The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My lecture today will be, in a certain respect, the opposite of yesterday's, since I shall have something to say about what can be seen supernaturally in the way I characterized it yesterday. However, I will have to ask for your indulgence, since I can naturally only highlight a few aphorisms from the unlimited fields of anthroposophical research. So today's lecture will be a kind of collection of details picked out as examples.

What is achieved for the human being through the three supersensible levels of knowledge that I characterized yesterday is that he can step before the soul's eye as a complete human being. I have already mentioned the first supersensible level of knowledge, the level of imaginative knowledge. And I already indicated yesterday how, through this imaginative knowledge, the organism of time can be seen, which is found in us human beings as the first supersensible entity, the formative forces body that exists in time and that organizes us, but as a supersensible organism organizes us in the time between our birth or conception and death. But I have also noticed that the moment imaginative knowledge begins to take effect, the difference between subjective and objective ceases to a certain extent, so that at the same time as we are spiritually contemplating our formative body, we are also standing in the midst of the entire etheric activity of the world; that we become, as it were, a member of the etheric cosmic organism and then stand out less, secrete less out of this cosmic etheric organism than we do in our physical organism in relation to the other natural facts and beings that surround us in the physical-sensual world.

When we then ascend to the inspired knowledge characterized yesterday, we extend our vision beyond what is in us between birth and death. We expand our vision to include what can be called the actual soul being of the human being, and we learn to recognize this soul being in the development in which it stood within a spiritual-soul environment before it descended into a physical human body.

By further developing this inspired knowledge into what I characterized yesterday as intuitive knowledge, one comes to know in the image the fact of death, the transition of our soul organism through the gate of death into a spiritual-soul world. So that the knowledge of the eternal nature of the human soul is joined by the knowledge of immortality and the unborn. At the same time, however, in this moment, by rising to intuitive knowledge, we see the true form of our ego, of our self. I will speak about this vision of the self again, preferably also in tomorrow's lecture. But you can see from what I have characterized that we come to the vision of a purely spiritual world, first of all of our own spiritual-soul being with its surroundings. Now, during our life on earth, we already have a definite share in this spiritual-soul world. It is always there. It is always around us, as already emerged from what was characterized yesterday. We have a share in it through our total human experience. This total experience breaks down into the waking state and the sleeping state, with the dream states in between.

When one speaks of waking and sleeping, one is actually touching on a very significant riddle of existence, especially in human life. This riddle has been tackled in many ways, including by purely physical research. And as in other fields, in this too, no amateurish opposition should be made against what is put forward by natural science with a certain right. But these scientific hypotheses (and they are mostly hypotheses that have been put forward in this regard; I do not need to list them, because today I will stick more to the positive anthroposophical results in my presentation) these scientific hypotheses always start from certain assumptions that, one might say, can be partially, but not totally, held even in the simplest, unbiased observations of life. For example, when explaining the transition from wakefulness to sleep, fatigue is usually given the greatest importance. And one often sees in fatigue - not always, because there is also a correct insight in science - a kind of cause for the transition to sleep. Now, I have known reindeer that, without having acquired any reason to be particularly tired during the day, fell asleep at the first words of my evening lecture, and not only on this, indeed more understandable occasion, but also fell asleep during many an extraordinarily stimulating sonata. So that just a simple, unbiased observation of life can tell you that fatigue is not necessarily the only reason, the only cause for the state of sleep. I think that anyone who takes even a little time to observe the phenomena of life, quite apart from any extrasensory research, as I will characterize it later, must observe how there is something in sleeping and waking that is connected with the human being, as it is in the physical world, in such a way that sleeping and waking belong to this being as a rhythm of life. Just as the pendulum swings to one side and then to the other, so we must assume that the human being's overall experience in these two states, waking and sleeping, is like a pendulum-like rhythm. I am not offering this as proof, but as something that one might come up with as a possible interpretation. But this will lead us to the next stage, if I now, from the direct view that can be acquired with the help of the three levels of knowledge that I characterized yesterday, first of all present the state of sleep and wakefulness in a soul-spiritual way.

When we are in imaginative knowledge, we get to know the etheric body, the formative forces of the human being. That is, we learn to look at what is in us as the first supersensible being. We then get to know the actual soul that flows into our physical body through birth or conception and also into this formative forces body. We get to know this soul-like quality as it flows out through death into a spiritual world again. We get to know this through inspired knowledge. And we then get to know the actual I-being, I would like to say, the deepest center of our human being through intuitive knowledge.

If we now apply these three insights to our observations of sleeping and waking, it becomes clear to us that the human being is only fully awake during the waking state, when he is fully aware of his mental life, so to speak, and that he is normally the physical body, the spatial body, the etheric body, the temporal body, the actual soul-being, which I referred to yesterday as the astral body, and the I. As a physical being, the sleeping person still has only the body of formative forces within them. Essentially, the soul, the astral body and the I have emerged from the physical body and the body of formative forces, which can now be observed through ordinary external sensory perception and imaginative perception. And from falling asleep to waking up, they are in the same sphere in which they were before the human being descended from the spiritual-soul realm into a physical embodiment on earth. So that the four members of the human being, that is, the physical body, the temporal formative forces body, then the ego and the astral body, the actual soul, are separated from each other in twos.

But now, if we want to understand how the state of sleep relates to the state of wakefulness, we must gain an inner vision, also to be attained through the stages of knowledge that are characterized, of what is actually present during sleep, let us say for the time being. The physical body of space only carries out what the body of time is. All the processes that the physical body carries out in this ether body, from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, can continue. These are all the processes that are connected with the plastic development of the human being, for example during childhood, and that are connected with nutrition and metabolism. But those processes that are connected with imagination, thinking, feeling and willing cannot be carried out. Man falls asleep into a state in which the life of imagination is dimmed, in which feelings are silent, where his will becomes powerless to somehow carry out something in the physical world through the physical body and etheric body.

If we now observe through supersensible knowledge that which has gone out of the physical body and etheric body, as I, as an astral body, that is, as a vehicle of thinking, feeling and willing, we find, above all, that the conscious activity of waking has sunk into an unconscious one, and that the human being is in an unconscious state. Therefore, one can only see through supersensible knowledge from the outside what has gone out of the physical body and the etheric body.

If one wants to characterize what is actually outside of the physical man, then one must compare it with something else. When a person is in a completely dreamless sleep, it can only be compared to the same activity that is present in the waking person's will, in the impulses of the will. The impulses of the will — I characterized this yesterday — also run in the waking person in such a way that the consciousness, the consciousness living in thoughts, has no knowledge of the inner nature of this will. I said yesterday that we plan to do something, for example, to raise our arm. We have the thought. How the thought then flows down into our organism, how the will takes hold of the arm – if I may express myself trivially – is something of which one also has no idea in waking life for the ordinary consciousness. The arm is raised. We only see the result again. The mental image of the result is a new mental image. During waking hours, we have as little idea of what lies between the mental image of the result and the mental image of the intention as a volitional impulse as we have no idea in our ordinary consciousness of what goes on in deep, dreamless sleep. But for supersensible observation, what is present as I and astral body, in addition to the physical body and the etheric body, is in sleep exactly in the same activity as will is during waking. A decided volition expresses itself. The activity of imagination is subdued. We shall explain shortly why this activity of imagination is subdued. That for which we already sleep while awake is quite active, only it is outside the body. It cannot move the arms or legs, cannot use the body as a tool for the will, but this will is powerfully present. And what then is the most important characteristic of this will? It is desire, which can then increase to become the wish and the other various nuances that one is familiar with. From the moment one falls asleep until one wakes up, desire is active in that which is outside of the physical body. And one must ask oneself: What is desire directed towards? When one can observe this streaming and swirling and surging of desire in the soul-being outside of the physical body through supersensible knowledge, then one is led to the question: What is this desire, this longing directed towards? It is directed towards nothing other than the physical body, towards regaining possession of the physical body. From the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up, the human being unconsciously wants to get back into his physical body and into his etheric body because he is outside of it. And then another question arises. These questions only arise, of course, when one applies imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. The other question that arises is: Why does this soul-filled person not immediately satisfy the desire to return to his physical body when he is outside of it? The reason for this, and this is explained to us in the moment of falling asleep, is that the human being, when awake, when he has taken hold of his physical body as a being of soul, as I and astral body, becomes tired of this physical body, which, after all, connects him to the outside world; because in a certain sense he is saturated with this possession after a certain time. Not just the possession of the interior of the physical body. This physical body carries the sense organs. Through them one comes into contact with the outside world. One's self and the astral body merge with sounds and colors, one's self merges with the words one hears from other people. If you do not want to be absorbed and have no possibility to escape in any other way from the impressions coming from the outside world, then you withdraw from the impressions of the outside world by falling asleep, just like the reindeer I was talking about. So that from falling asleep to waking up, in the human being as a spiritual being, satiation with the physical body and desire for the physical body pulsate together. And only when the satiation has completely disappeared can desire triumph over satiation, and the person wakes up and returns to the physical body. There is not enough time to describe why you wake up when the alarm clock goes off, for example, and the like, or why some people cannot sleep. These things can also be experienced, but I can only describe the principles and the generalities.

When we consider the alternating states of sleeping and waking, we are actually dealing with an oscillation between an inner inclination of the human soul to be in the physical body and no longer to be in it; we are dealing with a feeling of being oversaturated, hence the going out of the physical body, and with a renewed desire for the physical body. This desire for the physical body is particularly interesting for supersensible research to study. For this desire for the physical body is also discovered to a particularly intense degree at the time when the soul, bending down from the spiritual-soul world to earth, is again approaching a physical embodiment. Between death and a new birth, that is, on the way to a birth, the soul develops in such a way that, out of all the states it has gone through before, it develops, above all, a certain emptiness towards its spiritual environment and an intensely strong will element, namely the desire for the physical earth. So that we can study the last states that the soul goes through when it draws to an earth life, in a sense between falling asleep and waking up.

So we have an explanation that simply arises for supersensible research, which does not start from the physical of the alternating state of sleeping and waking, but rather recurs to the soul; which explains waking up above all as the satisfaction of the desire for the physical body, which explains falling asleep from a soul oversaturation of the physical body. We arrive at soul qualities and explain the change between sleeping and waking from the soul.

If we then look at dreaming – initially one-sidedly, because, as I said, we cannot explain everything today – we look at dreaming when waking up. As we observe the human soul with its swirling will-being from falling asleep to waking up, we see that thoughts begin to flash to the same extent that the human being returns to his etheric body and his spatial body, his physical body. During normal waking up, it is the case that the person relatively quickly slips into their etheric body and their physical body. In these he has the tools for his thinking, feeling and willing. Thinking, which is subdued during sleep, makes use, when the person returns to his physical body, primarily of the senses and nervous system as external tools. Feeling, which is also dampened during sleep, is submerged upon awakening in everything that is rhythm in the physical organism, for example, the rhythm of breathing, blood circulation, and also the rhythm of metabolism. There is rhythm there too. In fact, the rhythm of metabolism already plays a part in the circulation. So that one can observe how that which is thinking disposition, thinking power in the soul, submerges into the nervous system, and that which is feeling nature submerges into the rhythmic system. And with regard to the will nature, which is thus mainly active during sleep and is connected with the metabolic activity, I would like to say that there is no boundary between inside and outside. During sleep, the human being is indeed outside of his physical body, and everything outside is will, but this will passes through the boundary of the body with regard to the metabolism, also striking into the body through the boundary of the body, and during sleep the activity of the will also encompasses the metabolic system. It is only out of sensory activity and thinking, but with its will nature, the human being is completely immersed in its metabolic system.

Now one can observe how, so to speak, the human being with his soul essence descends into his etheric and physical body. If it happens that, due to some abnormality – although they coincide spatially, this can be the case – the etheric body is seized before the spatial body, then the human being does not immediately enter his body completely. He only submerges into the etheric body. The etheric body then takes up the liquid components of the body, and only the soul, which comes from the solid components, really remains outside. But the moment when the human being has not yet fully taken hold of the physical body, but has only taken hold of the etheric body, that moment is when the soul, emerging from the state of sleep, can only make partial use of the physical and etheric bodies, and that is when dreaming arises. Full waking only arises when the physical body is fully seized, that is, when all the organs of will and especially the sense organs are fully seized. So it is a partial seizure of the physical body when dreaming occurs.

But precisely when one observes this coming over through dreaming in supersensible research - and one can observe this dreaming very particularly through imaginative knowledge; it is not itself dreaming, it is a more fully conscious knowledge than the ordinary day-knowledge of normal consciousness, but one can observe particularly what actually takes place objectively in the dream – one can observe how the human soul takes hold of the physical apparatus, because in the present human life, when the soul is removed from the physical apparatus, it is not strong enough to carry out the thinking activity. It needs, so to speak, the physical tool as a support to carry out the thinking activity. So that in the moment when the human being submerges into the physical tool, thinking is really carried out through the physical tool.

But then, when one also observes feeling through inspired knowledge, both the feeling that is completely subdued during sleep and the feeling in the waking state, which is also a kind of dream-like state – feelings are not as fully conscious as mental images – then one does indeed come to significant differences between thinking and feeling. Only now do you notice these differences. When thinking, it is the case that, when one observes the thinking person with imaginative knowledge in a waking state, the nervous system is continually active during the thinking. The nervous system is in a mobile plastic state, so that basically, for the most part, everything of the soul sinks into the nervous system. When passing from sleep to wakefulness, that part of the soul that becomes a thinker in man disappears. It disappears into the sensory nervous system. This is not the case with feeling human beings. The part of the soul that constitutes the feeling human being submerges into everything that is a rhythmic organism in man, but not completely. One can even say, although this is only an approximation, that just as much of the soul remains outside the physical and etheric bodies as submerges. There is a continuous back and forth between the soul and the body in this feeling activity. And this continuous back and forth is expressed in the rhythmic system.

And the part that makes up the will of the human soul also submerges into the physical body during waking, but it does not submerge in the same way that thinking submerges into the nervous system. It submerges into the physical organism and into the formative forces, but it does not connect with them. Although it slips into the physical body, it remains separate and is a distinct being. Thus one can say that in the waking state, the human being has a remarkable polarity. If we look primarily at the nervous sensory organism, we find that it is developed in such a way that in the waking person the soul is completely submerged. It has almost completely disappeared into the organism as a thinking soul. And when we look at the workings of the will in the waking person, we actually see this will as something separate, alongside the physical processes in the physical organism. These then take place as two activities, although in the same space, but as strictly separate activities. So that it is only through such research methods that we actually gain an insight into how the human being, as a being of will, is involved in his body in a completely different way than he is involved as a thinking being.

This, however, becomes particularly clear when we approach the observation of the waking person with truly developed imaginative and intuitive knowledge. Once you have completed the exercises I mentioned yesterday, you are able to observe yourself from the outside. The thinking is strengthened. This makes it independent of the physical body. In ordinary consciousness, the human being must completely immerse himself in his physical body, that is, in the nervous sensory apparatus. But the achievement of supersensible knowledge consists in learning to think without this physical apparatus. That is the essential thing. We are too weak as sleeping human beings in our normal consciousness to be able to gather up in our sleep that which is soul-like, so that it develops in itself the activity of thinking without the support of the body. The success of the exercises described yesterday consists precisely in the soul becoming so strong that it can think without the body. But in this state, in which it can think without the body, it can see the body. Just as one sees something that is outside of oneself, as one knows that one sees the table with one's eyes, so for imaginative and inspired and intuitive knowledge one looks back to the physical and etheric bodies. As a being of soul, one is only within oneself, one is now conscious of what one is otherwise unconscious of in sleep. And now something very peculiar occurs. It occurs that one does not see everything of this physical body, but only the nervous system can be objectively seen, or rather seen by the soul. The human being, seen entirely from the outside, is a nervous-sensory being. Its nervous system, together with the senses, becomes visible from the outside. I emphasize this because it has played a role - not in these evening lectures, but in many of the daytime lectures - I emphasize that not only the so-called sensitive nerves become visible, but also the so-called motor nerves, and that it is precisely at this stage of knowledge that direct observation leads to the research result: there is no fundamental difference between the so-called sensitive and the so-called motor nerves. The sensitive nerves are there to mediate our perception of the external world through our senses; the motor nerves, which are also sensitive nerves, are there so that we can perceive the position and presence of our limbs within ourselves. The fact that we have an inner perception of ourselves is conveyed by the motor nerves, which are actually sensitive nerves in this respect. Such research results arise from the path of soul research.

So we have now come to the point where we have what belongs to the human nervous system in the broadest sense as an objective thing. On the other hand, everything that belongs to the metabolic system is not present as an objective. It is present in intuition as a purely spiritual being. There the material disappears, and one now learns to recognize this peculiar process in the waking human being, this total process that actually takes place there. One learns to recognize it in this way: if one first gradually orientates oneself through imaginative knowledge, one comes to understand how one moves out of the physical body, now not unconsciously as when falling asleep, but consciously, as one feels this lifting out, especially from the brain. Then, by passing over to inspired knowledge, one arrives at a point where, in addition to this lifting out of the brain, one still notices how the brain now becomes something outside of one. And then one arrives at intuition, one really arrives at objectively seeing what one has before one as the human sensory-neural apparatus. But now one also sees the whole process of ordinary thinking.

Yesterday I emphasized the importance of the person's common sense remaining intact while they develop the second personality, the observing personality, in anthroposophical research. The ordinary personality remains intact, otherwise the person does not become a supersensory cognizer, but a hallucinator. By observing how one comes out of it, logical thinking, which otherwise adheres to the sensory world, remains in the brain. One rises out of the brain only with what one is as a higher, soul-filled being. That is why we see in the entire nervous-sensory apparatus not a lump that lies there, but a process, something that is constantly happening, that is constantly a process. You see that when you look back. Something very strange then emerges, which fundamentally illuminates our entire knowledge of the world. It turns out that in our nervous-sensory being – I apologize if I now say something terribly heretical, it only appears so; it also arises directly from the consistent continuation of scientific thinking into the spiritual world – out of the spirit, which also comes across when we wake up in the morning, when the soul enters the physical body, material-spiritual particles are stored between the parts that only relate to the material, which are deposited and generated directly from the spirit itself. One witnesses the emergence of matter, even the plastic formation of matter in the human sensory apparatus. Matter arises out of spirit. According to his spiritual soul, man not only becomes an inhabitant of his nerve-sense apparatus, but, by storing matter that forms directly out of spirit, he becomes creative of matter. This is heretical because it goes against a principle of today's natural science, which only does not go to its ultimate consequences, those that extend to all beings - and the world consists of all beings, not just of inanimate facts and inanimate beings. This natural science has abstracted from the processes of the inorganic world and, at most, from the plant world, the so-called law of the conservation of energy and matter. As if the substance were there once and for all and would only be rearranged in this way. In a sense, this is the case in all other natural kingdoms. In man, however, there is actually a real creation of matter through the nerve-sense apparatus. But we can state - read the first pages of psychologies that are written today out of incomplete knowledge - that the law of the conservation of matter also applies to man. This is based on an illusion. The law applies, but how? If we look with intuitive knowledge at the workings of the will in the human organism, that is, in the metabolic organism, the part of the organism that consists of metabolism, then matter is continually being destroyed through a process that I would call an organic combustion process. And so, while man develops thinking in normal consciousness, matter creation takes place; while man develops will, matter destruction takes place. The healthy human life is based on the fact that, as it were, the left balance beam corresponds to the right, in the human being it constantly balances itself in the whole of life – matter is created during the thinking, and matter is destroyed, used up, hurled back into nothingness through the will process. And so it seems as though the law of conservation of matter also applies to the human organism, because as much matter is created and formed as is plasticized. By extrapolating such a law as the law of conservation of matter, which is quite correct, and applying it to the human being, we are able to gain a true insight into the very specific nature of the human being in its connection with the physical and with the soul-spiritual. In a sense, the human being becomes transparent in this way. But what path does one actually follow?

If one follows today's physiology, whose methods in external relationships are not at all to be challenged by me – they have their great merits and results, but these results are for the most part questions again, and in turn pose riddles – if one merely these external methods of research to follow the human organism, then one has only one side of the human being, and then one must put forward hypotheses as to the actual cause of what happens in the metabolism, as to the cause of what happens in the nervous process. These hypotheses actually tend to presuppose something unknown, which perhaps only exists in a lawful connection. That is what materialists believe. But in reality, one does not arrive at what the metabolism and the nervous process depend on through such hypotheses, but only through direct observation of the spiritual and soul-like itself.

And so you see that with regard to man, only total research, which does not sin against natural science but simply continues natural science, is able to put into perspective what otherwise only physiology and biology bring to light, by starting with the whole person. And this research does indeed lead to the extraordinarily important result that I presented in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul) a few years ago, after it had been the subject of thirty years of intensive research: the result is that the human being is a threefold creature. The being, which is mostly a nervous-sensory apparatus, is the carrier of the thought life in the waking state. Then the human being is a rhythmic being - breathing, circulation rhythm, other rhythms - and that is the carrier of the emotional life. Finally, the human being is a metabolic being, but the limbs are also part of the metabolic organism. Metabolism is only an inward continuation of what takes place in the limbs. Metabolism is the carrier of the will element. This has nothing to do with the nervous system, but only with the processes of metabolism.

Thus we come to recognize the human being as a threefold creature. The actual inner essence of the human being is based precisely on the fact that he is such a threefold creature, in that he has in his nervous-sensory apparatus that into which the thinking part of the soul is completely immersed, so that in terms of thinking we may actually be the greatest materialists. And today's psychology also comes to see in the brain, the various structures of the brain, true images of the thought life. It does not succeed in this for the emotional and will life, as she herself admits. One sees that one can be the most materialist with regard to the life of ideas, but one does not get along with pure materialism. It is not possible to do so if one imagines the brain in such a way that on the one hand one has the brain as a finished organ and on the other hand one has somehow the soul, which now uses the brain to shape thoughts. It is not like that at all. Rather, it is the case that thoughts have an existence of their own. It is just too weak to be active, for example, when the soul's part of the soul does not have the brain, as in sleep. But when the soul seizes the brain, it does not use it as a finished organ, but it is constantly developing in this brain what is happening in the brain as a process. These furrows are a perpetual process. This is at the same time the activity of the soul. Therefore, when we examine the brain, we can only do so if we have a mental image of the brain as a reflection of the soul, insofar as the soul is a thinking being. This is more important than one might think. This is immediately confirmed when you open up any brain physiology today and see how things have already been researched. And when you see the effects of these different brain areas, they are not at all such that you can see how the soul could make use of them, but they are such that they actually reflect the life of the soul: they are images of the life of the soul.

So that one can say: the brain is actually like an imagination of the soul's life that has been realized, that has become matter. It is an image, whereas the rhythmic organism has not brought it to the point of an image. The metabolic organism has brought it least of all to this, being something entirely unplastic, something unpictorial. We can understand the brain in the way it is constructed if we grasp it as an image of the soul life. And only then will brain physiology be on a healthy foundation, when we are able to understand the brain in this way, as materialized imaginations. On the other hand, one will not be allowed to understand the rhythmic organism, for example, as a materialized imagination, but here one has an inspiration that takes place externally in the process, in the process, where the spiritual and the material continually interact in rhythm. And in the metabolism, we have a continuous transition from matter to spirit, from spirit to matter, towards one pole and then the other.

It must be said that even today it is somewhat awkward to express these things. For naturally, if one is only within the field of biology and physiology, which have not yet become consistent with themselves, one sees such things as fantasies, or even worse. But when these things are known, one has the obligation to stand up for the known truths.

And from the human being, the other parts of our entire world being can then be reached. Let us go down from man to animal, for example. First of all, we need to really get to know the animal, not just talk about it from the outside, but really get to know it. If we want to truly recognize the human being in terms of his or her essence, we have to speak of a threefold being, but the three parts do not exist side by side. An unspiritual professor wanted to ridicule the threefold nature of the human being by saying: Steiner differentiates between the head, chest and stomach human. – As if these three members were juxtaposed like three boxes or cabinets standing on top of each other! That is not the case at all. The head is primarily a nervous-sensory organ, but the rhythmic and metabolic systems play into it; the chest is primarily a rhythmic organism, but the other parts of the body play into it; and so does the metabolism. The three members are interrelated, not separate. Those who characterize them as separate, whether as supporters or opponents, do not get it right.

Now, the situation changes immediately when we move from humans to animals. The animal is not a three-part organism. This is particularly evident when we look at it with imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. Strictly speaking, the animal is a two-part organism. In the animal, the rhythmic organism continually plays a role in the nerve-sense organism, on the one hand. So that? at the head pole of the animal, there is not such a differentiated sense organism as in humans. There is less differentiation, less separation of the nerve-sense apparatus from the rhythmic apparatus. It is a nerve-sense organ that is constantly pulsed by the rhythmic life. And the metabolic organism is in turn pulsed by the rhythmic organism. The rhythmic organism is not as distinct from the other two systems as it is in humans. The human being has the thinking organism, the nerve-sense organism, then the rhythmic organism and the metabolic organism. The three organ systems are relatively distinct from each other. In animals, the nervous-sense organism and the metabolic organism are present, but they form direct polarities. The rhythmic organism is not so strictly separated, but is more absorbed in the other two systems, so that in animals one has a kind of twofold organism.

What is essential in the formation of the human being is not that his head tends to have a special formation, but that which tends to have a special formation in the human being is his rhythmic organism. This becomes independent. As a result, it expels, on the one hand, the head organism in a more differentiated way than in the animal, and, on the other hand, the metabolic organism. So that in turn, there is a more intensive metabolism in man than in the animal, where the rhythmic organism continually plays into the metabolism.

When we study the animal and human organizations in this way, we come to the conclusion that the human being is a different being as a metabolic organism than as a nervous-sensory organism. In the nervous-sensory organism, the soul is completely submerged. So what do we have in our consciousness? Our mental images, our thoughts. Yes, we feel a certain unreality towards thoughts. Thoughts are only images. The most perfect part of the human being is the head organism, but the soul-spiritual is most deeply submerged in the physical. We can be most materialistic in relation to the organization of thinking, the nerve sense organism. For what remains of the spirit in us are only images. In thoughts we have images of reality. He who understands how the spirit is completely diluted to the point of images – if I may say so – and thus lives as spirit in the waking person, will indeed see in the thought life of man a clear proof that there is spirit in man, but he will not address the thoughts themselves as spirit, but will address the thoughts as images that the spirit produces by mostly immersing itself in the nervous sensory apparatus and only reflecting back what remains as an image and arises in consciousness as a thought. One learns to see right through human nature and, accordingly, animal nature as well.

But then, when one has come to know the human being in this way, through imaginative, inspired, intuitive knowledge, when one has come to see the human being as a spiritual-soul being, when he is outside of his organism, when he is asleep ; if one can achieve self-knowledge through imagination, inspiration, intuition, that is, self-knowledge for the human being when he is outside of his physical body, then the difference between subjectivity and objectivity ceases to exist. Outside of the body, we then belong to the cosmos. If we can recognize ourselves by looking back at ourselves, then we can also observe in the cosmos. And then such observations arise that provide us with a real cosmology, a cosmosophy, as I have tried to give in my book “The Secret Science”. These are direct results of observations made by imagination, inspiration and intuition outside the physical human body. And the correlate to this is the complete knowledge of the human being.

It would now be interesting to extend this observation to the plant and mineral kingdoms. However, there is no time for that today. I would just like to point out a few other areas. I can only give examples. I would like to start from how we can follow the metamorphosis of the human organism in this way, how we can see how, on the one hand, the human being, in his material organization as a nerve-sense human being, is a result of the soul-spiritual life, and how, on the other hand, as a metabolic organism, he is not such a result. For the spiritual life continually burns matter, especially when it is most active as a spiritual life. We see how man metamorphoses, and in such a way that he materializes, spiritualizes, spiritualizes. When one is able, through supersensible knowledge, to follow this transformation of the organs through metamorphosis, then one learns to follow it not only with regard to their healthy state, but also with regard to their diseased state. In this regard, I would like to point you in just one direction.

In the moment when, through the empty consciousness mentioned yesterday, one gets to know the spiritual world around oneself, everything that was previously only the object of sensory observation becomes the object of spiritual observation. As the human being appears spiritualized when viewed in this way, so the whole world, the cosmos, is ensouled, spiritualized before the spiritual gaze of the human being. Then, for example, the sun, which we see through ordinary observation and also through ordinary science as this firmly defined, sharply contoured body, appears in what it presents to us physically, to the eye, as a physical organism. On the other hand, there is a spiritual solar element that is not confined to this part of space that we see with our physical organs, but that, as a solar element, fills the entire cosmos that is accessible to us. This solar element permeates all realms of nature, including the human being. It is something that works in the human being. And just as we otherwise study in physics, how the ethereal sunlight penetrates through the eye, how we study the effects of light through what is similar to the physical apparatus of the eye or to the eye itself, so we can now also study the spiritual part, the solar, the spiritual part of the solar activity. But we encounter this again in all the inner organs of the human being. And we become aware that a large part of the organs – actually all organs, but the different organs to a greater or lesser extent – have a life that springs, sprouts and pushes towards growth, a life that ascends towards a single pole. This begins with a lesser sprouting and sprouting power and increases with sprouting and sprouting power in the formation of growth, in promoting nutrition, also in digestion, consumption and so on.

On the other hand, there is a descending life in all organs, a degenerative one. Every evolution is opposed by a devolution or involution. The ascending life of the organs we have within us is worked on by the sun-like element spreading through the cosmos. The descending life can be observed particularly in the brain. Because brain matter is continually being molded through the activity of thinking, there must also be a continual breaking down, precisely from the brain. And the moon-like has to do with these degenerative forces. For the moon is not only that which it appears to us physically, but the physical is only the physical embodiment of that which, as a moon-like quality, permeates the entire cosmos accessible to us. This penetrates into us and into all realms of nature. But by being able to study, we say, in the kidneys, the heart, the lungs, in every single organ, the solar process and the lunar process, the ascending and the descending, the fruitful, growing and the degenerating, by this we understand the individual organ from the cosmos. There will be no complete, total physiology until we understand all the organs of the human being in their ascending and descending life from the spirit of the cosmos.

And in the same way as from the solar and lunar, we can also understand the inner organs of the human being from other impulses of the cosmos. That which is healthy belongs to the ascending life, that which is diseased to the descending life. Centripetal and centrifugal forces depend on other impulses in the cosmos than the solar and lunar ones. I just wanted to mention this as an example. These solar and lunar influences also creep into the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, into all realms of nature. This leads to the study that culminates in the following: I study a human organ in a particular metamorphosis. I find that it is not in a normal state. For example, the human respiratory organs are not in a normal state, but rather as in the case of hoarseness, of a cold. I study this state. In layman's terms, I would say that I study the state of a cold. What is present in the human being? It is actually that which should otherwise be limited to the human senses, which should only prevail as forces in them, so to speak, has slipped down into the respiratory organs. They metamorphose pathologically so that they become too much like sensory organs. The sensuality that should otherwise only be in the sensory organs slips down into the respiratory organs. They sporadically become sensory organs, which makes them ill. Why is this? It is because that which can otherwise have a particularly strong effect in the sensory organs, the moon-like or sun-like, predominates. This is then transferred from the cosmos to the air, to other climatic conditions, so that such pathological metamorphoses arise from the human being's environment.

And now I observe something in the outer world of nature. For example, I look at the lilac, a violet flower with special petals. When one studies this plant, gets to know it inwardly, one finds that in it are active those forces which have an effect in precisely the opposite sense to the solar and lunar, as that which has a morbid effect in the interior of man when he has a cold, in the case I have described. And one learns to recognize how the peculiar interaction of sulfur-like forces with etheric oils in the lilac plant is in a polar opposite relationship to that which develops pathologically in the organism.

If we learn to recognize the metamorphosis of the human organs through the spirit, and if we learn to recognize the particular effects of the forces of the environment through the spirit of the cosmos, then we arrive at a rational materia medica and a rational therapy. We can now state, just as in other sciences, where we really have an overview of things, not just trial and error, which remedy may be suitable for this or that disease. I can only sketch the process. But in this respect, anthroposophy can shine a light everywhere. It does not have to rely on mere trial and error of this or that remedy for this or that disease, but one can see the connection between the remedy and the disease from the spirit of the cosmos. This is a very simple case. But it can be applied to the whole of pathology and therapy. Today I can only hint at the axiomatic, but in this direction, in anthroposophy, we already have a fully developed pathology and therapy. There are also institutes where things can be empirically verified and where one can be convinced that those remedies that are drawn from knowledge of spirit and nature prove to be effective, if, on the other hand, one is only able to diagnose the diseases correctly. Anthroposophy does not find such things in a botched, dilettantish, lay manner. It recognizes what medicine has achieved, and only builds further. But it is possible to build further, and much can be gained for the benefit of sick and healthy humanity if we continue to build on medicine in this way. In this way, as in so many other areas that I cannot touch on today, anthroposophy leads directly into the most important areas of life.

Now, finally, just a few examples of how to arrive at anthroposophical research results. I regret that I cannot cite more, but I would like to give at least a few disparate examples so that you can see how our scientific spirit can actually become universal by being shaped anthroposophically.

History, for example, is usually viewed in such a way that one records external facts or takes what is available in the way of documents about external facts, and perhaps draws a few conclusions about the spirit of the age from these. After all, it comes down to this: “What you call the spirit of the times is the lords' own spirit, which is reflected in the times”. But one believes oneself to be quite objective in history when one puts together a course of history from external documents. But when one ascends to such a realization, as I characterized it yesterday and as I have shown today with individual examples of its application, then one also comes to really observe from the other, the spiritual side. After all, we have perceptions of the natural side. We do not need to search for them. We have to strengthen our thinking to such an extent that it can organize and master the perceptions, so that through observation and experimentation the perceptions reveal their laws. But on the side of the spirit! Yes, since the old, intuitive insights, which were not fully conscious, as are today's anthroposophical insights, since they have only become traditional and can no longer be handled by people, the spiritual has basically lost its entire content, however little one wants to admit it today. It is interesting, though, that within German intellectual life, where one always draws the final consequences in this direction, on the side of intellectualism, there is a philosopher, Fritz Mauthner, who has taken Kant even further than Kant by writing a “critique of language” in which he attempts to prove that we actually have no spiritual content, that in what we say about things we can only say words. Critique of language - not critique of reason! And that is not even so unfounded. Fritz Mauthner, however repulsive his “criticism of language” may be, is only more honest than the others for the person who sees something in the real world. The others just do not admit to themselves that they only have words when they speak of thinking, feeling and willing. For these words must first be given a content again through supersensible knowledge. They have no content in the psychologists either. Take a modern psychology and read an explanation of what a thought is. They talk about thoughts because they have the word “thought” from ancient times, but there is nothing more in it in terms of the spiritual. We must first come to an understanding of this. And we will only come to that when we develop the slumbering powers in the human soul as I have described it yesterday. Then one will be able to follow the laws of spiritual development of humanity in a similar way to the way one follows the physical laws in natural science.

For example, there is the biogenetic law, which Haeckel strongly emphasized. Certainly, this has undergone various corrections. I am familiar with the current state of research regarding the biogenetic law. But essentially one can say that in the morphological stages that the human embryo goes through from conception to birth, until it is a fully formed human being, the formation of the individual animal forms is repeated. When the human germ is three weeks old, it resembles a fish, then it becomes more and more similar to other animal forms. It is an approximate law. The ontogeny, the development of the individual being, is an abbreviated repetition of the phylogeny, the development of the whole tribe, it is said.

Now, even if this law has to be corrected to a certain extent, it still provides a suggestion for establishing a certain connection between external physical perception and organic beings. But on the other hand, the aspect of human development in its historical becoming can be similarly arrived at through such a lawful connection. Anyone who has reached a certain age will indeed come to this - but human life as a whole belongs to the human being. Therefore, what can be observed in oneself only in later old age is also peculiar to the human being; one can see something very remarkable through unbiased observation, which is then confirmed and made clear through supersensible knowledge, if one is capable of it. One notices that, as a person approaches old age, all kinds of abilities may be present. These abilities actually want to develop inwardly, but they cannot come out. In today's human being, there is such a strong calcifying tendency that certain formative powers of the inner being cannot come out. They only hint at themselves. That is why people who are truly suited to self-knowledge inwardly today feel that, as they age, certain abilities slip away from them, abilities that actually want to develop but are overgrown by the hardening organism and cannot come out. And if we pursue this further, we go back in the development of humanity to times when these abilities could still emerge, when the human organism was still different from what it is today. Today, superficial views of nature believe that the human organism is quite the same as it has always been, as it was, for example, in ancient Egypt and before. No one considers that even in historical and prehistoric times, the human organism in its inner, deeper structure, its histology, is constantly changing, becoming stiffer and more sclerotic. So that if we go back to older times and follow what people in later ages have produced in literature, poetry and art, we also find empirical confirmation of what I am saying now. If we go back in time, we find that people in fact went through a certain development into a much older age, where their physical and mental development went hand in hand. Today, this is actually only present in youth. With children, we see very clearly: mental abilities develop in parallel with physical abilities. When the child changes teeth, a strong psychological change takes place. This happens again at puberty. Those who still have a sense of observation for such things will also find, at the beginning of the 1920s, that psychological changes still occur in parallel with physical changes in people. But then it all becomes very blurred. Towards the end of the twenties, it stops altogether for today's human being. In a sense, the human being becomes stationary in terms of his intellect and his capacity for feeling. He develops a spiritual life, and he can even perfect it, but the body no longer supports him in it. He no longer undergoes the same development.

If we go back to the Greeks – and with the methods I have described, we can also observe the past of historical life spiritually and directly, just as we can observe our own psychological past before birth or conception – by observing Greek life back in our imagination, actually produced a Aeskulap, a Sophocles, a Phidias, then one comes to the conclusion: the whole soul-body life of man must have been different, there must have been a different way of feeling and living into the world. But this can be traced back to the fact that in Greece, until the mid-thirties, the physical body was as it is with us only in youth. A person today, at the end of the twenties, who stops receiving support for their spiritual life from their physical body, had something during the Greek era until the mid-thirties, in the whole ascending life, whereby the physical body supported them. And if we go back further, two or three millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find people - anthroposophical research can recognize this through direct observation - who, well into their forties, are as dependent on their bodies as a child is on his or her parents until sexual maturity. We find that in prehistoric times, people experienced their bodies into old age.

But what does that mean? It means that we experience our body as it grows, up to the age of thirty-five. When it is in decline, in degeneration, it no longer participates with the soul. We perceive nothing through the power of the body. Precisely when the body decays, we no longer perceive through it. At that point we have already become independent of the body. Yes, anyone who studies the Vedas with their wonderful flow, with what lives in them, and who finds their way into their remarkable spirituality, which also lives in similar spiritual creations, will also find external confirmation of what anthroposophical research can say.

There were times, ancient times in the evolution of humanity, when man, in his body, not only had an entity in the ascending life that worked in parallel with his soul. In the ascending life we are half-stunned by the sprouting, sprouting life, so that we do not look into the spiritual world, while, as the body decays, we see all the more spiritually in the decaying body with the soul. There were times when man still experienced his disintegrating body, and by looking in the disintegrating body, he saw with the soul all the more spiritually. In that world period – one would like to describe it today as prehistoric, as if it had been primitive, but it was not – people still lived in their fifties and sixties in such a way that their spiritual life was dependent on the participation of physical development, and now of descending development. As a result, there was a certain mood in these old people. When one was young, when one was still a child or a youth or a maiden, one looked up to the old people and said to oneself: Oh, these old people, they experience through growing old something that one can only know as an old person. They grow into a spiritual world while their body decays. In the most ancient patriarchal times, people looked up to the elderly and said to themselves: They grow into a divine spiritual world simply by virtue of their physical development. Oh, they also approached old age quite differently, knowing: If I grow old, I will become a wise man. There were exceptions, of course, but there are exceptions among the young today as well. Imagine the mood that pervades a society when you look up to the patriarchs in this way because they can have something that you cannot have in your youth.

