man can consciously, that is, clairvoyantly, penetrate into that which is otherwise in the darkness of his own organism. I said that this is what touches us most closely in relation to the fate of our own spirit: that we cannot see how the soul and spirit work down there in the human organism, that we move, as it were, into the darkness of the human body while keeping watch, that we do not even know what the soul is doing by moving a hand.

The ancient yogi got to know this inner realm by scanning it with his breath, as it were. The clairvoyant person of today x-rays himself with exact thinking that has become clairvoyant, and in so doing penetrates into the darkness of his own body. This brings certainty instead of the insecurity that arises because otherwise, in ordinary daily life, one only plunges into the darkness of one's own body. But on the other hand, doubt arises from the fact that one sees the spiritual-soul dawning down in the process of falling asleep and finally one sees that it only dawns again when one wakes up. One must ask oneself: Can this soul then exist independently if it can be extinguished every day in this way by the needs of the body?

That was precisely what the old ascetic achieved: To the same extent that he systematically weakened his body, tuned it down, and in some respects even made it sick and weak, to that same extent his soul became more conscious, no longer completely permeating his life between falling asleep and waking up, but sinking down into the unconscious during sleep, experiencing dreams that were realities, more and more certain things coming up. To the same extent that the body was subdued, a soul life shone forth that was similar to the sleeping soul life, but which was conscious, and thus in turn opposite to the sleeping soul life. One had to say to oneself: You can therefore also live with this soul in the way you otherwise only live during sleep. So this soul can maintain itself in relation to the body even when it is not in this body. By reducing the life of the body, the ancient ascetic, as it were, drew out the independent life of the soul, and from that, in those ancient times, knowledge came to him, albeit in a dream-like way. When your body finally falls away from you, when it has reached the highest degree of dullness, which you have achieved to a small degree during your asceticism, when it falls away from you in death, then the highest moment will occur, which you have already experienced in a diminished way here in earthly life. And from the practice of ancient asceticism, the old clairvoyant person gained that knowledge, which he was also able to communicate in a different way: that the soul has eternal life in the spirit, even in the face of death. In ancient times, through a kind of exercise, yoga exercises, and today through meditation exercises, one saw into the pre-earthly existence, thus into the eternity of the soul on one side. The old clairvoyant person sees through the gate of death, sees how the soul overcomes death, precisely through the mortification, the paralysis of the body.

Again, this is something that we modern people cannot do, because again it turned out that the old ascetic was not up to life: his body, which had been weakened for asceticism, that is, for higher knowledge, could not meet the demands of everyday life. In those ancient times, people had confidence in such hermits and sought knowledge from them that they did not want to have themselves. Today one would not have it. But just as the yoga exercises can be modified for today's life, for today's sense of time, so too can the ascetic exercises be modified. The ancient ascetic attuned his body to awaken the soul life, as it was in the face of eternity, in his death. He thus weakened the body in order to allow the unaltered soul life to become relatively stronger in relation to the weaker body, so that he might recognize it. The modern person must take the opposite path. He leaves the body as it is and strengthens the soul life. This is achieved in a special way through exercises.

I will highlight some of the things I have described in detail in the books mentioned. One exercise is particularly effective. We are so immersed in our ordinary lives that we let our thinking, our inner soul life, passively follow the events of the outer world every day. We think about things that happen earlier in the day earlier, and think about things that happen later later. And when we follow life in reverse, as we do in legal, logical thought, we do nothing but imagine the correct course of events in our minds. Those who want to systematically strengthen their inner life must work day after day, even if only for a few minutes, but if they want to achieve something serious, they must work as diligently as in a laboratory or an observatory or a clinic; but what they have to do are intimate inner processes. Let us say, for example, that he first reviews his day in reverse order, for example, from seven o'clock; he reviews what happened first between seven and six o'clock, then between six o'clock and five o'clock, and thus follows his day backwards. It is best to follow the events of the day in full detail. Let us say, for example, that one went up a staircase. First you were on the bottom step, then on the next one, and so on. In this reconstruction, which should not be a mere reminiscence but a reconstruction, you are first on the top step, imagine how you go down to the penultimate, last step and so on. You do the whole process again. The same applies to other things. You can also do this with other years of your life, going back from the age of eighteen to the age of fifteen, but preferably in great detail. This is more difficult than is generally believed. In doing so, you actively resist the external course of events within yourself. You no longer merely surrender to the external course of events. You oppose it. In doing so, you tear your thinking away from the succession of the external sense world. By tearing one's thinking away from the succession of the outer sense world, one gets accustomed to a completely different inner hold on thinking. Thinking must become more powerful, more independent, by tearing itself away from the outer world.

Likewise, one can do other exercises. You know, my dear audience, that life is constantly changing. Anyone who is honest in their self-examination will have to admit that they are now quite a different person than they were ten or twenty years ago. But how did we become this way? Yes, we have actually only surrendered to life, we have become what life has made of us, what heredity, upbringing and so on has made of us.

Anyone who wants to become a spiritual scientist in the way meant here must take their own life into their own hands, must put as much inner energy into it as they have put into strengthening their thoughts in meditation, and must do the same in terms of strengthening their will. For example, at a certain point in his life, he must say: “For the next three years, you set yourself the task of equipping your soul life with inner habits in a certain way. You take into your own hands what life would otherwise have done to you. Life makes you different with each passing year. Now you take this power of the life stream into your own hands. You consciously change certain habits within you that life would otherwise have changed. It will be seen that especially small habits that have crept into life, when they are done with ever more conscious and conscious soul practice, work wonders in inner self-education – for example, someone who has had a certain handwriting up to this moment in their life, who now changes this handwriting out of this power. And so you can imagine that there are countless smaller or larger habits that one can take in hand, so that one can become, as it were, one's own inner guide, that one can become the director of one's will more and more.

And anyone who then continues the exercises related to the will from “How to Know Higher Worlds” and other books, anyone who continues these exercises, in other words, practices that which can be practiced both through that backward and by this self-discipline; anyone who practices self-conquest strengthens the life of the soul, just as the old ascetic weakened his body and left the life of the soul, so that it became relatively stronger than the weakened body. The body remains as it is, but the soul life is strengthened in this way. And we see something peculiar in our own human existence. I can describe it to you by using a comparison.

Take the human eye. How does the human eye see? Well, because it is transparent itself, because it allows light to pass through it. In the moment when the eye, let us say, becomes clouded, asserts its own materiality, in that same moment, vision ceases. The eye, so to speak, completely forgets itself. Thereby it becomes the servant of the human organism in relation to seeing. By not asserting its own materiality, it becomes the sense organ for the external physical world.

Our soul life, when we strengthen it in the manner described by overcoming ourselves, will ultimately prevail over the human organism in such a way that the latter is not only illuminated from within by meditation exercises, but that the body, like the eye in relation to sensory light, becomes transparent to the soul and spirit. Just as we do not see the eye, but the objects outside, so we learn through our body, which is now not physically but spiritually transparent, and which now does not drive out any desires, longings or passions, in the moments when we want to use it as a higher spiritual sense organ, through this organism we learn about the spiritual world as through a soul transparency. And in this way we attain the possibility of saying to ourselves: We see into a spiritual world through our organism. It has become our soul eye, our spirit eye. Now, like the ancient ascetic, we gain knowledge of the eternal nature of the human soul beyond death.

And by learning to live with the spiritual world around us, after our own organism has become a selfless sense organ, a life of the soul outside the physical body becomes clear to us. And we now have the opportunity to leave the body untouched by our soul life, as it is during sleep. But we have strengthened our soul life. We can separate the soul from the physical body and from the etheric body in the same way as it is separated during sleep. We experience a state similar to sleep, but which is in fact the opposite of sleep. We learn to recognize that we have not extinguished our soul life with sleep, that our soul life was just too weak to develop consciousness from falling asleep to waking up. Through the intensified soul life, we shine through an artificially induced sleep, we illuminate it. We know that we can develop a spiritual-soul life without the body. We therefore know, through the fact that this image is before us, this image of dying, of life after death, we know that the soul, beyond death, that is, on the other side from the one I described earlier, is endowed with eternal life.

Thus, through our meditations, we learn to think of our soul life, for our pre-earthly existence, the one side of eternity, and through the training of our will, through self-transcendence, through the strengthening of our soul life, we come to know eternity as extending beyond death, and we gain a vivid sense of the eternity of the human soul, of the spiritual essence of the human being.

You see how this is attempted. It is not attempted, as the spiritualist does, by means of experiments that are the same as those in the external world, no, but rather, the human soul life itself is developed in such a way that the muscles grow up to this soul life in order to look into the spiritual world. Anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to sin against the spirit of modern exact science. But it cannot initially research an external environment exactly, because it is not there at all, just as colors are not there for the blind, but the spiritual eye, the power of vision, must first be developed. This happens through meditation, through willpower.

But by proceeding with this meditation, with this discipline of the will, in the same way that the scientist otherwise proceeds with the external world, we can speak of bringing the spirit, the meaning of modern scientific civilization, into those areas where, ultimately, our scientific life merges into religious experience, where we ultimately recognize what the spiritual essence of man is. And this spiritual essence of man, my dear audience, lives just as much as the physical human being here with a physical world, lives with a spiritual world.

And how man can find his way into this spiritual world, how he can find the spiritual essence of the world, will be the subject of next Friday's lecture, so that we can understand not only the spiritual essence of man through the method of supersensible knowledge, but also the spiritual essence of the world. But then it will become clear to us how, through the intimate coexistence of the spiritual essence of man with the spiritual essence of the world, a deepening of religious life can arise out of real modern clairvoyance, how man can perhaps what he has lost through modern science, can regain in such a way that he can now combine the deepest religion with strict science.

That is what modern civilization is actually striving for. Because modern civilization has lost the spirit, it has also come to such bitter outer destinies. Perhaps it will also be possible to show what exactly the present dire fate of the times is when we next look at the spiritual essence of the world. Today, I just wanted to show, by way of preparation, how man recognizes himself as a spirit, so that he can then also find the spirit within the world and connect with it in a religious way, in bright, clear clarity. For perhaps it will emerge from the discussions that I have allowed myself to engage in before you today, my dear audience, that what is here called exact clairvoyance and which should lead to a knowledge of the eternal essence of human nature, that this should not conflict with the spirit of modern science, whose triumphs within modern civilization are to be and can be fully recognized by anthroposophy.

But something must be sought that this modern science, as it develops in external observation and external experiment, cannot give. This modern science is no more denied or criticized away in its justification by anthroposophical spiritual science than it is a criticism of human existence when we stand before people and say: There we have the physiognomy of the face, the person's gestures, their forms, the color of their skin; but in all that we see with our outer senses, there is something soulful, spiritual. And only when we see the soul speaking through the incarnate parts – through the skin color – through the gestures, through the whole form of the human being, when we see the soul speaking through the gaze, only then do we have the whole human being. And in just the same sense, when we know the outer world through the outer science of observation and experiment, we have, as it were, the outer gesture of the world, the outer physiognomy of the world, but not yet the soul, not yet the spirit of the world. But just as we only know people half way and cannot gain a proper relationship with them if we only look at the outside, at their color and form, we can only gain a relationship if the soul and spirit speak to us through all of this, so we can only recognize the world in the great and the essence of people if all that true, genuine natural science gives us — especially when it keeps within its limits — gives us of the world's physiognomy and gestures, if we allow all this to be valid, even recognized, and if we progress from this to an exact clairvoyance, to an exact seeing of the world's soul through the outer physical gestures of the world, and to an exact seeing of the human spirit through the outer physical gestures of the human being, so that we may recognize the spirit of the human being.

In this way, anthroposophy does not seek to rebel against science; on the contrary, it seeks to bring science into a realm that modern science cannot enter. It does not want to become something that seeks spirituality in a combative way, I might say; it wants to become something through full recognition of natural science, yes, through a higher evaluation of natural science than is often possible for the latter itself; it wants to become something in relation to what we know as soul and spirit in the world of materialism, in the world of physiology; it wants to become this anthroposophy itself, soul and spirit of modern science. And this modern scientific approach needs soul and spirit to complement the science, it needs warmth of the human soul, the inner light of the human soul, the true religious need. Only in this way can the modern human being revive in a new way from his soul, from his spirit, and move towards a more hopeful future than would otherwise be possible with a more materialistic world view.

Dear attendees, Last Tuesday I took the liberty of discussing here how it is possible for a person to gain knowledge about his own spiritual being, about the eternal that lies beyond birth and death. Today I would like to shed light on the same subject from a different angle and explain how it is indeed possible to gain knowledge about the spiritual essence of the world.

These insights cannot be gained by the methods currently used in scientific research. For this scientific method of investigation, which has achieved such great triumphs in recent centuries, triumphs that are fully recognized from the point of view that is asserted here, this scientific world view builds its knowledge on observation and experimentation, that is, on that which man can experience of the world through his senses. Of course, one does try — and must try — to penetrate intellectually that which the senses reveal about the world. In this way, one arrives at natural laws, that is, in a certain sense, at spiritual content, because the natural laws that one establishes in thought are, after all, a spiritual content. But the thoughts that one gains in this way, beyond observation and experiment, have no independent content; they only provide images of what the senses, either unarmed or armed, experience from the outside world. That is to say, the soul-spiritual in man reveals itself through what can be experienced by the human being through the senses, or through methodically trained sensory perception.

Everything that is experienced by man in this way is the effect of the external world on his bodily organization, on his physical organism. And what man experiences in his soul is nothing other than the experience of the sensual-physical world.

Man cannot stop at this mere experiencing of the sensual-physical world, because within this physical-sensual world there is no place for that which lives as an indelible impulse in the human soul, there is no place for the religious-moral inner experience. And the newer scientific world view achieves perfection precisely by observing the things and processes of the world in such a way that it does not mix anything of the human being as moral or religious into the world view, into the laws of the world. Man stands before a world to which he ascribes reality and existence, but which, as I said the other day, does not contain the most valuable thing by which man actually ascribes his dignity, his true value in this world: the moral, the religious essence. That is why people have always tried to penetrate beyond mere sensory experience, beyond mere experience in the physical, to a knowledge of the spiritual essence of the world.

Only the centuries in which we still live and which have become great in terms of their civilization through rigorous scientific thinking have either completely denied the possibility of supersensible, spiritual knowledge, or at least expressed serious doubts about the possibility of such knowledge. Today, however, we have reached the point, as I also hinted at last time, where man, precisely because of the certainty that knowledge of nature gives him, must seek an equal certainty with regard to the knowledge of spiritual life, that life which, in addition to the natural-physical, can also contain the moral event and the religious connection of man with the supersensible.

But if we want to visualize that path into the supersensible worlds for the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the world this evening, my dear audience, it will be good to follow a similar path to the one I took last time on Tuesday to explore the knowledge of the spiritual essence of the human being. I pointed out how, in the early days of human development, such a path to spiritual knowledge of the human being was sought, in order to illustrate how that older path was more material and how we today, based on our scientific foundation, must seek a more spiritual path to knowledge. Therefore, today I will begin by pointing out how, in the early days of human civilization, those who wanted to ascend from the contemplation of the physical-sensual world to a knowledge of the spiritual essence of the world sought it out. I do not want to be misunderstood about this either. I am not recommending that older path. It can no longer be followed today. But to explain the path that should be taken today, we can tie in with the older, more outwardly descriptive path.

This older path, which in turn leads us back to oriental spiritual contemplation, to human prehistory, this path presupposes that the one who walks it turns to someone who has already walked it, to a teacher, to a teacher of spiritual knowledge. In ancient Oriental times, anyone who wanted to ascend to the spiritual essence of the world had to seek out such a guru, a teacher of spiritual knowledge. However, you may ask, my dear audience, where did the first spiritual teachers of humanity come from according to those older times?

First of all, let us consider the view that existed in those older times regarding the most ancient teachers of humanity. These people believed that the very first teachers received their knowledge directly from divine teachers with whom they were in contact in a supersensible way at the very beginning of the earth's time. I can only point out this belief of older times here, because a discussion of the question would lead far afield from the subject today. I have only to point out that this question leads to the same regions as, for instance, the question concerning the origin of human language or the origin of human thought. In the past, people resorted to a transcendental explanation even for the transmission of the teaching of the transcendental to people, just as they sought the origin of language in the fact that divine influences themselves exerted an influence on people and humanity, and that in this way people directly acquired language from the transcendental. So it was also thought that the first teachers, the first gurus, received their knowledge through a supersensible intercourse with the first great teachers of mankind. But those who came later knew that they could only come to a true understanding of the spiritual, to a knowledge of the spiritual in the world, if they turned to such a teacher.

What did such a teacher do? The prerequisite for him to be able to do anything with his pupil at all was that, through all of civilization, the disciples sought this older teaching of mankind with an almost absolute trust in it, a trust that today's mankind, who feel and think differently in this respect, can no longer really imagine. The aura of mystery that surrounded such personalities was due to the fact that it was believed that they were in direct contact with the supersensible in their places of worship, which were also places of art and science – for religion, art and science were one in those days – in those places, in the mystery schools, as they are called today. They were looked up to in such a way that it was not merely assumed that they could be taught something theoretical, that they could be taught something that they themselves had discovered through some kind of natural experiment or the like. Rather, it was that the word they spoke, the signs they gave, that what they performed before the students was directly the external manifestation of the divine behind these teachers.

Thus one did not approach these teachers one-sidedly with the intellect, not one-sidedly with the head, but one approached them with the whole human being. One felt enlightened in one's intellect, not just intellectually and theoretically; but one felt everything that one received intellectually as enlightenment, warmly imbued with an element of feeling, and one felt it imbued with the power of a will that emanated from the depths of the world itself and poured into the will of man. You gave yourself completely by turning to the leaders of such mystery centers.

And the teaching was not theoretical in the sense that we understand teaching today, but it was linked to a deepening of feeling in all the details, it was linked to the fact that the student saw in the teacher how this teacher was aware of the fact that he was, as it were, with every word, with every hand movement, with all that he now developed in spirit-permeated experiments before the student, how he with all of this brought the divine spiritual will itself into earthly life.

What was achieved by this? The result was that the spiritual-soul nature of the pupil was actually able to separate itself from the physical organism and also from the finer, etheric organism, which leads a fleeting existence in the physical organism. And the student became aware of one thing. Before he received such instruction, he could say to himself: Perhaps my entire soul life ceases when I fall asleep at night, perhaps then I am only a physical body that performs different functions than in the waking state, and perhaps, when this physical organism has devoted itself to purely organic activities for a while, then it can in turn develop out of itself, just as a candle can develop a flame when it is lit, then it can in turn develop out of itself the conscious spiritual-soul life.

Before his instruction, the disciple could say to himself: Perhaps what takes place for me as spiritual-soul life from waking to sleeping, arises merely as an illusion, illuminated by the physical functions of the body. Through the instruction of the guru, he came to realize that he could no longer say this to himself, but he became aware that in the act of falling asleep in the evening, he actually emerged with his spiritual-soul being as a reality free of the body, a reality that emerged from his physical organism and also from the finer organism, the etheric that he is just as much with his physical organism among physical things and physical processes during waking hours, that from falling asleep to waking up he lives in a purely spiritual-soul organism that is outside the physical body, but that in the morning when he wakes up he submerges again into this physical organism. Only he said to himself through that teaching, which he received as a student: Yes, but when I fall asleep in my ordinary life, then the spiritual-soul entity that is now next to the physical organism, which remains in the physical-sensual world, is now in the spiritual-soul world and is active there, is so weak internally that it cannot become aware of what it experiences in the spiritual-soul world. But through the power that went out from the guru, what had been outside the body in the night from falling asleep to waking up in an unconscious state was transferred to a different kind of existence outside the body. And in this other existence, which at first could only take place under the influence of the guru and to which the disciple himself then became powerful, in this other existence, which was now no longer sleep, which resembled sleep only in that the spiritual soul was outside the body but which was therefore opposed to sleep, [it happened] that now within this spiritual-mental a power awakened in a spiritual-mental way, as one otherwise only has it through one's blood, through one's nerves when awake in the physical body. Through the awakening of such power, the soul and spirit came to life without the physical body and its support in a state opposite to sleep and yet so similar to it because the person was outside his body. This spiritual-soul life was inwardly enlivened. And just as the physical organism gives man the sense impressions when he is awake, so now this inwardly awakened, this inwardly strengthened spiritual-soul organism gave the disciple of the guru the impressions of a spiritual-soul external world.

Therefore, one can say: The guru brought it about that not only in the natural way that happens when a person falls asleep, the soul-spiritual realm outside the physical body of the disciple went, but the guru brought it about through his teachings, but above all through the influences borne out of trust, out of faith in action, that in a fully awakened state the soul-spiritual realm could leave the body, thereby internally strengthening it, interspersing it with waking, and experiencing in a waking state that this whole external world, which we otherwise perceive only through our senses – and which shows us only a sensual physiognomy and a lawfulness that summarizes the details of the sensual physiognomy – that this whole environment now appeared to him as a spiritual one. As I said, the prerequisite for this was not just a theoretical one, not just a student-guru relationship, but a moral relationship, as I have described it. The guru was virtually a morally sacred personality. And the disciple of such a guru not only had a religious relationship with the mysterious, supersensory powers of the world, but above all, in his guru, he had a mediator to the divine spiritual beings. He had a religious relationship with the guru himself. In this way the elderly person was able to see into the spiritual essence of the world, not in a theoretical way, but through a development of his whole being.

But you see, my dear attendees, what the prerequisite is for looking into the spiritual essence of the world. It is this prerequisite that we can step out of our physical organism with our spiritual and mental organization and knowingly unfold ourselves outside of our body in existence.

However, the way in which the older student in times of oriental civilization did this brought him into a relationship of dependency on his teacher, on his guru, which would be unbearable for people today. But all of that, dear attendees, what is traditionally present today in religious ideas, even what is present in moral impulses, did not arise from what science has taught people in recent centuries, but has been traditionally preserved from such older times, when people wanted to gain a relationship to the spiritual essence of the world in the way described.

Then came other times in the development of humanity. These other times are characterized by the fact that the possibility of one person having the same effect on another as the old guru had on his disciples ceased to exist. If this possibility had continued to exist, human civilization would never have been able to develop into what we find today gives human dignity and value to earthly existence; full self-awareness and the awareness of human freedom would never have entered into humanity.

This self-awareness did not exist in those older times, when someone who wanted to become a scholar in that way – if we may use today's word – did not have this self-awareness. Man felt an indeterminate dependence on external nature. He felt no freedom in relation to what came to him from external nature. But in the upsurge to a spiritual world, he felt even less freedom. He was primarily dependent on the guru in terms of the method of his development. And by allowing himself to be intensely stimulated by the guru to experience his spiritual and psychological life free of the body, he then felt even more dependent on those spiritual worlds into which he had entered cognitively. In this way he felt, so to speak, to be a tool of the divine spiritual powers. He felt dependent in every single volitional impulse, in every single thought, in every single nuance of feeling, on the divine spiritual currents that pulsed into his own organism from the spiritual worlds he had recognized.