Thus we see epochs in historical humanity, where humanity becomes younger and younger, if I may express it that way. First, people went through the physical up to their old age. Then we see people who experienced physical exertion into their forties, then the Greeks, who experienced it into their thirties, and thus only just avoided the cliff, that great turning point, where they could see into the decaying body and thus express that wonderful harmony of body and soul in their works of art.

Now humanity has become even younger. This expression is not used quite correctly. What I mean is that they consciously experience physical conditions up to the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Humanity will become ever younger and younger in this respect.

So while we say, with regard to our physical development as an embryo, that we repeatedly carry within us the physical tribal development from the simplest to the most perfect living being — the embryo goes through this from beginning to end — the reverse development takes place for the life of the soul. We as humanity experienced life into old age in earlier times. Then it recedes. People become mobile, inwardly and spiritually alive through their bodies only in their youth. This is what one notices as one grows older and actually wants to shape out what once really shaped out when the physical organization was still different. And just as the human embryo in the third week is like an earlier state, so is the soul development of humanity in its present state as if earlier states had degenerated, been lost. It is a retrogression. While the development of the embryo, now in the physical sense, is an upward development, the spiritual development is a retrogression. This is connected with the whole development of mankind. Whereas man was formerly dependent on the body in the historical development, he is more and more dependent on emancipating the soul from the body. The bodily element works in him more and more only as a youthful bodily element. This means that he is instructed to do that which he used to develop in himself through the powers of the body, now through spiritual-soul development from within, so that what the body does not give us in old age, the soul must carry us into old age.

In this way, pedagogy must be transformed, all human development must be transformed. Yes, when we get to know such laws – and there are many such laws that act as impulses in the development of humanity and of history – then we also have the opportunity to learn something very profound for human life from the study of history, which is now spiritualized. The necessity for the present-day organization of pedagogy and didactics in relation to pedagogy and didactics in earlier epochs of human development arises simply from the fact that humanity draws less and less from the physical development of the body in old age and more and more from the physical development of youth. and more and more on the physical development of young people; that it must therefore replace what no longer comes naturally by working into the body through the development of the spirit. If we find the right pedagogy, the right methodology to bring the soul to life, then we educate and teach in such a way that, for example, we do not simply receive concepts at school that are ready-made, with ready-made contours. That would be like keeping one's hands and arms as small as when one was a child throughout one's entire life. If we want to teach a child ready-made definitions and concepts, it is as if we wanted to keep the limbs of a human being fixed so that they cannot grow. We have to teach children such concepts, mental images and feelings that live and grow, so that by the fortieth or sixtieth year they are no longer the same as they were in their early years, through their own inner growth. This possibility exists. This is the aim of the pedagogy of the Waldorf school. It is not just about the child, but about the whole human being; it asks how the child must be educated so that it can benefit from the education throughout its life; so that the child does not have to say to itself when it is thirty years old: Now you have learned, but your concepts have remained childish dwarfs; they do not grow. One must convey such vivid mental images, concepts and impulses to the child that they are in a state of growth and will only be properly developed at a later age. In this way, one can learn intensively for life, directly from real, spiritualized historical observation. And when it is said today that people do not learn from history, it is because there is not much to learn from it, since it does not say much except for the compilation of data given for earlier epochs, which, however, are composed only of external appearances. Anthroposophically oriented observation also leads into the interior here, in that it provides perceptions in which the spiritual entities are not merely words, but also have spiritual substance.

So I could only show you in sketchy examples how the research results of anthroposophy look. They are such that we first get to know the human being, that we get to know the universe from the human being, that we also arrive at a corresponding practice of life through the correct application of the higher insights to the human being, a practice of life that extends into social life, as I tried to show with the example of education. So we may think in a similar way with regard to this reflection, as I have already said at the end of another reflection: Anthroposophy does not want to be a theory, does not want to be a one-sided teaching, but wants to be something that is drawn from life and can therefore, because it is drawn from the full life, from the bodily, soul and spiritual life, in turn serve the full life of man. For only then will a worldview truly serve life, when it is life itself. For this must be kept in mind: not abstract thoughts, which are inwardly dead in themselves – tomorrow I will have more to say about the deadness of thoughts – not thoughts that are dead, but only thoughts that are pulsating with life can also serve life. Only a worldview that does not live in dead thoughts, but is itself life, can serve life, because only life itself can be the true servant of life.

In the preceding meditations I have spoken to you about three successive but interrelated supersensible modes of knowledge: imaginative knowledge, inspired knowledge and intuitive knowledge. And I have tried to explain to you the views of the world and life that can be arrived at by applying these modes of knowledge. Today I will only add to what I said yesterday the knowledge to be gained through such supersensible insight into the innermost nature of the human being himself, the knowledge about which the human being longs for an answer because not only does the satisfaction of a religious or theoretical need somehow depend on it, but the possibility that the human being may only become fully human at all. All human striving ultimately aims at this: Man wants to become fully human.

That which forms the actual center of our being and which we initially face with the ordinary consciousness that we, so to speak, summarize it in the only point that we then express with the word “I”, we actually face in ordinary life as something unknown. And it is precisely this mode of knowledge, as it is meant and characterized here, that gradually leads to the self-knowledge that is initially accessible to the human being. I would like to use a comparison to make it clear what I actually mean. When we look around us with our eyes, we see things through light, which itself is supersensible, but which, in its effects in the colors of objects, makes them perceptible to us for this one sense. But we can also say that we see that which is not illuminated by light. If we have a white surface somewhere with a dot in the middle, we see the white through the effect of light, as we can imagine. But we also perceive the black dot, that which confronts us as dark. We know something of this black point. If we reflect properly, it is something like this in our ordinary lives with our perception of the self. We perceive the things around us. We also bring thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will from our own soul life to our consciousness. That is, so to speak, the illuminated part. But what belongs to us in all of this, the I, that we actually perceive only as a black spot. In our ordinary consciousness, we only know about it through the fact that we perceive nothing. I would like to expand the comparison even further. I would like to remind you how you actually have to put together your entire life on earth so far in your memory from the parts that you can see because you have lived through them in an awake state. But when you look back, you connect these experiences, which you have spent while awake during the day, in a single continuous stream of reminiscence. But these experiences are everywhere interspersed with what happened while you were asleep, let's say, dreamless sleep. And dreams also mostly belong to what has been forgotten, so that we can say in general: while you were asleep. In fact, in remembering you would always have to imagine these intermediate pauses if you wanted to place the complete stream of your experiences before your soul. But yesterday we saw that the I with the astral body - that is the actual soul being with its center, the actual self - dwells outside the physical body from falling asleep to waking up. They only emerge from their unconsciousness, in which they are during sleep, when they are not left to their own devices, but when they can submerge into the etheric body, the time body, and into the spatial or physical body. With the help of these supports – we cannot call them tools in the proper sense, as we saw yesterday – they have thoughts, mental images and, through mental images, feelings and impulses of will, which are more dream-like and also asleep. In order for the I and the astral body to truly unfold the forces that they have within them, it is necessary for them to submerge into the etheric body and the physical body. Thus, when we look back on our life on earth in our ordinary consciousness, we never actually remember the true form of the I and the astral body, but only what arises when this I and this astral body have support in the physical and etheric bodies.

From this you will see that it is more than a mere comparison when I speak of the fact that the I and the astral body, that is, the actual soul being, is like a dark point within that which is actually perceived. We would have to see the true form and capacity of this ego and this astral body in retrospect if we saw them not only as dark inclusions, but as realities, as we otherwise perceive realities. But we lift these soul entities out of their indeterminacy, their imperceptibility, through imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. As I discussed yesterday, we first lift the thinking part of our soul out of the dark uncertainty by immersing it in the physical body. This thinking part initially only uses the physical body as a kind of thinking power, which is present in this physical body in the form of air-like substance. And then, when sensory perceptions, emotional experiences, will impulses or desires are added to thinking when fully awake, where the soul must fully submerge into the physical body, where everything in the physical body must be utilized by the soul, then what would otherwise would otherwise be mere fleeting thoughts, as long as the processes take place only in the airy substance of the body, can, as it were, condense into the ability to remember and into that which, as thoughts, as mental images, connects with sensory perception or emotional experiences or volitional impulses.

We can study the human organism in a much more detailed way with the means of knowledge I have mentioned than we can without them. Ask yourself what a person usually has as a mental image of their physical body when they do not think about it too much. Of course, if you think about it a little, something else immediately arises. He has the mental image that the physical body is limited by the skin, and that inside it is actually a closed mass, which one thinks of as more or less solid or semi-solid. But we must take into account that hardly ten percent of the human body is really solid, that for the most part we are a column of liquid, that we constantly carry air within us, that through the airy we are constantly not separate from the outside world, connected to the outside world. The air that was just outside is then inside me; the air that I have inhaled, that has been processed in the body, is then outside. So that man, if he is to be understood completely in terms of his physical body, must be seen as a solid, liquid, air-like substance. And all this is permeated by the warmth element, which works in these different substances.

When, upon awakening, the soul descends into the body, it is the case with the purely conceptual that it does not descend further than what is present in our body as air-like substance. The thought takes hold of the airy element. It is quite wrong to speak of the thought merely in terms of vibrational nerve processes and the like. All this is revealed to the imaginative view that the mere thought, which also lives in dreams, first takes hold of the airy element. Then, as this air-shaped element enters into certain processes, the thoughts are transferred to the watery element, and from there they imprint themselves on the solid, salt-like element. This makes it possible for the reflexes to arise later as memories, and this through processes that I unfortunately do not have time to describe, although they are very interesting.

In this way one can gain an intimate insight into the workings and weavings of the soul within the body, graduated according to the aggregate states of the human physical body. This physical body gradually becomes transparent. One sees the weaving and workings of the soul within it. One sees that which I had to say remains actually obscure to ordinary consciousness. I put it like this yesterday: When we have the simplest volitional impulse, we first have the mental image that something should be carried out, for example, that the arm should be raised. Then this mental image shoots into our organism to become will. This eludes ordinary consciousness, just as sleep states do. In relation to the will, ordinary consciousness also sleeps in the waking state of the human being. But then one sees the effect again, and that again as a mental image. But then, when one studies the matter with the means of knowledge characterized here, one sees that when the thought becomes an impulse of will in us, this thought first has an effect in the air element of the human physical body. Then it is transferred again to the solid and liquid elements, and it is through the impulse of will that matter is, as it were, burned. In the liquid part of the human physical organism, matter is reduced to nothingness, as I described it yesterday. But because this is taking place, because matter is being reduced to nothingness, empty spaces are created in our physical body, so to speak. These empty spaces create a completely different dynamic. We become immersed in them. So that when we see through something with these means of knowledge, which becomes an act of will, we first perceive the thought, then perceive how the thought shoots into the body, how it destroys matter there, how we witness the rearrangement of the material. This is how the other state of equilibrium comes about, namely that matter is returned to nothing. This witnessing of a different equilibrium leads to the physical body also following this evocation of a different equilibrium in its movements, so that action then occurs, the action that is directly bound to the human being's physical body. In this way, the human being's will also becomes transparent in the soul, transparent down to the last details.

Just to show you that anthroposophy is truly not something that just rambles and rambles in vagueness, but that it enters into the very concrete facts of the world, I would like to give you a small example where there is also a will impulse. This example is taken from language. We have - I will choose a characteristic word, I could also choose another word - we have the German word “hier”. I say: “The box lies here.” What actually happens in the human organism when it comes to pronouncing the word “hier”? The first thing that happens is that what lives in the breath is first grasped in the subconscious. And this, what lives in the breath, is now the thought. The thought lives in the breath. We only have a real mental image of the thought when we know, from anthroposophical knowledge, that the thought can really live in the inhaled air, that it is a force that can act on the inhaled air. Only when we cannot go into these details do we come up against all the difficulties of psychology, taken physically. If we believe that thought can directly move a bone, that is, can have such a robust effect on physical matter, we cannot get by. But if we know that thought is something that is transmitted in a roundabout way through the warmth element into the air element, then what is stimulated there is continued into the rest of the organism, and we begin to grasp what is there with an impulse of will. So we can say: First of all we have the experience of breathing. This experience remains unconscious. Only the insight characterized here can transcend it. Then the second element is added: we inwardly experience that which now continues out of the breathing process into the liquid element of the organism. We experience that which signifies a direction in the speech organism. In the arm, it would mean an outstretching of the arm. We perceive this in the i. So we perceive the continuation of the thought-air into the watery element, so to speak the stretching movement. We see through imagination the transition from the breathing movement into the stretching movement. And then this stretching movement is formed in the right. If I were to say only “here,” I would have to draw it: 1st breathing process 5, 2nd stretching movement ie (the horizontal is drawn). But if I now draw the stretching movement as it is experienced unconsciously when I pronounce “here,” I must draw it like this: I perceive the breathing process, perceive the direction of the stretching, which is not carried out, but rolls along in the r. And then I have really experienced inwardly what is present as a volitional impulse when I pronounce the word “here”. In this way, we can follow the impulses of will that express themselves in language when we use our imagination to look into the whole weaving and ruling of the soul that permeates the physical body and the etheric or formative body.

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With imagination, we can initially gain an overview of the kind of things I have described here. When inspiration comes into play, we see how the soul plays within; how the physical body and the etheric body are something that exists externally in space and time, and how, on this, yes, I cannot say it well: like on an instrument, because this is in turn constantly being created by the soul processes, but like on a support, a ground that is constantly being worked on, the soul plays. Through inspiration, we thus advance to the actual seeing of the work of the soul in a physical organism.

When we then ascend to intuition, we perceive something else. Then we perceive: there is a law in the world that has nothing to do with physical law, but a law that certainly takes hold of people. I can perhaps express myself best about this fact in the following way: When one looks back at a later age on the way in which one's life on earth has passed, then one finds that, if one is honest with oneself, one must admit that one is actually nothing other than what one has become here in one's physical existence on earth as a result of one's experiences. Consider only: solely from this life. Consider how you learned to think, how you learned to feel, how you may have been stimulated to do this or that by meeting a particular person at a particular point in your life, which in turn may have had an effect on your character. Put together all the individual experiences you have gone through and ask yourself whether you would have become something different in relation to what you are for the outside world if different experiences had entered into your existence. If you follow this train of thought properly, you will soon see how something has been living in you from the very beginning, unconsciously drawing you to that which has become so important in your life. It is interesting how sometimes people who have reached a certain age and who have not used their lives to dream, but to grasp the facts of life that have come to them in a deeper sense, how such people, when they look back on their lives, came to say - Goethe's friend Knebel, for example, was such a person - “When I look back on my life, everything is like a dream.” , when they look back on their lives, came to say to themselves: When I look back on my life, everything is so systematically ordered. Not even the smallest event could be missing if I were to be exactly the same in my earthly existence as I am today. If the smallest event were missing, there would be a slight change, but a change nonetheless. Just think what, say, the sixty-year-old Goethe would have been if he had not experienced Italy. With Goethe, it is almost tangible. He did not go to Italy on a whim, but because there was a deep yearning within him. But these deep longings are not just there, if we want to analyze them precisely, so that we can always explain them, the following from the earlier, but they are born with us. We really find something planned in life. Of course, one could be deceived about that at first. I have only mentioned this because, after all, one can approach through the most ordinary observation that which is now given by intuitive knowledge. Intuitive knowledge really does give a full insight not only into what is going on in our organism in terms of the soul, but it also gives an insight into what works in us as the center, the I, the actual self-being. And this self-being reveals itself to intuitive insight at the third stage of supersensible knowledge. It reveals itself in such a way that we really do not stand passively in relation to the facts of the external world, but that we are drawn to them through that which is in us, and not through heredity, but from the deepest central soul being, which has been drawn into us from a spiritual-soul world at birth and has taken on a physical earthly body. Through intuitive insight one comes to realize that this I does not actually enter into earthly life in such a way that it would have to be passively surrendered to the random facts that come its way, but that it is strongly attracted by one fact and strongly repelled by another. It positively seeks its way in the world. In short, it is born carrying within itself the predisposition to its destiny.

And if we then further develop this intuitive insight into the nature of the human self, we come to realize that this ego has undergone repeated earthly lives. These repeated lives on earth did, however, begin at a certain point in time, before the I was so little different from its surroundings in its ancient form of existence that there was no such thing as a change between life on earth and spiritual-soul life. The repeated lives on earth will continue to be experienced until a point in time when the ego will again be so similar in its entire inner makeup to the spiritual world that it will no longer need an earthly life.

Thus, when we fully recognize the ego, we look back on repeated earthly lives. In other words, we look at the entire life of a person as proceeding in such a way that we have parts of that life between birth and death or conception and death, other parts between death and a new birth; that is, in repeated earthly lives the person lives out his full existence.

The usual objection is that people do not remember these repeated lives. This only applies to the ordinary consciousness. The moment intuition sets in, what happens through the repeated lives on earth becomes just as much an inner view of the soul as memories within a single life on earth. So it is here that anthroposophy does not come to its results through abstract proofs, as is the case with ordinary philosophy, but by first preparing the soul for higher knowledge and then recognizing these things through intuition. But this means that anthroposophical knowledge proves to be a continuation of the knowledge we have today in science, but it is a continuation that must work in a completely different way from the mere scientific knowledge that is recognized today.

Often the question is asked: how does anthroposophy prove what it asserts? Those who ask this question and who, because the usual form of proof is not available in anthroposophy, deny that anthroposophy is scientific, do not consider the following – I can only explain these things approximately, but they are absolutely and precisely true. The person who proceeds to prove something shows, by the very fact of proceeding to prove, that what has to be proved is not present in his intuition. Actually, we prove everywhere where we have no intuition. If I have to prove that yesterday a human being was here in this room, I shall need proof only if I myself have not seen the person here. This is basically the case with all proofs, and this is also the case with the proofs in the historical development of mankind. When, in their older, more instinctive knowledge, men had a view of what they called the divine being, they needed no proofs. The proofs of the existence of God began their life in historical evolution only when the view was lost. Proofs begin everywhere when there is no view.

The anthroposophical method, however, consists in first preparing the human soul so that it can then be perceived. When this is described – and this is the peculiar thing about anthroposophy – it can be brought into the forms of common sense and understood in the same way that a non-artist can understand a work of art, even though he cannot make it. Therefore, it cannot be objected that Anthroposophy cannot be grasped with common sense. It can only be investigated by someone who is an anthroposophical researcher himself. It can be understood by anyone who wants to apply their common sense without prejudice.

Thus we see that it is first of all knowledge of man, self-knowledge, knowledge of what the I really is, whereas otherwise, with our ordinary consciousness of the I, we have only a void, a darkness, a gloom, so that a knowledge is imparted of the real I, but that this I can then be seen in its eternity, and in this eternity as continuous through repeated earthly lives. Just as I have shown you that the human organism becomes transparent to the soul right down to the will, so too – as I have already hinted at in the previous days – the outside world is also made transparent. The soul-spiritual of the outside world is recognized through imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Many people who get to know superficially what is presented through anthroposophy, perhaps even only from the writings of its opponents, very often say that anthroposophy is a rehash of old worldviews, for example, of Gnosticism, which, after all, still prevailed among very many people in the first Christian centuries. They therefore say that we are dealing with something that has basically been refuted by the evolution of humanity over time, or at least has been overcome. Anyone who really focuses only on what has been presented in these lectures will not be tempted, even if they are also familiar with Gnosticism and anthroposophy, which certainly appears with new means and methods of knowledge and takes into account the consciousness of present-day humanity, to somehow combine it with Gnosticism. This anthroposophy works in such a way that it presupposes the scientific development of the last centuries. Of course, Gnosticism did not take this into account, because its existence preceded the development of science. But there is something else that could lead one to the temptation to lump anthroposophy together with gnosticism. The only way to avoid doing so is to really delve into the essence of anthroposophy. The only thing that anthroposophy might have in common with gnosis is that it also takes into account, in a certain way, what is a prevailing worldview in our time, and that is agnosticism, which is in a certain respect the opposite of gnosis and is also the opposite of anthroposophy, but in a different respect.

This agnosticism can first be characterized in terms of its theoretical aspect. It is present when a person speaks in the way, for example, Herbert Spencer spoke. Many others have followed in his footsteps, but they are not fully aware that they are agnostics, although they are actually agnostic in their entire way of thinking. He said: We see the world of the senses around us. We have the intellect, which rises from observation and experiment to the contemplation of the laws in this world. - To this we add what we can survey from ordinary consciousness as phenomena of the soul. Here too, a makeshift search is made, for it is only makeshift, for some kind of law. But then those who do not simply reject every supersensible reality, contenting themselves with the intellectual comprehension of sense perceptions and inner soul experiences as they present themselves to ordinary consciousness, , said: Yes, but one cannot penetrate with human abilities to what now lies as some or many origins behind these appearances; one cannot achieve a real gnosis, a real gnosticism, no knowledge. One is an enlightened person precisely because one admits that the origins of things cannot be known or investigated. Agnosticism in this form has taken hold in wide circles. It also exists in different variations. This agnosticism, when it appears philosophically, is a kind of opposite to anthroposophy, and I could, if I felt like it, start from this point in time to turn polemically critical, abusive if you will, against contemporary agnosticism, depending on my mood. What can be said about it, insofar as it really brings corruption to the human forces of progress in civilization, can soon be read in the journal “Die Drei”. I explained it in a lecture I gave at a Stuttgart School of Spiritual Science course. As I said, one could also approach the matter from this side. But I do not wish to do that today. I should like to show that this agnosticism also has its origin in the evolution of the human spirit.

Of course, errors can arise in the individual spheres of life. Then we become critics of these errors. We must root out these errors and illusions. But when something arises with such widespread popularity as agnosticism, then we can indeed fight it, the fight can be justified, but we must also ask: Yes, how is it that within the spiritual development of humanity something like agnosticism has arisen?

Now, anyone who sees more deeply into these matters must ask themselves the following: We once had to advance to that in the development of humanity, which I strictly defended on one of the last lecture evenings for the external natural sciences, especially the inorganic natural sciences; we had to advance to pure phenomenalism, as Goethe also demanded. To that pure phenomenalism, which no longer uses thinking to construct all kinds of atomic worlds behind sense perceptions that can no longer be perceived; which uses thinking merely to read sense perceptions, to remain within the phenomenal world, to arrange the phenomena in such a way that they appear to us as archetypal phenomena in the Goethean sense. All this has been done in the most diverse variations here in recent days. I do not want to deny that something of the kind does not live in a great number of people of the present time. Nevertheless, on the one hand, there is a definite tendency to theorize, where we, so to speak, once we have entered into thinking, pierce through the sensory carpet and continue with thinking for a while beyond sensory perception, where there is no longer anything for thinking to create. There we then posit atoms and all sorts of other things. This corresponds to a kind of law of inertia. Thinking will, in accordance with our present position, our present relationship to the world, actually only be applicable in such a way that we can apply it in the service of grouping, of interpreting phenomena in relation to one another, thus remaining within the phenomenal world, so to speak, reading the phenomenon and not underlying things with all kinds of explanations.

When someone writes down the word “table”, they have details. They try to combine the individual letters into a word. They read. They would start the wrong activity if they said: T, and then had to assume that processes were taking place that combined the T. Then the i. Thus he who, in following an inner law of thought, penetrates the sensory tapestry with his thoughts, instead of reading in the sensory world, exempts himself from having to do so. One penetrates the sensory world and puts forward hypotheses, which is not to say anything against phenomenal atomism. Some people in the present are well aware that there must be a pure phenomenalism. That is simply the direction in which natural science is tending. The natural scientists themselves, after all, are more concerned with experimenting and observing than with reflecting on the methods. Therefore, one cannot really blame them when all kinds of constructs are added to the phenomena. Then they believe they have facts in these constructs. But certain philosophical minds feel that it must come to pure phenomenalism. In particular, among Western thinkers – in the East it is quite different – we often have such personalities who see clearly that the science of the external world must ultimately come to a pure grasp of phenomena and use thinking only to allow the phenomena to interpret themselves reciprocally. “All fact is already theory,” says Goethe. And in William James, the American who established pragmatism, a philosophical interpreter arose in response to pragmatism. In Europe, he has emerged somewhat more blatantly in the so-called “as-if philosophy,” where it is said that one should not interpret anything into the phenomenon. But one must still ascend to something that is no longer an appearance, so one does not say of what arises: it is there, but one acts as if it were there. Much clearer than this “as-if philosophy” is that of William James, who actually gives up any substantial effect of the power of thought. He is clear about the fact that with thinking one can only group external facts and come to a point where one can then control these external facts in practice in the service of human development, of civilization. So that he actually sees nothing in all the laws that man penetrates to but practical guidelines, so to speak, for getting along with the world.

In principle, this is something that phenomenology tends towards. If we study it in its purity in Goethe, where it appears in a wonderful way with its full justification, we recognize that it was bound to arise, it must be there. Only through pure phenomenality can man fully enlighten himself about what is actually in his environment. But then everything that goes beyond the phenomenon is initially something that man cannot cope with. If one knows nothing of methods of knowledge that ascend into the supersensible worlds, that is, that ascend from phenomena as facts to other, but now supersensible facts, then, by tending towards phenomenalism, one must ultimately say to oneself: Only phenomena exist at all. When I examine them with my thinking, I do not discover anything that lives on behind them, other than the phenomena themselves. For the archetypal phenomena are ultimately also only phenomena. So that I actually get nothing out of them but practical principles for using the phenomena in the service of human beings.

Assuming that this were already fully developed; that phenomenalism were there, and thinking were to consist only in regulative principles ordering phenomena, then we have something that we could no longer call knowledge in the sense of the older concepts of knowledge, for example, gnosis. For what did that consist of which, in the past, out of instinctive human worldview, was always called knowledge? In my book 'The Riddles of Philosophy' you can read more about this in Greek times: Cognition consisted in the fact that when one looked at the world, one did not merely perceive the sense perceptions - sounds, colors, qualities of warmth - but that one perceived the thought objectively outside, outside oneself, like a color. Goethe still claims for himself that he sees his ideas in the world as the Greeks saw the ideas in the world, namely as sense perceptions. But now imagine a person in this mental-sensual activity. He looks at something, not just the colors, but the thoughts. By looking at the thoughts, he feels within himself, he experiences within himself not something passive as today, where we have only the sensual before us, but he felt activity within himself. This is the reason for Plato's assertion that there is something active in seeing, something like grasping. He felt something like activity, something that connected him as a human being with what he saw as an object outside. And this was knowledge, this feeling, this experience of an activity, it was not merely the acceptance of a passive thing. This way of experiencing knowledge is today found only in some retarded individuals, in some people who live more by their instincts than by their intellects, or it can be newly acquired by those who, in the anthroposophical sense, work their way up again into higher knowledge, but now fully consciously and not instinctively, as was still the case with gnosticism. But today ordinary consciousness is increasingly approaching the point where it is passively surrendered to external phenomena, where thinking is no longer considered a phenomenon, where it lives only in it as a guiding principle for ordering phenomena more and more practically and putting them at the service of humanity.

What is accomplished there with the phenomenal world does not lead to knowledge in the old sense. Those who, for example, still have the religious content with the God impulse from old traditions, like Spencer, for example, and then see what is called knowledge today, but which is no longer knowledge, gnosis, they profess that they say: One does not actually come to the source in this phenomenal existence. Agnosticism! And basically this agnosticism has two sides. On the one hand, it takes away everything that makes us strong as whole human beings when we have an activity in cognition. On the other hand, however, we have to go through this phase of human development, to be purely passively devoted to the phenomena. It is part of the overall development of the human race to develop this phenomenalism in the Goethean sense, because it conveys to us a level of truth that is necessary for the overall development of humanity.

What follows from the fact that we come to the phenomena and are thus, if we know nothing but the external phenomena, drawn into agnosticism? It follows that if we want to remain human, we have to approach the spiritual world in a different way than by interpreting the external sense world. And for that part of the external world that underlies the sense world, we cannot find it within the sense world. There was a time in my life when I was acquainted with a number of so-called teleologists. These people would come and say that the mechanistic worldview, pure phenomenalism, was not enough for the external world. One of these people even wrote a book, which was admired by many, about “empirical teleology.” He tried to show that mere causality is not enough, that one can also determine a certain purpose in natural phenomena, purely empirically. People felt very exalted about the mere mechanism, which has a certain justification in external natural science, by introducing a kind of teleology in this way.

I said to people at the time, including this Nikolaus Cossmann: just look at a clock. This clock can be explained completely mechanistically when it is in front of you. There is nothing there that causes us to assume little demons inside that make the wheels turn or anything like that. Any nebulous mysticism is excluded if you just look at the thing. I strictly held the view that the world of phenomena must be explained from itself. All interpretation and carrying in of teleology and the like is harmful. But the clock was made by a clockmaker. I will not get to know the clockmaker from the clock, but I can get to know him as a person. I choose methods other than analyzing the clock to get to know the clockmaker. I seek him out, perhaps in a social context, somewhere other than his shop. - At the moment when one is clear about the fact that the external world is to be grasped phenomenally, at that moment one has not, so to speak, demystified it, but one has shown the necessity of seeking this spirit, this supersensible, on other paths, through other means and methods of knowledge. And these are precisely the ones I have described. They must be added to the phenomenalist methods of knowledge.

As you can see, anthroposophy is currently endeavoring to fully establish and accept phenomenalism because it is clear that what leads to spiritual worlds must be achieved with these other methods of knowledge. This also includes what underlies the external sense world as a spiritual being.

So you see, on the one hand I could have repeated what I said in Stuttgart, as I mentioned earlier. I could have said: mental images become weak within agnosticism, because they are only passively devoted to the external world. But because we have weak mental images, we also have weak feelings. Feelings live in man in such a way that he must stir them up himself. They become sentimental, or else they remain dull, so that they become untruthful. Feelings thus become nebulous, sentimental or dull. As a result, a naturalistic or untruthful tendency has entered into our art, because art particularly emanates from the world of feeling. But because mental images do not enter into the impulses of the will as strong forces, we lack the right kind of determination today. In particular, we lack determination when it comes to taking on something new. We let what seems unfamiliar to us pass us by as a sensation. This is basically how it has been with anthroposophy for twenty years. Many people have heard about it, but they cannot decide, out of their usual experiences of the soul, to let it be more than a sensation. Agnosticism weakens us in our will. It even weakens us in the face of religious experience today. As a result, many people who have long aspired to have an elementary religious experience end up immersing themselves in traditional religions. How many honest seekers have recently returned to Catholicism. Or one returns to oriental mysticism. Because agnosticism weakens our mental images, we do not feel strong enough for elementary religious experiences.

Anthroposophy adds to the passive processing of the world in phenomenalism the impetus of imagination, inspiration and intuition, and thus even comes to a real grasp of that which, as supersensible, enters into our historical existence. She comes to a real grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha. She comes to a grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that she can see how the pure, divine being, the Christ-being, has taken possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This in turn gives real meaning to the mental images of the resurrection, of the connection between the living Christ and our own human development on earth, while it is actually deeply significant that theologians, who are considered enlightened in recent times, have said: Yes, one must just look at the life of Jesus. The resurrection, they say, arose as a belief, but one can only speak of an arising faith. What actually happened in the Garden of Gethsemane cannot really be spoken of. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, will speak of these things, which can only be grasped as supersensible, which cannot be grasped if one wants to grasp them with the usual historical methods taken from the world of the senses. I could speak at length about the deadening of our religious life through the widespread agnosticism of today. But I will only hint at that. It has already been discussed elsewhere.

But there are two sides to every coin. One can also speak of agnosticism in such a way that it has emerged as a necessary phase of development in the more recent history of mankind; that it is, so to speak, the accompanying phenomenon of pure phenomenalism, which we have to work our way towards. But even if this pure phenomenalism is of extraordinary interest to us as we work our way into it, we cannot gain from it that which is most important to us for our innermost humanity. We must gain that in a different way.

Now let me add something personal, not out of vanity or silliness, but because it is relevant. I have already mentioned that I completed my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1894. I am convinced that this “Philosophy of Freedom” could not have been written by someone who is not a pure phenomenalist in relation to natural science. For, although I am a pure phenomenalist in the field of natural science, what was I compelled to do in order to found the moral truth? I was compelled to introduce into this “Philosophy of Freedom” the moral intuition, which I have already characterized here as something thoroughly supersensible and spiritual. Especially resented was my ethical individualism. But it was necessary. I had to show that in the individual human being, the moral impulse can be intuitively experienced in an individualistic way through ordinary consciousness, whereas otherwise intuition can only be attained through higher exercises. This was how it had to be done in order to give the moral world a foundation, if one was a pure phenomenalist who already ascended into the spiritual world at that time. For in the face of pure phenomenalism, the moral impulse disappears when a person is only completely honest with himself. If he is dishonest, he succumbs to all kinds of illusions.

But anyone who has met people who have wrestled with worldviews not in theory but in every fiber of their emotional life knows what the tendency towards phenomenalism, which has agnosticism in its wake, can mean for today's people. I have met people who say to themselves: If we grasp the world with today's scientific means, we see only natural processes in it. We can hypothetically trace it back to a primeval nebula or something similar, which is the event of our earth. We can follow it to the end, to the heat death or something similar. But then we see how we can develop the moral world within us for a long time - it is only a haze and fog that rises above the only real thing, which begins with the primeval nebula and ends with the heat death. And after the heat death there will be the great field of corpses for all that not only lived on earth, but also what strove there for moral impulses, for religious inwardness. All this will be buried. Certainly, not many people feel this discrepancy for their own spiritual life, but there are people who feel it. I have met them, with all the inner tragedy that made them doubt not only the reality of what could be grasped in religious terms, but also the reality of a moral world order. They are haze and mist, rising from the merely externally phenomenal facts.

Now let me add something personal, not out of vanity or silliness, but because it is relevant. I have already mentioned that I completed my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1894. I am convinced that this “Philosophy of Freedom” could not have been written by someone who is not a pure phenomenalist in relation to natural science. For, although I am a pure phenomenalist in the field of natural science, what was I compelled to do in order to found moral truth? I was compelled to introduce into this “Philosophy of Freedom” the moral intuition which I have already characterized here as something thoroughly supersensible and spiritual. My ethical individualism was particularly resented. But that was necessary. I had to show that in the individual human being the moral impulse can be intuitively experienced in an individualistic way through ordinary consciousness, whereas otherwise intuition can only be attained through higher exercises. This was how it had to be done in order to give the moral world a foundation if one was a pure phenomenalist who already ascended into the spiritual world in those days. For in the face of pure phenomenalism, the moral impulse is lost if a person is only completely honest with himself. If he is dishonest, he comes to all kinds of illusions. But anyone who has met people who have wrestled with worldviews not in theory but in every fiber of their soul knows what the tendency towards phenomenalism, which has agnosticism in its wake, can mean for today's human beings. I have met people who say to themselves: If we grasp the world with today's scientific means, we see only natural processes in it. We can hypothetically trace it back to a primeval nebula or something similar, which is the event of our earth. We can follow it to the end, to the heat death or something similar. But then we see how we can develop the moral world within us for a long time - it is only a haze and fog that rises above the only real thing, which begins with the primeval nebula and ends with the heat death. And after the heat death there will be the great field of corpses for all that not only lived on earth, but also what strove there for moral impulses, for religious inwardness. All this will be buried. Certainly, not many people feel this discrepancy for their own spiritual life, but there are people who feel it. I have met them, with all the inner tragedy that made them doubt not only the reality of something grasped in religious terms, but also the reality of a moral world order. They are haze and mist, rising from the merely outwardly phenomenal facts.

This is rooted in the way our society is organized. Millions and millions of people, especially those in proletarian circles, only see reality in external, economic phenomena. What is spiritual – law, morality, art – is nothing, as they say, but an ideological superstructure, something that arises merely as a sham, an ideology. And so we have progressed in the agnostic direction to the point where one speaks of ideology. I myself, having been very active in working-class circles, have experienced the sense in which ideology is spoken of there, which, after all, is basically only the fault of those who, today, also from the direction of science, speak of everything spiritual, not quite clearly, not quite honestly, but actually in the sense of an ideology. We have arrived at the opposite pole of human development compared to the one that was once the oriental worldview. It spoke of Maya and of the true essence. Everything that is only accessible and attainable to the senses was Maya to it, was illusion. And the real, the truly real, was that which is now graspable for man above the sensual. Today we live in a worldview that presents exactly the opposite. For those who are agnostic, the sensory world is the only reality. They could just as easily say maya as ideology about that which can be grasped beyond the sensory world. We should translate this word in this way. Our maya is the spiritual; once the maya was the sum of sensory phenomena.

But this forces us, precisely because we had to arrive at this point, to take our paths of knowledge to the other side. For if we now ascend through imagination, inspiration, and intuition into the spiritual world, then we recognize precisely that which leads us to the actual essence of humanity. And we find the strong impulse to ascend into these worlds when we become fully aware that the sense world may only be explained from within itself, with its own methods. This gives us the impetus. But then, if the sense world can only be explained from its own methods, then thinking serves only as a tool of explanation in it. Then thinking has significance for the sense world only as a servant, for the mutual interpretation of phenomena, in order to bring the phenomena together in such a way that they explain each other. Then thinking, as we have it in pure phenomenalism or agnosticism, is merely an image. Then it no longer contains any reality. The Gnostic felt the reality of thought by looking at it. Our thinking has a mere image existence.

What follows from this if we really ascend to this pure thinking and grasp our moral impulses in it? Now, if I have a mirror here, with images in it, the mirror images cannot force me to do anything through causality. If I want to be led by mirror images, my thinking in the world development of humanity has progressed so far that it really only has the character of an image, so it no longer contains causality for me. Then, when I have moral impulses, pure thinking is formed into impulses of human freedom. By arriving at phenomenalism, and thus at pure image-thinking, and by being able to grasp moral impulses through the power of pure image-thinking, we also pass through the stage of freedom. We educate freedom into our human nature by going through this phase of human development. This is what I wanted to present in my Philosophy of Freedom. But we only become free when we have a thinking that is image-thinking, that proceeds entirely within the physical body, as I have described. At the moment we look further back, we see not freedom but fate. You see, here we have the opportunity to recognize that which we call human destiny, because it rules in the unconscious, because we only come to its rule when we ascend to intuition. Because we find spiritual laws in this destiny that work through repeated lives on earth, we have a spiritual necessity in it. But by entering into life on earth, we free ourselves from necessity for certain actions, and only follow the image-containing thinking, and in the present epoch of humanity we are thereby educated to freedom. There is no contradiction, if one looks into the matter properly, between destiny and freedom. However, in order to be able to present the concept of fate to the world correctly later on, it was necessary that the concept of freedom be presented first in the “Philosophy of Freedom”.

You see, what needs to be done is not a blind railing against agnosticism, because in a certain respect it is only the other side of phenomenalism. We read in natural phenomena, but if we merely read them, we do not find in them what we have to seek on the higher paths of knowledge. But precisely for that reason we need them fully only when we no longer bring forth instinctively from our human nature that which is the impulse of our thinking. In ancient times, even in the times of Gnosticism, man brought forth not only hunger and thirst from within himself, but also active thinking. He was not yet a technician in the modern sense. One only becomes one when one embodies pure thought outwardly in matter. I am even convinced – please forgive me for bringing up something very personal – that if I had studied philosophy in the conventional sense, instead of being educated at a technical university and finding my way into this technical life of the present, I would not have written the Philosophy of Freedom, because it is precisely the opposite pole to the experience of pure fact. And the pure fact, which is experienced in the outwardly mechanistic, and which then also leads to phenomenalism, is absolutely what, on the other hand, first evokes the full opposite pole. Otherwise, we instinctively bring something from within us that dreams little demons into the clock. We first seek the truly spiritual through inner powers of knowledge, which we must first gain when we can no longer approach our physical environment through instinctive forces and bring into it what arises from instinctive observation. On the one hand, the age of technology, with its machines, is precisely the fertile soil for a spiritual, anthroposophical worldview. And in this sense, a clear knowledge of the spirit must be brought about through anthroposophy, precisely from a non-mystical view of the world. We must not arrive at a new gnosis, based on active thinking by instinct, but we must seek for true spirituality in the outer sense and the inner human being, on a path of knowledge to be attained by practice.

We must close this course at some point, and since I wanted to present to you today what anthroposophy is in contrast to the prevailing agnosticism, we who have participated in this course are obliged to part.

Anthroposophy, as I have already mentioned, arose entirely out of the scientific spirit of modern times. Anyone who compares my earliest writings with my later ones will recognize this. It then took on the form in which simple human minds found each other and tried to satisfy certain religious needs within this anthroposophy. It may be said that there have been quite a number of such simple human souls who have found what is most essential, what is absolutely necessary for the human being, already in this anthroposophy.

It has always been a strange relationship with the scientists themselves. I can still see some of them sitting in front of me – I like to be specific – I can see a botanist sitting in front of me, for example. He was a theosophist in the sense that you may also be familiar with, in the sense of orientalizing mysticism, as it prevails in theosophical societies, for example. I had one of the most learned botanists in front of me, so it was natural for me to talk to the gentleman about botany. For me it was something natural. But he did not want to hear about it. No, no, botany must remain what it is in the university cabinet, not only with him, but also with other botanists. It should remain precisely in the way one acquires practical knowledge through the botanizing drum and works with the microscope. He should not interfere with that! Immediately, when I started a botanical topic, he talked about the etheric body, the astral body and even higher bodies. It was the rule in this theosophical movement that one first talked about all possible bodies, until far up, where they became more and more misty. They did not characterize things as I have done here, by pointing out that the etheric body is a time organism, by trying to present the matter concretely, by characterizing the astral body as that which comes from the spiritual-soul realm and inwardly shapes the body. I have tried to give a characteristic of sleep, even if it is still incomplete. I have always tried to give a concrete description. But people like those I am talking about now were not interested in that. If only one had the words for it: physical body, etheric body, astral body, then further kama manas, and then one went into the highest regions, which became thinner and thinner, but always remained material. It was a strange theosophical materialism that confronted me particularly crudely once when I was at a theosophical congress in Paris. Various lectures were held there. I asked a personality, who was actually very advanced, how she had liked the lectures. She said: Yes, it left wonderful vibrations, wonderful resonances. I felt as if she had said: One smells something extraordinarily good in this room after these lectures. — It was all transferred into the material. One knew nothing of the real spirit. And the man of whom I have just spoken always started from what lay in this direction. I always started from something else, for example, the secrets of root formation, stem formation, flower formation, the spiral tendency of plants, their germination or the like. Nothing, nothing - anthroposophy must not come into it, away with it! The astral body and buddhi and atma kept coming up, as did the rounds and the globes and everything else that is doing the rounds in the world in this sense. In short, I am only giving these as specific examples, but it was actually quite futile to approach scientists in their own scientificness.

But then, with the exception of a few people who had been involved in philosophical work from the very beginning, such as Dr. Unger, more and more younger people were coming forward. And we would never have been able to found the Freie Waldorfschule in Stuttgart if a number of people had not been truly seized by the anthroposophical spirit in the individual subjects of science in the anthroposophical sense. For only in this way could it also be transferred into pedagogy and didactics. This has also made it possible to expand more and more what used to be available only to simple minds, and to really return to science in a certain way. Today we can already see a broader field. And you were to be given a sample of this broader field, in which we can already work today, thanks to a number of younger forces who are working with extraordinary dedication on the development of the anthroposophical spirit in the individual concrete sciences. One may say that much would also be desirable in another direction. Work in the therapeutic-medical field is still in its infancy. We have also made all kinds of attempts, for example in the economic field. However, it is precisely in the latter that it is clear – and this can perhaps also be seen from events in recent weeks – that it is still not possible to work fully in the practical economic sphere. Hopefully, the things we have begun will continue to progress, and it will eventually be possible to work in this field in the same way as work is being done today in some areas of science itself, and as work can be done in a thoroughly future-proof way in education and didactics through the Waldorf school.

Following on from this, I would now like to express my heartfelt thanks to those here in Holland who, as friends of the anthroposophical movement, have made these college courses possible. It is certainly no easy task to organize such an event, and above all, in order to muster the necessary work in such a case, a deeper understanding of the matter is needed. That this has come about here, fills us - and I am convinced that I also speak from the hearts and souls of all those who were allowed to speak here during this course week - with a deep feeling of gratitude, and I would like to express this to you; first of all to you, who are the organizers of this course. And I would like to combine this feeling of gratitude with the hope that those who have now turned their attention to what has been discussed here over the last few days will feel that some suggestions have been given to them with the little that could be achieved here in such a short time. We cannot do more than give such individual suggestions. If you have the opportunity to develop these suggestions by trying to penetrate further into what has already been worked out, but which is still little known to the world, what has been worked out through the anthroposophical movement, the anthroposophical work, then you will see that this anthroposophical movement is not only not what its enemies and opponents would like to present it as, who mostly, because they cannot be objective, become personal, but that the anthroposophical movement not only is it not what its enemies and opponents would have us be, but that the Anthroposophical Movement is at least sustained by a truly serious scientific spirit.

And on the other hand, I may perhaps indulge in the hope that the lectures I have tried to formulate here this evening may contribute something to showing how unconscious longings live in a large part of civilized humanity in our time, which, when brought to consciousness, represent nothing other than the desire for something like anthroposophy. But the fact that such a longing exists can also be seen from all kinds of negative instances.

There is a personality in our time, Oswald Spengler, who is also known here in Holland, who wrote the book about the necessary decline of the Occident. I have witnessed how, especially among the youth of Central Europe, this book about the “Decline of the Occident” has made a deep, devastating impression. In this book, however, we are dealing with the work of a man who is fully at home in twelve to fifteen sciences, who truly does not speak from lightly-basted knowledge, but who speaks only from the negative authorities that are effective in our time.

One such negative instance is, for example, agnosticism, when it represents the other side of phenomenalism and one only wants to stop at this phenomenalism. The other, the positive, is part of it. This positive seeks to reach anthroposophy on the spiritual path of knowledge. In this sense, I would like at least a little bit of anthroposophy to have spoken to your souls, given your sincerity. Often, when representing anthroposophy, one has the feeling that it has been around for decades, but we are always at the beginning. And now, after decades, we are talking about the very beginning again, despite having spoken to thousands upon thousands of people over the decades. One feels this — not because of anthroposophy, which can wait — one feels it because of the longings of the time as something tremendously oppressive. But that is also why there is such deep satisfaction when people do come together who want to know what anthroposophy is and who, through their studies and serious engagement with life, have a certain ability to judge. Anthroposophy does not have to fear judgment. I can assure you of that from the spirit of anthroposophy. Critics with the ability to judge will always be most welcome to anthroposophy. Up to now, they have mostly become its adherents after they have got to know it. The more objectively one engages with anthroposophy, even if it means criticizing it, the better for anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is not something that works on the basis of blind faith in authority or that counts on a lack of criticism. It prefers those listeners and readers and collaborators who bring their full, discerning soul nature to it, not the kind that often comes from the agnosticism of the present, but the kind that comes from the truly unbiased human soul.

If one can have the feeling that, even if it was a beginning, such beginnings must ultimately lead to something that is connected with the deepest longings and necessities of human development, then one can say that one leaves such a course with a certain satisfaction. And so I believe that those who have spoken here will leave with a certain satisfaction and, above all, with a grateful heart from what has taken place here. But they would like to hope that some stimulating things may also have taken place for the honored audience.

In this spirit, allow me to conclude this course by saying to you in the warmest possible way, out of this anthroposophical spirit: If we have perhaps connected with each other through some thoughts, then we seek the ways to continue to be together, to work together in spiritual work. In this spirit, I bid you farewell for today.

Question and Answer Session

The Hague, April 12, 1922

Question about multidimensional space.

Rudolf Steiner: If I have the usual coordinate system, I have characterized three-dimensional space. Now, let us just discuss it schematically, we proceed from certain algebraic assumptions by abstractly continuing the same process that leads from the plane into three-dimensional space, and we arrive at the fourth dimension, the fifth and so on, at an n-dimensional space. And then it is even possible, let's say, to construct bodies – Hinton did that – to construct the tessaract, but that is not a real body, but the projection of the real tessaract into three-dimensional space. Now the thing is this: in purely theoretical-abstract terms, of course, there is nothing to be said against such derivations. In theory, one can also pass from three-dimensional space to the fourth dimension of time, if one proceeds within the calculation formulas in such a way that one takes into account the leap that is actually made, because it is different after all, if one passes from the first to the second dimension and to the third dimension of space, than if one passes into time. But if you refine it, ... then you can pass over into time. In this way one arrives at an abstract four-dimensional space. If one remains abstract, one can go on doing this as long as one remains in the purely intellectualistic, as long as one is not compelled to follow the matter vividly. But then one is confronted with a problem which, while the purely abstract train of thought leads to a regressus ad infinitum, vividly becomes an elasticity problem. We could also think of the pendulum as continuing to swing forever. But in the dynamic, we will get a state of vibration. That is how it is in reality. If you can get into imaginative thought, you simply can no longer carry out the process in infinitum by assuming a fourth and so on dimension. Then, if I call the first dimension +a, the second +b, the third +c, if I take real space, I am obliged not to write the fourth +d, but by the nature of things I am obliged to write -c. So that the fourth dimension simply cancels out the third bit by bit and only two remain. So instead of four, I end up with two dimensions. And so I am also forced, if I assume the fifth, to set - b, and with the sixth - a. That is, I come back to the point. Elasticity has struck back to the starting point. And that is not something that exists only in the imagination, for example, that is, a subjective experiment, but it is realized in the way I described the day before yesterday. As long as we have, let us say, the earth here and look at the root of the plant, we are really dealing with a special formation of gravity. Here one is in the ordinary dimensionality of space. But if one wants to explain the form of the blossom, then one cannot get away with that. Then, instead of taking the point of origin of the co-ordinates, one must take infinite space, which is, after all, only the other form of the point. And then one comes to going in centrifugally instead of going out centrifugally. You come to this wave surface. Instead of the thing spreading out, it pushes in from the outside, and then you get those movements, which are sliding or scraping movements or pressure movements, where you would go wrong if you took coordinate axes from the center of coordinates, but you have to take the infinite sphere as the center of coordinates and then all the coordinates going towards the center. So, one also gets the qualitatively opposite coordinate axis system as soon as one enters the etheric. The fact that this is not taken into account is the mistake in the ordinary ether theory. Herein lies the difficulty in defining the ether. Sometimes it is seen as liquid, sometimes as gas. The mistake here is that one starts from the coordinate system seen from the center. But as soon as one enters the ether, one must take the sphere, and construct the entire system not from the inside outwards, but the other way around.

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Things become interesting when they are followed mathematically and cross over into the physical, and much could still be contributed to the solution of borderline problems if these theories, which begin to become very real here, were developed. But there is still a terrible lack of understanding for this. For example, I once gave a lecture at a mathematical university society where I tried to introduce these things. I explained that if you have the asymptotes of a hyperbola here and the branches of the hyperbola here, what you have to imagine on the right here, spreading out, you have to imagine on the left here, spreading together, so that a complete reversal takes place. These things gradually lead to a more concrete treatment of space. But today there is little understanding for this. Even pure analysts often show a certain dislike of synthetic geometry. And this newer synthetic geometry is the way to get out of the purely formal mathematical and to the problem where one has to grasp the empirical. As long as one calculates with mere analytical geometry, one does not approach the realms of reality. There one has only developed the end points of the coordinates, the geometric location of the coordinates and so on. If one remains with constructing with the linear and with circles, then one stands in lines within them, but is compelled to take a certain visualization to help. This is what makes synthetic geometry so beneficial for getting out of the formal and showing how to think the mathematical in nature.

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Question: What does Dr. Steiner mean when he says that the physical body is a spatial body and the body of formative forces is a temporal body? The physical body also lives in time, growing and decaying.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, that is only imprecisely thought, if I may say so. In order to trace this back to an exact thinking, you would first have to undertake an analysis of the concept of time. Just consider: as the usually meant reality stands before us, space and time are interwoven. One can only think such things when one distinguishes between space and time. In ordinary objective knowledge, you have not given time at all. You measure time with nothing but spatial quantities, and changes in spatial quantities are the means of recognizing what then counts as time. Just imagine a different way of measuring time. Otherwise, you always measure time according to space. This is not the case in the moment when you move on to the real experience of time. People usually do this unconsciously. Actually, thinking is elevated into consciousness through imaginative knowledge. But you have a truly temporal experience when, for example, let us say, on April 12, 1922 at 4:4 minutes and so many seconds, you take your soul life.

When you take your soul life in this moment, it has a temporal cross-section. You cannot say that there is any spatial cross-section within this temporal cross-section. But within this temporal cross-section lies your entire earthly past, and if you want to draw schematically, if that is the flow of your experience from a to b, you have to draw the cross-section A to B. You cannot avoid placing all of your experience in this cross-section, and yet there is a perspective in it. You can say that experiences that lie further back in time are represented with less intensity than those that are closer in time. But all of this is represented in the one cross-section. So that you get different relationships when you really analyze time. We can only form a mental image of time if we do not use the analysis that we are accustomed to in physics, according to space-cognition means, but only by reflecting on our soul life itself. But in your soul life, even if you only have abstract thoughts, you are in the time body. What is important is that we are now able to understand this time body as an organism. You see, when you experience any indisposition, let us say a digestive disorder, in the stomach, you may be able to see that it affects other areas of your spatial organism as well. The spatial organism is such that the individual areas are spatially dependent on each other. In the case of the temporal organism, although we have a later and an earlier, later and earlier are connected in an organic way. I sometimes express this by saying: Let us assume we have a very old person. We find that when such an old person speaks to younger people, for example to children, that his words bounce off the children, that his words are of no use to the children. And we find another person. When he speaks to children, it is something quite different. His words flow by themselves into the child's soul. If you now study — one only does not study these things because one very rarely considers the whole human being, one does not, so to speak, pause with one's attention long enough to observe, for example, the basis of the blessing of an older man or woman, one must sometimes go back to early childhood. Today, observation does not extend that far. Anthroposophy has to do that. Go back and you will find that those who can bless in old age, who have this peculiar spiritual power in them that their words flow into young people like a blessing, have learned to pray in their youth. I express it figuratively: folded hands in youth become blessing hands in old age.

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There you have a connection between what influences other people at a later age and what, let's say, pious feelings and the like were present in the life in early childhood. There is an organic connection between the earlier and the later. And only when you know the whole person do you see how he has an infinite number of such connections. Today we are stuck with our whole life outside of this reality. We imagine that we are full of reality, but we are abstract creatures in our culture of life. We do not pay attention to true reality. For example, we do not pay attention to such things. We also do not pay attention to the fact that when we teach a child, we must avoid, if possible, giving him sharply contoured concepts, especially in primary school. These are really for a later age, as if one were to constrict the limbs and prevent them from growing larger. What we pass on to the child must be an organism, must be mobile. Now you are gradually approaching what I mean by an organism. Of course, it is only possible within the imagination. But one can still arrive at a mental image of an organism, if one is clear about the fact that what takes place in time in the human being does not relate to the spatial organism, but to the temporal organism. Now you see that there is a reality in time. You can also see this in mathematics. There was once a very nice discussion about this. I believe it was Ostwald who pointed out - not a supporter of the humanities, but someone who is not exactly a materialist - that the organic processes that take place in time cannot be reversed with the mechanical process. But the fact is that you can't even get close to the time processes with the usual calculations. You actually always remain outside of the time processes with the usual calculations. They do not follow the processes as such. If, for example, you insert negative quantities into a formula for the lunar eclipse, you get the more distant things, but you do not move away with the things. You only move in the spatial sphere. And so you only get a correct concept of what the human physical body actually is if you can separate the spatial from the temporal. In the case of man it is of fundamental importance, because one does not arrive at any understanding at all if one does not know that with him everything temporal proceeds as an entity for itself, and the spatial is ruled by the temporal as by something dynamic, while with a machine the temporal is only a function of that which has a spatial effect. That is the difference. For humans, the temporal is real, while for a mechanism, the temporal is only a function of space. That is what it ultimately comes down to.

This congress has been announced as a Congress on the philosophy of life, and no doubt you will take it as such. Anyone who wishes to talk about philosophical questions today, however, cannot ignore natural science, and in particular the philosophical consequences that natural science has brought with it. Indeed, for centuries—since the fifteenth or sixteenth century, we may say—science has increasingly come to dominate human thinking in the civilized world.

Now it would take a great many words to survey the triumphs of science in the field of human knowledge, and the transformation of our whole life brought about by the achievements of scientific research. And it would be merely a repetition of what you all know already. Philosophically speaking, what is interesting about science is something quite different. I mean the function it long ago assumed of educating the civilized world. And it is precisely in discussing this educational rôle in the development of modern man that we come up against two paradoxes, as I should like to call them. Let me begin with these paradoxes.

The first thing that has followed from the scientific method of research is a transformation of human thinking. Any impartial observer of earlier philosophical trends must conclude that, because of the conditions which then determined man's development, thinking inevitably added something subjective to what was given by experiment and the observation of nature. We need only recall those now outmoded branches of knowledge, astrology and alchemy, to perceive how nature was approached in former times—how human thinking as a matter of course added to what was there something that it wished to express, or at any rate did not suppress.

In face of the scientific attitude of recent times, this has ceased. Today, we are virtually obliged simply to accept the data given us by observation and experiment, and to work them up into natural laws, as they are called. Admittedly, to do so we make use of thought; but we make use of it only as a means of arranging phenomena so that through their own existence they manifest to us their inner connection, their conformity to law. And we make it our duty not to add any of our own thought to our observation of the world. We see this, indeed, as an ideal of the scientific attitude—and rightly so.

Under these conditions, what has become of human thinking? It has actually become the servant, the mere tool of research. Thought as such has really nothing to contribute when it comes to investigating the conformity to law of external phenomena.

Here, then, is one of my paradoxes: that thought as a human experience is excluded from the relationship that man enters into with the world. It has become a purely formal aid for comprehending realities. Within science, it is no longer something self-manifesting.

The significance of this for man's inner life is extraordinarily great. It means that we must look upon thinking as something which must retire in wisdom and modesty when we are contemplating the outside world, and which represents a kind of private current within the life of the soul.

And it is precisely when we now ask ourselves: How, in turn, can science approach thinking? that we come up against the paradox, and find ourselves saying: If thinking has to confine itself to the working-up of natural processes and can intervene only formally, in clarification, combination and organization, it cannot also fall within the natural processes themselves. It thus becomes paradoxical to raise the question (which is certainly justified from the scientific point of view): How can we, from the standpoint of scientific law, understand thinking as a manifestation of the human organism? And to this, if we stand impartially and seriously within the life of science, we can only reply today: To the extent that thinking has had to withdraw from the natural processes, contemplation of them can go on trying to encompass thinking, but it cannot succeed. Since it is methodologically excluded, thinking is also really excluded from the natural processes. It is condemned to be a mere semblance, not a reality.

Not many people today, I believe, are fully conscious of the force of this paradox; yet in the depths of their subconscious there exists in countless numbers of people today an awareness of it. Only as thinking beings can we regard ourselves as human; it is in thinking that we find our human dignity—and yet this, which really makes us into human beings, accompanies us through the world as something whose reality we cannot at present acknowledge, as a semblance. In pointing to what is noblest in our human nature, we feel ourselves to be in an area of non-reality.

This is something that burdens the soul of anyone who has become seriously involved with the research methods both of the inorganic sciences and of biology, and who wishes to draw the consequences of these methods, rather than of any individual results, for a philosophy of life.

Here, we may say, is something that can lead to bitter doubts in the human soul. Doubts arise first in the intellect, it is true; but they flow down into the feelings. Anyone who is able to look at human nature more deeply and without prejudice—in the way I shall be demonstrating in detail in the lectures that follow—knows how the state of the spirit, if it endures long enough, exerts an influence right down to the physical state of the person, and how from this physical state, or disposition, the mood of life wells up in turn. Whether the doubt is driven down into our feelings or not determines whether we stride courageously through life, so that we can stand upright ourselves and have a healthy influence among our fellow-men, or whether we wander through life disgruntled and downcast—useless to ourselves and useless to our fellow-men. I do not say—and the lectures which follow will show that I do not need to say—that what I have just been discussing must always lead to doubt; but it can easily do so, unless science is extended in the directions I shall be describing.

The splendid achievements of science vis-ä-vis the outside world make extraordinary demands on man's soul if, as from the philosophical standpoint here expounded he certainly must do, he adopts a positive attitude to science. They demand that he should be capable of meeting doubt with something stronger and more powerful than would otherwise be needed.

Whilst in this respect science would appear to lead to something negative for the life of the soul, yet—and this brings me to my second paradox—on the other hand it has resulted in something extremely positive. Here, I express once more a paradox that struck me particularly when, more than twenty years ago now, I worked out my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and attempted, whilst maintaining a truly scientific outlook on life, to fathom the nature of human freedom.¹

For, with its conformity to law, science does easily lead, in theory, to a denial of human freedom. In this respect, however, science develops theories that are just the opposite of its practical effect. When we go further and further into the semblance nature of thinking and, by actually pursuing the scientific attitude—not scientific theories—arrive at a right inward experience of that nature, then we conclude: if it is only a semblance and not a reality, then the process of thought does not, like a natural force, have a compelling effect. I may thus compare it—and this is more than a mere comparison—to a combination of mirror-images. Images before me cannot compel me. Existent forces can compel me, whether they are thought of as existing outside me or inside me; images cannot compel me. If, therefore, I am able to conceive my moral impulses within that pure thinking which science itself fosters in us by its methods; if I can so shape moral impulses within me that my attitude to their shaping is that to which science educates me, then in these moral impulses conceived by pure thinking I have, not compelling forces, but forces and semblances that I myself am free to accept or not. That is to say: however much science, from its very premises, is bound, and with some justification, to deny freedom, yet in educating him to semblance thinking it educates the man of our culture to freedom.

These are the two poles, the one relating to the life of thought and the other to the life of the will, with which the human soul is confronted by present-day scientific opinions. In distinguishing them, however, we indicate at the same time how the scientific view of life points beyond itself. It must take up some attitude towards human thinlting; yet it excludes that thinking. By so doing, it suggests a method of research that can be fully justified in the eyes of science and yet lead to a comprehensible experience of thinking. It suggests, on the other hand, that because it cannot itself arrive theoretically at freedom, the scientific attitude must be extended into a different region, precisely in order to attain the sphere of freedom.

What I am presenting as a necessity deriving from science itself—an extension into a region that science, at least as understood today, cannot reach—is attempted by the philosophy of life I am here advocating. Today, of course, since it stands at the beginning of its development, it can achieve this extension only imperfectly. Yet the attempt must be made, because more and more people in the civilized world today are being affected by the problems of thinking and freedom that I have described. It is no longer possible for us today to believe that only those in some way involved with science are faced with demands and questions and riddles of this kind. Even the remotest villages, to which no scientific results of any consequence penetrate, are nevertheless brought by their education to the kind of thinking that science demands; and this brings with it, though quite unconsciously as yet, uncertainty about human freedom. It is therefore not only scientific questions that are involved here, but quite clearly general human ones.

What it comes to is this: taking our stand on the ground of scientific education, can we penetrate further along the path of knowledge than does present-day science?

The attempt to do so can be made, and made in such a way that the methods used can be justified to the strictest scientist, and made by paths that have been laid down in complete accordance with the scientific attitude and with scientific conscientiousness. I should like now, at the start of my lectures, to go on to speak of these paths.

Yet, although many souls already unconsciously long for it, the present-day path of knowledge is still not easy to explain conceptually. In order that we may be able to understand one another this evening, therefore, I should like to introduce, simply as aids to understanding, descriptions of older paths that mankind has followed in order to arrive at knowledge lying beyond the ordinary region science deals with today.

Much of what, it is believed today, should just remain an article of faith and is accepted as ancient and honourable tradition, leads the psychologically perceptive observer of history back into age-old epochs of humanity. There, it turns out that these matters of faith were sought after, as matters of knowledge suited to their time, by certain individuals through the cultivation of their own souls and the development of hidden spiritual powers, and that they thus genuinely constituted matters of knowledge. People today no longer realize how much of what has emerged historically in man's development was once actually discovered—but discovered by earlier paths of knowledge.

When I describe these paths, I do so, of course, with the aid of methods I shall outline later; so that in many cases those who form their picture of the earlier epochs of mankind only from outward historical documents, and not from spiritual documents, may take exception to my description. Anyone who examines impartially even the outward historical documents, and who then compares them with what I shall have to say, will nevertheless find no real contradiction. And secondly, I want to emphasize that I am not describing these older paths of knowledge in order to advocate them today. They suited earlier epochs, and nowadays can even be harmful to man if, under a misapprehension, he applies them to himself. It is simply so that we shall understand each other about present-day ways of knowledge that I shall choose two earlier ways, describe them, and thus make clear the paths man has to walk today, if he wishes to go beyond the sphere of scientific knowledge as it is now understood.

As I have said, I could select others from the wealth of earlier ways of knowledge; but I am selecting only two. First, then, we have a way which in its pure form was followed by individuals in ancient times in the East—the way of yoga.

Yoga has passed through many phases, and the aspect to which I shall attach the greatest value today is precisely one that has come down to later epochs in a thoroughly decadent and harmful state. What I shall be describing, the historian will thus be forced, when considering later epochs, to present as something actually harmful to mankind. But in successive epochs human nature has experienced the most varied developments. Something quite different suited human nature in ancient epochs and in later ones. What could, in earlier times, be a genuine means of cognition was later perhaps used only to titillate man's itch for power over his fellow-men. This was certainly not true of the earliest periods, the ones whose practice of yoga I am describing.

What did it comprise, the way of yoga, which was followed in very ancient times in the Orient by individuals who were scholars, to use the modern term, in the higher sphere? It comprised among other things a particular kind of breathing exercise. (I am singling out this one from the wealth of exercises that the yoga pupil or the yoga scholar, the yogi, had to undertake.) When nowadays we examine our breathing, we find that it is a process which for the most part operates unconsciously in the healthy human organism. There must be something abnormal about the man who is aware of his breathing. The more naturally the process of breathing functions, the better it is for ordinary consciousness and for ordinary life. For the duration of his exercises, however, when he wished to develop cognitive powers that are merely dormant in ordinary consciousness, the yogi transformed the process of respiration. He did so by employing a length of time for inhaling, for holding the breath and for exhaling, different from that used in ordinary, natural breathing. He did this so as to make conscious the process of respiration. Ordinary respiration does not become conscious. The transformed respiratory rhythm, with its timing determined by human volition, is entirely conscious. But what is the result? Well, we have only to express ourselves in physiological terms to realize what the yogi achieved by making conscious his respiration. When we breathe in, the respiratory impulse enters our organism; but it also goes via the spinal cord into the brain. There, the rhythm of the respiratory current combines with those processes that are the physical carriers of mental activity, the nerve and sense processes. Actually, in our ordinary life, we never have nerve and sense processes alone; they are always permeated by our respiratory rhythm. A connection, interaction, harmonization of the nerve and sense processes and of respiration always occurs when we allow our minds to function. By transmitting his altered respiratory rhythm into the nerve and sense process in a fully conscious way, the yogi also made a conscious connection between the respiratory rhythm and the thought rhythm, logical rhythm or rather logical combination and analysis of thoughts. In this way he altered his whole mental activity. In what direction did he alter it? Precisely because his breathing became fully conscious, his thoughts permeated his organism in the same way as did the respiratory current itself. We could say that the yogi set his thoughts moving on the respiratory currents and, in the inner rhythm of his being, experienced the union of thought and breath. In this way, the yoga scholar raised himself above the mass of his fellow-men and was able to proclaim to them knowledge they could not gain for themselves.

In order to understand what was really happening here, we must look for a moment at the particular way in which knowledge earlier affected the ordinary, popular consciousness of the masses.

Nowadays, when we look out at the world, we attach the greatest value to seeing pure colours; to hearing pure sounds, when we hear sounds; and similarly to obtaining a certain purity in the other perceptions—such purity, that is, as the sensory process can afford. This was not true for the consciousness of men in older civilizations. Not that, as a certain brand of scholarship often mistakenly believes, people in earlier times projected all sorts of imaginings on to nature: the imagination was not all that unusually active. Because of man's constitution at that time, however, it was quite natural for older civilizations not to see only pure colours, pure sounds, pure qualities in the other senses, but at the same time to perceive in them all something spiritual. Thus, in sun and moon, in stars, in wind and weather, in spring and stream, in the creatures of nature's various realms, they saw something spiritual where we today see pure colours and hear pure sounds, the connection between which we only later seek to understand with the aid of purified thinking. And there was a further consequence of this for earlier humanity: that no such strong and inwardly fortified self-consciousness as we have today existed then. Besides perceiving something spiritual in everything about him, man perceived himself as a part of this whole environment; he did not separate himself from it as an independent self. To draw an analogy, I might say: If my hand were conscious, what would it think about itself? It would conclude that it was not an independent entity, but made sense only within my organism. In some such way as this, earlier man was unable to regard himself as an independent entity, but felt himself rather a part of nature's whole, which in turn he had to see as permeated by the spiritual.

The yogi raised himself above this view, which implied the dependence of the human self. By uniting his thought-process with the process of respiration that fills all man's inner substance, he arrived at a comprehension of the human self, the human I. The awareness of personal individuality, implanted in us today by our inherited qualities and, if we are adults, by our education, had in those earlier times to be attained, indirectly, through exercises. The consequence was that the yogi obtained from the experience of self something quite different from what we do. It is one thing to accept something as a natural experience, as the sense of self is for us, and quite another to attain to it by the paths that were followed in early Eastern civilization. They lived with what moves and swells and acts in the universe; whereas today, when we experience all this from a certain elevation, we no longer know anything of the universe directly. The human self, therefore, the true nature of the human soul manifested itself to the yogi through his exercise. And we may say: since what could be discovered in this way passed over as revelation into the general cultural consciousness, it became the subject-matter of extremely important early products of the mind.

Once again, let me mention one of many. Here we have an illumination from the ancient Orient, the magnificent song Bhagavad-Gita. In the Gita we have the experience of self-awareness; it describes wonderfully, out of the deepest human lyricism, how, when by experiencing he recognizes it and by recognizing he experiences it, this self leads man to a sympathy with all things, and how it manifests to him his own humanity and his relationship with a higher world, with a spiritual and super-sensible world. In ever new and marvellous notes, the Gita depicts this awareness of the self in its devotion to the universal. To the impartial observer of history, who can immerse himself in these earlier times, it is clear that the splendid notes of the Gita have arisen from what could be experienced through these exercises in cognition.

This way of attaining knowledge was the appropriate one for an earlier epoch of civilization in the Orient. At that time, it was generally accepted that one had to retire into solitude and a hermit's life if one sought connection with super-sensible worlds. And anyone who carried out such exercises did condemn himself to solitude and the life of the hermit; for they bring a man into a certain state of sensibility and make him over-sensitive towards the robust external world. He must retire from life. In earlier times it was just such solitary figures who were trusted by their fellow-men. What they had to say was accepted as knowledge. Nowadays, this no longer suits our civilization. People today rightly demand that anyone they are to trust as a source of knowledge should stand in the midst of life, that he should be able to hold his own with the robustness of life, with human labour and human activity as the demands of the time shape them. The men of today just do not feel themselves linked, as the men of earlier epochs did, to anyone who has to withdraw from life.

If you reflect carefully on this, you will conclude: present-day ways of knowledge must be different. We shall be speaking of these in a little while. But before doing so, and again simply by way of explanation and not with any idea of recommending it, I want to describe the principles underlying a way that was also appropriate to earlier times—the way of asceticism.

The way of asceticism involved subduing and damping down bodily processes and needs, so that the human body no longer functioned in its normal robust fashion. Bodily functions were also subdued by putting the external physical organism into painful situations. All this gave to those who followed this ascetic path certain human experiences which did indeed bring knowledge. I do not, of course, mean that it is right to inhibit the healthy human organism in which we are born into this life on earth, where our aim is to enable this organism to be effective in ordinary life. The healthy organism is unquestionably the appropriate one for external sensuous nature, which is after all the basis of human life between birth and death. Yet it remains true that the early ascetics, who had damped down this organism, did in fact gain pure experience of their spirituality, and knew their souls to inhabit a spiritual world. What makes our physical and sensuous organism suited for the life between birth and death is precisely the fact that, as the ascetics' experiences were able to show, it hides from us the spiritual world. It was, quite simply, the experience of the early ascetics that by damping down the bodily functions one could consciously enter the spiritual worlds. That again is no way for the present. Anyone who inhibits his body in this way makes himself unfit for life among his fellow-men, and makes himself unfit vis-à-vis himself as well. Life today demands men who do not withdraw, who maintain their health and indeed restore it if it is impaired, but not men who withdraw from life. Such men could inspire no confidence, in view of the attitude of our age. Although the path of asceticism certainly did lead to knowledge in earlier times, it cannot be a path for today.

Yet what both the way of yoga and the ascetic way yielded in knowledge of the sensible world is preserved in ancient and, I would say, sacred traditions, and is accepted by mankind today as satisfying certain needs of the soul. Only people are not interested to know that the articles of faith thus accepted were in fact discovered by a genuine way of knowledge, if one no longer suited to our age.

Today's way of knowledge must be entirely different. We have seen how the one way, yoga, tried to arrive at thinking indirectly, through breathing, in order to experience this thinking in a way in which it is not perceived in ordinary life. For the reason already given, we cannot make this detour via breathing. We must therefore try to achieve a transformation of thinking by other means, so that through this transformed thinking we can reach knowledge that will be a kind of extension of natural knowledge. If we understand ourselves correctly, therefore, we shall start today, not by manipulating thinking indirectly via breathing, but by manipulating it directly and by doing certain exercises through which we make thinking more forceful and energetic than it is in ordinary consciousness.

In ordinary consciousness, we indulge in rather passive thinking, which adheres to the course of external events. To follow a new super-sensible way of knowledge, we place certain readily comprehended concepts at the centre of our consciousness. We remain within the thought itself. I am aware that many people believe that what I am now going to describe is present already in the later way of yoga, for example in that of Patanjali. But as practised today, it certainly does not form a part of Eastern spirit-training—for, even if a man carried out the yoga exercises nowadays, they would have a different effect, because of the change in the human organism, from the effect they had on the people of earlier epochs.

Today, then, we go straight to thinking, by cultivating meditation, by concentrating on certain subjects of thought for longish periods. We perform, in the realm of the soul, something comparable to building up a muscle. If we use a muscle over and over again in continuous exertion, whatever the goal and purpose, the muscle must develop. We can do the same with thinking. Instead of always submitting, in our thinking, to the course of external events, we bring into the centre of our consciousness, with a great effort of will, clear-cut concepts which we have formed ourselves or have been given by someone expert in the field, and in which no associations can persist of which we are not conscious; we shut out all other consciousness, and concentrate only on this one subject. In the words Goethe uses in Faust, I might say: Yes, it is easy—that is, it appears so—yet the easy is difficult. One person takes weeks, another months, to achieve it. When consciousness does learn to rest and rest continually upon the same content, in such a way that the content itself becomes a matter of complete indifference, and we devote all our attention and all our inward experience to the building up and spiritual energization of mental activity, then at last we achieve the opposite process to what the yogi went through. That is, we tear our thinking away from the process of respiration.

Today, this still seems to people something absurd, something fantastic. Yet just as the yogi pushed his thinking into his body, to link it with the rhythm of his breath and in this way experience his own self, his inner spirituality, so too we release thinking from the remnant of respiration that survives unconsciously in all our ordinary thinking. You will find the systematic exercises described in greater detail in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, or in another one, Outline of Occult Science, or again in Riddles of the Soul and other books of mine. By these means, one gradually succeeds not only in separating the thought sequence from the respiration process, but also in making it quite free of corporeality. Only then does one see what a great service the so-called materialistic, or rather mechanistic, outlook on life has rendered to mankind. It has made us aware that ordinary thinking is founded on bodily processes. From this can stem the incentive to seek a kind of thinking no longer founded on bodily processes. But this can only be found by building up ordinary thinking in the way described. By doing so, we arrive at a thinking set free from the body, a thinking that consists of purely psychic processes. In this way, we come to know what once had a semblance nature in us—as images only to begin with, but images that show us life independent of our corporeality.

This is the first step towards a way of knowledge suited to modern man. It brings us, however, to an experience that is hidden from ordinary consciousness. Just as the Indian yogi linked himself in his thinking with the internal rhythm of respiration, and so also with his spiritual self which lives in the respiratory rhythm, just as he moved inwards, so we go outwards. By tearing our logical thinking away from the organism to which it is actually connected, we penetrate with it into the external rhythm of the world, and discover for the first time that such a rhythm exists. Just as the yogi made conscious the inner rhythm of his body, so we become conscious of an external world rhythm. If I may express myself metaphorically: in ordinary consciousness, what we do is to combine our thoughts logically and thus make use of thinking to know the external sensuous world. Now, however, we allow thinking to enter a kind of musical region, but one that is undoubtedly a region of knowledge; we perceive a spiritual rhythm underlying all things; we penetrate into the world by beginning to perceive it in the spirit. From abstract, dead thinking, from mere semblance thinking, our thinking becomes a vitalized thinking. This is the significant transition that can be made from abstract and merely logical thinking to a vital thinking which we clearly feel is capable of shaping a reality, just as we recognize our process of growth as a living reality.

With this vital thinking, however, we can now penetrate deeper into nature than with ordinary thinking. In what way? Let me illustrate this from present-day life, although the example is a much-disputed one. Nowadays, we may direct our abstract mental activity, by observation and experiment, on to a higher animal, for instance. With this thinking, we create for ourselves an internal image of how the organs of the animal are arranged: the skeleton, musculature, etc., and how the vital processes flow into one another. We make a mental image of the animal. Then, with the same thinking, we pass to man, and once again make a mental image of him—the configuration of his skeleton, his musculature, the interaction of his vital processes, etc., etc. We can then make an external comparison between the two images obtained. If we tend towards a Darwinian approach, we shall regard man as being descended from animals through an actual physical process; if we are more spiritually and idealistically inclined, we imagine the relationship differently. We will not go into that now. The important point is that there is something we cannot do: because our thinking is dead and abstract, we are not in a position—once we have formed a mental image of the animal—out of the inner life of thinking itself to pass over from that into the image of man. Instead, we have first to extract our ideas, or mental images, from the sensory realities, and then to compare these ideas with one another. When, on the other hand, we have advanced to vital thinking, we do indeed form a mental image still, but now it is a living mental image, of the skeleton, the musculature, and the interaction of vital processes in the animal. Because our thought has now become a vital one, we can pursue it inwardly as a living structure and pass over in the thought itself to the image of man. I might say: the thought of the animal grows into the thought of the man. How this works I can only suggest by means of an example.

Faced with the needle of a magnet, we know that there is only one position in which it remains at rest, and that is when its axis coincides with the North-South direction of the earth's magnetism. This direction is exceptional; to all other directions the needle is indifferent. Everything in this example becomes for vital thinking an experience about total space. For vital thinking, space is no longer an aimless juxtaposition, as it is for dead and abstract thinking. Space is internally differentiated, and we learn the significance of the fact that in animals the spine is essentially horizontal. Where this is not the case, we can demonstrate from a more profound conformity to law that the abnormality is particularly significant; but essentially an animal's spine lies in the horizontal plane—we may say, parallel to the surface of the earth. Now it is not immaterial whether the spinal cord runs in this direction or in the vertical direction to which man raises himself in the course of his life. In vital thinking, accordingly, we come to know that, if we wanted to set upright the line of the animal, that is to orientate it differently in the universe, we should have to transform all its other organs. Thought becomes vital simply through the rotation of ninety degrees from the vertical to the horizontal orientation. We pass over in this way, by an inward impulse, from the animal to the human shape.