It is precisely through the cessation of these old conditions that humanity has been able to achieve self-awareness and the awareness of freedom, that the human being has truly placed the highest value for a time on only that which is imparted to him through the mediation of his body. But that which comes to us through the mediation of the body gives us thought-images only for our knowledge, thought-images which initially merely depict for the external world that which reveals itself to us in nature.

Now, in the early 1990s, I had already shown in my “Philosophy of Freedom” how a person who is now completely imbued with the scientific spirit of the present can relate to the moral world. It is gradually being realized that natural science can, even more than it already has, apply all thought only to penetrating and ordering external phenomena in thought, and thus to arrive at laws that are, after all, conceived in thought. One comes to say to oneself: This view of nature cannot, by itself, gain anything supersensory; all that it can gain as an inner soul experience is an image of a sensory external world and must remain so.

Thus, precisely when we bring thinking to the perfection to which the scientific age has brought it, precisely when we are not dabbling in our scientific attitude, not as laymen, but from inner connections in the strict, exact methods of modern research, then we gradually come to an inner experience of thinking that is nevertheless now free from all physical corporeality.

This is generally rather difficult for modern humanity to grasp. Only those who have really immersed themselves in modern science ultimately find something in the life of thought that is not mediated through the body. And I called this life of thought pure thought and its activity pure thinking in my Philosophy of Freedom, written at the beginning of the 1890s, and I tried to show how precisely when man, in a thinking that has become pure from all inner instincts, from all inner arbitrariness, from all inner fantasy, when, through training in natural science, he pure thinking grasps a nature that is amoral, that no longer contains anything moral, grasps a nature to which he cannot gain a relationship, a religious relationship, when he makes himself very strong in relation to this thinking about nature, then, from deep within himself, precisely into this pure thinking that has become natural science, what now penetrates are the individual, personal moral impulses of the individual human being. We need only look uninhibitedly into nature, but then not stop at this looking, but now look back at our own personality, then we will find that the more genuinely we think scientifically and experience this scientific thinking, the more powerfully that which I then called moral intuition penetrates into our pure thinking. And then we stand before the world and say to ourselves: Of course, nature has been deified for us, has become amoral; but we human beings, as thinkers about nature, feel — as we otherwise feel the blood in our physical head, so that we have a physical tool for thinking —, so we feel our purest scientific thinking being pulsed through from within by moral intuitions.

Anyone who has felt this, anyone who has experienced this, my dear audience, knows through this experience that there is a spiritual, a purely spiritual, a body-free spiritual. And in this body-free spiritual, precisely in the power of that thinking that the Galilean, Copernican, Goethean, Darwinian age has brought us, precisely through that thinking, through we understand nature in a completely natural way, we gain an inner strength that makes it possible for us modern people not to seek out a guru in the old way and yet to penetrate the spiritual essence of the world to which we belong. For what in an outward way proceeded from the chela, from the disciple to the guru as the deepest trust that I have described, is replaced for us as modern people by what we experience when we let our gaze sweep over nature in a very exact way, with mathematical exactitude, as I mentioned last time, and then look back into ourselves and ask ourselves seriously, with genuine internalization: What have you actually done there? What is in you?

That which ruled within you while you were thinking about nature, excluding all arbitrariness and subjectivity, that which was woven in your own soul while you were completely absorbed in observing nature, in the objective observation from which you excluded everything subjective, that now gives from within that great trust that the old disciple had for his guru. I would like to say that simply by standing in the world as a human being, one acquires precisely from the scientific attitude that great trust, that great trust that tells you: if you have developed a way of thinking without anything from your imagination, from your arbitrariness, playing a role in it, which you faithfully accept in order to grasp your thinking, if you have developed such a way of thinking, then you can also develop this thinking with certainty. And you develop it further in the way I described last Tuesday, through meditation; that is, you penetrate the thinking that modern man accepts in the face of the scientific view of the world by having risen to its power, with what you will find described in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” “Occult Science” and others. For example, you will find a description of thinking as meditation within thinking. I already hinted at the principle of what this consists of last time. While otherwise one scurries along with one's thoughts about things and processes, so to speak passively scurries along, and lets one's thoughts run as the external impressions want, at most then reflecting on what the external impressions have given one, in meditation one stops this thinking, so to speak. One refrains from, one could also say one abstracts from all external impressions. One has learned to think of external impressions. One has learned to develop the power that lies in thinking. One does not hold on to external sensory impressions, but only to the inner power of the thought, pours into this inner power of the thought ideas that are easily comprehensible, rests on these ideas. But I already said last time that one thing is necessary for this. It is necessary that the meditation takes place in love for the images that you allow to be present in your consciousness in this way. However, one must be able to bring this love, because the spiritual scientific method is one that can still engage the whole person today and that, above all, must be imbued with that which is not needed for external natural science, or at most needed for its operation, but not needed to find something in it itself in order to handle its methods.

But what the spiritual scientific method needs in this direction is to start from the forces that otherwise lie dormant in the soul, from love. To meditate means to rest and to rest again and again in thoughts of love, to love purely mental life. We should not underestimate the fact that, given the way we educate and train people today, this is actually quite difficult. For when people are supposed to hold something in their thoughts, they become impatient. They say, “Oh, thoughts are sober; let's rather go where our senses get a lot of impressions.” Our present civilization, in its excesses, is set up to orient everything as much as possible to the senses. People find cold and sober and abstract and empty that which can be experienced in mere thought.

Meditating means gaining such inner warmth for these seemingly abstract thoughts in meditation as one otherwise gains in the world when one turns a loving heart to another personality or to some event or thing in the world. That warmth, which is otherwise only developed in everyday life on certain occasions, must glow and burn through that which is to be shaped in meditation by the human soul. Then this thinking is inwardly strengthened and invigorated without calling upon a guru in the old way, and one gradually comes to know: Through this meditative strengthening of the thinking, you come out of your physical body with your soul and spirit.

I say that today one does not seek out a guru in the old way. But one can indeed receive instruction from someone who is already experienced in spiritual matters on how to set up meditation, how to concentrate in one's thinking. But anyone who is a teacher of spiritual science today, if he is not a charlatan but a real teacher, will not make his student dependent on him, but will take into account the demands of contemporary civilization and in such a way that from a certain point onwards the pupil feels placed on his own personal foundation and, by virtue of his own liberated thinking, experiences living with his consciousness as reality outside of the physical body organization.

This is in fact the first thing one must experience in order to penetrate spiritually into the spiritual essence of the world, to become so empowered within oneself as a spiritual-soul being that one does that which one otherwise only does when falling asleep – leaving one's body – consciously in such states that one brings it about voluntarily.

Then, my dear attendees, one first experiences a general sense of the world, I would say. At first, one does not know more than that there is an existence of one's own spiritual soul outside of the physical body. But by continuing to meditate further and further, one reaches the point of bringing such inner liveliness into one's own thinking, into the world of thoughts, into one's own thought activity, as is otherwise only present in sensory perception. Sensory perception provides us with saturated colors, full-bodied tones. Thinking initially only provides us with abstractions. In meditation, one attains the ability to dwell in thinking in the same way as in external observation, as one otherwise dwells in external sensory perception. But in doing so, thinking is completely freed of its abstractness, and thinking now takes place in a pictorial way.

If you want, you can compare this pictorial quality that you now experience with dreaming. Except that when you dream, you always know: you are leaning on your physicality. You experience inner physical states in dreams, or you experience reminiscences, memories from earthly existence. But now you have images in front of you through the achievement of meditation, which, when viewed externally, are like weaving dreams, but you know that you are not looking at them like ordinary dreams, but like ordinary sensory perceptions. Just as you know through a sensory perception that there is a thing behind it, so now you know, when you have created the possibility for yourself in a fully awake state – not in dream consciousness, but in a fully awake state – of being in a thinking activity that is simultaneously a form-building activity, you now know: Behind what your eyes perceive and what your ears hear, which are external, sensual, physical things, there are now spiritual realities behind the images you experience in this way. You are not yet inside the spiritual world, but you know that there is a spiritual world behind these images. You only know that you are outside of your body, and you are real, you are a being, you have an existence. And you know that you are filled with a world of images.

I already said last time: this world of images initially presents you with a large tableau of your own life since birth, since you have been on earth, but not in the form of mere memories, but in the form of what created in the first years of childhood by the still unformed brain, what was created in the whole organism, what was transformed from day to day by the food we eat from outside into the substance of the body. Everything that works in us, but also everything that arises from the body as soul, all this stands before us in a great tableau, first through this world of images.

That is the first thing we perceive through this world of images. We would get nowhere if we did not continue the practice. And it is continued in such a way that one acquires the strength, having first empathized with one's soul in love. Thoughts that have become images, which one knows are rooted in a spiritual world, one must now acquire the ability to suppress these images again in order to make the consciousness completely empty. In this way, the whole human consciousness gradually strengthens. Those who always have their rather critical objections to the anthroposophical spiritual science presented here, who say: maybe it is all based on autosuggestion, is basically just like fantastically arising dreams. The person who speaks in this way does not know that the methods described here – and they consist of genuine, calm meditation – are not a matter of tuning down, muffling the consciousness, but of a much clearer, brighter consciousness. If I am to describe individual experiences of this enlightened consciousness, alongside which the other consciousness remains quite present, I could say something like the following: For the person who has developed eyes, as most people do, the light becomes perceptible when the sun rises in the morning. He sees the sensual-physical things around him through the rays of the sun, which are cast upon them and which come back to him. He sees things through the light that is outside and in which he himself is placed.

By developing a world of images in us in this way, as I have described it, using very precise methods — you will find them described in the books mentioned — that are as exact as any mathematically exact investigation, by developing such images within us , we come to the point where we are no longer dependent on an external light, for example, but we experience a light inwardly, in that we experience ourselves, in that we feel ourselves placed with our soul and spirit outside our body in a spiritual world, we feel a light connected with our being. We live and weave in the light, and the light is not just something that makes things visible to us externally, as is the case in the sense world, but we ourselves become the light, the radiance of the light. In this way we make the spiritual entities visible to ourselves. At first we experience them in images; but the images are illuminated inwardly. Therefore, it should not be spoken of in a nebulous sense – I already hinted at this on Tuesday – but in an exact sense, from which one can speak in the same way as one speaks exactly about mathematics, of what the spiritual researcher acquires: exact clairvoyance, exact clairvoyance.

Those who associate this with mediumship, with something that is often called clairvoyance in everyday life and which is practiced by all kinds of charlatans in the occult field, are simply unaware that someone who, for example, enters into autosuggestion while completely immersed in it has a tuned-down consciousness. The consciousness that is meant here as a clairvoyant one is not tuned down compared to the ordinary consciousness. The ordinary consciousness remains fully intact and the other is added to it, so that one is not less conscious, less prudent, than in ordinary life, but rather more prudent. One should first ask whether the person referred to here as a spiritual researcher cannot also speak about natural scientific matters in the same way as those who reject this exact clairvoyance! He can do that. Since he can do what the others can do, and only what is given by exact clairvoyance is added, then one can arbitrarily reject this exact clairvoyance, but one cannot say that it is something that takes away one's ordinary level-headedness or that leads one away from what, for example, as a natural scientist, firmly places one in the world. Entering into this exact clairvoyance for the purpose of gaining knowledge of the spirit of the world does not distract one from the practice of life or from calm research.