Thereby, we enter into the rhythm of natural process and so reach the spiritual foundation of nature. We attain, in our vital thought, something with which we can penetrate into the growth and progress of the external world. We reach once more the secrets of existence, from which we departed in the course of human development with the unfolding of ego-consciousness, the feeling of self.

Now you can all raise a weighty objection here. You can say, for example: there have indeed been individuals with this kind of thinking, ostensibly vital; but the present time, with its insistence on serious research, has rightly turned away from “vital thinking” as it was expounded, for instance, by the philosopher Schelling or the natural philosopher Oken. I myself agree entirely with those who raise this kind of objection; there is something quite fantastic, something that leaves reality behind and breathes no actuality, about the way in which mental images gained from external processes and substances are inwardly vitalized by Oken and Schelling and then applied to other natural facts and creatures, in order to see “in the manner of nature.” So long as our vital thinking does not pass on to a mode of knowledge other than this we cannot, even with its aid, reach any assurance of reality. Only by adding exercises of will to the exercises of thought do we secure in vital thoughts a guarantee of spiritual reality.

Exercises of the will can be characterized as follows.

Let us be quite honest with ourselves. In ordinary life, if we think back ten or twenty years, we have to conclude: in the actual content of the life of our soul, we have in many ways become different people; but we have done so by submitting more or less passively, as children to heredity, environment and education, and in later life to life itself. Anyone who wishes to attain knowledge of spiritual reality must take in hand, if I may use this somewhat coarse expression, by an inner education and discipline of the will, what is usually experienced rather passively. Here again you will find the relevant exercises, which are intimate exercises of the soul, described in the books I have named. Today, I can only indicate briefly what is involved.

At present, we have certain habits that perhaps we did not have ten years ago, since life has only recently imposed them on us. Similarly, we can decide to adopt these or those qualities of character. The best thing is to assume qualities of character for whose shaping you have to work on yourself for years on end, so that you must direct attention over and over again to that strengthening and fortifying of the will which is connected with such self-discipline. If you take in hand the development of your will like this, so that you in part make of yourself what the world would otherwise make of you as a person, then the vital thoughts into which you have found your way by meditation and concentration take on a quite special aspect for your experience. That is, increasingly they become painful experiences, inward experiences through suffering, of the things of the spirit. And in the last analysis nobody can attain to higher knowledge who has not passed through these experiences of suffering and pain. We must pass through and conquer these experiences, so that we incorporate and go beyond them, gaining an attitude of indifference to them once more.

What is going on here can be represented as follows: take the human eye (what I am saying here could be expounded scientifically in every detail, but I have time only for a general outline): as light and colours affect it, changes occur in its physical interior. Earlier mankind undoubtedly perceived these as suffering and mild pain; and if we were not so robust and did not remain indifferent to them because of our make-up, we could not help also experiencing the changes in eye and ear as mild pain. All sensory perception is ultimately grounded on pain and suffering.

In thus permeating the entire life of our soul painfully and in suffering with vital thought, we do not permeate the body with pain and suffering as does the ascetic; we keep it healthy to suit the demands of ordinary life; but we inwardly and intimately experience pain and sorrow in the soul. Anyone who has gone some way towards higher knowledge will always tell you: The pleasure and joy that life has brought me I gratefully accept from fate; but I owe my knowledge to my pain and suffering.

In this way, life itself prepares the seeker after knowledge for the fact that part of the path he travels involves the conquest of suffering and pain. For if we overcome this suffering and pain, we make our entire psychic being into a “sense-organ,” or rather a spirit-organ, just as through our ordinary senses we look into and listen to the physical world. I do not need to discuss epistemological considerations today. I am naturally familiar with the objection that the external mode of knowledge must first also be investigated; but that does not concern us today. What I want to say is simply this: that, in the same sense in which in ordinary life we find the external physical world authenticated by our sensory perceptions, we find, after the soul's suffering has been conquered, the spiritual world authenticated by the soul-organ or spirit-organ which as a complete spiritual being we have become.

Let us call this way of looking “modern exact clairvoyance,” by contrast with all earlier nebulous clairvoyant arts, which belong to the past. With it, we can also penetrate into the eternal substance of man. We can penetrate with exactitude into the meaning of human immortality. But consideration of this must be reserved for tomorrow's lecture, where I shall be speaking about the special relationship of this philosophy of life to the problems of man's psyche. Today, I wished to show how, in contrast to earlier ways of knowledge, man can attain a modern super-sensible way of knowledge. The yogi sought to move into the human substance and reach the self; we seek to move out to the rhythm of the world. The ancient ascetic depressed the body in order to ex-press spiritual experience and allow it to exist independently. The modern way of knowledge does not incline to asceticism; it avoids all arts of castigation and addresses itself intimately to the very life of the soul. Both the modern ways, therefore, place man entirely inside life. Whereas the ways of asceticism and yoga drew men away from life.

I have tried today to describe to you a way that can be followed by developing powers of knowledge, now sleeping in the soul, in a more spiritual sense than they were formerly developed.

By doing this, however (I should like to suggest in conclusion), we also reach deeper into the essence of nature. The philosophy of life of which I speak stands in no sort of opposition to the science of today. On the contrary, it takes precisely the genuine mood of enquiry which is there in scientific research and, through its exercises, develops this as a separate human faculty. Science today seeks exactness and feels particularly satisfied if it can achieve it by the application of mathematics to natural processes. Why is this? It is because the perceptions with which external nature provides us, through the senses, for observation and experiment are wholly outside us. We permeate them with something we develop solely in our innermost human entity—with mathematical knowledge. And Kant's saying is often quoted and even more often practised by scientific thinkers: In all true knowledge there is only so much science as there is mathematics. This is exaggerated if we are thinking of ordinary mathematics. And yet, when we apply these to lifeless natural phenomena, and nowadays even regard it as an ideal, for instance, to be able to count the chromosomes in the blastoderm, we reveal how satisfied we are if we can permeate with mathematics what otherwise stands outside us. Why? Because mathematics is experienced inside us with immediate certainty: we often have to represent this experience to ourselves by means of diagrams, but the diagrams are not essential to the certainty, the truth. Things mathematical are seen and discovered within us, and what we find within us we connect with what we see outside. In this way we feel satisfied.

Anyone who perceives this process of cognition in its entirety must conclude: things can satisfy man as knowledge and lead to a science only if they rest on something he can really experience and observe through his inner powers. With the aid of mathematics, we can penetrate into the facts and structures of the inanimate world; but we cannot move more than a little way at most, and that somewhat primitively, into the organic world. We need a way of looking as exact as that of mathematics with which to penetrate into the higher processes of the outside world. Even one of the outstanding representatives of the school of Haeckel has expressly admitted that we must advance to an entirely different type of research and observation if we wish to move up from the inorganic into the organic realm of nature. For the inorganic, we have mathematics, geometry; for the organic, the living, we have nothing as yet that corresponds to a triangle, a circle, or an ellipse. By vital thinking we shall achieve them: not with the ordinary mathematics of numbers and figures, but with a higher mathesis, a qualitative approach working creatively, one which—and here I must say something which many people will find abominable—which touches the realm of the aesthetic.

By penetrating with mathematics of this kind into worlds that we cannot otherwise penetrate, we extend the scientific attitude upwards into the biological sphere. And we may be sure that eventually the epoch will come when people will say: earlier times rightly emphasized that the amount of science extracted from inorganic nature is proportional to the amount of quantitative mathematics, in the broadest sense, that can be applied to it; the amount of science extracted from the vital processes is proportional to the extent to which we can probe them with a living thought structure and an exact clairvoyance.

People will not believe how close this modern kind of clairvoyance is, in reality, to the mathematical outlook. Eventually, when it is realized how, from the spirit of modern knowledge of nature, knowledge of spirit can be gained, this spiritual science will be found to be justified precisely from the standpoint of our modern knowledge of nature. It has no wish to run counter to the important and imposing results of natural science. It seeks to attempt something different: we can look with our external senses at the physical form of someone standing before us—his gestures, his play of feature, the individual expression of his eyes—and yet perceive merely externals, unless we look through all this to something spiritual in him, by which alone the whole man stands before us. In the same way, unless we travel the ways of the spirit, we look with science only at the external physiognomy of the world, its gestures and its mask. Only when we penetrate beyond the outward physiognomy that natural phenomena present to us, beyond the mask and gestures, into the spiritual region of the world, do we recognize something to which we are ourselves related, something of the eternal in the world.

That is the aim of the spiritual science whose methods I have sought to describe to you today by way of introduction. It does not wish to oppose triumphant modern science, but to accept it fully in its importance and substance, just as we accept fully the external man. But just as we look through the external man at the soul, so it seeks to penetrate through natural laws, not in a lay and dilettante fashion, but with a serious approach, to the spiritual element underlying the world. And so this spiritual science seeks not to create any kind of opposition to natural science, but to be its soul and spirit.

• 1. The German title of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is Die Philosophie der Freiheit.

When the riddles of existence touch the human soul, they become not only great problems in life, but life itself. They become the happiness or sorrow of man's existence. And not a passing happiness or sorrow only, but one he must carry for a time through life, so that by this experience of happiness or sorrow he becomes fit or unfit for life.

Now, man's attitude to his own soul is such that the most important questions about it and about its spiritual essence do not arise from any actual doubts he has regarding the spiritual element within him. It is precisely because he is certain of his spiritual substance and because he cannot help seeing in it his human dignity and his true significance as a man, that the question of the fate of his soul becomes for him a tremendous riddle. To deny the mind in man himself does not, of course, occur to even the most rigid materialist. He acknowledges the mental as such, regarding it as a result of physical, material processes. Yet anyone who, with no such theory but simply from his deepest emotional needs, queries the fate of this soul of his, will find himself confronted by a plethora of phenomena and experiences. And these become riddles to him just because he is fully conscious of the mental or spiritual life, and must accordingly ask: Is this spiritual life a passing breath, rising from physical existence and returning with it once more into the generality of natural phenomena, or is it connected with a spiritual world within which it has eternal significance?

Of the many experiences in the realm of the psyche which present the riddles of the soul to our “mind's eye,” I will select only two.

There are, it may be objected, very few people on whom such experiences obtrude so much that they become even conscious, let alone theoretical, problems. But that is not the point. The point is that these experiences take hold of the subconscious or unconscious, establish themselves there, and flow up into consciousness only as a general temper or distemper of the soul, making us courageous and vigorous in life or making us dejected, so that at no point can we properly come to grips with life. As I have said, I want to pick out only two of these experiences.

The first appears before the “mind's eye” every evening when we fall asleep, when the mental and psychic experiences that have floated up and down during the day sink down into the unconscious as if extinguished. Now, when he looks at this experience or, as is most often the case, when the unconscious awareness of it affects his soul, man is overcome by a sense of the powerlessness of his mental life in face of the outside world. And just because man sees in this life his most valuable and dignified quality and cannot deny that he is in the true sense of the world a spiritual being, he is assaulted from within by this sensation of powerlessness, and has to ponder the question: Does the general process of nature overtake mental experiences when man passes through the gate of death, just as it always does at the onset of sleep? The first experience, if I may so put it, is a sense of the powerlessness of mental life.

The second experience is in a way a direct opposite of the first. We perceive it distinctly or indistinctly, consciously or unconsciously, when on waking, perhaps after passing through a fantastically chaotic dream world not attuned to reality, our spirit descends into our bodily existence. At such times we feel it informing our senses, feel too that our psychic experience is being permeated by the interplay between the outside world and our senses, which are of course physical and physiological. We feel the spiritual element descending further into our body; we inform our organs of will with it and become alert and self-possessed, able to make use of our body, our organism. On reflection, however, we cannot help realizing: Anatomy and physiology make a valiant attempt to penetrate and analyse the bodily functions from without; yet looking from within, we ourselves, by means of ordinary consciousness, do not know anything about the interrelationship between our spiritual element and our bodily functions. A glance at the simplest bodily function controlled by the will, the lifting of an arm or movement of a hand, tells us: First there exists in us the thought or concept of this arm-lifting or hand-movement. How this thought or concept flows down into our organism, however, how it informs our muscles, and how finally there comes about what again we know only through observation—what actually goes on inside remains hidden from ordinary consciousness. So, too, in that wonderful mechanism that physics and physiology show us, the human eye or some other sense-organ, there remains hidden the spiritual element that informs this wonderful mechanism.

We are thus faced with problems both by the powerlessness of our mental life and by the darkness into which we feel our spirit descending when it flows down into our own body. We are forced to conclude (most people certainly don't do so consciously, but it affects them as the temper of their soul): this spiritual element in its relationship with the organism is unknown to us just when it is creative; it is unknown to us at the very point in physical life where it manifests its outgoing function.

What every naive individual thus experiences extends, in a different form, to psychology itself. It would need a great many words to explain scientifically how these enigmas creep into the subject; but we can put it, rather superficially perhaps, as follows.

On the one hand, psychology looks at the mind and asks: What is the relation between this and the physical, the external and corporeal? In looking at the physical, on the other hand, and at what physical science has to say about it, some people—and in this respect psychology has a long history—believe that we must regard the mental as the really effective cause of the physical; others believe that we must regard the physical as the really empowering element, and the mental only as a kind of effect of it. The unsatisfactory nature of both views has been perceived by recent psychologists. They have therefore set up the curious theory of psycho-physical parallelism, according to which one cannot say that the body affects the mind or the mind the body, but only: corporeal processes are parallel to mental ones, and mental processes to bodily ones; one can only say what mental processes accompany the corporeal or what corporeal ones the mental.

Psychology itself, moreover, is conscious of this powerlessness of the mind! If we attempt to examine the mind, even as it presents itself to the psychologist, with ordinary consciousness, we find that it has something passive about it, so that we cannot see how it can penetrate dynamically the life of the body. Anyone who looks at the psychic characteristics of thinking and feeling (volition is impenetrable, so that for psychology much the same is true of will as of thinking and feeling)—anyone who looks at thinking and feeling with the tools of psychology finds them powerless, and cannot locate anything that would really be capable of effectively activating the physical. It is then that the psychologist experiences his sense of the powerlessness of mental life in the eyes of ordinary consciousness. The most varied attempts have certainly been made to overcome this feeling. But the disputes of philosophers and the changing philosophies that have succeeded one another provide the impartial observer of humanity with factual evidence of the impossibility for ordinary consciousness of approaching the mind's experience. Everywhere there obtrudes a sense of the powerlessness of the mind as it is perceived by ordinary consciousness.

With regard to this particular point, a series of works have appeared here in Vienna which represent milestones in the development of philosophy. Although I cannot associate myself in any way with their content, I believe that, from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness, these books are extraordinarily significant. They include Richard Wahle's The Whole of Philosophy and its End, which is designed to show that ordinary consciousness is incapable of reaching any significant conclusion about mental life, and that what philosophical investigation is here attempting ought to be handed over to theology, physiology, aesthetics and social science. And Richard Wahle went on to work out these ideas still more clearly in his Mechanism of Mental Life. We may say: here for once ordinary consciousness is revealed as basically incapable of saying anything about the problems of mental life. The ego, the psyche, everything that earlier psychology brought to light—all these collapse in face of the self-criticism of ordinary consciousness.

In recent years, however, psychology has, understandably and indeed of necessity, not attempted to deal directly with the things of the mind—in face of which, as we have seen, ordinary consciousness is powerless—but has sought to discover something about what are usually called mental phenomena indirectly, via the physical phenomena that spring from them. In this way, experimental psychology has come into being. This is a necessary product of our present attitude to life and methods of research. And anyone taking the philosophical standpoint that I do will never for one moment deny that experimental psychology is completely justified, though he may not perhaps agree entirely with this or that detail of its methods and results.

It is here that the other enigma of the soul comes in. However much we learn about what can be experienced by the human body in experimental psychology, the fact remains: everything that appears to be discovered in this way about purely psychic functions is, strictly speaking, only indirect knowledge, acquired via the body. It all belongs to a sphere which, at man's death, is given over to the general process of nature, so that through it can be learnt nothing about the soul, whose fate in the world is of such paramount concern to man. Thus we may say: for psychology, also, the great riddle of the soul reappears.

This point, too, has been made by a modern psychologist who for many years lived and worked here in Vienna, and who will never be forgotten by those who sat at his feet here, as I did. In the first volume of his unfinished work on psychology, he asks: What can any psychology ever achieve by establishing—whether experimentally or non-experimentally, I might add—how concepts combine and separate, how attention operates, how memory develops in life etc.?—if, precisely because of the scientific character of this psychology, with its emulation of natural science, we must renounce all claim to understand the fate of the human soul once the body crumbles into its elements? This was said not by some eccentric or other, but by that rigorous thinker Franz Brentano, who made psychology his central concern in life and who sought to apply to his work the strict scientific method of modern times. Yet he it was who presented the riddle of the soul to his contemporaries in the way I have just outlined, as something scientifically unavoidable.

From all this the impartial observer today must draw a conclusion. It is that, in the study of man, scientific methods will take us only to the point they have now reached; but that we cannot deal with the soul by means of ordinary consciousness, entirely adequate as this is for science and for ordinary life. And so, since for scientific reasons this fact must be apparent to the impartial observer today, I speak to you from the standpoint of a philosophy of life that concludes: it is impossible, with the soul-powers that manifest themselves to ordinary consciousness and operate in ordinary life and ordinary science, to investigate the life of the soul. There must be developed other powers, which to ordinary consciousness are more or less sleeping or, let us say, latent in the soul.

To adopt the right attitude to such a conception of life, we need something which, if I may say so, is found only rarely in people today. I would call it intellectual modesty. There must come a moment in life when we say to ourselves: When I was a little child, I developed a mental life that was so dim and dreamy that it has been forgotten like a dream. Only gradually did there arise from this dream-like mentality of the child something that enables me to orientate myself in life, to bring my thoughts, my impulses and my decisions into step with the world, and to become a capable being. Out of the vagueness and lack of differentiation of the child's mental life, interwoven with the body, has emerged that experience which derives from our inherited qualities, as these develop with the growth of the body, and which derives also from our customary education.

Anyone looking back, with intellectual modesty, on his development during his life on earth, will not be above saying to himself at a certain point: Why shouldn't this continue? The soul-powers which are the most important to me today, and by which I orientate myself in life and become a capable being, were dormant during my existence as a child. Why shouldn't there be dormant in my soul other powers that I can develop from it?

We cannot help reaching this conclusion, which springs from intellectual modesty. I call it intellectual modesty because men are inclined to say: the form of consciousness I have once attained as an adult is that of the normal person; any impulse in the life of the soul to be different from this so-called normal consciousness is eccentric or hallucinatory or visionary or something similar. The philosophical standpoint from which I speak definitely starts from a healthy psyche and attempts on this basis to develop powers dormant in the soul, cognitive powers, which then become clairvoyant powers in the sense in which I spoke yesterday of exact clairvoyance. What the soul has to undertake I indicated yesterday. I mentioned my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Occult Science, Riddles of the Soul and so on. There you will find details of those exercises which, starting from a healthy soul-life, lead upward to the development of the soul, which thus in fact attains a kind of spiritual vision with which it can see into a spiritual world, just as with the ordinary sense-organs it can perceive the physical and sensuous world. In each of these books there is a first part, which is accepted as something that can be definitely useful to man even by many opponents of the philosophy of life I am advocating. It shows that by certain exercises of an intellectual, emotional and moral kind man can produce in himself a state of soul and body that can be regarded as wholly healthy. They also enable him to be on his inner guard against anything which, deriving from an unhealthy life of the soul, leads to mediumism, hallucinations and visions. For everything brought about in this way is unacceptable to a true psychology. Visions arise not from the sphere of the soul, but because morbid structures exist in the organism; the same is true of mediumism. None of these have anything to do with sound psychology and sound psychic development, and indeed from the point of view of this sound psychology all must be condemned. Opponents today, however, find fantastic and harmful the exercises which follow these preparatory ones, and which are designed to draw from the soul those powers of thinking, feeling and volition which, once they are trained, introduce man into a spiritual world in such a way that he learns to orientate himself in it and can enter it at will.

I have already suggested how, as modern man, we manage by certain mental exercises to remove thinking from its ordinary state of passive surrender to the phenomena of the outside world, and to what appear inwardly as memories but are also connected with the outside world. We transcend this kind of thinking by carrying out exercises in meditation seriously, patiently and energetically, and by repeating them over and over again. Depending on predisposition, it may take one person years, another not so long; but each can note, as he arrives at the crucial point, how his thinking, from what I have previously called dead and abstract thinking, becomes inwardly vital thinking in tune with the rhythm of the world. A balanced view of the world and of life thus strives, not to conjure up visions or hallucinations from the soul, but to experience the life of thoughts and concepts with an intensity that we otherwise experience only through the outward senses.

You need only compare the vitality of our experience of the colours we perceive through the eye, and the sounds we hear through the ear, with the pallor of our experience of thought in ordinary consciousness. By energizing our mental life in the way I suggested yesterday, we can gradually give the mere life of thought and concept the same intensive quality as the life of the senses. Man today, seeking to know the spiritual, does not therefore, if he is a reasonable being, seek hallucinations and visions. He strives quite calmly to achieve the ideal of the life of the senses, with its intensity and plasticity, in his mental activity. And if you devote yourselves as students of the spirit to meditations such as I have described, you need not be in any way dependent on the unconscious or subconscious. You can refer to the exercises, they are all directed at what I am trying to describe—and you will find that everything that is carried out by way of exercises in the life of the soul is done as consciously, as reasonably, as precisely we may say, as are operations in mathematics or geometry.

To sum up: we are concerned here not with the old nebulous clairvoyance, but with a clairvoyance brought about by fully conscious and balanced experiences and exercises of the soul. The self-possession at each step is such that we can compare what a man experiences and makes of himself here with what we otherwise experience in the case of a geometrical problem. If not, the exercises have no value.

A conceptual life of this kind is energized; is independent of breathing; is set free of the body; is a spiritual function only; and in it, as we know by direct perception, thinking is carried out not by the body, but in the purely spiritual sphere. Only when modern man attains this kind of conceptual life does he feel his thinking, in contrast to abstract thinking, as something vital and not as something dead. Our sensation when we experience the transition from ordinary abstract thinking to vital thinking is exactly as if we found a dead organism suddenly come to life. And although this vital thinking is a spiritual process, it is not so linear, not so superficial as ordinary abstract thinking. It is full and plastic. And this plasticity is what counts.

Now, however, a very great deal depends on our carrying over the balanced attitude, required during the actual exercises, to the moment when this vitalized or plastic thinking appears in us. If at this moment we surrender ourselves to the images we have struggled to achieve, believing we find in them realities of a spiritual kind, then we are, not students of the spirit but simply fantasy-mongers. This is something we must certainly not become; for it could not provide us with a firmly based philosophy of life for modern man. Only when we say to ourselves: we have attained one component of spiritual life, but it is a semblance component; it merely tells us something about powers that operate within ourselves—about what we ourselves can do through our own human nature; only when we really say to ourselves: this imaginal knowledge cannot give us any information about any kind of outside world, not even about what we are in the outside world; only if we perceive ourselves in this semblance-making and know ourselves as a power living within it—only then do we have the right attitude to this experience and feel ourselves as spiritual beings outside the body, and yet feel ourselves only in ourselves, with an inner plasticity.

Only by having the courage to continue the exercises to the next stage do we attain true spiritual perception. This next stage not only involves developing the capacity to focus our consciousness upon certain concepts that are readily comprehended—as we comprehend geometrical concepts, which we know to contain no unconscious element—so as to increase our strength of soul; it must also, and more particularly, involve being able calmly and at will to banish these concepts from our consciousness. This is, in some circumstances, a difficult task! In ordinary life, forgetting is not particularly difficult, as our ordinary consciousness is only too well aware. But when one has just struggled, although without driving oneself into auto-suggestion—which cannot occur if we are self-possessed—to focus one's consciousness upon certain concepts, then unusual strength is required to banish them from consciousness again. However, one must develop this greater strength gradually; and just as at first we concentrated all our attention and inner strength of soul, so that we might dwell upon such a concept in a state of meditation, so now we must dispel these concepts, and all other concepts, calmly and voluntarily from consciousness. And there must be able to enter, from our will, what one might call “empty consciousness.” What “empty consciousness” (if only for a few moments) implies, can be judged by reflecting on what happens to ordinary consciousness when it has to forgo both sense-impressions and recollections—when for some reason or other man is deprived of external impressions and even memories: he falls asleep; that is, consciousness is depressed and dimmed. The opposite of this is what must happen: completely controlled, conscious wakefulness, despite the fact that the will has swept consciousness completely clear.

If we thus first strengthen the soul and then empty it, yet keep it conscious, there will appear before it, as colour to the eye and sounds to the ear, a spiritual environment. We can look into the spiritual world. And so we may say: to the spiritual investigation here intended, it is perfectly understandable that ordinary consciousness cannot reach the spirit and the soul, and indeed that it turns out, as Richard Wahle found for instance, that ordinary consciousness ought not to speak of an “I” at all! For in this sphere, ordinary experience can only indicate and label with words a dark element which is immersed in and contrasted with the clear light; and which will never emerge until we have developed powers that are usually lacking. It is a sober recognition of the limits of ordinary consciousness, tied to the body, that impels us to develop in ourselves those powers that alone are capable of really discovering the soul and the spirit.

There is another point to consider, however, if you seek to arrive by this path at a sound and not a morbid psychology. Taking the mediumistic, visionary and hallucinatory as morbid, the fact is that anyone who falls into this kind of morbid psychic activity is entirely absorbed into it. For the duration of his sickness of soul, at least, he becomes one with this activity. Quite the reverse with the exercises I have been proposing here. Anyone who explores the soul with their aid does, it is true, leave behind his physical body with its capacity for ordinary thinking and ordinary orientation in life. He steps out of this body and learns to see imaginally, free of body; he develops a visual thinking. Yet not for a moment is he completely subsumed in this higher man, if I may so call it without arrogance. He always remains capable of regaining his body and acting just as calmly as before: there always stands beside this more highly developed man that ordinary man with his healthy common sense who is a sober critic of everything to which in his vision this higher being attains.

By developing plastic, vital thinking and then creating an empty consciousness, we reach a view of our own psychic nature, one that embraces in a single image all we have encountered in this life since we entered it. Our past life does not stand before the soul as is usual in the memory, with isolated reminiscences emerging, independently or after some exertion. Instead, all at once our life is surveyed like a mighty tableau, not in space but in time. All at once, with a single glance of the soul, we survey our life; but we see it as it informs our growth and the energies of our physical body. We see ourselves as we have been here on this earth as thinking, feeling, willing beings, but in such a way that thinking, feeling and willing now densify and at the same time take their places organically within the human substance. We can see into our spiritual life in its direct association with the physical. We cease trying to establish by philosophical speculation how the soul affects the body. In seeing the soul, we also see how at every moment our physical life on earth has been informed by what the tableau shows us. This will be described more fully in the next few days.

The next step must now be to strengthen still further by removing them from our consciousness the energized concepts that we have introduced into ourselves. We do this by continually repeating the exercises, just as we strengthen muscles by repeated exercise. And by continuing with these energized concepts, we also manage to eliminate from our consciousness this whole newly achieved tableau of the life of the soul from birth to the present. This requires more effort than the simple elimination of images, but one does eventually achieve it. We succeed in removing from consciousness what in our earthly existence we call our inner life, so that now our consciousness is empty not only of current impressions, but also of all that we experience within as if in a second and finer body (which yet informs our growth and our memory), a finer being, an ethereal being as it were, a now for the first time super-sensible being. And when we do so, our consciousness, which though fully awake is now empty and yet has attained a greater inward power, will be able to see further in the spiritual world. It will now be able to look at the nature of its own soul before this descended from spiritual worlds to an earthly existence. Now, what we call the eternity of the human soul is taken out of the sphere of mere philosophical speculation and actually beheld. We learn to look at the purely spiritual that we were in a spiritual world, before we descended to clothe ourselves, through conception, foetal life and birth, in a physical earthly body.

Although attained by as exact a method as are mathematical concepts, this may seem fantastic to many people today. Still more paradoxical may appear what remains to be said, not only about the soul when it still had a spiritual existence, but also about the concrete nature of this experience. These things can only be suggested in this lecture; more will be said in subsequent lectures. The suggestions can perhaps be explained in the following terms.

Let us first ask ourselves: What do we actually see when, in ordinary life, as beings who recognize, understand and perceive, we enter into a relationship with our natural environment? We actually see only the external world. This is clear from what I mentioned at the beginning today. We actually see only the outside world, the cosmos. What takes place within us we see, too, but only by making it into something external through physiology and anatomy. Imposing as these sciences may be, we see what is within only by first externalizing it and then investigating it exactly as we are accustomed to do with external processes. Yet it remains dark down there in the region into which we descend, where we feel our spiritual element flowing into our body. In the last analysis, we see in ordinary life only what is outside ourselves; by direct observation we cannot look directly into man and see how the spiritual informs the bodily organs. Anyone, however, who can examine life impartially from the spiritual viewpoint I have established will conclude: noble and great is external appearance and the laws we discover in the external world of the stars and of the sun, which sends us light and warmth; noble and great is our experience when we either simply look—and we are complete men when we do so look—or when we investigate scientifically the laws by which the sun sends us light and warmth and conjures forth the green of plants; noble and mighty is all this—but if we could look into the structure of the human heart, its inner law would be even nobler and greater than what we perceive outside!

Man can sense this with his ordinary consciousness. But the science that rests on exact clairvoyance can raise it to the status of true research. It can say: far-reaching appear to us the changes in the atmosphere, and there exists an ideal of science which, here too, will discover greater and more potent laws; but greater still is what is present and goes on in the structure and functions of the human lung! It is not a question of size. Man is a microcosm in face of the macrocosm. But as Schiller said: “In space, my friend, dwells not the sublime.” He means the highest form of the sublime. This highest form can be experienced only in the human organism itself.

Between birth and death it is not investigated by man with his ordinary consciousness. Exactly the opposite is true, however, of our existence before we unite with the body—our spiritual existence, in a spiritual environment. In this life on earth, the inner world is dark and the outside world of the cosmos bright and full of sound; in the purely spiritual life before our earthly embodiment, the outer cosmic world is dark, and our world is then the inner world of man. We see this inner world! And truly, it seems to us no smaller and no less majestic than does the cosmos when we see it with our physical eyes during our earthly existence. As if it were our “outside world,” we come to understand the law of our spiritual inner world, and we prepare ourselves, in the spiritual realm, for dealing later with our bodily functions, with what we are between birth and death. For what we are between birth and death extends before us like a world, before we descend into this physical existence on earth.

This is not speculation. It is direct perception arising from exact clairvoyance. It is something which, starting from this exact clairvoyance, leads us some way into the connection between the eternal element in man and the life on earth—that eternal element which remains hidden from us between birth and death, and of which we see the first gleams when we are able to perceive it in the still unembodied state. And with this we explore a part of human eternity itself. We don't even have a word in our modern languages for this part of human eternity. We rightly speak of immortality; but we ought also to speak of “unborn-ness.” For this now confronts us as a direct experience.

This is one aspect of exact clairvoyance, one aspect of human eternity, of the great riddle of the human soul, and thus of the supreme problem of psychology in general. The other aspect arises from those other exercises, which I yesterday termed exercises of the will, through which we so take in hand our will that we learn to make use of it independently of the body I explained that these exercises induce us to overcome pain and suffering within the soul, in order to make it into a “sense-organ” (to speak loosely) or a spiritual organ (to speak exactly) of vision, so that we not only look at the spiritual, but see its authentic shape. And when we learn to experience in this way outside our body, not only with our thoughts but with our will itself—that is, with our entire human substance—there appears before the soul the image of death, in such a way that we now know the nature of experience without the body: both in thinking and in willing and in what lies between, feeling. In an imaginally creative way we learn to live without the body. And in doing so we gain an image of our passage through the gate of death; we learn how in reality, too, we can do without the body and how, passing through the gate of death, we enter once more that spiritual sphere from which we descended into this bodily existence. What is eternal and immortal in us becomes not only philosophical certainty, but direct perception. By training the will, we disclose for the soul's contemplation the other side of eternity—immortality—just as unborn-ness is disclosed by the training of thought.

When the soul becomes a spiritual organ in this way, however, it is as if, at a lower level, a man born blind had been operated on. What for those endowed with sight is a world of colours, the blind man has hitherto been accustomed to perceive by touch alone. Now, after the operation, he sees something quite new. The world in which he previously lived has changed. So too, anyone whose “mind's eye” is opened in the way I have described finds that his environment is changed. How far it is changed I wish to bring out today in only one respect.

Even with our unopened “mind's eye” we can see in life how, for example, a man takes his childish steps, then grows up and reaches a fateful moment in his life: he meets someone, and their souls link up so that the two people combine their fates and move on through life together. (As I said before, I want to single out just one event.) In ordinary consciousness we are drawn to regard what happens in life as a sum of chance occurrences; to regard it, too, as more or less chance that we are brought at last to this fateful meeting with the other person. Only a few individuals, like Goethe's friend Knebel, gain an inner wisdom of experience, simply in growing older. He once put this to Goethe in the following words: If at an advanced age one looks back on the course of one's steps in life, one finds that these steps seem to reveal a systematic arrangement, so that everything appears to have been present in embryo and to have developed in such a way that one was led by a kind of inner necessity to what we now see to have been a fateful event. Human existence as seen with the “mind's eye” unveiled is as different from the life observed by the unopened eyes as the world of colour is from the merely tactile one of the blind man.

Looking at the child's soul life and the interplay of sympathy and antipathy, we see how it develops from these first steps; how then, welling up out of his innermost being, the man himself, out of his innermost longings, directs his steps and brings himself to the fateful moment. This is sober observation of life. When we look at life in this way, however, we see it rather as we see the life of an old man. We should not say that an old man's life simply exists “in its own right;” by logical processes we know how to refer it to its infant beginnings; its very idiosyncrasies make us so refer it. What simple logic does for the old man's life is done for human life in general by exact clairvoyance, by true vision: if we are really to look at life as it develops from the innermost longings of the soul, we must follow it back. And when we do so, we come to earlier lives on earth, in which were prepared the longings that appear in the present and lead to our activities.

I have not been able to do more today than suggest that what leads to this comprehensive contemplation of life is not a tissue of fantasy, but an exact method. It is a contemplation which, by means of an advanced psychology, penetrates to the eternal in human nature. And on this foundation there now arises something that is a certainty, something that wells up out of the knowledge appropriate to us as modern men today and forms a basis for true inner piety and true inner religious life.

Anyone with an insight (and I may say that I am using the word “insight” in its literal sense) into the way the individual soul struggles free of the body, in order to enter a spiritual realm, will have a different way of looking at our social life too. Armed with this new attitude, he can see how friendships, relationships of love, and other associations are formed; how soul finds its way to soul, moving outside the family and other social groups; how physical proximity may be a means to the community of souls, the sympathy and togetherness of souls. He now knows that, just as the body falls away from the individual soul, so the physical element and all earthly events fall away from the friendships and from the relationships of love; and he sees how the soul-relationship that has come into being between men continues into a spiritual world, where it can also be spiritually experienced.

On a foundation of knowledge, not of faith, we can now say: as they stride through the gate of death, men find themselves once more together. And just as the body, which impedes our sight of the spirit, disappears in the spiritual world, so too in that world every impediment to friendship and love now disappears. Men are closer together there than in the flesh. A mode of knowledge that may still appear abstract in relation to true psychology culminates in this religious feeling and vision. Yet the philosophy of life I am here presenting does not seek to infringe religious faith. This philosophy can be tolerant; it can recognize fully the value of every individual religious faith, and even exercise it in practice; but at the same time, as a nurse to this religious life, it provides an epistemological basis for this religious life too.

I have sought today to say something basic about the relationship to psychology of a spiritually appropriate modern view of life. I know, better than many an opponent perhaps, the objections that can be raised to the beginnings of such a philosophy. But I believe I also know that, albeit entirely unconsciously, the longing for such a psychology is present today in countless souls. It therefore needs to be said over and over again: just as one does not need to be a painter to feel the beauty of a picture, so too one does not need to be a spiritual scientist oneself—although one can become one up to a point—to be able to test whether what I am saying here is true. Just as one can feel the beauty of a picture without being a painter oneself, so with ordinary common sense one can perceive what the spiritual scientist says about the soul. That one can see it, I think I have established all the more firmly in recognizing how souls thirst for a profounder approach to psychology and to the great riddles of existence in relation to the soul. The aim of a modern view of life such as has been outlined here today does in fact represent the desire of countless people, though they are not ordinarily aware of it; it forms the pain, the sorrow, the privation, the wish of countless people—of all those who are serious about what we must regard as constructive forces in face of the many forces of decline present in our age.

Anyone today who wishes to advocate a philosophy for the times must realize that he has to speak, think and will in harmony with what the souls in our serious age, if in many cases unconsciously, strive for. And I believe—if I may close on this note—that just such a philosophy as I have adumbrated does hold something of what countless souls strive for today, something of what they need as spiritual content and vital spiritual activity for the present and for the immediate future.

Goethe who gave simple expression to so much that men find great and moving, once wrote: “Each man should consider with what part of himself he can and will influence his time!”

When we allow such a saying—with all that we know may have passed through Goethe's mind as he said it—to affect us, we are initiated into the whole relationship of man to history. For most people, of course, the search for their own particular standpoint, from which they can deploy their powers in the development of humanity in accordance with the spirit of the age in which they live, is more or less unconscious. Yet even a superficial examination of human development shows that men have increasingly been compelled to organize their lives in a conscious manner. Instinctive living was a feature of earlier civilizations. The transition to increasing consciousness is itself a factor in history. Nowadays, indeed, we can see that the increasing complications of life require man to participate in the development of humanity with a certain degree of consciousness, however humble his position. It is unfortunate that as yet we really have very few points d'appui in the study of mankind's historical development to help us in our efforts to reach this point of view.

As a scientific discipline, this study is of fairly recent origin, after all. Its novelty is apparent, one might say, in the historical writing that has been published.

Historians have produced magnificent things. In developing from the unscientific chronicle-writing that still prevailed even in the eighteenth century, however, history, falling as it did within the age of natural science, attempted increasingly to take on the forms appropriate to that science. Thus the historical attitude gradually became identified with the concept post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Although this way of looking at human history as cause and effect does indeed carry us a long way, yet to the unprejudiced observer there remain countless facts in history which are not consistent with a simple causal interpretation. And at this point we are struck by an image that can symbolize history: the image of a flowing river. We cannot simply derive its features at a given point from what lies a little farther upstream, but must realize that in its depths there operate all kinds of forces that may come to the surface at any point, and may throw up waves which are not determined by those that went before.

So, too, human history seems to point to unspoken depths, to resemble a surface on which countless forces impinge from below. And human observation can scarcely presume to gain a complete picture of the particular features of a given epoch. For this reason, the study of history will doubtless have to come more and more to be what I would call symptomatological. In the human organism itself, which is such a richly differentiated whole, a great deal has to be discovered about its health and ill-health by observing the symptoms through which the organism expresses itself. In the same way, we must gradually accustom ourselves to study historical symptomatology. We must learn to interpret surface features precisely, and, by including more and more symptoms in our interpretation, contrive to allow the vital essence of historical development to work on us. In this way, by a spiritual comprehension of the forces of human history—which in all kinds of indirect ways also affect our own soul—we can find our own place in the development of mankind.

A view of the world and of life such as I have put before you is particularly fitted to reveal how, even in one's most intimate inner experiences, what is historically symptomatic is manifest. What I have described to you, the awakening of cognitive capacities that are not present in ordinary consciousness, being dormant deep down in the soul—this awakening of capacities appropriate to modern man leads us to see that we must develop these cognitive powers differently nowadays from the way they were developed in earlier times. Not only this: when we do develop these powers, the spiritual vision that results is something quite different to the man of today from what it was, for example, to the men of the ancient East, which we touched on the day before yesterday in describing yoga exercises.

Looking at these ancient Oriental attitudes, as they were developed by men who sought to elicit, from within, powers of cognition reaching into the super-sensible sphere, we conclude: everything we know about it indicates that such knowledge, in gaining a place within the soul, took on a permanent and enduring character there. What men think in ordinary life, what they absorb from the experiences of earthly existence, and what then takes root as memories—these have permanence in the soul; and we are simply unhealthy in spirit if we have any considerable gaps in our capacity to remember what we have experienced in the world from a given point in childhood onwards. To this state of mental permanence were admitted all the insights into the spiritual world gained by ancient Oriental methods. They deposited memories, as the ordinary experiences of the day deposit memories. The characteristic of the early Oriental seer was precisely that he found himself increasingly absorbed into a lasting communion with the spiritual world, as he made his way into it. Once inside the divine and spiritual world, he knew himself to be secure. He knew that it also represented something enduring for his soul.

The opposite, we may say, is true of anyone today who, by virtue of the powers to which mankind has advanced since those early days, rises to a certain spiritual vision. He develops his views on the spiritual sphere to the point of experiencing them; but they cannot possibly become memories for him in the way that the thoughts we experience daily in the outside world become memories.

It is certainly a great disappointment to many who struggle to gain a certain spiritual vision by modern methods to find that, although they do gain glimpses of this spiritual world, these are transitory, like the sight of a real object in the outside world, which we no longer perceive when we go away from it. In this mental activity, there is no incorporation into memory in the ordinary sense, but a momentary contact with the spiritual world. If we later wish to regain this contact, we cannot simply call up the experience from our recollection. What we can do, however, is to recollect something that was an ordinary experience in the physical world: how by developing our powers we achieved our experience of the spiritual world. We can then retrace our steps and repeat the experience, exactly as we return to a sensory perception. This is one of the most important factors that authenticate this modern vision: that what we see does not combine with our physical being; for if thoughts are to gain some permanence as memories, they must always be combined with our physical being, held fast by our organism.

Perhaps I may interpolate a personal observation here by way of explanation. Anyone who has some contact with the spiritual world, and wishes to communicate what he has experienced, is unable to make this communication from memory in the usual sense. He always has to make a certain effort to attain again to direct spiritual observation. For this reason, even if someone who speaks out of the spiritual world gives a lecture thirty times, no lecture will be an exact repetition of the one before: each must be drawn direct from experience.

Here is something which, in my view, can remove certain anxieties that might arise in troubled minds about this modern spiritual vision. Many people today, with some justification, see the grandeur of the most significant riddles of existence in the very fact that they can never be completely solved. Such people are frightened of a philistinism of spiritual vision which might confront them with the assertion that the riddles of existence could be finally “solved” by a philosophy. Well, the view of life we are discussing here cannot speak of such a “solution,” for the reason that has just been given: what is always being forgotten must constantly be re-acquired.

But therein lies its vitality! We are brought back again to life as it is revealed externally in nature, as opposed to what we experience inwardly on seeing our thoughts become memories. Perhaps what I want to say will sound banal to many people; but it is not meant to be banal. No one can say: I ate yesterday and so I am full, I do not need to eat today or tomorrow or the day after; similarly, no one can say of modern spiritual vision: It is complete, it has now become part of memory, and we know where we are with it once and for all.

Indeed, it is not just that we must always struggle afresh to perceive what seeks to manifest itself to man; but that, if we dwell continuously over a long period on the same concepts from the spiritual world, seeking them out repeatedly, it will even happen that doubts and uncertainties appear; it is characteristic of true spiritual vision that we should have to conquer these doubts and uncertainties again and again in the vital life of the soul. We are thus never condemned to the calm of completion when we strive towards spiritual vision in the modern sense.

There is another point, too. This modern spiritual vision demands above all what may be called “presence of mind.” The spiritual visionary of ancient Oriental times could take his time. What he achieved was a permanent possession. If man as he is today wishes to look at the spiritual world, he must be spiritually quick-witted, if I may so put it; he must realize that the revelations of the spiritual world appear, only to vanish again at the next moment. They must therefore be caught by “presence of mind” at the moment of their occurrence. And many people prepare themselves carefully for spiritual vision, but fail to attain it through omitting to train this “presence of mind.” Only by doing so can we avoid a situation in which we only become sufficiently attentive when the thing itself is past.

I have now described to you many of the features that the modern seeker after the spiritual world encounters. In the course of my lectures, other features will become apparent. Today, I should like to point to just one more of them, since it will lead directly to a certain historical view of humanity.

When we try as modern men in this sense to find our way with certainty into the spiritual world, without becoming eccentrics, it is best for us to start from concepts and ways of thinking we have obtained from a fundamental study of nature and by immersion in a fundamental natural science. No concepts are quite so suitable for the meditative life I have described as those gained from modern science—not just for us to absorb their content, but rather to meditate upon it. As modern men, we have really learnt to think through science. We must always remember that we have learnt through science the thinking that is suited to our present epoch. Yet what we gain in thinking techniques from modern science is only a preparation for a true spiritual vision.

No logical argument or philosophical speculation will enable us to use ordinary thinking, trained on the objects of the outside world and on experiment and observation, as anything more than a preparation. We must then wait until the spiritual world approaches us in the way I have been describing. For each step we take in the observation of the spiritual world we must first become ripe. We cannot of our own volition do anything except make of ourselves an organ to which the spiritual world is willing to reveal itself. Objective revelation is something we must wait for. And anyone who has experience in such things knows that he has to wait years or decades for certain kinds of knowledge. Again, it is precisely this that guarantees the objectivity of what is real in the spiritual world—that is, of knowledge.

This again was not so for those in ancient times in the Orient who sought through their exercises the way into the super-sensible world. The nature of their thinking from the beginning was such that they needed only to extend it to find the way into the spiritual world which I described two days ago. Even in ordinary life, therefore, their thinking needed only to be extended to lead to a certain clairvoyance. But because it developed from the ordinary life of the times, this was a rather dream-like vision, whereas the vision towards which we as modern men strive operates with complete self-possession, like that which is active in the solution of mathematical problems. It is just when we turn our attention to the intimate experiences of spiritual research that we see in this change the expression of great transformations in human nature as a whole in the course of historical times. I mean times that are “historical” in the sense that they are approachable not only by anyone who can examine the history both of men and of the cosmos through spiritual vision, but also by anyone who examines the external documents quite straightforwardly. In these external documents, too, we can look at early periods in the spiritual life of humanity and perceive how they differ from the position within this spiritual world which we and our time must aspire to.

By virtue of the fact that our thinking cannot just be extended automatically to bring us to spiritual vision, but can only make us ready to see the spiritual world when it appears to us, it is suited to operate within the field of experiment and observation, within the field that natural science has made its own. Yet just because we perceive what inner rigour and strength our thinking has achieved, we shall be all the more likely to apply it to our training, and thus be able to await the revelation of the spiritual world in the true sense of the word. Even here, it is apparent that our thinking today is rather different from that of earlier times.

I shall have opportunities later on for historical digressions. Much that refers to the outside world can then be deduced from what I have to say today. Today, I shall speak rather about the inner powers of man's development. This is a subject that brings us in the end to thinking and to the transformation of this thinking in the course of man's development. But in the last analysis all external history is dependent on thinking, and what he achieves in history man produces from his thoughts, together with his feelings and impulses of will; and therefore, if we want to find the deepest historical impulses, we must turn to human thinking.

But the thinking employed today for natural science on the one hand, and for achieving human freedom on the other, differs quite considerably from that which we find in earlier ages of mankind. There will, of course, be many people who will say: thinking is thinking, whether it occurs in John Stuart Mill or in Soloviev, in Plato, Aristotle and Heraclitus or in the thinkers of the ancient East. Anyone with an intuitive insight into the way thoughts have functioned within humanity, however, will conclude: our thinking today is fundamentally something very different from that of earlier epochs. This raises an important problem in human development.

Let us examine our present-day way of thinking. (I shall have an opportunity later to give evidence from natural science for what I am now expounding historically.) What we call thinking actually developed from the handling of language. Anyone with a sense of what is operative in a people's language—of the logic, familiar to us from childhood, operative in the language—and with enough psychological awareness to observe this in life, will find that our thinking today actually derives from what language makes of our soul's potentialities. I would say: from language we gradually separate thoughts and the laws thoughts obey: our thinking today is given us by speech.

Yet this thinking that is given us by speech is also the thinking that has come of age in human civilization since the days of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, in periods when humanity has been devoting its attention principally to the observation of nature in the modern sense. The thinking that is applied to observation and experiment inevitably becomes a part of us; we refine what we absorb with language as part of our common heritage until it becomes a thought-structure by which we then apprehend the outside world.

But we need only go back a relatively short distance in human history to encounter something quite different. Let us go back, for example, to the civilization of Greece. Anyone who can enter the world of Greek art, Greek literature, Greek philosophy—can catch, in fact, the mood of Greece—will discover quite empirically that the Greeks still experienced thoughts closely interwoven with words. Thought and word were one. By the concept logos, they meant something different from what we mean when we speak of a thought or a thought sequence. They spoke of thought as if the element of speech was its natural physical aspect. Just as in the physical world we cannot conceive our soul as spatially separated from our physical organism, so too in Greek consciousness thought was not separated from word. The two were felt as a unity, and thought flowed along on the waves of words.

But this produces an attitude to the outside world quite different from ours, where thought has already separated from word. And thus, when we go back into Hellenic civilization, fundamentally we have to adopt a quite different temper of soul if we are to penetrate into the real experiences of the Greek soul. By the same token, all the science, for example, that was produced in Greece no longer seems like science by modern standards. The scientist of today will say: the Greeks really had no natural science; they had a natural philosophy. And he will be right. But he will have perceived only a quarter, so to speak, of the problem. Something much more profound is involved. What this is we can explore only by regaining spiritual vision.

If we make use of the way of thinking which is particularly apt for scientific research, and to which we now train ourselves by inheritance and education, and develop what we call scientific concepts, then in the nature of our consciousness we separate these concepts strictly from what we call artistic experience and what we call religious experience. It is a fundamental characteristic of our age that modern man demands a science which involves no element of artistic creation or outlook, and nothing that claims to be the object of religious consciousness and religious devotion to the temporal or the divine. This, we conclude, is a characteristic of our present civilization. And we find this characteristic increasingly well developed the further West we go in our examination of the foundations of human civilization. This is the characteristic: that modern man keeps science, art and religious life separate in his soul. He even endeavours to form a special concept of science, to prevent art from invading science, to exclude the imagination from everything that is “scientific,” except for that part concerned with inventions; and then to put forward another kind of certainty—that of faith—to play its part in religious life.

If you try, in the manner I have described, to rise to a spiritual perception, then, starting of course from the trained scientific thought of the present, you arrive at what I have characterized as vital, plastic thinking. With this plastic thinking, too, you feel equipped to comprehend, in what I will call a qualitatively mathematical way, what cannot be comprehended with ordinary mathematics and geometry: living things. With vital thinking you feel yourself equipped to apprehend living things.

When we look at the purely chemical compounds in the inorganic world, we find that all their materials and forces are in a state of more or less unstable equilibrium. The equilibrium becomes increasingly unstable and the interaction increasingly complicated, the further we ascend towards living things. And as the equilibrium becomes more unstable, so the living structure increasingly evades quantitative understanding: only vital thought can connect up with a living structure in the way that mathematical thought does with a lifeless one. We thus arrive (and as I have previously indicated, I am saying something now that will be shocking to many people) at an epistemological position where ordinary logical abstract thinking is continually being converted into a kind of artistic thinking or artistic outlook, yet one as exact as ever mathematics or mechanics can be.

I know how, impelled by the modern spirit of science, people shrink from transposing anything exact into the artistic sphere, which represents a kind of qualitative mathesis. But what is the good of epistemology insisting that we can only arrive at objective knowledge by moving from one logical deduction to the next, and by excluding from knowledge all these artistic features—if nature and reality do in fact operate artistically at a certain level, so that they only yield to an artistic mode of comprehension?

In particular, we cannot examine what it is that shapes the human organism from within, as I described the day before yesterday—that operates in us as a first approximation to a super-sensible man—unless we allow logical thinking to flow over into a kind of artistic creation, and unless from a qualitative mathematics we can recreate the creative human form. All we need is to retain the scientific spirit and absorb the artistic spirit.

In short, we must create from the science of today an artistic outlook, whilst maintaining the whole spirit of science. In so doing, however, we approach the reconciliation of science and art that Goethe sensed when he said: “The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature—laws which, but for its appearance, would have remained eternally hidden from us.” Goethe was well aware that, if we seek to comprehend nature or the world as a whole solely with the kinds of thought that prove to be healthy and correct for the inorganic world, then the totality of the world simply will not yield to our enquiry. And we shall not find the bridge from inorganic to organic science until we transpose abstract cognition into inwardly vitalized cognition, which is at the same time an inward freedom of action.

In thus turning, within the mental endeavour of today, to a comprehension of living things, we also come closer to what was present in the Greek mind, not in the controlled and conscious way at which we aim, but rather instinctively. And no one can really understand what was being expressed even in Plato, still less in the pre-Socratic philosophers, unless he is aware of the presence there of a co-operation between the artistic and the philosophical and scientific elements in man. Only at the end of the Hellenic age—in philosophy, for instance, with Aristotle—does thought become separated from language and later develop via scholasticism into scientific thought. Only at the end of the Hellenic age is thought sifted out. Earlier on, thought is an artistic element in Greece. And, fundamentally, Greek philosophy can only be understood if it is also apprehended with an artistic understanding.

But this now leads us to see Greece in general as the civilization where science and art are still linked together. This is apparent both in its art and in its science. Naturally, I cannot go into every aspect of this in detail. But if you will look at Greek sculpture with sound common sense and a sound, spiritually informed eye, you will find that the Greek sculptor did not work from a model as is done today: his plastic creation sprang from an inner experience. In forming the muscle, the bent arm, the hand, he made what he felt within him. He felt an inner, living, second man—what I will call an ethereal man; he experienced himself through his soul and in this way felt his outward envelope. His inner experience went over into the sculpture. Art was a revelation of this vision. And the vision, which was carried over into the thought living in the language, became a science that retained an artistic character by being one with what the spirit of the Greek language made manifest to a Greek.

We thus enter, with Greece, a world accessible to us otherwise only if we advance from our own science, divorced from art, to a kind of knowledge that flows over into the artistic sphere. I would say: what we now evolve consciously was once instinctively experienced. Indeed, we can actually see how, in the course of history, this association of art and science gradually passes into the present complete separation of the two.

As humanity developed through Roman times into the Middle Ages, the higher levels of education and training had a quite different basis from that which later prevailed. Later, in the scientific age, the main concern was to communicate to men the results of observation and experiment. In our education, we live almost entirely by absorbing these results. Looking back at the period when some influence of Greek civilization was still at work, we can see that even scientific training touched man closely then and was aimed rather at developing abilities in him. We see how in the Middle Ages the student had to work through the seven liberal arts, as they were called: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. What mattered was abilities. What you were to become as a scientist you achieved through the seven liberal arts—and yet these were already well on the way to becoming knowledge and science, as later happened.

If you study the now much-despised scholasticism of the Middle Ages, which stands at the meeting-place of earlier times and our own, you will see what a wonderful training it provided in the art of thinking. One could wish that people today would only assimilate something of the best type of medieval scholasticism, which fostered in men a technique and art of thinking. This is particularly necessary if, as indeed we must, we are to arrive at clear-cut concepts. By starting from the attitude of today, however, with its strict separation of science, art and religion, and tracing human development back through the Middle Ages, we approach the civilization of Greece. And the further we go back in this, the more clearly we see the fusion of science and art.

Yet even in Greek civilization there is something separate from science and art: religious life. It affects men quite differently from scientific or artistic experience. The vital element in art and science exists objectively in space and time: the content of religious consciousness is beyond space and time. It belongs to eternity; admittedly, it is brought to birth by space and time, but we cannot approach it by remaining within space and time.

We can see even from the external documents what spiritual science today needs to discover about these things. And I should like to draw attention to a work which has just appeared in Austria and which is extraordinarily helpful in this connection. It is Otto Willmann's History of Idealism, a book that stands head and shoulders above many other currently concerned with similar problems. (One can judge such things dispassionately, even if they spring from views opposed to one's own, provided that they lead to something beneficial to spiritual life.)

In Greece we find on the one hand this unity of art and science, and on the other hand the religious life to which the Greek devotes himself. In popular religion, it is true, this is represented plastically, but in the religious mysteries it is gained by initiation in a deeper sense. But everywhere we can see that religion plays no part in the soul-powers evolved in science and art. Instead, in order to partake of the religious life, the soul must first take on that temper of piety, that universal love, in which it can comprehend revelations of the divine and spiritual realm with which man can unite in religious devotion.

Let us now look across at the Orient! The further back we go, the more we find that its spiritual life is something different again. Here, once more, we can be guided by what we have gained through our modern spiritual training: we ascend from experience of the vital concept to that inner pain and suffering which we have to overcome in order that our whole self may become a sense-organ or spiritual organ; and we cease to experience the world in the physical body alone, by existing in the world independently of our physical body. In so doing, we exist in the world in such a way that we learn to experience a reality outside space and time. We thus experience the reality of the spiritual sphere and its influence on the temporal in the way I have described. But if by overcoming pain and suffering within ourselves we do gain spiritual vision, we shall have brought into knowledge something of this other element—the element which, whilst remaining intact as real knowledge, real spiritual cognition, is continually leading knowledge into religious experience. And while continuing to experience what has survived from ancient times as a religious element in venerable traditional concepts, we also experience a similar spiritual element of more recent origin, if we work our way up to a cognition that can exist in the sphere of religious devotion.

Only then do we understand how deep in man lie the springs of the unity of religion, art and science in the ancient East. They were once united: what man knew and admitted to his corpus of ideas was another aspect of what he set up to shine before him in artistic beauty; and what he thus knew and comprehended, and made to radiate beauty, was also something spiritual to which he made his devotions and which he treated as subject to a higher order. Here we see religion, art and science united.

This, however, takes us back into an age where not only did thought live on the waves of words, but where also it was man's experience that thought inhabited regions deeper even than words, and was connected with the innermost texture of human nature. For this reason, the Indian yogi elicited thoughts from breathing, which goes deeper than words. Only gradually did thought raise itself into words and then, in modern civilization, beyond words. Originally, however, thought was connected with more intimate and deeper human experience, and that was when the unity of religious, artistic and scientific life could unfold in complete harmony.

Today, there remains in the Orient an echo of what I have described to you as a harmonious unity of religion, art and philosophy, as it appears for instance in the vedas. But it is an echo which requires to be understood—and which we cannot easily understand simply from the standpoint of that isolation of religion, art and science which exists in Western civilization. We do truly understand it, however, if by a new spiritual science we rise to an outlook that can again produce a harmony of religion, art and science. In the Orient, meanwhile, we still have the remnants of that early unity before us. If you look, you will see that just where the East touches and influences Europe, the echo still persists. A past historical epoch remains present at a certain spot on the earth. We can perceive this presence in a great philosopher of Eastern Europe, in Soloviev.

This philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century has a quite special effect on us. When we look at the philosophers of the West, John Stuart Mill or Herbert Spencer or others, we find that their standpoint has grown out of the scientific thinking I have described today. In Soloviev, however, something survives which presents religion, art and science as a unity. When we first begin to read Soloviev, it is true, we notice that he uses the philosophical language he found in Kant or Comte; he has complete command of the modes of expression of these philosophers of Western and Central Europe. But when we become at home in his mind and in what he expresses by the use of these modes, our awareness of him changes. He arouses a sense of the past; he seems like someone who has come to life again from the discussions that preceded the Council of Nicaea. We perceive, in fact, the tone that prevails in the discussions of the early Christian fathers; and in those early centuries of Christianity there certainly did survive an echo of the unity of religion and science. This unity, in which volition and thought also flow together, informs Soloviev's East European philosophy of life.

And if we look at the culture and civilization around us today, we do indeed find in the more Westerly parts just that separation of religion, art and science; what really belongs to our moment of history, the real basis of our activities and our picture of the world, is the discipline that is strictly built up on scientific thinking, whereas in art forms and religious matters we take over older traditional material. We can see today how few new styles are produced in art, and how everywhere old ones live on. The vital element in our time is what is vital in scientific thinking. We must wait for a time that will have lively imaginal thinking as I have described it—a thinking that will again lead to what is vital and will be capable of artistic creativity in new styles, without becoming insipidly allegorical and inartistic.

Scientific thought, we find, is thus the motive impulse of the immediate present, especially the further West we move; while in the East we find an echo of an earlier unity of religion, art and science.

This religious strain forms part of the temperament of East Europeans, with which they look at the world. They are able to understand the West only indirectly, via a spiritual development like that contained in our spiritual science movement; they have no direct understanding of the West, precisely because people in the West attempt to distinguish sharply religion and art from scientific thought.

We who live between the two must allow the world of the senses to obtrude on us and must entertain the thought appropriate to it; but we cannot help also looking inward and experiencing our inner self, and for the inner self we need religious experience. But I would say: more deeply buried in human nature than the religious experience we need within us and the scientific experience we need for observing the outside world, is the link between the two, artistic experience.

Artistic experience is thus something which today is not a first demand on life. We have seen that Western civilization is concerned with scientific thoughts, and Eastern civilization with religious ones. We have seen that we are part of an artistic tradition, but that we cannot feel entirely at home in it, indeed that the artistic tradition itself is in many ways a revival. And yet one must say: the yearning for a balance of this kind is certainly present in the central region between East and West. We see it, for example, when we look at Goethe.

For what was Goethe's great longing when, with what I would call his predominantly artistic talents, he was faced by the riddles of nature? His artistic sense transformed itself naturally into his scientific outlook. One could say: in Goethe, the representative Central European, we find art and science all of a piece; all of a piece, too, is Goethe's life when we follow its development and know how to locate it properly within the history of recent times. Goethe made himself at home in the collaboration of art and science. There thus arose in him a longing that can only be understood historically: the urge towards Italy, to a more southerly civilization. After looking at the works of art he found in the South, he wrote to his friends in Weimar something that followed on from the philosophy and science he had come to know there in Weimar. In Spinoza he had found divine power represented philosophically. That did not satisfy him. He wanted an extended and spiritualized approach to the world and to spirituality. And in the sight of the Southern works of art he wrote to his friends: “Here is necessity, here is God!” “I have an idea that the Greeks operated according to the laws by which nature herself operates; I am on their track.” Here Goethe is trying to merge science and art.

If in conclusion I introduce a personal note, I do so only to show you how a single pointer can reveal the way in which the Middle region can take up a position between East and West. I encountered this pointer some forty years ago here in Vienna. In my youth I made the acquaintance of Karl Julius Schröer—he was then lecturing on the history of German literature from Goethe onwards. In his introductory lecture he made a number of important points; and he then said something entirely characteristic of the longing that instinctively inspired the best minds in Central Europe. Schröer's words, too, were instinctive. Yet in fact he expressed a longing to combine art and science, to combine Western scientific thought and Eastern religious thought in artistic vision; and he summed up what he wanted to say in the, to me, significant words: “The Germans have an aesthetic conscience.”

Of course, this does not describe an actual state of affairs. It expresses a longing, the longing to look at art and science together. And the feeling when we do look at them together has been finely expressed by another Central European, one whom I have just characterized: when we can look at science and art together, we can then raise ourselves to religious experience, if only the science and art contain true spirituality in Goethe's sense. This is what he meant by saying:

Whoever has science and art.
Has religion too;
Whoever does not have them,
Let him have religion.

Anyone with an aesthetic conscience attains to scientific and religious conscientiousness too. From this we can see where we stand today.

I do not like using the word “transition”—all periods are transitional—but today, in a time of transition, what matters is the kind of transition. In our time we have experienced and developed to its supreme triumph the separation of religion, art and science. What must now be sought, and what alone can provide an understanding between East and West, is the harmonization, the inner unity of religion, art and science. And this inner unity is what the philosophy of life of which I have been speaking seeks to attain.

We describe the features of the earth in accordance with the principles of physical geography. In the same way, the spiritual impulses at work on earth (and already briefly characterized in these lectures) can be described by a kind of spiritual geography—especially the interplay of Eastern and Western impulses in human life, with all their various differences. What I have to say today in this direction is bound to remain rather sketchy; but it is more important to find a specific point of view for looking at much that I have already outlined than to give a detailed description.

The relationship of East and West is often expressed symbolically by saying that light comes from the East. Looking at the East, Western man—the man of recent civilization in general—receives the impression of a dream-like spiritual life. Modern spiritual life is used to sharply delineated concepts, closely linked to external observation; in contrast, the notions of the Orient—shifting, fluctuating, less closely and less sharply linked to externals—show up as dream-like. Admittedly, from this dream-like spiritual life, embodied in the most splendid poems, the Vedas, there did of course then develop the clear-cut concepts of a comprehensive philosophy—Vedanta, for example. These concepts were not gained by examining external data, that is analytically, but emerged from an inwardly experienced and apprehended spiritual life.

When this dream-like spiritual life works on us, however, and we lovingly submit to it without at first noticing how much it differs from our own, it has a curious effect. Once we allow its various configurations to affect our soul, we cannot stop there. We cannot merely take over its concepts and ideas. In absorbing them, whether from the literature or the philosophy (including such forms of these as have survived in the East down to the present), we feel a spiritual need to go beyond these images, ideas and concepts. When an Oriental idea, such as that of man's relation to the secrets and the mysterious workings of nature and the world, affects us, it is often accompanied in our mind by something that symbolizes it for the Orient too: the flower of the lotus, as it folds its petals about what must remain mysteriously hidden. We may immerse ourselves lovingly in shifting concepts that are more fitted gently to touch external phenomena and surround them with a mist, than to perceive them in sharp contours, and we may enter their intertwining branches; and if we do, there will inevitably appear to us all the intertwining, branching vegetation of the East and, with it, all that the human hand, the human spirit and civilization have produced from stone and other materials in line with these flowing, branching concepts. We may say: in immersing itself in these concepts, our soul inevitably sees before it a nature similar in its life, diversity and imaginative working to the soul's experience of the concepts themselves.

There appears to be no objective reason for man to abandon this Oriental spiritual activity in favour of a “faithful observation of nature;” indeed, it seems to me rather that there is in the Oriental concepts themselves an incentive not merely to accept them, but to apply them to the outside world. Europeans may feel that such things cannot be applied to the outside world, because of their vagueness, their (to them) fantastic character. If so, we may ask: How, then, can we track, with sharply delineated concepts, the shapes of clouds, fluctuating and rapidly changing as they are? Yet track them we must, if we wish to observe nature's workings in immediate revelation, as they appear to the human senses and the human soul.

Why is this so? It seems to me that there can be only one reason: that in what reaches us from this Eastern spiritual activity, there survives an element from which it was once directly created.

At the time when the Oriental was developing the finest part of his philosophy of life (which has since come down to his descendants in a partially decadent condition), the East created everything with devoted love. Love lives in each of its ideas, concepts and images and in them we perceive love. The love seeks to flow out into objects. And it flows out according to its nature, and conjures up before our soul the symbols that the Oriental established, with an inner understanding of much that functions supersensibly, in seeking to establish what he perceived as the spiritual dement in things. Of course, this is not to assert that this configuration of spirit, if extended over all the earth, would be an unmixed blessing for the development of the world. But once it has appeared on earth, and exerted its influence over other regions, it must be considered objectively, especially at a time when we need to foster understanding between men.

Against it, we may set the particular outlook that has developed, certainly with no less justification, but in a quite different form, further West—and in this respect we ourselves belong in many ways to the West. Here, we find, it is regarded as an ideal to stand back from what the senses observe directly, what extends in space and time, and to test what nature offers, and what should lead us to the world's secret, for position, motion, dimensions and weight. What presents itself directly to the eye is dissected and placed under a microscope, and gives rise to notions that could only emerge under a microscope.

Let us imagine for a moment that we are in the laboratory: how heavily equipped we are with these concepts, so remote from direct observation! Look how we regard the light flooding through the world! How we regard it by means of abstract concepts! We need them, if we are to reach understanding. But how remote are the observations we record on light and colour from what we encounter in wood and meadow, cloud-shape and sun! We may say: what we formulate in our sharply delineated concepts—with the balance, the measuring-rod, the most varied counting devices—takes us into some of nature's shallows and solves some riddles, but it does not take us to direct observation of nature. It is all very well to say: direct your attention to sensory observation and then try to derive your philosophy of life from it. But this is not what happens at all! The scientific view of life we establish is far removed from what the senses observe.

What we ought to say is this: if we establish our knowledge by using the equipment of learning with which we have harvested perhaps the finest fruits of present-day natural science, we shall have to retune our soul before we can approach nature again. If as botanists we have used the microscope extensively and learnt about cell-life, and formed concepts in the atomistic manner of today, we shall have to retune our soul before we can recapture a love of the immediate world of plants as it grows and flowers. If we have formed a scientific concept of the structure of animal and man, again we shall have to retune if we want to move on to direct observation of the animal's shape and actions, and to enjoy the way it plays in the meadow or turns its melancholy or unmoving gaze upon us or looks at us confidingly. Equally, we shall have to retune our soul to share in what the eye can see when it looks at the human shape, tracing its planes with an artistic eye. The Oriental has no retuning to do. Since what he called his science was shot through with love, it led him out to immediate observation. And this was a direct echo of what he experienced in his soul.

These are differences of temper in the attitude to life of East and West. And these different tempers multifariously combine in the man of the region between. In what we experience scientifically, artistically and religiously, there flows much of the temper I have just been characterizing as the one that comes to us from the Orient. In other respects again, we are moved by something of the way of experiencing the world kindled by that scientific attitude which the West has developed—by youthful science and knowledge, so to speak, as against the old-established ones of the East. And in every soul in the civilization that lies between, these two currents flow together. In the last analysis, the life that surrounds us in Europe is a fusion—and one whose component currents we really need to understand.

The contact between the tempers of East and West in our present spiritual life can be characterized in another way.

From what I have just said of the East, one thing is clear about the Oriental. In growing into his spiritual life, he experiences it as immediate reality; he bears it with him in his soul as the reality self-evident to him. External nature, and indeed the entire external world right up to the constellations, seems to him an echo which is, however, fundamentally the same as what he bears within him. Yet he cannot regard as reality what strikes him as an echo, what seems to him a reflection, as he can regard as reality what he experiences directly in his soul. He is closely linked with what he experiences in the spiritual sphere and can say “It is,” because he feels its existence as if it were his own, and in this way understands its mode of being. When he looks out at the reflection of this existence, he knows that it is not reality in the same sense. If he did not illuminate it with the light that streams from within him, it would be dumb and dark. And in becoming more and more aware of this, he arrives at a temper of soul that says: truth and reality reside in what the soul experiences directly. What is reflected to it from without is illusion, maya, incomplete reality, becoming reality only when it is touched by what must first reveal itself through the human soul.

Thus we see how the East developed the view that the spiritual world is reality, and the outside world, that of the senses, is semblance, the great illusion, maya. It would, however, be wrong to believe on this account that, in the pre-Buddhist period for example, the Oriental averted his glance completely from the outside world. He accepts) it, even if in a higher sense he must admit that in what extends in space and time he is dealing not with complete reality but with an illusion, the great non-being, maya. But this in turn gives a particular temper to the life of the soul in the East: the soul feels a close link with the spiritual world and sees, in all that exists in the external world of the senses, a replica of the original shape of the world as it exists in the spirit. And in the end this grows into the view that one's own human sensuous substance is a replica of a human being whose true existence is in the spiritual world. And here I would say: the Oriental, quite consistently, regards the world as made up of replicas of a spiritual world, just as he regards himself as a replica of what he was before he descended into the physical and sensuous world. From his standpoint, the view of man and the view of nature are in complete harmony.

This harmony is possible; though no longer consonant with our views, it does indeed express a truth, if somewhat one-sidedly, as we can see once again if, with the research methods of spiritual science, which I have been describing in the last few days, we ourselves take a look at this Oriental mode of knowledge.

As I have shown, by awakening powers dormant in the soul we can attain a view of the spiritual world that yet suits modern man; we can look once more into a spiritual world; and find this spiritual world unfolding before our “mind's eye” just as the physical and sensuous world unfolds before our physical eye. When we develop this vision, however, the spiritual world does not remain a mere pantheistic and nebulous embodiment of universal spirituality; it becomes just as concrete in its individual forms as the world of the senses in those of the realms of nature. There will then follow a view of man that I should now like to characterize.

Let us start with something familiar to us at every moment in our lives: an experience of the outside world. We have entered into this external experience through our sensory perception and perhaps also through setting our will in motion in some activity. We live in conjunction with the data of the outside world. For us, this is an immediate experience. In the last analysis, human existence on earth is composed of such experiences. From them, we retain thought-images, which become our memories. We can look back on our experiences through bearing within us faded, shadowy and, in fact, mental images of them.

Let us be quite honest with ourselves and consider whether, at any moment in life, our consciousness contains very much more than memories of external, factual, sensory experiences. Of course, many a nebulous mystic believes that he can summon up eternal things from the depths of his soul. If he looked more closely and could really test the structures he summons from his soul, he would discover that as a rule they are no more than transformed external perceptions. Within man, memories are not only faithfully preserved; they are also transformed in many ways, and man then fails to recognize them. He thinks that he is acting as a mystic and summoning something from the depths of his soul, when he has only called up from his memory a transformed external experience. Of course, we need only think of mathematical truths to realize that all kinds of mental structures do establish themselves in the life of the soul. But as a rule it is not these structures that the mystic seeks.

However, anyone who simply wishes to accept the everyday life of the soul, as it appears in ordinary consciousness, must say: This life is made up of images that are the remains of our experiences gained-through perceptions, and of other experiences within the external sensuous world. When we look at our soul and at the spiritual element that permeates it, as we have it in physical life on earth, we can therefore say: outside is the physical world extending in space, the world that unfolds its causes and effects in time, the world, that is, of facts. Here within is the world of shadows in the soul; we do indeed experience it in general as something spiritual and vital, but its content we experience only as a replica of the world of facts and of the senses. Now, paradoxical as the outlook of today may find it, for the attitude that I have been expounding in the last few days, the reverse comes about: in empty consciousness, as a result of meditation, the spiritual in the world, the spiritual within natural phenomena, is really experienced; it is observed also as the soul-spiritual element in man himself, as he is before he descends into his physical existence from a spiritual world; the spiritual is observed concretely by the spirit-organ we have developed; the world about us becomes spiritual, just as to our senses it is sensuous and physical. And when all this happens, we begin to perceive—as if in recollection of the times when we lived as spiritual beings in purely spiritual worlds—how in its particulars our physical organism is a replica of the spiritual world that surrounds us. With physiology and anatomy we can observe our lungs, heart and other organs only as outer objects; but when we can see the spiritual world about us, then the lungs and heart as they really are within us will become for us a replica in the physical sphere of what is spiritually prefigured. Just as in our ordinary consciousness the world outside is physical, and our soul creates replicas as its experiences; so now we learn that there is a spiritual world outside and that the replicas of this spiritual world exist in our own organs. We come to know man's structure only in coming to know the spiritual world. What is usually called matter then ceases to have the significance it has assumed in recent civilization, just as spirit ceases to have the significance of something abstract that it has had in recent civilization. We can thus see that in our organic functioning there is in fact a replica of what we were before we descended into our earthly existence.

At this stage, we need no longer be frightened even by materialism, in so far as there is justification for it—and even materialism has done some good and brought us countless discoveries. We look at the human brain and the human nervous system in its physical operation. Of course, we agree that ordinary, everyday thinking is a function of these physical organs. We are entirely in agreement with what exact science must hold about these matters today. But on the other hand we know that the material forms operating within us are themselves simply a transformed reflection of the spiritual sphere. For this reason, the material is acceptable, and because, in transforming itself into mortal man, the spiritual has sought out the capacity of brain and nerves to achieve in a material replica what is spiritually prefigured.

Modern man can see this in his “mind's eye” by developing the powers of cognition of which I have been speaking in the last few days. Yet there is a dream-like anticipation of it, I would say, in the Oriental philosophy of life I have outlined. This philosophy has become old and senile, but certain of its features still work effectively in our heart and soul. In its instinctive clairvoyance, the ancient Orient sensed that the spiritual world is a reality with which it felt closely linked, and that nature, and the natural element in man himself, is a replica of the spiritual; it provides an external garment for the revelation of what is inwardly spiritual.

Yet it would be wrong to say that the Oriental did not observe nature. His organs were finely attuned to its observation. For him, however, from everything that he faithfully observed and lovingly honoured as a replica, something of the spirit shone. Nature revealed spirit to him, shone spirit upon him at every turn. And this spirit was his reality. What lay before him outside was maya.

Even in Buddhism, which gained a far greater influence on Oriental life than we usually think—since it later assumed the most varied forms—we can see how the sense of inhabiting a spiritual world paled as man and world developed. The gaze was increasingly directed upon what was maya, and experience of the great illusion, the great non-being, maya, gradually became predominant. There thus arose an awareness of the need for redemption from what can be experienced within maya—experienced, that is, in the manner of Buddha, who regarded our direct experiences of this maya as a crowd of sorrows that flow in on man.

But it faded, this sense of inhabiting a spiritual world; and this is what justifies us in considering the early Oriental philosophy of life as something instinctive and even partial: if we do return to something like it, we must do so with complete self-possession and lucid consciousness. The impairment of human activity relative to the demands of the physical, external world must not occur a second time in the world's development. Man must never again escape into spiritual activity and so prevent himself from devoting his full strength to earthly tasks—which are what the Oriental perceives as maya, even if in deference to modern concepts he does not say so; whereas he perceives as reality what reveals itself within him. He has within him a light that is a direct reflection of the divine and spiritual elements in the world.

Against what I have thus described as the spiritual geography influencing our modern life, I should now like to set another illustration from the development of the human spirit and the world, but this time from the immediate present. Our civilization, which even in Europe is now of some antiquity, is subject to pressures from certain spheres, whence arise social longings and also social conflicts. Anyone who has moved in these spheres will have come across the phenomenon I am about to describe.

Although no one could properly accuse me of Socialist opinions, I was for some long time a teacher in Socialist circles. My intention was to do something for which in fact the time had not yet come (it is more than twenty years ago now): to propagate a spiritual life that could lead to theories that are in closer accord with reality than those derived from abstract or modified Marxism, which in many respects indeed are not realistic at all. There exists in these circles a basic attitude—something we can recognize as a first step, yet which is as deeply rooted in the soul as was the sense of maya at which the Oriental finally arrived. And in observing this attitude, we are profoundly struck by a word that expresses many unconscious feelings, unconscious ideas and concepts, unconscious longings too, a word that we hear again and again and must recognize as having characterized wide circles of humanity for centuries. Encompassing millions of people is a mood that this word expresses. The word is “ideology,” by which is meant “idealistic theorizing.” It derives from an attitude that the proletarian class in particular has absorbed into its education. The scientific method, with its increasing emphasis on matter, has given rise to the view that historical reality consists simply of economic struggles, economic patterns, class struggles, in short of the immediate material elements, externally sensuous and physical, in human life and history; and that therefore economic forces are the true reality.