If one also manages not only to let the images come through the appropriate meditation, but also to remove them at any time, so that one has an empty consciousness, then a spiritual world penetrates in, just as otherwise the breath penetrates into our lungs; I say, as the breath penetrates into our lungs. I could also say, if I were to express the comparison less precisely, that it is as when color enters our eye or sound enters our ear; but then the comparison would be a little less precise. It is the case that when we perceive with our senses in the external physical world, these perceptions do not come to us as vividly as what we now experience in empty consciousness. We experience this penetration of the spirit of the world as strongly as we otherwise experience breathing unconsciously. But just as breathing is alive in us, not merely with the shadowy quality that colors and sounds have for us, so too is what we now experience spiritually when we have risen to the point of exact clairvoyance, as I have described it, so too is this direct experience.

But, my dear attendees, this direct experience would leave us standing halfway. We would have images. If we can make the images disappear in the manner described, we would know: there is weaving and life in the spirit outside. But we would only know about this weaving and life in the spirit in very general terms. For the remarkable thing is that we perceive what now appears as weaving and living in the spirit not in the way we perceive sensual things, that we say to ourselves: We stand there and the things are outside, but we feel ourselves now inside the whole world. We have, so to speak, poured out our own existence over the whole world. We feel at one with the world. We have moved outside of our body, have awakened our life, I would say outside of our body as a spiritual-mental being, and feel one with the whole world outside of our body, which we used to look at from the outside, but now we experience inwardly, as we otherwise experience the blood, the activity of our organs within our skin. Our consciousness has become a cosmic consciousness out of a personality consciousness.

One does not experience the spirit of the world, my dear audience, in any other way than by first experiencing it as an inner feeling. And you see, when you stand there in the ordinary physical world with what you have as ordinary consciousness, then the riddles of knowledge come to you. These riddles of knowledge usually go to the point where you want to get to know the inner workings of things. You become aware: You look at the outer surface of things, you want to get to know the inside. We know how science constructs this inner aspect as atomic action, how other people do it differently. But you want to penetrate into the inner being. Or you construct theories that it is simply impossible for the human capacity for knowledge. In any case, however, one feels outside of things, and with what one has in knowledge, one feels that one wants to approach things. Only then, one says to oneself, can one gain a picture of the existence of things when one approaches them. If one is in the spirit of the world outside of one's body, as I have described, knowledge is something completely different.

At first, one has only images. Images are there. And one would be a fool to imagine that the first form he receives would be anything other than images – images, to be sure, of a spiritual world, but images nonetheless. Once one has put these images away and the empty consciousness has set in, one feels as though in a spiritual world. But just as little as one sees the lungs, the stomach, the heart in the ordinary world, one sees just as little that which one now experiences as the spirit of the world like one's own inner being in cosmic consciousness. One does not yet see it. One knows that it is within oneself, it is within one, but one does not yet see it. And while in the physical realization one otherwise wants to approach things, now the opposite occurs, and one wants to get rid of things, one wants to separate from them and one wants to make them into images again. One has learned the creation of images that have a purely inward weaving of thoughts but with the vividness of images. One wants to bring what one experiences inwardly into such a tableau of images. One wants to grasp what one initially has in [cosmic consciousness] as a tableau of images within oneself. One wants to externalize things. Whereas in physical cognition one introduces them in the process of cognition, one now wants to externalize what one carries within oneself, so that one has the cosmos around oneself in imaginations, in images.

In physical cognition, one first has the inner thought, then one approaches the object. One takes in the object. In supersensible cognition of the spirit of the world, one first has the object within oneself and then seeks the image outside. One seeks to be able to visualize the world as a tableau of what one actually carries within oneself.

This level of knowledge, ladies and gentlemen, is not attained without progressing to exercises of will, as I also described last Tuesday, for example, to that exercise of will in which one reverses the order of what you used to always think forward, for example, the experiences of a day from the evening towards the morning, so that you tear the thinking away from the outer reality by the willful thinking. Or also to practice strict self-discipline, so that one adds new habits to one's old ones or also breaks away from old habits and imagines habits – this is not meant in a bad way – so that one really makes a different person out of oneself in the course of one's life, which otherwise only life makes out of one, that one takes one's self-education into one's own hands with all one's inner energy, so to speak.

Again, you will find exercises on this in the books mentioned. I will now only hint at the fact that, just as one trains one's thinking within meditation, so that one can live outside of the body with one's soul, one can train one's will. And through this training of the will, one comes to experience one thing in relation to one's fellow human beings, namely, that an ascent into the spiritual worlds is possible, so that they also become pictorial and objective. At a certain stage of this development of the will, my dear audience, you see your own existence completely immersed in the deepest pain, suffering, deprivation, worry and care. I use these words to describe the situation that the spirit-seer has to go through because he is a modern person and cannot rely on a guru as in the old days; I use this word to describe approximately what has to be gone through: sorrow, worry, pain, suffering. That only means the complete separation from the physical body. Man is only in a kind of well-being during his physical life because he is immersed in his physical body in his spiritual-mental, when he lives in a waking state. And in this way he is protected from feeling pain every night in his sleep and from having to endure sleep permeated by suffering, so that his consciousness actually extinguishes itself in sleep. But now we step out of our consciousness in a higher realization in a conscious way; and by bringing not only the thought but also the will outside of the body, the deepest pain awakens in the spiritual-soul. One feels that one lacks the body in one's inner experience. Not only does the sense of well-being, which only arises from the soul being permeated by the body, cease, but so does the inclination, the selfish inclination towards the body; for through the exercises one does, one becomes more and more selfless and selfless. Love must already be developed in meditation. In this way selfishness is eradicated, otherwise one does not come at all to this experience in images outside of the body. But through this one plunges into a painful experience.

It is already the case in ordinary life, my dear audience, that anyone who has come to a little not too sober, indifferent knowledge, but to such knowledge that is inwardly connected with the human being, will say, if he wants to be honest: I am grateful for my happiness in life, for my favorable destiny, but knowledge has actually only brought me what I have suffered. And so an inexpressible pain must first spread through the consciousness existing outside the body, if the external world is now to enter the emptied consciousness and the person is to gain the strength to objectively set down in complete images that which is the spirit of the world.

But then, my dear audience, then you stand before this spirit of the world, contemplate it in images, and something arises for this externally awakened consciousness that I would compare to ordinary memory, only that it is more powerful, more grandiose and just of a completely different kind. In ordinary life, we remember through thoughts the experiences we have gone through. We went through this or that experience ten years ago. Today we experience this experience in memory or from memory. It is in us in an inward, spiritual way. By having risen to the extra-corporeal consciousness and thus looking at the world as I have described it, there is something present in this looking that I would now also like to call a kind of memory, namely the memory of what we ourselves are in the physical world. We are, however, prudent; we can behave quite well as the most prudent person in the physical world; but at the same time, within this world of images, our own body becomes an image to us, and the things of the external world, minerals, plants, animals, physical human forms, they become an image to us; within the world of images, as in a cosmic memory, that world reappears in which we were when we were only sensually aware. And that is how we orient ourselves, my dear attendees, because that is the case.

We have experienced the sun here in the physical world. In the spiritual world, into which we have found our way in the manner described, we experience something else: spiritual beings, beings that now have inner life, but such a life that, unlike the human being, does not have an outer physical body. We experience spiritual and soul-like divine-spiritual beings that are not embodied in the physical world. And we experience them in such a way that we relate the new experience to an old experience. Just as we relate something in our memory to an experience from eight to ten years ago, we relate what we experience over there in the spiritual world, which we have entered, to the physical solar experience here. Like a memory, the physical solar experience is also among the images that we experience there. And we know through this: The sun is the external image of spiritual divine beings, just as our own body is the image of our own soul. We now see the forces, but the forces that are themselves spiritual beings, behind the sun. This seems grotesque and fantastic to today's man. It is no more fantastic than the results of the science of electricity or magnetism.

One must only inform oneself exactly about the way in which the spiritual researcher comes to these things, and one will no longer find it fantastic, but will find it as exact and realistic as a mathematical-scientific investigation leads to scientific results. But one also actually experiences processes within this remembering of the physical world and the beholding of the corresponding spiritual-soul, the divine-spiritual beings. Let us dwell for a moment on what is revealed to us there as spiritual-soul beings, I would say behind the sun, what is revealed to us as the spiritual-soul of the sun, as the sun spirit.

Now, my dear attendees, by having progressed so far in our realization of the spirit of the world, we also come to – I have already described another side of this realization last Tuesday – not only remembering our existence as we have lived it since our birth or sometime after, but we learn to look back into our pre-earthly existence, how we, as spiritual-soul, which has now been released from the body in its experience, were in a spiritual-soul world. Just as we are here in relation to the external physical sun, so in a pre-earthly existence we were in a purely spiritual environment, but now in connection with that which corresponds spiritually to physical sunlight. Just as the physical sun illuminates us here on earth, so in our pre-earthly existence we were in a relationship to the divine sun beings, who did not illuminate us with physical light, but who connected their own activity with our activity at that time, so that we found ourselves enveloped in the spiritual-soul in the spiritual effect of the sun, just as we feel irradiated by the physical effect of the sun here in our physical existence. And at a certain moment in our germinal life — we learn to recognize this — we descended from our pre-earthly, purely spiritual-soul existence, united with that which comes to us through father and mother as a physical human body. We united that which we have experienced under the influence of the activity of the sun beings with the physical body. We immerse ourselves in this physical body, permeate it with soul, spiritualize it. That which was solar activity in us becomes the etheric body that permeates us, which is within us as a fine body, and this stimulates our ability to now ignite the physical sunlight and to see through it the colors.

In short, we learn by getting to know the spirit of the world, we get to know ourselves as truly existing within this spiritual world, looking beyond our birth or our conception into our eternal, that is, spiritual existence, which reveals itself to us as spiritual-eternal, because we now know: By being in the spiritual counter-image of physical sunlight, we first took in that which permeates our physical body and imbues it with activity in physical life. Just as we take in physical sunlight here, we took in spiritual sunlight there and prepared our own earthly life. Our life on earth is our creation, not that what lived spiritually and soulfully in us is merely the creation of our earthly existence. In this way one gradually learns to enter into and recognize the spirit of the world.

Or let us take another example, esteemed participants. One learns to recognize — just as the spiritual essence is behind the physical sun — the lunar beings are behind the physical moon in the manner described. They reveal themselves to one precisely as that to which one has struggled through the development of the will. So that one can picture inwardly experienced events through the power of the sun. The spiritual beings, the beings of the spiritual world, which have their image in the physical moon and its activity, its effectiveness in space, enable us to do so even before our birth or conception, not only to experience what the spiritual environment is, but to consciously experience, as we know here in exact clairvoyance, by not only receive physical sunlight through our eyes, but also absorb that which works spiritually in the power of sunlight, that we thereby experience the world in an indeterminate way in the spirit; but that we can depict what we experience, like our cosmic interior, is due to the forces that are the spiritual lunar forces. And it is the spiritual lunar forces that bring us back into physical earthly existence.

So it is - my dear attendees - that man experiences the spiritual counter-images of that which shines in the sun, in the moon, and also in the stars, in an external-physical way. Through exact clairvoyance and through that education of the will, which I would like to call ideal magic - to distinguish it from all the charlatanry with which it is so readily confused today and which is so prevalent in the world today - through this , what I would call thought training on the one hand, to exact clairvoyance, which I would call on the other hand, the training of the will to the most ideal magic, through which one arrives at the recognition of the spirit of the world, initially not religiously, but thoroughly scientifically.

In this way, one comes to recognize in that in which one actually finds oneself unconsciously every night from falling asleep to waking up, the germ of that which emerges through the gate of death when one actually steps through that gate of death. And because our physical body is incorporated into the amoral nature, one learns to recognize what one is when one is outside of the body during sleep, as – I cannot say now, embodiment, but I must say: realization — as the spiritualization of what we are worth as moral beings in the world, and of what lives in us as a religious sense of the divine-spiritual that permeates the world. In the physical body, our soul and spirit are enclosed in the natural world, as if in darkness. When we become transparent to what we experience when we are outside our body as spiritual beings, from falling asleep to waking up, everything we have morally engaged in is there, our moral value is there, and it passes through the gate of death. And by getting to know the spirit of the world as I have described it, one also learns to recognize that everything we see physically – physics even says so today – will one day disappear in the heat of death, that everything external and material is transitory. But that which man acquires as a spirit-germ, which is unconscious in sleep and becomes conscious in exact clairvoyance, that is what outlasts everything we see around us in the form of minerals, plants, animals, stars, clouds and so on. That is what lays the germ for a future world.

We get to know the reality of the power of morality as it becomes real. We learn to recognize, just as the botanist recognizes the next year's plant in the germ of today's plant, so we learn to recognize the germinal nature of the present world for the future worlds by getting to know our soul and spirit in its connection with our moral quality. This means that we prepare future worlds through our moral and religious lives when the present ones have disappeared. This imposes on our soul a sense of responsibility of the greatest possible kind, for we know that what we educate morally, what we morally engage in, seems today to be subject only to an abstract human judgment; in reality, it is the germ of future worlds.

And as we learn to recognize our own immortality – that is, the ability of that which is outside the body, from falling asleep to waking up, which passes through the gate of death, to live in a spiritual world, in a spiritual environment, in the same way as it lived in a real way in its pre-earthly existence, in a post-earthly existence – as we recognize our own immortality, immortality, we get to know the eternity of the world, we know that the present world is the solidified, condensed spiritual world of the past, and we know that in the solidified world, which we see today as nature, by letting the physical human being emerge from itself, the spiritual-soul human being is formed within the physical human being, which will create new worlds.

Through all this, my dear attendees, modern man is then able to truly gain insights into the spiritual essence of the world, merely with the guidance I have already indicated, without the dependence on a guru, as was the case in ancient times. The starting point is only that, as I have indicated, and as I have already given it in my “Philosophy of Freedom” thirty years ago, the starting point is that one first recognizes the true nature of the moral in man, how this moral as the most individual in human nature, as it were, pours into pure thinking as the spiritually and soulfully awake human being himself.

If one then develops the method that I described in “Philosophy of Freedom” as the moral one, one develops it for the recognition of the universe, so this exact clairvoyance becomes idealistic magic, penetrating into the knowledge of the spirit of the world, and thus also of the eternity of the human essence. I only mention in passing that this is also connected with the consciousness of repeated lives on earth. This occurs at the time when it becomes possible to look back on the pre-earthly existence. When we look into it, how we weave and live in it, just as we create here among the natural phenomena as physical people, how we weave and live there as spiritual-soul people, we also find how we have brought this life over from previous earthly lives, how we will carry it through death into future earthly lives. So that which can be achieved through exact clairvoyance, through idealistic magic.

This, my dear attendees, is first of all a purely scientific matter, the spiritual continuation of what the modern human being has acquired precisely through the power of scientific thinking. But it rises to a religious feeling. And this religious feeling, I would like to describe it to you in a few final words, in terms of the mighty mystery that has taken place on earth at Golgotha. I would like to describe it to you in terms of the penetration of earthly human life with the Christ impulse.

If we approach the contemplation of the Mystery of Golgotha equipped with the knowledge of the spiritual nature of the world, of which I have just spoken, it becomes clear to us that, when we look at the times before the Mystery of Golgotha, all knowledge about the supersensible worlds was gained in the way I have described at the beginning of the discussions today. They were gained through the living relationship of the chela to the guru. Basically, our present-day religious beliefs are only traditional latecomers of what the old disciples learned from their guru in this way.

How did people look into the spiritual world in those days? They also looked at nature around them, but did not develop a real science of nature; if they wanted to seek knowledge, they went to the guru. The guru pointed them back to the earliest times of the earth's beginning, when the oldest gurus had learned from divine spiritual beings what the later gurus had basically appropriated for themselves to pass on to their disciples. They were now referred back to primeval times, to times when there was not yet such a separation of earthly life and spiritual life as there was later. Man felt, so to speak, as if he, by living only in nature, had fallen away from the original spiritual essence of the world, and he gradually felt that nature itself had fallen away from the spiritual essence of the world. Morality was viewed in such a way that it was said: We humans have become what we are today through natural development. Nature itself, which lives in us, has fallen away from the divine-spiritual. We must allow ourselves to be led back to what nature used to be by the holy gurus, to a time when it not only showed natural effects, but was imbued with moral impulses. If we look back to the earliest times, we find everywhere not a mere moral nature, but a spirit in nature. The religious sense turned to that, to which it can turn not in faith but in full realization.

But through that older realization, which was a dreamily developed clairvoyance, as I have described it here, through that older dreamlike art of clairvoyance, man also saw his pre-earthly existence. And precisely because in those older times, which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha — those times that immediately preceded it no longer had it, the older insights had already dawned —, but in those older times people had something within them that they experienced within themselves in a way that otherwise only humans experience nature; in this way, people experienced something arising within themselves, of which they said: 'I have this from my pre-earthly existence'. Because people had something like this, they were able to have this deep trust in the guru. And then the guru also told them: Yes, but you have been transferred to the physical-earthly world; you will enter the spiritual world again through death. You live here on earth in a world that has fallen away from the spiritual; over there you will encounter, above all, the being whose physical image is the sun. It will guide you so that you can gain strength to see the light, otherwise you will be spiritually dead on the other side.

And there was still something left of this ancient wisdom at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was unfolding on earth. And out of this ancient wisdom, in the first few centuries, the Christ Impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha were seen first. And they said: The being that used to be only in the spiritual world, that released the human being down into the physical world, that takes over his guidance again after death, this spiritual being has descended and has taken on the body of the human being Jesus of Nazareth. That to which people looked up in the times of the old mystery wisdom as the high solar being, the spiritual-divine counter-image of the physical sun, the guide of man through all deaths and all lives, of This Being, who was later called the Christ Being, was said by those who had remained old adepts, initiates from the old mysteries at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, they said that it had descended. And because man has become so earthly that he can no longer be connected with that which still lived as Divine-Spiritual at the beginning of the earth, this Divine-Spiritual Being has descended to earth itself, has taken on a body, has remained connected to the earth. And people can, in line with the words of St. Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” develop their sense of self and their sense of freedom through their mere physical body. They can permeate this sense of freedom, this sense of self, with their religious relationship to Christ, who in the body of Jesus of Nazareth went through the Mystery of Golgotha. In this way they can, through the power they absorb through their union with Christ, through their inwardly devout experience of Christ, achieve the same leadership after death that they used to achieve in the way described.

Thus, in the early days of Christianity, people pointed to the Christ-leader who descended from spiritual worlds into the physical world. This consciousness gradually ceased, as did the old wisdom of initiation, the yoga wisdom, and we humans today, as I have shown, have to gain insight into the spiritual world from a scientific point of view. We stand there with our moral consciousness. We stand there with the need for a divine world. But we can also know, as the ancients said: This world has fallen away from the divine-spiritual, it has become sinful in man, it has become amoral as nature – so we accept the world today, but we know that the moral intuition penetrates into the thinking of the individual human being in an individualistic way with the consciousness of freedom. We work our way up into the spiritual world to knowledge of the spiritual world, and we know, as the ancients knew, that they have been released by the gods onto the earth; we know that through the free power of the human being, which we develop out of the earthly, we will find our connection to the divine spiritual worlds again.

The ancients saw the past and regarded this earth as a falling away from the divine-spiritual of the past. We look at the earth and hope for the future that we will rediscover the gods through human freedom, knowing that they live as counter-images behind the sun and moon, as I have described. So we today, by looking at the Mystery of Golgotha and saying with the words of Paul: “Not I, but this Christ impulse gives us the strength to really work now,” for the de-deitified earth has become divine again through the fact that the Christ lives in it, by going through the Mystery of Golgotha. And we can know when we become certain again by looking up into the supersensible worlds of the Christ-being that this Christ-being will be our helper into the future in which we have to work through our spirit germ to form realities. Thus spiritual knowledge, which is meant here, leads again from mere knowledge of nature to moral consciousness, leading to religious consciousness.

Ladies and Gentlemen, how these things can then be lived out in external civilization, what significance they can have for practical life today, that is to be the subject of a third lecture, which I may give here tomorrow under the title: “Moral and Religious Education from the Point of View of Anthroposophy”. Here I wanted to show that what was once said in a completely different way by ancient human wisdom about the supersensible world can in turn be said by modern man, that this modern man, by meeting all the demands of modern civilization, does not become weak by placing himself in dependence on a guru, but can build precisely on the strong forces of his own individuality, and can enter precisely into those regions where knowledge of the spiritual essence of the world can be gained. Man must only have the courage to let that approach him again, which comes from the present-day spiritual researcher. For just as people today must let astrological, biological and physical knowledge approach them, so our time demands that these spiritual-scientific insights into our culture and our civilized life also be incorporated. For the means by which they have been attained is the powerful force of thinking, which not only allows man to look at the world passively, but also gives him virtues, self-discipline, self-education of the will to the point of overcoming all egoism, to the point of merging in love for the whole world, without which, as I have described, universal world knowledge in the spirit cannot be attained.

The many signs of decline that we see today – I have already pointed out what makes people today so lacking in perspective in the physical world – can only be healed from the spirit, from the soul. What we lack today, and what has brought our culture and civilization to a dead end, is the power of thought to the point of aliveness, the power of will to the point where it penetrates the darkness of the outer sense existence. If we see through this existence through the living thought so that we feel everywhere we go as comrades of the spiritual world — and we can do that through modern anthroposophical spiritual science — then we take that strong power of thinking, then we take that bright power of the will into our human consciousness, through which alone, as every unbiased person can well know, what humanity needs can be shaped. Our forces of decline in civilization show quite clearly what humanity needs in order to develop rising forces out of the present into the near future. For it seems to be obvious to everyone that these rising forces cannot be brought into our civilization through mere external institutions.

Those who recognize this should actually develop an inclination to look where they try to ignite that which cannot be ignited by external means, inwardly, from the spirit and the soul. But if it is kindled, then we will gain strength, courage and confidence to move in the right sense out of this present time of ours, with its difficult trials, into a future that will admittedly also be full of suffering, that will not just be happy for humanity , but in which people will be able to endure happiness and suffering in such a way that the human race will progress in a dignified manner through the overall development of this human race and this earth of ours into future times.

Dear attendees! First of all, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks for the kind words of welcome and for your invitation to this lecture. I have taken the liberty of making the relationship between the direction I represent in supersensible knowledge and the science of the present the subject of today's presentation. The objections that are raised against the possibility of supersensory knowledge in general – and in particular against the direction of supersensory knowledge that I intend to present and that works towards scientific methodology – are based primarily on the opinion that supersensory knowledge contradicts the scientific method of research and the actual task of scientific thinking.

Now I would like to point out one thing, first of all historically. I would like to point out that such extrasensory knowledge, as it is sought through anthroposophy, can actually only be a result of our time, of our civilization, and for the reason that this our time — and by that I mean roughly the last three to four centuries up to the present —, because this our time has only produced what can be called a complete way of knowing the world of the senses.