This economic materialism, which is far more widespread than many upper-class people today believe, is a consequence of the general materialistic outlook. Nowadays, this is taken to be overcome even in science; yet it has a wide following particularly in the West.

And what is this “ideology?” It is law, morality, the realm of the beautiful, religious concepts, political theory, in short everything that makes up spiritual life. These things are not true reality, but bubbles and baubles arising from true reality, which resides in material struggles and patterns. “Ideology” is a way of indicating that what man experiences within himself—whether it is art or science or law or maxims of state or religious impulses—is maya, to use the Oriental term.

If we do not just take it at its face value, but can feel what millions of people are thinking, then the word “ideology” points to something that must inevitably assume the most formidable dimensions unless it can be set on the right course in good time. What the soul experiences and shapes within is not reality: true reality is only what exists externally in tangible facts.

Inside Western civilization, therefore, there has developed an outlook diametrically opposed to that which long ruled the Orient and still survives even today as a kind of antiquated trimming. There, true reality is what is experienced in the spirit, and maya what proceeds outside in physical actuality; here, maya or “ideology” (which is indeed a translation of the word “maya,” but applied to the spiritual sphere) is what is experienced in the spirit, and reality what is tangibly displayed, palpably there in the world.

In its development, the world aims at complete realization of its various potentialities. Just as the one extreme developed, in the Orient, so too the other was bound in its turn to take hold of humanity. To bring about a fruitful development of man and world, however, and to change the forces of decline into constructive ones, we must understand the significance of this mood, this “ideology.” It is recent and therefore a first step.

Let us look once more at what modern spiritual science can tell us. In the Orient, there was a dreamy, dark, instinctive knowledge that there exists a spiritual reality, with a sensory replica here in the physical realm. Because the soul's attention was devoted primarily to this spiritual reality, sensory reality came to be regarded as unreality, external appearance, maya. Yet this maya is important in more than one way. Although the world may be maya, our efforts, which are a reality for us, must still be applied to it in the first instance. But it is important also for the precept “Know thyself,” for a truly human attitude. Why? Well, it is true that we can now elevate ourselves to a life in the spiritual world, as I have described; that we can see by means of sharply delineated concepts and thus understand what appeared to the Orient like a dream. But the experience of such a world would never have created in human development the impulse to freedom.

When man feels closely linked to the spiritual world, he feels at the same time inwardly determined by and dependent on it. Therefore he and his consciousness had to move out of it and, for a passing phase of history (in which we now are), to turn to a world of mere fact. Confronted with this external actuality, the life of man's soul becomes an image of it. The spirit informing this life turns into abstract concepts and gradually becomes a mere image, to be recognized as a replica.

I have already suggested that, by having images within us, we can be free. Mirror-images do not determine our actions. If we wish to conform to mirror-images, which in themselves are powerless, the impulse to do so must come from us. The same is true of abstract concepts. And in making its appearance in pure thinking, our noblest feature, the moral and religious element, becomes for us an impulse of freedom. It is a most valuable component of human life. But in a period when man finds himself confronted with physical actuality, it makes its appearance in abstract thinking.

At the moment when the moral element, in the shape of moral intuition, makes its appearance in pure thinking, the task of the epoch is fulfilled. The epoch has developed from spirit-reality to the spirit as abstraction and (I would say, exaggerating a little) it now interprets everything spiritual as maya, as mere illusion, as “ideology.” We have a certain right to interpret as “ideology” everything that is a reflection of external natural existence. At the moment when the moral element, in the shape of intuition, enters this maya-thinking, this “ideology,” we reach the first stage at which we can recognize once more that we must awaken this “ideology,” which we experience as mere semblance, to inner life by energizing ourselves and allowing the life that is hidden within us to stream forth. The meaning of the world had to become “ideology” for humanity in order that man himself could infuse it with his own reality.

This was necessary for man's experience of freedom, which is something that has only been attained in the West and in recent civilization. It was necessary that man should first feel himself to be in a sphere of unreality when in contact with everything that is most valuable to him—his art, his science, his moral concepts, in short his entire spiritual life—and that everything transitory that shone on him should appear to be the only reality. For this reality, rightly contemplated, cannot in any way impair his freedom—the freedom that depends on his being himself a spiritual being who creates in physical and sensuous actuality only a replica of the spirit.

We see, therefore, that “ideology” represents in an extreme form an attitude that we really need in face of such concepts of nature as position, motion, dimensions and numbers. If nature were to provide us with anything other than concepts, it would never make us free. Only if we rise to concepts that will then appear as mere “ideology” to someone who is still stranded at the previous stage, can a new and spiritually real form of the higher world infuse these initially unreal concepts. This is the first step, from which must emerge for man a new form of the spiritual world. And when we encounter the exaggerated notion of “ideology,” those of us who are not bogged down in the immediate opinions of the day but can see beyond them to the world's development, must conclude: it was necessary for man to reach a stage of development at which, looking at only one side of the world and himself, he could speak of “ideology;” it is equally necessary now for him to attain the decision, conviction, power and courage to infuse into this “ideology” a spiritually perceived and experienced world. Otherwise, although perhaps it may be discussed philosophically, the “ideology” will remain merely “ideology.” And as we shall see in the second part of these lectures, which will be devoted to Anthroposophy and Sociology, in that case the forces of decline will quite definitely proliferate.

Before us, then, are two pictures: spiritual world as reality and world of the senses as maya—world of the senses as reality and spiritual world as maya. We need a philosophy of life that is capable of injecting the spiritual world, regarded as “ideology,” with spiritual intuition, spiritual imagination and inspiration, so that what today appears unutterably empty is filled once more with spiritual meaning. At the same time, it must be able to perceive that what the Orient regards as illusion and maya is a reality in the sense that it is a true and faithful replica, a transformation of the spiritual world, which was necessary for the development of humanity in freedom. If we are to reach an understanding of these two diametrically opposed world-pictures, we need a philosophy that can combine them and not just add them together mechanically, one that will develop through its own inner life, not from the one or the other, but in a spiritual progression from human substance itself.

And these world-pictures do ultimately affect everything that we experience spiritually. They certainly condition individual features of life and of human attitudes. As a Central European here in Central Europe, I would rather not give my own opinion on this particular point. I prefer to pass on the opinion expressed some years ago by an Englishman who compared Western and

Central Europe in relation to a certain aspect of spiritual life. This Englishman wanted to exemplify the way in which spiritual life has revealed itself in particular phenomena. He referred to the appearance, at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties of the last century, of Buckle's important work, The History of Civilization. Buckle, he noted, views history mainly—if not so exclusively as do the Marxists, for example—in terms of economic drives, so that ultimately spiritual life is taken to arise from the action and interaction of economic forces. We do not always have to condemn a view of this kind; we can take a positive attitude, and say: since man is in part an economic being, a historical consideration of human life from this standpoint also was needed at a certain stage in human development. The Englishman then refers to another book that was produced in Central Europe at the same time as Buckle wrote his History of Civilization—Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The Englishman himself observes that a quite different spirit prevails here; Burckhardt describes how men feel, what their attitude to one another is, and how through the opinions they have of each other they enter into certain relationships, which in turn determine other events occurring among them. And the Englishman finally sums up—I am simply quoting his opinion here—by saying that Buckle describes man as he eats and drinks, whilst Burckhardt describes man as he thinks and feels.

And if I may now add something myself: if, as we have heard, the West looks at eternal actuality and derives spiritual life from it, and the Central European looks at what inhabits the realm of the soul, but the soul in its earthly existence, then one would have to add, thirdly, that Eastern man (and in many respects even the East European) describes man as he preaches and sacrifices.

And so we might say, supplementing the Englishman's verdict: in the West, man is described as he eats and drinks (I say this in no pejorative sense); in the Middle region, as he thinks and feels; in the East, as he preaches and sacrifices. In this preaching and sacrificing is operative what I have described as the attitude of the East. Similarly, in the view of history that has become generally familiar today and that is also reflected in the notion of “ideology,” there operates what I have described as the attitude of the West. But we also need to see how in the mode attributed to the Centre, where man is presented as he thinks and feels, the two currents meet. We are called upon today to understand this confluence correctly, by taking a first step that will gradually lead us onward to spirituality.

I will try to sum up in a single image the two attitudes I have sought to represent, in order to show where understanding is really needed between East and West. To do so, I should like to recall that, at a time when the physical and sensuous world, and human existence also, was already felt as maya in the East, he who is called the Buddha encountered in his wanderings the most varied manifestations of human suffering on earth. Among these manifestations was a corpse; death confronted the Buddha, and through contemplation of death he reached his conclusion: Life is Suffering.

This was the tenor of Oriental civilization six hundred years before the establishment of Christianity. Six hundred years later, Christianity was founded, and henceforward we have a significant symbol: the crucifix, the raised cross with the Redeemer, the human body on it. In the West, countless men look at this body, at the image of it; just as countless men, who have become disciples of Buddha, have looked at the body from which Buddha drew his teaching. The East acknowledged: Life is suffering, we long for redemption. Western men, in looking at the image of the dead body, however, did not simply say: Life is suffering! For them, the sight of death became a symbol of resurrection, resurrection of the spirit through inner human power. It became a symbol of the fact that suffering can be redeemed by overcoming the physical; that it is overcome, not by turning away from it in asceticism, but by keeping it in full view, not regarding it as maya, and overcoming it through work, activity, and the vigour of the will. Out of the introspective life of the East arose a contemplation of the dead body, with the conclusion: Life is suffering, man must be redeemed from life. Out of the life of the West, attempting always activity, there arose, at the sight of the body, the view: Life must develop power within itself, so that even the forces of death can be overcome, and human work can do its task in the development of the world.

The one philosophy is old and jaded. Yet it contains things of such great value that, even though we may treat it as senile, we still approach it as something venerable. We honour an old man without expecting him to profess the views of youth. What we encounter in the West, however, has the character of a first step. We have shown what the “ideology” in its attitude must become. It is young, it must develop youthful power in itself so that it may attain spiritual meaning in its own way, just as the Orient did.

In honouring the Orient for its spirituality, there is something we still need to be clear about: we must build up our own spirituality from the first step we have taken here in the West. We must so shape it, however, that we can achieve an understanding with any view that may exist on earth, especially old and venerable ones. This will be possible if, as Central and Western men, we come to understand that, although our philosophy of life has faults, they are the faults of youth.

If we do understand this, it is a summons to have the courage to be strong. If for all our respect, love and admiration for its spirituality, we take what we need from the East, not with passive receptivity, but with a busy activity rooted in what, today, is still perhaps unspiritual in the West, yet contains the germ of spirituality—if we add strength to respect, then we shall do the right thing for human development.

Nowadays, if you start to discuss, with someone who is interested in these matters, the possibility of achieving a knowledge of spiritual life in conjunction with the sensuous and physical world, you will generally meet with a sympathetic reception. At any rate, the question will be raised: Are there paths by which man can reach some kind of spiritual knowledge? even though it may often turn out that the only knowledge of a spiritual world allowed is one that takes the form of general concepts and ideas, a vague pantheism perhaps or a conception of life reminiscent of mysticism. If however you should then attempt, as it became necessary for me to do in my book Occult Science, to describe a real cosmology, a science of the origin and development of the world in specific terms, discussion with a rationalist is usually at an end. He reacts strongly to the suggestion that anyone today might be in a position, on some epistemological basis or other, to make a statement about a spiritual origin of the world, about forces operating spiritually in the world's development, and about the possibility that this development, after having passed through a sensuous and physical phase, might lead back once more into a spiritual form of existence. The reaction of the rationalist to such a suggestion, implicit in the specific descriptions in Occult Science, for example, is to avoid having anything to do with someone who makes claims of this kind. He will think that, if a man sets out to make specific statements about such matters, he is probably on the verge of losing his reason; at least, we cannot compromise ourselves by becoming involved in discussing these details.

It is naturally impossible, in a single lecture, to present any details of cosmology as they follow from the philosophy of life I am advocating. Instead, I should like today to try and show you how spiritual science can arrive at a cosmology and a knowledge of the spiritual impulses underlying the world's development. The reproach that is usually levelled at anyone who now attempts such a task is that of anthropomorphism, that is of taking features of human mental life and projecting them—in accordance with one's wishes or some other predilections or prejudices—onto the cosmos. A closer examination of the way in which the philosophy of life presented here attains its cosmological results, however, should be enough to demonstrate that there cannot be the slightest question of anthropomorphism. On the contrary, this philosophy seeks its data about the world and its development through a spiritual cognition that is just as objective as the scientific study of nature.

You will have gathered, from the lectures I have given so far, what the view of the world I am advocating aims at in its research methods. On the one hand, it desires to preserve everything that humanity has acquired over the last three or four centuries in scientific conscientiousness and a sure and careful method of seeking truth. In particular, this view of life certanly does not wish to exceed the limits of natural knowledge, in so far as this is appropriate, but to observe carefully where the limits of purely natural knowledge are located. The existence of such limits is much discussed today, and has been for a long time. We can say that the opinions of trained natural scientists on this subject today are founded on notions that more philosophically inclined minds derive from Kant, and other minds, to whom a more popular treatment appeals, from Schopenhauer and others. A great deal of material bearing on this point could be given.

Now it is probably true to say that Kant and Schopenhauer, and all those who follow in their wake, are dangerous guides to the discernment of the limits of natural knowledge, because these thinkers, very enticingly as I would say, stopped short at a certain point in their consideration of the human cognitive faculty and the capacities of the human psyche. They drew the line at a certain point; and their approach to this point is extraordinarily shrewd. Yet the fact remains that, as soon as we become aware of the need to consider man as a whole and to take into account all that can follow from man's physical and spiritual organism in the shape of cognitive activity and inner experience, we shall also realize that a one-sided critique of the cognitive faculty can only lead to one-sided conclusions. If we wish to examine the relation of man to the world, in order to establish whether there is a path that leads from man to knowledge of the world, we must take him as a whole and consider him in his entire being.

It is from this point of view that I should now like to raise the question: Assuming that the limits of our knowledge of nature, which scientists too have been discussing since Du Bois-Reymond (though they are viewed very differently today from the way he saw them half a century ago), did not exist, what would be man's position in the world? Assuming that man's theoretical cognitive faculty, by which he connects his concepts with observations and the results of experiments in order to arrive at the laws of the universe, could also penetrate without difficulty into the organic realm; if it could advance as far as life, there would be little reason why it should stop short of the higher modes of existence—the realms of soul and spirit. Assuming therefore that the ordinary consciousness we employ in the sciences and work with in ordinary life were able at all times not only to approach the outside of life, but also to penetrate below the surface of things to their inner being: if there were thus no limit of knowledge, what sort of constitution would a man need? Well, his relation to the world would be such that his entire being, his inmost experience, would be constantly entering into everything with its spiritual antennae. Though this may appear paradoxical to some people, a dispassionate observer of life and of the relationship of man to the world will realize: a being whose ordinary everyday consciousness was unlimited would inevitably lack the capacity to love.

And if we reflect on the significance of this capacity for our whole life, and on what we are in life because we can love, we shall conclude: on this mortal earth we should not be men, in the sense in which we must in fact be men, if we did not have love. But love demands that we should meet another individual, whatever realm of nature it may belong to, as self-contained individuals. We must not invade this other individual with our clear and lucid thinking; on the contrary, at the very moment when we develop love, our essence must become active—that part of us which is beyond clear and pellucid concepts! The moment we were able to invade the other individual with clear and lucid concepts, love would die. Since man must be a creature of love by virtue of his task on earth, and since when man has a certain capacity it conditions his whole being, we can conclude: man definitely needs limits to his knowledge of the outside world, and must not penetrate beyond them if, within his ordinary consciousness, he is to fulfil his task here on earth. The property that enables him to be a creature of love has its obverse side in his ordinary knowledge, which has to stop at the limit that is set for us in order that we may be creatures capable of love.

This is just an outline that each individual can fill out for himself; even so, it reveals something that has certain consequences. It shows, for example, that we must go forward from the premises of Kantian philosophy, and look at man as a whole, inhabiting life as a living creature. This is the first thing that the view of the world I am advocating has to say about the limits of scientific knowledge—and we shall be hearing more about them.

Here is one of the two guiding principles for any view of life and the world that is to be taken seriously today. The other, to which I have already drawn attention in the last few days, can be described by saying: any view of life and the world that is to be taken seriously today must not lose itself in nebulous mysticism. It is a fact that even noble minds at the present time, observing that natural science is limited and cannot provide us with a springboard into the spiritual world, throw themselves into the arms of mysticism, especially the older forms of humanity's mystical endeavour. Yet in face of the other kinds of knowledge man requires* today, this certainly cannot be the right way. Mysticism seeks, by looking within man, to reach the actual foundations of existence. But once again, human knowledge is limited when it comes to looking within man. Assuming that man were capable of looking into himself without limit, to the point where the deepest essence of human nature is manifest, where man is in touch with the eternal springs of existence and links his personal existence with that of the cosmos: what would he then have to do without?—Those who gain great inner satisfaction from mysticism often summon up the most varied things from within themselves. I have already indicated that what is brought up in this way ultimately turns out, on closer examination by a true student of the soul, to rest on some external observation. This observation sinks into subconscious depths, is permeated by feeling and will and organic process, and then appears again in an altered form. Anything observed can undergo a transformation or metamorphosis so great that the mystic will believe he is drawing from the depths of his soul something that must demonstrate the eternal foundations of the soul itself. Even such outstanding mystics as Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler are not completely free from the error that creeps in when we mistake altered concepts of ordinary consciousness for independent revelations of the human soul.

Objective reflection on this state of affairs, however, enables us to answer the question: What would man have to do without if, in ordinary consciousness, he could see right into himself at any moment? He would have to do without something that is essential for the well-ordered existence of our soul: a reliable memory.

For what is the relation of memory to the claims of mysticism? What I am now going to outline in a rather popular way I could also present quite scientifically. But we only need an explanation, and this can be conveyed in popular terms. When we observe the outside world and inwardly transform what we experience there as whole men, so that it can later reappear as memory, the spiritual result of our external observation actually falls on something like a mirror within us. This is a simile, but at the same time it is more than a simile. Impressions from outside cannot be allowed to stimulate us so much that we carry them down into our deepest self. It must be possible for outside stimuli to be reflected. Our organism, our human essence must behave like a reflecting device. Ought we, then, to break through this reflecting device in order to reach what lies behind the mirror?

That is what the mystic is trying to do, without knowing it. But we need our reliable, well-ordered memory. If there are any gaps in it, as far back into our childhood as we can remember, we shall fall victim to pathological mental states. Man must be so constituted that he retains the experiences that come from outside. He cannot therefore be so constituted that he can penetrate directly into his deepest self. If we make the mystic's attempt to penetrate into our innermost self with ordinary consciousness, we shall only reach the reflecting device. And it is right, from the point of view of our humanity, that we should there come up against the concepts we have absorbed from outside. Here again, we must look at the whole man, as he needs to be if he is to possess a memory, in order to see that mysticism is impossible for ordinary consciousness.

There are thus two limits to ordinary consciousness: a limit of natural knowledge, in relation to the outside, physical and sensuous world; and a limit in relation to mystical endeavours. And it is just from a clear insight into these two limits that there can in turn arise that other endeavour I have described here as befitting a modern search for the spiritual world. I mean the endeavour to draw from the soul dormant powers of cognition, so that by attaining a different form of consciousness we can see into the spiritual world.

With the kinds of knowledge I have been speaking of in the last few days, we can look at man as a creature capable of love and as a creature capable of memory. When we do so, we shall recognize that ordinary consciousness (operating through the senses, the intellect and the logical faculty) must call a halt in face of the outside world: for it is only by treating itself as a mere instrument for systematizing the outside world that it can become capable of developing further and creating that vitalized thinking of which I have spoken in previous lectures.

When we examine our own reaction to nature by means of this vitalized thinking, we find that, at the very moment when we have developed our logical faculty to the point where it provides a means of systematizing external phenomena, our ordinary consciousness is extinguished in the act of cognition. However clear our consciousness is up to a certain point in a given process of knowing nature, at this point it really goes over in part into a state of sleep, into the subconscious. Why is this? It is because at this point there must come into operation the faculty that diffuses something more than abstract thinking into the world around us: one that carries our being out into it.

For inasmuch as we love, our relationship to the world around us is not one of cognition but one of reality, a real relationship of being. Only by developing vital thinking are we able to carry over our experience into the reality of things. We pour out our vitalized thoughts; follow up the beginnings of spiritual life that exist outside (in the shape of spiritual world-rhythm and appearance); and, by cultivating empty consciousness as I have described, advance further and further into the spiritual world, which is linked with the physical and sensuous one. Compared with ordinary consciousness, we feel, in a super-sensible act of cognition of this kind, as if we have been awakened from sleep. We eavesdrop on our being as it becomes a living thing.

Here is something that can make a more shattering impression on the seeker after spiritual experience than anything he can obtain by repeating the experience of the profoundest mystic.

More moving than the latter's absorption in his inner self is the moment of realizing that, at a certain instant of higher cognition, man must pour out his own self as being into the outside world, and that the act of cognition transforms mere knowledge into real life, into a real symbiosis with the outside world.

At first, however, this is linked with an appreciable intensification of the sense of self. What happens is something like this: in ordinary cognition of the outside world, our ego goes as far as the frontiers of nature. Here, the ego is repulsed. We feel surrounded on all sides by psychic walls, so to speak. This in turn has repercussions on the sense of self. The sense of self has its own strength, and it gets the right temper precisely through the fact that, along with this feeling of something like confinement, there is intermingled that self-surrender to the world and its creatures that comes of love. In super-sensible cognition, the self is made even stronger, and there is, we may say, a danger that it will transform the love that rightfully exists on earth into a selfish submersion in things, that it will effusively thrust and insinuate itself into things. By so doing, the self will expand.

That is why, in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I attach so much weight to the preparatory exercises. These exercises are aimed at self-discipline in relation to the sense of self, and at helping us to develop the necessary capacity for love in ordinary life and ordinary consciousness, before attempting to move into the super-sensible world by means of higher knowledge. We must be mentally, physically and spiritually healthy in this respect, before we can enter the spiritual world in a way that is healthy. If we are, then no one will be able to raise the more or less philistine objection that there is something uncomfortable about listening in to our own capacity for love. To do so makes a shattering impression, it is true. We see ourselves as never before in ordinary consciousness. What we attain in higher cognition, however, does not incorporate itself into the memory—if it did, we should be capable of marching through life fondly contemplating our own capacity for love, which would make us inadequate as people. And, remembering this, you will know what to make of these demands on super-sensible knowledge.

So much for the relation of super-sensible knowledge to the capacity for love, from an intellectual standpoint. But what do we experience as a result of it?

It is clear from what I have said already that we effuse our intensified self into our surroundings. In this way the self moves forward to the spiritual sphere, and we now come up against the curious fact that, by making ourselves increasingly able to enter into the outside world, we actually arrive at knowledge of our psychic and our spiritual self.

Goethe's instinct in rejecting the knowledge of self that results from brooding introspection was, I would say, a healthy one. He had hard things to say about this kind of mystical self-knowledge. Man can attain true self-knowledge only if, by strengthening his otherwise dormant powers of knowledge, he attains the capacity to explore with his self the outside world. It is in the world outside that man finds his real knowledge of self! We must learn to reach a true knowledge of the world, in the modern sense, by turning many familiar concepts almost back to front. And so it is with the concept of self-knowledge: look out at the world, travel further and further into the distance; in strengthening, by the development of cognitive powers, your capacity to explore these distances, you will find your real self. We can therefore say: the cosmos allows us to penetrate it to gain super-sensible knowledge; and what it gives back to us as a result of this penetration is precisely our knowledge of self.

Let us look at this other aspect of experience, which is sometimes sought by a false mystical path. I have shown how the human will can be developed, and how it is possible to develop dormant powers. The will can be developed to such an extent that the whole man becomes a kind of sense-organ, or rather spirit-organ—becomes, that is, as transparent in soul and spirit as the human eye is transparent. We need only recall how selfless (in a material sense) the human eye must be to act as the organ of sight. If the eye were to fill with self-assertive material, our field of vision would at once grow dim. Our entire human nature must come to be like this, on the spiritual plane. Our entire being, soul and spirit, must become transparent. With what is vital in our will, we can then enter the spiritual world even during our earthly existence. There now supervenes, however, what I already hinted at yesterday: by seeing the spiritual world, we are enabled to comprehend our inner self. And, as I explained yesterday, when as physical and sensuous beings we confront the outside world, we enter into its sensuous and physical phenomena with our entire being, and carry away with us psychic memory-images. Indeed, our soul is made up of these images. We can say therefore: what is physical and sensuous without is seen as semblance within. Conversely, I would say: in attaining the capacity to look out, through the spirit-organ that is our self, into the outside world as a spiritual one, with spiritual entities and events, we perceive our own inner physical body. We learn to know the substance of our lungs, heart and other organs. The spirituality of the outside world is reflected by the physical nature within us, just as the physical outside world is reflected by our spiritual, abstract nature.

But the way thus opened up to us of learning to know ourselves by contemplating the outside world, turns out to be a very concrete one. We come to know the place of the individual organs in man's total substance. Gradually, we learn to perceive the harmony between the individual processes in these organs.

The first discovery we make is as follows: what the mystic is angling for in his clouded waters turn out, ultimately, to be transformed memories; but they often contain an admixture of something produced by an organic activity. He doesn't know this, of course. He believes that he is piercing the internal mirror that underlies memory. He is not piercing it. The processes of our organic being beat like waves upon the other side of the mirror. The mystic is not aware of what is really going on: he is only aware of a change in the memories that are reflected. Without becoming guilty of philistinism in the process, we are forced to reduce much that is beautiful, poetic, mystical, to prose and say: much that this or that mystic has drawn up from his soul in this way is not the expression of spiritual existence, but only a consequence of the surge of inner organic processes. Wonderful mystical accounts of ancient and recent times—from which those who take pleasure in such things can gain an extraordinarily poetic impression—are in the last analysis, for anyone who can see things objectively, no more than the expression of inner processes in human nature itself. It seems philistine to have to say: something mystical makes its appearance; it strikes us as poetic, and yet to anyone who understands, it represents the impact of certain vital processes on the memories. For the serious seeker after knowledge, it does not become entirely valueless on that account. For the truth in anything that is said does not reside in the way in which it is presented, which may be agreeable to limited minds, but rather in the fact that a genuine attempt is being made to get nearer to the root of the matter.

The nebulous mystic remains caught in ordinary consciousness. The man who goes beyond this and, after first ensuring his psychic health by means of preparatory exercises that emphasize the formation of a healthy memory, pierces this mirror of memory and really looks into himself, will see there the effects of wide-ranging processes, originating in the spiritual outside world and continuing still in the spiritual world. In this way we come to know man, and to say to ourselves: what the abstract idealist may regard as something base in man, because he is looking at it only physiologically or anatomically, from the outside—man's inner organism—is a wonderful consequence of the entire cosmos.

And when we really come to know this inner organism, this is what we discover: when we look into our spiritual self and go back in memory over much that we have experienced in life, we can then, from what we revive within us at a congenial hour, conjure up these experiences before our mind's eye, if only as shades. From the image-content our soul has absorbed from the outside world, we can once again conjure up this world before our soul in a way that satisfies us. If we also learn to know our comprehensive inner organism, and learn how its individual parts are spiritually derived from the cosmos, our entire being, as we now perceive it, will present itself as a record of cosmic memories. We look into ourselves, not now with the eye of the nebulous mystic, but with an awakened “mind's eye,” and can perceive the nature of our lungs, our heart, the whole of the rest of our organism, looked at spiritually, inwardly. All this presents itself to us as memory of the world, recorded in man just as our memory of the life between birth and the present is recorded in the soul. There now appears in us what we can call knowledge of man as a memory of the world, a replica of the world's development and of the course of the cosmos.

The first thing to do is to familiarize yourselves with the detailed exercises that must be undertaken before man arrives at such a knowledge of self—not the brooding self-knowledge of ordinary introspection, as it is called, but the self-knowledge that sees in each of our internal organs something like a combination of spiritual elements resulting from certain spiritual processes in the cosmos. Once they have understood this aspect of man, people will no longer accuse us of transposing what is in our soul anthropomorphically into the world, in order to explain the world in a spiritual way. Instead, they will say: We first attempt, cautiously and seriously, to penetrate inside man, and there will then be revealed to us the cosmos, just as when we look at memories the sum of personal experience reveals itself.

Such things may appear paradoxical to present-day consciousness, and yet this consciousness is on the way to apprehending them. There is a longing to follow up certain trends of thought that are already there. When men do so—a certain amount of practice is, of course, required—the thoughts that lie along these lines will develop more and more into vitalized thoughts. And when, in addition to this, the will has been developed, men will enter increasingly upon this kind of self-knowledge and see that, whilst on the one hand the continual advance of the self into the outside world leads to knowledge of self, penetration into the depths of man's nature leads outward from man to knowledge of the world.

To cultivate a disinterested approach to these matters, it is necessary to look at the nature of man in a way that is different from that usually adopted today. People today dissect man's bone system, muscle system and nervous system, and take the results as a definition of his physical being. They can then envisage man as if he were a creature of solid material constituents. Yet everyone today knows that, essentially, man is not made up of solid constituents: for the most part—some ninety per cent, in fact—he is a column of water. Everyone today knows that the air I have just breathed in was previously outside in the world, and that the air I now have functioning within me will later be outside once more and belong to the world. And finally, everyone can comprehend that the human organism has a continuous exchange of heat. When we look at man in this way, we gradually escape from our illusion of his solidity. We recognize it as an illusion, and yet we cling to it in our soul, as if believing that man resembled the rough sketch anatomy gives of him. With equal justification, we shall come to regard the liquid in man as part of his being—what vibrates, surges and creates in man the liquid being. We shall come to perceive that the air in man is also part of his being. And finally, we may come to comprehend that the air inside us that vibrates, surges, moves up and down, diffuses itself through the currents in our veins and functions within us, is warmed in some places and cooled in others.

The soul-spiritual element that we carry within us today in this more or less abstract form suffers from a marked semblance character, so that we can really only perceive it from within, as we say. Nor can we escape from this perception from within by looking at what physiology and anatomy tell us about man. All the magnificent results that ordinary science has achieved present us with a solid shape of complex structure; yet it is one quite different in kind from what we observe within us when we visualize our thinking, feeling and volition, and we cannot find a bridge from one to the other. We can watch the struggles of psychologists to establish a relationship between what they comprehend in its abstractness and semblance nature—the only way that is open to their inward perception—and what exists outside. The two things are so far apart that we cannot establish a connection between them directly, through ordinary consciousness. But if we proceed without prejudice and fix our eyes, not upon an illusion of the solid man, but upon man as a being of liquid, a being of air and heat, then by a process of empathy with ourselves we shall become aware of the flow of heat and cold in the currents of our respiratory circulation, if we provide a basis on which we can do so.

We can reach such a basis by the path of higher knowledge as I have tried to describe it in the last few days. In learning to apprehend the air that vibrates inside us, we remain more or less within the physical realm; but when we apprehend it and then transfer the vitalized thinking that detects something of reality within, the bridge is established for us. And if we become aware of man down to the details of his temperature variations, and condense the psychic element until, out of its abstractness, it attains to reality, we shall find the bridge.

Condensed in this way, the life of the soul can link itself with rarefied physical experience. When we begin to penetrate ourselves and thereby perceive how vitalized thought moves in our being of air, if I may so express myself, in which there are certain temperature variations, we gradually see how in fact differences of thought can also operate in our human organism. Thus, a sympathetic thought, for example the verdict: “Yes indeed, the tree is green,” does in fact induce a state of heat, whereas a thought in which antipathy is present, a negative judgment for example, has a chilling effect on our air-heat substance.

In this way, we see how the psychic element continues to vibrate and create through finer materiality into denser materiality. We find it possible to direct our path of knowledge into the human organism too in such a way that we start with the psychic and go on into the material.

This in turn makes it possible for us to advance further and further towards what I have just been describing: an inner knowledge of the human organism. For the psyche will not unveil itself to us until we can trace the various levels of materiality—water, air and fire—in the individual organs. We must first condense the psychic element; only then shall we reach man's physical nature and come in turn, by passing through this, to the spiritual basis of our physical organism. Just as, when we sink shafts into ourselves with the aid of memory, we discover the laid-up experiences of our individual existence on earth, so too, in thus descending into the whole man, we shall find the spiritual element that has come down from the spiritual world through conception, foetal development and so on. In clothing itself in us, with what it acquires from the earth, this spiritual element becomes world-memory. We find the cosmos stored up as recollection inside us. And we thus find it possible—exactly as in ordinary consciousness we can remember the individual experience of personal existence—to survey the cosmos through inward contemplation.

You will perhaps ask: Yes, but when we get back to very early states of the earth by means of this world-memory, how can we avoid the danger of a general description of spirit usurping the concrete world-recollection? Once again, we only need to make a comparison with ordinary memory. Because our memory is well ordered, we shall not, in feeling some experience that has taken place ten years before float to the surface, refer it to events that have only just taken place. The content of the memory itself helps us to date it correctly. Similarly, when we understand our organism aright, we find that each of its separate parts points to the relevant moment in the world's development. In the last analysis, what natural science produces theoretically by extending its observations from the present back into earlier ages can only properly be completed by man's self-contemplation, which leads to a real world-recollection, a world-memory. Otherwise, we shall always be condemned to fall into curious errors when we construct hypothetical theories of world-evolution.

What I am about to say may sound trivial, but it will illustrate my point. The so-called Kant-Laplace theory, now of course modified—the theory of how the individual bodies in the solar system split off from a nebula in the universe—is commonly illustrated by taking a drop of oil, making a hole in a circular piece of card, fastening a pin through it, and rotating the drop of oil by means of the pin. Individual droplets separate off and continue to revolve round the main drop. A miniature solar system forms, and from the standpoint of the ordinary scientist one can say: The same thing, on a larger scale, took place out there in space! But something else is also true: anyone demonstrating something like this, to illustrate the origin of our solar system, would have to take all the factors into account; he would thus have to take into account the teacher standing there and rotating the drop of oil. He would have to place an enormous teacher out in space, to rotate the cloud. This point, however, has been forgotten in the experiment I have described. Elsewhere in life, it is a very fine thing to forget the self; but in an experiment, in illustrating important and serious problems, one must not forget such things. Well, the philosophy of life I am advocating does not forget them. It accepts what is justified in natural science, but also adds what can be seen in the spirit. And here, of course, we do not find an enormous individual, but rather a spiritual world, which has to be superimposed on the material development. We thereby permeate the Kant-Laplace primal nebula which, perhaps rightly, has been posited, with the spiritual entities and forces operative in it. And we permeate what will become of the earth in the so-called heat-death, of which present-day science speaks, with spiritual entities and forces. After the heat-death, these will then carry the spiritual element out into other worlds, just as the spiritual element in man is carried out into other worlds when the body disintegrates into its earthly elements. In this way we attain something significant for our time.

I have demonstrated, I think, that what is ordinarily apprehended only in abstract cognition—the spiritual element, which cannot be reconciled with the material—is infinitely far removed mentally from matter. What has followed from this for our entire cultural life? Because in ordinary consciousness we are unable to reconcile the spiritual and the material, we have a purely material view of the world's history: we form concepts of a purely physical process, with a beginning conceived in purely physical terms, in accordance with the laws of mechanics, and an end conceived, in accordance with thermodynamics, as the heat-death of the earth. At the same time, we are aware of ourselves as men, standing inside this process and evolving from it in a way that is certainly unintelligible to present-day science. If we are honest, however, we have to admit that we can never connect up our mental experience with what goes on outside in the material sphere. And at this deepest level of the soul, interwoven with our thinking, feeling and volition, are moral impulses and religious forces. They live within us, in the spiritual element we cannot reconcile with the material.

And so, perhaps, the man of today, with his consciousness, may conclude: natural science leads us only to a material process; this alone makes up exact science; for moral impulses and religious forces, we require concepts of faith!

This view, however, is incompatible with a serious life of the soul. And in their unconscious minds, serious people today feel (though they may not admit) that the earth has evolved from the purely material. From this emerges a kind of bubble. There arise cloud-formations, and indeed shapes thinner even than clouds, mere illusions. In these exist the greatest value we can absorb as men, all our cultural values. We go on living for a while, and one day there supervenes the earth's entry into its heat-death, which can be foretold on external scientific evidence. At this point, it is as if all life on earth is buried in an enormous graveyard. The most valuable things that have arisen from our human life, our finest and noblest ideals, are buried alongside what was the material substance of the earth. You can say that you don't believe it. But anyone who reacts honestly to what is often thought about these things today by people who reject independent spiritual research, could not avoid the inner dissonance and pessimism that arise in face of the question: What is to become of our spiritual activity if we regard the world in a purely material sense, as we are accustomed to do in exact science as it is called? This is the origin of the wide gulf that yawns in our time between religious and moral life and the natural approach to things.

It seems to me that, in these circumstances, a genuine seership, an exact vision is called for, one suited to modern man, to establish a bridge between spiritual and material, by providing a basis of reality for the spiritual and taking from the material its coarseness as I would call it.

That is above all what we bring before us when we look at things as we have done today. We have seen the spiritual in man himself gradually passing over into his heat and air variations. By descending into the coarser material sphere and seeing how the finer element flows into vitalized thinking, we shall we able to think our way into the cosmos and understand correctly something like the heat-death of the earth—because we know how our own human heat in its differentiation is permeated by vitalized thinking. And from the standpoint of the world-memory that appears in ourselves, we can look at what is spiritually active in the material processes of the world. In this way we arrive at a real reconciliation between what presents itself to us spiritually and what presents itself to us materially.

There is, it is true, much in people's hearts today that still militates against such a reconciliation. For in recent centuries we have grown accustomed to count truths as exact only where they rest upon a solid basis of sensory observation, in which we surrender passively to the outside world. What has been observed on this kind of solid basis is then built up into natural laws and natural theories; and theories are accepted as valid only when they rest upon this solid basis of sensory observation.

Those who think like this are people who will only admit ordinary gravity to operate in space, and who say: “The earth has its gravity, and bodies must fall towards the earth and have a support, because they cannot float about freely in space.” This is true, so long as we are standing on the earth and considering the earth's gravity in relation to its immediate surroundings. But if we look out into space, we know that we cannot say: “The heavenly bodies must be supported,” but must say: “They support one another.” We need to attain this attitude, in a form appropriate to the spirit, for our inner universe of knowledge.

We must be capable of developing truths that specifically do not require the support of sensory perception, but support one another as do the heavenly bodies in space. This is, in fact, a precondition for the attainment of a real cosmology, one that is not made up simply of material processes, but in which the material is shot through with soul and spirit. And such a cosmology is needed by modern man. We shall see how he needs it even for his immediate social tasks. But not until we perceive how the really significant truths support one another shall we understand how we can win through to a cosmology of this kind.

Such a cosmology results when we accept as valid the way in which true self-knowledge is attained. We do not attain it anthropomorphically, by going out into the universe with our own experience of self. By entering the outside world, we discover more and more about our ego and so achieve knowledge of self. And when we then go down into it, our inner self becomes world-memory and we learn world-knowledge. Many people already sense the nature of the secret pertaining to knowledge of the world. I should like to express in two sentences what they divine. Self-knowledge and world-knowledge must be truths that mutually support each other. And of this nature, moving to and fro in a pendulum motion, are the truths that are attained by the philosophy of the world and of life I am here describing: as self-knowledge and as world-knowledge. The two sentences in which I should like to sum this up are the following:

If you would know yourself, seek yourself in the universe; if you would know the world, penetrate your own depths. Your own depths will reveal to you, as in a world-memory, the secrets of the cosmos.