Sensory knowledge as we have it today, as a result of scientific research methods, was not available at all until three or four centuries ago. This sensual knowledge is actually only a result of the endeavors that were initiated by Copernicus, Kepler and others, and they celebrated their greatest triumphs in the course of the nineteenth century, particularly in its last third, and also in the twentieth century. Any kind of world view, any kind of spiritual research that wanted to develop in contradiction to this scientific knowledge and way of thinking today would certainly have no prospect of having any kind of convincing effect on those people who count today, on people with a scientific education.

Out of this conviction, anthroposophical spiritual science, above all, seeks to work in such a way that it becomes aware: It has to work in this scientific age of ours. Not only does it not want to contradict science, it wants to work entirely from the same foundations, the same prerequisites as recognized science. But, precisely because we have come so far within the methods of sensory observation and experimentation, because we have developed exact types of knowledge within these research methods , and because these exact methods of knowledge are directed primarily towards the investigation of the sense world, we need – and I believe I can explain this to you today – we need a knowledge of the supersensible today.

Science itself demands that the unbiased gain knowledge of the supersensible. For let us just visualize for a moment, my dear audience, how knowledge was gained in earlier centuries, or even further back. People were unable to observe that which expresses itself according to its own laws in the external sense world. One need only recall how difficult it was in the course of the nineteenth century to expel from science the so-called life force, a mystical monster that had been created purely through inner speculation, through inner thinking, this life force that was not a result of observation or experimentation, that was purely imagined. In a way, it was the last remnant of the old mystical monstrosities.

Before the actual scientific age, people believed that they had to put as much into their sensory observations through self-opinionated thinking as their external sensory observations gave them. Usually, one does not notice – and it is not necessary for ordinary science – how, let us say, a scientific book looked in the twelfth or thirteenth century. There is just as much in it that a kind of scientific fantasy has put into things from the human being, from what has been inspired in the human being by his emotions, his feelings and so on and so forth, as from external observation.

What observation and experiment can scientifically give to people is provided by the empirical sensory sciences in connection with mathematics. But what this science has become for the education of educated humanity in modern times is what, above all, something like the anthroposophical spiritual science meant here must focus on. For not only have we explored outer nature and man himself, insofar as he is an outer nature, through observation and experiment; not only have we thereby obtained a sum of results that confront us today in the practical application, in the technical practical application of modern natural science, that confront us in natural science, and so on and so forth; not only has humanity gained from this development of natural science, but above all, humanity has undergone a tremendous education through this laborious work, in which man forbids himself to transfer anything of his inner thoughts and dreams into natural objects and natural processes , man has managed to use his thinking only to shape his observation and his experiment in a pure way, so that observation and experiment express their essence and, for this external science, thinking is basically only the servant of that which is to be produced in external science, so that it expresses its lawfulness.

To achieve this, a significant renunciation was necessary in relation to what had previously been incorporated from the human soul into the world view. A moral development is already taking place alongside scientific development and its results, which has brought humanity to the has brought humanity to the point where man renounces seeing anything spiritual in natural objects and natural processes, and applies his own spirit only to the fact that nature expresses itself purely and in accordance with its essence. This was not known in earlier centuries, before about the fifteenth century, to make thinking only a servant of the method, so to speak, so that nature can express itself. What has been achieved in inner human development, what one can go through inwardly in the soul through the scientific method, that is what anthroposophical spiritual science, above all, wants to acquire.

In other words, my dear attendees, anthroposophical spiritual science does not want to conquer any terrain that the other sciences have; anthroposophical spiritual science wants to penetrate into the world of the spiritual from the same attitude that is otherwise used for research today. We need only consider what has brought about our scientific progress; it has been brought about precisely by the fact that man has completely excluded himself, that he, by letting nature speak, does not add anything of himself to his knowledge. But as a result of this, it turns out in the end – people usually do not believe it, but it turns out – that because man does not allow his will, his creative imagination, to flow into nature, because he makes thought only a servant of his research, it turns out that he can get to know everything in the world that is not himself.

By excluding everything that lies within him from the justified objective method of research, man learns to recognize everything except himself. He is ultimately excluded from all that constitutes the very greatness, the triumphs of modern knowledge. Thought has become, so to speak, only a language about natural processes. And in fact, in today's external science, we only apply the mathematical to our full satisfaction in internal experience. But with this mathematical, one stands in a peculiar way to nature, if one does not simply apply it naively, but if one consciously asks oneself: What are you actually doing when you apply mathematics to nature? If one draws the mathematical externally, it is only a drawing. In reality, the mathematical arises entirely from the human being itself. We build something purely spiritual in mathematics, and we actually only find that mathematics has this great justification in nature because we see how we can apply it, because it can be applied, so to speak, everywhere to that which we can observe and which we can experiment with.

And we feel secure in mathematics because we extract this mathematics entirely from within ourselves. When we have a mathematical problem, it does not depend on whether hundreds of people say yes to it. If I understand the matter all by myself, I am secure. I live with my insight; I am completely immersed in it with my soul. And by grasping nature mathematically, by connecting what I develop within myself with natural processes in calculating experimentation and observation, I know that I am proceeding scientifically. I combine what lies within me, but what lies objectively within me, over which my subjectivity has just as little influence as it has over natural processes themselves. I combine the mathematical knowledge gained from within myself with natural processes.

That, dear attendees, is basically the model for what is meant here as supersensible knowledge, except that one does not proceed exactly with external nature, but first proceeds exactly with oneself. One starts from what I would call intellectual modesty. You say to yourself: You were once a small child with dreamy soul abilities. You developed into what you have now become. The abilities through which you can orient yourself in the world have gradually arisen in you. Now you say to yourself: Just as you have developed through life and education from the abilities of a small child to those that you possess today, can you not go further? Could there not also be abilities slumbering in the soul of the adult human being, just as they slumber in the child? And could one not take one's self-education into one's own hands, so that one can go beyond the abilities that we are so proud of in ordinary life, just as one goes beyond those that one had as a child?

But now, people say, scientific education in recent times demands that one does not fumble around in the vague nebulae, the mystical, by extracting human abilities from the soul. We have become accustomed to proceeding exactly in the mathematical-exact treatment of external natural processes, to proceed in such a way that one does not speculate dreamy-mystically, nor, as one says, merely immerse oneself dreamy-mystically, but rather to proceed in such a way that one follows each individual step with full deliberation, with full consciousness, as is the case with a mathematical problem. In this way one can develop one's own soul by awakening its dormant abilities. But the method of doing this is an exact one. One only develops into another soul being insofar as one makes every step one takes to develop these abilities as exact and supernaturally deliberate as one has learned in mathematics.

Please note, my dear audience, that we take as our model what we do with the external world, whereby we do science from the external world, become scientists, and we develop the exact way we have learned to develop our own soul. So while today's science, the science of the present, proceeds exactly in its treatment of the external world, leaving it at the abilities that one acquires through ordinary life and ordinary education, and then proceeding exactly in the external world, one proceeds exactly in one's own development, that is, only those soul abilities that can be directly grasped need to be developed. One develops exactly.

But this leads one to practise what I have characterized in my book, “How to Know Higher Worlds”, or in my “Occult Science”, or in other books, as the meditation and concentration in thinking appropriate to modern education. This includes what is necessary to develop inwardly in the manner indicated, and it encompasses many details. And anyone who believes that the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here is a casual product of inner experience or fantasy is greatly mistaken. What is striven for in it is truly no easier to attain than what is striven for in any other science; it is only more intimately connected with the deepest longings and needs of the human soul, and concerns not only those who have to pursue botany, astronomy and so on, but concerns every human being as a human being.

You can find more details in the books mentioned. I will only hint at the principles here. What is at issue is this: in modern, exact thinking, one has become accustomed to maintaining this structure of thinking while abstracting from all sense impressions. But one tries to bring the thinking that one has acquired into such activity and energization that, even if one has no external impressions, one can rest in ideas that one brings to the center of one's consciousness.

It does not matter to what extent these ideas initially correspond to external reality, but it does matter that we do something similar with these ideas in our soul as we do, for example, externally and physically with our arm when we work with it or when we exercise it. We strengthen its muscles. Meditation and concentration are concerned only with the exercise of the soul powers. But by strengthening one's soul abilities in thoughts that one freely holds, without passively leaning on an external sensory perception, purely actively internally in thoughts, and by systematizing one's inner life, but proceeding with full deliberation in this one's own inner development and activity , as otherwise only the mathematician does, one finally comes to it - for some it takes months, depending on their abilities, for others it takes years, but everyone can basically achieve it according to the current stage of development of humanity - one comes to develop what can be called with some justification exact clairvoyance, exact clairvoyance. However much the word clairvoyance is frowned upon today, I use it ruthlessly because it has a certain justification. It has its justification for the following reason: Let us reflect on how and why we, when we are in the outer world of the senses, perceive the things around us as seeing human beings. We perceive them when the sun or another light source sends its rays to the things and these things become visible to us under the influence of an external light source. We as human beings are thus within the light-space that is there through an external light source.

By continuing such exercises, which consist of meditation and concentration, as I have indicated in principle, more and more, we ultimately arrive at an inner experience in the soul that is not the same as the external light, but which makes us our own source of soul light. We really experience something, my dear attendees, which I would like to call an inner sunrise, a sunrise that has arisen because, through meditation, forces and abilities within us have been uncovered that previously and we are now able to really illuminate our environment with the soul light that we have kindled, just as the sun previously illuminated things in physical space. The awakening of an inner light justifies speaking of clairvoyance. And because we do not allow ourselves to bring about this clairvoyance in any other way than through exercises that are as straightforward as only the most exact mathematical and scientific problems, that is why this clairvoyance may be called exact.

But as a result of this, my dear attendees, we also develop something more and more within ourselves that is otherwise only presented under the influence of external perception. Try to honestly admit to yourself what a tremendous difference there is between the aliveness in which we are with our whole soul, with our whole human being, while we perceive colors, while we hear sounds, while we expose ourselves to impressions of warmth; try to realize quite clearly how we we live completely as human beings in our soul while we perceive colors, sounds, and differences in warmth, and how gray, how abstract, how lifeless our ordinary thoughts are through which we inwardly envision the external sensory world, how pale these thoughts are.

These pale thoughts, these inanimate abstractions, are inwardly filled with such liveliness through the exercises I have described that what most people run from because it gives them no warmth of soul, the abstract thoughts, becomes so full of life inwardly, so pictorially concrete, as otherwise only the impressions of the external sense world.

This is, so to speak, the first step we have to take in exact clairvoyance: that we, by merely thinking, but having a strengthened, inwardly animated thinking, an energized thinking, that we, without receiving external impressions, are so as we are when asleep, that we thereby develop an inwardly active life in an activity that is otherwise just a thinking one, which is now completely illuminated and energized with real images, but with images that are not stimulated from outside, that arise from the human being itself.

Now, however, we must continue this composure, for the sake of which I was able to call the acquisition of such a level of knowledge 'exact clairvoyance'; we must continue this composure to the extent that we feel completely subjective in this inner glow and image-generating. In the moment when we do not know that the whole tableau of images, the whole world of pictures that we produce as an inwardly self-illuminating one, is only our own being, is a world unto itself, in that moment we are not spiritual researchers; in the moment when we already consider this world of images to be real, we are visionaries, we are perhaps pathological personalities.

A healthy continuation of sensory knowledge into the supersensible world requires that we also bring our composure to the point that I have just described, and know that what we have gained have attained is indeed more inwardly alive, saturated, and concrete than the wonderful structures — I call them that because one can indeed be enthusiastic about mathematics — than the mathematical structures are. They are our product, like the mathematical figures. But still, to be immersed in it with your whole soul, to experience it, while always having your full, level-headed self standing by, with both feet in the real world of the senses, that must be there, otherwise you are not dealing with exact clairvoyance, but with an unreal, fantastic being.

By finding our way into this world of images, we can compare it to mathematical formation. But it is different. In mathematics, we know that we cannot apply it to our soul itself; we produce it from the soul, but we have to apply it to the external world. The external world gives us the content for it. The triangle as such is not a reality. But when I find the lawfulness of the triangle in an external sensual content, I penetrate reality in a certain way. But what one experiences in the way described as an inner world of images, as a result of meditation, in that one nevertheless senses an inner reality. You have to be clear about it as a level-headed person: it is only subjective, but it is an inner reality, it is not just a mathematical one, it is an inner reality. And if you go through this inner reality, you feel it out in your soul, so to speak, you devote more and more inner energy to experiencing inwardly what is contained in the images, then these images take on a very specific form for each person. We do not then live in remembered images, but we do live in a tableau that presents us with the formative forces of our own human beingness since our birth during our physical life on earth.

Let us remember what happens to a person during this physical life on earth. It is so wonderful to observe how, as a small child, the human being pours more and more soul power into his physiognomy, into his gaze, into his speech organs. Observing a child as it brings its physicality to life from within is one of the most wonderful observations one can make. For one can make such observations not only with the one-sided theoretical power of the human being, but with the whole human being.

But if one could also observe in the same way how the child unconsciously works wisely according to its own inner being, then the wonder one experiences would be a hundredfold too little expressed. Just think how little plastic the child's brain is in early years, how in the first seven years of life an unconscious wisdom works in the child's being to make this brain plastic. And the one who can study this in spiritual science, which I can only hint at in principle today, immerses himself in this inner plastic work of the child, full of wisdom, in the whole organism. And what the child initially sends inwards as a force, almost just fidgeting around, and plasticizes its internal organs, this later connects with actions that are performed outwards, through which one grasps things, orientates oneself in the world; this connects with the sense power. And from all that works within, what is received from the outside, what is experienced with the soul, from all this, what permeates the human being emotionally is formed. The memories and mental images we have of our experiences are only weak reflections of what we really live through, including what we live through unconsciously, what is created within us, which ultimately goes back to the growth forces, to the digestive forces, to the forces of nutrition.

When one rises to such an exact inner clairvoyance, one does not merely have a tableau of memories before one, but one has one's own human weaving and shaping, both inwardly in the organism and outwardly in the world. One has oneself before one as a second human being, and one says to oneself from this moment on: you have, in being outwardly in space, your physical spatial body, your physical spatial organization. Everything is interconnected. But you also have a time organization, a time body within you that is not spatially oriented, that is in the process of becoming, that is in the process of shaping, in which the shaping that you send into your inner being grows together with the shaping that you accomplish outwardly under the influence of the other world and of people, which in turn has an effect on you.

You see, the realization of this temporal body – that which cannot be painted any more than lightning can be painted; you can capture it for a moment, but you know that it is a temporal process – the of this creative process, which lies behind memory, memory, the stream of consciousness is like on the surface of what one is now looking at, illuminated by its inner sun, in spiritual scientific research one can call this the human etheric body.

Do not believe that a level-headed spiritual researcher speaks of the human etheric body as if it were a kind of foggy organization that only permeates this physical body. You can see it, albeit through a kind of fog, through a certain clairvoyance. That is not what it is about. That is what the opponents say. Those who really delve into spiritual science know that the first thing one sees in supersensible knowledge is a process, an event, but a real event. One gets to know oneself as a second being within oneself, which represents a temporal organization. The lasting in our soul life is presented to us in the smallest details, as in a comprehensive tableau. The physical substances we absorb and process internally are replaced every seven to eight years. The physical body is actually subject to constant change, to constant metamorphosis. What I am now pointing to, which can only be grasped by looking inwardly, is a continuous process during our earthly lives.

Dear attendees, present-day science worthy of the name proceeds in a precise manner in its external research. The supersensible knowledge that is meant here proceeds in a precise manner in the bringing about of the forces that man needs to see a supersensible world. The development of man is made exact so that, as it were, higher psychic sense organs are obtained, which are precisely manufactured and which can then see the supersensible world. In this way one has not only a theoretical conviction, but a real view of his spiritual being during physical life on earth. One would not yet know anything about the problem of, let us say, the immortality of the soul, which is so close to man. For this a further step is necessary, a further step that demands even more inner soul energy.

You see, when you bring ideas into your meditation that you are grounded in, so that you ultimately come to this inner aliveness, which, I would say, gives birth to an inner sun that then illuminates such images that you have to say, after perceiving them, they are real. You really only find something subjective, namely your own experience. That is what you initially feel as real in the images. You have nothing objective yet, you have your own experience, but as reality. This takes it beyond the mathematical. The mathematical gives form to the environment. It contains no reality in itself. What you achieve at this first level of exact clairvoyance allows us to sense an inner reality. And I said that if you scan the images inwardly alive, then they gradually form themselves into a tableau not only of our inner life, but of the formative, growing forces, even of those forces that we develop to effect nutrition, to effect inner nourishment. We get to know ourselves as a second person.

This is what we first perceive as a reality in our subjective imaginations, which may be subjective because they initially give us the subjective, our own life in forces, but in reality. But once you have devoted yourself to such strong thinking that you have become capable of looking beyond memories, so to speak, it is much more difficult to remove from your consciousness what you have achieved in your concrete, living thinking.

Some people find it difficult to remove images, especially if they are still alive in their soul through emotions, through feelings. Such images, for which one has applied a special effort in order to be able to experience them in the soul, are more difficult to remove. But this too must be learned. Just as one has learned, as it were, to look into a region that otherwise remains completely unconscious, that only brings forth images at the surface of the memory, so one must now learn to develop an inner strength that is more than just forgetting. Then, if I may say so, one must be able to get rid of the strong forces that arise in one through meditation, to be able to erase and remove from one's soul that which one has just first worked into one's soul with all one's strength. One must learn to empty one's consciousness, to empty it completely, so that one only watches.

Dear attendees, this is not actually saying little; it is saying a lot. You just need to remember what most people who are untrained in this regard do when they make their consciousness completely empty – they fall asleep; consciousness ceases. Before that, for the visualization I have just described, you must first eliminate all external sensory impressions. But you make the thinking as strong as I have described. Now you must in turn eliminate this strong thinking. The consciousness remains empty; but it remains empty only for moments. If you remain awake, you develop a state of mind that represents only wakefulness. Then the objective external spiritual world, the supersensible world, enters into this alert and empty consciousness; just as the external air for breathing enters into the lungs, so the spiritual world enters into the empty consciousness, which, however, has first been made empty in the way I have described. And in this moment, the first thing we perceive is the spiritual soul that underlies external nature.

We learn to recognize that just as our time body lies behind our memory and is the creative element in us in our earthly existence, we learn to recognize that spirit beings are hidden everywhere behind the nature that appears to us in sensory perceptions. Just as we enter a sensory world through our eyes, through our ears, through our other sensory organs, so we enter a spiritual world through the soul being that has been prepared in this way, where we become, so to speak, completely soul-eyed for our spiritual surroundings; we enter a spiritual world, a world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes. We really get to know a spiritual cosmos. And we then realize very soon that what we have had earlier as level-headed people in sensory perception, can be brought into a context with what we now know as the spiritual world. The ordinary visionary rises, so to speak, from his ordinary consciousness into another, where he gets to know all kinds of dream-like things, but knows no context.

The person who comes to exact clairvoyance in the way I have described retains his old consciousness alongside the new one he has attained. He can constantly check what he sees in the spiritual world against what he has been given here in the physical world.

This is the difference between the spiritual researcher and the visionary. The visionary, when he lives in his visions, has completely forgotten his ordinary human self, because he would not be a visionary if he saw the outer world of the senses as it is seen by the normal person. But the one who is an exact spiritual researcher sees the spiritual world, and at any moment he can put himself back into it in full composure, because, I repeat it again and again: everything I describe here as human development takes place with mathematical composure, as does this putting oneself into the spiritual world in a different consciousness and putting oneself back into the ordinary composure. So that you are able, my dear audience, to say to yourselves: With my outer eye I see the sun. That which I see with my outer eye in the sensual image of the sun is connected to that which I now see spiritually as certain entities of the supersensible world, it is connected to the sun beings in the spiritual world. The physical sun is the physical image of spiritual sun beings, just as my physical body is the physical image of my soul-spiritual being.

And so one learns to see a spiritual world behind the physical-sensual one. But then one must go further by developing the strength to remove from consciousness what is within, to empty the consciousness, to wait. One must take this so far that one removes from the temporal body the entire tableau that one first discovered, the creative process during one's life on earth, and that one also removes this, that one completely disregards oneself. So after you have come so far as to see how the forces of growth have shaped your body since childhood, how external experiences have affected it, after you have established what, I would say, lives under the surface of memory, you create it away in a radical abstraction, if I may express it thus, so that our consciousness now not only becomes as empty as I have described, but even more thoroughly empty, in that one's own earth-life, including the supersensible part of one's earth-life, is removed. Then, just as in the case I have just described, when beings who are behind the physical image of the sun come to meet one from the spiritual world, so now, when one's earthly life has been , as an inner experience, but at the same time it lives in a kind of cosmic consciousness. One feels at one with the cosmos, with the consciousness of the world. The pre-earthly existence comes to the fore. You get to know yourself as a spiritual being, as you were before you descended to the physical earth, united as a spiritual being with that which comes from your father and mother, which comes to light in the hereditary current and which forms our physical body, with which we unite. We actually look at this pre-earthly existence. In external science, we have given the view: that which we develop mentally as knowledge comes afterwards, the images that we develop inwardly of the outwardly visible existence come afterwards.

If we want to see into the spiritual and supersensible world, we must continue the education we have received in developing scientific concepts by developing our inner soul powers. Then we will be able to turn this development of our inner soul powers into a soul eye. And at the level I have just described, we see into our pre-earthly existence. If I may say so: in present-day external science, things are there first; afterwards comes the theory. What we draw on in forming theories, we bring to inner life. Thus, after the theory, comes the intuition. And we know that it is a reality.

You see, the same objection is raised over and over again: Yes, how can you know that what you are now grasping with the empty consciousness is not also your subjective, just an autosuggestion or something like that? Yes, my dear audience, distinguishing mere fantasy from mere perception of reality, only life can do that. It cannot be defined externally, full of life, what the difference is between an imagined hot iron and a real hot iron. The more precisely we imagine the real hot iron, the better it is, the less we make the difference. But the difference arises when we touch the iron. The real hot iron burns us, the imagination does not. We only have to grasp reality in life, and we have to grasp it in life.

So if, for example, someone comes, as often happens, and says: But there is also this, that when someone has vividly imagined a lemonade, they have the taste of lemonade in their mouth, so if you really imagine an image as a reality. Such objections are frequently made. One can only say that one should just try to imagine what it is like to look into the pre-earthly existence after the earthly life has been eliminated and to feel the reality of the soul, perhaps through the centuries before it descended to the earthly existence ; and one will no longer say: 'You will have the taste of lemonade through the imagination'; but one will then say, 'Yes, you will have the taste through the imagination, but do you also believe that you can really quench your thirst?' You cannot. You cannot. When you see through all the circumstances of reality and enter into the right context, you will know what is reality and what is mere autosuggestion in a corresponding case. So the reality of the supersensible world must be experienced. But it can be experienced when the abilities to do so are first present in the way described.