The lectures that follow will be based directly on the observations I have made already. I do not mean by this that we can say anything of consequence about present-day social life just by thinking out social reforms from first principles, in an abstract and Utopian manner; but rather that the spiritual philosophy expounded here could, if transformed into impulses of the whole man, into a human attitude of mind, provide a framework within which we could understand social life and shape social forces. The succeeding lectures will have to demonstrate that a philosophy of this kind, orientated towards the spiritual, does not remain at the abstract and Utopian level, but instead is peculiarly well equipped to deal with immediate concrete reality. Today, however, I want to establish a link between the lectures I have given already and those I have still to give.

Anyone who has taken in the full significance of my lectures so far will agree that what has been expounded has not implied a conception of life for the hermitage, for contemplative existence in a quiet cell. The conception of life proposed has its social side too—it is one that leads not only into spiritual worlds as such, but also into the world of spirit and soul that surrounds us directly in our fellow-men. It is, of course, easier to speak of social questions today if you are identified with a particular political party. Then, you have a platform, you have ready-made ideas, and can say: This is our age! These are its needs! But we here certainly cannot start from any of these ready-made political programmes. In the first place, I am fully convinced that—to speak somewhat sweepingly—there is actually no party that is entirely mistaken in what it asserts. The only thing is that the parties usually fail to recognize the limits beyond which their assertions cannot hold. On the other hand, I do not believe that any party is completely right; in a sense, it must always be mistaken as well. The only thing is that, given the particular way men look at the world, we can understand this mistakenness well enough. A tree, too, can only be photographed adequately from several sides. All the claims normally made by political parties seem like photographs of life from different sides. Yet people treat these various standpoints exactly as if someone were to look at a photograph of a tree, taken from the right, and say: “This picture is completely wrong,” knowing only the view from the left. Thus, all the objections from a certain standpoint to the views put forward here are familiar to me, and if I had to expound them all, it would not, given the philosophy of life I am advocating, prove a very difficult task.

I must say this in advance, in order to show that it is only by approaching social life and social problems from the most varied directions, as is attempted in the lectures that follow, that we can form a life-like picture of them.

There is much talk nowadays of social needs. Looking back over the history of humanity with an open mind, however, we observe that this has been true for only a relatively short period of man's development. There have, of course, always been social needs and social endeavours. That they should be formulated, almost as an abstract theory, however, is a feature of very recent times alone. And when we try to discover why it is that almost everyone these days is talking about social needs, we realize that there has been no period perhaps with such strong anti-social impulses as ours.

When the urgent necessity of life presses and misery knocks at our door, we do meet the challenge to produce positive social impulses. But when people speak of social needs, they really mean something different; they mean man's feeling that he is not simply a separate being, but that he must move among other men, and work among and with other men, and that he exists for his own satisfaction and the good of others. In this respect, the men of earlier epochs were actually much closer to one another, paradoxical as it may sound, than we are today. And this was only natural, because we nowadays live in a historical epoch which, as the preceding lectures have already indicated, has summoned particular powers from the depths of man's nature, especially within the civilized world. These powers are specially adapted to the purposes I have described, but are less well suited to arousing in man the social instincts and social impulses that were present, if in a form no longer appropriate to the present time, in earlier epochs.

Looking back over man's development, we see that, in the course of three or four centuries, there has emerged from within the human soul a capacity, a soul-power, which we can regard as intellectual—the power of reason, of a more or less rational view of the world. This view has been splendidly successful in the field of natural philosophy. It can carry men a tremendously long way towards developing their intercourse, their traffic with external nature. But the problem arises whether this power, which represents the glory and triumph, so to speak, of very recent times, is also suited, as it stands, to facilitate the intercourse of man with man. Only a clear view of this problem can, ultimately, throw light for us on the social needs of recent times. These needs, as they are ordinarily formulated, can only express a superficial outlook, symptomatic of something lying much deeper in man. This is what stands out above all for a spiritually scientific approach.

Again, when we look with an unprejudiced eye at the way in which social configurations and groupings arose in earlier epochs and indeed, fundamentally, still arise today—right down to cartels and trusts—we must conclude: the dominant forces in them are ultimately not intellectualized ones, not those of a rational attitude to life, but are instincts, unconscious feelings. And if we were to create social configurations by means of the intellectualized power that reveals itself so splendidly in natural philosophy, they would probably have only very slight viability. For, after all, it is not without significance that this power of the intellect has shown itself to be particularly important in the observation of inanimate nature, and that a man who desires only natural philosophy and does not wish to move upward to an outlook on things in accord with spirit, finds himself faced by an insoluble riddle when he has to move over from the inanimate to the animate. It is not surprising that what is of great importance, precisely because of its inner structure, for the inanimate, the dead, is not as powerful and fruitful in relation to something that is not only alive, but must also develop into human social configurations informed by spirit.

We can say, therefore: In certain subconscious regions of the soul, the forces that have been formative in social configurations are still present. On the other hand, man owes two of his strongest and socially most effective impulses to the characteristics of the present epoch. And for these he has to find the proper place in social life as a whole.

One of the most important social questions of today became apparent to me thirty years ago, when I was trying to look at the problem of man's freedom within his social life. The experience of freedom is really just as old as intellectual life. Only when intellectual life raises man to the apprehension of pure thought, by which he then comprehends natural phenomena, does he become conscious of his freedom. To all mental activity, earlier ages added something that resulted simply from organic processes and had its roots instinctively in the unconscious regions of will or else unconsciously in the life of feeling. To perceive something as clearly as is possible when thinking rises to distinctly apprehended and mathematically formulated laws; to comprehend something so clearly that we are present in it with our entire substance: this has only been possible to man since he raised himself to the pure thinking that inspired Copernicus, Galileo and their successors to modern scientific research. The experience of freedom is thus explicitly connected with something that leads away from the instinctive forces that previously formed society.

If we are approaching the problem of freedom with complete seriousness, however, we are cast for a moment, by this discovery, into a kind of emptiness, which we experience with all the terror that emptiness, or rather nothingness, does inspire in men. What we discover is that, in earlier epochs, when mankind was more naive about the life of the soul and had not attained to the consciousness that prevails in modern times, there could exist attitudes that were more imaginal and did not inhabit pure, abstract thought. But we need such imaginal attitudes if we are to take our place within the complicated social life of man. The things that enable us to find our place in the world can never be determined by abstract thought.

Now, in the last few days I have shown how the development of spiritual science takes us from abstract, dead thought once again to vital thought, by which in fact we can penetrate not only into inorganic, lifeless nature, but also into the forms of living nature and into the heart of spiritual worlds. By understanding this most modern development, man thus re-approaches, with his consciousness, what in earlier epochs existed in an instinctive way. I know that many people today still shrink back when they are told: that which operated instinctively in earlier epochs, fertilizing the imagination from the unconscious, can be raised into consciousness by a development of the soul such as I have described. Immediately, people suspect that behind this demand there lurks a kind of philistinism and pedantry that would translate naïveté into self-consciousness. People will continue to shrink back from this path into consciousness so long as they do not realize that the naive experience that was originally instinctive to man is to be restored, despite the consciousness of vital thought. But this vital thought then also introduces us to the shifting concepts that play their part in social life.

Let me refer to just one example of this today, by way of introduction. People at present talk a very great deal about capitalism and the function of capital in the social order. There are countless definitions of capitalism, often politically coloured. Yet this absence of unanimity obscures another point. We must clearly understand that the function even of something that forms as much a part of the social structure as capitalism cannot be comprehended in sharply delineated concepts. Instead, we require those vital concepts that the nai've, instinctive life of the soul once had and the conscious life of the soul can again acquire today. People need only look, for example, at what capital meant in Central Europe, in Germany, where a particular social development began later than it did in England, and what it means in England itself. In England, simply because of the existence of earlier stages in the country's economic life, when this development did set in commercial capital was available to create something which, in Germany, had to be effected by raising capital in other ways. If we look at the rôle of capital in Central Europe and then in England, we very soon find that our concepts, intended as they are to comprehend social life even in its individual configurations, cannot be sharply delineated. We need, instead, concepts that take hold of immediate reality at a particular point, yet remain elastic, so that they can move on from this point to other configurations of the social structure. And since we live in an age that is specifically educated to intellectualism—which subsists only in sharply delineated concepts—it is necessary for us, if we are to reach an understanding of social needs, to find our way out of intellectualism into the world of vital thought. This in turn can transform itself into social impulses such as arose from instincts in the earlier stages of human development.

The philosophy I am here advancing is specifically intended not to be something theoretical. It is often accused of dogmatism; accused, when it has to pronounce on social life, of looking for Utopias (which are also dogmatic). The charge is without foundation. The point of this philosophy is not at all what people mean by any particular concept; it is a definite attitude to life as a whole, physical, mental and spiritual—an attitude directed towards apprehending this life in its individual concrete forms in accordance with reality.

Thereby, however, a certain perspective on extremely important social needs of our age is opened up:

When we contemplate human life itself by means of a spiritual outlook such as I have been developing, we find that, like the historical development of humanity in general, the life of an individual human being is subject to certain changes. The resulting phases, which are apparent even to a casual observer, reveal their true nature only when we can see into their spiritual ramifications. It then appears, for example, that neither the infant in its first years of life, nor the child of primary school age, nor even the adolescent below the age of twenty, lives fully within the intellectualized mode of thought that has emerged in the course of man's development. In the last analysis, we only comprehend intellectualism with an inner sympathy in the more mature period of our twenties, when we begin to experience it as a kind of mental bone-system. Until then, we actually feel, if only instinctively, as if our life still had to solidify within us along lines which eventually result in this mental bone-system. Yet our entire social life, which understandably is shaped by adults, is permeated by the influence of intellectualism, in spite of the fact that intellectualism itself cannot be socially creative. It floods into areas where the instincts have become uncertain. We thus have in our present-day social pattern an inorganic combination of the instincts, grown uncertain, with an intellectualism that seeks to enter social life but does not really fit into it.

The end-result of this is that we form ideas of what is going on in social life which are quite unlike the forces that are really present. Nowadays, we speak in rather inexact terms, for the most part, about what governs society. We, mankind that is, have educated ourselves, in these three or four centuries, to cast everything into intellectualized moulds. As adults we can do this, but not while we are children or while we are young people.

Youth develops powers other than intellectual ones. The infant develops first the powers which make it, I would say, a single sense-organ, similar to what I have called a “spirit-organ,” but at a more material level. Its whole being is engaged in perceiving its environment, and it transposes what it perceives into its own movements. It is an imitator. This imitation, which pervades the life of the child's psyche, is quite certainly nothing intellectualized. Next, the child enters an age—say from second dentition to puberty—in which it is called upon no longer to imitate, but to absorb the opinions and convictions proffered by the adults round about.

Please do not think that the man who wrote The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is saying what he has to say now out of any reactionary instinct. What I have to say is in accord with a law of man's development. From second dentition to puberty, the young person evolves from within his being the need to listen to some person of natural authority and to what he or she offers him. Anyone who can look at life impartially will agree how fortunate it was for his inner harmony of soul throughout life if, at this age, he was able to look up to this or that person of authority with a proper respect. He did not now imitate this person; the relation was such that he felt: through this human individual is revealed to me what I myself ought to be and want to be; I listen to what he or she says and absorb the opinion into my soul.

The genuine psychologist will even discover something further. People continue to insist that, at this primary school age, a child should only take in what it already understands. In this way, only this one stage in the child's development is catered for. Not only this, but endless trivialities are piled up in an effort to present the child solely with what, it is believed, he “already understands.” The child certainly understands more than many people believe: not through intellectuality, however, but through its whole being. There is another point, too. We may reach the age of thirty, forty, fifty or sixty, and then something shoots up from the depths of our soul which is a reminiscence from our eighth year, let us say. We took it from authority; we absorbed it with respect. At the time, we did not understand it in an intellectual sense; but we came to feel at home in what we thus absorbed with our whole being. It was then drawn down into the depths of the soul. Decades later it reappears. We have become more mature. Only now do we understand it and bring it to life. It is enormously important to us in later years to be able to revive in this way what we have carried with us since childhood. This is something quite different from living among mere memories, untransformed.

This, too, then, can result from a vital art of education—one that seeks to give the child of this age, not sharply delineated concepts but vital ones. The former, it is true, have their uses in life. To the child, however, their effect is as if we seized his hand and clamped it so that it could not grow, had to remain small, and could not take on different shapes. We must move forward to an education which transmits vital concepts that will live on with the child as his limbs do, and are accordingly not sharply delineated but have an inner growth. Only then shall we give the child not only the right joy in life, but also the right strength in life. When the child experiences the sort of thing I have just indicated quite naively in his soul, his understanding and comprehension is not intellectualized. He is taking something from a respected authority, something that will instil in him vital powers.

Next, there follows an age when, essentially, all we can do is to approach the world with our concepts (which do not immediately take on sharp contours) all informed by the capacity for love. With this, we penetrate into things so as to emerge, sometimes, with quite illusory but all the more potent ideals, which fire our love.

Only when we have passed through all these can we move, without damage to our humanity as a whole, into the intellectual phase. Yet the material that in many cases the old generation nowadays presents to the young is really something appropriate only to a later age. It is no accident, therefore, that young people often fail to understand us as teachers: it springs from their very nature.

Older epochs developed in social life forces by which the old could be understood by the young in a quite different manner from today. Hence the social gulf that has opened between age and youth. It can be understood by those who comprehend our age as we must if we trace the development over the last three or four centuries. Not only through spiritual profundity, but through the animation of our spiritual life, we must restore the adult's capacity to reach complete understanding with youth.

But bridging the gulf between generations is only one side, only a very small area in fact, of present-day social needs. It can be brought about only by an extension of man's whole inner experience. Only those who strengthen the present intellectualized life of the soul by vital thought and spiritual vision, or at least accept the results of such thought and vision—for they too vitalize the whole soul—will regain the ability to look fully into the child's life. They will thus be able to draw out of the child's life itself the powers by which we can reach an understanding with him. But in indicating the gulf that has opened between age and youth in our time, we also indicate the whole series of gulfs separating man and man, man and woman, and class and class in our time. For just as merely intellectualized life separates us from the child, so too it ultimately separates us from other men. Only through vital thinking, which re-approaches certain instinctive conceptions of the cosmos, can we establish our position in the social order as firmly as the man of instinct did, to make social organisms possible for the first time. We find, too, that only through what we achieve with an empty consciousness—when we are inspired from the spiritual world with what spiritual entities reveal—can we really understand other people and see across the gulfs of class and sex.

This is the second stage in living together in society. The first is that of discovering imaginatively our own position. The second is that of finding a bridge across to someone else, someone who lives in a different social constellation. Nowadays, this is made very difficult for mankind; for when we take up a position in social life in line with our feelings, our judgment is not ultimately based on reality. In the last analysis, it is precisely when we think that our judgments are most in accord with reality that they are furthest away from it. You can see this by observing how even outstanding personalities today, who take up a position in life and would like to manipulate life, are fundamentally incapable of matching up to reality.

Let me give an example—not in order to say anything for or against the person concerned, but simply to characterize the phenomenon. A particularly striking personality among those socially active in recent times was Rosa Luxemburg. In personal acquaintance, you found a woman completely endowed with social graces: measured in movement and mode of speech, restrained in each individual gesture and phrase. A certain gentleness, even, certainly nothing tempestuous, was in her personality. Yet when you heard her speak from the platform, her way of speaking was ... well, I will quote an actual example. She would say, for instance: Yes, there were times when man believed he originated from some spiritual world or other, which had placed him within social life. Today—she said—we know that man once clambered about in the trees like an ape in an extremely indecent fashion, without any clothes on, and that from this ape-man there developed those who today occupy the most varied positions in society. And this was delivered in a manner that was fired, I would say, with a certain religious impulse. Not, indeed, with the fire of immediate personal impact, but in a manner that large proletarian masses can best understand: with a certain measured dryness, so that it could be received too with a certain dryness of feeling and yet call forth, for all its dryness, a certain enthusiasm. This because people felt: at bottom, then, all men are equal and all social distinctions are swept away! But none of this was spoken from an involvement in social life itself. It emerged from theory, though one that believed itself to be true to life. It created a reality that is ultimately no reality, no fruitful reality that is.

The standpoint of most people in social life today is like that of Rosa Luxemburg: they speak about society without the power in their words that comes from life itself, from experience of the social aspect of man. To speak of society is possible if, with the old instinctive power of looking at social forms, we can find our own place in life and also a bridge to men in other walks of life, other classes, or other generations, and to individual human personalities. This was achieved in earlier epochs out of extraordinarily deep-rooted human instincts.

These powers of cognition become conscious as man develops into the spiritual organism or “sense-organ” he becomes as a human whole, in the way I have described. As a result, he can live by choice, free of the body, in the spiritual world.

For sympathy with the other person is always an unconscious or conscious extra-physical experience of his being. It is dead theory to think that we look at someone, see that he has an ear shaped so, a nose, a face shaped so, and, knowing that we too have such a nose and a forehead shaped thus and so on, and that we have a self, assume unconsciously that the other person also has a self. This is not what we do. Anyone whose mind can take in what happens knows that we have an immediate perception of the life of the other person. This immediate perception, we might say, is simply the act of seeing, raised to the spiritual level.

Certain theories in present-day philosophy have even discovered this fact. Spiritual science shows that, by bringing the power that operates unconsciously and instinctively up into consciousness, man can project himself into the other human being: only thus can he really place himself within the context of social life. With the intellectualism attained at the educational level in human development to which we have been raised—or rather, with what can grow out of that intellectualism—we can point to this self-spiritualizing development of the human soul; and when this is possible, social perspectives too can be gained. Certainly, it is only by apprehending the spiritual in this way that we can gain the strength to cast aside old fears and achieve an immediate experience of the impulse of freedom in man.

Now the soul can only really apprehend this impulse of freedom out of a full human life. That this is so, I should like to illustrate once more with an educational example.

What, precisely, is the basis of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was created from a view of life in accord with the spirit? It seeks to act as a social organism in the life of today in a way that present-day forces themselves require. Its aim is therefore certainly not to inculcate a philosophy in any way. It would be an entirely false conception of the principle of the School to think that it sought to impart to the children any particular philosophy of life. A conception of the world and of life that is held to be in accord with the spirit exists in fact for the staff. And what, in this conception, is not theory but life may also come out in the skill and tact of the teacher, and in everything that he does, in all the work of instruction and education.

The isolated statements that are often made about the teaching methods at the Waldorf School really miss the point. They may well lead someone or other to say: Of course, there are other methods of instruction and education with the same aim. In terms of abstract principles, it is true fundamentally to say that what can be stated about the methods of the Waldorf School is also found elsewhere. What is important in the Waldorf School is the immediate life that flows from a conception of the world which creates life and not merely concepts.

What does this achieve? Well, it is difficult to describe life in sharply outlined concepts. I shall therefore explain what I mean in this way: quite certainly, there are on the staff of the Waldorf School some teachers who are not unusually gifted; we can say this without hurting anyone's feelings. But even if the widest range of physical, mental and spiritual talents were represented in the teacher, we should still have to say: among the children he has before him, there may be some who will at some stage in life develop talents that go far beyond those the teacher himself possesses.

We must therefore create educational methods by which we can handle the children at each age not only in such a way that they acquire the talents we have ourselves, but also that they develop any latent talents we do not have at all. Even if no geniuses ourselves, we must place no obstacle in the way of the child's development towards genius. It is all very well to go on declaiming that the child's individuality must be developed, and that “education is a drawing out and not a putting in.” You can say this, and as an idea it all sounds wonderful, and you think of it as something fruitful in life. But what people often mean by it is simply that they will develop in the child what they think is capable of becoming something individual, but not anything that goes beyond the individuality of the teacher himself.

In the Waldorf School, everything is directed towards education in freedom. Man's inmost spiritual element remains essentially undisturbed by the Waldorf School. It is not disturbed, any more than a plant placed in the ground and allowed to develop freely in the light and air has all kinds of stakes applied to it, training it into a set shape. A child's spiritual individuality is something completely sacred, and those with a genuine experience of human nature know that it will follow, of its own accord, the influences exerted on it by everything round about. The teacher thus has to set aside what can hinder this tenderly protected individuality in its development. The hindrances, which can result from the physical, the mental and even the spiritual sphere, can be discerned by a genuine knowledge of man, if it is developed on the pedagogic and psychological sides. And when we do evolve such a knowledge, we develop a fine sense for any impediment to the free development of individuality. There is no need for violent interference. Any alien shaping of the personality should be avoided. When we see that there is an impediment we must set aside, we set it aside. The individual will know how to develop through his own power, and his talents may then go far beyond what the teacher possesses.

Here is true respect for human freedom! This freedom is what enables man to find within him the impulses that lead and drive him in life. In earlier periods, as he instinctively grew into his social environment, man absorbed from it something that then operated within him as moral and religious impulses. This process has been paralysed, I would say, by intellectualism. What can consciously produce the social impulses that were once instinctively attained, has still to be developed.

Two things thus confront modern man. On the one hand, he must now seek his ethical and religious impulses in his own personality, finding them only among his soul's innermost powers. On the other hand, in the course of the last three or four centuries intellectualism has come of age, so much so that it is now regarded as the sole authority. Yet it can afford no such direct spiritual experience, but only observe the life of nature and classify it.

We are thus confronted by what we as humanity can achieve—magnificent as it is—within natural processes. And here humanity as a whole is productive. We can see this productive aspect emerging in the last three or four centuries in the splendid instances of co-operation between natural observation and technology. Anyone who can follow what man achieves by understanding nature can also see how he has advanced technologically. You need only look at a straightforward example—how Helmholtz, let us say, a genius in some respects, invented his ophthalmoscope.

To appreciate this, you must take into account the fact that his predecessors—as if impelled by scientific progress—were already close to the discovery, and he had only to take the final step. We might say: scientific thinking as such enters into man and leads him onward. Subsequently, he is productive in the field of technology. For what he extracts from nature serves him as an inspiration. Right down to the most recent discoveries, we can follow how, in anyone who becomes a natural scientist, what he absorbs impels his spirit from one technical advance to another, so that the inspiration of nature still goes on. There's inspiration for you!

Modern man lacks such inspiration, however, when he comes to the ethical, the volitional, the religious—in short, to everything that starts from the soul yet leads at last to social forms and life. What we need here is a force that will operate in the spiritual sphere as purely natural inspiration does in our external technology. In the latter, we have gone an incredibly long way. What we have achieved there, we, the men of modern times, must pay for in the sense that our purely spiritual life has languished for a while, sustaining itself on old traditions, in the religious as well as the moral and social sphere. Today, however, we need to be able, out of the human personality, to arrive in the full experience of freedom at immediate moral impulses. Because we are faced with this social necessity, I was able, in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, to show that there must be such a thing as moral intuition. And, as I indicated then, the real moral impulses that man can find to give him ethical and moral strength, which operate more individually now in modern life, can only derive from a spiritual world. We are thus forced to rise to spiritual intuitions precisely because in our contemplation of the outside world we do not attain anything spiritually productive.

Anyone who can consciously experience the technical age from within is especially inclined to say, on the other hand: faced by the need to stick close to the ground in technology so as to survey its inanimate substance, we cannot, from what technology gives us, gain moral impulses as earlier men could. They beheld the spiritual in storm and wind and stream and star and experienced it as natural forces. We cannot do this, because our knowledge of nature has had all this refined away from it. We can only gain our moral world, therefore, by intuiting it in a directly spiritual and individual manner.

For this, however, we require a vital spiritual force within us. And this force can follow, I believe, if we are steeped in the implications of the philosophy of life I have put forward here. As a philosophy, it certainly does not wish to lay down the law in ideas and concepts. It seeks rather to present ideas and concepts only in order that they may become as vital within us, on the spiritual plane, as our life's blood itself, so that man's activity, not only his thinking, is stimulated. A philosophy of life in accord with spirit thus reveals itself as a social as well as a cognitive impulse.

In consequence, we may perhaps be justified in saying: present-day social needs, as they are often formulated in public life today, appear, to those who can dispassionately perceive the true nature of our times, to be symptomatic. They are symptomatic of the loss of the old instinctive certainties of social life and of the necessity to establish, consciously, a spiritual life that will give the same impulses as did the earlier instinctive one. Because we can believe that such a stimulation of man's innermost vital powers really corresponds to the social needs of today, we would wish, in this age of severe social tribulation, to speak of the age and its social needs in this sense.

Sometimes, today, people feel that the immediate distress of the day, the misery of the moment is so great that, fundamentally, we ought to devote ourselves exclusively to it, and look for wider horizons only when some relief has been afforded close at hand. Of all the objections put to me since, at the instigation of a circle of friends, I have been trying to speak about social life once more and to take an interest in various things connected with it, I have felt most strongly the force of the countless letters sent to me, especially two years or so ago, saying: “What is the point of all these social ideas? Here in Central Europe the most urgent thing is bread.” This objection was made over and over again. We can understand it. But in another sense we must also understand that the earth is incapable of withholding its fruitfulness at any period, if only men can find a social organization that will enable the earth's gifts to flow into society and there be distributed.

It is thus, I think, right to believe that to devote oneself to the immediate situation is a loving and noble task—in which no one is impeded by reflections such as I have set forth here. Yet, equally, it must be said: for the moment, what can be done in this way may be good; yet on the other hand, men must gain an understanding of society as soon as possible, in order to prevent the factors that bring men into such distress and misery from recreating themselves.

That we cannot get by in the social sphere with the old Utopian and intellectualized formulations should have become apparent to people when many of those who, only a short while before, were speaking with incredible confidence of what social life should be were then called upon to do something. Never was there a greater perplexity in a society than among those who reputedly knew with absolute certainty how social configurations should be organized, if only the old regime could be cleared away as rapidly as possible.

Experiment in this direction has indeed created, in Eastern Europe, the most terrible forces of destruction. And for men today to believe that, without fundamental social thought and feeling and experience, simply by continuing the old formulations, they can arrive at anything but destructive forces, is an illusion. The spectre of Eastern Europe gazes threateningly across to the West. Its gaze, however, should not leave us inactive, but should be a challenge to us to seek at every moment for vital social forces and a vital formulation of social needs, now that the abstract and Utopian ones have revealed their unfruitfulness.

How this can be achieved will be shown more fully in the lectures that follow. I have tried today simply to provide an introduction showing that, behind explicitly formulated social ideas, there lies something more profound, something that is linked with a transformation of the whole life of the soul.

In very recent times, this is beginning to be understood even among a wide circle of the working class. Anyone who looks about him knows that social needs, and in particular our reactions to them, are in the midst of a profound transformation. The unfruitfulness of the old slogans is already more or less recognized. And already it is being emphasized in many quarters that we must move to a spiritual sphere, and that moral and religious impulses must once again pervade social life. We have not yet, however, evolved the life we really need.

Our age thinks itself extremely practical and realistic, and does not know how theoretical it is in fact—especially in determining social needs. Our task today, we may perhaps observe in conclusion, cannot really be to set up completely new social or other ideals. We are not short of abstract expressions of ideals. What we need is something different: experience of the spiritual, not merely excogitation of the ideal. What we need is spirit, not in concepts merely, but with such vitality that it goes with us like a human companion in all our doings.

In apprehending the spirit as something vital in this way, we shall also be able to rise to something socially effective. On this point, we may say: today, we need not merely a formulation of ideals and social needs. We need something that will give us strength to follow the ideals, and give us inner life to make these ideals incandescent; something that impels our will to wholehearted enthusiasm, fruitful to the world, for ideals and for the life of the spirit.

A few months ago, the British Colonial Secretary remarked that the world's centre of gravity has shifted from the Baltic and Atlantic to the Pacific. His observation is certainly indicative of the transformation now taking place in the social structure of the whole world. Only now, in fact, is the world gradually beginning, in circumstances that have arisen in the course of centuries and have changed so significantly as a result of the cruellest of wars, to realize the consequences of something that has long been brewing—the fact that not only economic and social relationships, but the whole of human relationships throughout the world are tending to transform themselves into a totality, a single entity.

If this is true, however, then the change in external economic organization (directly determined by the conversion of world trade into a world economy from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards) must also be followed by a profound spiritual transformation throughout the world, of which perhaps only the beginnings can be discerned today.

Yet we must also remember that, however social structures may change throughout the world, there live within them human beings who must reach an understanding as men if they wish to establish a relationship with one another. Understanding between men, however, involves trust. And trust involves a kind of insight into the souls of others. In Western civilization to date it has only been possible, generally speaking, to extend our horizons slightly, to include the Continent of Europe and its immediate colonial dependencies. A world-wide view has yet to be found.

Starting from one or two features of the historical background, which yet are directly reflected in man's life today, I shall try this evening to indicate what is actually happening in this direction. To do so, I shall first have to say something about understanding and attempts at understanding within Western civilization itself.

If you listen to the way educated Englishmen speak about Europe, about Central Europe and in particular about Germany, which has set the tone in certain respects for so long in Central Europe, what they say—and write in their books—is usually something like this: With us, everything rests on a democratic basis. The individual very largely determines what happens in spiritual and also in economic life. The greater part of public affairs is left to individual initiative. But when we look across at Central Europe—I do not want to claim that what they say is absolutely correct, only to illustrate what is in fact a widely-held view—a certain autocracy becomes apparent, a system of administration by officials—very capable, of course—who determine, from the centre of national life, the nature of individual human relationships. There is—or was before the war, at least—always this pointed reference to a centralized and more or less autocratic system. If we were then to look further East, we should have to say, following the same line of thought: further East, we find not just autocracy, but a kind of patriarchal autocracy. This is pervaded, not only by the ordinances of administrators, but also by a religious impulse: men therefore feel that what they do on earth is actually ordained by spiritual, extra-terrestrial powers and entities, the impulses from which are absorbed into their feelings.

Behind this English attitude there certainly lies something of great importance, which affects all the social structures of the present day. We can say: the further West we go, the more man with his whole thinking and feeling is bound up in the affairs he has to manage. This comes out most clearly when we look at economic affairs. In the West, what a man wishes to accomplish in economic life he accomplishes by attention to practical detail. He has an immediate personal relationship with the externals of life. In Central Europe, as the psychologically perceptive observer cannot help noticing, things are rather different. There is a tendency towards what the Englishman, from his standpoint, calls “academic administration by the state:” a tendency for certain ideas to prevail which are regarded as correct. These are expected to shape laws and inform administrative principles, and are set forth from the beginning in an administrative, a political system. The individual who comes to the affairs of actual life, even economic affairs, may look to economic practice first of all; but he is always looking over his shoulder at something of a juridical-political character that belongs to one of these systems. And he regards his personal activities as a part of such a system. The Englishman has no inclination to think up a system of this kind; his eye is only on the concrete details of life, not on the overall system that imposes itself upon them.

At this point, our attention is drawn to a historical phenomenon that has become particularly important in very recent times. For millions upon millions of people, the name of Karl Marx is of extraordinary significance. The rigidly dogmatic and formula-ridden Marxism that occupied the souls of many millions of men like a kind of religion, fifty years or so ago, has been modified in many ways. Yet for the broad masses of the European proletariat, the name Marx still denotes a prophet of social reorganization. On this occasion, I am not concerned to demonstrate the errors of Marxism. I only want to point to a certain aspect of Marx as a historical phenomenon.

Marx was educated in Central Europe, in Germany, where he absorbed a disposition towards the kind of systematization of ideas that I have just been describing. Then, however, he went to the West, to France and in particular to England, in order to study concrete details of the social and economic development of recent times. What he studied were concrete details—for that is all that exists in the British working-class. What he constructed from them is a system of social organization such as only a Central European temperament can create. And this system took root, not primarily in the West, but in Central Europe. And we may say: the concrete details that Marx observed in the West he shaped into a grand systematic edifice of ideas, which his disciples have made increasingly dogmatic and increasingly theoretical. It came to be regarded as the ideal organization of human society as a whole from the economic standpoint. And when its exponents had the opportunity of realizing it in Eastern Europe, it became, in a sense, the ideal economic and political organization—though in fact it has not been realized to any great extent, and even this little is gradually leading to absurdity. The essential point, however, is that we can see quite clearly, just with a phenomenon like this, how fundamentally the mode of thought even in Central Europe differs from that in Western Europe. From this, however, we must suppose that the variations throughout the world are very much greater still, and that only an impartial attitude, quite free of preconceptions, is capable of gaining a conspectus of these variations.

What strikes us as diversity within the small sphere of Western civilization must be seen today against a world background. This is because our present-day structures, including the social ones, are affected by world conditions as these have developed historically in East and West, just as they are affected by philosophical impulses, in the way I have described here in the last few days. A similar approach will be in place when we attempt to depict present-day social structures.

In so many of these, a great deal survives in a disguised form, so that its origin is only dimly visible. What originated long ago in the East exists side by side with what is specifically Central European and with what is just beginning to appear in the West as a quite new configuration. This is true of the social structures as it was of the philosophical situation throughout the world.

When we look across at the East—which, at some time in the future. Western structures will have to be extended to include—we can see in the modes of thought and social attitudes of people today definite survivals of ancient institutions and ancient impulses from which these arose. Decadent as it has become in the East, everything that can still be observed today points back to times when the Orient was ruled by a variety of priest-theocracies. In a way possible and appropriate to the culture of the time, their leaders embodied in the social structures things that they felt they had to ascertain from the spiritual worlds by means of the old instinctive spiritual vision, as I have described in the last few days. On the basis of historical documents, people today describe the priestly hierarchies as ruling by teaching the populace that all natural phenomena were inhabited by divine and spiritual entities, and that by certain magical operations one could gain the favour of these gods, or their love. This is true of a later epoch of the Oriental priest-theocracies, but it is precisely a later epoch, when the original qualities of the Orient were already in decline.

It is true that, in ancient Oriental civilization, certain select individuals sought a kind of connection with the spiritual world which was based on things that have no charms at all for us today. It was based on certain quite material activities of the human body: potions that were brewed and substances that were eaten. They regarded as a secret the fact that, by the consumption of these potions and substances, man's normal sensory activity is suspended, and he is taken back to times when there was as yet no sense of purely external natural law and when spiritual life, too, was not yet so abstract as it later became—times when the moral and spiritual element was still united with the physical and natural. These priest-scholars sought to return to primeval ages in the development of the earth itself by associating their metabolism with certain material essences of the outside world.

What they were actually asserting we again become capable of understanding when, by the quite different modern path into super-sensible worlds, we come to know what I expounded in my fifth lecture: that through spiritual insight into his own nature man experiences within himself a kind of world-memory. He thus goes back, in his spiritual vision of course, to times when for men natural laws were not as they are today—expressing themselves more or less by chance—and spiritual laws were not so abstract as they are today. In consequence, spiritual vision arrives, not at the purely mechanistic Kant-Laplace nebula, but at an origin of the earth that is to be interpreted physically and spiritually. As I have demonstrated in the last few days, the world-memory men gain in this way is achieved entirely without manipulating the physical, in a spiritual way by spiritual exercises. This was not so in those early Oriental times, when men established contact with the spiritual world through stimulating their unconscious instincts by associating their metabolism with essences of one type or another. They knew what each plant in nature could develop from their instinctive life by a kind of dream-like spiritualization; they knew that, if this or that plant was eaten, the effect upon their organism was such that they could transport themselves to a particular area of spiritual activity. This was in fact the way in which the high priests of the Oriental theocracies, who also had complete power over social and political structures, originally established contact with the spiritual world. They believed they had thereby obtained impulses that proved to be the actual guiding impulses for social life.

We may say: The subsequent belief, or rather superstition, that to this or that natural object this or that “spirit” was linked, is already a product of cultural decadence. The original implication was that, if we allow these natural objects to affect us in a certain way, we shall be led to a particular kind of spiritual being, from whom we can receive various impulses, including social ones. Oracles, star-gazing, everything astrological was basically a product of the decline of these older views, towards which, however, objective science today is already being led, if dimly as yet. Objective science has given up seeing crude polytheism deep down in all primitive peoples, and can now perceive a monotheism of primitive man. In the same way, it will arrive at the outlook that has been evolved by consideration of the historical background and by spiritual investigations such as I have described.

On the one hand, therefore, there existed a complete awareness of how impulses from extra-terrestrial nature, from spiritual entities, manifest themselves in human nature itself—these impulses had, after all, been obtained by stimulating the instincts, by a spiritualization of the instincts. Yet at the same time people could not help attaching some importance to what displayed itself in these instincts, which they ascribed to the particular quality of the blood, let us say in a family with a particular constitution. In the manifestations of this instinctive life also, they detected social impulses sent into the world from extra-terrestrial spheres. When decadence later set in, it was natural, for the men who were striving for power, to take over, quite arbitrarily, the general view that looked to this manifestation of the instinctive life, which they sought in blood and in what could be discovered through its spiritualization. In this way, however, something unspiritual and (based on blood) something patriarchal entered Eastern life as a whole. We can only discuss this patriarchal element, of course, by referring to what is known; but its point of departure lies in the relations that the old priest-rulers of the Orient sought with the spiritual world. For this reason, all the social configurations of the Orient are steeped in this religious element, this awareness that divine and spiritual powers must prevail in everything on earth, and that ultimately no man should give orders unless he has first allowed the power of the divine word to flow into the spirit, the soul that is to give them. Impulses initially felt as religious, as impulses of grace from extra-terrestrial powers, thus assumed for social life the character of commandments. Even when, in certain Eastern civilizations, we appear to be confronted with laws in the later sense of the word, we soon find, when we analyse the spirit of legislation such as that of Hammurabi, for example, that it is based on impulses of the commandment type, which derive from what was regarded as the commerce of the elect with the spiritual world.

In an increasingly attenuated form, this has survived in all the social configurations that rest on ecclesiastical and religious foundations. And however much these things are disguised in social structures today, we can see, even in those left-wing associations that rest on a religious basis, that the ancient Oriental impulses I have described still operate in an attenuated form. There is much in present-day social structures that we cannot understand at all if we are not in a position to ask: In what sense do human souls cling to such structures? They cling to them because, in these souls' subconscious depths, there still remain legacies of the religious inclinations of the Orient. This is true even where the religious views themselves have taken on quite different forms, forms that have detached themselves from economic life, as is the case with the religions of the West. That the effect of Oriental religions is felt even in detailed features of economic life could be observed in Eastern Europe right down to the Great War.

To understand social configurations, we must discuss the spiritual impulses that inform them. For the description often given these days of social structures really only relates to their external appearance, as can be shown quite clearly by an example such as the following.

Today, it is clear, we can only look with horror at the social organization that is trying to establish itself in Eastern Europe. Yet in considering what is going on there today, we cannot help remembering what happened some eight hundred years ago, in China. Here, quite suddenly, men sought and very largely realized a political system that aimed at ordering all the affairs of man, even those of an economic nature, in every detail on behalf of the state. At this period in China, there were government authorities that fixed prices from week to week, authorities that laid down how the land was to be cultivated here, there and everywhere, authorities that provided country people with the seed for the year. At this period in China, an attempt was made to impose a high rate of tax on people who were particularly rich, so that gradually their fortunes passed to the general public. Remembering all this, we may say: the social configuration sought in Europe in our time by certain circles was largely realized eight hundred years ago, over a period of three decades, until the Socialist government concerned was overthrown and its supporters expelled from China. For thirty years, a system persisted whose features, if we described them without mentioning China, might very well be taken to refer to present-day Russia.

We can point to such things if our aim is to direct attention to the surface features of social structures. For here we can see that Socialism, as it is popularly understood, need not be solely a product of our own time, but could arise eight hundred years ago there in the Far East on quite different cultural foundations.

Yet if we look at the spirit of these two social structures, we observe a significant difference. In the Chinese Socialism there clearly survive features of the theocracy that had always ruled over China, and does so still; in modern Russian Socialism there is embodied an abstract thinking, culled from natural science, which has nothing whatever to do with man's consciousness of a connection with spiritual worlds. Things that appear the same in their outward form are not the same when we consider them spiritually.

Looking at human history from this standpoint, we shall find that the particular form of the theocratic state—or rather, theocratic social structures—lasted for a definite period. When the Asiatic theocracies were at their zenith, the tribes in Western and Central Europe were still in an entirely uncivilized state. In moving over to Europe, what was theocratic in form has gradually assumed a quite special shape.

If we are sufficiently unprejudiced, we can discover a transitional form in the Platonic Utopian state. There is certainly something here faintly reminiscent, I would say, of the Oriental priestly hierarchies. For this reason, no doubt, Plato wished to choose as leaders of his state those who had become—in the Greek sense, it is true—wise men, philosophers. Within Greek civilization, in fact, the philosopher took the place of the Oriental priest. Yet Plato's Utopia derives, after all, from the social outlook of his own time, in the sense that it reproduces what was currently felt about society; and in it we can recognize a form into which Oriental society had already developed. No longer was a relationship of man to super-sensible powers sought. The religious feelings appropriate to this relationship were more or less taken over from the Ancient East; what the Greeks themselves evolved, however, was something that had played no particular part in early Oriental society, and ultimately plays no particular part even in the social structures we meet in the Old Testament. What was now elaborated independently was the relationship of man to man.

We encounter this relationship in its purest form when we look into the life of the soul in Greece. Here, man still felt a certain intimate association between the spiritual and the physical in his make-up. In conscious inner life, there was for the Greek as yet no separation of body and spirit, such as there is for us. We look within and apprehend the mind in a very diluted form, metaphorically speaking; so that, comprehending it by ordinary consciousness, we can have no conception how it activates the vigorous body or is influenced by it. For the Greeks it was different. And that is why Goethe longed to achieve their outlook in his own experience. The Greeks had no such concept of body and spirit as we have. For them, spiritual and physical were one. Not until Aristotle, a late Greek, does the distinction begin to creep in. Although Plato's views are often presented abstractly, the spirit in which he spoke is one that saw the body everywhere permeated by soul, even in its organic functions, and felt the soul to be so powerful that it could everywhere extend its antennae towards the physical organs. The attitude to the soul is more physical, to the body more spiritual. Such a view is linked at the same time, however, to a particular feeling that grows up between men. And from this view has arisen what is characteristic of the civilization of Central Europe.

If we look with a sensitive eye at the felt relationship between man and man among the Ancient Greeks, and recognize how it has evolved from man's old relationship to the divine, we can say: what was previously an attitude permeated by religion has transformed itself into the legal attitude, the political attitude. Out of this, out of a combination of the nature of Greek and Roman, there then arose something that could maintain itself in social configurations. The priest gradually becomes merely the successor of the Oriental national leaders, for, although he may have kept himself in the background, the priest in the Orient was always the real spiritual leader, even with Darius and Xerxes. There comes to the fore a mode of thinking that cultivates ideas based on the relationship between man and man. And this goes so far that even religious life is swallowed up by this legal current, as I would call it. A juridical element enters man's world-picture, and even the cosmology of the time; and this element then remains almost throughout the Middle Ages and can be detected when we study the political views of, say, Augustine or Aquinas. Religious impulses themselves, while remaining what they are, take on legal forms.

This entry of legal forms into man's religious, cosmological views is eloquently documented in the wonderful picture of the Last Judgment that faces us as we enter the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It is at its most monumental here in this picture in which Christ appears as judge over all the world. His status as judge magnificently symbolizes the transition from a purely religious and devotional element to that conception which permeates religious feeling with a legal element—one that is carried over into the theory of man's world government and guidance.

This legal element informs all the social structures of the Middle Ages and much that persists in those of today. When we remove the disguise, we observe the presence of this legal element, and see how it has transmitted to us religious impulses from ancient times. And in modern political systems, right down to their terminology and the workings of their laws, where these go back to the Middle Ages, we perceive how, in the middle period of human experience and in the civilization between East and West, this legal and logical element has made its appearance.

We may say: what was Oriental and theosophical changes into something legal and logical; the sophia of the Orient becomes the logos of the Occident; and from the logos there develops in turn the juridical structure, which then proceeds to reproduce itself.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the legal element also determined social configurations. You need only study the economic ordinances of the period: everywhere you will find that social structures are shaped by something which is permeated by ancient Oriental religiosity and is juridical.

Nowadays, we observe the religious element still active in the less formal human groupings or in those that arise from religious denominations, whereas in the major social structures that are the nations we observe the operation of legal thinking. We notice, however, that with the transition from medieval to modern history the religious element allows itself to be pushed more and more into the background, whilst the legal one becomes increasingly predominant.

At this stage, the legal element invades economic configurations. What I am now describing can be traced in all its detail in the history of Roman Law. We can see how concepts of property, customs of ownership, and everything economic in fact, has been decisively determined by a social mould of this nature.

Yet in the course of human development an independent economic element does assert itself increasingly in the West, the nearer we come to modern times. We can say: in earlier periods, economic activity is completely cradled in religious and legal forms. It is in the West that the economic element first emancipates itself in human thinking.

You need only examine the economic element as it presented itself to the Phoenicians, and compare it with the economic systems of modern times (though admittedly these are only at an early stage in their development). You will realize the difference: Phoenician economic life is the product of the impulses I have described; Western economic systems have gradually emancipated themselves from them.

Religion and law are thus joined by a third current which, at any rate at first, tends to endow economic conditions with a social configuration of their own. This trend derives from the West, which in turn has adopted, to a greater or a lesser extent, something of what originated in the East and in the region between. We can see, for example, how, in American civilization especially, economic conditions, unaffected by other cultural currents, evolve along their own lines, until trusts and syndicates emerge. We can see, too, how Western man is inclined to attempt to separate economic from religious life, though he is less successful in separating it from what he later absorbed from juridical thinking and feeling. Even so, we are clearly aware how economic configurations, in their social aspect, are gradually struggling free of the intellectual straightjacket that was imposed on them while they were still under the sway of the legal element. Increasingly, we find economic life pure and simple attaining its emancipation. There can then evolve categories that derive from economic life itself.

At this point, however, we become aware of something that must establish relationships between men and between peoples, yet also lead to conflicts between peoples, and indeed conflicts within nations. We perceive that, in the ancient Orient, the religious element included the legal and economic ones; that the legal element subsequently became more or less distinct, but still contains the economic one, whilst the religious element has become more independent; and that now, in the West, an independent economic life is seeking to develop. Perceiving this, we must also consider how the various cultural patterns of humanity stand in relation to these currents.

And here we may conclude that the theocratic and patriarchal element, with its roots in the East, can really only produce something consonant with an agrarian system, with a social organization based principally on the cultivation of land, on an arable economy. We thus observe a certain correlation between agrarian life and the theocratic element. Moreover, this has its effect on all the social structures of more modern times. In admitting that the theocratic element continues to inform social structures right down to our own times, we must also realize that, because other branches of human activity have come to the fore, they have come into conflict with it, to the extent that in agrarianism, in accordance with the nature of human agriculture, the theocratic element seeks to maintain its position. The correlation exists. A split occurs in it, however, when human activities of another kind seek to assert themselves.

Here we may point to something that can be regarded as a barometer for this aspect of world history. I recommend you some time to study the Austrian parliamentary proceedings of, say, the seventies of the last century. You can observe, sitting in this parliament, men who believe that the old order, with its roots in theocracy and jurisprudence, is intimately associated with agriculture. They are faintly aware of something that later became a great flood, the influx of Western produce—including it is true country produce—deriving from a mode of thought and a social order built on a quite different branch of the economy—on industrialism. Although this is only faintly audible in the various parliamentary speeches, yet we can perceive precisely here, where so much has come together and may be studied, something that illuminates world-wide perspectives.

To what is here developing in the West, the theocratic mode of thought is less applicable than it is to any other branch of the economy. What is developing is industrialism. Naturally, land cultivation is not included in it. But land cultivation itself is then caught up by social configurations that are distinctly reminiscent of the tutelage of industrial thinking.

Yet industrial thinking today, however much it has developed its technical structures, has still not assumed the social structures appropriate to it. On the one hand, we can see the correlation between the theocratic mode of thought, with its patriarchal essence, and the agrarian system. We can see, for example, that in Germany, right down to the present day, it has been impossible for agrarian thinking and industrial thinking to come to terms properly, for reasons I have indicated. We can see this correlation, therefore; but on the other hand we can also see how everything appertaining to commerce is, in the last analysis, correlated with politics and the law.

That is why, in the ancient Orient, commerce is a kind of appendage to the patriarchal administration of human affairs. And in the form that is socially significant for us today, commerce really develops alongside the legal element. For what is required between man and man in trade is something that develops particularly in the juridical sphere. In so far as it did develop in the Orient, the way was prepared by certain commandments, transposed into legal terms but definitely regarded as divine. Commerce, however, has achieved its social organization only within the political and legal current in human development. We can say, therefore, that it is the commercial aspect of economic life that has proved to be particularly suited to political systems based on law and legal thinking.

At the same time, it is true that—because in the whole man everything must be connected with everything else—the political and legal element has also linked up with the industrial sector of economic life. As we go further and further West, therefore, we find that, although men evolve their personal relationship to anything chiefly from industry and the things associated with it, yet they also take over features of commerce. For with social structures as they are today, any undertaking is viewed, in point of fact, in the light of its commercial function in the social order. The industrialist himself sees his own undertaking within a commercial framework, so that in this way too the second current, the legal one, maintains its influence on the economic life of the West.

In other present-day social structures, we can see even more clearly how this politico-legal element continues to exert an influence below the surface among the broad masses of the people. As concomitants of modern technical life, all kinds of social structures have emerged. We need only recall the trade unions. We correctly perceive the nature of these only when we realize that economic conditions have created them. Nevertheless, those who see these things in a vital manner know that, even if the unions emerge from economic conditions—associations of metalworkers, printing trades unions and so on—the way men behave within them, the way they vote, the way they look at things and discuss them, is the parliamentary, political and legal one, the administrative way. It is something that derives from the second current I have described. The ideas appropriate to the third current are still in their infancy, and it still has to take its social patterns from what is old.

At the present time, therefore, we can see three principal types of social configuration existing side by side, widely differentiated of course in one direction and another. They co-exist in such a way that, we may say, history is deployed in space. And in adapting ourselves to any individual social configuration—an economic association, a political association or a religious community—we do in fact, since each of them is in contact with the others, enter a community where elements that have arisen successively in history now co-exist. They have now become shuffled together in space, and call for our understanding today, for this is the time when mankind must regain, at a higher level, the nai'vet^ from which creativity originally sprang.

It was once proper that primitive economic and political life should be poured into the theocratic mould. At a later period, a duality developed, taking over from earlier times the religious element, and evolving the political and legal element, incorporating economic life. So, today, economic life cries out for independent organization, for vital human ideas that can operate once more in a formative manner, as the vital impulses! of the legal forms of Greece and Rome, and the Orient's religious impulses, once operated. Since these three currents in human development are now mutually diverging, however, we must be able to consider them independently. We must look at the spiritual side of social structures, initially the only effective one; must look at their legal side, which became the dominant one in the Middle Ages; and must look at their economic side, for which a spiritual aspect must also be sought.

This has been put forward simply as a reflection on the antecedents of present-day social structures. It is intended to indicate that, in order to understand these structures, we must enter with real understanding upon the contemplation of those world-wide perspectives to which I drew attention at the beginning of this lecture. To do so, however, we shall have need of vital thought. That this vital thought is needed can be seen on the one hand from the sociological tone of my observations here; but it also emerges from direct contemplation of contemporary life. Everywhere, people are longing to begin to permeate economic life with the vital thought-impulses appropriate to it.

In this respect, of course, educated men of the West are of peculiar interest. In an extraordinarily significant treatise written in England in the very year before the fearful event of the Great War, a notable Englishman pointed out how fundamentally the English way of thinking differs from the German one—in the sense that I indicated at the beginning of my observations today. But he points out something else too: what strikes him is that, within the German-speaking population of Central Europe, there has always existed thought. And he observes that thought is the element in the human soul that in the most intimate way points continually to the great enigmas. Through civilizations that cultivate thought, as the German does, we are confronted again and again with the deepest riddles of man and the cosmos, even if—and here comes the tail-piece characteristic of this man of Western Europe—even if, he says, we perceive the futility of supposing their solution.

Well, it was proper to speak of the “vanity” of a solution when one could only point to the thought that emerged by abstraction from the body of law and logic; for, although as thought it may rise to supreme heights, this still remains a kind of dead thought. Anyone, however, who becomes aware that in our time the souls of men can provide a birth-place for vital thought, will speak, not perhaps of a final solution, but of a path that can lead to our being able to solve, at least for that particular period, the social problems that face us at any time.

For it is probably true that, once thinking about social structures has appeared in human evolution, we cannot speak of being able to solve the social problem all at once, but must rather say that among the evolutionary impulses that must survive into the future are included reflections about social organization. We can say, therefore: It is true that we shall not be able to speak of solutions, but of a vital human thinking that in a conscious way will first perceive the goals and in a conscious way will then move towards the solution of the social riddles of existence.

When the conversation turns to what is lacking in society today, there is scarcely anyone who does not have something really significant to contribute, from his own particular position in life. My purpose here, however, is not to draw up a list of all the various deficiencies that a survey would reveal. It is rather to direct attention to some of the antecedents of a phenomenon that has, quite justifiably, attracted comment on many sides and has led a large part of mankind into a mood of extraordinary pessimism and hopelessness.

One of the most extreme expressions of this hopelessness came from a man of whom it might perhaps have been least expected—a man, moreover, who belonged to a period for which such an opinion cannot help striking us as something out of the ordinary. In one of his last books, the influential art-historian Herman Grimm, who did not live to experience the most fearful war in history, but died at the turn of the century, makes this surprising statement: “When we survey the international situation today, and observe, with the `mind's eye' I would say, how the various nations of the civilized world behave to one another, how they attack one another, and how they hold within them the seeds of further conflicts, then we feel ready to set a date for mass suicide, since we cannot envisage where all these things that bring men and nations into conflict, strife and combat, are to lead, if not to the utter collapse of civilization.” I regard this statement as striking precisely because it comes from Herman Grimm—since his philosophy of life was in itself a joyous one; throughout his life, he kept his eyes fixed on all the things that can elevate mankind and that exist in man as creative and productive forces. It is striking, moreover, that he did not make this statement under the influence of the sense of gloom that was to be experienced in the years just before the outbreak of the Great War, or during it. His observation sprang entirely from the spirit of the nineteenth century, at the end of which it was made. Nothing that has happened since then seems likely in any way to cushion the impact on us of such a statement.

Yet at the same time it can never be the business of mankind to get bogged down in mere hopelessness; we must rather be on the look-out for anything that can lead to revival, to reconstruction, to a new dawn. This being so, it is necessary for us to look more deeply into the causes of the extraordinarily difficult situation that has gradually developed inside European civilization. Even if we believe that these causes can only be economic ones, we shall still have to look to the spiritual life of modern civilization for the main reason underlying this economic decline.

In my lectures here, I have pointed out more than once how our present temper of soul—together with all the soul-powers we can acquire at present—is affected by historical forces, and to understand these we have to go back a long way in human development. Specifically, I pointed out yesterday how at the threshold of the spiritual life of the West, looked at historically, there stands a figure who still has one eye on Asia, whilst the other is already directed at the perspectives of Europe. I mean Plato.

When we examine Plato's social theories, they appear to our modern consciousness extraordinarily alien in many respects. We find that he sees the ideal social system in the creation of a community even at the expense of the development of individual human beings who have been born into this earthly life. Plato thinks it quite feasible that children who appear unfit for life should simply be abandoned, so that they may not occupy a place in the community and thus disturb the social organism. He also manages to regard as an ideal social organism one in which only members of a certain caste enjoy the full privileges of citizenship. Apart from the fact that slavery appears quite natural to him, he would also grant those responsible for trade and commerce only a precarious position within his social system. All those who are not fixed within this system by virtue of having been born—by right, as he sees it—into its fabric, are not in fact completely accepted into the organization. Much else might be said, too, on the question: How does Plato's ideal relate to the individual human being? And here, from the standpoint of modern consciousness, we must conclude that there is present as yet little understanding of this human individuality. Attention is still directed entirely to the community, which is seen as primary. The man who is to live in it is regarded as secondary. His life is accepted as justified only in so far as he can match the social ideal that exists outside his own personality.

To discover what led Plato to this concept of community, we must look once more at Oriental civilization. And when we do so, we realize how, in the last analysis, the historical development of Europe's spiritual life is like a small peninsula jutting out from a great continent.

When we look at Asia, we find that there the idea of community is the primary one, and that Plato simply took it over from the East. To what has been said already about this idea, one thing must be added, if the social situation throughout the world is to be illuminated.

When we come to examine the basic character of spiritual life in the Orient, we find that it embraced a humanity quite different in type from the Europeans of later civilization. In many psychic and spiritual matters, indeed, we can say that there prevailed in Asia a high level of civilization, one to which many Europeans, even, long to return. I have already mentioned the often-quoted expression: Light comes from the East. What is most striking of all, however, is that these men of different type did not have the feature that has been typical of Europeans since they first began to play a civilized part in the world's development. What we observe there in Asia is a subdued sense of self, a sense of personality that is still quiescent in the depths of the soul. The European's awareness of personality is not as yet found in Asia. If on the other hand this high level of Asian civilization is adopted by an individual who still lacks this sense of personality—and it is a civilization suited for adoption by a human community—then he experiences it as in a dream, without sense of personality.

Obviously, in an age when human individuality had not yet attained its full development, communities were more receptive to and capable of a high level of culture than were individuals. In communal life, human capacities for absorbing this civilization increased not simply in an arithmetical but in a geometrical progression. Meanwhile, the particular ideal that Oriental civilization had set before itself, as it gradually passed over into Europe, was minted by European spirits in a simple formula—the Apolline dictum: “Know thyself!”

We can, in a sense, regard the entire Ancient East as developing towards the realization in Greece, as the ultimate intention of Oriental self-less civilization, of that sentence: “Know thyself!”—a sentence which has since survived as a spiritual and cultural motto to direct mankind. Yet we can also see, there in the East, that it is regarded as desirable, for the attainment of a higher stage of development in mankind, to penetrate to the self after all. On the spiritual side, I have already indicated this in characterizing yoga. On the social side, it reveals itself when we look at the theories current in the East with regard to leadership of the masses. Everywhere we find that the man who was the teacher and the leader was at the same time, in the spiritual sphere, the priest, but also at the same time the healer. We find in the East an intimate connection between all that mankind sought as knowledge and as higher spiritual life, on the one hand, and healing, on the other. For early Oriental civilization, the doctor cannot be separated from the teacher and the priest.

This is, of course, connected with the fact that Oriental civilization was dominated by a feeling of universal human guilt. This feeling introduces something pathological into human development, so that the cognitive process itself, and indeed every effort to reach a higher spirituality, is regarded as having the function of healing man as nature made him. Education to a higher spirituality was also healing, because man in his natural state and thus uneducated was regarded as a being who stood in need of healing. Connected with this were the early Oriental mysteries.

The cult of mysteries sought to achieve, in institutions that were, I would say, church and school and source of social impulses combined, the development of the individual to a higher spiritual life. They did this in such a way that, as I have already indicated in my previous lectures, religion, art and science were combined: in performing the ritual actions, men were religious beings; and here what mattered was not the articles of faith, still less the dogmas, that occupied the soul, but the fact that the individual was participating in a socially organized rite, so that man's approach to the divine was made principally through sacrifice and ritual act. Yet the ritual act and its foundations in turn involved an aesthetic element. And this combination of aesthetic and religious elements gave to knowledge its original form.

The man who was to attain this unified triad of religion, art and science, however, had not merely to accept something that represented a step forward in his development; he had also to undergo a complete transformation as a man, a kind of rebirth.

The description of the preparations that such a student of the higher spiritual life had to undertake makes it clear that he had consciously to undergo a kind of death. He experienced, that is, something that set him apart from life in the ordinary world, as death sets men apart from this life. Then, when he had left behind everything in his inner experience that appertained to earthly life, he would, after passing through death, experience the spiritual world in a complete rebirth. This is the old religious form of catharsis, the purification of man. A new man was to be born inside the old. Things that man can so experience in the world as to arouse in him passions and emotions, desires and appetites, notions that are of this world—all these he was to experience within the mysteries in such a manner that they were left behind and he emerged as one purified of these experiences. Only then, as a man reborn, was he credited with being capable of exerting any social influence on his fellow-men. Even the academic scholarship of our time has quite correctly observed that the surviving remnants of this cult have been of enormous importance for social life, and that the impulses aroused in those who have experienced such a catharsis in these very secret places have exerted the greatest conceivable influence on social life outside. As I say, this is not merely a pronouncement of spiritual science, it is something that even academic scholarship has arrived at. You can see this by looking at Wilamowitz. What we find is that, in Oriental civilization, the aim was to cure man by knowledge and by all the efforts to achieve a spiritual education.

What existed in the East passed over in another form to Greece and thus to Europe, and it has continued to affect Europe to the extent that Greek culture itself has influenced European spiritual life and civilization. Let me mention a point that is not usually emphasized. In his study of Greek tragedy, from which the West has derived so much of artistic importance for its spiritual life, Aristotle produced a description that is usually taken far too much at its face value. People are always quoting the familiar sentence in which Aristotle says that the aim of tragedy is to arouse fear and pity, so that the excitation of these and other emotions shall bring about a purification, or catharsis, of them. In other words, Aristotle is pointing to something in the aesthetic sphere—the effect that tragedy should produce. Armed for the interpretation of Aristotle's dictum, not with academic philology, but with an understanding of Oriental spiritual life—with a knowledge, that is, of its roots in the past—we can interpret what

Aristotle means by pity and fear more extensively than it is usually interpreted. He means in fact, as we come to perceive, that the spectator is brought by tragedy to mental participation in the sorrow, pain and joy of others, and that in this way the spectator in his mental life escapes from the narrow confines that he naturally occupies. Through the contemplation of the suffering of others, there is aroused in the spectator—for here man goes outside his physical existence, if only vicariously—that fear which always arises when a human being is confronted with something that takes him outside himself, and creates in him a transport of faintness and breathlessness. We can say, therefore: Aristotle really means that, in looking at tragedy, man enters a world of feeling that takes him out of himself; that he is overcome by fear; and that a purification or catharsis ensues. In this way he learns to bear what in the natural state he cannot bear; through purification he is strengthened for the sympathetic experience of alien sorrow and alien joy; he is no longer overcome by fear when he has to go outside himself and into social life. In ascribing a function of this kind to tragedy, Aristotle, we perceive quite clearly, is really demonstrating that tragedy also educates man towards a strengthening of his sense of self and his inner security of soul.

I am well aware that to introduce the aesthetic element into social life in this way strikes many people today as a devaluation of art, as if one were trying to attribute some kind of extrinsic purpose to it. Objections of this kind, however, often really betray a certain philistinism, resting as they do on the belief that any attempt to assimilate art into human life as a whole, into all that the human soul can experience, implies its subordination to a merely utilitarian existence. This is not what it meant for the Greeks; it meant rather the inclusion of art in the life that carries man above himself, not just beneath himself into mere utility.

If we can look beyond the mere utility that typifies our time, we shall be able to understand the precise significance of the Greek view of art: that the Greeks saw in tragedy, side by side with its purely artistic aspect, something that brought man face to face with himself, drawing him away from a dream, a half-conscious perception of the world, nearer and nearer to a complete awareness of himself. We may say: in the social sphere, tragedy was certainly intended to make its contribution to the all-important precept: “Man, know thyself!”

If, moreover, from this extension of art into the social sphere we pass on to a consideration of the position of the individual vis-à-vis society, and from this perspective look back at the Orient, we find that, in the mysteries too, what was sought through therapeutic treatment—the rebirth of man as a higher being—represented a strengthening of the sense of self. From an awareness that the soul was not then attuned to a sense of self, and that such a sense still remained to be developed, the mysteries attempted a rebirth in which man emerged to individuality. For this ancient society, therefore, experience of self was really something that had still to be attained. It was seen as a social duty to foster the birth of this sense of self in individuals who could become leaders in the social sphere. Only when we comprehend this can we gain an understanding of the strong sense of community persisting in Plato's ideal state, and of his belief that man is entitled to develop his individuality fully only if he does so through the rebirth that was accessible to the wisdom of the time. This shows that humanity at that time had no awareness of the claims of individuality in the fullest sense.

What grew out of this kind of society in Asia then established itself in Europe, combined with Christianity, passed over into the Middle Ages and even survived here for a long period. The manner of its survival, however, was determined by the fact that the hordes which, mainly from Northern and Central Europe, streamed into this civilization—South European now, but inherited from Asia—were endowed by nature with a strong sense of self. These tribes acquired the important historical task of carrying over what Oriental man had achieved with a still subdued sense of self, into complete self-consciousness and a full sense of self. For the brilliant civilization of the Greeks, “Know thyself!” was still an ideal of human cognition and society. The peoples who descended from the North during the Middle Ages brought with them, as the central feature of their being, this sense of self. It was theirs by nature. Though they lived in groups, they none the less strove to incorporate into their own personality what they absorbed in the cognitive and social sphere. It was in this way, then, that there came to be established the contrast between community life and individual life. The latter only appeared in the course of history, and did so, I would say, with the assistance of man-made institutions.

In thus making its appearance in human development, the sense of self was bound to link up with something else, with which it certainly has an organic connection. Looking back once more at the features of Oriental-Greek civilization even as it appeared to Plato, we are nowadays very much aware that this whole civilization was in fact built on slavery, on the subjugation of large numbers of people. A great deal has been said from various standpoints about the significance of slavery in earlier times, and if we are willing to sift this properly, we shall naturally find a great deal that is significant in it. But the point that above all others is still relevant for our life today is precisely the one that I said has actually received little attention. For community life—and also for the social life which sprang from the mysteries, and for the development of which the Greek regarded his art as providing an impetus—the full significance of human labour within the social order was quite unrealized. In consequence, they had to exclude human labour from their discussion of the ideal image of man.

When we describe Oriental-Greek man, with the dignity that gave him his authority, we are describing something that was in fact constructed over the heads of the masses, who were actually doing the work. The masses merely formed an appendage to the social system, which developed within a society that had not absorbed labour into its being, since it regarded labour and those who performed it as a natural datum. Human society really only began where labour left off. At a higher level, in a higher psychic sense, man experienced something that also finds expression in the world of animals. In their world, the food supply, which with us forms part of the social organization, is provided by nature. The animal does not calculate; it does what it does out of its inmost being; and specialization is unnecessary for animals. Where apparent exceptions occur, they must be regarded as proving the rule. We can therefore say: in transplanting itself to Europe and entering further and further into the demands of individuality, Oriental civilization also took on the task of integrating human labour into the social system. When man's awareness of self is fully wakened, it is quite impossible to exclude labour from that system.

This problem—which did not exist as yet in Greece—became the great social question round which countless battles were fought in Rome. It was felt instinctively that only by integrating labour into the social system can man experience to the full his personality. In this way, however, the entire social organization of humanity took on a different aspect. It has a different appearance in civilized Europe from what it had in civilized Asia. Only by looking back at the development of individuality in Europe shall we understand something of what has repeatedly, and rightly, been emphasized as significant when we come to describe the source of the deficiencies of our time.

It is rightly pointed out here that the specific shape of the social order in our time was actually only decided with the emergence of modern technology and division of labour. It is also pointed out that modern capitalism, for instance, is merely a result of the division of labour. What the traditional teaching of modern Western civilization has to say in this respect, in characterizing division of labour and its consequences in the social deficiencies of our time, is extraordinarily significant. But when something like this is said, and from one point of view rightly said, the unprejudiced observer cannot help looking at, say, ancient Egypt or Ancient Babylon, and observing that these states contained cities of an enormous size, and that these achievements too were only made possible by a division of labour. I was able yesterday to show that, as early as the eleventh century, a kind of Socialism existed in China, yet that similarity of surface features is not what really matters. In the same way, I must point out that division of labour, too, which in modern times has rightly been seen as the central social problem, was also found in earlier epochs of human development; it was in fact what made the Oriental social systems possible, and these in turn have since affected Europe. In Europe, division of labour, after being less common at first, gradually evolved. I would say: division of labour in itself is a repetition of something that also occurred in earlier times; but in the Oriental civilizations it bore the stamp of a society in which individuality was still dormant. The modern division of labour, which makes its appearance along with technology, on the other hand, impinges on a society of men who are now seeking to expand their individuality to the full. Once again, then, the same phenomenon turns out to have a quite different significance in different ages.

For the Oriental social order, the first consideration was thus to allow man to grow clear of social restrictions and of communal life. If he was to move up to a higher spiritual life, man really had to find his individuality. The European of a later age already had this sense of self, and needed to integrate it into the social order. He had to follow precisely the opposite path from that followed in the East.

Everywhere in Europe we find evidence of the difficulty men experience in accommodating their individuality to the social order, whereas at one time the social system had been such that men sought to rescue their individuality from it. This difficulty still faces us on every side today as an underlying social evil.

When, some years ago, I was often called upon to lecture to audiences of working men, I saw a good deal of evidence that there did exist in men's souls this problem of articulating the ego into the general social order. Men are unable to find the way from a highly developed sense of self into the social order. And in attempting repeatedly to show proletarian audiences, for instance, what this way would need to be like—how it would have to be different from the ways that Socialist or Communist agitators commonly offer nowadays—one came across very curious views in the ensuing discussions. They might appear trivial; but a thing is trivial no longer when it provides the motive power for innumerable people in life. Thus, I once attempted to talk about social problems in a working men's club. A man came forward and introduced himself straight away as a cobbler. Naturally, it can be extremely pleasant to hear what such a man thinks; in this case, however, what he was unable to think was much more revealing than what he did think. First of all he set forth, in marked opposition to my own views, his conception of the social order; and then he reiterated that he was a simple cobbler: in the social order that he had outlined, therefore, he could never rise to be a registrar of births, marriages and deaths. Underlying his outlook, however, was the quite definite assumption that he might perfectly well be a Cabinet Minister! This shows the kind of bewilderment that ensues when the question arises: How is the ego, strengthened within spiritual life, to articulate itself into a social order?

In another working men's association (I am giving one or two examples, which could be multiplied indefinitely), someone said: “Oh, we don't really want to be foremen; we don't want to manage the factory; we want to remain what we are, simple workmen; but as such we want all our rights.” Justified as such a statement may be from one point of view, it displays, in the last analysis, no interest in social organization, only an interest in the strongly developed self.

I am well aware that many people today will not consciously admit that this particular discrepancy between the experience of self and the social order lies at the root of many, indeed almost all of our social deficiencies and shortcomings. But anyone who looks at life with unclouded vision cannot escape the conclusion: We have certainly managed to develop the feeling of self, but we cannot connect it with a real insight into man. We say the word “I;” but we do not know how to relate this “I” to a human personality that is fully comprehended and fully self-determining.

We can experience this once again when we come across views that are very much of the present, as opposed to what, on the basis of spiritual science, we regard as necessary for the health of humanity. A leading figure in present-day educational circles once said something very curious to me during a visit to the Waldorf School. I showed our visitor round personally, and explained to him our educational methods and their social significance. I pointed out that, with a sound educational method of this kind, education of the spirit and the soul must be linked with that of the body. Anyone wishing to teach and educate must first of all know the effect of this or that action on the forces of recovery or decline in the human organism, the human body; he must know how the exercise or neglect of memory expresses itself later in life in physical symptoms, and how, simply by treating the life of the soul, we can gradually bring about an improvement in physical ailments. The teacher, I concluded, must certainly understand the body's association with the soul and the spirit in health and sickness. And the reply I got was that, to do this, the teacher would have to be a doctor!

Well, up to a certain point it would indeed be desirable if this were the case. For when we look at our social system, with the difficulty of integrating the self into it, we are reminded once more of what I have touched on today in connection with the civilization of two regions: the Orient, where the doctor was also the teacher and leader of the people; and Greece, where, as I have shown, art had an educative influence. The art of medicine was associated with every aspiration of the spirit, because at that time man was regarded, if only instinctively, as a physical, mental and spiritual whole; in the treatment that was then applied to the soul, forces were brought into play which yielded knowledge for a general therapy of man.

The leaders at that time told themselves: I must attempt to cure man by leading him to true spirituality. To do this, I must bring healing forces to bear on a fairly normal life. Once I understand these forces thoroughly and can follow out their effects, this knowledge will tell me what to do when a man is ill.

From observation of the healthy man, I learn what forces to employ when confronted by the sick man. The sick man is simply one whose organism has deviated further in one direction or the other than it does in everyday life. Knowing how to bestow health on man in his normal state, I also know how to cure him when sick. Knowing which drink, which cordial affords me this or that insight into connections between man and nature—knowing, that is, the effect of a natural product in the sphere of knowledge—I shall also know what effect it has on a sick man, if used in greater strength.

The intimate association of medical art with education and development towards spirituality in general, which was the goal of the Ancient Orient and had an important rôle there, appears once more as a spiritual residuum in the Greek experience of art. Here, the aim is that the soul should be healed through art. Armed with this knowledge, we can still perceive in the use of the word “catharsis” in connection with tragedy how—because the same word was used in connection with the early mysteries, for the complete purification of man on entry to a new life—something of this sense is taken over. We are, however, also reminded that, for Greek doctors in the early period, knowledge and medicine still went together, and that in education, but also in popular culture in general, people saw something on a more spiritual level that was related to medicine, something that in a sense sprang from medicine.

We need to examine these phenomena of a bygone age, if we are to gain a strength of soul such that, when we contemplate the social systems in our own age, we can keep in view the whole man, and also such that, when we meet our fellow-men, we not only unfold a strong sense of self, but also connect this with a perception of the whole man in body, soul and spirit. If by an advance in spiritual science we can do this, there will become available, simply through the temper of soul that ensues, ways and means of integrating this whole man, but also all men, into the social order, thus annexing labour for society in the way that historical evolution in any case makes necessary. For this is what we are still suffering from today: the need to fit labour properly into the social order.

It is true that people often regard labour as something that goes into the article produced, being crystallized in it, so to speak, and giving it its value. Those who look more closely, however, will observe that what matters is not simply that a man should work, devoting to society his physical strength. The important factor in determining price and value is rather how the work fits into social life as a whole. We can certainly conceive of a man doing a job of work that is fundamentally uneconomic in the social order. The man may work hard and may believe that he is entitled to payment for his work; but when his work exists in the context of an inadequate social system, it often does more harm than good. And one ought to examine in this light a great deal of labour within society which, though exhausting, is really worthless. Consider how our literature is constantly accumulating; it has to be printed; a tremendous amount of work is involved in the manufacture of paper, the printing, etc., and then, apart from the tiny proportion that survives, it all has to be pulped once more: work is being done here which, I would say, disappears into thin air. And if you consider how much work has disappeared into thin air during the butchery of the recent war, you will gradually come to see that labour as such cannot lay claim to any absolute value, but derives its value from its contribution to the life of society.

The disease that most affects our age, however, is precisely the lack of this basic capacity to integrate labour into the social organism, taking account of the fact that everything men do, they really do for others. We need to win through to this by learning to integrate our own individual selves into the community. Only by achieving a true understanding between man and man, so that what the other man needs becomes part of our own experience and we can transpose our self into the selves of others, shall we win through to those new social groupings that are not given us by nature, but must be derived from the personality of man.

All our social needs certainly spring from the self. People sense what is lacking in the social order. What we need to find, however, is a new understanding of what human fellowship in body, soul and spirit really means. This is what a social order ought really to be able to bring forth out of the self.

The great battle that is being fought over the division of labour—fought quite differently from the way such battles have ever previously been fought under the influence of human individuality—is what underlies all our social shortcomings. Nowadays, we found associations for production; we participate in them, concerned not with their rôle in the social organism, but with our own personal position—and this is understandable. It is not my aim here to complain, pedantically or otherwise, about human egotism. My aim is to understand something for which there is considerable justification. Without this sense of self, we should not have advanced to human freedom and dignity. The great spiritual advances have been possible only because we have attained this sense of self. But this in turn must also find a way to imaginative identification with others.

There is a great deal of talk nowadays about the necessity of conquering individualism. This is not what matters. The important thing is to find society in man himself. The Oriental had to discover man in society. We have to discover society in man. We can do so only by extending on every side the life of the soul.

That is why I tried, at the close of one of my mystery-plays, to present a scene showing how a man wins through to an inner experience of the different forms of mankind. These differences exist outside us. In society, differentiation is necessary; we must each have our profession. If we find the right bridge between man and man, however, we can experience within us all that is separate in the social world outside—each individual profession. Once this social system comes into being within us, once we can experience the reality of society inside ourselves, we shall be able to follow that opposite way of which I have spoken: the way from the self to the social order. This will also mean, however, that everything connected with the individual—today we can point to labour; in the next two days we shall be looking at capital—is capable of finding its place in human society. In co-operatives, in the formation of trusts and combines, in the trade union movement, everywhere we feel a need to find a way out of the self into association with others. But here precisely is the great struggle of the present day: to enable what exists around us really to take root within us.

As already indicated, there was a time, not so very far behind us—we need only go back to the thirteenth century—when man had a bond with the product of his labour, and the making of every key and every lock gave pleasure, because the maker poured into it something of his own substance. The legacy of an earlier social order still made its mark upon the product. With their individuality as yet not fully awakened, people still accepted society. Since then, individuality has reached its zenith with the advance of technology. In the last analysis, the man of today is often extraordinarily remote from the product of his labour, even when his work lies in the spiritual sphere. What we perform in the outside world needs to take root in us and to link up with our individuality. This, however, will only happen if we develop the life of the soul on every side in the way I have described in the last few days. For if we do develop the life of the soul, our interest in all that has its being around us will be fired once more.

You encounter many people in this purely intellectual age who find their own profession uninteresting. It may have become so, perhaps. There must come a time, once more, when every detail of life becomes of interest. Whereas formerly what was interesting was the nature of objects, in the future the interest will lie in our knowing how our every activity is articulated into the social organization of mankind. Whereas formerly we looked at the product, we shall now look at the man who requires the product. Whereas formerly the product was loved, the love of man and the brotherhood of man will now be able to make their appearance in the soul that has developed, so that men will know the reason for their duties.

All this, however, needs to take hold of the soul before people try to reach an understanding about the particular social deficiencies of our time. From this standpoint, too, we must consider that Europe is still engaged in its battle for human individuality against the forces in its spiritual tradition that continue to flow from Asia—from foundations quite unlike those that exist today, foundations that took root in the souls of men, but at a time when full individuality had not yet been attained.

Thus the present time occupies a position not only between abstract concepts of individuality and community, but also in the centre of something that pervades man's soul and brings every individual human being today into action in defence of his individuality. We are only at the beginning of the road that leads to the discovery of the right relationship between self and community. It is from this fact that the shortcomings of the time, which for this reason I do not need to enumerate, derive.

Perceiving this psychological basis, this spiritual foundation, we shall be able to view in their proper light many of the needs, deficiencies and miseries that confront us in society today. To win our way through to this light, we need courage. Only then shall we know whether the pessimism that Herman Grimm expressed in so extreme a form is justified, and whether people are justified in saying: There remain only forces of decline in

European civilization, one can only be pessimistic, even: The date for mass suicide ought to be fixed.

That is, indeed, the question: whether all the Asiatic features that Europe had to conquer have in fact been conquered, so that after finding itself Europe can now, from the centre of the world's development, also reach an understanding with the East.

It is from a standpoint such as this that we must consider whether what we ought to see is the kind of thing Herman Grimm had in mind, or whether we are not justified in thinking that mankind can still, through the development of what lies dormant in its soul, prove capable of choosing a time when understanding shall be achieved, and that what faces us is not the death of this European civilization, but its rebirth.

Whether and how far this is possible will be examined, at least in outline, in the remaining lectures.