Now, my dear attendees, I would like to say that we have already presented the one side of the eternity of the human soul, beyond birth or conception. That part of human eternity for which we do not even have a word in the newer languages. We talk about immortality, that is, the duration of the human soul beyond death, but we do not talk about the unborn. We must also talk about it, because one only comprehends eternity when one understands the unborn as well as one understands immortality. But immortality can also be visualized. It can be brought to view by the fact that we now not only train our thinking in meditation, so to speak, to the point of inner energy and concreteness, as I have described it, but also by beginning to train our will.

Now, I will only hint again in principle – the more precise details can be found in the books I have mentioned – how to train the will. Consider, for example, that one grasps the will that lies in thinking itself, because thinking is always, when it is not completely passive, a mere brooding, as one's own body broods, when it is inward activity, thinking is always permeated by the will. But we adhere to the external natural processes with this will. We think of what happened earlier first, then what happened later; and when we think dialectically, logically, it is usually only to arrive at what was earlier and what is later in human nature. He who wants to cultivate the will inwardly must, as it were, tear thought away from its adherence to the succession of external nature. It can be done. I will give an example.

When we imagine our daily life backwards in the evening, when we imagine what was at five o'clock, was at three o'clock and so on, that is, backwards. So we tear thinking away from the course of nature, in which it runs forward, like the course of nature itself. Or we imagine a melody backwards, or a drama, in as much detail as possible. We remember how we climbed a staircase, imagine ourselves first at the top, then on the penultimate step, and so on, in other words, backwards. When we learn to practice a thought process that runs counter to the course of nature, our will is strengthened.

In addition, there may be exercises where we consciously change our habits. Let's be honest, dear attendees, life usually changes us so much that we say to ourselves when we turn 50: we were different when we were 25. But life has taken us over, life has changed us.

But you can also take your own development in terms of will into your own hands by exerting inner willpower, so to speak. You can say to yourself: You have to develop a very specific, radically different habit within three or seven years, and you can then work on your will in the most diverse ways. What do you achieve by doing this? Well, my dear audience, what you achieve by doing this is only real if it goes through a bitter feeling of pain. Without going through a bitter, deep pain, you still can't really come to a higher realization. That is the first experience one has: a terrible pain, as if one had become completely alienated from oneself, as if one had plunged the body only into pain.

From this pain, another area of higher knowledge then emerges. I can characterize this in the following way: When one has lived oneself into pain to such an extent that one has overcome it, then something has emerged from this culture of will that I can call a spiritual transparency of our own body, of our whole human being. I can explain this by using the eye as an example. What makes the eye the sense organ that we can use so easily? Because it is selfless, because it does not assert its own materiality, it is transparent. The other works in it, which comes from outside. The eye denies itself. In the moment when we get the cataract, the eye asserts its own materiality in the eye. Then the eye becomes selfish. But then we can no longer use it for seeing.

Nor can we use our organism for seeing the higher world, just as it is quite right for the physical world. Do not think that I preach asceticism, that would never occur to me. Man should stand with both feet in reality. But he should also allow moments to arise when he makes himself a knower of the supersensible worlds. In such moments, after a person has done such exercises as I have described, the person can make their entire body like a single transparent, but soul-transparent, sensory organ. Otherwise, a person experiences themselves as a human being in their bodily organs. Now, as a result of such exercises of will, one no longer experiences one's bodily organs as one really stands outside one's body with one's experience. The body becomes transparent to the soul. And this separation from the body, this possibility of being outside the body and yet not sleeping, but having a consciousness outside the body, so that one can then see one's own body from the outside, that it is an object, not a subject, this can only be achieved by first acquiring the ability to divest oneself of one's body.

But this can only be achieved through the pain described. You have to go through this pain, then the culture of will leads you not only to have exact clairvoyance, as I have described, but to experience how you can also do something in the spiritual world. You notice this from the following: When a person falls asleep in the ordinary course of the day, his consciousness passes into the unconscious. One cannot say, from external observation, that the physical organism of the person has not simply taken on other functions, which simply, as one extinguishes a flame, extinguish consciousness, because consciousness arises again through another metamorphosis of functions when one wakes up. This cannot be said from ordinary research. But the one who has come to the stage of supersensible seeing, which I have just described, knows that the actual spiritual-soul aspect emerges from the physical body when one falls asleep, only it does not have the strength to perceive one thing or another in the world of the spirit, in which it was now, in ordinary life. Now, after going through a culture of will and, first of all, a culture of thought-images, one also learns to look into the real being that one is outside of one's body every night during sleep. And now one learns to recognize what the soul does with this being. Now one learns to recognize that in everyday life one is unconsciously asleep. And that which sleeps, one looks at with the acquired supersensible knowledge as that which exists in sleep outside of the physical body,

And one now learns to recognize: When you go through the gate of death, then, then this, what you have unconsciously created, remains. It is your actual humanity, your moral deeds. That which you have acquired in your soul in your dealings with the world and with people as a moral quality becomes real in this being, which separates from you in every state of sleep. But this is also something that is independent of your body; because you have learned to experience outside of the body, you also learn to recognize death in the image.

One learns to recognize oneself in what one otherwise is every night and what can exist without the body. And by now having in the supersensible picture of knowledge in real perception what one is without the body, one learns to recognize death, one learns to recognize the overcoming of death by the human soul, one learns to know the other side of the human being, one learns to know immortality in its real contemplation. By making the body transparent to the soul in the way described, one learns to be without the body, one learns to be in the spiritual world through what one has become without the body, and one knows how one has discarded the physical body to be in a spiritual world after death. One has become familiar with the soul's inner work, which is purely spiritual and prepares both the future worlds and one's own future earthly lives. Idealistic magic has been added to exact clairvoyance, the inner work. One consciously learns what is otherwise only unconsciously practiced.

Anyone who, as so many often do in this day and age, speaks of an external magic is simply a charlatan. The one who speaks with inner religious feeling to science of the present day of magic, speaks of exact clairvoyance, of idealistic magic, in that one gets to know that which is created within physical life on earth and what then lives beyond death in further stages of existence in order to prepare later lives on earth.

What I have tried to show with these discussions, dear attendees, is the relationship between supersensible knowledge, as it is meant in anthroposophy, and contemporary science. I wanted to show how this anthroposophical spiritual science is aware that it has to prove its legitimacy to contemporary science every moment.

And let us consider how this science of the present day, in relation to external knowledge, has managed to recognize precisely that which does not include the human being, in that the human being, by making the renunciation described at the beginning of my discussion today, has renounced the need to be objective and initially uses thinking only as a servant. But what one has acquired in serving thinking gives one the attitude to make this thinking so inwardly alive that it fulfills it. For exact clairvoyance, renunciation gives one the powers that the soul has in the will to call upon for real activity, an activity, however, that works in the spirit, that has nothing to do with the physical and sensual existence of man, but that goes beyond death. So that we get to know the eternal part of the human soul, and get to know both the unborn and the immortal, through a realization that really looks like a genuine continuation of what man acquires as sensory knowledge.

But precisely because we get to know what is outside of us through the exact sensory knowledge that has been developed today, we, as clairvoyant human beings, are confronted with a world about which we have to ask ourselves: How does our morality operate in it? Is our morality just a vapor that rises in the purely natural world order, which, according to a modified Kant-Laplacean world creation, transitions to the more complicated, more perfect being, only to sink into heat death, whereby the end of that which arises in us as moral impulses would be given with the general cosmic cemetery?

The anthroposophical supersensible knowledge referred to here describes morality as a creative force and places moral impulses on an equal footing with purely naturalistic ones. Through this supersensible knowledge, the human being knows himself in a real world through his moral impulses, through his human morality. He knows that the real world we see with our eyes today is the result of previous spiritual worlds, and that what man brings into his own soul and spirit today as moral impulses — that separates from him in every sleep, that then passes through the gate of death — that this is now the germ of future real worlds. Man feels that he is placed in a moral cosmic order. And through such spiritual knowledge as I have described, he also has the possibility of feeling religiously. For man cannot feel religiously in the face of the moral nature with its mere natural laws. Super sensory knowledge is made necessary precisely by the perfection of our sensory knowledge.

If the ancients received a spiritual element at the same time as their senses gave them colors and sounds, we only faithfully receive what our senses give us through our observations and experiments, but we stand there as human beings in the face of this perfect science and ask ourselves: What is our position in the world as sentient, as total human beings? Supernatural knowledge gives us the answer. And because it is true and exact knowledge, it leads man up to the moral sense, to the religious sense, and unites science, morality and religion.

Thus, my dear attendees, the necessary acknowledgment of today's science, when unfeignedly and honestly acknowledged, leads to the acknowledgment of genuine supersensible knowledge. And what we gain through supersensible knowledge, we gain, my dear assembled guests, for the human being. The human being has become disinterested in relation to external science, wants to be objective, excludes his subjectivity. This is given back to him just as objectively as external nature is given to us in experimental science, in true exact supersensible knowledge. But with that, our minds are warmed from within by this supersensible knowledge, our wills are made strong. We are imbued with warmth, with strength for life, in which we must have security - if our fate is not to be a sad one - for life, in which we must work powerfully if we are to be right members of the human social order.

That is the significance of real supersensible knowledge, that it does not remain merely a theoretical view, that it permeates our minds so that we know we are united with the world and with other people through it in that warmth of life and love that we need to live, that we feel imbued with that energy which engages us in the work of the day and in the labors that are more lasting within our human life on earth. True supersensible knowledge imbues our humanity with powers from the supersensible world. Just as the world is a creation of the spiritual, so we make our own deeds a creature of the spiritual by first taking the spiritual into our humanity.

In no way does the supersensible knowledge that is meant here detract from the real external, the true external science of the present. It concedes to this science: Yes, you have found the right ways to recognize the extra-human. You recognize your limitations. One often speaks of the limitations of this science. But these limitations are only those that are drawn from observation in the experiment of the senses. The thinking that we develop in us through this observation, through this experiment, can be further developed. Then we will be able to permeate our inner being, as it is permeated with blood in our physical life, with soul and spiritual forces. Then we will become truly human in the true sense of the word through supersensible knowledge that comes from the spirit.

Such knowledge can be investigated if one is only unbiased enough to do so. One need not become a spiritual researcher oneself – which everyone can do to a certain extent, as the books mentioned show – but one need not become one. Just as one does not need to be a painter to feel the beauty of a picture, so one does not need to be a spiritual researcher, but only to surrender to one's unbiased mind, not distracted by any prejudices, not even by science, one will be able to make what the spiritual researcher has to say fruitful for one's life, just as one who is not a painter can understand a picture sensitively. One must be a painter if one wants to paint a picture; one must be a spiritual researcher if one wants to present the truths of the supersensible world. On the other hand, one can understand the picture sensitively, even if one is not a painter. One can understand what the spiritual researcher says if one only devotes one's unprejudiced common sense to it; one will find everything consistent and in harmony with the whole of human life. And supersensible knowledge can be assimilated just as one assimilates astrology or biology or something else, even if one is not oneself an astrologer or a biologist or something of the kind. Supersensible knowledge will lead not only to knowledge of the supersensible and of the outer human, but also to warmth of soul and spiritual power of the human.

Man will be able to add to what he has so perfectly recognized – although perfection only exists in an ideal, in any case – man will be able to add to what is extra-human the contemplation of man, after the relative independence with which he has recognized the extra-human. And in all knowledge, in all essentials, however much we may look around us in the world, understandingly, cognitively, in the end, when we are to work, when we are to be effective, and that is what matters, we must still be right people and place right people in a world that has attained a certain perfection through the science of the present. Supernatural knowledge worthy of the name attempts to place right human beings in this world so that they can work through this present-day science. It does so by educating the human being from the spiritual to become a right human being through life itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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